Purgatory by the Sea: Jon Fosse in Conversation
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I want to start with the language and writing of Morning and Evening. The style of the writing feels somewhat tidal. Each new detail is given with a wash of repetition and interior thought. I know you wrote it a while ago now, but could you describe your writing process for the novel? Why did this story demand this style?
The style gives itself. And yes, it is like waves. The movement of the waves. I grew up by the sea, so, in a way, I learned to speak while listening to the waves. And of course this movement has a lot to do with rhythm. Even if she can’t be an influence – I hadn’t read her when I wrote Morning and Evening – I feel there might be a connection to the language and rhythms of Virginia Woolf in this book.
The dialogue and interior thoughts are often preceded by anaphoric ‘yes’, ‘then’, ‘no’ and ‘and’. It reads as the syntax of the everyday, the mundane. How much of this line-level detail occurs as you write, and how much is added in afterwards, in the editing process?
When I am writing fiction, or a play, the language is both close to spoken language and at the same time an ‘artificial’ language. That’s because, in my writing, everything has to do with form, even what might be called content is part of the form. And the most important part of form is rhythm.
To me, writing is best described as listening.
Another thing is that I am writing in Nynorsk, a language based on all of the Norwegian dialects. It isn’t like any spoken language; it is a ‘constructed’ language, or a ‘reconstructed’ version of Norwegian. This means it is both very close to spoken language and has a distance to it. For my way of writing this is a perfect combination.
When I am writing well, there’s no need to change anything, but other times I have to delete, rewrite, etc. I prefer to know nothing when I start writing. I just sit down and start writing. And if the beginning is good, the rest of the text is almost already there. Every text is its own universe, ruled by an enormous number of ‘rules’, and when writing I have to listen. To me, writing is best described as listening. And at a certain point it is as if the text is already written: it exists out there somewhere, and I just have to write it down before it disappears.
When I wrote Morning and Evening, I had to make very few changes. The text wrote itself the way it should be written.
There are a few switches in POV in the novel: from Olai, to baby Johannes, to adult Johannes and to Signe, his daughter. When do you feel that the narrative commands a switch in POV? Is it intuitive? Do you find it difficult to shift interiority, particularly to be in the head of a newborn baby?
These changes are intuitive, whatever that might be. Writing is a kind of dreaming in a conscious state. But when I started writing Morning and Evening, for once I had an idea before I began: I wanted to write about the most extreme parts of human life, being born and dying. I had an idea that I wanted to write from the perspective of the baby being born, but I very soon learned that it was impossible, so I changed to the perspective of the father to be. Still now and then I use the perspective of the baby being born, but the words are gone, and only the sounds, mostly vowels, are left.
To move onto the themes of the novel, there seems to be a Lucretian concept of birth and death in Morning and Evening: ‘from nothing to nothing, that’s the path of life’. I know you studied philosophy, and I’m interested in which philosophers or texts influenced your concept of the afterlife, and how philosophy sits beside religion in the novel?
I mostly read Martin Heidegger, and spent a lot of time studying his Being and Time, but Heidegger limits himself strictly to human life ‘in this world’. What influenced an understanding of a possible life after this must be the works of Plato. The moment when Socrates is about to die, and he dies happy, because life on the other side will be so much better than on this. Also, Plotinus and Neoplatonism perhaps had an impact, mostly because of the ways in which they have influenced Christian mysticism. More than philosophy, I think the representation of an afterlife in Morning and Evening is influenced by a traditional Christian understanding, whatever that might be.
There is a hope in the darkness of my text.
My understanding of Christendom is strongly influenced by the writings of Meister Eckhardt, so he would have also influenced my representations of afterlife. But I don’t think it is possible to know anything about an afterlife. The novel ends with Peter saying to Johannes that now the words have to disappear, since there are no words where they now are going. There is silence. And, as it has been said, it is in silence you can hear the voice of God. I think this silence can be heard in all great writing, a silent language behind the written words. My language is not in the words, as the Finland-Swedish poet Gunnar Björling wrote.
The ‘purgatory’ of the novel reminded me of Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’, who I know you’ve been compared to in the past. What do you make of that comparison? Do you include his writings in your influences?
Not in my novels. I am influenced by Beckett as a playwright. I called my first play Someone Is Going to Come as a nod to his Waiting for Godot, but I don’t manage to see any influence in my novels. And in a more general sense, there is no hope in Beckett’s texts, but there is a kind of hope in the darkness of my text. A kind of reconciliation. A luminous darkness, as it has been called.
Finally, in the novel, memories and figures arrive as if cued on stage. There is a neatness to the choreography of the characters. How does your theatre work influence your novel-writing in general, as well as Morning and Evening specifically? And, I suppose I should ask, does your novel writing influence your playwriting?
I started out writing novels and poetry. When I began writing plays, I used what I had learned from writing fiction – for instance, writing dense stories spanning a short timeframe, a day or so, like in my first novels – and my plays are written in a kind of free verse, as my poetry was, and is.
But I am sure that as a novelist, I have learned a lot from writing all these plays. The way I write dialogue, or establish a situation, must be influenced by playwriting. I think this influence is so big that I don’t really see it. In fact, I wrote Morning and Evening in the years when I was writing the most for the theatre, so it makes sense that there is a discernible influence there.
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Image credit: Tom A. Kolstad.
Jon Fosse was born in 1959 on the west coast of Norway and is the recipient of countless prestigious prizes, both in his native Norway and abroad. Since his 1983 fiction debut, Raudt, svart [Red, Black], Fosse has written prose, poetry, essays, short stories, children’s books and over forty plays. In 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable’.
Zadie Loft is a writer from Suffolk, now living in London. After reading Classics at Cambridge, she studied Creative Writing at Oxford and is represented by Becky Percival at United Agents. She works as the Marketing and Editorial Assistant at The London Magazine.
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