The voice of contemplation

The book revolves around a man who, because he was so bored with everyday life, drove into the pine forest. He thought the adventure would help improve his mood, but things suddenly got worse when he realized the car was now stuck in the middle of a quagmire, while the snow was falling, the sky was getting dark, and the forest was empty. live. While trying to escape, he suddenly saw a large light approaching him. He tried to communicate with that “matter” but everything was constantly interrupted. What is it and why did it suddenly appear?

SLIGHT CREATES SILENCES

When talking about Jon Fosse’s works, the lasting impression that is always mentioned is lines of text without dots, only connected through conjunctions or repeated keywords. The above writing style is somewhat similar to writers following the school of thought. However, for Jon Fosse, this method is not about reproducing the flow of thought but rather creating a form-oriented creation to create what is called “Jon Fosse-style minimalism”, along with exploiting anxieties. , uncertainty, insecurity and the dilemma of humanity are the main points of his writing career.

The “silence” of this mood is the “unspeakable” that the Swedish Academy’s Literary Committee once mentioned when calling his name. For Jon Fosse, silence is the muteness of many states, from confusion, confusion, despair to collapse, when people don’t know what to do next. That is the aftertaste of emotions, and is also the thing that has the most impact on listeners, viewers and performers. Famous for plays, but if this genre has the advantage of perspective, sound, light… then novels do not have that support. Therefore, Fosse created a new form that imitates that feeling, by placing many clauses that continuously negate or refuse to affirm next to each other.

That is also seen in White light, revealing the subject’s confusion and confusion about how to escape the forest or pull the car out of the mud. This is exactly what will happen to most people, when they are constantly confused and indecisive about unfamiliar or unknown things. That is exactly what Fosse once said, that he did not write for anyone but for humanity. It can be said that by radically minimizing language and dramatic action, Fosse accurately recreated the unspeakable, thereby exposing emotions and naming these experiences.

TMOMENT OF REVELATION

In the confusion, Fosse and the characters suddenly heard the voice of silence. As he wrote in this work: “Then I stood there listening to the silence. And it was as if the silence was speaking to me. But silence cannot speak, can it? Yes, silence also speaks in its own way, and the voice I hear when it speaks, yes, whose voice it is. But I can’t say anything more about this voice. It’s just there, clearly say nothing”.

The same thing happened with Albert Camus – winner of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature, in his collection of short stories Exile and Kingdom, he lets the characters hear absurd things like the sound of water flowing in the middle of a dry desert or the silence in the gap above the roof of the starry sky… when they solve the “difficult problem” of the story. In your life, you have to choose between the relative and the absolute. That is the re-creation of revelations and contemplations when the characters fully understand themselves. Fosse, too, associated this experience with what is most sacred and best for a person.

That white light makes us think of the “time gate” between two worlds, where people move from being to being invisible, where from vision to feeling… From there, the character sees in the light source the familiar: from a woman with a gentle touch (possibly a lost love), two old grandparents constantly arguing (which the main character identifies as his parents), as well as a man he was dressed in a suit and tie (maybe he himself was in another, incomplete “form”, because his face had no lines).

Therefore, the experience with that light source can also be understood as a near-death experience, when in the cold forest, with no way out, the main character’s mind gradually becomes dull and becomes haunted by loneliness. unique, from there you can see the people you want to connect with. And that light source is the connection point between the two worlds – where silence can speak, and he himself gradually “escapes his body”. This seems to recreate the feelings of Jon Fosse, when he said that a near-death experience in an accident at the age of 7 changed him and led him to the path of literature, from which he wrote impossible things. speak out.

Can say White light is an impressive and very unique work of writing art, as well as revealing all the things that everyone will experience but cannot be expressed through separate literary creations. From there, it brings people closer to the state of meditation, where the human mind is “liberated” and each moment suddenly becomes unconditioned and becomes light.