Jon Fosse's Control of His Own Writing

The difference between ambiguities in the text and in the author's mind

I’d like to offer corrections to two ideas that are common in reviews of The Other Name and the Septology as a whole, then propose a critique of the way the book is written.

Reviewers often call the Septology and its author religious. (See for example Derek Neal’s essay.) Knausgaard said as much years ago, before Fosse began appearing in English. Both the author and the main character are converts to Catholicism, and we read the Lord’s Prayer several times in Latin. (One reviewer said he skips those passages—an amazing lapse of critical responsibility.) I am interested in religion and art as an unresolved theme in modernism and postmodernism, and I am sympathetic to attempts to conjure the failures of language or the way faith can be continuously nearly present. I am currently reading David Jones’s The Anathemata, where English Catholicism dyes every page in the same way as Eliot’s Anglican faith colors the Four Quartets, but in Jones’s case the pages look more like the determined secularism of the Cantos. This is by way of saying it isn’t easy or helpful to criticize what appears to be a very dedicated attempt on Fosse’s part to write a certain kind of faith into a long novel. (This is essentially Knausgaard’s reading.) But it doesn’t help to call on faith to assess the structure and length of the Septology. Ineffability and the inadequacy of art and language are like the cosmic microwave background, nearly evenly distributed everywhere, from the origin of time and space to the present. The negative theology—with echoes of Mark C. Taylor and John Caputo—that suffuses Fosse’s books gives them a sometimes attractive but aestheticized darkness, which makes it tempting to let questions of form recede into a twilit background.

A second problem in the critical reception has to do with the identity of the principal character, Asle. He shares a name and a profession with another character also named Asle. A number of reviewers have called them Doppelgaengers. (The Guardian, November 9, 2019; The Irish Times, January 4, 2020.) They certainly are that, since both are single, have grey hair, and are painters, and alcoholism has been, or is, part of their lives. (I’ll call the main narrator, who earns his living from painting, the older Asle, and the other, who is on the point of dying from his alcoholism, the younger one.)

Toward the beginning, I imagine most readers wonder if they are the same person, but after the older Asle visits the younger one, rescues him from freezing and takes him to a hospital, it may appear that Fosse is up to something else—yet it's curious no reviewers I’ve read say exactly what that might be. The New York Times reviewer thinks all possibilities are open: “the namesake-doppelgänger story line is never definitively established as an extended speculative exercise or an astounding coincidence (or taciturn act of autofiction).” (February 22, 2022.) Definitive resolutions aren’t the stock in trade of 800-page novels, but articulable possibilities can be. For example the sober Asle may actually be misremembering an episode earlier in his own life, when he was rescued (by someone else, now erased from his memory) and taken to the hospital. There are reasons to consider this, which have to do with some disjointed descriptions later in The Other Name.

For example there's a long episode about the older Asle and his sister when they were children. During this there are several pages in which the two children are disturbed by a loud noise. A little later a third child dies, and the noise is forgotten. Later in the novel, the older Asle is alone in his house, in a state of exhaustion, possibly asleep, and a disturbing noise intrudes on his thoughts. It turns out to be a friend's snowplow. That is intended, I think, to let us know that the earlier episode of the children was also dreamt, or hallucinated, by the older Asle.

The problem here is that hints and parallels like this are inconsistently depicted. The book as a whole is loosely written, by which I mean quickly enough, with a sufficiently small number of revisions, so that difficult narrative choices—like the possibility that the entire memory of the children takes place when the older Asle is asleep, rather than driving, as we’re told—become unpersuasive.

I’m not suggesting the book would be better if the Asles were clearly one person, or that there is any single solution, or that the book would be better if there were. It’s the same with Beckett, in the novel trilogy: sometimes, as Brian Richardson has pointed out, the characters suddenly seem to have written Beckett’s other books, and there is no way to make what he calls the “unnatural narrative” back into the usual consistently mimetic one. I mean something different: the Septology is loosely constructed, so there is no discernible difference between ambiguities in the text and in the author’s mind. Some passages work well; others are distractingly incompatible. Fosse has been compared to Proust, because both explore memory in ways that distort chronological time and identity, but Proust is in control of the writing, especially where time is strangely compressed (the age of the narrator, somewhere between child and adult, at the beginning) or narrrative voice is suddenly metaleptic (the famous passage in The Captive in which Albertine might have called the narrator Marcel). Fosse paints with a large brush, sometimes expressively and other times sloppily.

It isn’t sufficient to criticize a book, or a work of art in general, because it is done too quickly, or revised too little, because so many counterexamples can prove that sort of judgment wrong, from Whistler’s suit against Ruskin to writers like César Aira, the Bolaño of 2666, Tao Lin, Jesse Ball, or Mark Leyner. Intuition can be strong magic. There’s a suggestion early on in Septology that is fairly spectacular—that the main character has been permanently damaged by his alcoholism and more or less continuously experiences the hallucination that his younger, alcoholic self lives an hour away and might be rescued. Yet in order for that to be a serious possibility, the constructions of dreams, daydreams, and waking truths would need to be adjusted so they are individually coherent enough to permit readers to doubt each of them in turn, and hold the forms of their depictions in mind—as William Empson would say—as the books progress. As proof of this I offer the fact that no reviewer takes seriously the possibility that there is only one Asle: the reality and temporality we’re given is too consistent, and the characters’ dreams, daydreams, and hallucinations are too safely sequestered in the times they’re exhausted or actually sleeping.

Fosse. Photo Vilaser

Like his one-time student Knausgaard, Fosse is a relentless repeater of everyday actions and trivial conversation. I marked many passages as anticipations of Knausgaard’s affectless inventorying of everyday life. It may be one of Knausgaard’s achievements to have realized that the mode of relentless reporting is not easily mixed with multiple dramas of life crises, drownings, molestation, and other events that happen in Fosse’s book. I think writers will see places where particular dreams and hallucinations could have been handled more carefully, so that readers could continue to entertain the possibility that the older Asle is sufficiently deeply deranged that he lives his waking life with a specter of his earlier self. That could be done, I think, without damaging the kind of bewildering shifts of identity that come from alcoholism or other derangements of the senses. In The Unnamable, Beckett’s unnamed narrator goes through a half-dozen changes of ontology and personal history, but the moments when readers might doubt Beckett’s control—for example when the narrators take credit for Beckett’s works—are embedded in a larger exploration of identity, which is observed and controlled by the author in several ways. (A good account of this, which reveals the contrast to Fosse, is Richardson’s Unnatural Voices, pp. 95-103).

The loose, improvisatory, lucid-dreaming strategy can work well, and its successes can make it seem that novelists like Nabokov who believe in control, who need elaborate structures, are somehow misguided about what serious fiction can be. Arno Schmidt developed an extensive and idiosyncratic theory about this: he called intuitive writers DPs, his German abbreviation for writer-priests, and accused them of dreaming when they should research, inventing when they should observe, plunging into fantasy when they should work on structure. But the snake bites its tail on every page of his magnum opus Bottom's Dream, because a lack of controlled structure oozes out between the thousands of elaborately planned arguments, plotted over years with the help of 60,000 notecards.

Schmidt with his 60,000 notecards

Control and intuition are tremendously difficult concepts. Fosse’s books are exceptionally loose, even by standards of the monologues in The Unnamable or recent long experiments in structurelessness like John Trefry’s Massive or (very differently) Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport. Because I am trained as an art historian I tend to think of pictorial analogies. Large-scale gestural abstract paintings can be immersive and compelling, but unconvincing examples fill the storage rooms of museums and galleries. When the artists use dark tones to conjure occluded spiritual meaning, the canvases can become blurred and lugubrious, as in Hughie O’Donoghue’s earlier work or dark pieces by Makoto Fujimura. Some of the enormous gestures in O’Donoghue’s work are brilliant, but the expressiveness of others is blurred.

In the Septology individual passages are compelling, but I don’t trust the whole. It can be wonderful to be lost in a large abstract painting, or a long book of fiction, provided the looseness you experience at any given moment can be correlated with the incompletion or ineffability of the world, and does not seem to be an effect of the author's assumption that intuitive writing will carry the day if only it is felt deeply enough.