Suzanne Brøgger's Dramatic Morality

Af : Jens Kistrup

One of Suzanne Brøgger´s most striking talents throughout her almost twenty years of writing has been her ability and determination to surprise.

To surprise sometimes even offend or provoke – by her points of view, which have not necessarily remained static; indeed they have often been contradictory. To surprise in some instances by dragging in other genres than those we thought she had mastered: first the epic poem, most recently the drama.

The so-called epic poem Tone (Tone) is presented as a woman´s ballad for all those in need in difficult times." It is a poetic portrait of an earthly ideal woman who lived and died the way Suzanne Brøgger feels is the right way. Or did feel, one might say, since so much in Brøgger´s view of life has changed in recent years.

Today she would not be able to sign her name to what she thought (or proclaimed) about love and freedom in her first two books of essays, Fri os fra Kærligheden (Deliver Us from Love) and Kærlighedens veje og vildveje (Paths and Detours of Love). It was a long process that brought her that far reflected to some extent in her two autobiographical books, Creme Fraiche and Ja (Yes) - fragments of her own life´s novel about reality, the novel of a burned child - and in her article collecions Brøg (Brew), Den pebrede susen (The Peppery Whistling) and Kvælstof (Nitrogen).

This development has reached its culmination and high point to date in her tragedy Efter orgiet (After the Orgy), her debut as a playwright. She wrote the play on a commission for Dramaten in Stockholm, where it premiéred in the fall of 1991, directed by Bibi Andersson. How much it says about Brøgger´s dramatic talent is hard to say - it consists of a series of long monologues, interrupted by shorter chorus passages in which the hymns and children´s songs of the past bear witness to an innocence long abandoned and betrayed. And as a whole it gives a picture at once moving and painful of the state to which total sexual freedom has brought humanity - in this case the family, whose names clearly represent the alliance between sex and death which is the primary theme or Leitmotiv of the tragedy: the parents Rigor and Morits, and the children Dick and Vulva.

The background of After the Orgy is the world-wide AIDS epidemic, which Brøgger has already dealt with in her essay collection Nitrogen, and about which she spoke at more length in an interview with the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet on Oct. 21, 1990:

"I regard AIDS as far more than a medical disease. AIDS is the great question about whether the human race will survive at all. When death strikes at the core of sexuality and reproduction, then the world is changed. Then there is no hope. AIDS is the most consciousness-expanding thing a person can encounter. It brings the fundamental problems into the spotlight.

If I can find any moral in all this, it´s that the task of each person is to reconquer their own sexuality. Because if you conquer that, you conquer your own death. And then you can die in peace."

Whether the four characters in the tragedy After the Orgy get this far is doubtful. Parents and children, they all remain the experimenters and guinea pigs of sexuality, its captives and sacrifices. The message of the play is clear: "By liberating sexuality we have released the death wish into world. Our whole civilisation nothing more than one big death machine." And this is demonstrated with all desirable clarity in the play, which sometimes takes on the character of a catalogue of sexual deviance and perversity.

Both the daughter Vulva, the suicide – who rises from her coffin to tell about her promiscuous life - and the son Dick have practiced homosexuality. For a time he belonged to a group of "sex terrorists": "We were the avant-garde of the Western world when it came to self-destruction."

Although After the Orgy doesn´t deal with AIDS directly, it does show a world in the shadow of the pestilence: a world poisoned in its sources of life, and a world that made the wrong choice. A world in which everything went wrong. And although itseems to be mainly about sex - and as far as sex is concerned, it leaves out nothing - in the last analysis it is fundamentally about death, which has intruded into all the cells of the social organism - via sexuality and the way we have used or misused it. "The death wish, which civilization previously knew in the form of collective wars, has now become part of each person´s own body."

In After the Orgy Suzanne Brøgger has handed down her judgement on all sexual liberation as one big mistake. She started her career by advocating this very liberation, or, as she said in Deliver us from Love: "What we´re going to need in the future is not specialization, but generalization: the ability to love more people, more countries, more races, more sexes - and not just one single representative of the opposite sex." Now she is turning against herself - and against everything the prophets of sexual liberation preached and practiced. The question now is whether, in this moral crusade, she has gone farther out than she really wants to. And how much of a dramatist is she actually?

Has Suzanne Brøgger´s metamorphosis from sexual prophet to sexual moralist, from illuminating liberation to condemning it, really been as simple and trouble-free as one might be tempted to think after her dèbut as a playwright? At any rate, she does not downplay the manifestations of sexual liberation in this family (which after all is no ordinary one), where sexual experiments and extremes seem to be on the daily agenda around the clock: "We wanted a different world, and to create it we worshipped the abyss."

But for Brøgger these four characters are not merely human beings with individual destinies, they are also prototypes. Or as the son Dick says, by way of explanation and somewhat apologetically, himself abandoned and betrayed by love: "We are not the ones who are sick, we´re just symptoms and carriers of the real disease."

After the Orgy is a vision of a world that has changed, arequiem mass for sexual liberation at the time when sexuality was attacked by the epidemic. A judgement handed down about the dream of freedom that ran amok and ended up being consecrated to death - the price of a revolution that never happened.
Perhaps this is not an actual drama, but it is dramatic because of the hot and cold passions that hold it together. The tragedy in Suzanne Brøgger´s morality is also the tragedy of our tune. Her fascination with what she bemoans or condemns illuminates the characters from the inside. And her passion - moral or not - has been passed on to her language, which is that of both a poet and a dramatist.


Denne artikel stammer fra Danish Literary Magazine nr. 3, 1992.

Oversat af Steven T. Murray