ABSTRACT
In the opening pages of My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard flattens death, equating lifeless bodies with “lamps, suitcases, carpets,” and presumably buttons like those in evidence. Death reduces a person to yet another piece of earthly furnishings, to pure materiality. Death reduces a person to yet another piece of earthly furnishings, to pure materiality. Charles Dickens domesticates death by making it a spectacle to watch while knitting–a spectacle choreographed by knitting. Among all the issues designers are called on to address, the “problems” they are asked to “solve,” none is more fraught and contradictory than designing for death. Jonas Dahlberg’s proposal to commemorate the massacre of seventy-seven people by far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik on the Norwegian island Utoya in 2011 might well be the most literal memorial to traumatic death. The novel begins when death loses interest in the “usual death” that everyone thinks is “their natural due.”.
