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Jon Fosse debuted in 1983 and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023.

How Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse transforms anxiety into literary art

The Nobel Prize winner deals with anxiety in a way that draws on both Sigmund Freud and Søren Kierkegaard, says Professor Unni Langås.

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“Jon Fosse receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023 was fully deserved. He has created a completely unique and new style of writing,” says Professor Unni Langås.

In a new analysis, she shows how Jon Fosse creates profound literature with a seemingly simple writing style that he himself has developed.

Fosse was well-received by critics already upon his debut in 1983. The international breakthrough came with the play Nokon kjem til å komme (Someone is Going to Come) in 1996.

The Nobel Prize in Literature

Since his debut, he has written novels, poems, plays, and essays. He has received numerous awards and honours for several of his works.

The greatest honour he received was being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023.

“It's quite an honour, to have a Nobel laureate in literature hailing from Western Norway. He certainly is a genuine artist. The prize is well deserved and absolutely fantastic,” says Langås.

She is a professor at the University of Agder and has been studying Jon Fosse since 1998.

“Part of the reason Fosse writes at Nobel Prize level is that he writes books in his own style. He has developed his own writing style, so he is indeed unique,” she says.

Langås has now analysed the novel Stengd gitar (Closed Guitar) from 1985, the children's book Kant from 1990, and the play Eg er vinden (I Am the Wind) from 2008.

Language and content go hand in hand

The analysis is recent enough to only have been presented in a lecture twice.

She calls her lecture Jon Fosse and the language of anxiety. There, she touches on how repetitions of words, sentences, events, and actions demonstrate an intentional author who explores anxiety and trauma in his books.

Professor Unni Langås has been researching Jon Fosse since 1998. She has now analysed three of his books in her lecture Jon Fosse and the language of anxiety.

“For Fosse, these repetitions are not simply linguistic or aesthetic tools. They also reflect the themes explored in his books. Here, language and theme, or form and content, go together. The repetitions are a constant return to the same. The difficult or unresolved is what the characters in the books cannot get away from or get past,” Langås explains.

The language of anxiety

Langås also reminds us that Fosse talked about anxiety in his Nobel Prize lecture in December 2023. There, he referred to a personal background for writing about the topic.

“Of course, like everyone else, he writes about things that engage him. But the fact that he turns it into literary art is what makes it exciting. Besides, it's quite clear in his books that he also has a philosophical and psychological interest in the topic,” says Langås.

In her analysis, she uses philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud to demonstrate this.

Nothing is not nothing

In the book The Concept of Anxiety from 1884, Kierkegaard states that anxiety does not have an object, there is nothing specific that we fear.

Langås observes that both in Kierkegaard and Fosse, anxiety is an existential experience of facing nothingness or something unfamiliar that we do not understand.

“Kierkegaard likens this to the experience of standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down into the abyss, and feeling a dizzying sensation,” says Langås.

She finds something similar in Fosse's children's book Kant, which is also about standing on the edge and staring down at nothingness or an abyss.

The main character and narrator is a young boy who struggles to sleep at night. He is scared and calls out to his father for comfort. But the father falls short, especially when he claims that there is nothing to fear:

“‘I'm still scared,’ I say, and then I think that dad says ‘nothing’ as if the word were a completely ordinary word, as ordinary as the word ‘dad’, or ‘chair’. But it is an impossible word, which makes all kinds of scary things possible.” (Fosse in Kant, page 12)

“The edge and the abyss create a powerful sense of existential anxiety. And I think that Jon Fosse writes about such a fundamental human emotion, yet at the same time, he has learned a lot from reading philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard,” she says.

Langås reminds us that the child in Kant has already discovered that nothing is not nothing.

And perhaps here is the right place to insert a few words about the first analysis Unni Langås wrote about Jon Fosse. It was a trial lecture she gave when she obtained her doctorate in literary science in 1998. The study was later published in the journal Edda with the title Intet er hans stoff (Nothing is his substance).

Start with the thin books

“But for those who have not yet read anything by Jon Fosse, where should they start?”

“It might be a good idea to start with one of his thin novels, such as Morgon og kveld (Morning and Evening), Naustet (Boathouse), or Olavs draumar (Olav's Dreams),” says Langås.

She analyses both Naustet and Olav's draumar in her book Traumets betydning i norsk samtidslitteratur (The significance of trauma in contemporary Norwegian literature).

References:

Langås, U. ‘Jon Fosse og angstens språk’ (Jon Fosse and the language of anxiety), unpublished lecture, 2024.

Langås, U. ‘Intet er hans stoff. Om Jon Fosses dramatikk’ (Nothing is his substance. About Jon Fosse's plays), Edda, 1998. (Summary)

Langås, U. 'Traumets betydning i norsk samtidslitteratur' (The significance of trauma in contemporary Norwegian literature), Fagbokforlaget, 2016. ISBN: 9788245019636

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Read the Norwegian version of this article on forskning.no

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