Jon Fosse's Septology

What makes an experience of reading or writing immersive? How might we find ourselves developing within that over time? Fosse's Septology explores the uncanny border between spirituality and rationale

Through most of the 2010s, I wrote almost exclusively while listening to music through headphones so loud it would blot out any outside sound. I’d often get in a habit of playing the same record over and over—so that I could begin to learn to disregard it, too, somehow narrowing my attention within even the high volume. I avoided records that had intelligible lyrics, anticipating their distraction like any other irritant, though sometimes could get into it when the vox worked like any other instrument—more a texture than a message—or maybe when buried deeply enough in the mix they became essentially abstract. Sometimes, wanting a sudden break in the texture of the writing, I’d suddenly put on a different record to break the repetition, carefully selected for its tone to shift the influence of whatever was coming out of me before. Over a decade, I became so used to this set up that I began to feel unable to write without it, as gradually, actually audible noise outside the soundtrack felt more and more intrusive, like it was trying to click me out of my pursuit of a sort of out-of-body inspiration caused by white-walling anything in me that could guide the prose besides whatever was left of my imagination, memory, and intellect when forced to exist inside the musical extremity. Without reducing myself to a sort of bystander in my own mind, I often hated what I’d write—not what I meant, I’d think; too much me in the way.

Then something changed. I suppose I can attach it to extreme trauma—losing a loved one violently—but almost overnight it was like a switch flipped in my head, and I could no longer work the way I had. Instead of being a facilitator to bend my will toward what had always felt parallel to a state of enlightenment or meditation, now all I heard when I tried to write through music was raw noise. Whereas before, muting my interior had reset my levels and made me think new, now it felt like a headache, so intrusive as to make it seem all but possible to connect one word with any other word. It would take a while—more than two years—before I started to remember how to write from a state of silence, which I wouldn’t exactly equate to inner peace. More like, the noise I pumped into my head when I was younger had been replaced by an experience of being pushed so far beyond myself that suddenly using music to do it felt like a relic of some other person I’d once been. I’m never going to be able to write the way I used to, I started telling myself, in a way that felt at first like a death sentence. If I can’t go back, why should I go forward? Did I even still have interest in writing, or had it been forced off me, like some kind of creepy costume that no longer fit?

I find myself thinking about this sidelong but major change in my writing process alongside the experience of having recently finished reading Jon Fosse’s Septology, a 7-part, 667-page monolith (translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls)—right after having written recently about my recent struggles to find momentum reading almost anything during the same period of rediscovery of self. I bought it on a whim while browsing shelves at a store despite a personal promise to not buy anything else—especially doorstops—until I’d cut into the piles of as-yet-unread books piled up all over the house like dire loaves of kinetic energy, examples of my inability to stay caught up. I’d read a bit of Fosse in shorter forms to know that Septology wasn’t likely to crack my queue anytime soon, a foresight reinforced by flipping through its pages and seeing its heavy plates of margin-to-margin text, mostly run-on sentences and dialogue that appeared to promise a marathon-necessary experience not so different from my attraction to ambient noise. But, in the moment, apparently liking to push myself mindlessly into overwrought commitments, I bought it anyway; another good way to goad myself into staying close to the burning flame in me that realizes I don’t always know what I need, or even what I want. Where else, if not in what kinds of books you read, can you take a blind jump and still be seated safely with your feet on the soil? What good is reading for if all it does is reassure you of the delight of what you already know?

Not all responses to these sorts of questions can equate to satisfaction for a reader with little time and no attention to spare. It might seem like a bug, not a feature—of the continuously increasing abundance of creative literature—that often the kinds of work that might most reshape how we think—or much more basically, provide the kind of however-otherworldly experience we often seek in reading and art—books are often art, remember?—also feel like the most forbidding, portending to ask too much out of the gate. While as a younger person I sought those presences out incessantly, a seed of doubt, or something like it, seemed to have planted itself in my desire to be forced to reckon with the uncanny. I’ve read enough, I’d even started thinking, telling myself that the amount of time and energy required to push through the gnarl had crossed the point of a diminishing return. The more you read, after all, the more you’ve seen, and the less likely there is to be someone who has anything to say to you at all—a terrible baseline to go into any experience with, much less one as personal and non-apparent in effect as reading often feels.

I came into Septology with a mind for a quick hook if it didn’t hit the way the hype that led me to it said it should. I felt I already recognized the already well-broadcast Beckett comparisons, offering an experience of technical-sounding accrual of oblong reflections and refractions, requiring rich attention and a willingness to dig, needing to read certain sentences, paragraphs, and even whole pages multiple times if I wanted it to stick. In younger years, I’d often come in ready to truck my way through no matter what, allowing the text’s more oblique or pendulous aspects to wash across me mostly, leaving their processing to my unconscious, or even just to my experience of having absorbed. Now, if it didn’t hit after 30 pages, maybe, I’d set it aside and wait for it to find me at a later time, if ever, already having mostly abandoned my earlier willingness to finish everything I began in case it clicked—again, no time, even though I knew there had to be a reason Fosse’s work had such voluminousness, such lauded roots. In the last 40 years alone, he’d published more than 20 novels, 40 plays, numerous works of drama, essay, and poetry, only a sliver of which had yet made it into English, despite being a Norwegian legend, recipient of all sorts of awards for his genius. Of him, his former student, Karl Ove Knausgaard, wrote: “No one has written more perceptively about Jon Fosse’s literature than Lev Tolstoy in War and Peace, in the passage where the main character, Prince Andrei, is moved to tears when listening to a piece of music and endeavours to understand why.”

Indeed, the apparent gap between the experience and its meaning turns out to be a central theme of Septology from page one and all throughout. The means by which it does this is fairly simple—we’re immediately immersed in the voice of the narrator, a painter named Asle, who is contemplating the composition of his current work in the way one might while talking to themselves inside their head.

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 where the brown line and purple line cross the colours blend beautifully and drip and I’m thinking this isn’t a picture 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…

and on and on. Typing it out like that, I suddenly realize I don’t think there’s a single period used in this book, including any of the ends of its 7 numbered sections all the way to the end. But whereas often this unboundedness might cause the sensation of freefall, causing a time-senstive reader to wonder where they can rightly step out, thus creating an emotional roadblock to trusting the text, very quickly it becomes apparent that the opposite is true: that the momentum of the book comes from its rhythm, its syncopation; that it only gains steam as the elegance of the narration’s ability to keep rolling onto itself, almost like thinking. Though the volume definitely harbors a monotonic quality, often returning to same thoughts, images, memories, and narrative events, it does so in a way so close to how it feels to exist in a body that almost immediately the narrator’s consciousness affixes itself onto the reader’s own. By doing so, it alleviates and even negates the tension one sometimes feels in trying to eek out breathing room to put one’s self in a state required to be able to receive an experience through art.

Thus, the endless prose ends up feeling more like a bath than a battle—or like a painting rather than a narrative—syncing itself with the sounds of the body and the room of the reader in a way that deepens the accumulation of the book’s experience almost inherently—you can’t but help but want to keep breathing it in. Quickly, I found myself remembering the quality of reading the 2nd and 3^rd volumes of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy more so than Beckett; in particular, how strongly the ambient impression of my experience of reading those novels in my early 20s made me want to figure out how prose could seem to sit on you like age; similar, too, to sculpture and shadowplay rather than drama or even affect. Like McCarthy, too, if perhaps in a much more elemental way, Fosse manages an extreme fluidity to how the sentences stack together as they unfold. Using that intimacy of voice he establishes so well in letting the narration ponder, consider, and reflect, he also maintains extreme efficiency in splicing forward action and dialogue into the flow. As easily as changing postures, he slips between phases of the narrator’s daily life, going about his business as a painter who lives off his work. All it takes at times is the narrator noticing something unexpected in his periphery, and then he finds himself immersed in a similar memory, reaching back into his past to try to connect it to the present, and thereby who and why and how he is. Memories blend into dialogues, fixed around a tight cast of characters culled from the timeline of his life—an old friend, an ongoing lover, his dead wife, his landlord, his gallerist, many of whom have similar names, causing identities among them to transpose and confuse him, to make him wonder what is real.

The effect here, rather than attempting to unpack the larger heft of its literal means, is one that undoubtedly creates an experience through language that is unlike most anything I’ve read. Appropriately, I found myself physically reading in ways I hadn’t before, or at least in a long while—letting my eyes go loose and little and scanning the sentence like a vacuum at times, using the rhythm and the differences in repetition to kind of sprawl out along the page. Differently than letting it wash over me, it seemed to feel as if I was washing over it, picking up energy from one place and moving it to another, sitting it back down, seeing how it felt. The musicality of the voice, paired with its relative simplicity on a line level, created textures that Fosse then could use in going forward. I’ve never been a fan of people describing singular writing styles as “teaching you how to read it as you go,” but for once that rang true in a way that didn’t seem fake or forced; but more so, akin to life in a way that too often feels artificial, like something you have to accept as it is, and nothing more.

This also isn’t to say that Septology’s primary heft comes from simply working like a software you can download and find pleasure in basically masturbating with. As the accumulations continue, and as further and further expanses of the narrator’s intertwined existential and spiritual experiences develop side by side, there are at least a couple major moments where novel really cracks its essence open and spills forth epic light. Unlike realistic novels that ignore the psychological effects of its own gait, Fosse allows the novel’s network to overheat, and to hit holes. After pages and pages of the narrator contemplating his relationship with God, his self-destruction through alcoholism, his loneliness in loss, and his dedication to his art, followed by pages and pages of rampant scenes culled from his memory pondering a childhood friend who’s close to death and his struggle to make a living (much less a sense of companionship) as an artist, Fosse shores up his circling and follows the narrator into the cracks in his own mind—asking open questions about his own beliefs, his own hope for salvation, his reasons for being and creating, each in a way that creates awe; awe for having lived so long and still not knowing; awe at how one’s time spent in the world is less a line with defined points, and more, if you like, like paint, or prayer. He speaks of the spiritual in the way one might from extreme isolation, unaware of its political utility or even pride, but simply, finally, of a grandiose mysteriousness that manages to manifest itself through transposing rationality with its abandon, rather than romantic myth, or lyrical song—a kind of hypnotic state you’re grateful there’s so much of, rather than so little. Each of the seven sections ends with the narrator rubbing his beads and reading his prayers. Each way the prayer is said is similar and different. The variations make it moving even if you don’t know or relate to the prayers. Maybe you even begin to think about how you do relate to them, or how you might. God, who knows what you might think next?

Even that, though, in Fosse’s hands, won’t sit so simply, like the way a heavy meal occupies the body. Many mystical little loops—such as the appearance of The Namesake, who appears to be the same person as the narrator, blurring the lines of who Asle even is; or of how, as the book approaches its end, the narration itself begins to tangle, breaking down in its syntax and coherency for little flashes 600 pages in—remind the reader that the novel’s essence, though focused entirely through one first-person speaker late in their life, bears much more than it seems, even to it. Despite being able to sum up the entire plot in a page or two, and how consistently the novel’s voice explores its means, it begs rereading almost instantaneously, as if now armed with what you do think you know of it, you are now even more prepared to discover its deeper fields—the things it doesn’t even know it knows; the places it connects to only once you’ve worn away the locks—hidden as if in plain sight.