The Norwegian Jon Fosse (Haugesund, 1959) is the last Nobel Prize winner in Literature. His work encompasses theater, poetry and novels. In this last genre, his characteristic style, very rhythmic, is based on repetitions, sound sensations and the exploration of the mysteries of everyday life. He receives this newspaper, with a slight limp, at the headquarters of his publishing house in Oslo, after a snow storm. When checking the long list of Nobel Prize winners who have passed through these pages, he asks: “And they didn’t interview Harold Pinter?” “No, once we went to enter his house, but he didn’t receive us.” “I would have been drunk, what a lot we had together, when I was still drinking,” he says, amused.
What was your childhood like?
I grew up in an area next to a quite famous fjord, the Hardanger. It was a small community, a great place to be a child, we lived a very free life. If you grew up by the sea, you will always hear the sound of the waves. Oh, and the enormous darkness in the landscape, the enormous mountains. So I have very strong impressions, which are seen in my writing. And, of course, that’s where the language comes from. There I learned to speak Nynorsk, the language in which I write.
What type of language is it and why did you choose it?
It is a rural dialect of Norwegian. At school, they taught me how to write it, all the teachers spoke it. It is simply my language. I never thought about changing to the majority language of the country.
I think his parents were Quakers…
Yes. I come from a small farm that the family had since the mid-18th century. My father lived, good or bad, off what this farm could give. As a young man, he planted many fruit trees, but then, due to the flood of imported fruit, he had to look for another job and ended up running a kind of community store, a grocery store where they sold everything you could need in the Strandebarm area. And my mother was a housewife.
Your teacher made you read aloud, right?
Yes. One day, the teacher asked me to go out on stage to do it, and suddenly I felt desperation take over me. I ran out of the classroom and returned a little later. It was my first experience with anxiety. Never since then have I had that strong feeling.
And did you start writing to calm your anxiety?
Yes, in those years I wrote more and more, I wrote my first novel at 16 years old. But, before, I played the guitar a lot, I was part of a band for a few years, but then I stopped playing or even listening to music and I started writing more and more. In a way, I try to transport rhythm, everything I experienced when I played music, into my writing.
What was he playing?
Both the electric guitar in that blues band and the classical guitar. And I even tried to play the violin. I practiced a lot, but I never became a good musician, and I guess that’s why I quit. But, in my writing, I started using all the repetitions that I had been using in music. My books follow a musical pattern, with repetitions and variations.
You are one of the most important playwrights in the world, but you say that you only started doing theater for the money…
You know, making a living as a writer is not that easy. At first, the options were to spend less money or get a regular job. After studying philosophy and comparative literature for seven years, I worked for about six years at 25%, a quarter of a day, as a creative writing teacher. That’s the only job I’ve ever had in my life. In the early nineties, I had no steady income and they asked me to write the beginning of a play and a synopsis of the rest, for a Norwegian state theater aid program, and they paid quite well. It was a kind of contest, a competition. I lost because it is impossible for me to write a synopsis of anything.
And so?
It’s the same as if you were asked to write a synopsis of a piece of music. The very fact of asking for it is stupid, so I continued writing the work that I had started in the test… It was a great experience using that format, the theatrical one, with the dialogues, and indicating in the stage directions what they have and don’t have to do. And a theater in Oslo bought me Someone’s Going to Come, my most performed work in the world, around 150 productions already. I was happy and started writing other works. Within a few years, they began to be translated and produced in several countries. Claude Régy took me on stage in Paris, Thomas Ostermeier in Berlin and the Salzburg festival…
And why did it stop?
I wrote for about 15 years only theater. It was very tempting, I traveled to Paris, Salzburg, New York, Tokyo, Shanghai, to see the premieres… But there came a time when I felt exhausted from that life, I told myself that enough was enough, and, although I was at the end of my highest point in my career as a playwright, I left it and returned to novels and poetry. I first wrote the novel Trilogy and later Septology. After these plays, I promptly returned to the theater with Yo soy el viento or something else, but much less, and very different. For example, I will never see the functions.
Where do your ideas come from?
Sometimes I have the feeling that what I am going to write has already been written. It’s out there, not inside me. I just have to write it down before it disappears.
His literature makes the most everyday events take on transcendence and intense meaning…
If I write well, I think I manage to create a kind of everyday mystique, but I have never planned or researched or anything. I just sit down and start writing, listening.
Melancholia is narrated by the Norwegian painter Lars Hertervig (1830-1902).
That book destroyed me, when I finished it I was extremely tired. “Do you really want to write another novel?” He asked me. Hertervig was a distant relative of mine, he lived in the 19th century and was admitted to an asylum.
There are many painters in his books, not only here.
As a young man, he even painted and was talented. Hertervig made such an impression on me that she couldn’t write the beauty of her painting, so I thought maybe what she could do is show the other side, the frenzy, narrate how the light emerges from the darkness. He is one of the painters I feel closest to. Well, the one that is Mark Rothko, I always try to see his paintings.
And he got into the mind of a madman, turning him into a narrator and reproducing his way of speaking and thinking. It’s not dangerous?
Yes Yes. That’s why I ended up so tired, I didn’t want to write more novels. That was enough.
In his books there are delusions, hallucinations, ghosts…
Melancholia is a long monologue of love, loss and longing, and it already contains a double reality, everything that his frenetic mind shows him. There is also something like that in Morning and Afternoon, in which I wanted to reflect the two extremes of human life: being born and dying. I tried to write from the perspective of the child being born, but it was impossible. Only a succession of sounds came out that sounded like Finnegans wake. So, I decided to write it from the perspective of the future father and, then, the moment of the death of the child, now an old man.
Trilogy has biblical echoes, as it begins with a couple without money looking for a place to have a child.
It was not my intention. I only realized the parallel when, in the first interview, I was asked about it. And I, stupid of me, had not fallen.
Septology, starring his alter ego Asle, has, in the Spanish edition, a large bottle of wine on the cover. What is alcohol for?
I think it can be very useful in many ways for a writer. It disinhibits, loosens things that are too rigid, but it also has a very bad side. If you get addicted to it and end up being an alcoholic, it’s very destructive to your health, your writing, your painting, whatever. That’s what happened to me, I ended up drinking too much, and I had to stop drinking. The myth of the drinking artist is not true: even then, when he wrote, he had to be sober, he only had a small glass of red wine, because he had to be a little sentimental without losing his temper.
His character finds himself, he splits: one has found God and has stopped drinking and the other has not. Religion is a central theme of Septology…
Yes, in Melancholy the religion of the Quakers, the painter’s parents, already appeared. Quakers speak of the inner light, that of God, in each and every human being. It is one of their core beliefs. Another is that they believe in silence. They sit in a circle to summon him, no one says anything. And, suddenly, you feel an inspiration to say something, and you do it. If not, it’s just a silent meeting until the group authority decides it’s enough and rises. This is how they celebrate their funerals, weddings and baptisms, silently. Hertervig’s painting is greatly influenced by this concept of inner light. He is the painter of light. I was close to these groups and their way of believing, without being part of them organically, in the eighties.
But then he converted to Catholicism in 2013, the year he gave up alcohol.
When I started going to Catholic Mass, I experienced the same peace of those Quaker rituals. The liturgical texts are repeated over and over again, and the meaning appears clear. I felt at home because, in the Lutheran tradition, the Eucharist is of very little value, it has almost been left out. I started reading a lot about Catholicism.
Yeah?
I read so much theology that my wife feared for my sanity.
In Spain there are many Catholics, in Norway it is rarer, right?
There are perhaps 4,000 or 5,000 of us, very few, and almost all of us are converts, not by birth. Here the Protestant Lutheran Church dominates, a very rationalist way of believing, there is no mystery of faith.
“Literature saves lives,” you said. In what sense?
In the literal. A normal person doesn’t spend their life writing, you don’t do that if you’re integrated. These are people who would have serious problems finding a place in society without the solitude and freedom that being a writer gives them. Mental tensions can be greatly released by writing. I don’t write to express myself, but to escape. And I have realized that there are many people around me who have a hard time. In Norway, there are many suicides. And for people who are in such a fragile state, the intimacy of literature and the company and understanding that reading gives can help them cope with life. When I was awarded the Nobel Prize, people wrote to me telling me that reading me had dissuaded them from committing suicide. I was shocked by a woman who told me that.
In Septology you narrate an accident very similar to the one you suffered when you were 7 years old, right?
That’s right, but in a transformed way. I was very close to death, it is quite an experience. The sight of blood has been crucial for me. I wouldn’t be a writer if I hadn’t experienced this.
You have a house in the mountains, near Bergen, also in Austria, where your wife is from, and here in Oslo you live in the king’s gardens. How is that?
The Norwegian State gives the Grotto, a house in the gardens of the royal palace, as a place of lifelong residence for an artist. I was a little over 50 years old when the composer who occupied it died and they decided to give it to me.
Is there any Spanish writer that you admire?
Lorca, whom I have rewritten in my own way, making versions of his works. For example, I have been inspired by Blood Wedding for a work of mine about abortion.
