Category: European Literature

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.

Jon Fosse – A Shining

If a story is going to create a mystery without a single answer, it should at least aim at the creation of the potential for the reader to find an answer. The alternative is simply frustration. For instance, Kafka’s brilliance lies in the way that we can find a solution to his works’ problems, just never a conclusive one. We all know why Gregor Samsa becomes a bug – only our views inevitably conflict with one another. The text, nevertheless, provides clues for all of us. It prompts endless exploration. Whereas I am not sure Jon Fosse’s A Shining does.

I had high hopes for A Shining. After all, Jon Fosse has just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I spent weeks going around bookshops, trying to find Septology. Perhaps this effort meant that I demanded more (when I finally found a book of Fosse’s in stock) than the writing could give me. A Shining is about fifty pages long. It’s so thin that it bends the wrong way if I carry it in a breast pocket. But plenty of stories have managed much in fewer pages.

The plot is very simple. A man drives into a forest. He has been driving aimlessly, out of boredom. In the forest his car gets stuck. He gets out of the car and tries to find help. It starts snowing and he gets cold. He sees a mysterious “shining” that approaches and talks to him. Then the shining goes inside him. He then sees an old couple that he recognises, not immediately, as his parents. Then he sees a man in a suit. Then they all float away, the narrator included.

The narrator asks :

“What’s happening here in the middle of the forest, in the black darkness of the trees, where there’s white snow on the branches and on the ground between the trees[?]”

What, indeed.

I propose to start with the narrator, whose consciousness we inhabit. Often narrators are the way into a story like this.

He shows signs of depression: “Boredom had taken hold of me—usually I was never bored but now I had fallen prey to it. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do.” He hasn’t eaten a proper meal in days, and he experiences a kind of emptiness and anxiety that worsens as the story progresses. He is lonely. What else? As so often in these kinds of stream-of-consciousness books, he has a lack of self-knowledge that can easily grate: “And what was I doing on this forest road?”

Does he want to end his life? Perhaps – “And maybe that is exactly why I walked into the forest, because I wanted to freeze to death.” Perhaps not – he then immediately decides this is not the case. We don’t know his job, his life before the story, except for hints that are insufficient to form a view – “You might almost consider me a thinker.” In other words, our man is a blank slate, albeit likely a prideful one. Even when his “parents” arrive upon the scene, the dialogue between the three is very limited and focused on his trying to find a way out of the forest. There is insufficient evidence there for even the most ardent Freudian to make an essay from. 

Let’s go back to Kafka. Gregor Samsa was a travelling salesman. This made him a bug in the eyes of others. He had a family whose interactions with him give plenty to think over. Like the narrator of A Shining, he seems oblivious to certain things – in Gregor’s case, for example, that being a bug might make it hard for him to do his job. But unlike the narrator of Fosse’s story, his outward existence as an individual is sufficient to give us something to keep in our minds as we try to make sense of things. Both have personalities, but only Gregor seems to have had a life.

We might say that A Shining is about meaning, as if this is an excuse. Certainly, one real part of the work is the way that we try to find order and meaning in the world. The narrator’s hope for rescue leads him to ascribe meaning to the ground itself: “and that was probably a path leading into the forest, and it has to lead somewhere, doesn’t it, and there must be people there.” He finds a stone that just seems to have been shaped for sitting on. There is a human desperation for everything to make sense that he clings to.

Philosophically, this comes across in questions of determinism. On the very first page, the narrator notes: “All right then, this sudden urge to drive off somewhere had brought me to a forest. And there was another way of talking, according to which something, something or another, led, whatever that might mean, to something else, yes, something else.” (We might note here that our narrator, who thinks he is a “thinker”, refuses to state outright the simple name for this idea). If everything is determined by something else, then that suggests an ordering of the universe. That is a comforting thought.

Against that thought, there is reality and the random. The snow of the forest that obliterates any path that might be there,  that the car gets stuck to begin with. The narrator walking in circles as he tries to get out. The way that his parents, rather than helping him escape, argue with one another sadly and admit that they do not know the way out either.

We might look to parts of the story as symbols to guide us, to things as echoes of others. Dante’s Divine Comedy begins:

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

This is our narrator’s problem, through and through. After the uncertainty of the forest, Dante meets his guide. Our narrator in A Shining also meets guides – the shining, the parents, and so on. He also remembers seeing a cabin beyond the forest – a symbol, clearly, of the order and meaning he can achieve if he can work through the muddle of snow and trees. Back on the road, there was an abandoned farmhouse, showing that the world he left behind cannot be returned to. This all sounds good to me, reasonable interpretations of things. But it does make things look quite simple.

The Shining

Now it’s really as dark as it can get and there in front of me I see the outline of something that looks like a person. A shining outline, getting clearer and clearer. Yes, a white outline there in the dark, right in front of me. Is it far away or is it nearby. I can’t say for sure. It’s impossible, yes, impossible to say whether it’s close or far away. But it’s there. A white outline. Shining. And I think it’s walking toward me. Or coming toward me.

With the shining itself, it’s perhaps not necessary to demonstrate the parallels, except that I am increasingly aware that the extent to which I was exposed to Christianity as a child through my schooling is completely unrepresentative of the general distance many now have from the common stories of the Bible, regardless of belief. It could be an “angel”. Certainly, it brings comfort to the narrator, warming him up. At one point he thinks of it as a voice of “love.” The shining form enters the narrator and occasionally talks to him –

I say: who are you. The presence says: I am who I am—and I think that I’ve heard that answer before, but I can’t remember where I heard it, or maybe I read it somewhere or another.

So at least the book is aware that people’s connection to God is not what it used to be, and makes it obvious. Although the narrator suggests it might be some dark angel, it is fairly conclusive from the context that it is a positive spirit, trying to help him. “I’ll leave that for other people to decide,” he thinks, about whether it is the voice of God. But the book does not leave much room for an alternative.

Next, we have the parents, once the shining has gone quiet and entered the narrator. Their portrayal is touching, because of its vulnerability. We expect his parents to help, but they seem just as lost in the forest as the narrator:

She says: you don’t know the way—and he says no and she says she was sure he knew where the way was, he always knew the way, she couldn’t remember a single time when he hadn’t known the way, she was sure he knew the way, she would never have imagined anything else, she says and she’s stopped, and she’s let go of my father’s arm and now she’s looking up at him, and she says, and her voice sounds scared: you don’t know the way, you can’t find the way back home—and my father shakes his head. She says: so why did we walk so far into the forest—and my father doesn’t answer, he just stands there stiffly. She says: answer me. He says: but we came here together. She says: no, it was you who dragged me into the forest. He says: but you wanted to find him.

But at this point, we can say that the parents are sent by some higher power, clearly not to help the narrator escape, but to help him understand something about the world. “Wasn’t he always his own person,” his mother says to his father. Perhaps the lesson has something to do with selfishness and pride.

The final person is a man in a black suit. He has no face and perhaps is God, or the man the narrator could become. It’s impossible to say.

No, I don’t understand this. It’s not something that can be understood either, it’s something else, maybe it’s something that’s only experienced, that’s not actually happening. But is it possible to only experience something and not have it be happening? Everything you experience, yes, is real in a way, yes, and you probably understand it too, in a way. But it doesn’t matter either way.

He does not talk, but he and the narrator and all the others float off into the distance and the story ends, essentially bathed in light.

Conclusion

Now, either the narrator dies, or he is saved. It’s fairly immaterial. We can go for an atheistic interpretation that the whole thing was the delusion brought on by freezing to death, his parents, and the rest of it all just one of those near-death-experience oddities. Or we can say that in the forest he found some higher truth that is incommunicable, except as a strange second-hand experience for us readers. But it’s hard to see any other interpretation. It’s essentially a mystery that is not mysterious because there isn’t an answer here. We just need to accept the truth of it, which works with religion but seems fairly annoying with fiction.

A Shining isn’t actually bad as a religious tale. Its air of mystery is effectively created and it feels like a modern-day allegory. But it then suffers from not knowing what it is by trying half-heartedly to add ambiguity. Either it’s a story about a sad man who finds God/Meaning/Truth, in which case it should take itself still more seriously, or it’s an ironic tale that might just be a man freezing to death after taking a drive – at which point it could give us more to work with as we try to reach our own satisfactory interpretation of things. Either more ambiguity or more Truth, in other words.

Still, the funny thing is that I can see myself reading A Shining again. It’s not often that you have something that’s really trying to convey a mystical feeling – and partly succeeding. But on the other hand, I can’t see myself turning to the seven hundred or so pages of Septology too soon.