Going Beyond Language

On Jon Fosse's "The Other Name" (Books 1-2 of "Septology")

I first started reading Jon Fosse’s Septology in a bookstore. I read the first page and found myself unable to stop, like a person running on a treadmill at high speed. Finally I jumped off and caught my breath. Fosse’s book, which is a collection of seven novels published as a single volume, is one sentence long. I knew this when I picked it up, but it wasn’t as I expected. I had envisioned something like Proust or Henry James, a sentence with thousands and thousands of subordinate clauses, each one nested in the one before it, creating a sort of dizzying vortex that challenges the reader to keep track of things, but when examined closely, is found to be grammatically perfect. Fosse isn’t like that. The sentence is, if we want to be pedantic about it, one long comma splice. It could easily be split up into thousands of sentences simply by replacing the commas with periods. What this means is the book is not difficult to read—it’s actually rather easy, and once you get warmed up, just like on a long run, you settle into the pace and rhythm of the words, and you begin to move at a steady speed, your breathing and reading equilibrated.

So this is how the words work, but what do they say? After reading the first two books in the collection, which together are called The Other Name, the best way I can explain it is by quoting a passage from the book itself:

and that’s how it also is with all the paintings by other people that mean anything to me, it’s like it’s not the painter who sees, it’s something else seeing through the painter, and it’s like this something is trapped in the picture and speaks silently from it, and it might be one single brushstroke that makes the picture able to speak like that, and it’s impossible to understand, I think, and, I think, it’s the same with the writing I like to read, what matters isn’t what it literally says about this or that, it’s something else, something that silently speaks in and behind the lines and sentences (italics mine)

The narrator who is talking, an elderly painter named Asle who lives in rural Norway, spends much of the book like this, thinking about his paintings and trying to explain what they mean. He is unable to explain their meaning, however, because language and painting are two different things, and something gets lost in translation. What he says about writing takes things even further, suggesting that words don’t mean what we say they mean—“what matters isn’t what it literally says about this or that, it’s something else, something that silently speaks in and behinds the lines and sentences.” I would like to suggest that this is the true subject of Fosse’s book (or at least the first two that I’ve read), the idea that words do not mean what we say they mean, but something else, something behind the words.

Fosse’s challenge, of course, is to express this idea through language. How do we say one thing with words that mean something else? He begins by calling our attention to the inability of language to fully represent reality. In the first few pages, while Asle is describing his paintings, he makes constant reference to a group of people only referred to as “they,” who are presumably art critics.

most of the paintings are approximately square, as they put it, I think, but sometimes I also paint long narrow ones and the one with the two lines crossing is noticeably oblong, as they put it, but I don’t want to put this one into the show because I don’t like it much…

and then I take another look at the picture with the two lines crossing, both in impasto as they put it, and the paint has run a little and where the lines cross the colours have turned such a strange colour, a beautiful colour, with no name, they usually don’t have names because obviously there can’t be names for all the countless colours in the world (italics mine)

Language cannot capture “reality,” which is itself a concept created by language, nor can it fully explain art, yet we continue to try, to put into words, as Fosse writes, “the invisible in the visible.” Asle’s refusal to accept the critics’ characterization of his painting, qualifying each description with an “as they put it,” so we know that he doesn’t agree, or saying that there are some things “with no name,” foregrounds the inadequacy of language to capture life. Septology is a spiritual text, a book that takes for granted that a material view of the world is insufficient and that to reflect the totality of existence the spiritual is of utmost importance. But again, how to do this? While reading, I remembered a famous line from the Tao Te Ching: “the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” This seems to be Asle’s view on painting and writing, which is not to say that Asle is a Taoist; in fact, he’s a Catholic, and his religion is a constant presence in the text. He prays frequently, and these prayers, shockingly, are reprinted in the text in Latin. Here’s an example:

I’m so tired, so tired, and I think even so I need to say a Pater Noster before I go to sleep and so I make the sign of the cross and then I take the cross between my thumb and index finger and hold it tight and I say to myself Pater noster Qui es in caelis and I pause after those words and already I’m starting to drift off into the fog of sleep and I say Sanctificeture nomen tuum Adveniat regnm tuum and I think yes Hallowed be thy name Thy Kingdom come…

Asle’s prayer switches from Latin to English (perhaps I should say “the vernacular,” as it will change depending on the translation), which lets the reader know that this is the Lord’s Prayer, allowing us to understand the first lines Asle says in Latin (Our Father, who art in heaven). Some readers, of course, will recognize the prayer instantly, even without the change in language, but some readers won’t. And some readers will think back to their own memories of saying this prayer, while again, others might be unfamiliar with the prayer and not know it by heart. Still others might know the prayer only in Latin, and while they will have said it many, many times, they might not understand the literal meaning of the words because they will have never thought to translate them, and the prayer will not mean what the words mean, but it will mean something else, something that speaks silently behind the lines and sentences, like a ritual, a chant, an incantation.

In the novel, the Lord’s Prayer is often a gateway to memory. Asle begins to pray, and then he begins to remember, and without any indication that this is a memory, a new story emerges, a story about another Asle, usually Asle as a child. These stories are told in the third person, whereas Asle’s present day narration is in the first person, but in truth, we can’t confidently say that these are Asle’s childhood memories. There is, in the novel, another Asle in the present day, a painter, just like our narrator, who has long, white hair in a ponytail, just like our narrator, but this other Asle has given himself to drink,¹ has stopped painting, has let his life fall apart, whereas our Asle, who used to drink, has stopped drinking, just like he’s stopped smoking, and he paints constantly, and he sells his paintings in town, and he makes a decent living. So is the child Asle a memory of our narrator, or a memory of this other Asle, or a third Asle altogether? We don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. This is a spiritual text, not a literal one, and as such, we are forced to say that this other Asle is both different from the narrator Asle and the same; the child Asle is both the narrator Asle and not the narrator Asle. In this way, the novel that The Other Name reminds me of is Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, which also eschewed logic and reason in its plot in an attempt to articulate something more profound about human experience. In that novel, Ishiguro seemed to realize that there are no requirements for a novel, no reason that it must adhere to certain conventions about reality, no reason that a character cannot go to sleep in one place and wake up in another, or, indeed, go to sleep as a human and wake up as an insect—a novel creates its own rules, its own reality, and in doing so, need only adhere to its own internal logic.

While reading The Other Name and reading about Asle’s Catholicism, one is also reminded of The Bible, and the two parts I think of are Genesis, when God creates the world, and the beginning of the gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The gospel tells us that “the Word” comes first, perhaps even before God, and that the Word is God. Does the Word create God? Does language create meaning? In Genesis, while it says that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” it then tells us that God creates through speech: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light;” “And God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.’ And it was so.” This is the counter to the understanding of language discussed earlier—if language cannot capture truth, if “the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao,” we also must grant that language itself creates and structures our reality. This is the dilemma that Septology seems intent on exploring.

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A narrative thread running through The Other Name (the first two books), and that I imagine will continue in the next five books, is Asle’s painting “with the two lines crossing.” At first, Asle doesn’t like this painting and thinks it is unfinished, but slowly his understanding of the painting changes. His friend, Åsleik, is the instigator of this change. Åsleik is not a painter, is uneducated, has hardly ever left their small town, but has an uncanny eye for art and understands Asle’s paintings in a way few other people do. Their friendship is difficult to describe because it is unspoken and to certain readers, may not seem like a friendship at all, but this is because the words they use to communicate do not mean what they literally mean. Asle and Åsleik understand each other in a way beyond language because they are two men from a certain time and place; they take care of each other and drive each other crazy, which allows for moments of hilarity and wonderful one liners. They repeat utter banalities that, through repetition, become meaningful. Asle frequently remarks how he’s heard Åsleik say the same thing over and over, “because neither Åsleik nor I ever have that much new to say to each other and that’s why we always talk about the same things, because you have to say something.” Repetition creates time; time creates meaning.

On the first page of Septology, Asle says, about the picture with the two lines crossing, “I’m thinking this isn’t a picture but suddenly the picture is the way it’s supposed to be, it’s done,” before saying that, “I have to put this picture away with the other ones I’m working on but am not done with.” It seems the picture is both done and not done. Some 80 pages later, Asle says that “this isn’t a picture yet, it’s just a picture I’ve started on,” and then notes after another 80 pages says that “it’s stiff, it’s dead…it doesn’t have the light in it” but “it’s a St Andrew’s Cross, Åsleik says, and he’s right, and then he says it again, St Andrew’s Cross, he says and he puts a heavy stress on the words like he’s proud of knowing them, proud that he, Åsleik, knows a term like that.” Asle still doesn’t think it’s a good painting, but quickly his view starts to change, saying, “I’ll put aside that picture with the two lines, the St Andrew’s Cross, as Åsleik says, yes the picture should be called St Andrew’s Cross,” and then noting that he’ll paint the title on the painting and a “big A,” his signature, which is what he does when he finishes a painting. So, the painting is done. Nearly 100 pages later, Asle looks at the painting in the dark to see if there is light shining from it, which is his test of whether a painting is good or not. Now this painting seems so good—“the black darkness is shining from the picture, from almost the whole picture, the black darkness is shining, yes, I’ve hardly ever seen the black darkness shine like that from any other picture”—that he decides he can’t sell it; he paints the title (St Andrew’s Cross) and his signature on the painting; it’s done.

I trace the development of Asle’s understanding of this painting because it seems to me that when Åsleik calls it a “St Andrew’s Cross,” this initiates a change in Asle’s understanding of the painting, or at least it pushes him toward considering it in a new way. Åsleik doesn’t just say this once but repeats it, again and again, which seems to further solidify the possibility that the painting might be done, which also leads Asle to examine it in the darkness to see if it has the qualities of a good painting. Would Asle have looked for the “shining darkness” had Åsleik not led him to see the painting in a new way? Would Asle have continued to add to the painting? In naming the painting, does Åsleik create a new sort of meaning in the painting, or does he uncover the meaning already there? Said another way, does language create the world, or does it reveal the world? And what lies beyond language, and how can a novel attempt to show this through prose? Septology, so far, is exploring these questions, and here I’m reminded again of Knausgaard, who said that a novel is a search into something, which I think also describes Septology in that it’s Fosse’s attempt to search into “something that silently speaks in and behind the lines and sentences.”

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This essay was originally published on 3 Quarks Daily: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/06/going-beyond-language.html

1. At first I wrote, “is an alcoholic,” but Fosse never uses this word to describe the other Asle. It wouldn’t make sense in this book, because Fosse resists all language that would define or enclose human experience. Describing how much and how often someone drinks, the physical effect it has on them, is very different than calling someone an alcoholic. Knausgaard, in one of the My Struggle books, also commented on the term “alcoholic,” and how in Norway, he was unfamiliar with the term, but later realized that he would have fit the definition as a young man. He makes a curious observation: because he never defined himself as an alcoholic, one day, he just stopped, with no problem, whereas had he “known” he was an alcoholic, he would have been, in a way, marked with this label, and quitting would have been more difficult. As it was, he didn’t even quit, because he was never an alcoholic to begin with. This is not to say that the medical term “alcoholic” is incorrect or not useful—Knausgaard’s father and grandmother were both alcoholics, and might have benefited from recognizing this—but it is to say this term is a social construction, a term with a history; it is not a neutral description of objective fact. It can illuminate, but it can also occlude.