Navigating the perilous chaos of memories with Jon Fosse

At a certain point, the stream of memories grows dim. Thus, every certainty experiences its own winter. What secret lies hidden in the infinite album of lives?

“Lei è Ales”, a novel by Jon Fosse first published in Norway in 2004 and now finally available in bookshops from La Nave di Teseo, foreshadows the themes of the monumental “Settologia” (the only work consisting of seven parts, divided into three volumes published by the same publisher).

It tells of a love, a bereavement and a wait. Twenty-three years have now passed; it is 2002, and Signe is still conversing with Asle – or rather, with his absence. Signe and the fisherman Asle live alone in the house by the sea, once inhabited by his parents and, before that, by his ancestors. One day in late November 1979, a Tuesday, Asle’s small wooden boat was found empty, adrift, against the rocks of the foreshore, in the Bay (symbolic places); it would later be burnt in the bonfire of St John the Baptist, the martyr, described in the Gospel as ‘a lamp that burns and shines’, just like the fire that Signe stokes with shards of pottery in the stove.

Asle was named after his great-great-grandmother Ales and her grandson, who bore the same name; he was the brother of his grandfather Olav and died in the Bay at the age of seven, on his birthday – also in November – whilst playing with a half-metre-long toy boat, fully equipped, which his father Kristoffer (Asle Senior’s great-grandfather and Ales’s son) had built for him as a present. The date was 17 November 1897.

But what desire drives the fisherman Asle to leave his home and ride the waves out to the Luminous Fjord, despite the bad weather?

As the years go by, it can sometimes happen that the flow of memories, which once ran placidly, gradually becomes turbulent, initially diverted from its course by some unforeseen obstacle, or by a sudden drought, until it comes to resemble a dark, storm-tossed sea, so tumultuous as to swallow up the boats carrying the memories that have been brought to safety. At the same time, the will to hold the helm may wane under the sheer weight and pain that every recollection brings with it, for it is what once was and is no longer. Yet it comes and goes, like a wave that suddenly recedes, much like a broken promise. The vessel becomes riddled with holes and the very possibility of navigating the chaos of overlapping images fades away. Yet this “endgame” is not definitive; for Fosse, memories resurface. The Nobel Prize-winning writer, who converted to Catholicism in 2012, explicitly quotes Beckett and Meister Eckhart in “I Am Another” (the second volume of the “Septology”). ‘Silent Boat’ is the title of a painting that another Asle – the painter who is the novel’s protagonist – gives to his friend Åsleik. It depicts a brown and purple boat, veiled in shimmering dots of light. But what lies hidden within this luminous veil of darkness? Asle recalls his encounters with his namesake – also a painter, who resembles him: a double who, however, has lost himself to alcohol – particularly in the pub in Bjørgvin, a setting known as ‘The Last Boat’.

In the depths, a mysterious image seems to weave the threads of memories and destinies: as intimate and luminous as it is obscure – resembling nothing visible for ‘it is there without existing’ – it propels and obscures the currents of memory; it seems to create the very essence of the language that evokes them, just as a spring gives life to a river. Meister Eckhart writes in The Eternal Birth: ‘The image painted in the artist’s mind is art itself, whereby the painter is the source of the depicted image. And this is what the words “God was the Word” mean.’