Following is the second chapter of Lars Gustafsson's novel The Dean, translated by Michael Meigs. Click to go to chapter one.
2. A Learned Vietnam Veteran
The Dean?
Oh, yes. I’m happy to write about him. I will not maintain that I got to know him during the time that I was his assistant dean, but I did get a couple of things clear about him.
* * *
I was called in to the Dean’s office.
Naturally, that was intimidating. Of course I was worried. From the very first.
I had never met him personally before that. He doesn’t appear as often in public as the other deans because he is confined to a wheelchair. I was thoroughly nervous as I sat waiting in the reception room in the West Mall Building.
At the exact minute noted in my note of convocation the elegant telephone in the reception area rang. Susan, the cheerful strawberry blond secretary who also served as receptionist and who was visibly doing her best to put me at ease, opened the doors and I stepped into the surprisingly large, elegant office of the Dean.
It’s remarkable how much one can take in at once when one is in the attentive, in fact highly alert state of mind I was experiencing at that moment. Carpets, etchings, paintings. I even managed to note that the walls were decorated with a fine print from the Invenzione of Piranesi’s Carceri - The Imaginary Prisons. One sees them often on display in the quarters of men of authority, but rarely in such a clear, well-realized print. The stock of existing prints must have aged and worn down considerably since Piranesi’s time.
The man in the wheelchair behind the large oak desk where documents and folders were placed in perfect order appeared not imposing but in fact rather diminutive.
A deep green blanket lay over the Dean’s knees, hiding his legs. Otherwise he was dressed in a very correct gray suit and a black-and-white striped tie that in fact I recognized: King’s College, Cambridge. It seemed entirely appropriate to me.
He was entirely bald with a short well-trimmed gray beard in which a few traces of black remained, and his eyes were of a very cold blue. They were the sort of eyes that have seen the worst and which have somehow endured it; that was my first thought. No doubt they could see as many horrible sights as might exist, and they would regard them with the same calm, unmoved curiosity.
I began by introducing myself, with some ceremony and perhaps in a long-winded fashion. After all, that is my fashion of dealing with things. I am a long-winded man. I didn’t get far before the Dean interrupted me with a low and noticeably melodious voice.
“Spencer. Since I called you here, perhaps I do not need to be told your name. I am not yet completely senile. Not yet.”
Of course, I didn’t have much to say to that. The opening move was his.
“I read the published version of your thesis on Condillac this week. It is very interesting. A fine little book about a neglected philosopher. Or perhaps neglected only by me. That statue is really a fantastic idea, don’t you think?”
[The fact is that Condillac applies himself to an unusual thought experiment. He imagines himself to be a statue. Motionless, cold and hard – a statue. And then he endows that statue with the sense of smell. As a point of departure.
The statue becomes aware of smells.
But it cannot distinguish the difference between the smells and itself. The statue is the smells but is also the world.
The statue, one can assert in this instance, is all powerful. Or at any rate completely self-sufficient. It is a fantastic idea.]
“Yes, it certainly is! Hume lacked the imagination to come up with something of the sort.”
“You remember, of course, how the whole thing develops. Condillac’s statue is endowed with one ability after another. In the last chapter, I believe, he can even move around like a ghost and touch objects, one after another, and investigate what is himself and what is the outer world. He rushes around and becomes tired, terribly tired, and he falls asleep. But soon afterward he is in movement again.
“When I read your book I began to contemplate a remarkable idea.
“Couldn’t one reverse the sequence? So that the statue loses one capability after another, until it stands there, completely motionless and cold and it is a smell, a single fragrance, constituting the world?”
“A melancholy thought!”
“Yes. I suppose so.”
With a sudden change of tone he picked up the folder that the secretaries had obviously placed in readiness on his desk.
“Yes, well, Spencer, I have invited you here to hear what you might think about the possibility of working with my office, principally with development issues. Which, as you certainly know, mostly involve going out and begging for money. I need an assistant dean and I think that you have the qualities for the job.”
I was on the verge of asking him why, but I realized at the last moment that might be a mistake. I might have just asked how he came up with the idea, but I didn’t do that, either.
I was simply so taken back by the whole idea that I sat there like a sheep and thanked him and accepted.
“So we are in agreement, I see.”
I nodded my cowardly acceptance.
He startled me entirely with one additional question.
“Are you an atheist yourself, Spencer? Like Condillac and the Baron d’Holbach?”
He asked the question as if, really, it was a certain type of question. But at the same time perhaps it was also a different one. For some reason that I could not understand, it was clearly an important issue for him. I had no idea if I even owed him an answer; after all, we were in a state university where one is presumed not to take account of individuals’ views on such things. If I had been a couple of years younger I might have protested. But it was clear that he was asking because he really wanted to know.
“I am, in fact, an atheist.”
“Interesting! Very interesting!”
He tapped the end of his pencil lightly on the desk a couple of times. I interpreted that as a sign that the discussion was finished.
* * *
THREE WEEKS LATER to the surprise of my colleagues and, I believe, to the envy in certain cases of some, in a decision that passed over a long row of many more meritorious heads, I was named Associate Dean of Research and Development in the College of Liberal Arts. At the express request of the Dean.
It sounds grander than it was. The assignment is in fact that of a go-fer. Perhaps I should have stayed where I was, among the teacups and uncorrected essays with messy footnotes in the student-packed corridors of Waggener Hall. That was the spring term when rainwater began to leak through the roof of the fourth floor, so I hadn’t yet been able to move into my office. So I left my small, ancient room with its filing cabinet and the chairs and desks worn out by generations of students, and the precarious bookcases that were a threat to human life—and moved into an elegant administration office in the West Mall Building.
© Lars Gustafsson, 2003, in a translation by Michael Meigs (© 2010)
[Click to go back to Chapter 1 - One World, Seen from Another]
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