SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue Two - Journal - Page 127
The Syntax of Dissolution
Review of Jon Fosse’s Melancholy I–II (Deep Vellum)
In Melancholy I-II, Jon Fosse constructs one of the more formally persuasive
representations of unstable consciousness in contemporary fiction not through plot,
revelation, or psychological explanation, but through the interaction of syntax and narrative
architecture. The novel’s achievement lies in the way these two elements reinforce one another
until the reader no longer feels that consciousness is being described from the outside. Instead,
consciousness becomes the medium through which the novel itself is experienced.
The opening pages establish this immediately. Lars Hertervig lies in bed in Düsseldorf,
terrified of the judgment of his painting instructor Hans Gude, and the prose begins circling
obsessively around the same anxieties, returning to them again and again through recursive
variations rather than forward movement. At one point, Hertervig thinks that “he can’t paint,
and he can’t understand why he can’t paint, because he can paint, and he has painted, and
he paints all the time.” The sentence does not advance thought so much as rotate around it,
restaging anxiety through patterned return.
Thoughts repeat, slightly alter, dissolve, and reform. Sentences stretch outward through
accumulation rather than progression. The effect is not ornamental. Fosse is not using
repetition stylistically in the conventional sense. The syntax itself becomes a behavioral model
of consciousness.
This is what distinguishes Fosse from many writers associated with psychological
interiority. Most literary fiction treats thought as content. Fosse treats thought as process.
Sentences do not summarize mental states after the fact; they enact cognition in real time.
Clauses loop back upon themselves, re-enter emotional positions, restart perceptions, and
continually destabilize the apparent finality of earlier statements. The prose behaves like
consciousness trying to maintain coherence moment by moment. Hertervig repeatedly arrives
at emotional conclusions only to circle back into uncertainty almost immediately, creating
the sensation that thought itself has become spatial rather than linear—something wandered
through rather than resolved.
That syntactic architecture becomes especially powerful in the scenes involving Helene
Winckelmann. Throughout these passages, Fosse repeatedly returns to images of light, hair,
breathing, touch, and stillness, but the real force of the passage comes from the way syntax
gradually dissolves the boundary between subject and object. Hertervig does not merely
admire Helene. His consciousness begins reorganizing itself around her presence.
One of the novel’s most remarkable sequences arrives when Helene lets down her hair
in front of him. The passage unfolds through cascading repetitions that slowly transform
perception into a form of ecstatic displacement:
he was not Lars from Hattarvåg anymore, he was someone else, someone who was where
she is, and he was where she is, and then there was no longer any difference between him
and her, there was only the light from her hair and her white neck and her white blouse
and he was inside it all somehow
103
