Allemano, Marina. 2004. Suzanne Brøgger: en introduktion. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. 236 pages.
Although its subtitle identifies it as “an introduction,” Marina Allemano’s book on
Danish writer Suzanne Brøgger, published last fall (2004),
is much more than that. It is an up-to-date discussion, including interesting biographical
details as well as insightful interpretations and artistic contextualization of Brøgger’s
work over a period of some 30 years, from 1973 until 2004.
Allemano’s book is divided into thirteen chapters each of which deals with at least
one significant work, but with constant cross references to other works and due consideration
of where the work fits into Brøgger’s philosophical universe. The first chapter contains
valuable biographical information about her childhood and youth, but Allemano’s main
aim is to show the progression of Brøgger’s creativity as a writer and artist. In
her introduction, “Slør” [Veil] (9ff), Allemano writes that recovery of the “naked
truth” is not the objective of her book—hence the “veil”—but rather an account of
the “stemmer og skikkelser, der fylder det brøggerske symbolunivers” [voices and figures
that make up Brøgger’s symbolic universe] (9). It is Allemano’s aim to follow “selvets evolution…i en kronologisk gennemgang af hovedteksterne, mens den historiske Brøgger vil kunne
ses glimtvis i kapitlerne og ellers forblive sløret” [the evolution of the self…in a chronological discussion of the main texts, whereas the reader will only sporadically
catch a glimpse of the historical Brøgger, who will otherwise remain veiled throughout
the various chapters] (12).
For example, when discussing Jadekatten, the novel based on Brøgger’s own family history, Allemano provides us with a few
details, such as that the Løvins are actually the Henius family in Denmark. But in
this discussion she does not disclose the names of the corresponding members of Brøgger’s
family. Allemano discreetly informed the reader in the first chapter what the actual
names of Brøgger’s mother, father, sister, stepfather, and stepbrothers are. In the
Jadekatten chapter, however, she only discusses the fictionalized characters of the Løvin family.
This shows sensitivity, on the part of Allemano, to the privacy of a writer who is
notorious for her radically autobiographical writing. In terms of the family saga,
Allemano does point out that the novel ends quite differently from the history of
the historical family. As a fictional novel, the storyline demands a total decline
of the Løvin family. It only offers a faint hope for the future through the unexpected
appearance of an illegitimate branch of the family with a previously unmentioned Løvin
marrying a certain Sheherazade, the epitome of artistic creativity. Brøgger’s own
alter ego, Zeste, ends up as a spirited bag lady, not exactly the successful author
living in south western Sjælland [Sealand] with husband and daughter in real life.
In other words, Allemano is not intrusive; she confines herself to the task of a literary
critic.
Indeed, in some situations, Allemano goes out of her way to keep the real sources
unrevealed. For example, Brøgger was indeed pursued by a woman pretending to be her
and by a school teacher who claimed to be in love with her and who was subsequently
convicted of stalking her in 1985 (27 and 145). I personally was inclined to read
these incidents in Brøgger’s work as fiction, but Allemano, who has visited Brøgger
in her home almost every summer for many years, knows that these incidents actually
happened, and she is very much aware of the pain these two individuals caused Brøgger
in real life. Allemano does not mention the names of these perpetrators. I have elsewhere
published an article on Brøgger’s novel Transparence (Woods 2004) in which both the woman who misrepresents the narrator as her doppelgänger and the stalking school teacher appear. I interpreted these figures as expressions
of Brøgger’s public persona and her readers respectively, representing stages the
protagonist had to experience before her “rebirth.”
As noted above, the great majority of Brøgger’s work is highly autobiographical, but
it is nevertheless fictionalized and manipulated to fit into a structure of a more
philosophical nature. Brøgger is not really interested in writing a factual documentary
about her own life. Rather, she uses her own life as a springboard into her symbolic/literary
universe, and Allemano is very much aware of this. Brøgger herself endorses this approach
in a comment that Allemano finds particularly revealing: even an ashtray can be made
to symbolize something. Brøgger is thus constantly using her surroundings to create
narrative settings and filling everyday objects with symbolic meaning, if it suits
her current project. In
Et frit og muntert lig [A Free and Merry Corpse], Brøgger puts it this way:
Man slider i årevis med at fravriste virkeligheden dens symbolske værdier, denne omskabelsesproces
er kunsten. Men bagefter er de fleste mennesker kun interesserede i, hvad der er “virkeligt”
i historien…Det er først, når virkeligheden omskabes til fiktion, at mennesker vågner op—til virkeligheden.
Heri ligger fiktionens visionære kraft. (75-76)
[For years you struggle to wrestle the symbolic values from the real world; this transformation
is what art is all about. But afterwards, most people are only interested in that
which is “real” in the story…It is only when reality has been transformed into fiction that people wake up—to reality.
This is the visionary power of fiction.]
In other words, this is a double-edged sword. Brøgger is, on the one hand, critical
of the public for wanting the biographical details, but, on the other hand, she feels
she can only reach her public by appealing to people’s curiosity, and this she can
do best by transforming her own life into symbolizing, fictionalized narratives.
Although Allemano subtitles her study an “introduction,” she provides little in the
way of a synopsis to acquaint first readers with the contents
of the work discussed. Allemano presupposes that her readers will have read the books
in question which, given the author’s popularity in Denmark, is a reasonable assumption.
Details of the plot are imbedded in her discussion of literary and philosophical precursors,
the reception of the work by Danish critics, and the at times fascinating details
from Brøgger’s life. The interpretations are always well informed and insightful.
To illustrate her strategies, I have chosen to look at Allemano’s discussion of the
novel from 1979 En gris som har været oppe at slås kan man ikke stege more closely. Allemano identifies some of the people in Knudstrup and Løve who were
actually Brøgger’s neighbours, and served as her models, when she wrote this book.
But still, Allemano does not discuss these people, but only their fictionalized characters
in the book. There is thus a good balance between biographical detail, intellectual
background, literary sources, and interpretation of the work that make her book a
thoroughly enjoyable narrative. Finally, En gris som har været oppe at slås is contextualized within Brøgger’s larger oeuvre.
I find Allemano’s analysis of this novel illuminating, but since she refers to Rilke’s
novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge as a major inspiration for Brøgger’s own novel, Allemano might have explored some
of the major differences between Brøgger’s and Rilke’s use of the French tapestries
in Cluny as symbolizing the five senses, in addition to a sixth tapestry symbolizing
desire (A mon seul Désir). Rilke links these tapestries to the perception of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting,
and touching in a way that is not ordinary, and which foreshadows the progression
towards the demise of the protagonist Malte in Paris. Brøgger, conversely, uses the
tapestries as an affirmation of ordinary everyday life in the small town of Løve—which
may be on its way downhill, towards its death, the the narrator, as Allemano points
out—but the tapestries still represent life in Brøgger’s narrative, I would argue.
Another point I should like to make is that Allemano regards the narrator of En gris som har været oppe at slås kan man ikke stege as assuming that the lady of the sixth tapestry is the same one as the lady in the
five other tapestries. However, the fact that the narrator quotes Rilke’s Malte as
saying “Der er en Mængde Mennesker, men endnu langt flere Ansigter. For hver har flere” [There
are multitudes of people, but there are many more faces, because each person
has several of them] (1988 90; 1997a 100) indicates that each of us may outwardly
look like a single, self-identical [the same]
person, but we each occupy a multiplicity of subject positions. Allemano, however,
concludes that the lady in the A mon seul Désir tapestry “ikke er kommet et skridt videre på den lange vej” [has not moved forward
one single step on her long journey] (67). In each of the five other tapestry descriptions,
except the first tapestry, the
narrator asks whether it is the same lady as in the previous tapestry (1988 31, 44,
62, 84). To me, the point is that Brøgger is questioning the identity of the lady/ladies
with her question: “Is she the same lady?” repeated four times. Even though the conventional
interpretation is that all six
ladies are indeed the same one, just dressed differently in each tapestry, I think
that, within the context of the novel as a whole, Brøgger is calling into question
the concepts of identical and same. In other words, the “same” lady is different in each situation—like Malte’s idea
of the many faces of each human
being (1988 90).
This interpretation is supported by Brøgger’s discussion of pig farming in her novel.
She mentions that, in the countryside, it is important that all the pigs in the pig
sty be “the same”—to the point that the farmers have a spray that they apply to any
pig that appears
to be “different.” This is necessary as the pigs—so the farmers say, according to
the narrator—will
not tolerate a pig that is different. The symbolic implication is clear, to my mind.
In order for the protagonist of the novel to fit into the small community of Løve,
she must be like everyone else—at least to such an extent that they will not reject
her. Brøgger’s narrator has to “cover up” her difference. She becomes a villager who
partakes in the life of her village—and
loves it, indeed craves it. It is worth noting that Brøgger in real life has been
leading a kind of double life, too, to the point of her living mainly in a remodelled
old school house in Knudstrup near Løve, and at the same time maintaining an apartment
in Copenhagen (until quite recently) where she could metamorphose into her highly
intellectual self at least once a week, a self that she did not seem to want to flaunt
in front of her fellow Løve inhabitants. This idea of leading a double life is also
discussed in
Jadekatten through the interest of Zeste (Brøgger’s alter ego) in the historic personality of
the famous French actress and glamorous stage personality Sarah Bernhardt whose book about her own double life entitled
Ma double vie had touched a nerve in the Zeste character. I think this notion of having to live
a double life is a major issue also in
En gris som har været oppe at slås kan man ikke stege. Through various narrators and protagonists, Brøgger expresses a strong desire to
be just another ordinary citizen (a “non-different pig”), and at the same time to
be the exceptional personality that her ancestors on her
mother’s side had been, going back to her great grandfather Louis Henius’s brother
Max Henius (25; Max Løvin in
Jadekatten). I prefer this reading to Allemano’s statement that Brøgger’s text may lead to misunderstandings:
Fordi En gris…er konstrueret som optegnelser eller strøtanker uden uddybende ræsonnementer, er der…undertiden ytringer, som kan misforstås, og som læseren har svært ved at passe ind
i bogens overordnede mening. (67)
[Since A Fighting Pig…has been constructed as notes or aphorisms without clarifying explanations…statements do occur from time to time that may be misunderstood, and that the reader
may have trouble fitting into the overall meaning of the book.]
A statement like this shows how ambiguous Brøgger’s texts can be. At one point Allemano
also makes a remark about Brøgger’s “zitatsløseri ” [sloppy referencing] (100), but
this kind of remark is rare in her 200+ page book of enthusiastic commentary.
Not all of Brøgger’s work has her own life as its focal point. An example is her “epic”
poem Tone about a seriously ill milliner, Tone, in Copenhagen, who died of cancer. One of Allemano’s
most interesting interpretations is the one dealing with this poem. She shows the
significance of this life-affirming, yet death-inspired, poem in Brøgger’s philosophical
universe, and she successfully establishes a connection between Tone—and many of the
other female characters in Brøgger’s oeuvre—and mythological figures, such as Lilith,
Medusa, and various mermaids, furies, vampires, sibyls, and the like (77).
This fondness, on Brøgger’s part, for the Lilith/Medusa type of powerful woman recalls
her admired precursor Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen]. Allemano brings up Brøgger’s fascination
with Dinesen quite often, in different contexts, but she never comments on the indirect
visual reference to Isak Dinesen in the photographs of Brøgger in her book. Note especially
the photo of Brøgger at the St. Hans bonfire in 1993 (150) that brings to mind, intertextually,
Dinesen’s midsummer night speech from 1953, “Oration at a Bonfire,” in which Dinesen
is the “seer” of her day (1950s) with the historical overview. In the photo of Brøgger,
in Allemano’s
book, that was taken at the time that Brøgger was translating / re-creating the Eddaic
poem Völuspá, I see the powerful völva or vølve, the Old Norse soothsaying sibyl figure, turned into Brøgger, the postmodern sage
and seer with the historical overview at the end of the twentieth century.
Allemano does not discuss the photos in her book. She does however, as indicated above,
discuss Brøgger’s fascination with the late Dinesen from a literary point of view.
It is not difficult to understand this fascination, both writers being highly intellectual;
in order to conjure up their symbolic universes both use every cultural resource at
their disposal—Greek myth, the bible, and the cultural history of the past 3000 years,
as Dinesen liked to put it. Both writers project a public persona that underlines
their distinction from the average citizen, and they both champion strong women. Brøgger
even co-authored a play with the well-known Dinesen biographer and Associate Co-Producer
of the film Out of Africa, Judith Thurman (11), about Karen Blixen’s Lost Tale in 1999.
With the abundance of interesting information and references on each page of Allemano’s
book, it is unfortunate that some scholarly tools are incomplete or totally lacking.
Thus I cannot help regretting the absence of an index, for example, a lack that makes
the wealth of information that Allemano has assembled much less accessible. A North
American publisher would surely have required one—and rightly so. Similarly, the bibliography
of Brøgger’s works is incomplete. True, it does include several unpublished works,
among them Dark, an interesting play based on the fifteenth-century French virgin Jeanne d’Arc, whom
Brøgger re-creates as a contemporary Janne Dark (157f). Another is Karen Blixen’s
Lost Tale referred to above. Brøgger’s translation of Völuspá is also there, presumably because it has been named a “gendigtning” [re-creation],
but her translation, “Især katte”, from 1977 of Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats is not listed among her works. It is only referred to in the discussion of Brøgger’s
own cat book Linda Evangelista Olsen published in 2001. Likewise missing is Brøgger’s account of being raped in Uzbekistan that was first
published five years after this terrifying experience in the counter-culture publication
Suck, edited by Germaine Greer. Unfortunately, this particular article is not in the list
of Brøgger’s works in the back of the book, nor in the selected bibliography. Like Især katte, this publication is deemed worthy of mention in the text, but omitted from the bibliography.
In fact, many of Brøgger’s other articles and chronicles in newspapers are also missing,
unless they were published in one of her collections of essays. It would seem to me
that these items would constitute a valuable resource for researchers. This study
would be the more valuable for their inclusion.
Similarly, there is no comprehensive bibliography of works on Brøgger, just a list
of selected articles. Yet these articles are referred to in the notes to the chapters. Important Danish
critics Kistrup, Neiendamm, Hertel, and others, have written interesting critiques
in influential Danish newspapers, such as Information, Weekendavisen, and Berlingske Tidende, and Allemano quotes them, but they are not listed among the articles on Brøgger
at the back of the book. Allemano, or her publisher, seems to have decided that newspaper
articles are too insignificant to be listed as articles. Yet, she does list some critiques
in popular magazines, such as Femina. A comprehensive list would be ideal. Failing that, any work referred to in the text
should find its place in the references, including sources that do not address Brøgger’s
writing directly but which inform Allemano’s approach: Rilke, Kierkegaard, Baudrillard,
Marcuse, and many others.
Despite these omissions, this is an intelligent book. Not too abstract, but accessible
and relevant, and above all sufficiently rich in detail for readers interested in
Brøgger and her intellectual world. There are very few typos, but many anglicisms and academic terms. Notwithstanding the shortcomings just mentioned, this so-called introduction is a
most fascinating, well-written and well researched book, charged with biographical
and scholarly observations, which are drawn into a coherent, successful account of
the evolution of Brøgger’s literary and symbolic universe. Every chapter presents
fresh insights. Therefore, I would hope that this book will be translated into English
(maybe by Allemano herself?). I would suggest, however, that a title be chosen that
does more justice to the book’s impressive scholarly scope. If the scholarly tools
noted above are included, Allemano’s book truly will become a milestone in Brøgger
criticism.