The Review: A (Fictional) Professor Witnesses a Murder

Dag Solstad's noirish take on the academic novel. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. I’m on vacation, and on a friend’s recommendation I brought along the Norwegian writer Dag Solstad’s 1996 novel [Professor Andersen’s Night]( translated into English by Agnes Scott Langeland. The noirish premise plays a variation on Rear Window. Professor Andersen, from his living room, witnesses a man strangling a woman in the apartment across from him. For reasons obscure to himself, he fails to call the police. I hadn’t expected that the exploration of those reasons would turn, to a surprising degree, on Andersen’s vocation as a scholar — a professor of literature and expert on Henrik Ibsen. This is Rear Window as [Professorroman](. Andersen’s inaction triggers a wave of comprehensive self-doubt, which does not spare his chosen profession. Planning to confess to a colleague, Andersen finds himself instead complaining about Ibsen’s irrelevance: Occasionally I think, after having read through and studied, for instance, [Ibsen’s play] Ghosts: well, was that all? Was there nothing else? ... Was that it? I am not stirred by it. I’m not shaken. Not like the audience when it was performed for the first time, as a contemporary event. In my case it has not survived as the actual revelation it once was, and so how can I carry out my duty to society, which is to pass this play down to new generations? I’m in doubt, I’m so terribly in doubt about my own function in this age, which I really cannot stand any longer. Witnessing a murder is an extreme way of arriving at this sort of professional self-doubt, but the insecurity itself seems to be common among humanists. In his 2010 book, The Marketplace of Ideas, Louis Menand observed “something slightly disproportionate about the reaction of humanists to questions about the value of the humanities. In literary terms, their response lacked an objective correlative. In psychiatric terms, it was neurotic. There was anxiety that behind the problem of public justification was another problem, which was that professors in the humanities could not seem to produce a consensus around a paradigm for humanistic studies.” One reading of Professor Andersen’s Night might find in the witnessed but unreported murder the objective correlative for feelings of despair around the plight of the humanities. In any event, Professor Andersen’s friend opposes Professor Andersen’s emphasis on “revelation” with an alternative justification for literary study: “His colleague strongly maintained that it was their task to convey a sense of quiet enjoyment, and not stirring emotions. ... The essential thing to recognize, and enjoy, was the noble patina which rested on a work of art which had lasted beyond its own century.” Andersen remains unmollified; later on, his doubt about his profession is transformed into an apocalyptic doubt about the viability of artistic representation as such: “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. ... Now our wild course has brought us to the stage where we finally have the opportunity to rid ourselves of another illusion, one I so much would have preferred to keep.” For more on Dag Solstad, check out this 2015 LitHub essay, “[Norway’s Greatest Living Writer Is Actually Dag Solstad]( For Review essays touching on the academic novel, check out Dora Zhang, [here]( Charlie Tyson, [here]( Kristina Quynn, [here]( and Andrew Kay, [here](. 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