Dag Solstad - Shyness And Dignity

This was the situation. It was in 1974 that Johan Corneliussen had disclosed that Eva Linde used to listen to their conversations, giving them a different hue than before. Did Elias Rukla love Eva Linde? Did he lie on the sofa outside her and Johan Corneliussen’s bedroom door for seven years waiting for her? No, Elias Rukla could honestly say that this was not so. It was simply unthinkable. He was taken with her, that he would admit, but it was as Johan Corneliussen’s spouse that he was taken with her. She had no value at all for him by herself; that was not only forbidden, it was unthinkable. Had he then suffered from an unthinkable love for her? That was something Elias Rukla could not dismiss out of hand, and it would, if true, explain the twinges he used to feel in certain situations, of sadness, even grief, as well as a state of excitement, like the time when Johan Corneliussen disclosed that Eva Linde was listening to them behind her closed door. So it is not impossible that, between 1969 and 1976, from when he was twenty-eight until he turned thirty-six, when he started his career as senior master at the Fagerborg school in a mood of high expectation, established himself in an apartment of his own in Jacob Aalls gate, tried, albeit somewhat half-heartedly, to find a life partner, not least among his younger colleagues at Fagerborg and other secondary schools, amused himself in his leisure time mixing with old acquaintances from his student days, cultivated and kept up his particularly close friendship with Johan Corneliussen — it is not impossible that, in reality, he was suffering from, and letting his steps be controlled by, an unthinkable love for Eva Linde. But if that was so, no trace of this love can be found anywhere, except possibly for those brief occasional twinges in the course of those seven long years, not even in the rather odd geographical fact that, when Elias Rukla and Johan Corneliussen met in town, they did not follow it up with an evening in Jacob Aalls gate but in remote Grorud, a suburban village a good six miles from downtown Oslo with its restaurants, forcing Elias Rukla to get up at the crack of dawn the next morning and leave in a hurry to get to his job as senior master, whereas if they had ended up in Jacob Aalls gate, Johan Corneliussen could have taken it easy, because he did not have such obligations early the next morning. But it was Johan who insisted that they should go to his place, and that was due to the fact that it was his job to take care of Camilla when she awoke in the morning (so that Eva could sleep), and so he had to get home. Therefore, if they were to continue, it had to be at his place. So it was not the sleeping Eva who tempted Elias Rukla to undertake this rather strange trip to Grorud, but the company of Johan Corneliussen. Nevertheless, Elias Rukla could not dismiss the possibility that he had all along suffered from an unthinkable love of Eva Linde, but, if so, it had not even once been allowed to control his anything but remarkable steps, and if something had not happened that was beyond his control, creating an entirely new situation, he could have lived his whole life, to this day, when this is being written, that is NOW, without his having had the least suspicion that he was suffering from an unthinkable passion, whose source was the gradually rather fading beauty Eva Linde Corneliussen.

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 gewgaws, 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.