Shyness And Dignity

by Dag Solstad

  What he had in mind was that other conversation, the running conversation, which had always meant so much to Elias Rukla. It is possible that some men have such a relationship with their wife, or the woman in their life, that the running conversation can be had with her, but for Elias Rukla that had never seemed natural; his connection with her who was his wife was quite different and did not at all correspond to Elias Rukla’s need for a running conversation, nor, on second thoughts, could he see that the married couples he knew behaved in any other way than he and Eva in this matter, though he had to admit that he was possibly making this judgment all too superficially. To Elias Rukla, participating in a conversation had always seemed animating. There were few things that could rouse him more than to have been present at a conversation or discussion, both as it occurred and afterwards when he went home, or had come home and was reflecting on what had been said, sort of developing the argument further and, not least, improving on his own remarks, which were usually few and not always equally good when they were uttered. But this polishing of one’s own remarks afterwards was part of it – yes, indeed, it was part of a rich life, Elias Rukla thought, his reflective voice laced with fervour. But, first and foremost, it was the conversation itself that was animating, whether it was carried on as a conversation between two friends, say, at some late hour of the night, or around a table with several participants, some of whom naturally dominated the discussion, while the others stayed more in the background, such as Elias Rukla, but always took a lively interest in what was being said, all but stirred to their depths. Even if you would sit all evening without saying a word, you had been ardently involved, waiting eagerly for the next argument from one of the dominant participants and repeating the words to yourself once they had been spoken, appraisingly, uh-huh, or hmm, or I’ll be damned, and without getting an inferiority complex because you had a tendency to agree with the last speaker, the last honourable speaker, and then changed your opinion when the next person said something, for that’s the way it is, Elias Rukla thought, fired up as he recalled these conversations he had so often been part of. But now and then it happened that Elias Rukla, too, had arrived at a clear idea, or at any rate something that could become a clear idea, which he was itching to bring up, while at the same time wondering if he dared to, because it could well happen that what now seemed so clear to his mind would appear rather stupid when he gave vent to his opinions in the form of a sentence or a remark, as had often happened and could easily happen again, except that, before Elias Rukla made up his mind, the conversation had taken a new turn and Elias Rukla’s idea was no longer of any interest, because it would have had the effect of a straggler in the ongoing conversation – it’s important to take the floor at the right moment, Elias Rukla had often concluded when he came home, or was on his way home. Oh, how he longed for evenings like that, evenings he had so often experienced before and that stood out so luminously in his memory. It was one of the privileges of freedom to have been permitted to be part of this. But Elias Rukla no longer carried on such conversations, either with one individual, like a staunch friend, or around a table with several others. He no longer had anything to say, nor did it look as though anyone else in his circle of acquaintance, or cultural stratum, had anything to say. They did not seem to be interested in carrying on a conversation any more. In having a real talk, stretching oneself towards an understanding together, whether personal or social, if only for the sake of a brief flash of momentary insight. For his part, Elias Rukla had to admit that he was no longer capable of it, he could simply no longer talk. He did not even know how to start a conversation of the sort he had often taken part in before, but yearned to bring it about once more. The few times he had been on the point of starting such a conversation, either in the staff room at the Fagerborg Secondary School or in society, he had not been able to because he had felt it would somehow have appeared ‘artificial’. It would have seemed ‘affected’, well, ‘unnatural’, even ‘pompous’, and Elias Rukla was fairly certain that many others felt the same way, and so the ‘artificial’ aspect had caused conversation in his social set to cease of itself. In reality, it was puzzling that it should be like that. For example, in the staff room at the Fagerborg school there were gathered every day forty to fifty people who, together, were the mainstay of the general knowledge of our time in history, religion, botany, biology, French, German, English, American language and literature, even Spanish, in addition to the Scandinavian languages and literatures, of course, physiology, physics, mathematics, chemistry, art history, economics, political history, sociology, besides physical improvement through athletics and nutrition, and even though none of those who were here were champions in their fields, capable of coming up with new ideas in their disciplines, nevertheless they had sufficient knowledge to keep abreast of and understand new developments in their area of expertise, in any case if one took the large view and was not too critical of the actual competence of individual teachers, and no matter what, the amount of knowledge possessed by any individual within his or her discipline was great enough for the authorities to have chosen them all to instruct the coming generation in their fields, and what struck Elias Rukla in that connection as extremely remarkable was the shallow impact left by this stock of knowledge, well, by this high cultural level, on the personality of the individual teacher. Contrary to one’s expectations, it looked as if the teachers felt compelled to deny, at all costs, that they found themselves at this high cultural level, which they then could, as a matter of course, use as their point of departure when they voiced an opinion. Instead, they presented themselves as slaves of indebtedness. That was what they talked about, that was the focus of their conversation. Every morning forty to fifty slaves of indebtedness settled down with their lunch packets in the staff room at Fagerborg Secondary School. They chatted about this and that. About the size of their student loans p.t. and p.a., about the size and rate of interest of their housing loans p.t. and p.a., and about the size and terms of repayment of their car loans p.t. and p.a. Not all were p.t. slaves of indebtedness, it was the younger ones who were most deeply in debt; the others, such as individuals of Elias Rukla’s age and upwards, were former slaves of indebtedness. In the staff room, face to face with his colleagues, Elias Rukla was first and foremost a freed slave of indebtedness and, to spite his face, expressed himself safely in accordance with that when he said something; that is to say, when he heard a younger colleague state that the rate of interest on student loans was now down to 8 per cent, he could inform him that it was exactly as high, or low, a rate of interest as when he, Elias Rukla, began to pay off his student loan in the year of grace 1970, and he could also tell this same younger colleague about the deep financial dread he had felt shoot through him the first time the rate of interest on his housing loan rose above 10 per cent, in 1982. That’s the way it was in the staff room, all talking about their own lives as former or present slaves of indebtedness; that was the favourite topic in the lunch break, and if Elias Rukla met any of them when he socialised, with the wives starchily rigged out and the men dressed in comfortable, modern going-out clothes, it was, worse luck, also in their common capacity as slaves of indebtedness, you bet. There, too. Always in their capacity as slaves of indebtedness, conspicuously so, Elias Rukla thought. Not that he could not understand it – the salary of a senior master was not high, but, on the other hand, these miserably paid colleagues of his also represented something else, a high level of culture, which they did their best to hide so as not to contribute to exposing the ‘artificial’ aspect of their lives and preferences, not only out of respect for themselves but also for those others who found themselves at the same level. And so, two persons who both exist at a high cultural level would forthwith introduce themselves to one another as slaves of indebtedness and launch into a conversation with this as a starting point, both in the slaves’ own venue, the staff room, and when they met in society. It was as though they were able to see themselves as socially consci
ous individuals, that is, as persons who could talk together about something they had in common and was essential to all who participated in the conversation, only by starting with themselves as slaves of indebtedness. Given their level of culture, they were haunted by a justified fear that, in a social sense, they would appear somewhat ‘artificial’, even ‘unnatural’, but as slaves of indebtedness they experienced a virtually dramatic social existence that was well worth commenting and dwelling on both for themselves and others. True, being enslaved by debt you were a loser, a not entirely successful person, but it linked you to social life as a completely modern individual. On the premise of being a slave of indebtedness, you could also throw yourself on the newspapers and the TV programmes and enjoy commenting on what was said there, which, after all, was an expression of the style-setting trends, and as a slave of indebtedness it was not that difficult to share the values and preferences, even the attitude towards life, that were expressed there. And Elias Rukla had nothing to say, but he too talked and talked about nothing. Like the rest. Often with a critical and ironic distance to it all, but always about nothing. Elias Rukla remembered that when he had read The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera, he had been disappointed. Not by the book, which was excellent, even a masterpiece, but by the title. The title was wrong. The book was not about the unbearable lightness of being, but about something else. For the unbearable lightness of being is not an existential condition of human life as such but a social condition of that life for certain strata of the Western world in the latter half of the twentieth century. The unbearable lightness of being is something which affects brooding people, hungry for knowledge, at Fagerborg Secondary School in the Norwegian capital in the last two decades of our century. And that deprives one of the ability to say anything. To others. To speak. Conversation had come to a standstill. People belonging to Elias Rukla’s social stratum no longer talked together. Or only briefly and superficially. They practically shrugged at one another. Maybe to one another as well, in a sort of ironic mutual understanding. Because the public space required for a conversation is occupied. There they are otherwise engaged, as the saying goes. Being an outsider and having to proclaim that the public space is occupied, you become ‘artificial’. In ‘unnatural’ amazement you have to state that such a space no longer exists. No longer exists, no longer exists. No longer exists, so that a cultured senior master like Elias Rukla could suddenly hear himself exclaim, Well, if Kaci Kullman Five hasn’t gone and got diabetes! I wonder if it can be combined with being a top politician. Why did he say it? Aloud, in the staff room, so that all his colleagues could hear it. Were they open-mouthed with astonishment? No, they were not. On the contrary, they nodded meaningfully. They, too, were wondering. Whether Kaci Kullman Five would manage. To combine. Being a top politician and having diabetes. It certainly was not easy. Oh, how Elias Rukla would at times pine for someone to talk to. Oh, how he longed for someone to break out of this and say something, if nothing else than a reference to the fact that life has other things to offer. He was really looking for someone to allude to that, if only in a kind of code – yes, if only someone or other, during one of those quick exchanges in the staff room, would suddenly point his index finger at the heavens and in that way signal that there existed a long religious tradition, based on Christianity, in our part of the world, and that consequently one often pointed straight up like that, towards the heavens, where according to tradition God and his angels, well, the blessed ones too, were supposed to be, for then Elias Rukla would have thrown his arms around his neck, regardless of how ironic such an index finger would have appeared, both to the one who performed this act and to the others. For Elias Rukla it would have been a sign, replete with seriousness, even if just then it had been dressed up in the conventional language of irony. Oh, he was truly underfed; he felt that his brain was overheated, as if his brain membrane were afflicted with a latent spiritual inflammation which might break out at any moment and that, therefore, he no longer could be considered quite sane, as though he were expecting an attack, as though he had a violent, liberating round of vomiting directly ahead of him, in the immediate future, a round that never came. He searched for something in his colleagues that could express this something else, something that made an overture possible; he searched high and low in every word they spoke, with the best will in the world to put the most favourable construction on everything and rush to the rescue of the individual in question as soon as the possibly cryptic words had been spoken, in order to show him his gratitude, and then begin to speak himself, most likely a mere hoarse whisper in the first round, he assumed. And it did happen, once. Suddenly it had happened! One of his colleagues came into the staff room just before the bell rang for the first class and said, I’m somewhat of a Hans Castorp today, I should probably have stayed under the eiderdown. A jolt shot through Elias Rukla. Had he heard correctly? Was the name of Hans Castorp mentioned, and in this free and easy way, in passing? Hans Castorp, the main character in Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, referred to by a senior master at Fagerborg Secondary School, and not by a German teacher, but actually by someone who taught mathematics! Yes, it was true, and to Elias Rukla this was a shining moment. Here it must be interjected that it was not the first time, of course, that names of authors or fictional characters were mentioned among his colleagues at Fagerborg Secondary School. This happened quite frequently – Ibsen, Duun, Kielland, and so on – but in that case in a pedagogical context, regarding problems that had to do with teaching. Or someone had been to the National Theatre and seen an Ibsen play, and then, of course, Ibsen’s name came up, and often also the most important characters in the play, besides the names of the actors that appeared in the roles in question. But in that case it was more in the nature of a ritual: a colleague had had a delightful evening at the theatre and mentioned it in the staff room, and maybe another colleague had been at the same theatre a few days earlier and seen the same piece, and the latter might then also mention it, if he had not done so previously, and you might even hear a certain disagreement being expressed concerning whether So-and-so’s interpretation of the role of Hedda Gabler, or Miss Wangel, was convincing or not. They were brief exchanges, expresssed in the same way as comments on whether Jahn Otto Johansen’s beard was a disturbing element in TV’s Foreign Magazine or not, or whether Dan Børge Akerø’s style as a presenter was his own or had resulted from painstaking study of foreign models, especially from the USA, or England maybe. But the remark by the mathematics teacher, I’m somewhat of a Hans Castorp today, was a different matter. It was a naive and natural remark which had simply escaped his colleague’s lips without his giving it much thought. No profundity, just a mathematics teacher who felt a touch of fever and had therefore wondered whether he should stay at home today, under his eiderdown, or whether to forget about it and go to school anyway, because after all he only felt a bit limp and not really sick, and so he wanted his colleagues to know about it, that he didn’t feel quite alright, and the moment he was going to do just that, it occurred to him that his condition was, after all, a bit like the one that Hans Castorp experienced in The Magic Mountain, throughout its eight to nine hundred pages, and so he said it, as an allusion which would explain his condition, not to evoke sympathy, but to define his condition with a common reference that simply occurred to him – I’m somewhat of a Hans Castorp today, I should probably have stayed under the eiderdown – and perhaps he was reading The Magic Mountain just then and had thought, when he awoke with a bit of fever, that today I’ll stay home and lie under the eiderdown so I can continue to read The Magic Mountain, but then he had changed his mind, and to explain that he had said, I’m somewhat of a Hans Castorp today, I should have stayed under the eiderdown, and the moment he said it, one of his colleagues, the fifty-odd-years-old Norwegian and history teacher Elias Rukla, began to tremble, for joy. Yes, a thrill of joy shot through him. Another human being, a colleague at that, had mentioned the fictional character Hans Castorp
by name, as a natural reference to his own general condition! It was a strange schoolday for Elias Rukla. His joy remained with him all day, when he stood at his desk teaching and, afterwards, when he dropped into the staff room and sat there with his colleagues, glancing discreetly over at the colleague who had said this. He sat behind his desk and conducted his class in his somnolent way, an average grey class that failed to rise above the merely routine in the way he presented the literature of his mother tongue, but his heart was singing all the while: I’m somewhat of a Hans Castorp today, I’m somewhat of a Hans Castorp today, and this joy was so intense that he passed his hand over his forehead to find out whether he, too, wasn’t a little sweaty, a little damp, with an ever-so-little trace of fever today. For a long time afterwards Elias Rukla’s attention was directed at this colleague. He would very much like to become better acquainted with him. Well, actually he forced himself on him, but without his colleague noticing. Sat down beside him in the brief breaks (in the noon break, at the lunch hour, they had more or less permanent seats, and Elias Rukla sat at a different table from this maths teacher) and waited for him to say something. Something like what he had said, something that could give him that same remarkable uplift. Met him constantly in the narrow corridor where the teachers had their private cabinets, standing beside him there. Tried to say something himself. But what should he say? What he wished to say he could not bring himself to say, and what he actually said did not lead to their becoming better acquainted, just a few simple, casual words uttered to avoid a complete silence as they stood like this beside each other in the narrow passage, or sat at the same table in one of the brief breaks. He thought he might invite him for dinner! Featuring Eva’s lamb roast, with garlic and rosemary. No, not garlic, it wouldn’t do to invite strangers and serve them food that contained garlic; there were always some people who did not appreciate that, because of their breath afterwards. No, lamb roast with parsley, lots of parsley. He would invite the colleague and his wife for dinner, at home with Eva and himself. He stood in the narrow passage in front of their book cabinets, trying to pluck up his courage and invite him for dinner. But wouldn’t it sound rather odd? After all, they did not know one another, being simply colleagues with a passing acquaintance who had now begun to exchange a few brief words about nothing in particular. So would it not look a bit peculiar to invite him for dinner, together with his wife at that? But how about without his wife? Worse still – Eva and Elias Rukla and the maths teacher, why in the world? No, he had to invite him with his wife. But to do so struck him as being so out of place; after all, he did not know his colleague really well, and as for his wife, he did not even know who she was, and Eva of course knew nothing about either of them. Maybe he should invite Rolfsen too, Rolfsen and his wife, Rolfsen who sat at the same table as the maths teacher in the noon break, directly across from him – he had seen them often talk together, and Rolfsen and his wife knew both Eva and him well; yes, that must be it. But he did not do that either, for when all was said and done he did not think he knew him well enough to invite him and his wife together with Rolfsen and Rolfsen’s wife, although they both knew Rolfsen well. He must get to know him better first. But he didn’t, being unable to bring himself to say something that could have made them better acquainted, nor was there anything in the behaviour of the maths teacher which could be interpreted to mean that he wished to become better acquainted with Elias Rukla, and besides, as time went on, he found it improper to force himself upon him in that way, without his colleague noticing anything, to be sure, that he was convinced of anyway, and so after a while Elias Rukla stopped both being on the lookout for him in the narrow passage in front of the book cabinets and sitting down at his table in the brief breaks, doing it only now and then when it seemed quite natural and otherwise never again. But he was constantly waiting. For his colleague to say something that would make Elias Rukla tremble for joy and go into a sweat, as in a mild fever; he was listening with half an ear sitting there, but, of course, there is so much noise in the staff room, especially during the noon break, that as a rule it is impossible to hear what people at other tables are saying, especially when you do not make an effort to listen but only sit there, inadvertently prepared in case something should happen, which was not very likely. Oh, how he pined for someone to talk to. Also in the evening when he sat at home in the living room in Jacob Aalls gate, with his beer and his shots of aquavit, occupied with his own thoughts after Eva had gone to bed. He had his own ideas and read a lot. History and novels. He mostly read novels of the 1920s, which were a concept to him: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, Thomas Mann, and Musil were the authors he liked to read, and they were all authors of the 1920s to him. Also James Joyce, though he did not like him, but all the same he considered him a 1920s author, because that way you could perceive the broad outlines of the twentieth-century European novel. Strictly speaking, few of his 1920s authors were actually authors of the 1920s, in any case not without considerable reservations. Like Kafka. Kafka did not write a single book in the 1920s, most of what he wrote appeared even before 1914, but who is more of a 1920s author than Kafka? And Thomas Mann was originally a nineteenth-century author, but his great books, The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus, were novels of the 1920s, despite the fact that Doctor Faustus was actually published after World War Two. And Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time – most of that work was written before 1914 and very little in the 1920s. But it is the 1920s that have given them their character, not only because most of the works of these writers were published then, and attracted attention then, but because it was felt so right that they are placed in the 1920s, when one considers that, for five whole years, the old Europe was going under in a futile, purposeless, and utterly ruthless bloodbath in the muddy trenches of Flanders. That Europe survived that war is the truly historical riddle of our century, which must be understood at one time or another, in any case by me, Elias Rukla thought. And these novels of the 1920s, as Elias Rukla’s conceived of them, are stimulating also because they do not differ from one another according to whether they were actually written before 1914, during the Great War of 1914–18, or after it, in the actual 1920s, like The Magic Mountain, or for that matter later, in the 1930s or 1940s – indeed, Elias Rukla could point to novels written up to our own time that he would not hesitate to call novels of the 1920s. The Trial, The Guermantes Way, The Sleepwalkers, The Man Without Qualities, The Magic Mountain (and also Ulysses, if you will, though it is a dead end, Elias Rukla insisted stubbornly to himself), they are all hypnotic, soberly descriptive novels of the same historical domain, our century at the point in time where truth has become clear and painful. Why Elias Rukla was so taken with the novels of the 1920s, he did not know; he could not recognise himself in them, if that is what one would suppose, but he liked their style and temperature, however much the individual 1920s authors differed among themselves, both in style and temperature. What he found again were the mental jolts caused by the great European war, found again in his own mind eighty years later. His own country had been a neutral outskirt during that war, in any case as far as the Flanders trenches were concerned, and yet his innermost being belonged to the regions where these jolts were still reverberating, and this is something that more people than I ought to have reflected upon, Elias Rukla thought, both the fact that the 1920s can be found before the cause of the 1920s, the 1914–18 war, and that the jolts from it can be found in my mind, despite the absence of historical documentation, Elias Rukla thought, slightly puzzled. Perhaps I ought to include Kundera, too, as a 1920s author, though I’ve previously refused to do so, because his work is so marked by another postwar era, Eastern Europe after 1945, and not by the 1914–18 war, but judging by what I am saying now, that should not be a hindrance, if I am to use myself as reader as an example, and that, of course, I must be allowed to do, and then, figuratively speaking, Kundera will fit in perfectly as a 1920s author, and since I value him so highly and all – yes, I do, thought
Elias Rukla – Kundera is also an author of the 1920s. But of the old 1920s authors he gradually came to like Mann the best. At first it had been Kafka, then Marcel Proust, but lately he had begun to like Thomas Mann more and more. And that was because he had a curious idea that Thomas Mann was the only author who could have written a novel about him, Elias Rukla, and that he could have written down his entire narrative without self-pity, without whining, and with a rare irony, completely different from the kind of irony which is fashionable in our time, the Mannian irony, which is not used as a defence against reality but is a discreet hint that, when all is said and done, as eventually happens, this fate too (in this imagined instance, that of Elias Rukla) is rather unimportant, though it certainly is a fate and as such must be studied, as it certainly can be. To qualify oneself for being the central character in a novel is, of course, an achievement in itself, and with what right do I imagine I can be seen as such a character, and in a novel by Thomas Mann at that? Elias Rukla thought, on the verge of shaking his head at himself. Thomas Mann would not have been interested in my soul, or in my soul’s darkness, by itself, and why in the world should he take any interest in it? But I imagine that he might have derived a certain pleasure from describing my wanderings across the floor tonight, in my apartment in Jacob Aalls gate, where I’m walking back and forth, plagued by the fact that I am a socially aware individual who no longer has anything to say, Elias Rukla thought. Actually, Thomas Mann was the only writer of the 1920s who would at all have considered an offer from Elias Rukla to turn him into a character in a novel. He could vividly imagine turning up for an audition to be selected as a fictional character and being scrutinised by the novelists of the 1920s. He could see how they declined with thanks, one after another, he saw Marcel Proust barely raise an eyelid before casting a brief, meaningful, ironic glance at his colleagues, before Céline’s coarse laughter (yes, Céline is also an author of the 1920s, a typical one, though Journey to the End of the Night was written in the thirties) resounded in Elias Rukla’s ears. Only Thomas Mann would take the poor candidate aspiring to be a fictional character seriously. He would have looked at Elias Rukla and asked if he could, in a few words, say why he was of the opinion that precisely his fate was suitable as fictional material, either in the capacity of a central character or a minor figure, for, after all, if one has the ambition to be a central character, one must have a clear understanding that one can also be suitable as a minor character – that is a condition which must be agreed to before any author will take the slightest interest in one’s fate, he thought Thomas Mann would have said to him. And after Elias Rukla had given an account of his life – and that would, whether I stammered or not, be a model of brevity, he thought – Thomas Mann would give him a reserved but friendly look, he thought, and say, Well, I can’t promise anything, as there is no way I can fit you and your life into my present plans, as far as I can see, but there will be other times after this, and then we can possibly come back to the matter. I don’t promise anything, quite the contrary, yet it should be sufficient to keep you from being discouraged and make you continue your life as before, even if you should not be granted the privilege of entering one of my novels, as a character. Well, this is how Elias Rukla had spent evening after evening, staying up late fantasising, a bit shyly, about his own life and its possibility of at least making contact with the literature he valued most of all, well, perhaps also a bit shamefacedly, because he was afraid he was putting too big words into the mouth of Thomas Mann in the matter of judging whether he was suitable as a character in one of his novels, or that it would not do for him, even if only in his thoughts, to have Thomas Mann express an opinion about his possibilities as a character in one of Thomas Mann’s own novels. We were now far into the 1990s and, dazzled by modernity, Norwegians had already begun to look forward with eagerness to the millennium and the presumed spectacular fireworks that would mark the occasion, Elias Rukla thought with a barely audible sigh.