Saying the Unsayable, and Listening to Silence: Jon Fosse on How Writing Plays Transformed His Craft

Now what can I say about the fact that I ended up as a playwright? I wrote novels and poems, and had no desire to write for the theater, but the time came when I did so because, as part of a publicly funded effort to get people to write more modern Norwegian plays, I was offered quite a large amount of money, for the impoverished writer I was at the time, to write the opening scene of a play. I ended up writing the whole play, my first, and it is still the most performed of all my plays: Someone Is Going to Come. This first experience of writing a play was the biggest surprise I ever had in my life as a writer, because up until that point, both in fiction and in poetry, I had always tried to write what cannot be said in words in the usual way—in the usual spoken way. I had always tried to write the unsayable, which is exactly how the announcement of my winning the Nobel Prize put it. What’s most important in life cannot be said, only written—to give a slight twist to the well-known remark by Jacques Derrida. And so, in my fiction and poetry, I tried to put silent speech into words. What’s most important in life cannot be said, only written—to give a slight twist to the well-known remark by Jacques Derrida. But when I wrote plays, I could use silent speech—I could use silence—in a completely different way. All I had to do was write ‘pause’ and the silent speech was right there. This word ‘pause’ is without a doubt the most important word in my plays, and the one I use the most often: “long pause,” “short pause,” or just “pause.” There can be so much in these pauses—or so little. The fact that something cannot be said, the fact that something refuses to be said, or the fact that something is best said by not saying anything. But what I am quite sure speaks through these pauses the most is: silence. Perhaps all […]

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