Abstract

The article examines the six-volume autobiographical novel cycle My Struggle by the contemporary Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard as a case of parrh?sia, that is, telling the truth about oneself. The novel poses writing as a problem, in terms of truth. By exploring through My Struggle the preconditions, consequences, and difficulty of speaking the truth and how the practice may contravene social norms, the paper tries to get at the role that secrecy and truthfulness play in and for social relationships. In exposing his innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires and revealing family secrets for everyone to see and read about them, Knausgaard exceeded rules that govern sociality and felt obliged to be inconsiderate to others, on whom the parrhesiast practice nevertheless always depends. Ultimately, the novel is a freedom experiment that fails, transcending the boundary between art and life, literature and the social.

Highlights

  • In the essay “The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes”, Milan Kundera considers the history of the European novel as a “sequence of discoveries”

  • According to Kundera, the novel, during the four centuries of its European reincarnation, has disclosed, displayed, and illuminated great existential themes: In its own way, through its own logic, the novel discovered the various dimensions of existence one by one: with Cervantes and his contemporaries, it inquires into the nature of adventure; with Richardson, it begins to examine “what happens inside,” to unmask the secret life of the feelings; with Balzac, it discovers man’s rootedness in history; with Flaubert, it explores the terra previously incognita of the everyday; with Tolstoy, it focuses on the intrusion of the irrational in human behavior and decisions

  • It tries to get to the bottom of the relationships, situations, motifs, thoughts, and memories that shape and constitute the main character and real person Karl Ove Knausgaard

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Summary

A RELATIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON CULTURE AND SOCIETY

SPECIAL SECTION “Fictioning Social Theory: The Use of Fiction to Enrich, Inform, and Challenge the Theoretical Imagination”. Confessions of a Troubled Parrhesiast Writing as a Mode of Truth-Telling about Self in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Date of presentation: May 2019 Date of acceptance: June 2019 Published in: July 2019. Writing as a Mode of Truth-Telling about Self in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle”. In: Olli Pyyhtinen (coord.) “Fictioning Social Theory: The Use of Fiction to Enrich, Inform, and Challenge the Theoretical Imagination” [online article]. The texts published in this journal are – unless otherwise indicated – covered by the Creative Commons Spain Attribution 4.0 International licence. The full text of the licence can be consulted here: http://creativecommons. The full text of the licence can be consulted here: http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/

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