2023-10-08 07:56:02
The 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature is Jon Olav Fosse, born on September 29, 1959 in Haugesund, Norway. Graduated from the University of Bergen, he studied comparative literature there. He writes in an “official” variant of the country’s language, Nynorsk, one of the two written standards of the Norwegian language that only represents 12% of the population. The variant used by the majority is called bokmå. This is striking, because his original writing is for a minority. For a society equidistant on the globe, like Argentina, it is not only regarding linguistic differences.
From 1994 to 2021, for twenty years, Norway has been number one in the human development index (HDI), prepared by the United Nations Development Programme. This democratic parliamentary monarchy is one of the richest countries on the planet, ranking third in GDP per capita and being the third largest exporter of crude oil. For more differences: it is the antithesis of Argentina.
What would be an ideal world for many vernacular writers: Norwegian writers live on scholarships awarded by the State. In a report, Fosse himself acknowledges that his first play was the result of work paid for by a foundation. Today, he lives under the protection of the monarchy, literally officially living in a house within the architectural complex of the Royal Palace in Oslo, and so revered as a tourist-cultural attraction that a hotel offers a suite dedicated to his work.
This fame is due to his work as a playwright, his plays were translated into more than forty languages and performed around the world. The cultural “consecration” of Fosse is very particular, it occurs between November 2 and 18, 2010, at the Louvre Museum. There, Théâtre de la Ville-Paris produced the piece Autumn Dream, directed by Patrice Chéreau, who wrote regarding it: “The empty room of a museum where bodies interpose and tear each other, the death of an entire lineage by male part: the paternal grandmother, the father, then this man, this man without qualities and his nineteen-year-old son who will never know his son. (…) A dream in autumn, faces that love and suffer, an unsatisfied sexual desire, eroded by death and suicide. A man and a woman who met stand before us: what exists or existed between this man and this woman? What will his future be like, which we are already witnessing?
In Anders Olsson’s biobibliography (see column), published by the Swedish Academy, a certain “Fosse minimalism” is mentioned in the award-winner’s prose. And therein lies the key to his transcendence in the theater, his works have a modular structure where, for example, the characters lack names, the scenes are stripped of spatial and geographical references; In themselves, they are works of human situations adaptable to any context. But modular simplicity, when exploring the prose in his narrative work (see box on the novel Trilogy), we find that it omits the use of punctuation, an issue that has divided the waters of criticism beyond spelling. . Is it a stumbling block for the reader in the avant-garde way or an act of pure lazy arrogance?
Before continuing to analyze the literary resources used, it is worth noting that this is the fourth Nobel Prize in Literature for Norway, the previous ones were for Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson in 1903, Knut Hamsun in 1920 and Sigrid Undset in 1928. At the end of the Second War Worldwide, Hamsun’s books were burned by the population, who considered him a Nazi collaborator. Undset, on the other hand, was pursued by the invader and escaped extermination in a heroic journey through the snow. Almost a hundred years later, Fosse breaks the drought – in the full meaning of the term – of recognition, and receives the award in a more than opulent condition.
Already in 2019, the pose of a privileged intellectual is portrayed, in an interview published by the newspaper El País, by the journalist Andrea Aguilar: “For seven years he has divided his time between a village near the Austrian capital – ‘the very center of Europe. ‘–, a house in a fjord and Oslo. He wears a black sweater, blazer and a scarf. The gray ponytail and beard emphasize her bohemian air. With Norwegian sincerity she confesses that, although he adores music, opera itself, as an art, can seem somewhat kitsch to him.
But this relaxed Viking has literary anchors, for example, the best seller Karl Ove Knausgård attended his literary workshop, who remembers him in the fifth volume of My Struggle. Fosse also wrote poetry, essays, novels, and children’s literature. He has even put an end to his foray into playwriting, which earned him comparison with Henrik Ibsen and even as a recreation of him in the 21st century, and also with Samuel Beckett, his first work being a clear “homage” to Waiting for Godot.
Another aspect is translation. Fosse translated into Norwegian – for the staging – Federico García Lorca (helped by a dictionary of our language), the Austrian poet Georg Trakl, the novel The Trial by Franz Kafka and The Plains, by the Australian Gerald Murnane. It can be assumed that in these tasks he has respected the original punctuation of the works and has not adapted them to his usual spelling.
For more coincidences, in the note on the bets regarding the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, published on Saturday the 30th of last month in PERFIL, we highlighted that both Fosse and Murnane were preferred candidates. And there, too, Colihue Publishing House published plays by Fosse under the title La noche canta la’s songs and other plays. That is to say, the gambling world handles certain privileged information, like our politicians.
To configure an intellectual profile of Fosse, his statements published by The New Yorker in November 2022 are valid: “I began studying Derrida in 1979. At least here in Norway, the university, or the spirit of the university, was very influenced by Marxism. We had an extreme Maoist party that was very strong among academics, writers and people like that. It was the zeitgeist, even for me. I started studying Sociology. And I felt like it was completely stupid. This way of thinking, this positivist way of calculating things, was nothing at all. Then I jumped into philosophy. And there was a big shift in those years from Marx to the French post-structuralists. I remember reading Derrida for the first time somewhere in the Norwegian countryside. It was a Danish translation of On Grammatology.”
“Grammatology somehow had an influence on me. I studied and read Heidegger a lot. It was difficult, but also very inspiring. I felt that what Derrida was doing was turning Heidegger on his head. The main question for Heidegger was: what is common to everything that exists? The main question for Derrida was the opposite: what makes everything that exists different?
As for his personal life, Fosse is living a second marriage, following a long hospitalization for alcoholism, whose symptoms he understood to be terminal when instead of drinking at night he did it for breakfast. In parallel, came his conversion to Catholicism, of which he told Lamarea.com, in March of this year: “The current pope, of course, cannot say of himself that he is a socialist, but his way of thinking and speaking is very close to what I myself, as a kind of socialist, can think and say. I left the Norwegian Church at the age of 16, when I was able to leave it. He had the impression that she represented pure stupidity and that she was some kind of controlling social force that he mightn’t stand. I suppose if I had grown up in Spain I would have left the Catholic Church for similar reasons. On the other hand, there is no doubt that there is a close connection between the thought of Master Eckhart, my main Catholic influence, and Buddhist ways of thinking. I myself am a Christian believer, but I believe that all religions are ways of approaching the sacred. God has given himself many paths, as an old Norwegian father friend of mine affirms. Or God does not depend on the sacraments, as Thomas Aquinas said.”
The other aspect of this Nobel Prize is as much geopolitical as it is cultural, Sweden tells the world: the Nordic peninsula is also the center of Europe, the center of the West. The thing is that they share an extensive and inhospitable border with the new Russian empire, the invader, Putin’s. And their riches, and societies as beneficent as they are humanitarian, are in danger. There are peoples here, with languages and traditions, they seem to proclaim, and they cannot erase us from history with an invasion, as happens in Ukraine.
Biobibliography of Jon Fosse
Por Anders Olsson*
Fosse’s European breakthrough as a playwright came with Claude Régy’s 1999 Paris production of his play Nokon kjem til å komme (1996; Someone’s Gonna Come, 2002). Even in this first piece, with its themes of fearful anticipation and paralyzing jealousy, Fosse’s uniqueness is fully evident. In his radical reduction of language and dramatic action, he expresses the most powerful human emotions of anxiety and helplessness in the simplest, most everyday terms. (…)
In his works we are faced with words or actions that seem incomplete, a lack of resolution that continues to preoccupy our minds. The game Natta syng sine songar (1998; Nightsongs, 2002) represents a protracted but unresolved dilemma in which a woman’s impulse to go off with a new man is constantly opposed by a counterimpulse: a “yes” qualified with the key word “but”. The man she abandoned ends up taking his own life, while her new boyfriend disappears from sight. (…)
From the beginning of the work Namnet, from 1995 (The Name, 2002), we are presented with an everyday situation loaded with emotions. A girl, young and pregnant, waits for the father of her fetus, who is overdue. Tension builds here immediately due to this sense of uncertainty and the resulting fragmentary sentences. Furthermore, these disturbances create a chasm between the girl’s longing for a new life with her son and her anxiety over having been abandoned by her father.
Something similar occurs in the heartbreaking play Dødsvariasjonar (2002; Death Variations, 2004), a one-act play regarding a girl who commits suicide, told backwards from the moment of her death. It is written in short, interrupted phrases, spoken by six anonymous characters from different generations, both living and dead. The piece ends with her daughter’s deeply moving speech, delivered from the other side of the grave, in which she expresses a fundamental uncertainty regarding whether her decision to take her own life was the right one. (…)
A central prose work is Trilogien (Trilogy, 2016), composed by Andvake (2007), Olavs Draumar (2012) and Kveldsvævd (2014). A cruel saga of love and violence with strong biblical allusions, it is set in the arid coastal landscape where almost all of Fosse’s fiction takes place. For this highly dramatic and tense story, Fosse received the 2015 Nordic Council Literature Prize.
Fosse’s masterpiece in prose, however, remains the Septology, a late creation that he completed in 2021: Det andre namnet (2019; The other name, 2020), Eg er ein annan (2020; I am another, 2020) and Eit nytt namn (2021; A new name, 2021). The 1,250-page novel is written in the form of a monologue in which an elderly artist talks to himself as if he were another person. The work progresses seemingly endlessly and without pauses in sentences, but is held together formally through repetitions, recurring themes, and a fixed time span of seven days. Each of its parts opens with the same phrase and concludes with the same prayer to God.
*President of the Swedish Academy Nobel Committee.
How to write
By Jon Fosse
Find us a boat, Alida said.
Yes, Asle said.
What a boat, Alida said.
There is a boat moored in front of the Caseta, said Asle But that boat, said Alida and then she saw Asle get up and leave and she lay down on the bed of the sobrado and stretched and closed her eyes, and she is very, very tired and then He sees Father Sigvald sitting with his violin, he sees him take out a bottle and take a long drink and then he sees Asle, he sees his black eyes and his black hair, and he shudders because there he is, there is his boy, and then he sees Father Sigvald calls him with his hand and Asle approaches the father and she sees him sit down and put the violin under his chin and begin to play and, instantly, something moved inside him and Alida began to rise into the air and into the air. music of Asle heard the song of his father Aslak, and he hears his own life and his own future and he knows what he knows and then he is present in his own future and everything is open and everything is difficult, but there is the song, a song which must be what they call love, so he settles for being present in the music and doesn’t want to exist anywhere else and then Mother Herdis arrives and asks what he’s doing, shouldn’t he have already brought water to the cows, no? They should have removed the snow, what had they thought, perhaps they had believed that the mother was going to do everything, that she was going to cook, take care of the house and take care of the animals, it was already difficult enough for them to do everything that had to be done so that Alida, as always, as always, tried to avoid work, no, that mightn’t be, she would have to try harder, she would have to look at her sister Oline, see how she tried to help as much as possible, how two sisters might be so different, both in appearance and in everything else, how might they be, although, of course, one looked like the father and the other like the mother, one was blonde like the mother and the other dark like the father, that’s how the thing, it mightn’t be denied, and that’s how it would always be, said Mother Herdis, and of course Alida wasn’t going to help with anything, not while her mother continued scolding her and speaking badly regarding her, she was the bad one and Sister Oline was the good one, she It was the black one and Sister Oline was the white one, so Alida stretches out on the bed and wonders how this will end, where are they going to go with her regarding to give birth, in truth the Caseta was not much, but at least it was a place to stay and now they mightn’t even stay there and they had nowhere to go, not to mention the means, they had practically nothing, she had some tickets and some would have Asle too, although few, almost none, but they would still get by, anyway. I was sure of that, they would get ahead, and I hoped Asle would come back soon because regarding the boat, no, I didn’t want to think regarding that, that will have to be as God wants and Alida hears mother Herdis say that she is as ugly and as black as her father , and just as lazy, always avoiding work, says Mother Herdis, who knows how it will end, thank goodness it is Sister Oline who is going to inherit the farm, Alida would not have been good for that, it would have been a disaster, Alida hears her say to her mother and then she hears her sister say that thank goodness she is the one who is going to inherit the farm, that good farm they have here, in the Cuesta, says sister Oline and Alida hears mother Herdis wondering what will become of Alida, who knows how it will end, and Alida says not to worry because she doesn’t worry anyway and then Alida leaves and heads towards the Rock where she and Asle have taken to meeting and, as she approaches, she sees Asle sitting there and sees him pale and exhausted and she sees that her black eyes are wet and she understands that something has happened and then Asle looks at her and says that mother Silja has died and that now only Alida is left and Asle lies down on his back and Alida comes over and lies down next to him and he hugs her and then says that in the morning he found mother Silja dead in bed and her big blue eyes filled his entire face, he says and hugs Alida once morest his body and they disappear inside each other and they just look at each other. He hears a soft wind in the trees and they have disappeared and they are ashamed and they kill and they talk and they no longer think and then they stay lying on the Rock and they are ashamed and they sit up and they stay sitting on the Rock looking at the sea Look at doing something like that the day mother Silja died, says Aslen.
Excerpt from Chapter I of Trilogy, novel published by the publishing house De Conatus (Spain), translated by Cristina Gómez Baggethun and Kirsti Baggethun.
1696751893
#prize #distant #cold #Fiord
