On 19 May 2024, the Vatican released a new ruling on miracles. Since 1978, the veracity of visions and weeping statues has been determined by local dioceses, but that call now resides with the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith, AKA The Inquisition. The intention is to disenchant the world. These novels by Karl Ove Knausgaard re-enchant the world, but not in a good way. Think Voldemort, rather than the Virgin Mary.
The Morning Star and The Wolves of Eternity are the first in Knausgaard’s new series, with The Third Realm out in English in October and The Night School published in Norwegian last October. The style reinforces Knausgaard’s reputation as a master of autofiction, the fourteen hundred pages of minutely observed interior lives over the two novels domesticating the supernatural. A bright new star that suddenly appears in the evening sky unsettles, but is quickly dismissed by television experts as a supernova. Then strange events occur, observed in the same dispassionate language Knausgaard uses to describe his characters frying fish fingers or brewing coffee, leaving their implications to the reader.
The theme is the quest for immortality, introduced through occasional conversations over a barbecue, a train journey, a bowl of porridge and the occasional essay by one of the characters. Six of the fourteen main characters in the two novels indulge in metaphysical speculation, the rest get on with their lives with their self-talk, shopping lists and personal secrets distracting from the inexplicable.
In Morning Star, talk of immortality is sprinkled with references to Genesis, Rilke, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, while Wolves introduces Russian mystic Nicolai Fyodorov, who argued that immortality is not just possible, it is humanity’s task “…to resurrect all who have ever lived.” Silicon Valley entrepreneur and life extentionist Peter Thiel is mentioned as evidence that immortality has moved from religion to science, and both books quote this passage from Revelation:
“And in those days, men shall seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.”
As the star appears early in Morning Star, which takes place over two sweltering August days in present day Bergen, and at the end of Wolves, which covers 40 years to the present first in Norway then Russia, Wolves serves as a prequel. While the planet-sized star looms unexplained over Wolves, there is a hint in Morning Star as its arrival coincides with a satanic murder. A nod to 1990s Bergen, when black metal bands were burning churches and a member of the band Burzum (‘Darkness’ in the Black Speech of the Lord of the Rings) was convicted of murdering a Mayhem bandmate.
Hell on Earth
Near the end of Morning Star, Knausgaard ignores Nietzsche’s advice and the abyss stares right back. Jostein Lindland is a middle aged crime reporter, first to the murder scene, and soon after filing copy he passes out, wandering for 30 pages through a sparse post-apocalyptic world of mute zombies, lost relatives and mythical half humans pushing burning long boats adrift on the fjord.
Back on Earth, the metaphysical speculation continues in the form of an essay on death by one of the characters. Egil Stray is a scientifically sceptical, independently wealthy lapsed documentary maker and forty-something divorced son of a shipping magnate. After acknowledging that the origin of life could have been a random unplanned event, he goes on:
But the idea that death arose quite as haphazardly at the same time is something I have more difficulty believing. I can accept one random occurrence with consequences of that magnitude. But two, and at the same time? That smacks too much of a plan. And the doubt to which that suspicion gives rise gnaws at the very theory of evolution itself, which is unthinkable without death.
Egil is one of several characters who rejects scientific materialism, questions Darwinian evolution or complains that science has stripped the world of mystery. What he doesn’t consider is that death is a side effect of life. That mortality is cellular, a consequence of the fact that natural selection is a form of problem solving on the run with neither plan nor capacity for forethought. Death is ultimately due to the accumulated errors of cell division, hastened by the inflammatory effects of oxygen rusting us from the inside, not the legacy of a single random event.
But since the discovery of stem cells and telomeres, errors in cell division can theoretically be overcome. The problem is not the feasibility of cellular reprogramming or anti-senescent therapies, it’s their ethical implications.
Transhumanism
In Knausgaard’s world, immortality arrives miraculously overnight. When no deaths are recorded in Norway after the star appears in Wolves, and an emergency department in Morning Star records vital signs in people with clearly fatal injuries, hell on Earth is just a matter of time. This thought experiment parallels the potential side effects of efforts by today’s hi-tech transhumanists to extend human life – the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs embracing the utopian fantasy of human perfectibility and ignoring three thousand years of cultural caution from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Mary Shelley.
Uneven access to gene-editing rejuvenation and brain implants opens the prospect of not just an uberclass but a new sub-species. And history suggests that the relationship between H sapiens cyberensis and H sapiens sapiens will be no more fair or friendly than H sapiens sapiens vs H sapiens neanderthalensis. Jostein’s dream populated with the unspeaking undead, resurrected ancestors and hybrid overlords presages the dark side of transhumanism.
Of course, the promise of Silicon Valley’s transhumanists is to benefit all of humanity, to float all boats. The catch is that governance of this technology is up to states that have, in recent times, done more to increase inequality than reduce it. Billions of central bank funds released to keep economies afloat between 2008 and 2022 flowed to the high returns of the tech sector where platforms replace markets, rents replace profit and free data replaces labour in a self-sustaining cycle that captures, modifies and monetises our attention with every post and every purchase.
Knausgaard’s mastery of style immerses the reader in the intimate, mundane and unfulfilled lives of his characters and we sleepwalk with them into a new moral universe. Philosopher Daniel Dennett avoided immortality in April this year and, in one of his last publications, left us these words of warning:
Democracy depends on the informed (not misinformed) consent of the governed. By allowing the most economically and politically powerful people, corporations, and governments to control our attention, these systems will control us.
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star (Vintage 2022) and The Wolves of Eternity (Harvill Secker 2023) are available now.
