The seducer, p.61
The Seducer, page 61
Instead of reconstructing the conversation, Jonas accompanied this scene with voice-overs of what other writers had said about Knut Hamsun. So, while watching the Norwegian writer and the German leader, one of the most hated people in the world at that time, viewers heard various actors reciting what such diverse authors as Selma Lagerlöf, Johannes V. Jensen, Maxim Gorky, Boris Pasternak, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Isaac B. Singer, Stefan Zweig, Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann had written or said about Knut Hamsun, each tribute more glowing than the one before, to the point where it became almost embarrassing, it being nigh on impossible for any Norwegian to imagine that one of their own could have meant so much to so many of the world’s great writers, nay, that he could have been one of most eminent literary figures of the twentieth century.
The truly outrageous thing about the Hamsun programme, a direct consequence of those paradoxical interludes, was Jonas Wergeland’s suggestion that there might be another way of interpreting a person’s character. What Jonas did, you see, as the old writer – in the shape of Normann Vaage – sat there in his dark pinstripe suit, with the NS badge in his buttonhole and one hand on his cane, was to have him undergo a metamorphosis, one which in many ways followed the same shifts that can be detected in Hamsun’s works. Viewers compared this to the ‘heads-bodies-legs’ pictures of their childhood, or with twisting the end of a kaleidoscope, since some parts of the picture remained the same in each frame, while at the same time the picture as a whole changed. By dint of trick photography, and with the help of NRK’s excellent props department, which played a vital part in the Thinking Big series, Normann Vaage’s clothes and makeup changed from one instant to the next in such a way that he not only portrayed all of Hamsun’s many occupations and roles in life – shop assistant, actor, vagabond, road worker, gambler, tram conductor, farmer – but also the characters from Hamsun’s books. So while Hamsun was sitting there talking to Hitler, in between the panorama shots of northern Norway viewers saw him switch identity, becoming by turns the first-person narrator of Hunger, much as he had looked in Per Oscarsson’s rendering, Lieutenant Glahn, Johannes, the miller’s son, Benoni, Tobias Holmengraa from Segelfoss Town, Isak Sellenrå, August or Abel Brodersen from The Ring is Closed in a brown Ulster with his tie all askew. But first and last he was seen as Johan Nilsen Nagel from Mysteries, with his yellow suit and violin case, the most incomprehensible and bizarre of all Hamsun’s characters. Jonas also had Hitler undergo a slow transformation from the Führer, in a double-breasted grey jacket to the humpbacked manikin, the Minute, thus leaving one with a suspicion that there was talk here of a meeting, outside of time and space, between the visionary and his demon.
For Jonas, this meeting with Hitler illustrated what lay at the very heart of Hamsun’s work: the ambiguity, the juggling with lies that turn out to be true, and truths that turn out to be lies. And, not least, it illustrated Hamsun’s greatest achievement: his vision of the complexity of the human consciousness. After all, how was it possible: to be so stubborn, to fight for what one knows to be a lost cause, to do something as monstrous as shake the hand of the very Devil? By and large, Jonas detected a distinct resemblance between Hamsun and his fictional characters, almost all of whom lacked consistency, who refused to be pigeonholed by such terms as ‘identity’ or ‘set personality’; on the contrary, they were unpredictable, they could set the world on fire one day and retire to a mountaintop to meditate the next. They were many. And many people at once.
While working on the series, Jonas Wergeland became almost obsessed with Hamsun, since it seemed that through Hamsun he had been brought face to face with a problem with which he had been battling all his life, one that Gabriel Sand had put him on the track of in the saloon of an old lifeboat, with his mention of ‘his good friend’ Niels Bohr and the latter’s lecture in Como. For both Hamsun himself and his characters were as much of a puzzle as light: that agency which the physicists of the twentieth century had spent so much time and energy in studying and which they believed to take the form of particles one moment and waves the next. Thus, in Hamsun’s case, Jonas Wergeland felt moved to make some reference to Niels Bohr and the concept of complementarity: an obscure concept but one which hinted, nonetheless, that there were two sides to a story – two mutually exclusive aspects, both of which might nonetheless be necessary in order to arrive at a full understanding of the phenomenon. In other words, where the particle and wave properties of light were concerned, it was a matter of looking at light in two different ways at once. And of breaking out of an ingrained and rigid mindset.
This proved to be Jonas’s key to Hamsun. The writer showed him what a little way we have come in terms of understanding a man, or how the pieces of a life fit together. In studying Hamsun, Jonas discovered how dangerous it could be to hang onto some time-honoured psychological theory, to saddle an individual with an identity, a persona, an essence: and equally dangerous to cherish the belief that there has to be some sort of continuity, a thread running through life, as if without this comfort one were liable to become lost in a maze. Such notions prevented one from imagining that there could also be leaps, that there could be interruptions in a life, that it might not hang together at all, at any rate not in the way one thought. So it was with Hamsun. It was only when one held him transfixed, in a still shot, so to speak, that he became either a Nazi sympathizer or the great writer. But Hamsun was both at the same time and something more, something you could never quite put your finger on; and it was this, this great and unsettling enigma, which so few Norwegians seemed able to come to terms with. In the presence of Adolf Hitler, Norway’s worst enemy, Hamsun set out to plead Norway’s cause, tried to do something for Norway, for the people of Norway: a moral endeavour in the midst of immorality, good and evil merging into one. If one is to gain any insight into a man like Hamsun, it is necessary, as Niels Bohr demonstrated in his field, to forsake classic perceptions and plain language. Anyone who says he can think about Hamsun without his head spinning is simply giving away the fact that he has not understood the first thing about Hamsun. It is paradoxical – but also very comforting – that an author, a wordsmith, should constitute a mystery that defies description.
And yet this is exactly what Hamsun’s books are all about: writing the impossible. And it was this that inspired Jonas Wergeland to attempt something similar in his television programme, primarily by introducing an element of undermining, ironic distance to the scene in which Hamsun shook hands with Hitler, and in which Wergeland conveyed both Hamsun’s awe at actually being there in the lion’s den and, with equal force, his knowledge that this was a repellent and monstrous act. One could say that, by dint of its thoroughgoing ambivalence, this programme – one illusion meeting another illusion, two visionaries talking at cross-purposes – dealt as much with the way in which this entire tableau presented a challenge to the creative faculty, that basic element of human life; it dealt, in other words, with something that went beyond all talk, all demands, with a simple message. Consequently, this creative effort on the part of the mind itself became one of the key elements in the programme: that mind with which one perceives, that mind from which spring dreams and illusions and, hence, literature. As much as being a programme about Hamsun, this was a programme about an attempt to stretch the imagination far enough to accommodate this disquieting man by the name of Knut Hamsun. Or, to put it another way: it was about our need for stories. At heart, the whole programme questioned the viewers’ ability to create fantasies, and what part such fantasies – as, for example, those brought into service in understanding a situation as impossible as Hamsun’s meeting with Hitler – actually play in our lives. Hence the reason that this programme with its almost indescribable subject matter – an old man and a tyrant by a panorama window – had a particularly strange effect on the viewers. Everyone enjoyed it, everyone was profoundly intrigued by it, but no one could say exactly why.
The Third Option
So do not, whatever you do, forget the rest of the story of Jonas Wergeland in a studio at Marienlyst, being grilled by Audun Tangen, the Grand Inquisitor himself, ably assisted by Veronika Røed, ace reporter and – who would have thought it? – Jonas’s cousin. Jonas was suffering from an interminable mental block; all he could do was to sit there, staring at the cameramen working feverishly, with the Colonel’s voice sounding impatiently in their headsets, issuing orders to zoom and tilt and pan, and give me a total, and shift a bit to the right; the very sight of those headsets, together with the robot-like cameras, put Jonas in mind of creatures from an alien planet and gave him a sense of having withdrawn from the world, a feeling that none of this mattered at all. Then, at long last, he managed to say: ‘All I really wanted to do was to teach the viewers to think big.’
Veronika gave a soft exultant laugh, as if she had tricked him, all unwittingly, into confessing to a crime: ‘You’re wrong on two points, Jonas Wergeland. For one thing, television does not teach people to think big. TV teaches people to think flat. TV reduces everything to two-dimensional images, it appeals almost exclusively to one sense: vision. Everything that appears on television is automatically rendered flat and banal.’ Jonas could not help but admire her persuasive body language, her elegant suit, her flawless makeup, her unbeatable combination of sex appeal and seriousness. ‘And for another, and more importantly, you are inherently wrong in using the word “teach”,’ she said, almost indulgently, as if she were talking to someone who was dull-witted. ‘Television cannot ever be anything other than sheer entertainment. You are guilty of grossly overestimating the medium. You have not taught anyone anything at all. You have amused them. You have reduced a bunch of famous names to a slick bit of show business. Nothing more.’
‘Could you be a little more specific?’ Audun Tangen interjected.
‘Certainly. Take the programme on Knut Hamsun,’ said Veronika, addressing Jonas. ‘Could you have come up with any more entertaining scene from his life, anything more visually comical than his meeting with Hitler?’
A dramatic still from the Hamsun programme had been used as part of the set decor, along with other easily recognizable shots from the series, including the vignette: a prism splitting the white letters of the title, Thinking Big, into a rainbow. This last hung right behind Jonas; he was not sure whether this had been deliberate.
‘But the pictures themselves cannot be considered in isolation,’ he ventured. ‘You have to look at how the programme as a whole has been made, the way in which it has been constructed.’
He could not have laid himself more wide open. The sparks veritably flew from Veronika; sitting there in her chair, she let fly a whole cannonade of crushing assertions which Audun Tangen did not lift a finger to interrupt. He did not even try to hide his smile, not that he needed to, since up in the control room the Colonel was keeping the camera on Jonas’s face, on his pain, his suppressed anger, his dreadful disappointment.
For long enough the response to the Thinking Big television series had been, as we have seen, overwhelming. After some rather noncommittal reviews in the wake of the first few programmes – as is always the way in Norway: no one dares to say what they think before they know what everyone else thinks – came the jubilation, and once begun there was no end to it. For that, too, is always the way in Norway; when something is good, there are no limits to how good it can be. Even Jonas could see that much of the praise was laughably undiscriminating. As a child watching his father playing the organ, Jonas had always wondered that one small person could produce so much sound, and the response to Thinking Big left him with the same sense of wonder; how could one single, solitary human being cause such a stir simply by making a number of television programmes? Occasionally he had the notion that he, too, was playing an organ of sorts, an utterly unique organ, with the television masts on the tops of windswept Norwegian mountaintops as its pipes: Gausta, Tron, Jetta, Lønahorgi, Sogndal, Nordfjordeid, Narvik, Kistefjell – main transmitters all lying more than 1,000 metres above sea level. Or that through these he could set the stops of a whole nation’s emotions, that he had discovered a ‘Tutti’ button which gave voice to a great, many-voiced song of praise.
Jonas’s triumph remained unmarred until one Saturday morning, one of those beautiful summer mornings when everything is just perfect: the weather, one’s mood, the contents of the refrigerator, Margrete’s fresh-baked bread. All that was lacking were the tabloids, so he had taken a stroll down to the subway station to pick them up. On the way to the station he nodded amiably to people he met, and they for their part returned his greetings with the sort of odd smiling respect that left one in no doubt as to what they would say when they returned home: ‘Guess who I saw down at the newsagent’s!’ If he had not done so before, then certainly now, after the television series, Jonas Wergeland felt like a duke, a real prince. He sat down at the breakfast table feeling thoroughly – one hundred per cent – content. Margrete was pottering about in the bathroom, Kristin was out playing. He took a sip of his coffee and opened the newspaper.
There it was: a murderous piece penned by Veronika Røed, the incisive overture to four probing articles promised for the coming week. I do not intend to devote any space here to citing the content of a critique with which most people – Norwegians at least – are already familiar. But it may be worth pointing out that it was, in fact, the Classic Norwegian Discussion. In these articles Veronika Røed accused Jonas Wergeland of something which, in other countries, would raise very few eyebrows but which in Norway was sheer dynamite: namely, of pursuing aesthetic experience as an end in itself. ‘Jonas Wergeland ascribes to television a function that transcends good and evil,’ she wrote. So there you had it, Norwegian moralism raising its head yet again, and not surprisingly she cited the Hamsun programme in particular as a warning example.
There were times when Jonas Wergeland had the feeling that the country of Norway was a reversing boat and that he was in danger of being sucked in by its propeller.
Not that Jonas had not known all along that the bubble was bound to burst, that it had all gone too smoothly, but he was surprised at how quickly and how easily the great majority allowed themselves to become caught up in the witch-hunt. It was as if someone had snapped their fingers and an entire nation had woken out of a hypnotic trance and turned into a bellowing ape mountain. And as if that were not enough, a great many of these people seemed happy to have been told, with all the empty rhetoric and images frequently resorted to in Norway when it comes to anything new, whether important or not, that this was nothing but ‘art for art’s sake’, that ‘the emperor had no clothes’. Every tired old cliché in the book was trotted out – each one merely serving as a clear sign that everything was, reassuringly, just as it had always been. What annoyed Jonas most of all was the fact that people did not trust their own judgement, their feeling that the programme had really mattered to them, had given them something; that they were willing to deny their own instincts the minute some village idiot started bawling cheap slogans.
Then of course, after Veronika’s attack – that tactical tour de force of ingratiating populist phrase-mongering – the grand debate was off and running, like a collective attack of bitter hindsight, as unstoppable as a juggernaut; all at once grave doubts were being expressed as to the authority of the series. A whole host of academics and experts in this field and that, all of whom usually did nothing but sit around gathering dust in various offices and seats of learning, saw this as the chance of a lifetime and came racing out on to the course, screaming and shouting, to ride their hobbyhorses, to become celebrities for a week, to give vent to decades of pent-up ambition and bitterness, all of which now hit Jonas Wergeland full on. Even his colleagues at Broadcasting House saw this as a welcome opportunity to stab him in the back, under cover of some watertight excuse or other, not uncommonly a concern for the well-being of the medium of television. The debate raged fiercely in the press for several months. Not since the EEC debate of 1972 had such nigh-on hysterical fury emanated from so many column inches. Jonas did not lack for defenders, but taken all in all, these pieces most definitely worked against him, and even though many of the accusations against him fell flat, being nothing but petty personal attacks and harmless hair-splitting, the main current of criticism followed the lines laid down by Veronika Røed: divested of all its trappings, Jonas Wergeland’s series was an empty form, devoid of any real substance. But Jonas also sustained many a cut that stung more than he would admit, for in a debate of this kind just about everything is dragged into the open. ‘Can one trust a man,’ wrote one indignant mathematician in connection with the programme on Abel, ‘whose academic career consists of ten credits in astrophysics and two credits in mathematics, a man who, in some respects, never got beyond Prelims?’
Jonas Wergeland sat in the studio, surrounded by a landscape of his own making, constructed out of stills from Norway’s most talked-about television series, a room lined with pictures from a former triumph, suddenly transformed into a torture chamber. He heard Veronika Røed reiterating her arguments – now honed and polished, as seductive as diamonds – for the benefit of two million viewers, a whole nation gathered in front of their television screens, with Audun Tang occasionally breaking in to ask her to amplify some point, or elaborating on them himself, delivering the odd brilliantly sarcastic remark, reading out carefully selected quotes from a sheet he had conscientiously prepared in advance; other times he interrupted Veronika’s flow of words, almost apologetically, finding it necessary, for the sake of appearances, to ask Jonas for his comments, whereupon Jonas would make some brief, inconsequential reply. It was almost as if he were letting himself be mowed down, mangled, because he seemed to have nothing to say for himself, he felt sick, frozen to the marrow, taking a fatalistic view of the whole thing, there was nothing he could do about it; he made such a poor show of replying that even Audun Tangen eventually began to feel unhappy about it: the discussion was too unbalanced, a walkover, it didn’t even make for good entertainment, it was not achieving the effect that Tangen was looking for, the sort that would remind the viewers of his greatness, of his heyday, his quick-fire interviews, or the times in election programmes when he, the Grand Inquisitor, caused representatives from various political parties to go absolutely berserk and even reduced one to tears, a legendary feat; but there would be none of that here; Jonas Wergeland was too distant. Tangen could see it, inwardly lamented it; he tried to provoke Jonas with references to Veronika Røed’s fusillades, but sadly it did no good; Jonas just sat there, gazing at the clock on a pillar behind the cameras, following the second hand, circling and circling, and the big hand inching its way slowly towards the end of the programme without his having said anything of any consequence, anything that might redress the impression which the people of Norway now had of him, after Veronika’s successful campaign in the press and now here, live on TV; what could he do or say anyway, in the face of such a torrent of moral indignation, expressed with such tremendous seriousness, such assertiveness, what answer could there possibly be to the eternal pathological Norwegian fear of the word ‘form’, the horror of that enduringly intolerable foreign word ‘aesthetic’? Jonas sat there listening to Veronika repeating, hammering home, assertions the gist of which was that his programmes were totally devoid of any ethical substance; there was nothing behind the style, Veronika said, or pronounced, nothing but a lot of technical wizardry, and thus the entire series was really an evocation of pure, unadulterated nihilism – the most offensive word in the Norwegian language, a tag synonymous with some terrible, infectious leprosy.
