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.

Can Your Kids Handle Dangerous Ideas?

In the NY Times, Matt Gross writes a hymn to cool parenting and tough children. One the one hand, this is how I parented. On the other, is there a connection between this and soaring teenage anxiety? Let's start with this anecdote, which started when daughter asked if she could skip school:

You can’t skip school, my wife, Jean, and I told her. You just can’t. Not allowed. Nope!

But I offered Sasha a bit of unsolicited advice, too: Next time you want to skip school, don’t tell your parents. Just go. Browse vintage stores, eat your favorite snack (onigiri), lie on your back in Prospect Park and stare at the clouds. Isn’t that the point of skipping school, after all? To sneak around, to steal time and space back from the arbitrary system that enfolds you? To hell with permission! That’s being a teenager — carving out a private life for yourself under the noses of the authority figures who surround you.

Sasha said no, she would not be doing that. Not because she’s a Goody Two-shoes but because she’s too lazy to plan the subterfuge — it sounds as exhausting as algebra.

I get this; I think I may have written here before that after hearing my children discuss their sex lives in front of me I copied Xi Jinping and promulgated the "Seven Unmentionables," things that you were just not supposed to talk about with your parents. But is there something weird about forbidding your daughter to skip school and then telling her to do it in secret?

But the real meat of the essay is this:

But when I look at the broader cultural landscape, I feel isolated in my permissiveness. Parents — or at least the parents who seem to win media attention — are freaking out over everything their kids see, read and do.

Recently there were the parents who hated “Turning Red,” the Disney Pixar movie about a 13-year-old Chinese Canadian girl who transforms into a giant red panda at moments of intense emotion or embarrassment — and who rebels against her perfectionist mother, crushing on boys, lying about her extracurricular activities and (worst of all) listening to terrible pop music. Those parents complained that the film promoted bad values and that its portrayal of puberty and metaphorical menstruation was just too mature for an impressionable audience.

Then there are the parents across this country who continue to be up in arms about what’s taught in public schools. For some, the fact that this nation has historically failed to live up to some of its ideals is apparently so distressing that they are pushing for strict laws about what teachers can say about that in class. For others, any discussion of L.G.B.T.Q. issues is the boogeyman. . . .

Leaving aside the usual political battles between left and right, what’s at play here are two fundamentally different conceptions of parents’ responsibility to their children, with the same ultimate goal: Do you offer your kids broad exposure to the world, in all its beauty and foulness, and hope they make good decisions? Or do you try to protect them from ideas and activities that you see as dangerous or immoral — and also hope they make good decisions? Obviously, both approaches involve a leap of faith. And it’s impossible to adhere entirely to either philosophy. . . .

To me, the more hands-off approach is also the more realistic one. It acknowledges that our children are, in some basic sense, beyond our control: not precious innocents to be culturally cocooned, but thinking, feeling, increasingly independent human beings who are busy making up their own minds (and who are anyhow likely carrying around devices that give them unfettered access to billions of ideas and images, without any meaningful controls).

I want my kids to read, watch, and listen to what piques their interest, even if I don’t like it myself. Sasha loves “Attack on Titan,” a luridly violent anime series with fascist undertones, and I’m fine with that — but I worry about my kids watching “90-Day Fiancé” and becoming Kardashian-curious. They can tell fantasy from reality, but reality TV from reality? That’s trickier.

Still, I won’t dictate their preferences: I want them to navigate this huge, messy planet on their own, when they’re old enough to — and be ready for things not to go their way.

Could it be that maybe children do benefit from more parental guidance than that? That watching too much violent anime might feed anxiety? That being tossed out into the world with a quick "be careful" is anxiety inducing, and some children would benefit from more rules?

Beats me. But reading this essay just left me with a feeling that smugness about hipster parenting is the wrong response to a world full of kids paralyzed by amorphous fears.