The novels of the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse are full of doubles. His characters often share names, and sometimes appearance and personality. Namesakes exist alongside one another within a world, but also in different fictional worlds as more or less altered versions of one another, elements of a Fosse condensed universe. In Septology, Fosse’s major prose work, there are two painters, Asle and Asle. There is another Asle in an earlier novel, Trilogy. Fosse also has two different Aleses: the deceased wife of the first Asle in Septology, and another who is the great-great-grandmother of a third man named Asle in Aliss at the Fire (the spelling of “Ales” only differs in the English translation to avoid implying a scene of rustic boozing).
In Fosse’s most recent work, the short novel Vaim—published in English this past October and his first since receiving the Nobel Prize in 2023—we find no doubles as such, but two of the main characters are marked by parallel encounters with a woman named Eline. And though they are not namesakes, their names are significant. Middle-aged Jatgeir, who once pined for Eline in his youth, rests on his boat—which he has named Eline—after a long day. Eline appears, seemingly out of nowhere. She boards with a suitcase, abandoning her husband, and they live together until Jatgeir’s death. The novel later assumes the perspective of Olaf, the fisherman Eline has left for Jatgeir, who recalls his first encounter with Eline: she picked him up, inexplicably calling him “Frank,” from a restaurant where he was celebrating a big catch. After a drunken dance, she effectively orders him to take her home on his boat, where they live together until she leaves him for Jatgeir. Neither Olaf nor Jatgeir can explain quite what has happened to them. At the close of the novel, once Eline herself has died, all Olaf can say is that “everything was strange.”
In both Vaim and Septology Fosse conjures an atmosphere all his own, at once dreamlike and mundane, in which characters acquiesce to what in their lives is most baffling. Consider Asle and Asle, who, as several critics have noted, break with the classic literary trope of the doppelgänger. Doppelgängers are typically unsettling beings (they’re one of the paradigmatic examples in Freud’s famous remarks on the “uncanny”). Yet in Septology Asle and Asle are not horrified to discover one another, or that they share the same name and physiognomy, a gift for painting and a weakness for drink, as well as specific sartorial idiosyncrasies (velvet jackets, leather satchels). The closest the first Asle comes to being truly unsettled is when noting that the second Asle isn’t unsettled by their resemblances at all.
Septology comprises seven parts, divided into three volumes, the entirety of which consists of a single sentence. Each part is a day in the life of its protagonist, the middle-aged painter and widower Asle, and each ends in his reciting a prayer. Much of the action that does not consist in memories of Asle’s difficult past arises from his attempt to help the other Asle, who we meet early on in the first volume, The Other Name. It is an unconventional introduction. What initially seems to be the first Asle’s anxious daydream—he feels guilty for not having stopped in to see his namesake on his way home from town—morphs into the second Asle’s stream of consciousness. The second Asle is making an effort to stir himself from the couch and drink enough of something to ease his tremors; he struggles to summon the strength to get to the nearby bar. We stay with the other Asle for some time, a stretch of text too detailed and vivid to have been a dream, before we finally return to the first Asle. The first Asle is gripped by the thought that he simply must make the long drive back at night to find his namesake, only to discover him lying unconscious in the snow near his house.
What is happening here? Fosse offers a clue in his Nobel lecture: “The first Asle and the other Asle may well be the same person.” This is not a spoiler (Septology isn’t Fight Club…). But if the first Asle is literally the second Asle, the novel appears to no longer make sense. Asle discovering Asle lying unconscious in the street, his taking him to the hospital, his surviving his death by at least a few days—his memories and reflections on their past encounters, their different families and lovers—all this simply disintegrates and the narrative unravels. What Fosse says nevertheless feels right. What more can one say except that it makes poetic sense?
Consider Fosse’s clue in context:
There is a silent language behind the written language in the novels, and if I’m to write good literature, this silent speech must also be expressed, for instance in Septology, it is this silent language, to use a couple of simple, concrete examples, that says that the first Asle and the other Asle may well be the same person, and that the whole long novel, of around 1200 pages, is perhaps just a written expression of one extracted now.
What is this “silent language” behind the written one? How can a silent language “say” anything—let alone that the first Asle and the other Asle are the same person? Fosse continues:
But a silent address, or a silent language, speaks mostly from the totality of a work. Whether it is a novel or a play, or a theatre production, it is not the parts themselves that are important, it is the totality, which also must be in every single detail—or perhaps I may dare to talk about the spirit of the totality, a spirit that in a way speaks from both close and far away.
And what do you hear then, if you listen closely enough?
You hear the silence.
And as it has been said, it is only in the silence that you can hear God’s voice.
It is perhaps unsurprising, against the backdrop of remarks like this from the author, that reviewers and critics have struggled to communicate the ultimate significance of Asle and his namesake—and hence of Septology itself. The impression they give is of someone treading the circumference of a circle whose center they cannot bring themselves to describe. Take Ruth Margalit’s 2021 review in the New York Review of Books: “I hesitate to compare the experience of reading these works to the act of meditation. But that is the closest I can come to describing how something in the critical self is shed in the process of reading Fosse.” Or consider Merve Emre’s striking confession in Bookforum:
To describe what Septology is about—or even to claim that it is about something that can be fixed in words—is already to defile it. Perhaps it would be simpler to say that reading it is the closest I have come to feeling the presence of God here on earth.
For these critics, at the heart of Septology lies something fundamentally incommunicable. Fosse himself often cites the famous, or perhaps infamous, proposition with which the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein concludes the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof what one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.”
It can seem, then, that to try to say something about the essence of Fosse’s work is to go against the wisdom of the author as well as his most sensitive readers—and so perhaps to violate the spirit of the work itself. But Fosse always adds what he calls Jacques Derrida’s “twist” to Wittgenstein’s proposition: what we cannot say “must be written” instead.
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In an attempt to explain to the publisher of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus what this work—at once cryptically aphoristic and formidably technical—was all about, Wittgenstein provided the following clue:
I once wanted to include a sentence in the preface which doesn’t in fact appear there now. But I am writing it to you now because it might serve you as a key: For I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: the one you have in front of you and all that I have not written. And just that second part is the important one. Because the ethical is delimited by my book as it were from within; and I am convinced that strictly it can only be delimited like that. In short, I believe: Everything that many are blathering about today, I settled by being silent about it.
The similarities with Fosse’s Nobel lecture are remarkable. Both refer to a “second,” unwritten book that somehow contains the true significance of the first. Wittgenstein identifies his unwritten book as silent, and capable of fulfilling its ethical purpose only insofar as it is silent. Fosse describes his “unwritten” book as written in a silent language. Only insofar as this unwritten book gets “expressed” will the result be “good literature.” In each we find the book and its silent double.
What to make of these twin silences? It would be an error to confuse the philosopher’s purpose in writing with that of the poet. Yet Wittgenstein and Fosse, each in their own way, recognize that the “ineffable”—that which cannot be said—lies within, rather than beyond, language.
For Wittgenstein this insight was essential for understanding thought’s relation to reality. Wittgenstein held that language depicts the world. In a simple sentence, like “the cat is on the mat” or “gas prices are rising,” the different parts stand for, and thus represent, objects in the world. But they aren’t just jumbles of words. They have a structure, one they share with the world they depict. Wittgenstein’s originality was in recognizing that this shared structure is not an object like any other, and thus not something that can be put into words. As Wittgenstein says, “That which mirrors itself in language, language cannot represent. That which expresses itself in language, we cannot express by language.” What cannot be said which shows itself—“the ineffable,” or “the mystical,” as Wittgenstein also dubbed it—does not transcend language, but neither does it transcend the world.
The existence of the world can seem to call for explanation—“Why is there something rather than nothing?” The traditional answer, of course, being God. But for Wittgenstein, any attempt to answer the question will be confused, as if the world itself were just one more fact to be explained (albeit a very special one), and thus can only result in nonsense. What is mystical, according to Wittgenstein, is not “how the world is, but that it is”—the existence of any facts at all. To find the existence of the world mystical is not to grasp any special truths or uncover any sublime realities that language is somehow too “weak” to express. It is to confront it with wonder.
For many years, in addition to his dramatic and prose works, Fosse wrote a number of short pieces of literary theory. Yet despite his obvious attraction to Wittgenstein’s infamous remark about what cannot be said, he never addresses Wittgenstein’s philosophy directly.1 He is, however, the subject of a brief piece that is not easily categorizable as theory or criticism in the usual sense. Among the many memorable features of Wittgenstein’s biography is that he once built a hut in Norway where he could work on logic in solitude, away from the stifling social and intellectual climate of Cambridge. Fosse begins by noting the pride a Norwegian can feel in knowing that a great thinker chose to live among their people, their landscape, in order to work. He then turns to the personal remarks Wittgenstein recorded in his diary around that time—thoughts about suicide, his waiting for the sun to rise—and observes that Wittgenstein’s notion of the “inexpressible” is “resolutely related to art, ethics and religiosity,” and that “he declares on the first page of the diary that writing is a gift which may be taken from you at any moment.” Here things become stranger, and it gets harder and harder to disentangle Fosse’s reports on Wittgenstein’s reflections from Fosse’s own thinking. By the end of the essay, we find a similar moment to the one in Septology, the seamless transition of consciousness to consciousness that links Asle and Asle:
I am not able to write
Please help me God.
Will I be able to dedicate what I write to God?
Shall I give away the jersey I bought in Bergen?
I thank God for having found solitude in Norway.
Why do we say God created the world, not that he creates it?
I think about food all the time.
This essay may be more helpful in gauging Fosse’s true orientation toward literature and the divine than his more explicitly theoretical reflections. Fosse’s doubling of Wittgenstein’s own diary, his peculiar assumption of the first person in the close of the essay, marks a break—to an almost outrageous degree—with his usual humility in handling other writers. It expresses, without stating, a felt kinship on Fosse’s part.
In 2010, Fosse explained his decision to finally abandon literary theory altogether in an essay titled “The Gnosis of Writing.” (Gnosis is an ancient Greek word for knowledge, but in the mystical tradition Fosse alludes to it refers to the attainment of direct, nondiscursive understanding of God and, through it, salvation from an evil material world.) In writing plays and novels, Fosse says, he “knows more” than he does in any of his writing about plays and novels—of which he reports knowing “less and less.” He describes his writing as “an insight which cannot be spoken.” But what is the insight Fosse actually describes? Crucially it is not “about” anything—for it has no topic—like the world it simply “exists.” And at the same time, it just is the writing—the novels and plays anyone can read.
Fosse, I believe, realized that his literary theory had, all along, been attempting to say something about writing that was already, and could only be, shown through it. So he chose to let the work, as it were, speak for itself—silently. When Fosse does try to tell us what the “silent” language of Septology says—that Asle and Asle are the same person—he inevitably winds up talking nonsense. For he is, as Wittgenstein would say, running up against the limits of language, any attempt to get past which is “perfectly, hopelessly useless.” Even so, perhaps something is shown in the attempt.
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Here is a clue of my own: we can read Septology, in its totality, as a commentary on a different line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “The world of the happy and the unhappy are different.”
What is the difference between Asle and his namesake? While one found true love, and through true love, also God, the other did not. We may refer to them, thus, as “happy Asle” and “unhappy Asle.” While happy Asle found Ales, unhappy Asle had two disastrous marriages and poor relations with his children. Because he did not find his Ales, he did not come to appreciate, to feel the presence of, the divine. It is only that appreciation, that wonder, happy Asle admits, that has kept him from unhappy Asle’s downward spiral. Everything else is the same. Same appearance, same talents, same habits and personality, same predisposition to booze. What separates them are things of grace: love and faith. These things are not happy Asle’s doing, nor features of his character or person. The difference between Asle and Asle, considered in themselves, is, quite literally, nothing. In what way, then, might their worlds be different?
In an important way their worlds are of course one and the same. The world, such as it is, is made up of the totality of facts, of what can truly be said. (The first line of the Tractatus states: “The world is everything that is the case.”) What differs between them, then, lies not in the world, in its facts, but in its “limits.” Directly before contrasting the happy and the unhappy Wittgenstein states:
If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.
That the difference between happy Asle and unhappy Asle is irreducible to the facts as they stand is shown by there being no fact on which they reach different verdicts. And there is no fact that can explain the different paths their lives have taken. There is only their willing, good and bad, according to which the world “waxes and wanes as a whole.”
And yet don’t they precisely disagree on the most important thing: God? Yes and no. Asle says to his friend Åsleik that “to think that without God nothing would exist, but because God isn’t anything He is separate from the world of created things, where everything has a limit … He’s not a thing, in other words He’s nothing.” To which Åsleik responds: “That’s not something a person can believe in, is it? there’s no point in believing in nothing, is there?” After all, isn’t “nothing” what Åsleik, a skeptic, could be said to believe in too? What, then, distinguishes Asle from Åsleik (and from the unhappy Asle too)? Asle answers:
we agree on that point, we do, but it’s also wrong to say that God is nothing because at the same time He is all, everything all together, because what I think, I say, is that since nothing can exist without God sustaining it, without God having made it exist, given it being, as they put it, then it’s He who is, it’s He that everything has in common, yes, God says about Himself, about what we should call Him, that His name is I AM, I say
Now that I don’t understand, Åsleik says
No, I don’t really understand it either, I say
God does not simply figure, here, as a sustaining cause of the world—as an answer to the question: “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” For he “isn’t anything.” He is not one of the things that has a limit, existence, thinghood. In this sense he is nothing, and to disagree about him is to disagree about nothing at all. At the same time, Asle insists that “without God nothing would exist” and “God is what ‘everything’”—the world and language—“has in common.” His name is that he is.
The difference between Asle and Asle is nothing. It is the difference between the world, the totality of facts, felt as miracle, as redeemed or redeemable, and the world felt merely as facts, facts and more facts. Septology is a picture of that difference—the nothingness that separates the happy from the unhappy. And that is why the totality of the work can only be expressed as silence.
Vaim also depicts the nothing separating the world of the happy and the unhappy. It does so, however, more from the perspective of love than faith. Jatgeir’s real name, we learn, is just Geir, but because he always said “yes, yes, yes…” as a child (“Ja”) he was nicknamed Jatgeir. It captures his essential passivity, his going along with things. It is also a premonition of Eline’s mysterious summons many years later: “Jatgeir,” i.e. “Yes, Geir!,” she calls from outside his boat, at last recognizing and affirming his love. And when as a youth, apparently resigning himself to one fate, Jatgeir romantically names his boat Eline, he has perhaps summoned her after all. Olaf also receives a new name over which he has had no say. Eline’s name for Olaf, “Frank,” has no rhyme nor reason to it. He finds it absurd but senses it is useless to argue. He cannot resist fate. And this is his entire life with Eline: an empty, almost sterile fate.
Fate is what belongs most to you and what, at the same time, lies firmly beyond your control. Your given name is, along with the people who gave it to you, the first fact of fate. Neither Olaf nor Jatgeir can explain the mystery of their lives, but Jatgeir’s mystery is, even so, the mystery of love—a mystery felt as a wondrous revelation in contrast to the blanker, if not quite pained, bemusement with which Olaf recalls his own life. Jatgeir’s fate is no more explicable than Olaf’s. What matters is the difference in how they each are related to the limits of what, in life, is explicable. That is the difference between happiness and unhappiness.
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A poet is stung to creation, not by the problems of philosophy, but by what Wittgenstein names the “problem of life.” This is not a practical problem, not in the ordinary sense, but rather a problem posed by life as a whole—as a totality. Wittgenstein says:
The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.
(Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting, the meaning of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?)
The problem of life is not the kind of problem that can be solved, since it cannot be meaningfully stated in the first place. The solution consists in the disappearance of the sense that there is a problem to solve:
For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed.
The riddle does not exist.
That the riddle is not a real question—is not one whose answer can be articulated—does not, however, mean it is not a real problem. Literature is one expression after another of the problem. It assumes many guises.
Consider the most famous question in all literature: “To be or not to be?” Consider the difficulties that separate the unhappy families that interest the novelist from the happy families that Tolstoy says are all the same (and of whom no one writes). Consider the problem of history as a nightmare from which Stephen Dedalus cannot awake. Consider Marcel’s attempt to recover the lost time that constitutes the whole of one’s life. Consider too the problem that Asle, when just a child, confronts and cannot surmount, at the funeral of his younger sister, who without explanation has died in her sleep, when he thinks life is simply meaningless and that God cannot make any sense of it. It is the problem Asle has spent his life responding to in painting:
I didn’t want to be good at it, I wanted to paint just so that I could say something that couldn’t be said any other way, yes, paint from a faraway closeness, that’s how I think about it … all the paintings I’ve ever painted go together and make up a single picture, I think, it’s like there’s a picture somewhere or other inside me that’s my innermost picture, that I try again and again to paint away, and the closer I get to that picture the better the picture I’ve painted is, but the innermost picture isn’t actually a picture of course, because the innermost picture doesn’t exist, it just is in a way, without existing, it is but it doesn’t exist, and somehow it’s as if the picture that isn’t a picture sort of leads all the other pictures and pulls them in, kind of, I think,
Asle’s innermost picture, which, like his God, is but doesn’t exist, is the painter’s equivalent to Fosse’s own “silent language.” It is the nothing from which his art originates.
Fosse begins his Nobel lecture by recalling a fateful moment when, as a schoolboy, he was called upon to read aloud in class and couldn’t bring himself to—he simply couldn’t speak. His writing, he confesses, was that through which he managed to reclaim language for himself. We should not hear this, I think, as a straightforwardly triumphant story—certainly not as a triumph over silence. I would instead prefer to say that Fosse’s stunned silence was, thankfully, never overcome. In that moment Fosse found precisely what he could not say—and from that everything followed.
Art credits: Xiangjie Rebecca Wu, Can I Dwell in a Lacuna, 2025. Oil on linen, 30 × 40 in. Courtesy of the artist.
The novels of the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse are full of doubles. His characters often share names, and sometimes appearance and personality. Namesakes exist alongside one another within a world, but also in different fictional worlds as more or less altered versions of one another, elements of a Fosse condensed universe. In Septology, Fosse’s major prose work, there are two painters, Asle and Asle. There is another Asle in an earlier novel, Trilogy. Fosse also has two different Aleses: the deceased wife of the first Asle in Septology, and another who is the great-great-grandmother of a third man named Asle in Aliss at the Fire (the spelling of “Ales” only differs in the English translation to avoid implying a scene of rustic boozing).
In Fosse’s most recent work, the short novel Vaim—published in English this past October and his first since receiving the Nobel Prize in 2023—we find no doubles as such, but two of the main characters are marked by parallel encounters with a woman named Eline. And though they are not namesakes, their names are significant. Middle-aged Jatgeir, who once pined for Eline in his youth, rests on his boat—which he has named Eline—after a long day. Eline appears, seemingly out of nowhere. She boards with a suitcase, abandoning her husband, and they live together until Jatgeir’s death. The novel later assumes the perspective of Olaf, the fisherman Eline has left for Jatgeir, who recalls his first encounter with Eline: she picked him up, inexplicably calling him “Frank,” from a restaurant where he was celebrating a big catch. After a drunken dance, she effectively orders him to take her home on his boat, where they live together until she leaves him for Jatgeir. Neither Olaf nor Jatgeir can explain quite what has happened to them. At the close of the novel, once Eline herself has died, all Olaf can say is that “everything was strange.”
In both Vaim and Septology Fosse conjures an atmosphere all his own, at once dreamlike and mundane, in which characters acquiesce to what in their lives is most baffling. Consider Asle and Asle, who, as several critics have noted, break with the classic literary trope of the doppelgänger. Doppelgängers are typically unsettling beings (they’re one of the paradigmatic examples in Freud’s famous remarks on the “uncanny”). Yet in Septology Asle and Asle are not horrified to discover one another, or that they share the same name and physiognomy, a gift for painting and a weakness for drink, as well as specific sartorial idiosyncrasies (velvet jackets, leather satchels). The closest the first Asle comes to being truly unsettled is when noting that the second Asle isn’t unsettled by their resemblances at all.
Septology comprises seven parts, divided into three volumes, the entirety of which consists of a single sentence. Each part is a day in the life of its protagonist, the middle-aged painter and widower Asle, and each ends in his reciting a prayer. Much of the action that does not consist in memories of Asle’s difficult past arises from his attempt to help the other Asle, who we meet early on in the first volume, The Other Name. It is an unconventional introduction. What initially seems to be the first Asle’s anxious daydream—he feels guilty for not having stopped in to see his namesake on his way home from town—morphs into the second Asle’s stream of consciousness. The second Asle is making an effort to stir himself from the couch and drink enough of something to ease his tremors; he struggles to summon the strength to get to the nearby bar. We stay with the other Asle for some time, a stretch of text too detailed and vivid to have been a dream, before we finally return to the first Asle. The first Asle is gripped by the thought that he simply must make the long drive back at night to find his namesake, only to discover him lying unconscious in the snow near his house.
What is happening here? Fosse offers a clue in his Nobel lecture: “The first Asle and the other Asle may well be the same person.” This is not a spoiler (Septology isn’t Fight Club…). But if the first Asle is literally the second Asle, the novel appears to no longer make sense. Asle discovering Asle lying unconscious in the street, his taking him to the hospital, his surviving his death by at least a few days—his memories and reflections on their past encounters, their different families and lovers—all this simply disintegrates and the narrative unravels. What Fosse says nevertheless feels right. What more can one say except that it makes poetic sense?
Consider Fosse’s clue in context:
What is this “silent language” behind the written one? How can a silent language “say” anything—let alone that the first Asle and the other Asle are the same person? Fosse continues:
It is perhaps unsurprising, against the backdrop of remarks like this from the author, that reviewers and critics have struggled to communicate the ultimate significance of Asle and his namesake—and hence of Septology itself. The impression they give is of someone treading the circumference of a circle whose center they cannot bring themselves to describe. Take Ruth Margalit’s 2021 review in the New York Review of Books: “I hesitate to compare the experience of reading these works to the act of meditation. But that is the closest I can come to describing how something in the critical self is shed in the process of reading Fosse.” Or consider Merve Emre’s striking confession in Bookforum:
For these critics, at the heart of Septology lies something fundamentally incommunicable. Fosse himself often cites the famous, or perhaps infamous, proposition with which the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein concludes the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof what one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.”
It can seem, then, that to try to say something about the essence of Fosse’s work is to go against the wisdom of the author as well as his most sensitive readers—and so perhaps to violate the spirit of the work itself. But Fosse always adds what he calls Jacques Derrida’s “twist” to Wittgenstein’s proposition: what we cannot say “must be written” instead.
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In an attempt to explain to the publisher of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus what this work—at once cryptically aphoristic and formidably technical—was all about, Wittgenstein provided the following clue:
The similarities with Fosse’s Nobel lecture are remarkable. Both refer to a “second,” unwritten book that somehow contains the true significance of the first. Wittgenstein identifies his unwritten book as silent, and capable of fulfilling its ethical purpose only insofar as it is silent. Fosse describes his “unwritten” book as written in a silent language. Only insofar as this unwritten book gets “expressed” will the result be “good literature.” In each we find the book and its silent double.
What to make of these twin silences? It would be an error to confuse the philosopher’s purpose in writing with that of the poet. Yet Wittgenstein and Fosse, each in their own way, recognize that the “ineffable”—that which cannot be said—lies within, rather than beyond, language.
For Wittgenstein this insight was essential for understanding thought’s relation to reality. Wittgenstein held that language depicts the world. In a simple sentence, like “the cat is on the mat” or “gas prices are rising,” the different parts stand for, and thus represent, objects in the world. But they aren’t just jumbles of words. They have a structure, one they share with the world they depict. Wittgenstein’s originality was in recognizing that this shared structure is not an object like any other, and thus not something that can be put into words. As Wittgenstein says, “That which mirrors itself in language, language cannot represent. That which expresses itself in language, we cannot express by language.” What cannot be said which shows itself—“the ineffable,” or “the mystical,” as Wittgenstein also dubbed it—does not transcend language, but neither does it transcend the world.
The existence of the world can seem to call for explanation—“Why is there something rather than nothing?” The traditional answer, of course, being God. But for Wittgenstein, any attempt to answer the question will be confused, as if the world itself were just one more fact to be explained (albeit a very special one), and thus can only result in nonsense. What is mystical, according to Wittgenstein, is not “how the world is, but that it is”—the existence of any facts at all. To find the existence of the world mystical is not to grasp any special truths or uncover any sublime realities that language is somehow too “weak” to express. It is to confront it with wonder.
For many years, in addition to his dramatic and prose works, Fosse wrote a number of short pieces of literary theory. Yet despite his obvious attraction to Wittgenstein’s infamous remark about what cannot be said, he never addresses Wittgenstein’s philosophy directly.1At least with respect to what is available in translation, as collected in An Angel Walks Through the Stage and Other Essays. He is, however, the subject of a brief piece that is not easily categorizable as theory or criticism in the usual sense. Among the many memorable features of Wittgenstein’s biography is that he once built a hut in Norway where he could work on logic in solitude, away from the stifling social and intellectual climate of Cambridge. Fosse begins by noting the pride a Norwegian can feel in knowing that a great thinker chose to live among their people, their landscape, in order to work. He then turns to the personal remarks Wittgenstein recorded in his diary around that time—thoughts about suicide, his waiting for the sun to rise—and observes that Wittgenstein’s notion of the “inexpressible” is “resolutely related to art, ethics and religiosity,” and that “he declares on the first page of the diary that writing is a gift which may be taken from you at any moment.” Here things become stranger, and it gets harder and harder to disentangle Fosse’s reports on Wittgenstein’s reflections from Fosse’s own thinking. By the end of the essay, we find a similar moment to the one in Septology, the seamless transition of consciousness to consciousness that links Asle and Asle:
This essay may be more helpful in gauging Fosse’s true orientation toward literature and the divine than his more explicitly theoretical reflections. Fosse’s doubling of Wittgenstein’s own diary, his peculiar assumption of the first person in the close of the essay, marks a break—to an almost outrageous degree—with his usual humility in handling other writers. It expresses, without stating, a felt kinship on Fosse’s part.
In 2010, Fosse explained his decision to finally abandon literary theory altogether in an essay titled “The Gnosis of Writing.” (Gnosis is an ancient Greek word for knowledge, but in the mystical tradition Fosse alludes to it refers to the attainment of direct, nondiscursive understanding of God and, through it, salvation from an evil material world.) In writing plays and novels, Fosse says, he “knows more” than he does in any of his writing about plays and novels—of which he reports knowing “less and less.” He describes his writing as “an insight which cannot be spoken.” But what is the insight Fosse actually describes? Crucially it is not “about” anything—for it has no topic—like the world it simply “exists.” And at the same time, it just is the writing—the novels and plays anyone can read.
Fosse, I believe, realized that his literary theory had, all along, been attempting to say something about writing that was already, and could only be, shown through it. So he chose to let the work, as it were, speak for itself—silently. When Fosse does try to tell us what the “silent” language of Septology says—that Asle and Asle are the same person—he inevitably winds up talking nonsense. For he is, as Wittgenstein would say, running up against the limits of language, any attempt to get past which is “perfectly, hopelessly useless.” Even so, perhaps something is shown in the attempt.
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Here is a clue of my own: we can read Septology, in its totality, as a commentary on a different line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “The world of the happy and the unhappy are different.”
What is the difference between Asle and his namesake? While one found true love, and through true love, also God, the other did not. We may refer to them, thus, as “happy Asle” and “unhappy Asle.” While happy Asle found Ales, unhappy Asle had two disastrous marriages and poor relations with his children. Because he did not find his Ales, he did not come to appreciate, to feel the presence of, the divine. It is only that appreciation, that wonder, happy Asle admits, that has kept him from unhappy Asle’s downward spiral. Everything else is the same. Same appearance, same talents, same habits and personality, same predisposition to booze. What separates them are things of grace: love and faith. These things are not happy Asle’s doing, nor features of his character or person. The difference between Asle and Asle, considered in themselves, is, quite literally, nothing. In what way, then, might their worlds be different?
In an important way their worlds are of course one and the same. The world, such as it is, is made up of the totality of facts, of what can truly be said. (The first line of the Tractatus states: “The world is everything that is the case.”) What differs between them, then, lies not in the world, in its facts, but in its “limits.” Directly before contrasting the happy and the unhappy Wittgenstein states:
That the difference between happy Asle and unhappy Asle is irreducible to the facts as they stand is shown by there being no fact on which they reach different verdicts. And there is no fact that can explain the different paths their lives have taken. There is only their willing, good and bad, according to which the world “waxes and wanes as a whole.”
And yet don’t they precisely disagree on the most important thing: God? Yes and no. Asle says to his friend Åsleik that “to think that without God nothing would exist, but because God isn’t anything He is separate from the world of created things, where everything has a limit … He’s not a thing, in other words He’s nothing.” To which Åsleik responds: “That’s not something a person can believe in, is it? there’s no point in believing in nothing, is there?” After all, isn’t “nothing” what Åsleik, a skeptic, could be said to believe in too? What, then, distinguishes Asle from Åsleik (and from the unhappy Asle too)? Asle answers:
God does not simply figure, here, as a sustaining cause of the world—as an answer to the question: “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” For he “isn’t anything.” He is not one of the things that has a limit, existence, thinghood. In this sense he is nothing, and to disagree about him is to disagree about nothing at all. At the same time, Asle insists that “without God nothing would exist” and “God is what ‘everything’”—the world and language—“has in common.” His name is that he is.
The difference between Asle and Asle is nothing. It is the difference between the world, the totality of facts, felt as miracle, as redeemed or redeemable, and the world felt merely as facts, facts and more facts. Septology is a picture of that difference—the nothingness that separates the happy from the unhappy. And that is why the totality of the work can only be expressed as silence.
Vaim also depicts the nothing separating the world of the happy and the unhappy. It does so, however, more from the perspective of love than faith. Jatgeir’s real name, we learn, is just Geir, but because he always said “yes, yes, yes…” as a child (“Ja”) he was nicknamed Jatgeir. It captures his essential passivity, his going along with things. It is also a premonition of Eline’s mysterious summons many years later: “Jatgeir,” i.e. “Yes, Geir!,” she calls from outside his boat, at last recognizing and affirming his love. And when as a youth, apparently resigning himself to one fate, Jatgeir romantically names his boat Eline, he has perhaps summoned her after all. Olaf also receives a new name over which he has had no say. Eline’s name for Olaf, “Frank,” has no rhyme nor reason to it. He finds it absurd but senses it is useless to argue. He cannot resist fate. And this is his entire life with Eline: an empty, almost sterile fate.
Fate is what belongs most to you and what, at the same time, lies firmly beyond your control. Your given name is, along with the people who gave it to you, the first fact of fate. Neither Olaf nor Jatgeir can explain the mystery of their lives, but Jatgeir’s mystery is, even so, the mystery of love—a mystery felt as a wondrous revelation in contrast to the blanker, if not quite pained, bemusement with which Olaf recalls his own life. Jatgeir’s fate is no more explicable than Olaf’s. What matters is the difference in how they each are related to the limits of what, in life, is explicable. That is the difference between happiness and unhappiness.
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A poet is stung to creation, not by the problems of philosophy, but by what Wittgenstein names the “problem of life.” This is not a practical problem, not in the ordinary sense, but rather a problem posed by life as a whole—as a totality. Wittgenstein says:
The problem of life is not the kind of problem that can be solved, since it cannot be meaningfully stated in the first place. The solution consists in the disappearance of the sense that there is a problem to solve:
That the riddle is not a real question—is not one whose answer can be articulated—does not, however, mean it is not a real problem. Literature is one expression after another of the problem. It assumes many guises.
Consider the most famous question in all literature: “To be or not to be?” Consider the difficulties that separate the unhappy families that interest the novelist from the happy families that Tolstoy says are all the same (and of whom no one writes). Consider the problem of history as a nightmare from which Stephen Dedalus cannot awake. Consider Marcel’s attempt to recover the lost time that constitutes the whole of one’s life. Consider too the problem that Asle, when just a child, confronts and cannot surmount, at the funeral of his younger sister, who without explanation has died in her sleep, when he thinks life is simply meaningless and that God cannot make any sense of it. It is the problem Asle has spent his life responding to in painting:
Asle’s innermost picture, which, like his God, is but doesn’t exist, is the painter’s equivalent to Fosse’s own “silent language.” It is the nothing from which his art originates.
Fosse begins his Nobel lecture by recalling a fateful moment when, as a schoolboy, he was called upon to read aloud in class and couldn’t bring himself to—he simply couldn’t speak. His writing, he confesses, was that through which he managed to reclaim language for himself. We should not hear this, I think, as a straightforwardly triumphant story—certainly not as a triumph over silence. I would instead prefer to say that Fosse’s stunned silence was, thankfully, never overcome. In that moment Fosse found precisely what he could not say—and from that everything followed.
Art credits: Xiangjie Rebecca Wu, Can I Dwell in a Lacuna, 2025. Oil on linen, 30 × 40 in. Courtesy of the artist.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.