Very early, I noticed in literature this voice which was there but which, paradoxically, said nothing itself. What was strange was that, up out of good, written literature, rose this voice which was not verbal, which said nothing precise, which was there, only, like something that could be heard, like a word without words coming from afar.

And then it struck me that this voice was linked precisely to writing. And that is why I call it the voice of writing.

For me therefore, art was linked to this almost inhuman voice in its modest word. And what is paradoxical and strange is that this voice is there, and it says nothing. It is a silent voice. A voice which speaks by keeping quiet. It is a voice which, in a way, comes from all which is not said, it is a voice which comes from silence and which becomes audible at times through what others say, the narrator and the characters in a novel, for example, or the characters in a play.

A part of my aversion for the theatre was undoubtedly linked to the fact that the theatre appeared to me to offer only culture, not art. The theatre proposed only a space for what was, to my eyes, only a rather tiresome cultural event. No voice, like the one I’m speaking of, made itself heard. Or almost never did such a voice make itself heard.

… the most often, when I used to go to the theatre, I found only cultural consensus, idle chatter on subjects which were equally treated in newspapers and on television, or else formal inventions in a vain modernist style.

I had to escape as quickly as possible from this muggy cultural consensus which acutely threatened to take away from me all courage to live.

And yet, I had experienced a theatre capable of spanning the distance which separates culture from art – and when theatre became art, it really became it. This experience, I had had it. And when it occurred, something was encountered, a quite particular silent voice never encountered before. A person was really marked by a silent voice, and life, following an encounter with this voice, was no longer as it was before.

Translated from the Norwegian by Terje Sinding
This text was published in the programme of Nammet (The Name), a play first performed on 27th May 1995 at the Nationale Scene of Bergen

Jon Fosse