Perspectives (5)
Jon Fosse's Septology
[Image: “Simplon Pass,” John Singer Sargent (1911), courtesy of National Gallery of Art’s Open Access archive (Corcoran Collection, gift of James Parmelee), public domain. Yes, it’s a painting of a place in the Swiss Alps, but it has a feel about it that suggests the Nordic, yes? Also, I love the commentary from Parmelee, the donor who gave the painting, a commentary that could also apply to the text under discussion: "brilliant and self-assured . . . [the artist] has outdone himself in juggling with perspective, and [gives] the result a look of spontaneous unconcern."]
What a delight to wake up & find that the writer of the novel I most appreciated in the past year, Jon Fosse’s Septology, has been honored with the Nobel prize in literature for 2023. Though Fosse surely now has a full-size mountain avalanche of congratulations headed his way, I nevertheless add my small rock to the cascade.
Due to the ways in which faith is the breath of life to its protagonist, a painter named Asle, this year’s Nobel pick invites comparison to Sigrid Undset’s 1928 Nobel win and to one of her own masterpieces, Kristin Lavransdatter1—though in terms of style, form, structure, and even character, you’d be hard pressed to find two works that differ more from each other.
It’s character that may best help us begin to grasp the many contrasts at play here. Where Kristin is entwined, even enmeshed, with her interdependent medieval communities of endeavor and belief, Asle is isolated even from his closest companions; where Kristin’s passionate marriage is long-lasting, tumultuous, and ambivalent, Asle’s (no less passionate) is short-lived, idyllic, and a lifelong source of inner peace even after his wife’s passing; where Kristin’s ongoing conversion of life features the recognition of relational damages, forgiveness of wounds, and making of amends to family, community, and God, Asle’s no less thorough or vertically oriented conversion also reads as a much more contemporary story of recovery and healing.
Let me leap in here to forestall a certain resistance to the word contemporary which haunts, not to say plagues, some conversations on faith in fiction. Fosse’s narration, while formally innovative, has a classical, even historical feel. If it is, as some have said, “modernist,” it is so less as a conscious rupture with previous novelistic or narrative traditions and more as a conscious effort to recombine or encompass those traditions within something new, which also makes use of elements of modern stream-of-consciousness and elements of still older forms of spiritual narrative and self-aware self-accounting—which, we might be led to say, are confessional forms.
This seems to be no accident. A recent (if August 2021 still counts as “recent”) Harper’s piece on Fosse by Wyatt Mason notices the resonance with Augustine, as it also identifies a possible source for Septology’s structure that dips much deeper into Christian history, far back beyond the novel’s moment of genesis:
Septology is, in a painterly sense, a triptych, three books of alternating numbers of parts—II, III, II—two narrow panels flanking a central one, a religious painting, three crosses at its center as if on a hill; and … we might hear the seven canonical hours of prayer, or see the seven signs in the Gospel of John, or see the seven seals of the Book of Revelation written on a scroll… (Mason, “Seven Steps to Heaven,” Harper’s August ‘21, 84-85)
“Thankfully, these features do not add up neatly,” Mason says—hereby exposing an implicit critical bias against excessive tidiness as being a salient feature of good postmodern literary taste; I want to push gently back on this bias, noting that the structure Mason has identified is an extraordinarily tidy one, or instead of tidy, we might want to say stable: the triptych is an artistic form that corresponds, if not2 to other-than-human forms of nature (or supernature) then surely at least to something in the mind, something so deeply satisfactory and complete in itself that it also allows for the exploration and integration of a wild variety of human experience, a good deal of which is of a dark or sorrowful nature. Mason accounts for the contrast with an admission that is open-ended, yet far from dissolute: “the way Fosse wields the novel’s form does something spooky to one’s heart.”
So does the way Fosse wields the form of the sentence. An unpunctuated flow of thought, moving steadily from one observation to another without break or disruption—the way, we might note, an ancient or medieval manuscript does—has an effect on the reader that becomes hypnotic, trancelike, utterly engrossing. As with the happiest experiences of consciousness itself, in Fosse’s contemplative prose line there seems no compelling reason ever to exit this flow state; one desires only to be brought along into the next moment, even when the current moment is of a nature to terrify or repel; never strained or anxious even when pain is present, so that a desire to resolve and reconcile is never a desire to ignore or pretend away; childlike, one is certain of few things but very certain of those few: attuned to goodness, engaged by order, open to surprise. Can the experience of writing such a line have been anything like the experience of reading it? A writer has to wonder: what richness, what fluidity, went into the creation of such a river, when the experience of sailing down it is of resting in the hand of such powerful and beneficent direction?
In the Harper’s piece, Mason also observes that whatever else Septology is, it is an inversion of the kunstlerroman, the novel of the development of the artist: a retrospective unpacking of a creative life, a look back at what it has been and what it has meant. Yet this rather trite formulation, which could also apply to a great number of far shallower coastings over the waves of human effort and setback and accomplishment, fails to capture the depth and texture and urgency of this astonishingly full work. Key to the achievement seems to be the successful self-containment of the work within its chosen proportion; key, too, the perspectival relation between part and whole, scene and panorama, detail and meaning. In an artistic sense it’s precisely the successful architecture of overarching structure, contrasted with the roving freedom of the constraint-bursting prose line, that allows Fosse to sustain this balance over such a wide expanse of space and experience.
Mason suggests, and I endorse, the thought that Fosse, through Asle, seeks to teach his reader not only how but why to pay attention to—and to try to render in art—the robust completeness of a human life lived in the face of inevitable, eventual death. In contemplative realist terms, we might also want to say that Fosse
submits to an asceticism of cognition whereby we train our souls to ascertain the action of Grace in and around the contests of the human spirit … [and] will not rest content until he has rendered this relation between strained vision and enslavement, between a more complete seeing and the fullness of choice. … Fed by the majestic poverty of the Word he will write another novel of the nameless nobody who happens to be made in the imago Dei … surprised to find in … insignificance some of the deepest drama in the cosmos. (Contemplative Realism, 62-3)
After writing this, it strikes me that an even richer comparison could be made between Septology’s Asle and the protagonist of Undset’s own preferred masterwork, Olav Audunsson. Two stoic Norwegian men, both of whom start by seeking honor and a place in the world for their remarkable talents, both of whom become so swallowed up by memory and meditation that they are unable to speak fully of what haunts them to those closest to them, so that their deepest inner lives can only come to the reader through the writer’s mediating grace—yes, this is a thread worth following to its end, sometime…
Though I obviously think that, yes, it does thus correspond