Jon Fosse; Boathouse; Trans. May-Brit Akerholt; Dalkey Archive Press, 2017
In his collection of essays An Angel Walks Through a Stage, Fosse writes much about the mystical nature of his art, how writing for him has spiritual resonance. Mentioned as often, is silence. For Fosse, silence is as much a space or void, as it is heaviness and dread, the unspoken as reality, and in this work, both forms are largely at play. His characters say very little outwardly, and when they do, the statements are short, terse, often simple affirmations. But the entirety of this text is interior. A mind in constant, albeit looping motion. As the textual participant, we read the same phrases over and over again, often nearly whole blocks of identical or similar statements at the beginning and ending of each section, repeated statements about restlessness, small shuffles of movement and sounds, the inability to go outside, and central to the story, the near frantic recounting of the narrator’s encounter with an old school friend.
Only a few paragraphs into this book, with its well-known opening lines about not going out anymore, about being overcome with restlessness, I felt instantly in uncomfortable territory. Generally speaking, being in the mind of literary characters is the one of the main draws to reading fiction, in its otherness, comfort or discomfort, stances we would never personally take, but for me, being in the mind of the narrator, who suffers from extreme “restlessness,” was quite intense, and in my experience, represents the sensations of one who lives with varying degrees of social anxiety. The very nature of anxiety is obsession, looping thoughts that become a crippling reality, and often cause the sufferer to cease interaction with others and in extreme moments have the inability to even go outside. Many repetitive scenario loops take place, a rise and fall situation of pumping oneself up and tearing it all down again, until hopefully the dreaded moment the sufferer is considering has passed, or alternately, and sometimes physiologically painful, the time comes to participate. The horror of such a moment may be simply going to the grocery store, only a few blocks walk, to acquire new coffee, which the sufferer is aware can increase the tendency of these very reactions, all the while, going first thing in the morning to purchase coffee sounds like a far more dreadful way to start a new day, but the knowledge that a headache at 11:30 am the following day from withdrawal is equally unpleasant, and counter-productive to all the work one wants to produce on that following day, because much of the current day’s energy has been sapped into deciding about going to purchase a new can of coffee. I use this personal digression to illustrate the nature of my relation to this text on a very fundamental level. At 118 pages, much of this book reads like this kind of strain.
The core of these reactions has to do with human interaction, and the endless cycles of interpretation that may take place from such an event before and after, and this is the very center of the text in Boathouse. Told to us over and over again is the dread the two friends feel at having to meet one another again, because so many years have passed, there is nothing to say, and there was a moment in that distant past, in that relationship, that was painful, centered around misunderstanding and betrayal, which perhaps also has its roots in the narrator’s innate anxiety disorder.
Much of any accusations of difficulty towards Fosse’s work is based in this repetitious looping. The sentences are not difficult, the structure is quite simple, the vocabulary is rather basic, but it is this testing of resilience and patience, that makes Fosse “difficult.” Yet, he has stated that he tries to be very simple and not difficult. His work gets called haunting, obsessive, dream-like; I think of it as incantatory.
One of the brilliant tricks in this book is when, without changing this looping, ritual-like tone, Fosse’s narrator shifts to the internal perspective of the friend, from which we experience again the micro episodes of tension already written. This to me was such a powerful approach, because really, it is still the narrator telling us the friend’s thoughts, feelings and actions. A kind of interpretation and alienation is happening simultaneously. As the tension continues to mount, between the characters (the two friends and the friend’s wife, where a triangle of jealously, regret, and resentment play out), between the minds of the individuals, and the individuals to their environment, I sensed that the prose grows more fragmentary, de-energized with resignation.
In this work, Fosse masters the micro moment. In the way sufferers of anxiety live in imbalanced moments, moments that outsiders can even hardly begin to scale to their own interpretations of the very same scenario; his characters experience the same obsessive imbalance. Though the rather sudden connection between the narrator and the wife character seems somewhat improbable, as an equation to illustrate this anxiety-ridden microcosm, its works quite well. So much of the looping thoughts and references have little to do with the current situation, but are rooted in a single, apparently minor occurrence from the past that rises from its dormancy to trigger a paralyzing chain of thoughts.
Silence, inaction, and simplicity is what makes this work successful. To view someone from the outside, be it in the bus, the library, or at the grocery checkout, in all their isolated calmness, in contrast to our unawareness of the possible roiling interiority of that other is the uncanniness Fosse captures so well in Boathouse.
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