7/31/2019 Claudel Speaks About an Anamnesic Function of the Statues Which Render Themselves

1/5

Claudel speaks about an anamnesic function of the statues which render themselves (via the

actors bodies) for a moment in front of the public. In the case of Fosse, the actors themselves are

subjected to the reminiscence of an eternity which still habituates those areas of language which are

being gradually relieved of the shadow of meanings. We have seen that the screen writer Claude Regy ,

in his own attempt to destabilize theatric language, has put an accent on the stylistic structure of the

texts aimed to dissolve signs of the quotidian: firstly, the obsessive repetition, and secondly, the

variation and intermittence of gaps in speech. This does not prove to be a difficult in Fosses dramatic

plays, which themselves are built according to the same pattern:

Besides instinct, who or what can come to our aid is Fosse, the screen writer. His writing very

precisely indicates when actors look at each other, when they look at each others faces, when they are

very close to each other, when they come together, when they support their head on their shoulder,

when they are seated, when they stand up, when they take a few steps. If we respect that staging, we

realize that it constitutes some plans, established plans spreading over a few pages, in which

improvisation can take place. This is thus determined by the text, by its variations, but also by these

plans which are like murals or paintings. Fosse is greatly impressed by music, he himself says that he

writes as one would create music, but I believe that he is also greatly impressed by painting, and that his

work is to ascertain degree, plastic. These drawings that he composes with the actors help towards

creating variations, because plans change. One has to find the adequate improvisation for each change

of plan, starting from a text which is, almost all the time, identical with itself. Uncommon are the

authors who precisely describe what the staging replaces + All images overlap. Often, actors stay in

the same place.*+ The images overlap, making characters to substitute one another. This constitutes a

repetitive mechanisms present both in writing and in the creation of the image. On top of everything, I

consider the captions more and more as having the value of fiction. What lies written in the images is by

no means less important than what is written in the text. It would be thus condemnable to create a

staging according to our own fantasy rather than follow what was drawn for us.1

Here we have, therefore, a theatre of Fosse posted and understood according to graphic

principles. However, beyond all the attention which we can give to his creations from the point of view

of visible structures, there is also another level off these, difficult to approach, but indispensable in their

study, because it constitutes the generating point of all motion. I am referring to the morphological and

1Claude Rgy, in an interview given to David Lescot in 1999, Jon Fosse file, U.F.R. dEtudes Thtrales, Sorbonne

Nouvelle, Paris.

7/31/2019 Claudel Speaks About an Anamnesic Function of the Statues Which Render Themselves

2/5

syntactical plans of Fosses poetic system which, although as Vincent Rafis claims, is not a usual one that

contains traditional rhyme and rhythm, is supported by various stylistic mechanisms aim to qualify it as

such2. Firstly, according to Rafis, the absence of punctuation makes it possible to lock discourse in forms

of intention (and therefore in intonations). Secondly, the free verse of the plays associated with the

previous mechanism, allows the text to enter a counterpoint framework, in which two rhythms develop

at the same time: that of the verse as constituting structure and that of the discourse, undefinable

according to a fixed metric. Thirdly, the process of repetition and its rhetoric declinations develop both

over the semantic and the sonorous level, leading to the emergence of a chorus varying in intensity. As

we too have attempted to prove in our 2008 study, The Reformulation of the dramatic situation in

three plays of Jon Fosse, such intensity variations can be contained by a single phrase. We then gave as

example the original title of the play: Somebody will come- Nokon kjem til komme. Our analysis then

proved the existence of a dramatic tension of the syntax and the semantic structure in Nynorsk. Thephrase: Nokon kjem til kommedoes not make reference to an undefined person that will come

(Somebody), but it would rather be translated, as a first instance in English, by means of the

impersonal close enough to come, and in Romanian as: destul de aproape ca s se ntmple/

destul de aproape ca s vin. The meanings which consulting a Norwegian Explicative

dictionary3 offers are also found embedded in the narrative of Fosses Play: home enough to

arrive/ close enough to home to arrive/ to arrive But kjem (in English. Came) is also in the past

tense: came/arrived. The whole syntagm thus allows the translation came enough to come,

destul de venit ca s vin. We thus get from a past participle towards a purpose and a future

imperative- in order ro come- something about to happen, something which is already there in

order to happen/ to arrive, something on the way enough to arrive. In Norwegian we also use

kjem when we say that it is too early for a girl or to refer to unwanted children. Kjem is also used

for spatial orientation: towards a place which implies an action of movement, a movement

towards something. InSomebody is going to come this movement goes in two directions: it is

not only the protagonisits who are heading towards something, bu there is also something

heading in their direction. From this we observe that the meaning given is that of a future which,

absurdly, progresses in a regressive way towards the characters and not exclusively the other

way around. [...] Tracking the meanings of the verb:a komme whose past participle is kjem,

2Rafis, Vincent, A lore du langage, Images re-vues, n7, automne 2009, p. 8.

3Hellevik, Alf, Hjulstad, Hvard i Skadberg, Kre , Ordbok over det norske folkemlet og det nynorske skriftmlet,

Oslo, Samlaget, 1966.

7/31/2019 Claudel Speaks About an Anamnesic Function of the Statues Which Render Themselves

3/5

indicates the possibility of conecting and synonimous utilizations: he can be used in corelation

with traveling oneself ( reise esg opp), heading towards which are some of the recuring

ideas in Fosses work. It also makes reference to : lse ei oppgave godt to lose a kind of

mission, to lose the meaning of everything. Next we discover the idea of losing control over

something/someone, to lose oneself, an idea recurrent in all analyzed plays. Of the last of these

connecting meaning of this verb defaced by Fosse, in two tenses whose bringing together would

be logically impossible, wee can also talkabout the verb to develop. In the syntagm det kjem

folk- people are coming/ someone is coming, the arrival is almost within a perceptible level,

there being a degree of certainty offered by concrete information which somebody already has. A

second appearance of a komme in relation with the adverbtil, also aims for a possible. The

other adverb nokon preceeding the semantically rich kjem, is a quantitative adverb which it

imples the idea of saturation, just as eloquent, we believe, in the framework of Fosses drama.

Rafis goes even further with his textual analysis. In The memory and voice of the dead in the

plays of Jon Fosse, he attempts a complex study of the metrical and phonetical system of some

fragments of Fosses Plays. Their understanding, in his opinion, is impossible without

acquiescing the structure of the nucleus of the verse and of the word. Besides the syntax which

often challenges the rules of logic, Rafis discovers miniatural sonoral harmonies, which sustain,

at any level, the poetic characteristic of this dramatic authors work. Firstly, he anchors his

demonstration to a ritualic dimension of the sonorous material used by the antic theatre. Another

landmark of Rafis intuitions is the character of the language in which Fosse writ es, nynorsk,

which constantly develops a game with abstractions because it most often offers the a-

phenomenological instances of the verbs (in which predominates the infinitive, unsubjected to

declination and which contains within itself an infinite number of potentialities): The nynorsk

language, as Fosse suggested it to me , thus seams to difficultly dissimulate behind its semantic

windings; it is a direct languageand its freshness can justify the economy of words for those who

practice it

4

- a pure language, untouched by publicity or by business enterprise, as believes SarahCameron Sunde, the translator and screenwriter of three of Fosses plays in the United States;

she considers Fosses theatre as one which disconnects us from the technical world we l ive in by

presenting us with real human interaction. On the other hand, Rafis insists on the musicality of

4Rafis, Vincent, p. 8

7/31/2019 Claudel Speaks About an Anamnesic Function of the Statues Which Render Themselves

4/5

the original texts, similar, from a rhytmical point of view, to the ancient Scandinavian languages,

which: experience opositions in terms of vocalicor syllabic length5 and in which the metric

system is not determined by the number of syllables as much as it is by the way in which the

vowels and syllables are distributed in the verse. Jakobson, quoted in this context, consolidates

our opinion on the unnerving importance of the mechanism of repetition in Fosses plays: a

phoneme which only appears once, but in a key word, and in a pertinent position, on a

contrasting background, may make a significant relief fall apart..6 Offering a few examples

from:Somebody is going to come, Rafis tries to prove the validity of this linguistic principle:

Although the interogative pronoun kven breaks the affirmative movement of preceding

phrases, Fosse does not gift it with a convoluted relief.: although, on the contraty, kven and

kjem are quite close as phonetic entities because of the common use of /e/ and of the two

plosives /m/ and /n/, and again, the verbal group kjem til komme is redundant.Through this

the sentence rather contributes to the good ongoing illocutionary of the overall leitmotif, with

which the answer, given by the female figure a few lines later, contrasts in the most obvious

way:

Nokon kjem jo alltid But someone is always coming

Nokon kjem Somebody is coming

Ho kjem She is coming

Ho kjem og She is coming and

set seg ned sits down

sit der stays seated

ser deg inn i auga and looks you in the eye

Eg veit det I know that

5Ibid.

6Ibid

7/31/2019 Claudel Speaks About an Anamnesic Function of the Statues Which Render Themselves

5/5

Nokon kjem til komme Somebody is going to come

Here too there is a deviance in the discourse of a general affirmation which seems, by the use of

the adverb alltid (always), to have been raised to its maximum rank (Nokon kjem jo alltid/ But

somebody always comes), to a sentence suggesting a vision in real time (Nokon kjem/Somebody is

coming), in which a not yet determined subject(Nokon/ Somebody) will collapse over a

determinate (Ho kjem/ She is coming). Although Ho is a truly stigmatic point, on the one hand

because it marks a shift from the general towards the particular, and on the other hand because it

installs the exemplary concision of descriptive phrases which he suppresses (she is coming, she is

coming and, sits down, stays seated, and looks you in the eye) making the anguish generated by

the arrival of another increasingly precise and implacable, before returning to the articulating chorus(Nokon kjem til komme) through which we can consider that the assumption of anonymity [...] and

of innocence of the subject Nokon is offered to us from now as altered (because in this interval, the

rival figure Ho has phagocyted it)7 .

The phenomenon of phagocytation, which Rafis detects in the microstructure of Fosses text,

corresponds to that of expansion and effacement of the other, as we have called it in our chapter

regarding the dynamics of the characters bodies

7Ibid., p.9-10.