The Shining 7

2023 Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech: The Language of Silence_Jon Fosse 85
Translator's Note: To Hear More Silence 103

* The New Yorker and Financial Times Best Books of 2023
* Includes the Korean version of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech

“For me, writing is listening.

We can only hear the voice of God in silence.
Silence is also a language.” _Yon Fosse

Small wonders and mysteries on the threshold of life and death
The light that we meet in the darkness

“The Shining” is a short masterpiece about death.
In a word, it is great literature.” _〈Dagblade〉

"The Shining" is the story of a man who, bored with life, goes out for a drive one early winter evening and ends up stranded in a snowy field in a dark, deep forest.
He sits in the car, feeling empty and unable to move due to the wheels falling off, and he becomes increasingly afraid.
Finally, the day gets dark and it starts snowing.
As he retraces his steps, he desperately enters the forest to find someone to help him. There, as he wanders around exhausted, cold, and hungry, mysterious beings (a being emitting pure white light, an old couple who appear to be a mother and father, and a man in a black suit) begin to approach him unexpectedly.
How can he escape this forest in this inexplicable encounter?
What on earth will happen to him?
Fosse's characteristically restrained short sentences, clear descriptions, musical monologue style, and sentences of frustration and hope, faith and doubt, self-reproach and conversion that rewind and rewind repeatedly as if idling, provide readers with a powerful sense of immersion into the inner psychology of a human being who has reached a dead end.

The situation in this novel reminds me of the introduction to lines 1-3 of the first canto of the Inferno of Dante's Divine Comedy (“At the halfway point of our life's journey/ Having lost the right path/ I was in a dark forest path”).
The protagonist, 'I', experiences the fundamental emotions that humans universally experience in life, such as the boredom and emptiness of life, fear and isolation in the dark, anxiety and mystery of the unfamiliar, and expectations and frustrations about people, on this dark forest path.
Even though he despairs and blames himself for blindly entering this path without a plan, he cannot let go of the desperate and vain hope that there will be someone who will help him get his car out of the way and find his way.
Even under the moon and countless stars in the night sky, looking at the rocks covered with branches in the snow-covered forest, I picture a place (a home) for someone who is lost to rest.
The unexpected appearance of mysterious beings at the end is another mystery that illuminates the life wandering alone in the forest even more wondrous.
The reader is made to follow along as if experiencing it, repeatedly thinking about whether 'I' can escape this forest, why these beings are with 'I', and what on earth is happening to 'I'.


"The Shining," a work that exquisitely combines all the characteristics of John Fosse's literature.
: Silence and open interpretation, the use of periods and commas, and the lingering feeling of repetitive, easy sentences.

As seen in “2023 Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech: The Language of Silence,” included as a supplement to the Korean edition, Fosse defined his writing as “an act of listening.”
“Silence is also a language.
He stated that “perhaps what modern people need most is silence,” and emphasized that he has expressed this “listening” and “silence” through “between,” which appears most frequently in his numerous plays.
In this novel, too, the silence, stillness, and stillness heard in the middle of a dark, isolated forest without a single person permeate the entire work and sentences.
This naturally focuses the reader on the inner monologue of 'I' reciting alone, and takes them on a dazzling poetic journey of thought, into the pure white existence of nothingness, into the last breath of me, my parents, and the gentleman in the black suit together.
The hypnotic, repetitive short sentences and conversations with strangers read like Zen questions or prayers.

Another important thing in Posey's sentences is the use of periods and commas.
Unlike previous works that rarely used periods, 『The Shining』 uniquely features an unusually high frequency of commas and periods.
In the first scene, where the car is stuck on the road, the number of periods decreases as the car moves forward, blinking as if it were about to be interrupted by a comma, and as the actions and thoughts stop, the number of periods decreases dramatically as the consciousness of the 'self' fades and thoughts gradually accelerate towards the end.
Repeated, ruminating thoughts, rhythmic short sentences, and exquisite use of punctuation marks are also his literary signatures, key devices that highlight silence and the diversity of interpretation.
Lauren Groff, writing in The Guardian, said that the novel can be read in “many ways: as a realistic monologue, a parable, an allegory with Christian elements, a nightmare that you painfully recall the next morning,” and that “the more you read it, the less it sounds like a clear monotone, but rather a chord in which all possible interpretations resonate at once,” and cited the rejection of a single interpretation as the greatest strength of Fosse’s literature.

Although short, The Shining, which combines all these characteristics, is an “invitation to contemplation” from Jon Fosse to us who live difficult and lonely lives today, and it is a literary goodbye in the most typical way.

Author's Note

“What do we hear when we listen? It is silence.
As I have said, we can only hear the voice of God in silence.
(…) For me, writing is an act of listening.
When I write, I never prepare or plan in advance.
I just listen.
Therefore, it goes without saying that writing is reminiscent of music.
(…) I tried to recreate the emotions and experiences I felt while playing music in my writing.
(…) I have always been aware that in some sense writing can be life-saving, and perhaps it has saved my life.
“I believe that nothing could make me happier than if my writing could help save someone’s life.”
_From the “Nobel Prize in Literature Commemorative Speech”