“Writing saves lives,” in a literal sense, said the 2023 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Norwegian Jon Fosse (Haugesund, 1959), in his acceptance speech for the most prestigious literary award in the world, delivered this Thursday at the Swedish Academy of Literature. Stockholm, in which he reviewed the origins of his literary vocation and the transcendent function that, for him, literature has.
In a confessional tone and plain, direct language, far from the sophisticated linguistic construction with which he builds his fictions, Fosse revealed that “when I was in the first cycle of secondary school, (…) the teacher asked me to read aloud . And, out of nowhere, a sudden fear came over me and overcame me. It was like I disappeared into fear and that was all I was. “I got up and ran out of the classroom.”
That fear of reading aloud haunted him for years and he learned a lesson from it: “It was as if fear had taken my tongue away from me and I had to get it back, so to speak. And, if I had to do it, it couldn’t be on other people’s terms, but on mine,” so “I started writing my own texts, short poems, short stories. And I discovered that doing so gave me a feeling of security, the opposite of fear. In a way, I found a place inside me that was just mine,” the same place he continues to be in every time he sits down to write.
“And I learned more,” he continued, “I learned that, at least for me, there is a big difference between spoken language and written language, or between spoken language and literary language. Oral language is often a monologue communication, a message that something must be this way or that, or a rhetorical communication of a message with persuasion or conviction. Literary language is never like that: it does not inform, it is meaning more than communication, it has its own existence. And in that sense, good writing and all types of preaching, obviously, are in contrast, be it religious or political preaching or whatever.”
Fosse delved into the differences between theater, poetry and prose, the three genres he has cultivated. For him, “a good poem is his own universe, it relates mainly to himself. And whoever reads it can enter that universe; It is more a kind of communion than communication.” There he recalled: “I have never written to express myself, but rather to escape from myself.”
“I once said in an interview,” he explained, “that writing is a kind of prayer. And I felt embarrassed when I saw it posted. But later I read, to my consolation, that Franz Kafka had said the same thing. So, maybe, after all…”
Despite being one of the playwrights with the most international recognition, he admitted that “I wrote novels and poetry and had no desire to write for the theater, but over time I did because there was an initiative financed with public funds so that more would be written.” Norwegian theater and they offered me what for me, a poor author, was a good sum of money to write a play, my first and still most performed play, Someone’s Going to Come. In this way, “the first time I wrote a play turned out to be the biggest surprise of my entire life as a writer” and he ended up dedicating fifteen years of his life only to writing plays, which he has already stopped doing to focus on his novels.
He explained that, “in both prose and poetry he had tried to write what normally – in the usual spoken language – cannot be said with words. Yes it’s correct. I tried to express the unspeakable, which was given as a reason for awarding me the Nobel Prize. The most important thing in life cannot be said, only written, to twist a famous saying by Jacques Derrida.” While, in the theater, he realized that “he could use silent speech, silent people, in a totally different way. All he had to do was write the word ‘pause’, and silent speech was there.” . And in my theater the word ‘pause’ is undoubtedly the most important and most used: ‘long pause’, ‘short pause’ or simply ‘pause’.” While, in his prose, he had to use many words, to reproduce silence, especially with the resource of repetitions: “There is a silent language behind the written language in novels.”
The author of Septology presented himself, more than as a creator, as a hunter of elements that already exist: “And what do you hear, then, when you listen closely enough? Silence is heard. And as has been said, only in silence can you hear the voice of God. Maybe”. For him, “the act of writing is, for me, listening: when I write I never prepare, I don’t plan anything, I proceed by listening.” Hence “writing is reminiscent of music. And at a certain point, in my teens, I completely stopped playing music and listening to it, and started just writing, and in my writing I tried to create something of what I experienced when I played. That’s what I did then and what I still do.”
Elaborating on this, he stated “another thing, perhaps a little strange: when I write, at a given moment, I always have the feeling that the text is already written, it is out there somewhere, not inside me, and that I only need to write it before the text disappears. Sometimes I can do it without making any changes, other times I have to search for the text by rewriting, cutting and editing, and carefully try to bring to light the text that is already written.”
He recognized that “writing has become a habit without which I cannot live – perhaps, like Marguerite Duras, one could say that it is an illness.” Although she began with serious doubts about her abilities: “First I wrote Trilogy, and when I was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize for that novel, I experienced it as a great confirmation. Then I wrote Septology and, during the process of writing that novel, I lived some of my happiest moments as a writer. I had not planned to write such a long novel (1,200 pages) but it more or less wrote itself, with such fluidity that everything fit together. immediately. That is when I am closest to what can be called happiness.”
But “my first books had very bad reviews, but I decided not to listen to the critics, I had to trust myself, yes, stick to my writing. And if I hadn’t, I would have stopped writing after the publication of my first novel, Rojo, negro, forty years ago.” And, over time, “I received mostly good reviews, and I even started to receive awards, and then I thought it was important to continue with the same logic, if I didn’t listen to the bad reviews, I wouldn’t let success influence me, I would cling to my writing, I would hold on to what I had created. And I think that’s what I’ve managed to do, and I really think I’ll continue to do it even after I’ve received the Nobel Prize.”
The audience felt a chill when Fosse said: “There are many suicides in my writings. More than I like to think. I have been afraid that I have contributed to legitimizing suicide. (…) So what moved me most were those who wrote frankly telling me that my writings had simply saved their lives.” Because “in a sense, I have always known that writing can save lives, perhaps it has even saved mine. And if my writing can also help save the lives of others, nothing would make me happier.”
And he ended his speech by thanking the Swedish Academy and God for granting the prize.
