by Dag Solstad
Right from the start Professor Andersen had assumed that it wasn’t Henrik Nordstrøm’s wife he had seen at the window on the night before Christmas Day, but a casual female acquaintance, a girfriend of his, or suchlike. That was his assumption, on impulse, something he had never questioned before now, when it turned out that no woman was reported missing. He had expected that the description of this woman would be issued after a few weeks, fourteen days after Christmas Eve at the latest, in other words during the first or second week of January, and that he would then follow the newspaper reports about the search for this woman, how it slowly closed in on this apartment at Skillebekk, where Henrik Nordstrøm was sitting and tensely following the same hunt as he himself, Professor Andersen, in his spacious apartment on the other side of the street. But where was the body? Actually, Professor Andersen had imagined that one day, from his observation post, he would see two policemen entering the main door of the building on the other side of the street and ringing the doorbell at Henrik Nordstrøm’s place. If the light was on in the window, he might be able to see all three moving about in there, the two uniformed men and the unfortunate Henrik Nordstrøm. But where was the body? Sooner or later suspicion would lead them to Henrik Nordstrøm but what could they do without the body? Probably very little. He, Professor Andersen, was the only person who had seen what had happened, and his lips were sealed. Why? ‘And why did I leave the Britannia Hotel in Trondheim, head over heels, when I feared that he might simply disappear from here, for good?’ Professor Andersen asked himself, yet another time, over and over again.
But as time passed what was most probable was that it hadn’t been a casual female acquaintance, a girlfriend, who had been standing at the window, but his wife, whom he had murdered. That made the whole thing much more difficult for Henrik Nordstrøm, who, once suspicion had been aroused over the disappearance, would only have one opportunity to avoid being caught: if he himself reported her missing. If others reported her missing, Henrik Nordstrøm would, in reality, be finished. Even without the body. For as soon as she was reported missing, then it would turn out that she was, in fact, missing, and why hadn’t Henrik Nordstrøm reported it? Viewed in that light it was now just a question of time before he was finished, and Professor Andersen’s failure to report what he had seen wouldn’t be of any consequence. He was finished, whether Professor Andersen opened his mouth or not didn’t matter.
Between the months of January and February this had become quite clear to him, and it eased a little of the strain he had been living under recently. He now managed to concentrate fully on his duties as a professor of literature at the University of Oslo. True enough, Professor Andersen practised this calling in a context which didn’t make him feel light-hearted. Indeed, the context in which he now found himself had darkened his existence, his mind even, for several years, and to an ever greater extent. When all was said and done, Professor Andersen had a strong suspicion that he had spent his life on something that was doomed to perish. He was a professor of literature and he could no longer say that there was as great a value attached to literature as he had thought at the time when he chose it for his course in life. At any rate, not the literature he had applied himself to in performance of his duties, but also for pleasure. He did research on Ibsen. He had completed an enthusiastically received doctorate on The Pretenders as a fairly young man, but in recent years had been preoccupied solely with the plays Ibsen wrote in the 1880s and 1890s, that is to say, with the great Henrik Ibsen. There could scarcely be any doubt that if Ibsen had died in the year 1880, at fifty-two years of age, he would have been forgotten as a playwright today. Peer Gynt and Brand would scarcely have been performed on any stage in the twentieth century, except perhaps in Norway. A Doll’s House would also have been considered out-dated, if it weren’t for support from plays like Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken. His own doctorate on The Pretenders would have been regarded as a curiosity, and he would probably have been warned not to start on it, mainly due to the fact that a study of Norwegian drama around 1860 which took Bjørnson’s historical dramas as a starting point would be much more rewarding, from both a historical and a literary perspective. So for that reason, throughout the past ten years Professor Andersen had been preoccupied solely with studying the great Ibsen, the Ibsen who made possible his doctorate on the (relatively speaking) forgotten work, The Pretenders, and in consequence made his position as professor of literature possible, he thought, with a smile tainted by malevolence.
He had made use of all his imaginative and intellectual skills to depict Henrik Ibsen’s dramas from the 1880s and 1890s, so that their greatness would stand forth in a shining light. As a professor he saw this as his task. What the students, whom he tried to enlighten in this manner, didn’t know, was that he himself felt a gnawing sense of doubt as to whether this greatness actually existed, when all was said and done. He found himself having to take an extreme perspective in his interpretations, because if one couldn’t view Ibsen’s greatness in an extreme perspective, then one had to ask oneself whether there was any point in applying oneself to these dramatic works from the previous century, except in a strictly historical sense, which, of course, a nation ought to find a worthy cause, every so often. Take Bjørnson for instance, said Professor Andersen to himself. Even if there were people among us who only wish to be convinced of Henrik Ibsen’s eternal greatness, and with that in mind go to the theatre to see a modernised Henrik Ibsen standing before them. One accepted everything, absolutely everything: inflated sex dolls, giant penises in plastic, Oswald as a neo-Nazi, long-haired punks, a peace negotiator with AIDS, a UN soldier stationed in Bosnia at home on leave, absolutely everything that one could imagine in the form of theatrical costumes to dress up poor fictive Oswald, all of it was swallowed if only one could perceive the eternal spirit of Ibsen breathing through this young man of our own day and age. As a professor, however, Andersen saw it as his task to concentrate on Ibsen’s text, and search for greatness there. His students also yearned to feel the eternal spirit of Ibsen breathing on them. There were indeed master’s degree students who spent up to two years of the precious spring of their youth immersing themselves in Ibsen’s text. Why did they do that, really? On occasion Professor Andersen asked himself this, often sarcastically, too, if the truth be told. For why should a nice, amiable girl from Bærum be so fascinated by Rebekka West that she simply had to write a longish thesis about her in her own twenty-third year? Now and again it was beyond Professor Andersen’s comprehension, not least her daring to admit it. Professor Andersen could safely say that he wouldn’t have dared to admit it, if he were her, but she went around with her alleged enthusiasm for this intolerably sultry and morbid woman, not just at the university, but also in her circle of friends, indeed even in her childhood home, in the well-kept suburb of Bærum. Could it be that she was strangely fascinated by the thought of feeling Henrik Ibsen’s eternal spirit flowing through this woman, whom she was going to devote a year and a half of her young life to describing? Yes, indeed, that had to be the case, and this made Professor Andersen’s sarcasm creep away. For the fact remained that there were young students who yearned to apply themselves to Henrik Ibsen’s one-hundred-year-old dramas and they flocked around Professor Andersen’s seat of learning. In his lectures they would hear the notion of Henrik Ibsen’s greatness being confirmed and enlarged upon, in that way contributing to it being consolidated yet again for new generations, even though Professor Andersen himself did, in fact, doubt, ultimately, whether any such significance for which they yearned, and which he did his utmost to confirm, really existed; at least, it didn’t for those people with whom he shared a common fate and the passage of time, for if one pared away all cultural yearning as well as vanity, necessary though it may be, both on behalf of himself, his day and age, and of humanity, and scrutinised the real enthusiasm in their heart of hearts for these masterpieces, for traces of a fl
ame burning there, then he didn’t expect to find any such flame. But he took good care to conceal these doubts from his students, as he might have made a fundamental error in those judgements that darkened his mind.
He himself had, after all, entered Ibsen’s world, first as a student, later as a researcher and university teacher, without having experienced anything really momentous in relation to Ibsen’s work. He had acknowledged his greatness as a fact, and thereafter studied him diligently. His master’s thesis on The Pretenders (which he had later expanded into the enthusiastically received doctorate) had led him to study the play line by line, back and forth, weighing and measuring and comparing, so that he knew the work by heart and dreamed about it at night. All for the sake of a career, one might say. He had chosen Ibsen because it was sensible to do so if one intended to pursue a career in literary research in Norway, naturally enough. Later it had surprised him, he who so intensely despised careerists, and still did, that he himself had been so career-minded when he chose a topic for his master’s thesis. He ought perhaps to have devoted himself to the literature he was passionately interested in, in his daily life, the poetry of our own century, but it hadn’t occurred to him. He thought it was natural that a young man’s master’s thesis should be some form of training in dealing with the literary heritage, and that it was through training of this kind that one qualified oneself for doing research, hence for one’s career. Therefore, he defended having embarked as a young man on Henrik Ibsen’s dramatic work without having any particular attachment to it, and moreover that he had chosen one of Ibsen’s early plays as the topic for this study lasting several years, first for his master’s thesis, and later for his doctorate. For at that time the university was unchallenged as an institution, and demanded dispassionate adherence from its recruits. Today it was totally different. Everything Professor Andersen represented, and had represented, was challenged. Therefore, one had to defend oneself, and passionately at that. With composure and passion. Ideally, he regarded his task as that of contributing some footnotes to enable an understanding of Ibsen, a few footnotes, authored with passion. The more doubt he had concerning Ibsen’s greatness – or concerning our ability to comprehend the genuine greatness of Ibsen in the 1880s with the same enthusiasm as one greets a mediocre rock star, or the anticipation with which large numbers of the population await the next episode of a TV soap – the more it fastened its grip on him, and became a part of the inner fibre which supported the 55-year-old professor, and set its stamp on his life and work, the more sceptical he became about his students’ desire and ability to carry the literary heritage any further, through the humiliating intellectual life awaiting our kind of society in the next decades, and about whether there was any point at all in even trying, at any rate, under his supervision or guidance or direction.
But nevertheless one could see him displaying his ability at lectures and master’s seminars, particularly the latter. Professor Andersen gave his all in order to demonstrate Ibsen’s greatness in Hedda Gabler or Ghosts. In Rosmersholm and in John Gabriel Borkman. Not one word suggested that he himself doubted whether the play Hedda Gabler was great enough to survive for more than a hundred years, in its own right. Anything else is vanity on the part of humanity. He shook meanings from the text, pointed out the structure, the strange intellectual tensions and solvable paradoxes. He showed how highlighting various characters during the reading of the text, and looking at the play from their standpoint, as though they were the main character in the play, and then contrasting this with what happens if one lets another be the main character, and then letting these two interpretations stand side by side, allows one to see the void which then arises, the horrifying void; and he referred to the crystal-clear emotional life one could observe while Hedda Gabler moves from one room to another, from one position to another, from a sofa to a fireplace with a manuscript, from a living room to a lounge, where a pistol is lying. All this with the students’ full attention and vigilance. What they didn’t know was that he followed them with the same attention and vigilance, in order to reject or in order to have his own suspicion confirmed, which lay continually at the back of his mind throughout his concentrated work on Hedda Gabler, and which wasn’t just a suspicion that the play does not stand a chance of retaining its force in our own day and age, other than as a poor reflection of the original from 1890, but also to get rid of the cynical question which continually accompanied his inspired interpretations, and which ran like this, mockingly, over and over again: ‘Is this really all that good, when all is said and done? That a general’s daughter who marries in a state of panic, and who gets bored, causes a damned lot of trouble for others, and then finally shoots herself? Is that something to apply oneself to, with all one’s mental faculties and emotional intensity, for centuries?’ All this buzzed in the back of his mind, like voices, while he carried on lecturing, with his students’ interests at heart. When he had said something which he thought gave an exciting insight into Ibsen’s dramatic world, he waited expectantly on his students’ reactions. If they said something silly, then it cut to him to the quick, likewise if all they could offer were conventional statements picked up from some book or other they had read, or some banal expression from the milieu they moved around in, or came from, or if any of them found it the right place to make known their own strictly personal emotional reactions, which they ought to have kept to themselves, because this was not a matter of emotions but of literary expression. But it did happen, and not all that infrequently either, that he could see someone’s eyes light up a moment if he said something that sounded grand, and which he, Professor Andersen, couldn’t deny actually referred to Ibsen’s greatness, and then he noticed that a feeling of pleasure spread through his whole body, from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, and not even his subsequent disappointment over the fact that the comments issuing from them, after this light in their eyes, were so insignificant, so facile, indeed so conventional, could quite oust it. And now and then a student whose eyes he saw gleam in such a way with enlightenment could make a comment that was a genuine expression of what had induced that glimmer, and could even present it with great feeling, and then Professor Andersen was moved as well. These were rare moments, but could be connected to the actions of Mrs Alving. Mrs Alving’s actions which might be connected to the Greek tragedies, 2,500 years ago. As they might, might they not? Yes, Professor Andersen thought so, and he could present arguments in support of this, and then he could see the eyes of some students light up. They listened. Yes, they listened. Might one not trace a direct connection from a bourgeois Norwegian household, inhabited by Chamberlain Alving’s descendants, in the 1880s, back to mythical Greece, 2,500 years ago? Yes, indeed. The stir was the same. In Ghosts as in the Greek tragedies. The stir which literature can cause. It was this stir that the citizens of Kristiania experienced sitting in the theatre the first time Ghosts was performed; it caused the same stir. Professor Andersen felt an inexpressible bliss on saying just this, to them, the students. ‘But why have we lost this sense of stir, then?’ he thought afterwards, when he was sitting in his office, and smoking, and trying to collect himself after this master’s seminar. ‘It is, in fact, much worse than I believed,’ he thought then. ‘We are only a hundred years removed from this stir, which down through history has been an elementary requirement for a rewarding life, and we can’t grasp it any longer. So near, but all the same shut out. It’s past. Are we shut out from one of humanity’s most natural and most essential innate skills, which has been part of human nature, documented, at any rate, over the past 2,500 years? In that case a new kind of individual is about to emerge, and I am, whether I like it or not, one of its representatives, and my students, too, and they don’t even know it,’ thought Professor Andersen. ‘My poor students,’ he thought, ‘who don’t know this.’ He thought about the gleam in their eyes when he led them from Ibsen down through history to mythical Greece and pointed out the connection. How they, subsequent to his
pointing out this sense of ‘stir’, had sat down and compared Ibsen’s play Ghosts from the 1880s with a 2,500-year-old tragedy by Sophocles, to find out how this could occur. Ibsen’s dramatic form versus Sophocles’ dramatic form, how drama had altered, over the centuries, and the perception of humanity and the portrayal of the people on the stage, too, their function there, everything had altered, but all the same this sense of stir existed, which it was possible to restore to the two plays, both Ibsen’s and Sophocles’, and that was what they attempted. Of course, Professor Andersen had been annoyed by the banal comparisons they drew, the conventional opinions, self-assertive sentimentalities typical of our time, but some of their eyes had lit up as well. From a longing for what would always be lost to them, and which they could now only preoccupy themselves with as a past phenomenon, which it is true could be studied with great intellectual enjoyment, by the most gifted, in good moments, as a shining example of how humanity had understood its condition, but without it applying to themselves, who could only view, and maybe also admire, this long period back in time when it had been in operation, before it suddenly had gone out of operation, right under their noses, so to speak? So that they were now forced – something he, 55-year-old Professor Andersen, was not – to go along with the new spirit of the times on its crazy and hubristic journey towards new experiences, new values, new constellations, new sounds, new cries, new criteria, new preferences, and all because they were young and on a wild journey towards a new era, with enthusiasm, whether they wanted to or not (that was what Professor Andersen escaped from, having to express enthusiasm for this, with rehearsed body movements, like a kind of dance, in the way he had noticed that young people couldn’t avoid doing)? Professor Andersen felt compassion for his students, and wondered if it would soon be the right moment to stand up and voice his suspicion that the intellectual, reflective and bookish individual was now excluded for good. The reason why he did not do so was that in conjunction with this misgiving, out of the desire, or the duty, to stand up soon and voice it openly, something else lurked which was far more dangerous, and was absolutely negative. That no such stir existed as the one which Professor Andersen and his students had been studying today in Ibsen and Sophocles; that this was something which humanity had invented in order to endure its own inadequacy. True enough, for 2,500 years it had been necessary to maintain this illusion that human beings were creatures who allowed their inner selves to be stirred and moved by certain portrayals of the human condition, because although the ability was lacking both to create and comprehend such heights and depths in the understanding of human behaviour in order to understand their purpose here on earth, so there had been a yearning for this to be possible, but now it isn’t there, ‘and thus we can assume that no such stir has ever existed in connection with works of art created by man; these presentations have solely stirred us by virtue of their contemporaneity, the sensation that engenders, but have not had the ability to go beyond this. Now our wild course has brought us to the stage where we finally have the opportunity to rid ourselves of yet another illusion, one I would so much have preferred to keep, but I have succeeded in plumbing the depths of this suspicion, based on these very obvious assumptions,’thought Professor Andersen. He could picture the gleam in the eyes of his most gifted students, and thought wistfully of the times when this gleam had corresponded to a thought which so evidently had this sense of stir, if not as a personal experience, then nonetheless as its precondition.
