The Monumental Knausgård: Big Data, Quantified Self, and Proust for the Facebook Generation

Abstract

This article examines how Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle intertwines with contemporary developments in media and technologies of self-representation and -expression. First, I situate this series within the generic frame of ‘autofiction’ and explain the rationale behind this categorization. Then I outline developments that have led to an increasing emphasis on scale and quantification in Western culture: the emergence of big data, the accompanying mindset of ‘datafication,’ and ‘quantified self-movement,’ and the shift from narrative to database. I argue that these together amount to a shift to more inclusive scope in literature. I propose that My Struggle subverts the binary between narrative and database, and single out three devices through which this is done: interminable narration, lists, and the anaphoric singulative frequency. On the basis of these, I pose that My Struggle adopts an aesthetics of scale: a quantitative mode of narration in which causality and closure make way for seriality and accumulation.