At high noon, 64-year-old Jon Fosse was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is considered one of the most outstanding contemporary Norwegian writers. He made his debut in the early 1990s as a prose writer, but his dramas brought him the greatest popularity.
For the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, faith and writing are closely linked
Recently, he returned to writing prose, which is “Septology”, which tells the story of two men named after him – Asle. They are both artists, but their lives are completely different. The former leads a quiet life, while the latter struggles with alcohol addiction. In one of the interviews, Fosse stated that he had something of both of them, but “Septology” is by no means autobiographical literature.
A few weeks before the announcement of the Swedish Academy’s verdict, Michał Nogasi, a journalist from “Gazeta Wyborcza”, managed to talk to the writer. The topic of Fosse’s faith comes up in the interview. He confessed that as a young boy he was a declared materialist and atheist, and was fascinated by Marxism. Everything changed when he turned 20.
“I first became involved with religion in my twenties, I joined the Norwegian Church, I was a Lutheran,” he said in the interview. Earlier, however, he added that, as a teenager, he preferred to stay at home and write rather than play with his friends. Years later, he sees an analogy between the present and those times. He believes that this action saved his life.
And what led to the change, what completely changed my life and made me consider myself a true Christian, was writing. Thanks to him, I began to understand what happens when I create, how the act of creation takes place. And how much I have no influence on him – said Fosse.
The writer previously mentioned that while writing he is in a completely different space-time. “I start writing without having any idea what or why. I just write down subsequent sentences, one after the other, without even thinking about why they appear in front of me in this particular order,” he admitted.
However, he said he would not connect his creative process with the person of God. “It’s a big word, powerful, defined in many ways. However, I know that what I have to convey in literature does not come from me. It has already been written down somewhere, I just have to pass it on,” he explained. He strongly opposes being called some kind of preacher, but he simply sees a spiritual dimension in the writing process.
He believes he became an artist at the age of seven. But he wasn’t aware of it at the time
Later in the conversation, he also confessed that he became a deeply religious person not because of fear of death or awareness of transience. He was already sure of this as a seven-year-old, when he was an atheist. In a conversation with Nogaś, he mentioned that he had a serious accident from which he miraculously survived. Already then something stirred in him and he says that since then he considers himself an artist – a man who doubts without answers to many key questions.
To this day, I am convinced that the miraculous rescue of seven-year-old Jon cannot be explained solely by medicine – said the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He previously mentioned that at the age of sixty he decided to leave the Church of Norway and convert to the Roman Catholic religion. He believes that the Lutheran community had an extremely rational approach to everything and lacked spirituality.
How does Fosse address the topic of faith in “Septology”?
In “Septology”, which is called Fosse’s magnum opus, some readers look for the author’s characteristic features in the book’s hero, one of two men named Asle. Nogaś himself indicates that he is also deeply religious, and the author gives entire fragments of prayers in Latin in the novel. The writer confessed that some of these things actually deserve to be called similar. However, he himself says that these are only appearances:
I have an idea of what happened to Asle, basically both characters with the same name. However, if I included realistic descriptions from my life in the book, it would be very boring. My heroes have much more interesting things to say, he said.
Source: Gazeta
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
