2023-12-07 20:27:21
A short acceptance speech for the 2023 Nobel Prize by the Norwegian writer was expected Jon Fosse and so it has been. Perhaps because the playwright and novelist’s books tend to be compact, essential with measured phrases and hardly any subordinate clauses. This was his speech that under the title ‘The Silent Language’ launched into a definition of what, for him, the literary fact because, upsetting the French philosopher Jacques Derrida: “The most important thing in life cannot be said, only written.”
The author of ‘Septet’ – his magnum opus – began by recalling the first time had to read aloud in class, when I was in high school. He fear It paralyzed him and he ran out of class. Yesterday afternoon at the Swedish Academy he conquered that fear that has always accompanied him, after having managed to convince the teachers to excuse him. “In a way it was as if fear took away my tongue and I had to get it back, so to speak. And if I had to do that, I couldn’t on other people’s terms but on my own.” He then discovered, the author said, a place that was his alone, a “secret” place where he claims he continues writing.
He also spoke about his career, about his novels for which he received bad reviews, about his reconversion without seeking it as theater writer –with which he gained international fame, but also food sustenance- and, finally, as narrator again in the last 15 years. The religious desire – the author suffered a conversion to Catholicism that transformed his vision of the world – was also present in the speech – without it Fosse’s literature cannot be understood. “I once said in an interview that writing is a kind of prayer. And I felt embarrassed when I saw it in print. But later I read, as a consolation, that Franz Kafka had said the same thing.” To conclude, just as many readers wrote to him saying that his texts had saved their lives, this helped him think that writing most likely also saved his.
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