A Love Affair with the World

By : Lone Thygesen Blecher

With the novel Transparence(1993) (Transparence) Suzanne Brøgger concludes the trilogy initiated in the 70s. This article ties up the three novels apart in time but not in spirit.

From the moment she entered the Danish literary scene in 1973 with her first book Fri os fra kærligheden (Deliver us from Love) and until the publication of her latest book Transparence (1993) (Transparence), which was recently nominated for the Nordic Prize, Suzanne Brøgger´s authorship and her person have been surrounded by an almost impenetrable web of controversy and curiosity. Her work has been translated into thirteen languages, reaching well beyond the Scandinavian language barrier, and has evoked feelings ranging from abject adoration to raging disgust. Criticizing the institutions of marriage and family, particularly in her early work, Brøgger has questioned established moral attitudes toward sex and love, religion and death. Reaching for truer, more complex answers, she managed to provoke the wrath and indignation as well as the admiration of every stratum of society. Because she writes from such an intensely personal vantage point, and has experienced such extravagant overexposure in the media, critical comment about her has included descriptions as varied as "shameless narcissism and pride" and "visionary courage."

Vital erotic source of life
All her work is part of a long internal dialogue, each book examining the validity of the preceding one, always returning to the vital erotic source of life.
   Whatever else her work has meant, there is little doubt that Brøgger has managed to touch an entire generation of women in a place very close to the solar plexus, and to reach into the tender, secret, soft tissue connected to women´s sense of themselves as daughters, women, mothers and, finally, human beings. She has described, as no one else has, an odyssey of "liberation" realization and finally acceptance and understanding that we must all identify with as members of the female half of the human race at this particular point in time. Unrestricted by a vision of herself as a "novelist", "poet", "playwright", or whatever, Brøgger has worked in all of these forms, freely redefining them as she went along. Her fiction is as "real" as her journalism, and her journalism probably as "fictional" as her novels. As she says in the novel Ja (1984) (Yes), she wouldn´t dream of writing from her imagination when reality is so much more interesting to her. Yet, no one should take literally anything she´s written as personal experience. Her work is in the time honored tradition of Genet and Miller in which the author is the main character in her own, deeply revealing human comedy/tragedy.
   Brøgger´s production includes several collections of stories and essays, five novels, a play, an epic poem, a couple of children´s books as well as countless pieces of journalism. She writes with ease and grace, mixing elegant almost formal, ladylike phrasing with funny, bawdy, earthy language, taking to heart the first rule of all good writing: keep it interesting. In her own words, her work is an attempt to "give form to the formless and to dissolve the finite."
   Not withstanding the fact that Brøgger is all insightful, even profound writer, what exactly is responsible for the extraordinary passion with which she has always been met? Other writers have expressed similar points of view. Is the press solely responsible for the hype that surrounds her? What is the chord that Brøgger has struck, and that continues to reverberate?

The trilogy
A close look at her trilogy Creme Fraiche (1978) (Creme Fraiche), Ja and Transparence can yield some clues. Brøgger herself has described the three books as connecting across time to form a continuum, and it is now possible to read them one after another the way they were intended.
   One explanation for the way she was perceived in the public eye may have to do with the fact that her work has been read as ideology. Because her novels seemed so close to confessional writing, they were hard to perceive as fiction. She was taken on face value, and public and press alike demanded that she consistently five up to her image as the wild woman who denigrated traditional family values. When, after living alone for many years, she decided to marry and have a child, she was met by the press and public with scoffing and gloating as though she were guilty of defecting from her own cause.

An ecstatic flight
In the first volume of the trilogy she describes an ecstatic flight by the sexually charged narrator across various continents, interwoven with scenes from a childhood of curiously glamorous and dysfunctional family members. Detailed accounts of her sexual initiation into an international tribe of free spirits follows, interspersed with entertaining descriptions of meetings with more or less famous people from around the world and a pattern of love affairs inappropriate, hollow, but very handsome men. Although the book is written with charm, humor and insight, the superficiality of the narrator´s response to her experiences leaves one unsatisfied, even annoyed. One is impressed by the tour de force grandeur of the writing, but dismayed by the character´s seeming detachment.
   Perhaps, however, it was just this distance from experience that proved endlessly seductive to all those readers, especially women, who felt overwhelmed by their own suffocating sense of being tied to the ground. The heroine´s great mobility and terrifically varied experience - not to mention the ecstatic sex and powerful male attention she met wherever she went - were impossible not to envy. Brøgger threw a door wide open, let the breeze in, and showed us how tomorrow might look. She was an emissary from the future, a strange glorious bird of a role model - not one who preached at us to do two jobs instead of one and become men (in the sense of sexless), but one who gloried in her femaleness and creative power. Yes, men were the enemy, perhaps, but we were not pathetic victims; we had untapped powers.
   And, somehow, Brøgger seemed to have a solid grip on these powers already. Unlike an ordinary mortal woman, she seemed to have entered our collective consciousness fully independent, wild and wonderful, claiming - and demonstrating - that that was how she´d started out, and continued down the road, apparently never missing a beat. Even though in retrospect Creme Fraiche is full of clues pointing to a far more complex message, I don´t think this came across at the time of publication. In the second and third volumes of the trilogy it becomes clear that the heroine of the first is not merely a player in a pornographic fantasy tale, but someone headed for Hell and tragedy.

The family-tribe
Still, one might ask the question: how is it possible that, having had the experience of growing up in a family like everyone else, she seems to have emerged somehow untouched by it? The answer may be found in the fact that Brøgger´s "I" figure starts, in a sense, from a position where most people end: not being shackled to "other people", not affected by group pressure, outside the confines of the "tribe". She was in fact not born into a family like everyone else, but to a family in which, for a multitude of reasons, the identification with the "tribe" was practically nonexistent, where every individual´s inner pressures were so great that nothing else could be considered. Unlike most people, she never had to go through the process of freeing herself from the restrictions of the "family-tribe"; as she says in Ja, the second volume of the trilogy: "I never had to be accountable to anyone; there was no one to be accountable to".
   And so the public has experienced her as threatening the existence of the tribe, the very fabric of society, by acting like a free agent, undefinable by group standards. She had a huge appetite for experience, courage, good looks and talent to pull it all off, and unencumbered by "umbilical" cords pulling her in all directions, she just went ahead. And she wrote about it.

The dark side of freedom
There is, however, another aspect to this "freedom", the dark side as it were, that emerges as the main theme of the second and third volumes of her trilogy - namely, that she had been deprived of a sense of belonging, of having a bond by birthright, so to speak, through her family to the rest of society. While the rest of us have the companionship and approval of the other members of the tribe in our struggles to achieve a place in the universe which balances and satisfies our urge for both community and mobility, Brøgger´s narrator had no such mooring. When her free flight began to feel less satisfying than constricting and terrifying, her great need for feeling connected whirled her into a relationship in which she began to realize a profound lack of sense of herself, finally reducing her to a "black hole". In Ja she writes powerfully of this existential loss of ego. Focusing again on the erotic aspects of her connections to the world around her (but this time concentrating on one lengthy relationship), she explores in agonizing detail the depths of pain and humiliation and the limits of ecstasy possible for a person, without an anchor. At the same time, she manages to see herself as just a speck in the turmoil of the cosmic whole. And she discovers something about love.

Universal chord
In Transparence, the concluding volume in the series just recently published, the heroine continues the exploration of her alienation and begins searching for her own voice, partly by taking music lessons, and partly with an exiled Tibetan lama as a guide. She goes on a quest for a spiritual reality which takes her to damnation and back. By daring to look madness itself in the eye - here taking the form of a disturbed woman who literally attempts to steal the narrator´s identity, and a man calling himself Jesus who camps out on her doorstep - she reclaims a sense of herself and a right to her own life. By the end of the book she finally feels able to reach out to another human being and can imagine herself creating life, taking her place in the evolutionary chain, something most of us take for granted - but something which for her is a miracle of sanity. She has set things right, and has broken a destructive pattern. We feel that her ancestors and descendants are bowing in gratitude.
   Suzanne Brøgger´s journey is different from most people´s - not better - but different - and perhaps because of this difference, because of her unique, somehow inverted point of departure, and the intensity and courage which she has brought to this journey, she has shown both herself and us a perspective that dignifies and enriches all our journeys. Her vision throws its light both behind and ahead of us, and, with the ability of a true artist, she transcends "the issues" at the hand and touches a universal chord.

This article was first published in Danish Literature Magazine nr. 6, 1994