If any of those present had taken photographs of the dinner group, what would you have seen? Immediately after they were developed, those who were there, the seven people around the table, the hosts and the five guests, would have recognised themselves and smiled a little at their own traits; and then have been even more amused, perhaps, by the other guests’ traits; all seven of them would, in other words, have been concerned with both their own and the others’ mannerisms, and in doing so given acknowledging smiles. But in thirty or thirty-five years’ time the same picture, now in a photo album belonging to, let’s say, Nina and Bernt’s son Thomas, might perhaps, while he was showing it to his own children, who are in their twenties, call forth smiles of acknowledgement from Thomas, too, and his young sons (or daughters if you like), but now because this photo is so typical of the period. Typical of the Nineties, the time when Nina and Bernt Halvorsen were in their prime, and typical of this period in that set, that social grouping, which was theirs. They, that is Nina and Bernt’s heirs, would look at the photo of these seven people around a dinner table, in old-fashioned clothes, in strange positions, and they would exclaim, even though the original photograph was supposed to have been taken spontaneously, so the people being photographed didn’t know they were being photographed just then: So stiff they look, so arranged, and in spite of the fact that the very generation who were photographed here, and precisely this social grouping, with their shared development and background, were such that they individually and as a group were particularly preoccupied with this very thing — trying to appear natural, relaxed, indeed spontaneous in every way, for such is the relentless nature of an image frozen in time; the rigid, the arranged is always apparent, and probably this rigid, unnatural, arranged look was actually the prevailing state of affairs at the time when the photo was taken, and of which they were such utter prisoners without noticing it themselves, but which now, an imagined thirty or thirty-five years on in time, streams out of the picture and brings about the feeling which calls forth the good-natured smiles we all adopt when we see photos from a time which isn’t our own, and which you can call smiles of acknowledgement because one acknowledges what was typical of the Nineties in this chance photograph from a party on Boxing Day at their grandparents’ house at Sagene, and taken before they, in other words Nina and Bernt’s second-generation offspring, were even born. But while, let’s say, Bernt Halvorsen, on taking a look at this photograph of himself, would have shaken his head, because he would at once have recognised some habits from his medical profession which he never managed to exclude from his private life, which therefore had to be called bad habits in such a setting and which he regarded as slightly comic, though obviously it was much too late to do anything about them now, at this stage in his life, such things as laying one hand over the other, originally to calm patients, but now one of his characteristic traits, even when he was hosting a party in his home on Boxing Day, he could only shake his head in partial resignation, before he went on to study the rest of the people in the photograph, his wife’s little idiosyncrasies which came to light in the photo, and Per Ekeberg’s intense way of leaning forward, or Professor Andersen’s way of slightly tilting his head, which undeniably gave him an arrogant look, so typical of Pål, Bernt would have thought then, and smiled, because he knew that this arrogant, tilted head was a posture, created and built up to conceal the deep social insecurity that the 55-year-old had felt all his life, in the same way that his grandchildren, looking at the photograph in, for instance, the year 2029, would think how typical when they regarded their grandfather and Professor Andersen respectively, but they wouldn’t think how typical of Grandfather, and how typical of Professor Andersen, but would exclaim, at the sight of them both: So typical of the Nineties to hold his hands like that, and his head like that! The spirit of the times operates like this, concealed from the person who is its prisoner, but apparent to someone who observes us in photographs from another period, liberated, from the outside.
There must undoubtedly have been something about this party in the home of a married couple who were both successful doctors in Oslo in the Nineties which would lead you to point to it and exclaim: Typical Nineties, even though both the hosts and the guests spontaneously expressed their individuality. What that might be would have been difficult (not to say impossible) for them to determine themselves, and, of course, so painful (herein lies the impossibility of it) that one would rather not be preoccupied with it, but Professor Andersen was thrown suddenly into a strange inner (and outer) existence which led, for one thing, to a strong feeling of unease about his own position within this group, in which he felt partially at home, not least because he knew its social codes, in other words what was regarded as good taste, the sense of humour, if you like, but in which he also felt partially trapped, so that he really would have liked to break out, in a tremendous act of will, in a tremendous leap, if that had been possible.
What was it that united them as a group that was easily recognisable as quite definitely belonging to that period? What, in other words, was their mark of distinction? Their individual development and individual lives had in many ways been similar to the development you would have found in any social grouping like the one to which they belonged. Success had made them adapt. Good food, good drink, spacious living accommodation, holiday houses and weekend homes, cars and boats set their mark on the privileged people who enjoy such benefits, radical or non-radical. But if this generation or, to be more precise, this small minority within their own age group, who were confident, and probably justly so, that they were right to claim their own hallmarks as hallmarks of their generation, for if they had any hallmarks to speak of, any small but important detail that made them stand out amongst other fifty-year-old professors, medical consultants, celebrated actors, heads of administration, senior psychologists who were radical youths in 1950 or 1970 or for that matter whatever one may predict will exist among fifty-year-olds in 2020, then it must have been their refusal to be pillars of society. They were strongly disinclined to regard themselves as pillars of society. Because they didn’t feel they conformed: not to the authority, or rather duties, which they enacted, nor to the social group to which they belonged. They denied being what they were. They didn’t feel that they conformed to their given status. They were consultants, heads of administration, senior psychologists, celebrated actors and professors of literature, but in their innermost thoughts they believed, every single one of them, that they had not adopted the attitude that was expected of them. They were still against them, the others, although they could scarcely be distinguished from them any longer, apart from in small ways; they liked to wear blue denim trousers, so-called jeans or Levi’s, when they carried out their duties as heads of administration, professors, etc.; indeed, Professor Andersen himself rather liked to dress in jeans, and did so with glee, when he turned up at meetings at the National Theatre, where he was a board member. They continued to be against authority, deep inside they were in opposition, even though they were now, in fact, pillars of society who carried out the State’s orders, and no one besides themselves (and old photographs from the year 2020) could perceive that they were anything other than State officials, part of the State fabric, and the fact that most of them voted in elections for the ruling party would hardly surprise anyone other than themselves, but they, on the other hand, would argue that they didn’t want to throw away their own vote and by so doing bring the right-wingers into power. Nor were they being hypocritical. They just fundamentally did not conform in their own eyes, when all was said and done, to what they actually were.