Free Professor Andersen's Night by Dag Solstad Page A

even frightening. Here we are, the two of us, sitting in a hotel room in Trondheim around Christmas, and the light of our consciousness doesn’t reach back more than two generations. After that it begins to fade, a twilight memory here, a photograph no one knows the whereabouts of there. Then it’s dark. And we are both professors of literature.’ ‘Yes, indeed, of literature. We aren’t historians,’ said his colleague, defending himself . ‘Besides, we do have another kind of recollection which goes much further than our ties of kinship, we remember things with a connection to our work, in our case within the field of literature. You know many tales about Ludvig Daae, too, don’t you? Or you can conjure up the memory of Lorentz Dietrichsson, indeed, maybe even Jonas Collett?’ his colleague said triumphantly. ‘You’re right about that. But these eight great-grandparents of yours have nevertheless given you your genes; barely sixty or seventy years ago they were young and passed on their genes to the person who in turn bred the person who gave you your genes, and you have no recollection of them – isn’t it … ?’ ‘Well, yes, peculiar. Not embarrassing. And not frightening,’ his colleague broke in. ‘I find it frightening,’continued Professor Andersen, unremittingly. ‘What does it mean? Is it something common to humans, in other words a human trait, as living creatures, which we haven’t bothered to register, because the fact that humans are historical beings is so commonplace that it can’t be challenged ? Or is it a characteristic of humanity in the present day, and in our cultural circle? Or does it only apply to us who come from the common people? I don’t know, but it has something to do with our day and age, that’s for sure. There is something about it which makes us not particularly interested in what has gone before us, at any rate much less than we pretend is the case. It has something to do with being modern. And it must have begun early on, for both of us would have known about our great-grandparents if our parents had any interest in telling us about them, but evidently they didn’t; it isn’t that they quite simply forgot them, I don’t believe that. Our down-to-earth parents, these stuffy people, with their enthusiasm for plastic and the weather forecasts on the radio, must, in that case, have been bearers of a fundamental modernity, which they’ve passed on to us, without anyone being aware of it even. This has only dawned on me quite recently. The fact that my enlightened consciousness goes back no further than two generations, then it’s dark.’ ‘But now I must be allowed to interrupt you a moment,’ said his colleague eagerly, ‘because with regard to what you’re saying, I can only answer that there are few countries where you’ll find so great an interest in history as in our country, particularly history at the grass-roots level. Remember, every single town or small village has its own local history book, usually in three volumes. And every generation would like to write a new one, right from scratch and in three volumes. So don’t give me that. Or take the enormous interest there is in genealogy in this country. Or all the kinship gatherings at which people assemble every summer.’ ‘Well, well, that’s true. But nonetheless it doesn’t apply to either of us, and we are, after all, professors of literature.
Our
common social consciousness isn’t influenced by these cranky genealogists or local historians. Praiseworthy though they may be, these cranks who sit beside us in the University Library pursuing the traces of their own origins down through the ages, though they ought to give us hope, because they demonstrate that it is possible to break out of this common consciousness and go one’s own way, if only one’s passion and personal determination are great enough, they are and remain cranks who fail to leave any mark on the common consciousness, no