The unsayable subjects of Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse

Jon Fosse (Photo credit: Tom A. Kolstad/Det Norske Samlaget CC-by-SA 4.0 via Store norske leksikon via X/@NobelPrize)

This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Jon Olav Fosse, the Norwegian playwright and author, for, in the words of the Swedish Academy, his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable. What are these unsayable subjects that Fosse has devoted his life to?

Septology

Many in the English-speaking world were recently made aware of his monumental Septology, in a translation by Damion Searls, which is a seven-novel sequence narrated in one sentence that travels across almost a thousand pages. It explores the essence of God, art, identity, family dynamics, and the vulnerabilities of human existence.

Septology does this by delving into the mind of an ageing painter who confronts his alter ego, a man grappling with alcohol addiction. Like Fosse himself, this painter draws inspiration from the 14th-century German Catholic theologian Meister Eckhart, with statements such as, “God becomes God in the soul, and the soul becomes the soul in God”.

Fosse writes in Nynorsk, a form of the Norwegian language characterized by the use of traditional vocabulary and grammar. This, for Fosse, is “a minority language” which is an advantage for him as a writer because it is almost never used in commercials or business, giving it “a kind of freshness” that Bokmål, the official written standard of Norwegian, doesn’t have.

For critic Merve Emre, Septology is the only novel she has read “that has made me believe in the reality of the divine”. In an interview for the New Yorker late last year, Fosse told her that for him, the form of a text creates its own unique logic. The content belongs to the form, which has to be fashioned anew for each and every text. In this way, each time he writes, “I am creating a universe”.

Rhythm is a large part of this process; in another conversation, Fosse mentioned that though he finds it hard to express, “it is a flow that I have to follow”.  For translator Damion Searls, this can be seen in his “pure, repetitive, musical phrases” that employ a stripped-down vocabulary. Fosse has referred to this as “slow prose”, which delineates the way that life’s ordinary moments can be touched by grace or grandeur in a style that can be called mystical realism.

Fosse adopted this form of prose as a response to his approach to playwriting. As he put it: “My plays are rather short, and I always needed a strong intensity to work with. You cannot dwell on things for an extended period — theatre isn’t like that”. He has written over 40 of them so far, and it is as a playwright that Fosse is better known in Norway.

Among his notable plays are Someone Is Going to Come, in which a couple’s peaceful new home is haunted by a sense of impending dread; The Name, in which a pregnant woman and her boyfriend move into her parent’s house only to face a communication breakdown; and Dream of Autumn, in which a couple begin an affair in a graveyard and are haunted by temporal shifts. In these and other works, loss, language, and the lingering presence of the past intertwine, forming the thematic thread that binds Fosse's exploration of existential questions. It’s this quest that led Le Monde to dub him “the 21st-century Beckett”.

However, Fosse himself resists easy categorization. He has said that though he’s been labelled a lot of things, “I don’t want to call myself anything… In a way, I am a minimalist, of course, and in another way, I am a postmodernist — I was influenced by Jacques Derrida”.

If he had to be reductionist, he went on, he would call himself a Christian, “but it’s very hard for me…it’s not necessarily wrong, but I could never use such a concept for my own writing, as if to say, ‘It is like that’.” Ultimately, what readers are left with when experiencing Fosse’s work is, in the words of Ruth Margalit: “A mood. An atmosphere. The sound of words moving on a page.”