Knausgård explores wonder, human consciousness and the limits of science in The Wolves Of Eternity
Karl Ove Knausgård meditates on the deepest questions of human meaning and mortality in his 2023 novel, The Wolves Of Eternity.
Karl Ove Knausgård rose to fame through his Min Kamp (My Struggle) series, an immense work of ‘autofiction’ that lands somewhere between a memoir and an epic novel. The series has been translated into 36 languages, earned Knausgård comparisons to Proust and Ibsen, and has marked him as one of the most acclaimed authors of the 21st Century.
He followed this with his Seasonal Quartet, a series of stream-of-consciousness journal entries marketed as “a love letter about the world written by a father to his unborn daughter” before turning his attention back to fiction. In 2020 he published his first novel in more than a decade.
Morgenstjernen (The Morning Star) is a curious book. Set in the small Norwegian city of Bergen, the novel provides a window into the internal life of nine characters who are only tangentially related. But it is it’s successor that truly captures the imagination.
Ulvene fra evighetens skog (The Wolves of Eternity) is a rare novel in contemporary literature. With deeply textured prose, tangential storytelling and grand scope, it circles around the classical philosophical themes of sickness, death, freedom and human consciousness. In the novel’s first major section, we inhabit the mind of Syvert Løyning, a nineteen year old who has just returned home after military service in Norway. As with most of Knausgård’s work, time unfolds slowly, and we are invited to observe Syvert’s fleeting thoughts and experiences nestled in between descriptions of his mundane daily activity.
Our first impression of Syvert is not a positive one. He comes across as listless, lazy, immature and fairly unlikeable as he clashes with his widowed mother, gets drunk, fails to woo girls, and plays soccer. But as the days slowly progress there is a subtle repatterning of Syvert’s thoughts. We find him increasingly drawn to connect with his younger brother, Joar, who seems to be on the spectrum, beginning to empathise with his mother, long widowed, and starting to help run the household. And after a powerful dream experience, he starts to reflect on the death of his father, unlocking repressed grief and raising questions which eventually sends him searching for answers about the man he barely knew.
While this plot summary has only taken two paragraphs, the experience of the novel couldn’t be more different. Knausgård’s technique involves meticulously charting character development through a wash of thoughts, actions and experiences. As with Proust’s deeply textured novels, Knausgård’s digressive approach to storytelling and character development is addictive. I found myself emotionally invested in Syvert’s maturation, and felt a sense of loss when the section closed some 400 pages later.
When we return to Syvert’s story many years later it seems that some of his more unsavory character traits — hubris, pretension, ignorance, naivety — have resurfaced. Is this his true nature? While the first section shows Syvert metabolizing grief, pursuing a romantic interest, and encountering death through his work at a funeral parlour, the latter shows him as a successful middle-aged man (his wealth sourced from a lucky play in the stock market). Has success that has made him a less pleasant person?
These questions point to Knausgård’s ability to capture something profound about human consciousness. His characters are not unities, but rather have the chaotic and multifarious nature of real human beings. They are not constructed as wholly free individuals, but rather subtly shaped by people, experiences and social forces. Even they struggle to understand the reasons for their actions, as when Syvert brazenly punches a smaller player when he finds himself outclassed in a soccer match. Certain things are simply not accessible to the conscious mind.
If we can’t truly know ourselves, how much can we really know about others? Syvert’s younger brother Joar seems something of a mystery, though we can recognise the signs of someone potentially on the spectrum. While he clearly processes reality quite differently, it’s touching to see the love and appreciation the brothers have for each other.
Throughout the novel, Knausgård traces the ramifications of variations in human perception. For instance, we find nineteen year old Syvert regularly expressing wonder and bewilderment at the world around him. A typical reflection reads:
We were so certain of that procession: winter, spring, summer, autumn.
But how did it arise?
Something to do with distance from the sun I supposed.
(…) There was something disconcerting about the whole thing.
Why was that, exactly?
Maybe it was because in front of (the sun) and behind made no sense in space. There was no up and no down either. Just endless space, dark and empty, in which the earth revolved and rotated.
What was a human life in all that endlessness?
His brother, however, fails to share this sense of wonder:
‘Since you do so much thinking, what do you think’s the meaning of all of this?’ I said, indicating the situation.
He (Joar) rolled his eyes.
(…) ‘But don’t you think it’s strange that everything we can see around us here is the result of an explosion, and that before that there was nothing?’
‘Are you talking about the Big Bang now?’
‘Yes. How can something as complex as a cat emerge out of nothing?’
(…) ‘Is this something you’ve been wondering about?’ he said, looking at me with his mouth half open.
‘What if I have?’
‘There’s nothing strange about it,’ he said, his voice suggesting puzzlement that I can even ask. ‘Matter accumulates into great clouds. The clouds become stars and planets. On the planters, matter crams together and forms systems. In some of those systems, life emerges. Some of that life develops and becomes a cat.’
Joar is satisfied with the mechanical explanation of the phenomenon — further questions of agency and meaning simply don’t occur to him. Syvert, however, finds the mechanical explanation is incredible in the true sense of the word, and leads to further questions: Why does life exist? How should we consider the universe? How should we relate to it?
These are not questions that can be resolved by scientific facts; they are of a different order entirely, but whether such questions are meaningful seems to be a matter of perception and temperament. Teenage Syvert demonstrates an attentiveness and openness to the world that generates experiences of awe, but these experiences seem curiously absent in his later life. Thinkers as diverse as Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil and Thich Nhat Hanh have acknowledged this sense of intimacy with the world is something that needs to be actively cultivated — and which has significant repercussions for an individual’s experience of the world.
Such themes are picked up in earnest during the novel’s second (major) section, which takes place thirty years later. Here we inhabit the consciousness of Alevtina, a professor of biology living in Putin’s Russia who is travelling with her son to visit her ailing father. This section is narrated in a more classic, literary style with Alevtina producing long, digressive reflections on her life and career, reading somewhere between an essay and a memoir.
As she travels, Alevtina reflects on her years at University, which she frames as an intentional break with her father’s world of philosophy and literature to focus on the more “clear and concrete” world of science. This delineation is almost immediately complicated, however, by Alevtina’s speculative thinking about the sentience of trees. When musing about evolution, she becomes unable to shake the sense that nature is speaking in “secret languages, codes, strange forms of cognition”, and expresses a sense of wonder that borders on a mystical experience. But science is a place of cool, rational thinking, not of mysticism, and Alevtina’s recollections build towards a crisis point where she must choose between her growing, quasi-mystical awareness and the demands of scientific reductionism.
In the present day, Alevtina chastises a student who interrupts her lecture with Thomas Nagel’s critique of scientific certainty. Having access to her innermost thoughts, we know she is being hypocritical — she herself is drawn towards Nagel’s view that all science ultimately maps the limits of human perception and consciousness. She reflects that:
All creatures were limited in their scope of understanding… Like animals, we possessed a horizon of understanding within which our thoughts could freely move, and the space in which they moved was our reality. The edges of that horizon were mists where everything blurred, and beyond the mists was a wall, everything after that was unreachable to us. The nature of the mind was something that lay beyond our horizon of understanding. The nature of the universe and the atoms: beyond. Time: beyond. Death: beyond.’
This is the portrait of a woman who is internally divided, pulled between the poles of poetry, philosophy, science and the spiritual. While she tries to inhabit the persona of a secular rationalist who is dismissive of the idea of God, her inner reality is far more complex. Her story is of someone attempting to unify these multifarious elements of herself — a process which her father describes during one conversation:
‘It wasn’t until I was in my forties that my life became a life at all… Before that, it was all merely a series of possibilities, of what might be. And that shift, from living in the what-might-be to living in what actually was, turned out to be rather painful. I suffered a kind of mental whiplash, you might say — everything that had happened in the past came charging up and hit me full force from behind. It would be no exaggeration to say that I was damaged by it.’
The warring poles of Alevtina’s inner life dramatised by the personalities around her. Her son Seva is sensuous and pleasure seeking, living in the moment and yet seemingly incurious about the world around him. Her father is almost the opposite, treasuring the abstract knowledge of the humanities which Alevtina views as too divorced from concrete reality — and indeed, we do see him struggle to relate-to and connect-with the people around him — but he also possess a key to the other-worldly realm of music, which seems deeply resistant to reductionist ways of thinking.
Alevtina’s friend Vasya can appear both chaotic and childlike, but is able to produce moving poetry and deeply incisive essays. She seems to be an alternate form of Alevtina’s father: one who has a similar connection with art and the humanities, but with the added ability to maintain a kind of radical intimacy with the world around her. She is awake to the world in a way that the father is not.
Then come more minor characters: Alevtina’s mother, gentle, loving, open but seemingly unknowable; her brother Misha, an alcoholic who appears unable to cope with reality — seemingly due to childhood trauma associated with his father; Yura, an old college friend and rather boring businessman, and who Syvert seems to double in his middle-age.
These characters allow Knausgård to explore the ways in which different people experience and process reality, and how this in-turn shapes their relationship to the universe. But this is far from his only concern: he wants to know how determined our characters are; whether we are wholly free to form ourselves, or whether we are trapped by the genetic inheritance of our parents. He is curious about the sentience of plants and other beings. He wants to know what makes life, life, and how consciousness arises from matter. He wants to understand the religious impulse — and sees how, after being repressed in secular society, it can resurface into new forms, as with the dreams of eternal life or ‘curing death’ put forward by transhumanists.
What marks Knausgård apart from other writers working today is his utter refusal to collapse these spaces of inquiry into platitudes. He is wise enough to know the limits of human perception and understanding, and to feel the terror and beauty such a realisation brings. And so he constructs The Wolves Of Eternity as a symphony of experience, perception, and ideas, none of which are ever permitted to form a full or coherent picture, for communication and knowing are always fragmentary.
This is a novel which celebrates complexity and ambiguity, and meditates on the deepest questions of human meaning and mortality. In this it has more in common with the works of Dostoyevsky and Proust than it does with contemporary fiction. Its prismatic construction is entracing, such that is sparkles no matter what angle you turn it under the light.
It’s an impressive feat from Knausgård, and has be curious to see where he takes his work in future. Discard preconceptions and let it wash over you. You may emerge out the other side changed.
I stood for a minute in front of the house and looked at the sky in the west, where the sun was a reddish glow. All was still. The evening light embraced the trees. Here and there, columns of insects swarmed between the boughs. The fields and the slopes of the ridge seemed almost luminous.
How perfectly organised it all was.
The sky was a roof above us, so that we didn’t have to think about the cold and dreadful void beyond. The earth was the floor beneath us, so we didn’t have to worry about the burning core of metal below. And all we saw was a single room at a time.
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