Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Jonas had focused particularly on the moment when a bowing Abel hands over his paper on algebraic functions and their integrals — a theorem of such enormously far-reaching importance, regarded by some as the most significant mathematical work of the nineteenth century — at a meeting of the French Scientific Society at the Institut de France, in October 1826, where Augustin Louis Cauchy and Adrien Marie Legendre, the two men who would decide his fate — all shame on their names — were appointed to assess his paper: a scene in which Jonas made much of the Institut building, the solemn atmosphere of that room steeped in centuries of scholarship and the blasé faces of the assembled company, their sceptical glances at Abel, as he stood there, made up like a Negro. From this Jonas cut to a close-up of the front page of his manuscript, showing what was for him, Jonas, the obvious key to Abel’s failure. After his name Abel had added: Norvégien . From Norway. Norwegian. Could those grand gentlemen have been in any doubt? This addition was their guarantee that they were looking at a manuscript they did not have to take seriously, which they could, therefore, treat with the greatest indifference.

Abel’s hopes, on the other hand, were high; he expected to receive an answer within two weeks. The programme dwelt on Abel during this period of waiting as it dragged out, stretched to three weeks, then to four weeks; the camera followed Abel as he roamed the streets of Paris, waiting, lonely, hungry, waiting desperately, on tenterhooks, for the judges’ verdict. From time to time one was given a peek into Cauchy’s study and saw how Abel’s brilliant work on transcendental functions sank further and further down into a heap of papers, a situation almost as reprehensible, not to say stupid, as an Egyptologist having the Rosetta Stone fall into his hands right at the start, then forgetting where he’s put it. Cauchy — all shame on his name — was too taken up with his own works to look at the jottings of a young mathematician from Norway, a country where, by definition, scholarship was still languishing in the Stone Age.

In the meantime Abel, this Norwegian, was seen sitting in the cafés around St Germain des Prés, lodging as he did with a poor family who lived not far from there, in a street which no longer exists, as if the French, consumed by guilt, wished to erase all memory of Abel. He sits in cafés, writes letters that, typically, he dates with a mathematical problem. We see Abel, a Norwegian, walking the streets of a Paris that grows colder and colder; in the background we hear the sound of bells — a sound that dominates the whole programme — church bells ringing; we see how cold Abel is, shivering with cold, we hear him coughing, a cough that gets worse and worse; we see him circling, trembling with cold, around the Institut de France, stronghold of arrogance, where Jonas showed men walking out of the main door and shaking their heads dismissively, Cauchy among them — all shame on his name — at Abel who stands there waiting, humble, head bowed, made up like a Negro. The camera stuck with Abel, following him on his walks through the Jardin du Luxembourg amid the chiming of church bells, and from there back to the Institut de France, always back to that spot, around that building, coughing and coughing, then into the Café Procope, just round the back in the rue Mazarine, the haunt of all manner of individuals: Diderot and Rousseau to name but two; and here Abel, their equal, algebra’s answer to Rimbaud, scribbles on a sheet of paper, mulling over difficult mathematical questions. So here walked, here sat, a genius, an unacknowledged genius, a supposed nothing who was, in fact, a number one. And what was it they overlooked, these pompous Frenchmen, these budding Napoleons blinded by their own excellence? They overlooked a man with a unique gift for spotting profound connections between mathematical groups, how they affected one another; for turning tricky questions on their heads, seeing things from new angles, as when — instead of solving the problem of fifth-degree equations, he showed that generally these could not be expressed in terms of radicals. Similarly, with elliptic integrals: instead of studying the integrals themselves, he looked at the opposite, or inverse, functions, the elliptical functions. Suddenly, thanks to this magnificent device, everything looked different. Abel is brooding on a whole host of projects. There is just one catch: he has the misfortune to have been born on the periphery. Abel, a Norwegian, wanders around Paris, waiting and coughing, he waits one month, he waits two months, on a visit to a doctor he is found to be suffering from tuberculosis, but still Abel hangs on patiently in Paris for as long as his money lasts. Then he has to leave, travelling home by way of Berlin.

Not until word of Abel’s death reached Paris, a good two years later, was his paper unearthed by Cauchy — all shame on his memory — and dealt with post-haste, although it was not published until 1841, fifteen years after its submission. To crown it all, the publishers then added to the catalogue of crimes by losing the manuscript immediately thereafter.

Perhaps it’s not so strange that Jonas Wergeland, after working on Abel, had an even greater hatred of all things French, from the guillotine to their pompous, incomprehensible post-structuralism with its obscure terminology, all those arrogant Frenchmen, in fact, who, God help us, couldn’t even see that their own composer, Berlioz, was a genius; although Jonas Wergeland did possibly go too far in declaring in a promotional interview that the French were the most cynical and arrogant of races, that it was hardly any wonder they were the most detested and corrupt of all colonialists, or that they had no qualms about carrying out nuclear tests anywhere, as long as it wasn’t their own country. ‘And if you’re a corrupt dictator in the market for arms,’ he was reported as saying, ‘you can be sure that France will be happy to oblige, in their eyes no tyrant is too rotten.’ One of the film crew later maintained that, during the regular spot in which Wergeland himself entered the scene, he had spat on the Institut building — a shot which was edited out of the final version. Jonas Wergeland was sure he was right: France had killed a Norwegian, one of the greatest Norwegians of all time.

In the programme’s closing scene, Jonas Wergeland showed his hero standing just beyond the Pont Neuf, at that triangle where the two channels of the Seine run into one, gazing at the Institut de France. As a viewer, one senses Abel’s feeling that he is faced here with two choices in life, that he stands at a crucial parting of the ways. And yet one also sees what an ocean separates this coughing, shivering, starving figure by the bridge from those blind, self-righteous, shameless men shaking their heads outside the Institut de France. For the whole of the final minute Jonas showed fragments of Abel’s calculations projected onto various shots of Paris, not least of the Scientific Society building, televised images which made it look as though the buildings of Paris, the entire city, were covered in mathematical formulae, in Abel’s equations and elliptical functions, almost like graffiti, a rebellion, vandalism. An algebraic conquest.

One thing that comes to no one as a matter of course is love, far less that hormonal jitterbug inside us so feebly termed ‘being in love’. After Jonas’s dream, that somewhat morbid dream of getting his hands under Anne Beate Corneliussen’s bulging Setesdal sweater was, as it were, squeezed to bits, he suffered for some time from feelings of unfulfilled desire, and certain girls in the parallel class — this was before mixed classes became the norm — were the object of many a long look. Not unnaturally, it was one of these girls who eventually caught his attention or, more accurately, grabbed Jonas’s attention. Henny F. was a pretty ordinary girl, and Jonas did not take any real notice of her until the class trip in eighth grade, in March of that year — and, I should add, with the entire class in the throes of puberty — when they spent a whole tremulous week up in the hills near Vinstra, where the attraction between the sexes was strong enough to start an avalanche and a number of new pairings saw the light of day or rather, the dark of night. There was one dinner in particular at which Henny F. made a big impression by displaying her talent for tying knots of spaghetti in her mouth with her tongue. What would it be like to kiss such a girl, Jonas mused.