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Acclaimed Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard says that for most of his life, science seemed off limits to artistically minded souls like himself. Best known for his landmark autobiographical series of novels My Struggle, Knausgaard says he considered science a technical space too abstracted from real life.
But in recent years he’s come to the realization that he perhaps had it backward: that it is the scientists who are dealing in reality while artists work in mere symbols. Now he has become absorbed in reading all manner of scientific works on neuroscience and consciousness, climate change, astronomy. These new fascinations are reflected in his latest novel, The Third Realm, a sprawling tale about a world shocked by the sudden appearance of an inexplicable star looming in the near sky—though in it, he places the science in conversation with more fantastic ways of thinking. A neuroscientist encounters a crystal fortuneteller, for example, or a forensic investigator’s chase seems to have him hot on the tail of the Devil.
In the world of The Third Realm, the lines between science and the occult blur, and the philosophical quandaries undergirding the book strike at the core of our increasingly environmentally alarmed zeitgeist: “What about us? Don’t we belong to nature?” We recently discussed his newfound interest in science, how climate change inspired the series, whether intelligent machines can make art, and his outlook in the face of our uncertain future.
In The Third Realm there are noticeably more references to scientific and science-adjacent concepts compared to the previous installments in the Morning Star series. Was that intentional? And did you do any research?
I didn’t think much about that, really. I read a lot about consciousness and neuroscience—but not for any purpose, I just read what I’m really interested in, just for my own pleasure—and then it finds its way in. And it’s the same with biology and everything. And the thing is, this is a very recent thing. Before I was 40 it felt like I wasn’t even allowed to read books about anything other than literature or philosophy or social science or anything that had to do with humanities. And I’ve been wondering why, but it was like I just couldn’t. I wasn’t allowed to. It wasn’t for me, you know? And then it has been such an almost revelation to enter into that field. I don’t understand why I kept it at such a distance for so many years.
The Third Realm has this kind of antagonism between the “hard” sciences and more pseudo-scientific or para-scientific realms. What do you think of that tension between the two?
I like very much to have them both at the same time. I don’t like one theory. I like many theories that can be mutually exclusive almost. Basically everything is about what is it and who are we? And why are we here? And that’s the question everyone asks, in science or theology or whatever. It’s just incredibly different ways of entering the questions.
If something’s changing, if you are part of it, you can’t see it.
Your previous writing has been famously autobiographical, and now with your fiction you’ve moved into exploring a much broader range of themes and experiences. Was that a conscious choice?
Yeah, that was definitely a conscious choice. I wanted desperately to get away from what I have been doing, you know—the whole world in one person. I wanted to get out there and have many different characters interested in many different things—and also looking at the world in different ways with different restrictions, because everyone has restrictions, there’s always something someone doesn’t see—and play with that coming from a certain thesis that what’s truth is between us. It’s not fixed in you or me but it is something that’s constantly negotiated and floating. And also it gives me a chance to write about things I’m interested in, to make up a character and let her be a theologist or biologist or neuroscientist or whatever. And it’s fun and it has this double thing—I write about the brain, but I’m actually writing about myself in a much weirder way. And I am very interested in the physiology and the matter of the world. I’ve always been attracted to that.
You open The Third Realm with a woman experiencing the return of schizophrenic symptoms, and having spent 20 years watching a close friend grapple with this condition, I thought your depiction was incredibly accurate. The sudden imposition of voices that seem to come from outside the character. The slightly aggressive, negative way the voices tend to talk. The mania and depression that can accompany them and the family difficulties that arise. You worked in a psychiatric hospital when you were younger—is that where you picked this up?
Yes, from personal experience. I witnessed it several times. So in The Morning Star [the opening novel of his current series] it’s seen from the outside, and it seems like a problem. [It is related by the husband of a schizophrenic woman, who just wants her to go away to a hospital.] This time the challenge was to try to relate it from the inside, and her fear of change. She says her husband, he never changes. He can be happy, he can be sad, he can be all kinds of things, he can be drunk, but it’s always the same, and her fear of changing and losing control over herself and over her identity is kind of what that part is about. And for me, the interesting thing is that art is about losing that control, and it’s about transgressing your boundaries or transgressing your identity somehow. But in one case it can be incredibly destructive and very painful and horrible, and on the other, it’s creating something. I know several artists who deal in both, the painful and the creative sides of losing control.
The Morning Star series hinges on an environmental phenomenon that is out of humanity’s control and the unforeseeable consequences of it, which seems to be a metaphor for climate change. Am I right?
Yeah, it’s part of the whole book. Not in a very obvious or visible way. The star is something that appears and we don’t know what it is—which is unheard of, really, because we always know what everything is. And then there are some peculiar ways animals are behaving. In the first volume it’s the heat. It’s just small things. But what I’m really trying to do is capture change. So there is, for instance, this little dialogue between Syvert and his brother where the brother talks about the dream banks [online repositories where people report their dreams] and how if there are changes in mentality or in humanity, that’s the place you should look because it’s collective. And those banks actually exist. I’ve been into the dream banks but it’s incredibly boring after 10 minutes. But the idea is, if something’s changing, if you are part of it, you can’t see it. So one of the things I had in my head in the beginning of the series is the sentence, we have turned our backs to nature. I don’t know how much is on the page with this, but when I’m writing I think that if I write whatever comes through my head, it will be connected to something else that’s going on. That’s the nature of consciousness and the nature of writing.
One of the key elements of The Third Realm is the exploration of consciousness. What do you think the nature of consciousness is?
That’s the question I can’t answer. I don’t know. I’ve been reading about it and I’m not sure if anyone knows. And that’s so weird because everyone knows what it is to have a consciousness. I mean, that’s us. That’s who we are. But we still don’t know what it is. And I think with AI and all of that coming closer, it’s incredibly exciting. And also scary, of course—when technology and biology meet. But that’s what’s happening now. And that leap—either you believe that leap is possible, or you don’t think it’s possible. It’s almost like if you believe in God or not. That kind of gap.
In terms of creation, I don’t believe AI can replace anything.
What are your thoughts on AI?
It’s an incredibly impressive tool. For translation, for instance, I’ve used it privately when I’ve given speeches in Norwegian and translated it into English, and it’s apt. I have no understanding of how that’s even possible, and with that speed. I’m surrounded by technology and surrounded by computers and all of that, but I never got it. I spent seven months on it and read a lot and traveled around and I just couldn’t. And when I met some experts and asked, can you please just explain to me, what is AI? And they didn’t even understand the question, because to them it’s easy. I feel almost guilty to not know. I feel that ignorance is just not right. I mean, I’m raised to know a bit about politics and a bit about literature—to be a citizen, that’s what you have to do, and you have responsibility. But we have no responsibility to understand this. We just use it.
For me I think it goes back to the ’80s, when science was just … you couldn’t deal with it, shouldn’t deal with it. You felt like literature was kind of close to life and close to existence, and the other disciplines were just some sort of mechanical, technical, stupid stuff. And then I understood much, much later in life that the scientists were actually out there and digging, or out there in the sea, or out there in the world. And we in the arts were looking at signs and abstractions. And I think that that kind of division that I had between those fields made me completely ignorant when it came to computers.
But in terms of creation, I don’t believe AI can replace anything. I mean, that’s the whole point of art and that’s the whole point of us—that presence we have. And you can’t engineer that. That’s impossible, I think.
In The Third Realm there is a sense of foreboding or anticipation for what is to come. Are you a pessimist or an optimist?
I’ve always been optimistic. Always had faith. I don’t know why. Maybe there’s no reason for it. Do you know the Nordic “Völuspá?” It’s an old poem, 1,000 years old. Part of our mythology comes from it. So there is this winter that lasts for many, many years, almost eternally, and that’s Ragnarok, which is the end of the world—an eternal winter. And then the poem ends with the rise of a new world, kind of lush and green, and it’s an incredibly good ending. I always loved that. But then I read a book about the Vikings. Very good book. It’s written by a British archaeologist that works in Sweden, and he writes about this volcano in the year 500 and something that was the second most violent volcano event in the history of the world. And so winter was like 10 years or something. Half of the population of Scandinavia died. The consequences of this lasted for like 80 years. The society just collapsed, and everything had to start again. And then 500 years later, this is in a poem. You think it’s just fiction, but it actually was a real experience it came from. And the ending with the lush world, well, that was the world they lived in. And I felt comfort in that, both the historic events, but also the poetry in it. That’s very naive, I know, but you asked me if I was optimistic, and somehow I am. 
Lead image: Amrei-Marie / Wikimedia Commons
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Nick Hilden
Posted on
Arts, science, and travel writer Nick Hilden contributes to the likes of the Washington Post, Scientific American, Esquire, Popular Science, National Geographic, and more. You can follow him on Twitter at @nickhilden or Instagram at @nick.hilden.
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