Before going to the men’s room he carefully grinds out his cigarette, a <Prince of Denmark> in a way one might expect of a schoolboy caught smoking in the playground. When he returns and sits down at the table, he relights the blackened end of the butt, and it occurs to me that we have met before.
Five or six years ago, in Gdansk, we both read from our own plays. Carl Morten Amundsen, the director, referred to him as an <enfant terrible> and a rising star in the Nordic theatrical sky. Then Jon Fosse seemed unapproachable; he avoided eye contact, did not smile, spoke reluctantly when spoken to and read with great gravity and intensity in a language no one in the old city hall understood. In the discussion after the reading he threw out with a world-weary look the comment that compared with people in eastern Europe or Poland, western Germans were completely shameless. Suddenly the image came back to me – the almost uncouth attitude of a young man just sitting there, introverted, almost dreaming, at regular intervals running his hand through his long, straight hair to push it behind his ears.
When we met again several years later in Zurich for a conversation, Jon Fosse’s hair was still shoulder-length. Over time he has published almost forty books. And he seems reticently friendly, a man of few words. To my great surprise he is carrying a carrier bag with a sausage from a Zurich butcher, a souvenir from abroad for his family back home. Something that bears a trace of something else, something he has encountered elsewhere. It is this something <else> that his plays are about, this is what his texts travel towards, without quite saying what it is.
If you ask him the reason for his huge success, his success worldwide, he refers to the quality of his texts, and he also mentions a specific characteristic of our time as a reason for his popularity: ‘We live in a time that comes after the great ideals, since the great ideals have lost their power these days. My plays may reflect that condition, though I don’t mean that their power only comes from the time they come from. You can <sense> something. But I can’t quite say what it is. Perhaps it is something to do with a slight feeling of religiousness. Life is bigger than our image of life. I have often experienced that in my plays: there is another presence that suddenly becomes visible in the writing.’
Jon Fosse calls the experience that surrounds his plays – the experience that he dives into in his writing – ‘negative mysticism’, paraphrasing the literary theorist György Lukács. Negative mysticism may be applied to his approach to beauty through negativity; this is an approach fundamentally influenced by the concept that the positive is not directly accessible. It may be because of this that he regards the American expression <think positive> as ridiculous. As far as Jon Fosse is concerned there is no direct route to beauty or truth; rather his texts produce a form of emptiness.
In his essay ‘Negative Mysticism’ Jon Fosse formulates a theory about the novel and its multiple inner voices, in that the novel does not contain <one> meaning, but through its horizontal juxtaposition of various voices makes room for different forms of meaning. The voices of the novel do not produce a ‘final meaning’ or ‘the meaning of life’. They permit however a constant discovery of meaning, also in the sense of meaninglessness or opposing views. What is told makes room for multiple voices and irony which open up for a hint of the divine in a god-forsaken world, as Lukács does. In many ways this theory of the novel encompasses a basic polyphony, a fullness of contrary attitudes and life’s projects that are rediscovered within the framework of the theatre. Against the backdrop of this way of thinking Jon Fosse’s plays develop mystical qualities in the same way as in a novel: ‘The novel hangs on to meaning in a world where the great meaning does not exist, and where facts and trivia may threaten to replace meaning. The novel permits the miracle of meaning to continue, as meaning without meaning. Meaning is a miracle. Thus the novel is actually an insistence that the miracle exists, and thus the novel sustains an opening to divinity.’
As a lyricist, novelist, translator and essayist Jon Fosse was already an established author when he started writing for the theatre. He became a father at an early age, and wrote to earn money – a situation he frequently reverts to in his texts. He wrote articles for Bergen newspapers and translated texts by various dramatists, including Frank Wedekind, Thomas Bernhard, Botho Strauss, David Harrower and Lars Norén. But what originally made him become an author seemed to him even in his youth in Strandebarm to be a peculiar gift: ‘Ibsen said “I received the gift of sadness, which made me a poet”. The same applies to me. It is a sort of state of existence, though the state is not a perception formed by what is seen and experienced. It is dependent on <how> you look at life. This is particularly related to one thing: distance’, says Jon Fosse. ‘You are in the midst of the world and look at life as though you were outside it. This concept became important in my plays. They work in a similar way – neither one person nor another is right. If you look at the thing from inside, facing one character, then of course each individual is right. But I don’t see it that way. I see the situation from both sides, from a third position, at a distance, and this distance makes each individual right in his own way. I believe that this third, undefined position is essential to writing drama. On the other hand, as a novelist you can view a situation from one particular viewpoint or another, or from a mixture of perspectives.’
It was only by a hair’s breadth that Jon Fosse, the established lyricist, story-teller, novelist, essayist and translator, became a playwright. With time he has written far more plays than novels and poems, and he now considers himself a playwright: ‘I often told journalists that the theatre held no interest for me. It was true. I rarely went to the theatre, because my head was full of typical clichés about the theatre, about actors at parties laughing their heads off – all kinds of terrible images. But then I started writing my own plays and I got to know some actors. And I discovered the opposite of what I had imagined. Everything was different. I am very shy, and I noticed that actors are shy too. The real theatrical world turned out to be the opposite of my clichéd presumptions.’ Whether or not it was the translations of foreign plays that put him in touch with the theatrical world, it was at the exhortations of Kai Johnsen, the director, that Jon Fosse started writing his own plays. A request from the DNS theatre in Bergen got him going in the late autumn of 1992. Shortly afterwards he had a finished play – and a feeling of having achieved something that he had not succeeded in with his poetry or prose. <With the words>, as he says himself, and with the silences. Then, as now, silence was the central motif in his plays.
On closer reading Fosse’s plays show themselves to be extremely precise, calculated, economic constructions. The structures are reminiscent of the precision of Samuel Beckett’s texts, Bernard-Marie Kóltes’s poetic force and Thomas Bernhard’s musicality. At the same time there is a limit to what such comparisons tell us, since Fosse’s work has from the very first developed its own characteristic qualities in dramatic literature. In a way his musical scores may be called miracles. In another way, regarding the characters, the hermetic works appear to be almost indiscreet, constantly bordering on documentary, extreme realism, close to the untreated clumsiness of everyday life. The hesitation and silence that precedes or follows every action in the plays give us little hints that there is something greater driving the characters, while not wanting to drive others, as the characters do not perform an action without at the same time doubting the meaning and purpose of their own deeds. One of Jon Fosse’s most radical innovations has been to create dramatic dialogue that does not make it a matter of course to be able to verbalise thoughts and feelings.
What has always been essential to drama – uninterrupted series of dialogues that move the interpersonal world of the drama forward and thus express personal conflicts – is challenged in Fosse’s plays. Talking is neither inevitable nor simple, but rather a essentially difficult operation. In Jon Fosse’s world the historical core of the drama – the interpersonal sphere in which struggles for power were fought in the form of heated arguments and shrewd actions – is no longer part of the game. His delicate, sometimes extremely hard, observers of the world walk lonely paths. They do not behave as part of a community, they do not participate in society with a social intent, neither as agents with a task for a higher determination. They want far more strongly to flee from society, steer clear of it, because it represents a world of guilt and transitoriness.
Fosse has taken a searching look at his protagonists, their escape from the world and their complex relations with their feelings of responsibility to the world – everything that precipitates them into deep melancholy and makes them into paralysed witnesses of advancing accidents. In a strange way this examination has sensitised him to ‘failed or incomplete language’, which gives the texts an unmistakable basic tone. The dialogues feel their way between language and silence, repetition and interruption, and together they create moments of music. The strangest effect of this is that Fosse’s ‘failed‘ language has created the most intense expression on the stage today. In spite of the lyric composition of the plays, the characters do not have access to complete language when it comes to the big, essential issues, because the speaking being expands and fills the voids between the sentences in the script. The characters compulsively move to the topic of their own condition – a condition in which Fosse’s characters end up, quite simply because they participate in daily contact between people. It may appear as if everything would have been so much easier for them if they had only been alone. The characters speak in order to avoid saying anything, and in doing so reveal the unspeakable about themselves. The texts are also polished like crystals, saturated with emotions. They approach us, but their form does not permit them to be anything other than detailed suggestions and incomplete expressions of something that requires the audience to fill in the blanks.
In Jon Fosse’s drama the disparity between words and silence creates an intense encounter between the actor, the character, the fellow actor and the audience in a way that no other living playwright achieves. In contrast to the verses of Friedrich Schiller, for instance, which always lead to solo performances, Fosse’s scores demand the most intense collaboration. The roving movements draw the contours of relationships in crisis, at the brink of total silence. Every single sentence contains unstable bonds – without contact with the other characters in the play, none of Fosse’s personae would ever say anything. At the same time it is the very contact with the others that makes each character long for silence. This paradox provides them with dynamic force.
‘As a playwright I write about people’s mutual creative process; I describe the social dynamics of life,’ says Fosse. ‘and perhaps it was this interest that many years ago drove me to study sociology. When I write, I usually pay little heed to social signals – they are either there or not there. In general I reduce the characters’ individual and social characteristics so much that they often do not even have names. I prefer a social stratum in which the social stratum doesn’t matter.’ His characters are on the one hand relatively clearly placed in the social landscape, but on the other constituted of ‘this childlike anxiety for being deserted. This is the image: a little baby, all alone in the world. It is not our identity but our interpersonal relationships that steer our lives. And the theatre is the only art form that is able to mirror this social game.’
Fosse’s texts appear to be realistic and secretive, not least when translated, and it is not only their architecture, but also the substance of the language itself that is highly artificial. For his plays Fosse has developed both a characteristic style and an unusual artistic language. He writes <New Norwegian> interspersed with his own dialect, and he sees a close connection between this language and the theatrical stage in general: ‘The stage is beyond reality, just like this language. What the theatre contributes to transcend culture and become art means quite simply to hear a voice there, a voice that you have not noticed before.’ He calls this voice ‘silent speech, full of unknown meaning’.
Fosse created a tonal key, a rhetorical backdrop that conceals a hint of a life that could have been the opposite by going to seed in solitude. On his travels Fosse has to stay in hotels, and it is a well-known fact that he asks for rooms no higher than the first floor. He does not want to consider the possibility of jumping. He is an author who commutes between two sides of life: on the one side is the typewriter in him, constantly working, keeping him going, euphoric when it brings a flow. On the other side he is also aware of phases of total passivity and eclipse. His texts express both sides of life and preserve them with a hope of a meaning of unknown extent, expressed with a silent voice, ‘a voice that speaks through silence’.
If I have understood him correctly, Jon Fosse has remained something of a countryman, a bohemian on poor terms with urban life who provokes the establishment. He comes from the same area as the landscape painter Lars Hertervig, who studied painting in Düsseldorf. Fosse describes the painter’s life in the novel <Melancholia>, and in the same way as Hertervig the landscape always plays a part: nothing without a fjord, no story without the ocean. Dramas such as <Dream of Autumn>, <Death Variations> and <A Summer’s Day>, related novels such as <Morning and Evening> and <This is Ales> all developed the same dramaturgy of reverie, a literary mystical penetration of modern, fallen puritanism, music in which time, space and the contours of the narrated and the narrator are almost dissolved in a flow, a stream that leads to the final questions in human life, the last things.
Jon Fosse says of his plays that they come into being ‘like a journey into the unknown’. Alongside everything in the unconscious mind, his dramas also contain – under the artificial form and between the extensive temporal structures that lie in the interpersonal experiences – a scandalous plot, tangible and existential. A plot that a Hollywood thriller could just as well have been based upon, or a <Dogme> film. And as friendly and approachable as the author may appear, equally hard and unpleasant is the action in the social stories in his plays. But the plots indicate exclusively a social fall, and Fosse takes plenty of time to describe the rise and fall of his characters. The dramatic turning-points hardly ever take place on stage; instead the author shows over time how the character gives himself away. This is the real drama in the plays – buried scandals, scorned love seeping through, tension between life and death, relationships that need time to return slowly to the surface.
This prince of the north does not describe trivial misery, although his plays cultivate a gesture of unimportance that no author has done before. By thoroughly observing the minutiae of life he displays great tragedies: ‘I am a moral author,’ he says at the end of our conversation. ‘What does it mean to be a human being? That concerns me as a moralist. It is a moral without political adjustment. If you understand this morality, it makes a space where people meet one another, in which politics possibly could have found a base, though I cannot say what practical use it would be. As an individual I can be remarkably intolerant. It is only as an author that I am tolerant – every character is right in his own way. Even so I can hear in my own words that this cannot be the truth, the whole truth. So we are already on our way again, perhaps on the way to a new play.’}
English translation (from the Norwegian) © 2009 Roger Martin