Septology by Jon Fosse
An ageing artist’s reckoning with art, God, and his past and possible lives across seven parts in three novels.
Finished: 12 January 2023
Rating: ★★★★★
- The Other Name (Septology I-II)
- I Is Another (Septology III-V)
- A New Name (Septology VI-VII)
“every action should be a prayer,” the voice said
— from As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) dir. Jonas Mekas
“… and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
— Matthew 28:20 (NKJV)
I barrelled through Septology in two weeks but have struggled to articulate anything on it for over a month. There is so much to say about it — technically, stylistically, philosophically, emotionally — but the overwhelming sense that grew within me through each part, and that still stays with me now, was the desire to pray. I’m not alone in this. Wyatt Mason puts it well: “one feels—I felt—in the welter and waste of a single solitary life, the urge, inexplicably, to pray”. Merve Emre tweeted, “Reading Jon Fosse’s SEPTOLOGY is the closest I have come to feeling the presence of God here on earth.” For Fosse doesn’t opine on sacredness — he inhabits it, and he allows us to partake in it. As one who walks into a holy place is struck by awe, wonder, and all we cannot know, even where one doesn’t keep the faith of the place. And then spends the rest of one’s life trying to commune with this mystery, to argue with it, wrestle with it, come to some sense of peace with it.
I am intensely aware that any description of Septology comes across as painfully pretentious and if I say things like “Septology is astounding”, then you may read it and find a terrible case of the emperor’s new clothes. But I will say it anyway because it is astounding — and it’s astounding because it creates within the reader an experience, a deeply felt sense of the joys and grief of being alive that run like undercurrents within each of us and surface only if we step out of our own way and allow it. This isn’t the mere evocation of emotion — it’s more like the transfiguration of perspective. I am laid as bare as the words on the page.
Fosse brings all of this to light through Asle, the main character, who wants only to make the last few years of his life a little more bearable, and in wanting so, holds tighter to God. There is no scientific logic to religion here and no attempt to engage in the proof of God. Asle himself turned away from the church as a youth, apparently seeing no truth in God. By the time we meet him, however, he is a Catholic and the act of prayer has become the way in which he grounds himself and finds a place to anchor. Doubt still peppers his mind, but for Asle religion is beyond mere logic. Prayer and certain sacraments such as making the sign of the cross act as the proactive direction and redirection of his attention.
His attention, like any human being, wanders voraciously. We journey with him through multiple episodes of memory and states of anxiety and grief, illustrating, as stream-of-consciousness tended to do in 20th-century novels, the random meanderings of the mind. Significant parts of Septology also read like a fever dream — there are doppelgängers of the same person splintering off into different lives, and there are different timelines occurring in the same place. The characters seem unfazed. They take these crossovers as slightly strange happenings that they don’t scrutinise too closely. And unlike those 20th-century narratives, after the non sequiturs, Asle returns always to the same ruminations on God and the same prayer with which he finishes each part: “and then I say, again and again, inside myself, as I breathe in deeply Lord and as I breathe out slowly Jesus and as I breathe in deeply Christ and as I breathe out slowly Have mercy and as I breathe in deeply On me”. In this liminality, where we are at danger at tipping into the abyss of incomprehensible mystery, we are directed again and again towards the good. Rather than being at the mercy of his own mind, Asle seeks to receive the mercy of God — in the former, one lacks control over one’s fate; in the latter, one enters into the possibility for redemption. A lighthouse amongst the rocks.
We often fail to do the thing that is good for us, but then run to it out of desperation when the fact that our lives are falling apart is made apparent to us, not realising that the continuation of the good thing is what may in fact help us hold life together. Prayer is much like this. I think often about sacredness — a quality that arises where something challenges our sense of reality while also offering the ability to home us. I see Septology as experientially sacred because Asle brings us into his ritual of prayer to ground us against a series of bizarre events conveyed in a hypnotically mundane manner. The prayer that Asle continually returns to is a fragment of the Jesus Prayer, which ends: “have mercy on me, a sinner”. Asle omits the “sinner” part, but one idea I often return to is that “sin” really means to be thrown off course, to miss the target. In the New Testament, the Greek word that is used, which we translate to “sin” in English, is the word hamartia. It is an archery term to indicate that one has missed the mark.* I am fond of John Vervaeke’s further interpretation — in archery, shooting where the eye tells you to look will lead you to miss, and so you must have “faith” to sense where the shot must go.** For one who has strayed, who has wandered from the path, mercy is sought through prayer in the faith that one will be able to return.
What is incredible about the urge to pray that arises out of reading Septology is that there’s nothing at directly stake for us — we come with no supplications, and there are no edicts on us to pray, no argument of which one is to be convinced. It’s simply that we’ve been taken along and absorbed into a period of one human’s life. We are with Asle. We sit with him and journey with him and we are reminded of our own sorrows, terrors, mysteries, mortalities … . The desire to pray comes out of the acknowledgement of the pain that comes with being alive, and the desire to move towards that which might save us, might make these hours more bearable. It isn’t some primitive grasping for a supernatural salve. Rather, prayer is a deeply human act that is born of deeply human predicaments. It is, correspondingly, the recognition that we can move ourselves towards the good and that one way to do so is through praying. Storms will come, but we can either steer ourselves to the rocks or follow the light.
Have mercy on me, indeed.
[*] For the Greek mythology nerds, this is the same word for a ‘tragic flaw’, derived from hamartanein (“to err”). While this may seem counter to my point that such error can be corrected, Britannica notes that Aristotle introduced this in the Poetics to describe a tragic hero whose misfortune “is not brought about by villainy but by some ‘error of judgment’”. This error of judgment was later interpreted as a moral flaw.
[**] I have no archery experience so cannot confirm this. But I do agree that if I personally did archery, I would be relying almost solely on faith.