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 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. Peripeteia and anagnorisis merge in Liv’s mind in a scene at the hairdresser’s where her hair is dyed with multiple colors, thus being transformed into an artwork.