Hello Gentle Reader,
This years Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to the Norwegian dramatist and prose writer, Jon Fosse, who the Swedish Academy praised:
"For his innovative plays and prose which gives voice to the unsayable."
Shall it be described as a tradition now that all subsequent Nobel Prize in Literature announcements will follow the same formulaic expression that was established in 2019 with the announcement of the Laureates in Literature for 2018 and 2019. The chiming bell heralding the appointed hour, those white gold accented doors of the Swedish Academy opening into the beautiful ballroom with that crisp brilliant October afternoon light pouring through, where a full house of journalists have congregated to hear the announcement of this year's Nobel Laureate in Literature. From the doors emerges the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy (Professor) Mats Malm, who stands behind a barricade and rattles off the standard pleasantries before announcing this years Nobel Laureate in Literature. This year, roughly five or ten minutes before the announcement, a woman (I suspect producer or event organizer for the Swedish Academy) brief the assembled journalists of the afternoon's proceedings:
First – At 1:00pm (CET) Professor Mats Malm will come through the doors and announce the years winner.
Second – Afterwards Chair of the Nobel Committee Anders Olsson will provide an overview of the Nobel Laureate.
Third – Finally Chairman of the Nobel Committee Anders Olsson and Nobel Committee member Anne Swärd will hold a short interview regarding this year's decision.
The announcement followed the outlined format with particular Swedish proclivity for procedure. Permanent Secretary Mats Malm confirmed that by the announcement that he was able to get in touch with Jon Fosse who was driving en route to the fjord; there was a perceptible ironic smirk that crossed Mats Malm's face when he said this, as any reader of Fosse will recognize the trademark fjord as a quintessential Fosseian feature. As for how Jon Fosse took the news, Mats Malm commented that he was delighted but not necessarily surprised, as Fosse has been in speculation and tipped as a contender for a little over a decade now. This concluded Mats Malm's portion of the afternoon's proceedings. Following, Chairman Anders Olsson made his scheduled appearance and dryly read his bio-bibliographic sermon regarding Fosse, and what followed—rather quickly it seemed—was the casual (though concisely short) interview with Anders Olsson and Anne Swärd, though Olsson managed the interview in full (at least what was available to be seen during the live stream). In total the entire procession took roughly a half hour (?) maybe even less. Certainly, no lingering over the pudding.
In awarding Jon Fosse the Swedish Academy has finally landed its footing, re-establishing the Nobel Prize in Literature as a literary award fixated on quality and merit, though leaving it to fall slightly into the realms of expectation and predictability. That being said, caution should still be exercised with the Nobel Prize in Literature, as there are giants of literature who carry a certain expectation that they will be crowned and coronated with the Nobel, such as the still living Adunis and Ismail Kadare and recently deceased Milan Kundera and Javiar Marias. As is the case of the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, the Swedish Academy has also proven that it plays a long game and a conservative game at that, having confirmed that Tranströmer was nominated consistently every year since 1993. Yet, one can't help but imagine the Swedish Academy sitting there and mumbling to themselves: "too soon," every time his name crossed their table. By the time 2011 came along, the decision became a matter of now or never, due to Tranströmer's poor health and advancing age, thankfully the Swedish Academy made the right decision. The case and optics between Tomas Tranströmer and Jon Fosse are very different. As the Swedish Academy is a Swedish institution, it is aware that it can it be criticized for being bias towards Swedish language writers. This came to the fore front in 1974 when the Swedish Academy decided to split the award between two Swedish writers who were also academy members. This award remains a blackened mark on the awards history, readily available to be pulled out and used against the Swedish Academy to support a variety of allegations, accusations, and charges, which includes but not limited to eurocentrism and self-absorption on the brink of self-gratification. This explains why it took almost two decades for the Swedish Academy to take the plunge and award Tomas Tranströmer and another eleven years to announce Jon Fosse, as any Scandinavian writer who is announced as the winner will inevitably be scrutinized with a heightened degree of viciousness.
In awarding Jon Fosse, the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy did not evaluate his work beyond the purely literary. Fosse is a writer who has no sociopolitical motivation. This is a writer whose singular concern has always been motivated by how the literary is the medium to discuss existential and elemental concerns of the human condition, from the eternal anxieties of an indecipherable dread; the shadow of death in daily life; longing and perplexing questioning reaching out and contemplating meaning in any universal sense; dashed hopes and thwarted dreams; questioning the human relationship with the divine; and the absence or loss as the pit of emptiness and the nodal point of grief as a permeating feature of existence. The list goes on, forever changing, shifting, and evolving. These eternal and primordial themes have long stalked human thought and been the foundations of great literature and will continue to do so. How Jon Fosse treats these subjects is what makes him unique. Fosse is a writer who is burrowed in language, for what is literature without the appreciation and understanding of language, as language is the lodestone and medium of literature. Fosse's literary language is often described as minimalist, stripped down and repetitive. Jon Fosse's literary language is deceptively simple for its simple vocabulary and repetitive nature, but it has a unique rhythm a hypnotic lyrical quality to it that mimics the deliberate tidal movement of back and forth, push and pull, in and out. The other typical feature of Fosse's novels and plays is the complete lack of feature or detail. Characters are often nameless and featureless, representing anonymous voices in a landscape which has come to define and describe Fosse's reality: shingled shorelines, pewter skies of dove-coloured clouds, grey (or black) seas endless and eternal, waves rolling into the beach, docks and piers and boathouses creaking and bobbing in the currents drifting routines, and small houses where intimate and yet eternally existential dramas are set to unfold. There are times, however, when characters are named in Fosse's work, though the names are interchangeable appearing elsewhere Jon Fosse's bibliography, be it Asle, Alida, Olav, Ales, or Aliss. Alse in particular is a routine incarnation found throughout Jon Fosse's work.
Before the Nobel announcement, Jon Fosse is described as one of the most performed living playwrights around the world, with productions staged in France and Germany; New York and London, though, Fosse's dramatic works in the Anglosphere have always been muted or lukewarmly received at best. Contemplative rambling poetic monologues sprouted by names anxious characters, set in purgatory landscapes are always a tough sell for English language spectators. As a dramatist, Jon Fosse is often considered a heir of both Samuel Beckett and Henrik Ibsen. In a fashion similar to Samuel Beckett, Jon Fosse has completely abandoned the conventional rules and forms of drama. Yet, while Beckett paraded and guided the tour through an apocalyptical absurd existence and showcases languages inability to fully communicate meaning or apply logic to otherwise surreal existential events creating an almost highbrow comedy. Jon Fosse's work is rhythmic and hypnotic with the back and forth, back and forth, with a lacking sense of the comedic absurd while excavating the dreamlike conundrums. One of Fosse's most performed plays: "I am the Wind," is often described as a shipwrecked "Waiting for Godot," as two male characters The One and The Other find themselves shipwrecked adrift in the sea. Polar opposites, The One is cautious and reluctant to embrace life, tantalized by the prospect of death being release from the uncertainty of life; The Other is the social opposite enduring The One's depressiveness, and clinging to the basic instinct towards life. The English language reviews were not particularly enthralled, while in turn admitted the work did linger after its performance, a testament to its exemplary discussions regarding existential ponderings of cosmic conundrums and baseline existential apprehension. Whereas "A Summers Day," changes course, moving away from the Beckettian powerplay between two opposing characters, instead focusing on memory, love, and absence. The play recounts with an air of nostalgia formed by memory an older woman looking back on the day her husband goes missing. Time is a key feature and movement in "A Summers Day," being treated as circuitous, crossing and crisscrossing a continued repetitive loop. Even in the remembered youth, with smile and love, the threat of loss and emptiness is at the pit of their relationship. This same emptiness permeates the daily life and existence of the older woman, who scries through the past seeking understanding or some sense of resolution. In Fosse's work, however, resolution is seldom on offer.
Over the past decades there have been few playwrights awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. While Jon Fosse remains committed that prose and novels have always been his preferred form, his dramatic writings have always been discussed first, perhaps because they were translated faster and produced further, immediately gaining the attention and piquing the interest of the greater public first. Fosse's plays display his rhythmic and minimalist language, the rolling, swelling, and receding rhythm, followed by long pauses, all of which creates an atmosphere and drama founded in irresolution. Fosse's work are not about action, resolution, climatic display of virtues and moral grandstanding. Fosse instead leaves his disembodied voices of characters completely abandoned at sea, lost in the uncertainty and anxiety of their very existence. Otherwise, mundane moments become amplified by a creeping distress, paralyzing inaction and stifling resolve. Fosse's works exist within this stasis, this slow burn of existential dread. In awarding Fosse, the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy acknowledges his contributions to the dramatic world with his plays. Despite being heralded as the heir of some of the greatest playwrights of the 20th Century, such as Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Bertolt Brecht, there is something more singular about Jon Fosse's dramatic writing that is completely his own, abandoning in essence the playful nihilism of Beckett or the unrestrained manic vitriolic contempt of Thomas Bernhard. Fosse's writings have a gnostic incantation quality to them, continually attempting to articulate some unknown mysticism that could be divine or some other unknowable force; there's the wavering anxious and hesitant pauses be it long or short. A real sense of neutrality, with softer edge veering towards a lukewarm sense of warmth, which would be uncharacteristic of his predecessors. Fosse does, however, maintain the tradition of routinely deconstructing and revolting against the conventional forms of the theatre, ensuring that dramatic writings continue to evolve and thrive in an innovative sphere of both physical presence but absolute reliance on language. In their overview of Jon Fosse's work, Anders Olsson, has paid particular attention to Fosse's dramatic works highlighting key pieces of work: "Nightsongs," "The Name," "Death Variations," and "Dream of Autumn," and in their short interview post-announcement, Anders Olsson mentioned that Fosse's dramatic works are prosaic in form, meaning they can be read conventionally and not necessarily required to be witnessed or watched.
When it comes to Jon Fosse's prose, the Swedish Academy has highlighted his most recent novel (and what is now described as Fosse's magnum opus) Septology: "The Other Name: I-II," "I Is Another: III-V," "A New Name: VI-VII," which for seven volumes, presents its self as a reflective breathless monologue of an aging painter Asle, but also his doppelganger Asle in the city of Bjørgvin (Bergen) who is an alcoholic painter. The two Asle's ruminate over the complex questions of life, love, death, light and shadow, faith and despair. The novel takes Jon Fosse's signature minimalistic sinuous rhythmic language of crests and falls as Fosse continues the exploration of the human condition in metaphysical form. Septology has been described as a transcendental novel, an absolute masterpiece which continues to confront the perplexing questions that have daunted and haunted mankind since we first began too cognitively question or own existence and formed language in order to disseminate this line of questioning. This seven-volume novel, appears to be that great novel that has been lurking within Jon Fosse over the decades, slowly being released and accumulating in his beautifully written novels: "Aliss at the Fire," "Morning and Evening," "Boathouse," "Melancholy I-II," and the previously highly acclaimed Trilogy: "Wakefulness," "Olav's Dream," and "Weariness."
In "Aliss at the Fire," readers are provided an introduction into how Fosse's language and prose is hypnotic as it is hallucinatory, but also that circuitous play with time, as Signe an old woman slips further and further through memories regarding her missing husband Asle, who one day rows out into the fjord and is lost. He is neither confirmed or speculated of being dead. He is merely missing. Asle's permeating absence becomes the void of Signe's life, the very emptiness she routinely circles around. Lost in memory and speculation, she drifts back five generations of Asle's family, resting finally on the titular Aliss, who rescues her infant child from the icy waters of the fjord. Through her own grief, Signe has summoned the tragedies and legends of Asle's family through the ages in the same house, on the same fjord. "Aliss at the Fire," showcases Jon Fosse's circuitous depiction and understanding of time but also his mastery of brevity (the novel is barely over a hundred pages long). "Aliss at the Fire," is a masterful work of stream of consciousness narrative, moving further and further through a families personal and sustained generational tragedy now crashes ashore at Signe's feat with the loss of her husband. "Moring and Evening," recounts one man's entire life from his birth until his death. Once again just over a hundred pages long, an entire life is captured in one final day where everything is as it always was, but feels different. "Morning and Evening," is a novel of reductionist beauty, in pristine simple language. All the while Trilogy: "Wakefulness," "Olav's Dream," and "Weariness," is a metaphysical romance of ethereal beauty, with commentary drawing the biblical reference and metaphor of the stranded, searching and abandoned Asle and pregnant Alida to the equally despondent Joseph and Mary. Jon Fosse's trilogy is an absolute beautiful work, a set of novella's detailing the complications of two tragic lives from the brink of despair, shadowed by a precipitable but unknown darkness, the ache of hope dashed by retribution, mourning and grief with some remedial action leading the closest one can get to redemption. Trilogy proves that Jon Fosse is a master of reductionist narratives, boiling and carving away all the ostentatious fat, leaving crystalline prose which appreciates and employees' languages painterly mastery, to absorb and slip through time, memory, and encapsulate and capture the fleetingness of existence and life.
Jon Fosse is not a writer one reads for narrative or story or plot. Fosse is a writer one reads for language. The slow pared down rhythmic language. There is reason why Fosse's prose is called lyrical, not for their symphonic quality or orchestral technicalities, but for the parred down rhythm beat, which forces readers to slowdown and become adrift within its hypnotic repetitive qualities. Through plays, novels, short stories, and poetry, Fosse proves himself to be a master of language and one of the most literary concerned Nobel Laureates of recent memory, eschewing the paltry partisan pageantry of political grandstanding and social naval gazing, but rather being more concerned with literary concerns, language, and the enduring element and primordial preoccupations of the human condition and languages ability to give it some sense of form, or at minimum a sense of articulation, with no expectation of response or resolution. On the topic of language, Jon Fosse's literary language is Nynorsk, the minority written language, roughly 10 - 15% of Norwegians use Nynorsk as their written dialect, while the major Norwegian written dialect is Bokmål. The fact that Fosse employees Nynorsk is a particular component of his win, with many praising the decision to award a minor dialect. Furthermore, the Swedish Academy provided comparison between Jon Fosse and the great Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas who also wrote in Nynorsk.
This years Nobel Prize in Literature is more secure in its decision based on literary merit alone. Jon Fosse is a giant of literature, one of the most produced, staged, and performed dramatists in the world, but also one of the most devote literary writers, whose crystalline prose do not betray the depths beneath the surface. Fosse is a writer who has an appreciation and understanding of language that goes beyond utilitarian application, and is an artform unto itself. Fosse is also a writer of little to no controversy. There are no (if any) indignant "who?" screeching about. This is a writer of world class quality and appreciation. Jon Fosse is a writer of purely literary merit, no ulterior motivation. I am absolutely pleased that Jon Fosse has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. if there is any criticism to be leveraged against this year's award, it's that the Nobel Prize's citation is a bit perhaps to literal, or lacking in a quality that is more interesting, but no one and nothing is perfect. The Swedish Academy may be criticized for making a safe choice this year, but that does little to eclipse the fact that Jon Fosse is one of the most important dramatists in the world and one of the most singularly innovative though highly personalized even introspective prose writers currently at work.
Very warm congratulations to
Jon Fosse, a very well-deserved Nobel Prize and a very deserving Nobel Laureate.
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
M. Mary
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