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.