A Truth, a Variation
on Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth
TW: Incest, rape, anxiety, gaslighting
I believe that truth, like beauty, belongs to the beholder. Humans carry and offer truth as they believe it to be. Like beauty, and much like suffering, truth is final and tailor-made. What did Bohr say? The negation of a profound truth might very well be another profound truth. Truth is yours and yours alone: irresistible, lonely; like beauty, like suffering.
With the years that pass, some truths escape my hold. Most are altered, necessarily, by adulthood and by way of the world; rocks slowly giving in to the river that runs and runs. Other truths, those I hid further than others, were taken from me and supplanted by another. It’s a fistfight I often concede. Here in Hjorth’s universe a woman’s truth is spurned. Here, on the land where her truth begins, we watch as she pleads to keep it.
Will and Testament was first published in Norway in 2016. An instant favourite amongst both readers and critics, the novel also became a scandal and media sensation. The story follows a woman named Bergljot, who is long estranged from her parents and siblings for claiming that she was raped by her father when she was a child. When her father dies and her family begins the process of distributing inheritance and assets, Bergljot is forced into a family dispute over a pair of holiday cabins, and so begins another agonising cycle of accusations and rebuttals; Bergljot, her parents and sisters, all fighting for self-preservation, for the victory of their own truth. Bergljot’s story is drawn from Hjorth’s own family history, though the author has dismissed the idea that the book is autobiographical. This was the root of the furore: what are the ethics of presenting such identifiable truths without its actors’ consent? What are the ethics of claiming it is a novel, leaving the reader to play a guessing game of what’s plain or embellished? “Endurance is the first duty of all living beings,” a line reads, and this is what you must remember: this is one truth, Hjorth’s truth; writing is her survival instinct; this book the fruit of her endurance.
Bergljot’s memory, like many victims of sexual assault, came to her as an adult. She often finds herself ill from doubt, another symptom commonly suffered by survivors. Bergljot doubts the reality of the events itself, brought by the countless times she’s been told she’s lying. She doubts the legitimacy of her needs – to be heard, to be affirmed and supported by allies that proved to be few and far between (speaking to a psychoanalyst: “I understood that he saw it as a sign of health and that was what I wanted to hear, that my pain wasn’t an illness.” Elsewhere she recalls her mother’s anxiety and resentment then her father’s misogyny with cutting bitterness, only to experience bursts of sympathy, drawing tender moments from her childhood, suddenly unable to reconcile the nurturer and the perpetrator (“A deep compassion rose in me at the thought of Dad and Dad’s life, poor, poor Dad, who had done some stupid things as a young man which couldn’t be undone, which he couldn’t fix, and he didn’t know how to bear them, how to live with them.”) Other times, she would question happy bits of her current life, wondering if she is allowed this respite – if she deserves it (“it was possible to exist in two states simultaneously. To be fundamentally unhappy, shaken and rattled to your core, and yet still experience moments of happiness…). Doubt bleeds into Hjorth’s structure, too, trudging back and forth between youth and adulthood; a fragmented mind slowly coming together, a slow, agonising path towards reckoning that demands our patience (a memorable line from early in the book: “I hoped my childhood wasn’t coming back, I hoped I wasn’t going back to my childhood, and that explained why I was shaking…”). Hjorth also reiterates events and conversations, an attempt, perhaps, to eliminate doubt, to grow clearer with each retelling, to convince oneself of one’s own truth. Even then, Hjorth asks three fourths into the book: “was I just being paranoid?”
Every so often we find Bergljot ruminating on current events and works of art she encounters as a theatre critic. One profound reference was Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0, where the artist laid out various objects for the audience to use on her as they wish. The audience was reserved at first, apprehensive about violating a stranger’s agency. The first that came up to her was cautious, but the rest that followed took frightening liberties; tearing her shirt, placing a gun in her hand, pointing to her jugular. When the performance ended and the artist stepped into the crowd they flinched, outraged and mortified by what had taken place. But it was their own person they could not tolerate, Marina proclaimed, saying: “They could not stand me for what they had done to me”. Two pages later, Bergljot contemplates her father and repeats the edict:
[...] It must’ve been a difficult life, a life lived in fear, a life lived in terror. Dad avoided and feared his two older children because they reminded him of his crime, he couldn’t stand them for what he had done to them.
Other references went beyond the personal sphere. Bergljot considers the oppressive state, painting a picture of Tel Aviv, how it looked like “a European city, [...] familiar and civilised and a success,” while behind the Wailing Wall lived Palestinians, expelled, living as refugees of their own land. The juxtaposition Hjorth makes here is clear but questionable, though it becomes less so later on, when she pushes beyond Marina’s proclamation and considers the treachery of the narrative:
“They build walls…to keep the Palestinians out, [...] so they won’t have to look at them and recognise themselves in them, so they won’t be reminded of their own history of victimhood, they can’t stand them because of what they have done and continue to do to them.
What do we repress, what do we deny, that’s the question that must be asked over and over, he said, so that we aren’t blinded by our technological advances, our scientific progress, our magnificent new architecture, our well-ordered, well-regulated society here in Norway where a prime minister once said something so very un-Freudian: It’s typically Norwegian to be good.”
A dysfunctional family and the unknowable degree of human predisposition to cruelty, both extrapolated, their limits indefinite.
Bergljot did, at last, have her family confront her truth, with the family’s accountant present, though they were unable to account for anything Bergljot said, or anything her mother or sister said in rebuttal. Bergljot was at last able to declare her truth, though it only healed the emotional side of her grief – as she predicted earlier on:
“Roland Barthes said to a friend that the feeling will pass, but the grief remains. The friend replied: No, feelings come back, just you wait. Feelings come back.”
Indeed, time remains a straight line while grief runs in a circle. Bergljot continues to contest her truth with the duty and guilt she feels towards her family – much too established as a person’s duty and source of honour to disregard entirely. The very end of the story sees Bergljot with her granddaughter, Emma, who asks of Bergljot’s parents.”Yes, [my father] died not long ago,” Bergljot said, and Emma asks if the dead could grow big again. “No,” said Bergljot. His death is a certainty she needs most. But Emma asks then of her mother, wanting to meet her. “She lives a long way away,” Bergljot said, with no finality, and I am inclined to think that her healing must continue past generations, completed only by the children of her children. Distance often brings great clarity.
In real life, Hjorth’s sister Helga released her own book to refute the claims made against her father. Another truth, and an act of desperation, perhaps, for family is duty and honour. They had tried other avenues, Hjorth said in an interview: prior to the original publication of Will and Testament, the family provided information to one of the biggest newspapers in Norway, and had a lawyer write to Hjorth’s publisher in an attempt to intimidate. They created a scandal in their home country, but Hjorth’s novel was translated into twenty languages and was listed for a slew of awards, both in Norway and abroad. Her truth reigns, echoing beyond the continent, this truth that is her home and childhood. Halfway through the book Bergljot’s steadfast ally Klara quotes Tove Ditlevsen:
“The street of my childhood is the root of my being. It anchored me on a day I was utterly lost. It sprinkled melancholy into my mind on a rainy night. It threw me to the ground to harden my heart, before raising me gently and wiping away my tears.”
Perhaps it’s useful now to remember that truth belongs to the beholder. The truth belongs to no human, only to the wailing wall who hears our whispers and to the skyscrapers towering over it who understands our predispositions. The human’s truth are versions, variations; insistent in parts and quiet in others. I came across a poem by Jane Hirshfield: Everything has two endings, she wrote, and you must remember this, to reserve your sobriety before a truth:
Everything has two endings –
a horse, a piece of string, a phone call.
Before a life, air.
And after.
As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
