We hope time will pass quickly. We have but one single life on this earth, a split second of earthly existence in the endless expanse of time, and yet we don’t feel that it can pass quickly enough. Yes, I get it. It is hard to live your life in a way that matches that knowledge, perhaps it is impossible. I positioned myself so that no one cold see my face, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and told myself that all was well, I could sense the presence of my irritating, mortal fellow human beings, their breathing and the sounds they made when they moved, when they tried to keep warm by rubbing their arms, shifting their weight from one foot to another, how they moved up the steps as more people arrived, the queue compacted and it grew more crowded around the entrance, their impatience and their fears. There are no people anywhere else, only here on our little planet; there may well be plenty of intelligent life out there, but there are no people, not in any of the billions of galaxies, we are a rare and threatened species, and so wicked towards one another.
What a wallop, this novella, so simple and so beautifully articulated.
Ostensibly about the narrator's loss of virginity when she was sixteen, Repetition, by Vigdis Hjorth, recalls that November night forty-eight years ago when nothing much happened, but something happened, so much happened.
Unni thought my mother worried about me like most mothers worry about their daughters, they feared they might be raped or attacked by strangers, but what my mother was afraid of was what I might end up doing of my own free will.
I took out my diary and wrote: It will happen tonight. The event that no one ever forgets. I will write about it here, on these blank pages that my fingers are stroking as they write, pages that smell of expectation, that is the smell of white paper, the event you will never forget because no one ever forgets their first time.
Finally we learn that that's not the story the narrator is telling at all. And we never know what she actually wrote in her diary, what upset her father to render him drunk and sobbing. What they never spoke of again.
[The narrator's experience that night in November reminds me a little of the the summer I was eighteen when the boy from the bakery touched me between my legs and asked me if I felt a tingling and I said yes and he said that's an orgasm, my dear, and remarkably I didn't correct him, is it possible I didn't want to hurt his feelings, this boy who didn't think I might, despite my general inexperience and technical virginity, know what an orgasm was, and that this wasn't it, I should feign gratitude that he could educate me better than I could educate myself, how patronizing, I realized, even then, in the moment, the situation was laughable really, I don't remember how it ended between us, did I even see him again, in the end I was still a virgin after all. So the narrator's experience is quite different from mine actually, but she lets people believe what they want to believe. (In some ways she seems more powerful than I ever was, completely orchestrating the situation and empowered by its outcome, at least in front of her peer group, but also, that's just my reading couched in my own experience, we don't really know how that played out. The aftershock of the event that November night is most strongly felt at home, among her family, and the fallout manifests mostly as confusion for the narrator.]
The narrator is, of course, a writer. And this novel is very much about writing as document, as investigation and analysis, as therapy and redemption, as truth. She describes how her writing evolved, how her approach became clinical to excise all traces of her self, in order to ascertain what her heart and mind truly had to say. But then things changed.
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. I home in on it again and again because the body remembers and suffers and thinks, the body knows, it is not just the mind. The mind will hit a wall and when I write, I chip away at is, that is why I write, I work on the wall to discover what parts have substance and significance, yes, I rewrite and I reproduce like Munch painted several versions The Scream, I repeat and I vary the repetition, shamelessly, with my heart on my sleeve and suffering inevitable heartburn in order to process and understand and put it behind me or to reinforce the bitterness and excitement inside me, in order to change myself through repeating and varying patterns.
I first read Hjorth a few years ago while I was vacationing in Norway (where I saw several versions of The Scream) — A House in Norway, but I thought it might be a fluke, that my reading was coloured by my travel experience, the sting of the air and water, the feel of the land, but then I read If Only, wow, what a book, what a toxic relationship, I think I could never be so blindly hopeful, or drunkenly desperately reckless or accommodating or self-debasing, and also Is Mother Dead, about the narrator's relationships with her sister and her mother. Why didn't I write about those books here? Anyway, Hjorth's writing is insightful and compelling.
In Repetition, the technique of repetition, that haunting echo, is sublime. "Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life."
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, often causing you the same overwhelming and unmanageable feelings as it did the first time; you fear the intensity might kill you and so you fight its return, you resist, but you can't prevent or shield yourself from the pain that follows and so 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.
