by Dag Solstad
It was not that they were bored, it was rather that look of injury through which their boredom became manifest. There was nothing strange about being bored in a Norwegian class where a drama by Henrik Ibsen was being studied. They were, after all, eighteen-year-olds who were supposed to acquire a liberal education. They were youths who could not be viewed as fully developed individuals. To characterise them as immature, therefore, would not offend anyone, neither themselves nor those with authority over them, at any rate when considered from a sober and objective viewpoint. These immature individuals were placed in school in order to obtain knowledge about classical Norwegian literature, which it was his job to offer them. He was, in fact, officially appointed to do just that. The main problem with such a job was that they were incapable of receiving what he was supposed to give them. Immature individuals, at that in and of itself exciting stage between child and adult, are not in a position to understand The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen; to maintain anything else would be an insult to the old master, and for that matter to every grown-up person who has managed to obtain some knowledge of the shared cultural heritage of humanity. That was why, at this educational level, one spoke of pupils, not students. They were not students who were supposed to study, they were pupils who were there to learn. He was the teacher, they were pupils. However, since this was the highest level of general education in Norway, certain demands were made on the quality of what was to be taught there. This meant that what was to be conveyed was not always immediately adapted to the pupils’ uncultivated intellectual and emotional life, but was often of a kind that went over their heads, so that they actually had to stretch, and vigorously too, simply in order to see what was being communicated to them. There was general agreement that pupils who had completed the highest level of general education offered in Norway ought to have a certain knowledge of the Norwegian cultural heritage, not least as it has been preserved in literature, and so, here he was this rainy Monday morning at the Fagerborg school, dutifully going through a drama by Henrik Ibsen. They were to become familiar with it, but since this work obviously went over their heads at the immature stage of their lives where they found themselves, it was unavoidable that tedium settled on the classroom. That was how it had always been, it was built into the instruction, its method and goal – indeed, he had himself been bored in his gymnasium Norwegian classes, and as soon as he had stepped into the classroom as a fledgling teacher, seven years later, he had immediately recognised the same boredom among the pupils, whom he now was to teach a subject which he himself had considered boring when he was in school, a situation that, accordingly, is part and parcel of the conditions which govern the acquisition of general knowledge in youth, and which the one who is to communicate this knowledge must relate to with, as it were, a cheerful heart, just as he had done for at least the first fifteen or twenty years of his tenure in secondary school. He had even been amused at the thought that his teaching bored the pupils, thinking, Well, such is life, that’s the way it is, and must be, to teach in secondary school in a civilised country. The very thought of the contrary situation sufficed to make one quickly understand how impossible it would have been if it had not been the way it, as a matter of fact, was. Just try to imagine what things would be like if the cultural heritage awakened an enormous enthusiasm among the coming generation, so that they devoured it greedily, because it had both the questions and the answers to what they had secretly been preoccupied with – a sweet thought in a way, but not if one considers the reality of the situation, namely, that it is a question of immature people with a rather confused, incomplete, even at times directly commonplace emotional and intellectual life. If the literature handed down to us through our cultural heritage really took hold of our youth, at the mental and psychological level where it finds itself, that would, if true, throw a painful light on the very culture which called this literature ‘our cultural heritage’. Further, it would have to mean that the essays the pupils presented to their teacher, in this instance the one sitting at his desk in a classroom at Fagerborg Secondary School in Oslo this rainy, leaden Monday morning, were veritable literary dissertations, which he could barely refrain from pouncing on until he had got home, not to correct but to read, which was so far from the actual state of affairs as anything could be, indeed it was a phantom, a figment of the imagination, to put it mildly, something he knew very well after dutifully struggling through his pupils’ unfinished intellectual creations for all of twenty-five years, with at least three piles of essays every single month. No, the literature of the cultural heritage did not succeed in awakening the enthusiasm of the young, and their essays were not dissertations on a level with the outstanding achievements of the cultural heritage. And so we were left with the actual situation: the tedium that envelops Norwegian classrooms when the teacher goes through a dramatic work by Henrik Ibsen with his pupils. A tedium which does not even spare the teacher. For twenty-five years he had taught the same works by Ibsen, by and large, and it cannot be denied that he often felt as though he were regurgitating the same stuff, over and over again. He abhorred the first words in Peer Gynt, with the lines, ‘Peer, you’re lying’, ‘No, I’m not’, similarly ‘The Buckride’, something he was careful not to let his pupils in on. Only rarely did he derive as much personal pleasure from teaching as he did today. On the whole, what he presented to his pupils were quite well-known and, to him, elementary exegeses which were not capable of arousing his interest. True, it would happen that he began with a rather well-known thesis, for example, the similarity between Hjalmar Ekdal and Peer Gynt, and between Brand and Gregers Werle, and that he managed to express himself in a way that once more made him take an interest in this double comparison, felt inspired and had a sense that he glimpsed something, said something he had never thought before, but it was very seldom. But today he had. Quite unexpectedly. Oh, this Dr Relling, he had thought, with a deep mental sigh, when he asked his pupils to open their school editions of The Wild Duck to page forty-three and did the same himself. That perpetual mouthpiece. But then, just because Dr Relling in this scene on page forty-three, through the parenthetical ‘with a slight tremor in his voice’, had become part of Ibsen’s drama, it had suddenly dawned on him that Dr Relling was not the play’s rather uninteresting mouthpiece, because then, then Ibsen, the old master, would not have stooped so low as to give his voice a slight tremor and thus worked him into this little scene with Mrs Sørbye, where he appears as a dramatic character, with his bitter fate as a perpetual admirer of this, for the reader’s part, not all-too-attractive widow Mrs Sørbye, and he had again felt inspired. But naturally his eloquence and inspiration had no chance of awakening his pupils, who were, after all in no position to understand him. His eloquence could only inspire himself, while his pupils were bound, by their very nature, to continue partly to slump over, partly to sit at their desks, enduring the usual tedium of their instruction in the literature of their mother tongue. It was he alone, the teacher, who for once escaped the suffocating tedium of Norwegian class, making him feel very satisfied with himself at the end of the period. But it was an entirely trifling feeling which applied only to himself and not them, who were, after all, in no position to be happy about it, although he might hope that some were at least surprised to hear him so elated in the midst of this tedious grind of going through a work by Ibsen. But even if a few individuals among the immature group really were thus surprised, that too was, in the big scheme of things, a trifling (though happy) event. His task was plainly not that of producing inspiring exegeses of the great works of the national literature, his task was quite simply, within the framework of this classroom and through a certain number of repeated periods a week over three years, to form these immature pupils of his and enable them to understand certain requirements which this nation, and this civilisation, was based on, and which both he, the adult teacher, and they, his young and rather confused and unfinished pupils, were part of. It was the fact that he, a grown, very well-educated man, ha
d been placed in this classroom, at public expense, in order to go through, for the twenty-fifth year, a certain number of literary works from our common cultural heritage, whether the pupils were bored or not: it was this that directed his efforts. It was this that made him, the occasional radiance or lack of radiance of his humble person, his ability to inspire or his deficient ability to inspire notwithstanding, into a commanding presence who, in the short or long run, effected that formation of them which society had placed him there to accomplish. For that reason the pupils’ boredom had not touched him, not until now, lately, because it was caused merely by the fact that they were immature and inadequate, and this boredom was experienced both by him and the pupils (until now) as a lack. And this lack would mark them later in life. Either because they eliminated it or, and this applied to the majority, because unconsciously it marked their educated speech, which showed a socially determined lack in their full-grown personality. He had often experienced this when, for example, he met old friends from the gymnasium and told them in the course of conversation that he was studying Norwegian literature at the university – this was when they were in their twenties, the period in which he had most often come across old friends from high school – or he told them that he was a senior master at Fagerborg and made a point of studying Ibsen’s plays with his pupils; it was then that the other would say, Oh, Ibsen, well, I’m afraid he’s over my head, or, Hm, you know, I never became interested in literature, and in this there was a regret, and it was not their own, for they, after all, were so little interested in literature and in Ibsen’s plays that they saw no reason to regret anything; what in heaven’s name was there to regret, as far as they were concerned? No, it was as social beings that they found it necessary to express this regret, namely, a regret that was a necessary expression of the cultural background which every civilised society seeks to impart to its citizens and which, as one can see, it had in this instance succeeded in doing. That simple conversations between old acquaintances who meet by chance after some years turn out like that and not in the exactly opposite way, on this every civilised society builds its foundations, he had often thought, not least in the last few years.
But the young people who were now, on this particular day, a rainy Monday in early October, sitting opposite him, in this damp classroom in Norway’s capital city, and were bored by his exegesis of Henrik Ibsen’s drama The Wild Duck, were bored in an entirely different way than previously. He could not recognise his own boredom from secondary school in them, not at all, and he could not recognise the boredom of drowsy class hours on Henrik Ibsen that had marked previous sets of pupils, down to just a few years ago. The young people who now sat here in all their immaturity, being bored by his elated interest in Dr Relling’s function in The Wild Duck, did not look at their boredom as a natural consequence of being a pupil; on the contrary, they were indignant at actually having to spend this Monday morning being bored in Norwegian class at Fagerborg Secondary School, despite the fact, which they could not disregard, that they were, after all, pupils in this school and accordingly had to turn up. There they sat with their soft, puppyish, youthful faces, their – as they thought – horrible pimples, and with a confused and inadequate inner life filled as likely as not with the most soapy daydreams, actually feeling offended because they were bored, and he was the one they were offended by, because it was he, the teacher, who was boring them. And that was an affront that could not be blown away by a friendly remark like, Oh, don’t act so offended, Cathrine, or, Try to pretend you’re interested anyway, Anders Christian. For they were deeply offended. It was not just skin-deep but had completely saturated them, having become their dominant and fundamental attitude towards him, and thus their fundamental attitude as pupils in a classroom in which one of the foremost dramatic works of our literature was being studied. They quite simply felt victimised, and that was not to be disposed of lightly. Being bored was such an unendurable experience to them that their bodies, the bodies of absolutely everyone, and their faces, those of boys and girls alike, whether bright or less so, those good in school as well as those who just sat (or lay) there to pass the time, expressed a pent-up indignation. Why should they put up with this? How long should they put up with it? Does he have the right to do this to us? That, he could see, was what they were thinking.
There were, no doubt, some among them who were more tolerant than others and who, while sharing their fellow pupils’ sense of being treated unfairly, nevertheless tried to take a broad view and thus had a moderating effect on the others. They expressed the view that it was only a matter of time before such a method of teaching Ibsen would be a thing of the past, that in other words he was hopelessly old-fashioned and that, consequently, they ought to stretch a point and wink at him, and thanks to these pupils the pent-up indignation was mitigated in favour of a more traditional expression of general tedium, in any case seemingly. But although the classroom situation could in this way appear ever so jovial in all its drowsiness, he knew he was in reality unwanted as a teacher among his pupils, which in itself caused him no more pain than an average emotional hurt experienced by anyone not feeling expressly welcome somewhere; but since, in addition, those who did not welcome him as a teacher considered themselves perfectly justified, he felt deeply depressed now and then, because it made him look like someone who just stuck around, though his time was up, a hopeless, old-fashioned teacher, obsolete and spent, whereas at other times this irritation made him feel a certain ardour stir inside him that positively gave him courage. He would stand the way he stood, erect, and let his pupils have a chance to stretch towards Ibsen and the rest of their cultural heritage; while falling short at present, they would do better later in life.
His pupils behaved the way they did as a matter of course. They were not for a moment in doubt that when they did not rise to protest against his instruction, it was due exclusively to their own kind-heartedness and magnanimity. They were convinced without question that he could continue on his course solely at their pleasure. He sat there at their pleasure. Of this, his young, immature pupils were convinced, and if they were capable of such a conviction, it could not possibly be due to their own incomplete life and inadequate level of development, but to something wholly outside themselves. And so they were not themselves to blame, but in any case it was a quite detestable situation to be in for a well-educated grown man, with twenty-five years of experience in teaching his country’s mother tongue. Dr Relling. Dr Relling, the minor figure. Naturally, there were among the best pupils some who not only reacted to the fact that his teaching did not concern them, but also to his permitting himself to waste their precious time, as pupils with an eye on their final examination, by forcing them to occupy themselves with a minor figure in a play by Henrik Ibsen, though as required reading the play was otherwise relevant enough. Just as, among the brightest of them, there were some who felt that the teacher could have made it more interesting by paying attention to the literary history they were also reading. There it said that Henrik Ibsen anticipated the detective novel by his retrospective technique in shaping the dramatic action. Anticipating the detective story, could not that have been something? In any case, it would have been something for them. Others felt it was odd that he did not seize his chance to make Ibsen a little more relevant to the topics of the day, such as suicide, since, after all, Hedvig did commit suicide, as far as they understood. Why could he not have taken that as his starting point, since today it is a real problem that so many young people commit suicide? But not even that. Dr Relling. Dr Relling, the minor figure. Oh, if only the teacher could have said, It’s not true that Ibsen is a dusty old classic. The truth is that he is almost as suspenseful as a detective story. And then he could have explained in what way Ibsen was almost as suspenseful as a detective novel. Then he would have given them something of potential concern to them.