Mental fragility. Unstable mists. Expanses of Scandinavian nights.

Where are we? On what journey? Striving towards Unity — already destroyed, cracked scarcely begun?

A couple. An abandoned house on the border between earth and sea — on the edge of infinity? What other future living here than the future of the dead ancestors in this house? One can smell their tracks, their scent — mouldy urine, dirty sheets — old photos. And their offspring — a young man — is here, immediately.

And then, what is this living thing which roams ceaselessly around the house ? And which, of course, is going to come in. Is going to knock and enter.

Two of Jon Fosse’s novels are titled Melancholia I, Melancholia II. Look endlessly at the incomprehensible engraving Melencolia I by Dürer. Here (beyond the instability of spelling) are present in the distance, the sea and a comet. There, the black look, saturnine, of the winged figure — staring straight ahead —seeking what, in the middle of these objects from geometry or abandoned crafts? What Hartmut Böhme has written about Dürer’s engraving can also be said of "Quelqu'un va venir": "The work is not the representation of a landscape of this world, but the landscape of a mind for which the world has become uncertain and problematic," it is "an open space, threatening in the distance, puzzling up close".

Someone is going to come, facing the sea, awakening us to mourn for an unknown loss. Fantastical visions, of negation and of death, mingle with life.

Fosse brings these implacable contradictions together, and shows them to us, existing together at the same time in the same living being. Without doubt, it is only possible in the very particular way of life of the unconscious.

Jon Fosse invents an expanse, stretches a canvas, and there, by infinite modifications, by "minuscule linguistic and gestural movements", by stylised images, he gives a trembling impetus to a precise reality. Something is perceived, as untouchable as light, which undoes what is done. The contours are lost of what does, however, happen. We also feel that we would be able — and with as much force — what we want absolutely, to not want it at all. Amazed, we enter a forest, no trees can be seen, but we would say that the trees speak, and as they speak, we are less and less blind. It is very violent, the opening of this eye.

Noiselessly, delicately, precise reality lets us see that it is not at all a finished reality. The absence of all punctuation — even interrogative — erases our attempts to give intonations, and makes the text — even to the naked eye — unlimited.

And perhaps in this forest, something is heard beyond what we think we hear.
With Jon Fosse, we are disconnected from the traditional relationship between the sign and the sense.