Tag: Melancholy

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.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day – A Review

My friend James almost always brings up The Remains of the Day when we talk about literature. He’s a huge fan of Kazuo Ishiguro and rather thought the book would be my cup of tea. Well, at long last I’ve read the book and I have to admit that he was right. The Remains of the Day is a fascinating and sad story about the passage of time, and what we can salvage from the end of our lives, when it might seem that so much has passed us by. At my advanced age of twenty-two, it seems perfectly suited for me.

A photo of Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017
Kazuo Ishiguro is among the most celebrated authors writing in the UK now, and The Remains of the Day is probably his most famous work. He won the Nobel Prize in 2017. Photo by Frankie Fouganthin (CC BY-SA 4.0)

It tells the story of the life of a butler, Mr Stevens, who works in a great English country house, Darlington Hall, and the challenges he faces when he comes to look back on his past in his twilight years. For me the book is particularly poignant because of my own experience of the topics dealt within it, as my grandmother lives in a castle that is still served by staff (though they don’t live on site). Although it was published in 1989 and the action takes place in 1956, the questions and concerns of The Remains of the Day all remain vital and interesting now, and stretch far beyond the secret world of British upper classes it takes as its setting.

The Story

Mr Stevens, the aging butler of Darlington Hall, is presented with his greatest challenge yet when his new American employer suggests he goes for a car ride to get himself out of the house. The American is returning for a few weeks to his homeland and thinks that Stevens could use the fresh air. Stevens himself is not altogether for the idea, but he manages to convince himself. He has begun to notice certain mistakes in the running of the household, which he attributes to a lack of staff employed since Lord Darlington, the original owner, left. The trip can therefore be justified as a business one, for Stevens has recently received a letter from a former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, and he decides to end his trip with a visit to her home, hoping she will rejoin the household.

Though Stevens travels around the countryside, most of The Remains of the Day comes as memories Stevens reconsiders with age. The central tension in Remains of the Day becomes the one between what Stevens is willing to admit to himself, and what out of fear, or cowardice, or pride, he does not accept. The decline and death of his own father, the rise of fascism, and Stevens’ relations with Miss Kenton and Lord Darlington are all replayed to the reader, but only by looking at what is not said can we appreciate their significance.

The Style and Form of The Remains of the Day

The first-person narration of The Remains of the Day is deceptively simple. It certainly is deceptive. Stevens has been plucked perfectly from his upper-class milieu, and like the English upper-class, he rarely says what he means. It is only thanks to the vividness of his memories, in particular through remembered dialogue, that we come to see what is really going on in the past and in the present. To take one example, when Stevens finds that his father has died, he decides to continue working at an important international conference instead of taking a break. In the narration there is no hint that Stevens is suffering. The recollection is explained by Stevens as the apotheosis of his career as a butler, his ultimate mastery of dignity. But then we reach the dialogue of his waiting, and his desired impression comes under attack.

“Stevens, are you all right?”

“Yes, sir. Perfectly.”

“You look as though you’re crying.” I laughed and taking out a handkerchief, quickly wiped my face.

“I’m very sorry, sir. The strains of a hard day.”

Without narration to interrupt and reinterpret this exchange, we are presented with a direct glimpse of Stevens’ pain. But when the chapter ends he tries once more to control our interpretation of the recollection. “For all its sad associations, whenever I recall that evening today, I find I do so with a large sense of triumph.” Language is a tool for the expression of our selves, for communication. But it can just as easily be used for creating a false picture of the world. Stevens, as if to save himself from the truth of that day, from the rejection of his father on his death bed, uses language to justify his cold-heartedness, to turn defeat into a kind of triumph. “You see, I know my father would have wishes me to carry on just now.” He says. But we aren’t so easily fooled.

Love and Deceit

The language of The Remains of the Day, instead of revealing, conceals the true nature of what has passed. Through verbiage and excessive reasoning Stevens tries to fool himself and the reader. Miss Kenton and her attempts to flirt with Stevens are concealed in the narration by Stevens’ refusal to ascribe any kind of romantic meaning to them. They appear only as words, and we need to divine their hidden depths for ourselves. Likewise, Stevens structures his trip to Miss Kenton – he initially “forgets” that she’s married and now Mrs Benn – as a business trip. But to the reader it’s clear enough that there is a romantic interest involved too.

We would be forgiven for thinking that Stevens does not realise what he is doing, that he is deceiving himself. The truth is much more sad. As the book draws to a close we find Stevens, at the end of the day, sitting by the beach. As he talks with a stranger it becomes clear that he knows that his life has been filled with mistakes, and that he’s trying desperately to find something good in all of them. The ending at least gives us a glimmer of hope, that though Stevens is old, still he might yet change, and find joy in what remains to him, and what has passed him by.

A photo of an English country house, located in front of a pond
An English country house, of the sort that Mr Stevens spends his life in. But is there something missing in that world and that life? photo by Ronald Searle (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Great Butler and the Stiff Upper Lip

We English tend not to talk about our feelings, not even among friends. Stevens, one can tell, has never confided a thing to anybody. But though he has survived, The Remains of the Day raises the question of how far our English taciturnity is cause for celebration. Stevens is preoccupied with the question of “what is a great butler”, a question he explores with almost academic rigour. A large part of it is the stiff upper lip, what Stevens terms dignity. It is the decision never to let one’s feelings either show or affect one’s work. Stevens, in his own description of himself, asks the reader to consider whether he himself might be such a butler. For anybody who has been reading, his loyalty to Lord Darlington and his dignity in the face of his father’s death, are all compelling evidence of his “greatness”.

But Stevens never asks us at what cost this greatness has been attained. The Remains of the Day doesn’t just undermine Stevens’ narrative, it also challenges the very values he holds dear. What we see, even if he doesn’t, is that being a great butler attacks Stevens’ own humanity. The coldness, the dedication to one’s craft that Stevens practices, dehumanises him. He is unable to “banter”, to engage in the world and form non-professional relationships with other people. He suffers especially harshly at the hands of his new American employer, Mr Farraday, for whom bantering is second nature.

But Stevens also doesn’t appreciate beauty either. Although he claims to live in one of the most magical places in England, he rarely shows it. Whether the portraits on the wall or silver on the table, the beauty in objects simply becomes part of Stevens’ job – he must keep things clean and shiny. It is only extremely infrequently, and often in the company of Miss Kenton, that Stevens’ narration is forced, for a moment, to acknowledge the beauty of the sun setting or the grounds of the manor house. Stevens is a great butler, but for all that he’s lost his friends, he’s failed to find love, and he cannot even appreciate the beauty that lies in front of him. Truth be told, the cost of his excellence seems far too high.

The Glory of the Past

The common note in The Remains of the Day, even before Stevens’ personal failures are explored, is melancholy and decline. It is the gentle melancholy of Chekhov, seeing the world fall apart but not wishing to intervene. In Ishiguro’s novel this decline is primarily a decline of the worldview and corresponding world of the British upper class. We see this immediately at the novel’s beginning. Stevens has remained in the employ of the owners of Darlington Hall, but the Darlingtons are nowhere to be seen. Instead, an outsider – and American – has arrived, and most of the original staff have left. Americans in The Remains of the Day represent the future. Lord Darlington, dismayed by the cruel treatment of Germany with the Treaty of Versailles, hopes to change the treaty’s contents.

To this end, Darlington eventually organises a conference with major figures from all across Europe. The goal is to pressure their respective governments to ease the reparations demanded of Germany. It is a noble goal, motivated by honour and respect for the First World War’s defeated countries. However, it is a goal from a bygone age. An American in attendance stands and gives a speech where he attacks all of the Europeans for their foolish idealism, for their useless values and amateurism. What they need to succeed is cunning and professionalism. He is booed out of the conference. But Hitler succeeds precisely because he knew how to manipulate this idealism, how to appeal to the values of the British classes when encouraging appeasement. In the end, of course, the American is proved right.

The glorious past that Stevens loves is revealed, over the course of The Remains of the Day, to be ultimately an illusion. Darlington, with his conference a failure, dabbles in fascism and dies a disgrace. Antisemitism leads to the unfair dismissal of two maids, and Stevens – ever the professional – refuses even to comfort them as he removes them from their positions. Stevens is also a terrible elitist and snob without ever, really, justifying these views. As easy as it is to begin The Remains of the Day with a sense of nostalgia, it’s equally hard not to end the book with a feeling of disappointment in the world that lies behind us. Of course, there was a lot to value in some of the old British values – but there was far more that really isn’t worth our time.

Conclusion

It was interesting as I read The Remains of the Day to see how my attitude to Stevens himself changed. At first I thought of him as something of a buffoon. But then as time went on that bemusement morphed into sadness, disappointment, and finally a kind of anger. I was angry that Stevens was so obsessed about being a great butler that he came to neglect everything else in the world. I was angry that he spends the entire book lying to himself. It’s only at the very end that there’s a brief hint that all that might change. But I was glad of it, just as I was glad for Stevens. In truth, I pitied him.

the original cover of The Remains of the Day, showing a pocket watch on a black background
The book’s original cover.

The Remains of the Day is a lovely book. Its story of decline hidden under the façade of class glory rings true with my own experience of the declining position of old elites. It is wonderfully written – it is not beautiful, but it is the perfect blend of form and content. Stevens feels incredibly real, and his self-delusion seems strikingly real too. There are many of us who go through life trying to tell ourselves that our own course is the right one. But sooner or later the time comes when we must face the truth of our error. Even if we are already in the remains of our own days upon this earth, there is still great value in taking the step towards self-knowledge. In that sense, for all its melancholy, the message of The Remains of the Day remains an uplifting one. Check it out.

For more delicate treatment of the past, consider Salvatore Satta’s tale of the coming of modernity in Sardinia, The Day of Judgement, reviewed here; and also Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time, presenting in an interview format the collapse of the Soviet Union from those who experienced it, reviewed here.