Never Let It Go
Vigdis Hjorth’s Repetition Compulsions
Madeline Gressel
Photo by Juna Hume Clark
“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 [. . . .]” This is the opening of the Norwegian novelist Vigdis Hjorth’s most recent and twenty-seventh novel, Repetition. “However, when it has been reexperienced 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.” So thinks the novel’s narrator, an unnamed middle-aged writer who has just returned from a long promotional tour, exhausted by constant questions about the relationship between truth and fiction in her books. One night at the symphony orchestra in Oslo, she sits beside a teenage girl in clear conflict with her parents and is drawn back into a memory from her own adolescence.
November 1975: a sixteen-year-old girl in a middle-class family, tormented by the hysterical attentions of her mother, who surveils her, afraid she will succumb to the temptations of youth: to drugs, to alcohol, and above all to sex. The mother’s anxiety, which seems not to extend to her siblings, fills the girl with guilt and fear: “She watched me like a hawk for signs of the beginning of the end, soon I was doing the same and that was how I learned anxious self-reflection.” (Repetition will be published in English in March 2026, translated by Charlotte Barslund for Verso.) After failing to lose her virginity to a boy her own age, she records in her diary a pornographic imaginary account of what she would have liked to happen, which her mother reads, believes to be true, and, in a state of panic, shows to the girl’s father—who drinks himself into a stupor and collapses on the stairs, sobbing, “It isn’t easy being human.” His explosive reaction triggers in the girl the unbidden realization that her parents are hiding a terrible secret, which she both does and does not know: as a young child her father raped her.
Repetition is repetitious in both story and style. The girl comes and goes from her parents’ semi-detached home, from school to parties and back again, seeking small tastes of freedom. Her mother, suspicious, sniffs her clothing for signs of smoke and goes through her pockets. In earlier work, Hjorth is typically a prose minimalist with a penchant for declarative sentences, but here she lets the sentences run on, accumulating clause after clause and folding them back in on themselves (“The thoughts I was having now after having drunk beer in tiny, tiny sips, what I thought I now understood, were some that I must not forget, I ordered myself, I must not drink so much beer even in tiny, tiny sips that I should forget this revealing insight.”), giving the strong impression of a young girl stumbling in an attempt to run away.
And yet it isn’t the girl telling the story, but her sixty-four-year-old future self, who already knows what the girl is trying to understand. She never spells out the crime. Instead, she circles, implies, approaches, and retreats. For Freud the “compulsion to repeat,” as he called it, was an unconscious expression of what had been repressed by memory. Here, Hjorth brings that compulsion to life in prose, making the reader feel, at once, the desire to remember and the desire to forget, which battle it out on the field of memory. The novel’s explosive power comes from the tension between those competing desires, and its suspense comes from the presence of the unnamed trauma, which sits outside the family’s house like a hungry beast in the darkness.
Whether we, the readers, successfully interpret “what happened” depends both on our sympathetic attention and our familiarity with Hjorth’s work. The events implied in Repetition are explicit in Hjorth’s 2016 novel Will and Testament (Repetition is repetitious in that sense, too), which tells the story of Bergljot, a successful playwright and drama critic in her fifties who is drawn back into conflict with her family, from whom she is long estranged, after her father dies. As a young woman, Bergljot was struck down by a debilitating pain while writing; when she looked back to see what she had written—“he touched me like a doctor, he touched me like a father”—she realized that her father had abused her as a child (“a brutal encounter with the truth that upended my life”).
She told her mother and sister, who seemed poised, for a moment, to accept her account of the events. But soon after, they retreated; the knowledge cost them too much—a husband, a father—and the claim was dismissed as “a childish, rebellious urge which I could put aside when something really important happened.” They treat Bergljot as a liar and an hysteric; she becomes what is often called in family therapy the “identified patient,” isolated and blamed by the family for its unspoken conflicts. But thirty years later, in the wake of her father’s death, Bergljot becomes embroiled in a battle over her father’s will and, as long-standing resentments are unearthed, she senses a second opportunity to compel her family to listen to what they have stubbornly refused to hear.
Hjorth has been frank about the fact that the novels are drawn from her own experience, including (or especially) her father’s abuse—a claim her family has furiously refuted. The novel ignited a media debate around virkelighetlitteratur, meaning “reality literature” or autofiction: did an author of fiction have a right to smuggle a serious accusation of incestuous rape into a novel? In 2017, Hjorth’s sister wrote her own novel, Free Will, which denied the truth of Hjorth’s accusation but confirmed the family crisis that followed it. In English, “autofiction” often suggests a knowing wink—a genre marked by ironic distance and performative ambiguity. Yet one gets the sense through her novels and interviews that Hjorth, like the narrator of Repetition, is exhausted by questions of subjectivity and genre; her purpose is not to expose “truth” as a flimsy construct, but rather to insist on a truth in which her faith has cost her much suffering.
If Will and Testament shows us the process by which a repressed truth rises to the surface, Repetition shows us how it gets repressed. At the book’s climax, when her father comes home drunk and her mother slams the door in her face, the girl suddenly perceives the cost of knowledge: “It was a forewarning that I would end up alone. That my mother, if it came to a showdown one day, would take my father’s side.” The next morning, her father asks her, “Did you bleed?” Presumably, he wants confirmation of his crime—or the possibility of its absolution. The girl shakes her head no, and whatever she understands of the implication, she smothers: “I didn’t and I couldn’t acknowledge whatever it was that was threatening to rise up inside me because I knew I wouldn’t be able to cope with it or handle it, I had a strong hunch that it would kill me and so I fought it.” Rather than be destroyed, she tries to destroy the memory and succeeds in burying it, only to have it come back forty-eight years later to demand her attention.
The older woman, the narrator, has escaped the beast, but in doing so, she has forced herself to forget. What is gained by remembering now? What task is still at hand? In other words, what is the meaning of Hjorth’s seeming insistence that repetition itself has special power?
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Hjorth’s novels teem with repetition; it is in their DNA. Phrases and whole sentences repeat, both within the novels and between them. Certain constants recur: the dog, the friend, the married man, the house in the woods, the bad mother, the shadowy father, the drinking, the good husband who gets left, the sister who sides with the mother, the children who get short shrift. The five novels already translated into English are organized alike, with short, unnumbered chapters as long as a few pages or as short as a sentence. At times, a chapter describes a book or a film or an artist, say, Ingmar Bergman, Tove Ditlevsen, or Marina Abramović. Most of the novels begin in more or less the same way: a woman who has been sleepwalking through life is startled awake by a significant or trivial event and thrown onto a new path. It is often, or always, November.
Long before Hjorth wrote Will and Testament, she was circling the subject of her trauma, which can give her earlier work the strange aura of an unreadiness to speak. This sensation is particularly acute in her 2001 novel If Only, which tells the story of Ida, a writer with one foot out of a passionless marriage who meets an intense academic ten years her senior named Arnold Busk and sleeps with him.[1] Taken broadly, If Only is a chronicle of toxic love, its endless repetitions and codependencies and mutual destruction and the rapid-fire way that power changes hands from moment to moment depending on who cares more and who has less to lose. Hjorth’s prose is propulsive and staccato; her sentences mimic the spiraling circumlocutions of an obsessive mind. She writes with a claustrophobic intensity that evokes the ceaseless, powerful present, the way that our emotions take hold of us, the extent to which we are not in charge, the tyranny of constant feeling, “the straps of her bra, the knicker elastic against her thigh, the fabric of the seat pad, the table under her elbow, the glass against her lips.” Ida feels “the moon’s yearning for water, the hot core of the Earth, the will of the stars, she is magnetic and electric and feverish.”
The difference between the first book and the second is the difference between the two analysands: the one who says, “I lied,” and the other who says, “I lied, and here is the truth.”
What begins as a book about unrequited love stealthily becomes a book about the avoidance of the self. Ida is selfdestructive, an alcoholic, and there’s an unsettling indistinctness in her relationship to her children, her ex-husband, her friends. No doubt the masochistic desperation of her attachment to Arnold is connected to what she obliquely calls her “injury.” Like Bergljot, one day she is struck down by an attack of debilitating physical pain while writing. “Slowly until the time was right, until she could bear it, it had smuggled itself into her writing and given itself away.” But she doesn’t tell us what she wrote, and we, the readers, are left wondering: what is the “it” that this woman is so unwilling to reveal?
Compared to the frankness of Will and Testament, If Only reads like a masterpiece of evasion and transference. A scene occurs in both books: Ida/Bergljot goes to an analyst following the episode of debilitating pain. In both scenes, she tells him that, of her parents’ children, she was the favorite. In both scenes, she suddenly senses that she has spoken a lie developed to protect herself from an unacceptable truth. But only Bergljot moves forward to meet the implications of her realization: “Why would I have made myself believe something like that? Was the rest of my story equally untruthful?” Soon after, she names her father’s abuse. The difference between the first book and the second is the difference between the two analysands: the one who says, “I lied,” and the other who says, “I lied, and here is the truth.”
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What changed between the two books? How did Hjorth arrive at the strength to write about what her father did to her? The key would seem to lie in repetition: she had to say the same thing many times, across many different novels, until she was ready to say the thing. Repetition, she suggests, creates the right conditions for revelation. Each time we repeat, we repeat differently: there’s no such thing as a true repetition in the human mind. Say one thing enough times and something else slips in. Like Freud, Hjorth sees repetition as an act that unravels the many self-deceptions of the ego, because it creates the conditions for the unconscious to arise. Repetition forces us to grapple with the spontaneous emergence of the unpleasant or unbearable truths we’ve long avoided.
Freud, too, arrived at repetition circuitously, by way of trauma. For many years, Freud had hewn close to his own dogma that all human action could be traced back to the drive toward pleasure, even when the action resulted in unpleasure. But at the end of the First World War, soldiers came back with strange tics and neuroses that had come on so quickly, and after such harrowing experiences, that they could hardly be explained by pleasure. In 1920, as Freud was grieving the loss of his favorite daughter, he wrote Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he proposes that some human behavior, notably the compulsion to repeat, might actually arise from trauma and loss. Repetition, he wrote, was a way of unconsciously acknowledging a traumatic event by reenacting it—say, choosing a partner who might seduce and reject you like your abusive father, a là Arnold Busk.
Self-knowledge, for Freud, was essentially therapeutic. Neurosis, he wrote, was “the result of a kind of ignorance, a not knowing of mental processes which should be known,” and therapy was the process of transforming that ignorance into understanding, such that the symptoms of neurosis dissolved. Repetition was like a waystation between repression and resolution. The analyst’s job was to help transform this repetition into memory—into something that could be named and eventually laid to rest. As the writer, Hjorth must be both analyst and analysand, patiently cutting through thickets of self-deception and repression to confront the darker truths of her past and of her own nature.But in Hjorth’s novels, nothing gets laid to rest—and it would be a mistake to read them as a form of self-help, in which the hard work of self-examination is undertaken with an eye toward one’s future happiness. For Hjorth, self-knowledge promises no happy ending. “It requires hard work to transform suffering into something which is useful to anyone, especially the victim,” she writes in Will and Testament—a sentiment that repeats, with variations, across many of her novels.
Freud was ambivalent about repetition: on one hand, the compulsion to act out what should instead be remembered kept the patient trapped in the past; on the other, that same repetition was the means by which the past could be mastered.[2] But Hjorth goes a step beyond Freud. For her, self-knowledge is a moral imperative and a precondition for love. Nowhere is the cost of this failure more apparent than in Hjorth’s mothers. In the climax of Will and Testament, Bergljot finally confronts her whole family at the office of the will’s executor. She is utterly dismissed. “Liar,” her mother spits at her, “[. . .] what do you think it was like for your dad to be accused of something that awful, and then came the i-word with that strange pronunciation of hers, inchest.” In a lapsus that Freud would have relished, she can’t even say the word correctly. She asks the executor if it’s too late to cut Bergljot out of the will.
The psychiatrist Judith Herman, an eminent figure in the study of trauma, wrote that it was common for victims of sexual violence to feel more deeply betrayed by the onlookers in the family and community than by the perpetrator; this certainly holds for Hjorth’s narrators. In novel after novel, they tie themselves in knots trying to understand their mothers. The fathers in her novels are always distant figures—frightening, and at times beloved, but ultimately unknowable and unknown—whereas the mothers are by turns the tormentors, the rejectors, the accusers, the best friends, the greatest losses. Again and again, Hjorth’s narrators seek some kind of exculpating evidence that explains their mothers’ failure to protect them. But the closer they come to understanding, the farther they are from forgiveness. What emerges is a palimpsest of weak, contradictory women, childish and fearful, who rely on the strictures and platitudes of convention to prop up a hopelessly atrophied inner self—like the mother in Will and Testament, who has “never paid a bill in all her life.” Again and again, the mother chooses a convenient lie—my husband did not molest my daughter—over an inconvenient truth, which would require a strength of character that she does not possess.
The act of repeating is both an assertion of reality and a restitution to the child of the past. Forgiveness is secondary. What she can’t afford to do is forget.
“Will you never let it go?”the narrator asks herself at the end of Repetition. “No. I repeat and recall and relive and retell and redress because childhood lasts, youth lasts, our childhood and youth constitute a future that starts over constantly, it is an ongoing process.” This is the ultimate purpose of Repetition, for which the narrator has been recalled to the scene of the crime: forty-eight years later, she must make amends to her younger self for her own forgetting. “The young woman I once was [. . .] had been calling out to me for decades: Talk to me! Comfort me! Offer me your hand of salvation, throw me a lifeline, pull me up! I didn’t hear her calls, her desperate pleas then, but I hear them now, they echo in my brain and they won’t ever stop.” The act of repeating is both an assertion of reality—yes, this really happened, and I’ll say it as many times as it takes—and a restitution to the child of the past—I will listen to you, if no one else will. Forgiveness is secondary. What she can’t afford to do is forget.
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What saves Hjorth’s work from bathos and self-pity is her bright, black sense of humor and her capacity for self-awareness, which often come hand-in-hand. In her 2014 novel of A House in Norway (published in English in 2017), she turns the flashlight onto herself, creating a Hjorthian narrator who fails to meet this standard of self-knowledge. Alma is a successful textile artist in possession of a small apartment on her property, which she rents to a Polish immigrant and her young daughter. Alma prides herself on her own decency, as “a responsible member of society, who cared about the future, though it was terribly difficult to know what to do in order to avoid all the doomsday scenarios, apart from sorting your rubbish and driving an electric car.” But her relationships, with her own family and with her tenant, Sławomira, whom she refers to only as “The Pole,” suggest a woman incapable of intimacy or empathy.
A series of petty, commonplace disagreements between landlord and tenant—how to deal with mice, where to put the garbage, who must clear the drive—escalates into a full-blown vituperative meltdown on Alma’s part, which blinds her to the material reality of Sławomira’s situation and betrays a simmering resentment of her tenant’s foreign presence. Alma’s shame and self-hatred are violently flung at Sławomira and, in the end, the consequences to the tenant are very real.
A willingness to confront the self, Hjorth is saying, is the precondition to helping others: the moral equivalent of putting on one’s own oxygen mask first. Hjorth has described herself as a political writer, and Alma can easily be read as an allegory of Norway’s situation: cozy but isolated, self-satisfied and extractive. But the novel does not lead out into the world, toward the experience of Sławomira, whom we glimpse only through a few texts and emails. What we see instead is Alma’s distorted projection, to the point that, when Sławomira says “In the newspaper it says you are a cultural person. I have a different opinion,” we understand we’re really hearing Alma’s deepest fear: that her inability to connect with the people around her betrays an emptiness and a lie in her art.
At the end of A House in Norway, Alma does have a kind of revelation about the ways in which she’s failed to see both her tenant and herself—she glimpses the truth that moral behavior is not a set of correct opinions and a longing for self-satisfaction but a deeply difficult and often painful way of seeing that one must practice on a daily basis; in other words, not something we demand of the world but something that the world demands of us. In the end, it’s too hard for Alma, she gives up, but there lingers the hope that perhaps—through repetition!—she might make it stick.
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“I had just read that repetition is the whole point of life, that repetition is the daily bread of life, its blessing fills you up,” Hjorth’s narrator says in Repetition—a line that paraphrases Søren Kierkegaard, whose own slim volume by the same name explores repetition not as stagnation, but as existential commitment. If Freud unpacks the function of repetition in understanding the past, Kierkegaard illuminates its utility in building the future. His influence is especially palpable in Long Live the Post Horn!, a novel that stands out among Hjorth’s translated works for its clarity and moral force.
Long Live the Post Horn! tells the story of Ellinor, a thirtyfive-year-old marketing consultant who opens her old diary one day and is shocked by the banality of what she finds there: “the names were interchangeable, as were the dates, there was no sense of progression, no coherence, no joy, only frustration; shopping, sunbathing, gossiping, eating—I might as well have written ‘she’ instead of ‘I.’” Ellinor’s life consists of buying brand-name objects, seeing a boyfriend in whom she shows paltry interest, and writing press releases filled with false enthusiasm on behalf of an American fast-casual chain called The Real Thing. The emptiness of her diary reveals to her the emptiness of her life and triggers the painful conviction that nothing matters and that she’s been somehow living a lie.
Soon after, a coworker dies, apparently by suicide, and Ellinor takes over his work on a project for the Norwegian postal service fighting an EU directive that could cripple it. She is startled to realize that for the postal workers, the outcome of the directive reallymatters; as one postal worker declares in the comically incongruous forum of a media training course, “this job embodies the struggle between two different Weltanshauungs, or in other words and to put it bluntly, between the interests of the people and those of capitalism.” She, a lowly foot soldier of capitalism, feels that this postman is “absorbed in something meaningful, he belonged in a way I had never known, he was sustained by a decency I didn’t have.” Slowly, she begins to believe in the righteousness of the postal project, and her life changes: it thaws, sprouts of hope begin to grow. She opens up to her boyfriend and reaches out to her sister. She begins to seek meaning, decency, and belonging.
The title Long Live the Post Horn! is also taken from Kierkegaard’s Repetition, in which the small horn tooted by mail coaches becomes a hopeful metaphor for the possibility that something new can emerge from what seems like mere recurrence. Some of Hjorth’s best lines are also drawn from Kierkegaard. Ellinor wonders, “What kind of life was this? Being dumped here without ever having been asked, without wanting to, but to whom should I report my lack of interest, to whom should I complain?”—an echo of Kierkegaard’s comic lament, “How did I come to be involved in this great enterprise called actuality? [. . . .] Am I to be forced to be part of it? Where is the manager, I would like to make a complaint!” Kierkegaard also supplies the book with a kind of moral architecture, anticipating Hjorth’s leap from the idea of the good as something we are, to the idea of the good as something we struggle for daily, ceaselessly, and often with much failure. As Kierkegaard puts it: “[I]t requires courage to will repetition. He who will only hope is cowardly. He who wants only to recollect is a voluptuary. But he who wills repetition, he is a man, and the more emphatically he has endeavoured to understand what this means, the deeper he is as a human being.” For Kierkegaard, repetition is growth.
Of all Hjorth’s books in translation, Long Live the Post Horn! is the most hopeful, and it’s significant that of all the heroines, only Ellinor sticks it out with the good, available man. She doesn’t find meaning in new things, but in what she already has. Midway through the novel, Ellinor thinks:
[T]here was joy in repetition [. . . .] That my legs would carry me to the office on Monday so that I would see Rolf, that my heart would keep beating though the weekend to Monday just like the starry sky above me would keep on glowing in the darkness, just like the night would pass and the daylight would come, even in December, it never seemed to get bored with repeating it forever.
Toward the book’s end, Ellinor tracks down a lost letter that was sent to a former schoolteacher who, in the summer of 1967, asked her students to write an essay on the topic “Why am I unhappy?” Terrified by what the essays might reveal, the children’s parents seized them and tore them to pieces. Years later, one of these students writes to her teacher that the essay had set her on a path away from shame, toward freedom. It was then, she writes, that she took the first step out of the basement—Kierkegaard’s metaphor for an existence spent, in the description of the writer Christopher Beha, “facing endless decisions while suspecting that none of your choices really matter, being overwhelmed by information without seeing how any of it might be put to use in your life, constantly displaying yourself to a watching world while suspecting that your innermost truth remains unknown.”
Unlike the other novels, in which despair is inevitably entwined with trauma, in Long Live the Post Horn!, it is a universal experience, the very condition of being human. “There is not a single human being who does not despair at least a little, in whose innermost being there does not dwell an uneasiness, an unquiet, a discordance, an anxiety in the face of an unknown something,” Kierkegaard wrote. The basement of life is where we all begin, regardless of what we have suffered, regardless of pain and blame, and it is nothing less than a moral obligation to climb out of it: yes, life is a task that demands something of us.
[1] Arnold Busk was purportedly based on Hjorth’s long-term partner, the academic Arild Linneberg. Like Hjorth’s sister, he too published a novel retelling the events of If Only from Arnold’s perspective, called If Only Arnold Busk.
[2] Of the famous fort-da game, Freud writes, “At the outset [the child] was in a passive situation—he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part. These efforts may be put down to an instinct for mastery that was acting independently of whether the memory was in itself pleasurable or not.”