Jon Fosse takes Nobel Prize in literature

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By Our Special Correspondent

New Delhi, October 5: Jon Fosse has been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel Prize stated that Fosse has much in common with his great precursor in Norwegian Nynorsk literature Tarjei Vesaas.

“Fosse combines strong local ties, both linguistic and geographic, with modernist artistic techniques. He includes in his Wahlverwandschaften such names as Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard and Georg Trakl,” added the Nobel Prize in a post on X.

Sharing insight in the newly unveiled Nobel laureate, it was also stated that “while Fosse shares the negative outlook of his predecessors, his particular gnostic vision cannot be said to result in a nihilistic contempt of the world. Indeed, there is great warmth and humour in his work, and a naïve vulnerability to his stark images of human experience.”

Sharing the background of the author, the Nobel Prize wrote:

“Jon Fosse was born 1959 in Haugesund on the Norwegian west coast. His immense œuvre written in Nynorsk and spanning a variety of genres consists of a wealth of plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations. While he is today one of the most widely performed playwrights in the world, he has also become increasingly recognized for his prose. His debut novel Raudt, svart 1983, as rebellious as it was emotionally raw, broached the theme of suicide and, in many ways, set the tone for his later work.

Fosse’s European breakthrough as a dramatist came with Claude Régy’s 1999 Paris production of his play Nokon kjem til å komme (1996; Someone Is Going to Come, 2002). Even in this early piece, with its themes of fearful anticipation and crippling jealousy, Fosse’s singularity is fully evident. In his radical reduction of language and dramatic action, he expresses the most powerful human emotions of anxiety and powerlessness in the simplest everyday terms. It is through this ability to evoke man’s loss of orientation, and how this paradoxically can provide access to a deeper experience close to divinity, that he has come to be regarded as a major innovator in contemporary theatre.

In common with his great precursor in Nynorsk literature Tarjei Vesaas, Fosse combines strong local ties, both linguistic and geographic, with modernist artistic techniques. He includes in his Wahlverwandschaften such names as Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard and Georg Trakl. While Fosse shares the negative outlook of his predecessors, his particular gnostic vision cannot be said to result in a nihilistic contempt of the world. Indeed, there is great warmth and humour in his work, and a naïve vulnerability to his stark images of human experience.

In his second novel Stengd gitar (1985), Fosse presents us with a harrowing variation on one of his major themes, the critical moment of irresolution. A young mother leaves her flat to throw rubbish down the chute but locks herself out, with her baby still inside. Needing to go and seek help, she is unable to do so since she cannot abandon her child. While she finds herself, in Kafkaesque terms, ‘before the law’, the difference is clear: Fosse presents everyday situations that are instantly recognizable from our own lives. As with his first book, the novel is heavily pared down to a style that has come to be known as ‘Fosse minimalism’. At the same time, there is a sense of trepidation and a powerful ambivalence. This later comes to feature in his dramatic work, in which he is able to make use of pauses and interruptions to express this uncertainty – and moreover charge them with emotion. In his plays, we are confronted with words or acts that appear incomplete, a lack of resolution that continues to preoccupy our minds. The play Natta syng sine songar (1998; Nightsongs, 2002) represents a drawn-out yet unresolved quandary in which the woman’s impulse to go off with a new man is constantly opposed by a counter-impulse – a ‘yes’ qualified with the keyword ‘but’. The man she has abandoned ends up taking his own life, while her new beau disappears from sight. It is no doubt Fosse’s courage in opening himself up to the uncertainties and anxieties of everyday life that lies behind the extraordinary recognition he has received among the general public.

From the very beginning of the play Namnet from 1995 (The Name, 2002), we are presented with an emotionally charged everyday situation. A girl, young and pregnant, is waiting for the father of the unborn child, who has been delayed. The tension is immediately built up here due to this sense of uncertainty and its resulting fragmentary sentences. These disruptions moreover create a gulf between the girl’s longing for a new life with her child and her anxiety that she has been abandoned by the father.

Something similar occurs in the heart-rending work Dødsvariasjonar (2002; Death Variations, 2004), a one-act play about a girl who commits suicide, told backwards from the time of her death. It is written in short, interrupted locutions delivered by six nameless characters from different generations, both alive and dead. The piece ends with the daughter’s deeply moving speech, delivered from the other side of the grave, in which she expresses a fundamental uncertainty as to whether her decision to take her own life was the correct one.

In Skuggar (2007), Fosse stages a series of reunions during which the same simple phrases are repeated with an explicit ambiguity: ‘No, of course / That’s just what you say when you meet someone’. As a dramatist, Fosse generally respects unity of place while disrupting unity of time. In fact, the place where the nameless characters meet after many years is both unknown to them and rather disconcerting. This timeless setting of Fosse’s own creation provides an emblematic backdrop for his dramatic encounters. In his earlier play Draum om hausten (1999; Dream of Autumn, 2004), he presents us with a masterly representation of multi-layered time. The scene here is a cemetery where a man – coincidentally, it seems – meets a woman. In fact they have spent their lives together, a shared experience filled with love, false steps and unrealized dreams. Also in this piece, different time layers in which the demons of the past haunt the living are almost seamlessly intertwined.

A notable example of his early prose is the short novel Morgon og kveld from 2000 (Morning and Evening, 2015). Written in the midst of an intense period of dramatic output, it may well be his most hopeful work. One morning, the elderly protagonist Johannes’s perception of reality begins to dissolve in an uncanny fashion, and we understand that he is going to die. And yet, there is, both in this process and following his death, a tone of reconciliation – although questions that arise in the hinterland between life and death remain unresolved. Along with its pauses, interruptions and negations, such questions are profoundly characteristic of Fosse’s language. His 2004 novel Det er Ales (Aliss at the Fire, 2010), includes all of 200 questions in the space of only 70 pages.

A central prose work is Trilogien (Trilogy, 2016), consisting of Andvake (2007), Olavs Draumar (2012) and Kveldsvævd (2014). A cruel saga of love and violence with strong Biblical allusions, it is set in the barren coastal landscape where almost all of Fosse’s fiction takes place. For this highly dramatic and tautly crafted tale, Fosse was awarded the 2015 Nordic Council Literature Prize.

Fosse’s magnum opus in prose, however, remains the late Septology he completed in 2021: Det andre namnet (2019; The Other Name, 2020), Eg er ein annan (2020; I is Another, 2020) and Eit nytt namn (2021; A New Name, 2021). Extending to 1250 pages, the novel is written in the form of a monologue in which an elderly artist speaks to himself as another person. The work progresses seemingly endlessly and without sentence breaks, but is formally held together by repetitions, recurring themes and a fixed time span of seven days. Each of its parts opens with the same phrase and concludes with the same prayer to God.

The first section of the novel addresses the painti ng that Asle, the narrator, has been unable to complete but which is nevertheless dearest to him. This depicts two strokes, one purple and the other brown, in the form of a diagonal cross, the style therefore appearing abstract. It is as if this opening phrase draws together the different time layers of the work into a single infinite present. Asle’s painting becomes an icon, its emblem of a cross indicating the central theme of death.”