People: A Guest Post by Karl Ove Knausgaard

This dark twist on Christopher Marlowe’s classic play Doctor Faustus is a cautionary tale about the price of success and the moral dilemma that follows. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Karl Ove Knausgaard on writing School of Night.

“The first seed for what would become The School of Night was planted
 sometime in the 1990s, when I read an essay about Shakespeare by the
 Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges one evening. Almost in passing, he 
mentioned one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe, and what he wrote about him was so striking that it has stayed with me ever 
since. I knew that Marlowe was the first to write drama in blank verse, and that his most famous work was about a man’s pact with the devil, Doctor Faustus. But what aroused my interest here was the darkness and wildness that surrounded his life. Marlowe was an atheist and a
 blasphemer – he would say things like that Jesus was not the son of God, and that Jesus and John had a homosexual relationship, which was of course not only an unheard-of statement in Elizabethan England, but also completely dangerous – and he died at the age of only 29, under unclear circumstances, in a quarrel at an inn in Deptford, what then was outside London, where a knife was stabbed through one of his eyes. He was part of a secret society, Borges wrote, called “The School of Night.” It was
 a place for transgressions in a world that was otherwise tightly closed. More than twenty years after I first encountered Marlowe and this dark world, I moved to London and had one of those experiences where something vague from the past suddenly rises to the surface in the present: Deptford, it said on a bus.

Wasn’t that…?

Yes, it was. The place where Marlowe died belonged not only to literature, myths, the night of history, but also to concrete reality: it still existed, I could walk there.

 The second seed of the novel was a photograph, one of the first ever taken, by Daguerre, depicting a street in Paris on an early spring morning in 1837. The photograph is eerie, like that of an extinct city, because where the boulevard should be bustling with life and activity, it is completely silent and empty. This is of course because the exposure time was so long that nothing that moved was captured in the image, neither people, animals nor birds. Except for one man. Tall and thin, dressed in black, he stands there, alone on the sidewalk. Ever since I saw it for the first time, I have thought that it must be the devil.



So that was the world the novel was to set in motion: London and
 Deptford, Marlowe and Faust, the photograph and the devil. But how? No 
idea can drive a novel, no abstract notions can carry it, only characters can. People. And that’s how The School of Night began: I had a young Norwegian named Kristian Hadeland move to London in the summer of 1985 to attend art school. He was wildly ambitious, without a shred of self-awareness, and he wanted to be a photographer. He got a room in Deptford. After following him for a few pages, I discovered a side to him that opened some interesting doors. He didn’t care in the slightest about other people, he was completely and utterly preoccupied with himself, and he lacked empathy entirely. Those character traits
 completely defined the novel: what does such a life look like, what could happen in it? Character is destiny, said the Greeks, and I believe that: you make certain choices in certain situations based on who you are, and that leads you in certain directions. A person without empathy is, in practice, completely free, since they can do whatever they want
 without being bothered by thoughts of the consequences. But the consequences will still be there – so what if something he once did in the past haunts him later? When he is at the top? That is the Faust-myth, of course. And the reason I believe in the truth of it, is that I got there through Kristian, not Marlowe. In that way, The School of Night wrote itself!