Hauntological Form in Jon Fosse’s Septology I–VII

Hauntology has been used as theoretical scaffolding for analysing numerous diverse forms of expression within literary, film, and cultural studies. Its obvious connection to central ontological features—such as temporality itself, memory, trauma, repression, addiction, the embeddedness of lost futures in the past, and historiology more generally—has given it a status as a distinctly versatile and useful analytic tool. In terms of genre, it has primordial connections to two immensely popular and perennially vital categories of fiction that have a relatively long history as genres, that is, gothic/horror and crime fiction. Both genres are obsessed with the past and frequently also with the actual or potential return of the past in the form of spectral presences. In addition, the temporal hauntological core exists in other types of literature in which haunting does not initially seem to have an immediate focus or a central structuring function. This essay centres on a collection of such novels, namely Septology I–VII by Nobel Prize laureate Jon Fosse (2023). The analysis zooms in on the idiosyncratic phenomenology of Fosse’s writing. His carefully crafted prose allows the narratological forms themselves to incorporate hauntology as a dominant constituent of the structure of cognition, experience—and ultimately the constitution of the lifeworld itself—and how these take shape as the artistic medium that gradually shines forth as an overall hauntological manifestation. The literary analysis centres on micro and macro aspects of repetition in Fosse’s thoroughly worked out narratological and phenomenological configurations.