The Voices of Jon Fosse

A Critical Study

Edited by Trond Haugen and Marius Wulfsberg

Reformasjonstidens religiøse bokkultur cirka

1400–1700:

tekst, visualitet og materialitet

Bente Lavold og John Ødemark (red.)

The Voices of Jon Fosse

The Voices of Jon Fosse

A Critical Study

Edited by Trond Haugen and Marius Wulfsberg

National Library of Norway, Oslo 2025

1 Introduction: Voicing Fosse. The Life, Works and Criticism of Jon Fosse 11

Trond Haugen and Marius Wulfsberg

PART I: THE PROSE WORKS OF JON FOSSE

2 A Unity, However Hidden: On the Origins and Promise of 30 Jon Fosse’s Essays

Arild Linneberg

3 Writing as Insight: On Gnosis and “Shining darkness”, with Emphasis 51 on Septology

Tom Egil Hverven

4 Between Rural Men: Anxiety and Homosocial Bonds in Jon Fosse’s 83 Boathouse and Septology

Christine Hamm

5 Sounding German: An Exploration of Linguistic Devices in Trilogien 106 versus Trilogie

Rebecca Boxler Ødegaard

6 The Wonder of Literature: On Rhythm, Narration and the Question of 138 “What” in Jon Fosse’s A Shining

Marius Wulfsberg

7 Jon Fosse Emerges through the Director’s Archives – An Essay 170

Kai Johnsen

8 Manipulative Desire: A Reading of Someone is Going to Come 196

Frode Helmich Pedersen

9 La voix de l’ecriture: The Story of an International Breakthrough 226 Trond Haugen

10 Metaphysics in the Everyday: Drama by Jon Fosse with Emphasis on

I Am the Wind

Drude von der Fehr

11 Jon Fosse and the Festival System: New Perspectives on the 280 Playwright’s Success on the Global Stage

Jens-Morten Hanssen

12 He and She out into the World: An Introduction to the Jon Fosse 302 Archive at The National Library of Norway

Benedikte Berntzen

In 2021, the National Library of Norway received the Fosse Archive from its previous custodian, Nynorsk Kultursentrum (Centre for Norwegian Language and Literature). The acquisition of this archive was a key motivation for a seminar hosted by the National Library in September 2023 as part of the International Fosse Festival at Oslo Nye Teater. Titled Literature, Theatre – A Seminar on Jon Fosse’s Authorship, the event focused on Fosse’s novels and dramas, highlighting their vital contributions to contemporary literary prose and theatre. One month later, Jon Fosse was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Voices of Jon Fosse offers an academic response to this significant moment. Most chapters in this volume originate from presentations given at the seminar, which have since been revised and expanded into scholarly essays. We are pleased that Benedikte Berntzen, Drude von der Fehr, Christine Hamm, Jens-Morten Hanssen, Trond Haugen, Tom Egil Hverven, Kai Johnsen, and Marius Wulfsberg have chosen to publish their contributions in this collection.

A few additional chapters have been included following the seminar. Special thanks go to Frode Helmich Pedersen for “Manipulative Desire”, a chapter based on a lecture delivered at the symposium The Big Soaring at Litteraturhuset (The House of Literature) in Bergen on 1 June 2023, to Rebecca Boxler Ødegaard for her study of Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel’s translations of Jon Fosse into German, and to Arild Linneberg for his new study on Fosse’s literary-theoretical essays. We are also grateful for the enthusiasm and rigorous reviews provided by several anonymous peers.

When we began work on this volume in the autumn of 2023, following the announcement that the Swedish Academy had awarded Jon Fosse the Nobel Prize in Literature, we did so with a deep sense of purpose and the conviction that his authorship merits sustained scholarly attention. We knew that this view was shared by many within both the Norwegian and international literary communities. Over time, however, the project took on an additional dimension – one that, with a playful nod to Friedrich Nietzsche, we might call the joyful science . The process became infused with the pleasure of reading, writing, interpreting, and analysing a literature that continuously invites reflection on what literature may be.

Trond Haugen

and

Marius Wulfsberg

Oslo, 3 June 2025

1. Introduction: Voicing Fosse. The Life, Works and Criticism of Jon Fosse

Trond Haugen and Marius Wulfsberg

Since the 1980s, Jon Fosse has been one of Norway’s most challenging, intriguing, and influential authors. Alongside a select group of writers, he helped shape a new form of Norwegian literature. In dialogue with European modernism and contemporary theory, he pushed the boundaries of what literature and writing can be. Over the years, his authorship has evolved from prose and poetry into drama, reaching an ever-growing audience in Norway and internationally. In October 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his ability to “give voice to the unsayable” (NobelPrize.org.).

But what is it about these texts – written in Nynorsk (New Norwegian) – filled with repetition, composed of either strikingly short or endlessly long sentences, marked by unusual punctuation, and at times formulated in ways that make us wonder whether meaning lies in the word’s definition or whether the words themselves carry a material presence that unsettles our capacity to read, feel, and understand? His writing seems to move toward a voice resonating from a place where words have not yet – or no longer – assumed their conventional meanings. What, then, creates the singular quality of Jon Fosse’s writing? And how might we, as readers, even begin to analyse his texts?

The Voices of Jon Fosse offers a series of responses to the question: What constitutes the distinctive qualities of Jon Fosse’s literature?

This introduction offers a brief survey of his biography, an

overview of the literary criticism and scholarly reception of his work, and a presentation of the volume’s outline.1

A short biography

Jon Olav Fosse was born on 29 September 1959 in Haugesund, a city on Norway’s west coast. However, he grew up in the hamlet of Fosse, part of the village Strandebarm in Hardanger – a place where “the houses lie not far from the foreshore, the waves, the wooden boats, the jetty, and the row of boathouses. Across the fjord rise snow-covered peaks, Gygrastol, Melderskin, and Folgefonna, cloaked in an icy blue. At its deepest, the fjord plunges to 800 meters” (Seiness 2009, 22). 2

Fosse’s childhood home was a smallholding whose houses were built with money earned from transporting the dried fish known as clipfish or bacalao across the world. Fosse’s great-grandfather was a skipper, but after his ship was wrecked, he lived off his savings. His father managed the local Strandebarm Co-Op grocery store, while his mother was a housewife.

Jon Olav Fosse is the oldest of three siblings. He was named after his grandfather and his grandfather’s brother, but later, after becoming a writer, he began using only the name Jon. At the age of twelve, Fosse began playing the guitar. His first instrument was red and black, and from that moment on, he gave up everything else to play. His first band was called Lucifer Green; later, he became the thin,

1 The presentation of Jon Fosse’s writings and their scholarly reception is based on the Fosse bibliography at the National Library of Norway (www.nb.no/bibliografi/fosse/), as well as the Bibliografi for norsk litteraturforsking (Bibliography of Norwegian Research in Literature , www.nb.no/bibliografi/littforsk/) and the former database of Norwegian Journal Articles (NORART, www.nb.no/bibliografi/norart/), which was discontinued in 2022. The Fosse bibliography went online in the autumn of 2021 and is continuously updated. It includes references to Fosse’s works in their original language and in translation, journal articles and book chapters, theatre manuscripts, theatre programs, adaptations based on his works, as well as his translations and reworkings of other authors’ texts. Additionally, it contains reviews of Fosse’s works published in daily newspapers. The list of references in this introduction is not exhaustive but is limited to the works and articles specifically mentioned here.

2 This short biographical sketch of Fosse’s youth is based on Cecilie Seiness’s book Jon Fosse. Poet på Guds jord (2009).

long-haired guitarist in Rocking Chair. Eventually, he left the guitar behind and turned to the computer keyboard instead. While still in high school, Fosse published his first texts. He wrote short stories and poems for a column titled “Skriverier” (“Writings”) in the Socialist Youth League’s magazine Ungsosialisten (The Young Socialist). The short story “Knuste draumar” (“Broken Dreams”) was among the pieces published. This was in the late 1970s, when literature was widely regarded as a tool for political engagement.

He went on to study at the University of Bergen. Initially, he enrolled in sociology, but the subject reportedly disappointed him. He then turned to literature and philosophy and earned a master’s degree in comparative literature under the supervision of Professor Atle Kittang, the highly influential founder of the department. His thesis, composed of two essays on the theory of the novel, argued that there is no narrator in the novel – only a writer.

When he began his university studies, Fosse was already a father, living in Bergen with his partner and their son. From 1979 to 1981, alongside his studies and writing, he worked as a journalist for the newspaper Gula Tidend , which publishes in Fosse’s preferred Nynorsk version of the Norwegian language.

Fosse in the 1980s

In 1981, while still a student at the University of Bergen, Jon Fosse won a short story competition hosted by the student magazine StudVest with his story “Han” (“He”). The jury, which included acclaimed Norwegian avant-garde writer Cecilie Løveid, praised Fosse’s distinct style: “It is highly deliberately composed, and the author has succeeded in employing a somewhat original style” (StudVest , no. 9/10, 1981). A year later, the story was featured in the literary magazine Vinduet (3/1982).

Fosse made his debut as a novelist in early 1983 with Raudt, svart (Red, Black), published by Samlaget, Norway’s leading publisher of Nynorsk literature. His reputation quickly grew, and he became a key voice in the language-oriented avant-garde. His second novel, Stengd gitar (Closed Guitar), first published in 1985, was translated into

Swedish in 1988 by the prestigious publishing house Bonnier, earning widespread acclaim across the Swedish press. His 1986 debut poetry collection, Engel med vatn i augene (Angel with Water in Her Eyes), was included in Danish critic Poul Borum’s list of the top 40 Scandinavian poetry works that year. And in 1989, Fosse released his third novel, Naustet (Boathouse), which was also translated into Swedish that same year.

In the late 1980s Fosse also taught creative writing at the Hordaland Writing Academy and contributed essays on literature and literary theory to academic journals. In a series of articles published late in the decade, he explored the relationship between modernism and the social realism that had defined Norwegian experimental writing in the 1970s. Drawing on Marxist, linguistic, and poststructuralist criticism, he developed his own concept of the voice of writing – a theme he further refined in his first essay collection, Frå telling via showing til writing (From Telling via Showing to Writing), published in 1989.

By the end of the decade, Fosse was no longer just a significant writer of avant-garde poetry and novels in Norway – he was recognised as one of the leading Scandinavian authors of his generation.

Fosse in the 1990s

As one of Scandinavia’s most influential novelists, Fosse’s initial ventures into playwriting came as a surprise to many of his readers. In the mid-1990s, he began writing his first dramatic works in collaboration with Den Nationale Scene (The National Stage) in Bergen. His first full-length play, Namnet (The Name), premiered there in 1995 under the direction of Kai Johnsen. Four years later, the play Nokon kjem til å komme (Someone is Going to Come) received a triumphant reception on the theatrical stages of Paris. Soon The Name experienced similar success in Salzburg and Berlin.

While Fosse’s early theoretical writings had explored the voice of writing in response to the formal challenges of modernism, in the 1990s, his essays took a more religious turn. Through his engagement in themes of negative mysticism and Gnosticism, he seemed to nudge the paradox of the silent voice of writing in a somewhat theological

direction. This transition culminated in the publication of his second essay collection, Gnostiske essay (Gnostic Essays), in 1999. His fiction underwent a similar shift. Melancholia I (Melancholy I ) from 1995 and Melancholia II (Melancholy II ) from 1996 are fictional explorations of the real-life Norwegian landscape painter Lars Hertervig (1830–1902). With this novel, Fosse reached a wider audience. Later, in 2012, the German newspaper Die Zeit even named the novel the best literary work of 1995. During this period, Fosse also published three poetry collections, further expanding his literary range. By the end of his first two decades as a writer, Jon Fosse was on the verge of his international breakthrough and had firmly established himself as a writer to be reckoned with across all three classical branches of literature: the novel, drama, and lyric poetry.

The postmillennial Fosse

Following his swift international success in the theatre around the turn of the millennium, Fosse’s authorship was characterised by a dynamic interplay between drama and fiction. During this phase, his novels appeared less frequently than in his early career. Morgon og kveld (Morning and Evening) was published in 2000, Det er Ales (Aliss at the Fire) in 2004, while the trilogy Andvake (Wakefulness), Olavs draumar (Olav’s Dreams), and Kveldsvævd (Weariness) were released separately between 2007 and 2014. In 2015, Fosse received The Nordic Council Literature Prize for the trilogy. The jury praised the work for its poetic qualities and timeless storytelling. These novels, in turn, are surrounded by a series of plays – approximately one per year from 2000 to 2010 – that have secured Fosse a prominent position in the international theatrical canon. Draum om hausten. Skodespel (Dream of Autumn), directed by Kai Johnsen, premiered at the amphitheatre stage of the National Theatre in Oslo 1999. Dødsvariasjonar. Skodespel (Death Variations) premiered at the National Theatre in 2002, while Eg er vinden. Skodespel (I Am the Wind ) premiered at Den Nationale Scene in Bergen during the Bergen International Festival in 2007. These last two works have since become part of the most internationally renowned plays by Fosse.

Fosse seemed to withdraw somewhat from the public spotlight between 2011 and 2020, at least in terms of output. Perhaps it was due to his work on the novel Septologien (Septology), which was published in stages between 2019 and 2021. With this monumental prose work, he garnered widespread international recognition as one of the foremost contemporary novelists. This decade saw only two new plays: Hav. Skodespel (Ocean) (2014) and Slik var det. Monolog (Thus It Was) (2020).

When Jon Fosse received the Nobel Prize in Literature from the Swedish Academy in October 2023, he was already widely recognised as one of the most distinguished dramatists and prose writers of his time. His poetry had been included in the Norwegian Hymn Book of 2013, his dramatic works had become integral to modern postdramatic theatre, his children’s books had been adapted for theatre, and his prose, once primarily appreciated by a literary elite drawn to his minimalist experiments, had reached a broader audience engaging with his fiction as part of the great epic tradition of the Western novel. Jon Fosse had become a household name in what often is referred to as World literature.

In his Nobel Prize Lecture, A Silent Language , Fosse reflected on his early fear of reading aloud in secondary school – an overpowering experience in which he felt consumed by his own anxiety. Over time, he came to understand that this fear was deeply connected to his own voice, or rather, his own language. “I had to take [language] back, so to speak,” he explained. His response was to write.

In recent years, Fosse has continued to expand his literary output. His full-length play Einkvan (Everyman) premiered at Det Norske Teatret on 25 April 2024, while his most recent prose work, Kvitleik (A Shining), released in the spring of 2023, explores themes of boredom, loss of meaning, and death. The story can be regarded as a prose version of the 2023 play I svarte skogen inne (Inside the Black Forest), serving – as it stands now – as a striking reminder of Fosse’s sustained artistic engagement with literary language across poetry, prose, and drama.

More than forty years have passed since Samlaget published Fosse’s debut novel Red, Black in 1983. His works continue to evolve.

There is every reason to believe that he will remain a rewarding presence for readers and scholars worldwide. Our dedicated interpretations of his literary efforts to reclaim his own language are one satisfying way to listen to, enjoy, and actualise his frail, yet multiple voices of writing.

Negotiations – Fosse’s scholarly reception 1986–2000

Scholarly engagement with Jon Fosse’s work evolved slowly but significantly, tracing a path from his early theoretical writings to his emergence as a major dramatist. The negotiation between Fosse and the scholarly discourse on literature began in the mid-1980s, when he, armed with his first novels and a master’s thesis on the poetics of the novel, entered the literary-theoretical debate. He published essays on poetics, particularly on the relationship between speech and writing and the status of narrative language, where he developed his conception of the voice of writing. These contributions engaged not only with philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida, but also in polemical dialogue with Norwegian writers and academics.

The first academic article on Fosse according to the Fosse bibliography is Asbjørn Aarseth’s “Scripsi Scripsit. En replikk til Jon Fosse” (1988), a reply to Fosse’s essay “Tale eller skrift som romanteoretisk metafor” (“Speech or Writing as a Metaphor in the Theory of the Novel”) (1987), both published in the Norwegian literary journal Norsk Litterær Årbok . These texts reflect the early critical debate on the status of writing in narrative fiction, which took place within both academic and literary discourse at the time.

Sustained literary analysis of Fosse’s fiction began to appear after the publication of the novel Boathouse in 1989. In Finn Tveito’s article “På sporet av den tapte vestlandstid” (“In Search of Lost Time on the West Coast”) from 1992, the scholarly focus shifted to Fosse’s prose fiction, with particular attention to phenomenology, metaphysics and the aesthetics of repetition. This theme was further explored in Ole Karlsen’s “‘Ei uro er kommen over meg’. Om Jon Fosses Naustet (1989) og den repeterende skrivemåten” (“‘A Restlessness Has Come

Over Me’: Repetition in Jon Fosse’s Boathouse (1989)”), from 2000. Both articles were published in Edda. Scandinavian Journal of Literary Research , the most prestigious scholarly journal for literary studies in Norway.

Throughout the early 1990s, theses and academic articles increasingly examined Fosse’s novels through modernist and existential lenses, notably in Drude von der Fehr’s “Det ‘fenomenale’ som leserprosjekt i Jon Fosses Stengd gitar ” (“The ‘Phenomenal’ as a Reading Project in Jon Fosse’s Closed Guitar ”) (1994). Despite Fosse’s early and distinctive poetry, scholarly interest in his poetry remained limited throughout this period.

A rare and influential exception is poet and critic Espen Stueland’s 1996 essay Å erstatte lykka med eit komma (To Replace Happiness with a Comma), which offered a nuanced reading of both Fosse’s poetry and prose, emphasising their shared rhythm, tone, and metaphysical orientation.

By the mid-1990s, as Fosse’s poetics turned increasingly toward mysticism and drama, scholarship began to explore theological, mystical and ritualistic dimensions in his work. This shift is evident in Rolv Nøtvik Jakobsen’s “Det namnlause. Litteratur og mystikk” (“The Nameless: Literature and Mysticism”) (1997) and Unni Langås’s “Intet er hans stoff. Om Jon Fosses dramatikk” (“Nothing Is His Material: On the Drama of Jon Fosse”) (1998).

Toward the end of the decade, following Fosse’s international breakthrough as a playwright, scholars increasingly interpreted his oeuvre as a unified exploration of existential and spiritual themes. Academic writing began to focus on his dramatic language, ritual structures and the interplay between silence, voice and transcendence across genres. What began as a negotiation between literary theory and fiction gradually developed into an attempt to read Fosse’s entire authorship as a singular event in contemporary literature, one that challenges conventional boundaries between prose, poetry and drama.

Scholarly reception 2001–2010

During the 2000s, literary criticism’s engagement with Jon Fosse’s work expanded across disciplines and geographies. This period saw a marked shift toward drama, theatrical reception and performance studies.

A pivotal moment in this shift was the writing of Therese Bjørneboe, editor of the journal Norsk Shakespearetidsskrift (Norwegian Shakespeare Journal ), particularly her 2003 article “Jon Fosse på europeiske scener” (“Jon Fosse on European Stages”), which analysed the reception of his plays across the continent. This shift can also be traced in the publication of the book Tendensar i moderne norsk dramatikk (Tendencies in Contemporary Norwegian Drama) (2004), in which several articles framed Fosse’s work in terms of phenomenology, negative theology, and material aesthetics.

Thematically, research in this period concentrated on silence, repetition, absence and transcendence. Fosse’s essays in Gnostiske essay (Gnostic Essays), first published in 1999 and reissued in 2004, became essential theoretical texts for understanding the metaphysical dimensions of his writing. Scholars such as Lars Sætre, Tom Egil Hverven and Hadle Oftedal Andersen investigated the aesthetic and theological resonances in both his prose and his drama.

This decade also marked the emergence of substantial international scholarship on Fosse’s work. Suzanne Bordemann’s extensive research, including her PhD thesis and later book Jon Fosses frühe Dramen und ihre Rezeption in norwegischen und deutschsprachigen Medien ( Jon Fosse’s Early Plays and Their Reception in the Norwegian and German Media) (2013), argues that Fosse’s dramatic experiment with linguistic rhythm and language as aesthetic material posed a challenge for contemporary Norwegian and German criticism. French theatre theorist Jean-Pierre Sarrazac situated Fosse within a lineage of European modern drama in Poétique du drame moderne (Poetics of modern drama) (2012). Scholars such as Sarah Cameron Sunde (USA) and Kirsten Wechsel (Germany) contributed new readings of Fosse’s scenographic and rhythmic language.

By the end of the decade, Fosse was no longer studied solely as a

Norwegian modernist. He had become a transnational figure – a writer whose work traversed genre boundaries, spiritual traditions and aesthetic frameworks, and whose language of silence and repetition resonated across cultural and linguistic contexts.

Scholarly reception 2011–2025

In the last fifteen years, Fosse’s global status was fully consolidated. International scholarship deepened, with significant contributions from French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian scholars. The publication of Septology and the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature intensified interest in the religious, mystical and metaphysical dimensions of his work.

Theological and post-secular interpretations flourished, especially following his Nobel Lecture, A Silent Language . For example, Paul J. Griffiths offered a reading of Septology through the lens of Christian mysticism in his essay “A Life of Repose in the World to Come”, published in the magazine Commonweal in 2023. Unni Langås and Kjell Arnold Nyhus explored trauma, ritual and mysticism in relation to Fosse’s prose and drama, while Ingrid Nymoen articulated a poetics of silence in post-secular terms.

Meanwhile, scholars such as Avra Sidiropoulou (Cyprus), Maren Anderson Johnson (USA) and Marie Lundquist (Sweden) have explored Fosse’s theatre in relation to Henrik Ibsen and Friedrich Hölderlin, translation, scenography and voice. Studies have also examined the musicality and rhythm of his work – Geir Hjorthol’s Kontrapunkt (Counterpoint) (2023) being one example. The Swedish critic Leif Zern and the Norwegian critic Jan H. Landro published important books on Fosse’s writing and poetics. Fosse’s literature has also become an integral part of studies on theatre directors such as Claude Régy and Thomas Ostermeier.

Fosse’s plays and novels are increasingly studied as expressions of religious experience and literary exploration. The growing interest in the relationship between literature and faith has led to comparative studies with the works of Hölderlin, Ibsen, Olav H. Hauge, and even Christian mystics. A key example of this theological turn is Jean-Luc

Marion’s Création (Creation), delivered as the inaugural Fosse Lecture in 2025, which places Fosse’s writing within a broader phenomenological and theological tradition. The field of scholarly research on Fosse is now too expansive to be surveyed in a brief overview, as the everlengthening Fosse bibliography clearly testifies.

Today, Jon Fosse is read not only as a dramatist or novelist, but as a literary thinker whose writing opens spaces for reflection on being, voice, grace and transcendence. His oeuvre – prose, drama, poetry and essays – has become fully integrated into an academic landscape shaped by intermediality, spirituality and transnational aesthetics. What the research reveals is not only the range of Fosse’s work, but its unique capacity to resonate across disciplinary, cultural and philosophical boundaries – to stage literature itself as a form of silent thought.

The Voices of Jon Fosse – outline

This volume represents the first major effort to bring a diverse collection of critical perspectives on Jon Fosse’s authorship to an international audience. While it seeks to engage with global scholarly discourse on Fosse, it also provides a distinctly Norwegian perspective, illuminating his institutional habitus within national literary history – both as a formative influence on Norwegian prose and literary theory in the 1980s and as a key figure in the transformation of modern Norwegian drama in the 1990s.

We therefore open the first part of the volume with Arild Linneberg, historian of literary criticism and essayist. His recollections of professional collaboration, theoretical discourse, and his engagement with Fosse’s essayistic work provide a rare insight into the institution of Norwegian literary studies in the 1980s – an institution that was instrumental in shaping Fosse’s trajectory as a writer. The first section of the volume offers an in-depth investigation into the aesthetic foundations, thematic complexities, and linguistic characteristics of his distinctive style. Linneberg opens the discussion by examining Fosse’s rigorous engagement with aesthetic theory, situating his work within broader literary traditions and exploring the philosophical depth underpinning his prose.

In “Writing as Insight,” Tom Egil Hverven examines Fosse’s Gnostic influences as a lens for interpreting Septologien (Septology). His background as a literary critic and theologian informs his approach, offering original perspectives on the novel’s aesthetic negotiations of spiritual inquiry and literary form. Christine Hamm follows with a comparative analysis of Boathouse and Septology. Her interrogation of masculinities, social dynamics, homosocial bonds, and existential anxiety in Fosse’s depictions of rural men uncovers new and intriguing depths within an important, yet often neglected, thematic strand of his works. Rebecca Boxler Ødegaard investigates the meaning and rhythm of Fosse’s linguistic peculiarities through a close reading of Fosse Prize recipient Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel’s German translation of Trilogien (Trilogy). Her detailed comparison of the literary devices used to achieve poetic effects in Nynorsk and German sheds light on Fosse’s style in both languages. Marius Wulfsberg’s “The Wonder of Literature” turns to Fosse’s recent story A Shining and explores how rhythm, narration, and the polyvocal articulation of the word “kva” (“what”) shape the literary experience of his work. Through an analysis of boredom, bewilderment, voice, and repetition, Wulfsberg shows how Fosse’s prose stages the unfolding of meaning as an open-ended event – where language itself becomes both subject and enigma.

Jon Fosse’s influence on contemporary theatre is undeniable. In collaboration with major European theatre directors such as Claude Régy and Thomas Ostermeier, his dramatic works have reshaped conceptions of language, silence, and presence on stage. Fosse’s literary minimalism and rhythmic style find their fullest expression in theatre; his exploration of existential themes, human isolation, and the unspoken tensions between characters resonates on a global scale.

The second part of this volume investigates Fosse’s contributions to dramatic art, his evolution as a playwright, and the international reception of his works. We begin this section with Kai Johnsen’s personal essay on his correspondence with Jon Fosse during the critical period when Fosse transitioned to writing for the theatre in Bergen. Kai Johnsen has been one of Jon Fosse’s key partners, having directed eleven world premieres of his plays between 1994 and 2014. In the

spring of 2023, he passed on his personal Fosse archive to the National Library in Oslo. Johnsen’s chapter highlights important, and to some degree previously unknown, documentation from this archive, whilst also sharing personal anecdotes from the period he refers to as The Great Fossefall (literally, “Waterfall”, a play on Jon Fosse’s surname, which means “waterfall”). His insider perspective offers valuable insights into the influences and decisions shaping Fosse’s early dramatic works and serves as an academic prelude for researchers exploring Fosse’s turn to theatre worldwide.

Frode Helmich Pedersen follows with a close reading of Someone is Going to Come. Pedersen’s detailed analysis of realist interpretations illuminates how even Fosse’s simplest lines generate profound tensions between desire and manipulation. His analysis offers new insights into the emotional and literary depth of Fosse’s work and clarifies the distinct characteristics of his dramatic style.

Trond Haugen investigates Fosse’s early poetological reflections on writing, arguing that these meditations played a crucial role in his international breakthrough with director Claude Régy in France. The reception of Quelqu’un va venir (Someone is Going to Come), the play that introduced Fosse to the peaks of French theatre in 1999, suggest that Fosse’s fusion of theoretical reflection and dramatic method resonated with French audiences, and became instrumental in elevating his work onto the global stage.

Drude von der Fehr’s contribution, “Metaphysics in the Everyday”, provides a close reading of I am the Wind , one of Fosse’s most philosophical plays. Her analysis explores how ordinary experiences within Fosse’s theatre acquire metaphysical significance, revealing layers of existential meaning that take on new urgency in a world increasingly threatened by climate catastrophe.

Jens-Morten Hanssen’s chapter engages in a dialogue with Haugen’s, shifting the focus to Fosse’s global reach through an investigation of the festival system and the theatrical networks that have sustained his international reputation as a playwright. By employing digital humanities methodologies, Hanssen examines the institutional mechanisms behind Fosse’s worldwide success, uncovering the

theatrical infrastructures that have propelled his works onto the global stage. Finally, Benedikte Berntzen introduces English readers to the Fosse Archive at the National Library of Norway, offering a glimpse into the archival materials and documents that contextualise Fosse’s oeuvre and provide crucial insight into resources available for future research.

Due to various constraints, The Voices of Jon Fosse does not include a dedicated section on Jon Fosse’s poetry or children’s books. However, several chapters, and particularly those by Linneberg and Hverven, touch upon his poetry in ways that demonstrate the interconnectedness of his literary production. Jens-Morten Hanssen discusses the increasing adaptation of Fosse’s children’s books for the theatre after the turn of the millennium. Rather than a shortcoming, we view this as an invitation to savour the transferable value of the literary analysis of Fosse’s style across genres.

So, what have we learned about Fosse’s literature? At the very least, nothing that can be reduced to a few closing remarks; this volume does not aim to map out Jon Fosse’s entire authorship, summarise the full scope of current research, or champion any one theoretical approach. What it does offer is a series of in-depth engagements with his work – guided by curiosity, critical insight, and a shared recognition of the singularity of his voice. His books continue to call upon us to reflect on what literature is and to negotiate the promise, event, and wonder of his writings. Ultimately, the secret of Jon Fosse’s literature remains. Only in the act of reading does literature begin to reveal itself.

Aarseth, Asbjørn . 1988. “Scripsi Scripsit. En replikk til Jon Fosse”. Norsk litterær årbok 1988: 140–146.

Bjørneboe, Therese . 2003. “Jon Fosse på europeiske scener”. Samtiden 2003(1): 101–115.

Bordemann, Suzanne . 2013. Jon Fosses frühe Dramen und ihre Rezeption in norwegischen und deutschsprachigen Medien. Peter Lang.

Fehr, Drude von der . 1994. “Det ‘fenomenale’ som leserprosjekt i Jon Fosses Stengd gitar”. Skrift 1994(1/2): 57–74.

Fehr, Drude von der , and Jorunn Hareide , eds. 2004. Tendensar i moderne norsk dramatikk. Samlaget.

Fosse, Jon . 1981. “Han”. Studvest (36): 9–10.

———. 1982. “Han”. Vinduet (3): 41–42.

———. 1983. Raudt, svart. Samlaget.

———. 1985. Stengd gitar. Samlaget.

———. 1986. Engel med vatn i augene. Samlaget.

———. 1987. “Tale eller skrift som romanteoretisk metafor”. Norsk Litterær Årbok 1987: 171–188.

———. 1989. Naustet. Samlaget.

———. 1989. Frå telling via showing til writing. Samlaget.

———. 1995. Melancholia I. Samlaget.

———. 1995. Namnet. Samlaget.

———. 1996. Melancholia II. Samlaget.

———. 1999. Draum om hausten. Skodespel. Samlaget.

———. 1999. Gnostiske essay. Samlaget.

———. 1999. Nokon kjem til å komme. Samlaget.

———. 2000. Morgon og kveld. Samlaget.

———. 2002. Dødsvariasjonar. Skodespel. Samlaget.

———. 2004. Det er Ales. Samlaget.

———. 2004. Gnostiske essay. Reissue. Samlaget.

———. 2007. Andvake. Samlaget.

———. 2007. Eg er vinden. Skodespel. Samlaget.

———. 2012. Olavs draumar. Samlaget.

———. 2014. Hav. Skodespel. Samlaget.

———. 2014. Kveldsvævd. Samlaget.

———. 2019–2021. Septologien. Samlaget.

———. 2020. Slik var det. Monolog. Samlaget.

———. 2023. “A Silent Language” (Nobel Prize lecture).

https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/12/fosse-lecture-english.pdf. Accessed 19 May 2025.

———. 2023. Kvitleik. Samlaget.

———. 2024. Einkvan. Samlaget.

Griffiths, Paul J . 2023. “A Life of Repose in the World to Come”. Commonweal Magazine, vol. 150 (4): 49.

Hjorthol, Geir . 2023. Kontrapunkt: om litteraturens musikk i Jon Fosses Septologien I. Cappelen Damm Akademisk.

Jakobsen, Rolv Nøtvik . 1997. “Det namnlause. Litteratur og mystikk”. Norsk litterær årbok 1997: 225–238.

Karlsen, Ole . 2000. “‘Ei uro er kommen over meg’. Om Jon Fosses Naustet (1989) og den repeterende skrivemåten”. Edda 3: 268–279.

Langås, Unni . 1998. “Intet er hans stoff. Om Jon Fosses dramatikk”. Edda 3: 197–211.

Marion, Jean-Luc . 2025. Création. National Library of Norway.

National Library of Norway. 2021. “Fosse-bibliografien” (Fosse bibliography). https://www.nb.no/bibliografi/fosse/. Accessed 19 May 2025.

National Library of Norway. n.d.-a “Bibliografi over norsk litteraturforsking” (Bibliography of Norwegian Research in Literature). https://www.nb.no/ bibliografi/littforsk/. Accessed 19 May 2025.

National Library of Norway. n.d.-b “Norske og nordiske tidsskriftartikler” (Norwegian and Nordic index to periodical articles). https://www.nb.no/bibliografi/ norart/description. Accessed 19 May 2025.

NobelPrize.org. “Jon Fosse – Facts – 2023”. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/ literature/2023/fosse/facts. Accessed 4 June 2025.

Sarrazac, Jean-Pierre . 2012. Poétique du drame moderne. Seuil.

Seiness, Cecilie . 2009. Jon Fosse. Poet på Guds jord. Samlaget.

Stueland, Espen . 1996. Å erstatte lykka med eit komma. Samlaget.

Tveito, Finn . 1992. “På sporet av den tapte vestlandstid”. Edda 1: 66–78.

PART I

THE PROSE WORKS OF JON FOSSE

2. A Unity, However Hidden: On the Origins and Promise of Jon

Fosse’s Essays

Arild Linneberg

“… the essay’s innermost formal law is heresy”

Theodor W. Adorno , “The Essay as Form”, 1958

Cross-connections

In the late 1980s Jon Fosse encouraged me to make a selection of the essays which Theodor W. Adorno published in four volumes between 1958 and 1974 under the title Noten zur Literatur (Notes to Literature) (Adorno 2019). In 1991, therefore, a volume with selected essays translated into Nynorsk , (New Norwegian), was published under the title Notar til litteraturen (Adorno 1991). Jon Fosse was one of the translators, and he chose to translate Adorno’s essay on “Punctuation marks”. In his first collection of his own selected essays, Frå telling via showing til writing (From Telling via Showing to Writing) (1989), Jon had already written about Adorno’s philosophy of non-identity as well as Adorno’s aesthetic theory.

It was no surprise that Jon was interested in Adorno. In his own essays, Jon often recalls that he found his way to writing through music, through rock music. He used to play guitar in a band, and in his youth, music was more important to him than words. In school he did not like to read, he was especially afraid of reading aloud. In an autobiographic note to the title essay “From Telling via Showing to Writing”, he tells us that he was so afraid that he ran out of the

classroom to avoid reading when the teacher had asked him to read a text out loud.

However, he began to experience that music had its own language, another language, a musical language that does not communicate in the way the normal everyday language does. It was a way of communicating meaning without words, a meaning void of normal meaning, all the same not void of meaning, but communicating a void filled with meaning.

Adorno’s essay on punctuation marks (Adorno 1958) dealt with musical phrasing in language. I remember Jon told me that his way of understanding Adorno’s writing was to listen to Adorno’s language, the music in his language. It was the musicality in Adorno’s language that was the key to understanding Adorno’s philosophy of art, he said. That was a clever observation. Adorno called his work Ästhetische Theorie (Aesthetic Theory); it was a theory that was aesthetic, artistic, in its own form. Jon even encouraged me to translate Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie from German into Norwegian, and during my eight years at work on this translation (see Adorno 1998, 2021), he was one of my main private interlocutors and consultants.

In 1989 he asked me to write an afterword to his first volume of selected essays, mentioned above, From Telling via Showing to Writing. According to his own preface, he had considered publishing only three of his essays in this volume: one about linguistics and poetics, “Mellom språksyn og poetikk ” (“Between Language Perspectives and Poetics”) (1986), and two on the theory of the novel, “Tale eller skrift som romanteoretisk metafor” (“Speech or Writing as Metaphors in the Theory of the Novel”) (1987), and the title essay “From Telling via Showing to Writing” (Fosse 1989).1

In the 1980s Jon and I worked together at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Bergen, and for several

1 The first two essays mentioned are not included in the English edition of essays, An Angel walks through the stage and other essays , translated by May-Brit Akerholt, Dalkey Archive Press 2015. All three essays published in Fosse 1989.

years we also were neighbors, each living in our own small flat in two apartment blocks in the Bergen suburb of Åsane. In addition to Adorno, Jon read and wrote about Jacques Derrida and Mikhail Bakhtin (see Derrida 1967, Bakhtin 1973) – and about several literary philosophers and theoreticians – from Viktor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson via Georg Lukács to Wayne C. Booth, Gérard Genette, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Harold Bloom and many others. It is a sort of tradition that some of the most important writers of novels, poetry, drama and fiction have also written about literary theory, that they even were literary theoreticians. In the classical tradition, such literary theoreticians ranged from Horace to Boileau, in modern times from T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Bertolt Brecht to Umberto Eco and Jon Fosse. To me, Jon Fosse is one of the most important writers who is also an impressive theoretician of literature.

The breadth of his reading, and writing, of literary theory and philosophy of literature, is remarkable. He is not afraid of establishing cross-connections nearly everywhere – connections of similarities, but above all connections of differences.

Adorno, Derrida and Bakhtin are cornerstones in his philosophy of literature. However, Jon always transforms what he reads into an integral part of his own way of thinking. I remember being very surprised when he first talked to me about Derrida. It was in the late 1980’s. The most important in Derrida’s thinking is his concept of God, Jon said. What do you mean? I asked. You see, Jon answered, and then he explained to me the relationship between Derrida’s philosophy of the supplement and the gliding of signifiers and what he called God: that nothing in the universe is fixed, it is always changing, in movement, and this movement is God. 2

What Jon said about this, was almost a revolution; he saw connections that very few, if any, had seen. The connection between

2 See “Speech or writing as metaphors in the theory of the novel”, “From telling via showing to writing”, and “Skrivarens nærver” [“The presence of the writer”, not translated into English].

Derrida’s philosophy and theology would become an issue, but at the time Jon recognised it, it was not. And as far as I know, no one had ever mentioned a possible link between Derrida’s potential theological assumptions and Bakhtin’s theory of the novel, of the novel’s novelness. Jon established an interrelation between Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy of the supplement and Bakhtin’s theory of the novel’s polyphony, its multivoicedness: The meaning in language utterances and the meaning in a novel is never fixed, it is always ambiguous, and in that sense also ironic. Jon even discovered a connection between Derrida’s deconstruction, Bakhtin’s semiotics and Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). In this sense his essays on literary theory and his philosophy of the novel were eclectic, although in the best Aristotelian sense: that to see similarities is recognition. And, as the Norwegian philosopher Georg Johannesen wrote, if you see similarities, you do not have to explain them. Jon often mentions Georg Johannesen, who was a Norwegian poet and the first professor of rhetoric in Norway. He too worked at the University of Bergen. In Georg Johannesen’s philosophy of rhetoric, irony was the central trope (see Johannesen 1981, 1987). I think it was Johannesen’s foregrounding of the rhetoric of tropes, concentrating on irony as the fundamental trope both in everyday language and in literature, that paved the way for Fosse’s most important definition of the novel, not only as irony in the linguistic sense, but as irony as an attitude to the world. Moreover, it was not merely in the Socratic sense in the way Søren Kierkegaard analysed Socrates’ world view, but in a quite unique way, a Fossean way to regard the novel as negative mysticism .

I remember that I held some lectures at the Academy of Writing in Bergen on Viktor Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose (1925) and Georg Lukács’ Theory of the Novel (1920). Jon was one of the founders of the academy, at the same time as he was assistant professor at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University in Bergen. Jon pointed to a surprising connection between Viktor Shklovsky and Georg Lukács, between Shklovsky as a founder of the linguistic turn in literary theory and in the philosophy of language, and Georg Lukács, who used Jon’s own term for the novel as irony in a theological

way: “the writer’s irony is a negative mysticism in a world without God” (Lukács 1971, 90). Some years later Jon’s own concept of the novel as negative mysticism would lead him to Harold Bloom. However, in Jon Fosse’s universe, not only philosophers and thinkers of a different kind are combined, but all sorts of different subjects and objects appear. Like in the old tradition of essays from Erasmus Roterodamus via Michel de Montaigne to Walter Benjamin – and in Norway from Aasmund Olavsson Vinje to Ole Robert Sunde and Rune Christiansen – no detail seems too small to be treated with attention. Jon Fosse’s first collection of non-fiction prose is composed mostly of texts about other authors and thinkers in addition to and in connection with a presentation of his own poetics. The order of the essays is chronological; the formative principle of combining things and keeping things together, is the evolution of subjects in his own writing in the six years’ period from 1983 until 1989. This starts with an essay on social realism and modernism and ends with two essays, first the title essay and lastly a short piece on the 1989 Swedish translation of Peter Handke’s 1986 Die Wiederholung (Repetition). Fosse ends his review of Handke with a discussion of the impossibility of telling. A son asks his father to tell the story of his life, but the father finds it very difficult above all because he has killed an Italian during the First World War. The father cannot find the right words to tell his story, so he simply says: It is impossible to tell it, you must write it! In this subtle way the last essay in this first volume of his selected essays ends with the book’s main theme: the road from the impossibility of telling to the necessity of writing.

Jon Fosse’s next and last collection of essays has the title Gnostic Essays (Fosse 1999). This book is not composed chronologically in the same way, although the first essays were written in 1993 and the last one in 1999. The book is divided into five sections with different subjects: Visual , Theoretical , Personal , Literary, Theatrical . I will return to aspects of this second volume of essays later on and especially to the meaning of its title: Gnostic Essays.

The Sognefjord enigma

More than 25 years after Fosse’s second and last collection of essays was published in 1999, this work suddenly appeared to me in a new light. In one of the final essays, “Old houses” (Fosse 2015), he wrote that everything he had written in recent years, was written in his writing room in an old house with a view to the sea, to the fjord or to the ocean (Fosse 2015, 101).

I had moved from Bergen to an island on the West Coast not far north of Sognefjord. In the meantime, Jon had bought himself a boat, a double-ended motor launch of a type called a snekke in Norwegian, and a cottage with a boathouse in Dingja, a small place near the mouth of Sognefjord.

I was very surprised when I found that Honoré de Balzac’s novel Séraphîta , first published in 1834, was set in a Norwegian fjord called “Stromfjord”. It is quite obvious that this fjord resembles Sognefjord. Balzac never visited the place, but he may have seen paintings by the Danish painter Johannes Flintoe (1787–1870) or the Norwegian J. C. Dahl (1788–1857). Balzac’s descriptions of the area looked like they were based on paintings like Flintoe’s Old Birch Tree by the Sognefjord (1820) and J. C. Dahl’s Winter at the Sognefjord (1827).

How could Balzac otherwise have described this Norwegian landscape without having been there or having seen these or similar paintings? All the same it is an interesting coincidence that Balzac’s story Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece) was first published in 1831. It is a story about the painter Maître Frenhover, who worked for ten years to create what he believed was a masterpiece, but when his friends finally got to look at it, they saw nothing of the kind. The painting was a failure. It had some fascinating, beautiful details, but all in all it was only a chaotic mess of colours. It is a story about the relationship between the artist’s work and the reasonable assessment of the spectator, Giorgio Agamben writes in his analysis of the story (Agamben 1999, 9).

To Paul Cézanne Balzac’s story showed the fundamental and problematic correspondence between art and reality, the problem of depicting reality in art (Ashton 1991, ch. 2). Whatever Maître

Frenhover saw, he was not able to depict accurately. There was no direct correspondence between his perception and his painting, he had seen something he was not able to describe. The mess of colours, despite having some beautiful details visible, was a sort of cosmos without any visible meaning, the meaning was hidden, not for the creator of this universe, but for everybody else.

Three years after The Unknown Masterpiece , Balzac published Séraphîta . This novel was the third in the row of Balzac’s series of three philosophical novels at the beginning of The Human Comedy (1829–1848). 3 The three philosophical novels have the same main subject: Emanuel Swedenborg’s mysticism. In Séraphîta , an angel, both man and woman, is sent down to Earth from Heaven – to an area on the Sognefjord coast. Seraphita and Seraphitus, a hermaphrodite being, shows us the mystery of sex, but also at the same time the hidden unity of the universe. It may be worth mentioning that the two paintings of Flintoe and Dahl, especially Flintoe’s painting of the old birch, also symbolise the hidden unity of the universe: the absolute.

Jon Fosse took a great interest in painting, he even wanted to be a painter, he tells us in an essay in the opening of Gnostic Essays (Fosse 1999, 14). Indeed, the first of this book’s five parts deals with painting and painters. Briefly summarised, his point of view is that there is something we cannot see behind what we see. This unseen is the mystical, the absolute unity, name it God. To me, having read Balzac anew in the context of Jon Fosse, it was exciting to notice that Fosse points to Cézanne as the most fascinating painter – especially as we know the impact Balzac’s novel about Maître Fenhover had had on Cézanne. According to Balzac, his novels on mysticism formed the basis for his later and more realistic novels in The Human Comedy. “Det mystiske i det konkrete” (“The mystery of the concrete”) is the title of one of Fosse’s essays in Gnostic Essays. 4 According to Fosse, all his

3 The first of the kind was the short story Les proscrits (1831), the second Louis Lambert (1832).

4 See also Aagenæs 1999. “The Mystery of the Concrete” is not one of the essays translated into English in An Angel Walks through the Scene (Fosse 2015).

novels are realistic, but they also at the same time incorporate the mystical, Fosse says. The mystery of the concrete, and even Swedenborg’s mysticism, is important in the modern literary tradition, from Balzac to Baudelaire, from Baudelaire to August Strindberg, from Strindberg to the French surrealists, and because of these authors also for Walter Benjamin. Swedenborg was of fundamental importance to Strindberg, for instance, in his work A Dream Play (1902). Strindberg and his mysticism paved the way for French surrealism, Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926) is unthinkable without Strindberg and his mystical, surrealistic Fairytales (1904). 5 André Breton mentions Swedenborg’s mysticism as a precursor in his Manifest of Surrealism (1924), and Walter Benjamin was deeply influenced by Strindberg and Aragon in The Arcades Project, which he wrote between 1927 and his death in 1940 (Benjamin 1982). 6 Jon Fosse’s writings, especially in his essays, further develop this literary and philosophical tradition.

The common denominator is the mystery of the concrete, the mysticism of everyday life, as Walter Benjamin called it. To Fosse, this mystery of the concrete seems to be connected to the Norwegian landscape, or, rather, that is where he finds it, and especially on the coast and in the fjords. In his essay “For the sun to rise”, he even locates Wittgenstein in this landscape (Fosse 2015, 105–109), where Wittgenstein built a cottage with a view to a fjord and sat there thinking and writing in solitude surrounded by the everlasting mountains. Wittgenstein sat there, “waiting for the sun” and thinking about “the area of the inexpressible” (Fosse 2015, 107). To Fosse, Wittgenstein was a mystic waiting for the light, to be enlightened.

Fosse wrote an essay on Nynorsk , “his beloved New Norwegian” (Fosse 2015, 36–40). The version of the Norwegian language he uses is one of the two officially recognised in Norway. The roots of Nynorsk go back to the language historically spoken in rural Norway. Today it is used mainly in the country’s southern and central areas, particularly

5 See Linneberg and Sund 2018 and https://walterbenjamin.no.

6 See Linneberg and Sund 2017.

along the Norwegian West Coast. Some 10–15 percent of the Norwegian people, around 500 000, use Nynorsk as their primary language of written communication.

Although based on old traditions, Nynorsk is called new because it was constructed as a written language standard in the latter half of the nineteenth century (after 1850) and developed by some of the most important Norwegian linguists and authors. Nynorsk has a very strong literary tradition. From a linguistic point of view, this is Jon Fosse’s tradition, and this tradition also has had a deep impact on his way of thinking.

Many early Nynorsk authors wrote not only about Norwegian nature, but about the mystery of the concrete. Arne Garborg (1851–1924), Ivar Mortensson-Egnund (1857–1934), Olav Nygaard (1884–1924) and others combined a materialist realism with mysticism in their works. The mystery of the concrete, the invisible behind the visible, is also fundamental in Fosse’s novels, as outlined in his essays, and not least in his theory of the novel.

Dog and angel – and Georg Lukács’ Theory of the Novel Dog and Angel is the title of a collection of poems that Jon Fosse published in 1992. The title was strange. What is the meaning of the combination of these two words? I asked myself when I wrote a review of the book. We know what a dog is, and whether we believe in their existence, or not, we have an idea of what angels are or represent as something holy, divine.

One of the poems goes like this:

Ingenting overtyder meg meir om Guds nærvær enn fråveret av mine døde venner. Gud er mine døde venner.

Gud er alt som forsvinn.

God kunst er guddommeleg: god kunst er delaktig i det ubestemmelege, som er Gud, i det bestemmelege.

Utan døden ville Gud vere død.

Alt seier at Gud er. Ingenting seier at Gud finst.

Kvifor skal Gud finnast? Gud som er?

Å finnast er å vere borte frå Gud

for at Gud skal kunne vere og dermed for at alt skal kunne vere (Fosse 1992, 64).

Nothing is, to me, more convincing about God’s presence than the absence of my dead friends. God is my dead friends. God is everything that disappears.

Great art is divine: great art participates in the indeterminate, that is God, in the determinable. Without death God would be dead.

Everything tells us that God is. Nothing tells us that God exists. Why should God exist? God that is?

To exist is to be away from God so that God could be so that everything could be. 7

In the history of the relationship between man and animals, something strange takes place in the northern parts of Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. There are mythical stories about the St Bernard breed of dog, which could find and save people who were lost in the wilderness. The dog was called “a saving angel”. Dogs became angels, saving human beings: the dogs were profane angels, a symbol of the secularisation of the hidden transcendent powers.

In the poem quoted above, God is absent, but present in his absence, present in the material world around us. That could be a plausible meaning of the collection’s title Dog and Angel . In this respect the poem is almost an emanation of Fosse’s enigmatic theory of the novel around 1990.

In an essay on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, “Art as the Precondition for Philosophy” (Fosse 1989), Fosse discusses art as enigma for the first time. 8 As his point of departure, Fosse takes a chapter in Adorno’s work concerning the enigmatic character of art, truth content and metaphysics (Adorno 2021, 308–333). Here Adorno argued that art is always enigmatic, works of art are enigmas without answers. An

7 My translation.

8 This essay is not included in An Angel Walks through the Stage and Other Essays (Fosse 2015).

absence of meaning points at a meaning that lies beyond normal meaning, i.e. an absent meaning that cannot be communicated. In the 1980s Jon and I often discussed Adorno’s philosophy and his aesthetic theory, and I remember Jon pointed to a more or less hidden connection between Viktor Shklovsky and Adorno. This was because Shklovsky also claims that an enigma hides in art as the basic layer of aesthetic language. To Shklovsky the defamiliarisation of reality, the strangeness of art, is enigmatic. The essence of art’s language is enigmas that make us see the world in a new way. To Jon Fosse both these theoretical views lie at the heart of his conception of art and of the relation between art and reality.

Among Fosse’s extended reading of literary theory and theories of the novel, one book made a special impression, and in this book only one sentence stood out as exceptional. I have already mentioned both the book and the sentence. The book was Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel (1971), and the sentence was that “the writer’s irony is a negative mysticism to be found in a time without God” (Lukács 1971, 90). Maybe it is time to ask what this sentence implies both in Lukács’s and in Fosse’s thinking?

The sentence stands at the centre of the concluding section “Irony as mysticism”, in Lukács’s chapter 5, “The historicophilosophical conditioning of the novel and its significance” (Lukács 1920, 1971). Although Fosse only quotes this sentence from the book, his discussion of the implications of the sentence in fact follows Lukács. “For the novel, irony consists in this freedom of the writer in his relationship to God, the transcendental condition of the objectivity of form-giving”, Lukács wrote (1971, 92). The writer “can see where God is to be found in a world abandoned by God” (1971, 92). Lukács concluded by stating that for this reason the novel was “the representative art-form of our age: because the structural categories of the novel constitutively coincide with the world as it is today” (1971, 93). Among these structural categories were “the detour by way of speech to silence” in a world of “empty immanence” (1971, 91, 92).

Like Lukács, Fosse considers the novel to be a representative art-form of his time, and he had already further developed at least

three of Lukács’s conclusive categories (silence, transcendence, and the objectivity of form-giving) in his own poetics before quoting Lukács on negative mysticism.

For some years, Fosse was a member of the Norwegian Society of Friends (Quakers), to whom silence is, in a way, more important than words. In an essay he mentions Samuel Beckett as one of his favourites, and in Beckett we find a similar scepticism towards the spoken language, and language as such, as among the Quakers. In Aesthetic Theory Adorno describes Beckett’s art – and all great art – as “close to silence” or “close to being silent”. The reason for this silence is that we “cannot tell” what cannot be told. We cannot say much about transcendent matters. Adorno calls the transcendent truth in art “an interrupted transcendence” and “a blocked transcendence”. We have no admittance to the absolute, but art points in the direction of something unknown that we call transcendence (Adorno 2021, 245).

Adorno’s discussion of silence and transcendence comes very close to Fosse’s view as sketched above, or maybe the other way around, Fosse’s view comes very close to Adorno’s. To both Fosse and Adorno, it is the musicality of language that allows us to “hear” silence, not only because sound and silence are the basic components of music, but because the language of music and the musicality of language do not refer to an external reality in the same way as everyday language and the language of concepts do. For that reason, Adorno describes the language of art as “a language that is similar to language, but is not language” (“Sprachähnlichkeit der Kunst”). This is quite similar to Fosse’s discussion of art’s language in his essay “From telling via showing to writing”, where he describes his way from rock rhythm to writing (Fosse 2015, 14–21).

The play Namnet (The Name) (Fosse 1995) tells a simple story: a young couple, expecting a child, have no place to live, and they move in with the woman’s parents. The drama’s plot, however, is more complex. The conflict centres on the problems of communication between the characters and how difficult it is to express feelings and thoughts in everyday language. I think the play’s title, The Name, alludes to Fosse’s discussion of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language in an essay

called “The Deepest Need for Speechlessness”, written in 1990, but first published in 1999 in Gnostic Essays and translated to English in An Angel Walks Through the Stage and Other Essays (Fosse 2015, 28–32).

Jon Fosse here considers Benjamin’s essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (1928) to be “at once the most comprehensible and most incomprehensible notion [of language] I have ever read” (2015, 29). Benjamin’s theory of language is “a mystical language theory”, language itself becomes “messianic ” (his emphasis) (2015, 30).

Fosse ends the essay with a beautiful quotation from Benjamin, stating the duality of language, that language is both what can be communicated and what cannot be communicated: “In all grief, there is the deepest need for speechlessness” (2015, 31).

Benjamin’s philosophy of language is deeply rooted in Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, and focuses on the name. The lost identity in the relationship between utterance and meaning corresponds with Derrida’s and Bakhtin’s theories of language as presented by Fosse in his first collection of essays in 1989. In 1995 Derrida’s text On the Name was also published in English. In three essays Derrida considers the problematics of naming, alterity and transcendence, and this work lays open the connection between deconstruction and negative theology: Kabbalah.

“The breaking of the vessels”, Kabbalah and deconstruction

Gnostic Essays opens with an epigraph from Harold Bloom, and one of the essays in the book has the title “Bloom, Canon, Literary Quality, Gnosis”.9 It is reasonable to assume that the title of this volume of essays points at Bloom. Fosse only quotes one line from Lukács’s Theory of the Novel , although the main aspect of his own theory of the novel takes its point of departure from Lukács’s definition of the genre as “negative mysticism” (see also Hagerup 1999). That being so he does not quote many sentences from Bloom either; the most important and extensive quotation is in the last part of the essay on gnosis. According

9 First published in Vagant , 1998, Fosse 2015, 102–105.

to Fosse, Bloom writes in Omens of the Millenium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1997) that “the gnostic insight – or the ‘direct acquaintance of God within the self” – should be sought neither in the empirical nor in the intelligible world, neither through the senses nor in concepts”, it must be sought “in between these, in a between-world we may only access through good art’s pictorial presentation”.10 Fosse goes on, stating that to Bloom “it is literature which first and last has given him the gnostic insight he presents as his wisdom, his gnosis” (Fosse 2015, 103). The connection between Lukács and Bloom is a strange constellation in Fosse’s philosophy of literature. Yet it is not as strange as it may seem. The connecting line is Jewish mysticism.

In Kabbalah and Criticism (1975) Harold Bloom presents his deconstructive philosophy of literature and its theological basis. According to the book’s prologue, Kabbalah and Criticism contains the following chapters. The first chapter of the book offers the “primordial scheme”: Kabbalah . In this chapter Bloom deals with the fundamental aspects of Kabbalah, from God’s creation of the world, Ein Sof and tzimtzum , to the recreation of a new world order, through tikkun . In the next chapter, “the scheme is related, in detail, to a theory of reading poetry”. Bloom’s concepts in his theory of interpretation are directly diverted from and related to the kabbalistic scheme of interpreting the Torah. “A manifesto for antithetical criticism, based on this theory, constitutes the third and final chapter” (Bloom 1975, 12).

Bloom also establishes a link to his two works The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misreading (1975 b), connecting them to the kabbalist way of interpreting texts, because in Kabbalah every interpretation in the tradition – and Kabbalah means tradition – is a contribution to a new way of seeing the tradition and keep it alive by reshaping it. From this point of view even The Western Canon. Books and School of the Ages (1994) could also be seen as a continuation of Kabbalah and Criticism .

10 I have changed the English translation’s (Fosse 2015) ‘intelligent’ to ‘intelligible’ and ‘presentation of the figurative’ to ‘pictorial presentation’.

It is not difficult to see Bloom’s writings as a main source for Fosse’s theoretical exercises. To mention some of Fosse’s basic concepts, such as writing, irony, deconstruction, theological mysticism, Gnosticism – they are all there also in Bloom’s main works as well. To what degree Fosse was familiar with the kabbalistic grounding of Bloom’s literary theory, I don’t know. But it is of no importance, when pointing to Bloom, Jon Fosse is pointing at a theory with Kabbalah as a fundament. “The primal act is that God taught, the primal teaching is writing ” (Bloom 1975, 80), Bloom writes, and adds: “Kabbalah is a theory of writing ” (Bloom 1975, 52). “Kabbalah, if viewed as rhetoric, centres on two series of tropes: first – irony”, he also writes (Bloom 1975, 73).

As mentioned above, Fosse saw the theological implications of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction already in De la grammatologie (1967), and in Kabbalah and Criticism , Bloom underlines the connection: “More audaciously than any developments in recent French criticism, Kabbalah is a theory of writing (…) Kabbalah speaks of writing before writing (Derrida’s trace),” he says, and continues to talk about “the brilliance of his Grammatology” in this context (Bloom 1975, 52).

In the commentaries to Kabbalah and Criticism , it is common to mention the poets that Bloom discusses, such as John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop. However, Bloom also discusses Kabbalah in interpretations of the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Wallace Stevens. In my opinion, even more important in this work are the philosophers he mentions and their kabbalistic influences. In addition to Derrida and French poststructuralist criticism, Bloom points to fundamental kabbalistic features in psychoanalyses, semiotics, critical theory and, not least, in German idealism. He interprets kabbalistic features in the works of Sigmund Freud and Thomas Kuhn; he discusses the parallels between Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics and the fundamentals of Kabbalah in the models of Cordovero, Luria and Gershom Scholem; and he even sees the Frankfurt School’s

negative dialectics in the light of Jewish mysticism: in the philosophy of Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer.11

“Hegel,” Bloom writes, “was impressed by what he knew of Kabbalah”, and Hegel knew “creation as the breaking of the vessels” (Bloom 1975, 90). As Gershom Scholem has shown in Zohar: The Book of Splendor (1949), the breaking of the vessels is the central kabbalistic figuration of God’s creation of the world. To create the universe, God withdraws from the world, and with his contraction, the world falls apart into broken vessels, that contain evil, but also glimpses of light, traces of God. To gather these glimpses of light is man’s task on Earth, tikkun, to create a better and different world anew by rearranging the fragments of reality.

I mention this not only because it lies at the heart of Bloom’s gnostic version of Kabbalah and is therefore a central layer of Fosse’s way of thinking, but because this reveals a hidden connection between the two main theorists in his essays: Harold Bloom and Georg Lukács. The breaking of the vessels is also hidden between the lines in Lukács’ Theory of the Novel , referring to Hegel’s presentation of the breaking of the vessels in 1807 in Phenomenology of Spirit (1977). Hegel’s German term for this is “Lichtwesen”. He tells the story of God’s creation of the world, the divine Lichtwesen : “Light disperses its unitary nature into an infinity of forms and offers up itself as a sacrifice to being-for-self, so that from its substance the individual may take an enduring existence for itself” (Hegel 1977, 420). To Lukács, “the irony of the novel is the self-correction of the world’s fragility”, i.e. of the dispersion of the light.12 In the novel, the parts are “united” in “the structure of the novel’s totality” (Lukács 1971, 75–76). This is the novel’s atheistic mysticism, the negative mysticism in a world without God. The world has fallen apart, in the novel the parts are united in a new totality. Moreover, by following Hegel’s dialectical scheme for the development of history, Lukács already subscribes to the hermetic tradition of mysticism in German idealism (Magee 2001).

11 See also Linneberg 2021.

12 I owe this perspective to Agata Bielik-Robson (2020).

In this context we could have interpreted Jon Fosse’s novel Melancholia (1995), about the painter Lars Hertervig, “the painter of light”, living in a dark world of depression and melancholia. But that is another story.

The essay as form is characterised by its “cross-connections between elements, something for which discursive logic has no place”, Adorno says. In these cross-connections between elements we find “a unity, however hidden , in the object itself”. This unity is created when the essay “approaches the logic of music, that stringent, and yet aconceptual art of transition” (Adorno 1958, 45, my emphasis). His conclusion is that “the essay’s innermost law is heresy. Through violations of the orthodoxy of thought, something in the object becomes visible which it is orthodoxy’s secret and objective aim to keep invisible” (Adorno 1958, 47).

In the cross-connections between the elements in Fosse’s essays we find a unity, however hidden, not only between Georg Lukács (German idealism) and Harold Bloom, but between the Frankfurt School’s Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse, Bakhtin’s semiotics and Derrida’s deconstruction. Through violations of the orthodoxy of thought, something becomes visible: a negative theology, based on the mysticism in Kabbalah and Gnosticism, which it is orthodoxy’s secret and objective aim to keep invisible.

This unity, however hidden, constitutes the origins and promise of Jon Fosse’s essays.

Epilogue about being Norwegian and evil

One of the very last essays in Gnostic Essays has the title “The Demoniacal Writer” (Fosse 2015, 115–116). Fosse writes about Ibsen:

The better you want to be, the more stupid and evil you are, the Ibsenite wisdom seems to say.

And if Norwegian politicians had understood this in their eagerness to make Norway to something as disgusting as a “leading country” (…) it would have been better to live in this land. (…) But Norway, the land of goodness, has to this day not understood Ibsen, the demoniacal writer. Instead, they have made him a spokesman for a lot of “isms”, like

“feminism”, although there never existed a less constructive author than Ibsen. It is nearly impossible to misunderstand more.13

Because, Fosse continues, “what you find in Ibsen’s works is pure destruction. A destruction that is liberating, and that could make us wiser and better as human beings, because it gets us out of the idiot-like condition, that unavoidably makes things worse.” Further, he quotes the former prime minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland, who, during the Olympic Games at Lillehammer in 1994, famously said: “It is typical Norwegian to be good”.

“If this had been uttered in a play of Ibsen”, Fosse writes, “it would have been revealed, to all who understand, that in effect it means the opposite: it is typically Norwegian to be evil”.

In gnostic philosophy, the demiurge is an evil sovereign who rules over lower powers. The kabbalist Franz Kafka, who Fosse has translated into Norwegian, said that this world was the worst and most evil of all worlds. However, according to Kafka’s antinomic mysticism based on Sabbatai Zevi, this negation points to another world. A better world (see Adorno 1982).

When Jon was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, I sent him an email to congratulate him. In his reply he once again talked about his attraction to the fjords on the Norwegian west coast, especially Sognefjord.

I look out of the window, I see the “fingers of light” from Heaven down to Earth, the sun flowing through the sky, glittering on the water, and I don’t have to refer to Zohar. The Book of Splendor to say that so is, to me, Jon Fosse’s answer to the world’s evils also in the light of his essays.

13 My translation.

Aagenæs, Bjørn . 1999. “Det konkrete i essayet. Om Gnostiske essay av Jon Fosse”. Vinduet (Vinduet.no) 12 November 1999, accessed 5 June 2025, https://www. vinduet.no/kritikk/det-konkrete-i-essayet-om-gnostiske-essay-av-jon-fosse.

Adorno, Theodor W . 1958. Noten zur Literatur (I), Suhrkamp Verlag. See Adorno 2019.

______. 1982. “Notes on Kafka”. In Prisms, 243–271. MIT Press.

______.1991. Notar til litteraturen. A selection of Adorno’s Noten zur Literatur. Translated into Norwegian by Arild Linneberg, Jon Fosse et al. Samlaget.

______. 2019. Notes to Literature. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson. Columbia University Press.

______. 1998. Estetisk teori. Translated by Arild Linneberg. Gyldendal.

______. 2021. Estetisk teori. Translated by Arild Linneberg. Revised edition with an introduction. Vidarforlaget.

Agamben, Giorgio . 1999. The Man Without Content. Stanford University Press. Ashton, Dore . 1991. A Fable of Modern Art. University of California Press.

Bakhtin, Mikhail . 1973, 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. University of Minnesota Press.

Benjamin, Walter . 1982. Das Passagenwerk. Suhrkamp Verlag.

______. 2017. Passasjeverket I–II. Translated by Arild Linneberg and Janne Sund. Vidarforlaget.

Bielik-Robson, Agatha . 2020. “The Void of God, or the Paradox of the Pious Atheism: From Scholem to Derrida”. European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 12 (2): 109–132.

Bloom, Harold . 1973. The Anxiety of Influence. Oxford University Press.

______. 1975. Kabbalah and Criticism. Seabury Press.

______. 1975b. A Map of Misreading. Oxford University Press.

______. 1994. The Western Canon. Books and School of the Ages. Harcourt Brace & Company.

______. 1997. Omens of the Millenium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection. Riverhead books.

Derrida, Jacques. 1967. De la Grammatologie. Éditions des Minuits.

_____. 1995. On the Name. Stanford University Press.

Fosse, Jon. 1986. “Mellom språksyn og poetikk. Forteljing med sleivspark etter Kjartan Fløgstad”. Vinduet (3): 54–59.

______. 1987. “Tale eller skrift som romanteoretisk metafor”. Norsk litterær årbok 1987: 171–188.

______. 1989. Frå telling via showing til writing. Samlaget.

______. 1992. Hund og engel. Samlaget.

______. 1995. Namnet. Samlaget

______. 1999. Gnostiske essay. Samlaget

______. 2015. An Angel Walks Through the Stage and Other Essays. Translated by May-Brit Akerholt. Dolkey Archive Press.

Hagerup, Henning. 1999. “Etterord. Jon Fosse – en negativ mystiker?” In Fosse, Gnostiske essay, 265–278.

Handke, Peter. 1986. Die Wiederholung. Suhrkamp Verlag.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1977 [1807]. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford University Press.

Johannesen, Georg. 1981. Om den norske skrivemåten. Gyldendal.

______. 1987. Rhetorica Norvegica. LNU.

Linneberg, Arild. 1989. “Jon Fosse – skrivern”. Afterword to Fosse, Frå telling via showing til writing, 165–173.

______. 2021. “Det gåtefullt estetiske: Estetisk teori og det estetisk gåtefulle”. Introduction to Adorno, Estetisk teori, 7–113.

Lukács, Georg. 1971 [1920]. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. The Merlin Press.

Magee, Glenn Alexander. 2001. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition. Cornell University Press.

Scholem, Gershom. 1949. Zohar: The Book of Splendor. Schocken Books.

Shklovsky, Viktor. 1991 [1925]. Theory of Prose. English edition. Dalkey Archive Press.

Sund, Janne and Linneberg, Arild. 2017. “Innganger og utveier. Passasjer om Walter Benjamin og Passasjeverket”, Passasjeverket I. Translated by Arild Linneberg and Janne Sund, 13–107. Vidarforlaget.

———. 2018. “Benjamin and Strindberg: Mystical Constellations”. In Arcade Materials: Arcades Blue: Threshold to Cosmos, edited by Sam Dolbear and Hannah Proctor, 85–108. Aldgate Press.

3. Writing as Insight: On Gnosis and “Shining darkness”, with Emphasis on Septology

Tom Egil Hverven 1

In this exploration of some of Jon Fosse’s works, with the main focus on Septologien (Septology (2019–2021)), I would like to argue that his work is moving, if not away from mysticism, then in a direction other than gnostic dualism. Following some preliminary comments on gnosis and Gnosticism, I will demonstrate how the novel’s use of Biblical text, liturgy, prayers and art combine to give the painter, Asle, insight, as well as a delicate sense of belonging, unity and cohesion – a place to be, expressed in the Nynorsk (New Norwegian) version of the Norwegian language.

For decades, the writer, student and reader Jon Fosse has been moving through literature and literary theory towards theology. In Septology, insights into art, literature and theology meld together in the painter Asle, in a language expressing the ambivalence of faith, the ambiguity of conviction. The work expresses paradoxes encountered by the artist of faith in relationship to the Bible and Christian tradition. Grounded in the works of the Dominican monk Meister Eckhart, a writer Fosse holds in high regard, as well as being Asle’s most important source of inspiration for Septology, one paradox may be expressed as follows:

1 This chapter is translated to English by Kjellfrid Reite Castle.

[…] eg tenkjer på Meister Eckhart som seier at utan mennesket hadde ikkje Gud vore til, og utan Gud hadde ikkje mennesket vore til […] (Fosse 2021a, 225)

[…] I think about Meister Eckhart who said that without human beings God would not exist, and without God human beings would not exist […] (Fosse 2022, 755)

Here, the traditional, hierarchical relationship between God and human beings is turned into a type of equitable relationship, with exchange and dependency going both ways. In previous works by Fosse, a gnostic worldview accompanied by dualism was more readily evident. Gnosis is a Greek word meaning “knowledge” or “insight”. Gnosticism is a collective term for several philosophical and religious directions rooted in Antiquity, in pre-Christian times. 2 A shared trait among gnostic movements is the idea that the physical, mortal human being is caught in a darkness, in a lower world, as in a prison. The way out and upward from this is found through a form of introspective knowledge; insight can lead the human being’s immortal soul to an originally higher, spiritual world. In Gnosticism, therefore, the state of being is interpreted as fundamentally dualistic: there is a distinction between a lower god, creator or Demiurge, who is responsible for the material, dark world, and a higher form of deity who reigns in the spiritual, the world of light.

Early Christianity, represented by the so-called Church Fathers, had a critical and delineating posture towards Gnosticism. Radical gnostic thinkers were considered heretics, for instance the Persian prophet Mani, who in the third century CE proclaimed a radical, dualistic teaching on how the deity of darkness and the god of light were opposed to one another from the beginning. Due to his influence, the

2 The following account of Gnosticism is based on the introduction to Gnostiske skrifter (Gnostic Writings) (Gilhus and Thomassen 2002, VII–XLVI). I have also consulted “Judekristendomen och gnosticismen” (“Jewish Christianity and Gnosticism”), chapter 3 in Bengt Hägglund’s Teologins historia (The History of Theology) (Hägglund 1981, 14–25), and the reference entry, “Gnostisisme,” in Store norske leksikon (Kværne, Karlsen, and Groth n.d.).

term Manichaeism is often used as a collective term for dualistic religious movements. Among these were the Cathars in twelfth-century Europe, who in turn became the origin of the Norwegian word kjetter, meaning “heretic”. The mainstream Catholic Church, and later the Protestant churches, defined themselves in opposition to Gnosticism.

Jon Fosse’s work consists mainly of literary texts that do not give a precise definition of Gnosticism. In his protagonists, varieties of gnostic thought create a literarily productive basis for distance to tradition – whilst often being situated within a Christian horizon of understanding. Fosse’s own affinity for gnostic thought is most explicit in a couple of texts in the book Gnostiske essay (Gnostic Essays) 3 (1999, quoted in Fosse 2011, 247–530). The essay “Bloom, Canon, Literary Quality, Gnosis” (Fosse 2011, 355–357), in particular, addresses Harold Bloom’s Omens of Millenium , originally published in 1996. By quoting and paraphrasing, partially with translation into Nynorsk , Fosse moves towards adopting Bloom’s insights as his own. Bloom equates gnostic insight with “direct knowledge of God through oneself”. Knowledge must be sought in an intermediary world between the empirical and the intelligible, between the sensory and conceptual, something to which visual depiction in good art provides access. In such an intermediary world, depicted concretely in Asle’s own images, one may see the contours of a theoretical basis for the protagonist’s thoughts on visual art in Septology. For Bloom, canonical literature is insight, gnosis, which leads to an unshakable trust, a knowledge which is not a faith, based on an encounter between what he calls foreignness and beauty. In the essay “Negative Mysticism” (Fosse 2011, 374–387), Fosse grounds Gnosticism more concretely in his own experiences, particularly in relation to his mother’s family. Her father was influenced by the Quakers, by “how the connection of souls gave dignity to the human being in the world, from a place far beyond the world” (Fosse

3 Translator’s note: For publications with no official English translation, the Norwegian title has been used throughout the text; the first instance of each title also includes an (unofficial) translation. For works with a published English translation, just the English title has been used throughout the text.

2011, 376). Later in the essay, he discusses how the Quakers imagine “the inner light”, as their form of collective worship is pared back to sitting still in a circle, in silence (Fosse 2011, 381). Fosse also tells of his father’s mother, who came from Strandebarm in Western Norway, and of whom one can see hints in his poetry, for instance in “Sleep My Loved Ones” (Fosse 2021b, 264–265). In this poem, one can virtually hear the singing of hymns and smell the coffee brewing at the lowchurch prayer house. For Fosse, both grandparents represent what he calls a Norwegian Puritanism. Whilst his maternal grandfather connects Fosse to the Quakers, he perceives his paternal grandmother as a link to Pietism, both with “mystical insights that also controlled their lives and thought” (Fosse 2011, 377). Although they must have disagreed profoundly, Fosse credits them both for their undogmatic approach. The short anecdotes in his essay about his grandparents serve to illuminate why Fosse depicts himself as a “post-puritan”. He uses his grandparents’ stories to approach his own theory of the novel, which is not primarily meant to face the world – it is to constitute a world of its own. In Fosse’s unique development of Quaker ideas, he sees the sermon as something external, worldly, while scripture represents to him the inner, the personal: “The sermon is social. Scripture is individual” (Fosse 2011, 380–381). The Quakers’ gnostic concept of an inner light is identified with scripture. Fosse compares his resistance to the use of omniscient narrators with the Quakers’ scepticism about priests and ceremonies. For a time, he refused to use the word “narrator” to describe the voice of a novel, instead preferring “writer” (Fosse 2011, 383). Inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of “the polyphonic novel”, he saw his own novels as a blended dialogue between narrator, writer, author and person. Later he moved, via Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of irony, “closer to the paradox and oxymoron than to sarcasm” (Fosse 2011, 384), to Georg Lukács’s description of the novel as negative mysticism. Fosse terms this “the irony of writing” or “horizontal irony”, in which multiple meanings are found side by side, as “meaning without meaning”. The essay poses multiple questions concerning what meaning is or what it signifies, e.g., by simultaneously asking and stating that “meaning is, as we know, always in motion?”

By insisting that meaning exists, in the minor, the adjacent, as I interpret Fosse, not as what he calls “the grand meaning”, the novel allows the character of meaning as being a miracle to emerge, as meaning without meaning, and “in this way the novel keeps open an access point to the divine” (Fosse 2011, 385). This line of reasoning leads us to Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel , in which he writes: “The writer’s irony is a negative mysticism to be found in times without a god […] ” (Lukács 2001, 73). “That hit hard”, Fosse writes. As I interpret him, one cannot approach God or meaning without taking the via negativa .

What, then, is “negative mysticism”, according to Fosse? He associates it with an understanding of the novel as writing. Fosse adds that this understanding has as much to do with his own fear of speaking as it does with the influence of Jacques Derrida, although he admits that the French philosopher has been significant (Fosse 2011, 386).

Reference to previous works by Derrida is found elsewhere, for instance in a more literary-theoretical essay such as “Speech or text as metaphor for theory of the novel”, in which a Danish translation, Om Grammatologi (Of Grammatology), is listed among the works cited. If one were to read Fosse’s texts on negative mysticism with explicit reference to Derrida, the book On the Name, particularly the essay “Sauf le Nom (Post-Scriptum)”, would be particularly relevant, although I have not found it mentioned in Fosse’s writings. In the latter, Derrida reads texts in a Christian, mystical tradition from Dionysius the Areopagite, in which Meister Eckhart is a significant author along with the later Angelus Silesius, a pseudonym for Johann Scheffler. In this tradition, the divine is described apophatically, based on what God is not, in recent times termed as negative theology (Derrida 1995, 33–85). Derrida emphasises how negative theology works as a corrective to – or a criticism of – the notion of Christianity as a continuous, metaphysical tradition identical to itself throughout history (Derrida 1995, 71). According to him, negative theology leads, interestingly, to a freedom reminiscent of what he describes, earlier in the book, as modern literature’s freedom from authorities, freedom to say anything (in the essay “Passions”, Derrida 1995, 27–28). A detailed analysis of similarities

and differences between Fosse’s and Derrida’s thought patterns would be beyond the scope of this article, not to mention that when Fosse himself describes what he means by “the novel as negative mysticism” he does not refer to theory but indirectly to his own practice as a writer. The mysticism he speaks of “can only be written forth, it cannot be referred to, as an about, it only exists in the writing that allows the mysticism to arise” (Fosse 2011, 387). Let us therefore go to the writings, to the literary texts.

The protagonist of Septology moves beyond gnostic dualism. Through Biblical texts, liturgy, prayer, and artwork, Asle gains a profound sense of belonging, unity and cohesiveness – a place to be as it expressed in the Nynorsk version of Norwegian. Like the author Jon Fosse, Asle arrives at this place by writing, specifically, in Asle’s case, translating the prayers of the Catholic Rosary. Additionally, the novel’s use of paradoxes, of faces, of the gaze, shows possible ways to arrive at this point. I would also like to give examples of how Fosse has prepared the fragile ground for unity, a place to be, in previous poems and translations, as well as prose texts, plays and essays.

Fosse tends to express belonging or calm with words for unstable situations, such as “sway”, or in oxymorons, i.e. paradoxical rhetorical figures, juxtapositions of words normally mutually exclusive, such as the expression “shining darkness”. As we shall see, this expression is found as early as in the discussion of Lars Hertervig in the novel Melancholy II, in which the painter is seen through the eyes of a fictional sister, Oline (Fosse 1996, 37–38). This oxymoron also appears towards the end of the play A Summer’s Day, published in 1997, the year after the novel. In the play, the older woman acknowledges in a monologue that she has lost her husband, Asle, out at sea. She is alone in the dark and rain:

[…] og eg stod der høyrde bølgjene slå og slå og eg kjende korleis bølgjene slo igjennom det regn og det mørker som no var meg

som no skulle vere meg for alltid skulle vere meg

No skulle eg vere i det lysande mørkret i dei slåande bølgjene stod eg der og merka

[…] (Fosse 2001, 79)

[…] and I stood there heard the waves pound and pound and I felt how the waves pounded through the rain and the darkness that now were me that now would be me would be me forever Now I would be in the shining darkness in the pounding waves I stood there feeling

[…] (Fosse 2004, 69)

By a window facing the fjord, a familiar motif throughout Fosse’s work, the older woman says she feels a sense of emptiness, as “the rain and the darkness”. She is a large, empty calm, a darkness, a “nothing” (Fosse 2001, 78). 4 From this “nothing” rises the acknowledgement of an empty darkness shining out from herself. She cannot divorce herself from this darkness, but as she opens the window and hears the rain and darkness more clearly, her realisation grows that she is to remain in the “shining darkness” – as quoted above. Rather than denoting a fixed place, the oxymoron refers to a feeling of belonging among the waves, in the darkness and rain – in something extensive, universal.

4 The Swedish theatre critic Leif Zern uses this passage from A Summer’s Day as a point of departure for the analysis in The Luminous Darkness (Zern 2005, 81–87). A similar excerpt of the play was performed by Stina Ekblad in connection with Jon Fosse’s Nobel Prize lecture in Stockholm on 7 December 2023 (https://youtu.be/-lCRE3ERj_Y) – 32 minutes into the video. Accessed 22 February 2025).

For Asle in Septology, the Rosary and Latin prayers also function in such a way that the liturgical texts converge into a movable, weightless sway of belonging rather than a fixed, Earth-bound place. In the novel, the texts of Meister Eckhart constitute a melting pot of dogma history in which Asle’s reflections are in dialogue with the liturgical sections, ever giving new form to the paradoxes. Septology suggests that the basis of theology is poetry, literary texts, grounded on human experience and imagination. The last thing Asle says in the novel, “dizzying”, inside him, is a prayer quoted verbatim, a text providing a sense of belonging to a worldwide liturgical community, shared throughout centuries. The words used by Asle do not seem to be formulated from above, as required prayers, but appear as Asle’s cry for help, from below. His second to last thought is a confession of sins, formulated as a fundamental acknowledgement of loneliness: he “thought [not] well of the others” (Fosse 2021a, 331), he did not care about the others. In other words, as I interpret it, Asle admits that he is incurvatus in se, curved inward on himself, a phrase that can be traced back to St Augustine and Martin Luther, with support in St Paul’s letter to the Romans. For Augustine and Luther, being curved inward on oneself is a description of the sinfulness of the human being, its lack of ability to do any good, paradoxically formulated by St Paul: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Romans 7:19 KJV).

That a Catholic like Asle should also be inspired by Luther is not as strange as one may think. A reading of Luther’s writings makes it evident that he and his contemporaries were deeply influenced by the mysticism of the late Middle Ages, including authors such as Meister Eckhart. Jon Fosse, author of Septology, grew up with Norwegian Lutheran low-church Christianity (Seiness 2009, 32–35). Like Asle, he has also moved away from a relatively narrow form of Protestantism and into a more culturally open variety of Catholicism. Septology is saturated with the idea that all paths to God are equally valid, whether they go by way of different confessions or through various expressions of art.

There are certain aspects of gnosis, the unique form of insight which parts of Fosse’s writing lean towards, to which one may adopt a sceptical posture. A stringent dualism may lead to worldly contempt or escape, suggested for instance in the disappearance of Asle’s “Namesake” at sea in A Summer’s Day. At the same time, painter Asle in Septology emerges, due to the extensiveness and multifariousness of his reflections, as more movable than earlier gnostic-influenced figures of Fosse’s literary universe. I read this large novel about the painter in contrast to Olai, the father of Johannes in Morning and Evening , the way he thinks at the birth of his son (Fosse 2015, 14–16, referred to in the following). Olai seems more trapped in gnostic dualism. He is aware that his thoughts are incompatible with “the creed”, and that he could therefore be seen as a “heathen”. However, in his view, he cannot pretend to not have seen what he has seen, or to not have understood what he has understood. His denial of the world is explicit: Olai’s God is “a God one can sense when one denies this world, that is when he appears, strangely, both in the individual and in the world”. Art, or music, represents alternatives: Olai can hear some of what God would say when “a player plays well”. Good music rejects the world; therefore, Satan always causes trouble and devilry when anyone plays really well, Olai thinks. He imagines his son, Johannes, coming out into “the world, the evil”. Already from the first moment, “one is in communion with God’s goodness and with a lower god or a Satan”, Olai thinks. For him, dualism does not seem like it can change. As we shall see, Asle in Septology emerges with a different kind of mobility, a changeability that gives the novel a distinctive literary quality.

What is insight? What does it mean to understand something? In the foreword to Gnostic Essays, Fosse writes that, in future, he will write fewer essays and instead stick to other literary genres. Wisely, Fosse avoids formulating this as a promise. He simply suggests that from then on, i.e. from 1999 when Gnostic Essays was published, he would write fewer essays: “… the little I know can be better said in other

languages”, he concludes (Fosse 2011, 252). That is also what has happened, apart from the fact that there are extensive essay-like passages in Septology, in a characteristically inquisitive, dialogical form that is also found in texts published in the essay genre. As far as I am aware, Fosse has only added one pure essay in book form, the final text in the book Collected Essays from 2011. Under the title “The Gnosis of Writing”, he reflects precisely on what it means to understand something. As mentioned previously, in the essay “Negative Mysticism”, by confirming and asking in the same sentence, he demonstrates how meaning, or understanding something, is always in motion. The first-person narrator, conventionally understood as Jon Fosse in March 2000, when the essay was first published, claims to understand less and less as the years go by. At the same time, he understands more and more, he writes, then asks: How can this be? The answer touches upon our topic, writing as insight . Fosse continues: to understand a little is also to understand a lot, it is “true in a certain sense, perhaps almost in a gnostic sense” (Fosse 2011, 533). As I interpret Fosse here, gnostic insight consists, in a paradoxical way, of waiving one’s insight. Perhaps there is a vague echo of the Apology of Socrates, in which he presents wisdom as the insight that he knows that he does not know. A related idea in philosophical and theological tradition is the idea of “the hidden god”, deus absconditus, particularly in the writings of Martin Luther. Theologian Marius Timmann Mjaaland addresses this aspect of Luther’s thought in the book The Hidden God (Mjaaland 2016). I will return to how Mjaaland’s treatment of Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation of 1518 makes it possible to see a kinship between Luther and the thought pattern in Septology. The novel reflects a long line of criticism of metaphysics in Western thought which we have already touched upon, from Meister Eckhart to Martin Heidegger and Jacques

Derrida, 5 and which tends to emerge in Fosse’s discussions of literature (Seiness 2009; Skjeldal 2015). Septology is full of philosophical and theological renderings, albeit told in a fragmented way.

Lutheran thought on “the hidden God” seems to be related to the nature of Asle’s ideas about life. This is how he thinks towards the end of the fifth volume of Septology:

[…] Gud løyner seg heile tida, ja det er som om han syner seg med å løyna seg, i livet, i tinga, i det som er, ja sjølvsagt også i eit målarstykke, og kanskje er det slik at di meir Gud løyner seg di meir syner han seg, og omvendt, ja di meir han syner seg, eller vert synt fram, vert påstått å vera slik eller slik, di meir løyner han seg, tenkjer eg, ja at Gud openberrar seg igjennom å løyna seg, og det er i den løyndomen Gud er, i Guds løyndom, at eg kan gløyma og gøyma meg sjølv, og berre der […]

(Fosse 2020, 346)

[…] God has been staying hidden this whole time, yes, it’s like he shows himself by concealing himself, in life, in things, in what is, yes, in paintings too of course, and maybe it’s like the more God conceals himself the more he shows himself, and vice versa, yes, the more he shows himself, or is shown, you can say it either way, the more he conceals himself, I think, yes, God reveals himself by hiding, and it is in the hiddenness of God, God’s hiddenness, that I can forget myself and hide myself, and only there […]

(Fosse 2022, 567)

What does it mean that God “[…] shows himself by concealing himself, in life, in things”? Considering Fosse’s thoughts on negative

5 The Hidden God. Luther, Philosophy, and Political Theology discusses the expression deus absconditus based, e.g., on texts by Heidegger and Derrida (Mjaaland 2016, 11–15, 16–19). In addition to the books Mjaaland mentions are texts which explicitly address art. Heidegger discusses the Greek concept of aletheia (uncovering, uncoveredness, as opposed to concealment, being concealed) in The Origin of the Work of Art (Heidegger 2000, 35 and 56ff.). Derrida reflects on related phenomena in The Truth in Painting . (Derrida 2004, 139ff.), which includes an interpretation of The Origin of the Work of Art . The dialectic between covering and uncovering, as it is laid out by Heidegger and Derrida in these texts, comprises an important backdrop for Fosse’s use of “shining darkness” and similar expressions. In Å lese etter troen (Hverven 2022, 85–98) I go into further detail on Fosse’s relationship to another of Heidegger’s texts, “… poetically man dwells … ”, mainly about Friedrich Hölderlin (Heidegger 1995).

mysticism, this quote can be seen as a rejection of “the grand meaning” – in practice. Repeated small, affirmative interjections, three times “yes”, underscore Asle’s adherence to the idea that God paradoxically reveals himself by hiding. Incidentally, there is a link here to key events in some of Christianity’s oldest texts: towards the end of the four Gospels in the New Testament, after His resurrection, Jesus alternates between being visible to and hidden from his disciples and their friends, until in “The Acts of the Apostles”, he becomes invisible, though present via the Holy Spirit, in the fellowship of his followers. A favourite Bible passage for Fosse (Skjeldal 2015, 116) can be translated in two ways, either as “the kingdom of God is within you” or “the kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:21, cf. explanatory note in Bibelen 2024 ), i.e., as something individual as well as something social. The Septology quote has activity going both ways: God alternates between opening and closing himself, as in a wave-like motion. Asle the narrator can forget and hide himself “in the hiddenness of God” – and only there. At another thematically and formally related place in the novel, Asle is thinking that God is hiding in the silence, and in love, before he notices his wife Ales putting her arm around his shoulder, long after she has passed away, as a gesture of affection from the other side of death (Fosse 2021a, 226). We will shortly look more closely at the metonymic relationship between God’s and Ales’s faces. First, however, we must get a better understanding of what the idea that writing gives insight might entail.

In the essay “The Gnosis of Writing”, Fosse asserts that there may be two ways of understanding. Use of theory and concepts causes him to understand less and less, while turning to fiction and poetry, he “understands more and more” (Fosse 2011, 533). In forms of literature such as story, poetry and drama, he writes forth a language that primarily is, rather than meaning something, “almost as stones and trees and gods and humans” (Fosse 2011, 534). The essay takes an unexpected turn, as Fosse writes that of course this has to do with himself

and his own story. 6 From when he was young, at an “embarrassingly young age”, he has withdrawn to write little poems and stories. The embarrassing part, he writes, is that he confirms the established myths about the artist. But it is precisely this, writing forth characters, stories, little universes that do not already exist, that gives him great joy. Upon closer inspection the issue seems clear: if we think of texts as things, as existences, like stones, trees, gods and humans, they make up parts of a world that becomes inhabitable in new ways – through writing. Texts arise by being created, that is, by being written forth by the author himself. Texts can also be moved between linguistic universes, for instance by translating the works of other writers. Translation and rewriting moves things. In the last few decades, Fosse has translated a number of significant works from world literature alongside his own extensive production – individual poems and books by Friedrich Hölderlin, Georg Büchner, Franz Kafka, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Harold Pinter, Sarah Kane, Peter Handke and Gerald Murnane, to mention some. In Septology, this practice continues in the form of translating and applying the liturgical prayers of the Rosary, incorporated in the novel, i.e. made part of the textual corpus, a reciprocal effect with Christian liturgy. In the novel, the prayers of the Rosary also derive their meaning from Asle’s regular participation in Catholic mass, particularly in the Eucharist.

Towards the end of the essay, Fosse reflects on the social aspect of being a writer, on his experience that all his intense writing makes him a deviant. At the same time, he realises that precisely the result, his texts, have earned him renown. The essay returns to the idea of seeking solace in writing. Writing emerges as a place he “has created for himself in life” (Fosse 2011, 536), a place where he not only lets go of concepts and theories, but also “of the social hierarchising consensuses”. What

6 Fosse gave supplementary autobiographical information in his Nobel Prize lecture “A Silent Language” in Stockholm, 7 December 2023: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/12/ fosse-lecture-english.pdf (accessed 12 April 2024).

are social hierarchising consensuses? The word “hierarchy” is a compound of the Greek words for “holy” and “to prevail/dominate” and was originally used to describe the priesthood. Later, like many other theological concepts, it became secularised and its meaning was transferred to various forms of organisation structured by rank, with superiors and inferiors, such as the military, public bureaucracy or larger private companies. A closer look at Septology reveals that the novel hardly builds on any such hierarchical ranking, neither of people nor of ideas. On the contrary, Fosse writes in a paratactical literary tradition, with greater emphasis on the relationship between words, and between people, than on any hierarchical ranking of these. A clear example is Asle’s relationship to his neighbour Åsleik. Their friendship is portrayed as full of reciprocity in the way they treat favours and gifts. Åsleik shovels snow and drives to fetch firewood for Asle, who reciprocates by providing paintings for Åsleik. The friends share meals; they travel together to Åsleik’s sister Guro to celebrate Christmas.

The paratactical also emerges as something concrete in the text itself. Fosse’s use of the conjunction “and” resembles the occurrence of connecting words and punctuation marks at the beginning of the Old Testament, specifically in the creation narratives in Genesis. In Å lese etter troen (Reading After Faith) (Hverven 2022, 132–135), I show possible connections between different images of God in the creation narratives and the images of the various characters named Asle (or different versions of a single character) that emerge through the narrative style of Septology. The novel’s use of the connective conjunction “and” creates a horizontal novel universe that gives greater motion to the narrator Asle – in time, in thought and in action.

In “The Gnosis of Writing”, Fosse describes how, through poetry and fiction, he is seeking to find a place where one does not understand, “a nearly absolute non-understanding”. He terms this “non-understanding” as movements and rhythms, as paradoxes, flowing between various concepts and theories, without attaching unambiguously to any of them. This tendency is reinforced by the conjunction “and”. As I see it, words used frequently in his writing, such as the previously mentioned “wave”, “sway” or “flight” (Fosse 2007, 42), are

apt descriptions of what is happening. Towards the end of the essay, Fosse approaches, again with Harold Bloom, the place of writing, a place knowing something that resembles what the old Gnostics knew, what gave them gnosis, an insight which cannot be uttered, but may perhaps be written. Fosse’s sentences twist themselves, via a brief reference to Wittgenstein and Derrida, into the formulation “what cannot be said must be written” (Fosse 2011, 537). Writing, in other words, is directed at something that cannot be said, but which nonetheless must be written. 7

Fosse expands on this sentence by adding that in this respect, writing may just as well be like a prayer. For him that is rather obvious, he concludes. In Septology, these two activities merge into one as Asle recites prayers he himself has translated from Latin to Nynorsk . One might add: prayer is directed at God, and the word “God” holds within its three letters much of what humanity does not understand. Fosse concludes the essay by writing that to write well feels almost like a criminal prayer. The reflections in the text on writing are circular and have occurred in repetitive oppositions. Earlier in the essay, Fosse mentions that the criminal is associated with joy, i.e. the joy of not being better than most folks – rather, somewhat worse (Fosse 2011, 535). There he hastens to add that he wants to be like the others, whilst also wishing that they leave him alone with himself, and with what is his, and with his writing.

For a long time, Fosse’s work has circled around the fundamental conditions of human life: birth, life, and death. What kind of insight does

7 Towards the end of the first volume, similar sentences are repeated in connection with The Bald Man’s sexual assault: “[…] and he thinks that he’ll never tell anyone, never, because this, he knows, is something you don’t talk about […] ” (Fosse 2020, 338). It could, however, be written. The outset is the seventh and final sentence of Tractatus logico-philosophicus , “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen” (Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent) (Wittgenstein 1984, 85). Derrida’s version is found in The Post Card : “What cannot be said above all must not be silenced, but written” (Derrida 1987, 194).

literature provide into these conditions? The novel Morning and Evening is focused on the extremities, Johannes’s emergence and disappearance. As mentioned, the novel contains something that can be interpreted as classic gnostic views on life: a sharp dualism, the idea of the world as fallen, created by “a lower god”, whilst hopes of a better world are placed on the other side of death. The purpose of life is to be liberated, through insight, gnosis, to a different world, suggested in the novel as Johannes’s experienced, deceased friend Peter coming to fetch him and rowing him through the waves out towards the horizon. On this final journey, Johannes meets the gaze of his deceased wife Erna, “and her eyes light up” (Fosse 2000, 115). 8

In Septology, Asle takes his reflections on the extremities of existence further than do previous characters in Fosse’s works. At the same time, the gnostic elements are toned down in favour of a more open posture, both to art forms and to the Catholic Church, with its liturgy, particularly the Eucharist – as well as the prayers of the Rosary. Asle sees art, literature and holy scriptures as different paths to the same goal, expressed as follows at the start of the novel:

[…] alt som i alvor vender seg mot Gud, anten ein nyttar ordet Gud eller kanskje er så klok, eller så blyg, andsynes den ukjende guddomen at ein ikkje gjer det, alt fører mot Gud, så slik sett er alle religionar éin, tenkjer eg, og slik sett fell òg religion og kunst saman, også fordi både Bibelen og liturgien er fiksjon og poesi og bilete, er litteratur og teater og biletkunst, og har si sanning som det […] (Fosse 2019, 31)

[…] other ways of honestly turning to God, maybe you use the word God or maybe you know too much to do that, or are too shy when confronted with the unknown divinity, but everything leads to God, so that all religions are one, I think, and that’s how religion and art go together, because the Bible and the liturgy are fiction and poetry and painting, are literature and drama and visual art, and they all have truth in them […] (Fosse 2019, 31)

8 Jakob Lothe points to similar effects of sunlight, mixed with light from his girlfriend Helene, for painter Lars Hertervig in the novel Melancholy I (Lothe 2018, 176).

Indirectly, passages like this one are a radical critique of the Bible as divine revelation, a central view in traditional Christianity. While conservative Christians may claim that both events and moral statements in the text are to be interpreted literally as God’s authoritative word, the novel instead emphasises that all religions are paths to God.9 Not only that, the Bible and liturgy join in with other human undertakings, such as literature, theatre or visual art. Thus, Asle’s view of the Bible and liturgy as “fiction and poetry and imagery” are closer to a modern, culturally open theology than to the conservative, low church Christianity he grew up with in Barmen. The truth cannot be transformed into dogma and repeated word for word. The truth that Asle seeks is one that must constantly be presented anew, created through language, metaphor and imagery, indirectly or through the via negativa . The wisest or shiest ones might avoid using God’s name at all, Asle suggests. As for him, he addresses God first and foremost in the prayers of the Rosary. In themselves these prayers are performative, they call God forth, just as Asle understands himself as called forth by God. Asle is radical in that he not only translates the prayers to his own language, Nynorsk , thereby turning them into literature as part of his narrative in Septology, but he also asserts that the prayers, as part of Christian liturgy, already are literature, art and theatre, and have their truth as such. At times he closes his prayer or liturgical act with an “Amen” (Fosse 2019, 79 and 81; Fosse 2021a, 210, 228 and 264). This Hebrew word means “it stands firm”, “it is certain and true” when used as a liturgical closing, according to the glossary in the most recent Norwegian Bible translation (Bibelen 2024, 1437).

In Å lese etter troen , I further address how these viewpoints are connected to an early practice in Fosse’s oeuvre (Hverven 2022, 86–89). When, in Septology, he lets Biblical quotes, prayers and theological fragments glide almost seamlessly into the text, he extends a line from his

9 This is related to the Eckhart quote at the beginning of this article: “[…] without the human being, God would not exist, and without God, the human being would not exist […] ” (Fosse 2021a, 225).

early days of writing. Hund og engel (Dog and Angel ) (1992) incorporates a translation of Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Hälfte des Lebens” (“Half of Life”), a poem which in word and phrase resembles a prayer or Biblical text. The first stanza depicts paradisical ideas of fertility and ripeness.10 The sudden change in the second stanza begins with the familiar Biblical phrase “Weh mir” [woe is me] (Job 10:15 etc.). To be sure, the strength of the German wording is diminished by Fosse in his translation. He writes instead, “And I […] ” (Fosse 2021b, 159). The original is more clearly rendered in his elder Norwegian colleague Olav H. Hauge’s version, “Ve meg […] ” (Hauge 2001, 27). Seen in context of the paratactical practice, with extensive use of the word “and” in Fosse’s oeuvre, his choice of “And I […] ” in his translation of Hölderlin’s poem may nonetheless be seen as both paradoxical and consistent.

There is another significant difference between the two prominent Nynorsk writers’ use of poetry from other languages. Olav H. Hauge utilises his translations to make his literary “house” inhabitable through many years of publication in periodicals, finally publishing them together under their own title, Dikt i umsetjing (Poems in Translation) (1982). Fosse, on the other hand, lets his translations glide in among his own poems as early as in the mentioned work, Dog and Angel . There is also a stanza there from Hölderlin’s “Patmos”, with the words:

The god Is near, and hard to grasp. But where there is danger, A rescuing element grows as well.

[…]

(Hölderlin 2007, 71)

The same lines from “Patmos” are quoted in German in Septology : “Nah ist und schwer zu fassen der Gott Wo aber Gefahr ist wächst das Rettende auch” (Fosse 2021a, 104). The content of this sentence, which

10 At the mentioned place in Å lese etter troen , I show how Hölderlin’s poem exists in a context that reinforces the images of fruit and bliss associated with agriculture and the speaker’s grandparents.

can be interpreted to mean that God is near in the darkness, when mankind is at its weakest and most vulnerable, is repeated in several varieties throughout Septology, and can be read as versions of the phrase “a shining darkness”. *

The many repetitions throughout Fosse’s oeuvre can be a challenge. My first impression of Septology was that much of it – too much –sounded familiar. It particularly disturbed my reading of the first volume that some of the wording related to the painter Asle seemed to echo Melancholy I–II, the novel that mentions “a shining darkness” in connection with painter Lars Hertervig. In Melancholy II, his sister Oline sees a connection between the images and “Lars when he gets like that. […] It’s black in the same way Lars is black. The darkness is the same. It’s a darkness that isn’t dead, it shines, it’s a shining darkness” (Fosse 1996, 37–38). Septology offers familiar elements from Fosse’s universe, including the window facing the fjord, out to the Western Norwegian landscape, which we recognise from the play A Summer’s Day. In addition, the oxymoron “shining darkness”, or an equivalent phrase, is repeated, with nearly identical formulations occurring at least twelve times, with variations, in the first volume (Fosse 2019, 22, 138, 149, 310, 319, 468, 498f and 501ff) and the two following ones (Fosse 2020, 162, 164; Fosse 2021a, 96 and 100ff). How is this repetition to be understood? To find out, I would like to show how the use of this wording is not static; it changes throughout the novel. To be sure, in one instance Asle says, “[…] I always think the same thoughts over and over again and I paint the same picture over and over again” (Fosse 2020, 164). Nonetheless, something interesting happens with the phrase “shining darkness” throughout the seven sections of Septology. From being associated with a specific painting, such as the picture Asle admires at the beginning of each of the first six sections (Fosse 2019, 22), St Andrew’s Cross painted impasto, with a purple and brown line, the repetitive monologue’s use of “shining darkness” shifts to his neighbour Åsleik’s eyes and on to Asle’s wife Ales’s eyes.

In one of the novel’s many humorous dialogues, the friends Asle and Åsleik speak about fishing, and of the innlysande (“obvious”) (literally, “shining-in”) – note the gnostic insight emanating from this word – in that one must have a certain amount of knowledge to catch fish (Fosse 2019, 148–149). After their conversation, it is Åsleik who falls “out of this evil world and into a still and peaceful clearing or clarity, an area of stillness, of light, yes, of shining darkness”. Asle thinks: similar light, and an accompanying calm, can come out of the heavens in certain cloud formations, or from the eyes of a dog. The latter reflection is developed in several scenes of Septology with Asle and Bragi (Fosse 2019, 500; Fosse 2020, 349; Fosse 2021a, 13), including when the dog is calm, with its eyes closed (Fosse 2019, 373–374). Light and calm are therefore not limited to coming from the heavens, or from human eyes. Light can come from the calm gaze of a dog.11

Asle and Åsleik’s conversation about fish calls to mind the final scene in Melancholy II, in which the dying Oline experiences the eyes of the dead fish she has fetched for her dinner gazing into her inmost being. She can even go as far as to see herself as being these fish eyes. At the end of the novel, perhaps at the moment of death, she sees nothing other than “these fish eyes and then this calm light” (Fosse 1996, 112–113). Several reflections can be linked to this passage: ICHTYS, the Greek word for fish, is an acronym for “ Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ Υἱός, Σωτήρ” (Iesous Christos, Theou Yios, Soter) which means “Jesus Christ, God’s son, saviour”. This acronym became a symbol, rendered as a simple figure of a fish, used as identification among the first Christians, in the novel described as “those who were called the humble” (Fosse 2021a, 97).

These passages are also reminiscent of the place where Johannes catches a glimpse of Erna’s eyes towards the end of Morning and Evening, which in turn is reminiscent of Asle’s experience of Ales’s face in

11 Here, there may be reason to remind the reader of Heidegger’s mentioned (Note 3) treatment of covering, uncovering, light or “lighting”, in “The Origin of the Work of Art”: “In the midst of being as a whole, an open space emerges. A lighting is. […] Even when hidden, a being can only be within the leeway of this lighting” (Heidegger 2000, 59–60).

Septology. There are also similar scenes at the end of the trilogy starting with Wakefulness, i.e. Weariness. Here, the roles are swapped between man and woman. Alida sees the dying Asle’s face in the heavens, “as an invisible sun she can see it”, and she hears him tell her not to be afraid (Fosse 2014, 38). Such is the pattern of association that can flow back and forth while reading Fosse’s work, partly due to repetitions, and partly through innovative use of established figurative language. The scenes play on something one might call a mystical experience of the simultaneity of an outer and inner gaze. One may notice a resonance of the Aaronic Blessing, the oldest known written Biblical text, from the sixth century BCE. According to Biblical tradition, God, through Moses, commanded Aaron and his sons to use specific words – about the relationship between a face and a blessing. This was adopted by Christians and is still used in Norwegian worship services today:

The Lord bless thee, and keep thee:

The Lord make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee:

The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace. (Numbers 6:24–26 KJV)

Asle’s experience of a shining darkness in the painting – in his friend Åsleik’s face, in the dog Bragi’s eyes and in his wife Ales’s face –constitute an important part of the shifts in the novel, from the experiences of his youth to the theological reflections and ponderings of his later years, usually in the chair facing the window, gazing out toward his focal point, the landmark Asle often looks to out towards the Sygne Sea from his house in Dylgja. Bragi may well be on Asle’s lap as he sits in his chair by the window, as is his habit, and finds his focal point in the waves in the middle of the Sygne Sea (Fosse 2020, 253).

Just as Fosse likens writing to prayer in his essay “The Gnosis of Writing”, Asle can compare painting to prayer. He believes the quiet

moments “turn themselves into light in the paintings” (Fosse 2019, 310). At this same point he emphasises that he himself has translated the Lord’s Prayer from Latin, and that he knows both the Latin version, Pater Noster, and his own Nynorsk version, by heart. In this way, writing, in the form of literary translation, appears as part of seamless preparations for creating a work of art. Parts of the prayer are then repeated, in Latin as well as in Nynorsk , in the actual text of the novel (Fosse 2019, 302).

Asle’s conversion to Catholicism is due to Ales. In the present time of the novel, the final days of Advent, just before Christmas, Ales is dead. The novel’s most intense descriptions of “shining darkness” are linked to Ales’s face, her eyes. Although she is deceased, in his mind she seems like a living person, one he can speak with, almost as with God, in prayer. Certain passages resemble the Aaronic Blessing I just quoted:

[…] det rolege ettertenksame andletet til Ales når ho vert borte inne i seg sjølv og i den rørsla vert som del av eit uskjøneleg lys som usynleg strålar frå andletet, ja det finst så mange andlet der i minnet, somme i smerte, somme i kvile, og oftast av eit andlet som berre er der, liksom utan medvit, og som berre er fylt av, ja kva det no er, ja så mange er andleta at dei er ved å samla seg til eitt einaste andlet […] der det spreier sitt lys av omsut over det ho ser på […]

(Fosse 2019, 319–320)

[…] Ales’s thoughtful peaceful face when she disappears into herself and in this movement becomes like part of an incomprehensible light that streams invisibly from her face, yes, there are so many faces in my mind, some in pain, some resting, and most of all faces that are just there, unconscious in a way, just full of, yes, what exactly, yes there are so many faces that they’re about to merge together into a single face […] shin[ing] the light of care and tenderness on all that she’s looking at […]

(Fosse 2022, 213)

Seeing the Aaronic Blessing and Asle’s thoughts on Ales as a whole, one sees that in both texts the face is associated with light, grace, peace and compassion – words which within the horizon of this novel point in the same mild, reconciliatory direction. The Aaronic Blessing obvi-

ously uses the imagery of the sun as a religious symbol of the face of God, a life-giving force in the religions of the area preceding Judaism and Christianity, further developed in the Old and New Testaments. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus’s face shines like the sun (Matt. 17:2). From the very beginning of the Bible, in Genesis, lowering one’s face, hiding it or turning it away are associated with sorrow, wrath, shame – with falling outside of grace. In both quotes above, particularly the one about Ales, one can sense a number of faces behind one another. They gather together in the novel as well as in the Aaronic Blessing to form a single face, and it is this face that is gracious, gives peace, or “spreads its light of compassion”. I understand the relationship between God’s and Ales’s faces as metonymic. Such an understanding may help explain how compassion, whether from God or from Ales, makes life in this world tolerable for Asle. Again, an affirmative “yes” is used as part of the rhythm, as underscoring, or to create a crescendo in the expression between the clauses of the sentence. Precisely such a crescendo seems more important when considering the connection between the quotes I have used which utilise the word “yes” in this way in Septology. 12

One might see it this way: while gnostic, dualistic impulses could have dragged Asle away from the mainstream of Christianity, Ales pulls him back to something more unified, through the prayers of the Rosary and Mass, particularly the Eucharist. Asle emphasises how liturgy has connected him to a long tradition, dating all the way back to the first Christians, “those who were called the humble” (Fosse 2021a, 97, 100,). As previously mentioned, the “humble” had the fish as their symbol, as the Greek word served as an acronym for “Jesus Christ, God’s son, saviour”.

12 In addition to affirmative, emphatic and reinforcing effects, dictionaries also give this final sense as a possible meaning at the end of the article about the Norwegian interjection “ja”: “Used between clauses to indicate a crescendo of expression from the first to the next.”

Det Norske Akademis Ordbok : https://naob.no/ordbok/ja_1. A similar wording is found in Bokmålsordboka : https://ordbokene.no/nob/bm,nn/ja. Articles were accessed 11 April 2024.

In the second volume of Septology, the idea of “shining darkness” is further developed – as part of a process in which the act of painting expresses something that cannot be said in any other way, close to how Fosse in some of his essays describes the act of writing. Asle is thinking that he will:

[…] måla fram eit fråverande nærvær, slik eg tenkjer det, tenkjer eg, ja få det svarte til å lysa, ja måla fram det lysande mørkret […] ein eller annan stad finst eitt bilete inne i meg som er mitt inste bilete, og som eg om att og om att prøver å måla fram, og di nærare eg kjem det biletet di betre vert biletet eg målar, men det inste biletet er ikkje noko bilete sjølvsagt, for det inste biletet finst ikkje, det berre er på eit vis, utan å finnast, det er, men det finst ikkje, og likevel liksom styrer det biletet, som ikkje er noko bilete, alle dei andre bileta og dreg dei meir eller mindre til seg […]

(Fosse 2020, 164)

[…] paint from a faraway closeness, that’s how I think about it, I think, yes, make the blackness shine, yes, paint away the shining darkness […] there’s a picture somewhere or other inside me that’s my innermost picture, that I try again and again to paint away, and the closer I get to that picture the better the picture I’ve painted is, but the innermost picture isn’t actually a picture of course, because the innermost picture doesn’t exist, it just is in a way, without existing, it is but it doesn’t exist, and somehow it’s as if the picture that isn’t a picture sort of leads all the other pictures and pulls them in, kind of […] (Fosse 2022, 448) 13

Once again, use of the word “yes” creates a crescendo, an intensification, a movement towards the insight which Asle paints forth, which the novel writes forth. Not long afterwards, Asle interrupts himself. He considers whether seeing the innermost image is the same thing as dying – or the same thing as seeing God (Fosse 2020, 165). Indirectly he is referring to God’s answer to Moses when he asks to see the glory

13 Editor’s note: The Norwegian phrase “måla fram” seems open to multiple interpretations. The published translation opts for “paint from” or “paint away,” whereas “paint forth” may provide a better sense of the phrase in this context.

of the Lord, an answer that appears paradoxical when thinking of the Aaronic Blessing: “And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live” (Exodus 33:20 KJV).14 The text of Septology continues pivoting on Biblical paradoxes – the visibility and invisibility of the face. Nowhere in the work do Asle’s theological musings go further than in the third volume, where the phrase “God’s shining darkness” appears in connection with a couple of Latin quotes from Church father Tertullian’s texts: “credibile est quia ineptum est , that’s how it is, or certum est quia impossibile est, so it was said and that’s how it is” (Fosse 2021a, 95. The Latin phrases are also mentioned on page 36) (Translation citation Fosse 2022, 670). These words have their origin in De carne Christi , a polemical text written by Tertullian against Docetism, a variety of Gnosticism that denied Jesus’s true humanity.15 According to Docetism, Christ only had the semblance of a body, and his suffering and death therefore only seemed to take place. Through this difficult terrain, terminologically speaking, Asle moves while his dog Bragi is lying on his lap, later at his feet, warming his body in the cold living room (Fosse 2021a, 96–97). Asle takes out his rosary; his reflections are often linked to the prayers associated with its cross and beads. First, he recites the Apostolic Creed, then the Lord’s Prayer, then three times Ave Maria, then a short version of Gloria, then the Lord’s Prayer again, then a longer version of Gloria, called the Doxology, before closing with Salve Regina , Hail Holy Queen. As mentioned, Asle has translated all these prayers to Nynorsk , and thereby created part of the novel’s own writing as insight, aside from the Salve Regina . That one is impossible for him to translate, he thinks, “it would only be a loose paraphrase” (here and in the following quoted from Fosse 2021a, 97–98). The latter is difficult to understand. Asle otherwise displays a relative ease, unbound and uncommitted, in his dealings with

14 For Jacob, seeing his brother Esau after a long time apart is like seeing the face of God: “for therefore I have seen thy face, as though I had seen the face of God, and thou wast pleased with me” (Genesis 33:10b KJV).

15 My insight into Latin and Tertullian writings is limited; I have consulted Eric Osborns Tertullian, First Theologian of the West for key facts on the quote (Osborn 2003, 48).

the texts. When reciting the Apostolic Creed, he breaks up the Latin and Nynorsk phrases with his own, free considerations. He says, “I believe in God the Father the Almighty”, but quickly adds that he actually does not believe what he says. He believes it “in a certain sense”. The text of the novel allows Asle’s faith to sway somewhere between faith and non-faith, whilst it gives him comfort to think that the first Christians, “those who were called the humble”, said the same words. In this way, the Apostolic Creed as form, as continuity in practice, emerges as at least as important as what one might call the content of the creed, its meaning. In Asle’s practice, as portrayed in Septology, the distinction between form and content is broken down. He repeatedly questions the content of the creed. God does not appear almighty; rather, powerless, he muses. First and foremost, God is love. There is one thing of which Asle is certain: “the greater one’s distress and suffering, the closer God is.”

This sentence is an echo of some aspects of Martin Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation of 1518, as relayed by Marius Timmann Mjaaland in The Hidden God . The book describes how Luther gave negative theology, the Christian apophatic mysticism, a political and bodily facet in the public discourse at Heidelberg ( Mjaaland 2015, 91–93). This should be seen in the context of a new form of anthropology, and thereby a new view of Christ, occurring contemporaneously with Luther, with emphasis on the human body’s vulnerability.16

Parallel to this, as Mjaaland shows, a shift in perspective occurs in the view of God, from essence to existence. The Christian God is no longer high above human beings. The image of God moves from omnipotence to suffering – and thus, powerlessness. The hidden god is hidden precisely in the darkness of suffering. This is similar to how

16 In his biography Martin Luther: Rebel in an Age of Upheaval , Heinz Schilling goes into further detail on how both Luther’s allies and his enemies were influenced by this anthropological shift in the late Middle Ages, illustrated by the painting The Lamentation of Christ (“Christi Beweinung ”, approx. 1525) by Matthias Grünewald. The image was originally commissioned by Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, who later became an enemy of Luther (Schilling 2016, 90). The painting depicts the suffering Christ, not the triumphant and judging Christ.

Asle thinks in Septology – and he takes his reflection a step further. Where he grew up in Barmen, those who believed had ideas of God as an omnipotent father in heaven. In other words, such a God must have used all his power to exterminate millions of Jews, Asle thinks. To him, such an image of God is blasphemous. He believes it is logically irreconcilable that God should be almighty whilst also becoming human “and sharing in our powerlessness” (Fosse 2021a, 98–99). Like Luther at Heidelberg, he refers to St Paul. In the First Letter to the Corinthians, St Paul presents the message of the cross as foolishness (1 Cor. 1:18), “a counterintuitive wisdom”, as Mjaaland calls it (Mjaaland 2015, 92). *

In the sixth volume of Septology, Asle quotes the Apostolic Creed line by line. He sees Jesus’s resurrection and disappearance as an expression of a new connection between God and humans,

[…] ikkje i denne verd, heller som ei fornekting av denne verd, som motstand mot denne verd var den gode Gud no til stades i mennesket, ja som eit lysande mørker der inst inne i menneska […] (Fosse 2021a, 100, here and in the following)

[…] not in this world, or rather it was like an annihilation of this world, it was like in opposition to this world that the good Lord now existed in humanity, yes, like a shining darkness deep inside people […] (Fosse 2022, 673)

Once again, Asle’s own terminology is in the vicinity of a gnostic vocabulary, “like an annihilation of this world”, before he goes to the final part of the Creed and says, “I believe in the Holy Spirit, a holy Catholic Church”. Thus, he is back with the continuity of the Catholic Church, the mainstream, not any deviating gnostic heresy, to put it that way. Asle thinks of how the Christians, “the humble”, have thought and pondered for two thousand years about how God can simultaneously be omnipotent, omniscient and loving. Asle’s reflections oscillate back and forth; he concludes that it is wrong to think this way, “because in a certain sense, God isn’t anything, he is a dark,

shining nothingness, a nothing, a not”. Everything comes from nothing and goes back to nothing, Asle thinks, as he approaches Meister Eckhart’s statement that “God becomes God in the soul and the soul becomes the soul in God” (Fosse 2022, 674). No one, he thinks, has made faith more credible for him, or with a paradox, “more comprehensibly incomprehensible”, than Meister Eckhart. With him, oppositions come together as a form of unity.

This movement in the direction of unity can be read in light of philosopher Jon Wetlesen’s foreword in Å bli den du er (Becoming Who You Are), his selection of Meister Eckhart’s texts in Norwegian. Wetlesen believes that Eckhart’s “unity mysticism” is precisely non-dualistic. It is traceable to an “inner unity with other beings, not only humans, but all living beings, animals, plants, nature as a whole. In a way, Eckhart’s ‘unity mysticism’ implies that one lives in a paradox […] This way of relating to things makes it possible to live in the world without being of the world” (Meister Eckhart 2000, 13–14). The language of the Dominican monk draws associations to Asle’s closeness with animals, such as his dog Bragi. Or one may think of his experience of the Eucharist, in which the shining darkness is made concrete in the transformation that happens in and with the bread, the host. God is in the bread, as he is in each and every person, as God speaks in silence:

[…] frå det som er til, frå sjøen, frå himmelen, frå dei gode målarstykka, ja frå det runde bordet der attmed meg talar Gud taust, og frå dei to stolane som står attmed bordet, ja Gud ser på meg frå bordet, frå stolane, tenkjer eg, for ja Nah ist und schwer zu fassen der Gott Wo aber Gefahr ist wächst das Rettende auch […]

(Fosse 2021a, 104)

[…] from what exists, from the water, from the sky, from the good paintings, yes, from the round table right here next to me God silently speaks, and from the two chairs next to the table, yes, God is looking at me from the table, from the chairs, I think, because, yes, Nah ist und schwer zu fassen der Gott Wo aber Gefahr ist wächst das Rettende auch […]

(Fosse 2022, 676)

The famous quote from the poem “Patmos” by Friedrich Hölderlin closes the circle of German quotes, again underscored and reinforced by a prefixed “yes”. Parallel to this, the liturgical circle connected to the Rosary’s Latin prayers throughout the novel continues all the way up to the final prayers that follow Asle into his death. The novel ends with Asle’s unfinished prayer, Ave Maria, perhaps in faith that the Divine sees all, and that the Virgin Mary will intercede for him, just as Asle experiences Ales surrounding him, in his weary, half dreamlike state.

Asle’s use of the Rosary, rendered as a textual mosaic in Septology, suggests a faith in the existence of linguistic, literary bonds from generation to generation throughout history, back to the first Christians, “the humble”. Through translations from German, Latin and indirectly from Biblical Greek and Hebrew, through layer upon layer of language and history all the way up to his own use of Nynorsk , Asle has found a place where he can exist, in a vibrant life, in and out of the key formulations of Christianity, the Apostolic Creed and the most ancient prayers, with a fluidity to which gnostic thought, Tertullian, Meister Eckhart, Friedrich Hölderlin and, not least, Fosse’s own work contribute.

Bibelen (The Holy Bible). 2024. Bibelselskapet.

Bokmålsordboka (Dictionary of Bokmål), s.v. “Ja”, The Language Council of Norway and the University of Bergen, accessed 11 April 2025, https://ordbokene.no/ nob/bm,nn/ja.

Derrida, Jacques . 1987. The Post Card. Translated by Alan Bass. University of Chicago Press.

———. 1995. On the Name. Translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr., and Ian McLeod. Stanford University Press.

———. 2004. Sannheten i maleriet. Restitusjoner av sannheten i skonummer. Translated and annotated by Ragnar Braastad Myklebust. Pax.

Det Norske Akademis Ordbok (Dictionary of the Norwegian Language), s.v. “Ja”, accessed 11 April 2025, https://naob.no/ordbok/ja_1.

Fosse, Jon . 1992. Hund og engel. Samlaget.

———. 1995. Melancholia I. Samlaget.

———. 1996. Melancholia II. Samlaget.

———. 2000. Morgon og kveld. Samlaget.

———. 2001. Teaterstykke 2. Samlaget.

———. 2004. Plays Two. Translated by Louis Muinzer (A Summer’s Day), Kim Dambæk (Dream of Autumn), and Ann Henning Jocelyn (Winter). Oberon Books.

———. 2007. Andvake. Samlaget.

———. 2009. Teaterstykke 4. Samlaget.

———. 2011. Essay. Samlaget.

———. 2014. Kveldsvævd. Samlaget.

———. 2015. Morning and Evening. Translated by Damion Searls. Dalkey Archive Press.

———. 2019. Det andre namnet, Septologien I–II. Samlaget.

———. 2020. Eg er ein annan, Septologien III–V. Samlaget.

———. 2021a. Eit nytt namn, Septologien VI–VII. Samlaget.

———. 2021b. Dikt i samling. Samlaget.

———. 2022. Septology. Translated by Damion Searls. Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Gilhus, Ingvild Sælid , and Einar Thomassen (eds.). 2002. “Innledende essay”. In Gnostiske skrifter, VII–XLVI. De norske Bokklubbene.

Hauge, Olav H . 2001. Dikt i umsetjing. Samlaget.

Hägglund, Bengt . 1981. Teologins historia. Liber Förlag.

Heidegger, Martin . 1995. “ ‘… poetisk bor mennesket …’ ” Bøk. Tidsskrift for litteratur og teori (6): 21–33. Translated by Espen Stueland.

———. 2000. Kunstverkets opprinnelse. Translated and with afterword by Einar Øverenget and Steinar Mathisen. Pax.

Hölderlin, Friedrich . 2007. Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin. Translated by James Mitchell. Ithuriel’s Spear.

Hverven, Tom Egil . 2022. Å lese etter troen. Gyldendal.

Kværne, Per , Turid Seim Karlsen , and Bente Groth . “Gnostisisme”. In Store norske leksikon. Accessed 4 June 2025, https://snl.no/gnostisisme.

Lothe, Jakob . 2018. “Kunstnarkall og forfattarkall. Jon Fosses Melancholia I ”. In Kallsvariasjoner. Postsekulære kall i skandinavisk litteratur, edited by Stine Holte, 163–88. Novus Forlag.

Lukács, Georg . 2001. Romanens teori. Translated by Per Paulsen. Gyldendal.

Mester Eckhart . 2000. Å bli den du er. Perspektiver på menneskets frihet. Translated with introduction and notes by Jon Wetlesen. Thorleif Dahls Kulturbibliotek/ Aschehoug.

Mjaaland, Marius Timmann . 2016. The Hidden God. Luther, Philosophy, and Political Theology. Indiana University Press.

Osborn, Eric . 2003. Tertullian, First Theologian of the West. Cambridge University Press.

Schilling, Heinz . 2016. Martin Luther. Rebell i en brytningstid. Translated by Eivind Lilleskjæret. Vårt Land Forlag.

Seiness, Cecilie . 2009. Jon Fosse. Poet på Guds jord. Samlaget.

———. 2019. “Frostvar og lettkokt”. Syn og Segn (2): 10–22.

Skjeldal, Eskil. 2015. Mysteriet i trua. Ein samtale mellom Jon Fosse og Eskil Skjeldal. Samlaget.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig . 1984. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Werkausgabe 1. Suhrkamp.

Zern, Leif . 2005. Det lysande mørket: Om Jon Fosses dramatikk. Translated by Eldbjørg Hovland. Samlaget.

4. Between Rural Men: Anxiety and Homosocial Bonds in Jon Fosse’s Boathouse and Septology

Christine Hamm

In the lecture he gave as part of the Nobel Prize ceremony on 7 December 2023, Jon Fosse explained how he came to write literary texts. When he was at secondary school, he was asked to read aloud in class but was overwhelmed by fear. He could not utter a word and fled the classroom. As Fosse remembered:

In a way it was as if the fear took my language from me, and that I had to take it back, so to speak. And if I were to do that, it couldn’t be on other people’s terms, but on my own.

I started to write my own texts, short poems, short stories.

And I discovered that doing so gave me a sense of safety, gave me the opposite of fear.1

While the thought of having to expose himself to others produced intense anxiety, finding another kind of language, his own aesthetic style, brought him a feeling of safety.

Anxiety and safety are subjects that are not only addressed in his personal anecdotes, but also in Fosse’s literary work. I will more specifically compare two of Fosse’s most well-known novels

1 An English translation of Fosse’s lecture, which he gave originally in Norwegian (Nynorsk) is available on the Nobel Prize homepage: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2023/ fosse/lecture/.

– Boathouse (1989) and Septology (2019–2021). My main argument is that the relationships between men play an important role in these texts, in fact, a more important role than the relationships between men and women. However, how the relationships develop more precisely in the plots is strikingly different. I will show that in the earlier novel Boathouse (1989) homosocial desire produces anxiety. In the more recent Septology (2019–2021), homosocial bonds help to hold anxiety at bay. In what follows, I will find answers to these more specific questions: What precisely triggers anxiety in Fosse’s male protagonists? How is anxiety expressed by the protagonists and as part of Fosse’s literary style? And finally, how do the male protagonists deal with their anxiety? Answering these questions will contribute to better knowledge of Fosse’s work and key themes. It will offer an explanation of the fact that Fosse has developed a special kind of style and a unique narrative technique. In addition, answering these questions will show that reading Fosse’s work might inspire readers suffering from anxiety to develop an understanding of their challenges. It might also suggest possible therapeutic activities, such as writing, painting, praying and talking to friends.

Triggering anxiety: homosocial desire in Boathouse

Boathouse was Fosse’s breakthrough as a writer. 2 The text opens with the first person-narrator’s statement that he feels restless: “I don’t go out anymore, a restlessness has come over me, and I don’t go out” (p. 9). 3 The opening is typical for Fosse’s style. The first observation “I don’t go out anymore” is repeated shortly afterwords in a slightly different syntactical form: “and I don’t go out”. In the next two sentences, the second and third sentences of the novel, the narrator

2 Boathouse is still the text written by Fosse that has provoked the most research and comments by Norwegian literary scholars. Readings include studies of style (Tveito 1992), narratology (Karlsen 2000, Reinhoff 2002), and plot (Søgaard 2015, Langås 2013/2016).

3 “Eg går ikkje ut lenger, ei uro er kommen over meg, og eg går ikkje ut.” (Fosse 1989, 7). For the English quotations, I have used May-Brit Akerholt’s translation (Fosse 2017). Page numbers after English quotations refer to this edition. Page numbers after Norwegian quotes refer to the first edition of Naustet (Fosse 1989).

informs the reader that his restlessness started this summer, just after he had met his childhood friend Knut on his way to the library. They had not seen each other for many years. As becomes clear on the following pages, Knut is now a music teacher, a married man and the father of two young daughters. The narrator himself still lives with his mother, although he is more than thirty years old (p. 9).

Why does the narrator get restless after the meeting with Knut? The feeling must be very intense. It is not only something that the narrator himself addresses explicitly, but it permeates his discourse throughout the novel and is therefore also transferred to the reader. The narrator looks as if he has no control over the text he produces, pieces of sentences appear repeatedly without any clear motivation; the discourse seems breathless, and the text has no clear aim. The overall impression is a chaotic and not very logical rendering of the events. 4 However, the reader understands that Knut’s wife tries to seduce the narrator on several occasions. First, when they meet on the fjord when he is out fishing. Then, she invites him into Knut’s mother’s house, and, ultimately, she asks him to go for a walk after the dance at the youth club.

Among the characteristic aspects of the narrator’s discourse is the endless repetition of Knut’s name. This certainly creates the impression of Knut’s importance for the narrator. 5 The use of the definitive form of the name “Knut’en” in the Norwegian text 6 underlines that the narrator constantly wonders where this specific Knut is,

4 Unni Langås has argued that the narrator is traumatised for reasons not made clear to the reader (Langås 2016). However, Langås thinks the narrator might suffer from sexual anxiety and connects this to the presence of the narrator’s mother in the text. Mother is repeatedly mentioned as walking through the house in an uncanny way, for instance (Langås 2016, 39–40). Langås’s interpretation is certainly interesting, but I think that the relationship with Knut is the important one, not the relationship to Knut’s wife or other female characters mentioned in the text.

5 The narrator himself has no name. Knut’s wife thinks it’s Leif or Bård, but she is not sure.

6 In the Norwegian text of Fosse’s novel, the name “Knut” is used in the definitive form “Knut’en”. Use of this form of the name, which would be equivalent to a diminutive or nickname in some other languages, stresses the intimacy between the narrator and his friend.

what he is doing and why, and what he might think of the situation he finds himself in. When meeting with Knut on the main road of the village, the narrator explains: “I see Knut coming and Knut thinks this is something he has been dreading, but he knew it had to happen, meeting old friends, had to happen, of course” (p. 13). 7 The narrator seems to be more interested in finding out what Knut might think about meeting him than how he himself reacts to meeting Knut.

Thus, the narrator’s restlessness is clearly triggered by the fact that the friendship with Knut is threatened (see also Karlsen 2000 and Søgaard 2015). Knut’s wife does not play a major role in the thoughts of the narrator, apart from her being a person who is a further danger to the relationship between the two men. This neglect of the woman’s importance is uncannily confirmed when the narrator’s mother informs him, close to the end of the story, that Knut’s wife has drowned. It looks as though she has taken her own life. Did she do this because she felt superfluous – because she was not allowed to play a role in the men’s lives? Did she realise that she was only an object to be dealt with in the ongoing negotiations between the two men?

The underlying structure of the plot in Boathouse – circling around two men and a woman – is strikingly like the one we find in the literary texts that Eve Kosowsky Sedgwick studied in Between Men in 1985. Sedgwick elaborates on the many triangular relations between two men and a woman in canonical texts from seventeenth and nineteenthcentury English literature. Her point is that the heterosexual relationship between a man and a woman is not necessarily the central point of the plot, but that literature often focuses on homosocial desires between men. She emphasises: “‘Homosocial’ is a word occasionally used in history and the social sciences, where it describes social bonds between persons of the same sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed by analogy with ‘homosexual’, and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from ‘homosexual’” (Sedgwick 1992, 1). The female characters in the

7 “Eg ser Knut’en komme og Knut’en tenkjer at dette har han grudd seg for, men han visste det måtte skje, treffe gamle kjennningar, måtte vel, sjølvsagt” (p. 10).

texts she studies often become a mere piece in the game between the two male protagonists. The men’s competition, and the protagonist’s desire to be acknowledged by the other man, is the main issue.

Boathouse forces the reader to understand the importance of male friendship, competition, rivalry and mutual understanding, and it emphasises the importance of ‘male bonding’. From the perspective of Sedgwick’s analyses in Between Men , the intensity of the relationship between the narrator and Knut in Fosse’s novel becomes understandable. The narrator himself points to the obvious fact that he somehow failed to keep up with Knut in terms of careers. As the narrator explains, he used to help his mother with the shopping and chopping wood for the stove, while he also visited the library frequently and practised playing the guitar. However, the meeting with Knut this summer forces him to see that he has not really had what one, in the eyes of other men, would call a successful life.

It seems logical to think that the narrator, when meeting his former friend, is catapulted back to the desire for Knut’s appreciation that dominated his childhood. Meeting Knut reminds him of the difference between himself and Knut. It leads him to doubt if he will ever get anywhere else than where he has been since childhood. While Knut has managed to build a career, the narrator is a rural man who seems to confirm the depressing picture often drawn in Norwegian newspaper articles and TV documentaries of men living in the countryside. 8 Fosse’s description of the friendship between the two men thus brings out hierarchical structures implied in the imagination of rural masculinities.9 Knut obviously comes close to the ideal of hegemonic masculinity, implying that a man should be able to conquer a woman, get a well-paying job and support a family. The narrator does not acquire these goods. But why is Knut the man the narrator singles out for comparison? What makes Knut special?

8 For a study of Norwegian men living in the countryside, and stereotypical perceptions of them, see Linda Marie Bye’s dissertation from 2010.

9 Here, I follow Raewyn Connell’s analysis of different masculinities as they are constructed in relation to an ideal that functions as “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell 1995).

Experiencing

anxiety: reacting to the discovery of separateness

The narrator’s discourse is often interrupted by memories of the past, and he repeatedly states that when they were kids he and Knut were always together. The old boathouse where they had meetings during their youth is the symbol of their friendship; it is, for example, the place where they started rehearsing songs for their band.10 Up to a certain point, they were attuned, to use the term of the philosopher Stanley Cavell, meaning that they shared a form of life and a set of criteria that brought out what was important for them.11 This is underlined in scenes from their childhood showing that they had uncomplicated conversations. In fact, it looks as if they often had no need for words at all because they were in total agreement. For instance, when starting to meet at the boathouse they thought simultaneously that they would need something to sit on, as the narrator remembers it:

We should really have a bench up here, I say. Just what I was thinking, says Knut. We often think the same thing, I say. Knut nods. And then, about the same time, we think about the fact that there are some old fishing nets in the shed, and some old empty flour sacks, and then it’s obvious what we can do, it’s not a problem to make a bench. (1989, 45) 12

The feeling of living in total harmony with each other is underlined by the observation that they need no words to know how they will build the bench. The two friends live in a state of symbiosis and do not experience themselves as two different, separated persons. This idyllic picture of close and unproblematic friendship stands

10 For a slightly different reading of Boathouse and the use of the central metaphor, see Tveito 1992.

11 Stanley Cavell uses this word in The Claim of Reason when diagnosing criteria in an unproblematic use of ordinary language that is shared by a community (Cavell 1982, 32).

12 “Vi skulle forresten hatt ein benk her oppe, seier eg. Nett det sit eg og tenkjer òg, seier Knut’en. Vi tenkjer ofte på det same, seier eg. Knut’en nikkar. Og så kjem vi, omtrent samtidig, på at det ligg jo gamle nøter nede, det ligg gamle tomme mjølsekker nede, og då er det jo klart då, er ikkje vanskeleg i det heile å lage seg ein benk då.” (p. 40).

in contrast to how the narrator experiences the situation in the summer when he meets his old friend again. In the present, the narrator cannot communicate with Knut at all. He often talks of only seeing his back, not even his face (p. 70/64 and 103/93). The haunting picture of Knut’s back becomes an expression for Knut being completely unknown. Something must have happened, then, in the relationship between Knut and the narrator that has triggered his anxiety, as expressed by the restlessness he addresses, but also by the style of his prose and his tendency for repetition.13

One of the central scenes that the narrator repeatedly returns to is the memory of a situation where Knut, the narrator and other adolescents from school had a gathering in the boathouse and played a game called “kiss-pat-and-hug” (p. 76). When the narrator was chosen by a girl, he remembers he became totally paralysed. The interesting part is that his thoughts are not directed at the girl, but at Knut: “[…] she has said kiss, and I wish with all of me that it isn’t me she is going to kiss, it must be Knut, because it’s Knut she wants to kiss, not me” (p. 77). 14 Not only is he painfully aware of Knut’s presence, he also thinks a lot about the others watching them: “[…] I have to move out of the dark community, with my hair with my body” (p. 77). 15 The narrator seems to be traumatised by the feeling that something is coming between Knut and himself – the girl’s desire – and the fact that she has to choose between the two close friends. He is further shocked by the insight of being himself, of having to recognise that he needs to face his individuality.

As the scene is described, as well as the consequence of it, it is the mere discovery of being a separate human being that puts the narrator into an experience of overwhelming anxiety. But why is the insight into his separateness, his individuality, experienced as trauma-

13 In addition to Unni Langås, Arild Linneberg has read the novel psychoanalytically. He thinks the narrator is a neurotic person (Linneberg 1994).

14 “[…] ho har sagt kyss, og eg ønskjer med heile meg at det ikkje må bli meg ho skal kysse, det må bli Knut’en, for det er Knut’en ho har lyst til å kysse, ikkje meg” (p. 70).

15 “eg må stige ut or den mørke fellesskapen, med håret mitt, med kroppen min” (p. 70).

tising? The reason seems to be precisely that he had for a long time been living in a sort of unproblematic union with Knut, where he did not even have to use words to express his thoughts and desires. Suddenly, due to the actions of the girl, he is forced to acknowledge his human body, his separateness, and his loneliness. That this sudden insight into our human condition, into the fact that we are exposed to others, can produce anxiety is something Fosse has described elsewhere. The book Mysteriet i trua (Skjeldal 2015) contains interviews and conversations Fosse had with Eskil Skjeldal. There Fosse talks about the experience of existential anxiety:

And that a human being is like this, is tuned, is in a mood, and not the least in the mood of anxiety, as Heidegger especially comments on, stresses the most fundamental aspect of life, of existence, as he says: that one is here as a being between other beings, but in contrast to everything else that exists, the human being is conscious of this being, he can do what he wants, has a freedom of death in his consciousness […] One just exists, as a factum, and that is the mere facticity we have, you there, me here.16 (Skjeldal 2015, 25–26)

Fosse reminds Skjeldal of Heidegger’s philosophical thoughts about our human condition and about our freedom and exposedness. He explains that the need to face these issues can result in strong anxiety. However, Boathouse does not render thoughts about anxiety in a philosophical argument. Readers do not find references to Heidegger or a nuanced account of the protagonist’s feelings. Rather, they are exposed to the narrator’s rhythmic prose style, created by repetition and variation of the same words, motifs or sentences.

In the scene remembered from adolescence, the narrator wants nothing more than to disappear from the scene, while being totally

16 This is my own translation of Fosse’s text that runs like this: “Og det at mennesket er slik, er stemt, er i stemninga, og ikkje minst i stemninga angst, som Heidegger særskilt tek føre seg, peikar mot sjølve det fundamentale i det å leva, mot eksistensen, som han seier: at ein er her som verande mellom andre verande, men i motsetnad til alt annat verande er mennesket klar over at det er det, og over at det fritt kan gjera kva det vil, ein har fridom til døden i eit medvit […] Ein er her berre, som faktum, det er sjølve faktisiteten vår, du der, eg her.”

aware of his own body, his hair and his clothes. Discomposed by the girl’s demand, he also becomes aware of the sound of the waves and, from then on, the sound of waves becomes connected for him to both the feeling of sexual desire and of anxiety. Therefore, it is only reasonable that the narrator many years later pays attention to the sound of the waves when he walks from the dance to the old boathouse together with Knut’s wife. He feels restless “The restlessness moves through my whole body. A distinct restlessness” (p. 94),17 and then he hears the waves, “Always these waves” (p. 95).18 He remembers other relationships with girls that came between him and Knut, and he experiences again the same anxiety produced by the insight into his existential loneliness. The question, then, is how the narrator deals with his anxiety.

Coping with anxiety: the act of writing

According to the narrator’s own words, he counters his restlessness by striving to write. “I had to find something to do, and so I decided to write. Perhaps writing will help, will keep the restlessness at bay” (p. 10).19 But why does he think writing will help him control his anxiety? Here, the fact that the narrator in Boathouse at certain moments changes from being a first-person narrator to behaving like a thirdperson narrator becomes important. While Part I of the novel contains the narrator’s story about the events of the summer as he remembers them, Part II starts with rendering the same events mostly from Knut’s point of view. The narrator imagines, for instance, how Knut becomes jealous when meeting him on the main road: “[…] Knut thinks that he has met me today, and of course his wife had to look at me in that way, it’s so long since we talked to each other, Knut thinks”

17 “Uroa går gjennom kroppen. Ei tydeleg uro” (p. 85).

18 “Alltid desse bølgjene” (p. 86)

19 “Eg måtte finne på noko, og eg har bestemt meg for å skrive. Kanskje vil skrivinga hjelpe, halde uroa vekke” (Fosse 1989, 8).

(p. 111). 20 The narrator even describes scenes happening between Knut and his wife where the narrator is not present. In other words, the narrator creates fiction. 21

It is interesting to observe that the threat to the close union between the two men, as it is brought about by different women – the girls from school in adolescence, other girls at dances, Knut’s wife in the present – allows the narrator to transcend the ontological boundaries between human beings. When he imagines having direct access to Knut thoughts, he disowns the knowledge he has of human separateness, to use the terminology of Stanley Cavell. 22 The narrator’s reaction to the insight that Knut is another, separate human being is to turn him into someone he can control – a character in a book. 23 The creation of fiction, of the text where the narrator records Knut’s thoughts, is thus a result of a fantasy developed to cope with the insight into human separateness: the fantasy of having immediate access to another person’s internal life (see also Søgaard 2015).

The style of the narrator’s discourse in Boathouse reveals the narrator’s anxiety. At the same time, however, the writing is also the result of his effort to control this same anxiety. To sum up, in Boathouse, the frightening insight into the fact that we all, as human beings, must accept human separateness creates anxiety. The narrator attempts

20 “[…] Knut’en tenkjer at han i dag har treft meg, og sjølvsagt måtte kona hans sjå på meg på den måten, det er så lenge sidan vi sist snakkast, tenkjer Knut’en […] ” (p. 101).

21 The shift in the narrator’s focus from first person singular to third person singular is often commented on in readings of the novel. For instance, Natasha Reinhoff has argued that the narrator turns into an unreliable person: “Skriveren kan tenkes både som en nokså pålitelig person, som kanskje intuitivt tilskriver Knut til og med ‘sanne’ tanker, dvs. tanker som Knut virkelig har tenkt. Men han kan like godt ansees som en person som har diktet det hele – til og med seg selv.” (Reinhoff 2002, 117).

22 In his book Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare , Stanley Cavell has shown how Shakespeare’s tragedies in different ways can be read as performances of scepticism. The plays show the tragic effects that result from human beings who do not want to, or cannot, acknowledge what they should – must – acknowledge, for instance, the fact that there are others, that my children are mine, that one can be loved by another more than one loves the other (Cavell 1995).

23 This comes close to Søgaard’s conclusion. Søgaard thinks that the third-person narrative is an expression of a phantasy that results from the narrator’s scepticism about his ability to communicate with other people using ordinary language.

to deal with this by creating fiction, a literary text. 24 This means that the narrator of Boathouse believes in art as the solution to his problems. The method chosen by the narrator in Septology is a different one, as we shall see now.

Anxiety in Septology

Septology is a novel in seven parts published in three books between 2019 and 2021. It is one of Fosse’s latest works but is already widely known and translated into many languages. 25 The first-person narrator, Asle, is an almost seventy-year-old successful painter who is thinking of retiring. He has been a widower for some time already, and we follow him during the days in December leading up to Christmas Eve, the day of his death.

Every one of the novel’s seven parts starts with Asle seeing himself standing in the living room of his house in the countryside. He sees himself looking at the last painting he created: “And I see myself standing and looking at the picture with the two lines that cross in the middle, one purple line, one brown line, it’s a painting wider than it is high […] ” (p. 13). 26 The moment of narration, the position from where he looks at himself looking at the painting, is somehow situated outside the happenings in the present, and the narration is probably anchored in the moment of death, as it turns out later. However, Asle watches himself performing everyday routines, and he observes himself

24 Finn Tveito has another reading of the novel. He thinks Fosse’s text can be explained as driven by a Derridean logic, i.e. the thought that writing undermines itself (due to difference). According to Tveito, the narrator nevertheless believes that writing helps (Tveito 1992).

25 Septology has attracted critics and scholars; for instance, Kjerstin Lothe Haga has written an MA thesis at the University of Bergen (2024), while Jan H. Landro comments on the work in his book Jon Fosse – Enkelt og djupt (2022).

26 “Og eg ser meg stå og sjå mot biletet med dei to strekane, ein lilla og ein brun, som kryssar einannan på midten, eit avlangt bilete” (I, 11). Page numbers after quotes from Septology in English refer to the English translation by Damion Searls, published in one volume (Fosse 2023). Page numbers after Norwegian quotations refer to the first three-volume edition of Septology published by Samlaget in 2019–2021. Roman numbers after Norwegian quotes refer to the volumes.

thinking of God. He sees himself driving to the nearest city during the days of Advent and transporting his latest collection of art to The Beyer Gallery, for instance. Beyer, the owner, had discovered Asle when, all by himself at the age of 16, he had just organised his first exhibition in the village hall. At a time when no one else cared for Asle’s paintings, which were not realistic enough in style for his rural neighbours, gallerist Beyer from the nearest larger city recognised his talent. This is one of the many retrospections in the novel, which include scenes from Asle’s childhood, such as the death of his sister Alida. Asle, the narrator, also looks back on his younger self – to whom he often refers in the third person – and remembers how he moved to the nearest city to go to high school. There he met another painter, also named Asle, and started drinking. 27 Further, the reader gets to know how Asle found his late wife Ales, 28 who also introduced him to the Catholic Church.

Like the protagonist in Boathouse, Asle the narrator is suffering from anxiety. One of the scenes Asle the narrator sees and experiences in the present, but that turns out to be something that had happened in the past, contains events at a children’s playground close to the house where he first lived after meeting Ales. The young man he sees has brown hair and a leather bag (just like Asle had), and the woman has black hair and a purple shirt (as Ales had). The young woman lies down in the sandpit and invites the young man to come down to her. She has spread out her jacket and lies on the ground, and she lifts her shirt as an invitation: “[…] she’s lying there in just her bra and purple shirt and her dark hair spreads out and then she says that he needs to take his clothes off too” (p. 50). However, he does not want to accept her invitation, “he says no, no we can’t do this, someone might see us”

27 Fosse often makes use of the doublet in his texts. For the use of the motif in Septology , see Landro 2022, 225f. I will also come back to this motif later in my argumentation.

28 Fosse often reuses names. Ales is one of them. Ales is also a protagonist in the novel Det er Ales (2023), while both Asle and Alida are used in the Andvake trilogy (Andvake (2007), Olavs draumar (2012), Kveldsvævd (2014)). See also Landro 2022, 278.

(p. 50–51). 29 As Asle the narrator observes, Asle the young man experiences fear of being seen by others, he fears the experience of shame. As was the case in Boathouse, the action described in the quote from Septology circles around a woman who takes the initiative and a rural man who finds himself exposed to a woman’s sexual desire. However, in Septology the challenge is not first and foremost the fear of being watched by others, but to accept the fact that human desire is precisely the result of human separateness. The desire to bring bodies together in a sexual act is an expression of an insight into the condition of our body. In Septology, Asle nevertheless listens to Ales, and he manages to overcome the anxiety that Ales’s invitation brings forth. He has what looks as his first sexual encounter with her in the playground, and they later get married. The importance of the scene in the playground is further underlined by the older Asle’s observation of the movements of the two young lovers in the sandpit, and the simultaneous observation of the sounds of waves that mix with the sounds of his heart.

[…] and with a kind of clear-sightedness that lets me see in the darkness I see the two of them lying there in the sandpit, and the clear sounds of breathing are coming from the sandpit and I hear them moving with the same regularity, like waves striking land, I hear the regular movements like waves. (p. 51–52) 30

Again, the motif of the waves is connected both to sexual desire and anxiety, and anxiety is shown again to be produced by an insight into human separateness, the ontological fact of the human body. But the waves are also recognised by the older Asle as more soothing in Septology, the sound is calm and not threatening, as it was in Boathouse, and the younger Asle also seems to overcome his anxiety due to the fact

29 “nei, nei slikt kan ein ikkje gjera, nokon kan sjå dei, seier han, ho må kle på seg att med det same, seier han […] ” (I, 69).

30 “Og med eit klårsyn som gjer at eg kan sjå i mørkret ser eg dei to liggja der i sandkassen og det lydest tydeleg anding frå sandkassen og eg høyrer dei same jamne rørsler, lik bølgjer som slår mot land, eg høyrer som bølgjer slå i jamn rørsle” (I, 72).

that the other human being – the girl who invites him to have sex – is Ales, the person he feels attuned with.

Nevertheless, there are several other scenes spread over the many pages of Septology that show how meeting a woman also produces anxiety in the older Asle, the narrator. For instance, Asle must control his feelings when he meets a woman called Guro in Bjørgvin after having accompanied his friend, the other Asle, to the hospital. That night, Asle must spend the night at Bjørgvin, and Guro volunteers to look after Brage, the other Asle’s dog. Guro tells Asle he can stay at her place, too, together with the dog. This frightens him, and he declines her offer. He cannot stand to be close to other people. He gets upset whenever someone pays him a visit: “for someone to come into my house, well that’s one of the worst things I know of, yes, I get so nervous and uneasy then that I don’t know what to do with myself” (p. 195). 31 Even at the age of almost seventy, Asle has problems relating to others. He becomes extremely frightened by the idea of having to face others as others, of having to expose himself to their gaze.

On the other hand, there are people in his life whom he knows very well – almost too well to be true. When it comes to the other Asle, his former friend and fellow artist, he somehow knows his feelings and thoughts. The narrator can see the other Asle lying on the bed in his flat, or sitting on his sofa, for instance: “I see Asle sitting there on his sofa, and he’s shaking and shaking, he’s thinking he can’t even lift his hands” (p. 99). 32 This fantastic insight into his friend creates the impression that the other Asle is not a real, separated human being, but rather someone like the narrator’s alter ego. In much the same way as in Boathouse, when the narrator records Knut’s thoughts, Asle the narrator of Septology acts as a third-person narrator when recounting the other Asle’s inner life. The other Asle turns into something like a

31 “det at nokon kjem heim til meg sjølv ja det er noko av det verste eg veit, ja då vert eg så uroleg at eg ikkje veit kvar eg skal gjera av meg” (I, 292).

32 “eg ser Asle sitja der på sofaen sin, og han skjelv og skjelv, og han tenkjer at han ikkje eingong klarer å lyfta handa si” (I, 144).

fictional character invented by the narrator. He is split off from Asle the narrator as his dark other.

That Asle the narrator relates to the other Asle as someone other than a real human being, whose corporality would limit insight into his thoughts, is confirmed at the plot level. For instance, Asle the narrator seems to feel, immediately as it were, that he is needed by the other Asle. Therefore, when the other Asle becomes seriously ill, Asle the narrator appears on the scene in Bjørgvin just in time. He arrives precisely when Asle has collapsed in his small backyard and saves him from freezing to death. In this way the impression of the other Asle being the narrator’s double is reinforced; the other Asle seemingly has no life of his own, independent from the narrator.

The doppelgänger motif is important, not the least because it makes readers reflect on two different possible ways to face the feeling of anxiety. Because he feels the same kind of anxiety as Asle the narrator, the other Asle has for many years tried to console himself with alcohol. Finally, his serious drinking problems not only keep him from working, but also lead to his early death in hospital, while Asle the narrator stopped drinking after he met Ales. Why does Asle the narrator manage to stop drinking when he meets Ales, and how does he now cope with his anxiety?

Christian faith and the art of painting in Septology

It was Ales who originally introduced Asle the narrator to Catholicism. Asle later thinks that becoming a member of the church saved him from becoming an alcoholic. This explicit comment on Catholicism in Septology is something new in Fosse’s oeuvre. In his earlier works, the impression of mysticism is often created, 33 but the protagonists are never shown to be praying. In Septology, all seven parts end with Asle’s prayers. The words of the prayers are also directly part of Fosse’s literary text, both the words in Latin and those translated into Norwegian (by Fosse himself!), are interwoven with Asle’s narrative.

33 For the role of mysticism in Fosse’s dramatic works, see Leif Zern (2005).

Furthermore, the movement of waves, which in the earlier novel Boathouse was a certain indicator of the experience of anxiety and an expression of restlessness, undergoes an interesting development. In Septology, the original anxiety resulting from the fear of sexuality (and having to accept human separateness, as earlier pointed out) is changed into a feeling of calm and safety. This already happened in the scene in the playground, where the movement of the waves became a calmer movement, a kind of breathing. The sound of the waves changes into a pulsation that represents life. Just like praying involves breathing, and renders comfort, the discourse of Asle the narrator flows on, without any punctuation, in a back-and-forth movement, repeating some of the parts and introducing new material, a movement that is also reminiscent of waves. This movement is not necessarily experienced as chaotic in Septology, but rather as comforting.

This change from anxiety to safety is not only expressed as a subject in the text, but becomes part of the narrator’s discourse. For instance, the old words of different prayers that are part of Asle’s narrative (especially the Lord’s Prayer, “Pater Noster”, and “Ave Maria”) are repeated many times. Stylistically, it is a remarkable aspect of Septology that all seven parts are written without a full stop. The text of the different parts moves back and forth between anxiety – for instance, provoked by the fear that something will happen to the other Asle – and safety – often experienced in the situation of prayer.

In more than one way, faith in God helps the narrator to control his anxiety. The prayers lead to a calmer form of breathing, and his belief in God further assures Asle that he will never be totally alone, not even at the moment of his death. Even when he experiences religious doubt, he finds his way back to faith in the end. When the narrator is anxious for his former friend Asle, who is dying in the hospital, he imagines his wife Ales as laying down close to him, and she seems to still be alive for him. The narrator also remembers Meister Eckhart’s thoughts. This medieval scholar noted that God only exists because human beings think he exists. Asle takes up the rosary and recites the Lord’s Prayer after observing, “I think that God maybe doesn’t exist, no, obviously he doesn’t exist, He is, and if I were not

then God wouldn’t exist” (p. 230). 34 The paraphrasing of Eckhart’s text is integrated seamlessly in Asle’s stream of consciousness. The coincidence of opposites that Eckhart struggles with – that God is not, but at the same time is – finds its solution in prayer. In Septology, again, this belief in God helps Asle to hold his anxiety at bay.

At the same time, Catholic faith is in the eyes of the narrator of Septology inherently interwoven with the creation of art. Prayers to God and the creation of works of art somehow seem to fill the same functions. 35 That the activity of painting, just like praying, is motivated by Asle’s efforts to cope with the experience of anxiety becomes clear, for instance, by the reflection of the narrator about the time when he started to paint “seriously”. Asle remembers that the early death of his sister Alida turned him into a real artist. It therefore seems as though the experience of death, the experience of the final separation from a beloved sister, made Asle aware of him being alone in the world. He is forced to accept his human condition as an embodied being, which includes his mortality.

The insight into his limited existence and his separation from others that is forced onto him by his sister’s sad death bothers him and makes him feel anxious. He cannot get rid of images he sees inside his head, his memories, and tries to “paint them away”. He stopped painting realistically and no longer produced images of his neighbours’ farms. By creating art, he wanted to find a new place, a place where he could be calm and safe. Asle formulates this ambition in the third part of Septology:

[…] now he’ll paint away the pictures he has in his head, but he doesn’t want to paint them exactly how he sees them in his head before his eyes, because there’s something like a sorrow, a pain, tied to every one of those pictures, he thinks, but also a kind of peace, yes that too, yes he’ll paint

34 “eg tenkjer at Gud kanskje ikkje finst, nei sjølvsagt finst han ikkje, han er, og om eg ikkje var, så fanst ikkje Gud” (I, 346).

35 This seems to be part of the reason why Fosse has said that to write is to pray. See, for instance, Fosse’s comments on this in his Nobel Prize lecture: https://www.nobelprize.org/ prizes/literature/2023/fosse/lecture/.

away all the pictures he has collected in his head, if he can so that only the peace stays behind. (p. 387) 36

According to Fosse’s Asle, it is non-realistic art that keeps anxiety at a distance. Even when rooted in experience, as many of the paintings Asle creates in Septology seem to be, the paintings do not mirror experience. They are something different; they are works of art.

In a conversation with Eskil Skjeldal, Fosse explains that getting away from himself when creating art is important for him as a writer. In creating plays and novels and poems, he wants to “leave himself” (“komme seg vekk frå seg sjølv”, Skjeldal 2015, 53). The same would be the case for drinking alcohol and for faith in God. As Fosse points out, philosophy wants human beings to know themselves, while religion asks them to forget themselves (Skjeldal 2015, 53). However, according to Fosse’s reflections, the therapeutic solution, as is also shown by the kind of art that Asle creates in Septology, would not be to write about oneself and one’s life (as writers of autofiction do). It may be tempting, for instance, to read Karl Ove Knausgård’s novels as his effort to understand himself, including his anxiety, but according to Fosse, concentration on one’s own problems will not help in controlling anxiety and will not necessarily lead to the creation of great art.

37

Homosocial bonds between rural men: an answer to anxiety

Asle the narrator often remembers scenes from the past, but he also describes what happens in the present, close to the narration’s present time. Most often, Asle mentions how his neighbour Åsleik comes to visit. Åsleik is a bachelor who lives on a little farm nearby. He delivers

36 “no skal han måla bort dei bileta han har inne i hovudet sitt, men han vil ikkje måla dei nett slik han ser dei føre seg der inne i hovudet, for det er som ei liding, ei smerte, knytt til kvart einaste bilete, tenkjer han, men òg ein slags fred, ja det óg, ja han skal måla bort alle bileta han har samla der i hovudet, om det lèt seg gjera, slik at berre freden er att […] ” (II, 70–71).

37 This underlines that, in spite of the similarity between Asle’s life and Fosse’s life, Septology should not be read as autofiction. The similarities one can find may simply be part of a game the author plays with his reader. In fact, in a conversation with Jan H. Landro, Fosse explicitly admits that he just wanted to play a bit with the popular trend of autofiction when giving Asle attributes that he himself shares with the protagonist (Landro 2022, 259).

wood for the stove and lamb ribs for Christmas dinner. He also keeps the driveway free from snow. Asle, on the other hand, buys necessities for Åsleik when he goes into the city to visit the gallery or church. And every Christmas, Åsleik can choose among Asle’s paintings and give one to his sister as a gift. While Asle is at first sceptical about Åsleik’s capacity to recognise art, he later comes to admit that Åsleik’s sister must have the best collection of his works. It is also Åsleik who comes up with the title for Asle’s last work. After having seen the painting with the two lines, the brown and the purple one, he calls it “St Andrew’s Cross” (p. 122), and Asle himself starts to think of the painting by that name.

The homosocial bonds between Åsleik and Asle seem quite loose at the start of the novel but are revealed to be much tighter in the later parts. While Åsleik seems to be just another good neighbour in the opening of the novel, the two men set out for what becomes Asle’s last journey in Part VII, a boat trip to Åsleik’s sister where they plan to celebrate Christmas. The journey clearly alludes to ancient tales of the dead having to cross the river Styx. The dialogues on board the boat and during the Christmas meal at Åsleik’s sister’s house reveal the intimacy between the two elderly men. Åsleik, for instance, reminds Asle of what he had wished for his life. He also promises that he will give Asle the boat from his sister’s boathouse: “[…] and Åsleik says I’ve been talking about getting a boat all these years” (p. 809). 38 Even if the subject of Åsleik’s words seem to be trivial, such as boats and dogs and practical organisation, and Asle the narrator seems reluctant in his answers, the mere fact that Åsleik shares this journey with Asle in the plot Fosse has created points both to their homosocial bonds and to their common condition as human beings – they are both destined to die, for instance. While the homosocial desire in Boathouse produced tension and resulted in feelings of jealousy and alienation, the homosocial bonds between men from the countryside in Septology are presented as comforting. Both Åsleik’s concern for Asle the artist and Asle the narrator’s

38 “Åsleik seier at eg i alle dei år har snakka om at eg skulle ha fått meg båt” (III, 305).

concern for his sick friend Asle in Bjørgvin show that rural masculinities are not constructed merely in a hierarchical manner, but often also centres on understanding and friendship. Fosse’s most recent work points to the fact that rural men do not need to express their feelings explicitly; they do not need to put them into words. Instead, they show them by sharing daily activities such as preparing meals and other practical tasks, or just being there when a friend is in pain. This does not mean that they live in a kind of symbiosis, that they live in an illusion of unity that does not exist (the relation between the two Asles being perhaps the exception that proves the rule). The fact that Åsleik and Asle have different opinions and are clearly different people with different tastes, as they never get tired of pointing out, stresses this fact clearly enough. But the two men are attuned, they know each other in that they acknowledge the other, and this is a reasonable thing to expect of the people one shares aspects of one’s life with.

Conclusion

Comparison between the earlier Boathouse and the recent novel Septology highlights an interesting development in Fosse’s work. Anxiety is shown throughout his work to be the result of the protagonist’s recognition of existentially being alone, of being one human in a world populated by others. His earliest texts, however, seem to be more characterised by the feeling of intense anxiety, while his later texts describe a road to calmness and peace. Anxiety is expressed as restlessness in Boathouse, and the narrator thinks a solution to that restlessness is to write. In Septology, anxiety is counteracted first with drinking and painting, and later with praying and painting. Stylistically, anxiety is expressed in both Boathouse and Septology by references to the movement of waves. The waves, which are sometimes literally part of the description of the surrounding landscape, are simultaneously evoked by the repetition, with some variations, of certain sentences throughout the novels. In Boathouse , these waves express restlessness. In Septology the movement of waves is seen as calmer, and the text turns stylistically close to prayer when the flow resembles a kind of breathing.

Homosocial bonds are central to the plots of both Boathouse and Septology. However, while the relationship between men creates anxiety in the rural protagonist in Boathouse, the friendship between Asle and Åsleik turns out to be important for the narrator’s experience of safety and comfort in Septology.

Bye, Linda Marie. 2010. “Bygdas unge menn. En studie av bygdemenns forhandlinger om og utforming av ‘rurale maskuliniteter’”. PhD diss., Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

Cavell, Stanley. 1982. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford University Press.

———. 1995. Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press.

Connell, Raewyn W. 1995. Masculinities. Polity Press.

Fosse, Jon. 1989. Naustet. Samlaget.

———. 2017. Boathouse. Translated by May-Brit Akerholt. Dalkey Archive Press.

———. 2019. Det andre namnet. Septologien I–II. Samlaget.

———. 2020. Eg er ein annan. Septologien III–V. Samlaget.

———. 2021. Eit nytt namn. Septologien VI–VII. Samlaget.

———. 2023. Septology. Translated by Damion Searls. Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Haga, Kjerstin Lothe. 2024. “Religiøse motiv i Jon Fosses Septologien (2019–2021)”. Master’s thesis, University of Bergen.

Karlsen, Ole. 2000. “Ei uro er kommen over meg: Om Jon Fosses Naustet (1989) og den repeterende skrivemåten”. Edda 3: 268–79.

Landro, Jan H. 2022. Jon Fosse – Enkelt og djupt: Om romanane og forteljingane hans. Selja Forlag.

Langås, Unni. 2013. “Fanget i fortid: Tre traumefortellinger av Jon Fosse”. Edda 3: 217–234.

———. 2016. Traumets betydning i norsk samtidslitteratur. Fagbokforlaget.

Linneberg, Arild. 1994. Bastardforsøk. Gyldendal.

Reinhoff, Natascha. 2002. “Kven er det som skriv? Skriveren i romanen Naustet av Jon Fosse”. Nordlit 12: 111–124.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. (1985) 1992. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia University Press.

Skjeldal, Eskil. 2015. Mysteriet i trua: Jon Fosse i samtale med Eskil Skjeldal. Samlaget.

Søgaard, Mari Flølo. 2015. “Bilder av ensomhet: Språk, kropp og skeptisisme i Jon Fosses Naustet (1989) og Tomas Espedals Gå. Eller kunsten å leve et vilt og poetisk liv (2006)”. Master’s thesis, University of Bergen.

Tveito, Finn. 1992. “På sporet av den tapte vestlandstid: Naustet av Jon Fosse”. Edda 1: 66–78.

Zern, Leif. 2005. Det lysande mørket: Om Jon Fosses dramatikk. Translated by Eldbjørg Hovland. Samlaget.

5. Sounding German: An Exploration of Linguistic Devices in Trilogien versus Trilogie

In “The Translator’s Task” (1923) Walter Benjamin writes that a translator must “set free in his own language the pure language spellbound in the foreign language [...]. To this end he breaks through the rotten barriers of his own language” (Benjamin 1997, 163). 2 In his 1984 essay “The Manifestation of Translation”, Antoine Berman argues that translation is an “autonomous discipline” that must rise above its “ancillary condition”. The purpose of translation is dialogue, and the translator’s ambivalence consists in “wanting to force two things: to force his own language to adorn itself with strangeness, and to force the other language to trans-port itself into his mother tongue” (Berman 1992, 2, 5). 3

1 This chapter is translated into English by Kjellfrid Reite Castle. Although the chapter is translated into UK English, as the published English translations of Fosse’s work are in US English, quotes and character names from these will be left in US English. Quotes from people other than Jon Fosse are translated into English and put in quotation marks even if the original quote is Norwegian. Jon Fosse quotes are reproduced in the original with English translations in brackets. Translated quotes without references are from works that are unpublished in English; these quotes are translated by Castle.

2 Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), German philosopher, translator and literary critic. The German original is titled “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” and was first printed in 1923 as a preface in Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux Parisiens. Deutsche Übertragung mit einem Vorwort über die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, von Walter Benjamin .

3 Antoine Berman (1942–1991), French philosopher, translator and “key discourse shaper for international translation history and theory” (Refsum 2000, 61). The French original is titled “La traduction au manifeste”, published in Antoine Berman: L’épreuve de l’étranger Culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne romantique (1984).

Rebecca Boxler Ødegaard 1

In 2016, Jon Fosse’s Trilogien (Trilogy) (2014), consisting of the stories 4 Andvake (Wakefulness) (2007), Olavs draumar (Olav’s Dreams) (2012) and Kveldsvævd (Weariness) (2014), was translated into German by Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel and published by Rowohlt Verlag. 5 As a Nordic philologist who is also a native German speaker, I am struck by the elegance with which Schmidt-Henkel engages in this “autonomous discipline”. Without letting it adversely affect the reader, he succeeds in breaking through the “rotten barriers” of language by letting Fosse’s text re-emerge in a unique and unexpected German cadence. Where Fosse consistently follows an archaic but accepted standardised Nynorsk , Schmidt-Henkel blends elements of spoken, non-standard German with written, standard German. 6 The translator’s choice is surprising and sometimes even provocative to a German audience. Norwegian readers are accustomed to encountering various Norwegian language variants. In contrast, German readers expect a single, rigid standard, as non-standard German is largely confined to informal and private contexts.

Prime examples of this are found in the following key excerpt from the original Andvake and its German translation Schlaflos. Here, we find the couple Asle and Alida in the Norwegian port city of Bergen (Bjørgvin) in an undefined historical past. 7 They are searching in vain for a place to live, finally falling asleep in exhaustion in the city’s raindrenched streets. Half-dreaming, Asle remembers his father, the folk

4 The Norwegian word used by Fosse is forteljingar, literally stories or novellas . These will elsewhere be referred to as stories making up the trilogy.

5 Schlaflos (Andvake) was first published in 2008. In 2016, Olavs Träume (Olavs draumar) and Abendmattigkeit (Kveldsvævd ) were published together with Schlaflos in Trilogie (notably not as Die Trilogie , which would be equivalent to Fosse’s definite form in the original).

6 In scholarship, “standard German” (language) is used as a concept denoting what in everyday speech is known as “High German” (Hochdeutsch). “Non-standard German” (language), previously also known as “substandard”, is a more value-neutral concept for spoken language in any linguistic area in a broad sense, i.e. everything that differs from the standard/written norm: regional variants, dialects, sociolects, slang etc.

7 According to Jan H. Landro (2022, 202), it is impossible to determine the exact time period in which the actions of the three stories take place. The point is that the stories appear timeless.

musician Sigvald [the English translation follows the Nynorsk and German]:

Slik var det besten din, han du er kalla opp etter, byrja som spelemann, seier han

Og no byrjar du òg slik, seier han

Og slik var det eg òg i si tid byrja, seier han

og Asle høyrer noko uklårt i røysta til far Sigvald og han ser mot han og han ser at han står der rett opp og ned og det er tårer i augo hans og så såg

Asle tårene byrja renna nedover kjakane til far Sigvald og det stramma seg til i kjakane hans og så tok han handbaken opp til augo og strauk tårene bort

Så av stad, sa far Sigvald

og så såg Asle i ryggen til far Sigvald der han gjekk bortover og han såg at det i det lange håret, halde saman med ein taustump bak i nakken, håret som svart hadde vore, like svart som Asles hår, no var mykje grått kome, og ganske tynt er håret òg vorte og far Sigvald går litt tungt, og så ung er han no heller ikkje lenger, men ikkje så gammal heller og Asle høyrer ei røyst seia at dei kan ikkje vera her og han opnar augo og han ser ein høg svart hatt der framfor seg 8 og han ser eit skjeggute andlet og det står ein mann der med ein lang stokk i den eine handa og i den andre held han ei lykt og lykta held han opp framfor andletet til Asle og så ser han Asle rett inn i andletet

(Trilogien : Andvake, pp. 52/53) 9

So hat auch dein Groβvater, nach dem du getauft bist, als Spielmann angefangen, sagt er

Und so fängst du jetzt auch an, sagt er

Und so hab ich auch angefangen seinerzeit, sagt er und Asle hört etwas Unklares in der Stimme vom Vater und er sieht zu ihm hin und er sieht ihn dastehen und er hat Tränen in den Augen und dann sah Asle die Tränen über dem Sigvald seine Wangen rinnen und die

8 The sequence “og han ser ein høg svart hatt der framfor seg” (“and he sees a tall black hat there in front of him”) is missing from the German translation.

9 In the following the page numbers after the Norwegian quotes refer to Fosse, Jon. 2014. Trilogien . Samlaget.

Wangen strafften sich und dann fuhr der Sigvald sich mit dem Handrücken über die Augen und wischte die Tränen weg

Dann mal los, sagte der Sigvald

und dann sah Asle dem Vater seinen Rücken, wie er den Weg entlangging, und er sah, dass in sein langes Haar, das im Nacken mit einem Stück Schnur zusammengebunden war, dass in das Haar, das so schwarz gewesen war wie seines, Asles, jetzt viel Grau gekommen war, und recht dünn ist das Haar auch geworden und der Vater geht etwas schwer, und so jung ist er nun auch nicht mehr, aber auch noch nicht so alt und Asle hört eine Stimme sagen, dass sie hier nicht bleiben können, und er macht die Augen auf und er sieht ein bärtiges Gesicht und da steht ein Mann mit einem langen Stab in der einen Hand und in der anderen hat er eine Laterne und die Laterne hält er Asle vors Gesicht und dann schaut er Asle direkt ins Gesicht hinein

(Trilogie : Schlaflos, p. 45) 10

That’s how your grandad, the one you’re named after, started as a fiddler, he says

And now you’ll start like that as well, he says

And that’s how I started in my time, he says and Asle hears something hazy in Pa Sigvald’s voice and he looks at him and he sees that he’s standing there and there are tears in his eyes and then Asle sees the tears starting to run down his father’s cheeks and his cheeks tighten and then he puts the back of his hand up to his eyes and he wipes away the tears

Off we go, Pa Sigvald said and then Asle watched Pa Sigvald’s back as he was walking along and he saw that the long hair, held together with a piece of twine at the back of the neck, the hair that had been black, as black as Asle’s hair, now had a lot of gray in it, and it had become quite thin too and Pa Sigvald is walking a little heavily, and he’s not so young anymore, but not so old either, and Asle hears a voice saying that they can’t stay here and he opens his eyes and he sees a tall black hat there in front of him and he sees a bearded face and a man is standing there with a long stick in one hand and in the

10 In the following the page numbers after the German quotes refer to Fosse, Jon. 2016. Trilogie . Translated by Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel. Rowohlt.

other he holds a lantern and he holds the lantern up in front of Asle’s face and then he looks straight into Asle’s face (Trilogy: Wakefulness, pp. 28/29) 11

I would like to comment on three aspects in this excerpt concerning Fosse’s language: Fosse’s vocabulary, his syntax and the Nynorsk genitive constructions he uses. At times, the German translation makes opposite linguistic choices regarding these same aspects. This tells us a great deal about the quality of the translation, as well as how Schmidt-Henkel is able to make Fosse “sound” authentically German.12 My analysis of linguistic devices in Trilogien versus Trilogie will discuss examples from excerpts throughout the entire work, including the above. I wonder: what decisions does the translator make within the mentioned categories? What is the purpose of an in some ways opposite approach to that of the original, and what effect does this have on the modern German reader?13 What is it that makes Trilogie so successful as a reworking of the original?14

When considering the vocabulary of the chosen excerpt, the word “spelemann” (“fiddler”) hints at an undefined historical past. It is translated faithfully as “Spielmann”, which a modern German reader will associate with medieval times, along with the surviving concept of the carnival. Spielmann has perhaps an even more archaic ring to it than its Norwegian counterpart, considering the prominent status and presence of folk music in Norway today. On the contrary, Fosse’s intimate, informal “besten” (“grandad”) is translated in the

11 In the following the page numbers after the English quotes refer to Fosse, Jon. 2016. Trilogy Translated by May-Brit Akerholt. Dalkey Archive Press. The English quotes are intended simply to help the reader understand the Norwegian text, not to reflect Fosse’s linguistic choices in the original Nynorsk

12 See Fosse’s requirement of linguistic musicality in Nes (2019, 140 et seq.) and the paragraph “‘My Dear Nynorsk ’ … ”.

13 The reader (the author of this article) is a native German speaker, but as a Nordic philologist is very familiar with Fosse’s original work.

14 Paraphrasing Berman (1992, 5–6): The translator “wants to be a writer, but is only a re-writer. He is an author – never The Author. His translations comprise a work, but not The Work.”

same sentence as the neutral standard German “Groβvater”. Conversely, the neutral Nynorsk “rett inn i andletet” (“straight into Asle’s face”) is translated as the childlike, non-standard German “direkt ins Gesicht hinein” (my emphasis), rather than “direkt ins Gesicht”.

Another striking feature of the Andvake excerpt is the inverted 15 syntax, an irregular pattern of words and phrases in a sentence often in combination with multiple inserted subordinate clauses: “han såg at det i det lange håret, halde saman med ein taustump i nakken, håret som svart hadde vore, like svart som Asles hår, no var mykje grått kome” (“he saw that the long hair, held together with a piece of twine at the back of the neck, the hair that had been black, as black as Asle’s hair, now had a lot of gray in it”). Inverted syntax is also seen in what apparently is casual conversation: “Og slik var det eg òg i si tid byrja, seier han” (“And that’s how I started in my time, he says”). This is an unusual measure in Norwegian (including Nynorsk), causing a modern reader to pause. The German translation is not as surprising at the syntactic level. In German, conjugation by case is still preserved, and the reader is therefore comfortable with a freer and more complex syntax. At times the translator compensates for this lack of surprise with literary devices such as alliteration and repetition: “und er sah, dass in sein langes Haar, das im Nacken mit einem Stück Schnur zusammengebunden war, dass in das Haar, das so schwarz gewesen war wie seines, Asles, jetzt viel Grau gekommen war” (my emphasis). Other times, he chooses a more archaic vocabulary compared to Fosse: “ Und so hab ich auch angefangen seinerzeit ” (and not Und so hab ich auch damals angefangen ; my emphasis) (“And that’s how I started in my time, he says”).

Fosse’s choice of genitive forms also surprises. Instead of the sin-genitive (his genitive), a more colloquial form of genitive commonly used in Nynorsk , Fosse chooses to construct the genitive by using a prepositional phrase, such as “røysta til far Sigvald” (and not far

15 In linguistics, this denotes changing a normal and expected syntax in a sentence. It is used particularly if the subject and verbal swap places but also to emphasise words or expressions in a sentence, or to achieve variety of expression (Gram and Hagemann, “Inversjon”).

Sigvald si røyst). At other times, he chooses the -s genitive, 16 such as “Asles hår” (and not Asle sitt hår). The German translator also surprises us – by choosing the opposite. Schmidt-Henkel reproduces Fosse’s non-colloquial genitive largely with constructions from non-standard German, either with prepositional phrases, as in “in der Stimme vom Vater” (and not in der Stimme des Vaters), or by denoting the person who possesses something in dative followed by a possessive pronoun (hereafter referred to as dative + possessive), such as in “dem Sigvald seine Wangen” (and not Sigvalds Wangen). However, the -s genitive which predominates in standard German, only occurs in a striking fragment which also emphasises the foreignness in Fosse’s language: “seines, Asles” (implied: Haar) is used to translate “Asles hår” (“Asle’s hair”).

Before I proceed to paraphrase Trilogien below and develop my arguments with more examples from the source versus the translation, I will allow Fosse himself to speak. What kind of relationship does he have to his (written) language, his “kjære Nynorsk” (dear Nynorsk)?17

And at what stage in his linguistic development is Trilogien situated?

“Min kjære nynorsk” (My Dear Nynorsk) – and a linguistic shift

Eg kan ikkje fordra å argumentere for språket mitt, det er nesten som å måtte stå der og kope og argumentere for sin eigen eksistens. Og korleis kan ein argumentere for den? Det er ikkje så mykje meir å seie enn at eg er her no eingong. Og det same gjeld nynorsken. […] Det same gjeld òg bokmålet [...]. Noko seier meg at det i så måte ville bli betre vilkår for nynorskskrivande dersom ein meir enn no fekk auga opp hos folk, anten dei no har si tilknyting til nynorsk eller til bokmål, for kvalitetane i nynorsklitteraturen [...].18 (Fosse 1999, 116–118)

16 According to Almenningen and Søyland (2012, 21), the -s genitive is not particularly widespread in Norwegian dialects. It is therefore used sparingly in Nynorsk .

17 A reference to Fosse’s essay “Min kjære nynorsk”, first printed in Norsklæreren in 1992.

18 See previous note.

I cannot stand having to argue for my language – it is almost like having to stand there, idle, and argue for my own existence. How can one argue for such a thing? There’s not much more to say than that I am actually here. And the same goes for Nynorsk. […] The same also goes for Bokmål [...]. Something tells me that in this matter, circumstances for writers of Nynorsk would be better if we were able to open the eyes of the public, whether users of Nynorsk or Bokmål , to the qualities present in Nynorsk literature [...].

The above is from Jon Fosse’s 1992 essay “Min kjære nynorsk” (My Dear Nynorsk). Around thirty years later, in an interview with the Nynorsk newspaper Norsk Tidend 19 , he admits feeling “meir som nynorskforfattar enn som norsk forfattar” (“more like a Nynorsk author than a Norwegian author”) and is happy to be described as a “målmann” (“champion of Nynorsk ”). Still, he has never felt the pressure which the unique Norwegian language situation has involved for many Nynorsk authors. However, it is important for him to distinguish between spoken and written language. He has personally grown more conscious of avoiding “å sleppa inn dialektale variantar i skriftspråket som gjer at det liknar meir og meir på bokmål. Ein må insistera på nynorsken som nynorsk” (“letting dialect variants into the written language which make it increasingly resemble Bokmål. One must insist on Nynorsk as Nynorsk ”). Neither does he have anything against being translated into the Bokmål version of Norwegian: “Eg er omsett til all verdas språk, så kvifor ikkje til bokmål? Det er dessutan ei understreking av at nynorsk er eit språk, til liks med bokmål” (“I’ve been translated to all the languages of the world, so why not Bokmål? Besides, that would highlight the fact that Nynorsk is a language, like Bokmål ”).

Any literary work is a language unto itself, argues Fosse, and although it is important to treat Nynorsk as a fully-fledged (written) language with its own rules and norms, the most important thing is that it has cadence – “det må klinga”: “Du må jo bruke øyra når du skriv nynorsk” (“Of course you have to use your ears when you write

19 See Grov (2020). The following quotes are taken from this.

in Nynorsk ”) (Torsheim 2019, 142). Ensuring cadence must, if necessary, be done at the expense of conforming to standardised Nynorsk . Although Fosse-Nynorsk has long been established as an individual standard, like any (written) language in use, it is in no way static. Fosse himself claims having tried to teach himself to write in Nynorsk for over fifty years: “Når ein snakkar om å kunna eit språk, så har eg aldri heilt skjønt, kva meiner ein eigentleg med det?” (“When speaking of knowing a language, I’ve never quite understood – what do we actually mean by that?”) There must be room for both innovation and cultivating of old treasures: “Det er den gamle nynorsk-norma, at du ikkje skal bruka s-genitiv. Men går du for eksempel tilbake til norrønt, så kryr det jo av genitiv” (“It’s the old Nynorsk norm, that you shouldn’t use the -s genitive. But if you go back to Old Norse, for example, it’s teeming with genitive forms”) (Torsheim 2019, 140).

Fosse demonstrates this art of creating an old-new language in Trilogien , as he conducts a permanent linguistic shift in his prose “in the direction of a consistent -a infinitive and more conservative choices of words and conjugations”, what is referred to as a “moderated Hauge Nynorsk ” (Landro 2022, 200). In fact, while writing Andvake , which was published in 2007, he had the idea of writing in an even more old-fashioned style, by using the i-mål form. 20 In the end, however, he settled on the more moderate a-mål form, reportedly without any pressure from his publisher. 21 However, when many years later, in 2018, he went so far as to change the title of his famous play Nokon kjem til å komme (Someone is Going to Come) (1992), it was necessary to compromise. Since then, it has been called Nokon kjem til å kome (and not

20 i-mål : Variant of Nynorsk in which the definite article is formed using the suffix -i, as in soli and husi instead of sola (the sun) og husa (the houses). These i-forms were the original forms in Landsmål , which historically was the precursor to Nynorsk . Later they became designated as secondary forms, and in 2012 they were removed from standardised Nynorsk (Grepstad, “i-mål”).

21 The transition to a consistent -a infinitive in Fosse’s prose occurred as early as in 2005, in the story “Bølgjer av stein” (“Waves of Stone”) in the book Håvard Vikhagen . However, the transition took longer in his drama. It was only in 2009 that the monologue Juletresong (Christmas Tree Song) appeared, containing the -a infinitive.

Nokon kjem til å koma). Fosse comments on the matter as follows: “Med åra har eg byrja skriva ein meir tradisjonell og radikal nynorsk [...]. Av prinsipp likar eg ikkje å endra i alt utgjevne bøker, men denne endringa får vera unnataket som stadfester regelen” (“Over the years, I have begun writing in a more traditional and radical Nynorsk [...]. As a matter of principle I do not like to change books that have already been published, but this change will have to be the exception that proves the rule”) (Fosse, 2018).

Trilogien

Trilogien consists of three stories, Andvake, Olavs draumar and Kveldsvævd , centring on the couple Asle and Alida. Although Trilogien is a small work in terms of number of pages (around 240), it has great significance, and it was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2015. Fosse himself has several times spoken about the origins of Andvake : “Når eg først får det til, då skriv det seg av seg sjølv. […] La oss seie ‘Andvake’, den trur eg ikkje er endra på, nesten ingen ting” (“When I really get going, it writes itself. […] Let’s take Andvake, that one I don’t think I changed, hardly at all”) (Torsheim 2019, 135). At the outset he had no plans for a sequel, let alone a trilogy. Olavs draumar and Kveldsvævd were written within a short space of time. Both stories needed to be completed before the entire work could be published as a trilogy in 2014.

Andvake remained a standalone work for several years. In the story, the reader meets the fiddler Asle – who has inherited his fiddleplaying talent from his father Sigvald – and his heavily pregnant girlfriend Alida. Both are around 17 years old and, on a journey, or rather an escape, to Bjørgvin from their hometown of Dylgja, located in a Western Norwegian fjord landscape. On arrival in Bjørgvin, they search in vain for shelter but eventually obtain it by illegal and violent means. Andvake ends with Alida giving birth to a baby boy, named after Asle’s father: “Du og eg, seier Asle Og så vesle Sigvald, seier Alida” (p. 83) (“You and I will manage, he says/You and I and little Sigvald, she says” (p. 94)).

In Olavs draumar, the couple have changed their names to Olav

and Åsta, to cover over a past that cannot stand the light of day. While Andvake tells the story of the couple, Olav (Asle) alone is now the protagonist. The couple have been living outside Bjørgvin for a while with their young son. One day, Olav travels into Bjørgvin to purchase wedding bands. In the alleys and watering holes of the city, he is confronted with his own past and conscience. Olavs draumar ends with him being executed in front of a large crowd. On his way to the gallows, he cries out: “Eg er Asle” (p. 171) (“I am Asle” (p. 103)). In his final moments his thoughts are with Alida: “Alida tek Asle i handa og så reiser han seg opp og så står han der og held Alida i handa” (p. 173) (“Alida takes Asle’s hands and then he stands up and then he stands there and holds Alida’s hand” (p. 105)).

Kveldsvævd is the story of Alida after Asle’s passing in Bjørgvin. Her story is interwoven with the story of her daughter Ales, whom Alida has with Åsleik after Asle’s death. The much elder Åsleik also hails from Dylgja. He finds Alida and young Sigvald starving and alone in Bjørgvin in search of Asle and takes care of them. Alida has two daughters with Åsleik, though only Ales survives childhood. Through the memories of the elderly Ales, the reader learns that Alida, in old age, chooses to take her own life by drowning herself in the fjord. There, she is united with Asle: “og alt er berre Asle og Alida” (p. 239) (“and everything is only Asle and Alida” (p. 147)). Ales chooses the same fate as Alida: “Ales går ut i bølgjene […] så slår ei bølgje over det gråe håret hennar” (p. 239) (“she walks out and out into the waves […] then a wave rolls over her gray hair” (p. 147)).

Although there is an exciting external plot that drives Trilogien forward, it is the unsaid, what has happened, or what may have happened but is not discussed, that holds the reader in its grip. The work can perhaps be described as a stripped-down version of Crime and Punishment , even though the misdeed(s) committed are done more or less in passion. Still, in Trilogien people do commit morally reprehensible acts and justify them to themselves. They must also atone for their actions. The opening scene of Andvake has often been linked to the Christmas story in the Bible, though Fosse himself has denied having this in mind. To him, Andvake is a “heidensk” (“heathen”) work: “Det

er noko av det minst religiøse eg har skrive. […] I teksten kan det kristne synast, men i historia er det lite kristendom” (“It’s probably one of the least religious things I’ve ever written. […] In the text, Christianity may appear, but in the story there is little Christianity”) (Seiness 2009, 123).

Vocabulary in Trilogien

Trilogien’s vocabulary is – though strangely antiquated – largely Fosse-esque: “undemanding”, casual and free of any foreign loan words (Landro 2022, 24 and 7, respectively). A modern Nynorsk reader may be unfamiliar with especially the titles of the first and the third story, Andvake and Kveldsvævd , as both words have largely fallen out of use in Norwegian. In the title, Andvake is used as a noun, while the online Nynorsk dictionary Nynorskordboka only refers to the adjective andvaken , meaning søvnlaus (sleepless), derived from the Old Norse andvaka (andvaki). Aside from sleeplessness the noun can also mean caution or vigilance (though this is a rare meaning of the word). 22 Andvake also appears as a proper noun in the Old Norse sagas and is the title of a Landsmål periodical issued up until 1871, as well as a variety of other periodicals from more recent times. Ultimately, though, it is Fosse who brought this word back from the dead. He describes andvake as when “du ligg og ankar på noko og ikkje får sova” (“you lie there worrying about something and being unable to sleep”) (Torsheim 2019, 137). An old word for a timeless phenomenon, in other words. Although the specific noun form of kveldsvævd is not listed in Nynorskordboka , its corresponding adjective has an entry in the dictionary Norsk Ordbok as kveldsvæv or kveldsvævd . There are several entries for this in the dialectal base material of Norsk Ordbok , in what is known as the Setel Archive (Setelarkivet). It means “a preference to sleep in the evening; early sleepiness”, and etymologically, it is linked to the Old Norse kveldsvæfr, which is attested a few times in medieval

22 See entries for andvaka and andvaki in the online dictionary ONP: Dictionary of Old Norse Prose , onp.ku.dk.

literary sources. 23 In combination with the archaic Bjørgvin rather than the contemporary Bergen , the disused, archaic words andvake and kveldsvævd are rather a signifier of an undefined historical past in which the action takes place than any attempt to bewilder the reader with the use of obsolete old words.

Although the nouns “spelemann” (“fiddler”), “kjakane” (“cheeks”), “andletet” (“face”) and “lykt” (“lantern”) and the adjective “skjeggut” (“bearded”), all in the excerpt from Andvake, do adhere to the archaic style of the work, they are easily intelligible to a Nynorsk reader. All three stories are full of examples like these, such as “fela” (p. 11) (“fiddle” (p. 3)), “byltar” (p. 11) (“bundles” (p. 3)), “Skjenkjestova” (p. 97) (pub), “seidel” (p. 106) (“tankard” (p. 63)), “Matstova” (p. 190) (canteen) and “tagale” (p. 195) (“in silence” (p. 120)).

In a repetitive, Fossean way, the vocabulary and cadence used reinforces the undefined historical, fairytale-like and legendary sense that rests over Trilogien in its entirety: “dei søv og dei søv, dei søv og dei søv” (p. 75) (“they sleep and they sleep, they sleep and they sleep” (p. 43)) on “ein benk, i eit kjøken, i eit lite hus” (p. 75) (“on a bench in a kitchen in a small house” (p. 43)) in Andvake . Jan H. Landro (2022, 210) mentions allusions to Sleeping Beauty; to that I would add Snow White, who, uninvited, decides to stay in the dwarves’ house. Also, the similar-sounding and repetitive description of the fateful bracelet that Asle buys for Alida has a magical, fairytale-like quality about it. The bracelet is not only yellow and blue once, but twice, and the adjectives yellow and blue appear in both a positive and a superlative conjugation: “gulaste gull med dei blåaste blåe perler” (pp. 100/101, 106 and elsewhere) (“yellowest gold and the bluest of blue pearls” (pp. 59, 62, 64)). 24

23 https://alfa.norsk-ordbok.no/ . See also Landro (2022, 200). It occurs in Egils saga (pre1240) and in Johan Storm Munch’s language history article “Levninger af Nordens gamle Tungemaal udi Norges Provindsial-Dialecter” (Relics of the Ancient Tongue of the Nordics Out in Norway’s Provincial Dialects) in the periodical Saga (1816).

24 This also reminds me of Astrid Lindgren’s Mio, min Mio (1960) (Mio, My Son): Jum-Jum , “det gyllene guldäpplet” (p. 13) (the golden gold apple), “Jag hade inte sett hans rosor, alla hans vackra, vackra rosor” (p. 23) (I hadn’t seen his roses – all of his beautiful, beautiful roses). (Page references from the original Swedish.)

Alliteration is generally very frequent, not only in and with the name combination of Asle and Alida, but also in humorous phrases such as in combination with pars pro toto: “han ser ein høg svart hatt der framfor seg” (p. 53) (“he sees a tall black hat there in front of him” (p. 29)), or “og ved bord sit dei, hattane og huvene, tett i tett” (p. 96) (“and they sit at tables, the hats and the heads [sic] 25 , tightly together” (p. 56)).

Syntax in Trilogien

Trilogien contains a remarkable amount of dialogue, most of it brief, appearing in quick succession: “Og no byrjar du òg slik, seier han”/ “Og slik var det eg òg i si tid byrja, seier han” (“And now you’ll start like that as well, he says”/ “And that’s how I started in my time, he says”) and “Så av stad, sa far Sigvald” (“Off we go, Pa Sigvald said”), we read in the above excerpt from Andvake. “Hei du, du Asle, seier han”/ “Eg vil snakka med deg, seier han”/ “Eg har noko å spørja deg om, seier han” (“Hello there Asle, he says”/ “I want to talk to you, he says”/ “I have something to ask you, he says” (p. 53)), we read in Olavs draumar (p. 91) Olavs draumar is likely the most dialogue-rich book in Fosse’s entire authorship (Landro 2022, 212).

Though extensive use of dialogue may at times be an expression of intended informality, that is not the case in Trilogien . Although the punctuation is, in true Fosse fashion, entirely idiosyncratic, with few full stops, a complete lack of question marks or quotation marks, and rather intuitive use of commas, the syntax of the direct speech is usually correct down to the smallest detail, i.e. not informal. The characters speak in complete sentences: “Eg trur det” (p. 32) (“I think so” (p. 13)) says Alida, not just trur det (think so). “Det høyrest fint ut” (p. 128) (“That sounds fine” (p. 76)) says Olav, not just fint (fine). However, it is the extensive and, to modern Nynorsk readers, unfamiliar use of inverted syntax, often in combination with long inserted subordinate clauses, which most strongly characterises Trilogien in its entirety.

25 Chapter translator’s note: According to Nynorskordboka, huve , the singular form of huvene , means “soft hat”.

It operates on all levels (direct/indirect speech/narrative text) and in all kinds of situations.

Thus, the words Sigvald says to Asle in a confidential situation in the introductory excerpt appear strangely stilted: “Slik var det besten din, han du er kalla opp etter, byrja som spelemann” (“That’s how your grandad, the one you’re named after, started as a fiddler”). This same phenomenon is seen in the conversation between Asle and Alida, after one of the most intimate moments a young couple can experience: “Tenk å gjera noko slikt den dagen mor Silja er daud” (p. 26) (“Imagine doing something like that the day Ma Silja dies” (p. 12)). Also, in Kveldsvævd , as Åsleik and Alida are sitting on their own at the informal eating house, Matstova (canteen), their everyday conversation is heightened through inversion: “Men noko å drikka til må ein vel ha” (p. 190) (“But you’ve got to have something to drink” (p. 117)). On the other hand, inversion comes somewhat more naturally in the conversation between the Jeweler, Asle-Olav and Åsgaut in Olavs draumar : “eg har […] den tru at dei vyrde karar kanskje kan finna noko dei kan sjå seg mon i”/ “Kva skal det så vera” (pp. 129/130) (“I believe you respectable men might find something to your liking”/ “What can I help you with” (pp. 77/78)).

Indirect speech is also infused with inversion: “far Sigvald går litt tungt, og så ung er han no heller ikkje lenger, men ikkje gammal heller og Asle høyrer ei røyst seia at dei kan ikkje vera her” (p. 52) (“Pa Sigvald is walking a little heavily, and he’s not so young anymore, but not so old either, and Asle hears a voice saying that they can’t stay here” (p. 29)). As is typical of the whole of Trilogien , this example has a seamlessly connected past and present, in one and the same sentence. In the excerpt, Asle is reminiscing about days gone by. Then, the rude awakening to a present without a future occurs in a single subordinate clause, characteristically marked by inversion. The denial of the couple’s right to a (shared) existence is brutal, even in its linguistic banality. As Erling Aadland argues in his analysis of Det er Ales (2004) (Aliss at the Fire), Fosse is at his most “elegant […] when inverted syntax coincides with a temporal transition, which additionally is a change in perspective” (Aadland 2004, 98). Another elegant twist – not

necessarily intended though – is the discrepancy which occurs between the content and linguistic inversion in “og han høyrer Gamlingen seia at han veit at han no står og snakkar så kvardagsleg med ein drepar” (p. 109) (“and he hears the Old Man saying that he knows he’s standing there chatting with a killer” (p. 64)). Whilst the old man claims to speak “kvardagsleg” (everyday speech) his statement is estranged by the linguistic inversion.

The syntax in Trilogien is akin to a solemn, archaic, in parts Old Norse style, as well as overly complicated administrative/chancery language 26 of more recent times. In particular, this is exemplified by the long narrative sentences with lists, interjected by inserted subordinate clauses. There are more of these in Andvake and Kveldsvævd than in the dialogue-rich Olavs draumar. A good example of this has already been mentioned, found in the excerpt: “han såg at det i det lange håret, halde saman med ein taustump i nakken, håret som svart hadde vore, like svart som Asles hår, no var mykje grått kome” (“and he saw that the long hair, held together with a piece of twine at the back of the neck, the hair that had been black, as black as Asle’s hair, now had a lot of gray in it”). However, a similar effect is also achieved in a short subordinate clause when the perfect participle and the corresponding preposition occur in an unexpected order: “då karen opp var komen” (p. 17) (“when the man had come in” (p. 7)).

While the dialogue in Trilogien appears oddly textual through inversion, the same measure can have a reverse, more informal and unwinding effect in narrative text: “Slik gjekk han, og på hovudet hadde han ei grå huve, og kvifor går han så sakte, for sakte må han jo gå” (p. 88) (“that’s how he walked, and on his head he wore a gray knit cap, and why is he walking so slowly, for he must be walking slowly” (p. 51)). It also breaks up the elderly Alida’s long stream of thought in Kveldsvævd :

26 So-called kansellispråk

gamle Alida står der, og ho kan ikkje det gjera, det går ikkje an, ho kan ikkje berre stå der, ho som longe er død, og det der armbandet ho alltid gjekk med har ho på seg, det av gull, og med blåe perler (p. 233)

old Alida stands there, and she can’t be doing that, that’s impossible, she can’t just be standing there, she’s long dead, and she’s wearing that bracelet she always wore around her arm, the golden one with blue pearls (p. 144).

Nevertheless, Fosse’s consistent use of inverted syntax remains slightly peculiar to the modern Norwegian reader, particularly the Nynorsk reader.

Genitive in Trilogien

In all, Trilogien offers three types of genitive constructions. Two of them occur in the excerpt from Andvake. Most frequent is Fosse’s use of the genitive with prepositional phrase. It occurs no fewer than four times in the excerpt: “røysta til far Sigvald”/ “kjakane til far Sigvald”/ “ryggen til far Sigvald”/ “andletet til Asle” (“Pa Sigvald’s voice”/ “his father’s cheeks”/ “his eyes”). It can also be traced throughout the entire work, with examples such as “skuldrene til Alida” (p. 68) (“her shoulders” (p. 44)) and “om bord i båten til Åsleik” (p. 211) (“on Åsleik’s boat” (p. 130)). Parents are often denoted with a far (father) or mor (mother) in front of their name, such as “spiskammerset til mor Herdis” (p. 75) (“Herdis’s larder” (p. 43)).

Least frequent is, not surprisingly, the use of the -s genitive in a Nynorsk text. It only occurs four times within a short space of text, exclusively in Andvake. The first occurrence is in the excerpt, regarding Asle (later known as Olav): “Asles hår” (“Asle’s hair”), then in “Asles alder” (pp. 49 and 53) (“Asle’s age” (pp. 26 and 26)), and in “far Aslaks røyst” (p. 63) (“Pa Aslak’s voice” (p. 33)). Frequently employed, too, is the -s genitive in the title Olavs draumar. As a rule, the -s genitive is not recommended in Nynorsk , to avoid creating an unnecessary distance from spoken Norwegian. However, Fosse believes the s-genitive “høyrer heime i nynorsk, sjølv om eg brukar han med måte” (“belongs in Nynorsk , although I use it sparingly”). He describes

Edvard Hoem’s Kjærleikens ferjereiser (1974) as one of “[d]ei beste nynorske boktitlane” (“the very best Nynorsk book titles around”) (Torsheim 2019, 140 and 142 respectively).

The third genitive construction occurring in Trilogien is formed using the pronoun hennar (the feminine form of the possessive). Examples are “på fingeren hennar Åsta” (p. 95) (on Åsta’s finger), “(på) armen hennar Åsta” (p. 101, 113, 126, 136, 153) (“on Åsta’s arm” (p. 59)) and “mor hennar Alida” (p. 182) (Alida’s mother). Here, Fosse declines to choose the most frequent genitive form in Nynorsk which would include the pronoun sin (Åsta sin finger, Åsta sin arm etc.): known in Norwegian as sin-genitiv or garpegenitiv (his genitive or separated genitive). While the separated genitive is assumed to have its roots in the German spoken variant known as Plattdeutsch , the variant of “på armen hennar Åsta” can be traced back to an Old Norse origin. 27

In modern Bokmål , the genitive is always formed with an -s; however, according to John Ole Askedal -s genitive is used “to a lesser or minimal degree in everyday speech and is often avoided in Nynorsk ” (Askedal 2017, 61). Olaf Almenningen and Aud Søyland argue that the type of genitive with a prepositional phrase “is often the best solution” in Nynorsk . The separated genitive, on the other hand, can “at times seem a bit heavy and clumsy” (Almenningen and Søyland 2012, 20–21). However, in 2014, in a newspaper interview with Dag Simonsen from the Language Council of Norway, the separated genitive was proclaimed victorious: “the acceptance of the separated genitive has increased sharply in recent years. In Nynorsk , it has even become largely dominant.” Simonsen adds, though, that there are still many

27 Plattdeutsch , also known as Low German or Niederdeutsch , is a regional language in the northern states of Germany but not a standard written language like High German (standard German) (Theodorsen, “platt-tysk”). Torp (1988 and 1989) argues that the garpegenitiv (separated genitive) originates in the Low German by pointing out: “[g]arpar was […] a nickname people in Bergen used to refer to the German merchants during the period when the Hanseatics were a powerful group in the city.” As early as in 1989, this genitive is no longer “limited to the spoken language ‘in the western and northern parts of the country’ – today, it can be heard everywhere.” However, the variant has a low status and is associated “mostly […] with colloquial spoken language.”

“who believe the form is childish and awkward” and that this is, after all, a “matter of preference.”28

If we consider Fosse’s preference within the mentioned categories, in Trilogien he demonstrates fidelity to Nynorsk as a written norm. Given a choice between more or less influence from spoken language, he chooses to make it as written as possible in style. This is also very much true for his choice of genitive construction.

Vocabulary in the German translation Trilogie

Turning our attention to Schmidt-Henkel’s German translation, Trilogie, his choice of devices when it comes to vocabulary, syntax and genitive constructions makes for a fascinating read.

At the lexical level, in places, Trilogie offers an even more archaic and formal vocabulary than does the source. Aside from “Spielmann” (“fiddler”), the excerpt from Andvake also has the nouns “Stab” (and not Stock) (“stick”) and “Laterne” (and not Lampe) (“lantern”), giving a somewhat more archaic connotation in German than in Nynorsk . More formal is also the use of the participle “getauft” (and not b/ genannt) (baptised) and the adjective “recht” (and not ziemlich) in “recht dünn” (“quite thin”). This is in line with the neutral and correctly formal “Gro βvater” for Fosse’s warm and informal “besten” (“grandad”). A German alternative, a formal-informal compromise in this context of a conversation in confidence between a father and his son, would be Gro βpapa . On the other hand, Opa , the currently most frequently used and childlike, sometimes belittling term, would be far too modern.

Other examples of a more antiquated translation of neutral Fosse words are found elsewhere in Trilogie : “Obdach” (p. 9, alternatively, Bleibe) for “husvære” (p. 11) (“shelter ” (p. 3)), “Bub” (p. 10, alternatively, Junge or Knabe) for “gut” (p. 13) (“boy ” (p. 4)), or “jähes

28 In Halvor Ripegutu: “Garpene sin seier”, published 16 April 2014: https://www.aftenbladet. no/kultur/i/dkroo/garpene-sin-seier. https://www.aftenbladet.no/kultur/i/dkroo/garpenesin-seier.

Glück” (p. 60, my emphasis) for “brå lukke” (p. 69) (“sudden happiness” (p. 40)). Rendering brå as the neutral, not to mention two-syllable plötzlich would have been out of place in my opinion. “Fiedel” (p. 9) for “fela” (p. 11) (“fiddle” (p. 3) works, much as “Spielmann”, but is inevitably more archaic. Unlike in Norway, the folk song tradition is more marginal in mainstream German society, and these words are therefore more historically marked for a German reader than they are to a Norwegian. On the other hand, “Wohnung” (p. 159), not the alternative Bleibe, for “stad å bu” (p. 186) (“place to live” (p. 134)) stands out as a surprisingly modern choice.

Far more remarkable, however, is the movement to a surprising element of informal, spoken language in Trilogie, a choice that goes in the opposite direction what Fosse does in Trilogien . To achieve this movement, the translator sprinkles the work with (older) dialectal words, or words and expressions from other non-standard German (which, to some degree, carry negative connotations). Many of these dialectal words originate in what is known in linguistics as the High German 29 linguistic region, and they are also used in instances where Fosse chooses neutral words in the original text. “Bub” (p. 10) for “gut” (p. 13) (boy) has previously been mentioned as antiquated, but it is still used in southern German, Swiss and Austrian dialects. 30 Another (archaic) standard German alternative is Knabe. Other examples include “freilich” (p. 10) for “sjølvsagt” (p. 12) (of course) and “Bankert” (p. 58) for “lausungen” (p. 67) (“bastard kid” (p. 38)). “Deubel” (p. 125), on the other hand, is a Low German 31 variant of Teufel (devil), the original word in Fosse’s text being – equally un-neutral – “din jækel” (p. 152).

29 This is an original term for the dialects in the southern, southeastern and middle regions of Germany (Oberdeutsch , Mitteldeutsch), which also include parts of Northern Italy, Switzerland and Austria. It is currently used as a general term for standard German (Hochdeutsch), which developed from High German dialects and took over as standard for both the spoken and written variants in the Low German region after the Hanseatic period (Theodorsen, “høytysk”).

30 Also Bueb , Buob , Bübele etc.

31 Niederdeutsch or Plattdeutsch

Other examples of a dialectal style are “Herr Jesses” (p. 59) for “Herre Jesus” (p. 68) (“Jesus Christ” (p. 45)), and the use of Mäuler in “da kriegt man nicht viele Mäuler satt” (p. 92) for “kan ikkje føda mange nei” (p. 110) (“can’t feed many, no” (p. 65)). Mäuler, the plural of Maul , denotes the mouth of an animal (maw) and is used in a derogatory sense about humans in non-standard German. Also, the adjective blöd in “Die war ja blöd, sagt Alida” (p. 36) for “Ho der var fæl, seier Alida” (p. 42) (“She was awful, Alida says” (p. 23)), stands out as more informal (and childlike) than does “fæl” (a more direct translation could be schlimm , schlecht). This is in line with the omission of the e in habe in, for instance, the following: “Ich hab mich auch gerade gefragt, sagt Asle” (p. 57) for “Eg tenkte på det same seier Asle” (p. 65) (“I was thinking the same thing, Asle says” (p. 37)).

Another frequently used word from non-standard German is bisschen instead of standard ein wenig, which is equivalent to Fosse’s neutral litt : “Lieg du noch bisschen, sagt Asle” (p. 25) for “Ligg litt til du då, seier Asle” (p. 30) (“You lie there for a bit longer, Asle says” (p. 14)), “Bisschen Bier brauchst du aber auch” (p. 48) for “Litt øl må du òg ha” (p. 55) (“You’ll have to have a sip of beer too” (p. 31)), and “Alida […] nimmt auch ein bisschen ausgelassenen Speck auf die Gabel” (p. 163) for “Alida […] får òg litt steikt flesk på gaffelen” (p. 190) (“she gets a bit of roasted ham on her fork too” (p. 117)). To be sure, bisschen is mostly used in direct speech. The same orality occurs with the use of German diminutive forms of nouns, instead of the neutral standard form of the original: “kein Wörtchen antwortet er” (p. 82, and not Wort) for “ikkje eitt ord skal han seia” (p. 98) (“he won’t say a single word” (p. 57)), “ein Stückchen weiter nördlich” (p. 85, and not Stück) for “ein plass lenger nord” (p. 102) (“a place further north” (p. 60)).

Following my discussion in the previous section about the titles Andvake and Kveldsvævd , it is natural to want to examine the German translation choices for these titles. Fosse’s noun Andvake becomes the adjective schlaflos, which covers one sense of the word andvake, i.e. the state of being sleepless/sleeplessness. The translator prefers schlaflos to the rather sterile noun Schlaflosigkeit, which has a bit of a medical quality

to it. Even though this adjective is not as archaic and obscure as andvake , it nonetheless also has something poetically enticing about it. 32 Another interesting choice is the noun Abendmattigkeit for the adjective kveldsvævd . This is another instance in which the translator could have chosen the adjective form, abendmatt , but the short a sound in matt would be jarring against the long a sound in Abend . It is as if matt would remove some of the gravity of the word (which does not occur with schlaflos, where both vowels are long). Abendmattigkeit also has an old-fashioned ring to it, like the original title – an air of Goethe’s Wandrers Nachlied (1776/1780), or of a folk tune. Thus, the translator’s choices of titles preserve the original timeless and poetic quality of Fosse’s original.

When it comes to diction, a feature worth noting is the translator’s use of the definite article before proper nouns, particularly in Schlaflos. In the introductory excerpt, we see “dem Sigvald seine Wangen” for “kjakane til far Sigvald” (“his father’s cheeks”) and “sagte der Sigvald” for “sa far Sigvald” (“said Pa Sigvald”). Other examples are “Du bist also der Asle” (p. 49) for “Du er Asle du ja” (p. 57) (“So you’re Asle” (p. 32)). Definite articles ahead of proper nouns are not standard German, though they do occur in dialects and regional variants, particularly within the High German linguistic region. 33 When taken out of the context of direct speech, “der Sigvald” seems perhaps accidentally childlike to a modern German reader. A similar dialectal feature in Norwegian, though with less infantile connotations, is the pronoun ahead of proper nouns. Fosse, however, only uses this a couple of time, in Kveldsvævd : “han Åsleik”, “ho Alida” (p. 187) (“[he] Åsleik”, “[she] Alida” (p. 115)).

In Andvake and Olavs draumar, on the other hand, the mothers

32 This calls to mind e.g. Robert Schneider’s novel Schlafes Bruder (1992, Brother of Sleep in English, 1996), which also has points of thematic commonality with Trilogy (alienation, forbidden love, violence, loneliness, nature).

33 A definite article before a proper noun is typical, for instance, in the article author’s home region, in southern Germany near the Swiss border, in the dialect known as Hochalemannisch

and fathers are denoted in a rather hypertextual legalese style with a preceding father or mother : “sa far Sigvald”/ “røysta til far Sigvald” (p. 52) (“Pa Sigvald said”/ “Pa Sigvald’s voice” (pp. 28/29)). Here, the translator uses a definite article before the proper noun where Fosse uses mor or far, or where any form of emphasis is lacking: “dem Sigvald seine Wangen” (p. 45) for “kjakane til far Sigvald” (p. 52) (“his father’s cheeks” (p. 29)), “die Kerze, die die Herdis vor sich hält” (p. 27) for “lyset mora held framfor seg” (p. 32) (“the light [Ma Herdis] holds up in front of her” (p. 16)). The same German informality is, as mentioned, seen in the excerpt from Schlaflos: “dann schaut er Asle direkt ins Gesicht hinein” for “så ser han Asle rett inn i andletet” (“then he looks straight into Asle’s face”). Not only is “hinein” childlike and informal, but also “schaut” (and not sieht) is more informal than is the case in the original Nynorsk . In the example “Du bist also der Asle” (p. 49) for “Du er Asle du ja” (p. 57) (“So you’re Asle” (p. 32)), however, the same level of informality is recreated through the use of a preceding article in German versus a repetitive du and the additional ja in Norwegian.

In this context, the German translation shifts from a more oral and in places youthful language (Die war ja blöd ), particularly in Schlaflos, to a more textual and formal-adult language in Abendmattigkeit . For example, the definite article before proper nouns is almost completely absent in the final story of Trilogie . This may be a subconscious measure influenced by the degree of seriousness of the plot and life phase: a young couple establish themselves; a young man in difficulty/death; a young woman in difficulty/older woman/death. In the original, on the other hand, we see traces of a somewhat weaker and reversed linguistic shift: from greater textuality in Andvake to more colloquial features in Kveldsvævd . Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Andvake was published as early as in 2007 and stood alone for a long time, and the fact that it came at an early point in Fosse’s linguistic shift may mean it would adhere more consistently to Nynorsk writing norms.

A feature that is toned down in the German translation is the magical-suggestive word play which Fosse uses repeatedly in

connection with the bracelet Asle purchases for Alida: “das herrliche Armband in der Hand, lauter Gold und die schönsten blauen Perlen” (p. 112) is used to render “gulaste gull med dei blåaste blåe perler” (pp. 100/101, 106 et seq.) (“the yellowest gold and the bluest of blue pearls” (pp. 59, 62, 64 et seq.)). Instead, the suggestive tone of the original is recreated through frequent, intricate use of alliteration in the German text. The German “im Haus von der Herdis am Hang” (p. 39) is used for “i huset til mor Herdis i Brotet” (p. 45) (“in Herdis’s house in Brotet” (p. 25)); “wenn ihn wer fragte, woran das wohl lag” (p. 41) for “vart han spurd om kva det hadde med å gjera” (p. 48) (“if he was asked where it came from” (p. 26)); “Bisschen Bier” (p. 48) for “Litt øl” (p. 55) (“a sip of beer” (p. 31)).

Syntax in the German translation Trilogie

As the German language is more flexible than Nynorsk at a purely syntactic level, Trilogie has less room to manoeuvre in this area than the original when it comes to providing the element of surprise. In the excerpt from Schlaflos we read: “So hat auch dein Groβvater, nach dem du getauft bist, als Spielmann angefangen” (“That’s how your grandad, the one you’re named after, started as a fiddler”). Unlike a Nynorsk reader, a German reader will not necessarily struggle with such a syntactic inversion, not even in direct speech. To a German reader of adult literature, the sparsely punctuated Fosse-esque lists from the Schlaflos excerpt: “und er sieht zu ihm hin und er sieht ihn dastehen und er hat Tränen in den Augen” (“and he looks at him and he sees that he’s standing there and there are tears in his eyes”) are more peculiar-sounding. 34 This translation is a faithful rendition of “og han ser mot han og han ser at han står der rett opp og ned og det er tårer i augo hans”. Despite his unique aesthetics, Fosse adheres closely to the requirement of simplicity of form and style in Nynorsk . There

34 Norwegian readers are also unaccustomed to this phenomenon; however, since standard German is more normative than Norwegian (including Nynorsk) to begin with, this is more of an issue for a German audience.

are also fewer comma rules in Norwegian than in German. To a German reader who has not yet cracked the Fosse code, such run-on sentences may at times seem accidentally comical and infantile. This is particularly true in the following sentence from the excerpt, which has already been quoted several times: “und in der anderen hat er eine Laterne und die Laterne hält er Asle vors Gesicht und dann schaut er Asle direkt ins Gesicht” (“and in the other he holds a lantern and he holds the lantern up in front of Asle’s face and then he looks straight into Asle’s face”) – reinforced with “hinein”.

It is also interesting to note that the translator renders the many brief dialogues of the original in a manner that is syntactically incorrect according to standard German. While Fosse, with few exceptions 35 , lets his characters speak in complete, grammatically correct sentences, the translator may well omit the subject: “Glaub schon” (p. 24) is used for “Eg trur det” (p. 28) (“I think so” (p. 19)), “Liegt sich gut hier” (p. 30) for “Det er godt å liggja her” (p. 36) (“It’s good to lie here” (p. 18)), “Kommt wohl auch vor” (p. 34) for “Det hender vel det òg” (p. 40) (“I’d think that sometimes they do” (p. 21)) and “Klingt hübsch” (p. 107) for “Det høyrest fint ut” (p. 128) (“That sounds fine” (p. 76)). At times, this choice particularly makes Asle and Alida seem more immature in the German translation than in the original. Nonetheless, in my view, making the language less grammatically rigorous is a necessary device because it is used to recreate the light, intricate, staccato-like musicality that characterises Fosse’s dialogues, which are beautiful in their simplicity, particularly in Olavs draumar.

An equally musical, albeit calmer and more meditative and suggestive tone is created in German through frequent use of the non-standard interrogative pronoun wer (rather than jemand ) in various conjugations. 36 This linguistic device could just as well be mentioned in the category of vocabulary and cadence but is most surprising

35 Here, the excerpt proves the exception from the rule in Trilogien : “Så av stad, sa far Sigvald”.

36 Schmidt-Henkel chose to translate Nokon kjem til å kome as Da kommt noch wer (my emphasis).

in its syntactically beautifying function. It may be seen as a substitute for Fosse’s technically correct but distracting inversion. The translation reads “und Asle muss wen zur Hilfe holen” (p. 65) for “og då må Asle finna nokon som kan koma og hjelpa til” (p. 77) (“and Asle has to find someone who can come and help” (p. 44)); “dort muss sich doch wer finden lassen” (p. 66) for “der må han vel einkvan finna” (p. 78) (“he should be able to find someone there” (p. 45)); “Es muss ja auch wer von Måsøy sein” (p. 87) for “Og nokon må vere frå Måsøy” (p. 104) (“Someone has to be from Måsøy” (p. 61)); “bevor wer anders kommt” (p. 108) for “før det kjem ein annan” (p. 129) (“before someone else comes” (p. 77)). Wer seems even more powerful in combination with alliteration: “und wenn ihn wer fragte, woran das wohl lag” (p. 41) for “og vart han spurd om kva det hadde med å gjera” (p. 48) (“if he was asked where it came from” (p. 26)); “und Alida versuchte darauf zu kommen, wer das wohl war” (p. 158) for “og Alida prøvde å koma på kven det vel kunne vera” (p. 185) (“and Alida tried to think who it could be” (p. 114)). Also, the shortening of etwas to the non-standard was in “Ich hab dich was zu fragen” (p. 76) for “Eg har noko å spørja deg om” (p. 91) (“I have something to ask you” (p. 53)) has the same function. Here, Fosse’s inversions and the hard consonant rhythm of Nynorsk (nokon/noka/kven etc.) are replaced with an equally suggestive but softer German consonant rhythm (wer/was/wen etc.). In a conversation from 2023, Schmidt-Henkel compares Fosse’s repetitive, suggestive style to waves, with the large and small movements that can occur in a lake or a fjord. 37 Incidentally, the German word for wave, Welle, also begins with a soft consonant sound. Finally, to return to the excerpt from Schlaflos, the at times more archaic and formal word choice in the translation (“Gro βvater”, “getauft”, “seinerzeit”, “Laterne”) is also a substitute for Fosse’s alienating syntactic devices. This is not least true for “Habe” (p. 9) and

37 https://www.srf.ch/audio/kultur-talk/der-norwegische-schriftsteller-jon-fosse- erhaelt-dennobelpreis?id=12459876. SRF, 6 October 2023, Michael Luisier in conversation with Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel and Professor Klaus Müller-Wille, University of Zürich.

“Siebensachen” (p. 15) for “det dei åtte” (p. 11) (“[what] they owned” (p. 1)) and “det som deira er” (p. 19) (“what belongs to them” (p. 8)).

The word Siebensachen refers to the old German expression seine Siebensachen packen and is usually synonymous with being evicted from one’s home or another place. It also implies how little Asle and Alida own. With its reference to the magical number seven, the expression is reserved for the fairy tale genre and oral storytelling. An alternative standard German measure which also has archaic connotations is Habseligkeiten . Siebensachen , on the other hand, is completely in line with the translator’s choice of alienating (oral) elements to create his completely unique but nonetheless Fosse-esque German musicality.

Genitive in the German translation Trilogie

The excerpt from Schlaflos contains examples of all three variants of genitive construction that occur in Trilogie. The first variant is the genitive formed with prepositional phrases such as “in der Stimme vom Vater” for “røysta til far Sigvald” (“Pa Sigvald’s voice”), then twice as dative + possessive, as in “dem Sigvald seine Wangen” for “kjakane til far Sigvald” (“his father’s cheeks”) and “dem Vater seinen Rücken” for “ryggen til far Sigvald” (“Pa Sigvald’s back”), and finally as -s genitive in “seines, Asles [Haar]” for “Asles hår” (“Asle’s hair”). Of these, only the -s genitive is standard German for proper nouns (Sigvalds Wangen). Without proper nouns present, the article and noun are conjugated in the genitive (Der Rücken des Vaters/das Haus der Mutter).

Of the two non-standard German varieties, the genitive formula dative + possessive stands out. Certainly, this construction is very frequent in spoken German, occurring in numerous dialects across the entire German-speaking region. However, it is in no way a feature of standard German (Zifonun 2003, 97–98); rather, it is perceived as provocative and unheard of, in the sense of unacceptable, in a work of fiction. It is thus especially notable, then, that the construction is in fact used several times in Schlaflos and Olavs Träume. In addition to the aforementioned examples, the translator writes “dem Sigvald sein Gesicht” (p. 48) for “andletet til far Sigvald” (p. 56) (“Pa Sigvald’s face” (p. 31)) and “dem Aslak seine Stimme” (p. 51) for “far Aslaks

røyst” (p. 59) (“Pa Aslak’s voice” (p. 33)). In Olavs Träume, it is used in connection with Åsta and the bracelet: “an der Åsta ihrem Arm” (p. 85) for “på armen hennar Åsta” (p. 101) (“on Åsta’s arm” (p. 59)), “der Åsta ihr Arm” (p. 95) for “armen hennar Åsta” (p. 113) (“on Åsta’s arm” (p. 81)), and “an der Åsta ihrem Handgelenk” (p. 112) for “rundt armen hennar Åsta” (p. 126) (“on Åsta’s arm” (p. 92)). In the case of “skal han setja ring på fingeren hennar Åsta” (p. 95) (“the ring he’ll put on [Åsta’s] finger” (p. 56)), however, the genitive is replaced with a subordinate clause: “den Ring, den er ihr an den Finger stecken wird” (p. 80). We therefore see that dative + possessive is no straitjacket for the translator. Nevertheless, it is also used in places where Fosse takes to the preposition til , and – in one case – where he uses the -s genitive. While Fosse’s choice of -s genitive in “far Aslaks røyst” (p. 59) can be described as unheard of – though not unacceptable – in writing to a Nynorsk reader, the dative + possessive in “dem Aslak seine Stimme” (p. 51) seems provocatively oral. This construction has a clear derogatory connotation in German and gives an impression of lack of refinement in the individual using it.

Gisela Zifonun points out that there are constructions similar to the dative + possessive in many Germanic languages, mentioning the variant called the separated genitive ( garpegenitiv) in Nynorsk and in Norwegian speech (Zifonun 2003, 110). It is therefore important to restate that Fosse does not choose the separated genitive, but the archaic Nordic variant of “armen hennar Åsta” (p. 153). However, a German reader without linguistic training and who is unfamiliar with Nynorsk would have no grounds on which to assess the choices of either Fosse or the translator. Otherwise, the formal similarity to the Nordic variant of the original would have been easy to spot. Nonetheless, even I, a Nordic philologist with a good knowledge of Nynorsk , was unsettled at my first reading of Trilogie. The alternative to the dative + possessive, namely non-standard German genitive with the preposition von , seemed far more acceptable to me; though this also, seen in isolation, could appear somewhat childlike to a modern German reader. In the context of Trilogie , however, it takes on an archaic, literary tone, perhaps even stronger than the genitive with preposition used in the

original. The translation reads “in der Stimme vom Vater” (p. 45) for “røysta til far Sigvald” (p. 52) (“Pa Sigvald’s voice” (p. 29)), “das Gesicht von der Herdis” (p. 27) for “andletet til mor Herdis” (p. 32) (Ma Herdis’s face), and “Am Knochen von der Keule” (p. 104) for “inntil beinet i fenadlåret” (p. 124) (“the leg of mutton to the bone” (p. 74)). In the example “am Handgelenk von der Åsta” (p. 129) for “på armen hennar Åsta” (p. 153) (“on Åsta’s arm” (p. 59)), the level of obsolescence is balanced between the German and the Norwegian. The strong oral style, at times childlike in its simplicity, is further strengthened in instances where the dative + possessive and genitive with prepositional phrase occur in combination with the definite article before proper nouns, such as “an der Åsta ihrem Handgelenk” (p. 112) and “das Gesicht von der Herdis” (p. 27). This is found mostly in the first two stories. The original does not have this issue.

However, if you surrender to the rhythm of Trilogie, the dative + possessive suddenly falls naturally into place. It is precisely the translator’s vigorous repetition of one and the same unheard of genitive construction that helps create the waves of his Fosse-German linguistic rhythm. The provocative aspect of an exaggeratedly colloquial German word choice is quickly dissolved in pure delight at this ode to death and love. And perhaps it is precisely here, in the intricacies of the genitive, that Schmidt-Henkel most markedly breaks down “decayed barriers” in standard German by putting his faith in the magical powers of “pure language” (Benjamin 1997, 163).

Trilogien as Trilogie

In his foreword to Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis from 1946, Arne Melberg writes that the task of the philologist is to be a “ruminator who demonstrates the art of reading slowly” (Melberg 2002, 8). In this article I have endeavoured to be guided by the dual linguistic-aesthetic pleasure of reading Jon Fosse in Norwegian and German. This has included reading and re-reading the German translation many times. I have dwelled on what to me was distracting the first time and wondered why I so quickly fell for the translator’s unconventional approach. An Auerbachian fascination with the pure text in both the

Norwegian and German versions is what makes it possible to pinpoint the ways in which Schmidt-Henkel succeeds in making Fosse’s Trilogien sound authentically German. And to put it simply, it works.

In Trilogien , Fosse’s word choices in combination with repetitive and inverted syntax create a unique and antiquated language rhythm which is also surprising within the context of Fosse’s linguistic universe. The short yet grammatically complete sentences in the dialogue make for an easy but intense read. Along with the tension-driven frame narrative in what is a very brief work, Trilogien emerges as an ode to bygone times, which is nevertheless captivating to the modern reader.

Schmidt-Henkel’s translation, though faithful to the original, creates a whole new text altogether, a German foreignness. Where the modern Nynorsk reader will pause at the sight of antiquated poetic word forms and inverted syntax, the modern German reader will require other means entirely. Where Fosse chooses a greater textuality in his Nynorsk than before, the translator chooses the opposite: an unexpectedly oral approach, by German standards. The language in Trilogien and Trilogie meet in the middle, in a compromise between written Nynorsk and (modern) non-standard German with features of regional dialect.

The German Trilogie is a work in its own right far beyond an “ancillary condition” (Berman 1992, 2). It is an aesthetic linguistic experience for any German reader, regardless of whether they have any knowledge of the original. It also fulfils Fosse’s requirement å klinga , of sounding, authentically German. Where Fosse writes in a formal and often quite solemn style of Nynorsk , his translator turns standard German upside down and adds a new dimension to German literary language. He recreates the distracting textuality of Fosse’s Nynorsk through a distracting German casualness. In so doing, Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel achieves nothing less than a German Fosse (non-) standard which over time may play a part in changing the very literary language of German.

Aadland, Erling . 2004. “Jon Fosses indre dialog. Anmeldelse av Jon Fosses Det er Ales. Samlaget, 2004”. Vagant, No. 4: 95–99.

Almenningen, Olaf , and Aud Søyland . 2012. Praktisk nynorsk for lærarstudentar. Det norske Samlaget.

Askedal, John Ole . 2017. Norsk grammatikk. Bokmål (moderate former)/riksmål. Kunnskapsforlaget. Det Norske Akademi for Språk og Litteratur.

Benjamin, Walter . 1997. “The Task of the Translator”. Preface to Charles Baudelaire: Tableaux Parisiens. German original title: “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”. Translated by Steven Rendall. In Traduction, teminologie, redaction (TTR) 10 (2): 151–165, https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/ttr/1997-v10-n2-ttr1487/037302ar/.

Berman, Antoine . 1992. “The Manifestation of Translation” [“La traduction au manifeste”]. Translated by S. Heyvaert. In The Experience of the Foreign (L’épreuve de l’étranger), 1–9. State University of New York Press.

Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (ONP). onp.ku.dk

Fosse, Jon . 1999. Gnostiske essay. Samlaget.

———. 2014. Trilogien. Samlaget.

———. 2016. Trilogie. Translated by Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel. Rowohlt.

———. 2016. Trilogy. Translated by May-Brit Akerholt. Dalkey Archive Press.

———. 2018. Nokon kjem til å kome. 3rd edition. Samlaget.

Grepstad, Jon . “i-mål”. In Store norske leksikon. Accessed 25 April 2025. https://snl.no/i-mål

Grov, Astrid Marie . 2020. “Fosse og målet hans”. In Norsk Tidend, member magazine for Noregs Mållag. No. 3, 4–5, 6–8. https://www.nm.no/fosse-og-malethans/

Landro, Jan H . 2022. Jon Fosse – enkelt og djupt. Om romanane og forteljingane hans. Selja forlag.

Lindgren, Astrid . 1960. Mio, min Mio. Rabén & Sjögren.

Melberg, Arne . 2002. “Forord”. In Erich Auerbach, Mimesis. Virkelighetsfremstillingen i Vestens litteratur. Translated by Per Paulsen, 7–10. Gyldendal.

Refsum, Christian . 2000. “Introduksjon til Antoine Berman – mot en moderne oversetterkritikk”. Vagant (3–4): 61–63.

Seiness, Cecilie N . 2009. Jon Fosse. Poet på Guds jord. Samlaget.

Simonsen, Hanne Gram , and Kristin Hagemann . “Inversjon”. In Store norske leksikon. Accessed 25 April 2025. https://snl.no/inversjon.

Theodorsen, Cathrine. “Høytysk”. In Store norske leksikon. Accessed 30 April 2025. https://snl.no/høytysk.

Theodorsen, Cathrine. “Plattysk”. In Store norske leksikon. Accessed 30 April 2025. https://snl.no/platt-tysk.

Torp, Arne . 1988. “Garpegenitiven – framgangsrik vestlending med kontinentale anar”. Språknytt 17(2): 9–10. https://www.sprakradet.no/Vi-og-vart/ Publikasjoner/Spraaknytt/Arkivet/Eldre/Garpegenitiven/.

Torp, Arne . 1989. “Er garpegenitiven egentlig ‘jydegenitiv’?” Språknytt 16(4): 8–9, 17. https://www.sprakradet.no/Vi-og-vart/Publikasjoner/Spraaknytt/Arkivet/ Eldre/Garpegenitiven/.

Torsheim, Oddvar . 2019. Ulyzes. Frå skissebøkene. I samtale med Jon Fosse. Leikanger. Skald.

Zifonun, Gisela . 2003. “Dem Vater sein Hut. Der Charme des Substandards und wie wir ihm gerecht werden”. In Deutsche Sprache 31 (2): 97–126. https://d-nb.info/1136133445/34.

6.

The Wonder of Literature: On Rhythm, Narration and the Question of

“What” in Jon Fosse’s A Shining

Marius Wulfsberg

What, exactly, happens in Jon Fosse’s Kvitleik (A Shining)? This chapter aims to answer this seemingly simple question while exploring the story’s central event. I was drawn to this question by the sense of wonder I experienced when first reading A Shining – a wonder evoked not only by the plot but also by the rhythm of the narration itself.1 Fosse’s writing often evokes such moments of wonder by blending detailed realism, a stream of reflection and a rhythm that gestures beyond meaning. A Shining is no exception. On one level, this first-person narrative tells the story of a man who becomes lost in a forest and ultimately disappears into what seems to be the moment of death. On another level, as the story progresses, strange events challenge the narrator’s and the reader’s understanding of what happens. In the forest, the man encounters a shining white figure, his elderly parents and a barefoot man dressed in a black suit. At the sight of this man in the suit, the narrator’s bewilderment reaches its peak, culminating in the following exclamation:

1 See my review in Dagbladet on 5 January 2023. https://www.dagbladet.no/bok/etmesterverk/78220239

What’s happening. Where am I actually, yes I’m in the forest but then again this isn’t like how things are in a forest, is it. What’s happening (Fosse 2023a, 45).

Kva er det som skjer. Kvar er eg eigentleg, ja eg er inne i skogen, men det er då ikkje slik som dette inne i ein skog, vel. Kva er det som skjer (Fosse 2023b, 67).

How should we, as readers, interpret this passage? Is it a moment of disorientation, a rupture in perception – both the narrator’s and our own? Are we being drawn out of concrete reality and into something more allegorical? And what about the repetition of the word “what”? Is it simply an interrogative pronoun – or is it on the verge of becoming something else entirely? A noun, perhaps? Or is it not a question at all but a designation of the event itself, the thing – the what – happening as it happens?2

The passage, in any case, resists our immediate urge to interpret. Instead, it invites us to listen to the beats, the repetitions, the halting uncertainty, and the “what” wavering between question and statement. So, what happens if we, as readers, surrender not to meaning but to rhythm? What happens if we try to adjust our reading to include not only the words and the syntax of the sentences but also the repetitions and strange punctuation? Then, this passage heightens the strange interplay of meaning, rhythm, syntax and punctuation – not only here but throughout the story and Fosse’s work.

In his novels, stories, poems and plays, rhythm is always crucial – but never in quite the same way. Its function and effect shift across his body of work, shaping the text’s movement and the reader’s

2 My understanding of the event and “the what” in A Shining also draws on Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “The Surprise of the Event”, and his reflections on how “the surprising” constitutes the very event and separates it from that which only happens. In the opening of the essay, he put it thus: “What makes the event an event is not only that it happens, but that it surprises – and maybe even that it surprises itself […].” (Nancy 2000, 159). For a general introduction to the concept of the event in contemporary theory, I refer to Christian Refsum’s articles “Event: Or, How Foucault used Baudelaire to Enlighten Kant” and “Event” (Refsum 2023a and 2023b).

experience. Fosse’s sensitivity to rhythm also extends beyond style; it is a way of thinking about language, particularly literary writing. This understanding of literary writing is evident in his approach to punctuation. Fosse’s engagement with Theodor Adorno’s reflections on punctuation becomes especially significant in this context. He has translated Adorno’s essay “Satzzeichen” (“Punctuation Marks”), and his writing seems to explore, in its own manner, Adorno’s claim that “[t]he punctuation marks govern the presentation; they are not the reader’s diligent servants in the traffic of language, but stand as hieroglyphs for something that plays itself out in the interior of language, on language’s own track.” (Adorno 1992, 59, my translation of Fosse’s translation, which differs from the English version. 3) For Fosse, punctuation is not merely a structural or syntactical tool; it plays a vital part in the rhythm of his writing, closely tied to the events unfolding in his texts. His use of punctuation does not simply follow the flow of thought – it shapes it, creating pauses, hesitations and repetitions that mirror the narrative’s uncertainty, disorientation or revelation. In this way, punctuation in Fosse’s work becomes not just a formal feature but

3 The differences between Fosse’s Norwegian translation and the English version of Adorno’s passage are worth noting. Fosse’s translation reads: “Skiljeteikna styrer heller framstillinga; dei er ikkje lesarenes flittige tenarar i språkets trafikk, men står som hieroglyfar for noko som spelar seg ut i det indre av språket, på språkets eigen bane.” By contrast, the English translation reads: “On the contrary, they are marks of oral delivery; instead of diligently serving the interplay between language and the reader, they serve, hieroglyphically, an interplay that takes place in the interior of language, along its own pathways.” (Adorno 2019, 106). The contrast is striking. Whereas the English version emphasises the connection between punctuation and oral delivery, Fosse’s rendering highlights how punctuation governs (styrer) the presentation in a literary rather than a spoken sense. It is also worth noting that in the English version, the phrase “along its own pathways” is somewhat ambiguous: it can be read as referring to language rather than to the punctuation marks themselves. Adorno’s original German reads: “Vielmehr sind es solche des Vortrags; sie dienen nicht beflissen dem Verkehr der Sprache mit dem Leser, sondern hieroglyphisch einem, der im Sprachinnern sich abspielt, auf ihren eigenen Bahnen.” (Adorno 1963, 162). Here, the possessive pronoun “ ihren” refers to “ die Satzzeichen” – the punctuation marks – not language. Fosse translates “auf ihren eigenen Bahnen” as “på språkets eigen bane” (“on language’s own track”), subtly shifting the emphasis from the autonomous trajectory of punctuation to the internal movement of language itself. Adorno, by contrast, seems to suggest that punctuation marks follow their own trajectories, independent of language’s mimetic function – that is, they no longer serve to imitate speech, but instead operate as hieroglyphic signs within writing’s own system of articulation.

a symptom – or “hieroglyph” – of something invisible and latent within language, which resonates with his poetics of the voice of writing.

Fosse’s preoccupation with the voice of writing runs throughout his theoretical essays. In particular, he engages with Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia , exploring literary language not as transcribed speech but as writing with its rhythm and a voice distinct from the oral. Derrida’s notion of différance – the constant deferral and difference of meaning – resonates with Fosse’s emphasis on rhythm, pause and repetition as fundamental to the movement of thought in writing. Similarly, Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia , emphasising the multiplicity of voices within language, informs Fosse’s understanding of prose as a site of tension between different positions of enunciation. He develops these ideas in essays such as “From Telling via Showing to Writing” (Fosse 1998/2015), “Speech or Writing as a Metaphor in the Theory of the Novel” (1998), and “Negative Mysticism” (Fosse 1999/2015), where he reflects on how literary language withdraws from speech and opens itself to a different kind of expression – one that emerges through silence, interruption and tonal ambiguity. In his most recent prose, this poetic approach takes on a new form, in which punctuation, rhythm and syntax shape an exploration of the relationship between the act of narration and what I might call the ultimate event: death itself.

4

For example, in Septology, the absence of full stops creates a rhythm that stretches time, blurring the lines between past and present and giving the novel an almost eternal “now” – a moment suspended between life and death as the narrator looks back on his life from what, in the final volume, we realise is the moment of death. In contrast, A Shining operates in a different tempo: the full stop punctuates each sentence, pushing the story forward relentlessly. However, in

4 The term “ultimate event” draws on the French philosopher Claude Romano’s essay “Possibility and Event”, where he writes: “In this sense, death is an event, and probably even an event par excellence. It is true that in the case of death we can never say that it has happened, in the sense of a present occurrence, since the moment it is present I lose all capacity for being there and experiencing it” (Romano 2016, 53).

the quoted passage, punctuation plays a different game. The word “what” seems to waver between question and affirmation. Is the narrator simply asking, “What is happening?” Or is he suggesting that what is happening is … a what? Or perhaps, in its simplest form, a kind of wonder – not in the sense of awe or admiration, but in the sense of perplexity and puzzlement that lies at the beginning of both philosophy and literature?5 The strange effect of the punctuation invites us to question the very nature of the event, urging us to explore the tension between narration and wonder. What is the relationship between the event that unfolds in the story and the act of narration in A Shining ?

A simple story in three episodes

In A Shining , Jon Fosse presents a first-person narrative told by a nameless narrator, unfolding in three distinct episodes. The first episode, written in the past tense, recounts how the narrator is overtaken by an inexplicable boredom that leads him to surrender to chance. Indifferently, he gets into his car and drives off aimlessly, alternating right and left at each junction until he gets stuck at the end of a forest road. As darkness falls and snow piles up, he sits in his car, trying to make sense of his submission to what he calls “pure chance” and wondering how far he’ll have to walk back for help. The episode ends abruptly with a sense of urgency, pulling his thoughts back into the present moment of narration:

And now I mustn’t wait any longer. I can’t. Now something must be done, because now it’s snowing like anything (Fosse 2023a, 15).

Og no må eg ikkje, kan eg ikkje, vente lenger. No må noko gjerast, for no snør han jo som berre det (Fosse 2023b, 17).

5 The notion that both philosophy and myth begin in wonder (thaumazein) is central to Plato (Theaetetus 155d) and Aristotle (1979, 982b). As Aristotle observes, “a man who is perplexed and wonders considers himself ignorant (whence a lover of myth, too, is in a sense a philosopher, for a myth is composed of wonders) […].” (Metaphysics 982b, 18–24; Aristotle 1979, 15). For a literary reflection on how writing gives form to such wonder, see Maurice Blanchot, “The Song of the Sirens” (Blanchot 1999).

In the second episode, the narrative shifts from past to present tense as the narrator gets lost in the forest. At first, he imagines that a path winding between the trees will lead him to people, but soon, the path disappears into the darkness and he loses his way. Cold and tired, he sits on a stone, but fearing he will fall asleep, he stands up and continues walking. Even more unsettling than his physical disorientation is the slow fragmentation of his identity: the narrator splits into two voices, two conflicting versions of himself, both present in the same moment. The split becomes palpable as the narrator’s conflicting voices speak in tandem:

I have to stand up. I can’t stay sitting here on this stone. I stand up. I need to find someone, or else I have to go back to the car […] (Fosse 2023a, 18).

Eg må reise meg. Eg kan ikkje bli sitjande her på denne steinen. Eg reiser meg. Eg må finne folk, eller eg må gå attende til bilen […] (Fosse 2023b, 22).

But then, as if responding to his own words, another voice – still sitting on the stone – contradicts him:

I need to stand up and I guess I’ll just have to walk in one direction or another, then I’ll probably find the path (Fosse 2023a, 18).

Eg må reise meg. Eg må likevel berre gå i ei eller anna retning, så finn eg nok stigen (Fosse 2023b, 22).

The narrator’s voice splits in two – one version of him stands while the other remains seated – creating both a spatial doubling and a sense of temporal simultaneity. This interplay of voices, which resurfaces later in the text, complicates the narrator’s sense of self. At one point, his reflection on his own death takes the form of a dialogue between two inner voices: one that wants to live and another that wants to die:

If a miracle doesn’t happen, I’ll freeze to death. And maybe that was exactly why I walked into the forest, because I wanted to freeze to death.

But I don’t want to. I don’t want to die. Or is it exactly what I do want (Fosse 2023a, 18).

Om ikkje eit under skjer, så frys eg i hel. Og kanskje var det nettopp difor eg gjekk inn i skogen, fordi eg ville fryse i hel. Men det vil eg jo ikkje. Eg vil jo ikkje døy. Eller er det nettopp det eg vil (Fosse 2023b, 23).

The episode ends with the narrator staring into pitch-black darkness, no longer sure of who or where he is. Filled with a “fear without anxiety,” he is transformed into a series of disconnected movements – confused, flailing, jagged, jerky (Fosse 2023a, 19; Fosse 2023b, 24).

By the third and final episode, the forest has become a liminal space where the boundary between reality and imagination dissolves. Strange encounters unfold – first with a shimmering white figure, then with the narrator’s elderly parents, and finally with a mysterious man in a black suit. These encounters lead the narrator toward a climactic moment of ecstasy. The boundary between life and death dissolves as the narrator, his parents and the faceless man in the black suit, led by the shimmering figure, walk barefoot into “a breathing void”:

[…] it says follow me, and so we follow it, slowly, step by step, breath by breath, the man in the black suit, without a face, my mother, my father, and I, we walk barefoot out into the void, breath by breath, and suddenly there’s not a single breath left but only the radiant, shimmering presence that lights up a breathing void, what we’re breathing now, with its whiteness (Fosse 2023a, 47–48).

[…] han seier følg meg, og så går vi etter han, langsamt, steg for steg, andedrag for andedrag, mannen i den svarte dressen, han utan andlet, mor mi, far min og eg, vi går berrføtte ut i inkje, andedrag for andedrag, og brått er ikkje eitt einaste andedrag lenger att, men berre den skinande, skimrande skapnaden som lyser eit andande inkje, som no er det vi andar, frå sin kvitleik (Fosse 2023b, 71–72).

In these three episodes, A Shining weaves a haunting narrative of boredom, bewilderment and death. Yet what unsettles is not only what happens but how it happens – through a fractured narrative voice that doubles back on itself, shifting between past and present, between

certainty and dissolution. In its final movement – from breath to breathlessness, from narration to silence – the story seems to ask: Does it narrate a passage into death, or does it speak from a place where death has already occurred? Is the narrator’s voice dissolving, or are we hearing its reverberation from the other side? What kind of story is A Shining ?

One could even say that A Shining not only narrates its own disappearance but enacts it formally. In the first Norwegian edition (Fosse 2023b), Kvitleik is presented almost as a minimalist installation: a black endpaper at the beginning and end, a large drop of white space before the first sentence appears, and, at the end, the final words of the story placed at the very top of page 72 – leaving the rest of the page entirely blank. This material design reinforces the story’s movement into silence. The white page becomes an extension of the “breathing void” the characters enter, and the textual rhythm – so far governed by punctuation, syntax and repetition – culminates in a final visual gesture: a silence that is not only read but seen.

Narrating the impossible

The event unfolding in A Shining may be seen to unfold first as boredom, then as bewilderment, and finally as a single word: what . In Fosse’s writing, narrative often draws near a threshold – where language approaches its own limits, and where the event of death, or its proximity, becomes palpable. An early example appears in his debut novel Raudt, svart (Red, Black) from 1983, which ends with the suicide of a young high school student. The boy collapses in front of his landlady’s white door: “‘Take it easy now,’ he says, noticing how the words slowly glide into a great fog. He sees blood running down the landlady’s white door.” (Fosse 1983, 182, my translation). This scene shares certain motifs with A Shining – not least the presence of whiteness at the moment of death – but the narrative structure is altogether different. In Red, Black , death is observed from the outside. It is rendered in third person, and the distance between narrator and protagonist remains intact. In A Shining, by contrast, that distance collapses. The voice telling the story seems to disappear into the event it narrates.

Narrator and protagonist converge, and the act of narration itself begins to tremble at the edge of what can be told. Compared to Fosse’s treatment of death in novels such as Morgon og kveld from 2000 (Morning and Evening , 2024) and Det er Ales from 2004 (Aliss at the Fire, 2022), A Shining constructs a literary universe that is stranger and more enigmatic. While the earlier works unfold within a recognisably realistic framework where different temporal layers are woven together, A Shining gradually transforms into something more allegorical and abstract. At first, the reader can follow the narrator’s actions, reflections and disorientation. But in the third episode, something changes. It is no longer only the narrator who struggles to comprehend what is happening – the reader, too, is drawn into a world where the boundaries between inner and outer, presence and absence, dissolve. By the end, we are confronted with an event that resists comprehension altogether: How are we to grasp the sudden transition from breathing life to the moment of death – when the narrating voice disappears into a “breathing void”?

Before the publication of A Shining, Fosse mentioned in an interview that the story is closely related to the play I svarte skogen inne (Inside the Black Forest , 2023), which was written first and published a few months later (Landro 2022, 269). The two texts share several motifs – a man gets lost in a forest, encounters a white figure, his parents and a man in a black suit, and ultimately freezes to death. However, the differences are more striking than the similarities. The most significant difference is that the play presents the lost man from an external perspective, while A Shining depicts the events from the perspective of a nameless “I” as he gets lost and ultimately dies. Everything in the narration is conveyed through inner monologues in free indirect discourse. This perspective has decisive consequences for how the text approaches death. In the play, the protagonist dies on stage, and the audience observes it from a distance. In contrast, A Shining presents a first-person-driven narrative that extends into the moment when narration itself becomes impossible. As the voice that carries the story forward disappears into a “breathing void”, we encounter a logical and narratological paradox – a death narrated from within, a paradox at the

very heart of narration itself. In my view, A Shining represents Fosse’s most radical attempt to give literary form to that which, by definition, is impossible to narrate: the moment of death itself.

It is, therefore, more accurate to compare the narrator’s death in A Shining to the moment of death in Septology. This seven-part novel, collected in three volumes, is composed with a strikingly circular structure. Each of its seven books opens with the same scene: the narrator sees Asle standing before a painting. From the beginning, the relationship between narrator and protagonist is marked by a doubling: the narrator sees what turns out to be himself as another, and the narrative voice emerges from this unfolding difference. As the novel progresses, we follow Asle’s daily life in the days leading up to Christmas. He drives back and forth between his home and a nearby city where he is preparing an exhibition. Along the way, memories, reflections and dreamlike sequences expand the narrative to include scenes from Asle’s entire life – from childhood to his death.

As Jan H. Landro notes, “the moment of death is the novel’s real present time” (Landro 2022, 227). In Septology, this moment does not mark an endpoint but a point of convergence: past and present, life and death, narration and event all merge in the final moment. The protagonist becomes the narrator, and the story and the act of narration collapse into one. This convergence is mirrored in the novel’s style, where every sentence begins with “And” and continues without full stops, creating the impression that all moments, all layers of memory and experience, coexist in a single, extended present.

In this way, the moment of death takes on a narratological function that recalls Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time – not because death produces the narrator, as it does in Septology, but because time is suspended and folded. In In Search of Lost Time, the recognition of time regained transforms Marcel into the narrator; in Septology, the moment of death brings about this transformation. Unlike in A Shining, where the narrator’s dissolution leads to disorientation and estrangement, death in Septology creates a moment where the story coincides with the act of narration. The moment of death becomes the point where form and time fold back into themselves, completing the circle.

Is A Shining a narrative in which Fosse attempts to break the circle? It is not a work of return, but of rupture. The narration does not contain the event but is drawn toward it – and ultimately overtaken by it – as if the text continues after the narrator disappears. Indeed, the final pages suggest that narration does not simply cease but is absorbed by the event itself: a breath, a whiteness, a breathing void, “eit andande inkje”, that continues to unfold beyond the narrative voice. In this sense, the event is not enclosed within the act of narration but survives it – an occurrence without a subject, or the remainder of a writing while the narrator disappears.

Considering Maurice Blanchot’s reflections on the récit , it is tempting to describe A Shining as a narrative that does not simply recount an event but is itself the event, or rather, the approach to the event – the space in which the event is made to happen, and from which it continues. In his essay “The Song of the Sirens”, Blanchot distinguishes between two types of narrative: one that recounts an event that has already occurred, and another in which the event is still unfolding, even transgressing the act of narration itself. He writes: “Narrative is not the relating of an event but this event itself, the approach of this event, the place where it is called on to unfold, an event still to come, by the magnetic power of which the narrative itself can hope to come true” (Blanchot 2003, 6).

Although Septology also approaches the idea of narrative as an event, it does so differently. As I have shown, the final convergence of narrator and protagonist collapses the distance between narration and experience. Yet the structure of Septology remains circular, meditative, even redemptive. The narrator is not dissolved but transformed; time is not ruptured but gathered. The narrative remains within the order of recognition and return.

In A Shining , the event seems to push beyond narrative form itself. It is no longer a matter of recollection or recognition but of a kind of writing that approaches what cannot be said – a writing that continues as the narrator falls silent. This is perhaps what makes A Shining closer to Blanchot’s understanding of the récit : not a story about something that has happened, but a text in which the event is

still to come, drawing the writing toward itself as its impossible future.

Let me, then, attempt to trace the event that unfolds in A Shining – first in the guise of boredom, then of bewilderment, and finally as a single word: what.

Boredom

Already at the outset of the story, we understand that something has happened. But what exactly has happened? Interestingly, the narrative does not start with the event itself. Instead, it opens with a depiction of joy and pleasure. In the first scene, the narrator describes how, one day, he drove away without mentioning what he was leaving behind. He repeatedly emphasises that driving and motion made him feel good. He didn’t know where he was going – the uncertainty of his destination adding to the intrigue.

I was taking a drive. It was nice. It felt good to be moving. I didn’t know where I was going, I was just driving (Fosse 2023a, 9).

Eg køyrde av garde. Det gjorde godt. Rørsla gjorde godt. Eg visste ikkje kvar eg skulle. Eg køyrde berre (Fosse 2023b, 7).

As we see, the story opens not with a casual drive but with a movement away – perhaps even an escape. But what, then, is the narrator trying to move away from? What event precedes his departure? The narrator names this event “a boredom”.

Boredom had taken hold of me – usually I was never bored but now I had fallen prey to it (Fosse 2023a, 9).

Det var ei keisemd som hadde teke meg, eg som elles aldri keia meg hadde vorte teken av keisemd (Fosse 2023b, 7).

Fosse often writes about existential experiences of estrangement, and boredom is one of them. The first instance of boredom in his work appears on the opening page of his debut novel Red, Black : “‘It was just boredom, I’m bored and sorely miss someone to talk to,’ he said”

(Fosse 1983, 9, my translation). Even here, we see a shift in the way boredom is depicted – from an external event that befalls the protagonist to a more personal experience. In Red, Black , the protagonist believes that boredom has a cause and that it might be overcome by talking to someone. However, this is not the case in A Shining. There, boredom is an event that sets the story in motion, but does he ever escape it – or does it transform the nameless man to the point where he no longer recognises himself?

The boredom that has seized the narrator in A Shining seems to trap him both existentially and stylistically. A literal translation of the Nynorsk version reads: “It was a boredom that had taken hold of me, I who otherwise had never been bored had been taken by boredom.” At some point in the past, the narrator was overtaken by boredom – a weighty experience that has left a significant impact. It opens a gap in his experience, separating the joy of motion from the weariness that follows. And as the story unfolds, the reader understands that there is no way the narrator can return to the past state of joy. The boredom thus appears as an event which represents a radical change. In the story, this change is depicted both in the sentence and through its rhetorical structure, as the boredom is mentioned three times. First as “ei keisemd” (“a boredom”), then as a personal state of mind and finally as a more general, undefined “keisemd” (“boredom”).

A boredom has not only seized him from the outside (“had taken hold of me”) but has also trapped him in a world defined by a more fundamental and undefined boredom. We also see that this boredom reveals itself only through its effects, so it is already there when he realises that it has taken hold of him. It is an event that prevents him from imagining anything that might bring joy. This is not passive boredom – it suddenly and actively shuts him down, closing him off from meaning or pleasure.

The relationship between these three forms of boredom is expressed through a chiastic structure that stylistically locks him between “a boredom” and “boredom”. The chiastic structure mirrors the narrator’s entrapment, making it impossible for him to break free. His drive, a key element, is thus a displacement activity – a reaction to

boredom rather than a purposeful decision – and the text depicts the drive almost like a whim or an impulse:

I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do. So I just did something. I got in my car and drove […] (Fosse 2023a, 9).

Ingenting av det eg kunne koma på å gjera gav meg noka glede. Og difor gjorde eg berre noko. Eg sette meg i bilen min og køyrde […] (Fosse 2023b, 7).

We even see that the drive has no motivation but appears more like a random reaction. His drive is thus not only an aimless motion – it might also be an attempt to flee something he cannot escape. But even as he moves, the source of his restlessness remains elusive, as if driving reflects a more profound inability to escape. It is a drive from a specific boredom to more profound and indefinite boredom, which ends when the car gets stuck, and the narrator notices that the boredom has transformed into emptiness and anxiety.

Yes, well, now I’m here, I thought, now I’m sitting here, and I felt empty, as if the boredom had turned into emptiness. Or maybe into a kind of anxiety, because I felt something like fear as I sat there empty, looking straight ahead as if into a void. Into nothingness (Fosse 2023a, 9).

Ja no står eg no her, sit eg no her, tenkte eg, og eg kjende meg tom, som om keisemda hadde vorte til tomleik. Eller kanskje heller til ein otte, for eg kjende som ei redsle i meg der eg sat og såg framfor meg, tomt, som inn i eit inkje. Inn i eit inkje (Fosse 2023b, 8).

The story’s opening, while deceptively simple, unfolds a philosophical drama that resonates with Martin Heidegger’s analysis of boredom. In his essays, Fosse often refers to Heidegger’s Being and Time and his analysis of “attunement” in this seminal work from 1927. However, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, a series of lectures Heidegger gave in 1929, we find his most detailed analysis of boredom. Heidegger analyses three forms of boredom, each more overwhelming than the last. The different kinds of boredom are moments in the unfolding of boredom, according to the German philosopher. The first is the

experience of being bored with something specific – not unlike “a boredom” in Fosse’s text. The second is the experience of being bored with oneself in a particular situation, for instance, while waiting at a railway station, to mention Heidegger’s example, and being unable to find a single distraction. The third, the most profound, is fundamental boredom with no particular object or situation – perhaps like Fosse’s “boredom.” This boredom, Heidegger argues, does not arise from any particular thing, it is a boredom without object or occasion, a boredom that encompasses all. In its “overpowering nature”, it is a boredom without end or outside, revealing all beings – even ourselves – as indifferent to us. As Heidegger describes it, this boredom has a transformative power:

Beings have – as we say – become indifferent as a whole , and we ourselves as these people are not excepted. We no longer stand as subjects and suchlike opposite these beings and excluded from them, but find ourselves in the midst of beings as a whole, i.e., in the whole of this indifference. Beings as a whole do not disappear however, but show themselves precisely as such in their indifference. The emptiness accordingly here consists in the indifference enveloping beings as a whole (Heidegger 1995, 138).

If we read the opening of A Shining against the background of Heidegger’s distinctions, we see that the particular boredom gripping the protagonist transforms everything into something boring. He is overtaken by a boredom that initially appears as ‘being bored with’, but soon reveals itself as something deeper, perhaps what Heidegger calls ‘profound boredom’. His attempt to escape this boredom leads him into a world of chance and an ever-deepening spiral of dislocation and dread. The boredom that has already taken hold of the narrator is the starting point for all his actions in the story. Compared to Heidegger’s focus on overcoming boredom by confronting it as a burden of existence (a theme tied to the socio-political context of 1920s Germany), the boredom in A Shining seems more like a one-way descent, paved with chance and bewilderment. Heidegger describes how boredom reveals all things as indifferent and how this indifference

can be overcome by shouldering one’s situation as a burden. Fosse’s story, by contrast, shows how boredom transforms the world into a field of chance the narrator cannot control in any way but had already fallen prey to when he got into his car and drove away. “So I just did something. I got in my car and drove (…).” (Fosse 2023a, 9). Rather than overcoming the boredom, the narrator is already overwhelmed by overpowering boredom that leads him into a world of chance, bewilderment and, eventually, disappearance and death. The boredom that has befallen the narrator before the narration begins has thrown him into a world devoid of joy, fundamentally attuning him. This suggests that boredom in A Shining is not only existential but linguistic: it alters the narrator’s ability to speak.

For instance, when the car is stuck at the end of the forest road, the narrator stares into “a void”. Fosse’s characteristic use of repetition (“a void” and “nothingness” in Damion Searles’ translation, “inkje” and “inkje” in the original) gives not a sense of progression but rather deepens the existential rupture. The final, singular “nothingness” stands apart, its abruptness calling attention to the growing fragmentation of the narrator’s world and language. The shift is not merely cumulative; it is significant that the final occurrence of “nothingness” marks a pivotal moment. This repetition provokes the narrator’s reflection on language itself, signalling the first revelation of the instability of language, the point in the story where words begin to unravel.

We also note a change in tone and register as the protagonist’s voice shifts from transparent to fragmented. Initially, he uses negative existential terms figuratively: “as if” and “as into”. However, with the final “[i]nto a nothingness” / “[i]nn i eit inkje”, the tone becomes more abrupt, and the phrase stands alone without the softening effect of a simile. The voice behind this utterance seems to be disconnected from the protagonist’s immediate consciousness, as if it does not belong to him but to the narrative itself. This division of voices, where another voice intrudes into the protagonist’s language, is subtle yet crucial. It foreshadows the eventual confusion between the two “I’s” and the numerous voices in the text – a theme that becomes more explicit as the story unfolds, adding a layer of complexity to the narrative.

This interplay between the narrator’s and the other voices becomes more acute as the scene unfolds. When the protagonist discovers the forest before him and wonders what he fears, the words “what” and “why” stand out for the first time – not simply semantically, but rhythmically and typographically – because of the tension between syntax and punctuation: “What was I scared of. Why was I scared.” (Fosse 2023a, 9) / “Kva var eg redd for. Kvifor vart eg redd.” (Fosse 2023b, 8). At first glance, these sentences demand to be read as questions, and yet the absence of a question mark unsettles this expectation. It is as if the punctuation mark that should affirm the interrogative, its natural partner, is missing or perhaps silenced. The full stop, usually a mark of finality, now points to an absent question mark. This spectral punctuation invites, or compels, the reader to hesitate, to linger and to ask whether these are questions at all – or already something else. Fragmented statements, perhaps. Gestures toward something ineffable. Noun-like designations of fear itself. Here, punctuation does not merely guide the presentation; it follows a rhythm of its own. As Adorno writes, punctuation marks no longer serve to smooth the traffic between language and reader, but act “hieroglyphically,” expressing something that unfolds “in the interior of language, along its own pathways.” In these lines, punctuation is not mimetic of speech but resists it. The full stop, instead of grounding the sentence, destabilises it. It does not close the question but opens a new kind of reading that approaches the text’s own rhythm. It is as if the language itself – its breath and beat – turns inward, becoming opaque, pulling the reader into the text’s inner movement. The words “what” and “why” no longer stand only as interrogatives; they become symptoms of an ungraspable experience that the protagonist cannot name but only voice, again and again, as questions turn into affirmations. Thus, my analysis of boredom here has attempted to shed light on how Fosse’s treatment of boredom may be read in dialogue with Heidegger’s analysis of boredom as an attunement that reveals the groundlessness of existence. Heidegger stresses how boredom encompasses everything in an indefinite indifference that man must overcome. In contrast, boredom in Fosse’s story is not a mere state of mind

but a transformative force that turns the world into a field of chance in which the narrator gets lost. The story’s unfolding of boredom, chance and bewilderment also invite further investigation into what is happening. This open-ended inquiry compels the reader to delve deeper into the text, continually probing the event in A Shining. What kind of event has seized the protagonist, and how does it unfold?

Bewilderment

Let us continue our inquiry and, like the narrator, move from boredom to bewilderment. The first sign of bewilderment appears at the crossroads. If driving is his initial response to boredom, his method of navigating – turning right and left alternately at every crossroad – marks the second stage of this journey. This becomes evident when we examine the opening passage once more:

So I just did something. I got in my car and drove and when I got somewhere I could turn right or left I turned right, and at the next place I could turn right or left I turned left, and so on (Fosse 2023a, 9).

Og difor gjorde eg berre noko. Eg sette meg i bilen min og køyrde og der eg kunne ta enten til høgre eller til venstre tok eg til høgre, og der eg ved neste vegskil kunne ta til høgre eller til venstre, der tok eg til venstre. Og slik held eg fram med å køyre (Fosse 2023b, 7).

The passage immediately establishes that his actions are neither deliberate nor intentional. They are whimsical responses to boredom – a way of filling time without any clear direction. We also see how the narrative lingers on the moments when he alternates between right and left. In English, this location is initially described as “somewhere” and later as “the next place” he can turn. In the original version, however, Fosse does not use the common word for “place,” but instead the more specific term vegskil – an archaic word for crossroads that now also carries metaphorical connotations, such as “a turning point” or “a life decision.” Fosse, however, reactivates the term in its literal, physical

sense – a choice of direction in the landscape – which makes the word stand out and gives it stylistic and semantic resonance. 6

Unlike the modern word vegkryss, which neutrally denotes an intersection, vegskil emphasises separation, bifurcation, and differentiation – more akin to the English phrase “a fork in the road.” The latter part of the word, skil , is derived from the verb å skilja – to divide, separate, or distinguish. By choosing this archaic term, the text transforms the road into something more than a mere network of paths: each crossroad becomes an event of divergence, a threshold where direction is lost rather than chosen. The narrator is no longer moving forward but is unwittingly drawn into a structure that increasingly resembles a labyrinth without an exit.

Even though his movements follow a rigid pattern – alternating left and right – he first experiences this as a kind of game, something unfolding on its own. But as the narrative progresses, it becomes clear that he is not in control. His repeated use of “just” underscores this passivity: “So I just did something. […] I just kept driving.” He isn’t making choices; he is merely obeying an arbitrary rule that has taken on a life of its own. Then, the inevitable happens, his car gets stuck. The first time he attempts to assert agency by reversing, he fails:

I tried to reverse but I couldn’t, so I stopped the car (Fosse 2023a, 9).

Eg freista rygge han bakover, men det gjekk ikkje, så eg stogga bilen (Fosse 2023b, 7–8).

This moment marks a shift. A pattern has dictated his movement until this point, the mechanical rhythm of left-right turns. Now, suddenly, he is confronted with an absolute limit. He can neither turn back nor continue forward. He has reached an impasse – a dead end where no further steps are possible. The narrative subtly transitions from

6 For a graphical comparison of the frequency of vegskil and vegkryss in the digital collection of books in the National Library of Norway, see: https://www.nb.no/ngram/#1_1_1_ vegskil%2C%20vegkryss_2_1_3_1810%2C2022_2_2_2_12_2

structured repetition to radical indeterminacy. The order he followed has collapsed, and what remains is something he names pure chance.

And so why did I drive onto the forest road then. It was purely by accident, maybe. Pure chance. Yes, you probably couldn’t call it anything else. But chance, what is that anyway (Fosse 2023a, 11).

Og kvifor køyrde eg då inn på skogsvegen. Av rein slump, kanskje. Ja, det kan vel ikkje kallast noko anna. Men slump, kva er no det for noko (Fosse 2023b, 11).

But what does “pure chance” mean here? It is not merely randomness. It signifies the breakdown of any recognisable structure governing his reactions. Until now, his movement has followed a rhythm, however arbitrary. Now, he has lost his rhythm, and he is no longer following anything – not a pattern, rule or even, perhaps, an impulse. The impasse marks the moment and the limit where all prior coordinates dissolve and he finds himself thrown into a state where nothing determines what comes next. Pure chance is not just an absence of order; it is an exposure to the limit of possibility.

This becomes evident when we consider why the narrator enters the forest instead of returning to find help. After contemplating how far he would have to walk back, he suddenly propels himself into action at a key shift in the narrative, when the tense changes from past to present: “Now something must be done, because it is snowing like anything.” (Fosse 2023a, 15). “No må noko gjerast, for no snør han jo som berre det.” (Fosse 2023b, 17). As the snow covers the windscreen, the narrator turns on the wipers. The beauty of the snowy landscape overwhelms him and he is drawn into the landscape before him. “I see that it has stopped snowing and the ground out there is white, and the trees in the forest have also turned white. It is beautiful.” (Fosse 2023a, 15). “Eg ser at det har slutta snø, og bakken framom meg er kvit og også trea er kvite vortne. Det er vakkert å sjå på.” (Fosse 2023b, 18).

Yet beneath this beauty lies a quiet threat, an allure not unlike that of the song of the Sirens in The Odyssey. The sight stirs his imagination and he envisions a path leading into the forest, one that promises

help and connection. When he exits the car, he is no longer merely an “I” but seems on the verge of becoming a “we,” subtly indicated by the phrase: “All right here we go, I said […].” (Fosse 2023a, 15). “Då går vi, sa eg […].” (Fosse 2023a, 18). Yet, the path he believed would lead to others leads him astray instead. As he finds himself lost in the forest, he reflects in desperation:

[…] what could have made me think I’d be able to find help in the forest, in the dark woods, that thought, no, it was totally wrong even to call it a thought, it was more like an impulse, a sudden idea, something like that, something I just came up with. Nonsense is what it is. Pure foolishness. Stupidity. Pure and utter stupidity. […] this is worse than stupidity, this is, no, I don’t even have words for it (Fosse 2023a, 16).

[…] korleis kunne eg vel koma på tanken at det var hjelp å finne i skogen, i svarte skogen inne, for ein tanke, nei det vart aldeles feil å kalle det ein tanke, det var meir eit påhitt, noko slikt, eitkvart eg berre hadde kome på. Tullete, var det. Reine toskeskapen. Dumskap. Rein og skjer dumskap. […] nei dette er verre enn dumskap, dette er, nei eg har ikkje ord for det (Fosse 2023b, 20).

This realistic and absurd passage mirrors the earlier passage where the narrator tries to understand why he surrendered himself to “pure chance”. But the repetition also intensifies and deepens the narrator’s confusion and bewilderment. Here, his stream of thoughts moves from whimsy and stupidity to nonsense and foolishness until it reaches a point where he can no longer put it into words. He has not only got lost in the forest but also in himself – as if the sight of the snowy landscape has lured him into a space where all coordinates have disappeared. He has become a riddle to himself.

As the story progresses, the division between voices becomes increasingly pronounced. The narrator no longer simply recounts events but is fractured across conflicting positions, perspectives and temporal registers. This fragmentation is particularly striking in the scene where the shining figure appears. The narrator describes himself taking a deep breath and closing his eyes – gestures that might suggest a desire to regain composure. Yet paradoxically, even with his

eyes closed, he continues to see: “I take a deep breath. I close my eyes. […] And I see a shining presence right in front of me, coming toward me.” (Fosse 2023a, 20). “Eg andar djupt. Eg lèt att augo. […] Og der framfor meg ser eg ein lysande skapnad koma imot meg.” (Fosse 2023b, 26). Here, the narrative perspective seems to hover above the protagonist, no longer entirely rooted in his consciousness. It emerges from elsewhere, from a displaced vantage point that observes rather than participates. This estranged perspective unsettles the reader’s relation to the “I”, suggesting that the voice of narration is no longer fully the protagonist’s own. Rather, it comes from a reflective “now” beyond the story’s temporal flow, an echo of the event rather than its direct witness. The doubling of the “I” thus marks a deeper rupture – both in voice and narrative coherence – mirroring the protagonist’s own disintegration.

The rupture reaches its peak when the narrator encounters his parents:

I say: are you looking for me – and there’s no answer. I see them standing there, my mother and father, and they just look at me and they don’t answer when I talk to them, and of course they need to, because in spite of everything I’m their son and I say: you need to answer me when I’m talking to you, so answer, don’t just stand there, answer me, you need to answer me – and I hear that my voice is begging and pleading, almost pitiful, yes, I’m downright whimpering, you could say, maybe exhausted too, or else it’s like it’s not my voice, it’s like someone else is speaking through me, someone I don’t know, a total stranger actually (Fosse 2023a, 34–35).

Eg seier: leitar de etter meg – og ingen svarar. Eg ser dei stå der, mor mi og far min, og dei berre ser imot meg og dei svarar ikkje når eg snakkar til dei, og det må dei sjølvsagt gjera, for eg er tross alt son deira og eg seiar: de må svara meg når eg snakkar til dykk, svar då, ikkje berre stå der, men svar meg, de må svara meg – og eg høyrer at røysta mi er bedande, nesten ynkeleg, ja rett og slett klynkande, kunne eg seia, forkomen kanskje òg, eller det er som om det ikkje er mi røyst, det er som om ein annan snakkar igjennom meg, einkvan eg ikkje kjenner, ein heilt framand eigentleg (Fosse 2023b, 50–51).

At this point, the division is complete: the “I” who speaks no longer recognises its own voice. The narrator watches himself plead for recognition, yet his voice is foreign, inhabited by someone he does not know. The gap between the self who acts and the self who narrates has widened into something unbridgeable. At this point, language itself seems to turn away from the narrator, or to speak through him in a voice not his own.

Earlier, when the protagonist stares into the void at the end of the forest road, a similar displacement takes place: “I stand there looking at the car […].” (Fosse 2023a, 11). This line, spoken from a position that seems detached from the immediate scene, suggests that the narrative voice has shifted, perhaps to a point outside the story altogether. In contrast to the extended temporal “now” that shapes Septology, this moment appears sudden, unmoored, even disorienting. Something happens in the act of narration: the voice no longer belongs to a subject situated in time but seems to arise from elsewhere. These passages may be read in light of Maurice Blanchot’s understanding of narrative: not as the transmission of experience, but as a space where experience reaches a limit and gives way to writing. If death marks the end of lived experience, it may also mark the threshold where writing begins – not a writing that recounts, but one that enacts. In his essays, Fosse refers to the emergence of the “writing voice” (skriftstemma), not as the voice of the narrator or the character, but as a textual voice shaped in and through the act of writing itself. This voice is inscribed in the text through the interplay of voices, and it often manifests, perhaps most clearly, through the tension between syntax and punctuation. Here, punctuation marks do not serve to clarify or conclude, but to suspend, repeat, and fracture.

In A Shining , the writing voice does not follow the speaking voice; it seems instead to breathe through the punctuation itself, through the full stop where a question mark might have been. The work’s origin may not lie in speech, memory, or lived experience, but in the writing process itself, where punctuation marks the precise point at which the voice of writing begins to sound.

What happens when what is not a question?

Returning to the questions raised at the beginning of this essay, I want to revisit the relationship between rhythm, punctuation and the word “what” – and thereby address the guiding concern throughout: What is happening in A Shining ? As I have already suggested, punctuation in Fosse’s prose does not clarify meaning but opens a space in which meaning begins to shift. In this space, the word kva – translated as “what” – takes on a particular intensity. It wavers between interrogative and declarative, question and assertion, rhythm and rupture. To understand how this wavering operates, it is necessary to consider the historical shift in the function of punctuation and the role it plays in detaching writing from the voice.

According to Theodor Adorno’s essay “Punctuation Marks”, punctuation creates rhythm in language and maintains a shifting relationship with the voice and speech. While punctuation once marked the rhythm of the speaking voice, in modernist literature, punctuation has distanced itself from the spoken voice and oral storytelling. Adorno writes:

For punctuation marks, which articulate language and thereby connect writing to the voice, have, through their logical-semantic emancipation, distanced themselves from the voice, just as all writing has done, and thus come into conflict with their mimetic nature (Adorno 1992, 65, my translation of Fosse’s translation).

As Arild Linneberg notes in his introduction to Notar til litteraturen (Notes to Literature), Adorno highlights how the function of punctuation evolves over time. If punctuation marks were once tied to the speaking voice in antiquity and more recently to the narrator’s voice, they have, over time, removed themselves from the voice, and, according to Adorno, have lost their mimetic nature. This separation of punctuation marks from the voice is perhaps most evident in another text Fosse frequently refers to in his essays. In “Différance”, Derrida discusses why phonetic writing – writing understood as an expression of the voice – cannot function without incorporating signs that are not phonetic, such as punctuation marks and spaces. He writes:

But I would say that […] the silence that functions within only a so-called phonetic writing – quite opportunely conveys or reminds us that, contrary to a very widespread prejudice, there is no phonetic writing. There is no purely and rigorously phonetic writing in the strict sense. So-called phonetic writing, by all rights and in principle, and not only due to an empirical or technical insufficiency, can function only by admitting into its system nonphonetic “signs” (punctuation, spacing, etc.) And an examination of the structure and necessity of these nonphonetic signs quickly reveals that they can barely tolerate the concept of the sign itself (Derrida 1986, 5).

As is evident from the essay collections From Telling via Showing to Writing (Fosse 1989) and Gnostic Essays (Fosse 1999), both Adorno and Derrida are crucial theorists in Fosse’s understanding of modern literature’s break with oral storytelling. Instead, like many of his Norwegian contemporary writers, such as Tor Ulven and Ole Robert Sunde, he has explored the specific possibilities of writing and textuality. According to Fosse, what characterises prose literature as writing is precisely this: the voice we read is not the narrator’s but the writer’s textual voice – a voice shaped by rhythm, syntax and silence.

In Fosse’s prose, non-phonetic elements such as punctuation and spacing are intricately tied to what he calls the “writing voice” – the textual presence that shapes the narrative and the reading of it. As I have shown in my analysis of A Shining, the redoubling of voices becomes visible or audible through the text’s rhythm, syntax and punctuation. Perhaps it can be said in this way: the voice of writing is the textual instance that appears in the difference between the various voices that say “I”. Perhaps nowhere, then, do the traces of the writing voice become more evident than in the tension between syntax and punctuation in the sentences that begin with the interrogative pronoun “what” and end with a full stop. Here is an example:

I felt empty. And then this anxiety. What was I scared of (Fosse 2023a, 9).

Eg kjende meg tom. Og så denne otten. Kva var eg redd for (Fosse 2023b, 8).

It is almost impossible for the reader not to mentally replace the full stop with a question mark, interpreting the sentence as a conventional question. But the presence of the full stop subtly alters both tone and meaning. What initially appears to be a question is transformed by its punctuation into something else: a fragment, a suspended statement, a gesture toward something that cannot be fully articulated.

This creates a tension between the interrogative form (what?) and its nominalisation (what) – in other words, its shift toward becoming a noun or designation. The word “what” no longer functions purely as an interrogative pronoun; it begins to resemble a name for the very fear the narrator cannot otherwise express. The period cuts off the movement toward an answer, and in doing so, isolates “what” as a kind of linguistic remainder – neither fully a question nor a statement, but something in between. It becomes an index of the event itself.

The result is a strange rhythm that challenges the conventions of question and answer. Syntax and punctuation no longer align to guide the reader smoothly from inquiry to meaning. Instead, the full stop becomes haunted by the absence of a question mark – as if what remains is not a question to be answered but an unresolvable rupture. In this way, the punctuation does not simply mark the end of a sentence; it signals a break in understanding and marks the emergence of a voice that is no longer asking, but naming – or at least pointing to –something unspeakable.

This wavering between interrogative and nominal use of “what” – its double exposure as both question and name – recurs throughout the story. But toward the end, the instability of the word reaches a breaking point. We are no longer simply witnessing a tension in syntax or punctuation; something more fundamental is happening. The word “what” detaches from its usual grammatical role and begins literally to fall out of its conventional meaning. This becomes most apparent in the passage where the protagonist sees the man in the black suit for the first time and does not know what he means by the word “what”:

And the man is standing there completely motionless. Or is he moving. Maybe a little. But in any case just barely. Or maybe he isn’t moving.

Maybe I’m just imagining he’s moving. Could be. But in any case, yes, in any case. In any case what. What. What do I mean by that. In any case, what (Fosse 2023a, 42).

Og heilt urørleg står mannen der. Eller rører han litt på seg. Kanskje litt. Men i så fall berre så vidt det er. Eller kanskje rører han ikkje på seg. Eg innbilller meg kanskje berre at han gjer det. Kan så vera. Men i så fall, ja i så fall. I så fall kva. Kva. Kva meiner eg med det (Fosse 2023b, 62).

At this point, language itself seems to falter. The narrator is not just uncertain about what he sees – he no longer knows what he is saying. The word “kva”, “what”, stripped of its interrogative force, stands alone, isolated. “I så fall kva.” / “In any case, what.” A pause. Then again: “kva”, “what”. And once more: “kva”, “what”. Not questions, but echoes – ghosts of a question that has lost its form. The narrator tries to recover the meaning: “Kva meiner eg med det.” / “What do I mean by that.” But this only underlines his disorientation. He no longer commands the word he is using.

We might say that what here no longer points to something – it is something. A remainder. A symptom. A residue of meaning is suspended in the aftermath of perception. The full stops lend each “what” a kind of finality while simultaneously refusing closure. They arrest the question, but they do not answer it. The punctuation fragments the sentence, slowing time and suspending comprehension. We are left with a series of interruptions: “kva”/“what”, “kva”/“what”, “kva”/ “what”. The word is not simply spoken – it happens. And what happens is not only the loss of meaning but the emergence of “what” as a marker of the very event that has no other name than “what”.

This strange and deeply fascinating attuning of the word “what” culminates in the passage I quoted at the beginning:

I sit on the round stone and look at the man in a black suit. What’s happening? Where am I actually, yes I’m in a forest but then again this isn’t like how things are in a forest, is it. What’s happening (Fosse 2023a, 45).

Eg sit der på den runde steinen og ser imot mannen i den svarte dressen. Kva er det som skjer. Kvar er eg eigentleg, ja eg er inne i skogen, men det

er då ikkje slik som dette inne i ein skog, vel. Kva er det som skjer (Fosse 2023b, 67).

How do we read this passage now? We first notice that the protagonist is sitting on a stone. Immediately, one might assume it is the same stone he sat on earlier, but a few pages before, he remarks on it with surprise, as if seeing it for the first time:

[…] but there, over there, is a stone, a round stone, right in the middle of the forest too, and now that’s strange […] (Fosse 2023a, 40).

[…] men der, der borte er det jo ein stein, ein rund stein, og det midt inne i skogen, og det var då merkeleg […] (Fosse 2023b, 59).

Here, as earlier in the narrative, the sight of the stone is a moment of rupture and wonder – a figure of bewilderment, doubling and displacement. It marks a break in the continuity of time, space and perception. What stands out most, however, is not the stone but the syntax surrounding the word “what”. While the narrator is sitting on the stone, he also seems to observe himself doing so. So, who speaks when the line “What’s happening” is uttered? The sentence is not tied to an “I” and hovers somewhere between observation and exclamation as if emerging from a space not within the event but just beyond it – a reflective threshold. If earlier in the story, the word “what” wavered between question and noun, it now appears to have reached a kind of transformation. It is no longer simply a question – it has become the name of what resists naming. It designates a moment of surprise or wonder, a threshold at which language itself falters. This is not merely a stylistic gesture, but a revelation of what Fosse’s prose makes possible: a language in which the familiar becomes strange, and where words – through rhythm, syntax, and silence –begin to name what we do not yet know. The “what” does not point to a hidden meaning behind events, but to the very event of meaning as it trembles into being.

This brings us closer to the centre of Fosse’s poetics. In his prose, the voice of writing emerges not from the narrator’s control over

language, but from the way “the writer” – skrivaren , in Fosse’s sense of the term – shapes, twists, and tunes the words through rhythm and punctuation. In this sense, the voice of writing does not depict the event, but gives form to its unfolding by transforming a word like “what” not into an image, metaphor, metonymy, or symbol in the conventional sense. Rather, the prose turns the word “what” into an image of the word “what” – as if the word itself becomes visible as a word, as writing. 7

Through the repeated tension between the interrogative “what” and its transformation into a kind of name or noun, Fosse pushes the boundaries of linguistic convention. And in doing so, he brings us closer to the event of literature. For “what” does not simply ask; it also names. It names the very thing that cannot be grasped – an event in language, a disturbance in sense, a moment of wonder. If wonder is the event par excellence because it escapes articulation, then literature may be the space in which that escape is registered – not as absence, but as a presence without a given name. In Fosse’s hands, what becomes the name of this presence: the wonder of literature itself.

7 See Maurice Blanchot’s reflection in the essay “The Essential Solitude” on how literary language may become “an image of language itself […] an imaginary language, one which no one speaks […].” (Blanchot 1982, 34).

Adorno, Theodor. 1963. “Satzzeichen”. In Noten zur Literatur I, 162–167. Suhrkamp Verlag.

———. 1992. “Skiljeteikn”. In Notar til litteraturen, edited and introduced by Arild Linneberg, 59–66. Translated by Jon Fosse. Samlaget.

———. 2019. “Punctuation Marks”. In Notes to Literature, edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson, 106–111. Colombia University Press.

Aristotle. 1979. Metaphysics. Translated with Commentaries and Glossary by Hippocrates G. Apostle. The Peripatetic Press.

Blanchot, Maurice. 1982. “The Essential Solitude”. In The Space of Literature. Translated, with an Introduction, by Anne Smock, 19–33. University of Nebraska Press.

———. 2003. “The Song of the Sirens”. In The Book to Come. Translated by Charlotte Mandell, 1–10. Stanford University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1982. “Différance”. In Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass, 1–28. University of Chicago Press.

Fosse, Jon. 1983. Raudt, svart. Samlaget

———. 1989. Frå telling via showing til writing. Samlaget.

———. 1999. Gnostiske essay. Samlaget

———. 2000. Morgon og kveld. Samlaget.

———. 2004. Det er Ales. Samlaget.

———. 2019. Det andre namnet. Septologien 1–II. Samlaget.

———. 2020. Eg er ein annan. Septologien III–V. Samlaget

———. 2021. Eit nytt namn. Septologien VI–VII. Samlaget.

———. 2023a. A Shining. Translated by Damion Searls. Fitzcarraldo Editions.

———. 2023b. Kvitleik. Samlaget.

Heidegger, Martin. 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World,

Finitude, Solitude. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Indiana University Press.

Landro, Jan H. 2022. Jon Fosse – enkelt og djupt. Om romanane og forteljingane hans. Selja forlag.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. “The Surprise of the Event”. In Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne, 159–176. Stanford University Press.

Refsum, Christian. 2023a. “Event: Or, How Foucault Used Baudelaire to Enlighten Kant”. In Temporal Experiments. Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature, edited by Bruce Bernharrt and Marit Grøtta, 15–30. Routledge.

———. 2023b. “Event”. In Temporal Experiments. Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature, edited by Bruce Bernharrt and Marit Grøtta, 147–148. Routledge.

Romano, Claude. 2016. There Is: The Event and the Finitude of Appearing. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Fordham University Press.

PART II

THE DRAMATIC WORKS OF JON FOSSE

7. Jon Fosse Emerges through the Director’s Archives – An Essay

Kai Johnsen 1

IDear Kaj [sic] Johnsen,

Thanks for the essay you sent me, which I have read with great interest and from which I have benefitted greatly. As you know, I am an author, writer, and that means I write alone, in isolation. That is the way it has been, and that is how it would have to be if I were to write for theatre. And I am deeply unsatisfied with the conventional – whether it is conventional-conventional or conventional-experimental. And I am asocial enough to claim that the conventional has to do with social consensus; that is the part that must by all means be avoided.

With that said, I must let you know that what you call simultaneous dramaturgy seems to be what I have been doing in my novels: it is not the linear plot, the psychology of the characters, the driving conflict etc. which have been important to me; rather than dynamic stories, my novels are more of an unfolding of states. (…)

1 This chapter is translated to English by Kjellfrid Reite Castle

I am trying to write chords, to use that metaphor, not individual notes or series of notes (= melodies = story). I think I do a pretty good job of it, even though it’s not really easy to explain what it’s like.

And it’s not hard for me to imagine that this type of spatialisation of time, I suppose it could be described that way, could be well suited to that type of writing, to put it that way, as theatre might be able to write.

(…)

However, and this is important: although I have drawn crucial inspiration from modernist prose, I have been influenced to an equally crucial degree by the realist novel.

(…)

If I am to think of theatre, it will have to be in that direction. Something that means “peepshow” and the audience in peace and quiet in their darkness.

(…)

But in any case: neither non-immersion nor immersion, but both, both modernism and realism, or whatever word one uses. As I see it, it is precisely this combination – for instance, the combination of the linear and the non-linear – which is the strength of my novels.

(…)

This is, of course, both a type of conceptual art, expressed in certain conceptual boundaries (a banal example: the action takes one day), as well as a type of minimalism…

(…)

And if one were to think of theatre, there must be certain concepts there as well, which can function the way my concepts function in my novels, only in their own way, within their own art, if you understand. And in a way, “the whole” must be situated within those conceptual boundaries.

(…)

Or for a third matter: I can try to write for theatre; in that case I will also do that in isolation, but I’d like to do it so that we talk

before, during the process, and after. In that case, I suppose there is a type of three-month contract or whatever it is called that perhaps I could get. In any case, I suppose we can meet over a beer or something when you come to Bergen. 2

This was written by Jon Fosse in his very first letter to me, on my birthday on 25 August 1991. I turned 29 that day, and he was about to turn 32.

Here, Jon Fosse situates his own oeuvre, his poetics, his writing style, and says something about how he might possibly write plays in future. And that is nearly how it turned out, when two years later he started on his first play. We can clearly see the lead-up to how he would come to move in the tension between abstract modernism and what he himself calls realism.

I don’t know if my original letter to Fosse still exists. However, I do know that the article I had written which is referred to in the letter (Johnsen 1991), about simultaneous theatre , does still exist, and can potentially tell us something about what came into play at this early stage of our collaboration.

From the very beginning, I held on in a fairly systematic way to the material in what would develop into a more than thirty-year collaboration and friendship, constantly ongoing in its own way, with Jon Fosse. The four moving boxes I have left to the National Library contain many of Jon’s manuscripts, what in the old days we called “director’s notes” (the director’s working script with drawn-in motion patterns, pause markings etc.), in other words, scribbles, thoughts, ideas, process notes etc., as well as rehearsal plans, programmes, reviews, criticisms, photographs, interviews, preliminary reviews and more. And perhaps most importantly in my view: a very extensive correspondence, on paper as well as digitally, between Fosse and myself. I

2 Private archive 16 Kai Johnsen/Jon Fosse: Papers and digitally created material related to collaborative projects. All quotations from the Kai Johnsen/Jon Fosse correspondence are taken from this archive.

would think we are talking about up to 300 letters and messages. This material, either on its own or in combination with Fosse’s own archive at the National Library, gives a rather unique opportunity to examine Jon Fosse’s development as a playwright in the period from 1993 to around 2007. From the time he expressed what almost appears as disdain for drama as an art form – until he gradually and, eventually, explosively, became a world-famous star within drama. The material also gives insight into a rather unusually close collaboration between director and playwright.

Let us back up a couple of years, to two years before the quoted letter from 1991, and take a look at the beginning before the beginning:

bortover gangen, og føtene er tunge mot golvet. døra slo igjen og ungen begynner grine. eg går med tunge føter bortover mot heisen. det er morgon. full berepose. ungen skrik. eg åpnar luka til bossjakta, og høyrer plastposen falle nedover mot containeren i kjellaren. flyttebilen svinga opp framfor blokka, gjennom byen hadde vi køyrt, og ut av byen. bror min køyrde. spurde oss fram mellom blokkene. ein toromsleilighet, i femte etasje. eg har kasta boset. morgon. føtene er tunge mot golvet, og luka til bossjakta må latast igjen. eg går bortover gangen, mot leiligheten. oppgang C. femte etasje. namneskilt har eg enno ikkje hengt på døra, har ikkje blitt. enno kan eg høyre døra slå igjen, og ungen begynner grine. eg må late igjen luka. ein svart gitar (Fosse 1985, 7).

along the corridor, with heavy feet against the floor. the door slammed shut and the child begins to cry. i walk with heavy feet towards the lift. it is morning. full carrier bag. child crying. i open the hatch of the rubbish chute and hear the plastic bag fall down towards the skip in the basement. the moving truck swings up in front of my building, through the town we had driven, and out of the town. my brother drove. asked our way among the apartment buildings. a one-bedroom flat, on the fourth floor. i have thrown out the rubbish. morning. feet are heavy against the floor, and the hatch of the rubbish chute needs to be closed. i walk along the corridor, towards the flat. entrance C. fifth floor. i still haven’t hung a name sign on the door, i haven’t gotten around to it. still i can hear the door slam shut, and the child begins to cry. i need to close the hatch. a black guitar.

I was sitting and reading the above, the first lines of Fosse’s second novel, Stengd gitar (Closed Guitar) (Fosse 1985) – followed by the entire

novel in a single sitting – on a sunny Sunday (I remember that very clearly), in a rented flat in Sandviken, Bergen. It was the summer of 1988. I was recently graduated from the Academy of Theatre, already quite worn out and tired of theatre, I might add, and for that reason this summer I was assisting with a large multi-media project in Bergen by the Norwegian visual artist Inghild Karlsen. I picked out this small, nondescript, white book after having barely noticed it among the many others on the landlord’s shelf.

I was utterly taken with Stengd gitar, about a young woman (with substance abuse issues) who by mistake locks her small child inside her flat, and, as she struggles to find solutions, is forced out on an odyssey in town and, eventually, on her own painful life journey. It all happens in a single day: a type of extended and simultaneously fragmented great moment. This was literature, text, that wrote forth precisely some of what I was interested in within the theatre, the stage art, the contemporary dance, the contemporary music and the contemporary literature that I encountered particularly throughout Europe on my many travels in those days: not artificial, but charged, almost mundane, and simultaneously utterly precise, giving form to the conflictual interface between inner thought and external action. Between what we think and how we think, consciously and unconsciously – and what we express and do in the external world. Surfaces of rhythm-steered text employing repetitions and small, decisive shifts. As emotional and movement-oriented musical scores. I will never forget the feeling that this read created in me: a demanding, rhythmic, engrossing and physical formation of presence and ritualised fumbling. I swayed, partly repressed and partly manic, as I sat on the sofa reading.

finne nøkkel. trøttheten. kan ikkje berre stå her. setje meg ned på golvet. kvile meg. han med den slitne veska. far min. stilt i leiligheten, og ungen grin ikkje. eg tar i dørklinka, eg drar døra mot meg. ho er stengd. drar og drar, og døra er stengd. stilt i blokka. eg tar hardt i dørklinka. ungen min, eg er her no, ikke ver redd, seier eg. legg munnen min inn mot døra, kviskrar. tar i dørhandtaket, og drar mot meg. døra er stengd. eg må gå, skulle (Fosse 1985, 176).

find the key. tiredness. can’t just stand here. sit down on the floor. rest. the guy with the tired bag. my father. building is quiet, and child not crying. i take hold of the doorknob, i pull the door towards myself. it is shut, pull and pull, and the door is shut. building is quiet. i grab the doorknob firmly. my child, i am here now, don’t be afraid, i say. press my mouth in towards the door, whisper, pull the door handle, pull towards myself. the door is shut, I must go, should

At this time, I had already heard of Fosse as a kind of rising avantgarde author with great credibility in the most sophisticated literary circles in Norway and to some degree Sweden. This was why I chose Stengd gitar from the bookcase. And I know that I was fairly resolute that Sunday in Sandviken as I thought: this has to become theatre!

But three whole years would pass before Fosse and I came into actual contact with each other. In hindsight, it seems a bit strange to me that it took so long. I think one of the reasons was that at the time I was interested in a more conceptual, physical and “anti-literary” theatre. Also, and this is significant to the continuation: at the time I was associated with Den Nationale Scene (The National Stage, DNS) in Bergen, where Tom Remlov was artistic director. Remlov had an overarching programme in which one of the things he wanted to do was reintroduce the living playwright in Norwegian theatre. I thought that was a load of rubbish. However, his project was full of real will and enthusiasm. At the same time, I had always been interested in drama history (and the creative, ambivalent and complex relationship to text in theatre arts), and I suppose I am first and foremost a talking person, a “text person”. And I had read a different author, who felt like a sort of ally, who I thought I would try to entice to write for me and for theatre. I believed that this could turn out to be something completely novel and unique. So it was that, at some point in the early summer of 1991, I wrote a letter to Jon Fosse. And parts of his reply were what I quoted in the introduction here. I had written a long letter – at the time I didn’t write short letters – in which I shared my great enthusiasm for Stengd gitar, enclosed this long article/poetic I had written about simultaneous theatre, and asked if it would be possible for him to write something for

me that could be performed. His answer was both yes and no; I suppose he would have preferred that I made something out of Stengd gitar, or something else out of his prose. At the same time, he was quite obviously intrigued and interested – and besides, there might be some potential money waiting out there (later I understood that there were issues of financial sustainability on his side). He wanted to meet me. Get to know each other. Discuss possibilities. And drink beer.

Not long after this letter, after we had met several times, in the autumn of 1992, two constellations of artists were selected to present project proposals for a theatre production that would be performed at Black Box Teater in Oslo. This was common at the time, this idea of trying to create artistic collaborative projects. The Museum of Contemporary Art was in on it, as was what at the time was called Concerts Norway, as well as other reputable institutions. I have often wondered how it was that Jon and I ended up in the same group working on this project. Without ever having asked him about it, I am fairly certain it was Tom Remlov, with knowledge of my interest in Fosse’s work, that pulled some of his many strings.

The teamwork on this project gradually got going, we met in Bergen, an author, a director, a visual artist and a composer, and we organised our own workshops, discussions and exchanges. I remember Jon being particularly interested in boathouses and old houses by the sea at this time. Sketches and materials were discussed and considered. Eventually, we wrote a project description.

Bergen 27 May 1993:

Given how I write my novels, with rather tight and dramatic plots occurring between few individuals during a rather limited period, gathered around one or a few key moments, in one or just a few places, it has sometimes occurred to me that I might also be able to write good drama for the stage. I still haven’t tried it. But when this invitation came, and after our conversations in the project team were pointing in a direction that felt right to me, I have decided that I – now, or never – will try my hand at writing plays. Now or never, because I believe a key to both

artistic and “real” realisation is close collaboration with a director. In that sense, I see my limitations quite clearly.

And I will write a piece that is Classicist in the sense that it will be unified in time, place and action, as my novels largely are. I will also take elements with me from my novels – I can’t do otherwise, I write as I write – my repetitive and suggestively rhythmic writing style (which I suppose nearly begs a rhythmic-stylised speech and acting style), that obsession which is also present in my novels, I will of course also try to write forth when I write drama.

In short: the uniqueness I have achieved through my writing over the years should go a long way to also take me over into a new art form.

(…)

This is an excerpt from a seven-page letter, original and signed in blue pen, from Jon, in which he describes his thoughts on how his first play should be – before he has written it. Shortly after this letter, I received the first 20 or so pages of a manuscript. About a week after that, I received the entire text of Gammalt møte (Old Meeting) (which would later be called Nokon kjem til å komme (Someone is Going to Come). I sat down to read.

Over the following weeks, however, strange things started happening, before I had even had a chance to read the manuscript particularly thoroughly, and without me knowing about it. After it turned out that the other constellation won this competition for production that we had taken part in (and I had sent the manuscript to artistic director Remlov), I write the following to Jon on 15 July:

Dear Jon:

Everything all right? Sorry you haven’t heard from me sooner. There are two reasons for it: I have been on the jury for admission of new acting students at the Academy of Theatre (24/7 for about three weeks), and I have been awaiting a reply/remark from Tom Remlov. Because I assume you know – the original

“collaborative project” will not be going ahead. That may be just as well, though of course it’s never a good feeling to feel rejected.

(…)

On 18 August, I write again to Jon: (…)

Tom R. is now back from his holiday and in the swing of things. I talked to him on the phone yesterday. He has read your play and has constructive viewpoints going in different directions. He suggests that the three of us meet up to possibly start a dialogue. (…)

On 23 August, Jon replies:

Dear Kai,

I must inform you that I have today sold the rights to my play, Gammalt møte , to Det Norske Teatret (The Norwegian Theatre).

Earlier today, I received a phone call from Otto Holmlung, who told me that he and the others in the dramaturgiate had read my piece and had “jumped for joy”, as he put it. They would like to have the world premiere, it will at the latest be in February 1995.

As I understood it, both you and Tom had a number of objections to my piece, there might be a point with those, but at the same time, I was familiar enough with the text that I would prefer to see it performed about the same way as it was first written. It was therefore easy for me to accept the offer. (…)

Jon had in other words gone and sold his play to Det Norske Teatret in the meantime. I was livid. At Fosse. Here I was, having spent several

years cultivating this guy, this author – and then without so much as the slightest warning he gives away his first piece to Det Norske Teatret (which in my view had done very little of substance for new or Nynorsk drama in recent years). Sure, I had points I wished to discuss with him (particularly in the second act of the play), but I am firm in my assertion that I was interested in seeing this project all the way through to a premiere.

But clearly, that train was gone. Still, in Jon’s letter dated 23 August, he closes with the following:

I am still intent on continuing to work with you on a play that can be performed at DNS. Of course it cannot be Gamalt [sic] møte, but I am willing to write a new play that you, if you would like to, can direct in Bergen . As you know, I write pretty quickly, once I get started, so – I don’t think I’ll be getting in the way of it happening. (…)

Tom Remlov and I met Jon at the restaurant of Neptun Hotel in Bergen; most likely it was in September 1993. I was not happy. However, I already had a clear idea: I wanted Jon to translate a German text/ monologue by Botho Strauss (Hennes bryllupsbrev (Her Wedding Letter)), which I had planned to stage with the actor Unni Kristin Skagestad at DNS. And with this as a “warm-up”, I wanted Jon to try to write a separate theatrical text. He said he would try.

About two months later, the first play by Jon Fosse to ever be performed was given to me in an envelope. It was Og aldri skal vi skiljast (And We’ll Never Be Parted ). We immediately went a few rounds, made some minor adjustments, Jon, myself and Unni Kristin (I suppose that was one of the last times there was a lot of “work in progress” around a Jon Fosse play). At this point, we had already begun rehearsing Hennes bryllupsbrev. Gradually, we also started rehearsing And We’ll Never Be Parted .

Jon attended a good number of the rehearsals, he and I went out to discuss, we drank copious amounts of beer and smoked pack after

pack of cigarettes – he had made it into theatre. And he liked it there. Since then, he has often described how that form of community and integrity, angst and ambition, which can be found in a small theatre ensemble in a rehearsal situation, suited him well and interested him.

And We’ll Never Be Parted is about, among many other things, a woman waiting for her partner to come home/back to her. A large part of it is an inner monologue. Just as the audience is inclined to conclude that she actually is abandoned and alone, that her partner will never return to her, he quietly appears beside her. It is as if he is both concretely there and also not really present to her. After a dialogue about the day’s chores, he disappears again, and the woman then prepares, once again alone, a meal for the two of them. At this point the man appears again, but with him he has what appears to be his new partner. After a brief intermezzo with the three of them, the woman is abandoned once again. I see it as a highly precise and original text about closeness, absence, various forms of presence, longing and disappearance. As is almost always true for Fosse during these years, an unusual connection occurred between something mundane and something metaphysical. Originally, the play was titled Som i ein død (As in a Death). At this time, his reading list included Dante.

Jon, myself and Tom Remlov (and in fact a number of others) really enjoyed our production of And We’ll Never Be Parted . Imperceptibly, something entirely unique had entered into Norwegian theatre. However, perhaps there were quite a few who were unsure of exactly what to do with this. It was very different.

Due to some challenges with the repertoire for the Bergen International Festival the following year, 1995, in the autumn of 1994 I think it was, Tom Remlov asked us if our next project (for there was no longer any doubt that there would be more projects in Bergen) could be expedited. As I remember it today: Jon went home from this meeting with Tom and myself, sat down at his computer – and a few weeks later sent me Namnet (The Name).

As he sends me The Name, Jon writes (just as I am in the run-up to premiering Uncle Vanya by A. Chekhov at DNS):

3 January 1995

Dear Kai, I’ll start as is the custom these days: Happy New Year! And now I must immediately say that although I now, as you can see, am sending you a manuscript, I know that you are premiering in not too long, so I don’t at all expect you to read and comment on this text straight away.

(…)

I think I will refrain from commenting for now, I am fairly happy with the play, as I see it, once again a type of mixture of “realism” in history and “modernism” in expression. I think (as they say).

(…)

Where And We’ll Never Be Parted had been more of an expressive, repetitive and rhythmic partial inner monologue, with relativisation of time and space, The Name was something entirely different. Unity of time, place and action. About a young pregnant girl who in crisis returns to her family home (perhaps somewhat of a distant relative of the girl in Stengd gitar). After a brief inner monologue, the “drama” explodes with many characters, and pure dialogues with several layers of twists, situations, attempted approaches and conflicts. I eventually began to refer to it as a ritualised modernist folk comedy. By the early summer of 1995, in just over a year, we had staged And We’ll Never Be Parted and The Name at DNS, both on the smallest stage at this theatre. For Norwegian theatre at this time, this was an utterly extraordinary speed. It had really gone well, as we stage artists like to say when we are satisfied with our own work. We, for by this time many saw us as a kind of “duo”, had made an impact and sparked people’s interest. Public opinion was divided, as it always had been regarding Jon, but in circles that meant something to us, we were noticed.

The newspaper reviews were definitely more mixed. Aftenposten could hardly see anything of particular significance. About And We’ll Never Be Parted they wrote: “finally, the audience becomes downright tired of hearing the same lines repeated over and over again, for

instance […] this doesn’t concern us" (Enger 1994). When it came to The Name, they could really no longer resist ridiculing, in their totally unique and unqualified way:

Coming out was like getting our lives back. The extreme boredom for an hour and twenty minutes was particularly burdensome precisely because it was a fitting expression for parts of Norwegian reality, a spirit of tediousness and apathy and ambiguity and silencing, which is not the author’s invention, but has been the cause of greater soul suffering in Norwegian towns, and perhaps also cities, than either violence or hard liquor (Straume 1995).

Yes, that is how it was in those days. It can be useful to consider this when trying to understand what we were up against in public life and on the cultural scene in those years. However, there were also interested and positive voices among the critics. When things went badly in the press with any of the many performances Jon and I staged in these and the following years, we usually said: Yes, but just you wait for Askøyværingen – it’ll come in a few days. They believe in us! And if that doesn’t work out, we’ve always got Gula Tidend [both being very small, rural, local newspapers]!

II

Jon writes to me on 2 February 1996, before we had started rehearsing Barnet (The Child ), our third staging:

Dear Kai, I am sending you the script of Sonen (The Son). This play hits really hard (in my opinion). It was almost scary to read it: I felt I was sitting and reading a different piece than what I had sat and written! It was scary. (…)

New plays were now coming one after the other from Jon. These and the following years, roughly from 1995 to 2005 (e.g. Warm , the first international commission, from Deutsches Theater in Berlin) can be

called The Great Fossefall . At some points during these years, he wrote two to four new plays per year.

During most of this period, there was no doubt that the collaboration between Jon and myself was very, very close, and I think it is beyond doubt that I was the person who was closest to his process of writing new plays. Although there were others, for instance his wife at the time, a literary scholar, who read his work in progress, there were some publishers and eventually also dramaturgs, particularly his entrusted “secret consultant” Cecilia Ölvezcky at Det Norske Teatret, who eventually became significant – but for the time being, I was the main addressee.

In 1996, Jon’s and my project had moved from Bergen over to Nationaltheatret (The National Theatre) in Oslo. There, we would shortly be staging the world premiere of The Child (1996), a kind of “great” broadside ballad about a young couple who meet, miraculously, get together, and lose their unborn child in hospital. The Son (1997), about a plagued son (there are many of these throughout his oeuvre) who returns home one fateful night (a neighbour will die in an accident) to his parents’ home in a village threatened by abandonment, far from the city. And Mor og barn (Mother and Child ) (1997), about quite a silent son who reaches out to his apparently successful career-mother in the capital – with probing questions about his background and origin. The reason for this move to Oslo was partly due to Tom Remlov having resigned as artistic director in Bergen (to become director of the now defunct Norsk Film), and partly because still, for a few years to come, it was I as director who managed to get the work for Jon and myself. In 1996 (three years after they bought it), Det Norske Teatret finally premiered Someone is Going to Come under artistic director Otto Holmlung. For nearly two decades to follow, a long-term “battle” developed between Nationaltheatret and Det Norske Teatret over who would “own” Fosse.

The Child came into existence because theatre director Ellen Horn had asked me if I would stage Henrik Ibsen’s Little Eyolf for the Ibsen Festival of 1996. I wrote to her that I would prefer to have Jon alongside me, as well as two other colleagues of his whom I was

particularly interested in at the time, Tor Ulven and Jan Kjærstad, to each write one-act plays – to some degree based on Brand by Ibsen. This idea was based on my interest in what at the time one might have referred to as “overpainting” (the German playwright Heiner Müller referred to his Hamletmachine as an overpainting; similarly for instance Racine in the seventeenth century had worked on his overwritings of the Greek classic tragedies, and the Greeks in their time had overwritten etc.). For various reasons, Ulven and Kjærstad did not end up writing anything. I was quite familiar with both oeuvres, and I had some form of contact with both of them (I had for instance hired Ulven as a translator for a Beckett project in Bergen, and I had also socialised with Kjærstad). Sadly, Tor Ulven committed suicide at about the time I wrote to him concerning this potential project, and I suppose Kjærstad didn’t feel confident to do it. I still remember one of the sentences Kjærstad wrote to me in his reply: Drama is probably the hardest literary genre that exists. But regardless, Jon quickly wrote a play that could stand on its own without any problem whatsoever. Around the time of the premiere of The Child , on Nationaltheatret’s Malersal stage, which really was an excellent and well-acted staging in my opinion, Jon writes to me:

17 August 1996 Dear Kai, (…)

Otherwise, I need to tell you that I think this (that is, the performance) all in all looks very good indeed, and it will probably be by far the best Fosse production to date.

I have since thought much about the “kissing scene” in the first act, first I thought it stood out too much, then that it was in a way right (and what justified it in a way was Gisken’s withdrawal) and also something I am not sure what it is (!). I suppose I am still a bit unclear on this.

Maybe – maybe – it would be better if they just sort of “slipped” into their love, sort of slowly and “snugly”? (…)

The letter then continues with other specific comments and discussions on various scenes, costumes etc. We see here how closely Jon followed the processes at the time – and how over time he developed a vast wealth of knowledge about theatre.

Just as Tom Remlov was instrumental in our first period in Bergen, now it was artistic director Ellen Horn who gave Jon and myself the framework to continue our work. In a notoriously short amount of time, as mentioned, we staged three world premieres. Not long after that, we staged Draum om hausten (Dream of autumn) for Nationaltheatret’s centenary, in 1999, for the opening ceremony of the rebuilt Amfiscenen stage. This is a key play about a mature couple who meet almost by chance, get together, and are confronted, in several instances, by his gradually fragmenting family. All this takes place at a cemetery. Once again, the dimension of time comes into play as a key component in Fosse’s work. In my opinion, this staging unfortunately did not turn out very well. And I suppose that was my fault. But that’s just the way it is sometimes.

During the first few years, Det Norske Teatret did their own thing (without me) when it came to Fosse. After the world premiere of Someone is Going to Come in 1996, the great Swedish Bergman actor and director Gunnel Lindblom staged Ein sommars dag (A Summer’s Day) in 1999, a complex frieze about a woman grieving her drowned husband. And eventually, it was mainly at Det Norske Teatret that Jon and I developed our shared part of the “journey” onward: Vakkert (Beautiful ) (2001), almost a “summer comedy” with twists and turns and different generations’ frustrations and romantic encounters around a boathouse; Rambuku (2006), about an elderly couple who cross over to the realm of the dead; and Hav (Ocean), (2014, joint production with Nynorskens hus (House of Nynorsk) and the Bergen International Festival), about a small flock of people searching around for connections and a sense of belonging in a charged landscape between life and death. Director and artistic director Eirik Stubø also showed an early interest in Fosse, and from time to time Jon and I staged these other productions, Natta syng sine songar (Nightsongs), about a young family headed towards tragedy, with him at Rogaland Teater in 1997. At the

same time, some of the actors who had worked with us on our productions wanted more. In 1994/95, Bjørn Willberg Andersen, who had been part of And We’ll Never Be Parted , asked if Jon could write a text for him that in some way thematised a rock musician. This became Gitarmannen (The Guitar Man), which at the time was not brought to the stage. Another Fosse actor (first in The Child at Nationaltheatret), Andrine Sæter, also played a fairly important role for a few years. She mastered Jon’s characters and texts in such a subtle, strong, moving and precise way that Jon began writing texts with her in mind.

An example is Kjærleiken ser (Love Sees) (which I received in the summer of 1999). A kind of semi-abstract love story (a man and a woman are both present and absent to each other in their mutual potential relationship) which has never been staged. And it would probably have been utterly forgotten – had I not fairly systematically over the years archived virtually everything Jon ever gave me. I for one had forgotten about this text (and after a while Jon had given up archiving properly parts of what he wrote). When I showed him the manuscript again after almost 25 years – he was really surprised. But I came with more than just Love Sees to my meeting with Jon at our regular cafe in Oslo in 2022, I had a total of five unstaged plays. I had started going through my archives more carefully. Jon could only remember one of these five with any clarity, and that one was a Hertervig piece (1996). About the old painter Hertervig who looks back on key moments in his life (Quaker meetings, artist calling, education, breakdown etc.), of which nothing came in Stavanger. A third play is to some degree based on imagined scenes in the life of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1996), and Hundeeigaren (The Dog Owner) – about a house meeting with various residents in a small apartment complex. And, finally, Gåvene (The Gifts) (1996), about a mature couple who exchange letters and finally meet to try and see if they can make a relationship work between them. In other words, a huge amount just in 1996.

18 July 1996

Dear Kai,

Thanks for your letter. I hope you had a good time in Poland, and most recently in France.

I am sending you yet another play.

But first, perhaps another word on The Gifts . I suppose I agree with you that it isn’t a very good text, in a way we can let banalities be banalities, and besides, I suppose we can see a certain enthusiasm for dramatic contrivance in the text. I have written better, no doubt. If I were nonetheless to say something good about the text, it would have to be that a huge number of the best dramas in world literature actually are both a bit banal and a bit contrived, they are sort of a bit too much (seen as literature).

Therefore, I suspect (without knowing for sure, of course) that such a text would have worked well on stage, even though it is not very good when seen as literature.

Another way of looking at it is that what is good literature (when read) is also what works well on stage. I hope that’s true, but I am not sure.

Another thing is that I, when checking in with myself, am not that eager to have the text staged, and that and that [sic] should at least mean that the text isn’t that “important”, but of course one can ask, does everything need to be?

Still, I suppose my view is that we should leave the script alone for a while, and that neither one of us sends it on. And then we can see what happens with it, if it should be left alone or if I should return to it.

Now, to the enclosed script (…).

In other words, self-criticism on one piece, and then an enclosed new play!

How could it have turned out this way with these unstaged plays? Now, many may want to add: Well, it is not THAT unusual to have unstaged and unpublished texts by famous authors lying around

in lofts and basements. And not everything even a Nobel laureate author writes reaches the point of staging or publication. But it is nonetheless of interest that these plays exist, in “my” archive boxes at the National Library, written at about the time that Fosse became one of the world’s greatest playwrights. They can tell us something about his quest in both form and content, not to mention the intensity of his writing.

Nevertheless, from 1996 and into the 2000s, a number of new plays were staged, including at Nationaltheatret, DNS (where I directed Besøk (Visits) in 2000) and Rogaland teater (in addition to those I have mentioned that I directed myself at DNS, Nationaltheatret and Det Norske Teatret).

At the height of the Fossefall (“Waterfall”) period, he said himself that as a rule he wrote prose in the autumn and winter and plays in the spring and summer. At times, I could in fact receive several plays in the post only a few weeks apart. And he was always testing out formal devices, borrowing stories from his own prose, getting new commissions, trying to place more or less successful plays at alternative theatres etc.

Some of these plays Jon was satisfied with, others not. And I think in hindsight we can see that Jon himself wasn’t always necessarily right about which texts were the best or most usable. And as we have been able to discern, related to this burst of energy was also Jon’s tendency, if either of us had any objections to his texts, suggestions for rephrasing or reworking – to prefer to “throw out” the entire text!

He has given me a rough description of how he wrote at this time: He switched on his computer, looked at the white screen, then wrote a line … And then another, and then another … Really, that simple – I suppose it cannot be, but I think it is pretty close to the truth. And I think the “theatrical” and “performative” aspects of Jon Fosse’s playwriting are linked to this working method and approach. And then his logic became that there wasn’t much point in continuing to work with and revisit a text. At that point, he would rather throw it out. However, this raises some interesting questions. Were Jon and/ or I wrong in our decisions (of which of course there were many after a

while)? Or were we right? I am fairly certain of the latter. Of the five “dead” plays, I suppose it is perhaps the Bernhard text and the love duet that I now think have the most substance. Can any of these five plays be staged? Yes and no. But equally – here there is ample opportunity to read and research. And inside the archive boxes from me, and in the computers that are there in my archive, are cover letters, emails, comments etc. – which can help create a context and space for reflection around these unstaged texts, along with a large number of the ones that were actually staged. When linking this again to Fosse’s own archive at the National Library, together with other sources (various private and institutional archives), the puzzle can become quite interesting. And since Jon is a master at writing letters and emails: here is a lot of fantastic material for whoever wants to examine one of the most unique and delightful oeuvres of our day.

III

The turn of the millennium saw my role, and my archive, gradually fade a bit into the background. There were many reasons for this. During these years, Jon had his definitive and huge international breakthrough, which required a lot of him, there were entire years of work that went into simply managing his participation in the various stagings and projects around the world. In addition to him almost constantly continuing to write.

Since 1996, various Fosse productions had started to appear at smaller theatres around Europe. And Jon and I travelled to and saw many of them. In 1999, however, a sudden change occurred regarding attention from a major theatre scene beyond our borders. Someone is Going to Come, directed by Claude Régys at Théâtre Nanterre Amandiers in Paris, received a huge amount of intense attention. Just a few months later, Thomas Ostermeier had a German-language world premiere of The Name at the Salzburg Festival, produced by Schaubühne in Berlin. I saw them both. With the French and German productions, Fosse had undoubtedly achieved world fame. And in the next few years, the number of productions exploded. Hundreds. Foreign directors and theatres, publishers and agents were

scuffling for their part of the “Fosse pie”. Naturally, more of his correspondence, his manuscripts, his thoughts and opinions were now turned in this direction. Eventually, I also became busy with other things besides staging. And over time, I began to view this intense and increasing determination among many to be part of Fosse’s ascent to the heights of theatrical fame, this “industry”, at some distance. However, we continued to have a lot of contact, collaborations and world premieres (2007 Rambuku + 2014 Ocean). Though with less intensity than in the period from 1993 to 2001.

4 December 2001: (…)

I have been to Munich and seen Dream of Autumn at Münchner Kammerspiele, it’s one of the best versions so far, (…)

1 July 2002:

Dear Kai,

I also had good days in both Bonn and Berlin. It was very interesting to be part of the read-through at Schaubühne (they have their own large rehearsal rooms close to Tegel Airport), the actors are really good, and Ostermeier has made changes to the stage set in the play, the three paintings, and also omitted the text related to that. Everything seems to work well. (…)

18 September 2003:

Dear Kai,

Today I am seeing things a bit more from the bright side, so maybe I can manage to write something for Riksteatret [National Travelling Theatre], after all! Let’s talk about it, in a way everything is working well the way it is, that I write piece after piece, and if I stop, I stop, right? The thing about Det Norske can be there anyway, but maybe further ahead? Why don’t you have a think about it too, from your point of view.

And let’s drink a little (ahem) beer and talk about this and get together when we have a chance.

Best wishes, Jon

25 January 2005:

Dear Kai,

Hope you’re living well!

I am sending you a piece I have written for Deutsches Theater, Berlin, the world premiere will be there (according to the plan, if they want the piece! It has just been translated to German), there is no Norwegian production being planned. (…)

23 January 2008: Dear Kai, (…)

I have tried for a while to write drama, but it’s been hard going, and I am now working on some prose, so far it’s going pretty well. As I’ve said before, I’ve imagined for a long time now that this is how it would end. But versions and translations of plays I will write, as long as anyone wants me to do so. (…)

When considering the thirty-plus plays he wrote between 1993 and 2007, there are some tendencies I will try to point to.

The 1993 play Someone is Going to Come was the beginning, and it captures many of the devices that would later be used. This is where it all begins. Following this, And We’ll Never Be Parted from 1994 is more monologue-driven, and in some ways linked more closely to his prose texts. In these two plays, it is fairly evident how his extensive reading of realist and modernist literature over many years (particularly Beckett – who himself stood in this tension) inspires him to search for different forms of literary entry points to performativity. He challenges our common perceptions of drama: the distinction between inner monologue

and external dialogue is blurred, itself driving the content. The statements are testing and probing, at once introspective and outwardlooking. It is not the external, potential renewal of form and experimentation that drive him, but rather unique attempts at unifying form and expression – between the mundane and what borders on the prosaic –and the space this can open up for tactile metaphysical overruns.

The Name, from 1995, brought an important shift, towards what Jon and I referred to as the “sitting room pieces” (they often take place in a sitting room – almost as in any naturalistic piece), perhaps more conventional in form, but many among the very, very best he has ever written for theatre. He became an enthusiastic reader of classic and modern drama, and some (e.g. Tennessee Williams, Thomas Bernhard, Lars Norén, Ibsen and Shakespeare) influence him to become profoundly concerned with the situation of the stage action, the fundamental potential of the moment. Classic issues connected to space and time come into play through ritualised everyday musical scores. Collisions arise between the mundane and the potentially metaphysical. The family as arena and universe. Small islands of condensed presence.

As I see it, Dream of Autumn from 1999 marked a new kind of turning point (which he had experimented with to some degree in the preceding years). At this point, he again begins gradually to work with systematic abstractions in time and space, and they often occur outdoors, in several places, gradually in nearly placeless universes. It is as if he is trying to find his way back to his dramatic starting point –stream of consciousness meets dialogue with the other as somewhat of a fateful, ritualistic disappearance. The poetics of absence and presence. His texts and characters move into the zones between life and death, with varying degrees of “realism” in their expression.

It seems to me that in the years up to around 2007, Jon wrote himself gradually into somewhat of a theatrical emptiness, in which his characters are neither dead nor alive, they find themselves in more of a noncommittal state of limbo. Perhaps his work became more lyrical, almost symbolistic, and as I see it, his characters’ relationships became less filled with situational necessity and agency.

Gradually, and with time more suddenly, we reached the point

he has warned us of for a long time, at which Jon stopped writing new plays. At one point he believed that Ocean , originally written in 2006/2007 for the American experimental director Robert Wilson and the Bergen International Festival/Det Norske Teatret (a play that I, for various reasons, would bring to world premiere as late as 2014) – would be his last. After this, more than 10 years would pass before Jon once again began to write drama. Since his “resurrection”, which perhaps did not come as any surprise, at least not to me, as of January 2024, he has written five new plays in the last four years or so.

However, throughout all those years that he thought he had stopped writing plays, he and I remained close. And to some degree, we continue to collaborate to this day. We usually meet a few times a year, and we email each other regularly. He always keeps me fairly up to date when it comes to important things in his life and what he is working on (whether it be prose, versions of pieces, translations or reworkings etc.). But between 2006/7 and about 2020, an extended period occurred in which most of his creative attention was turned to prose: this was when he wrote Trilogien (Trilogy) and Septologien (Septology).

Why have I given up all this material, this archive, to the National Library? Well, I suppose it is partly because this collaboration between Jon and myself could not have happened were it not for the public funding of the cultural sector in Norway. In a sense, I believe the material belongs to the public. And I have no desire in any way to protect or capitalise on it. All this has filled my life with enormous creative satisfaction, curiosity, fear, grief, happiness, wistfulness, longing and ecstasy. It has been a great privilege to, for so many years, spend my days writing and in the rehearsal room with these unique figures of his. They feel like family to me. Which is also a point, that since both Jon and I are still around, the existing archives should be transferred now, while we are present and can explain connections, consequences and references. I also hope that to some degree I can assist present and future researchers and others who are interested, not to mention perhaps young authors and directors, who are interested in examining some of the multifaceted connections around Jon Fosse’s

remarkable development as a playwright. This is Norwegian and particularly European theatre history of great significance. And now, it is also Nobel Prize history.

Manuscripts and Archival sources

Oslo, National Library of Norway

Private archive 16 Kai Johnsen/Jon Fosse: Papers and digitally created material related to collaborative projects, National Library of Norway.

Works cited

Enger, Ruth Krefting. 1994. “Drømmekvinnen”. Aftenposten, 7 March. Fosse, Jon. 1985. Stengd gitar. Samlaget.

Johnsen, Kai. 1991. “Prosjektteater – en simultan og likestilt dramaturgi”. In Regikunst, edited by Helge Reistad, 243–266. Tell Forlag.

Straume, Eilif. 1995. “Et taushetens tyranni”. Aftenposten, 29 May.

8. Manipulative Desire: A Reading of Someone is Going to Come

Frode Helmich Pedersen

In the early 1990s, Jon Fosse was something of an insider’s tip within the Norwegian literary establishment. In addition to a handful of novels, he had written a few volumes of poetry and a collection of essays. In the Nobel Prize lecture he delivered in December 2023, Fosse stated that his career as a dramatist was a coincidence. In 1992, he was offered money (by the Norwegian stage director Kai Johnsen) to write the opening of a play and ended up writing an entire dramatic work, which he finished in 1993. He titled the work Nokon kjem til å komme (Someone is Going to Come) and, according to Fosse himself, the play is currently the most frequently staged of his entire production. His first play to be performed, however, was the second play he wrote, Og aldri skal vi skiljast (And We’ll Never Be Parted ), which premiered at Den Nationale Scene (The National Stage) in Bergen. A further play of Fosse’s, Namnet (The Name), was staged at the same theatre in 1995, while his first-written play – which to my mind is still his best – was only the third to be performed, at Det Norske Teateret (Norwegian Theatre) in Oslo, which specialises in productions of works written in Nynorsk (New Norwegian).

In all three plays, Fosse employs a technique which is recognisable to readers of his novels, the use of chanting repetitions of various themes, lending a lyrical quality to his dramatic dialogue. It seems reasonable to assume that this technique significantly contributes to

what the Nobel Committee identified as the great achievement of his writings: the ability to give “voice to the unsayable”. This can be understood as his literary language’s capacity to capture in words what seems to lie beyond their reach but which we can still somehow apprehend or intuit.1 Thematically, his early dramas express an existential anxiety that seems inherent to his writing and must therefore be connected to what he himself calls “that secret place within me”, which is the wellspring of his literary creativity. His dramatic writings are generally characterised by minimal action, with few characters, who are ordinary rather than exceptional people grappling with universal conflicts about love, jealousy, loneliness, alienation and intimations of death. In Fosse’s world, trivial events are typically tinged with a sense of the fateful and momentous. His dramatic form seems to balance between hyperrealism and the theatre of the absurd, between social drama and the dream play. The common denominator is a distinctly West-Norwegian social culture, where spoken words are often sparse and loaded with understatement. These characteristics make Fosse’s plays easy to read but difficult to fully comprehend. In contrast to the plays of Samuel Beckett, the dialogue in Fosse’s plays can be read as real exchanges between real people, and the action takes place in a familiar environment – at least in the early plays. At the same time, the chanting quality of the repetitions, the endless variations on a limited number of themes and subjects, and the monologic quality of the text, makes us alert to the fact that Fosse’s world is not our own. This suggests that the dialogue may not be real, not even within the play’s literary universe, and that the characters may not always exist on the same plane of reality. To put it in literary terms, one might say that we are, faced with Fosse’s plays, unsure whether to read them as realism, as symbolism, as poetry, as veiled monologues or as sermons. There is, in other words, a fundamental sense of uncertainty in Fosse’s dramatic literature, which makes us suspect that they are set in a world that lies

1 The Nobel Committee’s decision is available online here: https://www.nobelprize.org/ prizes/literature/2023/fosse/facts/

somewhere between our own and a ghostly or transcendent sphere beyond time and space.

While the sense of the otherworldly dominates in plays like And We’ll Never be Parted and I am the Wind , other Fosse-plays, like The Name and Someone is Going to Come , can be interpreted more or less within a realistic framework. They can be labelled relational plays, since they explore human relationships, especially between would-be lovers ridden with jealousy and an inability to communicate their emotional needs. But even if the reader is justified in the belief that the characters in these plays may be understood as real people, a realistic reading is necessarily challenged by what we could perhaps call the “writerly” quality of the text. 2 The lyrical quality of the dialogue forces us to notice that there is a writer’s hand behind everything that is uttered in the plays, and that this is literature, not reality.

Nevertheless, I suggest that we read Someone is Going to Come mainly as a realistic play, in the broad sense that we view the characters as if they were real people with individual psychologies and a personal history, who inhabit a world much like our own. On the question of how one should understand the strangeness of Fosse’s dialogue, I suggest that we view it as an artistic device that gives multiple layers of meaning to the play’s exchanges. Through repetitions and variations, everyday utterances retain their pragmatic meaning while at the same time pointing to a deeper level of significance or a productive ambivalence. Consider, for instance, the line “soon he will come home” uttered by the lonely woman longing for her man in And We’ll Never be Parted . The way the line is presented, it expresses both an expectation that the man will soon come home and the denial that this could ever happen. It also seems to mean something in the way of “the fact that he will never come home again is the greatest sorrow of my life”. A similar effect is achieved in the title of the play. “And We’ll Never be Parted” contains both the literal meaning and its opposite (we will forever be separated),

2 The term “writerly” was coined by Roland Barthes in his book S/Z (1970) and refers to self-consciously literary works characterised by a stylised use of language.

while also suggesting a third meaning: You will forever be a part of me. As we can see, Fosse’s language tends to retain multiple and sometimes opposite meanings at the same time, partly depending on the perspective of the interpreter. To use an example from Someone is Going to Come, if the utterance “no one is going to come” can also mean that “someone is (inevitably) going to come” and maybe also something in the way of “deep down, I wish that someone will come”, the interpreter is faced with a complex interplay of meanings that calls for a close reading of the play, which is what I propose to present in this contribution.

A play about ambivalence

Someone in Going to Come achieves its aesthetic eminence through its ability to sustain several conflicting interpretations as the action unfolds, without decisively supporting one possibility over another. One could say that the play encourages the reader’s (or theatre-goer’s) interpretative curiosity, keeping us guessing as to what is really going on between the two lovers and their curiously insistent neighbour. The play is an archetypical Fosse-drama, with few characters, a minimalistic setting (a house, a garden, the sea) and a stripped-down action. The characters are generalised by being called “he”, “she” and “the man” (I will refer to the latter as “the neighbour” for clarity’s sake) and they appear to be ordinary rather than exceptional people. They exist in a sphere where the most fundamental existential questions seem to reside in the most mundane comments or objects. The couple seems to be always on the brink of a crisis, threatened by love-loss, jealousy, anxiety, alienation, loneliness and dangerous desire. The play’s action thus achieves a dreamlike quality while at the same time having a realistic feel to it, not least because it is set in a physical environment which is typical of the West-Norwegian landscape, with its fjords, “weatherbeaten” houses and gardens situated on steep slopes that run directly down to the sea (p. 11). 3

3 The page numbers refer to the English edition of Fosse’s early plays, Plays one (2002). The translation of Someone is Going to Come is by Gregory Motton. In the cases where I refer to Fosse’s original text, I use the edition Teaterstykke 1 (Fosse 1999).

At the beginning of the play, we meet the couple, a man and a woman, who arrive at an old “somewhat dilapidated” house “desolately situated” on the ledge of a slope near the sea (p. 11). They have recently bought the property, which they now intend to make their new home. There is a significant age disparity between them: The man is in his fifties, the woman around thirty. The introductory stage direction supports a realistic reading in the sense that it gives the characters specific individual features: He is described as “slightly rotund, with grey somewhat overlong hair, shifty eyes and slow movements”. She, on the other hand, is “quite tall, rather heavily built, medium length hair, large eyes and slightly childish movements” (p. 11). They arrive at the garden hand in hand, like Adam and Eve, with an expressed wish to live in isolation from others and to “rest in each other” as they repeatedly put it. In previous commentary on the play, this has been referred to as a state of ‘symbiosis’, which the lovers are trying to achieve. 4 It doesn’t take long, however, before their plan of seeking solitude is thwarted. A man, the former owner of the house, shows up in the garden and strikes up a conversation with the woman, who is at this moment sitting alone on a bench. When her partner comes back and sees them together, he is stricken with jealousy. Later, when the couple is inspecting their new home, they discover that it is already invaded, as it were, by foreign elements: Pictures of the neighbour and his grandmother still adorn the walls, and as if that weren’t enough, they discover an unemptied chamber pot in the bedroom previously occupied by the neighbour’s deceased grandmother. The feeling that their twosomeness is being impinged upon is exacerbated by their suddenly catching a glimpse of the neighbour in the garden and his subsequent knocking on the door. They are unable to abstain from answering, but the man refuses to socialise with the visitor, choosing instead to withdraw into the living room, where he lies down on the couch in a foetal position, seemingly crippled with jealousy. The woman shows the neighbour into the kitchen, where she lets him drink his beer (without

4 See for instance Hadle Oftedal Andersen (2004, 24).

having any herself) and talk flirtingly to her. Although her responses are sparse, she accepts his phone number when he hands it to her and thereby consciously establishes a connection with the world beyond the supposed state of ‘symbiosis’ with her partner.

Short overview of previous commentary

Before presenting my own view on how the play should be read, I will give a brief overview of the existing commentary on the work. According to the Swedish critic Leif Zern, the couple initially believes that they have found a place outside time and space, before gradually being forced to realise that this seemingly nameless locality is invaded by both the past and premonitions about the future (Zern 2005, 26). They are unable to let go of their forebodings of what may yet come to pass and therefore fail to establish a stable present. In her book on Fosse, the Norwegian editor and Fosse-critic Cecilie Seiness contends that the couple seems to have “fled from the world of man” (Seiness 2009, 138). They have arrived at the place of their dreams but cannot get rid of the anxious expectation that someone will show up and ruin their solitude. Hadle Oftedal Andersen writes in his interpretation of Fosse’s play that the couple moves away from other people because “they need the frozen moment in order to be able to experience their symbiosis” (Andersen 2004, 23). According to Andersen, they do this because there is something inside themselves that threatens their symbiosis. Had this not been the case, there would have been no need to establish themselves in the isolated old house by the coast, which according to Andersen functions as a symbol of their ‘symbiosis’. All three interpretations share the assumption that the couple are in agreement about the project of establishing a relationship in isolation from others. They also share the contention that there is something within the couple itself that stands in the way of the realisation of the project. In Zern’s view, the couple is disturbed by a kind of compulsive obsession about the possibility that someone will come and ruin their harmonious twosomeness. It is as if they keep saying to themselves and to each other: “Someone is bound to come; we just know it.” Since they are unable to rid themselves of this obsession, they are also

unable to achieve peace in their new home. Seiness explicitly names the source of the couple’s unease, which she calls angst in Norwegian (Seiness 2009, 123). This is supported by the play’s text, where both the man and the woman at various points state that they are “afraid” or “scared”. Andersen prefers to let the inner threat to the ‘symbiosis’ remain unnamed. Instead, he uses hints in the dialogue to construct a minimal narrative about the couple’s past, which can be used to explain their present ailments. Before they arrived at the house, Andersen writes, the man was the one who had strayed towards others, making the woman jealous (Andersen 2004, 24). In the play’s present the imbalance has shifted, perhaps because of his advancing age, so that he is now the one who jealously fears an intrusion by another man who may replace him at the woman’s side. Like other commentators of the play, Andersen presupposes that the couple has a shared intention of seeking isolation from others in order to secure the quiet flowering of their relationship. If we view the characters as if they were real people, it is hard to escape the conclusion that this presumed intention does not testify to a healthy relationship. If you have to remove yourself from everyone else in order to remain a stable couple, there must be something seriously wrong. Any reader of the play would therefore be wise to assume that the relationship we are presented with is, even at the outset, a destructive or unhealthy one. This assumption, in turn, makes it prudent to ask whether the intention of seeking an isolated state of ‘symbiosis’ is indeed a shared project between them.

Three ways of reading the play

Teaching Someone is Going to Come through the years, my experience has been that there are mainly three possible interpretations of the play, which can all be characterised as realistic in the broad sense of the term. 5 The three interpretations are, strictly speaking, mutually

5 As noted earlier, other ways of reading the play (symbolic, allegorical, religious, metaphysical) are also possible. Other realistic readings are also conceivable, but I suspect that such readings would be subsumable under one of the three main categories of readings suggested here.

exclusive but are nevertheless all supported by the text, to varying degrees, throughout the play. In my assessment, the literary richness of the play hinges precisely on its ability to sustain all of these interpretations without confirming any single one of them in a decisive manner. I will first briefly explain the basic assumptions of each of the three possible readings, before going on to show how they work in specific sequences of the play.

The first way of reading the play is, in my experience, the most intuitive, in that it seems to present itself most naturally to first-time readers. This reading also broadly corresponds to the commentary that we have just looked at. Its basic tenet is that the man and the woman have a shared project of seeking solitude in order to devote themselves to their love. This project is disturbed first by the anxiety that someone could appear and intrude upon them, and subsequently by the actual intrusion in the form of the importunate neighbour. There is a fatalistic feel to this development: What the couple feared would happen, comes true, as if by fateful necessity. The anxiety inherent in this turn of events may help to explain why the couple seems so inept at dealing with the situation after the neighbour has introduced himself. After all, the situation can – in itself – hardly be viewed as very sinister or out of the ordinary. The couple are inept at handling the presence of the neighbour because of their nervous anticipation that someone was bound to come, which makes them inclined to read fateful consequences into trivial phenomena. In this interpretation of the play, the couple’s ‘symbiosis’ is disrupted primarily because of the ageing man’s morbid jealousy, which makes him infer wicked motives from the (innocent) behaviour of the woman. In this reading, the play is seen as a phenomenological study of how jealousy works and how it tends to develop into a kind of mental sickness, always looking to confirm its own suspicions. The second interpretation becomes more evident after a careful re-reading of the play. The basic idea is here that the man’s jealousy is justified in the sense that the woman is, in fact, subtly but actively seeking to establish a connection with the neighbour. In this interpretation, the play is read in sympathy, as it were, with the jealous gaze. When the play is read though these lenses, the interpreter uncovers

numerous indications that the woman does not, or at least not entirely, share the man’s desire to live in isolation from others. Consequently, she seeks to escape their ‘symbiosis’ at the first opportunity. This view is supported among other things by the age difference between them and the fact that the neighbour is closer to the woman in age. In this interpretation, the play is about the younger woman’s yearning for freedom and the older man’s jealous need to possess and control his partner. Reading the play in this manner highlights the woman’s ambivalent attitude towards the plan of moving to an isolated place. On the one hand, she wants to be devoted to her partner and has agreed to go through with the project. On the other, she harbours serious doubts about whether the plan corresponds to her real feelings, wishes and desires.

The literary richness of Fosse’s play cannot, in my view, be fully appreciated without considering a third interpretation within the same generally realistic framework. This interpretation sees the psychology of the man in a different light compared with the two previous readings. We see him now as a kind of director of the entire action, which he is constantly manipulating in accordance with his own fantasies and desires, which involves playing the cuckold and a pathological motherfixation. In this reading, the man is in fact successfully controlling the woman throughout the play, making her talk and behave in a manner that fits the gratification he experiences by the idea of having an unfaithful or promiscuous wife. Understood in this way, the man has achieved all his aims at the end of the play, when he is lying on the couch in the foetal position, apparently feasting on his fantasies of being a cuckold and revelling in a sexually charged mother-fixation. In this interpretation, the play is about manipulation or gaslighting, where the man is constantly seeking to orchestrate the events in a way that confirms and exacerbates his jealousy and thereby (partly, at least) succeeds in persuading the woman that she is, in fact, looking to flirt with the neighbour, who does not otherwise give the impression of being a rake. As I will argue in the analyses below, there are two alternatives to the third reading. In the first, the woman is viewed as oppressed and tyrannised by her partner and therefore confused and

uncertain as to what is expected of her. In the second alternative, she is consciously and actively participating in the role-playing game initiated by the man, which seems to be always unfolding according to the same pattern. In the remainder of this contribution, I will demonstrate how these interpretative possibilities are in play, to varying degrees, throughout the dramatic action.

Act I: Someone is bound to come

The first scene takes place as the couple approaches the “desolately situated” house they intend to make their home. From where they stand, they can see the house, part of the garden and the sea. As we have seen, the man is described as slightly rotund and shifty eyed, with slow movements, whereas the woman has large eyes and childish gestures. Their first lines reflect these character traits: She seems cheerful, perhaps forcedly so, and rather talkative. He is, in contrast, more heavily assertive: “You and I alone”, (p. 11) he declares in his second line, and the reader senses the weight of the statement. His next line follows up the point: “And then no-one is going to come” (p. 11). 6 But even as the assertion may sound definitive at the level of the play’s action, it is immediately subject to dramatic irony, since the reader (or audiencemember) knows from the play’s title that someone will come. This is reflected in the addition of the narrativising word “then” in the utterance, indicating a future event while at the same time stating a nonevent.

Still, the man’s early utterances seem to create a common sense of reality and purpose for the couple. Here, at the outset of the play, it looks as though both of them dream of living a life in isolation from others. The woman repeatedly confirms the man’s assertions, albeit with a somewhat less gloomy perspective. Her expressions are: “alone together” and “alone in each other” (p. 12). In other words: She highlights their fellowship, whereas he emphasises their isolation.

6 In his translation, Greory Motton omits the crucial word “then” in this line, giving us only “And no-one is going to come” (Fosse 2002, 11).

Still, it is the woman who strikes the first tone of discord between them when she comments that the house is not entirely what she expected it to be. It is “slightly different”, she feels (p. 12). And soon after she has uttered this discrepancy between reality and the imagined scenario, the thought that the isolation will be intruded upon, arises. She has the feeling, she says, that “someone is going to come” (p. 12). The question is how we should understand the woman’s premonition at this early stage of the dramatic action. The three readings would each give a different answer: She could here be expressing her dread at this eventuality or her secret longing for it. Alternatively, she could be experiencing ambivalence, both dreading and longing for an intrusion. I would argue that all three interpretations remain possible after repeated readings of the play – and that they remain so even if we consider them mutually exclusive. Each interpretation gives a different understanding of what is going on in the play. The three possibilities may be viewed as three different layers of the text, or three different angles along which to approach it, as in a parallax phenomenon. 7 My main claim is that all three readings come into play simultaneously throughout the drama, creating a tense and rich experience of the text, whether it is performed on stage or encountered by a solitary reader. If we take the position of the first reading, which assumes that the woman and the man are both committed to the idea of isolating themselves from others, we would be inclined to emphasise the woman’s feeling of dread at the thought that someone is going to come. This premonition works as a natural build-up to the reader’s sense that the first meeting with the neighbour (at the beginning of the second act) is pregnant with disaster. Adopting, instead, the perspective of the second interpretation, which assumes that the woman is, at least on some level, looking for a way to escape the ‘symbiosis’, the woman’s remark about a possible disturbance is construed as an expression of a wish, which may be partly or wholly repressed. This will lead to a different

7 The point of such phenomena is that the object seems to change when the perspective is changed.

view of the meeting with the neighbour, because he now represents a possible way out of what she may experience as a suffocating entanglement with her man. Finally, if we opt for the third way of reading the play, we would be in a better position to grasp the combination of the woman’s conflicting inclinations, that is, her constant ambivalence between dread and anticipation. At the beginning of the play, it seems most plausible to assume that her ambivalence is the result of the man’s manipulative way of speaking, which we will have a closer look at presently. In other words, what we are witnessing at the outset of the play is, according to the third interpretation, a woman who has been brought into a state of nervous confusion and who is therefore unsure what separates her own wishes from those of her partner.

Let us take a closer look at the dynamic between the man and the woman in the play’s first act. We have seen how the woman has struck a tone of discord by commenting that the house differs somewhat from how she had imagined it. She then points out that “it is so isolated here/ that someone is going to come”. The man doesn’t react to these remarks but keeps looking at the house “as if in his own thoughts”. The woman goes on to paint a dramatic picture of the house in the autumn, surrounded by darkness, howling winds and crashing waves. And then she says: “imagine how cold it will be in the house/ when the wind goes right through the walls/ and think how far it is from people/ how dark it is”. This utterance can hardly be viewed as anything but a clear reservation on the woman’s part about whether they should move into the house at all. She is, in other words, clearly making objections to a project to which she does not feel fully committed. This sequence, then, is best understood in light of the second interpretation, which takes the view that the woman is not really, or at least not in the same way as the man, looking to establish a symbiosis away from “everyone else”. It does not seem plausible that the man fails to perceive these reservations. Nevertheless, he responds as if the woman has merely restated their common dream of living in complete isolation. Her long line about the house in autumn ends with the comment: “so far from people”, and there can be no doubt that she means this in a negative sense (p. 13). The man responds as if the opposite were true: “Yes, so

far from people. (Pause.) Now we are alone at last”. He continues in this vein, stating that they have moved away “from everyone else”; that “we just wanted to be/ alone with each other”; that “[t]here’s only us here”; that “no-one is going to come”; that “we are alone” and that “[n]o-one is coming”. In other words, he is both asserting the fact that they are alone, that they will be alone in the future, and that this is in accordance with their wishes.

What is the man trying to achieve by this manner of speaking? If we read the exchange through the lens of the first interpretation, we would assume that he is trying to reassure both himself and the woman that they are exactly where they wanted to be and that everything is going according to plan. His repeated insistence that no one is there, and that no one is going to come, may be read both as an expression of his fear that the opposite may turn out to be the case, and as an attempt to forestall the inevitable and try to force, or charm, as it were, reality to unfold according to his wishes. This view is supported by his rhetoric, which resembles an invocation and seems as much directed to the universe in general, or to himself, as to the woman. Opting instead for the second interpretation, one immediately becomes aware of the manipulative character of the man’s speech. He is constantly suggesting that his wishes are identical with the woman’s and his assertive manner is apparently aimed at conjuring up a common reality for them both. The woman raises several guarded objections to his assertions. We have seen how she has uttered reservations about the desolation of their new home. When the man reasserts the wish for complete isolation, she raises two concerns: First, she asks whether this kind of isolation is at all possible, and then if it might not be dangerous. He answers with a counter-objection: “But we wanted to be by ourselves”. We notice that he is not only asserting his own needs and wishes, but hers too, making his speech manipulative. He also gives her a reason why they need to stay isolated: “the others […] draw us apart” (p. 14). Again, she raises objections: “But will we be left

alone? […] Someone is here. Someone is going to come” (p. 15). 8

According to the stage direction, she says the latter two lines “despairingly”, while he answers “calmly”: “We are the only ones here […] There is no one here”, and yet again: “no one is going to come”. In light of the second interpretation, the main point of this exchange, from the perspective of the man, is to manipulate the woman into thinking that she agrees with his plan of living in isolation, thereby protecting himself both against his own easily stirred jealousy and the possibility that she is drawn to someone else.

How would this exchange look if we take the view of the third interpretation? The man’s speech would still be manipulative but with a different aim compared to what we have just looked at. In the second interpretation, the man aims at agreement with respect to how they should live their life together. In the third, he is more concerned with keeping the woman confused and bewildered both as to what is going to happen, and what his real wishes are. In light of this interpretation the man’s repeated proclamations that “no-one is going to come” is a constant reminder to her that the opposite is true: someone is going to come. And when that happens – so his suggestion goes – it will affect them both in serious ways.9 At this early stage, this is just a veiled suggestion, and the woman is clearly in a state of apprehensive confusion.

One of the man’s lines deserves particular attention in this regard. After the woman has asked whether they will be left alone, he answers “calmly” by directing her attention to the sea and tells her to notice how beautiful it is, how the surf is constantly breaking against the rocks, how the waves keep rolling and rolling and how the ocean stretches far beyond their view. This not only counteracts her earlier description of the house surrounded by autumnal darkness and the

8 Motton’s translation has “But can we be alone” in the first of the woman’s two lines, which misses the original’s sense that this is not up to them.

9 One may note here that the use of the pronoun “no one” to mean an unknown “someone” is often used in Fosse’s poetry, which in the 1990s was dominated by the negative metaphysics of literary modernism.

rough sea in stormy weather but also seems to be a kind of tranceinducing oration, lulling her into a dreamlike state, before he abruptly breaks off. “And there”, he says suddenly, adding an affirmative “Yes” twice before looking at her. She responds by looking down. According to the stage direction, she looks “small and afraid” (p. 16). It looks as if he has deliberately frightened her by first inducing her into a state of dreamy calmness and then by enacting a disturbance by his sudden indication that someone or something is actually coming, before going back to his eerily reassuring mode: “No one is coming”.

In light of the third interpretation, the man is in this sequence deliberately trying to control the woman’s state of mind, making her sway to his words and his mood as they unfold, always ensuring that he is master of the situation, even as he gradually, as we shall see, manoeuvres himself into the seemingly subordinate position of the spurned lover. As mentioned earlier, there are two different options within this reading: In the first, the woman is simply being manipulated without being aware of what the man is up to. In the second, she is fully aware of the game they are playing and participates in it even if – at times – it makes her uneasy. In the sequence we have been discussing, the first option seems the most explanatory.

In the exchanges that come immediately after the one we have just looked at, the man repeatedly restates their desired isolation from everyone else. The woman responds by once again expressing her unease at the whole scenario. He sits down on “an old, rotten bench which has been put up against the wall of the house”, while she remains standing (p. 19). She now articulates what she has apparently been thinking the entire time, namely that someone has already come, or will come very soon. Ignoring these remarks, the man goes on in his usual, incantatory manner: “We are alone together”, “No one else will be here”, before telling her to sit down next to him. She nods but remains standing and keeps insisting that someone is already present. At this point, she seems genuinely distraught at the thought that someone will disturb their solitude, which supports an interpretation which assumes that she shares her partner’s desire for isolation. This understanding appears to be corroborated in the exchange that follows,

where the woman becomes more and more despairingly insistent that someone will come and “knock and knock on the door”, and ends up accusing her man of secretly wanting this to happen (p. 21–22). He asks, for the first time, who is going to come, before returning to his usual incantations about how no one will come. She tells him that it is going to be a woman and that she is going to look into his eyes and that this is something that she could not bear (p. 22–23).

This situation seems to fit well with Andersen’s surmise that in their previous life, the man is the one who was drawn towards others and that the woman has therefore the most reason to be jealous and to seek solitude. This would be in line with the first interpretation, assuming that the man agrees with the idea of “moving away from everyone else”. The second alternative would be to suggest that the woman has, in this moment, at least temporarily, succumbed to the man’s manipulation to the extent that she is identifying with his jealousy. She sees the world as he sees it, that is, as a place filled with potential disasters for their would-be monogamous relationship. Alternatively, she could be projecting her own secret wishes onto him in order to be able to express them at all.

Adopting the view of the third interpretation, the woman has reached a state of confusion with respect to how to regard her own reality. There are several indications that this could be the case. The woman feels that the place is both “desolate and not desolate at the same time”. She also states that she has a feeling that there is “someone here without there being someone here” (p. 21), which reinforces her feeling that the two of them will never be let alone (p. 22, p. 23). At the conclusion of Act I, it is as if they both lose control of their own suggestions, anxieties and premonitions about someone coming. They now seem to hear steps everywhere, inside the house and in the garden, and the man goes off to investigate whether someone is really there, leaving the woman alone on the bench.

Act II: The intruder

In the second act, the premonition in the play’s title comes true. With the arrival of the neighbour, the couple’s prospect of achieving their

isolated ‘symbiosis’ is ruined. The main question is how we are to understand this development. Are the lovers united in their rejection of the intruder? Is the woman moved into subtly welcoming the neighbour by her own secret desire? Or are we witnessing a kind of roleplaying game, where the neighbour is unwittingly used as a stooge in a play-within-the-play, where the man carefully stages a situation in which he can enjoy his fantasy of being made into a cuckold, and then, subsequently, a child comforted by a superior mother-figure?

The act opens with the neighbour appearing in front of the woman, who is now standing in the garden by herself. A conversation ensues. He informs her that he is the one who sold them the house, which has belonged to his family for generations and was the residence of his grandmother until she died a few years earlier. The stage direction describes him as a man in his late twenties, which makes him slightly younger than the woman, who is about thirty. He is further described as “a normal looking man” but also as “arrogant” and “somewhat boastful”, which is confirmed by the way he talks (p. 25). Their conversation gives a more realistic impression than the earlier exchanges between the man and the woman. The crucial point of the exchange is the neighbour’s suggestion that the two of them spend time together, which amounts to him introducing a flirt between them. While they talk, she takes a seat on the bench, and he sits down next to her. At the precise moment when her partner returns from his investigations, and sees them sitting together, she raises her head and looks at the neighbour. On seeing this, the man immediately withdraws and stays out of sight, while still being able to hear them talk, including the neighbour suggesting to the woman: “Perhaps we can keep each other company” (p. 28).

During this part of the exchange, the woman lifts her head toward the neighbour twice. The final time she does so, the stage direction informs us that she locks eyes with him. In other words, she behaves exactly as she has anticipated that a woman would upon encountering the man, which supports the view that she was, in the earlier situation, projecting her own wishes and desires onto him. We cannot assume that the man, who stands behind the corner, perceives

their glances, but he has certainly heard the neighbour’s flirtatious suggestion and seems uncertain about how to respond. First, we are told that he “starts to come forwards” but that he “prevents himself” (p. 28). After overhearing more of the conversation, he becomes increasingly troubled and then, “as it were, forces himself forwards” (p. 29). He walks into the garden in front of the bench, where he remains standing, looking down. The woman addresses him “nervously”, explaining who she is talking to. The neighbour gets up and walks briskly towards the man, as if to challenge him. He remains still, staring at the ground, remarking feebly that they have just arrived. After having remarked that the couple must need some time to accustom themselves, the neighbour leaves and says he will return later with something to drink. When he has left, the man sits down on the bench as far removed from the woman as possible. He then expresses his jealousy and accuses her of having encouraged the intruder’s advances. How are we to understand this situation? We can begin by exploring the possibility that the woman is, in fact, innocent of any amorous encouragement of the neighbour. Through her passive behaviour, she is politely rejecting the neighbour’s advances. In this way, she protects the ‘symbiosis’ against the neighbour’s intrusion. This view is supported by the impression that the neighbour is the one who is coming on to the woman and by his aggressive behaviour towards the man. It is corroborated by the fact that the woman’s conduct is well within the bounds of propriety. When looked at in this light, the main takeaway from the second act would be that the primary obstacle to the couple’s harmony is the man’s pathological jealousy, perhaps in combination with the couple’s shared anxiety that their love is already doomed. This reading fits well with the man’s increasingly despairing accusations against the woman (“it was a secret desire/ that you emitted” etc.) as well as his expressions of angry distain for the neighbour (“a blasted inbred”, “that creature” etc.).

The second possibility is that the woman is subtly, and perhaps partly unconsciously, encouraging the neighbour’s advances. This view is supported by the fact that she initiates contact with the neighbour by nodding to him and by lifting her face toward him three times,

vaguely echoing St Peter’s betrayal of Christ. The third time, she locks eyes with him, something she has herself only moments earlier described as unbearable when imagining herself in the position of the spurned lover. This possibility is further supported by the fact that she nods in agreement when the neighbour remarks that living in this place will be very lonely. She thereby invites him into her confidence (she has several times expressed anxiety about the loneliness of the place) in a way that doesn’t seem compatible with the assumption that she is trying her best to reject him. This is partly confirmed by her own statement, as she admits that she “liked him in one way” (p. 32). In this reading, the man’s jealousy is justified or at least understandable in the sense that the woman is, in fact, trying to establish a kind of relationship with the neighbour, betraying their supposed ‘symbiosis’ at the first opportunity. It is possible to take this view without castigating the woman as unfaithful or disloyal. She could here simply be seen as rejecting her lover’s unreasonable attempt to isolate her “from everyone else”.

The third possibility is that the man, as he stands impassive in the garden, emasculated by the neighbour’s challenging behaviour, is in fact enjoying himself. In this interpretation, the situation prompting the man’s jealousy is orchestrated by himself and the jealousy is a source of gratification to him, mixed with a sexually charged motherfixation. This view is supported by the fact that the man leaves the woman as soon as they perceive someone approaching, thereby setting the stage for an encounter between her and the intruder. It is further underpinned by the fact that the man postpones his confrontation with the neighbour, preferring to let the conversation develop into flirtatious territory before he makes his presence known.

During the confrontation between the jealous man and the woman, we become aware of a possible pattern that indicates that this is not the first time they have experienced this kind of situation. When the man accuses her of having emitted her secret desires to the neighbour, he adds “as you usually do”. He then works himself up with accusations and dejected gestures, ending up “pacing up and down the yard” in agitation. She has repeatedly told him that he scares her by

this behaviour but turns suddenly “calm and composed” and takes control of the exchange. “Calm down now”, she says, “No more now” (p. 34). She is now clearly taking a motherly tone towards him, telling him what to do and ignoring his protests: He doesn’t want to live in the house anymore, he says, but she tells him that they should go in and have a look at it. She comforts him: “everything is going to be fine” and puts her hands around him and rocks him gently, kissing him on the forehead, like one would a child, repeatedly telling him “you and I”, “You and me” etc.

This sequence is the first clear indication that the woman is consciously playing along with the game that the man has initiated, first inducing his jealousy, then letting him work himself up to a state of ecstatic agitation, before calming him down, taking him in her arms as if she were his mother. After they have concluded the sequence, they give the impression of starting over again on a new cycle, taking each other by the hand – like at the beginning of the play – as they walk towards the front door of the house (p. 36).

Acts III and IV: A house invaded

The impression that the couple is starting a new cycle of their role-playing pattern is confirmed at the opening of the third act. They are now inspecting their new home, and as the woman speaks enthusiastically about the kitchen furniture, she reverts to their earlier way of talking, giving the impression that the roles have shifted: She is the one insisting reassuringly on their isolation, while he remains apprehensive of the likelihood that someone will come. Just as she reiterates the phrase “No-one shall come”, the man breaks off: “There he is again” (p. 38). Motton’s translation of the stage direction tells us that he looks out of the window “anxiously”, but Fosse uses the more revealing Norwegian word “ivrig”, which means “eagerly”. The text contains, in other words, a clear suggestion that the man is eager to start playing the game all over again, i.e. to work himself up into a new state of heightened jealousy. When the woman, after a brief discussion about whether the neighbour can really be back so soon, offers to “go out and have a look”, the man immediately grasps the opportunity:

“Do you just want to meet him/ Don’t you want to be together/ with me” (p. 39). She tells him to “stop that”, and the stage direction informs us that she is “a bit afraid”. One should note here that the third possibility discussed above, where we assume that the man is directing the events according to his own desire, hinges on the premise that the stage direction need not be taken at face value. In other words, the woman is not necessarily really afraid, she may just act it to the benefit of the man’s gratification. We should also bear in mind that this third interpretation comes in two versions. In the first, the man is seen as manipulating the woman into a state of confusion, in the second, she is willingly playing along with his game. For the latter alternative to work, the stage direction must be read ironically.10

The last sequence of the third act revolves around a repeated knocking on the door. They do not answer it, but the man takes the opportunity to renew his accusations against the woman: “You would much rather we opened it/ You really want to”. She doesn’t respond to the accusations, emphasising instead that the neighbour will go away again, adding that “He won’t come back/ before many days have passed/ and then he won’t come/ here ever again” (p. 41). The man responds by altering his mood in a manner that seems more compatible with the view that they are playing a game than with the idea that they are acting naturally. He is now “happy”, while she is “pleased”, nods, and takes him by the arm, leading him into the living room, which concludes Act III.

At the beginning of the fourth act, we get a sense that the pattern established in the previous act is repeated. While the woman is enthusiastically reviewing the features of the living room, the man keeps suggesting that the neighbour is still present outside the house. She finds the room “nice” and goes on to talk about some of the photos on the walls, which she assumes must be of the neighbour’s grand-

10 There is at least one instance where the stage direction is doubtless intended as ironic. At the beginning of Act IV, the man suggests that the neighbour is still standing right outside the front door, adding “bravely” – so the stage direction informs us – that he can just stand there for all he cares, “because the door is locked” (p. 43).

mother. Commenting on a picture of the grandmother as a young woman, she says that she “must have been beautiful”. The man immediately seizes the opportunity, retorting that he supposes that she thinks he – meaning the neighbour – is “beautiful too” since he “resembles his grandma” (p. 44). She brushes him aside, remarking that they don’t resemble each other that much.

It is quite possible to view this scene in line with the assumption that the man’s jealousy is both very real and pathological, since he keeps interpreting everything the woman says in the worst possible light. Seen in this way, one would view the woman’s enthusiasm for the room as a nervous attempt to abate the man’s mistrustful attitude. This assumption does not, however, fit well with the woman’s “spontaneous” remark about a wedding photo, where she finds both of the grandparents “goodlooking” and “a beautiful pair” (p. 45). This is not the kind of thing she would say if she were nervously trying to ward off the man’s growing jealousy. It seems more accurate to view this as part of the game, with the woman alternating between reassuring him and inflaming his jealous suspicions, because she knows that this is exactly how he wants her to behave.

At this point, the couple find a photo of the neighbour as a young man, commenting that it is strange that he did not remove “such pictures” from the wall before he sold the house. The feeling that the house is invaded by foreign and unsavoury elements is exacerbated when they discover a chamber pot “half full of old piss” in the bedroom (p. 47). This sequence is best explained by the standard interpretation, which holds that outside forces are disturbing the couple’s united attempt to establish a place of their own “away from everyone else”. Their feeling of foreboding becomes all the stronger as they realise that they are confronted with the old woman’s deathbed, which has apparently been left exactly as it was at her death. This suggests that the entire house is, as it were, saturated in the odour of death and decay. This is not, in other words, a place where one can expect to make a fresh start.

The idea that the entire dynamic between the couple is a game they have played before is suggested once again when the man reverts to his suspicious remarks: “You knew someone/ had to come/ You

knew it” (p. 48). She neglects to respond and goes over to the window to look at the sea “almost as if [she] is bored” (p. 49). If this is taken to mean that she is in fact bored, the situation does not seem congruent with the idea that she is now in a state of nervous confusion as a result of the distrustful and manipulative behaviour of her partner. It rings true, however, if we assume that she is (at least momentarily) growing tired of a game she has willingly participated in. Without going into every detail of the remainder of the act, I think it safe to say that the play keeps oscillating between the possibilities that we have been looking at so far, alternatingly supporting the idea that the couple is really afraid of being disturbed in their solitude, that the woman is secretly unhappy with the prospect of living in isolation, and the idea that she is either being manipulated into inflaming the man’s jealousy or consciously playing a game to gratify his sexual fantasies.

The Freudian associations of the game are reinforced by the crucial role played by the “divan” in the fourth act. A divan is the same word one would use in Norwegian (as in German) to refer to Freud’s famous couch. Its presence in the play must therefore be considered significant, serving as a place where a person’s secret desires are revealed. During the exchanges between the man and the woman in Act IV, the man goes to lie down on the divan twice. The first time he does so is right after he has discovered the half-full chamber pot in the unmade bedroom. He lies down on his back, stares straight ahead, with the wedding picture of the neighbour’s grandparents right above him on the wall. This is the position he is in when he says that the grandmother probably died in those same bedsheets. He is now placed in the same posture as patients undergoing psychoanalysis. The themes of love (in the form of the wedding photo) and death are framing his state of mind as he is lying there. When the woman is looking out of the window, and their conversation turns to their solitude by the sea, the man rolls over on his side, facing the wall, with his back to the woman. In a similar way as at the end of Act II, she assumes a motherly tone, talking soothingly to him and assuring him that she will console him. She lies down behind him, putting her arms around him “comfortingly” (p. 50) (i.e. more in the manner of a mother than a lover) and

keeps talking to him in that same chanting manner that the reader will recall from the first act, with repeated use of phrases like “You and I shall be together” taking “rest in one another” etc. They seem again to have arrived at the end of a cycle, just as they did at the conclusion of the second act. The man seems to have staged a kind of regression, placing himself in the position of the child, enjoying the woman’s motherly protection. He is not done with the game, however, but immediately starts over again by exclaiming that he can hear the neighbour approaching outside. The woman keeps talking soothingly to him while he works himself up over the neighbour’s supposed presence in the yard.

The second time the man lies down on the coach is after the neighbour has been knocking on the door for a while and he has – four times – proposed that the woman answer the door. He makes it clear that he does not want to meet the visitor. We get the sense that he is setting the stage for the final act of his personal drama, where he will both take the role of the cuckold and the innocent or mistreated child. Initially, he retreats into the messy bedroom, possibly because he thinks that this would be the ideal place to enjoy his (imagined) humiliation. As he immediately returns to the living room, however, it is as if he has decided that the divan is, after all, the best spot for the kind of enjoyment he is seeking. Renewing his enactment of a regression, he assumes something resembling a foetal position on the divan, with his back to the room and his knees drawn up against the wall. He is now positioned out of sight of the neighbour (as he was at the beginning of Act II) but within hearing range (as he was when he overheard the woman’s first conversation with the stranger), which apparently suits his purposes. At the conclusion of Act IV, the reader, or the audience, thereby gets the impression that the fifth act is not simply staged by the dramatist but also by the man, who lies apprehensively on the divan, waiting, as it were, for the show to begin.

Conclusion: The endgame – and a new beginning?

As the fifth act begins, all of our three ways of interpreting the play remain possible. Parts of the exchanges are consistent with the

assumption that the couple is struggling to overcome the obstacles to their dream of establishing a harmonious twosomeness. Other parts of the text hint at the woman’s desire to start a relationship outside the ‘symbiosis’. Still others suggest that the man is either engaged in manipulating the woman into behaving in accordance with his obsessive desires or enacting a drama which always seems to unfold according to the same pattern, with the woman as a willing participant. The question now is how the play ultimately resolves—or deliberately fails to resolve—the possibilities it presents, and how we should evaluate the interplay among the various layers of meaning we have uncovered so far. Are we, at the conclusion of the play, witnessing a kind of endgame or are we left with the feeling that the drama could start anew and play itself out indefinitely in multiple variations over the same theme?

Act V opens with the woman showing the neighbour into the kitchen. He has brought beer and wants her to drink with him, which she declines. He does most of the talking and, at the end of their exchange, offers her his phone number, which she accepts and puts in her purse. With respect to our three possible readings, we may note that the first interpretation, in which we assume that there are no real grounds for the man’s jealousy, is supported both by the fact that the woman declines the neighbour’s invitation to drink with him and the fact that she says very little during the exchange. The second interpretation, where we assume that there are real grounds for the man’s jealousy, is supported by numerous subtle indications – some of which takes the form of sexual innuendo or symbolism in the language of the stage direction.

The first indication comes right after the neighbour’s suggestive comment that he knows “every nook and cranny” of the house. According to the stage direction, the woman stands by the window “resting her weight on her right foot, so that her hip sticks out in a gentle arch towards him” (p. 57). He immediately responds to this pose by looking at her hips, a look which is repeated later during the exchange. The next indication comes as the woman hands him a glass into which he pours his beer, and the stage direction tells us that it “bubbles over”. At his first gulp of beer, we are informed that “the beer

leaves a froth around his mouth”, making the sexual implication hard to miss. When he asks her: “What have you done with your husband?” she answers by looking at him while repeating the question before she sits down opposite him at the table. At this point, he starts flirting openly with her, suggesting that they “can meet somewhere” (p. 60), that she come over to his house, that she phone him “whatever time it is” (61). He then proceeds to write down his number, handing it to her. The way she accepts the piece of paper is elaborately described in the stage direction: “SHE takes it. SHE takes out a purse from her jacket pocket, opens it, puts the piece of paper inside the purse. HE smiles at her, nods at her ” (p. 61). The original text has the word “portemoné” for purse, after the French “portemonnaie”, which refers to a small coin purse, creating a strangely intimate, and vaguely Freudian, impression of the woman’s action in this sequence. It is as if she, through the erotic symbolism in the language of the stage direction, accepts the neighbour sexually. This reading is supported by the fact that he clearly intends the invitation to call him “anytime at all” (p. 62) as a way to arrange a sexual meeting with her. As he is leaving, he concludes the exchange by saying that he’ll come back “later some time”, to which she responds by silently nodding, as if in agreement. All these signs and hints suggest that the woman is secretly encouraging the neighbour’s advances.

The interpretation which holds that the man secretly enjoys his jealousy is most evident when we compare the exchange in the kitchen with the woman’s subsequent conversation with her partner in the living room during Act VI. The fifth act, regarded by itself, calls for such a reading through the strangely disinterested behaviour of the woman during the entire meeting with the neighbour, where she mostly stands by the window, looking out, saying very little but without seeming anxious or uncomfortable. It is as if she knows that it matters very little what she says in this conversation. What matters is that she is there alone with the visitor, letting him talk freely to her so that the man in the living room can get his kicks by overhearing his advances. When she goes back into the living room after the visitor has left, she assumes a calm and motherly tone towards her partner, in accordance with the

pattern they have already established. When the man gets started with his increasingly aggressive accusations, she acts scared, as she is supposed to do, if we are assuming that they are role-playing. Alternatively, she is genuinely confused as a result of not knowing exactly what the man is playing at.

The most interesting occurrence in this sequence concerns the neighbour’s handing the woman his phone number in the previous act. The man, who is now revelling in his jealousy, asks the woman when she is going to call the younger man, to which she replies that she is not going to call him (p. 64). He asks her why she took his phone number if she doesn’t plan to use it. She replies that there was really nothing else for her to do, prompting the man to triumphantly declare: “Of course/ And you gladly took it/ I get it” (p. 64). He pursues the subject by asking her why she “put the bit of paper/ with the telephone number in your purse”, which she first denies having done, before asking him how he knows that she did that (p. 65).

Why indeed? His accusation is conspicuously elaborately formulated, echoing the stage direction’s language when carefully explaining to the reader how the neighbour writes down the number “in a deliberate manner” before detailing the woman’s movements as she puts the piece of paper with the number in her purse. One way to explain the man’s knowledge of this event, which he clearly hasn’t observed, would be to point to the almost supernatural precision of the jealous intuition. Another way of explaining it, would be to suggest that he knows what has happened because this is a game they have played before. This assumption is corroborated by an incident in the third act, where the man accuses the woman of having looked the neighbour in the eyes at the precise moment when she comments that he does not live so far away (p. 53). This too, refers to an event which he cannot have observed. In both cases, I would propose the possibility that he knows what has happened because the woman has acted in accordance with the script he has prepared for her. When he tells her that he “just know[s] that kind of thing”, she leaves him. He then sits up on the divan “[t]otally calm”. The mood seems almost post-coital. It is as if they have reached the end of their game, at least for the time being.

In the play’s brief final act, the man sits alone on the bench outside the house and renews his chant about the two of them being “always […] alone/ in each other”, which is at this point necessarily saturated with irony. As the woman approaches him from around the corner, she looks “amicably at him”. Fosse uses the word “mildt”, which means in a mild or benevolent manner, giving a more motherly impression. She seems at this point to have assumed an air of superiority towards her partner. How are we to understand the conclusion of the play?

The woman could here either be relieved that the man has gone back to confirming their union, hoping that he will come to his senses and gradually desist from his jealous outbursts. Alternatively, she could be regarding him with superior compassion, knowing that he is bound to be replaced sexually by the neighbour. In fact, there is a possibility that she has already been to see the neighbour and is now returning home from a new and perhaps more intimate encounter with him. The third option is that she, through her “amicable” or “mild” expression, is signalling to the man that she understands that they are about to start playing their game all over again, with the neighbour as a stooge. In this case, we can imagine that the man will, after the fall of the curtain, continue with his green-eyed obsessions, working himself up to a new state of exalted jealousy and then go on to once more enact a regression to a child-like state, craving the consolation of the mother-figure.

At the very end of the play, the man laughs three times: The first time “to himself”, the second time “out loud”, the third time “coarsely” (p. 65–66). If we view these outbursts of laughter in light of our three interpretations, the first option would be that he laughs despairingly: what he feared would happen, has happened and the ‘symbiosis’ is broken. The second possibility is that he laughs bitterly, realising that the woman was not committed to his plan of seeking isolation after all but instead took the first opportunity to establish a connection with another man. The third option is to see the outburst of laughter as an expression of release or gratification, perhaps tinged with shame or self-contempt. All three options remain possible at the play’s conclusion.

What conclusions can we draw from this close reading of the play? We have seen how several interpretations are possible, to varying degrees, at all stages of the text, creating a productive ambiguity which doubtless contributes to Fosse’s celebrated ability of “giving voice to the unsayable”. This creates a tantalising dramatic work which, in my experience, is richer as a literary text than as a staged drama. When the work is staged, it is all but impossible to keep all the interpretative possibilities in play at the same time, for reasons that have to do with dramatic consistency and the kind of literalism that will always be suggested when an audience is confronted by real human beings who are play-acting dramatic figures.

When the play is read carefully as a literary work, it becomes a theatre of the mind in which the accent of meaning is constantly shifting and where the reader is persistently challenged to ponder mutually exclusive options as to what is really going on in any given scene. The result is similar to what is achieved in Henrik Ibsen’s symbolic dramas. What we are experiencing when we are reading Fosse’s play is a gradual turning away from the concrete situation, and from everyday life, into a timeless realm of common humanity, where we can sense how deeper desires and the secret needs of the soul are manifested in the characters’ words and actions and seem to play themselves out – often in a contradictory manner – in a place outside space and time. This does not mean that Fosse’s play should not be read as realism in the broad sense of the term. But an attentive study of Someone is Going to Come will inevitably guide the reader into deeper layers of human experience, and the human mind, than is typically associated with realism.

Andersen, Hadle Oftedal. 2004. Ikkje for ingenting. Jon Fosses dramatikk. Institutionen för nordiska språk och nordisk litteratur.

Fosse, Jon. 1999. Teaterstykke 1. Samlaget.

———. 2002. Plays One. Translated by Gregory Motton (Somone is going to Come, The Name) and Louis Muinzer (The Guitar Man, The Child). Oberon Books.

Seiness, Cecilie N. 2009. Poet på Guds jord. Samlaget.

Zern, Leif. 2005. Det lysande mørket. Om Jon Fosses dramatikk. Translated from Swedish by Eldbjørg Hovland. Samlaget.

9. La voix de l’ecriture: The Story of an International Breakthrough

Trond Haugen

“L’écriture, c’est l’élément dramatique essentiel”

Claude Régy

What was it about Jon Fosse’s distinctive dramatic style that elevated him from a prominent Norwegian novelist – who ventured into theatrical experimentation – to one of the world’s most celebrated and widely performed contemporary playwrights? What aesthetic qualities led to his international breakthrough?

While I acknowledge that such a literary breakthrough can also be analysed through institutional conditions, socio-cultural structures or actor networks, this chapter will centre its focus on what I believe is the most joyful practice of theatre and literary studies: uncovering how the intricate cogwheels and microscopic springs of aesthetics come together to produce what we never quite seem to fully understand – the event of literature.

Quelqu’un va venir at the Théâtre des Nanterre-Amandiers

Let us take a closer look at one of the pivotal moments that marked Jon Fosse’s international breakthrough: the debut of his play Nokon kjem til å komme on the French stage. This significant event took place at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, just outside Paris, on 28 September 1999. The play was translated into French by Terje

Sinding under the title Quelqu’un va venir and was directed by the French director Claude Régy.

Already on the theatre poster for the production at Théâtre des Amandiers, it was clear this would be a unique event. Against a blurred backdrop featuring a dark landscape and a white house, the title of the production, Quelqu’un va venir, stood out in bold, light-green letters. Above the title, the author’s name appeared in dark green, in a smaller, sans-serif font. Below the title, highlighted in contrasting orange and using the same style and font size as Jon Fosse’s name, the poster emphasised the director and the performance: “Mise en Scène Claude Régy”.

By 1999, Claude Régy was recognised as one of France’s leading avant-garde directors. Since his directorial debut in 1952, with the first French production of Federico García Lorca’s Doña Rosita , he had worked with texts by several renowned modernist and post-dramatic authors in Europe, including August Strindberg, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Harold Pinter, Peter Handke, Botho Strauss, Sarah Kane and Maurice Maeterlinck. Régy had established a reputation for his focus on the dramatic text itself, on the articulations of the players and their ability to uncover various dimensions of literary meaning in a work of art. Through his attentive use of silence in dialogue, the spatial distances and depths, and the interplay of light and shadow within the stage setting, Régy had secured a prominent position in modern, language- and choreography-oriented theatre.

A decade after Régy first staged Fosse’s work in French, Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Roux published an extensive collection of theatre studies essays in the series Les voies de la création théâtrale (The Paths of Theatrical Creation) titled Claude Régy. Several contributions specifically explored Régy’s enduring investigation of the unique role of language in theatrical performances. Helga Finter, a professor of theatre studies at the University of Giessen in Germany, contributed an article called “Le mystère de la voix de l’écriture” (“The Mystery of the Voice of Writing”). Drawing on a series of Régy’s productions, from Strindberg’s Dödsdansen (La Danse de mort) in 1969 to Fosse’s Dødsvariasjonar (Variations sur la mort) in 2003, she examined

how the director’s emphasis on the voice of writing, or la voix de l’écriture, also entailed a conception of reading as a form of staging. Furthermore, she investigated the decisive role of the voice of writing in the production of representation and meaning:

The textual voice, although distinct from the modulated sound of a concrete voice, requires internal articulation. It demands incorporation through breath in order to be heard by the reader; the actualised voice of the written text is the condition for the image to emerge, generating representation(s). Language is never neutral; it is always subjectively predetermined in an affective and mnemonic manner. Contributing to this process in reading are both the vocal materiality of the auditory image and the visual materiality of the written image (Finter 2008, 299).1

The director himself emphasised this orientation towards writing as a core element of his career during a 2013 interview in the French daily newspaper Le Télégramme :

For me, writing is the essential dramatic element, from which the actors’ performance emerges. Writing occupies the central position, reimagined by the spectator, who becomes a creator and no longer assumes a passive role. The spectator must approach the performance with goodwill. The audience plays a crucial role in the production; they can either diminish it through a lack of receptiveness or elevate it through their engagement (Nivet 2013).

The fact that Jon Fosse’s work was to be staged on the French theatre scene naturally did not go unnoticed in Norway. On the very day Quelqu’un va venir was performed for the first time at Théâtre des Amandiers, Jon Fosse explained in the Norwegian newspaper VG – although one might question how convinced he was of this himself –that he was not particularly nervous, precisely because it was Claude Régy who would be directing the production. “I’m not particularly nervous. Since Claude Régy is so well-known here, it becomes more

1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. I’ve consulted AI resources, such as Google translate and Copilot, but take full responsibility for any misunderstandings.

his play than mine. For the French, a new Régy production is an event.”2

Voix sans parole – introducing Fosse to the French

In France, a simple press kit was prepared for the autumn festival at Théâtre des Amandiers, titled Dossier de presse théâtre, Festival d’automne à Paris. This dossier adopts an intriguing strategy for introducing Fosse’s unfamiliar work to the audience and critics in Paris. Instead of offering a conventional, realist paraphrase of the dramatic action, it directs attention to the core of theatrical expression – emphasising drama as an act of linguistic exploration.

Notably, the dossier foregrounds the playwright himself. In a brief yet profound text, titled “Voix sans parole” (“Voice without Speech”), Fosse articulates his own poetics of dramatic art.

While Norwegian readers of the dossier would instantly recognise Fosse’s reflections on drama as consistent with his earlier theoretical musings on the nature of the modern novel (some would even recognise the text itself), French readers were more likely to interpret this essay as a connection to and acknowledgment of Claude Régy’s language-oriented productions, based on prominent modern playwrights such as Duras, Handke and Kane. The press kit’s deliberate inclusion of the young Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse in Régy’s canon of modern dramatic works – through Fosse’s own unique poetics of drama – offered the critics, and perhaps the audience as well, the promise of a daring artistic theatrical event.

In “Voix sans parole”, Fosse introduces his aspiration for a distinctive dramatic language to an international audience for the first time. He achieves this by reframing his novelistic exploration of the silent voice of writing within the context of the performative nature of drama:

2 “Jeg er ikke særlig nervøs. Fordi Claude Regy er såpass kjent her, blir det mer hans stykke enn mitt. For franskmenn er et nytt Regy-stykke en begivenhet” (Langfeldt and Oftedal 1999).

Une partie de mon aversion pour le théâtre était sans doute liée au fait que le théâtre ne me paraissait offrir que de la culture, et non pas de l’art . Le théâtre ne proposait qu’un espace pour ce qui, à mes yeux, n’était qu’une manifestation culturelle assez pénible.

Aucune voix, comme celle dont je parle, ne s’y faisait entendre . Et pourtant il m’était arrivé, au théâtre, de m’apercevoir que cette voix que je pouvais entendre dans la bonne littérature était là également – et je ne cacherai pas que c’était dans des mises en scène de pièces écrites par Samuel Beckett et Lars Noren.

Mais le plus souvent, lorsque j’allais au théâtre, je n’y trouvais qu’un consensus culturel, du bavardage sur des sujets dont il était également question dans les journaux et à la télévision, ou alors des inventions formelles d’un modernisme vain. L’un était sans doute destiné à un public plutôt âgé et élégant, l’autre à des spectateurs plutôt jeunes et vêtus de noir (Théâtre des Amandiers 1999, 7).

Some of my great resistance towards the theatre has been that it looked to me as if all the theatre could offer was culture, not art . The only thing theatre presented was a space for what seemed like strained cultural observations.

The kind of voice I’m discussing here was not noticeable. Or it was almost never noticeable. Because I too had noticed that this voice which I found in good literature – and I don’t mind saying where I found it: in productions of plays by Samuel Beckett and Lars Norén.

But most of the time when I went to the theatre, I only found a cultural consensus, only talk about the same things that the newspapers and television talked about; or all I found were hollow modernistic notions of form. The first was for an older generation dressed up for a night out, the second for a younger generation, in their black clothes (Fosse 2015, 83).

“[A]ll the theatre could offer was culture, not art,” Fosse writes, before elaborating on his statement. “The kind of voice I’m discussing here was not noticeable.” What kind of voice is Fosse really referring to in this passage? The answer requires a brief detour into Jon Fosse’s literary career prior to his emergence as an internationally acclaimed playwright.

Jon Fosse – a language writer

At the time when Claude Régy staged Quelqu’un va venir at the Théâtre des Amandiers outside Paris, Fosse was an unknown figure on the

international theatre scene. To the Scandinavian public, however, Fosse was already a recognised 1980s modernist/postmodernist writer. Immersed in the progressive cultural currents of the late modernism, Fosse had carefully aligned himself with experimental, languageoriented literature. His background in the Norwegian literary avant-garde may provide insights into the aesthetic premise of his international breakthrough.

From the earliest reviews of his debut novel Raudt, svart (Red, Black) in 1983, critics recognised Fosse’s distinctive writing style. On 21 April, Hans H. Skei, a Norwegian Faulkner scholar and later professor at the University of Oslo, analysed Fosse’s unique approach to writing in the weekly newspaper Dag og Tid :

What Fosse writes about may seem small, limited, or even private and personal in most cases. However, through his way of writing, the author effectively conveys that what he writes about has relevance to others as well. It is precisely in his way of writing that Fosse’s strength lies. At times, certain images or symbols (such as the alarm clock) may take on an outsized importance, even if their function is clear and significant. Nevertheless, this image-creating ability is a hallmark of his style. His surprising twists, fresh comparisons, and carefully balanced parallels and repetitions are striking. His language often attains an almost hypnotic power: the words, combinations of words and sentence structures carry weight in and of themselves. Much of the meaning, which the text might otherwise struggle to convey, resides in the rhythm and flow of his language (Skei 1983).

Skei analysed Fosse’s debut Red, Black as a language-critical experiment. It wasn’t the novel’s subject matter, but the way it was written that impressed his first critics. Skei immediately ascribed the singularity of this novel to Fosse’s image-creating abilities, his innovative comparisons, as well as his suggestive parallels, repetitions, and the rhythm and movement of his language.

A few critics rejected Fosse’s debut novel due to its use of foul

language and its negative attitude towards life. 3 But Skei was not alone in recognising Fosse’s unique qualities as a writer. Younger literary critics from the departments of philosophy and comparative literature at Norwegian universities, such as Finn Tveito and Finn Stenstad, were well-equipped to appreciate this kind of literature. So were his fellow contemporary writers, such as Truls Horvei, Herman Starheimsæther and Atle Næss. Some identified with Fosse’s portrayal of male loneliness in the novel, but most focused on his formal language experiments, such as his characteristic use of interior monologue, experimental repetitions and critical modernist realism. Several even interpreted Fosse’s style as an original response to the problem of form in modern literature.

A critic who, in other respects, was critical of Fosse’s debut work, Tor Obrestad – a key figure of the 1960s modernist ‘Profil’generation in Norwegian literature – acknowledged the distinctive musicality of his dialogues: “He is quite accurate in his use of realistic and precise details, and he has a surprisingly good grasp of dialogue. There is a musicality in the lines that is nice” (Obrestad 1983).

Towards a theory of the novel

Despite the generally welcoming reception of Fosse’s Red, Black , the author and his publishing house felt a certain lack of recognition during the early phase of his career. 4 His second novel, Stengd gitar (Closed Guitar), received a slightly more lukewarm reception compared to Red, Black and never even made it into the columns of the national

3 On Monday, 25 April 1983, missionary priest and pastor Kaare Horgan discouraged readers from engaging with the book in a review titled “The Pursuit of Happiness Cannot Be Recommended” published in the Christian newspaper Dagen in Bergen. Horgan disliked the novel’s frequent use of profanity and its perceived negative outlook on life (Horgan 1983).

4 Cecilie N. Seiness, currently Jon Fosse’s editor, presented the main features of the critical reception of Red, Black in her book Jon Fosse. Poet på Guds jord (Jon Fosse. A Poet on God’s Earth) from 2009: “Debutant Jon Fosse was not met with cheers from the critics, but he also did not have to lose his spirit for life” (Seiness 2009, 80).

press in Norway. 5 His first poetry collection, Engel med vatn i augene (Angel with Water in Her Eyes), gathered only around five reviews in Norwegian newspapers but was included in the Danish critic Poul Borum’s top-40 list of Scandinavian poetry in 1986 (Borum 1987, 70). In 1987, he published a relatively short experimental prose work that deliberately avoided the genre label of the novel: Blod. Steinen er. Forteljing (Blood. The Stone Is. Story).

Although he didn’t feature on the front pages of Norwegian newspapers, Fosse gradually reached a wider audience during these early years of his modernist authorship. Notably, in 1987, the prestigious Swedish publishing house Bonnier translated and published his second novel, Closed Guitar.

According to Cecilie Seiness, the Swedish modernist author Ola Larsmo first discovered Fosse during a literary seminar at Nordens Folkhögskola Biskops-Arnö in Sweden in 1986. As editor of the literary journal Bonniers Litterära Magasin and a manuscript consultant at Bonnier Publishing, Larsmo was a key figure in the Swedish avantgarde literary scene. The book was translated by the Swedish modernist Steve Sem-Sandberg and received numerous favourable reviews in national Swedish media (Seiness 2009, 91–93). Bonniers Litterära Magasin regarded the book as a potential experimental departure from the era’s dominant social realist novel and its perceived impasses:

His novel also presents a possible way out of the socially engaged novel’s debated deadlock, and one would wish to send an equal number of copies to both those who blindly defend this genre and those who claim it is definitively dead. For Fosse demonstrates that it is indeed possible to write a socially engaged novel that also has an engaging form. Funny enough, both writing styles are represented within his novel; on the one hand, a modernist prose in Liv’s inflamed monologues, and on the other

5 The Christian national newspaper Vårt land , however, published a not very favourable review of Closed Guitar : “Jon Fosse has tried once before, this is his second book. He proves that he can write a worse book than Red, Black which came out in 1983” (Stanghelle 1985).

hand, a strictly observational realism in the dialogue sections, such as those with the mother (Beckman 1988, 213).

Although Fosse’s Scandinavian breakthrough as a novelist was significant, not least for his later success as a playwright, I choose not to delve further into this aspect in the present context.

During his early years, Fosse also gained recognition as a writer of poetological and theoretical essays. He distinguished himself as an intellectual and literary interpreter of prominent modern and post-structuralist thinkers within the European tradition, including Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and Mikhail Bakhtin.

His first systematic attempts at developing a theory of the novel, or fiction, were published as early as 1986 and 1987. In an essay from the literary magazine Vinduet (published in October 1986), titled “Mellom språksyn og poetikk. Forteljing med sleivspark etter Kjartan Fløgstad” (“Between Vision of Language and Poetics: Story with Miskicks at Kjartan Fløgstad”), he advocated for a distinct modernist position regarding the relationship between literature and politics. Quoting Herbert Marcuse, Fosse asserted that the political power of language lies within its aesthetic dimension (Fosse 1986, 58).

A year later, he expanded on this perspective in an extensive essay for the literary yearbook Norsk litterær årbok 1987 (published in April 1988). Titled “Tale eller skrift som romanteoretisk metafor” (“Speech or Writing as Metaphors for Theories of the Novel”), the essay takes inspiration from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s seminal work, De la grammatologie (1967). Building on Derrida’s generalised concept of writing as a transcendental, differential process of signification, rather than mere outward representation of inner presence or meaning, Fosse carefully develops his own material concept of writing: writing as play, breath and rhythm:

Skrivarens eigenart er bestemt av skriftas eigenart, skrivaren er i skrifta, og det som går føre seg i skrifta kan, som eg tidlegare har sagt det, opptil fleire gonger, bestemmast som “the free play of meaning”, og i dette spelet, i denne leiken – som i leik elles, enten det no er barns leik, for det er

barnet ein oftast forbind med leik, eller det er vaksnes leik, og som kjent er gjerne deira leik kjær-leik – er rytmen viktig. Rytmen er i kroppen, i pusten, og skrivaren er først og fremst til stades som rytmen, som pusten, i skriftas materialitet (Fosse 1987, 184).

The writer’s individuality is determined by the nature of the writing; the writer is present within the writing itself, and what occurs in the writing can, as I have previously stated several times, be defined as “the free play of meaning”, and in this game, in this play – just as in play more generally, whether it is children’s play, for the child is most often associated with play, or adults’ play, which, as is well known, frequently involves games of love – rhythm is crucial. Rhythm resides in the body, in the breath, and the writer is most tangibly present as rhythm, as breath, in the materiality of the writing.

In 1989, Fosse released no fewer than three publications with Samlaget publishing house: his third novel, Naustet (Boathouse), his first children’s book, Uendeleg seint. Biletbok (Infinitely Late. Picture Book), and his first collection of essays, Frå telling via showing til writing (From Telling via Showing to Writing).

6 The title essay from this collection is generally considered the most consistent articulation of Fosse’s literary poetics of the 1980s.

What characterises Fosse’s theory of the novel in this essay is the way his theoretical insights reflect his practical experience as a writer. He consistently engages with ideas from key literary theorists and writers within the postmodernist and poststructuralist canon, but in a distinct manner shaped by his own literary intuitions. The result is a unique Fossean concept of writing, whose clear ambition is to capture the elusive quality of great literature: the concept of the writing voice, or the voice of writing. His experience as a musician likely contributed to the development of this theory. According to Fosse, the literary artist “sounds” his or her writing (or the work of art) with a voice that is neither identical to the written words on the page nor the voice of the narrator or the

6 Boathouse is Fosse’s third novel, if one accepts Fosse’s deliberate genre labelling of Blood. The Stone Is. Story as a story.

characters. Fosse’s personal formulation of the grammatological absence, which Jacques Derrida identified as a deconstruction of the privileging of the spoken word as an authentic guarantee of any metaphysics of presence in De la Grammatologie, was rephrased and repeated like a guitar riff, evolving into an almost poetic incantation or spell. This is how it appears in footnote no. 9 of the essay:

Komme seg til skrifta, så tilbake til stemma. Ezra Pounds stemme. Overvinne skrifta gjennom skrifta. I byrjinga var ordet og ordet var Gud. Langsamt tilbake igjen. Frå stemma, til skrifta – og så til skriftstemma, skriftrøysta. Uendelege, tallause rusa samtalar, att og fram i tanken. Lese poesi høgt. Ein eigen angst mellom linjene. Musikken i språket. Klangen. Spele gitar med stemma. Skriftstemma. Tilbake igjen. Gitaren, så stemma. Songen. Komme seg til skrifta, og komme seg ut or skrifta, heile tida, det eine, så det andre. Angsten som forutsetning for skrifta, fiksjonen, teoretiseringa. Skriftstemma (Fosse 1989, 160).

Come to the writing, then back to the voice. Ezra Pound’s voice. Overcome the writing through the writing. In the beginning there was the word and the word was God. Slowly back again. From the voice to the writing, and then to the writing voice. Endless, countless, inebriated conversations, back and forth in your thoughts. Read poetry out loud. A special fear between the lines. The music of the language. The sound. Play the guitar with the voice. The writing voice. [Back again. The guitar, then the voice]. The song. Come to the writing, and come out of the writing, all the time, the one, then the other. Fear as a condition for writing, fiction, theorising. The writing’s voice (Fosse 2015, 20). 7

Fosse’s concept of a writing voice, or a voice of writing, revolves around a series of poetological phrasings, repetitions, differences, improvisations, movements and appeals to the musicality of language. It is both a literary practice and a poetics, developed and performed against a backdrop of negativity – of silences and pauses, existential-religious doubt, transcendental emptiness, godlessness or anxiety. Nevertheless,

7 The English translation skips a couple of sentences in the footnote. I’ve added my translation in square brackets. It is also worth noting that Fosse’s conscious philosophically motivated use of the word angst (“anxiety”) is translated as “fear”.

it is affirmed as a kind of negative pathway toward what can be described as the event of literature or the literary happening. Literature is not a spoken voice, but a voice written. The voice is not one of presence but of absence – a voice that resonates through the silent written words themselves: the voice of writing.

My point is this: Jon Fosse’s international breakthrough was deeply intertwined with his concept of the voice of writing. Rooted in an influential modernist and post-structuralist tradition, he refined this concept through his novels and aesthetic theories. It obviously resonated with one of the most prominent text-oriented directors in Europe at that time – Claude Régy.

A voice without speech – intensifying the poetological paradox

It is certainly no coincidence that it was Jon Fosse’s seminal essay on dramatic literature, “Røyst utan tale” (“Voice without Speech”), which was rendered into French and incorporated into the promotional materials for Claude Régy’s staging of Quelqu’un va venir. Originally published in the theatre programme for the performance Namnet (The Name), staged at Den Nationale Scene (The National Stage) in Bergen in 1995 under the direction of Kai Johnsen, the essay expanded Fosse’s poetics of the voice of writing into the domain of drama.

Drawing on his earlier reflections on the theory of the novel, the 1995 essay intensified the paradoxical tension between the concept of the voice of writing and the silence residing within the pauses and unspoken lines of characters in a play. The essay evoked a palpable sense of a modernist fiction writer tentatively exploring the theoretical principles of dramatic language:

Eg la tidleg merke til denne røysta som var der, men som paradoksalt nok ikkje sjølv sa noko, i litteraturen. Det merkelege blei då at det ut frå den gode skrivne litteraturen [k]om ei røyst, som ikkje var munnleg, ikkje sa noko bestemt, men berre var der som noko ein kunne merke, som ein tale utan tale langt bortanfrå liksom.

Og dermed slo det meg at dette var ei røyst som nettopp var knytt til skrifta. Eg kalla den jo då også for skriftrøysta .

I god litteratur merkar ein alltid ei tydeleg skriftrøyst. Den kan ikkje reduserast til innhald, ikkje til form, men den er i alle fall knytt til den faktiske einskap av form og innhald som er den skrifta litteraturen i seg sjølv er.

For meg blei altså kunsten nettopp knytt til denne røysta, nesten umenneskeleg i sin usle tale.

Og det paradoksalt [underlege] er at dette er ei røyst som er der, og som ikkje seier noko. Det er ei stum røyst. Ei røyst som taler gjennom å teie. Det er snakk om ei røyst som på ein måte kjem frå alt det som ikkje blir sagt, det er ei røyst som kjem frå ei togn og som lar seg merke gjennom og imellom det andre seier, til dømes forteljaren og personane i ein roman, eller personane i eit skodespel (Wilhelmsen 1995, 12–13). 8

Very early I noticed this voice which was present in literature, but that paradoxically enough didn’t say anything in itself. The strange thing, then, was that out of the good, written literature came a voice which didn’t say anything in particular, but was just there like something you could detect, like a speech without speech from far away somehow. And so it struck me that this voice could only be connected to the written word. So I called it the writing-voice.

In good literature you will always notice an unmistakable writingvoice. It cannot be reduced to content, or to form, but at least it is connected to the actual entity of form and content that is writing, that we call literature.

For me, all art is connected to just this voice, almost inhuman in its [frail] speech.

And the paradoxically strange thing is that this is a voice which is there, and which doesn’t say anything. It is a mute voice. A voice that speaks through silence. It’s a voice which in a way comes from what is not spoken; a voice that comes from a [silence] and lets itself be seen through and in between what others are saying, for instance the narrative voice and the characters in a novel, or the characters in a play (Fosse 2015, 81–82).9

8 The essay “Røyst utan tale” was later published with the minor revisions as “Stemme utan tale” (“Voice without speech”) in Fosse’s second collection of essays Gnostiske essay (Gnostic Essays) in 1999. The epigraph from Marguerite Duras in the original is removed in the revised version of the essay. A couple of misspellings in the original essay are corrected in square brackets.

9 The English translation is based on the revised version of the essay from Gnostic Essays . A misinterpretation of togn (“silence”) as tegn (“sign”) is corrected in square brackets, and the original phrase “usle tale”, later revised by Fosse to “tause tale”, is maintained in a square bracket, just for the historical fun of it.

In other words, it is a voice of writing that dwells in silence, in the frailty of what remains unarticulated, in all that is unsaid – perhaps even destined never to be said.10 At the risk of oversimplifying the argument: Fosse’s theory of the voice of writing is elusive and challenging to grasp. The paradox of a voice without speech, emanating from silence, demands interpretation, and at least a couple of alternative readings are possible.

Norwegian critic Henning Hagerup offers one interpretation in an afterword to Fosse’s Gnostic Essays, obviously following Fosse’s own account of the novel as negative mysticism. Hagerup understands Fosse’s voice of writing as originating from a place “which both exists and does not exist at the same time” (Hagerup 1999, 277). He suggests – as does the author himself – that the insights gained from such a contradictory experience of art, “can never be communicated in rational language, but only through the paradoxes inherent in the language of mysticism” (Hagerup 1999, 277). In this view, the paradox of a voice without speech is resolved through a form of religiously oriented mysticism – possibly reminiscent of the eschatological promise, revelation or epiphany found in certain strands of poststructuralist thought.

An alternative interpretation is provided by Erling Aadland, professor of comparative literature at the University of Bergen, in his book Litteraturens verden. En undersøkelse av litteraturens antinomier (The World of Literature: An Examination of Literature’s Antinomies). Aadland demystifies the concept of a voice without speech, instead

10 At the time Jon Fosse started writing for the theatre (see Kai Johnsen’s essay within this volume), he was concurrently advancing the concept of the voice of writing in a more mystical direction. His 1993 essay “Negativ mystikk” (“Negative Mysticism”), charts his evolving view of the novel: from the voice of writing to romantic irony (influenced by Friedrich Schlegel), and finally to negative mysticism in a godless world (drawing on Georg Lukács): “[…] og det er jo sjølvsagt slik at den mystikk eg snakkar om ikkje kan snakkast om, den kan berre skrivast fram, den kan ikkje refererast til, som eit om, den eksisterer nemleg ikkje slik, den eksisterer berre i den skrift som lar mystikken oppstå” (Fosse 1999, 135)/“[…] the mysticism I am talking about cannot be talked about, it can only be expressed through writing, it cannot be referred to, as something, since it doesn’t exist in that way, it only exists in the writing which allows the mysticism to arise” (Fosse 2015, 55). The English translation of the essay “Negativ mystikk” (“Negative Mysticism”) is based on the revised version of the essay published in the essay collection Gnostiske essay (Gnostic Essays) in 1999.

proposing a more accessible explanation grounded in aesthetics or reader-response theory.

Thus, the voice of writing originates. It resides within writing – not as a bumblebee buzzing against a closed window, but as something with the potential to sound. This voice is brought into being by the writer, the poet assuming the role of a writer. The unique skills and abilities of the poet, his historical situatedness and ideological emplacement, responsiveness, sensibility, and productivity, give rise to the writing, and, consequently, the voice of writing. It may even be that this voice of writing resounds within the writer’s writing. […]

Something similar happens when others read what the writer has written. As the reader reads, he or she perceives the emergence of sound from what is, in and of itself lifeless and silent matter – letters and signs. The responsiveness of the reader allows the potential voice of writing to resound again, and the reader recognises this voice of writing across the writer’s oeuvre, from work to work. The voice of the writer is within the writing, is inscribed through writing, yet resounds through the act of reading (Aadland 2019, 534).

The two distinct interpretations of Fosse’s nearly impossible concept of the voice of writing – constituted by absence, yet letting itself be heard, felt, traced or resounded through hesitations, empty gaps and pauses between words – demonstrate how it prompts the reader to reflect on that which resist comprehension or communication. At the same time, it invites a critical inquiry into the fundamental nature of literature itself. These perspectives may, in fact, be deeply interconnected.

In any case, this persistent engagement with literature’s inherently incomplete yet continually generative potential was undoubtedly familiar to the French audience. It is a notion of literature that manifests itself across various historical traditions, first taking shape in German Romanticism at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries and later achieving a defining articulation through the emergence of French Symbolism in the mid-19th century. It attains an even more distinct theoretical articulation in the poststructuralist inquiries of late modernism in postwar France.

Naturally, a comprehensive account of this tradition’s history

would extend beyond the scope of a chapter such as this. However, I wish to highlight one aspect of the development of this literary concept – namely, the rejection of the notion that a definitive answer can be given to the question of what literature is. Instead, it considers literature’s critical investigation of its own nature, along with the reader’s provisional and experimental responses, as constituting a distinct post-poetic aesthetic.

In his doctoral thesis, “Det litterære rommet. En studie i Stéphane Mallarmés og Maurice Blanchots forfatterskap” (The Literary Space: A Study of the Writings of Stéphane Mallarmé and Maurice Blanchot), Marius Wulfsberg, articulates this modern French concept of literature as follows:

If modern literature takes the shape of a reflection on its own incomplete existence, this reflection does not culminate in a definitive determination of the essence of literature. […] Literature rather is the name for a multitude of forms of writing, in constant change, and this experience has haunted modern literature, from Schlegel through Mallarmé and Blanchot, extending into our contemporary era (Wulfsberg 2002, 234).

“Mallarmé begins to write at a moment when it is no longer possible to write the way you did before,” Wulfsberg continues a little later. “His texts take the shape of reflections on a poetry that no longer exists, of drafts and sketches for a literature yet to come. To put it in the words of Roland Barthes: Mallarmé is a writer without literature” (Wulfsberg 2002, 234).

Wulfsberg refers to this literary stance as “post-poetic literature”, a critical examination of the possibilities of writing in an era that has surpassed the age of beauty. Clear theoretical parallels can be observed with Hans-Thies Lehmann’s 1999 concept of post-dramatic theatre:

Post-dramatic theatre is a theatre of the present . Reformulating presence as present […] means, above all, to conceive of it as a process, as a verb. It can neither be object, nor substance, nor the object of cognition in the sense of a synthesis effected by the imagination and the understanding. We make do with understanding this presence as something that happens,

i.e. drawing on an epistemological – and even ethical – category as distinguishing for the aesthetic realm (Lehmann 2006, 144).

My main point so far is as follows: The French theatre scene did not encounter Jon Fosse’s Quelqu’ un va venir within an aestheticphilosophical void. On the contrary, its reception was prepared by the distinct theatrical aesthetics and directing style of Claude Régy, and the profound kinship between the director’s and the author’s understanding of the distinctive nature of the literary work of art. Consequently, French audiences were exceptionally well-prepared to understand and appreciate Fosse’s meta-literary investigation into the voice of writing, the ambiguous place/non-place or the event/non-event of the work of art, and the paradoxical nature of theatrical audience engagement – being both detached and immersed in the resonance of a dramatic voice of writing.

The French reception of Quelqu’un va venir

Three months after attending the performance of Jon Fosse’s Quelqu’un va venir at the Théâtre des Amandiers, the journalist and theatre critic René Solis published an article in the French left-wing newspaper Libération . Writing with the distanced intensity of hindsight, Solis sought to articulate the impressions of a magical theatrical evening –not preserved in any recording – with Claude Régy and Jon Fosse in Nanterre:

Il y a trois mois, une nuit d’automne, vous êtes sorti de cette même salle transformable de Nanterre, halluciné, sonné ; autre. Dans la voiture ou l’autobus, certains avaient le fou rire, comme on se défend, et vous pouviez les comprendre. Plusieurs fois, les jours suivants, avec d’autres initiés, vous imiteriez ce phrasé ralenti jusqu’à l’absurde, ce flot de sylll-laaa-bes pééé-triii-fii-iiées qui sortaient de la bouche des acteurs comme d’une source qui se tarit. Queeeeel-qu’unnnn-vaaaa-ve-niiiiir, le titre de la pièce du Norvégien Jon Fosse, se transformerait même en plaisanterie de bureau, gestes décomposés à l’appui. Mais le fait d’en rire n’enlèverait rien à l’intensité du souvenir, au contraire (Solis 2000).

Three months ago, on an autumn night, you left this very transformable room in Nanterre – hallucinated, dazed: another. On the car ride or bus journey home, some people burst into laughter, as if trying to defend themselves, and you could understand their reaction. In the days that followed, among fellow initiates, you would mimic the phrasing, drawn-out to the point of absurdity, the peee-trii-fii-ied floo-ow o-of sylll-laaa-bles that emerged from the mouths of the actors, like a source slowly running down. Queeeeel-qu’unnnn-vaaaa-ve-niiiiir, the title of the piece by Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, even became an office joke, complete with decomposed gestures to back it up. Yet, no amount of laughter ever diminished the memory’s intensity – in fact, it only served to heighten it (Solis 2000).

Although Solis’s commentary was written long after the event itself, it provides a delightful, sensory, and subtly humorous, glimpse into the enduring impact of Fosse’s play on French theatre audiences. Solis focuses on three key aspects of the event.

First, to capture Fosse’s distinctive dramatic style, Solis introduces a linguistic term – maybe even inspired by the director himself – to describe this mode of writing, event or performance: “l’écriture minimal du Norvégien Jon Fosse” (“the minimal writing of the Norwegian Jon Fosse”).

Second, he emphasises the dramatic choices made by director Claude Régy, illustrating how Fosse’s minimalist writing was realised through the drawn-out phrases and petrified syllables of the performance at Théâtre des Amandiers.

Finally, he highlights the transformative experience of the audience in modern drama, comparing it to a sense of being hallucinated, dazed and initiated into something entirely new: autre (“another”).

René Solis’s retrospective expression of admiration for Fosse’s dramatic language and minimalist writing style echoed several French critics.

Thanks to the transference of the Jon Fosse archive to the National Library of Norway in 2021, a year and a half before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, we can study the initial French

reception of Fosse’s international breakthrough.11 The archive’s previous custodian, Nynorsk Kultursentrum (Centre for Norwegian Language and Literature), had undertaken impressive efforts to document the early international critical reception of Fosse’s plays.

Among the materials, the archive included a folder containing press clippings related to Claude Régy’s production of Quelqu’un va venir. While René Solis’s retrospective commentary was not included, the folder comprises most of the reviews published immediately after the performance. A cursory examination of this folder reinforces the view expressed by Norwegian theatre critic Ida Lou Larsen, who, referencing Odile Quirot’s review of the play in the weekly magazine Nouvel Observateur, aptly summarised the critical reception of Fosse in France in October 1999: “Jon Fosse excites Paris” (Larsen 1999).12

“Jon Fosse and Claude Régy walk together on the peaks of the theatre,” wrote Michel Cournot – journalist, actor, and film director –in Le Monde on 1 October 1999. Drawing on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, Cournot argued that Fosse’s language encapsulated the singularity of life, without distraction. “Quelqu’un va venir is a drama that seizes, without interference, love – the essence of love,” Cournot proclaimed, ultimately describing the collaboration between Fosse and Régy as nothing less than an event: “Yes, it was a big night. A meeting” (Cournot 1999).

In the cultural magazine La Terrasse , Véronique Hotte emphasised the hypnotic qualities of Fosse’s language, underscoring its gestural and musical aspects by describing it as a dance of words: “The audience remains captivated by the haunting and hypnotic dance of

11 While working on this chapter, I became aware of Aslaug Fodstad Gourvennec’s master’s thesis, “Åpenhet og poesi. Den franske resepsjonen av Jon Fosses teater” (“Openness and Poetry: The French Reception of Jon Fosse’s Theatre”), from the University of Stavanger 2008. Unfortunately for me, her analysis focuses on Claude Régy’s instruction of the play Dødsvariasjonar (Variations sur la mort/Death Variations) in 2003, but I have greatly benefited from consulting her study.

12 “Jon Fosse begeistrer Paris” (Larsen 1999).

the word” (Hotte 1999). 13 Similarly, in the newspaper Le Figaro, Frédéric Ferney observed how Régy’s uncompromising choices exposed the pure and naked language of Jon Fosse, binding dramatic text and direction into a unified, aesthetic knot:

No music, no sound: pure and devoid speech. Because Régy is absolute sincere, violent as the doctrinaires of the soul often are – the saints, but also certain criminals, certain fanatics (Ferney 1999).

The theatre critic from Le Figaro not only highlighted Régy’s uncompromising approach to the production but also sought to capture the experience of witnessing a literary event that required the audience to relinquish control and surrender to the text, as though drifting into a dream:

We believe that poetry – the very word says it – requires invention, but no, it is not even a question of inventing, and the requirement, beyond aesthetics and morality, is entirely internal: we must only dare to transcribe, as in a dream, sometimes with what resembles a dazed devotion, what happens, what is accomplished, and annex the universe to the intimate curve of his brain (Ferney 1999).

On the same day, seasoned journalist and critic Jean Pierre Léonardini, writing for the former communist newspaper L’Humanité, offered his interpretation of Fosse’s distinctive sensual-intellectual rhythm. He analysed the effects of Régy’s slowed-down performance, describing it as a Zen-like serenity – an experience of dreaming and thinking stretched out through time:

Along the way, the spectator’s body matches the slowed heart rate of the performance. Another duration is imposed, that of dreaming and thinking. The theatre, here, would borrow from Zen an appearance of serenity

13 The French sentence goes like this: “Le public reste le captif de cette danse lancinante et hypnotique du verbe” (Hotte 1999). Through the metaphor “danse du verbe”, Hotte marks an interesting connection between Fosse’s piece and the French tradition of considering literature or poetry as a form of dance, which is expressed in Paul Valéry’s text Philosophie de la danse from 1936.

but, all things considered, it is a tense serenity, a latent anxiety objectively stretched out in the air of time. It is an experience to live (Léonardini 1999).

Another critic who compared Fosse’s dramatic language to music was Jean-Louis Pinte, writing in the weekly supplement to Le Figaro, Figaroscope, on 6 October:

This long prose poem is written with few words, like repetitive music. Through his staging, Claude Régy makes it a lament, a ceremony with muffled harmonies (Pinte 1999).

Régy’s staging, along with the actors’ distanced and stylised performances, was described as possessing an extreme intensity in an unsigned article from the Le Monde supplement Aden : “Their admirably detached and stylised playing produces extreme force” (Anonymous 1999).

The actual review of Quelqu’un va venir in Libération , titled “Fond de Fosse”, was published on 8 October. Theatre critic Mathilde la Bardonnie argued that Fosse’s musical language was the secret to the play’s essence. Her nuanced judgement and thought-provoking comparisons make her review well worth reading:

The underlying secret of Jon Fosse lies in his mastery of a language that, while seemingly conversational, is deliberately rationalised and rigorously constructed in intricate loops. These loops, with their elaborate rhythms and shifts, evoke comparisons to Bach’s variations on a motif or to jazz masters who endlessly repeat a single note – to the ultimate point of unplaying it (Bardonnie 1999).

Even Claude Régy attempted to articulate what captivated him about Jon Fosse’s style of writing. In various newspaper interviews, he highlighted different aspects of Fosse’s literary qualities. In an interview conducted by René Solis, published alongside Mathilde la Bardonnie’s review of Quelqu’un va venir in Libération , Régy shared his reflections on Fosse’s minimalist writing:

What attracted you to Jon Fosse’s play?

Always the same thing: that such an enormous life can emerge from such minimal text. I’ve spent a long time exploring the disconnection

between sign and meaning, and, according to Fosse, you can convey two opposite meanings through the exact same sentence. Peter Handke already said: “You want to say something, and you say the opposite.” Fosse is even more perverse: his writing contains a multitude of meanings. And we can’t define them – doing so would only reduce them (Claude Régy interviewed by René Solis 1999).

In an interview conducted by Ghania Adamo for the Swiss newspaper Le Temps on 23 October, Régy emphasised the sense of doubt that Fosse’s writing instils regarding time and space, framing it as a prerequisite for dissolving the boundaries of imagination:

Le Temps: In the theatre, you have never followed trends. You demonstrate this once again with Quelqu’un va venir. What attracted you to Jon Fosse’s writing?

Claude Régy: His ability to blur the lines. With Fosse, we don’t know what time we’re in or what space we’re inhabiting. In staging the play, I was faced with several questions: do the wanderings of the two main characters, She and Him, suggest a journey of the dead? Is the house they live in one? Does the Man who visits them represent a ghost? I still don’t have answers to these questions. But I embrace this uncertainty because it dismantles the barriers of imagination (Claude Régy interviewed by Ghania Adamo 1999).

Negotiating the voice of writing

Reading the French reception of Claude Régy’s production of Jon Fosse’s Quelqu’un va venir at the Théâtre des Amandiers through the lens of Fosse’s own theories on the voice of writing proves highly rewarding. The critique serves as a contemporary and well-informed acknowledgment of Fosse’s poetics. His écriture minimal is interpreted as a relevant modernist aesthetic, firmly rooted within a recognised modernist and post-dramatic tradition.14

The respect for Fosse’s dramatic project is unmistakable. Critics perceptively engage with, articulate and theorise their experiences of

14 The French performance of Quelqu’un va venir at the Théâtre des Amandiers also became an event for the German theatre audience, through reviews published in the major Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Régy’s staging, as well as Fosse’s dramatic and literary techniques. This rigorous critical-intellectual will-to-understand permeates nearly every review of Quelqu’un va venir. Consequently, these public discussions of the event witnessed at the Théâtre des Amandiers provide valuable insights for later readers, capturing vital aspects of Fosse’s theatrical breakthrough.

A striking feature of the French reviews of Fosse’s Quelqu’un va venir is their nearly unanimous appreciation of the central focus of the theatrical event in Nanterre: Régy’s placement of Fosse’s language at the heart of dramatic action. Their analytical commentaries on Fosse’s minimalist language, intricate rhythms, dancing words, and resonant silences – elements amplified by Régy – attest to the informed sensibilities of French critics. They readily acknowledge how Régy foregrounds the playwright’s language as the centrepiece of the performance.

Perhaps one could put it this way: By emphasising the linguistic pauses, repetitive rhythms and musicality that were vividly conveyed in Terje Sinding’s French translation of Jon Fosse’s play, Régy offered the French audience a powerful introduction to a Jon Fosse deeply rooted in the European modernist tradition. This tradition, shaped by figures such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Marguerite Duras, Natalie Sarraute and Maurice Blanchot, as well as English, Austrian, German and Scandinavian figures such as August Strindberg, Peter Handke, Botho Strauss and Harold Pinter, obviously provided the ultimate context for understanding Fosse’s minimalist voice of writing – to his contemporary critics, as well as his theatre audiences in France. As I have argued earlier in this essay, Régy’s inclusion of Fosse in the European canon of modernist contemporary theatre was far from a mere coincidence. Rather, it was rooted in the very tradition that Fosse himself had studied to deepen his understanding of his own writing, particularly within the genre of the novel.

The seamless integration of literary work, aesthetic theory and critical culture in the French public’s reception of Fosse’s écriture minimale offers valuable insights into his aesthetics. By engaging in public discourse, French critics explored the performative dimensions

of Fosse’s theory of the written voice, or l’écriture minimale. In various ways, they demonstrated how the separation of sign and meaning in his writing paved the way for an understanding of the dramatic text as a kind of musical score – a work of art experienced as music, or even as a form of dance (the “dance of words”).

Fosse’s repetitions, variations and minor alterations were interpreted both as akin to modernist serial music and as jazz-like improvisations on a single note, ultimately unplaying it – as if the dramatic work of art had the power to overturn its own linguistic premises. His écriture minimale was also interpreted as a realistic-existential reduction of essential human phenomena, such as love and jealousy.

Moreover, French critics highlighted how Régy’s emphasis on stagnated syllables amplified the inherent ambiguity of Fosse’s literary language. By inviting audiences to immerse themselves in the sounds, Régy opened a wider space for emotional reflection, intellectual engagement and the coexistence of contradictory – or even mutually exclusive – interpretations. Through this process, the French reception not only analysed but also negotiated, enriched and deepened Fosse’s concept of the written voice, or a voice without speech.

What is literature?

Studying the aesthetic foundations and critical reception of Jon Fosse’s Quelqu’un va venir under Claude Régy’s direction at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre in 1999 may seem like a daunting task. However, I argue that such an investigation offers valuable insights into how an experimental, language-focused novelist from Western Norway emerged as a rising star on the international theatre scene. While it may never be entirely possible to fully grasp the precise historical reasons and mechanisms behind this phenomenon – whether institutionally or aesthetically – an analysis of the author’s works and his archives enables us to engage with the crucial and elusive question: What is literature?

Following Fosse’s receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature from the Swedish Academy on 5 October 2023, this endeavour has become even more significant. Not because literature itself is altered or

enhanced by an award, but because the awarded books and plays – Fosse’s oeuvre – inevitably reach a wider audience.

The unlikely encounter between the French director of silence, pauses, repetitions and variations and the Norwegian author of minimal language, tentative repetitions and musical experiments surpasses any strictly historical or sociological explanation. The event of literature one autumn evening outside Paris in 1999 may, perhaps, be best understood as a productive aesthetic dialogue: the French director’s and the Norwegian writer’s slow, slow dance.

In December 2023, the Norwegian government announced plans to honour Nobel laureate Jon Fosse by establishing an annual Fosse Lecture. The inaugural Fosse lecture was delivered by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, at the Royal Palace in Oslo, 24 April 2025.

It has indeed become a fascinating tale: of a Nynorsk-writing, language-oriented member of the Scandinavian literary elite, who has become a household name in the world of fiction. Fosse’s persistent theoretical efforts to elucidate his own writing and grapple with the impossible yet essential literary question, “What is literature?” turned out to have immense impact, unconceivable to the general reading public in Norway at the time. What was once incomprehensible and inaccessible has now become a cultural-political industry.

In this chapter, however, I have tried to show how Fosse’s largely unrecognised explorations of the nature of literature proved instrumental to his international breakthrough. Perhaps it was in France that his aesthetics of the voice of writing received their first true recognition. The rigorous and nuanced negotiation of Fosse’s poetics, alongside his dramatic literary practice in French public discourse, sheds light on his rise to prominence in the French theatre scene. Claude Régy’s advocacy of Fosse’s écriture minimale, situating the Norwegian author within an esteemed modernist tradition in France, provides a compelling example of how a writer may first achieve prophetic stature in a foreign land, before becoming a prophet in his own.

Even though Jon Fosse’s international breakthrough – viewed from Norway – might seem like a magical event or an improbable

stroke of luck, it is perhaps no more magical than this: in the autumn of 1999, a distinctive Norwegian modernist author and playwright finally encountered a director of the voice of writing, as well as an audience with a profound appreciation and understanding of the aesthetic singularity of a contemporary written work of art within the modernist tradition of drama.

Aadland, Erling. 2019. Litteraturens verden. En undersøkelse av litteraturens antinomier. Vidarforlaget.

Adamo, Ghania. 1999. “L’événement: Festival d’automne parisien: Claude Régy crée ‘Quelqu’un va venir’ du Norvégien Jon Fosse”. Le Temps, 23 October 1999.

Anonymous. 1999. “Quelqu’un va venir”. Aden, 6 October 1999.

Bardonnie, Mathilde la. 1999. “Fond de Fosse”. Libération, 8 October 1999.

Beckman, Åsa. 1988. “Var finns vaktmästaren”. BLM – Bonniers litterära magasin 57(3): 212–213.

Borum, Poul. 1987. “Poesi i Norden 1986. Eller Poul Borum All-Time 1986. Scandinavian Poetry Top Forty”. Poetica (9/10): 66–67.

Cournot, Michel. 1999. “Jon Fosse et Claude Régy cheminent ensemble sur les cimes du théâtre”. Le Monde, 1 October 1999.

Ferney, Frédéric. 1999. “Un rôdeur de limites”. Le Figaro, 5 October 1999.

Finter, Helga. 2008. “Le mystère de la voix de l’écriture”. In Claude Régy. Les voies de la création théâtrale 23, edited by Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Roux, 294–303. CNRS Éditions.

Fosse, Jon. 1983. Raudt, svart. Samlaget.

———. 1985. Stengd gitar. Samlaget.

———. 1986. “Mellom språksyn og poetikk. Forteljing med sleivspark etter Kjartan Fløgstad”. Vinduet (3): 54–59.

———. 1987. “Tale eller skrift som romanteoretisk metafor”. Norsk litterær årbok 1987: 171–188.

———. 1989. Frå telling via showing til writing. Samlaget.

———. 1993. “Negativ mystikk”. Bøk. Tidsskrift for litteratur og teori (1): 70–83.

———. 1999. Gnostiske essay. Samlaget.

———. 2015. An Angel Walks Through the Stage and Other Essays. Translated by May-Brit Akerholt. Dalkey Archive Press.

Gourvennec, Aslaug Fodstad. 2008. “Åpenhet og poesi. Den franske resepsjonen av Jon Fosses teater”. Master’s thesis in Literary Studies, University of Stavanger. DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.16141.10723.

Hagerup, Henning. 1999. “Etterord. Jon Fosse – en negativ mystiker?” In Fosse, Gnostiske essay, 265–278.

Horgan, Kaare. 1983. “Jakten etter lykken kan ikke anbefales”. Dagen, 25 April 1983.

Horvei, Truls. 1983. “Sterk, talentfull debutroman”. Hadeland, 14 July 1983.

Hotte, Véronique. 1999. “Quelqu’un va venir”. La Terrasse, October 1999.

Langfeldt, Espen Olse n and Petter Oftedal. 1999. “Større enn Ibsen?” VG, 28 September 1999.

Leblanc, Stéphane. 1999. “En redoutant Godot”. Impact Médecin Hebdo, 15 October 1999.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Routledge [Taylor & Francis e-Library].

Léonardini, Jean Pierre. 1999. “Entre Claude Régy et Les brèves de comptoir, il y a de la marge”. L’Humanité, 5 October 1999.

Mervant-Roux, Marie-Madeleine, ed. 2008. Claude Régy. Les voies de la création théâtrale 23. CNRS Éditions.

Miglorin, Robert. 1999. “Un auteur norvégien se révèle à Nanterre”. Le Croix, 5 October 1999.

Nivet, Isabelle. 2012. “Théâtre. Rencontre avec Claude Régy”. La Télégramme, 23 January 2013.

Nymoen, Ingrid. 2018. “Den tause talens poetikk. Krysskulturell, postsekulær mystikk hos Jon Fosse”. Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek 36(2): 215–221.

Næss, Atle. 1984. “Raudt, svart, desperat”. Vinduet 38(2): 80.

Obrestad, Tor. 1983. “Ung på gymnas anno 1980”. Stavanger Aftenblad, 19 May 1983.

Pinte, Jean-Louis. 1999. “Harmonies feutrées”. Figaroscope, 6 October 1999.

Quirot, Odile. 1999. “Découvrez Jon Fosse”. Nouvel Observateur, 21–27 October 1999.

Régy, Claude. 2012. “Épisode 5/5 : ‘L’écriture, c’est l’élément dramatique essentiel’”. In Claude Régy, autoportrait d’un maître qui ne voulait pas l’être. Radio France, 20 July 2012, accessed 31 March 2025, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/ podcasts/hors-champs/l-ecriture-c-est-l-element-dramatique-essentiel-1103153.

Seiness, Cecilie N. 2009. Jon Fosse. Poet på Guds jord. Samlaget.

Skei, Hans H. 1983. “Ung, nynorsk debutant”. Dag og Tid, 21 April 1983.

Solis, René. 1999. “Le spectateur doit créer son œuvre. Claude Régy se revendique aux antipodes de l‘art utile”. Libération, 8 October 1999.

———. 2000. “Régy sème la magie”. Libération, 21 February 2000.

Stanghelle, John. 1985. “Seksualsadisme på Samlaget”. Vårt Land, 25 April 1985.

Starheimsæter, Herman. 1983. “Stort talent på leiting etter form”. Gula Tidend, 7 May 1983.

Stenstad, Finn. 1983. “All denne sjelenød”. Fremover, 25 May 1983.

Théâtre des Amandiers. 1999. Dossier de presse théâtre, Festival d’automne à Paris. Festival d’automne.

Tveito, Finn. 1983. “Sterk romandebut frå Jon Fosse”. Folkemål 12(2–3): 10.

Valéry, Paul. 2019 [1936]. Philosophie de la danse. Éditions Allia.

Wilhelmsen, Sverre Chr. , ed. 1995. Namnet. Av Jon Fosse. Den Nationale Scene.

Wulfsberg, Marius. 2002. “Det litterære rommet. En studie i Stéphane Mallarmés og Maurice Blanchots forfatterskap”. PhD diss., Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo.

10. Metaphysics in the Everyday: Drama by Jon Fosse with Emphasis on I Am the Wind 1

Drude von der Fehr 2

This chapter examines Jon Fosse’s play Eg er vinden (I Am the Wind ), which premiered in 2007 at Nationaltheateret (the National Theatre) in Oslo, 3 in terms of metaphysics, religion and language. It shows how the play gives language to Hannah Arendt’s thoughts from The Life of the Mind on the metaphysics of our inner life (Arendt 1977), whilst also actualising an external, natural and extrasensory existence through its poetic language. The intention of this text is to show the breadth of possible interpretation in Fosse’s drama and the depth of his dramatic language.

In I Am the Wind , two men, THE ONE and THE OTHER, find themselves in a boat on the way out to the open ocean. The narrative present is a situational description. There are two men in a boat. They eat and drink wine. They have a conversation. The dramatic

1 The chapter is based on my 2021 book, Dramatikk og metafysikk. Jon Fosse og menneskets vilkår i verden (Drama and Metaphysics: Jon Fosse and the Human Condition) and contains a number of direct quotes from it. However, the focus of the chapter is on individual aspects of the book, and not an account of the book as a whole.

2 This chapter is translated to English by Kjellfrid Reite Castle. For publications with no official English translation, the Norwegian title has been used throughout the text; the first instance of each title also includes an (unofficial) translation. For works with a published English translation, just the English title has been used throughout the text.

3 The dramatic text was published in 2008 by Det Norske Samlaget.

action is retrospective; the action has already taken place. THE ONE has jumped into the sea and drowned himself. We find this out only at the end of the play, but it is hinted at already at the beginning. In other words, one of the two men in the boat is dead, and we are face to face with a situation where the people we meet are nameless; they are simply THE ONE and THE OTHER, and one of them is dead. We cannot but wonder what kind of voyage it is that these two are on.

Already from the first line, we have a hint. THE ONE says, “Eg ville det ikkje, Eg berre gjorde det.” (“I didn’t want to, I just did it.”) “Du berre gjorde det” (“You just did it”), says THE OTHER.

DEN EINE

Ja Kort pause

DEN ANDRE

Det skjedde berre

Men du var jo

Ja så redd for at det skulle skje

Kort pause

Du sa det jo til meg ganske kort pause fortalde meg om det

DEN EINE

Ja Pause

DEN ANDRE

Og så skjedde det

Ganske kort pause

Det du var redd for at skulle skje

ganske kort pause

ja at du skulle gjere

ganske kort pause

ja det skjedde

Kort pause

DEN EINE

Ja Pause

DEN ANDRE

Det er fælt

DEN EINE

Eg har det godt

DEN ANDRE

Ja

DEN EINE

Eg er borte

Eg er borte med vinden (Fosse 2008, 10–11).

THE ONE

Yes

Short pause THE OTHER

It just happened

But you were so afraid it would happen

Short pause

You said that to me

quite short pause

You told me about it

THE ONE

I know

Pause

THE OTHER

And then it happened

Quite short pause

Exactly that which you were afraid would happen

Quite short pause it happened

Short pause

THE ONE

It did

Pause

THE OTHER

It’s awful

THE ONE

I’m fine

THE OTHER Really THE ONE

I’ve gone now I left with the wind (Fosse 2011, 25).

Like verses in a song, the very opening of the play gives voice to a metaphysical question. THE ONE has jumped overboard. However, here at the beginning, it is not the action that we encounter, but the will. THE ONE was afraid of jumping overboard and did not want to – but he did it anyway. It happened. By pointing out the relationship between will and action, the text opens space for a key metaphysical question: the question of whether human beings have free will. THE ONE’s will is not free. He does not do what he wants. When the dramatic text links will to action, it elevates what is said to a metaphysical level.

The metaphysical aspect of the play is highlighted through introductory stage directions, which state: “ein tenkt og så vidt illudert båt, og handlingane er også tenkte, og skal ikkje utførast, men illuderast” (“The boat and the actions that surround it should be evoked or suggested rather than represented mimetically”). In other words, it is important that this play is not perceived literally and staged as a realistic play – it is, in fact, explicitly stated that the actions are to be evoked. We find ourselves, then, in an imaginary world. The wild voyage of the boat with one living and one dead person on board is a spiritual, imaginary voyage.

Let us linger around these opening lines just a bit longer. THE ONE, who is standing there on the stage in front of us, has in fact taken his own life. He is dead, yet he stands there before us, alive. Can the metaphysics of Christianity be illustrated any more clearly: dead, but alive? THE ONE is dead, but he’s fine, he says. In other words, being dead is good. Is that because, as dead, he is nonetheless alive? What is the actor on the stage there in front of us embodying for us? Is he claiming, by his mere presence, that the human being wishes to

live, but also wishes their own death? And do they wish their death because, as dead, the human being is part of the natural, but also divine, cosmos?

Perhaps it is only on a theatrical stage – and in the Christian sacrament, the Eucharist – that such a paradox can be brought to life. So, already in the opening scene of the play we encounter the Christian paradox – that Christ is both living and dead; dead but resurrected –and we encounter an understanding of reality that exceeds our knowledge and our day-to-day rationality. The Christian sacraments, baptism and the Eucharist, challenge this rationality.

Language bears reality

In the theatre, the two characters stand there calmly on stage, speaking out into the audience. There is no action in the performance aside from what happens linguistically. It is language that bears the reality we encounter. It is as an imagined reality. The two tell us that they are on an increasingly wild voyage out to the open ocean. On the way out, THE ONE says he will make something to eat. He switches on the cooker and opens a tin. THE OTHER asks if he has wine, and THE ONE opens a bottle.

DEN EINE

Maten smaker mykje betre på sjøen

DEN ANDRE

Eg har i alle fall lyst på mat

DEN EINE

Ja

Lang pause

Men du

DEN ANDRE

Ja

DEN EINE

Mat smaker betre på sjøen

Ja

Men eg trudde bryt seg av, ganske kort pause. Den eine rører i panna (Fosse 2008, 64).

THE ONE

Food always tastes better at sea

THE OTHER

I could do with something to eat

THE ONE

Yeah

Long pause

But you THE OTHER

What THE ONE

Food always tastes better at sea

Okay

But I thought Breaks off, quite short pause. THE ONE stirs the pot (Fosse 2011, 66).

Word by word, these lines are easily recognisable – they resemble our everyday speech. However, Fosse’s language also has the ability to cast doubt on the referential character of the lines. The words are in some sense translucent. They have a referential meaning, but this meaning is also diminished as soon as they are uttered. It is as if the words are moved to another sphere and their meaning changed.

By eating the bread and drinking the wine, Christ’s resurrection happens anew. In the play, the bread is replaced with tinned food; the wine, however, is there. The reference to tinned food instead of bread veils the religious significance to some degree, whilst also giving the text an aura of realism.

At first glance, one will not notice that the everyday exchange between THE ONE and THE OTHER may be linked to a metaphysical reality that transcends our day-to-day experiential world.

Something different is happening with Fosse’s use of the word “believed”. Here he introduces, almost imperceptibly, a metaphysical space for understanding the conversation between the two characters.

The word “believed”4 is a key to a Christian understanding of these lines. Through the Eucharist and the belief on which it builds, the Christian teaching of the living-dead is brought to reality. Through this belief, the human being becomes a participant in a Christian fellowship and a Christian metaphysics. In the language of the play we find but traces of a distinctly Christian language usage.

As with the use of the word “believed”, these words have an everyday general meaning, but at the same time they bring us into another space: an imagined, metaphysical space. And when it comes to the actions, these are imagined or evoked. That is quite clear from the introductory stage directions. It is the speech of the two characters that acts. The two characters speak out that which is imagined: that which we think.

In the posthumously published work The Life of the Mind , philosopher Hannah Arendt argues that thought is the bearer of an alternative reality. Thought transcends action. We can see this as a form of metaphysics. Thought is present, but not perceptible. It transcends that which is perceptible. To extend to Fosse Arendt’s view of what thought is and how it emerges, we can say that his language in I Am the Wind is in its entirety one long staging of what is thought, for as Arendt says, “Mental activities, invisible themselves and occupied with the invisible, become manifest only through speech” (Arendt 1977, 12).

The metaphysics of the inner life

In antiquity, Greek theatre was an institution that had a hugely important religious and societal function. In our modern time, Fosse’s drama, with its close relationship to religion, has revived some of that aspect of ancient theatre, because religion addresses fundamental questions of our human existence – metaphysical questions – which until recently, through the secularisation of our culture, have been perceived as lofty speculations bordering on the ridiculous. Metaphysics

4 Translator’s note: Excerpts from the play quoted in this chapter are taken from Simon Stephens’s 2011 translation, except here, where “belief” is translated as “thought”.

has a bad reputation because it has been associated with belief in absolute truths – for instance that one can prove the existence of God – and therefore with fundamentalist religious groupings and anti-scientific attitudes towards reality.

Although the religious significance of Fosse’s drama has been the subject of much discussion, and a Christian worldview is evident in various ways throughout most of his dramatic works (Jakobsen 1997; von der Fehr and Løvlie 2013), one of the main points I make in my book Metaphysics and Drama , and also in this chapter, is that, in Fosse’s drama, the metaphysical extends further than to what we associate with Christian metaphysics.

Fosse’s drama is metaphysical because it stages an inner spiritual world. As we saw in The Life of the Mind , this “spiritual life” – the life that the human being lives on their own – is characterised by the imperceptibility of our internal thought world. Our inner world feels just as close to us as that which we sense and is as much as that which is perceptible a part of our reality. Our inner world is an imagined world and must be “evoked” (“illuderast”), as Fosse puts it. Our inner world is an important part of what it is to be human, and each of us must relate to it and make it our own. On this, Arendt remarks, “Each new generation, every new human being, as he becomes conscious of being inserted between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave anew the path of thought” (Arendt 1977, 210). In line with Arendt’s idea that each person must in their inner life “pave … the path of thought”, we can understand the wild voyage of THE ONE and THE OTHER towards the unknown and the future as precisely this: the journey on which every human being must embark in order to make their inner life their own.

Implicit in Arendt’s words is also the notion that metaphysics is involved in steering our lives, but as experiencing something meaningful, without being knowledge that can be rationally understood. Arendt’s distinction here between the meaningful and rational knowledge is with reference to Immanuel Kant. Both knowledge and meaning are linked to spiritual activity and thought, but while rationality has to do with scientific activity and knowledge, sensibility is concerned

with what cannot be proven, i.e. meaning (Schanz 2019, 9–18). Perhaps it is such that individuals can only answers questions about meaning in their lives through their own spiritual endeavours? Or are such questions best answered through literature? In thought, the metaphysical world becomes present. In this sense, the metaphysical realm is something every human being inhabits daily. Yet, as human beings inhabit both an inner and outer world, it is essential for everyone to cultivate a conscious awareness of their inner experience. What Fosse achieves in I Am the Wind is to create a language for this inner experience.

So far, our understanding of metaphysics in this article has been based on Hannah Arendt’s philosophical observations concerning the inner, imagined life of human beings. For a more traditional way of understanding metaphysics, let us turn to Armen Avanessian. In his book Metaphysik zur Zeit (Future Metaphysics) from 2018, quoting Martin Heidegger, he states that metaphysics is a way of asking questions that have to do with what it is to be:

Metaphysics is a questioning in which we inquire into beings as a whole, and inquire in such a way that in so doing we ourselves, the questioners, are thereby included in the question, placed into question (Avanessian 2020, 10).

Such questions pull along those who ask. By this he means that a metaphysical question will also always be about the person themselves. The one who asks becomes part of the question. Metaphysical questions always involve questions of what the human being is, not who they are. Our Zeitgeist’s focus on identity – in which one asks who a person is – is not a metaphysical question. If we ask who people are, we are asking what distinguishes us from one another as people. We ask for instance about gender, ethnicity, class etc., while environmental philosophy, on the other hand, asks a metaphysical question. Environmental philosophy asks: What is nature? And when one asks this question, one is also asking what is human as opposed to what nature is. The question of what nature is is revolutionary, for if nature is not first and foremost something to be domesticated and used by humans, but something with a right to be respected for its own distinctiveness, then

this upsets the central position of the human being in the cosmos. Because what are we, if we must share our position in the universe with the sky and the ocean, and with winds and stones?

This question is raised by I Am the Wind , in a poetic, indirect way. THE ONE and THE OTHER ask themselves what a human being is. They step out as representatives of humanity and of what humanity is, not who people are. Their everyday speech makes them easily relatable, and their verbal exchange with its distinctive poetic double meaning points to the significance of spirituality in terms of what a human being is, including in relation to what surrounds them. In I Am the Wind , it is the ocean and the sky that surround the human being and wind and stones.

Like Avanessian, I also think that, in our time, metaphysics is making a comeback. This is particularly evident in environmental philosophy. In the era of climate crisis, we are now experiencing that human beings are in, and are faced with, a mighty cosmos. Although there can only be a few people who believe that the climate crisis is an intentional action from an omnipotent God, it is becoming ever clearer to us that all the forces of nature play a part in determining our lives. In fact, we have some right to say that nature’s own intention, i.e. the inherent logic in all systems and the evolution of all living things, can in turn be perceived as part of the conditions determining the lives of human beings.

Unlike understandings of metaphysics from earlier times, today’s metaphysics does not put forward any absolute creed. Metaphysics is on its way back because it overrides a traditional view of what the human being is and asks new questions of the human’s responsibility for themselves and for the nature of which they are a part. I Am the Wind forces us to think through what it means to be human. Already in the title we see that the human being is wind – nature, in other words. We are nature, and our spiritual life is part of what it means to be nature. But today, as we are destroying the nature of which we are a part, what can save us?

Of course, Avanessian does not pretend to solve this problem in Future Metaphysics, but he believes it is important that we acknowledge

the degree to which metaphysics forms the basis for what we perceive as objective knowledge. He points out that even natural science has its metaphysical prerequisites (Avanessian 2020, 31), and predicts that metaphysics could once again play an important role:

We are not experiencing simply this or that new event, but the advent of a new age. What we lack, and what alone can help us to understand this new age, are new concepts and a revision of the originally metaphysical concepts and central categories of philosophy we already possess (Avanessian 2020, 25).

The fact that Fosse has created a casual language to express the metaphysics of our inner life is entirely consistent with what Avanessian believes is significant in our encounter with the new era. Perhaps literature and poetic language will play an important role as we face this new time? Perhaps we can view the language of Fosse’s drama not merely as a way of expressing a spiritual reality, but also as a warning against outdated scientific dogma and a renewed need for awareness of the significance of one’s inner life?

The human being as a whole

In the dramatic language and the staging of it – when the language is made audible on stage – Fosse creates a holistic world in which body and thought, material and spirit are united. In Fosse’s holistic thinking, the human being is interpersonal and can be understood based on psychological and biological criteria. We have scientific knowledge about the human being. However, the human being is also a seeker of meaning and submits to the wholeness of their own being. An aspect of this is the inevitability of death.

So, then, as THE ONE and THE OTHER head away from the safety of the inshore islands and islets and into the dangerous open ocean, it is not just THE ONE who overrides common sense by jumping into the ocean, but THE OTHER also overrides the limitations of sensibility by insisting on continuing the crazy voyage. The two do not represent a dualistic view of the human being; the two are one in the

power of their longing to fulfil their being as human, a being that includes death and the forces of nature.

THE ONE is not only wind. He says about himself that he is “so heavy”.

DEN EINE

Eg blir ein stein

Ja ganske kort pause og så blir han ja steinen ja tyngre og tyngre ganske kort pause så tung at eg søkk ganske kort pause nedover og nedover ned ganske kort pause ned til under havet ja ned til botnen søkk eg og så ganske kort pause ja berre ligg eg der på botnen

Tung

Urørleg

DEN ANDRE

Og då ja når du er ein stein ganske kort pause ja då ja ja då seier du ikkje noko

DEN EINE

Eg kan nesten ikkje seie noko ganske kort pause for kvart ord må slitast fram slitas laus ganske kort pause

og då

når ordet er sagt er det så tungt

ganske kort pause

ja at også det tyngjer meg ned ganske kort pause

og får meg til å søkke og søkke

DEN ANDRE

Er det slik

Orda blir tunge

DEN EINE

Ja Kort pause (Fosse 2008, 16–17).

THE ONE

I turn into a rock quite short pause and it gets the rock gets heavier and heavier quite short pause

I get so heavy that I can barely move quite short pause so heavy that I that I sink quite short pause down and down quite short pause down under the sea

I sink down to the bottom and then quite short pause

I just lie there at the bottom of the sea

Heavy Motionless

THE OTHER

And then

right when you’re a rock quite short pause then

then you don’t say anything

THE ONE

I can barely speak quite short pause it’s a struggle to get a single word out to extract a single word quite short pause and then when the word is out when the word has been spoken it feels so heavy quite short pause that it drags me down too quite short pause it makes me sink and sink

THE OTHER

Is that what it’s like The words get heavy

THE ONE

Yes

Short pause (Fosse 2011, 30–31).

I am a rock, he says. He is so heavy. He sinks and sinks. And his words are so heavy. The brief lines and all the pauses between them add to the heaviness being described. The language is focused on objects. We observe the object, the rock, and we experience, as we listen to the language, how the words about the rock become heavy. But although the language is pointing to an external world, it is the experience from the inner world on which the language is focused. For what experience is it to which THE ONE gives language?

Let us call it a threshold experience. We can understand such an experience as one that can be had when concentrating deeply. It might feel like falling to the bottom of one’s own consciousness. Perhaps such an experience might be perceived as sacred? It can also be thought of

as a near-death experience. In any case, such an experience eludes verbal description.

However, the challenges offered by the dramatic text are greater than this. When THE ONE rounds off the play by repeating “I’ve gone”, this is illogical from a linguistic point of view, and here the language takes on a quality of being “impossible”, which it has in fact been all the way from the beginning of the play. Even though a human being can stand there, alive, and say they are not there, they cannot not be there and say they are.

Elisabeth Løvlie discusses a similar problem of linguistic logic in the book Tro på litteratur (Faith in Literature). She refers to the French philosopher Derrida’s reflection on “the voice that testifies of its own death”. Derrida terms this – “namely, being dead, but still having a voice – as the most absolute aporia” (von der Fehr and Løvlie 2013, 213). Aporia means a paradox that cannot be reduced to anything preceding and reconciling it. There are many examples of such “unreadable” language in Fosse’s texts (for example in the novel Melancholy I-II ). We are talking about a threshold moment in which consciousness is neither dead nor alive. In this moment, the human being is on the verge of becoming material nature, like rock – a dead body.

However, here we are faced with more than a problem of linguistic logic and a dead person who can describe their own death experience and their own “becoming nature”. This paradox of a dead/alive voice not only expresses a state of death which is a rock and materiality – it is also transcendence and metaphysics, the over-sensory or extrasensory.

Because the sea and nature can also be the calm and light

DEN ANDRE

Og det er så mange holmer her så mange skjer

Ganske kort pause

Og havet

Og himmelen

Lang pause. Den eine skjenkjer i på nytt, dei drikk

DEN EINE

Det gjer godt å få seg noko å drikke

DEN ANDRE

Ja

Kort pause

DEN EINE

Og så er det så stille her

DEN ANDRE

Berre sjøen som skvulpar mot båten kan høyrast

DEN EINE

Ja ja og vi flyt så lett ganske kort pause vi er så lette liksom ganske kort pause det er vind i oss

DEN ANDRE

Det er som om vi duvar

DEN EINE

Ja

Ja det er godt

DEN ANDRE

Og så duvar båten

DEN EINE

Duvar lett duvar sakte ganske kort pause slik er det

DEN ANDRE

Vi er så lette

Vi er lette som vinden ganske kort pause ja nesten (Fosse 2008, 42–43).

THE OTHER

And there are so many little islands here so many reefs

Quite short pause

And the ocean

And the sky

Long pause. THE ONE fills their glasses, they drink

THE ONE

I do like a drink

THE OTHER

Yeah

Short pause THE ONE

And it’s so quiet here

THE OTHER

All you can hear is the sea lapping against the boat

THE ONE

Yes and we just float quite short pause we’re so light it’s sort of like quite short pause there’s wind in us

THE OTHER

It’s like we’re rolling

THE ONE

Yes

Yes that’s good THE OTHER

And the boat’s rolling

THE ONE

Rolling lightly

Rolling gently quite short pause that’s exactly the way it is

THE OTHER

We’re so light

We’re as light as the wind quite short pause nearly (Fosse 2011, 50–51).

Although this exchange is not entirely different from the lines about rock, it has something new and wondrous about it. We might say that in these lines we see a change in mood. Hannah Arendt says that the soul has unstoppable mood shifts, and that repetition creates a feeling of reality: “In inner experience, the only thing to hold onto, to distinguish something at least resembling reality from the incessantly passing moods of our psyche, is persistent repetition” (Arendt 1977, 40).

In other words, the extensive repetition of words and pauses in the first lines recreates something characteristic of the inner life: its repetitive nature. In our thought life, the repetitiveness of thoughts leads to a feeling of reality. Fosse’s repetitions give us a feeling of something material. There is something tiresome and intrusive about the speech. The heaviness of the speech is felt and is present in our concentration and is thereby a reality to us. On the other hand, when the subject is silence and a rocking motion rather than stone and heaviness, the language is no longer focused on an object. The language has a different character – it touches us easily. It urges us to listen. It demands our alertness to sound and challenges our attentive skills. We might say that the lines have different expressive modalities. They affect us differently.

Rocks and wind at once

As the dramatic language makes us aware of experiential differences in the material and the spiritual, but also to the wholeness comprising both material and spirit, and brings this to the stage, highlights one of the most significant distinctions in the history of philosophy. I am thinking here of the distinction Descartes draws between res extensa and res cogitans, i.e. the distinction between material and spirit or body

and soul. For the environmental philosophy5 of today, to understand what nature is, it is crucial to overturn this distinction between material and spirit (Vetlesen 2016). A similar overturning of set distinctions is found in the view of Jesper Hoffmeyer, professor of biosemiotics, on what the human being is as a biological entity, for instance in an article found in the book Den levende kroppen (The Living Body). 6 He states that we as human beings are fundamentally of the same essence as nature – we are made of the same substance (Hoffmeyer 2016, 59).

In The Denial of Nature , Vetlesen states the following on environmental philosophy:

The heart of the matter is the division made between the living and the dead. In western culture since the seventeenth century, human beings have been accustomed to viewing themselves as the living, as epitomizing the sanctity of life, and so inviolable in a moral sense. By stark contrast, the nature from which they take themselves to stand apart has been viewed as lifeless, as so many automata and so many constellations of particles. In this historical perspective, Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes, followed by Hobbes, stand at the beginning of the ending of nature … (Vetlesen 2016, 130).

When the play asks what I am as a human being, the answer is: I am part of all living things. I am the living paradox, stone and wind at once. If it is true that the human being is part of all living things, including a living cosmos, sky and ocean, it does not distinguish itself categorically from dead material. Though such a statement may seem unreasonable and unscientific, it is worth listening to what geologist Henrik H. Svensen has to say about a surprising scientific discovery. In the article “Pust inn, pust ut” (“Breathe In, Breathe Out”) he says:

5 Regarding environmental philosophy, I am relying on the Norwegian philosopher Arne Johan Vetlesen’s two books, The Denial of Nature from 2016 and Cosmologies of the Anthropocene from 2019.

6 Biosemiotics is a field of research in which biology is understood based on the scientific theory of American philosopher Charles S. Peirce.

Perhaps the findings were not surprising at all – that oxygen is the most abundant element in rock, that the proportion of oxygen in a stone you hold in your hand is twice the proportion in the air you breathe into your lungs. Oxygen is also the most abundant element in the human body, where it accounts for 65 per cent, most of it bound up in water (Svensen 2023, 84).

As we have already heard in this article, biosemiotician Hoffmeyer says that we humans are fundamentally of the same essence as nature – we are made of the same substance. We find evidence of this in geology. Fosse’s dramatic poetry expresses a scientific fact through an “impossible” language which in a paradoxical way is completely in line with the current findings of natural science.

Language and the world

But it is not because we are interested in philosophy or natural science that Fosse’s drama gives us such a powerful experience: philosophy, metaphysics and natural science merely sneak in through the back door. What moves us is Fosse’s language and its performative power. Fosse’s dramatic poetry acts. It includes its audience in an event that does not play out as a traditional realistic stage performance, but which illuderast (“is evoked”), to use Fosse’s own word. The event is something that happens to us as we experience Fosse’s language. An important aspect of language emerges in the linguist Arild Utaker’s book Tenker hjernen? Språk – menneske – teknikk (Does the Brain Think? Language – the Human Being – Technique) from 2018. One of Utaker’s main points is that language is socially contingent to a high degree. Language is formed in human community. Fosse’s drama brings this human community to the fore.

However, Utaker also expresses a view of language developed by the Danish philosopher and theologian K. E. Løgstrup. Løgstrup uses a linguistic-philosophical starting point for his thoughts, which is important for us to understand how Fosse’s “impossible” and aporetic language can bear both the material and that which transcends it.

Let us begin with something as obvious as the assertion that language is sound. In theatre, language is uttered out loud. The sound

quality affects us as the audience. It also takes time to hear the sound. Løgstrup says that sound furthers itself and fills out time. It becomes tone and sets the mood in its own way (Utaker 2018, 65). This means that we, as the audience, experience the language becoming a tone that puts us in a certain mood. This mood does not say anything about the external world. It has its own rhythm and its own sensoriality. The meaning of the word is found in the rhythm of the language. It is necessary to hear and feel the rhythm and sense the language.

In Fosse’s text, the rhythm of the lines is clear, in part due to the many pauses and repetitions. But even though the sound can be sensed, it is not only heard for a moment. The language sounds outwards, and the sound fades into the distance. Therefore, language, particularly poetic, spoken language, connects us to the metaphysical. We sense it and are simultaneously lifted out beyond the sensory and put in a certain mood. Løgstrup’s term for his thoughts on language is sensory metaphysics. Language is both sensory and metaphysical because it is sensory but simultaneously transcends its sensory nature. The sound of language can be compared to deep concentration that is felt, but seems to exceed the feeling and bring with it something else – something that brings us beyond ourselves.

Language gives us freedom and the opportunity to experience the world anew

Sound is a distinct phenomenon. Sound is material. We sense sound waves in the air. But at the same time, as we can sense sound, it fades and is gone, says Løgstrup (Utaker 2018, 66). The fact that sound eventually disappears is a prerequisite for its freedom and ability to transcend our experiential world. We can say that Fosse’s poetic language has a sensory aspect to it, a rhythm and a tone that we experience and sense and that causes us to experience his texts as “real”, i.e. of the same world as that in which we (the audience) live. At the same time, the ability of language to camouflage its presence and the ability of sound to fade out give freedom to thought. Moreover, we can see that Fosse’s poetic drama is philosophy without a philosophical vocabulary, and that this language tells us

something important about the essence of reality. We have touched upon the idea that in Fosse’s drama, nature and the cosmos are in possession of a power far exceeding that of human beings. In I Am the Wind , the human being is not separated from nature but has an existence in common with it. “I am rock”, says THE ONE. “I am wind”, the human being also says. We, human beings, are ourselves nature. We are spirit, consciousness and materiality in one and the same body. Human beings do not live separated from their external world, but in symbiosis with it. All living things share a dependence on their surroundings – at the biological level – but environmental philosophy asserts something far exceeding this, namely that all living organisms are subject to a shared purpose. The purpose of the living has to do with a striving to sustain life. All living things strive to sustain themselves, according to their own particularity and unique needs (Vetlesen 2016, 135). The human being’s position in the universe is not unique. The human being shares with all living things a common struggle to sustain life.

God, philosophy and science?

7

In I Am the Wind , could it be that the human being testifies of their own death, but also testifies of their own will to live? After all, the dead are alive. We can see this as an expression of the idea that the human being has a life after death. But can we not also see it as an expression of the idea that the human being has a will to further its own selfsustainment? Such an interpretation raises new questions of the essence of reality. The relevance of such questions and their effect on us may be important to the further existence of human beings. A renewed understanding of reality involves an altered philosophical outlook. As Vetlesen (2016 and 2019) writes on environmental philosophy, he makes himself a spokesperson for a philosophical perspective he describes as “philosophical realism”. Normally we understand realism as the view that external reality exists independently of our

7 See the epilogue of Dramatikk og metafysikk (Drama and Metaphysics), 159–164.

consciousness and our ways of perceiving reality. The fact that it is not human consciousness and humans’ perception of the world that determine what is of value makes it a fundamentally anti-Cartesian view.

With Løgstrup’s philosophy of language in mind, we can say that his understanding of language as sensory metaphysics also implies a liberation from Kant’s epistemology. Kant argues that we as humans know the world by placing it within the form of knowledge by which we ourselves are determined (Utaker 2018). We reach out to things because we constitute them ourselves. According to Løgstrup, this only applies to that which we consider as knowledge, but does it also apply to all insight?

If what is outside us – that which can be described as transcending us – does not have anything foreign or transcendent about it, then Kant loses the world by making it entirely dependent on human beings’ own ability to know it. And language loses its ability to override the senses and lift us out of our day-to-day rationality. For Løgstrup, the transcendent nature of language implies the possibility of a divine existence. We can also imagine that it would be possible to say something like this about Fosse’s dramatic language. If so, that would mean that Fosse offers us an opportunity to once again believe in God. One might call that which transcends and lifts us, God. Or one might call it faith in a fundamental realism – the view that it is in our nature that because we are part of all living things, of nature and the cosmos, it is possible for us to transcend ourselves, even in our materiality and sensory state. We can join Vetlesen in describing this as “philosophical realism”.

But in a theatrical staging, this philosophical realism can only be evoked (again, “illuderast”), and cannot employ a traditional realistic formal language. And as Løgstrup said, the overriding character of sound can in fact do something extraordinary. It can give us freedom. Language and the sound of language can give us freedom to transcend ourselves. Fosse, with his dramatic and impossible poetry in I Am the Wind – his metaphysical everyday speech – sets us free from much cultural dogma and limitation. But freedom from the mistakes of the past is not enough. Freedom requires something of us. Perhaps

the freedom that Fosse’s language gives us requires that the human being takes responsibility for itself as nature?

Does not the metaphysical-disguised-as-ordinary of I Am the Wind tell us that the aptitude of the inner life for concentration and heightened attention, and the ability of language to override our limitations and our rationality, is a necessary condition for humanity to survive?

Arendt, Hannah. 1977. The Life of the Mind. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

———. 2019. Åndens liv. Klim.

Avanessian, Armen. 2018. Metaphysik zur Zeit. Merve.

———. 2020. Future Metaphysics. John Wiley & Sons

———. 2021. Metafysikk for vår tid. Existenz forlag.

Fehr, Drude von der, and Elisabeth Løvlie. 2013. Tro på litteratur. Vidarforlaget.

Fehr, Drude von der , ed. 2016. Den levende kroppen. Mot en ny forståelse av menneske og natur. Vidarforlaget.

Fehr, Drude von der . 2021. Dramatikk og metafysikk. Jon Fosse og menneskenes vilkår i verden. Vidarforlaget.

Fosse, Jon. 2008. Eg er vinden. Det Norske Samlaget.

———. 2011. I Am the Wind. Translated by Simon Stephens. Oberon Books.

Hoffmeyer, Jesper. 2016. “Viden og krop”. In Fehr, ed. Den levende kroppen. Mot en ny forståelse av menneske og natur, 57–75.

Jakobsen, Rolv Nøtvik. 1997. “Det namnlause: litteratur og mystikk med utgangspunkt i dramatiske tekstar av Jon Fosse”. Norsk litterær årbok 1997: 225–238.

Kongevold, Laila , and Stefan Christiansen. 2023. Verdens navle. House of Foundation.

Schanz, Hans-Jørgen. 2019. “For frihed – introduktion til Hannah Arendts bog om åndens liv”. In Arendt, Åndens liv, 9–35.

Svensen, H. Henrik. 2023. “Pust inn, pust ut”. In Verdens navle, 83–92. House of Foundation.

Utaker, Arild. 2018. Tenker hjernen? Språk, menneske, teknikk. Vidarforlaget.

Vetlesen, Arne Johan. 2016. The Denial of Nature: Environmental Philosophy in the Era of Global Capitalism. Routledge.

———. 2019. Cosmologies of the Anthropocene: Panpsychism, Animism, and the Limits of Posthumanism. Routledge.

11. Jon Fosse and the Festival System: New Perspectives on the Playwright’s Success on the Global

Stage

Jens-Morten Hanssen

Having a play included in the programme of an international theatre festival adds prestige to a playwright’s reputation. In rare cases, a dramatist may experience the extraordinary privilege of having an international festival named after them. Jon Fosse has achieved both, and this chapter explores a particular aspect of his international success as a playwright, namely his standing within the festival system. Shortly after making his debut as a dramatist in the 1990s, Fosse managed to become a household name at prestigious festivals. It began in Norway but it did not take long before he made a name for himself at festivals across Europe – and eventually worldwide. My main hypothesis is that festival events are a crucial factor in explaining Fosse’s phenomenal success.

My point of departure is data and evidence held by the National Library of Norway and contained in a dataset established in collaboration with the performing arts archive Sceneweb. In 2021, the National Library received a large archive of material related to Fosse’s authorship.1 The archive contains both published and unpublished material, including letters, manuscripts, theatre programmes, posters, photos,

1 This archive has the shelfmark Ms.fol. 4778, Jon Fosse: Private archive, mainly related to Fosse’s literary work.

books, journals, newspaper material and DVDs. Two things became evident in the process of sorting and registering the archive. First, Fosse’s global success was closely connected to the fact that he began to write dramatic works. During the 1990s, he went from being a prose writer with a limited Norwegian audience to a renowned playwright whose works were staged by an ever increasing number of theatre companies worldwide. Second, the archival holdings make clear how fast it all happened. Shortly after the turn of the millennium, that is less than ten years after he wrote his first drama, Fosse held a prominent position in European theatre. Prompted by the need for a systematic overview of stage productions based on his works, a collaboration between the National Library and Sceneweb was initiated, and information about all known and documented Fosse productions is now registered in the Sceneweb database.

Sceneweb is a performing arts database which records information about stage productions according to eight main categories, five of which are relevant here: production, person, organisation, venue and work. This chapter sets out to study to what extent and in what way festival events account for Fosse’s international stage success. I begin therefore with a short presentation of the dataset and then set out to examine Fosse’s position within the festival system from different viewpoints.

A total of 935 Fosse productions are currently registered in the Sceneweb database, spanning a period of 31 years from 1994 to 2025. 2 The dataset shows that these productions are associated with 76 works by Fosse and that 5,659 unique individuals – stage artists, stage technicians, writers, translators, producers, composers etc. – are recorded as contributors, while 623 organisations are registered as responsible for these productions. A stage production might occasionally travel in time and space, resulting in multiple performances across several venues. An examination of the distribution of productions per venue reveals that performances were presented at a total of 1,755 venues,

2 https://sceneweb.no/en/artist/3170/Jon_Fosse, accessed 10 March 2025.

indicating that a single stage production is, on average, presented at two different venues. 3

Fosse’s entrance into the festival system

The organisation category covers a wide range of bodies, ranging from institutional theatres and independent theatre companies to arts production companies, educational institutions, media and broadcasting companies, and festivals. 84 out of 623 registered organisations, in other words well over 13 per cent, are festival organisations of some kind. An account of Fosse’s association with major international festivals may go like this: The story starts with the Bergen International Festival and continues with the Ibsen Festival in Oslo, from where it transfers to the European mainland, where Fosse gained entry into major festivals such as the Festival d’Automne in Paris, the Salzburg Festival, and the Berlin Festivals’ Theatertreffen, finally culminating in the International Fosse Festival in Oslo. The latter demonstrates to the full that Fosse has now become the equal of world dramatists such as Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov and Beckett, with an international festival named after him.

Bergen is Norway’s foremost festival city, and the Bergen International Festival takes great pride in maintaining its position as “the flagship of music and theatre festivals in the Nordic countries”.4 How did Fosse come to be admitted into the programme of such a prestigious festival within a year of making his debut as a playwright? It was more than sheer luck. First, when he emerged as a dramatist, he was already an established author of multiple volumes of novels, short stories, poems, children’s books and essays, and was, in Bergen and its surrounding area, acknowledged as a literary notability. Second, Fosse’s collaboration with stage director Kai Johnsen was a

3 For a discussion of different levels of determination for the concepts of performance, event, production and work, see Jonathan Bollen’s study on data models for theatre research (2016).

4 https://www.fib.no/en/festival/2020-and-before/articles/about-the-bergen-international-festival, accessed 7 March 2025.

door-opener for the newly minted playwright. At the time, Tom Remlov was theatre director at Den Nationale Scene (The National Stage) in Bergen, with Kai Johnsen as one of his trusted stage directors. It was to be Johnsen who was instrumental in the events that led to Fosse’s debut as a dramatist (Grøndahl 1996; Seiness 2009; Johnsen 2023). Fosse’s literary-artistic collaboration with Johnsen resulted in the very first Fosse production on Bergen’s main stage in 1994, And We Shall Never Part . 5 Given the Bergen International Festival’s decadelong partnership with Den Nationale Scene, the path was open for Fosse’s third play, The Name , to be included in the 1995 festival programme.

In his book International Theatre Festivals and 21st-Century Interculturalism , Ric Knowles claims that

From the 1990s to 2020 there has been an exponential increase in the number and type of festivals taking place around the world. Events that used merely to be events have become ‘festivalized’: structured, marketed, and promoted in ways that stress brand identities, urban centres as tourist destinations, and the corporate attractiveness of ‘creative cities’, all participating in the so-called ‘eventification’ of culture (Knowles 2022, 4).

Note that Knowles here describes a period that coincides precisely with Fosse’s turn towards drama and theatre and the unfolding of his “dramatic convulsion” during the years from 1993 to around 2010. I contend that this development has profoundly influenced his career as a dramatist. No Norwegian city illustrates Knowles’s argument better than Oslo. Prior to 1990, theatre festivals were unheard of in Norway’s capital. Since then, however, the city has seen the establishment of no less than four festivals targeting theatre audiences: the Ibsen Festival, Samtidsfestivalen (Contemporary Festival), Heddadagene (Hedda Days), and the International Fosse Festival, altering Oslo’s theatrical life in significant ways.

5 Here and in the following sections, the titles of Fosse’s works are given in English, in accordance with the bibliography in Zern (2005, 131–134).

Ever since his dramatic debut, Fosse has constantly been compared with Ibsen. This intensified in 1996 for two reasons: first, he won the Norwegian Ibsen Award for the play The Name, and second, Fosse’s next play, The Child , opened as part of the Oslo Ibsen Festival, also with Kai Johnsen as stage director. 6 Ellen Horn, who was at that time theatre director at Nationaltheatret (the National Theatre) in Oslo, had commissioned Fosse to write a play inspired by Ibsen’s Brand . The Child introduced several Fosse plays produced by the National Theatre during Horn’s tenure as theatre director and that of her successor, Eirik Stubø. The theatre’s leading position in staging works by the new rising star of Norwegian drama was further strengthened in 2001 with the inclusion of four Fosse plays on the programme of the inaugural festival of contemporary theatre, Samtidsfestivalen.

The Ibsen Festival and the Samtidsfestivalen mark a turning point in the theatre history of Norway. One of the aims of the Ibsen Festival, made explicit by Stein Winge who initiated the event in 1990, was to revitalise the Norwegian Ibsen tradition. The chosen strategy was to invite stage directors and theatre companies from abroad to present Ibsen’s works at Oslo’s most prestigious theatre (Hyldig 2011; Holledge et al. 2016, 96–100). After the turn of the millennium, the Samtidsfestivalen operated in an equal fashion by inviting foreign stage artists to present contemporary plays, among them many Fosse plays, on the very same stage. In 2001, guest performances of the Schaubühne Berlin’s production of The Name and the Schauspielhaus Zürich’s production of The Guitar Man were presented as part of the Samtidsfestivalen.

The International Fosse Festival, established in 2019 by Oslo’s Det Norske Teatret (Norwegian Theatre), a venue which features works in Nynorsk and other Norwegian dialects, marks a further continuation of this development, whereby Norwegian and foreign stage

6 Note the difference between the Norwegian Ibsen Award and the International Ibsen Award. Fosse has earned two Norwegian Ibsen Awards, in 1996 for the play The Name and again in 2021 for the play This is How it Was . In 2010, he won the International Ibsen Award which was established by the Norwegian government two years earlier.

productions of Fosse are presented side by side, often directed by a prominent European stage director. When launching the International Fosse Festival, Det Norske Teatret was in many ways following in the footsteps of Stein Winge in 1990 – capitalising on a world-renowned dramatist and building a reputation as an international hub for outstanding productions of Fosse’s works.

Network of stage artists and festivals

Festivals have changed the field of cultural production in significant ways. They have become important arenas for intercultural exchange in a globalised world, and they have led to increased diversification. In what follows, I will investigate festival productions based on works by Fosse in view of these two factors.

It is generally assumed that Fosse’s international breakthrough was the result of events taking place on the European mainland around the turn of the millennium. One specific production has attracted the most attention, namely Claude Régy’s staging of Quelqu’un va venir, the French translation of Someone is Going to Come 7 at the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers outside of Paris, in the autumn of 1999. Cecilie Seiness claims that Régy’s production marked a turning point and laid the foundation for Fosse’s European breakthrough (Seiness 2009, 180).

The National Library’s Fosse archive contains a 120-page folder documenting the media’s overwhelmingly positive critical reception of this specific production alone, which makes it hard to argue against such a claim. Régy’s staging was part of the prestigious Festival d’Automne in Paris and was the first festival on the European mainland to present a play by Jon Fosse. In 2003, the theatre critic Therese Bjørneboe maintained that the most remarkable thing about Fosse’s success is not so much the critical acclaim but rather the huge interest shown by stage directors and theatre companies. She pointed out that Fosse had, by then, already been staged by leading European directors such as Régy, Luk Perceval, Christoph Marthaler, Jossi Wieler, Thomas Ostermeier

7 Jon Fosse wrote the play under the title Nokon kjem til å komme in 1992.

and Katie Mitchell (Bjørneboe 2003, 102). Strikingly, the Sceneweb dataset shows that the very same stage directors are all frequently featured in connection with festival productions. It also constitutes an opportunity to test all kinds of hypotheses regarding the stage history of Fosse’s works, and the question is: does it support the assumptions of Seiness and Bjørneboe?

Sceneweb stores performance data in a database developed in accordance with the so-called relational data model pioneered by computer scientist Edgar Frank Codd, in which data are organised into tables – or “relations” – of columns and rows with a unique key identifying each row (Codd 1970). Within the field of digital humanities, the relational database model has proven to be a powerful research tool and a particularly appropriate basis for a quantitative and data-driven investigation. The Fosse dataset is relatively small, but the field of performing arts is complex, involving efforts and contributions from a messy mixture of organisational bodies, individuals in multiple capacities, and concerns related to literary or artistic sources. Considering Fosse’s three-decade long stage history, it is hard for the human eye and brain to keep track of events spanning such a long period of time. In what follows, I will use social network analysis to examine the relationship between three data elements, production, festival organisation and stage artist.

As a collaborative art form, theatre is a platform for social networking: the process of creating, rehearsing and presenting a performance draws together a company of artists working together over time. Therese Bjørneboe has emphasised the significance of prominent stage directors (Bjørneboe 2003; Bjørneboe 2010), but her focus tends to centre too much on the European mainland, overlooking the important interconnections between events there and those in Scandinavia. I have elsewhere offered important nuances to Bjørneboe’s argument, demonstrating that Fosse’s global performance history is dominated by a group of Norwegian and Swedish stage artists, including not only stage directors but also designers and actors. Using computational tools for automatic detection of hubs, that is highly connected nodes that are instrumental in holding the network together, I have identified the

following group of individuals: the stage directors Kai Johnsen, Trine Wiggen and Svante Aulis Löwenborg, the designers Olav Myrtvedt and Kari Gravklev, and the actors Hildegun Riise and Øystein Røger. Seen from a strictly quantitative point of view, these stage artists emerge as the leading figures within the global Fosse tradition (Hanssen 2023). Furthermore, network analysis reveals the significance of international festivals, in that such festivals form an arena for social networking across nations and languages. Kai Johnsen, for example, was not only instrumental in the process leading up to Fosse’s debut as a playwright and the first to direct a play by him on stage, he also staged the first Fosse play on the European mainland, in 1997, with a Hungarian company of actors in a performance that premiered in Dunaújváros, a city situated by the Danube 70 km south of Budapest, thereby creating a link between Hungarian and Norwegian stage artists. The graph in Figure 1 visualises the network of stage directors involved in staging Fosse’s works at festivals. The stage director nodes appear in lime green, whereas the festival nodes are violet in colour. By pure coincidence, the total number of stage director nodes and festival nodes is the same, at 80 of each. The productions are represented by lines with three degrees of thickness, depending on the number of productions. The thick line connecting Kai Johnsen with the Bergen International Festival is due to his three festival productions there, the semi-thick line connecting him with the Oslo Ibsen Festival is due to his two productions there. 8 The thin lines thus indicate a single festival production. The node size in turn is set relative to the number of incoming lines. The nodes representing the International Fosse Festival, the Bergen International Festival, and the Samtidsfestivalen reflect the fact that these three have presented a comparatively large number of performances: 20, 17 and 11 festival productions, respectively. They are therefore the three largest festival nodes in the figure. The largest stage

8 The Bergen Festival productions were The Name in 1995, Visits in 2000, and Sea in 2014, and the Oslo Ibsen Festival productions were The Child in 1996 and Over There in 2006, cf. https://sceneweb.no/en/artist/5162/Kai_Johnsen, accessed 7 March 2025.

Figure 1: Network of stage directors and festivals

director node is Kari Holtan, with 13 incoming lines, while the other stage director nodes that stand out are Kai Johnsen, Émilie Anna Maillet and Denis Marleau, with 10, 8 and 6 incoming lines, respectively.

The figure reveals at least four things. First, it visualises a tight network with a relatively high degree of connectedness, suggesting that festival productions based on Fosse are internally connected to each other. The network appears with a star topography with nodes connected by lines, and there are only a few instances of stars in the periphery of the graphic which are disconnected from the dominating cloud in the middle. Second, the degree of connectedness is due to the occurrence of highly connected nodes which appear as hubs. Here, there are two types of hubs, festivals and stage directors. The most important festival in terms of the number of festival productions, the International Fosse Festival, is creating ties across large segments of the network. It should, however, be noted that a stage director like Kari Holtan creates a similar effect by connecting a large number of festivals to the network. Note also that there are, interestingly, two ways for a stage director to appear as a hub, either by being associated with many different productions or by being associated with a production which has been presented at many festivals.

Kari Holtan was the stage director of the Norwegian theatre company De Utvalgte’s production of Shadows, which premiered in February 2009 at the Oslo Black Box Teater. In terms of global reach, the production was a sensational success, with a performance run spanning a period of ten years and with performances in twelve countries. The total number of festival associations is 13.9 In 2010, as it was

9 De Utvalgte’s production of Shadows was presented on stages in Norway, Slovenia, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Irland, Iraq, Colombia, Belgium, Greenland, Sweden, Russia, and the United Kingdom, and the production was presented at the following festivals, The Bergen International Festival, the Fosse-dagane, METEOR, the Mladi Levi Festival, the Noorderzon Festival, the 4+4 Days in Motion Festival, the Bealtaine Festival, the Kurdistan International Theatre Festival, the Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro, the Hong Kong Arts Festival, the Nuuk Nordic Culture Festival, the 2018 Jon Fosse Festival in Russia, and the 2019 International Fosse Festival in Oslo, cf. https://sceneweb.no/en/ production/3171/Skuggar, accessed 7 March 2025.

289

announced that Fosse had won the International Ibsen Award, Therese Bjørneboe drafted her own top-eight list of major Fosse productions in the daily newspaper Aftenposten . She characterised De Utvalgte’s performance of Shadows as an “eye-opener” in terms of the diversity of interpretation (Bjørneboe 2010).

Like Holtan, the French stage director Émilie Anna Maillet is featured in the network with a single production only. This was a stage adaptation of The Edge (Kant) which, after its 2015 premiere, was presented at eight festivals. The same goes for Denis Marleau, who was the stage director of a 2004 production of Sleep You Little Child of Mine, which was presented at six festivals in France, Norway, Hungary, Canada and Switzerland. Kai Johnsen’s appearance in the network, on the other hand, is due to festival performances of a larger number of different productions.10

My third observation relates to the argument about the significance of prominent European stage directors, put forward by Bjørneboe and Seiness. Throughout his impressive career as a stage director, Claude Régy was a recurring figure in the two most prestigious festivals in France, the Festival d’Avignon and the Festival d’Automne in Paris. There is no denying that his production of Quelqu’un va venir and the fact that it was included in the Festival d’Automne’s programme, was a turning point in Fosse’s stage history. However, as evident from Figure 1, Régy occupies only a marginal position within the network compared to Holtan, Johnsen, Maillet and Marleau. Furthermore, Perceval, Marthaler, Ostermeier and Mitchell were also involved in festival productions based on Fosse, yet none of them appear as central figures in the network.

Luk Perceval’s Munich production of Dream of Autumn was

10 In addition to the five festival productions mentioned in footnote 8 above, Johnsen is registered as stage director in Beautiful (the 2001 Vilnius New Drama Action Festival and the 2002 Bonner Biennale), And We Shall Never Part (the 2015 Fosse-dagane), Someone Is Going To Come (the 2019 International Fosse Festival), and Play the Game (the 2022 Bergen International Literary Festival), cf. https://sceneweb.no/en/artist/5162/Kai_Johnsen, accessed 7 March 2025.

invited to the 2002 Berlin Theatertreffen and the 2003 Hamburger Autorentheatertage. In 2019, he was invited to Oslo to dramatise and direct Det Norske Teatret’s production of Fosse’s Trilogy, which opened the 2019 International Fosse Festival. Christoph Marthaler was the stage director of the Schauspielhaus Zürich’s above-mentioned production of The Guitar Man . Opening as part of the Salzburg Festival in August 2000, Thomas Ostermeier’s Schaubühne staging of The Name quickly became an international stage success. In addition to the 2001 Samtidsfestivalen, it was also invited to Paris and Porto. As a follow-up, Ostermeier later staged Fosse’s The Girl on the Sofa , which was commissioned by the Edinburgh International Festival and premiered as part of the 2002 festival there. Katie Mitchell’s Royal Court Theatre production of Nightsongs was further presented at the 2002 Toronto World Stage Festival.

There is, however, a fourth lesson to be learned from the figure. The network bears clear traces of patterns of transnational artistic collaboration. While three major festivals located in Norway dominate the picture, their status as international festivals should also be noted. As such, they have invariably presented a programme including a combination of Norwegian and foreign productions. It should further be noted that transnational artistic teams now tend to be the rule rather than an exception. In the history of the performing arts, transnational artistic collaboration is not unheard of, quite the opposite. My point here is rather that international festivals form a system that has led to a strong increase in performing arts projects of this kind.

Diversification and decentralisation

Studying the rise of festivals in Norway since the 1980s, the sociologist Svein Bjørkås has pointed out that, to some extent, festivals provided a solution to a well-known centre-periphery problem, namely the lack of geographical balance when it comes to the supply of art and culture. Demography and market conditions may hinder the establishment of a permanent theatre in small towns, let alone in villages, but recent decades have shown that organising festivals, even in the least populated areas, faced few barriers. Moreover, so Bjørkås claims, festivals

have expanded the space available for marginalised art forms. In other words, festivals have paved the way for and resulted in greater diversification in the field of cultural production (Bjørkås 2001; Bjørkås 2004).

A closer inspection of the variety of festival organisations featured in the Sceneweb dataset reveals that both these factors have a bearing on Fosse’s association with the festival system.

In Sceneweb, venues are registered with geodata such as street address, city, state or province, and country, thereby facilitating geographical analysis. The dataset reveals that Fosse has been presented at venues in 60 nations across 6 continents. However, the geographical distribution has a strong bias, as 90 per cent of the venues are European. Within Europe, there are three geographical areas which stand out: Norway, France and Germany (Hanssen 2023, 25–27). Scrutiny of the festival organisations involved in presenting Fosse reveals the exact same bias, with 90 per cent being based in Europe and well over half of them based in Norway, France or Germany. Fosse has been included in the programmes of festivals in huge cities, such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul, Bogotá, Moscow and New York, but also presented at festivals in some of the least populated parts of the world. The spread to low-populated areas has a conspicuously uneven profile, as it is restricted to Scandinavia and Central Europe. Norway and France, in particular, stand out as having a strong regional distribution, while performances of Fosse’s works outside of Europe are restricted to venues in larger cities.

Festivals set up in sparsely populated areas share many common features. Their history is short. Their mostly low budgets are generally stitched together from a variety of sources, corporate sponsors, private sponsors, funding from the local municipality, county council, or, in rare cases, the government. The festival organisations are often heavily dependent on volunteers. Their very existence is based on the sine qua non of festivals, namely that they are limited in time. It is hard to imagine a small village being able to house a theatre on a regular basis, although a festival may be a feasible option. The municipality of Fjaler in Western Norway, with a population of barely 3,000 people, has managed to run an annual, three-day theatre festival since 2013, with

Fosse included in the programme in 2014 as well as in 2022. 11 Stamsund, a fishing village in the district of Lofoten in Northern Norway, with approximately 1,100 inhabitants, established its annual international theatre festival in 2001. Fosse was presented as part of the festival programme there in 2004 and 2005.12

Festivals take many different forms and come into being in a variety of different contexts. In 2009, the municipality of Strandebarm, on the eastern shore of Hardangerfjord where Fosse grew up, organised an event to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. The event’s programme featured De Utvalgte’s performance of Shadows and a performance based on Fosse’s novella Wakefulness. The celebration went down in history as the first Jon Fosse-dagane (The Jon Fosse Days), which has since become an annual event. Typically, although Strandebarm has no venue specifically built for the performing arts, events are set up in a provisional manner at locations such as the local school, Strandebarm Skule, the youth club, Haugatun Ungdomshus, and the venue now known as Fossehuset. 13 Strandebarm offers no ordinary festival, and the Jon Fosse Days stand out from most other festivals in the dataset for obvious reasons. Fosse has transformed into a brand, particularly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and become an attraction for literary tourists and literary pilgrims. Strandebarm is not only the place where Fosse grew up, it has evolved into a destination for those wishing to explore the author’s authentic background and the places that may have influenced his writings.

11 The theatre festival in Fjaler featured a Turkish production of The Son in 2014 and a Norwegian production of Mother and Child in 2022, cf. https://sceneweb.no/nb/ organisation/37056/Teaterfestivalen_i%20Fjaler, accessed 7 March 2025.

12 In 2004, the Stamsund theatre festival presented the first Norwegian performance of The Guitar Man , whereas the following year’s festival featured a double bill with Someone is Going to Come and Winter, produced by the Sami language theatre Beivváŝ Sámi Našunálateáhter, cf. https://sceneweb.no/nb/organisation/5658/Stamsund_Teaterfestival, accessed 7 March 2025.

13 https://sceneweb.no/nb/organisation/124707/Jon_Fosse-dagane, accessed 7 March 2025. The fact that the former prayer house, which stands close to the house where Fosse grew up, was renamed Fossehuset (the Fosse House) in 2021, is clear testimony of an ambition to attract literary tourists.

Festivals have significantly changed the field of cultural production, but they cannot be said to have outmanoeuvred or ousted the established cultural institutions; rather, they have supplemented them (Bjørkås 2001, 167). In many cases, the established institutions themselves are responsible for organising the festivals, as is the case with the Ibsen Stage Festival at the National Theatre and the International Fosse Festival at Det Norske Teatret. Here, the festivals are an attempt to bolster the institutions’ regular activities.

Prior to 1990, the number of festivals in Norway was low. The Bergen International Festival was established in 1953. Music festivals began to emerge in the 1960s, with jazz taking the lead. Jazz festivals were founded in Molde in 1961, Kongsberg in 1964, Voss in 1973 and Oslo in 1986. In Northern Norway, a counterpart to the Bergen Festival, the Arctic Arts Festival, was founded in Harstad in 1965. Since 1990, there has been a marked increase in the number and type of festivals, with research indicating that this is part of a broader international trend.

Ever since his literary debut in 1983, Fosse has operated in multiple genres and subgenres, including long prose, short story, children’s story, poetry, libretto, drama, monologue, adaptation of classic works, non-fiction. The entries in the Sceneweb dataset reflect his prolific and multifaceted career as a writer. The registered Fosse productions are associated with a total of 76 original works. The number of works is considerably higher and the genre variety much wider than in comparable authorships. Searching the Sceneweb database for stage productions based on Henrik Ibsen, for instance, returns a list of productions associated with only 37 original works.14

Works by Fosse which have resulted in stage adaptations fall into five genre categories: dramatic works, prose works, children’s books, librettos and collections of poetry. Since the turn of the millennium, there has been a growing tendency to adapt Fosse’s prose works and children’s books for the stage. The development is clearly

14 https://sceneweb.no/nb/artist/3317/Henrik_Ibsen, accessed 7 March 2025.

connected to Fosse’s breakthrough on the European stage. Stage success and the rapidly growing awareness of Fosse’s plays generated interest in other aspects of his authorship. Here, I am mostly concerned with how the subset of festivals mirrors the multitude of artistic expressions at work in Fosse.

A total of seven prose works have been adapted for the stage in productions presented at festivals. Trine Wiggen’s adaptation of Fosse’s second novel, Closed Guitar (1985), has resulted in radio drama productions by public broadcasting companies in Norway, Denmark and Iceland, and in a stage production which opened at Bergen’s Den Nationale Scene before it was transferred to Oslo and presented as part of the National Theatre’s Samtidsfestivalen. Morten Cranner’s adaptation of Melancholy I (1995) underwent a similar trajectory. It was initially produced as radio drama and broadcast on the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio channel P2, whereupon it went through a further adaptation for the stage and was presented as part of the Samtidsfestivalen in 2005. Fosse’s short novel Sleepless has been adapted for the stage several times, first in a performance co-produced by the Rikskonsertene and Det Norske Teatret, which featured the traditional folk musician Benedicte Maurseth, the actor Svein Tindberg and the stage director Kjetil Bang-Hansen. The production toured the eastern, southern and western parts of Norway, and was eventually presented at the Fosse Days in Strandebarm. The three consecutive novellas Sleepless (2007), Olav’s Dreams (2012) and Weariness (2014) were later compiled and published in one volume entitled Trilogy (2014), which served as the opening performance of the inaugural International Fosse Festival in 2019, in a stage adaptation created by Luk Perceval and the dramaturg Christina Bellingen. The great majority of festival organisations featured in the Sceneweb dataset are either theatre festivals or interdisciplinary arts festivals. The festival ecosystem has also fostered a type of theatre festival that targets an audience of children and young people. In 2012, a stage adaptation of Fosse’s children’s book Sister (2000) was presented by the Theater Marabu in Bonn, Germany. During a performance run spanning a period of four years, the production was invited to five children’s

festivals in Germany, Austria and Belgium. The picture book The Edge ( Kant) was initially commissioned by a Swedish publisher and appeared simultaneously in Swedish and Norwegian editions in 1990. Since then, the story of eight-year-old Kristoffer and his father has been adapted for the stage multiple times, particularly in France. It was staged for the first time by a theatre company in Lyon in 2004. In 2015, a highly experimental adaptation of The Edge, applying video, 3D and VR technology, opened as part of the programme of the Festival Théâtral du Val d’Oise in Eaubonne, a northern suburb of Paris. The production ran for four years and was presented at seven different festivals in France, some of which targeted a younger audience. It was ultimately invited to the International Fosse Festival in Oslo in 2019 (Vederhus 2020).

Fosse has developed a very distinct and easily recognisable literary style based on repetition, a hypnotic rhythm, pauses, a strippeddown vocabulary and an experimental use of punctuation marks – or rather a lack of punctuation. His style has been lauded for its musicality, and it is unsurprising that his works have been adapted into music. Productions based on Fosse have also gained entry into music festivals. In 1996, at the same time as he was heavily engaged in writing plays in close collaboration with Kai Johnsen, a CD album was released based on a collaboration between Fosse and the Norwegian jazz musician Karl Seglem. This included text excerpts from novels, short stories and poems by Fosse – recited by himself – and compositions by Seglem. A live performance of some of the album tracks was given at Dei Nynorske Festspela (Nynorsk Festival) in 1998, with Fosse as the festival’s writer-in-residence. An opera by the Norwegian composer Knut Vaage, which was based on Fosse’s most frequently performed play, Someone is Going to Come, premiered in 2000 at the Ultima Contemporary Music Festival in Oslo, in a performance coproduced by the Opera Vest, the Ultima Festival and Den Nationale Scene. The list of musical adaptations of Fosse’s works has grown ever since, and now includes works by composers such as Georg Friedrich Haas, Nikolaus Brass, Du Wei, Alaisdair Nicolson and Peter Eötvös. The German composer Nikolaus Brass wrote a libretto and composed a chamber

music theatre piece based on Fosse’s A Summer’s Day, which was presented at the 2014 Munich Biennale and at the 2015 Ultraschall Berlin. Fosse’s oeuvre includes an edition with three librettos penned by himself, one of which presents a contemporary take on the dilemmas afflicting the protagonist of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Nora (Fosse 2015). The libretto resulted in an opera entitled “Nora – Too Late”, composed by the female Chinese composer Du Wei, which after the opening at the Tianjin Grand Theatre in Tianjin, China, was presented during the 2015 Bodø Biennale.

Scholars such as Ric Knowles, Willmar Sauter, and Henri Schoenmakers describe a trend towards “festivalisation” and “eventification” that has pervaded the field of cultural production in general, including the film industry, the music industry, theatre, dance and, not least, literature (Sauter 2007; Schoenmakers 2007; Knowles 2022).

Fosse-based performances which combine music and words, in the form of a recital, poetry reading, staged reading, literary concert etc., have also taken place at literary festivals. The actress Anne Marit Jacobsen and the musician Sinikka Langeland collaborated on a performance of a selection of poems by Fosse recited by Jacobsen alongside music composed and performed by Langeland. The performance entitled Ro mitt hav (Row my Ocean) has been presented at five different festivals, including the Oslo International Poetry Festival. A concert performance combining Edith Piaf songs and Fosse poems was presented at the 2019 Norwegian Festival of Literature in Lillehammer, with music composed and performed by Arnhild Vik and lyrics sung by Eline Holbø Wendelbo.

Concluding Remarks

Initially, it was Fosse’s innovative plays that paved the way for his international career, and one might argue that he would probably not have won the Nobel Prize in Literature if it were not for the fact that he began to write for the stage in the mid-1990s. In this chapter, I have examined Fosse’s standing within the international festival system and established that festival events based on his works are crucial for understanding the scope of his success. Fosse came to the fore as a

dramatist at a time when international festivals were gaining in significance, and he managed to acquire a strong position in festivals across Europe within a relatively short space of time. Theatre studies suggest that the field of theatre – and this obviously goes for the field of cultural production in general – has witnessed a marked shift towards “festivalisation” and “eventification”, with an increased focus on branding. My examination suggests that Fosse has fared well in this regard.

The point of departure for my study was a dataset created by the National Library of Norway in collaboration with the performing arts archive Sceneweb, comprising information on all known and documented stage productions based on Fosse. I have used social network analysis to interrogate and unravel patterns in the relationship between productions, festival organisations and stage directors. The analysis indicates that there are internal connections at a deeper level. The overall pattern of nodes representing festivals and stage artists of various nationalities, connected by lines that crisscross each other, suggests a strong network of transnational artistic collaboration among stage artists involved in producing Fosse for the stage. I have presented evidence that challenges widespread assumptions regarding the significance of Fosse performances by prominent European directors such as Régy, Ostermeier, Marthaler and Perceval. Network analysis brings alternative perspectives to the forefront. While Fosse has been presented at festivals all over the world, the foremost festivals in terms of network connections have taken place in Norway, specifically the International Fosse Festival, the Bergen International Festival and the Samtidsfestivalen. There is no denying that Fosse’s long-standing literary -artistic collaboration with Kai Johnsen makes the latter a pivotal figure in Fosse’s stage history; the network graphic reveals that he occupies a key position also in relation to festival events. More surprisingly, my study emphasises three stage directors hitherto largely neglected in existing research on Fosse, namely Kari Holtan, the French director Émilie Anna Maillet, and the Canadian director Denis Marleau. These three were responsible for Fosse’s biggest festival successes, judging by the number of festival appearances.

Fosse’s association with the festival system is manifested in at least two ways. On the one hand, his works have been presented at a wide variety of festival types, including multi-disciplinary arts festivals, theatre festivals, festivals for children and young people, music festivals and literary festivals. The trend towards festivalisation has altered the cultural field in significant ways, and Fosse seems especially attractive to festival organisers and producers on account of his versatility. On the other hand, the body of festival productions in itself testifies to Fosse’s multifaceted and versatile authorship, in that many of his works written in genres other than drama have also been adapted for the stage and presented at festivals. This development resulted from Fosse’s international breakthrough at the turn of the millennium.

Manuscripts and Archival sources

Oslo, National Library of Norway

Ms.fol. 4778, Jon Fosse: Private archive, mainly related to Fosse’s literary work.

Works cited

Bjørkås, Svein. 2001. “Navigering av båt med kunstner og blind skipper: Essay om kunstfestivalene i glokalkulturen”. Nordisk kulturpolitisk tidskrift 2: 154–172.

Bjørkås, Svein. 2004. “Et Timbuktu for moderne mellomlag: Om kunstfestivalene og den utdannete middelklassens kulturelle prosjekt”. In Kultur, politikk og forsking: Festskrift til Per Mangset på 60-årsdagen, edited by Sigrid Røyseng and Dag Solhjell, 202–217. Telemarksforskning.

Bjørneboe, Therese. 2003. “Jon Fosse på europeiske scener”. Samtiden 1: 101–114.

Bjørneboe, Therese. 2010. “Mangfoldige Jon Fosse”. Aftenposten, 10 September 2010.

Bollen, Jonathan. 2016. “Data Models for Theatre Research: People, Places, and Performance”. Theatre Journal 68:4: 615–632. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ tj.2016.0109.

Codd, E. F. 1970. “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks”. Communications of the ACM 13:6, 377–387.

Fosse, Jon. 2015. Tre librettoar. Samlaget.

Grøndahl, Carl Henrik. 1996. Avmaktens dramatikk: Bergensprosjektet på Den Nationale Scene 1986–1996. Aschehoug.

Hanssen, Jens-Morten. 2023. “Jon Fosse på den globale scenen – en dataanalyse”. Teatervitenskapelige studier 7: 21–38.

Holledge, Julie , Jonathan Bolle n, Frode Hellan d and Joanne Tompkins. 2016. A Global Doll’s House: Ibsen and Distant Visions. Palgrave Macmillan.

Hyldig, Keld. 2011. “Twenty Years With The International Ibsen Festival”. Ibsen Studies 11(01): 21–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2011.575642.

Johnsen, Kai. 2023. “Jon Fosse & Kai Johnsen i Bergen”. Norsk Shakespearetidsskrift 4: 16–22.

Knowles, Ric. 2022. International Theatre Festivals and 21st-Century Interculturalism. Cambridge University Press.

Sauter, Willmar. 2007. “Festivals as theatrical events: building theories”. In Festivalising! Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture, edited by Temple Hauptfleisch, Shulamith Lev-Aladgem, Jacqueline Martin, Willmar Sauter and Henri Schoenmakers, 17–25. Rodopi.

Sceneweb. “A National Performing Arts Archive”. https://sceneweb.no/.

Schoenmakers, Henri. 2007. “Festivals, theatrical events and communicative interactions”. In Festivalising! Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture, edited by Temple Hauptfleisch, Shulamith Lev-Aladgem, Jacqueline Martin, Willmar Sauter and Henri Schoenmakers, 27–37. Rodopi.

Seiness, Cecilie N. 2009. Jon Fosse. Poet på Guds jord. Samlaget.

Vederhus, Inger. 2020. “På terskelen til ingenting? Kant”. In Jon Fosse i skulen, edited by Dag Skarstein and Inger Vederhus, 86–119. Samlaget.

Zern, Leif. 2005. The Luminous Darkness: The Theatre of Jon Fosse. Translated by Ann Henning Jocelyn. Oberon Books.

12. He and She out into the World: An Introduction to the Jon Fosse Archive at The National Library of Norway

Benedikte Berntzen

This chapter aims to analyse the conditions and challenges that lie behind the reception and handling of Jon Fosse’s private archive. It problematises the duties and practicalities carried out by the National Library of Norway as the custodian of this unique body of works, which was donated to the National Library of Norway in 2021. The chapter supports Jennifer Douglas’s new view on the archival tradition of respect des fonds (respect for origins).1 With many stages to be covered in the process before a writer’s archive has a permanent location, the traditional idea of an original order is challenged. Jon Fosse’s authorship has been the main focus when arranging the archive, even if its contents cannot provide any complete documentation of the writer’s artistic process. Instead, the archive documents Fosse’s extraordinary international success on Europe’s literary and theatre scenes. Book editions, theatre programmes, letters and other records have been sent to Fosse or the organisation Nynorsk Kultursentrum (Centre for Norwegian Language and Literature) from a wide international network. The archive documents, through various media, Fosse’s busy career as a dramatist, author of books for both adults and children, 1 I especially draw on Douglas’s article “What We Talk About When We Talk About Original Order in Writers’ Archives” (2013).

essayist, translator, editor, teacher and recipient of numerous awards. It also documents the response to international premieres of his plays, the most frequently staged being Nokon kjem til å komme (Someone is Going to Come).

Initial donation

In the summer of 2021, The National Library of Norway received Jon Fosse’s private archive to be included in the library’s Special Collections. The archive was originally initiated and established by the nonprofit foundation Centre for Norwegian Language and Literature, in cooperation with Jon Fosse. Fosse contributed by donating material to the foundation, at the same time as his career as a writer, essayist and dramatist was coming into full bloom. Today, the archive stands as a collection of outstanding literary and historical significance: from a young author’s first press clippings to a large amount of international material of published translations and theatre productions. The earliest clipping dates back to 1973; a short newspaper article signed with Fosse’s full first name, Jon Olav, at the modest age of 12. When it arrived, the physical starting point was 28 cardboard boxes, containing correspondence, drafts, photographs, diplomas, theatre programmes and posters, video tapes, PhD theses and book editions of dramas in numerous languages. Due to Norwegian government restrictions during the Covid pandemic, access to the archive was initially limited, while it remained secure in closed storage under the National Library’s roof. Three years later, a team of librarians, archivists, IT developers and others have experienced many an interesting day handling and cataloguing this remarkable material. It was given the catalogue number ms.fol. 4778, with the headline “Jon Fosse: Private archive, mainly related to Fosse’s literary work”. The National Library’s collection policy is part of Norway’s overall cultural policy. The collections’ foundation is the Norwegian Legal Deposit Act of 1989 (Pliktavleveringslova), which requires the safe deposit of aspects of Norwegian culture and society, to preserve and make available source material for research and documentation for present and future generations. Thus, all published and released

documents such as books, music records, posters and theatre programmes are deposited with the National Library. Multiple copies are requested, as all documents must, in physical or digital format, be available to any university or research institution across the country, including the Svalbard region. Extended digital access can be provided for researchers within the field of Norwegian culture studies who are living abroad. Subjects of research on Norwegian geography, history, human rights and artistic fields have been carried out on the basis of the National Library’s collections, a practice dating back to the institution’s establishment in 1811. 2 The management and dissemination of major cultural assets have been its explicit objective since the library opened, a tradition that weaves together past and present practice.

As the Legal Deposit Act deals with published documents, the records constitute a deliberate and intentional collection. Private archives are a voluntary matter, both in their original creation by an institution or artist, and in their transfer to a custodian institution. Artistic works, especially within the fields of literature and the visual arts, were prominent forms of expression during the long period of nation-building that culminated in the dissolution of Norway’s union with Sweden in 1905. Norwegian culture as such, can be read through aesthetic as well as ideological lines of development. The Norwegian parliament (the Storting) was the seat of democratic administration. Simultaneously, the debates of the times were held in newspapers, theatres, art galleries, literary societies and at cafés, challenging traditions and customs. Preserving works of cultural heritage for posterity proved to be important, as authors, dramatists, essayists and painters expressed what would be identified as Norwegian culture. From the 1870s onward, Norway and Scandinavia’s realistic and polemical works of art influenced the European avant-garde through the significant movement known as the Modern Breakthrough. The collection strategy of the National Library states that the

2 The National Library’s collections date back to the University Library of Kongelige Frederiks Universitet, established in Christiania (Oslo) in 1811.

collection is intended to reflect the different types of public expression in use at any given time. It emphasizes that this also involves collecting material that is not covered by the Legal Deposit Act. 3 In the Manuscripts Collection, this means archives containing unique letters, drafts and manuscripts from Norway’s major cultural figures, with Henrik Ibsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Knut Hamsun, Fridtjof Nansen and Sigrid Undset being the most famous and admired. Material was, and still is, acquired from authors themselves, their heirs, or institutions such as foundations or museums. Sigrid Undset brought the manuscript of Kristin Lavransdatter from Lillehammer herself, carrying it up the wide granite steps of what was then the University Library in the 1920s. When the manuscripts of Henrik Ibsen were acquired after the death of his wife in 1914, a wheelbarrow was used to trundle them from his home to the library building. The objective of the Department of Research and Special Collections is to facilitate the library’s material so that it will serve as reliable sources for knowledge of the past. This requires knowledge of the cultural-historical context of a private archive’s genesis. Historical awareness – with a little splash of Fingerspitzengefühl – is the starting point for employees who work with private archives. Most professional employees have academic backgrounds from literary and theatre studies, musicology or photo history. Traditionally, an author’s archive documents artistic activity that has been performed and come to an end. The private archive of an active writer, who practises his profession today, is somewhat different. Jon Fosse’s private archive is large in quantity, but most likely incomplete; additions will be included in the time to come. Still, all archives included in the National Library’s collections (as any archival institution holding a body of records), are transformed into “historical

3 “The collection is intended to be a window on public life in past times, and to enable present and future generations to understand and interpret Norwegian society in a historical context. All publishers are required to deposit their publications with Nasjonalbiblioteket. We also constantly supplement the collection with content not covered by the legal deposit requirement. Nasjonalbiblioteket’s collection is intended to reflect the forms and media of public expression in use at any given time” (National Library. Strategy).

objects” due to the process of inclusion: the records have been judged as worthy of long-time preservation and arrangement. To a greater extent than in many completed archives, Jon Fosse’s private archive documents both a writer’s development and the remarkable reception of his literary works. It is characterised by thematic breadth as well as extensive correspondence with individuals and institutions. Together with letters from theatre directors, translators, dramaturgs, illustrators, literary agents and travel agents, there were book editions, posters, PhD dissertations, photographs and theatre programmes, many of which with their own right holders. As proud as the National Library is to receive Fosse’s archive, it requires a balancing act between archiving and preservation, literature mediation and protection of applicable copyrights.

The principle of provenance and the original order reconsidered

On a visit to the National Library, Jon Fosse said: “If a kind of archive can be available for those who would like to study my authorship in Norway and abroad, this must be for the good.”4 In these few words, Fosse pointed to some pertinent views on what a writer’s archive represents, and what it does not. First and foremost, the archival records constitute a limited entity (“a kind of archive”) associated to former activity. The content will always point to the past; completed letters, received faxes, filed first drafts, posters from theatre productions that closed down years ago, and more. The archive is not a complete collection from Jon Fosse’s artistic career, which the catalogue entry introduction makes clear: “The National Library keeps a large collection of Jon Fosse material that encompasses far more than his private archive” (cf. Library catalogue no. 4778 Jon Fosse: Private archive, mainly related to Fosse’s literary work, my translation). Several library departments handle material connected to Fosse. Norwegian published books are encompassed through the Legal Deposit scheme, while

4 The National Library. Press release January 20, 2022.

translated editions are provided by the Department of Acquisition and Bibliographic Services. Such acquisitions go beyond the archivist’s task.

A typed manuscript of the children’s book Kant (1990), found in the Special Collections, is not included in the private archive, as this originates from Fosse’s Norwegian publisher Det Norske Samlaget, and not Centre for Norwegian Language and Literature. This example demonstrates the principle of provenance, a methodological principle that takes as its starting point that the archives and their contents must be linked to their origin, i.e. the archive creator and the original archive formation process. The principle of provenance combines two long-standing principles for handling archives, traditionally known as the French respect des fonds and the Prussian Provenienzprinzip. In Norwegian, these are referred to as external and internal provenance, in the meaning of outer delimitation and original structure arrangement. However, the principle of internal provenance, i.e. original structure, is no longer the undisputed structure for arranging private archives. Recent literature on archival discourse discusses how, while the original order is essential to an archive’s history, its former high status should be challenged.

I am not suggesting the principle of respect for original order should be abandoned; however imperfectly we understand and represent it, the original order is an essential part of the records’ history. Rather, I am suggesting that “original order” is simply one of many possible orders a body of records will have over time and, therefore, its privileged status needs to be reconsidered (MacNeil 2008, 24).

In her 2008 article “Archivalterity: Rethinking Original Order”, Heather MacNeil argues how the principle (or promise) of original order should be reconsidered from the very start of an archival process. Jon Fosse’s private archive was donated to the National Library from the foundation Centre for Norwegian Language and Literature, which had, for a period of time, corresponded with Fosse about what records should be included in such an archive, and which had received donations from Fosse over several years. The material was eventually packed

and transported from Centre for Norwegian Language and Literature in the Sunnmøre district of Western Norway. Prior to the arrangement of the archival unit, Fosse had relocated to several homes in Bergen. In the years to follow, Fosse travelled extensively as part of his engagement with his literary works’ international distribution and success. One can assume that considerations made by Fosse in the material selection and delimitation process, were made in very busy times. The records contain many letters and published works from translators, directors and other collaborators, presenting a large international network in European literature and theatre. I will describe the preservation and cataloguing methods and assessments later in this text.

In her article “What We Talk About When We Talk About Original Order in Writers’ Archives” (2013), Jennifer Douglas supports MacNeil’s assessment for reconsidering the promise of original order, and furthermore, suggests that the archivist should aim to identify the problematising factors:

The promise of original order is overshadowed by so many factors: the difficulty of determining when an order is original or which of several orders should be identified as original; the difficulty in expressing what original order can communicate about personal archives’ creators; and the impossibility of preserving an original order intact – should we succeed in identifying one – as we carry out our archival functions (MacNeil 2008, 24).

Arrangement of the archive

Considering the different source locations and practical circumstances for the body of records in Jon Fosse’s private archive, the concept of original order is challenging. Another difficult factor is added when we consider yet another temporary location; the storage facility in the National Library in which the two pallets of material were kept during the first period under its roof. We found that the pallets contained big cardboard containers, stacked for safe transport rather than for archival arrangement. The complete body of records had to be re-housed once more, into acid-free boxes on library shelves for long-term preservation. Although the transfer of Fosse’s archive to its permanent

archival home was accomplished safely, the relocation process is a critical stage for any archive, involving risks of disarray and damage. In the arrangement and cataloguing of private archives in the Section of rare books and manuscripts, the National Library takes as a starting point the general archival arrangement schema suggested in the book Privatarkiver: Bevaring og tilgjengeliggjøring (Private archives: Preservation and availability) (Lange et al. 2001,155). This schema can appear as a hierarchical and somewhat rigid structure but should be read as a negotiable method for cataloguing. An essential point of this archival arrangement schema’s original structure was recognisability, so that the user can easily navigate the content of any archive. But a significant characteristic of private archives is breadth, both formal (different media types) and thematic. As a consequence, the archivist may be challenged by ambiguity in the archival arrangement process. For instance, there is a significant number of video recordings in Jon Fosse’s archive, derived from his dramas. While such recordings are interesting in the context of performance art and theatre history, the productions did not come from the artist’s own hand, and are, as such, less significant from an archival perspective. In Privatarkiver, Lange et.al. underline that private archives’ breadth requires a strict archival procedure, but with special attention to the creator’s artistic work and the documents’ information potential and relation. The catalogue entry confirms such attention to the creator’s work by listing correspondence and artistic writings first on the list of sub-series. The arrangement of the archive in this traditional form means reading the principle of original order as “conceptual”, and, by the archivist’s knowledge of genre, the result is what Jennifer Douglas refers to as an inferred logical order: “writers’ fonds whose arrangement reflects an inferred logical order. For example, writers’ fonds are often arranged into series according to the genre of the record” (Douglas 2013, 11).

Library catalogue no. 4778 Jon Fosse: Private archive, mainly related to Fosse’s literary work

A Correspondence

B Finances and personal documents

C Manuscripts of Jon Fosse’s literary works

D Non-fiction and other works by Jon Fosse

E On Jon Fosse’s literary works by others

F Clippings and press material

G Duplicates and published material

H About the Fosse archive

1.5

The first section, Section A, contains an extensive body of correspondence; mostly letters, either handwritten or typed, and most with Fosse as the recipient. Some letters are signed by Fosse, likely copies of his own outgoing correspondence, such as printed e-mails. This section also includes invitations, contracts and diplomas. Fosse has received numerous prizes for his literary works from the authorship’s genesis. While still at university, he won a student’s writing competition with the short story Han (He), prior to his debut novel Raudt, svart (Red, Black) from 1983. A substantial part of Section A is related to awards won between 1989 and 2009. A very valuable part of the correspondence is a large number of letters from publishers in different countries, agents, theatre PR staff, dramaturgs, other poets and collaborators. Letters from illustrators and theatre directors especially, have artistic touches to them, expressed as sketches or written visions for theatre productions. One translator writes how a trip from Japan to Norway’s landscapes resulted in a closer connection to Fosse’s dramas.

5 Ms.fol. 4778, “Jon Fosse: Private archive, mainly related to Fosse’s literary work”, the National Library. The catalogue has informative entries within each sub-series. My translation.

Fig.

Some letters were sent via telefax, with writings on thermal paper not intended for long-term preservation. For this specific material, the decomposition process has started, and the pages are faded.

As Fosse’s career grew into international success and distribution, his network expanded and publications of his works in different languages became the actual material to document it. The inclusion of numerous envelopes marked by theatre institution or FedEx from Europe, USA, Australia and Asia underlines that the material received does not fall neatly into the standard archival structure. As a result, even with the application of genre knowledge and taking account of arrangement norms, the contents became hard to classify. The correspondence, and especially the printed material, book editions, theatre programmes, posters, flyers and PhD dissertations are proof of Fosse’s progress to a unique position in world literature and theatre.

With this background to the archive’s formation process, one can truly define the body of records at hand as “a kind of archive”, to use Fosse’s own words. In the next section, I will describe the contents and the archival work more specifically. The starting point is the catalogue entry mentioned above, namely “Jon Fosse: Private archive, mainly related to Fosse’s literary work”. It must therefore be remembered that this unit of records does not represent Fosse’s authorship in full, neither his literary production nor its distribution. The basic question is how the archivist will structure the material for future traceability and research, and how this work can result in an authentic presentation of the contents’ significance as part of cultural history.

Someone was going to come. The archive’s contents

In the following section, Fosse’s tremendous success as a novelist and dramatist will be exemplified with archival records from the very busy years 1998–2009. The transition to dramatic writing would turn out to be the pathway to international acclaim. This is the assertion of JensMorten Hanssen in an article from Norsk Shakespearetidsskrift (Norwegian Shakespeare Journal) in 2022:

Fosse’s international breakthrough is closely connected to the fact that he started to write dramas. The archive shows how rapidly things happened. […] After writing his first drama in 1993, it took less than ten years before he was on the repertoire for theatres throughout Europe. Today, he is translated into close to fifty languages and is regularly staged on theatres on all continents. (Hanssen 2022, 162, my translation).

Book editions, programmes and correspondence about Fosse’s most frequently performed play Nokon kjem til å komme (Someone is Going to Come) will primarily be presented here. Written in 1993, the play premiered at Det Norske Teatret in Oslo in 1996, and a book edition was published the same year. It is by far Fosse’s most performed and bestknown play, with 101 theatre productions registered on six continents. 6 When Berit Gullberg, the director of the theatre agency Colombine, first read Someone is Going to Come, she was struck by this extraordinary dramatic text, a throbbing drama in a restful style with a “linguistic score” (Gullberg 2022, 138, my translation). Since 1995, Colombine has been Fosse’s agency for theatre productions of his plays, a long and fruitful collaboration. Revealingly enough, in a letter published in Gullberg’s book Gaffelgränd 1A. Minnen ur teaterförlaget Colombines historia (Gaffelgränd 1A: Memories from the History of the Colombine Theatre Publishing House) (2023), Fosse anno 1995 predicts that “it is probably in Norway the chances of getting anything staged are best”. In a later greeting insert, he writes in retrospect: “Berit worked actively from the start to get theatres to stage both the Someone-play and later other plays, because I rather quickly wrote others. And early on, it came to international productions […] ” (Gullberg 2022, 169, my translation). Gullberg’s efforts to get Fosse’s plays onto European stages significantly boosted the number of productions, particularly in the years following the millennium. 2002 holds the record as the top year of international Fosse premieres, with 70 productions registered (numbers retrieved from Sceneweb.no as of March

6 Number from Sceneweb, the Norwegian online database for professional stage productions. https://sceneweb.no/nb/artwork/3647/Nokon_kjem%20til%20 %C3 %A5 %20komme, accessed 5 December 2024.

2024). Gullberg’s book is proof that even if European theatre often builds on the artistic intent of dramatists and directors, international success also requires a network of translators, agents, publishers, festivals, dramaturgs and PR workers alike. Gullberg’s generous way of writing about Colombine’s progress and success will make her book an important document of Scandinavian and European theatre history in the future. 7

Theatre programmes, flyers and press reviews can never recreate a stage production or provide a taste of the atmosphere of such an ephemeral event. However, the material can tell future readers about the conditions surrounding a theatre production. Such printed material forms another significant part of the archive, about 20 boxes in all. Fosse’s international premiere of Barnet (The Child ) in Stockholm in 1997 was a breakthrough for both him and director Kia Berglund, and the start of a series of Fosse plays for that director. This was also the start of Fosse’s international theatre distribution, followed by the Danish -language version of Someone is Going to Come (Nogen vil komme. En kærlighedsgyser af Jon Fosse) at the fringe theatre Caféteatret in Copenhagen in February 1998. Caféteatret was established as a theatre group in 1963 with links to the French café-théâtre tradition. The theatre’s repertoire revolved around Danish contemporary drama and Danish premieres of international contemporary drama. A new Nordic drama in a distinct language was perfectly suited for their profiled style. One of Europe’s most distinguished actresses, Sofie Gråbøl, played the role of “She”. Gråbøl was already an experienced actress with numerous films under her belt, and her choice of this role does her credit. A review in the Danish newspaper Information tells of her

7 Berit Gullberg’s book Gaffelgränd 1A. Minnen ur teaterförlaget Colombines historia (2023) has been the inspiration for this chapter. This lively memoir recounts Gullberg’s and Fosse’s travels to premieres and seminars on Fosses’s plays throughout Europe, USA and Asia. Together, they have enjoyed Paris nightlife with film stars, faced ranting medieval festival monks, taken a snow scooter ride in Scandinavia’s northern Sámi region, and spent numerous nights around wobbly café tables discussing life and art. In 2008, Gullberg received the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit for the promotion of cultural cooperation between Norway and Sweden.

on-stage nervousness on the edge of the big breakdown and calls it “vidunderlig” (wonderful).

Rather than the big institutions, it was the smaller stages that first took on Fosse’s plays during this initial period, maybe as a result of these companies’ experience in looking for new, significant expressions that reflect the contemporary. European theatre in the 1990s was characterized by a crude and confrontational style, expressed through the plays of Philip Ridley, Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill, with graphic titles like Blasted (Kane, 1995) and Shopping and Fucking (Ravenhill, 1996). Aleks Sierz has analysed how this theatre style affected and involved audiences in his book In-Yer-Face-Theatre: British Theatre Today (2001). Jon Fosse offered (and his works still do) a quieter world, a Fosse environment where contemplation and observation appeared on stage, apparent to the reader as well as the audience, and dramatic action proceeded without any tangible rebellion. In Sweden, Teater Giljotin in Stockholm and Cinnober Teater in Gothenburg became Fosse advocates, working closely with the author on several stagings of his plays. Director Svante Aulis Löwenborg at Cinnober Teater worked both as translator, dramaturg and director, and has later acknowledged how Cinnober became one of the pioneers. The archive contains a flyer from their production of Någon vill komma from 1998 (Someone is Going to Come , Swedish translation by Svante Aulis Löwenborg). It is printed in bright yellow and has a modest format. The Royal Dramatic Theatre Dramaten staged its first Fosse drama in 2002, with Dröm om hösten ( Dream of Autumn , Swedish translation by Claes Hylinger). The same year, the dramatist Lars Norén translated Someone is Going to Come from Fosse’s original Nynorsk into Swedish for the National Touring Theatre Riksteatern. The German and French productions of Fosse’s plays brought him extensive attention in Europe, and he was kept very busy travelling to premieres and giving interviews in many countries. From Canada to Japan and China, Fosse and Gullberg watched and enjoyed many premieres of his dramas and stage versions of his prose, including his children’s books. Gullberg states in her book: “No other dramatist I know spent that much time on travelling out into the world to

his premieres as Jon did the first years. And they were many” (Gullberg 2023, 140, my translation).

In France, the production of Someone is Going to Come (Quelqu’un va venir) at the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, masterminded by director Claude Régy in 1999, was a resounding success. Fosse was highly praised and received great deal of attention. The newspaper Le Monde wrote about how the production, which was slow in pace but still distinct, came close to being “theatre heaven” (Cournot 1999). An extensive folder of clippings containing over 100 reviews and articles from this single production is included in the archive and will serve as tangible proof of what transpired. Also, several programmes and flyers are placed in the published material section, Section G. The programme from the Claude Regy productionas no photos, though common in theatres today, and portrays neither characters nor set design. On one of the mere four pages, a key line from the play’s first act is written in large letters: Une mer qui déferle blanche et noire et rien que toi et moi (A sea that is white and black / and only you and I ), translated by Gregory Motton. Régy would later stage two more Fosse productions, the early novel Melancholia and the drama Variations sur la mort (Death Variations). Each year, several Fosse plays are staged in France, and Fosse has expressed great gratitude to the country.

The archive’s documents are proof of a wide professional network. In 2003, Fosse was made a chevalier of France’s Ordre national du Mérite. His acceptance speech for this event is one of many significant treasures in the archive. Here, Fosse gave a big thank you to translator Terje Sinding, director Claude Régy, and artist Pierre Duba, who made an animated version of Someone is Going to Come in 2002. This version of the play has the lines woven into the water-coloured images, matched the original tone and atmosphere. “I feel he has rendered my persons absolutely perfect. Incredibly beautiful images for my Someone-play”, Fosse stated in the speech. 8 The official speech

8 Catalogue no. 4778 A2a: Correspondence concerning prizes, awards and more. Acceptance speech 2003, my translation.

and other documents from the night of the award ceremony are included in the archive.

Cataloguing Dream weaving. Different media formats

From the section above, it should appear apparent that much of Jon Fosse’s private archive relates to his artistic work and network. However, a look at the material sent to Centre for Norwegian Language and Literature or Fosse, makes it clear that a wide field of creative work has gone into producing these published works, resulting in books, posters, programmes, flyers and photographs. A writer may work alone in their manuscript phase, but in the publication or stage production process, they will encounter editors, dramaturgs, illustrators, photographers, set designers, directors and translators – professional creators in their own fields. Traditional archival practice has searchability and retrievability as the main principle. Each archival record’s format and materiality will, to a large extent, decide how to go forward with registration and conservation. As a consequence, the archivist will work closely with librarians, photo historians, IT consultants and others, to ensure the best conservation, cataloguing and retrieval methods for each specific media type. Photographs are best kept digitally, posters need silk paper for safe storage in drawers, and so on. The theatre programmes have proven to be particularly useful in contemporary Fosse research and are retrieved from the library stacks regularly.

About 30 book editions of Fosse’s literature, mostly dramas, but some prose works, are included in the archive, and represent proof of creative works and processes by others than the original writer. The books also lay out a variety of artistic expressions. The first record that appeared when first opening the archival boxes was a Korean book edition of Fosse’s dramas. The book has a cover in light green and blue, which gives it a somewhat enigmatic style. In a body of records that involves over 40 different languages, some semantic challenges have been taken on in the cataloguing. On the cover of a book in Mandarin Chinese (2015), another selection of Fosse’s dramas, the text reads: Dream weaving. Selected dramas by Yueen Fuse. Following Mandarin writing protocol, a punctuation mark is placed between the first

and last name. With the help of eminent librarians in the department of Acquisition and Bibliographic Services, the Chinese characters have been converted into Latin letters by way of phonetic transliteration. The documented information can sometimes be quite sensational. The Chinese characters’ sound is Yueen Fuse, so this is what registered. For the Arabic book editions, the registration in Latin letters is Yun Fussih. For precise retrieval results, the native spelling Jon Fosse is also recorded, albeit in brackets. The books and theatre programmes are now registered in Oria – the online search engine of Norway’s research libraries. The National Library’s librarians in the department of Acquisition and Bibliographic Services have been particularly important in this work.9

Norwegian seaside landscape expressed

As mentioned above, the body of records in Fosse’s archive is characterised by collaboration and visual expressions alike. This is particularly evident in the theatre material’s designs. Posters, programmes and book covers bear images of Norwegian coastal landscapes. Such visualisations associate Norwegian landscapes with the calm tone found in the literary works. The “visual Fosse” is presented through subtle colours, seaside landscapes or houses isolated in a Norwegian fjord. Many photographs from stage productions show empty chairs, an abandoned sofa or characters observing each other more than interacting with each other. This atmosphere is encapsulated by the “She” character in Someone is Going to Come , when she states in the first act: “it is so isolated here” (Fosse 2002, 13). The use of characters without first names establishes a distance between them and invites the audience to perform a very specific listening role. As with the programme for a Japanese version of Someone is Going to Come (Dareka Kuru) from 2004: A traditional Japanese ink drawing makes a rather unfathomable

9 Librarian Kjetil Wormstrand and head librarian Elin Grønneberg have made an invaluable effort in the registering of the published material.

design that could be read as a visualisation of a deserted place as much as the characters’ inner landscape.

Another telling record in the archive is a review of the first production of Someone is Going to Come in Portugal, the headline reads Suspeita à beira-mar (Suspicions by the Sea). The reviewer uses the image of a fata morgana to claim the impossibility of a happy marriage in total isolation. The surroundings and the dramatic action are woven together into a melancholic state, which will be recognised by a broader international audience from the works of Henrik Ibsen, Edvard Munch and TV series in the Nordic Noir genre. It is no secret however, that such fixed readings of “quiet enlightenment” are not praised by everybody. In a press clipping with a review from the staging of The Girl in the Sofa at Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh in 2002, Charles Spencer, writing in The Daily Telegraph , accuses Fosse of omitting the very thing that makes theatre work – energy – and substituting it with “a listless Nordic gloom. In comparison, Ibsen seems like a chirpy stand-up comic” (Spencer 2002; Ms.fol. 4778: F).

When the Swedish Academy awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature to Jon Fosse, the Chair of the Nobel Committee for Literature, Anders Olsson, described his colossal, genre-spanning body of work as “giving voice to the unsayable”. On this occasion, the American -Turkish literature critic Merve Emre put forward her understanding of this somewhat fleeting praise.

What I think the Academy meant is that, across his forty-odd plays, his novels, his essays, and his children’s books, what is unsayable – the absolute depths of abandonment, shame, love, and grace – is felt without needing to be named, surpassing the mere arrangement of words on a page (Emre 2023).

The body of records in Fosse’s private archive can support such an argument by demonstrating how the material’s different media formats express observation and disconnection between the characters.

Concluding remarks

Jon Fosse’s works have broken new ground for contemporary theatre in Europe and beyond. The visual and mental landscapes evoked in his plays challenge the audience to acknowledge the sensitive act of listening in their theatre experience. His literary works invite readers, audiences, illustrators and directors into a new land of contemplation, but where there is no promise of relief or redemption.

Work on Jon Fosse’s private archive has given us a sense of kinship with professional collaborators within the artistic field. While a writer’s archive may rightfully appear to be a treasure chest for studies on one authorship, it is also a social and collaborative body, which originates not from one person only, but rather from a dynamic interplay of contributors, archivists and future users. The archive confirms a collective of creators from different creative fields, agents, translators, designers and others who stand behind the publication of a book or the staging of a play. This body of records will serve future users and researchers with rich and specific material about Norway’s most prominent living author. The private archive of Jon Fosse is a cultural statement of creative collaboration, distribution and the recognition of art as a force.

Manuscripts and Archival sources

Oslo, National Library of Norway

Ms.fol. 4778, Jon Fosse: Private archive, mainly related to Fosse’s literary work.

Ms.fol. 4778. Private archive of Jon Fosse. F Clippings and press material.

Works cited

Cournot, Michel. 1999. “Jon Fosse et Claude Régy cheminent ensemble sur les cimes du théâtre”. Le Monde, 1 October 1999.

Douglas, Jennifer. 2013. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Original Order in Writers’ Archives”. Archivaria 76: 7–25. https://archivaria.ca/index.php/ archivaria/article/view/13456.

Emre, Merve. 2023. “Jon Fosse, the Nobel Prize, and the Art of What Can’t Be Named”. New Yorker, 6 October 2023.

Fosse, Jon. 2002. Plays One. Translated by Gregory Motton (Somone is going to Come, The Name) and Louis Muinzer (The Guitar Man, The Child). Oberon Books.

Gullberg, Berit. 2023. Gaffelgränd 1A. Minnen ur teaterförlaget Colombines historia. Pajazzo Förlag.

Hanssen, Jens-Morten. 2022. “Verdensdramatikeren Jon Fosse”. Norsk Shakespearetidsskrift 2/3: 162–167.

Lange, Vilhelm , Øyvind Ødegaard and Dag Mangset. 2001. Privatarkiver: Bevaring og tilgjengeliggjøring. Kommuneforlaget.

Lovdata. “Lov om avleveringsplikt for allment tilgjengelege dokument (pliktavleveringslova)” (the Norwegian Legal Deposit Act), accessed 26 February 2025, https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/1989-06-09-32.

MacNeil, Heather. 2008. “Archivalterity: Rethinking Original Order”. Archivaria 66 (1): 1–24. https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13190.

National Library of Norway. “National Library of Norway: Strategy”. Accessed 7 March 2024, https://www.nb.no/en/strategy/.

Sceneweb. “A National Performing Arts Archive”. https://sceneweb.no/. Sierz, Aleks. 2001. In-Yer-Face-Theatre: British Theatre Today. Faber and Faber.

Contributors

Benedikte Berntzen completed an M. Phil. in Ibsen Studies at the University of Oslo in 2006 and is a research librarian at Department of Research and Special Collections, National Library of Norway. Berntzen works closely with Jon Fosse’s private archive and the Theatre Collection. She was Associate editor for Ibsen. net in 2007 to 2012. In 2016, she curated the exhibition NORA Around the World.

Drude von der Fehr is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. She earned her doctorate with a dissertation on La Storia by the Italian author Elsa Morante. Her research combines literary theory with philosophy and aesthetics, often drawing on the semiotic thought of Charles S. Peirce. She has published widely on drama and theatre and is co-author of Teater som betyr noe (2007) and author of Dramatikk og metafysikk (2021), a study of Jon Fosse’s dramatic works.

Christine Hamm is professor of Scandinavian literature at the Department of linguistic, literary and aesthetic studies, University of Bergen. She has published books on the novels of Sigrid Undset and Amalie Skram, as well as many articles on Nordic literature since 1850. Among her most recent publications is Reading Literature (Fagbokforlaget, 2023).

Jens-Morten Hanssen is Associate Research Professor at the National Library of Norway. He earned his PhD at the University of Oslo with a dissertation on the early reception of Ibsen in Germany. His research focuses on theatre history, authorship, and cultural metadata. He is the author of Ibsen on the German Stage 1876–1918 (2018) and co-editor of The

Hermeneutics of Bibliographic Data and Cultural Metadata (2025).

Trond Haugen is Associate Research Professor at the National Library of Norway. He holds a Dr. Art in Comparative Literature from the University of Oslo, with a dissertation on the aesthetic interplay between poetry and music in the works of Carl Michael Bellman. His research includes contemporary Norwegian literature, literary criticism, banned books, and song lyrics. He served as chair of the Norwegian Critics’ Association from 2003 to 2007.

Tom Egil Hverven is a writer and literary critic for the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen He holds a master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Oslo. Hverven has written extensively on Jon Fosse, including in the books Å lese etter familien (1999) and Å lese etter troen (2022).

Kai Johnsen is a stage director and dramaturge educated at the Norwegian National Academy of Theatre and the University of Oslo. He has served as senior consultant at the Norwegian Arts Council, artistic director at the Norwegian Centre for New Playwriting, and professor of directing at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Johnsen has premiered numerous new works for the stage, including eleven world premieres of plays by Jon Fosse.

Arild Linneberg is Dr. Philos. and Professor Emeritus of Literary Studies at the University of Bergen. He has published works including A Rough Guide to Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1999), Thirteen Sad Essays on War and Literature (2001), Twelve and a Half Speeches:

On Literature, Law, and Justice (2007), and Only About Arnold Busk: Told by Himself. A Novel (2024).

Frode Helmich Pedersen is professor of Nordic Literature at the University of Bergen and literary critic in the Norwegian paper Morgenbladet. His major research interests include Scandinavian contemporary literature, Norwegian literature of the nineteenth century and humanistic legal studies. He is the author of several books in Norwegian and co-editor of the volume Narrative in the Criminal Process (2021).

Marius Wulfsberg is Associate Research Professor at the National Library of Norway in Oslo and a literary critic for the Norwegian daily Dagbladet. He holds a Dr. Art in Comparative Literature from the University of Oslo, where he also worked as a postdoctoral fellow. His research focuses on modernist literature and the relationship between fiction and non-fiction prose. He has also worked extensively on the writings of Camilla Collett and edited her correspondence.

Rebecca Boxler Ødegaard is a Researcher at the National Library of Norway, where she works as an archivist with private archives and collections of Norwegian authors and literary organisations. She holds a Cand.philol. in Scandinavian Literature and a teaching degree in German and Norwegian. Since 2020, she has edited Sigrid Undset’s letters for the critical edition series NB kilder, including Brev til Nini Roll Anker 1911–1940 (2021–2023).

Nota bene is the National Library of Norway’s channel for disseminating research findings built on its collections, and research of relevance to these collections. All manuscripts are peer reviewed. Nota bene has a wide thematic profile. In order to mirror the full breadth of our collection, the publications, which include monographs, critical editions and edited collections, may be based on manuscripts, printed material, film, photography, music, broadcasting, and digital media.

Nota be N e 1

Det nasjonale i Nasjonalbiblioteket | Marianne Takle | 2009

Nota be N e 2

The Archive in Motion. New Conceptions of the Archive in Contemporary Thought and New Media Practices | Eivind Røssaak (ed.) | 2009

Nota be N e 3

Axel Charlot Drolsum. Brev 1875–1926 | Bjørg Dale Spørck | 2011

Nota be N e 4

Opplysning, vitenskap og nasjon. Bidrag til norsk bibliotekhistorie

Ruth Hemstad (ed.) | 2011

Nota be N e 5

Latin Manuscripts of Medieval Norway. Studies in Memory of Lilli Gjerløw Espen Karlsen (ed.) | 2013

Nota be N e 6

Den engasjerte kosmopolitt. Nye Bjørnson-studier

Liv Bliksrud, Giuliano D’Amico, Marius Wulfsberg and Arnfinn Åslund (eds.) | 2013

Nota be N e 7

Naturen og eventyret. Dokumentarfilmskaperen Per Høst

Gunnar Iversen | 2014

Nota be N e 8

Å bli en stemme. Nye studier i Camilla Colletts forfatterskap

Trond Haugen (ed.) | 2014

Nota be N e 9

Propagandakrig. Kampen om Norge i Norden og Europa 1812–1814

Ruth Hemstad | 2014

Nota be N e 10

Small Country, Long Journeys. Norwegian Expedition Films Eirik Frisvold Hanssen and Maria Fosheim Lund (eds.) | 2017

Nota be N e 11

Reformasjonstidens religiøse bokkultur cirka 1400–1700: tekst, visualitet og materialitet | Bente Lavold and John Ødemark (eds.) | 2017

Nota be N e 12

I dørtrekken fra Europa. Festskrift til Knut Sprauten. I anledning 70-årsdagen 22. juni 2018 | Ola Alsvik, Hans P. Hosar and Marianne Wiig (eds.) | 2018

Nota be N e 13

Litterære verdensborgere. Transnasjonale perspektiver på norsk bokhistorie 1519–1850 | Aasta M.B. Bjørkøy, Ruth Hemstad, Aina Nøding and Anne Birgitte Rønning (eds.) | 2019

Nota be N e 14

Lov og lovgivning i middelalderen. Nye studier av Magnus Lagabøtes landslov

Anna Catharina Horn and Karen Arup Seip (eds.) | 2020

Nota be N e 15

Notated Music in the Digital Sphere: Possibilities and Limitations

Margrethe Støkken Bue and Annika Rockenberger (eds.) | 2021

Nota be N e 16

Språk i arkivet. Historier om hvordan språk reflekterer samfunnet

Johanne Ostad and Elise Kleivane (eds.) | 2021

Nota be N e 17

Silent Ibsen. Transnational Film Adaptation in the 1910s and 1920s

Eirik Frisvold Hanssen and Maria Fosheim Lund (eds.) | 2022

Nota be N e 18

Old Norse Law Books from a Material Perspective

Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir and Lukas Rösli (eds.) | 2024

Nota be N e 19

The Hermeneutics of Bibliographic Data and Cultural Metadata Jens-Morten Hanssen and Sissel Furuseth (eds.) | 2025

Nota be N e 20

The Voices of Jon Fosse. A Critical Study

Marius Wulfsberg and Trond Haugen (eds.) | 2025

© National Library of Norway, Oslo 2025

ISBN 978-82-7965-599-2 (printed)

ISBN 978-82-7965-600-5 (e-book)

ISSN 1891-4829 (printed)

ISSN 2535-4337 (e-book)

Design: Superultraplus Designstudio AS, www.superultraplus.com

Print: Erik Tanche Nilssen AS

This material is protected by copyright law. Without explicit authorisation, reproduction is only allowed in so far as it is permitted by law or by agreement with a collecting society.

Reformasjonstidens religiøse bokkultur cirka

1400–1700:

tekst, visualitet og materialitet

Bente Lavold og John Ødemark (red.)

The Voices of Jon Fosse is the first major effort to bring a diverse collection of critical perspectives on Jon Fosse’s authorship to an international audience. It offers a variety of new interpretations of his work.

From the shores of Western Norway to the world’s great stages, Jon Fosse’s voice has become one of the most distinctive in contemporary literature. His poetry, prose works and dramas have reshaped Norwegian literature, captivated readers across the globe, and challenged how we read, feel, and interpret language itself. In 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Reformasjonstidens religiøse bokkultur cirka 1400–1700:

The study is structured in two parts. The first examines Fosse’s prose – essays, fiction, and translations – through reflections on literary promise, gnostic insight, rural masculinities, translations, and rhythm. The second turns to his dramatic works, analysing his aesthetics of absence, realist and postdramatic theatre, and international reception – from rehearsal rooms and directorial archives to festival circuits and international stages. It ultimately probes the question of what defines modern literature.

tekst, visualitet og materialitet Bente Lavold og John Ødemark (red.)

Nota bene is the National Library of Norway’s channel for disseminating research findings built on its collections, and research of relevance to these collections. All manuscripts are peer reviewed. Nota bene has a wide thematic profile. In order to mirror the full breadth of our collection, the publications, which include monographs, critical editions and edited volumes, may be based on manuscripts, printed material, film, photography, music, broadcasting and digital media.

ISBN: 978-82-7965-599-2