The appeal of Septology as religious fiction - the urge, inexplicably, to pray - because it helps! it helps!

Septology is a stream-of-consciousness novel throughout, a mix of sentence fragments, unconventional punctuation, and temporal shifts, meaning the painter Asle is sometimes thinking about the present and sometimes about the past. 

These are all old moves, old techniques.  I was a little surprised that the story of Asle’s past life was told almost entirely in chronological order. 

Fosse’s and Asle’s stream-of-consciousness has a repetitive, looping aspect that often reminded me of – is deeply influenced by – Thomas Bernhard.  Fosse is a gentler writer, lacking Bernhard’s rage and thus his over the top humor.  No mad rants about the outrageous perfidy of Anton Bruckner or Adalbert Stifter or their wretched Norwegian equivalents here.  In Septology the humor is not in Asle’s head but out in the real world, where somehow the characters he encounters enact his repetitive, looping style.  Septology, like a number of late Bernhard novels, is also a novel about grief.

I have only read a few Bernhard novels but I can’t imagine him using the sincere religious expression that is frequent in Septology.  Many readers of Fosse’s book, including many reviewers, have responded strongly to this aspect of the novel.  Wyatt Mason’s review in Harper’s (August 2021) of the first two novels is a helpful example.  He writes (this also appears on the back cover of the novel):

With Septology, Fosse has found a new approach to writing fiction, different from what he has written before and—it is strange to say, as the novel enters its fifth century—different from what has been written before. Septology feels new.

Let’s pretend we did not see that “fifth century” bit.  I saw this quote when I was far enough into Septology that I had some footing, and “new” is not how it seemed.  “Like Thomas Bernhard,” rather.  Surely Mason will tell me what he means later in his review.

There is nothing formally new about narratives that deploy the long sentence. Thomas Bernhard, who inherited its sound from Joyce and Woolf, pursued the long line with rage at its heart.

Hey now, I was just saying!  For some reason Mason digresses with a list of other recent writers influenced by Bernhard – Sebald, Marías, Krasznahorkai – all of whom seem more formally interesting to me than Fosse.  Not to Mason:

Fosse seems both the most obviously influenced by Bernhard and the most radically his own.

Strong claim, but now he will explain.

But what feels most striking about Fosse’s method is something this review can only gesture at.

Oh.

I can say that Fosse’s novel, its vocal progress, is incantatory, or that the prose reads like an extended prayer, which sounds blurbily [!] fine, and not wrong, just empty and familiar. Reading Septology, watching Asle progress through life and, I suspect, in parts six and seven, to the end of it, one feels—I felt—in the welter and waste of a single solitary life, the urge, inexplicably, to pray.

Not to deny the experience of Mason or any other reader, but at no point did I feel the urge to pray.  “It would be too much to suggest that in Septology one comes to feel the love of God, but the way Fosse wields the novel’s form does something spooky to one’s heart.”  Yes, it would be too much, way too much.  This seems like something a specific kind of reader brings to the novel, not something in the novel itself as Mason claims.  “We are here to pray, the form says.”  I do not think form can “say” this.  Bernhard’s similar form does not.

I am surveying the blurbs.  Ruth Margalit writes that “the experience of reading these works” is like “the act of meditation.”  Actually she “hesitate[s]” to make the comparison, but of course does make it.  Sam Sacks thinks the prose “feels almost holy.”  Dustin Illingworth thinks it “trembles with the beauty, doubt, and gnostic weariness of great religious fiction.”

So I take it that all of that is there if you want it.  I guess all of these people mean what they say.  "[I]f they saw me thinking I could sit in a parked car in a turnoff saying Kyrie eleison Christie eleison, it's absurd, they'd have to laugh, but let them laugh, let them, let them, because it helps! it helps!" (p. 30-1).  But I will add that the reader who is not in that market, who thinks, for example, that religious belief is a matter of psychology, may well find Septology interesting not for its novelty or aid to meditation but for its creation and exploration of the psychological interior of a complex character, a unique and enduring specialty, to go back to form, of the novel.

I should mention that the translation by Damion Searls is superb, his project almost heroic.  I can’t judge the technical details, but his control of tone and voice is superb. He learned a new language, Nynorsk, just to translate Fosse’s novels, with the likely reward of complete indifference in the English world.  Fosse was for a long time the most produced living playwright in Europe, while the English theater world ignored him.  (Does anyone reading this know his plays?  I have read one scene).  But anyway it all worked out all right for Searls, and Fosse.

Dolce Bellezza encouraged me to read Septology for her Norwegian Literature month, ongoing.  I was planning to read only the first novel of the novel, The Other Name (2019), but I had questions, and enjoyed Asle’s company, so I kept going.  Thanks!