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Vigdis Hjorth

 

I’ve also, as you know, been in prison. I’m not proud of that”

(C) Agnete Brun
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Interview by Karim KazemiPortrait by Agnete Brun 

Vigdis Hjorth’s novel Will and Testament, published in an English translation by Charlotte Barslund by Verso in 2019, describes a protracted family rivalry in which four siblings battle for their parents’ holiday cabins. The novel’s focus gently shifts, though, revealing this conflict’s true terms: credibility, the control of inherited narratives, and the legitimacy of the lines we stake out between ourselves and our “loved ones” in the present, measured against the half-life of the hurt they inflicted on us in the past. If Only, Hjorth’s latest to appear in English and also translated by Barslund, is a claustrophobic, wincingly real rendering of one woman’s against-all-odds romantic obsession and the superhuman strength it affords her to demolish and rebuild her world. Speaking with Karim Kazemi over Zoom, Hjorth cautioned at the outset that, in her non-native tongue, her humour might not shine through. (It certainly did.) The only moment Hjorth faltered was while explaining the play on words in the work’s Norwegian title, Om Bare, – which translates, literally, to “If Only,” but is also a perfect homograph for “On Nudity”.

Karim Kazemi  You used to hold a seminar called “How to Earn Money from Your Misfortunes.” How does that work, exactly? It’s a topic I’m personally interested in.

Vigdis Hjorth One of my more famous books is a children’s book, about my unrequited love for a boy called Jørgen when I was ten years old. I wrote love letters to him that went like this: “I love you. I REALLY love you. Do you want to be with me? I HOPE YOU WILL!” He did want it for a short time, and then he didn’t want it anymore, and so I was going out in the middle of the night to stand outside his window, crying as loud as I could. He didn’t want that. Then I wrote this book, and it’s the book I’ve earned the most money from. It has been republished again and again. Although that’s how I got my start making money from unhappiness, it didn’t stop there. I’ve had so many unhappy love affairs. I was with a car salesman for a couple of years, which was a special, interesting experience, and I wrote a novel about that, from which I made a lot of money. To live is a kind of investigation. If I have the opportunity to go out with a car salesman, I will investigate that.

KK Of your many great refrains, my favourite crops up often in Is Mother Dead? to conclude the narrator’s recollections of painful childhood experiences: “But it has all burned itself out in me now.” How does anybody rid themselves of fury, or rage, or rancour or whatever? How do you burn it all out?

VH It helps to think it through, and to think it as far as you can. You can also talk about it, over and over again, with somebody who has the right questions. If you don’t have anybody like that, you can ask yourself questions as though you were a total foreigner in your own life. I think it’s necessary for everybody to have an honest conversation with themselves. Of course, the difficult part of having these honest conversations with yourself is that you will find out that you are not as good as you pretend to be. After World War Two, when the German occupation of Norway was over, people went out into the streets and shaved the heads of the Norwegian girls who had slept with German soldiers. Scholars have found that it was not the people who had resisted the German occupation who were doing this; it was the people who had been sitting around, very pragmatically, waiting to see how the war would end, because they wanted to be friends with whoever won. The people who would cooperate with the Germans a little bit, like giving them information in exchange for a bottle of cognac, were the people who were so eager with their shears. They should have asked themselves, as we can ask ourselves now: “What am I thinking?” Cutting off the hair of those poor girls. But they were reinventing themselves.

KK They were reinventing themselves?

VH They wanted to show the rest of society that they were good Norwegians. Too late.

KK  The protagonists of your novels are often gripped by a desire to heal the world. Often, this involves dragging some really ugly, hidden truth out into the open. In both Will and Testament and Long Live the Post Horn!, the protagonist finds a foil in another character, a sibling, who is also committed to bettering the world, but by much more measured, conciliatory means. They try to broker compromise, they insist on civility, they don’t take hard stances – or they wait to take hard stances until it’s way too late. They work in human rights, and they only eat organic meat and greens. Society sees their efforts as commendable, whereas the protagonists are labelled as narcissistic, destructive, maniacal and extreme.

VH Norway’s former prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland used to say, “It’s typical for Norwegians to be good.” I mean, what? We give out the Nobel Peace Prize, and we think we are peaceful. But are we on the side of the weak? No, we are on the side of NATO, the side of the United States. We talk as though we are innocent, as though we are the good guys. Not only the good guys, but the goodest guys, in the whole world. Of course, in my personal life, I have experience with these kinds of people – people who talk very correctly, who say they want peace in the world, yet who can’t accept that others have good reasons for being enraged or rude. Astrid, the narrator’s sister in Will and Testament, is like that as she talks about human rights. Maybe she does good things as well, but it’s not because she wants to save the world, it’s because she wants to feel that she herself is good.

KK  For me, if anything is shocking about your novels, it’s not the “taboo” nature of their subject matter, but rather how their narrators bring us into close contact with the logic of extreme states of desperation. They seem to be saying, “Can you believe that this is what it’s come to?” Some of the more shocking passages in Will and Testament are those in which Bergljot draws analogies between the sexual abuse she suffered by her father and international conflicts – genocide, even.

VH Yes, because the process of reconciliation – in fractured families, just as in war – requires just as much from the victims as it does from the aggressors. We often expect victims to be very well-behaved. Suffering, being abused, or experiencing violence, doesn’t make you a nice person. Almost always, as a rule, it makes you an angrier person. It makes you worse. It is hard work to transform your pain into something that is good for others. It’s very hard work.

KK  Late last year, when Israel began its brutal siege on Gaza, we heard a lot of sentiment [from Israeli spokespeople] like: “What we are doing is OK because we said so, and we are uniquely entitled to say so because the trauma we have inherited has made us superior arbiters of what’s right and what’s wrong.” But having suffered, obviously, having been persecuted, actually painfully distorts one’s perception of reality. It’s ridiculous to have to say this, but that’s one of the big reasons why suffering is bad!

VH That’s what I hope that Will and Testament is about. Of course, on the surface it’s about this family situation, but the same mechanisms that you see in the family, you see in society as well. Before World War One, Europeans were convinced that the big European war would never come about. Everybody talked warmly about international cooperation. But a war came, more brutal than any other war, and people were horrified and astounded. In the battle of the Somme, in one day, 1 July 1916, 50,000 Englishmen – over 50,000 Englishmen! – died or were gravely wounded. Thirty thousand in the first half-hour. At the same time, in 1916, Sigmund Freud wrote an essay called “Thoughts About War and Peace”, in which he writes that he shares in Europe’s general horror but not its astonishment, because the Europeans had not suddenly sunk so deeply. They had never been as high as they had imagined. They were so blinded by their own civilisational triumphs that they had forgotten their urges. They don’t understand, he wrote, that they are obeying their passions, not their interests. It’s dangerous to neglect the instincts and urges that do not disappear. The human task, he wrote, is to learn to live with our urges and instincts wisely – in society, and in the family. Will and Testament is also about that. 

KK One thing that the protagonists of your novels often have in common is that they almost believe themselves to be clairvoyant, because the thing they’ve always dreaded would happen to them, or hoped would happen to them, happens. It’s not that they can see the future, but that they possess a kind of self-knowledge that other people don’t. They know what they’ll have to go through in order to become themselves.

VH I read a lot of the existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. He insists that to be an ordinary, mortal human being is a gift and a vote of confidence from the higher powers, so it is both a task and an adventure. The adventure is not to travel around the world, to have a lot of erotic affairs, to be famous, or to be the president of the United States. The adventure is to be exactly the human being you are, exactly where you are. He writes that so many people are living in the basement, the garage, the doghouse of themselves, even though they could live in the penthouse apartment of themselves, where the view is huge. I try to get my characters, my main characters, up from the basement. I try to follow them as they become more responsible, more grateful, and take themselves more seriously – not because they are particularly special people, but because being a human being is serious, and you should be so glad that you are alive on Earth. Once, I was standing alone in a little stone church, and I was lighting a candle for all of the people that I love. I saw the flame begin to waver, and then it was still, and then I saw it shake again. I thought, “Is there wind coming from somewhere?” and then I understood that it was my breath. Just by breathing, I understood, I make things move. 

KK Your new book If Only is about a woman, Ida, who goes after a married man with the full force of her being, but when she first meets him, she doesn’t find him particularly charming or attractive. In fact, she thinks he might be gay.

VH When we fall in love, when we enter into relationships, we don’t know what we are really doing. Ida is married to a businessman whom she has three children with, but she knows it’s not how she really wants to live. That’s a kind of wish she can’t deal with, so she seeks out a love that will overpower her shame and the moral difficulty. What she wants is another life, but that’s easy to say afterwards. When I was writing the book, I was involved with a literature professor in Norway, and I wanted to call it The Love That Overcame Everything because we were quarrelling. We were drinking too much, we went to sex clubs. All that kind of thing, we did. So I asked this former lover of mine, “What kind of name will you have?” and he decided that he should be called Arnold Busck, which is the name of a famous bookstore in Copenhagen. Just a month ago, I got a letter from this former lover of mine. “Vigdis, I have written a novel,” he said. “It’s called Only About Arnold Busck, Told by Himself”. It’s out now in Norway, and he has presented it as a book challenging If Only – his side of the story. Twenty years later! It’s just fun. It’s kind of interesting to read his version of the eight years we were together, and how differently he remembers everything. In his version of the book, this Arnold, he’s always helping me – Ida – when she’s drunk, because she’s drunk all the time. He lets Ida call him “My little boy, my little boy,” but I have never called any of my lovers “my little boy.” It’s difficult to write a novel twenty years too late but, as a phenomenon, it’s nice. 

KK I read that one of your recent projects is a nonfiction book about your relationship with alcohol. Most of the time, when an author writes a book like that, it’s about getting sober, so I was surprised to discover that this book’s central questions are, “Why does drinking make me feel so good?” and “Why can’t I feel that way all the time?” 

VH I speak very openly about my dependence on alcohol. Why should I hide it? Everybody knows anyway. But it is very interesting, because when you depend on something, you are always ambivalent about what you’re dependent on, like when you’re dependent on your parents as a child. I’m always telling myself it’s good for me, and people who work with people with alcoholism, and alcoholics themselves, will tell me that I’m lying to myself. Of course it’s not good for me – or not only good for me – but I want to study that! I want to find out what it’s all about. And I’ve also, as you know, been in prison. I’m not proud of that. 

KK I didn’t know that.

VH You didn’t know that? I’ve written a book about that as well. Thirty days in prison in this little town called Sandefjord, because I was driving a car drunk. It was in the middle of the night, but still, something could’ve happened, and I’ve never done that since. I was forced to analyse my relationship with alcohol, the kind of love affair I have with alcohol. And you know something? This Jørgen I was so in love with when I was ten years old? He is working with addicts now, alcohol and narcotics addicts, in my community, so maybe I will have another chance to be with him. You never know! .