Category: European Literature

Smart Smut? De Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir

This is one of the trickier books I’ve had to review here. As it was a gift from my girlfriend, I really have no choice in the matter, however. It is certainly interesting, being the only philosophical porn book I’m ever likely to read, while also advocating philosophies that I have little personal interest in. I have read some Anais Nin, which is as close as the canon seems to get to proper erotic fiction, but de Sade is more complicated than that. Here, he is trying to make philosophical arguments and at the same time describe fairly non-standard sexual practices in as explicit and shocking a way as possible.

The two are linked, of course. Any work of philosophical fiction gains its power from using the fiction part as much as possible to bolster and enhance the philosophical part. Dostoevsky’s and Camus’ characters put their ideas into practice. In the Magic Mountain we can see the irony of the lengthy philosophical discussions being only possible because the real world is elsewhere, down the valley. So, it seems to me that the best way of writing about Philosophy in the Boudoir is to ask whether it is effective as a work of philosophical fiction. Does the “plot” work with the ideas?

De Sade himself does not really need an introduction. We know that from his name comes sadism. Even if he got up to only a fraction of what he describes in his books, he would already well deserve his poor moral reputation. A glance at his biography on Wikipedia is quite the ride.

As for Philosophy in the Boudoir, it is, as seems from my knowledge of his others, a relatively milder work. Eugenie, the girl who is gradually corrupted by the older characters, is both a willing student and at the age of 15 in most countries just around the age of consent. Nobody is murdered, though there is plenty of (consensual) whipping, and the story does end with some rape and torture which only seems mild to me because I expected something far worse!

The Story

“I’m committing both incest, adultery, and sodomy, and all that from a girl who only got devirginized today!”

At least de Sade simplifies the summarising of his tale by barely having anything to it. Madame de Saint-Ange, a libertine, meets the girl Eugénie at a convent retreat and invites her round for a debauched weekend with her – the Madame’s – brother, Chevalier, along with Dolmancé, another libertine. Over a day Eugénie is introduced to pretty much every sexual act you can imagine – from anal sex to a wide variety of poses available when there are plenty of participants. She not only loses her virginity but also learns a lot about her partners’ libertine morals. Sodomy, incest, and blasphemy are just some of the sins they all commit which today may be slightly more (some of them) acceptable than they were in late 18th century France, but which are still more than a little spine-tingling for the moral-minded among us.

Structurally, the story is almost like sex itself, with built-in refractory periods. We get “tableaux”, where the characters are arranged by Dolmancé for maximum pleasure, then they do the deed, and once they have finished and need to rest, they discuss philosophy. Rinse (I wish! – nobody washes here) and repeat.

I may not have spent time closely reading the philosophy as I would with another philosopher, but I think I have enough of a sense of the gist of it to be able to talk about it. The book is dedicated “to the libertines”; the goal is pleasure. “Listen only to those delicious passions; their source is the only one that will lead to happiness.” Essentially, the whole thing is about pleasure, which here is equated with happiness. Since pleasure is natural and nature is good, we must act in a way that aligns with nature. Pretty much everything that we deal with regularly – laws, religion, social customs – is the work of humans, and hence unnatural and ought to be the object of scorn.

Because we do not know other people, we can only trust our pleasure and ignore their pain and cries for help. Because nature does not care for us, we being tiny and irrelevant on a cosmic scale, it provides no higher guide for right conduct and no consolation for it either. Once we are old and can no longer have sex or engage in gratuitous violence, we should at least aim to have a store of pleasurable memories to look back on. The death of another is meaningless, for we all become mulch for nature to create a new life upon our deaths, so the overall balance of the living and the dead never changes. Hence murder is legitimised, including of our parents and children, as are the (alleged) pleasures of the sexual acts of things like incest and paedophilia. As soon as we recognise the absence of any authority except our own sensory pleasure and deny the existence of others’ inner worlds, we create a simplified world of pleasure available for those with the strength to take it. This is de Sade’s world.

Need I say that there’s plenty wrong with it?

I want to begin by undermining all of this using the work itself, before moving on to a more direct engagement with the significance of the ideas. The primary problem with Philosophy in the Boudoir is that its two parts, the smut and the philosophy, do not work together. This does not seem obvious at first. The philosophical text advocates for hedonism, and the story shows some people having the wildest of orgiastic pleasures, after all. But the problem is that the sex is utterly dreadful, and the characterisation so lax, that every opportunity for proving the truth of the philosophy within the bounds of the story’s world ends up doing the opposite – the story makes the philosophy look silly.

Allow me to explain. There is nothing wrong with hedonistic characters, or monsters, depending on how you look at them. Bad people exist, so that when Dolmancé declares he lit a bonfire for joy when his mother died, we can accept that. We can accept also, even, when someone says of Eugenie “What a delight to corrupt her, to suffocate in that young heart all the seeds of virtue and religion that were planted in her by her tutors!”. We’re all guilty of hamming things up from time to time.

Eugenie

But the problem, one of them, is Eugenie herself. We were all once teenagers – and many of us will have been horny teenagers. So we might think she really could be immediately corrupted by being removed from a convent and masturbated and abused for hours at a time. She might regret it afterwards, but who hasn’t, in the heat of arousal, done or thought things that the cooling water of the aftermath makes sting? No, we can tolerate that and still find her an utterly unbelievable creation. This comes across in the joints, the seams where de Sade is trying to stitch the two parts of the work together. Here is an example of one such shoddy transition:

“I’m dead, I’m shattered… I’m devastated!… but please explain two words that you’ve used and that I don’t understand. First of all: what does “womb” mean?”

Readers, I don’t know. I can accept orgiastic pleasures just as much as I can accept that a young girl in the 18th century may know very little about her own body. But the juxtaposition, this switch from post-coital exhaustion to notebook-on-lap schoolgirl is too sharp. It is laughable. Or, several orgasms later, how about: “What do you mean by that expression “whore”? I apologize, but I’m here to learn.” I know and you know damn well too. But in case readers of this blog post have become convinced that the poor girl really is just an innocent ingenu inducted rapidly into the world of physical pleasures and trying to catch up on the theory, I present the most egregious example:

“I’d like to know whether a government truly needs a set of morals, whether they can really influence the essence of a nation.” This, I am afraid, is too much for post-coital discussion. I was an annoying 15-year-old, but even I wasn’t that bad – and that was without getting laid!

Other Problems

So, Eugenie’s characterisation rather makes the whole thing silly. There are plenty of other things too. One of them is de Sade’s tendency to pat himself on the back: “I can’t tell you how persuasive you are!”. Another is that classic mistake of any erotica, the oversized male member. We might believe that the average is eight or nine inches if we are regular readers of men pretending to be women on the internet, but de Sade, long before message boards, was way ahead of them. Take the servant, Augustin, who is brought in to deliver additional male firepower: “his member is thirteen inches long and eight and a half inches around.” I leave off the absence of lube in spite of all the anal and other sex, which seems the lightest graze against the edifice of realism when set aside such blatant howlers.

The Pamphlet – a moment of realism?

By showing the pleasures of constant orgies, we might come to believe that a good life really is one where we can say with Eugenie, that “Lust is now my only god, the single measure of my conduct, the sole basis of all my actions.” Instead, de Sade is constantly undermining himself. This is nowhere more obvious than in the pamphlet that appears halfway through the book.

This is a really interesting moment. I love texts-within-texts because they can do a lot to reflect and refract what goes on around them. Purportedly a pamphlet found on the street, Dolmancé reads it to the gathered pleasure-fiends. (Allowing for the reading out of lengthy texts is a concession to unrealism I can always allow – it gave us Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, and a lot of lovely German novellas.) The pamphlet could, like the sex, bolster the philosophical arguments. By providing something similar, it could legitimise them by making them seem more widespread. By providing a, for example religious, alternative, it could allow the characters to create more finely formed counterarguments. Instead, and this is de Sade’s perennial problem, he can only talk like himself.

It begins well, or at least, it does not advocate violence, and it talks about republican virtues – virtue being hitherto a dirty word. It shares with the characters the simpler things, like a rejection of religion, for example. It is also boring and long, which has the singular advantage of making it seem more like a real pamphlet. But then de Sade’s restraint falls away, and this text too starts talking about the need for murder to be allowed, and the importance of pleasure. It just means that we are listening to the characters all over again, without the sex to make us laugh. It fails, in other words.

Concluding Complaints about Realism and Effectiveness

There are a few other things that Philosophy in the Boudoir does against itself. Its ending, where Eugenie rapes and tortures her mother, then infects her with syphilis, is unpleasant to read. It may be milder than the violence of the summary of the 120 Days of Sodom, but it still makes a reader interested in pleasure who may have enjoyed at least some of the sex go “this is too much.” To put it more simply, if de Sade wanted to be persuasive, he should have stopped earlier – instead, it seemed he was too interested in getting himself off. And it costs the book, and by extension us. But then again, perhaps de Sade didn’t want to convince – he probably just didn’t care, if he was doing his own philosophy properly!

Good bits

Now that I’ve got all that off my chest, I want to mention some qualities of the book that do make it interesting and not only the unrealistic, unrewarding picture I painted of it earlier. For one, the book is aware of its context. Written during the French Revolution, we have a sense of the Enlightenment and its consequences quite forcefully here. Eugenie has come “to be taught” – like Rousseau, de Sade is interested in education, good and bad, and is trying to advocate for a “right” version. We have a sense at times of the advancement of science and world exploration (Captain Cook is mentioned) and how these are destabilising a Eurocentric, Christian worldview.

At times, de Sade sounds a lot like Nietzsche or Freud. He has a keen, if probably more intuitive than reasoned, sense of the origins of social rules. For example, he claims incest is only considered bad because it allowed wealth concentration within families – hence people had to find a way to prevent people from marrying their siblings. By showing how other people practice murder or casual sex, (in Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder the section on Tahiti is extraordinary – and very sad) de Sade does successfully make his ideas seem more reasonable or acceptable. He also uses the Bible to show how incest has been acceptable or practised at one point or other, letting him both devalue the Bible a little and legitimise incest in the same swipe.

What is here would understandably be shocking to a reader in the 18th century, and is often shocking to me in the 21st. But what is exciting at the same time is how de Sade really does fall into an intellectual tradition by showing its more extreme points. He is a fool, for example, when he says that despotism in bed and despotism in the halls of power are not linked. But precisely by being that fool, he presages the fools that eventually did gain power and placed violence on a pedestal. By revealing the tendencies of the Enlightenment towards the extinguishing of ultimate truths, he’s like a horny Max Weber.

And the real problem, intellectually rather than in the sense of quality as before, is that it seems the closer to the present we get, the more de Sade seems to be saying something almost true. Sodomy and blasphemy are now well tolerated in my country. Sex is mass-marketed and widespread – you can buy toys and lube in any supermarket. Contraception means that coitus and reproduction are now divorced. Apps make casual sex even more widespread than before, while recent trends towards step-sibling porn are merely a slope that ends eventually in simulated sibling porn, and then real sibling porn.

For example, it seems to me, intellectually, that there really is no good argument against incest, provided the people involved are over the age of consent and are not groomed before then (these are gigantic if’s), and conception does not take place. It may take people out of society because of the taboo and hence social discrimination, and also the way that having a partner within one’s own home gets in the way of going out to find a mate. But we value choice, and let people legally ruin their lives in many other ways. I am not sure we will be happy with this – but what I mean by bringing it up as an example is that de Sade taught us long ago that we don’t really have good arguments against it, only feelings. Likewise, with books like Open being reviewed in the New York Times, the nuclear family continues its dissipation into a startling – or refreshing? – array of alternatives.

I am not about to say what I think of this – a piece like this is not the place for moralising. To repeat, what I am saying is that seems de Sade saw where we are going. We may get there in my lifetime or yours, but society really does seem to be slipping towards a kind of freedom where we can do everything we want, with whomever we want, provided power is sufficiently evenly distributed (through the mutual consent of people in a position to give it). It is only this check, consent, that separates the future world from the world of de Sade’s dreams. Is it a good world? I’ll admit I may have some doubts.

Another thing we must grant de Sade is that by being wrong but different, he still has value in the context of women’s rights. Women certainly were not made just to have fun having sex, but at least by questioning what women were made for de Sade makes us think women may not just be made for whatever most people thought they were made for (babies), back in the 18th century. He loosens our ideas of what is right and wrong, and if we may not like what he puts in their place we at least can get started with thinking of what we ourselves might put in their place. This, the challenging of received ideas, is never unwelcome, even when it comes in so strange a guise as here.

To conclude, then, there really are some interesting thoughts in this book. The problem is that de Sade was not willing to make his fiction and philosophy work together. He was too much writing for himself in the sex/plot scenes, to be able to allow them to speak to the rest of the work in a way that enhanced it. Do I regret reading it? At 170 pages in the Penguin translation by Joachim Neugroschel, it’s not too bad. But I cannot see myself reading de Sade again. Readers, I believe I can say I have saved you the trouble too.

Thank me later.

Jon Fosse – Septology

When I wrote about Aliss at the Fire, I wondered whether it had now become necessary for anyone wanting to write stories about faith and religion to adopt a style like Jon Fosse’s. A style that shifts constantly, fluctuating between perspectives and making porous limits which normally seem solid. One feels adrift within a more mystical world, where God and faith are not idle thoughts but lived experiences. Now, having finished Fosse’s much longer Septology, I wonder whether I can even write a blog post about it without adopting the same style, which here reaches still greater heights of mystic power, and letting my sentences run and run, and my entire language become like a breath, going in and going out but never, except at the end of the post, finally ceasing. 

I will spare readers such an attempt. Instead, I will try to say a few words about the book. It is hard. Normally, if I like or dislike a book, I will annotate it heavily. My Septology has been only lightly touched, mainly just with marginal notes indicating what scene we are in. I underlined only a single phrase. This gives some indication of some of the strangeness of the text, which has no full stops and lives by commas, ands, and paragraph breaks. Much of the narrative here is mundane, repetitive stuff, the kind we might know from Samuel Beckett or Thomas Bernhard – a character’s struggle to persuade themselves to get out of bed or open the door. When moments of great beauty or significance arrive, they are entire paragraphs of reflection which gain their power by accumulation and contrast, and which whither and die when we try to extract them. 

Septology concerns a painter called Asle, who lives in the Norwegian countryside. He has a friend, almost a double, also called Asle, who lives in Bergen and suffers from alcoholism. There is another double-like figure in the form of Asle’s wife, Ales, who died some time ago of a mysterious illness. Other characters include Beyer, a gallerist, and Asleik, a farmer. There is also a somewhat sinister woman called Guro, who has her own double too. Our narrative is mostly of reflection. The first Asle is our narrator, and he uses the first person, but when he reminisces or transports himself to the life of the second Asle, he uses the third person, even if he seems to be thinking of his own past.  

Over Septology’s seven books narrator-Asle goes to Bergen several times, discovers his friend Asle passed out in the snow and takes him to the hospital, delivers some paintings to Beyer, has an artistic crisis and decides not to paint anymore, and decides to visit Asleik’s sister for a Christmas meal. But mostly he ruminates. As in Aliss at the Fire, Asle seems to see into his doppelgänger’s soul. He also sees into his own life’s story, seeing figures as he drives past the places of his past, and in such a way that we cannot know whether he falls into their world, or whether they emerge back out into his.  

Asle is not the other Asle. But they are almost one another, being both artists, both being bearers of the same name. Yet what is the meaning of this? Fosse is careful with names. Streets and restaurants are given simple names like “The Lane” or “Food and Drink”; so too are people – “The Teacher”, “The Bald Man”, and so on. One effect of this is to give every encounter a heavy sense of symbolism and significance, even if we cannot always identify at first glance what that might be. The second Asle, when met for the first time in a memory, is “The Namesake” – not the same, but bonded to him, nevertheless.  

When I really think hard about Septology, I can say that it is a book of suffering. And the two Asles are part of this. They have led divergent lives, with a common root in their art and countryside upbringing, and the split occurring when it comes to the matter of love. Narrator-Asle meets Ales by chance in a café in Bergen, and immediately they fall in a kind of magical, dreamlike love that seems to last until her death. The other Asle arrives in Bergen to go to The Art School there with a girl already following him, pregnant with his son – The Boy. He marries her, but within a year has already found someone else, Siv, a woman who studies at The Art School and who seems to offer a more fulfilling relationship than the suicidal Liv. But like the names, the relationships echo, and it seems – seems, because nothing in Septology is quite certain – that Asle is then unfaithful towards Siv with another woman, Guro, and Siv leaves him too.  

A harmonious home life, versus a chaotic one. But both are marked with tragedy and ultimate loneliness. Both Asles drank heavily when younger, but Ales’s Asle gave up – under pressure from her – whereas the other Asle did not. Early on in the novel we are faced with shocking images of the second Asle, “weighed down as he is now, so weighed down by his own stone, a trembling stone, a weight so heavy that it’s pushing him down into the ground, I think”, as he struggles even to get up to pour himself another drink. His life has completely collapsed with the breakdown of family life, and his thoughts seem to circle around suicide.  

The other Asle has also seen his life collapse. The love he has for Ales is so pure, so total (in a novel with much German, Ales’s similarity to Alles – “everything”, cannot be entirely coincidental), that her loss leaves her own Asle with deep, deep wounds too. He lives alone, he lives in the countryside, with barely a friend, and now his heart’s companion is gone. Though years have passed since then, the wounds remain. 

But still our narrator survives. He does not return to drink, he does not end his life. The reason is, without a doubt, his religion. Septology is a novel about faith’s ability to be a fortress that can protect us from the greatest injuries. Faith is this novel’s foundation and its source of power. Each of Septology’s seven sections begins with art, but each ends with Asle in prayer. Whenever he is in pain – and he often is, thinking of Ales and his loss – he takes his rosary and prays. The Our Fathers, Hail Mary’s, and Christ Have Mercy’s, stabilise him and help him cast off from the world when he needs to sleep. Because his life is so full of pain, these moments in the text feel fair and earned. Religious or not, we see that these moments are necessary – utterly vital and necessary – for Asle’s own survival.  

For the survival of pain is this story – not its complete defeat. We notice that for all the memories we encounter, Septology is also full of silences. Asle mentions, without remembering, the end to his drinking. And in truth aside from its beginning, the relationship with Ales is also a blank. We have to take on faith that the relationship was what he claims it was. Often Asle thinks of Ales and then says he doesn’t want to think about her, that the pain is too great, so that these blanks remain. We notice, sooner or later, that Asle’s memories of the boy Asle are indeed usually about himself. But making him another, not the “I”, seems itself a way of hiding past pains whilst approaching past realities.  

God is also present in the silences. Asle feels God, just as he feels Ales’s presence, and seems even to see her at times. The flowing prose of Septology allows for this, just as it allows the whole text to seem, at times, like a breath or a prayer. Asle’s art draws him close to God, as does his contemplation of Ales – who had introduced him to faith to begin with. Septology’s world is full of pain, as is that of Aliss at the Fire, so that as with that work God becomes a necessary force – the only way of not falling into despair. A child drowns, a sister dies suddenly of illness, as does a beautiful friend – and many other characters suffer similarly upsetting fates. But we see here, unironically, what it might mean to commend the spirits of the departed to God – and what solace we might find in those words.  

Ultimately, what Septology does is argue for the power of faith as well as any apologist could, perhaps better. Religion is proved, if ever, by experience, and Septology draws us into an experience which shows faith’s potency in that specific life – and, in the second Asle’s case, the damage of its absence. We see something similar in my other favourite religious writer, Marilynne Robinson. Both writers, Fosse and Robinson, are adept at making a reality that is sanctified and filled with wonder. Fosse’s difference is that it sometimes seems we are relying on Asle’s consciousness to make his reality so, whereas in Robinson’s works life really does seem to be invested with God’s reality. By this I mean that her language constantly confirms God’s presence, whereas Fosse’s language confirms God only at particular points, for a particular consciousness. That means that stretches of Septology can be quite dull and meandering, as we wait for that moment where we will feel significance and harmony again. 

Such an approach would most aid a story showing a wavering, on-off faith. But that’s not really what’s going on here. It’s just that Asle is remembering something, and we need to work to make it meaningful for ourselves, if we can. If sometimes it can feel like this is not worth the effort, that shouldn’t take away from the rest of the book. Septology is a work of contrasts, of light and dark, faith and the loneliness of its absence, and it may be that its magnificent, truly heavenly highs are dependent on the moments when the story is simply a limited low. Really, truly, it’s a marvellous book regardless.  

On the Edge of an Abyss – Jon Fosse’s Aliss at the Fire

This is a novella that seems to sit on the edge of an abyss. I have read nothing like it. As a description of madness, its brilliance is in showing madness as a thing within the mind that goes beyond merely mistaking what lies before us, or acting in a way that makes little sense to others. Yet what Aliss at the Fire shows may well not be madness at all and instead another, deeper consciousness. It is a supremely mystical, magical work.

Set by a fjord in Norway, Signe, an elderly widow reflects on her husband Asle’s disappearance over twenty years before. But this reflection is more like the spinning of a cobweb. Told primarily using only commas and line breaks, the text itself is a constant stream. So it is that Signe imagines her past self, and the text enters the perception of this past Signe, as she says goodbye to her husband. He walks to the shore, and there he encounters a vision of himself as a child, walking with his grandmother. Other figures are seen by Asle or Signe as the novella progresses, including Asle’s great-grandmother, Aliss.

Perspective

This shifting of perspective, or time and place, comes so smoothly, the way that we can follow one thread of the web to a junction and turn immediately to any of many others without pause, precisely because of the relative lack of punctuation. Amongst the flow, we notice a “he thinks” or a “she sees” and that is all we have to tell us of a shift from one Signe to another, or from one Asle to another.

Signe is our only character in the present. As with Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, we have a very isolated existence on which to build our drama. There is a reference to a boat builder, who built the boat that Asle heads out on to meet his fate, and also to two boys who burned the boat later as part of a Midsommer celebration.

But Signe is alone, friendless, and adrift in herself.

Alone, that is, except for all these memories. There is something almost cinematic about Fosse’s style in Aliss at the Fire, which builds up in echoes and reverberations until it becomes deafening. Asle drowns on a boat. His grandfather, also called Asle, drowns on a toy boat he receives for his seventh birthday. The original Asle’s father, Kristoffer, nearly drowns when out with Aliss. Aliss makes a fire to roast a sheep’s head, and both the second Asle and Signe see strange fires, out on the fjord or down at the shore.

The Signe of the present witnesses this past, as it passes through her house – for it is Asle’s family home – without understanding who these people are. She also witnesses her own self, watching for her Asle. Though alone, the doors are constantly opening as people rush in and out. The air is filled with the sounds of past life.

We must ask ourselves: is it madness or a great comfort to have the past be so real?

Trauma

Seen from the present, we know everything that is to come. We know, because Asle tells us, that his grandfather’s brother Asle died as a boy, long before we see the seven-year-old head out from the shore for the last time, bearing a cargo of shells for Bergen. We know also that Asle himself, whatever his doubts, will go out on his own boat during a storm, and will not return. What these moments lose in immediate shock, they gain in emotional weight.

If we read Aliss at the Fire as a novella about trauma, we can possibly see it is being about coming to terms with that trauma by seeing its many interlinkages and coming to accept it and the past it inhabits as a totality. At the back of my copy, I wrote down Asle’s family tree, not necessarily because it is complicated, but because I wanted to see the whole thing together. Signe goes from watching in bewilderment as the world passes through her house, to acceptance as she strokes Kristoffer’s wife Brita’s hair as she hurries inside with the drowned small Asle in her arms.

As a character, Signe thinks back to that final day with Asle because she wants to understand how he could have died – a moment that remains unrevealed to us. She goes in circles with her questions: “…what was it he said before he went out that day when he disappeared? what did he say before he left, did he say something? something about going out onto the fjord for a little while maybe?…”

Perhaps one way we can read what she experiences is as a demonstration of the answer to them – a showing of the answer, rather than its direct telling. Although, as we do not see Asle’s death, we must use the other memories – as must Signe – as a way of understanding her loss.

Without an insight into Asle’s death, we must speculate based on what little we have. Inevitably, one thinks of suicide. I am aware that Scandinavian intimacies may be more subtle than those of warmer climates, but it is difficult to find much fire in Asle’s heart. And she seems to have many more doubts than would be sensible. There are hints of friction in their past, such as when she thinks about how he does not like long words after she writes him a flowery love letter.

Furthermore, we must ask why Asle goes out on the fjord every day when he himself does not seem to like it or know why he goes. Perhaps we can answer the question by saying that Asle is in the grip of forces he does not know or control, just as Signe finds herself in the grip of memories she cannot control either.

God

The main thing one notices in Aliss at the Fire, more than minor questions of what and why, is the pervading mystical feeling. We know at once that we are not dealing with the physical rules that we are used to seeing governing our lives. Here the dead come back not as ghosts but as images, as if something is projecting the past back onto the present. Here we see mysterious fires, and we inhabit a universe that is essentially devoid of other human life.

It is only Signe, only Asle, only a few family members, and the world of the fjord and the elements. Often I thought of the prints of Edvard Munch, for here too we often see our characters only from their backs as they face the landscape and try to make sense of it. Here too, we see but do not truly know them.

What do we make of these porous boundaries? Is Signe losing her mind, or drifting between worlds? We might find something primeval and pagan in the mysterious fires seen above the water, or the sheep’s head Aliss burns on the shore. At the same time, however, as an old grandmother, Aliss provides comfort to her son and daughter-in-law after her grandson Asle drowns on his toy boat in a distinctly Christian way. For though Christianity is present indirectly in the novella, for example in Kristoffer’s name (Christ-bearer), it is only about two-thirds of the way through that God himself is invoked by Aliss:

“The Lord moves in mysterious ways, she says

He is happy, Asle’s happy now with God in Heaven, so don’t be said, she says

God is good, He is, she says”

This marks the beginning of God’s direct involvement in the novella, which culminates in the story’s final and very ambiguous moment, when the whole of reality seems to collapse, and Signe herself joins the memories in their ghostly realm. If I found Fosse’s A Shining a little silly, Aliss at the Fire is much easier to enjoy as a kind of religious work. Perhaps this is because the work as a whole is far more intense.

It is hard to convey, in my own neat sentences, the sheer force of Fosse’s writing in Aliss. The near absence of full stops, coupled with the constant shifting of perspective, really drags one into the world in the way that the mildly annoying personality of the narrator in A Shining kept me out. I felt like I had a mystery before me, whereas A Shining had something that seemed altogether too obvious.

This does not make Aliss’s words religiously convincing, but it makes them weighty. In a story where trauma seems destined to repeat, with drowning after drowning, we must believe in the earnestness of the characters’ attempts to deal with it.

Aliss is serious in her confrontation with death in a way that the bumbling narrator of A Shining is not. It is this seriousness that allows us to overlook the essential absurdities that might otherwise get on our nerves or seem entirely unrealistic. Things like the way that nobody has any friends, the way Asle has no job and literally spends his entire life going out on the fjord on his boat each day, and so on.

Instead, we see the beauty, and just like Signe, we find ourselves adrift in this strange and mysterious world.

Conclusion

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the work, as I reflect on it, is the way that Fosse’s stylistic approach aids and supports his thematic goals. Literarily, this is pretty elementary stuff. But the particular use of streaming narrative and flowing consciousnesses for the particular goal of turning our thoughts to realms beyond our reality is really rather effective. It makes me wonder whether we can actually write anything serious about religion or spiritual matters, now, in normal language, or whether we have to do something strange, like Fosse’s flowing language, or McCarthy’s cathedrals of prose. This seems to me, as someone who is interested in these things and can imagine myself writing about them, to be quite important to think about.