“The
relationship between mother and son and mother and daughter is different,
because the mother is a mirror in which the daughter sees her future self and
the daughter is a mirror in which the mother sees her lost self.”
Is Mother
Dead
“What do we
do with our despair if our lives are too small to contain it?”
Long Live the Post Horn!
“The
relationship of a work of art to reality is uninteresting; the work’s
relationship to the truth is crucial; the true value of the work doesn’t lie in
its relationship to a so-called reality, but in its effect on the observer.”
― Vigdis
Hjorth, Is Mother Dead
Vigdis Hjorth occupies a prominent place among contemporary
Scandinavian writers. Her novels examine family conflict, memory, gender and
legal institutions through psychologically acute, often fractured stories. Hjorth
is extremely well known in her native Norway and throughout Scandinavia. She
began writing in the early 1980s. She started writing children's books and
moved on to fiction for adults. She is a prodigious writer with some forty
books under her belt. It is a safe bet that if more of her books were translated
into English, she would be a far bigger writer. All her English books have been
translated by the excellent Charlotte Barslund. Four of her books in English are
variations on a story of family rupture and estrangement, with more or less the
same cast of characters.
To understand Hjorth and the broader landscape of
Scandinavian fiction, the reader must study the political-historical context of
Hjorth’s work and examine the social functions performed by literature in a petty‑bourgeois
milieu. Hjorth’s fiction often explores the fractures of bourgeois family life,
individual trauma and the legal and cultural institutions that sustain property
and social standing. On a deeper level, her work shows how “personal” suffering
is shaped by class relations—inheritance disputes, cultural capital, gendered
social labour, and the moral vocabulary that deflects systemic critique into
private pathology.
While you would be hard pushed to describe Hjorth as a left-wing
writer, her novels do make an ideal entry point for politicising cultural
debate. Her focus on family law, inheritance, trauma and testimony intersects
with current social conflicts over housing, social care, gender violence, and
access to justice. She reveals how “private” disputes often reproduce material
inequalities and legitimise social hierarchies.
Hjorth’s fiction is heavily influenced by other Scandinavian
fiction, which also often depicts welfare infrastructures, gender norms and
small‑property
relations that appear “progressive” yet conceal new forms of
commodification, household debt and petty‑bourgeois aspirations. Hjorth,
like other Scandinavian writers, both male and female, frequently recycles sets
of ideological strategies that hide class antagonisms while channelling popular
grievances into non‑class answers.
Perhaps the master of this genre is Soren Kierkegaard, whom Hjorth
greatly admires. Kierkegaard is a crucial figure in the genealogy of modern
bourgeois ideology: his subjectivism and rejection of reason helped lay
philosophical groundwork for existentialism, postmodernism and the
anti-scientific tendencies of contemporary ideology. Kierkegaard’s turning away
from reason anticipated the modern cult of subjectivity, the delegitimisation
of science, and the promotion of personal mysticism as an alternative to
collective political solutions. Hjorth has to be very careful not to get too
close to him; her writing will take on a very reactionary turn.
In her latest book, Repetition Hjorth goes over familiar
ground. As Elaine Blair points out in her critical review, “Hjorth has been
returning to this material for more than two decades, offering different
perspectives on the constellation of prodigal daughter, ambivalent siblings,
convention-bound mother, and tyrannical father. Her novels have spanned
different periods of time, some focusing on a limited period of months or
years, others pulling back to tell the whole story. It’s as if she’s asking:
Where is the story? What is the best way to tell it? In a sense, Hjorth’s
narrators did not experience the crucial events of their lives in chronological
order. An ordered timeline is true to the abusive father’s perspective (he
alone knew what happened and when) but not to that of the daughter, whose
experience of abuse, with its repressed and resurfaced memories, defies the
schema of linear time. The abuse was happening to her, then it hadn’t happened
to her, then it had happened to her, a long time ago.”[1]
Vigdis Hjorth’s novel Repetition, although only 144 pages, is
a psychologically acute, formally inventive exploration of memory, trauma and
personal alienation. The reader needs to understand it as part of the broader
social and historical fabric, and not to study it not only as individual
psychology but as a social product whose form and themes are shaped by class
relations and institutions.
Hjorth’s Repetition locates trauma and interpersonal
breakdown inside the family, legal procedures and therapeutic institutions. Far
from being purely personal failures, these institutions appear in the novel as
mediators that translate social distress into individual pathology. This
depiction is symptomatic of the wider neoliberal transformation of social life
in Norway and globally. Under neoliberalism, governments and employers have
shifted costs and responsibilities onto households and individuals. In Norway,
this has taken the form of tightened welfare provision, market pressures on
municipal services and an expansion of private providers alongside public
services. Internationally, the same logic prevails: health, social and legal
services are re‑organised to be “efficient” for budgets and profitable
for providers. At the same time, the working class and small proprietors pick
up the bill.
Hjorth’s portrayal of family collapse, court proceedings,
and therapy mirrors these transformations: families are expected to absorb
economic and emotional strains; the law is increasingly an instrument for
adjudicating private disputes in ways that reproduce social inequality; therapy
becomes a form of individualised management that treats symptoms rather than
social causes.
Why do Hjorth’s novels matter, and what can we learn from
them? They are important now because they dramatise the individual consequences
of social atomization under neoliberalism: privatised suffering, judicial and
therapeutic institutions that individualise social injury, and cultural
narratives that valorise personal authenticity over collective remedy.
Notes
Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, by Joachim Garff, translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse. 867 pages, Princeton University Press, www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/04/kier-a17.ht
[1] Where Is the Story? Vigdis Hjorth repeats herself-harpers.org
