Category: European Literature

Art, God, and Madness – Jon Fosse’s Melancholy I-II

Jon Fosse’s novel Melancholy, through four linked episodes, makes a forceful argument for what being a certain kind of artist actually means and feels like. Taking the real 19th century Norwegian painter Lars Hertervig as its central figure, a man who was released from an asylum as incurably mad and who ended his days destitute in a poorhouse while still having created many masterpieces, Fosse finds Lars’ artistic power to be inextricably linked to his ability to see what others could not and place it on the canvas. He was great precisely because he was mad, mad because he was great. This special sight, his gift, in both its glory and its terror is presented not only through what Fosse writes, but also how he writes it. Preceding those extraordinary works Septology and Aliss at the Fire, Melancholy is every bit as extraordinary as them in its use of language. It’s a truly beautiful work.

Four episodes comprise the novel, each giving us a new angle from which to observe Lars himself. In the first and longest, we follow Lars for a single feverish afternoon in Düsseldorf in 1853 as he gets kicked out of his rented rooms and wanders between them and a pub frequented by others from the art academy where he studies. The second sees Lars in 1856, already trapped within an asylum and still less in control of his mind than he was even in the first section. The third deals with a writer, Vidme, who in 1991 is trying to write about Lars, and decides to visit a pastor to enquire about returning to the Norwegian Church. The fourth and final section follows one of Lars’ sisters, Oline, shortly after Lars’ death in 1902, as she tries to hold onto life in the present as memories and age keep her drifting back mentally into the past.

Lars is there, forcefully, for the reader from Melancholy’s very first words – “I am lying in bed…” The man we get acquainted with strikes us immediately by his strangeness and his child-like vulnerability. He is in love with his landlady’s daughter, Helene, a fifteen-year-old girl, and by the novel’s beginning has already had a moment of rapture with her. Not sex, but something stranger – “And then Helene Winckelmann stood there and looked at him, with hair falling down from the centre part over a small round face with pale blue eyes, with a small little mouth, a small chin. With eyes that shined. Hair flowing below her shoulders. Pale, flowing hair. And then a smile on her mouth. And then her eyes, that opened towards him. And out from her eyes came the brightest light he had ever seen”.

This is chaste, the kind of thing that is reminiscent of a saint’s vision. Lars is innocent in other ways too. For one, he’s incredibly susceptible to others’ words. At the inn, Malkasten, the other artists taunt him, saying Helene is hiding there waiting for him, and he believes them as readily as he believes himself when he convinces himself that she has telepathically called him back to the house where he has just been thrown out onto the street. He seems petulant rather than upset at being mistreated, mentally tapping his feet while he waits to be allowed to go and find Helene again. At the same time, we notice the purity of his belief in his own artistry. Over and over, he remarks mentally that he is an artist. It’s not as if he fears he is not one, rather it is the fixed core of an identity that is otherwise totally unstable.

For Lars is, admittedly, barking mad. Just as he has these beautiful visions with Helene, he has visions of a darker sort too. He sees black clothes hovering and trying to smother him. His anger is ferocious, and he declares an intention to kill every single other painter on a regular basis. His mood swings from elevation into despair. He loves Helene with every tick but with every tock believes, wholly without any textual evidence, that she is actually trying to get rid of him to pursue a sexual relationship with her uncle.

These negative qualities become still more pronounced once Lars is incarcerated in the asylum in Melancholy’s second section. Where in the first section he referred to how Helene’s uncle would “do things” to her, now he expresses a hatred of all women as mere whores and spends a considerable amount of the section touching his penis against the guard’s explicit instructions. Deprived of his art, all of Lars’ worst qualities are magnified. Unsurprisingly, ripping out the core of someone’s identity is no way to bring them back to anything approaching sanity. While the novel at no point makes any suggestion that Lars is even several kilometres away from sanity, it presents those who challenge his mild delusions as only making things worse – whether Helene’s uncle, the guard at the asylum, or the workers of the poorhouse in the final section – and reminds us of the dire state of mental health treatment in past centuries.

In some sense though, it doesn’t matter what personality Lars has, or what the external world does to him. What matters is only the implicit argument of Melancholy that being an artist (of a certain sort) can bring us closer to God or, if you prefer, something higher. To some vision of the sort Lars experiences with Helene, which can provide succour for a whole life. Perhaps the best way of exploring this, however, is to shift from the content of the text to how that content is itself presented, the texture of it. For all of the oddities of Fosse’s style – the shifting times, the shifting perspectives, the repetition – turn the novel into something more like a picture than a prose work, and bring the reader to the borderlands of something she would be hard pressed not to call mystical in nature.

Melancholy is a book that drifts from the now into the then, and the real into the unreal. Even without considering the black clothesthat attack Lars, he travels in his mind while remaining physically in one place – to Helene’s transfiguration, to his departure from Stavanger on the boat, to images of his father and sister Elizabeth underwater. Vidme, the writer, drifts between what he expected of his meeting with the pastor, and what he actually experiences. And Oline, in the final sections, drifts between the drudgery of her aged life (emphasised by repeated struggles to maintain control over her bodily functions and trips to the outhouse) and the wonder of her childhood with Lars in the Norwegian countryside. Overall, the technique is less advanced than it is in Aliss at the Fire, but still, we might go from now to then with only an “and” to warn us.

The impression of such shifts is that life is turned into a thing of layers, a little like those transparent sheets we place and shift around for an overhead projector. It gains a wholeness and interconnectedness from the prose which in its lived moments it can seem to lack. Even as the present moment is devalued, something we see most concretely in the way Lars will often talk to people who aren’t there, or fail to talk to those who are, individual experience is placed on a still higher plane.

Something similar happens when we think of the novel’s willingness to shift between the first and third person within the sections. It’s almost like the characters in Melancholy decide from time to time to turn away from their embodied lives and talk directly to us, reflecting on themselves and their fates from a strange new distance. Here again, loosening themselves from the physical world, the emphasis seems to be placed on life seen as flux rather than constancy. This is something that is in evidence also from Lars’ shifting moods and liquid identity. Perhaps I can venture to say that if the text presents the leap from first person to third as no great jump, it implies the leap to another perspective or other life is no great challenge either.

Perhaps the most unique aspect of Melancholy’s prose in comparison to other fiction is, however, its use of repetition. Many writers aim at the telling detail or the careful avoidance of cliché as they craft their images, so that their works build up huge beautiful flat scenes like artful, intricately layered watercolours. Fosse does not even work from the same paints. He uses oils. That is why it is so hard to quote him. Not just because he writes long flowing sentences, but because taking individual pieces from the work is like chipping off some paint, no, varnish, and expecting it to tell us something about the picture it was trying to represent. Fosse’s works are thick, lumpy, textured things. He builds up impressions through repeated words – “white” and “black”, or “eyes”. Perhaps this is closer to how the world really comes to us moment to moment – wave after wave of the same vision with only slight differences each time.

What matters here is the effect: the reader is forced to confront a kind of loosening of the bond between text and meaning. We sense that here what is important is not what is in the text but what lies behind it, the “silent language” Fosse refers to in his Nobel Prize speech. No text tells us how to interpret this. There’s no evidence for the pub Malkasten being like Hell other than the overwhelming impression on my soul caused by page after page of Fosse’s prose. In the same way, God isn’t a character, but the text brings us closer to the mystical way of thinking by showing us what it looks like, what it feels like. We see things as an artist, a particular artist, perhaps saw them. The light and dark, the magic and wonder of shifting impressions, shifting times, intense visions – these things make us look up from the page to see the world as being closer, perhaps, to the kind it is to a believer.

Vidme, in the third section, is ultimately rejected by the pastor. She says she has read one of his books and dislikes the mystical inclinations in it. Lars himself is raised a Quaker, a group that look for their own inner light rather than waiting to be told how to live. The emphasis on interconnectedness made me think a little bit about Spinoza, who saw the everything as one substance, and his successor Schopenhauer, who believed that if we could “still” our will, we could notice that all things are interconnected and simply manifestations of the same single longing. Reading Melancholy I certainly felt the strange connections it seemed to want me to find.

In the end, Fosse himself did not return to the Norwegian Church, neither when Melancholy was written in the late 1990s, nor later. Instead, around 2012 he became a Catholic, a church which has historically been far more accommodating to mystics. Reflecting now as I come to the end of this post, I realise I have perhaps given the wrong impression when I wrote about the role of God in this novel. Rather, Melancholy expresses a longing for God, but not yet a success in finding Him. We are still far away from the awesome beauty of Septology, where God is right there on the page and the single salvatory force holding the painter Asle’s life together. This lack makes Melancholy a sadder book, as its title implies, but still far from a hopeless one. It remains a beautiful, wonderful, if occasionally insane, novel, and perhaps the best vision of what it means to be an artist that I have yet read.

The Best Kind of Modern Life – Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection

I now cannot recall how I came across Perfection, a short novel by the Italian Vincenzo Latronico translated this year by Sophie Hughes, but once I, an uprooted cosmopolitan type in Germany, learned it was about some uprooted cosmopolitan types in Germany, I considered myself duty-bound to read it. In fact, I’ve already read it twice. (Occasionally I have to stop imagining I am the hero of a Russian novel and instead admit my real-world reflection might be a little less flattering.) What we have here is a short novel – but this word feels wrong, when the work feels more like an extended observation, almost anthropology – of a couple who move to Berlin to work in the creative sphere when young, watch the city and themselves change, and wonder with a little sad dismay at the shape their lives have taken. And all this without a word of dialogue, in a style that is numb yet perfectly, patiently, observant. 

For these are the heroes of Perfection – style and detail. The goal of this book is not to turn Anna and Tom – our couple – into people we might shed a tear for as individuals, but to display their life choices and their consequences with such clearsightedness that any implied assessment of their lives, whether by themselves or the author, has the crushing finality of a prison door clanging shut. From the first section, where we see an image of their existence as a series of snapshots on a holiday rental booking for their Berlin apartment, the details are so overwhelming that we feel they must be true. The houseplants are named, the furniture, the board games, the magazines. The impersonal narration itself – “the life promised by these images is clear and purposeful, uncomplicated” – seems to suggest we look no further, that the objects of a life are sufficient for extracting all its meaning.

Things. I do endless, hopeless, battle against them. Perhaps I fear that I myself can be identified in my entirety by them. Perfection is not some anti-materialist novel, but by leaving out the dialogue and individual scenes – the habitual “would” is an extremely important word in the novel, giving a weightless generality to any event and action it mentions – we as readers are forced to find meaning in these details, rather than in those things that otherwise might be the key to understanding character, intention, and novelistic work.

Often with literature we talk about the dichotomy of “show” versus “tell”, and Perfection provides an example of why this is a simplistic approach. The novel tells us everything in declarative paragraphs dully consistent in length and weight, yet enhances the telling by showing it through the details chosen. It tells us who Anna and Tom are and then finds its proofs in the materiality of their world, whether it’s the details of what they do at the weekends, their sex life, or the social media they consume. Whole sections might have been lifted from some report with titles chosen according to the part of their lives that are in focus: “gentrification”, “money”, “sex”, “social groups”. Only vaguely do we sense that in the background time is passing.

Talking about the book sensibly is hard because the action and characterisation is so light. There are no ambiguous gestures to interpret, no action to set our heart hammering, nor even any real personality on Anna or Tom’s part to make us care about them. We care, if we do, because they are like us, and not because they have earned our love. The narrator, observing them from behind the glass, does not try to make us feel for them too much. Another key word in Perfection is “if”, used in a kind of characterisation by absence. “If they had ever thought it through” – but the couple had not. Or else “…looking like a young professional couple in Berlin, which is exactly what they were.” Brutally, mutely – because all dialogue is differentiation – they become the types that they are. Even the country in Southern Europe that they are from is not named.

Without cares, without interpretation or ambiguity, we can only judge – them and their world. This is how such an anthropological novel works, and it seems that this is how Perfection aims to work, given its narrator speaks with enough distance to encourage us to judge them. Anna and Tom are uprooted, just as passive as the narration of their lives. They live in Germany, but do not speak the language or work with German clients, and their social circle is a series of people like themselves passing in and out of a revolving door. “They inhabited a world where everyone accepted a line of coke, where no one was a doctor or a baker or a taxi driver or a middle school teacher.” They are ultimately isolated. Reading, it’s like we are following these two people as they push their way through a thick fog, clinging mutely onto each other.

Isolated as they are, they are also part of a kind of community. Except that it is a community of appearance, rather than reality. Loose connections, comings and goings. The scene shown in an Instagram post is more significant than the memories of a bad day that the photo came from. They live in anxiety about their sex life, because they are not polyamorous or getting off at sex clubs or using toys when they know that others are. They have to lie to their parents about how much money they make. As the city becomes ever more gentrified, they realise that they haven’t got the money to keep up. At the same time, they have no idea how to change things because they have never worked in an office.

There is a dark well at the centre of Perfection which it slowly lowers us into alongside the characters. Things start well enough, then get steadily worse. Young and in Berlin in the early-mid 2000s, Anna and Tom have a good life. But using only clients from back home, not integrating or learning the language, they become trapped. When an opportunity for real action appears during the beginnings of the European refugee crisis in 2015, Anna and Tom discover that the lives they have led have not given them anything that would actually allow them to help. They use their house as a base for gathering donations for onward movement to the refugees camps, but when they try to help at the camps themselves they learn they have no in-demand skills, nor even enough German to communicate properly with the police.

At last, they try travelling, but find that the world they left behind is simply following them. In Portugal helping a new hotel set itself up they realise they are just importing the same design aesthetics from Berlin with only the slightest Mediterranean twist. Even the people they find on the street, the early harbingers of gentrification, are like ghostly echoes of the people they knew when they first came to Berlin. The people they themselves were when they first came to Berlin. Travelling lets them see nothing new, and there’s a real hopelessness that settles in on the text as it approaches its end.

Then, just when we are fearing the worst, they have a moment of luck. In a section entitled “Future”, using that tense rather than the “would” of the rest of the novel, we witness a redeeming vision. Anna and Tom inherit a farmhouse in their country, and are able to turn it into a large holiday rental. Using a PR agency they are able to get influencers to stay the first few nights, and positive initial reviews ensure that theirs will be a going concern. Away from Berlin, which they had outgrew, or which perhaps had outgrown them, the ending seems to promise something new, solid, rooted, compared to what came before.

That the novel ends with what is just a stroke of good luck is not unreasonable within its own rules. Throughout it we get a sense that Anna and Tom have not the agency or fortitude to lead lives that are not determined for them. Without language, without enough money, without enough strength of will to fight against conformity, they are blown around by chance, helpless against their changing world. Even their choice of career is an accident – something formed from “teenage obsession” with the early internet and then monetised, rather than coming from any real intention. This ending, too, comes from things happening to them, not because of them. But at least this thing is a positive one. A little bit like the changing fortunes of Frédéric Moreau in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, driven by the randomness of the stock market, here too do we have a sense that one of the essential features of modernity is precarity, a total exposure to forces, good and bad, that we do not influence ourselves.

Anna and Tom’s “good life” is not the “perfection” of the novel’s title, and there is much missing in it. But it is interesting for me, as a young mildly rootless person myself, (albeit admittedly one who speaks German at a high level and volunteers locally partly to ensure I integrate), to see its overlaps with my own life and those of my friends. While it’s easy enough to dismiss the two Berliners’ lives as failing because of, say, their failures to integrate, the evidence of my own circle of friends and acquaintances, spread across many countries and professions, seems to point much more towards a more general malaise, rather than some gentrification-specific one.

People coming out of good universities and feeling entitled, perhaps, to good jobs, when they have missed the silent signals that the pathways to such jobs are the “spring weeks” and internships. People who have come from good families and are determined to maintain the positions of their birth by forcing themselves into jobs they hate in law or banking. People refusing all that and working in the fields only to feel a growing distance from everyone they knew before, without being able to replace them with anyone else. Even my own employment contract lasts until the end of August. Everywhere is precarity, not enough money, mute misery. In between the two gods – money and authenticity – nearly everyone decent is stranded somewhere, and few in the right place for their own happiness. Anna and Tom are not living entirely authentically, which we are told but also notice ourselves, by the way they are living always in the shadow of images – others’ and their own. But neither, typically, are we.

Modern life is tiring – witness My Year of Rest and Relaxation, whose narrator wishes to check out from the world for a year. It’s also strangely fragmented, as in the novels of Sally Rooney, where often we find ourselves constantly needing to shift between times in order to give interactions weight because by themselves individual scenes just feel light, airy. In the past I would have complained – have indeed on this very blog complained. Perfection’s numb descriptive style, without its dialogue, without its differentiation of character or action into scenes, is not enjoyable in the way that a rollicking drama is. But now, getting up each day to go to the office, struggling in the chinks of time when I’m not working to find space for authentic life, I can no longer criticise something that seems so manifestly true.

It’s not the writers who are wrong – it’s life itself. If you want good fiction today you need to change the world.

(this is referring to tales of middle and upper-middle class professional lives. I am aware that good fiction about other lives, and by other lives, continues to be produced on a regular basis)

W.G. Sebald’s leftovers – Campo Santo

As a reader, W.G. Sebald seems to have loved what is marginal and passed over. It only seems fair then, that after his death in a road accident in late 2001 we should be able to peruse his own marginal works and see what light they throw upon his major ones. Campo Santo is a collection of essays and prose pieces, of which the latter are far more interesting than the former. Snarky readers who know Sebald already may ask what the difference between an essay and “prose” is for Sebald, given that his “fiction” is already strangely essayistic and impressionistic, akin to very wise travelogues. The answer that comes out here is that in the prose the narrator is in the world, instead of merely contemplating it. In other words, he has legs.

Composed between The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, and which may had Sebald lived longer have come together as another book close to the former in approach, but which instead bob like buoys, disconnected and out at sea, the four prose pieces set in Corsica are the best part of Campo Santo. I read them not only because I now love Sebald, but also because I wanted to see whether perhaps in these pieces the carefully constructed machinery underlying his novels might be more visible. Sebald is one of those writers whose prose seems deceptively simple, thoughtless even, and it was only with equal care and attention that I could shake that impression when I first read him.

Sebald is all about mood. He describes a world we recognise as our own while somehow making it sinister, unnerving, uncanny and tinted with melancholy. “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” is a case in point. This, the first of the prose pieces, begins with the kind of sentence that makes you do a double take, so far from Sebald’s towering reputation does it seem:

In September last year, during a two-week holiday on the island of Corsica, I took a blue bus one day down the west coast to Ajaccio to spend a little time looking around the town, of which I knew nothing except that it was the birthplace of the Emperor Napoleon.

Certainly, there’s a sense of potential mystery – what will this town hold – but the main word I’d use to describe this sentence is “banal”. I could write it or its like. Here you go:

“In the beginning of May, taking advantage of the generous German public holidays that month and feeling a certain unease at the thought of another weekend spent at my new home in the Ruhr region, I took two trains and a ferry north to the island of Norderney, of which I knew nothing other than that it was where the poet Heine had composed his cycle of prose and poems “Die Nordsee”.”

If we hoped that the “something more” would come at once from Sebald, we are disappointed by the information in the subsequent sentence that it “it was a beautiful, sunlit day”, and a description of the palms swaying. Our first sense of something possibly being off is “a snow-white cruise ship” which looks “like a great iceberg”. Here, at last, do we have something out of place – an iceberg in Corsica. It’s not startling by any stretch, but it is odd enough that we might notice the image half-consciously. “Dark, tunnel-like entrances” to houses, the houses themselves like “citadels”, give further images that, especially through their contrast with the charming day, serve that Sebaldian unease.

Sebald works his moods upon us less by shock than by a gradual accumulation of things half-noticed, unimportant in themselves but which by contrast with a safe or sanitised version of reality, the one we ourselves normally perceive, send us off-kilter. Within “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” we have women who seem to look like Napoleon, another one who looks dead while she sits in her chair, and a certain absence of people generally, an emptiness and darkness to contrast with the light, colour, and babble we normally associate with travel.

Unease also comes from the narrator himself, whose voice is decidedly slippery. He starts talking about an image of Napoleon, describing his situation and even his emotions, only to begin the next paragraph with a lurch – “Or so at least we might conclude from an article in Corse-Matin published on the day of my visit”. What we had trusted to be his voice was only his mediation.

We jump from normality to the strange, from voice to voice, but also from time to time. Within this piece alone we go from the present to Kafka in 1911, to Flaubert visiting the same museum as the narrator, to “Mary and Joseph”, and of course to Napoleon himself. If Sebald’s narrators do not live horizontally, in the sense that they struggle to connect to humans around them, they do however live vertically through time, endlessly connecting to past figures and ideas as intimates and friends, or at least frames of reference. This, too, is hardly typical, and encourages the reader to see the world the same way.

Once we are seeing as Sebald did, he can start encouraging us also to share a more specific view, beyond just unease and scepticism of his sources – his pessimism. “The unfathomable misfortune of life” is how he names it here, but other similar phrases are scattered throughout, not so often as to be overwhelming yet unmissably there. One way this is justified is through violence, overt in places, but more often bubbling.

At the end of the first prose piece, a bomb goes off – it is Corsica after all. The second piece talks about burial practices, but also the banditry of Corsica. The third details the devastating effects of hunting and logging on the original ecosystems of the island, and local inhabitants’ inability to connect the consequences to their own actions. Such violence is blatant. Once we start thinking in terms of violence we are able to pick up its more subtle traces, such as in the manias affecting various figures (including at times the narrator himself). Or even, in a description like this:

Before leaving the museum I went down to the basement, where there is a collection of Napoleonic mementos and devotional items on display. It includes objects adorned with the head and initials of Napoleon—letter openers, seals, penknives, and boxes for tobacco and snuff—miniatures of the entire clan and most of their descendants, silhouettes and biscuit medallions, an ostrich egg painted with an Egyptian scene, brightly colored faïence plates, porcelain cups, plaster busts, alabaster figures, a bronze of Bonaparte mounted on a dromedary, and also, beneath a glass dome almost as tall as a man, a moth-eaten uniform tunic cut like a tailcoat, edged with red braid and bearing twelve brass buttons: l’habit d’un colonel des Chasseurs de la Garde, que porta Napoléon Ier (The uniform of a colonel in the Chasseurs de la Garde, worn by Napoleon I).

Sebald’s reading, his mood, his drifting gaze, draw us into a way of looking where we cannot read this description of a typical museum’s clutter without seeing in it a certain horror. How did an ostrich egg reach Corsica? Certainly, we might innocently say trade, but in the context of Napoleon it’s much easier, and probably more correct, to say imperialism. Perhaps the “Egyptian scene” is ancient, rather than Napoleonic – it’s much harder to say the same about Napoleon riding a camel. The pointless military adventure to Egypt is not mentioned, but a knowing reader cannot but think of it. The colonel’s uniform is more explicitly related to violence, but like all the others it is something apparently innocuous which, chosen and placed alongside the others in this paragraph, becomes transparent so that we see the blood behind it.

Such a paragraph, such a working of associations, perhaps exemplifies Sebald’s project. Indeed, in one of Campo Santo’s essays there is a telling remark on “my method of procedure: in adhering to an exact historical perspective, in patiently engraving and linking together apparently disparate things in the manner of a still life.” That, ultimately, is how Sebald’s prose works. Every comment, or rather cut, whether deep or shallow, obvious or subtle, works to advance his world upon us. And since that prose seems to be both factual, with the vast erudition implied by its author, while also being highly authentic, for here the narrator is in the world and experiencing and sharing it with us, the whole book seems silky and very seductive.

Yet still, once we read the other essays of Campo Santo we might find a certain tension, should we return to the prose pieces. Sebald praises this objective, reporter-like style, saying “the ideal of truth contained in the form of an entirely unpretentious report proves to be the irreversible foundation of all literary effort” precisely because it prevents the “human faculty of suppressing any memories that might in some way be an obstacle to the continuance of life”. However, once we see the work that goes into constructing this memory-preserving prose, it’s hard to see it as anything objective anymore. If we still see the narrator as a charming guide to the world, now we see Sebald himself, furiously stabbing at his stone – what we have here is rather extremely subjective, but well masked. And what do we make of the fact that the narrator, though as obsessed with memory as the man who wrote him, remains as silent as the latter on his own past and personal life?

The excitement of Sebald is that he teaches us how to read and look anew upon the world, finding the violence and horror of history behind the slightest of objects. We come away with a greater sense of memory, its passage and the challenges of its conservation. Inevitably though, we must turn that same critical eye back towards the man who made the prose. How far can we trust a man who has such knowledge, yet is so little of the earth itself? We like mysteries, and Sebald himself provides them in his work and also in his person. The recent, in literary terms, scandals (for example here and here) over the biography of Sebald written by Carole Angier and its revelations concerning where Sebald blurred the lines between truth and fiction suggest that these mysteries are unlikely to disappear any time soon.