{"id":4643,"date":"2016-08-17T13:03:39","date_gmt":"2016-08-17T13:03:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/magoria.ch\/wp\/?p=342"},"modified":"2025-08-19T06:53:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T06:53:12","slug":"the-importance-of-circumstantial-detail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.magoria.ch\/dam\/the-importance-of-circumstantial-detail\/","title":{"rendered":"The Importance of Circumstantial Detail"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In his talk with Karl Ove Knausgaard<\/a> at a Guardian Live Book event earlier this year, interviewer John Mullan elaborates on \u00abthe importance of circumstantial detail\u00bb in literature \u2013 not just in Knausgaard\u2019s autobiographical series of novels, but ever since the inception of the British novel in the 18th century. To conjure up and create presence<\/em> Knausgaard resorts to details. James Wood, in How Fiction Works<\/em><\/a>, comes to similar conclusions when he analyses Flaubert\u2019s realistic method \u2013 or rather: his artificial realism. \u00abLife is amorphously full of detail\u00bb, he argues, \u00abwhereas literature teaches us to notice.\u00bb In other words: \u00abLiterature makes us better noticers of life; […] which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.\u00bb<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The key to remembering, for Knausgaard, is to describe the physical world, and by writing about and focusing on the past he finds access to a world that seemed forgotten or lost. This seems to work for his readers as well, or they wouldn\u2019t find his novels addictive. However, the question is: Are there too many \u2013 irrelevant or dysfunctional \u2013 details? Wood might answer yes, as for him \u00abthe artifice lies in the selection<\/em> of detail.\u00bb Or is Knausgaard\u2019s just another (extremist or excessive) form of conventional realism? Can such an abundance of detail achieve what Hemingway \u2013 at the other end of the spectrum \u2013 tried to bring off by \u00absearching for the unnoticed things that made emotions\u00bb, purposefully leaving out \u00abthe underwater part of the iceberg\u00bb, as he aptly put it in his Paris Review<\/em> interview<\/a> 60 years ago?<\/p>\n

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In his talk with Karl Ove Knausgaard at a Guardian Live Book event earlier this year, interviewer John Mullan elaborates on \u00abthe importance of circumstantial detail\u00bb in literature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5602,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.magoria.ch\/dam\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/knausgaard-about-details.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1053,1055,1061,6,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stil","category-medientipp","category-magoriana","category-texte","category-uebersschreiben"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.magoria.ch\/dam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.magoria.ch\/dam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.magoria.ch\/dam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.magoria.ch\/dam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.magoria.ch\/dam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4643"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.magoria.ch\/dam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5599,"href":"https:\/\/www.magoria.ch\/dam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4643\/revisions\/5599"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.magoria.ch\/dam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.magoria.ch\/dam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.magoria.ch\/dam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.magoria.ch\/dam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}