Shyness And Dignity

by Dag Solstad

  It was in 1974 that Elias Rukla had felt this twinge of pain that made him wrought up, and subsequently wistful, at the thought that, behind the door where Eva Linde was asleep, there was a listening woman in a state of slumber. By that time, however, Johan Corneliussen must unconsciously have reached the decision that made Elias Rukla’s unthinkable love thinkable. The proof of this is contained in his strange decision not to apply for the large fellowship that would have taken him and his family to the University of Heidelberg for two years. His justification was that the family could not afford it and that he did not want to go there by himself. Due to family reasons, that is, he decided not to apply for the fellowship (which he had been urged to apply for), something Elias, and many others, already then thought was odd, because the small family would have managed without any special problems, given the economic circumstances in which Dr Corneliussen, PhD, would find himself in Heidelberg. But this oddity also pointed to something else, something of much greater scope and seriousness by this, Johan Corneliussen declared that he was no longer going all out for philosophy. Through this decision Johan Corneliussen showed (to those who wanted to see, which nobody did at the time) that he would no longer devote his life to becoming a contributor to nothing less than the dossier of human thought, which, after all, he had asserted that the literature about Immanuel Kant actually was. So something must have happened to Johan Corneliussen that was rooted in his thinking.

  He took his PhD in philosophy in 1972, at the age of thirty. His dissertation on the relationship between Kant and Marx had been speeded up after he became a family man. He was very pleased to have finished, and he had asked Elias to read the dissertation before it was submitted for evaluation. Elias was honoured and read it, despite the fact that he was completely unqualified to do so. But he was stunned by the power of Johan Corneliussen’s thinking. At the same time he had a sneaking little doubt, which he hesitated to express. Had Johan’s transition from Kant to Marx taken place as smoothly as Johan had indicated in conversation with him (and others)? For even if Elias Rukla was completely unqualified to appraise this dissertation, he had wondered whether its very foundation was not rather vague. It belonged, of course, to the field that Johan Corneliussen, following his ambition, aimed to enter, namely, the literature on Kant, but all the same it appeared to be somewhat wavering with regard to whether it was written by a Kantian or a Marxist. Was it the literature about Kant (that is, Marx’s relationship to Kant) or Marxism as an ideology of liberation that was Johan Corneliussen’s principal concern in this dissertation? Elias Rukla could not tell for sure and felt rather perplexed, but, as already indicated, he hesitated to voice his doubt, both because he was not qualified to entertain such a doubt and also because he was afraid of offending his friend, for even if the doubt concerning his dissertation was expressed by an unqualified person, it might seem wounding to Johan Corneliussen, considering the situation in which he then found himself, he had assumed. However, Johan Corneliussen himself had no doubt about his being a Marxist; he was no longer a student leader, to be sure, or a political activist in any other way, yet in his fundamental thinking he was a Marxist, that he maintained. Anyway, his PhD dissertation was very well received in the Institute of Philosophy at Blindern, and Dr Corneliussen’s future appeared very bright. Two years later he was urged to apply for the large fellowship that was to have taken him to Heidelberg, but then he said no. Why?

  Did he have a doubt resembling the one which the unqualified reader, Elias Rukla, had had when he read his dissertation? Or did he decide not to apply for the fellowship because he feared he would not get it anyway? Was there in the appeal, which came from the highest authority at the Institute of Philosophy, an undertone of reserve that Johan Corneliussen had picked up? And had there not also been an undertone in the enthusiasm that his dissertation had aroused? Elias Rukla had been present at the candidate’s mandatory academic lecture and participated in the subsequent celebration, and it had occurred to him, though just barely, just barely, by all means, that the homage offered to Johan Corneliussen was somewhat strained. Everyone seemed concerned to live up to the idea that this was a long-awaited event, but the ones who showed authentic enthusiasm, and therefore represented an absolutely necessary stimulus in the celebration of Johan Corneliussen’s PhD degree, were those of his fellow students who considered his work to be a Marxist pamphlet. Johan Corneliussen had been captured by Marxism. Elias Rukla could not look at it in any other way when he recalled this celebration. Could it be that he was incapable of relating to Marxism with the same intellectual fervour he had felt previously, when he dreamed of entering the ranks of the interpreters of Kant? That he was a Marxist there could be no doubt, but did Marxism manage to give him the same satisfaction, the same enduring joy of butting against the outer limits of thought he had felt when his mind was grappling with far-flung plans of taking his place among the long row of important philosophers who saw themselves exclusively as interpreters of Kant? Elias Rukla wondered about that, and he wondered even more whether Johan Corneliussen did not wonder about it as well – in other words, whether this thought had not occurred to him and, of course, been dismissed, yet remained with him as a muted disappointment in his innermost self. To go back to the thinking of his early days as a student was impossible, as he considered the basis of Marx’s historical materialism to be all too self-evident, and so he had been captured by Marxism even in his thinking, leaving him short of contemplative satisfaction, Elias Rukla thought. And, sure enough, when Johan Corneliussen used Marxism, say, in his nocturnal discussions with Elias Rukla on the ninth floor of the cramped three-room apartment in the high-rise building at Grorud, it had turned out to be primarily Marxism as a method of understanding capitalism. As time went on, Johan Corneliussen spoke little about Marxism as a vehicle of liberation. Thus, he more and more avoided terms like ‘working class’, for example, to the relief of Elias Rukla, incidentally. Though he had benefited, too; indeed, there is no denying that, personally, Elias Rukla greatly benefited from his discussions with Johan Corneliussen, because he could later draw upon them in his classes at Fagerborg Secondary School, both in his Norwegian and his history classes, sitting behind his desk in a classroom which at certain times was defined by pupils with a penchant for the same language as that of Dr Corneliussen, Doctor of Philosophy. No, what fascinated him was the superiority of Marxism for an understanding of the dominant social system in our part of the world. And then he was not just thinking of external factors, like class relations, power structures, etc., but first and foremost of Marxism as a vehicle for understanding the innermost dreams, hopes, disappointments, and secret desires of human beings deeply marked by capitalism. He was very much preoccupied with advertising, both as language and image. He had been so as long as Elias had known him, and with this as a starting point his transition to Marxism blended nicely with a greater depth in his understanding of the world in which it manifested itself. Already in the mid-1960s, Elias had wondered about Johan Corneliussen’s relationship to advertising, such as when they found themselves in the highbrow Oslo cinema Gimle. There the usual thing was that the commercials before the film were greeted with laughter. Elias, too, used to laugh, but sitting there in the dark beside him Jonas Corneliussen was sucking up the advertising images, all alone, surrounded by bursts of laughter. It was as though he felt they were an expression of the art of our time. And of course they were, he afterwards asserted. The advertising images say more about our time than the art you find in the galleries, he maintained. Later, as a rebellious Marxist, he amplified his view. The art of the galleries was adapted to the taste of the wealthy public of the metropolises. Advertising, or commercial art, as he called it, pandered, with every possible means, to the taste of the large masses of people in the same metropolises. The fascination. He said it was a matter of understanding the very fascination which pulls us towards the darkness that capitalism is, intellectually understood, while it is perceived as glamour, glitter and g
ewgaws, which capitalism also is, if only you open your eyes and see. Shining, glittering, sparkling – look at any metropolis. After attending a big international philosophy conference in Mexico City, or Ciudad de Méjico, as he used to say, in early December 1975, he was even more taken up with this. Then he had seen for himself how the poor masses were streaming into the big city, bewitched by the idea of living just there. They left a poor, humdrum everyday life in the countryside for a hopeless slum on the fringes of the metropolis from which they would never escape. They had been better off where they came from, but they set out for the metropolis and dug in there. Why? The fascination. The fascination of being contemporary with the big cars, the TV programmes, the fancy restaurants, the lines of cars, the lights of the cinema ads, the lotteries, the luxurious residences behind high walls with armed guards outside the gate. Hunger might gnaw at their vitals, but being contemporary with the TV shows makes you forget it. The dreams quench the thirst. Dreams give satisfaction! he would exclaim in his cramped three-room apartment at Grorud in the middle of the night, and so loud that Elias said hush, hush, as they were used to do when one of them made the mistake of getting too deeply affected by his own words.

  With this in mind, Elias Rukla was not surprised when, five months after Johan Corneliussen returned from the international philosophy conference in Mexico, he received his telephone call from Fornebu Airport just outside Oslo and was told that he was on his way to New York – for good. Johan told him that he was entering the service of capitalism (a sarcasm, or perhaps it is called irony). He was not greatly surprised. For Elias did not doubt that Johan Corneliussen was still a Marxist, and what was he to do with that fact? He did, after all, possess a unique understanding, namely Marxism, which gave him a superior ability to interpret people’s dreams, once they found themselves where they did find themselves, here, in this society, that is. He could take advantage of this ability of his only by entering the service of capitalism, because capitalism is, after all, the only system that can turn these dreams to account and, not least, make use of dream interpreters. Marxism as such contains a moral element of an educational nature which is at variance with actually making use of this ability. But here was Johan Corneliussen telling him that he had been offered a dream job in New York. In a big consulting firm which had as its speciality to evaluate commercial ideas, concepts and designs, and whose clients were the big film companies, advertising agencies, book publishers and record producers. He would get rich, he said, in a strangely naive manner, and the moment he said it Elias Rukla wished wholeheartedly that Johan Corneliussen would get rich, although he also felt strangely disappointed, even cheated, that Johan would be gone for good and had not uttered a word about it beforehand. Only when he asked about Eva (and Camilla) and understood that they did not belong in Johan’s new future, as a philosophical consultant and dream interpreter in the USA, did he feel shocked, not least because Johan said, I’m leaving them in your care, which he just then interpreted as a sarcasm, hurtful and bewildering.

  It was planned. The pattern was clear. In any case, since 1974 Johan must subconsciously have entertained plans to abandon philosophy, and at the international philosophy conference in Mexico he must have established contacts that made this possible. He had known for five months that he was going to leave them, for good. And not said a word to Elias. Had he told Eva, and when? How long had they both known, and what had she done when she was told? He never found out, for when a little later he rang the doorbell at the apartment on the ninth floor of the high-rise building at Grorud, he found a woman who would never again mention Johan Corneliussen’s name, or speak about him. But why did he leave her? That Elias never got to know, for not even at the time when they lived together did they let him in on the disagreements they must have had. The only thing he could ascertain was that Johan Corneliussen had left Eva, and not only Eva but also a daughter of six whom he obviously cherished above everything on earth, and since he did so, it must have been because his love had died. His love had died, and even though he cherished the child they had together more than anything in the world, it did not suffice to make him decide to take the child with him to the USA, because then he would also have to take along the child’s mother, and his love was dead. How long had his love been dead? Johan Corneliussen’s love, which had died. How long ago? It must have been dead when he returned from Mexico City and had made the decisive contact that made this leap possible. He had been planning it for five months, with his dead love behind the closed bedroom door, in the night, alone, or together with Elias Rukla (without saying anything), or other friends (also without saying anything, only thinking, racking his brains). Why, why? His love had died. But how was it possible that his love of Eva Linde could be dead?

  And why this sarcasm directed at him, as the last word from friend to friend, before he quite simply put down the receiver? It made Elias feel confused, and it would continue to confuse him for years to come. For as it turned out, he was to occupy himself with Johan Corneliussen’s sudden and final departure even though he had no-one he could talk to about it. Why this sarcasm, followed only by his putting down the receiver? Why end a friendship of many years with such an unkind break? Now and then it occurred to him that it was not at all meant as a sarcasm, but that it was the expression of a naive, slightly confused wish, and that Johan, after having expressed his wish, felt embarrassed and put down the receiver in sheer perplexity. Or that he put down the receiver because the plane he was taking, to London (with a change of planes to New York), was just being announced for the last time and he had to run to catch it. Yes, this is how Elias would think now and then in the years to come, but regardless of how much he thought, Johan Corneliussen’s parting words left him at his wits’ end. Time and time again he would also carefully go over, in his mind, the last five months Johan spent in Norway and the conversations he had had with Elias then, either alone on those evenings at Grorud, or in town, or whenever all three of them, Eva, Johan and he, had been together, but without being able to find the least hint of a sign Johan might have given him that he was about to leave them. He did find some possible signs, of course, and he brooded over them, but all such possible signs dissolved into nothing as soon as he began to analyse them specifically as signs from Johan to him, and so he had to conclude: Johan left no signs, no message, except perhaps for this sarcasm at the very end, just before he had to put down the receiver and make a dash for the plane. Elias Rukla was bewildered. He was at the Fagerborg school when Johan Corneliussen rang him up. He took the telephone standing in the staff room. When Johan put down the receiver he understood nothing. He immediately went to the principal and asked to be released from his last three classes for the day, because something had happened to some intimate friends which required his presence, as he put it. Then he took the underground straight to Grorud.

  Eva was home, and alone. She was calm, but a bit tired. She confirmed what had happened. It had all been settled. The separation papers signed by them both and all dispatched. There was no more to be said. As far as she was concerned, it would serve no purpose to talk any more about this. All the same she invited him for coffee, since he had come this long way to Grorud. Elias was astonished, even outraged, and showed it, first and foremost because he had not suspected anything. That … no … he understood nothing … and he was so bewildered that she started laughing. They were sitting side by side on the sofa, that was how she had set the table. Feeling concerned, Elias asked how she would manage, to which she replied that there would be no problems. As soon as she could see it all in perspective, that is. Well, yes, she was a bit tired, obviously. And suddenly she leaned her head against his shoulder. Yes, she put her head on his shoulder, making a strange shudder go through Elias Rukla, utterly different from anything he had previously experienced. No, no, he thought, this cannot be true, and to reassure himself about that, and to escape from this strange feeling that flowed through him, he discreetly patted her hand in all friendliness. They s
at like that for a while, she with her head on his shoulder, he filled with a rapture he could not believe in, until he got up and said he had to go.