Künstlerroman of "Late Modernity": Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle and Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet

The "Künstlerroman is alive and well," wrote an American critic in 2012 (Wallace) when volume 1 of Knausgård's My Struggle was translated into English. A "female Künstlerroman, a woman's story of coming of age as an artist in a male-dominated world" wrote another (How We Spend Our Days) on 1 August 2015 just before "Ferrante Fever" took hold. The label of Künstlerroman occurs very frequently in reference to both My Struggle and the Neapolitan Quartet. Among these occurrences two are particularly noteworthy: Ben Lerner's review in the London Review of Books in 2014, "Each Cornflake" ("My Struggle is a portrait of an artist who will turn his back on art, a Künstlerroman that is also a suicide note") and Lauren Groff's endorsement when Elena Ferrante was nominated by Time as one of the top 100 most influential people of 2016 ("her four-novel Neapolitan story is an epic masterpiece, a Künstlerroman of sustained passion and fury"). The Künstlerroman ("artist-novel" in German) overlaps with the Bildungsroman in showing the artist's growth to maturity and the development of an artistic vocation. My Struggle and the Neapolitan Quartet are indeed a reflection on art and writing, on what it means to be a writer today. The urgency with which Knausgård and Ferrante dissect the act of writing and ponder the function of literature is the object of this article. I will contextualize their works as an example of the revival of the novel, a significant phenomenon of the new millennium. In particular, I will link Knausgård and Ferrante to the proliferation of self-narratives (autofictions, autobiographical novels, first-person novels) which plays a part in this rehabilitation of the novel. Making brief reference to other contemporary works (by Shields, Lerner, and Kandasamy), I will spell out some of the features of these self-narratives, namely: why narrating the self has become the new imperative, the use of the autobiographical element, the emphasis on "raw material" and authenticity and, finally, constant self-reflection. The comparison between Knausgård and Ferrante will then be articulated in an examination of the collision of the real and the fictional and the preoccupation with authenticity which seem to be recurrent in the Künstlerroman of "late modernity."

In his highly acclaimed and best-selling work Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010), David Shields celebrated the advent of a new artistic movement characterised by: a "deliberate unartiness"(which he described as "raw" material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and "unprofessional") but also by an "emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation" and "self-reflexivity; self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real" (5). The emphasis on "raw" material, the plea for a "reality-based art"—best exemplified for Shields by nonfiction genres including the lyric essay, memoir, and collage—and the criticism of the novel and particularly of plot ("the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot, [114]) were greeted with roaring praise but also with some perplexity because they seemed to rekindle the "Is-the-novel-dead-(again)?" controversy. Certainly the novel, with its fictionalisation, its "invented plots and invented characters" (175), is for Shields inadequate to capture the speed and complexity of contemporary experience; besides, it is precisely because we live in fictitious times that Shields is bored with fictions: "Living as we perforce do in a manufactured world, we yearn for the 'real', the semblances of the real. We want to pose something nonfictional against all the fabrication" (81).

A decade on from that manifesto, with ten more years of developments in the "manufactured world" of digital technologies and social media which finds us in the age of post-fact and datafication, there is no trace of the demise of the novel. The opposite is true: there is a revival of the novel, with the global success of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet being just one of...