Tea at Trianon: Mystical Realism

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, October 16, 2023

Mystical Realism

From The Lamp:

Sometimes the Swedish Academy actually gets the Nobel Prize in Literature right, as it did this year when it gave the award to Jon Fosse. The Norwegian playwright and novelist doesn’t represent any particular identity or ideology: he is an introverted writer from rural western Norway who likes hiking in the forest and messing around in small boats on the fjord. Nor is he anything at all like his former student, Karl Ove Knausgård, the poster child for “autofiction,” where a blend of memoir and fiction circle around the author’s quotidian life, often at great length and rarely to memorable effect.

This is not to say that Fosse isn’t a writer of considerable intellectual passions and stylistic creativity. For many years he was a prolific playwright; it is said that his plays have been staged nearly a thousand times, the vast majority in Europe. But a little over a decade ago, feeling burned out with his theater work, he turned full-time to fiction writing. Around the same time he came to the conclusion that he had a serious alcohol problem and stopped drinking. The third major change was his reception into the Roman Catholic Church.

On this side of the Atlantic, the buzz about Fosse began with the publication of what may turn out to be his fictional magnum opus, Septology—a novel in seven parts (as its title indicates) but published in three volumes in a highly regarded translation by Damion Searls.

The opening words of Septology are:

And I see myself standing and looking at the picture with two lines that cross in the middle, one purple line, one brown line, it’s a painting wider than it is high and I see that I’ve painted the lines slowly, the paint is thick, two long wide lines, and they’ve dripped, where the brown line and purple line cross the colors blend beautifully and I’m thinking this isn’t a picture but suddenly the picture is the way it’s supposed to be, it’s done, there’s nothing more to do on it I think, it’s time to put it away, I don’t want to stand here at the easel any more, I don’t want to look at it any more

These words are spoken—or perhaps more accurately, thought—by Asle, a widower and a renowned painter who lives alone with his memories and who receives an occasional visit from his friend, Asleik, a gruff farmer and fisherman who motors over on his tractor for a shared meal. As the excerpt indicates—beginning mid-thought with a conjunction—we are immersed directly into Asle’s head in a sentence that will literally never end, as the final words of Septology also break off mid-stride. Fosse has called his style “slow prose”; his translator says “Fosse writes pure, repetitive, musical phrases in a stripped-down vocabulary.”

Some have compared Fosse to Samuel Beckett, but the Norwegian’s prose is far more accessible than the Irishman’s. No doubt it owes much to the strain of modernism that tends toward minimalism, but the spirit and intent of this stripping down is more warmly human and approachable than that of his twentieth-century influences. Fosse might be considered an acquired taste, but the bar of entry isn’t high: Septology is the kind of novel that teaches you how to read it. The mental adjustment is entirely manageable. (Read more.)