Shyness and Dignity [Paperback]

"To qualify oneself for being the central character in a novel is, of course, and achievement in itself, and what right do I imagine I can be seen as such a character...?" But Elias Rukla IS the central character in this preternaturally 'true' novella, the setting of which is entirely in his own thoughts about himself, his wife Eva Linde, and his prepotent friend Johan Corneliussen whom Elias shyly regards as the 'central character' in his -- Elias's -- life story. Elias is a teacher of Norwegian literature, a "senior master in his fifties" with twenty-five years of experience at a high school in Oslo, and his thoughts often turn upon interpretations of literature. Elias chose teaching as a career with a full measure of idealism about its significance as well as a fuller measure of modesty about his own talents. He is a shy, diffident, insecure fellow, this Elias, with an undiagnosed tendency to alcoholism. He wakes up one morning in October with a sour hangover, goes to class, has a curious insight into Ibsen's The Wild Duck which he feels that he fails to communicate to his bored, latently hostile students; his sense of ineffectuality sparks a train of dour thoughts about his society and his own irrelevance to it. More goes wrong -- small but painful things, a broken umbrella, students who smirk at him, a persistent headache -- and Elias 'snaps', swears at a student, smashes his umbrella against the school fountain, stumbles toward downtown Oslo in a rage and panic, sensing that both his career and his marriage are 'done for'. The rest of the narrative -- first person encased within third person, very skillfully managed -- tells the story of Elias's friendship with the brilliant Johan, who deserts his 'brilliance' willfully as well as his 'indescribably beautiful' wife and daughter, deeding them in effect to the humble Elias. That beautiful wife, Eva Linde, has 'let herself spread', lost her beauty seemingly by choice, and Elias perceives her indifference to her beauty as indifference to him.

Not only his marriage seems stale and hollow to Elias, however. His colleagues and his whole contemporary society, he concludes, are all "slaves to indebtedness", with no more on their minds or in their small talk than their finances. Elias longs for the 'running conversations' he used to have, with Johan especially, but then such conversations couldn't amount to much for him as he has become: "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."

"Shyness and Dignity" is a portrayal of estrangement, of the introspective anomie of an ordinary well-meaning highly responsible 'everyman' who has been side-lined even in his own life, the life of 'quiet desperation' that Thoreau predicted for modern humanity. It's not a cheerful or diverting book to read; don't expect any resolution or relief at the end of it, or even any sense of what will come next for poor Elias. But it's not, at least for me, a depressing book to read, simply because it is so powerfully real and honest. There's a lot in Elias that most people will know in themselves. His reflections on the 'insignificance' to the Modern World of his devotion to literature compelled me to think uncomfortably about the 'insignificance' of my own career as a musician to the vast bulk of humanity. For me, writing this 'true' cannot be uninteresting.

Dag Solstad's style seems to own quite a lot to the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, with some of the same devices of contrapuntal reiteration, of circling around a thought or a state of mind, then slipping through an irrelevance or a random association into another thought or state of mind. But Solstad's character Elias is someone you will empathize with more than the egregious neurotics of a Bernhard novel; you could say that Solstad is 'Bernhard with a human face'. In any case, I can assert that Solstad is 'easier to take' than Bernhard, yet every bit as potent an analyst of the indignity of the individual in our modern world.

Shyness & Dignity reminded me of several of my favorite authors: Saul Bellow, especially "Seize the Day," with its portrayal of an irrevocable moment of existential dread, Samuel Beckett for its painstaking examination of the world in so absurdly rational a way as to bring rationality into question, and Knut Hamsun, especially Hunger, in its presentation of consciousness, so vivid that it can be said that consciousness itself is the hero. It's a novel so fresh and real that it puts the pallid exercises of contemporary American academic "authors" to shame. Let's hope more Dag Solstad gets published!

Shyness and Dignity, the first of Dag Solstad's some thirty literary works to be translated into English, is a worthy introduction of this thrice-time winner of the Norwegian Literary Critics' Award to an English-speaking readership.

The novel, first published in 1994, tells the tale of a "sottish Senior Master", named Elias Rukla, who teaches high school literature in Norway's capital of Oslo.

The novel presents the climactic self-implosion of the Senior Master, when he verbally lashes out at an unsuspecting female student, in the novel's opening pages.

In the remaining one hundred and forty pages of the novel, Solstad slowly unveils the intricate patchwork, the many, complicated layers of onion that is Rukla's past, and which all together lead up to his self-destructive tantrum.

Shyness and Dignity contains little dialogue, and is concerned mostly with the inner dialogue of its protagonist, Rukla. In his exposition-heavy prose, Solstad makes effective use of repetition- repeating words and phrases like a guitarist improvising version after version of a baseline riff.

This repetition lends a musical quality to Solstad's narrative; it guides the reader along, and gives the narrative the momentum it needs in the absence of more dialogue. To give the narrative much of its depth, Solstad inserts competing, probing questions into the narrative, and which exist in the mind of Rukla. These questions also serve to make Rukla more human, as we recognize that slowing Rukla down are many of the same questions that confront us all.

Slowly, as the narrative progresses, the reader becomes arrested within the mind of the novel's perplexed protagonist. We are never afforded the luxury of looking back at Rukla. The reader feels Rukla's "estrangement" along with him.

As Rukla begins the recollect his past, we first follow Elias back in time to his days as a student, when he befriended a magnanimous and eccentric philosopher and fellow student named Johann Corneliussen. As young students in the 1970s, the two would engage in all night drinking binges that would linger late into the night and be imbued with lively, challenging philosophical debate.

It is through Corneliussen that Rukla eventually meets Eva Linde, his future wife. But Eva was first married to Corneliussen. But when Corneliussen abandons Eva and their daughter to unexpectedly pursue a career in marketing in Manhattan (forgoing his ambition to be a contributor to the timeless dialogue between scholars of Immanuel Kant), Eva moves in with Rukla. The two eventually marry.

Their relationship is far from healthy, and only serves to accentuate Rukla's isolation. Eva and Elias lived what Elias felt was a tempered domestic life, in which they both sacrificed personal ambitions. The two "moved past each other in separate orbits", and were unable to bridge the lexical gaps that existed between them in order to express their love for one another.

From Elias' perspective, it was that Eva who had "never opened her innermost self to him and who had not let him in either, with his innermost self, his burning questions".

The tragedy of Elias is that he, while exceptionally introspective, is utterly unaware of his self-absorption. The "burning questions" that he wishes to pose to his wife are not concerning her. He only surmises how she feels and thinks, like a writer does with his or her characters. He never simply asks her how she feels, or why she will not express her love or lack thereof for him.

Elias only wishes to expunge himself of his burning questions about life, and to engage in a dialogue about his thoughts on his terms. He is a philosopher, or writer, with no outlet, no audience. And that is precisely what Elias wants: an audience that he feels will make his ideas relevant.

When Elias teaches, for example, he wishes only to espouse his unique insights on Ibsen. He never once stopped his soliloquies to ask his students what they thought about the text. Elias mistakenly assumes his "estrangement" is a product of something his wife, his students, or those around him lack, rather than being a product of his own self-absorption.

There is something, though, about Elias' isolation that elicits empathy from the reader. There is a quality of his isolation that is universal, and which plagues us all. His ennui is a tragedy inherent in the life of modern man. Elias' consternation represents the "unbearable lightness of being", or the idea that within a world of unprecedented security and prosperity, modern man is still yet inflicted with an unprecedented lack of moral and spiritual direction.

Elias, too, represents the most tragic cross section of individuals, in that not only is he spiritually estranged from his fellow man, but he is also painfully aware of his estrangement. Better would it be if Elias were able to just petal through life oblivious to any larger, perplexing questions.

Elias, though, has gotten to a point where ignorance is not an option. And it is this dichotomy of Elias's rich, probing inner dialogue or "innermost self", and his inability to find a satisfying outlet for that dialogue, which is his great tragedy. So acute and tortuous is this dichotomy, that Elias is willing to uproot any sense of security in his life, if only to disrupt the sense of banality that he feels is chasing him like a ghost.