Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

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with the robot-like cameras, put Jonas in mind of creatures from an alien planet and gave him a sense of having withdrawn from the world, a feeling that none of this mattered at all.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?’