John Fosse’s Quest for Peace

Hardangerfjord, Norway’s second largest fjord, makes its way from the North Sea to the distant mountains of Vestland. Around the middle of the fjord, where the light on the shore is dark and the darkness of the water is silvered with light, is the village of Strandebarm. It is home to the Foss Foundation, an organization dedicated to John Foss – a writer, essayist and one of Europe’s most produced contemporary playwrights – who was born there in 1959. The foundation’s members meet in a small gray house of prayer overlooking the bend at the port; a waterfall cascades down the black rock behind him. Down the road from the foundation are two white houses: the house where Foss grew up, where his mother still lives, and the house that belonged to his grandparents.

This August, the Fosse Foundation hosted a luncheon for the translators, publishers and journalists who had gathered to attend the John Fosse International Symposium. On the top floor, a violinist was playing a waltz on a Hardanger violin, which is strung with four top strings and four sympathetic strings below that vibrate to the notes played above. Downstairs, visitors could walk through an exhibition by textile artist Åse Ljones, who had sewn sentences from Fosse’s writings into sheets, handkerchiefs and nightgowns. A member of the Fosse Foundation held up one of Lonnes’ sheets and asked one of Fosse’s six translators to translate it. The words were risky, the corrections muttered under their breath. There was competition in the air, greed.

The word that comes to mind to describe it all—the light, the music, the holy waters, the holy vestments—is “worship.” One rarely sees living writers treated with such reverence. “I’m just a weird guy from the western part of Norway, from the rural part of Norway,” Foss told me. He grew up a mixture of communist and anarchist, a “hippie” who liked to play the violin and read in the countryside. He enrolled at the University of Bergen, where he studied comparative literature and began writing in Nynorsk, the written standard of the rural west. His first novel, Red, Black, was published in 1983, followed over the next three decades by Melancholia I and Melancholia II, Morning and Evening, Alice in Wonderland and The Trilogy. After a highly successful and stressful period working almost exclusively as a playwright, Fosse converted to Catholicism in 2012, stopped drinking and remarried. He then began writing Septology, a seven-volume novel written in one sentence and illustrating what he described as his turn to “slow prose.” (The book was translated by Damion Searls for Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK; a US edition is out this month from Transit Books.) Septology’s narrator is an artist named Asle, a convert to Catholicism grieving the death of his wife Ales. On the night before Christmas Eve, Asle finds his friend, also an artist named Asle, unconscious in an alley in Bergen, dying of alcohol poisoning. Their memories double, repeat, and gradually blur into a single voice, a diffuse consciousness capable of existing in many places and locations simultaneously.

To read Fosse’s plays and novels is to enter into communion with a writer whose presence you feel all the more intensely thanks to his reserve, his closedness. His plays, whose characters usually have common names – The Man, The Woman, The Mother, The Child – tap into the intensity of our primal relationships and are by turns dark and comic. Septology is the only novel I have read that made me believe in the reality of the divine, as described by the fourteenth-century theologian Meister Eckhart, whom Foss read carefully: “In the darkness one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow , then that light is closest to us.” None of the comparisons to other writers seem right. Bernhard? Too aggressive. Beckett? Too controlling. Ibsen? “He’s the most disruptive writer I know,” Fosse claims. “I feel like there’s a kind of—I don’t know if it’s a good English word—but a kind of reconciliation in my writing. Or, to use the Catholic or Christian word, peace.

Foss hadn’t come for the walk to Hardangerfjord, but he had attended the dinner hosted by the Norwegian Ministry of Culture the previous evening in Bergen, where the Norwegian foreign minister had quoted Ludwig Wittgenstein: “That which cannot be spoken, must be kept silent.” ” We talked over dinner, then met again in the House of Literature, in Foss’s room, where a black-and-white mural of Foss’s face looked down on us benevolently. More than the mural, Foss resembled his description of Asle: a long gray ponytail , black coat, black shoes, snuffbox in pocket. Sometimes he seemed hurt by the need to speak, yet completely confident in what he said. Often, during our conversation, I sensed the same competing impulses that fueled his writing: like curiosity , as well as a defense of the man behind the words; both skepticism and faith in his mystical descriptions of how to write fiction. He struck me above all as deeply a kind man expressed by his willingness to talk about everything: grace, love, jealousy and peace, his near-death experiences and his love of translation. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.

You don’t do many face-to-face interviews.

I prefer to do interviews via email. I feel that it is often easier to write, even in English, than to speak.

I’ve interviewed several writers who claim that the reason they write is because they can’t talk.

Yes, it’s a bit like that for me. The Foreign Office man quoted Wittgenstein: What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence. You know that famous Jacques Derrida twist, “What you cannot say, you must write.” That’s closer to the way I think about it.

Derrida is extremely present in your early essays in An Angel Walks Across the Stage. One can sense his thought patterns in many of your plays and novels, especially around the play of speech and silence.

I started studying Derrida in 1979. At least here in Norway, the university or the spirit of the university was heavily influenced by Marxism. We had an extreme Maoist party that was very strong among academics, writers and people like them. It was the zeitgeist, even for me. I started studying sociology. And I felt like utter crap. This way of thinking, this positivist way of calculating things—it was absolutely nothing. So I skipped philosophy. And during these years there was a great shift 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 Grammarology.

“On Grammar” somehow influenced me. You have read Sein und Zeit by Martin Heidegger. I studied and read Heidegger a lot. It was difficult, but also very inspiring. I felt that what Derrida was doing was turning Heidegger upside down. 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? And I thought that the act of writing was a very strange thing. It’s not like talking. This is something different, very different. And that also gave me a kind of connection, of course, with Derrida and his concept of writing.

And then I started studying comparative literature. By then I had already written my first novel and various literary things. The theory of the novel was my main subject. These theories have always had the narrator as a central concept: narrator, person, character, the relationship between their points of view. And they are important enough, but I still felt that the central concept of a theory of fiction should not be the narrator who derives from the oral tradition. It should be the writer. The way I thought about the writer was like the body part of the writing, the materiality that went into your writing. And I wanted to write my own little theory of storytelling or of written fiction with the writer as the central concept.