Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Then hear, and hear with pride, how things went with Jonas Wergeland when, as a natural consequence of all this, he found himself in a television studio at Marienlyst in Oslo, almost visibly squirming, as if he really were being grilled, tortured, at a question concerning Knut Hamsun, a question so pointed that it was virtually an ultimatum.

He tried to get round it. ‘The programme had nothing to do with whether he was a Nazi or not,’ he said, his voice barely audible; he had to clear his throat before continuing. ‘It dealt with one pivotal event, intended to shed some light on Hamsun’s life.’ Jonas glanced up at the studio firmament in such a way that the viewers must have thought he was seeking help from there, or possibly looking for an almost invisible planet, like Pluto, but the only thing to catch his eye was a little overhead camera, mounted close to the ceiling, hidden away like a black hole amid the galaxy of different lamps, this too an innovative element, with the Colonel, from his all-powerful position in the control room, occasionally cutting to a bird’s-eye shot of the studio and the three protagonists, as if to create a certain distance, while at the same time giving the viewers the illusion of sneaking up on them, of eavesdropping on a private quarrel.

Veronika Røed, quite unaffected by half-an-hour in the studio, by the inhuman concentration which the cameras and spotlights craved, was not about to back down on the Hamsun issue; she could tell that this was a weak point: ‘But the event in Hamsun’s life which you selected is only a detail . How can you be so incredibly naïve as to think that such a tiny slice of Hamsun’s life could give viewers any insight into how it hung together as a whole? I doubt if Hamsun has ever been presented in a less credible light!’

Jonas was aware that the Colonel, on the alert and rubbing his hands, was now showing an ultra close-up of his, Jonas’s, face, as if holding him up to ridicule, on one and a half million television screens; slicing him up; illustrating Veronika Røed’s point and letting everyone see how badly his makeup had been applied, see the beads of sweat on his upper lip, giving the impression of a gloss surface about to crack.

Something stirred inside him. It was that word ‘credible’ that had given him a glimpse of an angle of escape: ‘There, you’ve just said it yourself, that ’s why you don’t like my programmes,’ he said to Veronika, who looked quite flabbergasted to see him baring his teeth. ‘You’re accusing me of not making what you want to see: psychological portraits. The sort of programmes that people are used to. The sort of thing we’ve been seeing on television for the past thirty years. With the emphasis not on “psycho”, but on “logical”. That good old logic which is true because it is recognizable and safe.’

To his relief, Jonas found himself growing more animated, but he was cut short by a VT spot. Then, while that was running, one of the studio hands had to turn on a fresh spotlight to replace one that had gone out. Jonas watched him turning the little cogs on the side of the spotlight with a pole rather like a boat-hook; working intently, sweating, giving Jonas the urge to help him, or simply to have a go himself, with that boat-hook, which reminded him so much of his summers on Hvaler, his grandfather’s stories.

‘Ah, so you admit that you don’t give two hoots for the moral aspect? You feel you’re above all that, do you?’ This from Veronika, they were back in the studio, and even though Jonas’s eyes had fixed once again on the overhead camera, she did not catch him off-guard. ‘It’s amazing,’ he said. ‘It really is so depressing to have to say this — but the thing is, my programmes are neither psychological analyses nor ethical commentaries …’

‘What are they, then?’ Audun Tangen asked like a shot, in an echo of the quick-fire interviews of his heyday.

‘They are stories . And stories don’t convey a moral, they don’t teach, they provide an experience, they get under our skin, become part of us, like genes, and like genes they can be used for good or evil.’

Now the studio really came to life. Audun Tangen and Veronika Røed were both talking at once; Veronika, in particular, was up in arms, but to Tangen’s credit it has to be said that he kept her in check, endeavoured to pursue Jonas’s statements, possibly because he was happy that Jonas was finally answering back. ‘How on Earth can you say that a story has nothing to do with morality?’ he asked.

‘Okay, so I’m splitting hairs,’ said Jonas, confidently as if up until then he had been treading water and now, suddenly, felt his feet come to rest on the back of a huge turtle. ‘But everyone else is splitting hairs, so why shouldn’t I.’ Jonas Wergeland leaned forward in his chair, addressing his words as much to two million viewers as to Veronika Røed and Audun Tangen: ‘Stories are not about what is good or evil, but about good and evil. A story embodies both aesthetics and ethics in a sort of complementarity, if I can use such a word. But stories also embody a third indefinable element, something which gives rise to a sort of a leap inside us, something outside of, or contained within, the ethics-aesthetics issue. And we are not talking here about something above and beyond good and evil, but about another issue, an issue which comes before, as it were, a more fundamental issue; and this totally different level relates to our imagination. When you come right down to it, the point of stories is to give people fresh eyes, to enable them to see the world differently. That ’s what the programme on Hamsun was about.”

A great many people agreed that a change came over Jonas Wergeland during the final third of the programme, that he seemed to revive and presented them with his old self, the persona for which he was famed: his face, his charisma, his winning personality, and from then on he could have said anything at all, and they would have lapped it up; except that Jonas Wergeland did not just say anything at all; he sat there and talked about stories, he presented a passionate defence of his right to tell stories.

I can now reveal what had actually happened, although I do so with some reservations, knowing that this could lead to misunderstanding and misinterpretation; it was the camera mounted on the studio ceiling that had provided Jonas Wergeland with a fresh angle. As he looked up into its lens, that black hole, he had the sensation that the camera lowered itself down over him and settled on top of him, and this led him to fantasize that, via this camera, he was making love to the people of Norway, and it occurred to him that much of his career at Marienlyst came down to just that; and at this thought, or rather this fantasy, this in many ways shocking fantasy, he felt his nervous shivers giving way to warmth and furthermore, as with his encounters with women, he had a revelation. Jonas Wergeland was sitting in a studio at Marienlyst, head tilted back during a video insert, gazing at a camera lens above his head, when suddenly it dawned on him what it was that he had been trying to do all along in his television series Thinking Big : to tell stories, stories that dealt with those chinks in existence which only the imagination could penetrate, insinuating its way into the grey area between cause and effect, where the ability to select a set of values, to perceive the links in a chain, lay slumbering.

And in passing it ought to be said that this revelation also prompted Jonas to wonder whether he might not have spent his whole life misunderstanding Veronika Røed’s motives, which he was inclined to believe sprang from pure evil. On reflection, however, he realized that Veronika had always had a weakness for a good story which, as well as channelling her quite naturally into the world of tabloid journalism, where she had proved to be a proper little goldmine for the owners, had also in certain instances enticed her into fabricating stories. Such as with all of the debate surrounding his television series. So when she had pushed him into the water as a child, or shut him up inside a snow cave, it was not inconceivable that such things might represent an attempt to dramatize real life, a curiosity to know whether a little shove or a snowball would beget a good story. At best, thought Jonas, she had done those things because she knew that he would be rescued.