Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

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.

And in the midst of all this — with all the experts being trooped out, on tape, in inserts which were so intricately worked in that Jonas’s thoughts went to poor Vivi, the script girl up in the control room, whose job it was to keep track of all the VT spots — Jonas did nonetheless try to defend himself, even if for the most part he simply sat there, saying ‘ah’ or ‘well’ or ‘no’ or ‘yes, but’, interspersed with the odd ‘it’s possible’ and on a couple of occasions: ‘I don’t know’ — this last alone was something of a sensation, enough in itself to establish the programme as a milestone in television history: that a man, and a Norwegian at that, should appear on television and say ‘I don’t know’.

The truth is that Jonas Wergeland could not think of anything profound to say, even though he was dismayed to note that the whole discussion presented an example of a particularly Norwegian way of thinking: when you cannot see the moral in something, which is to say, when you do not recognize the moral, you call it ‘immoral’ or, at best, ‘nihilism’. Here, under a firmament of irritating spotlights, Jonas saw more clearly than ever how the entire case against him could be boiled down to the following: his programmes were reprehensible because they were different , because they could not be understood or explained in traditional terms or by recourse to good old-fashioned ideology. Because that is the way of things in Norway: if something does not claim quite explicitly — in block capitals underlined in red, basically — to deal with morality, people are incapable of opening their minds to the idea that it might, nonetheless, deal with morality, and they had even more trouble in accepting — perish the thought — that, as in Jonas Wergeland’s case, it might actually deal with another and arguably more important link in the chain of causality that leads to ethical standpoints: namely, the imagination.

But, thought Jonas, he was also guilty of an even worse crime: he had ventured to question the established perceptions. To Jonas it often seemed as if the Norwegian race — more than other races — considered itself to be complete and fully evolved in much the same way as it took the theories of its day for granted, regarding them as unshakeable truths. Nothing could be harder than getting a Norwegian who had finally and painfully managed to absorb new ideas to understand that even the theory of relativity, or quantum theory, or Darwinism, were merely temporary, that in a hundred years they would be a thing of the past.

But how was he to say that, how to protest against this deep-seated need for old habits and the status quo; how to find an angle that would get round this endless deadlock between ethics and aesthetics?

Jonas almost laughed out loud when a guy with a handheld camera stepped into the arena and proceeded to move, hunkered down, around the set, getting shots of Veronika from below while she was talking. Looking back on it, it is easy to see how, ironically, this whole programme, with its bombastic assertions regarding Jonas Wergeland’s aestheticism, owed so much to the Thinking Big series — and would indeed have been unthinkable had it not been for it. Never had the artistic form been employed more deliberately in a current affairs programme. Not only did the Colonel use video inserts in an experimental fashion, he even had Normann Vaage, dressed up as Henrik Ibsen, saunter onto the set once or twice to say a few words direct to the handheld camera. On the graphics side, too, by dint of the character generator, the Colonel produced quite a few innovative effects and demonstrated a couple of new ways with the digital special-effects system. The vision switcher said later that he had never made such great or varied use of the buttons on his control panel — and this in a live debate programme. The Colonel was to reap the greatest plaudits of his career for this broadcast.

But none of this was of any help to Jonas. He did not feel up to becoming involved in all this; he simply sat there thinking of irrelevant things, like the time he had lifted a 150-kilo cabinet, or the time he had raised the Comorian flag over the schoolyard, or the time he had broken a circle of stones on the top of Mount Sinai; he did his best to follow what was going on, really concentrated, but then he found himself marvelling at Tangen’s cleverness, his ability to be mentally one jump ahead, coming up with other questions, other lines of attack, while at the same time listening intently — Tangen, that is — to Veronika’s tirades.

‘Pull yourself together, for Christ’s sake,’ Tangen said to Jonas, while an excerpt from the Hamsun programme was being shown in all those thousands of homes. Tangen had received an irate message ‘in his ear’ from the Colonel. ‘Surely you can at least defend yourself!’ Tangen said.