Skomsvold’s Struggle

Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold. Image sourced from Dagbladet.

If one is nothing but empty space, one must hurry to fill it up, black holes suction all matter into themselves, and in order not to disappear into myself, I must fill the void with something external.

Monsterhuman (55)

Every time I sit down to write about Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold I somehow end up scribbling about Karl Ove Knausgård instead. It’s difficult enough to bypass Knausgård when talking about autofiction generally. It’s nearly impossible to do so when talking specifically about Norway’s homegrown varietal, virkelighetslitteratur (“reality literature”). So when I think about Monsterhuman, Skomsvold’s autofictional tour-de-force from 2012, I can’t help but situate the novel in the wake of Knausgård’s six-part My Struggle (2009–2011), the final volume of which had just appeared in Norway the previous year.

Skomsvold of course recognizes the immense shadow Knausgård casts. And being the deliciously canny writer she is, she finds a way at once to acknowledge and dismiss that shadow, principally by absorbing Knausgård into her own literary penumbra. About two hundred pages into Monsterhuman, Skomsvold’s first-person narrator, also named Kjersti, describes an experience at a party when an acquaintance known only as “the Satanist” challenges her to a push-up match. The two cross the street to a dark parking lot where the match is to take place. Out of nowhere Kjersti announces: “And that’s where I meet that rangy author for the first time.” When the Satanist informs Kjersti, “That was Karl Ove Knausgård,” she replies, “Never heard of him” (198).

Kjersti’s claim never to have heard of Knausgård offers a good example of the narrator’s characteristic humor, defined by a feigned naïveté that often takes the form of self-effacement but which here gently undermines the renown of Norway’s most famous writer. Kjersti-the-character’s lack of familiarity with Knausgård bristles against Kjersti-the-author’s keen awareness. The latter implicitly acknowledges as much when she marks this encounter for future comment: “I will later talk about this meeting more extensively.” Knausgård at once appears and disappears in Kjersti’s narrative, a “rangy” figure mentioned only to be put off until some later point.

Amusingly, Kjersti does return to this meeting about one hundred pages later, but her discussion proves less extensive than she initially promised. At this point in the story Kjersti and Knausgård share the same publisher, Forlaget Oktober, and they happen to run into each other in the firm’s Oslo offices:

I end up sitting next to Karl Ove Knausgård, and I relate to him the first time that we met. The Satanist, in his tight, black silk pants, I in my white dress, in the parking lot there was nothing to hear except for the Satanist’s moaning as he attempted another pushup, and then this rangy man came walking around the corner, I didn’t know who he was, just a lanky man with thick hair, on the way home from festival drinking, most likely tired of all the partying. The Satanist looked up from where he was pumping the asphalt. “Hi,” said the Satanist. “Hi,” said Knausgård. “Thirty-three,” I said. (293)

Once again, Kjersti ushers Knausgård into her narrative only to look the other way: in the midst of an encounter with a strange-looking man in a dark parking lot, she alone remains humorously hyper-focused on the push-up match.

However amusing in its deflationary power, Skomsvold’s acknowledgment of Knausgård in Monsterhuman also sets up an important passage in which she reflects one of her novel’s most anxious preoccupations: the meager length of her first book, the writing of which is the major subject of the present book’s first half. Kjersti recounts:

I tell Knausgård that I would like to be able to write a longer novel. He says that he would like to be able to write a shorter novel, just imagine being able to say anything essential in only a hundred pages. Maybe he’s trying to be nice. He says “three thousand pages in two years.” I say, “four years for a hundred pages.” His autobiography books are going to be published soon, but I think I should wait to read them until I’ve read Marcel Proust. (293)

The paragraph concludes with yet another deflationary dismount, dismissive both in Kjersti’s throwaway use of the phrase “autobiography books” and in her vague decision not to read them until much later—the reading of Proust being a time-consuming commitment that could delay her reading of Knausgård for a lifetime. (In fact, she does read Proust in the final fifty pages of Monsterhuman: “I cried when I read . . . about how Proust was finally able to begin writing, and now I am crying because I’m not able to write about Proust” [392]). But before this casual dismissal, Kjersti presents a brief, pathos-filled scene depicting two authors encountering each other’s chief anxiety about their own writing. Whereas Kjersti wants to produce a more substantive novel, Knausgård longs to be less long-winded. 

Yet for anyone familiar with both My Struggle and Monsterhuman, this encounter in the Oktober offices bespeaks a much deeper and more serious thematic connection between the two works. A connection, I hasten to add, that further showcases the masterful irony involved in Skomsvold’s calculatedly casual dismissal of “that rangy author.”

In My Struggle, Knausgård spends more than 3,500 pages trying to write himself out of being a writer. Cleverly reversing the Proustian conclusion of In Search of Lost Time, when Marcel announces that he’s finally ready to begin writing, the Knausgårdian twist that concludes My Struggle features (spoiler alert!) an exhausted Karl Ove celebrating that he can finally put down the pen and cease to be a writer. Proust’s ending retroactively endows the seven volumes of his enormous novel with an elegant structure that, upon rereading, gives way to any number of beatiful thematic complexities and temporal paradoxes. Likewise, Knausgård’s ending gives new meaning to the six volumes of his own magnum opus. If Proust’s novel recounts Marcel’s long aesthetic education (what Gilles Deleuze calls his “apprenticeship to signs”), then Knausgård’s novel recounts Karl Ove’s long struggle to relinquish a closely held desire to become a renowned author. After accumulating 1,371,255 words (by the publisher’s count), Knausgård cashes it all in, so to speak, liquidating his status as a now (in)famous writer in exchange for some other life or livelihood that remains unarticulated in the novel itself.

Like Knausgård’s fictional avatar, Skomsvold’s also struggles to write herself toward a profound transformative release. But instead of writing herself out of being a writer, Kjersti has the more basic aim of writing herself into existence. Skomsvold’s second novel is a work of autofiction, with the protagonist functioning as a quasi-fictional stand-in for the author. But it’s also a Künstlerroman (German, “artist novel”), which is to say a novel of an artist’s apprenticeship and maturation. These two genre paradigms intertwine to tell the story of a young woman, named Kjersti Skomsvold, who turns to writing in her battle against myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), an illness better known as “chronic fatigue syndrome” that descends on her in her late teenage years.

Throughout the first half of Monsterhuman Kjersti writes to convince herself that her illness has not rendered her an “ME-monster” and that she still rightfully inhabits the status of “human.” Once she’s completed her first novel, her “heart-book,” the nature and aim of her writing transforms. She begins to pen a second novel, a semi-autobiographical work she calls her “Helgrim-book”—indeed, the very novel we are reading. In this book, Kjersti writes not only to become human, but to become herself. Ultimately, then, the novel tracks a young woman’s coming-of-age as an artist, working to discover in herself an individual who doesn’t just meet the bare requirements of humanity but also has the qualities attributable to the protagonist of a novel. In other words, Kjersti’s trajectory follows a line from ill woman (“monster”) to author (“human”) to character (“protagonist”).

Existing in counterpoint with this trajectory is Kjersti-the-narrator’s ongoing preoccupation with existentialist tropes of being and nothingness. Thus, despite her journey from monster to human and beyond, throughout the novel Kjersti retains a fundamental anxiety that takes form in oscillating images of filling and emptying, plenitude and the void. Early in the book Kjersti formalizes this pattern when she determines that her recovery will only happen if she fully empties herself each day. Before bed she asks herself: “Whatever you’ve done today, Kjersti, did you give all that you had to give, everything that you had inside of you, is there nothing left in there?” (81; emphasis added). The curious insistence here on voiding the self—or the self as a void, an “aching shell” (39)—comes up repeatedly in the book. A period of insatiable hunger and weight gain gives way to a period of spontaneous vomiting and weight loss. Images of vacuums, black holes, and the death of the universe also proliferate throughout the novel. At one point Kjersti pushes these images to the point of absurdity, describing a story her high-school English teacher once told her about his vacuum cleaner exploding, filling the air with dust (more on this later). The opposition even plays out on the order of grammar and syntax. At many points we encounter run-on sentences in which Kjersti laments her inability to write or describes at length how she feels like she’s disappearing.

In the rest of this essay I’d like to trace how Kjersti’s images of being and nothingness play out in relation to the overarching trajectory of Kjersti’s aesthetic education. Understanding how the oscillating symbolism of fullness and emptiness will, I hope, help unveil an underlying pattern of accumulation and liquidation that I’m coming to believe is fundamental to many novels, going all the way back (at least) to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748). In this sense, the current essay may also be considered a companion to the piece I wrote on “novelistic personhood” with reference to Olga Tokarczuk’s 2018 work, Flights.

Monsterhuman opens with Kjersti living in an elder care facility. At just seventeen years old, she has fallen prey to a mysterious and persistent exhaustion that put an abrupt end to her track-and-field career and upended her plans to pursue an engineering degree. Physically and mentally hamstrung, Kjersti has landed in a rural “old folks’ home,” where the clanking of cowbells interrupts her sleep and she’s forced to listen as a dying woman next door “gurgles and moans, empties out the remaining sounds of her life and suffering into my ear” (3).  Over the course of her slow and fragmentary recovery, Kjersti loses her boyfriend and watches her family implode. She also spirals in and out of an anxiety-fueled depression. In search of strategies to cope with her new reality, Kjersti makes comprehensive lists of her deepest fears, including that her pain will never end and that she will never find love again.

But these lists fail to make her feel better. Instead, they intensify her feeling that she’s lost her claim to humanness and devolved toward monstrosity. Desperate to avoid this slide into subhumanness, Kjersti picks up a pad of Post-It notes and begins writing fragments, arranging them in a constellation on the wall above her bed. These Post-Its contain the earliest fragments of what will—with much struggle and much, much, revision—become her first novel, a slim volume about an old woman named Mathea, who is afraid of dying without anyone else realizing that she was ever alive. (Unsurprisingly, this book sounds identical to Skomsvold-the-writer’s own first novel, Jo fortere jeg går, jo mindre er jeg [2009], translated by Kerri A. Pierce as The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am [2013, Dalkey Archive].)

Kjersti glimpses in this constellated composition the road to her recovery: “I am not a human, and I am not Kjersti. I think that what it means to be Kjersti is related to what it means to be an author, I can’t figure out how else I can become Kjersti. If I can become a book, I will also become human” (62). But to become the author of a real book, Kjersti needs more than disconnected fragments. In pursuit of a place to unfold a more streamlined narrative, she forces herself to leave her bed in her parents’ basement, creeps into her dad’s office, and nabs the notebook he uses for the household accounting. After tearing out the pages filled with “Dad’s economic keywords,” she begins to write.

Kjersti’s use of an accounting book carries a curious symbolism, particularly given her growing obsession with the sheer accumulation of words. She imagines that a book worthy of endowing her with a fully human status must be epic in scope and ambitious in execution. For this reason she invests in a computer. But when the computer arrives she laments that the white box looks too small to contain the vastness of her masterpiece. Yet Kjersti’s first draft is tragicomically slim:

It’s October, and I’ve finished writing the book! It is thirty-eight pages long. I think about everything that these pages are supposed to accomplish for me. Make me get better and give me a steady income and a husband and children. I read through the manuscript. It feels like half the book is missing. . . . I read through my diary to see whether there are any good, missing points, hidden inside. There aren’t. I change the line spacing from 1.5 to 2. That feeling of not knowing how to write. (86)

Kjersti’s anxiety about page count continues plague her until late in the book. Hence the scene, recounted above, in which she confides to Karl Ove Knausgård that she wishes to write a longer novel.

Kjersti’s anxiety about number of pages would be an ordinary undergraduate kind of concern if it weren’t also bound so closely to her physical and mental recovery. The more she writing she accumulates, the better she feels. But as the number of manuscript pages increases, her worries about losing everything grow more acute. In this regard Kjersti’s attitude strikes me as being weirdly akin to that of someone who rockets into new wealth, and as their net worth increases, so too does their paranoia about losing the power that wealth entails. Perhaps this explains the frequent reprise of the quasi-economic metaphor that grounds Kjersti’s writerly enterprise: “I try to collect myself (collect myself!)” (97).

The pseudo-financial anxiety about accumulation also transmutes, in Kjersti’s imagination, into expressions of the old existentialist dialectic of being and nothingness. Kjersti begins to depict herself as sliding into the abyssal void of nothingness, struggling to generate a plenitude she associates with being. Despite its high-flown philosophical register, the struggle between being and nothingness appears in strangely ordinary moments. For example, one afternoon, while Kjersti lays on the ground contemplating cloud formations and reflecting that she may not know how to be a writer after all, she makes a sudden, bizarre pivot: “My English teacher in junior high said that he would buy my first book, he was certain that I would write a book one day. But he told me with the same enthusiasm about the time his vacuum clearer exploded, his living room filled with dust” (129). The emotional logic of Kjersti’s non sequitur seems clear enough. Her teacher displayed about as much excitement for her writing as he did for his vacuum cleaner—hardly a booster of confidence. Yet the image of an exploding vacuum also offers a homely recapitulation of the existentialist dialectic. What is a vacuum if not an appliance designed to void a space of (unwanted) matter—nothingness? What is a roomful of dust if not a model of chaotic plenitude—being? 

As if seeking a kind of imagistic slant rhyme with the anecdote of the exploding vacuum, Kjersti shortly thereafter discusses the annihilating power of black holes. Specifically, she imagines herself swirling into a singularity’s annihilating abyss: “Black holes have a well-earned reputation for destruction, but they’re even worse than you might think. If I were to fall in, not only would I be shredded to bits, but my timeline would end. No new life would rise from the ashes; my molecules would never be recycled” (151). Just as her English teacher’s exploding vacuum anecdote offered an ill omen of her fate as an author, the black hole threatens to nullify her existence. Curiously, she goes on to liken this nullification to the radical annihilation that awaits a character at the end of a book: “As a figure who is reaching the last pages of a book, I wouldn’t just exit with death—it would be my existential ruin.”

Kjersti’s reference to herself as a character marks a shift in her anxieties as she completes her first novel and begins working her second. Her debut novel comes out, and the critics greet it with general acclaim. Kjersti has become an author. She also seems to have made a full recovery from her chronic fatigue syndrome. By her own accounting, then, she has restored herself to the ranks of humanity. And now, fully human, Kjersti embarks on a second novel in which she will make herself the protagonist and narrator. Whereas the first part of Monsterhuman tells of Skomsvold’s struggle to transform from monster to human, the second will entail her further transformation into a character.

Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold. Image sourced from Morgenbladet.

The transition from the first book to the second coincides with drastic changes in Kjersti’s physical body. To be sure, physical changes have accompanied Kjersti’s writing since the beginning. While drafting her first novel she ate voraciously, as though seeking to satiate a bottomless hunger. Then, on the cusp of her debut, Kjersti undergoes rapid weight loss. She takes up running. She all but stops eating. She vomits spontaneously. Her friends worry she’s become anorexic and warn that she “mustn’t vanish completely” (316). But Kjersti sees her weight loss as part of her new writing regime. Whereas she needed excess sustenance while constituting herself as an author, now that she’s become human she no longer requires nourishment and can instead draw on her own “fat reserves” (278).

Yet Kjersti’s physical diminishment also relates in a strange way to the genre of her new writing project, an autofictional novel in which she, or a version of herself, will serve as the narrator. As she transitions from author to character, from human to protagonist, Kjersti feels herself vanishing, effectively liquidating the self she has labored to accumulate throughout the first half of the book. The sense of disappearance intensifies as Kjersti revisits her own period of physical and mental illness. Just as her battle with ME had threatened to banish her to the void, self-doubt conspires to make Kjersti vanish:

The problem with writing about yourself is that you can end up hating the person in question. I often dislike myself because I write so badly, and on top of all that, I’m now supposed to write about a person whom I often dislike. The result is that I vanish, it’s nothing worse than that. I can pretend that there’s more and more of me when I write about myself, but the truth is that I’m vanishing by the minute. (320). 

The autofictional endeavor threatens to evacuate Kjersti to the point that “there’s nothing left of anything” inside her (323). The sensation of disappearance grows to the point of neurosis: “I’ve turned into that vacuous, meaningless person that I’ve always suspected I truly am inside. . . . It’s as if there’s almost nothing left of Kjersti or anything else inside of me” (330).

Kjersti’s new neurosis initially seems like a displaced version of the obsessions that occupied her throughout the novel. Most obviously, her language here echoes the images of being and nothingness that appeared frequently in the novel’s first half. However, despite the fact that Kjersti’s talk of vacuity, meaninglessness, and “who I really am inside” does represent a thematic refrain of the existentialist dialectic, that refrain now rings out in a new key. For her first book, Kjersti labored through a primarily physical process of writing as self-constitution. For her second book, she struggles through a primarily metaphysical process of writing as self-substitution—maybe even self-sublimation. Put differently, Kjersti trades the “practical” endeavor of learning to be an author for the more refined, “theoretical” challenge of transubstantiating into text.

Let me explain.

As Kjersti embarks on her second book she also enrolls in a creative writing program, where for the first time in her life she pursues a formal aesthetic education. For her coursework she reads widely in European literature and literary theory. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the theoretical text that captures her imagination is Roland Barthes’s landmark essay, “The Death of the Author.” She takes solace in his touchstone idea that authorship does not dictate final authority over the composition or meaning of a text. Kjersti derives great comfort from Barthes’s dictum that, as he puts it, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (Barthes 148). The lesson she learns is that there’s no way around the kind of vanishing she’s experiencing; the author’s disappearance is fundamental to the process of writing. She is not the origin of what she writes, since the author’s only power is essentially combinatorial, “a web of symbols, an isolated and infinitely delayed imitation” (342). For this reason, the autofictional experiment she pursues does not pertain to her real self. She cites Proust as an example: “he didn’t put his life into a book, he made his life into a work, of which his own book was a kind of model.” Paradoxically, a book about a real-life person precedes its subject, effectively allowing Kjersti to vanish into the purity of her authorial desire: “I’m not even the one who is writing, I am the one who WANTS TO WRITE.”

Thus, the autofictional enterprise enables Kjersti to accomplish her final disappearance—her final liquidation of self—through the mysteries of first-person narration: “Using the word ‘I’ gives the feeling of something real, and if you enter far enough into the ‘I,’ it transforms into a third person. Maybe this indicates that the closer I am able to get to who I am, in my writing, the less it will feel like me. What if the writing about myself is the most extreme way to flee from reality?” (353). Writing about herself proves fundamentally self-effacing. In order to transform herself into a first-person narrator in a novel about her own life, she must other herself; she must experience her own experiences as if they belonged to someone completely different. Autofiction therefore requires a complete self-evacuation. As Kjersti-the-narrator puts it: “in composing, one enters into true meaninglessness, one abandons a fixed framework, only an empty room remains, and then, then one should try to fill it with meaning and substance again.” Basically, writing effaces the self of the writing subject, producing an empty vessel that must subsequently be filled with the “meaning and substance” of character. 

In the end, then, Kjersti’s longstanding struggle to achieve a humanizing plenitude ultimately requires a radical evacuation. From the fullness of being to the void of nothingness—that age-old dialectic, again! Whereas she started by accumulating a self by writing and becoming a human via authorship, she ends by liquidating the very selfhood that authorship had bestowed in order to transmute herself a properly novelistic subject.

As if to underscore the absurdity of her own existential themes, Kjersti concludes the novel by considering how to conclude. She draws inspiration from six theories about how the universe will end: the big lurch, the big freeze, the big rip, the big crunch, the big brake, and the big whimper. Ultimately, Kjersti says, the astronomers consider the big whimper the most plausible theory. Of this theory, she says: “If the fate of the universe is the big whimper, then it will expand forever, it will only grow emptier and sadder. . . . Though time never ends, it becomes more and more meaningless” (447).

Monsterhuman could be said to end with a similar whimper. After surveying the various astronomical theories, there is a short section in which Kjersti complains to her friend Ellisiv that she still can’t come up with an ending that she wants. Ellisiv responds: “You’ll never get the ending that you want.” Crucially, though, a complete paragraph appears between Kjersti’s complaint and Ellisiv’s response. In her final authorial intervention, Kjersti-the-narrator declaims:

Of all the fearsome things that exist inside ourselves, or in the sky, or on the earth, perhaps we needn’t fear anything other than that which is never said. Once everything’s been said, we can feel safe, but not before. Then, at last, we can be silent, for we no longer need fear silence. We can finally be at peace. In the end, all of those things that we fear turn into something to laugh about. I say this only to you. (448)

Only when everything has been said, when the vacuum of silence has been filled with the plenitude of utterance, can peace reign and the end finally come. 

Ironically, Kjersti’s own burgeoning theory of language and authorship has shown us just how insufficient her own themes of emptiness and fullness are for thinking about personhood, novelistic or otherwise. She continues to suffer and struggle to the very end precisely because there is no end to the (self-)production of the self. The vessel cannot be filled. A subject—whether “monster” or “human” or “protagonist”—will never be complete, will always require further supplementation. Like the universe, then, Kjersti can expand infinitely. 

Yet, also like the universe, Kjersti can also evacuate herself at a whim. She suggests as much in the way she ends the book with her characteristic self-effacing humor, and more specifically in the penultimate paragraph’s reference to laughter. Though I haven’t mentioned it yet, laughter plays an important role throughout the novel. This is particularly true in the first half of the book, when Kjersti experiences random moments of insuppressible laughter. These bouts of laughter often erupt at awkward or inappropriate moments. The laughter is thus never an expression of something comic, but rather a kind of involuntary somatic ventilation—that is, an autonomic expulsion of emotional buildup. When laughter returns on the final page of the novel, it has a similarly voidant power. Thus, if Kjersti seems to be laughing at the end of Monsterhuman, it’s not quite the laughter of comedy. Instead, it’s a strange, humorless laughter of self-evacuation that will enable Kjersti-the-character to face existential annihilation as the novel approaches its end.

And I imagine that what I am reading now, which is about the novel, is also about men. In order for the man to be ridiculous, he must be brought close. Everything ridiculous is close. Laughter annihilates anxiety and the piety of the object, of the world, it subjects man to intimate, uninhibited contact, and thus paves the way for a limitless exploration of the man. (352–53)

The end of the universe. Image sourced from IFLScience.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Music – Image – Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill & Wang, 1978, 142–48.

Deleuze, Gilles. Proust and Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: George Braziller, 1972.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle. 6 vols. Trans. Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken. New York: Archipelago Books, 2012–2018.

Skomsvold, Kjersti Annesdatter. The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am. Trans. Kerri A. Pierce. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2011.

———. Monsterhuman. Trans. Becky L. Crook. Victoria, TX: Dalkey Archive, 2017.