Septology! Septology! Septology!
Take the Fosse Pill
Comparison in criticism is an easy crutch; the music review cliche is “it’s x band blended with y band” and the book review cliche is to mention every stylistic contemporary and possible influence. I even leaned on this crutch when I wrote about the first two books in Jon Fosse’s Septology, put out in an English translation by Damion Searls as The Other Name, mentioning Thomas Bernhard and Laszlo Krasznahorkai as similar practitioners of the long, long, long sentence. But comparison can only get so far, can only try to make something more comprehensible by leaning on a referent, and never approaches the particularity of the writer being discussed. Jon Fosse writes in a way all his own, and, as Merve Emre revealed from an upcoming interview with Fosse, he himself doesn’t seem himself writing in a tradition as much as synthesizing a number of voices and influences into something different.
Taking the old masters and making something new out of them, placing yourself in a continuum of art, retroactively changing their work and your own in the process, well, that’s an idea as old as Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” but Fosse’s trilogy does engage more in reconciliation, escaping the chronology and event making of 'tradition’ altogether. Fosse’s Septology obliterates difference itself, approaching the holy in its insistence that past, present and future are occurring all at once, and that every person in the world is not only a recipient of God’s grace but also essentially the same person.
If you missed the previous Fosse newsletter, the book is about a lonely widowed painter named Asle who lives in a small town in Norway. He has a doppelgänger in the big city of Bjorgvin (Bergen) also named Asle who’s also a painter. Narrator Asle’s only friends - and only real connection to the rest of the world - are Other Asle, Beyer the gallerist, his small-town neighbor Åsleik, and the memory of his dead wife Ales. The extremely limited plot consists of Asle driving between his small town and Bjorgvin, checking in on the Other Asle, delivering his paintings to Beyer, and remembering his (and Other Asle’s) life in a slow, ‘hypnotic,’ style of prose, heavy on repetition and light on periods. Some critics have compared the style to the liturgy, others to a fugue state, though I think it is best described as an extremely expansive stream of consciousness, one that inhabits different time periods as well as different consciousnesses rather than insisting on a single, present consciousness. The Other Name (books one and two of the septology) feature the most pure plot, whereas the next two books (I is Another and A New Name) burrow more into flashback and reflection.
In describing the book as I have, I feel as if I’ve made it sound like a didactic moral religious instruction, the doppelgänger conceit working as a high concept Goofus and Gallant. Narrator Asle converts and becomes a successful artist, the other Asle doesn’t believe and becomes a suicidal alcoholic on the road to perdition. But there’s too much blurring between the two for that charge to even stick; where one Asle begins and the other ends is so ambiguous as to make accusations of preachiness null. As a narrative device, the other Asle could simply be a manifestation of the narrator’s worst impulses, of the sinner in all of us, a walking ghost of a life differently lived (having children, continuing to drink, staying in Bjorgvin), or, simply, just a doppelgänger. It can happen!
Crucially, the first meeting between Asle and the other Asle – who our narrator begins to refer to as “The Namesake” – isn’t some moment of epiphany as much as a moment of revulsion. Though the narrator and the namesake share similar ideas about painting – as a way to bring forth light from the dark, as a way to paint out images that are lodged in their minds – the two are not fast friends. The next time Asle sees his Namesake, he wants more than anything to not see him, to get away from him as fast as possible. After a meeting at a bar, here’s how they next come across one another, at an art store:
“…and who should he see standing in front of the tubes of oil paint but The Namesake, his long brown hair, the black leather jacket, the brown leather shoulder bag, the scarf around his neck, and Asle thinks that of course they’re dressed the same today too, and of course he should go up to The Namesake and of course now he’ll have to talk to him, and wasn’t once enough?”
Oh, this fucking guy – myself – again! For all the seeming mysticism of the book, it’s moments like these that return the book to the real; as someone so self-obsessed that I can hardly stand the idea of being at a party with another Evan, I can only imagine my annoyance if there was someone who looked just like me doing the exact same thing as me – and doing it better! At this point, the Namesake’s already gotten into art school just on the strength of his pictures, while the narrator is still stuck in his personal hell of high school. Please don’t send me a link to a wildly successful other Evan’s newsletter. Or maybe do, because it’s the Namesake’s success that inspires Asle to submit his own paintings to the art school, the doppelgänger conceit now a human prick of inspiration, Asle’s ambitious urge personified. The passage is also part of Fosse’s continual undercutting of the ‘goodness’ of his narrator; for all the times he seems to be an avatar of perfect Christian peacefulness (not unlike, say, Marilynne Robinson’s John Ames from Gilead), Fosse will bring in an instance of Asle being uncharitable, sinful, harboring negative thoughts. It’s at once a test of goodness (similar to how Dosteovsky and his characters constantly pokes and prods the beatific Alyosha Karamazov and Prince Myshkin) and also an admission of human sin, the acknowledgement that perfection only comes after death.
Like most trilogies1, the second one is probably the best2. I is Another - the title taken from a Rimbaud line, “Je est un autre” – is where the symbolic lines of the two Asles cross in their first meeting, and where Fosse crosses the symbolic lines of life and death, another paradoxical reconciliation alongside the interminglings of time and character. (The last painting that Alse has made is just two lines crossing, a painting that initially entrances him before becoming an object of something like disgust as the book goes along). At the end of book four, the midpoint of the septology, Asle sits in his home and thinks of Ales:
“and when I sit with one of Ales’s rosaries in my hands we kind of talk to each other for a long time, about anything and everything, before we say goodbye to each other and say it won’t be long before we meet again and then I hang the rosary back up on the hook, and I miss Ales so much, and why did she have to die and leave me, so young, so suddenly? I think and I hear Ales say that even though I always wear the same rosary I do change the scarf I wear, and I say that I’m absolutely sure I’ve worn all the scarves she’s given me, and she says that I certainly have and then I hear Ales ask if I’m doing alright and then I see her sitting in her chair, there to my right, there next to the round table in front of the window, and I say I am, but I miss her so much […] even though it’s impossible to say anything about how she is, now that she’s dead, because in a way she’s not like anything, well yes she’d have to say that she’s doing well, because there’s no other way to say how she’s doing, and when we talk together we do have to use words, but words can say so little, and the less they say the more they say, in a way, Ales says and she says she’s always near me…”
The scarves and the rosaries that Asle holds onto are physical remnants of Ales, but there is also the overwhelming power of love evident here, the power to keep someone right there with you even as they move into the other world, even beyond the shared language of words. Words, in Fosse’s formulation, are another necessarily insufficient way to approach the ineffable, alongside painting and all types of art, a way to get at something that is true but may not be real. “[B]ut even if we aren’t together visibly on earth anymore we are still invisibly together […] now she is everything that exists in language, because God is the pure, the whole language, the language without division and separation […] Ales says she can’t tell me what that’s like, because people can’t picture it…” If there is anything that Fosse’s writing style is like, to get back to that nasty business of comparison, then it is something like a language “without division and separation,” something that can’t be pictured but can be felt. When critics talk about the rhythmic quality of the prose in these books, it’s this effect, the repetitive simplicity sanding down the edges of the world.
If there is a transcendent quality to these books, it is hard earned. I’ve focused here on the radiant love and grace that suffuses the book, but that is not to say that there is not, appropriate to Fosse’s reconciliatory style, an almost equal amount of darkness and suffering. Asle’s reminiscences of his own life, and of his Namesake’s, are filled with tragedies - catastrophically bad marriages, inexplicable deaths (inasmuch as death is ever explicable, but the sudden death of children is even moreso inexplicable), abuse, alcoholism, suicidal ideation, and a far Northern hemispheric atmosphere of melancholy. It is from these depths that the shining light of the book emerges, a light emerging from the darkness, as it is in Asle’s pictures, as it is in life, extremity and intimacy existing all at once. “… [W]hat’s strange is that the easiest way to get pictures to shine is if they’re dark, yes, black, the darker and blacker the colours are the more they shine […] it’s always, always the darkest part of the picture that shines the most, and I think that might be because it’s in the hopelessness and despair, in the darkness, that God is closest to us, but how it happens, how the light I get clearly into the picture gets there, that I don’t know, and how it comes to be at all, that I don’t understand…” You don’t have to understand to see, to know.
A New Name, and the entire septology, ends at Christmas, another mixture of death and life – this time, Christ’s. Asle is spending the day with Åsleik and Åsleik’s sister, Guro, and the long boat trip they take there could be a metaphor for the long trip to the other world, or, again, more literally, just a long boat trip. (All great art operates on multiple levels). In a mausoleum to himself – almost all of his best pictures are hung at Guro’s house, as Åsleik’s yearly Christmas gift – Asle enters his most transcendent state, mixing his life and his Namesake’s life and seemingly all life in a kind of fugue, clauses smashing together, subjectivities smashing together, the commas and breaks that used to gesture towards difference removed, a multivocal compression of Molly’s monologue at the end of Ulysses. I are who I are, I is another, I have an(other) new name, the trinity, 3=1, this world and the other, the real and the incomprehensible come together. If that’s not the central trick of metaphor – of all fiction – to make two unlike things into one, then I don’t know what else you’re lookin’ for.
You can get Jon Fosse’s Septology at your local bookstore, your local library, or order it from Bookshop.org, where purchases support independent bookstores as well as this newsletter! If you liked this post, please share it with a friend!
Or, I guess, septologies split into trilogies.
See The Empire Strikes Back, The Two Towers (book and movie), Spider-Man 2, Terminator 2, Evil Dead 2, Book 2 (‘Pseudoreality Prevails’) of Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities, Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, and Rachel Cusk’s Transit. We mix the high and the low here, folks.
"the doppelgänger conceit working as a high concept Goofus and Gallant"
It's Dostoyevsky, but in the mode of Highlights for Children
Mon semblable, mon frere...you get an A+!