A SILENT LANGUAGE, Jon Fosse

Translation by Damion Searls.

Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize for Literature 2023, and these are the lectures he gave. Fosse is a difficult writer. He’s one of those people who writes novel-long sentences, like Krasznahorkai. But where Krasznahorkai’s endless sentences jump and spin and cackle and gurn, Fosse’s are slow and stuttering, reaching for incantation through repetition. You need hours on your own with a Fosse book.

The Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge once wrote a poem where he compared writing poetry with being a child playing in the forest, building little shelters of leaves and twigs, and then crawling inside these shelters, lighting a candle, and sitting there feeling safe in the dark autumn evenings.

This slim volume capturing his lectures for posterity are, however, very easy to read – because he’s writing to speak the words – and fascinating.

When it comes to prose fiction, Mikhail Bakhtin was right to argue that the very form of literary expression, of narrative, is double-voiced. To simplify slightly: it contains the voice of the person who decides on the words, the writer, and also the voice of the person in the story. These voices often blur and slip into each other in such a way that it’s impossible to say about any given words of the text whose they are. The narrative simply becomes a double-voiced piece of writing  – which is also, of course, part of the created written universe and its logic. Everything I have written is, as it were, its own fictional universe, its own world. A new world for each and every play or novel.

This is a writer who’s split his time between prose and play, and has learned a lot about both. And has sat and thought about what he’s learned. And passes a good deal on, here. It was extremely valuable to me as a tool to think with. And it is, in places, quite affecting.

…for me, the act of writing is one of listening – when I write I never think it out in advance, I don’t plan anything, I proceed by listening.

I only wish I could write like that.

A SILENT LANGUAGE, Jon Fosse (UK) (US+)

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