Altering Henrik Ibsen’s Aura: Jon Fosse’s Suzannah

Abstract

In anticipation of Ibsenåret 2006, the Ibsen Year, Jon Fosse wrote a drama on the private life of “the father of modern drama” and his wife. Suzannah, written in 2003, is based on the known historical information about the private lives of the Ibsens; yet since much of this knowledge was lost when Suzannah burned their personal correspondence after Ibsen’s death, Fosse fills in the gaps of historical information with possible scenarios. Instead of taking the form of a modernist crime-fiction novel in which the suspect is unknown, Suzannah is a postmodernist “anti-crime” drama since we immediately know who committed the “crime” and we search for something that cannot be found or “solved”: the contents of the letters and the reasons why she burned them. Fosse presents the history of Ibsen, an influential modern playwright, in a postmodernist way; Ibsen never appears on stage and Suzannah is fragmented into three characters, each of which represents a different stage in the Ibsens’ life together. Fosse’s three Suzannahs serve as mouthpieces for Fosse to comment on and critique the Ibsens’ private life. In addition, Fosse alters Ibsen’s retrospective technique by having the Suzannahs narrate their experiences in present time as opposed to recalling their memories. The Suzannahs’ overlapping narration creates an overall experience of clues being reported at the scene of a crime or in cultural archives. Fosse’s fictitious account of the Ibsens’ private life shows a juxtaposition of, and a clash between, historical “fact” and fictional story. This approach allows Fosse to replace a totalizing modernist presentation of the Ibsens’ history with a fragmented postmodernist one, an approach that seeks to alter the traditional