THE ONLY LOVE
I think you can be addicted to anything. I think addiction comes from a void you feel inside. You want to fill it but it is always empty and hungry. I like to fill it with alcohol the best. If not alcohol, then love. Love is harder. When you drink, you can just keep drinking, black out, keep drinking, until you pass out. Love—you don’t get the relief, the escape of blacking out. You just yearn endlessly. That’s the worst part. There is no end. And if you’re lucky enough to have that person requite your feelings, it’s even worse, a mutual endlessness, where is the satisfaction? You kiss, you fuck, it’s not enough, never enough. Maybe fucking is love’s version of blacking out. But then it ends, and you’re still conscious, you’re still there, what now?
In Vigdis Hjorth’s If Only (published in Norwegian in 2001, translated into English in 2024) Ida and Arnold try pissing on each other, hitting each other, inviting other people into the bedroom, desperate to be satiated, desperate to have their all-consuming love for one another communicated through sex, they can’t find a vessel for their love no matter how hard they try. It makes me wonder if the only satisfying love is loving someone from afar, yearning on your own, admiring a distant figure. Maybe that’s why God is necessary.
Ida and Arnold are essentially two hedonistic lovers both seeking abjection. Ida (a playwright) is submissive, Arnold (a professor) dominant. They see how far they can go together, the depths of misery they can reach. It is a game they both want to play. Before they are together, Ida is first suffocated by her desire for him. For years she suffers a yearning spell for him that wrecks her life. Then, when she finally acquires him, Arnold is overtaken by his need to completely possess her, knowing it is impossible to achieve, it is impossible to completely possess another person no matter how hard you try, but that impossibility makes it all the more pleasurable, the new ways in which he can throw tantrums and torture her, it will never satisfy him but it feels good. They long for suicide because death is the only experience they haven’t shared yet, it is the most severe.
They escape to different countries to perform new scenes of passion and humiliation. They can have no friends because no one could understand their game, no one would approve of it, it is not appropriate for adults to drink and fuck and fight all day, if everyone did that it would be pure anarchy, there is a reason for societal norms, for rules, for moderation and taboos. But for them it is a way to escape routine, until it becomes a routine. This is real, true love that normal people don’t know about. It is the only love. Love is a test to see how much pain you can take.
A majority of the criticism of this novel concerns its length (343 pages), its tediousness, its repetition. Only twice does the third-person narrator break the fourth wall. Page 314: “Oh, it is sad to write, it must be sad to read, how long does it go on?” Page 322: “But I’m not going to milk it, wallow in it, it bores me already, it seems so infantile, so banal, that even the pain it caused seems infantile, banal, embarrassing, a source of shame.” As if this is just one of Ida’s plays that she’s written and staged for us. But it also conveys the cognitive dissonance we experience in life, how, for just a brief moment, we can step back and recognize how absurd, how pathetic everything is, but we can’t maintain that distance, that perspective, no, if we could there would be no problems at all. If only we could stay there, far from feeling. If we had the option, would we? Probably not.