But these teachers were not to be pitied, nor were they robbed of any of their self-confidence. I would remind you that we are talking here of Oslo Cathedral School, Norway’s élite school par excellence, an institution which, in spite of everything, prided itself on the quality of its teaching staff. And no one need feel sorry for Mr Osen PhD, with his thesis on Wage Labour and the Rise of the Class System in Norway, 1870–1921, when Jonas put up his hand to protest, and Jonas was protesting not only, like Axel, at Mr Osen’s cocksureness; he was also protesting because such a system, in which all of the pieces fall neatly into place — illustrated, what is more, by a wheel spinning in mid-air — was so monstrous that it made him feel physically sick.
‘This stuff about the steam engine is all very well, sir, but whatever happened, one might ask, to an element such as “the spirit”?’ It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, at the word ‘spirit’, Mr Osen recoils like a vampire confronted with a crucifix. ‘I would just like to remind you of what the historian Jacob Burckhardt says in that celebrated work Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien,’ Jonas goes on, ‘in the first chapter of the third section, which deals with the Renaissance attitude to antiquity.’ As you can see, this was one of those occasions when Jonas Wergeland revealed the source of his quotation, and to listen to him anyone would have thought that he had just finished reading this relatively demanding work, in an early edition, printed in Gothic at that, just sailed through it, and not, as was in fact the case, simply memorized a piece from his little red notebook, one which was five lines longer than the part he had cited: ‘Here,’ says Jonas, ‘Burckhardt asserts that it was not the revival of antiquity alone, but as much the spirit of the Italian people, which led to the spread of the Renaissance throughout the western world. Would you then, sir, rule out the possibility that the spirit of the French people, for example, had some bearing on the events of 1848?’
As I say, Osen was a tough nut, and so Osen simply ignores the question or rather, he is so nettled by the mere mention of Jacob Burckhardt’s name that he snorts, a snort which is, to be sure, drowned out by the chuffing of the steam engine.
Then it is time for Axel to take over: ‘But sir, what about the minds of the people? What about the theories that had been making themselves felt in Europe for fifty to sixty years?’ he says or all but shouts. ‘Theories propounded by, for example, Diderot, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau? Do they count for nothing, sir? Or do you perhaps believe that Diderot, too, came about as a consequence of the French Revolution? Or,’ and here Axel points to the toy on the top of the desk, ‘of the steam engine?’
Then the thing that Osen fears most happens: the class bursts out laughing, even the girls in the white Aran sweaters laugh. And at this moment Osen thinks back with longing — and this makes it possible to forgive him — to when he was a boy, to the Christmas when he was given this toy, so long before all the years at university, all the toiling away at Wage Labour and the Rise of the Class System in Norway, 1870–1921; Osen thinks of how, that first Christmas Day, he put the steam engine through its paces for his chums and they had stared, all agog, at this marvel which, for a short time, put Osen — the boy Osen, that is — in the for him unwonted position of being the centre of attention: a marvel which was not a steam engine — they had not the faintest idea what this thing might be used for, that it was a model of something which actually existed — but a miraculous object, a sort of perpetuum mobile, and what mattered was the gleam of the paintwork, the tooting of the whistle, the smoke issuing from the funnel. It was pure magic, a pure enigma, much like history.
Axel had long since spotted the turtle in Mr Osen’s lesson — and it was one of the truly big turtles of the day: dialectic materialism. And since Axel Stranger was extremely interested in causal relationships, a mania which would also come to determine his choice of profession, he now rises to his feet, as if to mark the solemnity of the moment, and says: ‘History requires goodstories, sir. What you have not grasped is that dialectic materialism is a really rottenstory.’ And at that he delivers a lengthy and pretty impassioned diatribe against dialectic materialism in which he succeeds quite brilliantly in mastering such dogmatic and deadly concepts as ‘the forces of productivity’ and ‘means of production’ and ‘basis’ and ‘superstructure’ in such a way that he not only takes up the fight but actually goes into the attack on Osen’s home ground, where the goal is defended by Karl Marx and his foreword to A Critique of Political Economy. That Axel thus dismisses dialectic materialism’s answer to the not exactly trifling question as to what factors have contributed most to the transformation of human society, could be put down neither to his being an uncritical idealist or a wish on his part to return to the primary school’s subjective, storybook style of teaching, but to a demand for fewer bombastic theories and a more nuanced approach — in other words, have the steam engine, by all means, but not just that. ‘You might at least put a well-thumbed volume from Diderot’s encyclopaedia alongside that bloody steam engine, eh sir?’
And it is here that Mr Osen makes his fatal blunder: he tries to accommodate Axel’s views and as a result, particularly after a swift and elegant parry from Axel, he loses himself in a hopeless rigmarole of vulgar Marxist jargon: living proof, if you like, that no Norwegian is ever capable of absorbing more than the most simplified version of any theory from the outside world, just as turtles from along the coast of Mexico are doomed to die on those occasions when they stray into the Gulf Stream and end up in Norwegian waters.
Axel, on the other hand, is in his element. It would have been fair enough if Olsen had simply trotted out Engels’ fine-honed version of dialectic materialism, even though that, too, is now so utterly banal, since anyone with an ounce of sense has long since recognized the relationship between technology, ownership structures and civilization. But what Osen is advocating with his little steam engine really is going too far, a ludicrous brand of determinism. ‘So you see, sir, what I cannot accept about this theory of yours,’ says Axel, ‘is, first of all, that it denies the significance to history of conscious human acts, which is, in itself, quite absurd; and secondly it states that human beings act solely from motives which spring from material concerns, something which, quite honestly, sir, goes against everything experience tells us.’
So ends this history class with 2MFb at Oslo Cathedral School, and it ends with a teacher packing away his boyhood steam engine and a pupil, right to the last, following one pointed remark with another until, as the school bell rings he strategically gets in the final word, as he concludes by saying that the interesting thing about Watt’s steam engine was not what it gave rise to but what had given rise to it. In other words, whether it had been an angel or a devil that had given Watt and the others the idea.
So much for high school. But right now it was recess for Jonas. He was on board a little gem of a lifeboat, a slice of Norwegian history if you like.