By Kohinoor Dasgupta
The one-named protagonist of Septology, an enigmatic novel by 2023 Literature Nobel winner Jon Fosse, steadfastly holds on to prayer. Asle prays several times daily. He prays himself to sleep. Asle converted to Roman Catholicism when he was a young man. Going by art gallery owner Beyer’s remark that he has been exhibiting and selling Asle’s work for 50 years, Asle is now in his mid-sixties. Although Asle attends Mass as often as he can at St. Paul’s Church in Bjørgovin (Bergen, Norway), he obsesses about what he believes. A few pages into Septology, he is thinking:
"of course you don't need to be dipped in water to be baptized, you can also be baptized in yourself, by the spirit you have inside yourself, the other person you have and are, the other person you get when you’re born as a human being, I think, and all of them, all the different people, both the ones who lived in earlier times and the ones who are still alive, are just baptized inside themselves, … they’re baptized by the other person they’ve been given and have inside them, and maybe through their connection with other people, the connection of common understanding, of shared meaning, yes which language also has, and is, I think…”
While driving his big car, which is like a small van, from Bjørgovin back to his house in Dyalgia, Asle continues to ponder the question.
"yes baptism is also a part of the truth, it too can lead to, yes, lead to God, I think, or at least to God insofar as I can imagine Him, but there are also other ways of thinking and believing that are true, other ways of honestly turning to God, maybe you use the term God or maybe you know too much to do that, or are too shy when confronted with the unknown divinity, but everything leads to God, so that all religions are one, I think, and that’s how religion and art go together, because the Bible and the liturgy are fiction and poetry and painting, are literature and drama and visual art, and they all have truth in them…”
The thoughts are not new, but they are persistent. As usual they have in the beginning a touch of confidence stemming from Asle's personal insights as an artist and frail human, but they peter out in doubt and confusion. Asle has stopped the car and has been sitting in the freezing cold and "frittering away" his time.
Later in Part I, while Asle is standing in the middle of the main room of his house and responding laconically to his helpful neighbor Åsleik’s queries about an upcoming Christmas lamb ribs dinner, he thinks:
"… the mere fact that we have the word and the idea God means that God is real, I think, whatever the truth of it is it’s at least a thought that it’s possible to think…”
In Part VI he muses:
"somehow you get closer to God in Jesus Christ than you do by thinking about God entirely without human characteristics”.
The mystical sermons and treatises of Meister Eckhart, a German Dominican monk of the late Middle Ages, resonate with Asle’s profound sense of God, his understanding of the origin of his gift and of the purpose of his paintings. (In 1327, a year after Meister Eckhart died, Pope John XXII condemned him as a heretic).
Though made out of a river of words, Septology is a sort of wordless personal diary. Throughout his sixty-odd years, Asle has lived intensely within himself. To the people closest to him he may have come across as wooden, tongue-tied or even lacking in empathy. Alcoholism further disconnected him from "other people, the connection of common understanding, of shared meaning". It is probable that he could not utter the words that people in his life might have wanted to hear. He does not trust words. Yet he is a constant spiritual seeker, he is true to his gift, he diligently examines his own work for a light that to him is the highest truth, and for some years he has been praying for intercessions for other people. Septology is the mute account of such a man and such a life. A great writer has used words to hear silence and examined the "new name" hidden in the stone. The novel, which was published in Norwegian in three instalments (I-II, III-V and VI-VII) in 2019, begins with the following quote from the Revelation:
"And I will give him a white stone, and on the stone a new name written, which no one knows except him who receives it.”
During Advent of an unknown Anno Domini, Asle feels exhausted and, for the first time in his life, has no desire to paint. His new work, which he does not recall naming 'St Andrew’s Cross’ but has, is superficially different from his usual work. Åsleik remarks that it looks like "something real". However, we eventually find out that the painting is no different from Asle's powerful abstract work. There is a person in the picture whom only Asle can see. The painting is perhaps the final one in a long sequence of purged images. Asle has always needed to paint out the images that got stuck in his head. The images invariably were connected to painful memories. In the deepest darkness of a Norwegian winter, having switched off all lights, Asle gazes at 'St Andrew’s Cross’ to see if it shines. His paintings represent some subliminal agony or another. The good ones have a radiance which Asle hopes that others see as well.
"I have to paint a picture in a way that dissolves the picture lodged inside me and makes it go away, so that it becomes an invisible, forgotten part of myself, of my own innermost picture, the picture I am and have, because there’s one thing I know for sure, I have only one picture, one single picture, and all the other pictures, both the ones I see and the ones I can’t forget that get stuck in me, have something about them that resembles the one picture I have inside me, …”
Although nothing is unfamiliar at home or on the way to Åsleik’s farm, or in the High Street-University-Bay area of Bjørgovin, Asle barely holds on to his bearings. At home he orients himself by looking out of a particular section of a window so that he may stare precisely at "a fixed point in the waters of the Sygne Sea”, even if it is pitch dark out. At his house, or while sitting inside his small van as if in a daze, or lying on clean sheets at the Country Inn, Asle prays as though he needs the words to feel silence. He prays either in Latin or in his own Nynorsk translation. He has stringed together a prayer: the Pater Noster, Ave Marias, the Gloria Patri and sometimes parts of the Apostolic Creed, the Nicene Creed and Salve Regina.
Encrypted by the skipping, slowing, nudging, numbing, circling, ascending, smudging and coalescing words of this novel without paragraphs, a chronological story runs its course. It really begins towards the end of Part I. Asle's family owned a pear orchard by Horda (Hardanger) fjord. Father took over Grandfather's farm and never left, except for a year at Agriculture school. He worked all day in the orchard and also built traditional fishing boats to make a little extra money. Mother had her hands full too, with daily chores and seasonal farm work like bottling fruit and making juice from gooseberries and redcurrants in autumn. Grandmother and Grandfather lived in The Old House.
One bright, still day, which Fosse's writing gives an aura of anticipation and a prelapsarian fragility the way François Truffaut presented Jules, Jim, and Catherine's beach outing, little Asle and his little Sister, Alida, break Mother’s rules and walk all the way to The Beach. On yet another day, Father, gripping the steering wheel like Jhumpa Lahiri’s Mrs. Sen, sets off on his first drive down the country road. Asle's Father, like "Father" in Fosse’s 2023 novella A Shining, is a man of few words. In this manner, a bunch of vivid scenes, involving a small number of people mark out the miles of Asle's life.
By chance, I began reading the book in the middle, Parts III to V, published by Transit Books in Damion Searls’ English translation as I Is Another. Though semi-hypnotized by the breathless words on page after page, I imagined I saw daylight between Asle and Asle. Upon finishing I Is Another, I was eager to know what happened next. The image that lodged in my head at the end was The Namesake and pregnant Liv on their way to Liv’s parents’ house in Sartor. There was something lively, yet wretched and doomed about The Namesake.
After finishing I is Another, I read its blurb, which said: "Asle and Asle are doppelgängers – two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life”, and I wondered where was absolute proof of that except that they were identical in appearance, wore identical clothes, and were both gifted painters? It was easier to see Asle and The Namesake as detached from one another. It was easier to divide their heartbreaks and and their flaws.
After reading Septology from its beginning (Part I-II, The Other Name) to the end (Part VI-VII, A New Name), I would say that Fosse has given us a sort of Cubist novel. We are free to orient ourselves to the characters as we will. We are free to arrive at our own conclusions regarding the two sets of doppelgängers, the Asles and the Guros. Perhaps The Namesake is a younger version of Asle. Perhaps Asle is a ghostly dream of a little-known artist, an alcoholic ignored by his family, a painter whose last work is called A Shining Darkness. Why does Asle see himself staring at the painting called 'St. Andrew's Cross'? Fosse progressively increases the darkness and coldness in the white house where Asle has taken to sleeping on a bench in a corner of the main room, wrapped in Grandmother’s blanket, and still wearing his black coat.
Ales, omnipresent and unreal, could be Asle's angel, his connection to his innermost, single picture. She could be an idealized version of Siv, who also had long dark hair.
The Asle who is in the foreground of Septology is a solitary widower and a well-known painter of Norway. He lives in a bubble, only occasionally turning the pages of a newspaper at The Coffeehouse. No radio, television, or cell phone. He has a landline, and the bookshelf which he built years ago holds many books, among which are two on the mystical thought of Meister Eckhart: Unity with God and From Whom God Hid Nothing. Asle reads in several languages. He has no friends anymore except fisherman Åsleik, who is a younger single man who also reads a lot. Asle makes enough money, and he has been thrifty. His personal needs are minimal, though he does have a newish four-wheel-drive vehicle with new studs. Incomprehensible as Math was when he was a schoolboy, Asle has done the math to be financially stable even if he stops painting now. True, he is a lugubrious man. True, he misses Ales, the love of his life whom he married, and who left him the house he lives in. Yet, his general gloom and sense of guilt, and avoidance of some topics even in thought, seem excessive, considering his accomplishments and comfortable circumstances. Is he always this unhappy? Is this unhappiness an aberration? Is he physically sick? There are only a handful of passing moments in these two weeks during Advent when Asle says he is happy, for instance while driving back home with The Namesake's dog, Bragi, in Book II.
Meister Eckhart preached a faith that gave believers joy and happiness.
"A man who is established thus in God's will wants nothing but what is God's will and what is God. If he were sick he would not want to be well. To him all pain is pleasure, all multiplicity is bare simplicity, if he is truly established in the will of God. Even though it meant the pains of hell it would be joy and happiness to him.” - Sermon 57, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart . Translated by Maurice O'C Walshe
Perhaps Asle is moving towards that happiness. He does feel that God is near. In Part VI, his empty easel fills him with happiness. When one finishes reading Septology, its very first lines take on meaning. They could be telling, in very few words, the story of Asle and Asle, their unity, their detachment and their pure light in the single picture.
"And I see myself standing and looking at the picture with the two lines that cross in the middle, one purple line, one brown line, it’s a painting wider than it is high and I see that I’ve painted the lines slowly, the paint is thick, two long wide lines, and they’ve dripped, where the brown line and purple line cross the colours blend beautifully and drip and I’m thinking this isn’t a picture in the way it’s supposed to be, but suddenly the picture is the way it’s supposed to be, it’s done, there’s nothing more to do on it, I think, it’s time to put it away, I don’t want to stand here at the easel any more, I don’t want to look at it any more, I think, and I think today’s Monday …” - Jon Fosse, Septology, Part I
Septology by Jon Fosse
Translated from Norwegian by Damion Searls
First American edition published by Transit Books.
Comments