Knausgaard on Fatherhood and Limits

The most interesting part of this John Baskin essay on fatherhood is his summary of what Knausgaard said on the subject in My Struggle:

Knausgaard is desperate to avoid being like his father, whose arbitrary temper and alcoholism had terrified him for most of his childhood, but, having seen only this defective model up close, he is unsure what it would take to improve upon it. “Being a father is a commitment,” he hazards. “But what are you committing yourself to?”

Knausgaard’s conclusion is that a true father is committed to being present for his family, which means above all that he abides by the “limit” that having a family places on him. “You have to be at your post; you have to be at home,” he writes. “Yearnings and aspirations are irreconcilable with this because what you hunger for is limitless and what home does is set limits. A father without limits is no father, but a man with children. A man without limits is a child, that is, the eternal son.”

Although the father-son dichotomy comes late in My Struggle, it can be read back into the long conflict that the narrator of the novels has undergone between his desire to become a writer, which is tied up with all his inner dreams and yearnings for what he calls the “unlimited”—and therefore with his status as a son—and his desire to become a father, which is to say a good man as his society and his wife Linda define it. Yet in contrast to the crisis-of-men shows, whose drama was predicated on their protagonists remaining in a state of immaturity and indecision, Knausgaard makes a choice. At the end of Book Six, he proclaims that he is no longer a son, and therefore no longer a writer. He chooses the role of father over the role of artist. In a sense, he suggests that this is the only defensible choice, that all the rest is egotism, dissipation and role-playing. But having made this choice, he leaves behind him a work of art that documents voluminously, and with a rare honesty, the full spectrum of its consequences. For all he loathes the repetitive tasks of childcare, not to mention the Dantean trials of endurance known as kids’ birthday parties, Knausgaard affirms that his involvement in the everyday lives of his children allows him a “closeness” that never existed between his father and him. He also enumerates, often at length, the cost of this commitment—not only to him as an artist but also to him as a man. “When I pushed the stroller all over town and spent my days taking care of my child,” he writes in Book Two:

“It was not the case that I was adding something to my life, that it became richer as a result, on the contrary, something was removed from it, part of myself, the bit relating to masculinity. It was not my intellect that made this clear to me, because my intellect knew I was doing this for a good reason, namely that Linda and I would be on an equal footing with regard to our child, but rather my emotions, which filled me with desperation whenever I squeezed myself into a mold that was so small and so constricted that I could no longer move.”

One of the reasons I read so much of Knausgaard's monstrous book was that I have also felt keenly the dichotomy between a life embedded in a family and the search for the soaring freedom that Knausgaard called “limitless.”

I have found, though, that no kind of life is really limitless, and that soaring moments are few and brief in human existence. If I had not chosen to raise children I would have written more books and seen more of the world. But I have done enough writing to understand that the pounding out of words and sentences rarely soars into the creative planes like we wish and imagine that it might. I have had moments of wonder while traveling the world, but not many, and I think that the more one travels, the more one habituates to the new and the harder it is to recapture the feeling of stepping into your first gothic cathedral or climbing your first mountain.

The seek the limitless, whether in art, sex, travel, or freedom, is to chase phantoms. I think it is best done in small expeditions from a secure base in the limited world of family, home, and work.