Think of Jon Fosse as more like Simone Weil and Flannery O’Connor than the literary precursors in my headline (Fosse, when asked about influences, cites these two, Beckett and Pinter): His work, across all literary genres, is a longing for an end to the self and an equal longing for its replacement by God.
“To write what I myself have experienced doesn’t interest me at all. I write more to get rid of myself than to express myself,” he tells one interviewer. “Writing is all about transformation. I listen to a universe that is different from mine, and writing is a way to escape into this universe. That’s the great thing about it. I want to get away from myself, not to express myself,” he tells another.
An almost-fatal alcoholic (he doesn’t drink anymore), a depressive, Fosse understands with painful clarity the unbearable lightness/heaviness of human being, and he also understands that the process of aesthetic creation suspends the hated self (just as alcohol does). “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion,” wrote T S Eliot; “it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” Remember the title of Catholic novelist Graham Greene’s memoirs: Ways of Escape. Remember that the one book left behind on his bedside table after Anthony Bourdain’s suicide was Ways of Escape — in which Greene writes: “Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition.”
Not sayin it’s fair, but if you don’t happen to be an artistic genius, you might indeed have to deal with your self-hatred (UD thinks the capacity to hate oneself is one of humanity’s more endearing traits) via drink or drugs… I mean, you also remember the Randy Newman song, right?
You know how it is with me baby
You know, I just can’t stand myself
It takes a whole lot of medicine
For me to pretend that I’m somebody else
And a whole WHOLE lot of medicine for me to pretend that I’m nobody else…
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Worse, for many creative geniuses, it’s not either/or: You drink AND you write The Great Gatsby… or you drink and write a novel that had a huge impact on Fosse: The Sound and the Fury… So think of Jon Fosse as a particularly desperate escape artist, unwilling to inhabit permanently the tormenting nothingness of being and the occasional suspension of nothingness via writing/alcohol, and really longing to move to a higher plane. “[E]veryone has a deep longing inside them,” he writes; “we always always long for something and we believe that what we long for is this or that, this person or that person, this thing or that thing, but actually we’re longing for God, because the human being is a continuous prayer, a person is a prayer through his or her longing…”
Consider Fosse’s poem, “Night Psalm.”
There is an earth that opens wide
its night of black abyss
and soul and body will it hide
until there’s none to miss
There is a night that meets with you
receives you nice and soft
and lets you rest with honour due
hand, foot and soul aloft
For God he is in all on earth
in teeming night above
your soul is His, you are His worth
you shine His heaven’s love
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So in the first stanza it all comes down, as Tracy Nelson reminds us, to Mother Earth; just under your bright life black death awaits your capture, Midnight Skater…
But! (Stanza Two) There’s a softer night all around us that doesn’t simply gobble us up; it is gentle and wafts you to an honored place, and if you follow God you will find it. For, as Fosse says in his final stanza, God is here with us on earth. He is everywhere, above and below; and you must learn, if you are not to fall forgotten into the abyss, that you belong to him and he awaits your acceptance of his gift of eternal life. Remember Simone Weil’s favorite poem, the poem which propelled her into the Catholic faith:
LOVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.
‘A guest,’ I answer’d, ‘worthy to be here:’
Love said, ‘You shall be he.’
‘I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on Thee.’
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
‘Who made the eyes but I?’
‘Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.’
‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘Who bore the blame?’
‘My dear, then I will serve.’
‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’
So I did sit and eat.
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You must accept this divine gift of eternal life; if you do not, you will fall into the abyss.
And no, there’s no bitter Blakeian irony behind the simple language of Fosse’s last stanza. The lines honestly state the convictions of a Catholic convert.
As with Flannery O’Connor, most of Fosse’s writing locates itself in the agonizing daily void which is life prior to faith; but in this poem he sets forth the way out of ways of escape.