The Conqueror

Cain and Abel

Stamps illustrate the uniformity of an era. For months, years maybe, everyone, millions of letter-writers, stick identical images on their envelopes. Stamps were the forerunners of the mass media: there too, for weeks on end, one sees the same face, the same picture, everywhere. It was against just such a background that Jonas Wergeland’s programmes stood out; he produced a stream of images unlike anything ever seen before, on NRK or any other channel.

After the scandal broke, Jonas Wergeland’s television programmes were pretty much put under the microscope, as if people were searching for clues, some warning of what was to come. The programme on Niels Henrik Abel, in particular, with its unforgettable opening shot of the Pont Arts in a grey, December-chill Paris — the eyes fixed longingly, almost pleadingly on the façade of the Institut de France — was subjected to a lot of scrutiny. Initially, its pointed visual statements were construed as a sign of admirable commitment — something singularly lacking in most TV programmes — but the prevailing, hypocritical consensus later was that here Jonas Wergeland had gone over the score, that this out-and-out caricature of Frenchmen and all things French was far too spiteful by half. ‘Behind the virtuosity of this programme one discerns something dark, hateful even,’ one famous opportunist would later write. However that may be, the story of Niels Henrik Abel formed the basis for the most subjective and aggressive of Jonas Wergeland’s programmes.

I can now reveal, Professor, that there were personal reasons for this. And here I am thinking not of stamps, although I’m sure you have already spotted the connection, you may even own one of the stamps issued on 6 April 1929 to mark the centenary of Niels Henrik Abel’s death. No, I am referring to one of Jonas Wergeland’s first and little-known trips abroad, to that same city of Paris. He was feeling nervous even before he had got through passport control, as if he was prepared for anything to happen at an airport named after Charles de Gaulle. This insecurity, which he thought must spring from some sort of national inferiority complex, grew even more palpable as he was passing through Customs, where a man in uniform eyed him sternly. And it was at this point that Jonas, as he saw it, made his big mistake: he smiled. The customs officer promptly called him over and asked to see his luggage. Jonas had the feeling that the man was doing this purely out of resentment — he wasn’t going to have any stupid Norwegian smiling at him. He didn’t conduct a neat search of Jonas’s suitcase either but rummaged around in it as if sure of turning up something, and when he found nothing, Jonas was led into another room where the first man and another officer proceeded to interview, or virtually cross-examine him — that, at least, is how it seemed to Jonas. ‘Here in Paris I’m not a Norwegian, I’m a nigger,’ Jonas said to himself. I would like to emphasize that I’m sure such things did not happen very often, that this was in all likelihood a cosmic exception to the usual hospitality of the French passport and customs authorities. Nonetheless, it did happen. Jonas spoke to the two officers in his best French, but they acted as if they did not understand, interrupted him with curt, antagonistic orders, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, Jonas kept thinking; and this they did even though they knew he hadn’t done anything, this they did because they had every right to do so, Jonas could be a dangerous character, a big-time smuggler. Jonas had smiled: now who would smile at a strange Frenchman if they had nothing to hide? They asked to see his tickets, inquired as to where he would be staying, how much money he had with him, he understood what they said, they did not understand what he said, although they should have been able to; several times Jonas heard the word ‘zéro’ — not ‘rien’, but ‘zéro’ — and automatically assumed that this referred to him; I’m not sure, Professor, but it isn’t altogether inconceivable that they also asked him to undress, that they also searched his person in the most thorough and humiliating way and still with every right to do so, I say again, even though he had done nothing wrong, ‘il est nul’, but he had smiled, he was suspicious, a pathetic Norwegian, a nigger in Paris, they had sussed out that he was a nothing trying to make out that he wasn’t just a nothing, they simply would not have a nothing in their country, in France, a land of ones, the cradle of European civilization; Jonas felt that they were laughing at him the whole time: at his clothes, his sad excuse for a suitcase and not least his halting French, which had been good enough at school but a joke here. ‘C’est un zéro en chiffre.’ They let him out of the room with a little laugh, and even though they did not find anything, Jonas felt that they had exposed him, that they had stripped him bare, in more than one sense. ‘They raped me mentally,’ he said later. Even if he was not a nothing, they made him feel like a nothing.

Am I on the right track? Why else would Niels Henrik Abel, as played by Normann Vaage, walk around Paris made up to look like a Negro? Jonas Wergeland’s story about Abel was a tale of intellectual racism, of the degradation of a small nation, of the world’s doubts that anything good could really come out of Norway. There was a personal reason for the underlying rage in the programme, but that is not the whole explanation. Jonas Wergeland was on safe ground here — for who could help but feel outraged at the thought of how Abel was treated in Paris?

Jonas Wergeland could, of course, have centred his programme on Abel around the discovery of elliptical functions and the heart-stopping race to pip Gustav Jacobi to the post, but from the very start he knew how to angle this programme in his series on heroic Norwegians, Thinking Big: he would focus on Abel’s waiting. Niels Henrik Abel was, in short, a brilliant scholar, a man who, in the words of one mathematician, was in the process of ‘discovering Magellian passages to huge areas of that same, vast analytical ocean’. An individual who, in his short life, would establish a legacy ‘which will keep mathematicians occupied for five hundred years’, as another put it. The programme captured this unique person at the point on his grand tour when he arrived in Paris, the mathematical capital of the day, to present what has since become known as the great Abelian theorem, his masterpiece, to the French Scientific Society, in hopes of seeing it published in their Mémoires des savants étrangers’ and thereby winning international recognition and a university lectureship, as well as the chance to develop all of the other ideas proliferating inside his head to an extent unseen in any other mathematician at that time. Abel is in Paris. This is his moment of truth. The only problem is that he comes from Norway.

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.