Catholic writers can convey their Faith beautifully in their prose. Evelyn Waugh managed to insert Catholic characters in his novels. Tolkien created an entire world with its own unique language, yet it is clear to those who read him with attention that he was inspired by his Catholic Faith. The writing of Nordic Catholics is less widely known. But they have long been out there and shatter the illusion of a wholly Protestant, or even pagan, Northern land – as this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has again reminded us.
Earlier in December, Jon Fosse (b. 1959), a Norwegian Catholic, whose literature is imbued with the Catholic mystical tradition, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on 7 December. He joins Norwegian Catholic writer Sigrid Undset, who was awarded the prize in 1928 for her writing about the medieval Catholic world of Scandinavia.
Even the most peripheral locations aren’t denied access to God’s universal grace. The frigid lands of Scandinavia have yielded some of the most well-known authors of world literature: Henrik Ibsen in Norway and H. C. Andersen in Denmark.
Despite their remote and silent existence, Scandinavians often seem particularly capable of probing the human condition to say something that resonates with readers across the world. So it is with Knut Hamsun (1859-1952), in many ways the father of modern Norwegian literature; Karl Ove Knausgaard (b. 1968), with his monumental autobiographical fiction My Struggle (6 volumes, published 2009-2011); and now with this year’s new Nobel Laureate in Literature.
Known primarily for his plays which were frequently performed during the 1990’s—often more frequently than Shakespeare—Fosse’s writing has gradually taken a turn towards more existential questions about identity, death and faith. Then, a decade ago, Fosse converted to Catholicism.
His writing illustrates a concern with the human predicament. He writes about people in the peripheries, not merely geographically but also socially: those who have been forgotten or ostracised. A scrupulously private person, Fosse keeps his world small, delving into questions of life from his solitary desk. He never shies away from the darker aspects of life, but his writing also carries a light of hope (a very Catholic combo). One literary critic has called him a “mystic” and described how Fosse “was a Catholic before he knew it himself”.
Fosse’s Catholicism is particularly evident in his magisterial Septology (2019 – 2021)—a seven-part novel asking fundamental questions about what it means to be who we are. Set in Norway and following an aged painter and widower by the name of Asle, we follow the narrators meandering thoughts about life and his recollections about his own past experiences. In the same village lives another Asle. This second Asle is also a painter but he lives a more dissolute life. These two Asles are doppelgängers, but the style (there are no punctuation marks in the books) and tempo of the writing makes the reader doubt whether they really are two separate people.
In Septology we find St Andrew’s Cross, the prayer of Our Father, Meister Eckhart and God Himself. Opening a page now, I find God mentioned no less than 11 times. The book isn’t a pious treatise but resembles the real-life relationship many people have to divine matters. Not everything is immediately self-evident, but rather reveals itself successively the more one wanders into the mysteries. Awarding him this year’s Nobel prize, the Nobel Committee cited “his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable” as their motivation.
I spoke to Asle Toje, a member of the Nobel Committee, and asked what Norwegians make of the Catholic Jon Fosse; surely a secular country shaped by its more recent Protestant heritage might find it difficult to understand the underlying Catholicism in the books?
“Fosse would not like to be called a ‘Catholic writer’—his Catholicism is not Latin, it is most of all mystical,” Toje told me. To illustrate his point, Toje quoted to me from Fosse’s Mysteriet i trua (2015): “The sacred can only be revealed by being hidden. The holy can only be felt, not said.”
Fosse’s writing is a reminder to us that the life of faith is a gift, and it is one which is received only once we open ourselves to the possibility of receiving. The time and place matters less.
Even though we may be intellectually convinced of the truths contained in the Catholic Faith, as spatiotemporal beings we will at one point in time be confronted—as Fosse, who has struggled with alcoholism and atheism, appears to have been—with our own “Damascus moment”.
Fosse has spoken of his conversion: “I had a kind of religious turn in my life that had to do with entering this unknown. I was an atheist, but I could’t explain what happened when I wrote, what made it happen.”
Through the gift of faith, Fosse found a way out of his situation and an explanation for the source of his writing.
Whether we are converts or cradle Catholics, there usually comes a point “when it clicks” and the point of our Faith begins to make more sense. It is not necessarily explicable, but we realise that we are in the presence of something beyond ourselves.
This is how Fosse has described his conversion during interviews, and his books are also replete with imagery of this epiphany. In Septology, the narrator describes how he wrestles with the question of child baptism about which he remains sceptical, yet he nevertheless makes the leap of faith and converts; even without being able to explain it eloquently, he sees that there is truth in what the Church teaches.
This kind of realisation only happens if we stand ready to receive faith, which Fosse’s work constantly reminds us, is the greatest gift of all.
Photo: Norwegian playwright and author Jon Fosse at the Norwegian Theatre in Oslo, Norway, 6 September 2019. (Photo by HAKON MOSVOLD LARSEN/NTB/AFP via Getty Images.)
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