Överskridanden : En tematisk studie av verklighetsproblematiken i Karl Ove Knausgårds Min kamp 1-6

Abstract: The award-winning Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgård achieved great success with his latest book, Min kamp. Both commercially and critically, the novel was praised for its seemingly successful attempt to transcend the boundary between fiction and real life. Focusing on the auto-fictional narrator’s struggle to balance his daily life with his ever so demanding aesthetic ambitions, the novel gives high-detail descriptions of the most basic day-to-day chores, intimately mixed with philosophical reflections on topics such as painting, literature and postmodern civilisation. This essay proposes an alternative perspective on the realism of the novel. Instead of relying on a correspondence theoretical view, which highlights the level of correspondence of a particular representation with reality, I seek, inspired by Martin Heidegger’s thoughts on works of art, to trace a poetics which sees the verity in a work of art as the ”unconcealment” of the world, or the coming-to-being of objects. The function of art in relation to reality is to ”open up” the conventionally understood world and offer a perspective situated between an intellect-based outlook on the world and an intuitive and subconscious one. In order to carefully analyse the formal manifestation of the poetics in question, I turn to the notion of heteromediality, which proves fruitful in distinguishing, in the verbal text itself, certain formal traits usually associated with other media. I suggest that when found in the text, these traits function as a way of stressing the becoming of objects, rather than primarily their mere existence.