I was so thrilled to see the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Jon Fosse. I am not familiar with his plays, but a couple of years ago I began reading his Septology and was mesmerized. It is one of those novels that changes how you inhabit the world.
Just as a way to celebrate this news, I thought I’d share a snippet from a lecture I gave last year. This is from a second plenary talk I gave at the Conference on Christianity & Literature at Azusa Pacific University. It also represents ideas I’m working out for my next book on contemporary art and contemplative practice. This is a slice that briefly engages Fosse’s The Other Name.
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In Jon Fosse’s novelistic triptych, Septology I-VII, we are invited into the mind of a Norwegian painter who is something of a recluse and reluctant Catholic. The entire novel is either one unending sentence or, in any case, a book that refuses to use a full-stop, as if trying to stave off any ending, perhaps reflecting the profound loss he lives with.
Fosse also writes at the speed of consciousness, we might say, but this isn’t just any “stream.” There is a pacing to the prose that I can’t quite describe, a slowness that feels at once deliberate and frantic. Here’s just a taste from early in the novel, when Asle, the narrator, who has just been imagining his friend and doppelgänger, Asle, who is also a painter, in his living room, this Asle, the first Asle, is parked near a playground watching a young couple in the park and there’s this inchoate sense, for the reader, that he might be looking at his younger self alongside the girl who would become his wife who has since passed away:
…I’m just sitting quietly in my car for no particular reason, just sitting, and why? I think and then I realize I could go down to them, get out of the car and just go right down to the two of them, get out of the car and just go right down to them there in the playground, but it wouldn’t be right to do that, would it? they should be left alone, the two of them are sitting there in such a big slow calm fragile peace that I can’t go bother them, it would disturb them if I went down to them, they’re so calm there, so peaceful, I think, but still, am I going to stay sitting in my car like this as if I can’t do anything, can’t manage anything any more, as if I’m exhausted from having seen Asle in his apartment by the sea in Sailor’s Cove and seeing all the shaking in his body…[1]
The bleeding of time in this novel, taking us into the consciousness of another, will feel familiar. We recognize it because Fosse has slowed down his attention to the pace of thinking (or sped it up?) then managed to inscribe it in a prose whose flow lacks friction so that we can slide through it. So just like within our own minds, the way, within the blip of milliseconds, we can be now and twelve years ago, projecting a future and in an obscure past, Fosse takes us into the fantastic capacities of Asle’s consciousness and, by doing so, inducts us into the mysteries of another.[2]
Fosse’s narrator, Asle, has a remarkable capacity to sit quietly in a room, and Fosse, the novelist, must have had the same, and now we, the readers, are invited to this kind of contemplative quietude. To manage the contemplative space & time to read Fosse is to actually give oneself the gift of reflection.[3] This narrator’s voice is perhaps subtly teaching us how to look at ourselves. I am not adequately describing how mesmerizing this can be if one can, like the narrator, find the time & space to give oneself over to such stillness and contemplation, the “big slow calm fragile peace” he describes.
It is interesting that such a fictional project—slowing down attention to attend to the speed of thought so that prose can then play it out on a page for us to feel—often ends up confronting deeply spiritual questions. This is the Pascalian dictum again: even if you put Karl Ove Knausgaard[4] alone in a room long enough, God shows up. In Fosse’s first volume, The Other Name, we get hints of Pascalian possibility:
…yes, I can sit for a long time and just stare into empty space, at nothing, and it’s sort of like something can come from the empty nothingness, like something real can come out of the nothingness, something that says a lot, and what it says can turn into a picture, either that or I can stay sitting there staring into empty space and become completely empty myself, completely still, and it’s in that empty stillness that I like to say my deepest truest prayers, yes, that’s when God is closest, because it’s in silence that God can be heard, and it’s in the invisible that He can be seen, of course I know my Pater Noster and I pray with it every day, to tell the truth, at least three times a day, and often even more in fact, and I’ve learned it by heart in Latin, and learned it by seeing it before my eyes, I never memorize mechanically because I can remember written things by seeing them, a bit like pictures, yes, but I try to only remember the written things I think are important to remember, and unlike with pictures I’m able to turn off the memory of written things, and then I made my own translation of the Our Father into Nynorsk, and of course I know that by heart, yes, I can see it in my mind, but still it’s probably these moments when I’m sitting and staring into empty nothingness, and becoming empty, becoming still, that are my deepest truest prayers…[5]
And while I’m reading The Other Name and listening to Asle’s thought, and sitting still with Jon Fosse, having managed to withdraw into his novel, having shut out the distraction of blinking lights and the ding of notifications, and I’m just sitting quietly in my chair, even though I’m amidst the noisy din of the airport, but things have been quieted because I’m dwelling with this novel, and it’s like my perception is being recalibrated because my attention is being retrained, and I sense that I’m starting to imagine others differently because when I have to close the book and catch my flight, I look up and see the people frustratedly waiting in line and I realize that each of them is an entire galaxy of consciousness and mystery and, if only for a brief moment, I am Thomas Merton on that street corner in Louisville and all of these image-bearers are shining like stars and I think: a novel did that.
[1] Jon Fosse, Septology, trans. Damion Searls (Oakland: Transit Books, 2022), 28.
[2] Cp. Girardoux, The Choice of the Elect
[3] Cp. giving oneself over to the formative experience of “slow cinema” (Schrader).
[4] I should say that Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine is my “first love” when it comes to this genre.
[5] Jon Fosse, Septology, trans. Damion Searls (Oakland: Transit Books, 2022), 167-168.