Abstracts

Jørgen Veisland (Bio)

The silence of the black guitar. Pathos in Jon Fosse’s Stengd gitar.

The motif and plot of Jon Fosse’s novel Stengd gitar (1985) recall classical Greek tragedy. The text, which is interposed with frequent periods creating pauses and silences, is a first-person narrative alternating with third-person accounts of the life of a twenty-year old woman named Liv. After she has locked herself out of her apartment and left her one-year old son locked in, she walks through town, desperately searching for a key. Flashbacks describe traumatic scenes from her life: she is scarred after being burnt in a fire at the age of four; she was tied down at her eighteenth birthday and coerced into a sexual intercourse; in the present she is exposed to the eyes of people in the street and recalls a bad drug trip during which the eyes of gray animals penetrated her skin. A classical fusion of perepeteia and anagorisis occurs in a scene at the hairdressers.

There are three allegorical patterns behind the text. Firstly, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The myth appears in the text on two levels: As Orpheus’ song emanating from the black guitar which is played in a trembling tone at first and descends into silence at the end; and in the glance of Orpheus which forces Eurydice to return to darkness, as does Liv. Secondly, the myth of Psyche who was blinded by Eros and could only face God in darkness. Thirdly, the story of Abraham and Issac, Genesis 22, 1-19. The three underlying allegorical patterns are intertwined and enhanced by the subtle discursive implementation of the Kierkegaardian concepts of self-enclosure, Indesluttethed, as analyzed by Vigilius Haufniensis in The Concept of Anxiety (Begrebet Angest, 1844), and silence interspersed with a trembling speech in Fear and Trembling ( Frygt og Bæven, 1843) by Johannes de Silentio. The blue, trembling tones of the guitar turn into bars, sprinklar, blocking the light. Liv descends (or ascends?) into darkness, thus realizing ‘the absolute relation to the absolute’, Johannes de Silentio’s definition of the religious. Liv’s narrative enacts an Aristotelean pathos in the modern(ist) mode.