Septology—Jon Fosse
hail mary, full of grace...
I was very skeptical about Septology going into my reading of it, given that Merve Emre, in a Bookforum roundup of contributors’ favorite books of 2022, said that reading Fosse’s seven-part masterwork was “the closest I have come to feeling the presence of God here on earth.” I continued to investigate the critical reception Fosse was receiving to see if there was more over-the-topness in the air. I stumbled upon Wyatt Mason in Harper’s, who remarked that “reading Septology, watching Asle [the gnostic painter protagonist] 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.” Jesus Christ, man. It seems like people who are really into this book just want to bend over on the pews at a proper latin mass. Is praising Septology an act of penance? Am I going to hell for not bowing at its altar? Oh no oh no our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done…
Look, Septology is actually a really good book, and an ambitious one formally, which always scores points with me. It exists in a family of books that includes Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece (ekphrastic terror), Doestoevsky’s Brother’s Karamazov (“The Grand Inquisitor,” Jesus Fucking Christ), Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (consciousness…) and the collected works of Laszlo Kraznahorkai, Mathias Enard and Thomas Bernhard (one sentence masters). Stylistically, Fosse sometimes seems like a point guard in basketball or winger in soccer doing a bunch of moves and dribbles without meaningfully advancing the play. He is an old master after all, Knausgaard’s creative writing teacher. He knows all of these tricks.
To end my brief exposition, I’d offer that the majority of the reviews of this book demonstrate a minor intellectual and spiritual sickness that lit crit culture is experiencing. Baudrillard talks about something called the “hyper-real” and about how it has become more important than reality itself. Hyper-real can include things like signs, signifiers, screens, etc. It’s a flawed concept but you get it. My main gripe here is that, while Fosse does genuinely emit a “prayer-like” vibe, I think that people see the very visible discussion of God, signaled by Fosse’s use of religious terminology, and think that the book must contain religious truths. My hope is that critics will be ever attentive to the religious in things that aren’t signaled by the religious “hyper-real.” I’m not against the religious per say, just don’t embrace the category then only discuss it in relation to explicit symbolic discussions of religion as a category. In his review of the first two books of the…septet(?), Dustin Illingworth notes that “to understand how completely these things [religious matters] elude comprehension, and to clothe their fundamental mystery in such gorgeous raiment, is a [profound] achievement…” Fosse certainly “clothes” in gorgeous raiment, but I don’t buy that these “fundamental mysteries” are things-in-themselves. It’s weak as hell to have to rely on reading Fosse to seriously contemplate, meditate on, these spiritual issues.
