Jon Fosse's Septology - art "can only say something while keeping silent about what it actually wants to say"

Jon Fosse’s Septology (2019-21) is a long stream-of-consciousness novel about a Norwegian painter trying to understand one of his paintings.  Each of the novel’s seven sections begins with Asle looking at the painting:

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 dripped, where the brown and purple line cross the colours blend beautifully and drip and I’m thinking this isn’t a picture… (p. 13)

It is possible that Asle is not looking at the painting, but imagining that he is looking at it.  Again every section literally begins with “AND I SEE MYSELF STANDING” and then a paraphrase of the above quotation.

Each of seven parts ends the same way, too, with Asle praying his rosary, a “brown wooden cross” (276 and elsewhere).  The endings of Parts II through V have the same prayer and are paraphrases; Parts I and VII feature a somewhat different prayer* and some other differences, one of which gives the novel an actual ending, perhaps.  Someone more knowledgeable will have to tell me about the meaning of the two prayers.

Asle is an exploratory artist, a “look first” artist, not a conceptual or “think first” artist, the kind who dominate the high end art world today.  I am borrowing my own terms from years ago.  Asle is the kind of artist who has to create a work of art before knowing what it means.  “[T]he only thing I can do is paint, yes, try to paint away these pictures that are lodged inside me, there’s nothing to do but paint them away, one by one” (27). 

Is the painting, for example, good?  Asle argues the case.  “I can’t stand pictures that directly paint feelings even if I’m the only one who knows it, that isn’t the kind of thing I paint, it’s not the kind of thing I want to paint, because a painting can certainly be filled with feelings but you shouldn’t paint feelings themselves, like screaming and weeping and wailing” (409).

The novel has many passages where Asle thinks about not just this particular painting but why he paints at all.  He is Catholic, converted by his somewhat dream-girly wife.  The “wordless prayer of painting” (463) he calls his art, late in the novel, wondering if he is done with it (painting, not prayer) for good.  Among a cluster of ideas indebted to Meister Eckhart, Asle “sit[s] and stare[s] into the empty nothingness, and probably in a way I am the empty nothingness I’m looking at,” and “these silent moments enter into the light in my paintings, the light that is clearest in darkness, yes, the shining darkness” (168).  His special fondness is for white and black paint “because it’s in the darkness that God lives” (267).

There is something of a manifesto in Septology, but it is in fragments across the book.  A conceptual artist would put it all in one place.

I wonder how abstract Asle’s paintings are meant to be.  The cross is both a stark form but also an object full of symbolism (although the lines are diagonal, so it is a Saint Andrew’s cross).  “[I]t was so badly painted, but it was oil paint on canvas and that, oil paint on canvas, lodged inside me from the very first moment and stayed there to this day” (63).  Medium, color, form, those are the pieces Asle uses to create meaning.  Although clearly not exactly an abstract painter, his ideas often reminds me of the American Abstract Expressionists.

The cross is perhaps his last, or next to last, painting, which gives at least a little bit of an excuse for telling this story at this time.  The meaning of the painting requires a review of not just Asle’s ideas about painting but his life, from his early childhood to the present, as well as his religion, his time, in the past, as an alcoholic, his life with his wife, who died young, and most curiously the parallel life of his double, another exploratory alcoholic painter named Asle, who I guess is meant to actually exist, although at times I had doubts.  But his dog is real.  Whole separate essay about what that dog is doing in this novel.

Anyway, that’s how Fosse takes a painter thinking about a painting to nearly 700 pages.  Most of the usual novelistic stuff is there.  Asle is one of those complex, well-rounded characters many readers look for.  The inefficient, even at times tedious style – “he can just launch into talking nonstop, this and that, past present and future all jumbled together” (57) – now has a long history as a way to create complex fictional characters.  I had originally planned to read only the first novel of Septology – three novels, seven parts – symbolic! – but found Asle interesting enough to stay with him until the end.

Many prominent critics have found Septology interesting for other reasons.  I will write one more piece expressing some doubt about them.

The aphorism in the title, which is not true in general although true for Asle, is on p. 464 of the Transit Books edition.

*  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  Please see the comments for the schema.