Two novels after the indissoluble element
A Contrary review by David M. Smith

	In Shyness and Dignity, Elias Rukla is a “sottish” language arts teacher at Fagerborg Secondary School in Oslo. For weeks now, he has been lecturing about Ibsen’s The Wild Duck to a classroom of bored pupils. One day as he drones on, he has a sudden revelation about a minor character, Dr. Relling—who had always seemed to him superfluous, an artificial mouthpiece for the playwright—and this discovery strikes Elias as a momentous, the key to understanding the play, which he eagerly tries to relate… none of which has the least effect on his immensely bored pupils, who at the sound of the bell leap from their chairs at once, leaving Elias confounded and dejected on this rainy morning in Oslo, which will end up being the decisive day in his life. 

In Novel 11, Book 18, Bjørn Hansen is the town treasurer of Kongsberg. This provincial Norwegian town is where he settled with another woman after leaving his wife and two-year-old son in Oslo. Despite his humdrum occupation, he considers himself a well-read and intelligent person, and after joining the amateur Kongsberg Theatre Society at his partner’s urging, convinces everyone that they really ought to go for something more serious than their usual musicals and farces, namely, Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, with himself cast as the central character of Hjalmar Ekdal. “Bjørn Hansen had carefully studied Ibsen's play, with underlinings, and thought he had understood it so thoroughly that he felt Hjalmar Ekdal’s Weltschmerz in himself.” Nevertheless, Bjørn Hansen is no actor, and the play is a miserable flop.

Despite their shared allusions, what’s remarkable about these two brief novels is not how they utilize Ibsen, or augment our understanding of The Wild Duck in any significant way. Nor is it how they critique or satirize a given segment in Norwegian social life, the generation of 1968, say. Nor do they feature some special symbolism lying conspicuously around waiting to be decoded. For instance, Elias Rukla goes on to demolish his collapsible umbrella in an impotent rage after it refuses to go up in the foul weather. A man with a malfunctioning umbrella, well, “everyone ‘knows’ what this is,” Dag Solstad has said. “It's a man who can't get his prick up, something of that sort, right? I wanted to write a novel where that element is absent.”

“That element” is partly vulgar Freudianism, of course, and there is nothing especially surprising about wanting to avoid all that. But there is something else going on here. “My thin novels,” according to Solstad, “can be seen as an indissoluble counterpoint to the dominant art of our era, the commercial.” In opposition to the “dissoluble” in the novelist’s bag of tricks—elements which are more or less interchangeable with some emotional, intellectual, or moral reaction they are meant to evoke—Dag Solstad is after the indissoluble element that “illuminates by way of a dear and civilized inflexibility, and testifies what sort of achievement the speaking person is, historically and biologically speaking.”

This will not be easy to grasp, if we are accustomed to situation, character, etc. as the accidental accompaniments to a novel’s core meaning. In contrast, Dag Solstad begins with concrete situations, and takes these as necessary, essential: Elias Rukla walking away from the schoolyard, his hand bloodied from the exposed ribs of the umbrella, and Bjørn Hansen waiting at the Kongsberg Railway Station for a twenty-year-old son he does not really know but will soon come to dislike. 

These simple, somewhat unpromising core scenes are our entranceways to the whole lives of Elias and Bjørn, two lives that fundamentally do not add up; and this not-adding-up is a real, felt one, not merely a feigned not-adding-up that prods us and the characters inevitably towards the Godhead. The titles even reflect this: “Shyness and Dignity” and (especially) “Novel 11, Book 18” are so nondescript the books may as well come in brown paper sacks. If they did, maybe they could come packaged together with some other obscure plays by Ibsen, and we could rid ourselves of the temptation to look for “souls” at the center of such works.




David M. Smith is a writer living in Bergen, Norway.

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Novel 11, Book 18

Dag Solstad

2008, Harvill Secker

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Shyness and Dignity

Dag Solstad

2006, Graywolf Press

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SUMMER 2009 COVER

YELLOW FINCHES
JIM KROSSCHELL

THE FACTORY: AN ELEGY IN 6 PARTS
REBECCA LEHMANN

CROW YEAR
PAUL SILVERMAN

DAY OF THE DEAD
ARLENE ANG

THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS
EDWARD MC WHINNEY

BABY IN A JAR
TANIA HERSHMAN


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