Are there serious contemporary writers who remind us of our mortality? The forty-three-year-old Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard is certainly one. Was it not possible that one day he might lie on that same piece of furniture, and die there? It would be hard to write in such a study while oblivious of death as a life rhythm, of life as a death cycle.Ī fair amount of contemporary prose seems to have been written by people who, like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, refuse to accept that they will die there is a puerile or evasive quality in many new novels (not to mention movies), especially in America, where infinite information promises to outlive us, and dazzle down the terminality of existence. Most of his thirteen children-five of whom died in childhood-were born on it, too. She died when he was nearly two years old. Tolstoy’s mother had given birth to him on this couch.
I sometimes think that the old leather couch Tolstoy kept in his study would be a good symbol of the mortal pulse that Benjamin was talking about. “If the art of storytelling has become rare, the dissemination of information has had a decisive share in this state of affairs,” Benjamin writes. Instead of the news of death, there is just news-the “information” that we get so easily in newspapers. Benjamin notes that death has disappeared from contemporary life, safely shuffled away to the hospital, the morgue, the undertaker. But these days, he suggests, that hearth is cold and empty. It is the fire at which listeners warm their hands. Walter Benjamin, in his great essay “The Storyteller,” written in the nineteen-thirties, argues that classic storytelling is structured around death. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan / Pen American Center Knausgaard has an artistic commitment to ordinariness and inexhaustibility.
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