2023-10-05 14:14:44
Jon Fosse He wrote novels, poetry and essays and hated the theater or, at least, “hated the Norwegian theater” for the kind of reasons for which one usually hates the theater, out of fear of the affectation of bad actors. Then, in the 1990s, just as he turned 40, Fosse found himself broke and accepted a commission from director Kai Johnsen, a reader of his novels, to write a play. Johnsen knew his works of fiction and sensed that Fosse was a playwright in the making. The result, Someone is Going to Come, was a dazzle for its author and for his viewers and the beginning of the other story of the writer who this morning won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the third Norwegian author and the first playwright in the palmares of the Nobel since Harold Pinter’s prize in 2005.
He Nobel jury has justified Fosse’s ruling in “his innovative plays and his prose, which have given voice to the unpronounceable. His immense work, which covers a great variety of genres, contains works, novels, poetry, essays, children’s stories and translations. He is one of the most performed playwrights in the world, but he has also been increasingly recognized for his prose.”
Fosse has explained his relationship with theater as if he were the best critic of his work: his idea of theater, the treasure he discovered in theater writing, is that of scarcity. For the new Nobel, theater is the limitation of space, time and means. His working hypothesis therefore consists of making that discipline a path to epiphany. As a minimalist artist, Fosse thinks of tension more as the emotion that theater should seek, rather than the exposition of an idea or the development of a narrative. His works are successful if they take their viewers from tears to laughter. In an interview he referred to his literature as “mystical realism”, as opposed to magical realism.
Fosse, shortly after learning of the ruling, declared himself “surprised but not too surprised” by the announcement of the prize since his candidacy had been circulating for two decades in the vicinity of the Nobel Prize. . “I was surprised when they called me, but at the same time not too surprised,” the 64-year-old writer told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK. “I prepared cautiously for what could happen in the last 10 years. But believe me, I didn’t expect to receive the award today, even if there were chances,” he said. The writer and playwright received a phone call from the Swedish Academy while driving near Bergen, on the western coast of Norway. His editor John Dicht was more expressive when celebrating the award: “I am overwhelmed and grateful. “I consider this to be an award for literature that aims to be above all literature, without further considerations,” said the editor, who praised Fosse’s “innovative works,” and his prose that gave voice to the unspeakable.”
Karl Ove Knausgard, the most read Norwegian novelist of our time, introduced Fosse to Spanish readers a decade ago, when his work was barely published in Spanish and his works were almost unheard of on our stages (even today, his work has not been published in Spanish). never represented in Madrid). In the pages of the first volumes of My Struggle, Knausgard remembered Fosse as a teacher in the writing workshops of his youth, a man of angry character and self-destructive tendencies and with an overwhelming passion in his dedication to art. The biography of the new Nobel Prize winner confirms this portrait: Fosse was an alcoholic, had a crisis of faith and a crisis of atheism, he stopped writing when he was fed up with himself and was on the verge of becoming a tragic character. But I got ahead. Years later, Knausgard wrote about the theater of his former teacher: he wrote about a theater made of convulsions and aimed at achieving a deep connection with the spectators.
In Someone is Going to Come, Fosse’s first play, the starting point of a decade of almost inexplicably simple successes, some keys to the Nobel Prize’s work could be found: on stage, a couple of fifty-year-olds, cultured and apparently happy , arrives on an island, on a closed stage, where the two characters are waiting for someone indeterminate. In their longing, Fosse’s characters begin to slide toward an amendment to the entirety of your life, expressed through thoughts, obsessions and moments of unstructured speech. Does it sound a bit like Samuel Beckett, like Godot? It is one of the most common references that have been used to place Fosse on the map of theatrical literature.
Often, the fjords of his country, the small sailboats, the rainy days, the conflicts between children and parents also appear in Fosse’s landscape… An almost Bergmanian world, apparently ordered but about to break at any moment and in which the characters seek a deeply human connection to avoid horror. “Your eyes open my heart / and say that life exists / Your eyes open my heart / and make me love once again,” are some verses by Fosse. “Who do I write for? For God. Writing is like praying,” is another quote of his.
The work in prose
The theater, in any case, is the most brilliant half of Fosse’s work. His novels continue to be at the origin and, probably, at the core of the new Nobel Prize winner’s work. Red, Black, a text barely referenced today, was Fosse’s debut as a writer, in 1983, 10 years before the theater offer arrived. Between the ages of 40 and 50, Fosse abandoned narrative for playwriting, which made him a star of his country’s culture. When that cycle ended, exhausted and in crisis with himself, the author withdrew from the world and stopped writing.. When he returned, he did so to reappear as a narrator of books that are only partly novels: Triloga (published in Spain by Nórdica) and Septologa are good examples of this reborn Fosse: both texts are flows of consciousness, interior monologues or, rather, dialogues with memory that, once again, seek a spark of tension, a moment of tears a second before a laugh. His voices represent characters that could also seem taken from the work of Ingmar Bergman: painters of Nordic landscapes, field artists, mistaken dreamers, who relate to nature, to God and to the impulse of self-destruction.
The first playwright since Pinter
Los 10 last winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature have been:
2022: Annie Ernaux (France) for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she discovers the roots, distances and collective restrictions of personal memory.”
2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah (United Kingdom) for “his empathetic and uncompromising account of the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugees caught between cultures and continents.”
2020: Louise Glck (United States) for “her characteristic poetic voice that, with its austere beauty, makes individual existence universal.”
2019: Peter Handke (Austria) for “his influential work that, with much linguistic ingenuity, explored the periphery and singularity of human experience.”
2018: Olga Tokarczuk (Poland) for “a narrative imagination that, with an encyclopedic passion, symbolizes the overcoming of borders as a way of life.”
2017: Kazuo Ishiguro (UK) who “has revealed, in novels of powerful emotional force, the abyss beneath our illusory sense of comfort in the world.”
2016: Bob Dylan (United States) for “having created, within the framework of the great American music tradition, new modes of poetic expression.”
2015: Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus) for “her polyphonic work, a memorial of suffering and courage in our time.”
2014: Patrick Modiano (France) for “the art of memory with which he evokes the most imperceptible human destinies and reveals the world of the Occupation.”
2013: Alice Munro (Canada), “sovereign of the art of the contemporary short story.”
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