Is Artistic Ego a Faustian Bargain? Karl Ove Knausgaard on Plot, Narcissism, and His New Novel

The moral fulcrum of Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, in which a scholar gains knowledge and power through a demonic pact, is a relatively straightforward statement on the human condition. Daily life is filled with ethical sacrifice, even if most of it occurs on a miniature scale. Half a glance at the international news suggests that major Faustian bargains are occurring at a breakneck pace, all around the world, many by untroubled parties.

Faustian parables unlock more interesting connotations when considered not in terms of politics, but of art. Aren’t all artists a bit selfish? And doesn’t art itself derive from a human capacity for preening?

Few authors are better equipped to address these questions than the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, who made a name for himself by alchemizing his private life into approximately 3,500 pages of literary voyeurism and stamping it with the name of Hitler’s manifesto. Knausgaard specializes in piercing self-awareness; he clearly knew what he was doing while he did it, even if he couldn’t have predicted the ensuing popularity. My Struggle would estrange his first wife and assorted family members, even as it cemented Knausgaard’s own artistic status.

Speaking from his extensive personal library in London (documented by The Washington Post in 2024), Knausgaard tells me, “When My Struggle succeeded, I felt guilty for having written it. And then I got success. There was a correlation.”

Knausgaard says that his newly translated novel, The School of Night, a retelling of Marlow’s famous tale, wasn’t spurred by his own artistic culpability. Still, it’s a fascinating read when viewed through the lens of Knausgaard’s own fame and backlash.

“Can you be a good writer and a good person?” he muses into his Zoom camera, vaping every few seconds. “Is that possible to combine? Can you be a good writer and a good father?”

Knausgaard hatched the idea for The School of Night after moving to Deptford, a London neighborhood on the south banks of the Thames where Marlowe was murdered, under murky circumstances, in 1593 at the age of 29. But the novel’s first-person protagonist, a young Norwegian photographer named Kristian Pederson, pulls more from Knausgaard’s youth than from Marlowe’s.

“I took a lot from myself at 18 or 19,” says Knausgaard. “[Kristian] is very naïve when it comes to what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. He really has no idea. And I was the same when I was that age. The strong narcissistic impulse he has, I had that myself when I was 19.”

Knausgaard’s narcissism—let’s face it, a common trait in authors—steered him into a creative writing course taught by none other than eventual Nobel winner Jon Fosse, who delivered a scalding workshop critique that echoes in The School of Night.

“Why should I look at them?” a professor says of Kristian’s photographs, speaking before the entire cohort. “They investigate a phenomenon, that of perspective. They succeed in telling me something about that, we see how the lines converge on a vanishing point. But it is not enough, Kristian. Your pictures are basically a bit dull. Without temperament.”

“Can you be a good writer and a good person?” he muses into his Zoom camera, vaping every few seconds. “Is that possible to combine? Can you be a good writer and a good father?”

The scene is rooted in Fosse’s excoriation of Knausgaard’s work. “My workshop was even more brutal,” he says with a smile. “[Fosse] was 29 and really hardcore. He said exactly what he thought of the writing, there was no mercy. It didn’t live up to his expectations. And his expectations were high. So that was a crash course.”

The disparagement made Knausgaard drop writing for a good ten years. He returned to it “accidentally” when an editor later asked for some work, instilling him with just enough confidence to crank out his first novel. “Before that,” he says, “I had given up.”

That criticism scene is where the Knausgaard/Kristian simulacrum begins to crumble. Unlike Knausgaard, Kristian isn’t one to back down. He’s moved to London at 20, partly to pursue art but also to chase after booze and women, and mainly to escape from his Norwegian family, whose compassion he detests out of kneejerk lonerism.

“I wanted to write about a character who doesn’t turn inward,” says Knausgaard. “There’s no shame. He just accuses the world around him. That creates a different path through life than I have had. And that was the fun part, to see where it would take him. He’s very unsympathetic. It’s not a good human quality, but it’s good for an artist, I think, to be the way he is.”

Kristian has no trouble sidestepping the criticism. The teacher thinks his work is bad? The teacher is an idiot! Kristian makes other bargains and decisions—one involving a dead cat—to advance his career throughout the novel. But the most Faustian element of his character, as Knausgaard just revealed, is his towering ego. Kristian is a man of passable talent who looks down on everyone and everything around him, issuing proclamations like, “Americans. Either they were all swagger or else they were submissive,” and, “Just as an arse had two buttocks, there were two sides to artistic taste—and from the middle came nothing but shite.”

This latter remark is illustrative. In and of itself, certainly, but also of Kristian’s disposition. He’s a jerk, but he’s undeniably funny. And clever enough, somehow, to hold down a brisk 500 pages.

Knausgaard says that he tends not to plot out his novels, but instead creates characters and sees what they do when they wander out onto the page. “When I’m writing,” he says, “I never know where I’m going.” Take for example the aforementioned cat carcass, which Kristian decides to boil in a stovetop pot and then photograph in his tiny apartment. Knausgaard says, “Kristian was on his bike thinking about what he can work with, and this idea of scaffolding, of skeletons, and of bones turned up. And I thought, like him, how can I get access to an animal? What kind of animal? You know, you can maybe go there… and then I just let him do it. Then the problem is, well, how to get to the skeleton?” (The bin behind an animal hospital.) “How long would it take to cook? What would it smell like?” (“The stench almost knocked me out.”)

“He’s just doing it,” says Knausgaard, growing animated in describing his creative approach. “I’m writing it while he’s doing it. I didn’t plan it.” He compares the process to method acting: the character dictates what happens. And of the character, Knausgaard says, “I become him.”

Knausgaard has written his last six novels—beginning with 2020’s The Morning Star—using this process. “That’s probably why there’s so many digressions,” he says. “If I find something, it’s like a little pocket opens up. I go into there and write about that and come back.”

It’s prime seat-of-the-pants stuff, like wandering through dense woods in the dark. A fun activity, for a while, if the weather’s just right—but this “method acting” process doesn’t seem suitable for most types of books, or for that matter, most types of authors. Knausgaard can write like this because his style creates exceptions to a few major rules. How? First, he’s a terrific sentence-level author. Second, his translator Martin Aitken is an equally terrific sentence-level author. But the core of Knausgaard’s writing, from My Struggle to the present day, is his perceptiveness, the well-paced cognitive steps that form an easy entryway to the mind on the page. Here’s Kristian at a London pub:

I went over to buy myself another pint. When the bartender turned to take my order, something stopped me, not a thought exactly, but something like it. Drinking in the daytime isn’t OK, it said.

Really? Why not? OK to whom? If I want another pint, and if I think it’s OK to have one, then why shouldn’t it actually be OK? Who are you to impose on me anyway? I’m alone here in the world, you see, and I can do exactly as I want. And now I want to buy myself another pint.

Maybe Knausgaard appeals because his characters—including his most famous character, himself—overprocess the world in the exact way that writers themselves overprocess the world. There are shades of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea here, the supreme dislocation of being a person in a world where others are so utterly unknowable. For fledgling photographer Kristian Pederson, the antidote to this schism is a cosmic dose—a Faustian dose—of self-confidence.

Is all art, therefore, Faustian? It’s a ridiculous generalization, so I wait until the end of our interview to broach it. “No, I don’t think so,” answers Knausgaard after a moment. “But it absolutely needs to be free. And the matter of how to get that freedom, that’s the question.”