“Writing can save your life”

2023-12-08 20:03:36

One day in high school, a teacher asked Jon Fosse to read aloud. Out loud ? The idea scared him so much that he jumped out of his chair and ran out of the classroom. Aged 64 today, the Norwegian playwright and novelist overcame his phobia and was able to read, in Stockholm, in front of a gathered audience, Thursday December 7, the speech he had written a few days earlier for the reception of the Nobel Prize of literature.

Writing, link to an interior space

In a very personal text, devoid of any political message like some of his predecessors may have sent on this occasion, Jon Fosse gave the story of his long and intimate companionship with writing. This one precisely began with the episode of reading aloud in high school. “It was as if fear had robbed me of my language and I had to get it back”he explained, but that was impossible “in the words of others”.

A difficulty which led him to a quest for his own language. “I started writing my own texts, short poems, short stories, continued Jon Fosse. And I discovered that it gave me a feeling of security, the opposite of fear. In a way, I had found a place within myself that was only mine and from which I could write what was only mine. »

The other lesson of the reading aloud episode is the discovery of ” big difference (…) between spoken and literary languages ​​», continued Jon Fosse. While the first has a precise function – to inform, to persuade, to convince, etc. – the second has “one’s own existence”. Under these conditions, all literary writings are different, he concludes.

“I never wrote to express myself”

Convinced of the irreducible singularity of the language of each writer, Jon Fosse did not, however, consider his own as a translation of himself. “I never wrote to express myself, as they say, but rather to escape from myself”insisted the writer who, in fact, never appears, either explicitly or implicitly in his works.

Loneliness is “more or less the lot of the one who writes”, he noted, paying a fine tribute to the theater – for which he wrote more than thirty plays, which made him one of the most performed playwrights in the world. The first staging of his plays gave him “a great feeling of happiness and security”, he explained, a staging in the theater amounting to a “sharing art”.

Jon Fosse then detailed his writing process. When he takes up the pen, he has “the feeling that, in a certain sense, the text has already been written” and all he has to do is write it down “before it disappears”. A listening that he has practiced since his beginnings and from which he has never abandoned despite a very cold reception of his first novel, Red, black (« Red Black “, untranslated) in 1983. “I decided not to listen to the criticism”, he confided. And then not to let yourself be sidetracked by success. Will his Nobel Prize change anything? “I really believe that I will continue”, he assured.

Writing as a means of survival

Jon Fosse ended his speech with a confidence: “There are a lot of suicides in my books. More than I would like to believe. I was afraid that I had helped legitimize suicide. » In this sense, the numerous congratulatory messages received after his Nobel Prize – to each of which he responded – comforted him, especially those whose authors confided to him that his texts had saved their lives. “I always knew that writing can save your life, and maybe it even saved minehe concluded. And if my texts can also help save the lives of others, nothing can make me happier. »