The easy recourse to the fjord to headline the news yesterday announcing the award to Jon Fosse made direct allusion to an element of the landscape associated with his work, but there were also other more symbolic readings if we look at how these coastal inlets are formed sea The fjord is born from fractures that produce water when it freezes and its lower part is submerged.
The Nobel laureate, who must have been aware of his chances of victory because he picked up the phone while driving, when he had stated in an interview that he never takes calls from a private number, has largely based his work on the fracture -understood both in the sense of the dislocations or emotional wounds that we all carry and in that of a formal exercise that loosens many of the grammatical and narrative conventions- and in accentuating what is beyond the reach of our senses and understanding , hopelessly submerged.
It is not surprising to see the biographical data that point to his quality as an ex-alcoholic (the inner hells and the struggle of the human being against what overcomes him may be his great theme) and as a Catholic convert who asserts that writing is how to pray But if Fosse writes for God and assures that the most important thing in life is in the silences, how do we connect mere mortals with a work that aspires to the ineffable? Precisely because from this impossibility or paradox emerges a unique and challenging, essentialist music that portrays us in a stark way.
For all this, the author seems to be the embodiment of that pure and romantic idea of the writer, a serious and tormented artist, embarked on the mission of finding the elusive words that illuminate the chasms of our soul, a speleologist of the human condition, a medium capable of bringing down to the earthly world of signs everything that is transcendent on Earth. I am aware that all this may sound presumptuous, but we are talking about someone who has manifested the imprint in his work of the philosophy of language through Heidegger and Wittgenstein, which he has in the incommunicado of Beckett and the anguish of Ibsen two of his dramatic engines, who fills his texts with biblical allusions and Christian symbology, who has not stopped reflecting on grief, suicide, art, fate... (yes, many times with the search for consolation as a goal and with occasional touches of humor), who perhaps set a record for both rhetorical and unfathomable questions thrown at the reader in his novel Det er Ales (two hundred in less than seventy pages) .
To read his Septología (published in Spain in four volumes by Donatus, a round of applause for the publishing audacity) is to dive into a monologue – often cryptic – of more than a thousand pages sustained at a challenging pace by virtue of sacrificing conventional punctuation and resort to repetition. To read Mañana y tarde (again in De Conatus, but this time in co-edition with Nórdica, a round of applause for them as well) is to witness a life cycle from expressive minimalism, in which fragmentation, pause, silence, irresolution or uncertainty look to dismantle the devices that allow literature to generate a false sense of order or linearity in our lives.
"God is in the details", said Flaubert in a phrase that was later appropriated by Mies van der Rohe. For Fosse he is in the silences and his work is an attempt to express them in words.
