The books I most enjoy are often the most difficult ones for which to write reviews. This review is much-delayed because Jon Fosse’s Septology is a work of extraordinary beauty. Full stop. I’ll grant you the mercy of periods because they are infrequent (or completely absent?) from Fosse’s seven short novellas, which offer pages and pages of largely uninterrupted thought, granting reprieve only in rare instances of a paragraph or dialogue break. On the one hand, I recommend this book unequivocally as a masterpiece. On the other hand, I don’t recommend it unless you have a particular set of tastes.
If you’re a fan of Samuel Beckett’s work, you’ll find a lot to love about Jon Fosse. Septology emulates a similar rhythm to works like The Unnameable or How It Is (I can’t help but notice Fosse’s narrator Asle often repeating the phrase “that’s how it is”): there are frequent repetitions, tangential observations, and meandering passages of introspection. I think Septology has perfectly captured how we I think while capitalizing on the poetic possibilities stream of consciousness affords.
This is a novel that is both easy and impossible to summarize. In terms of actual plot, the book is pretty sparse, with only one or two “events” for every hundred pages. From what I can tell, the book takes place over a week in the lead-in to Christmas. It begins with a Norwegian painter, Asle, going on a trip to Bjørgvin to get groceries. On his way home, he thinks about checking in on his friend, also named Asle. He opts not to, but when he returns home he has a sudden feeling that he needs to go back, so he makes the drive back and finds Asle shaking on the front steps of his home in the cold—presumably DTs. He then takes Asle to the clinic and Asle is admitted to the hospital. From there, Asle goes back to retrieve his friend’s dog and is waylaid in a series of bizarre encounters similar to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. He meets Guro, a woman who claims to know him intimately (and intimately), suggesting they’ve slept together and he stayed at her home a number of times. He delivers his paintings to the gallery in Bjørgvin as part of an annual Christmas gallery showing. Meanwhile, his neighbour Åsleik invites him to Sister’s house for Christmas dinner (as he does every year—and every year Asle declines). Asle always allows Åsleik to select a painting to gift Sister—who he finds out is also named Guro. Asle has also painted a painting that is a brown line crossing a purple line and he decides he want to quit painting (although he ultimately paints again, creating a portrait of Sister).
The beats of the frame narrative are straightforward enough, but the novel gets complicated in its reminiscences of the past and, seemingly, of possibility. Each section of Septology seems to offer a key detail of Asle’s past, often rooted in some kind of trauma. For instance, the narrator remembers his sister’s sudden death. He talks about being a child and disobeying the rules (like going down unaccompanied to the fjords) on the same day that another boy drowns; he returns home and finds his mother so troubled, given that a boy has just died. When he disobeys the rules, he accepts a ride from a man in a van who molests him and gives him a few kroner; and it’s particularly heartbreaking when he is accused of stealing and lies and lies about where he found it. Watching his experience of guilt in lying just twists the knife of having watched him just go through a traumatic sexual assault. Another section recounts him starting a rock band, feeling like he’ll never be good enough, quitting the band, and getting into a physical fight with the singer. It recounts him getting into Art School and having his first exhibition, which is simply stunning.
Before all of this, though, about thirty pages in, Fosse’s completely engrossing prose presents a scene of such incredible, heartbreaking beauty that it will forever be etched into my soul. There’s a scene in which a young man and woman are at the park in the middle of a snowstorm and Asle stumbles upon them. He watches them as they play on the swings, make snow angels, discuss leaving, defer leaving, discuss leaving, and ultimately share an intimate experience underneath the young man’s jacket. The scene goes on for roughly twenty pages and Fosse is completely masterful in balancing a tragically beautiful tone, dancing the line of reluctance and exuberance, tenderness and danger—of loss and nostalgia. I’m not sure if it was the first time in the book, but throughout the Septology Asle often discusses a kind of invisible light radiating out of darkness, or around it like a halo. This scene imprinted on my eyelids a young woman with dark hair on a swing, an outline of light surrounding her in an otherwise dark void. I can’t put into words how perfect the moment was.
Asle returns to the scene roughly fifty pages later. The passage loses some of its effect without the blips and superfluousness of Fosse’s voice, but I’ll nonetheless present an excerpted version here to reflect its rich imagistic quality:
and they take each other’s hands and walk out of the playground and up the path to the road and I stand there and look at them and he says look, there’s a car there, in the turnoff, it wasn’t there when we walked by earlier, was it, he says and she says she can’t remember if there was a car there before or not, in any case she didn’t particularly notice a car, she says and I stop and stand stock-still for a moment because I don’t want them to notice me [...] and then I look at the two beautiful snow angels in the playground and then I go to into the playground and stop and stand there and look at the snow angels and they’re so beautiful, so beautiful in that if I tried to paint them it would turn out to be a bad painting, compared to the sight of the snow angels, I think, because that’s how it is, that’s how it almost always is, what’s beautiful in life turns out bad in a painting because it’s like there’s too much beauty, a good picture needs something bad in it in order to shine the way it should, it needs darkness in it, but maybe, can I maybe paint a picture of two snow angels dissolving as they melt away? could I make a picture like that shine? I think and I know at the same moment, at this very instant, right now, that another picture has lodged inside me, it will be there forever, another picture has entered into me that I’ll have to try to paint away[...] I think and I see the footprints in the snow, four of them going down, right next to one another, two bigger and two smaller, and four of them going up [...] and then mine going down after the four, and my footprints look so lonely, so alone, and so uneven, so erratic, as if I wasn’t entirely steady on my feet, as if I was drunk, or staggering a little (105)
Reading it again, I retain that feeling of longing, sorrow, and beauty all commingled in the image of the snow angels and the footprints. Like for Asle, this too is a picture that will “lodge inside me.” Especially because the rest of the scene is so sparsely described, it feels as if it takes place in a black void and then these snowy moments are captured as that bit of white that seems luminescent.
There is such a beautiful attention to shading with this book, conceptually and stylistically. The interplay of dark and light makes grey, of course, and throughout the book, Asle comments with a painterly eye on the nuances of reality (reminiscent, actually of a moment in Milkman by Anna Burns). He comments on how on a house “the siding has turned totally grey and the cracks in the wood give it so many different grey colours [...] and he says that The Boathouse is grey but it’s also so many different colours of grey that don’t have names and Sister says yes and he holds her hand tight because it’s almost enough to scare you that there are so many different kinds of grey, and so many kinds of the other colours, like the ones called blue, just blue, but there must be thousands of different blue colours, thousands, at least, no there are so many that you can’t even count them, Asle thinks. […] The sky is grey and The Boathouse is grey, the stones on the roof are grey and the walls of The Boathouse are grey, but you see how they’re such different greys?” (218). There’s a kind of terror here, but also a kind of beauty. Once again: balance.
In fact, the entire book radiates with that light shining off the darkness. Asle’s paintings take the same approach. I’ll find it tremendously difficult to quote from the book succinctly, but here is a passage that encompasses the aesthetic of the light and the darkness with my own italics added for emphasis:
I think and I look at Bragi and I see life shining in his eyes and think I understand so little while it’s like these dog eyes looking at me understand everything, but they will rot too, will pass away, or else flames will consume them, once it would have been on a bonfire and now it’s in an oven, for an hour or two or however long it takes now in an oven and then the whole visible human being, the body, is gone, but the invisible human being is still there, because that is never born and so it can never die, I think, yes, the invisible eye is still there after the visible one is gone, because what’s inside the eye, inside the person, doesn’t go away, because there’s God inside the person, it’s the kingdom of God there, yes, as stands written, and yes, yes, that’s how it is, in there, there inside the person is what will pass away and become one with what is invisible in everything, and it’s like it’s tied to the visible but it isn’t the visible, yes, it’s like the invisible inside the visible, and it’s what makes the visible exist, but out of everything that exists it’s only people in whom the invisible in the visible is so closely related to what’s invisibly visible in everything else, but different from everything that exists because it belongs to everything that exists, even though it doesn’t exist itself, not in space, not in time, it is not a thing, it’s nothing, yes a nothing, I think, and only while the person is alive does it exist in space, in time, and then it leaves time, goes out of space, and then it’s united with, yes with what I call God, and that, yes invisible thing in the visible, which acts within it, which sustains it, yes, it shows itself in time and space as shining darkness, I think, and it’s that and nothing else that my pictures have always tried to show and once my eyes get used to the darkness so that I can see a little, yes, then I can see if there’s any of the shining darkness in the picture, and if there isn’t then I’ll usually always paint a thin coat of white or black, either one coat or a few thin coats of white or black, in some place or another, a glaze, they call it, and then I keep doing it, sometimes with just white, sometimes with just black, but always with a thin coat of oil paint, I keep doing it until the picture shines darkly, I paint with white or black in the darkness and then the darkness starts to shine, yes always, yes, yes, sooner or later the darkness starts to shine, I think, but now I’m so tired that I just want to go lie down (269)
The book is finely wrought, with a meticulousness whose phrases are punctuated so beautifully (though not literally), and the construction of parallels gives the book a kind of internal coherence, though it so often slips away. For instance, in the scene I referenced above where the young lovers are observed, a parallel scene emerges later on. Asle watches these young people in the park before the snowstorm gets too bad and he needs to travel home. Much later, Asle recounts his relationship with Ales, with whom he feels instantly connected (they decide before knowing each other that they are boyfriend and girlfriend, and by the end of the day they are married, in a way). He remembers being in a park and a man dressed the same as he is in the frame narrative watching over them from a van—as though Asle is both the watcher and the watched, both the dangerous man in the van and his victim.
In fact, much of the book seems to hover around this idea of what is interior and exterior. Asle talks about how he paints that which is inside him that he needs to expunge. What is inside must come out. So, when there are multiple characters with the same name, it is tempting to see these as parallel lives—other possibilities for Asle. Indeed, he is an artist who admits he had had a drinking problem, and his friend with the same name (later referred to as The Namesake), is an artist with a drinking problem who dies from it. It’s as though the line between memory and imagination ceases to be meaningful: this other Asle could have been him in other circumstances. It’s as though Asle sees exteriorized manifestations of himself all about town. For that reason, it’s a hard book to summarize because it’s never quite clear where these characters stand—Guro and Sister, for instance, look exactly the same. Guro claims to have been intimate with Asle, who does not remember her, and she looks exactly like Sister, whose name is also Guro but whom he has never met—unless he did meet her in the cafe, which he did before Guro 1’s home burnt down with her in it and which killed her.
The complications of defining the interior and the exterior of a person come up through a doubled grammatical structure that repeats throughout the text: “I think and I think.” The repetition is a bridge between two moments—the end of one thought and the start of another. But is it not also a suggestion that there are different entities thinking within the same body? The repetition seems to serve also as a distinction. I think while I think.
That motif seems to come together in passages in discussing religion. Fosse’s exploration of Catholicism is complex, asserting that God both does and does not exist. He offers some deeply philosophical-theological meditations that discuss this difference of inside-outside and the limits of the individual. For instance, one passage reads as follows, with my emphasis added once more:
I think and I think no, now I need to stop, now I’m thinking foolishly myself, thinking about other people’s folly while my own thoughts don’t make sense, they’re never clear enough, they don’t fit together, 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 of all 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, not with water in a church, not by a priest, 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, what language also has and is, I think and I think that some people are baptized, as children or as adults, yes, some are washed clean with water, with holy water, I think, and that’s all well and good in its own terms but no more than that, and every single baptism of this or that person is a baptism of everyone, that’s what I think, a baptism for all mankind, because everyone’s connected, the living and the dead, those who haven’t been born yet, and what one person does can in a way not be separated from what another person does, I think, yes, just as Christ lived, died, and was resurrected and was one with God as a human being that’s how all people are, just by virtue of being men and women in Christ, whether they want to be or not, bound to God in and through Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, whether they know it or not, whether they believe it or not, that’s how it is, it’s true either way, I think, Christianity knows a thing or two too, and sure enough I would’ve done if it hadn’t been for Ales since I didn’t even agree with the Catholic Church about child baptism, but I never regretted converting, I think, because the Catholic faith has given me a lot, and I consider myself a Christian, yes, a little like the way I consider myself a Communist or at least a Socialist, and I pray with my rosary every single day, yes, I pray several times a day and I go to mass as often as I can, for it too, yes, mass too has its truth, the way baptism has its truth, yes (22)
It essentially becomes an inconsequential question, then, which characters and are not Asle. The echoed names suggest that perhaps all characters are versions of Asle, but because we’re all connected, there’s a posthumanist core to the book that would suggest that individual identity is spurious at best.
On the further topic of religion, each section of the book ends with Asle going to sleep and reciting his nightly prayers. It serves an incantatory function that reads as hypnotic, particularly because there are sections in other languages. They have no meaning to me, but have still seem imbued with meaning.
I’ll never be capable of explaining this book appropriately. It is more than a novel: it is a 667 page experience—for me, it felt like a spiritual one, largely due to the balance of lightness and darkness. When Asle’s neighbour sees his painting, he comments on how it looks like a St. Andrew’s Cross. Asle is irritated by Åsleik commenting on his art, which the reader experiences with such intimate closeness that it cannot help but feel completely human and real. Incidentally, it adds to a moment of tension where Asle is immensely proud of his painting and thinks it may be one of his best and Åsleik nearly claims it for himself to give as a gift to Sister. It’s something that objectively has such low stakes but has so many profound ones psychologically. When Åsleik is asking questions about his painting, Asle is irritated by his philistinism and once more comes back to the invisible light—and I can’t help but think you either feel the light or you don’t when it comes to the style of this book:
he doesn’t want to hear anything about any invisible light, that’s exactly what Åsleik would say and that’s why I don’t want to say anything to him about it, someone lives and then he dies and that’s that, no more no less, Åsleik says and he’s probably right about that too, but then again maybe it isn’t so simple, because life isn’t something you can understand, and death isn’t either, actually to put it in other words it’s like in a weird way both life and death are things you can understand but not with thoughts, this light understands it in a way, and life, and paintings, I think, get their meaning from their connection to this light, yes, when I’m painting it’s actually about an invisible light, even if no one else can see it, and they definitely can’t, or don’t, I don’t think anyone does, I think, they think it’s about something else, it’s about if a painting is good or bad, something like that, and that’s why I can’t stand thinking about the pictures I painted to make money when I was young, they were just pictures, they didn’t have any light in them, they were just pretty and that’s why they were bad, they looked so real and the sun was shining and there was light everywhere in the picture and that’s why there was none of this light, because this light is only in the shadows, maybe, I think and suddenly I hear Åsleik say that even if he’s just a fisherman he knows a thing or two about how everything goes together, everything fits into a big unbreakable whole, people catch fish, for food, and for the fish to be caught this and that has to happen and so everything goes together in a mysterious way, everything is one big whole, but you believe in God and I don’t, he says, and I say what I always say, that no one can really say anything about God and that’s why it’s meaningless to say that someone does or doesn’t believe in God, because God just is, he doesn’t exist the way Åsleik imagines, I say and I think that Åsleik and I have talked about this so many times, it’s something that’s nice to talk about again and again, and also boring to talk about again and again (80).
From this lengthy passage, I think you can probably start to see Fosse’s project in miniature. Septology as a novel, I think, is so focused on things that we “talk about again and again,” simultaneously nice and boring. It’s the kind of obsessiveness that is both comforting and arduous. This passage about the invisible light also bridges into a discussion of religion and the way that all things are ultimately connected. The difference between painting and fishing is rendered a superficial one, the difference between God existing and not is a superficial one. Essentially, all things are connected, “everything is one big whole,” so the book explores the significance of that for the erosion of interior-exterior or differentiation between identities.
To return for a moment to a connection between painting and religion, it’s worth noting that Asle thinks the invisible light in his paintings might be something like God. The spiritual work of art is addressed more explicitly later. Asle reflects on when he quit drinking and started taking snuff and he thinks about how Ales helped him quit and how Ales died and how he was so sad that he had to keep everything of hers as it was, except for her painting supplies. There’s a beautiful passage where Asle describe Ales’ paintings; she also wanted to attend Art School when she was younger and then dropped out and became very devout. She commented on how Norwegians don’t have much of a saint-based culture and she explored that by painting icon upon icon. Asle describes how when she died, there were icons everywhere, but what becomes particularly interesting is how “she’d painted over almost all of her paintings with white and some of the best paintings I ever managed to paint were on canvases where Ales had painted over her own pictures” (257). The symbolism of the moment seems to capture this idea that there’s a spiritual layer to artwork that is present even when not visible. The saints are painted over with white and then that white is painted over and that’s what allows the artwork to shine. Even when religion is erased, it persists below the surface (if there is a difference between surface and depth).
Continuing on the idea of darkness and the light that shines through it, one of the ways in which Asle tests his paintings is by looking at them in the dark. In one passage, he returns home and thinks he should close the curtains to inspect his painting. He narrates as follows:
I think that maybe I should shut the curtains, I usually do, but not it’s so dark out that I can look at the picture in the dark just fine without closing the curtains like I usually do, maybe it’s a strange habit, always wanting to look at my paintings in the dark, yes, I can even paint in the dark, because something happens to a picture in the dark, yes, the colours disappear in a way but in another way they become clearer, the shining darkness that I’m always trying to paint is visible in the darkness, yes, the darkness it is the clearer whatever invisibly shines in a picture is, and it can shine from so many kinds of colour but it’s usually from the dark colours, yes, especially from black, I think and I think that when I went to The Art School they said you should never paint with black because it’s not a colour, they said, but black, yes, how could I ever have painted my pictures without black? No, I don’t understand it, because it’s in the darkness that God lives, yes, God is darkness, and that darkness, God’s darkness, yes, that nothingness, yes, it shines, yes, it’s from God’s darkness that the light comes, the invisible light and I think and I think this is all just something I’ve thought up, yes, obviously, I think and I think that at the same time this light is like a fog, because a fog can shine too, yes, if it’s a good picture then there’s something like a shining darkness or a shining fog either in it, in the picture, or coming from the picture, yes, that’s what it’s like, I think, and without this light, yes, then it’s a bad picture, but actually there’s no light you can see, maybe, or is it that only I can see it, no one else can? Or maybe some other people can too? But most other people don’t see it, or even if they do sort of see it it’s without knowing it, yes, I’m completely sure about that, they see it but they don’t realize that it’s a shining darkness they’re seeing and they think that it’s something else, that’s how it is, and even though I don’t understand why it’s night, in the darkness, that God shows himself, yes well maybe it’s not so strange, not when you think about it, but there are people who see God better in the daylight, in flowers and trees, in clouds, in wind and rain, yes, in animals, in birds, in insects, in ants, in mice, in rats, in everything that exists, in everything that is, yes, there’s something of God in everything, that’s how they think, yes, they think God is the reason why anything exists at a all, and that’s true, yes, there are skies so beautiful that no painter can match them, and clouds, yes, in their endless movements, always the same and always different, and the sun and the moon and the stars, yes, but there are also corpses, decay, stenches, things that are withered and rotten and foul, and everything visible is just visible, whether it’s good or bad, whether it’s beautiful or ugly, but whatever is worth anything, what shines, the shining darkness, yes, is the invisible in the visible, whether it’s in the most beautiful clouds in the sky or in what dies and rots, because the invisible is present in both what dies and what doesn’t die, the invisible is present in both what rots and what doesn’t rot, yes, the world is both good and evil, beautiful and ugly, but in everything, yes, even in the worst evil, there is also the opposite, goodness, love, yes, God is invisibly present there too, because God does not exist, He is, and God is in everything that exists, not like something that exists but as something that exists, that has being, they say, I think, even if good and evil, beauty and ugliness are in conflict, the good is always there and the evil is just trying to be there, sort of, I think and I can’t think clearly and I understand so little and these thoughts don’t go (266-267)
I apologize for the lengthy passages that I’ve been including in this review, but at the same time I feel it is necessary to see the circuitous routes that Fosse’s narration takes when exploring a concept. It’s hard to give these other words or paraphrase, particularly because the concept he’s addressing seems to be outside our capabilities of logical analysis. You can intuit the fog that surrounds this book (again, The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro has the same type of fog), but how is it that one can put fog into words? Well, essentially by saying a lot that is superfluous but at the same time critical. The droplet-words look the same, but taken together form an entirely different entity. The phrase about how “they see it without knowing it” seems indicative to me of being in a firmly posthumanist framework. My understanding is that within a humanist framework, we can explain connections between ideas with a kind of logic, while posthumanism notes that there is something beyond logic that cannot be articulated. There’s a kind of epistemic framework being enacted here that relies more heavily on intuition than fact-finding, and the style intimates that intuition.
As an aside, it’s interesting that Asle’s instructors at the Art School refused to let them paint in black since it was not a colour. Asle praises the use of grey for all of its nuances and possibilities, both terrifying and inspiring. To have black seems to be an absolute in the passage above—it’s the space where nothing is, and yet everything is in it simultaneously. It’s these paradoxical observations about the world that make this book such an engaging experience. For instance, there are two different modes of existence that Asle identifies. God does not exist but exists. It appears he’s grasping for a third metaphysical space, a paradoxical one akin to, perhaps, Jean Baudrillard (if I may be so crass as to inject theory): that which is Real is not real, that which is real is not Real.
I’m often pretty dismissive of religious literature (cough William Golding’s The Spire cough), but when it is continually touched by scepticism it seems to open up engaging possibilities. Asle addresses the common meditations for religious doubt, like “if God isn’t almighty but is more likely powerless, still he’s there in everything that is and everything that happens, because that’s how it has to be if God put limits on himself by giving human beings free will, since God is love and love is inconceivable of without free will, so he can’t be all-powerful, and the same thing is true of nature, if God created the laws that nature follows then the laws are what’s in control, I think and if God hadn’t given himself limits, for whatever reason, then he wouldn’t be all-powerful either, not in any thinkable way” (545). It’s the kind of paradox that is the starting place for many atheistic arguments and Fosse’s rambling style is exactly right for depicting paradox: if this then that, but so. The idea of self-imposed limits is an interesting one and it is somewhat Dostoyevskian as Fosse continues: “I think, because that can’t be thought, but there’s one thing I’m sure of and that’s that the greater the despair and suffering is, the closer God is, I think [...] but if you get hung up on the literal meaning, to the extent you can, then the words become meaningless, and I used to do that myself, because it’s almost like the people who spoke these words when I was growing up believed it, believed in the literal meaning of what they said, in God a father who lived up in the sky somewhere, who was all-powerful and who used that power to even exterminate millions of Jews, I think, but those who think of God like that are truly sinning, misusing God’s name, or maybe they’re not, they don’t know any better, and I shouldn’t judge them, because judge not lest ye be judged, as is written, but I can’t help it, I think it’s blasphemous to think like that (545). I think that’s a really impactful spin to consider Biblical literalism to be a blasphemous way of thinking, a degradation to the metaphorical and symbolic level.
Despite his scepticism, Asle nonetheless discusses the compulsion (yes, compulsion seems the right word) towards religion, noting, “I get very still inside, and I think that everyone has a deep longing inside them, we always always long for something and we believe that what we long for is this or that, this person or that person, this thing or that thing, but actually we’re longing for God” (464). In other contexts, this would have the religious certainty that I find impossible to believably portray in an aesthetically satisfying way, but the rationale for Asle is an interesting one, suggesting that “the human being is a continuous prayer, a person is a prayer through his or her longing” (464). There’s a devotional passage which follows where he imagines or remembers Ales singing “Amazing Grace” (song is always more than itself—how does a melody mean something?) and then he looks at his inherited dog and reflects on the humanity of non-human animals: “I look at Bragi standing there and looking at me with his dog’s eyes and I think that dogs understand so much but they can’t say anything about it, or else they can say it with their dog’s eyes, and in that way they’re like good art, because art can’t say anything either, not really, it can only say something else while keeping silent about what it actually wants to say, that’s what art is like and faith and dogs’ silent understanding too, it’s like they’re all the same” (464). This interplay of silence, knowledge, speaking, and ignorance hovers about each of these moments connecting them. It’s also notably that there’s a perpetual displacement. That which matters most can never be addressed directly, but only circuitously in the way we think through issues.
The repetition of the book is once again critical. I am remembering Gertrude Stein’s comment that “A rose is a rose is a rose.” To me, the phrase has never been a straightforward tautology, but instead something that gains incremental force through repetition. The repetition is, in some sense, adding to the meaning and the real effect of repetition is never simply restating. To that end, Fosse’s narrator takes on another dimension:
“I think, because I always think the same thoughts over and over again and I paint the same picture over and over again, yes, it’s true, but at the same time every single picture is different, and then all the pictures go together in a kind of series, yes, every exhibition is its own series, and finally all the paintings I’ve ever painted go together and make up a single picture, I think, it’s like there’s a picture somewhere or other inside me that’s my innermost picture, that I try again and again to paint away, and the closer I get to that picture the better the picture I’ve painted is, but the innermost picture isn’t a picture sort of leads all the other pictures and pulls them in, kind of, I think, but maybe I’ve now painted everything I can paint from this innermost picture of mine? I think, maybe I’ve now in a way entered into this innermost picture and thereby destroyed it? I think, but this going into your innermost picture, yes, seeing it, well that’s probably the same thing as dying? I think, yes, maybe it’s the same thing as seeing God? And whoever sees God has died, as is written, I think and I look at the snow that’s covering the windshield and I see Asle standing there in the room and I see Mother standing there looking at him (366).
What I find compelling here is this notion that despite their differences, everything is the same in a certain way and that the sameness is all united by an unseen master project. In Asle’s case, he refers to the innermost picture that is the source of all art, but the question marks in this passage note his doubt—his doubt that all of these ideas are worth exploring, that all of them are relevant to the master project. Despite the tangents, there’s an internal coherence that all of these thoughts and vignettes in the book are revisions to a moment that form part of a greater whole. They are unique and completely un-unique at the same time. It’s notable that there are almost no, if any, periods in the book, but quotation marks are so frequent. It adds to that fog of uncertainty.
That uncertainty shows up even in our private mantras. I’m confident that there are things we unequivocally believe, despite having no proof, but also that despite our wholehearted belief there is a doubt that underlies it. At one point, Asle is reflecting on lucky numbers, specifically because he’s deciding on the number of pictures he’ll show at his new exhibit and he notes: “usually I have thirteen big pictures and six small pictures, nineteen in all, I really believe in the number nine and I always want it to be in there one way or another, or else it can be a number where the digits add up to make nine, or something, I think, but the woman supposedly named Guro told me that the number that brings me luck, yes, my lucky number, is eight, or four times two, as she also said, because that was the number she got to by adding up the digits of my birthday, she said, but I’ve stuck with nine, and also three, I think, and so now I’m not sure about the number thirteen, because I think that thirteen can be both a good number and a bad number, the same with eight maybe, I think, no, anyway, eight is a good number, I think, but usually I’ve always had it be nineteen pictures, some of them small, because The Beyer Gallery isn’t that big and Beyer told me that he doesn’t want any more pictures than that so I’ve never had more than nineteen, but one time I brought nine pictures and Beyer said it wasn’t enough, or barely enough, it couldn’t be any fewer than that in the future, he said” (249). There’s a kind of duality even in that which we hold most dear—number eight could be lucky or its opposite and there’s no external measure for deciding its reality (possibly because there’s no difference between external and internal.)
Underlying much of the text is the notion of time. Perhaps that’s where all things lead back to—our greatest question. When Asle meets Ales, it is a significant moment—and given the repetitive nature of our lives, significant moments are hard to come by. Asle offers the following narration about time and significance:
Ales says, and she says that today is one of the great days, one of the days when something happens, yes, an event, because it’s so strange, day after day goes by and it’s like time is just passing, but then something happens, and when it happens the time passes slowly, and the time that passes slowly doesn’t disappear, it becomes, yes, a kind of event, so actually there are two kinds of time, the time that just passes and that really matters only so that daily life can move along its course and then the other time, the actual time, which is made up of events, and that time can last, can become lasting, Ales says and she says that that’s how her mother Judit talks about it, how she divides up time, she says, because she and her mother Judit talk about all kinds of things together, Ales says and Asle thinks that his Grandmother died yesterday, but he doesn’t want to tell Ales that, not now, he thinks and Ales says here she is babbling away and Asle says that he thinks he understand what she means and then Ales makes the sign of the cross sitting there and Asle has never seen anyone make the sign of the cross before and Ales says that now they’re boyfriend and girlfriend. (584)
In a surprisingly short passage, all things considered, we’re given a glimpse into a philosophy of time. There is chronological, standard time, and a kind of time that only happens when events happen. It’s a compelling idea to explore, especially in the context of a book that has so few actual events. Most of the book is showing us the fabric of time that simply passes and then an actual event happens and it lasts—the impact of the moments in the text are particularly powerful because so little of the book actually “matters” to time. What might be worth further exploration, though, is the idea that time slows when events happen, because experientially it feels to be the opposite. Fosse’s narrator lingers for lengthy passages on moments from the past and anecdotal observations and it’s hard to reconcile with the idea that time slows when you’re having fun—but that contradiction may well be philosophically significant.
In many ways, Asle’s quest in the book is to achieve nothingness. I think back, actually, to the days of working at McDonald’s. There was such a satisfying feeling to emptying a box of its final row of cups and then crushing down the box and I’ve often thought I want to write a poem about “life being as empty as a box.” Asle gives voice to a similar perspective:
I’ll just lie in bed in the bedroom without even turning the light on and I’ll keep it as dark as I can, and then I’ll try to get some sleep, and I’ll try not to think about anything, because I want to let everything be empty, yes, empty and silent, yes, silent, yes, silent and dark, because the only thing I long for is silence, yes, I want everything to stay perfectly silent, I want a silence to come down over me like snow and cover me, yes, I want a silence to come falling down over everything that exists, and also me, yes, over me, yes, let a silence snow down and cover me, make me invisible, make everything invisible, make everything go away, I think and all these thoughts will go away, all the pictures I have, all the pictures gathered up in my memory tormenting me will go away and I will be empty, just empty, I will become a silent nothing, a silent darkness, and maybe what I’m thinking about now is God’s peace, or maybe it isn’t? Maybe it has nothing to do with what people call God? I think, if it’s even possible to talk about God, if that even means anything, because isn’t God just something that is, not something you can say anything about? (500).
There’s a kind of beauty and tragedy in this passage. Of course, there’s the despairing reading of wanting to not deal with anything that constitutes life any more and just drift away. It’s an uneasy kind of peace to be empty. The snow motif resonates especially because of the earlier scene of the couple in the park, which was laced with such bittersweet tension. Here, too, snow is an uneasy kind of peace—certainly, the torment of memory is covered up, but it seems to imply that all existence stops. Life requires tension to continue.
Of course, Fosse doesn’t let things be that easy, because even the idea of nothingness is a positive entity—nothingness exists in a way often not considered. He writes that “even after all of creation is gone there will be nothing there, nothingness, that’s how it is with everything that is, with each individual person, after the individual, the person is gone from creation they will be in God’s eternity, as nothing, there is God’s shining darkness, in his nothingness, because everything comes from nothing and to nothing it will return, it comes from God, who is therefore so close, so close, since he is inside every single person, yes, he is the foundation, the abyss, yes, the innermost picture in everyone, like a full void, like a shining darkness, I think, and this was why everything came into existence, so that God could exist” (547). The way that Fosse describes nothingness is that it has effects. The darkness, the nothingness, the void, are all extant in particular ways, possibly in the highest imaginable ways. The passage continues with a meditation on God and suggests that “whether they realize it or not [...] many of the people who don’t believe in God are people who really do, while the ones who are doing all kinds of things to show that they believe in God actually believe in something other than God [...] because they believe in good works, in repentance and fasting, in sacraments, in the liturgy, in this or that conduct bringing them closer to God” (547). You can start to see why God is “nothing” here—it’s a belief in an entity that is not its displacements. It is not good works, it is not repentance—it is a belief for nothing. Again, it returns to the idea of an erosion of the difference between inside and outside: “most of those who are inside are outside, and most of who are outside are inside” (547) and the following grammatical construction pairs two opposites as being proximate: “closer to eternity and nothingness” (547). The two are the same.
I found Septology to be thoroughly engaging for exploring these paradoxes both in a philosophical register and a deeply personal one, full of moments of heart and beauty and sorrow and tragedy. To quote Fosse one more time, I think my review of the book could be reflected here: “I think and I think and think and there’s probably nothing especially smart about what I’m thinking” (547). Fosse’s passage takes on an elegiac quality from there, noting, “I think and everything exists at some point and stops existing at some point, not just me, because obviously both my paintings and myself will cease to be, how ridiculous is it to think that anything in creation won’t disappear and turn into nothing, even the most beautiful painting, the most worthwhile painting in the world will be gone someday, the same way whoever painted it will be long gone,and the greatest poem will disappear, because everything disappears, and eventually there’ll be nothing left” (547). The rest is silence, as it were.
And while I know all of this may be true—that great art will also fade and that eventually nobody will be left to appreciate it, I have to say that Septology does feel timeless. It feels like a masterwork that will linger in my imagination, and hopefully the collective one, for years to come. And if eventually there is nothing left of it, at least we’re provided with the assurance that even when there is nothing, nothing is still something.
Happy reading; sad reading. It’s the complete experience. What a masterpiece.
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