JON FOSSE - PLAYWRIGHT

Jon Fosse (born in 1959) belongs to the generation of writers that in the 1980's introduced post- modernism into Norway, in pronounced opposition to the socio-realistic tradition that was dominant in Norway in the 1970's. In Fosse's case, this new orientation didn't manifest itself--as in the case of some others of his generation--in a writing technique with inter-textual references or with passages of meta-reflection in his books. Fosse's books have a spare vocabulary and are rather marked by a form of religious austerity, of pietism. Fosse is from Strandbarm in Hardanger, and the Western Norway is present in almost everything he has written.

He made his debut with the Tarjei Vesaas-inspired novel Red, Black in 1983; after it came the novel Locked Guitar and a poetry collection, Angel with Water in His Eyes (1986). In this poetry collection, which can be characterized as a form of diabolic expressionism inspired by Olav H. Hauge among other things, Fosse weaves in poetry by the German expressionist Georg Trakl and uses him to clarify some features of his own poetry.

Up to the middle of the 1990's Fosse continued to stand out as an essayist and a novelist who used a writing technique that can be described as "scream-of-consciusness". The action always takes place in the present, and there is no omniscient narrator who knows more about the action than what is experienced at any time by the first-person narrator, there is no narrative plan beyond the situation, and no other information is given than what is filtered through the first-person's mind. This implies among other things that the flow of the text is not interrupted by a narrator's voice that explains how old the characters are, what they look like and where they come from--all such "personalia" come out indirectly.

Jon Fosse has given his own fiction technique the English name of writing, and he is preoccupied with writing rhythm. The distinctive feature of his fiction technique is precisely the rhythm. His rhythm is repetitious and is so close to the first-person's consciousness that one can speak of the novel's rhythm as mirroring the first-person's experience of the world; the same thoughts and sensations occur again and again, manic obsessions that display the locked patterns of action. Among other things, the only book written so far about Fosse's authorship, Replacing Happiness with a Comma (1996) by Espen Stueland, deals with this subject and with how the pauses in what is said and writtten creates meaning beyond the literal meaning in what is said.

Without exception, his novels have dealt with severely-tested people who find that they aren't "handling" their everyday life. It is also society's rejects that Fosse has attempted to portray and for whom he shows his sympathy. As reader, one comes to feel consideration for his fictional characters; his novels can therefore be said to be a medium for understanding, for empathy. An example of this is the novel Lead and Water (1992), which is about a journalist who on his way to an interview appointment meets a girl who is probably a drug addict; she falls in front of him in the queue at a newsstand, and he has to help her up. A little later he meets her on a bench, and a policeman comes to pick her up, but he tricks the policeman by saying that she is his sister, it being implied that he is going to take care of her. A contact arises between the girl and the journalist, and this contact becomes so strong in the course of the novel that he gives up his job and his wife. He decides that his life must change direction.

Social engagement in the novels is therefore not expressly political, and implies no social analysis, but is a matter of direct sympathy. Jon Fosse has written two novels based on the life of the westland Norwegian painter Lars Hertervig (1830-1902). The first, Melancholia I, is put in the mouth of the mentally disturbed and tragically self-assertive Hertervig, but contains besides an added chapter which describes a young, westland Norwegian author-- living in Åsane outside Bergen, where Jon himself lived--who is going to write a novel about Hertervig. The second of these Hertervig novels. Melancholia II, is put in the mouth of a fictitious sister of Lars Hertervig's, Oline, an old and half-senile woman who thinks back on her brother Lars, while she herself fades in decline. These two novels are the highpoint in Fosse's novel writing so far.

In recent years, he has concentrated exclusively on writing plays. In his plays, too, the encounters between characters are the focus, and it is stressed that the encounters can be so powerful that they change the characters, that uncertainty over how far each has been understood and understands the other torments the characters to such an extent that they plunge into new attempts to understand. Not knowing brings into play a new speech, a kind of slip-of-the-tongue speech. It is also an everyday speech that catches the intentions behind what is said in such a way that the seemingly least-charged words in our speech can emerge as symptoms of serious secrets of life that are impossible to articulate. The little that is said is so charged that it communicates below the surface all it is impossible to say.

It is in his work with voice, with the way a thing is spoken, that Fosse has accomplished something quite extraordinary. Fosse has had a great breakthrough with his plays, become a favourite of the media, and been performed in theatres all over Europe. From being a writer with a reputation for being inaccessible up to the mid-90's, the image of Jon Fosse at the end of the decade has become entirely different.