Shyness And Dignity

by Dag Solstad

  But no. The teacher dealt with classical Norwegian literature on the express premise that it was classical Norwegian literature they were now being given, within the framework of a Norwegian public school, which was to lead them, eighteen-year-olds with round cheeks, to the highest level of general education the country was able to give its youth. He talked. About Dr Relling, a minor figure in the play The Wild Duck he was now absorbed by, as – if he might say so – he had a right to be as a senior master in Norwegian to a graduating class at Fagerborg Secondary School. This was the third of four plays by Ibsen they had to study. They had read Peer Gynt and Brand already, and after The Wild Duck they would read either Ghosts or Hedda Gabler (he had not yet decided which, taking great pleasure every year in weighing pros and cons of any fourth play of Ibsen’s to be included in the syllabus, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, Rosmersholm, or When We Dead Awaken). As a result his pupils got a lot of Ibsen, more than those who had other teachers, who as a rule stopped at one play (Peer Gynt), or at most two. That did not mean that he passed over Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Kielland, Jonas Lie. Well, he did pass over Lie a bit, being of the opinion that the ravages of time had so severely eroded Jonas Lie that he could no longer defend his place among the Four Greats, and so he would rather not let his pupils read him but gave Lie’s place to Garborg, so that one (i.e., he) could still talk about the Four Greats, who now, accordingly, were Bjørnson, Ibsen, Kielland, Garborg (though when all was said and done he considered neither Bjørnson, Kielland or Garborg really to be among the Four Greats, the four really great being Ibsen, Hamsun, Vesaas, Mykle, but these were thoughts and ideas which carried him far away from the classroom where he had his day’s work and did his duty, although he had actually wished all along that one of his pupils would pose precisely this question. That, after he had mentioned that the Four Greats in Norwegian literature must now probably be said to be Ibsen, Bjørnson, Kielland, Garborg, when for almost one hundred years one had considered it to be Ibsen, Bjørnson, Kielland, Lie, the time having come for letting Garborg occupy Lie’s place in order to prevent the breakdown of the very concept of the Four Greats, some bright eighteen-year-old would hold up his hand and ask, But master, master, does that mean that the Four Greats are your favourites? which he then would have had the opportunity to deny: No, no, my favourites are Ibsen, Hamsun, Vesaas, Mykle. But as [in his daydreams] he would have a chance to say exactly this, he would have hastened to add, But you must not attach great importance to that, because when I express myself that way I speak like a limited person, like a captive of my own time; my statement betrays how easily my heart is moved by literature from my own century rather than how good my judgment is at rendering valid appraisals of our national literature in general, he would say if he had been posed this question by a bright, extremely eager eighteen-year-old, and by this reply he hoped he would have been able to convey an aspect of himself that the pupils might be surprised he had, for he could vividly imagine [he dreamed] that it would astonish his pupils that he too, after all, let himself be moved more easily by contemporary literature than by the literature of earlier periods – that was what he imagined they thought when he was giving a sincere answer to a question asked by a bright and interested hypothetical eighteen-year-old pupil, and then they would perhaps understand that when there was such a dearth of contemporary literature in his classes, it was not due to his personal taste, but to an overarching plan, the nature of which would now, right now, he thought as he was thinking about this hypothetical situation, dawn on them, like a sudden glimpse of something that was of greater importance than both they themselves, the pupils, and the one who was teaching them, the master). So, Bjørnson, Kielland, Garborg, beside Ibsen. One work by each, every year. These were the Four Greats. Next, the great writers before them. Norse literature. Folk ballads. Petter Dass. Holberg. Wessel. Wergeland and Welhaven (and not the way it has usually been: Wergeland [and Welhaven]). Ivar Aasen. Vinje. Amalie Skram. From the twentieth century: Olaf Bull. Kinck. Hamsun. Vesaas. Not Mykle; one must at least die before making one’s entry into the schools. That was all. Nobody forgotten? Yes, Obstfelder. No-one else? He could not entirely bypass Sigrid Undset, but his appetite for going through Kristin Lavransdatter was rather limited; he preferred Cora Sandel. But then full stop. No contemporary literature, except to exemplify classical literature, language development, thematic changes, etc., throughout the ages.

  This was how he taught the literature of his mother tongue. This was how it went from year to year. For the pupils a steady grind, which in some might arouse a bit of curiosity, if only to understand why a grown-up, well-educated man could have, as his official occupation, the job of sitting behind a desk in a classroom bidding young people to read all these books they were neither particularly interested in nor understood to any great extent, not the way this officially appointed educator tried to make them read them anyway, books that were intended for everybody regardless of whether they were grazed by such a curiosity, which could of course be the first condition for making an effort, so that those who, despite everything, had received their society’s highest general education as nineteen-year-olds would not later in life in their everyday conversation – the sum of which, with its different nuances and under- and overtones, forms society’s own self-understanding – serve up private gush and loose talk about topics worthy of a more seemly demeanour, thereby demonstrating that even among those who had received society’s highest education there were downright uncivilised individuals who did not even have sufficient breeding to hide it, let alone be ashamed of it, he had thought; but this was before the present situation had dawned on him. He had taken his teaching seriously, and often the routine aspect of it had been trying for him, but short of making him feel it was no longer meaningful to teach your mother tongue, and especially its belles-lettres, its beautiful literature, as he jokingly called it at times to his colleagues, and not on account of the few classes in which he seemed to succeed in getting on to something new in the work he was presenting to his pupils, for they were the exceptions, no matter how stimulating, joyful, even brilliant, if he might say so, and they were not a condition for finding his existence to be meaningful. All the more enjoyable it was when such classes occurred. Like now. In this double period on a rainy day in early October, for the graduating seniors. He was on the track of something now. Something having to do with what Ibsen was really struggling with when he wrote The Wild Duck, well, what he was actually looking for. Based on the assumption that Dr Relling is Ibsen’s antagonist and that Dr Relling is right, or ‘right’. No, right. He once more asked the pupils to turn their pages to the end of the play. They did, automatically, grudgingly, without a murmur. He asked one of the pupils to read from where it says, ‘Relling (goes up to Gregers and says): ‘No-one shall ever fool me into thinking …’ The pupil, an overgrown boy dressed in the latest fashion and enveloped in the most profound boredom, read tonelessly and so carelessly that he did not even bother to caricature his own voice to create a bit of ‘life’ or ‘mood’, a little ‘fun and laughter’ in the classroom – not for a moment did he succumb to the temptation to respond to the boredom with a touch of tomfoolery, which would have been natural and often happened in earlier days, he recalled; no, he preferred, as a striking expression of the attitude of his class, to suffer in silence, secure in his conviction, his faith in the future, that it was only a question of time when exhausted and extinct phenomena would no longer form part of the required curriculum for a liberal education, not on this side of the globe at any rate. ‘Relling (goes up to Gregers and says): No-one shall ever fool me into thinking that this was an accident. Gregers (who has stood horror-stricken, twitching convulsively): Nobody can say for certain how this terrible thing happened. Relling: The wadding has burned her bodice. She must have pressed the pistol straight at her breast and fired. Gregers: Hedvig has not died in vain. Didn’t you see how grief released the greatness in him? Relling: Most people show a certain greatness when the stand
grieving over a dead body. But how long, do you think, this nobility of his will last? Gregers: Why shouldn’t it last and grow all his life! Relling: Within nine months little Hedvig will be nothing more to him than a fine pretext for speechifying. Gregers: You dare say that about Hjalmar Ekdal! Relling: We’ll talk again when the first grass has withered on her grave. Then you will hear him spouting phrases like ‘the child prematurely torn from the paternal bosom’, then you can watch him wallowing in sentiment, self-admiration and self-pity. Wait and see! Gregers: If you are right and I am wrong, life is not worth living.’ Thanks, he said, and the pupil instantly stopped his toneless reading. That’s it, he burst out. What we’ve been looking for. Don’t you see, Dr Relling is right, you can see that! Of course, Dr Relling is right, we could all of us have said the same thing, it’s to the point. And yet, the drama is that of Gregers Werle. It’s what he says that makes the play tick, he said, for some reason or other, he had perhaps meant to say kick or stick. He grew slightly embarrassed at this ‘tick’, which had fallen out of his mouth. Yes, ‘tick,’ he repeated, for what does Gregers Werle say? Well, he says, If Dr Relling is right, what we are doing here is not worthwhile, and Dr Relling is right, after all, but so what? Well, what he says, damn it, he exclaimed. What Gregers Werle says is the drama, after all! What has Gregers Werle not done? He has killed Hedvig, lured her, seduced her with words, to carry out this sacrifice. Hedvig, this half-blind child, in puberty, with a pistol in her hand inside an absurd dark attic to make a sacrifice, suddenly understands that it is not the wild duck, but herself she must give to her father, about whom she too has her doubts, being uncertain whether he is her father or not, but she is his daughter unto death all the same, about that she has no doubts, so why the wild duck when she has herself, unto death herself, to give away? And then she does it! The shot is fired. Now he certainly must understand that he is her father and that she loves him. What cruelty is hidden in the depths of this play, he exclaimed. An elder brother driving his little sister to her death, and afterwards he needs to see the imagined father experience a sincere sorrow, for otherwise life is not worth living. Gregers Werle is shuddering, both at his own deed and at the possibility that Dr Relling is right. And Dr Relling is right, but it is Gregers Werle’s shudders which are … which are … He searched desperately for words. He was on the track now, but he could not find the right word for it. He had it on the tip of his tongue, but did not find it. He was in despair, but not because, as a teacher, he was unable to give so brilliant an interpretation of The Wild Duck as he thought he could see in his mind’s eye. That, he felt, was fully compensated for by the fact that the pupils had now had the rare opportunity, he would not hesitate to say good fortune, of observing, in close-up, a grown man struggle with the absolutely essential questions of our cultural legacy in an acceptable, though imperfect, way, making him stammer, perspire, follow certain trains of thought as far as he, in his incomplete manner, was capable of doing, and if that was not sufficient to cause the nostrils of at least some of his pupils to start sensing some of the conditions which their lives, too, would build on, as a foundation, and even if they might never read this play by Henrik Ibsen again, they would still understand the reasons why this play was present here, now. No, his despair was due solely to his not finding the words he was searching for, which he thought were so near, but when he wanted to get at them, and pronounce them, they were not there, except for a rather useless, miserable surrogate, which might be somewhat similar, as far as it went, but not at all what he had been looking for and even thought he had found. Terrible, he burst out, we will have to do it once more.

  He asked one of the pupils, an eighteen-year-old girl, to read it again. She bends over the book and begins to read. But at that very moment a resigned sigh is heard from one of the other pupils, who is no longer capable of suppressing it. Loud and clear, on the verge of a savage roar, so insolent that it made him give an inward start, but despite the fact that the class peeked cautiously up at him, on the sly, he chose to ignore it and waved the eighteen-year-old girl on. She read. A teenager with a dreary, rather bashful face and sweet, calf-like voice that seemed to search for the words, which she recited somewhat unsteadily and fumblingly, either because she did not understand what she was reading, or because a layer of dew had coated her eyelashes, brought about by an unendurable and glaringly unjust drowsiness that was blinding her like tears, so that she could not see clearly but had to look for the words, one by one. ‘Relling (goes up to Gregers and says): No-one shall ever fool me into thinking that this was an accident. Gregers (who has stood horror-stricken, twitching convulsively): Nobody can say for certain how this terrible thing happened. Relling: The wadding has burned her bodice. She must have pressed the pistol straight at her breast and fired. Gregers: Hedvig has not died in vain. Did you not see how grief released the greatness in him? Relling: Most people show a certain greatness when they stand grieving over a dead body. But how long, do you think, this nobility of his will last? Gregers: Why shouldn’t it last and grow all his life! Relling: Within nine months little Hedvig will be nothing more to him than a fine pretext for speechifying. Gregers: You dare say that about Hjalmar Ekdal! Relling: We’ll talk again when the first grass has withered on her grave. Then you will hear him spouting phrases like “the child prematurely torn from the paternal bosom”, then you can watch him wallowing in sentiment, self-admiration and self-pity. Wait and see! Gregers: If you are right and I am wrong, life is not worth living. Relling: Oh, life can still be quite alright, if only we could be left alone by these damn bill collectors who force themselves on poor people with this so-called claim of the ideal. Gregers (with a vacant look in his eyes): In that case I’m glad my destiny is what it is. Relling: What, then, is your destiny, if I may ask? Gregers (about to leave): To be the thirteenth at table. Relling: The hell it is.’

  He listened to this rather stammering reading with increasing irritation and became completely paralysed. Not because of the reading, but because of the aggressive, suppressed groan heard in the classroom right before the girl began to read. Which he had not remarked upon. It so paralysed him that he was unable to say ‘Thank you’ when at last she reached Gregers Werle’s epoch-making words, which for him had now become the key to the play and, more, were the entrance to that clearing where the tracks he believed to have discovered were to be found and, pointing further inward, were the reasons why he had asked these lines to be read anew, because he hoped that when he got to that remark again, he would once more see this clearing and be able to follow the tracks inward. But when she got there he could not bring himself to stop her and let her go on, in her stammering fashion, to read the final, concluding exchanges in The Wild Duck as well. He was so vexed that he did not manage to concentrate on the play. That suppressed groan. Aggressive in all its youthful intensity. Which he had pretended not to hear. It was humiliating, although he hoped the pupils attributed his non-censure to his being so patronising that he did not bother about such trifles. But that was not the reason, as he knew in his bones. He had simply not dared to speak up, and the moment that dawned on him he had felt utterly paralysed and incapable of thinking clearly. Damn it all! He would not have dared protest against it under any circumstances, that he had to admit. And it wasn’t the first time – every time the class had got to the point where one or more of them burst out in that way, giving vent to their inward righteous indignation, he gave a start and pretended not to hear it. Because he feared it. That youthful, self-righteous groan. He was afraid of what it could trigger if he rose up against it. He simply had to realise that he was afraid of them and did not dare to criticise a pupil who groaned at his teaching. He simply had to realise that he did not dare look sharply at the pupil who had taken the liberty of heaving such a bitter, heartfelt sigh at their having yet once more, in the same class hour to boot, to reread the conclusion to The Wild Duck, and then coldly and condescendingly reprimand him with, Save your breath, pay attention! And it was not bec
ause of cowardice; rather, he saw his fear as an expression of the shaky structures he himself represented, necessitating a certain caution on his part, not least because his young pupils, for all their arrogance, had no clear idea of the social force they represented. Hence he could certainly allow himself to nettle them with his exemplary teaching, but he could not provoke them so deeply that they would rise in protest and tell him they were not going to put up with it any longer. He feared the moment they would stand up, slam their desks, and demand respect for their worth, because then he would be helpless. For it was beyond doubt, after all, in view of the existing circumstances, that they were the ones who were right and he was wrong. His teaching did not measure up, because the assumptions he started from did not apply to them, and it was only a question of time, he feared, until it would be equally clear to everyone that his mission, already today quite painful, would be made superfluous. But he allowed himself nevertheless to feel an intense unease at the fact that this was the case. He let the irritation rise to his head and paralyse his tongue at the least reminder of the real state of affairs, the source of his fear. Like now. When the eighteen-year-old girl had come to the end of her stammering reading, he merely sensed an intense irritation, knowing that he was no longer capable of pursuing the track he just minutes before thought he had discovered but found no precise language for. And so he looked at his watch and said, I’m afraid we’ll have to conclude our study of The Wild Duck for today, I have to use the rest of the class hour for some practical announcements. Experienced as he was, he managed to spin this out so that the school bell rang at the very moment the last announcement concerning homework, paper topics etc., was made, and the pupils could close their school editions of The Wild Duck with a bang and throw them back into their satchels, while he himself quietly closed his book. The pupils got up from their desks and stood there at ease, tall and ungainly or broad and blustery, twenty-nine young anarchical men and women who were now leaving their isolated classroom, looking forward to the break as they passed him, directly below the podium, some already with their ears plugged into their Walkmans and snapping their fingers. He, too, stood up, feeling tired, spent, and deeply disappointed. The pupils passed by in small groups, taking no notice of him as they chatted cheerfully, representing wholesome, fearless Norwegian youth to an all but overwhelming degree, now liberated from the unnatural and antiquated rituals of a double period. Suddenly he called after them: But … Till next Monday. Then we will finally get to the bottom of things. Then we will understand Gregers Werle’s shudderings. Those convulsive twitchings the text talks about. But they passed him without giving the least indication that they had understood what he was saying, and as for his last two remarks, they probably didn’t even hear them, because by then he could only see the backs of the last pupils disappearing, so that he, he had to admit, stood utterly alone in the classroom, calling after them, though that was not exactly a reason to feel annoyed – it is, after all, just a slightly comical posture I’ve got myself into and which they did not even notice, he added to himself.