Speech of dean Petr Francán on the occasion of the Honorary Doctorate bestoved on Jon Fosse by the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts, 15 October 2021, Brno
Your Magnificence, Dear Rector,
Spectabilis, Honorabiles, Members of our Academic Community, Ladies and Gentlemen, dear distinguished guests…
It is an honour for me to give the laudatio speech for Jon Fosse, a world-class author, poet, novelist and playwright. And it is also an honour for me to personally welcome him to our academy – to be more precise: to welcome him in the name of the Faculty of Theatre whose Arts Council proposed and unanimously approved awarding him the title of honorary doctor.
Jon Fosse is a former sociologist, philosopher and literary scholar who, at the beginning of his professional career, worked as a journalist, editor and later taught at the Academy of Creative Writing in Hordaland. Since publishing his debut novel Red, Black in 1983, he has compiled an exceptionally profound literary legacy, so far translated into more than forty languages, and counting more than fifty pieces.
His literary achievements have earned him many accolades, and I would like to mention at least a handful of the most important ones: twice – for his 1996 play The Name and his 2021 play So It Was – he received the prestigious Norwegian Ibsen Prize; in 2005, he was awarded his native country’s Order of St. Olav; in 2010 he also won the International Ibsen Prize; and last but not least, in 2015, he received the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize, one of the most prestigious European literary awards, for his mystical prosaic trilogy about love (Wakefulness, Olav’s Dreams and Weariness). The total number of literary awards Jon Fosse has received so far is fast approaching fifty.
Although we view the work of Jon Fosse comprehensively and as a whole, the Faculty of Theatre JAMU’s proposal to award him the Doctor Honoris Causa honorary doctorate is primarily related to his dramatic work.
His work first entered the Czech stage in 2001, when the play Someone Is Going to Come Home was performed in the Brno National Theatre, directed by the then-student of our academy, Tomáš Svoboda. Also, another more recent production staged in our country, The Name (Zlín 2019), was the creative work of two other graduates of the Faculty of Theatre JAMU, playwright Jakub Molnár and director Miroslav Lukačovič. Of the twelve Czech performances of Fosse’s plays, five are directly tied to our faculty, which I see as enough of a reason to consider Jon Fosse an author closely associated with our academy, almost one of our own.
However, my aim is not to present you with a list of facts about the life of a well-known writer. And I don’t even want my speech to become a treatise on literary science or theatrology, although there are indeed many elaborate definitions of Fosse’s authorial style to be discussed. I want my laudatio speech to be a more personal affair, a homage of a reader and a viewer, as I have read and experienced his texts purely subjectively.
An oft-repeated phrase, found in many sources but first used in the German magazine Die Woche, is that Fosse is the “new” or “second Ibsen”. It relates not only to the range of his work, but above all the frequency with which his plays are staged all around the world. This comparison, which by the way embarrasses the author, may, however, give way to misleading interpretations. For that reason, I would like to clearly state another, equally true fact: Fosse is not the second Ibsen, Fosse is the first Fosse… Jon Fosse is not even a new Ibsen, Jon Fosse is a permanently directed Fosse…
What do I mean by that?
That as a writer, Jon Fosse has naturally changed and matured over the course of his career, but at the same time he remains true to himself in the literary sense. He directs his work quite consciously, to quote the author himself: “In a way, it’s like my face. My features and hair change, but certain things remain the same. Be it twenty years old or sixty, it’s still my face.”
Fosse has the gift of not using words as mere tools of speech. He uses them so that the reader’s essence may exist among them. That is the profoundest, most spiritual way to work with your instrument, your art. Not only to influence the viewer, reader, or visitor, but allow them to coexist with the work itself. To humbly bow before the greatness of the universe and thus penetrate it. When taken in the general sense of the word, any piece of art may be understood in this way… The most important thing takes place not only in words, but also between the lines; not only in paintings, but also beyond the frames; not only in film shots, but also in the editing; not only in tones but also in the silence; not only in the touch of sculptural material, but also in the light cast by its reflections…
In this year’s interview with Karolína Stehlíková, Jon Fosse told Host magazine: “It’s not me writing. When I sit down to work, something in me starts writing. It’s like a different personality that writes by itself. Like my creative demon. I’ve gotten rid of various other demons, but my creative demon, the demon of writing, is fortunately still with me.” And elsewhere: “I don’t adapt to the audience. For me, literature or writing is almost a sacred process.”
The author therefore resigns his ego, focuses on his work and delves deep inside. He does not compare himself to anyone on the outside and he does not even compare himself to himself. He creates an intimate space in which only his reader moves about and fends for himself. Fosse is so intimate with his reader that he convinces him that they’ve known each other for a long time and that nothing needs to be explained unless absolutely necessary. Just like when we meet a close friend and conduct an unplanned conversation in which literally “anything” can happen.
Perhaps – or rather certainly – it would be possible to describe all the tools by which the author influences his reader or viewer in purely technical terms. However, that would be about as useful to us as stating that music comprises tones, and therefore to assume that everyone can compose… The form and content of Jon Fosse’s work create an inimitable mixture of flavours, which in its richness of course contradicts any analysis. After all, Fosse himself states in his essays that the true meaning of a text cannot be directly verbalized, but must be revealed in the indefinable grace of the moment.
Fosse’s characters pass on words to one another and repeat them, swinging them along waves of human understanding and the desire to comprehend. And with each repetition, new contexts, new depths, and new realizations appear. The delight of discovery appears. And as we read all those long sentences, often devoid of punctuation, we actually feel the play or novel taking over time and literally ruffling our perception of the present. Fosse’s faith in language and its fragile power seems infinite. After all, he himself says with deliberate exaggeration that his writing is not about something, but that it in itself is something!
In addition to the literary alchemy outlined above, I must also mention the tangible authorial honesty with which Fosse puts nothing aside for future use or in case he might need it later-on. No, he invests everything into every part of the text and hides nothing at all from the reader – and that is another facet of his mastery. He knows that he can, and in essence must, give his all, and he won’t be any the poorer for it. On the contrary! Jon Fosse is stronger and more captivating with each new opus, and at the end of each one, the reader and the author are both richer than before. Fosse’s poems, plays, and prose are bearers of knowledge, and we all know that knowledge never comes without pain. I hope that Fosse’s current and future readers find comfort in the fact that the tears of knowledge that many of them weep are cleansing tears. They are and will forever be theirs and theirs alone, and therefore I think that it is not at all important that Jon Fosse knows about them…
Finally, I would like to once again mention the author’s mother tongue, this time in the linguistic sense. Although his work is part of our shared cultural consciousness, it is not widely known that Jon Fosse writes in the Nynorsk language, which is one of the two official written forms of Norwegian. While Nynorsk has its origins in Norwegian dialects and Old Norse, Bokmål, the second literary variant, evolved mainly from Danish. The way language is used in everyday life is key, and so is the soundscape that it paints. The sound and rhythm of Nynorsk, as well as the precisely defined pauses, are very important building blocks not only of Fosse’s poetry, but also his drama and his prose. By the way, this is also the reason why we found it crucial that the lecture of our new honorary doctor should be given in Nynorsk – in order for us to hear it, feel it, sense it and really get a taste of it…
After all, we former Czechoslovaks have an innate understanding of the close relations between languages, just as Jon Fosse has an understanding for us, former Czechoslovaks, because his wife translates from Norwegian to Slovak and is Slovak by birth.
In the last paragraph of the aforementioned interview for this year’s May issue of Host magazine, Jon Fosse said of his identity: “I feel like I am a Central European. I really like German literature and my favorite authors are Austrians, to name but three: Georg Trakl, Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke. And now I myself have ended up living in Central Europe. And I feel good here. I’m already a bit Slovak, and therefore I feel a bit Czech.”
I have the feeling that it is actually rather magical and in a way significant that we award an honorary doctorate at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts to the eminent Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, who has right now, in our hearts, in one moment and of his own free will, become our compatriot…
All that remains is to wish: so be it!