"I already have ten or so big paintings finished plus four or five small ones, something like that, fourteen paintings in all in two stacks next to each other by the kitchen door, since I'm about to have a show, most of the paintings are approximately square..."
So Asle tells us on the opening page of The Other Name.
Asle is a painter living alone on the southwest coast of Norway. I can imagine one of his paintings in the stacks might look something like the artwork above. Or, perhaps this bold diagonal brushstroke can be likened to a section of his largest canvas, the one Asle is working on now, the one on the easel in his studio, a large rectangular painting, wider than it is high, one thick diagonal line painted in brown, the other thick diagonal line painted in purple, the two thick dripping lines crossing in the middle.
Jon Fosse relates his daily schedule when writing this, his longest work: while living in an apartment outside Vienna in Austria, he would wake up at four in the afternoon, start writing at five and continuing through the night until nine the next morning (that's sixteen straight hours of writing!). As the Norwegian author acknowledges, it was a very strange experience. And since he always has written shorter novels, the length of Septology surprised him. Note: Septology is a 667-pager and contains seven parts in three volumes: I-II The Other Name, III-V I Is Another and VI-VII A New Name.
When speaking of his own writing process, Jon Fosse notes he doesn't have a set plan when writing a novel. He just sits down and listens. The novel is fully formed somewhere in his subconscious, and all he has to do is write it down before it disappears – and the hearing happens as he's writing. For Jon, it's too boring to plan things out in advance; rather, it's all about the excitement of the journey into the unknown where something comes into existence that he didn't know before. That is to say, Jon would never write in an autobiographical way. Worth underscoring: Jon Fosse is not writing autofiction a la fellow Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgård or Kjersti Skomsvold.
The action of the novel is straightforward enough: Asle does things like speak with his neighbor Åsleik who clears his driveway when it snows, drives from his home in Dylgja to the small city of Bjørgvin, and, one time while in Bjørgvin, comes to the rescue of another painter by the name of Asle who collapsed dead drunk out in the snow. This second Asle brings up a key question: what is the narrator's relationship with his namesake and how close are their individual identities entwined? After all, both Asle and Asle are unmarried painters with long grey hair, are of similar age, have the same build, and have, or had, an issue with being an alcoholic.
Or, is their relationship more subtle? What's happening to the narrator, Asle? Is he imagining or dreaming or even hallucinating a second self? Or, more plausibly, the second Asle is actually the narrator in his past life, a time when he had way too much to drink, passed out in the snow and required hospitalization.
And the novel's language itself - hypnotic, repetitive, what Jon Fosse terms “slow prose” where he circles back in describing a simple happening or feeling or observation or reflection in ways that are reminiscent of classical music in minimalist mode played on piano or cello or xylophone. Speaking of Septology, Jon said, "I wanted to give each and every moment the time I felt it needed. I wanted the language to flow in a peaceful way."
It's time to shift to an aspect of Jon's novel that is critically important: mystical transformation via direct experience of the divine light. In an interview, Jon relates: “This mystic side has to do with when I was seven years old and close to dying. It was an accident. I saw myself from outside, in a kind of shimmering light, peaceful, a very happy state, and I’m quite sure that accident, that moment, that close-to-death experience formed me as a writer. Without that, I doubt I would have even been one. It’s very fundamental for me.” It's not for nothing that Åsleik says Asle strikes him as a Russian monk. Again, Jon is definitely not writing autofiction but there's an undeniable spiritual kinship between Jon the writer and Asle the painter, as per this snip of Asle's musing on art and life:
“...but in summer too I try to cover the windows and make it as dark as possible before looking at where and how much a picture is shining, yes, to tell the truth I always wait until after I've seen a picture in pitch blackness to be sure I'm done with it, because the eyes get used to the dark in a way and I can see the picture as light and darkness, and see if there's a light shining from the picture, and where, and how much, and it's always, always the darkest part of the picture that shines the most, and I think that that might be because it's in the hopelessness and despair, in the darkness, that God is closest to us...”
With Asle's vision here, the author's following words carry added power: “When I manage to write well, there is a second, silent language. This silent language says what it is all about. It’s not the story, but you can hear something behind it — a silent voice speaking.”
A silent voice speaking. Like Asle, Jon Fosse converted to Catholicism but we shouldn't think of religion in the conventional form. Not at all. Both men read Meister Eckhart and both men's reflections bring to mind not faith so much as a Gnostic knowing, particularly in terms of art and aesthetic experience as a revealer of light.
According to Jon Fosse, writing is a mystery, and painting is a mystery that can't be explained in words. Asle can't explain his paintings and he as author can't explain his writing. Thus, as readers, we are well to open ourselves to the language behind the language – the underlying music.
Coda: A special call-out to translator Damion Searls for rendering Jon Fosse into fluid, clear English.
Norwegian author Jon Fosse, born 1959
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