Dag Solstad's Shyness & Dignity

In the middle of Act IV. Where Mrs. Sørbye appears in Ekdal’s home and announces that she is going to marry Werle, the merchant, and where Ekdal’s lodger Dr. Relling is present, and he read (himself, instead of asking one of his pupils to do it, which he did at times for the sake of appearances, but he preferred to do it himself): “Relling (with a slight tremor in his voice): This can’t possibly be true? Mrs. Sørbye: Yes, my dear Relling, indeed it is.” As he was reading he felt an unendurable excitement because all at once he thought he was on the track of something to which he had not previously paid any attention when trying to understand The Wild Duck. For twenty-five years he had gone through this drama by Henrik Ibsen with eighteen-year-olds in their last year of high school, and he had always had problems with Dr. Relling. He had not fully grasped what he was doing in the play. He had seen that his function was to proclaim elementary, unvarnished truths about the other characters in the play, well, actually about the entire play. He had seen him as a kind of mouthpiece for Ibsen and had been unable to grasp why that was necessary. Indeed, he had been of the opinion that the figure of Dr. Relling weakened the play. What did Henrik Ibsen need a “mouthpiece” for? Did not the play speak for itself? he had thought. But here, here there was something. Henrik Ibsen lays his hand on his minor character Dr. Relling and, within parentheses, makes him speak with a slight tremor in his voice as he asks Mrs. Sørbye if it is really true that she will marry Werle, the powerful merchant. For a moment, Henrik Ibsen pushes Relling into the drama he otherwise exclusively comments upon with his sarcasms. There he is, caught in his own bitter fate as a perpetual, unsuccessful admirer of Mrs. Sørbye, throughout her two marriages, first to Dr. Sørbye, now to Werle, and for a brief moment it is his fate, and nothing else, that is frozen into immobility on the stage. The moment of the minor figure. Both before and after this he remains the same, the man who reels off those smart lines, one of which has acquired an immortal status in Norwegian literature: “If you take the life-lie away from an average person, you take away his happiness as well.”