Category: Literature

Melancholy: Obsession & Vulnerability

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Jon Fosse; Melancholy; Trans. Grethe Kvernes & Damoin Searls; Dalkey Archive Press, 2006

I have come to consider the experience of reading Jon Fosse’s books as submersion. I mean by this the feeling associated with actual underwater submersion, in a lake, perhaps, where the bottom is not visible, nor is the mottled hues of brown, green, and black light in the water particularly welcoming. First there is the commitment to do so, which for me has always invoked a particular inflamed imagination verging into panic, but really the true difficulty, once under the water, is the inevitable opening of the eyes, to glimpse that aquatic, alien world, and the anticipation of what will be seen, or more dreadfully, not be seen. And yet, when a moment has passed, there is the undeniable, liberating, and peaceful feeling of floating in opaque darkness, there is an impression of true isolation that sparks a sense primal happiness. These conflicting elements of claustrophobia and airy expanse are the spiritual core of Fosse’s books, and to read through them all successively generates a similar reaction.

His work is dark, earthy, and menacing, but he equally achieves humor, spirit, and compassion. These qualities, certainly the heavy matter of great books, are also delivered in a distinct prose style that Fosse has made his own. I have come to see and read the blocks of repetitious text, made jagged by sparse lines of unquoted dialog, as bodies of water, and once the reader is fully invested, there is little to be done but move with the current. His books may feel to some as tedious, repetitive, or self-indulgent, but I would argue, to extend the aquatic metaphor, that to lower one’s shoulders beneath what seems a cold surface, will likely bring on a strange comfort; his strings of sentences, clauses and terse dialog become incantatory, penetrating, and the combination of this written approach with the spiritual tension present in his work, makes one feel as if they’ve just experienced an obscure ritual.

The tension of the secular and non-secular, or perhaps in less loaded phrases, the spiritual and the earthy, is the hallmark of Fosse’s oeuvre; some works verge overtly into the former, such as Morning and Evening, with its ghosts and afterlife elements, and others lean heavily into the latter, including Melancholy, a work that prods deeply and unrelentingly into human psyche as it exists in society.

Melancholy is unlike the other books, in that at 284 pages it is nearly three times the length. The other books, which I read before this one, are short blasts of experience, where signature Fossian traits seem to flash into the reading consciousness, whereas this title reads more like the slow burnout of a star, a condition that allows the residual matter to rest in growing layers on the mind. I found this text difficult at times, due to its length and repetitions, which seem to be more pronounced here than elsewhere, but this discomfort is enhanced by the fact that the “menacing” element is placed in the very foreground as opposed to its spatial presence in the other works. This element is the mental unhinging of the main character, Lars Hertervig, a Norwegian man studying painting in Germany. What at first reads as an energetic if slightly unstable monologue by a socially awkward (a common theme in Fosse is the very given awkwardness of social life) ego turns further and further into a full-blown mental collapse. It can be quite unpleasant at times, hearing in your mind as your read, the same disparaging or desperate, or vulgar remarks over and over again. These two components of the text, in the end, may slightly detract from its power, in the way a teasing game of tickling or poking becomes tedious then irritating. Though I believe Fosse could have achieved the same ultra-immersion into a difficult mental landscape with less, the extent of these detracting factors also, I realize after finishing the book, enhance the claustrophobic grip on the reader, making the inability to escape ultimate. Indeed, the last portion of the “Asylum Lars” [my title] section (there are three distinct narrative sections) focuses on this entrapment to such a degree, that the character ultimately resigns his pushback and gives into to his madness.

The three narrative sections of the book happen chronologically. The first and the majority of the book, brings the reader to Germany into the mind of Lars Hertervig (1830-1902), a historical figure in Norwegian Romantic landscape painting. On this particular day of the narrative, Lars is asked to leave the home in which he boards while undertaking his painting studies, a proposition his mind can barely grasp with, and it seems that possibly this request is the trigger that sets his mind cascading into a cyclical loop of paranoia, speculation, and outlandish behavior. The central interest of his, or rather his discomforting obsession, is the homeowner’s teenage daughter Helene, for whom his intense passion is repeatedly stated in his hyper-focused mind. This unhealthy relationship, likely quite one-sided and perhaps even a delusion, is the reason he’s asked to pack, and his reluctance to do so increases the tension in the home. The second point of contention is his total lack of comradeship among the other painters. As numerous as his professions of love are his disparaging remarks about the other students’ total lack of talent – the phrases “can’t paint” and “can paint” appear often. The degree to which his mind has loosened its grip becomes apparent when he begins to convince himself that the reason for his expulsion from the home is that his “girlfriend” is really more interested in having an incestuous affair with her uncle, the man behind the eviction. Lars wildly veers from love and caring of Helene to graphic accusation of her motives, and this all in his mind, while outwardly he typically says very little to those around, in fact its this juxtaposition of external paralysis and internal storm that makes his display of madness effective. At one point, the internal diatribe becomes heightened with Helene and he makes a random internal comment about killing her, and the reader knows that this is a new reality for Lars, a reality of conflicting realities. After a long shameful scene in a pub, the humiliation at the hands of his peers, Lars inexplicably attempts to return to the boarding house, where he is finally arrested.

The second section of the novel takes place in Gaustad Asylum in Norway, where Lars is a resident/patient. He has succumbed to the mental illness that wrecks his life (though not directly stated, it seems he suffers from a form of schizophrenia and paranoia) and is given to mostly the disparaging commentary that marked the onset of his collapse. Women are now whores and declares he will kill the painters. This section is much shorter than the first and is quite effective. Fosse also uses this opportunity to play up a bit of humor, not at the expense of mental illness, but through the juxtaposition of those with mental illness, individuals who are perhaps aware of their status and those mild-mannered personalities in charge of them. In this case, we meet Hauge the attendant, the man in charge of caring for Lars and the other men in his room, in the early morning when he catches Lars masturbating under the sheets. “No not again, can’t you stop with that, even once,” or “you had a bath yesterday and everything, you’re a fine one,’ or most often he responds to Lars’s disturbing comments with a passive “all right now.” Mental illness is certainly not humorous in itself, nor is masturbation inherently funny, nor is an individual in involuntary confinement, but the odd structure of domesticity these scenes offer does create a form of absurdity that can be comical, dark as it may be. Much like the ending of the first section, where Lars spends much energy trying to deny his situation and to literally escape it, at the asylum the same pattern emerges, feelings of superiority and escape give way to defiant behavior, acceptance, and madness. These patterns in Lars of irrational behavior followed by resignation will structure the final and perhaps keystone section of the book as well.

1991; Vidme is a writer going through a difficult period. A distant relative of Lars Hertervig, he wants to write about this distant relative. He is discomfited by the appearance of a “glimmer” of the “divine” in his writing, words and responses he thinks of as “blasphemous,” and has a desire to reunite with the Norwegian Church. In an apparently frantic response to these emotions, he calls the local church seeking counsel from a pastor, a person he learns is a woman when he had anticipated a man. The meeting is awkward at best, and Vide lacks the social grace to make any connection, but realizes that he preferred to meet with “a cultured and well-read old man, one who is deeply immersed in pain and wisdom…” and is disappointed in Maria. The pain that Vidme is feeling is deep and existential, and believes that the young, beautiful woman, with the nice name and big round breasts and bare feet in slippers, the interim pastor, perhaps lacks the conviction or understanding to offer him the solace he seeks, and leaves after little is discussed. Once back home he sits and decides to write and ponders the encounter:

“…she said that if he needed to talk to anyone he could just call her and Vidme doesn’t like it when someone tells him that and that is why he had decided never to call Maria again and never visit her again and never to call any other pastor either, he will just sit here and write and now may God have mercy on him, now may God have mercy, so that he can write. Now he needs to be able to write. He sits there, Vidme the writer, and thinks. Now may God have mercy on him so that he can write.”

Fosse has written elsewhere of prayer, Quaker austerity, and turning away from the world. Melancholy is exploring these terms, the notion of art as a higher element, the eternal battle of God and the human psyche, if indeed they are separate entities, the precarious nature of man near the abyss of darkness and eternity. He is writing here a tribute of sorts to the Romantic painter Lars Hertervig, a cautionary tribute perhaps, about the overpowering seduction of the sublime, and the risks one may encounter when turning away from the world. But Fosse is also stripping away the romanticized version of the nature-genius artist, for his Lars, like the actual man, is ill, and his mind though turned away, in fact must still exist in this “real” world of society, and is just as often concerned with earthly human things such as jealousy, ego, success, relationships, sex. Art has power, maybe, or is it really only full of the interpretations and connections humans give it, and really there is no power in art, but power in humans to make art powerfully meaningful, and is the spiritual creativity just as vulnerable and precarious as the people that make and consume it? Is this why so many artists  go mad, or unknown, because there is a bond to creation that becomes intolerably stretched, and yet, as is the case with the real life Lars Hertervig, they become rediscovered as humans, and then, as a runway at night, sight lines appear in the gloom and guide us in to their creations anew, to the residual glow of their nuclear active mental landscape that turned away from the rest of us, and now with the gloves of time, we can hold those mentalities nearby, and vicariously experience the fear of turning away, without the burn suffered by the afflicted? The spiritual and the earthly are in league together, they coil around one another, it’s the points of contact that we equally loathe and revere.

The Proper Study

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I have made a partial pivot from my current reading of Fosse, a resurfacing, so to speak, for air to fortify the next leg, only to be pulled under by a swell of a quite different system. Initially thought of as diversionary reading, these books remain on the reading tables, at hand. I have always enjoyed the simultaneous reading of non-fiction, usually unrelated histories, while reading fiction, hence the selection of essays by Isaiah Berlin. David Winters’ book Infinite Fictions I sought as a tool, a lesson in how to read and write reviews, which then led me to Warren Motte, the noted critic of French Literature. Valeria Luiselli’s Sidewalks then, when glimpsed on the shelf was irresistible in the context of current global-literary-cultural-essay immersion.

David Winters’ proves to be good company: engaging, smart, accessible, informative. His pieces in the second half of this book, responding to others’ books of criticism and literary theory are quite good. He excels in giving a good account of the work, explaining its significance or interest to him while offering reflective counter-thoughts. He handles the reviews in such a way that, indicative of the best reviewing practice, he constantly stokes the reader’s interest, and most likely, their enthusiasm to pursue the titles for themselves. His approach, namely conversational, not over-the-top clever, acts as an introductory welcome to texts that may otherwise be off the radar ( at least frequently mine), all the while he maintains a professional front; he does not fall into chatty reverence but operates in the way the best teachers do: he stokes one’s excitement by displaying his own for the material, but then encourages you to be thoughtful, reflexive.

Fables of the Novel, is a much different creation. Whereas Winters’ title is deliberately popular and constructed as accessible (reviews), Motte’s book is academic, critical, scientific. His proclivity for modern or experimental literature makes the list of titles he writes about quite interesting. As one of the leading authorities of contemporary French Literature (he wrote the first book on Georges Perec) one knows they are in capable hands. His subjects in this book include J.M.G. Le Clezio, Eric Chevillard, Marie Ndiaye, Jean Echenoz, Jean-Philippe Toussaint. The book opens thus:

Readers familiar with the contemporary novel in France are currently witnessing, I believe, the most astonishing reinvigoration of French narrative prose since the “new novel” of the 1950s.

He then relates his appreciation for a wide array of literary output, but finds plenty of worthy novels “too bland, like eating fried eggs without salt.” He is interested in the avant-garde because that is the point of exploration, newness, unmapped territory, but acknowledges that much cutting-edge work is alienating for many readers, “forbidding.” Then he goes on to describe the “avant-garde with a human face…inaugurated in the novels of Raymond Queneau, and confirmed in those of Georges Perec.” This is the novel that, while pushing the reader’s thought processes and demanding some attention, “can also be read luxuriously.”

The essays are then devoted to texts whose worlds are usually that of the quotidian, told in largely simple narrative, but he finds in them larger contemporary, exploratory themes and specifically: “Each of the novels I deal with here seems to me to present – among the many other different things they may offer – a fable of the novel, a tale about the fate of that form, its problematic status, its limits, its possibilities.” In other words, though these books under consideration may not be outwardly avant-garde in the Joycean or Pynchonesque way we have come to understand the term, their operation is that of the cuckoo, infiltrating the bastion of conventional literature, while delivering games, tricks, assaults on language and form, and in their work, posing questions about the novel itself.

Berlin was known as one of those intellectual’s that could write on history, as it relates to ideas, as it relates to culture, as it relates to politics, a kind of cultural polymath. Famous for his writings about the Counter-Enlightenment and Two Concepts of Liberty, these essays (I have read about a third so far) are fascinating in their range. Not prepared to write anything like a review for this large collection of complicated material, I will say, as an initial foray into Berlin’s work, these essays right now, act as larger framework material for interpreting what I read in international literature and the arts. His ideas about the French Revolution and rationalism versus the oppositional thinkers such as Johann Hamann and Giambattista Vico leaves a lot to be considered. This is the kind of book (a collection of his most popular/well-known writings) that gives me the sense of its long being near at hand and referenced.

Valeria Luiselli’s Sidewalks, in contrast to Berlin’s essays, is totally digestible. Physically thin at just over 100 pages and comprised of mostly short paragraphs, that is not say it is insignificant in any way. Reading this book is like being in the company of a smart, philosophical, worldly, and cool person. It is a hybrid of personal and travel essay, ruminations on melancholy, nostalgia, movement in space. Written by a young, globally-experienced person, it does not feel hip or ironic, she may even be accused of being overly pondering, the kind of “sad” that I think may annoy the large group of get-in-capitalist-mediocre-line that is represented by those of us born in the 80s, and yet, I believe she captures underlying qualities that the aforementioned generation call disconnected, depressed, romantic. It is in writers such as Luiselli and Teju Cole, those who grew up in a post-Cold War global era, that discover obstinately “antiquated” or memorializing writers such as W.G. Sebald, that may prove an interesting way forward in contemporary thought. His emphasis on exile, interconnections, fictional reality, exile, anti-tech influenced prose, and memory are the legacy that will continue to influence. Remembrance, acknowledgement, open intellectualism, depression or melancholy as a popular condition of life, hauntology, global flaneurship in contemporary capitalist-surrounded cities, acceptance of immigrant cultural contributions are subjects I see Luiselli grappling with in this book.

New Criticism

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David Winters; Infinite Fictions: Essays on Literature and Theory; Zero Books, 2015

As a self-taught student of literature and theory, the internet has been my university. Easy access to the wide array of considerate writing and thoughts concerning contemporary literature, art and culture has been invaluable. As any reader that avails themselves of this sphere will know, the webs and pathways created through this source can widely open one’s awareness and pursuit of so much material that otherwise would perhaps remain distant, foreign, overwhelming. The “ivory tower” remains distant, impenetrable, self-concerned. And thus, from the interconnected and referential world of online critical output, I am grateful when I learn of books such as Infinite Fictions by David Winters. Such a book is quite refreshing because, whereas I quite enjoy the click-and-consume aspect of digital culture, bringing home a book of insightful, relevant and forward moving pieces such as this one unites the two sides of my reading life.

These short essays, or reviews, on contemporary literature and theory are so far excellent, in that Winters has the ability to create perceptive, considerable readings of these works, while maintaining an accessibility I quite value. He is not attempting to write over his readers’ heads, to wow them with his obvious knowledge, but serves to construct a bridge to works otherwise less known, or perhaps, to offer alternate ways of considering these works when read. Of course, some of the authors are quite highly regarded: Lydia Davis, Sam Lipsyte, Gordon Lish, Gerald Murnane, but the majority are those working on the forefront of contemporary literature, mostly lesser-known (at least to the main current of American literature) and Winters introduces the books and offers interesting commentary, without falling into the academic practice of doing a paragraph-by-paragraph deep analysis of the texts, but also succeeds in doing more than giving us a simple gloss of each paragraph illustrated with generous chunks of quoted text (which can be useful, but oftentimes this style of review feels exhaustive and less insightful than I would like). Instead, there is a middle ground of considerable analysis and general review.

From his somewhat personal reflections in the introduction, which again, feels like a fresh and approachable stage for the following pieces, one gets the notion that Winters is a passionate reader and thinker of what he’s read, and it is that marvel, that connection to his own life and the reading life within, that he brings to this work. Essentially, it is enthusiasm for the enrichment critical thought brings, not enthusiasm for showing others his critical thought, that seems to give this collection value beyond the ideas contained within.

With more of the book to get through, I find myself excited to follow Winters’ considerations, and after a reading I feel myself invigorated to seek those pathways in my own reading.