Vigdis Hjorth Keeps Going Back

Her novel Repetition is an attempt to live with the weight of the past.

“To inherit or not to inherit, that is the question” for a woman who wants to make art, “as Virginia Woolf also thought,” the Norwegian novelist Vigdis Hjorth writes in her novel A House in Norway. The fictional narrator of Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own” receives an inheritance of £500 a year from an aunt, giving her enough financial independence to write. Woolf, too, inherited £500 a year from her own aunt.

Questions of inheritance animate much of Hjorth’s work. Often, the inheritance is literal: The central character of A House in Norway (2014), the first of Hjorth’s novels to be translated into English, is an artist who makes her living by renting out an apartment in the house she purchased with inherited money, and her best known novel, Will and Testament (2016), is framed by a family dispute about who of four siblings should inherit a set of holiday cabins after their father’s death.

But these inheritances unfold into intangible questions about legacy and duty—A House in Norway probes the uneasy intimacy of landlord and tenant, asking what we owe to others and particularly to immigrants, and examining the struggle to see ourselves clearly through comforting national and personal myths. Will and Testament revolves around the revelation that one of the siblings, the narrator, was sexually abused by her father as a young girl, what this has done to her life and relationships, and how this trauma changes the network of debts and obligations among the members of the family. These are questions, for Hjorth, about the persistence of the past in the present, inheritance as a way of folding time back on itself.

The persistence of the past in the present is a classic Freudian preoccupation. In his essay “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” Freud wrote of the compulsive repetitions of people who have repressed memories, their continual turns back to the past. He wrote that the patient experiences these repetitions “as something real and contemporary,” but therapeutic work involves “tracing it back to the past.” This works, too, as a description of Hjorth’s writing style; her narrators are endlessly reflexive, and she structures her novels so that past and present often blur, creating what could be called a psychoanalytic rather than a linear sense of time.

Her latest book, fittingly, is called Repetition, translated into English by Charlotte Barslund (who has also translated five of Hjorth’s other works since 2017). In it, an older woman, a novelist who speaks on panels about “the relationship between the novel and real life,” attends a musical performance. There, seated next to a teenage girl who seems uncomfortable attending the event with her parents, the narrator is thrown back, like a patient on an analyst’s couch, into her own past. In Barslund’s translation, Hjorth’s prose is elegantly, claustrophobically interior; her books have a breathless quality, poised between a headlong plunge and a pressured pause, like having the wind knocked out of you by a blow to the chest. Barslund also carefully preserves a network of repetitions that spread across and between Hjorth’s books—phrases reappear nearly verbatim a handful of pages after they are first written; scenes repeat from one book to the next, ceramics are always being smashed. In Repetition, the relationship between repetition, memory, and writing becomes Hjorth’s explicit theme.

The book opens with what could be a description of the psychoanalytic method:

Anything you want to forget will come back to you, it will haunt you so vividly that it feels as if you’re going through it all over again ... you are forced to relive it. However, when it has been re-experienced and relived yet again, when the paralysing pain subsides, you will often find that you have gained a fresh insight into the significance of that particular memory; it was the reason it came back, in order to tell you something.

Anything you want to forget will come back to you, it will haunt you so vividly that it feels as if you’re going through it all over again ... you are forced to relive it. However, when it has been re-experienced and relived yet again, when the paralysing pain subsides, you........

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