The Seducer

Opium of the People

Allow me to introduce Nora Næss, resident of the town of Bryne in the Jæren area of south-west Norway, a teacher, married to a man who works out in the North Sea, two children, own house. A perfectly ordinary, middle-aged Norwegian woman, exactly like Nanna Norheim in Bærum or Nina Narum in Tromsø. On the evening on which NRK TV showed the first programme in Jonas Wergeland’s series Thinking Big, Nora Næss had not really been intending to watch television; she pressed the button more or less out of habit, without checking to see what was on, because she was in the dinette, ironing tablecloths and could just as well have something to look up at now and again, something to break the monotony of the job. And then suddenly there was this amazing programme. First she glanced up more often than usual, possibly for a little longer, then she started watching more and more and ironing less and less until eventually, without taking her eyes off the screen, she pulled the plug of the iron out of the socket, sat down on the sofa and watched television as if she had never watched television before. Or, as she confided to her friend, and the odd thing is that Nanna Norheim and Nina Narum both confided almost the same thing to their friends: ‘To be honest, I felt as though I was being made love to. I mean it. And as the programme was coming to a close I could feel myself swelling up with pleasure.’

Now of course this should not be taken too literally. What Nora Næss — likewise Nanna Norheim and Nina Narum — wished to convey was, first and foremost, a sense of being taken seriously: a sense of gratitude that someone had fondled her of all people, her eyes, her ears, all of her senses, not least her intellect, giving her a sort of all-embracing sense that this concerned her, concerned her to such a degree that it gave her goosebumps.

So over the months that followed Nora made sure, as did Nanna and Nina, that she saw all of the programmes in the series; in fact she not only saw them, she lived them, she videotaped them and watched them again, more than once, really watched them. For the first time, thanks to Jonas Wergeland’s television series, Nora Næss thought of herself as a viewer, or rather as a seer in the true sense of that word, a visionary. Because, although she found it hard to put into words, she had seen something new, something important, something she had never seen before which filled her with a positive energy and moved her to watch the programmes yet again, such that she was constantly discovering aspects and details that she had missed on previous occasions while at the same time spotting more of the similarities and devices that cropped up again and again; thus she was continually expanding her grasp of the common thread linking all of the programmes. ‘They’re like gems within a larger gem,’ as she put it, not knowing that Nanna Norheim and Nina Narum had said pretty much the same thing. She talked about those programmes, really felt a need to speak to someone after viewing them, and since others had the same urge, they discussed them in the staff room or outside the local shop or in each others’ homes. Nora Næss also talked to her husband about them, in case anyone thinks there were problems on that front. He had seen the first two programmes out in the North Sea and was every bit as hooked on them as she; in fact they actually believed, both of them, that their relationship was somehow strengthened by the series.

I am telling you this in order to make it clear that there is no way that Jonas Wergeland’s series, Thinking Big, can be condensed into words; what is more, in resumé it seems banal and rather dull. I would like therefore to take this opportunity to apologize for my earlier accounts of it, because the series’ success, if that is the right word, is impossible to explain. Mind you, media experts have for a long time been producing big fat treatises in which they have attempted to analyse why and how these programmes had such an impact, but apart from citing those factors which were patently obvious, such as the high professional standard, the sophisticated technical quality, they had to admit defeat and resort instead to drawing parallels with poetry, not to mention mysticism and talk of ‘the unutterable’. A few did keep their feet on the ground and venture to highlight Jonas Wergeland’s voice ‘which has the same appeal as that of a prime minister, a national father-figure’, some spoke of his knack for composing pictures while others pointed to the original viewpoints, the actual angle of attack, and still others latched onto his personal presence in the programmes, the intensity of his expression — all this without, of course, a single person mentioning anything about a silver thread in his spine, a crystal prism in his head or balls of gold. No one has yet been able to say anything about the cause, only about what an almost narcotic effect the series had on large sections of the Norwegian viewing public.

How could such a thing happen? When Jonas Wergeland started working in television, he simply had the gift. Everyone who met him while he was learning his craft — not just mastering the technical side but making a close study of the very best television productions from around the world, from Britain in particular — was struck by his obvious rapport with the camera, a creativity within the medium that could only be described as an innate talent. Even after the programmes he made in the early eighties, viewers like Nora Næss were exclaiming ‘God, that was terrific’ as if, after twenty years of watching television, they had had their first encounter with great television, one which instantly threw other programmes into relief for them. All at once, people like Nora Næss from the town of Bryne over in Jæren, saw how bland and, above all else, how dull, all of those other programmes were, even on Saturday evenings. You see it is easy to forget that Jonas Wergeland’s programmes also provided entertainment, with knobs on. And in the midst of this entertainment, while people were thoroughly enjoying themselves, he tore conventions apart, reflecting things from totally unexpected angles, accentuating details in the bigger picture that left people like Nora Næss agape at the picture as a whole. Consequently, Jonas Wergeland also found on several occasions, precisely because the form of the programmes put across the subject matter in an unusual and striking fashion, that he was setting the agenda for other media — saw how the newspapers in particular tended to follow up his programmes with long, probing articles.

Even so, Jonas Wergeland was also astonished by the tremendous impact of Thinking Big, which he thought could perhaps be put down to the fact that it was produced as a series, with the programmes being shown at two-week intervals for almost a year, and that in this way they had a cumulative effect. However that may be, he did in fact succeed in realizing the concept of the title, borrowed from Henrik Ibsen who, in his application for a writer’s grant wrote that he would fight for ‘that vocation that is for me the most important and the most necessary in Norway, that of arousing the Nation and encouraging it to think big’. It really was quite remarkable. For nigh on a year not only Nora Næss and Nanna Norheim and Nina Narum but virtually the entire population of Norway went around thinking big. It has been said that people walked differently in Norway that year, with straighter backs. It was quite an achievement — and let me add: a mystery unequalled in the history of Norway. For one brief moment, Jonas Wergeland lifted a whole nation a few centimetres above, or out of, its accustomed ways of thinking.

It should be said, however, that this phenomenon is unlikely ever to be repeated, inasmuch as Jonas Wergeland’s series was shown during the heyday of public broadcasting; when money was not only made available for serious programmes of this sort but when it was still also possible to gather an entire nation in front of the television screen at one time, a time which will soon be looked back on with nostalgia, just as there are many now who recall how certain radio broadcasts could command the ears of the whole country in the fifties.

Even so, none of the bosses at NRK, broadcasters to the nation, had any idea what was going on. They were quite simply not prepared. To be honest, it was so totally unlikely that such a concept, a series of programmes about famous Norwegian men and women, should score a hit with the general public at all. But for a year, via the television screen, Jonas Wergeland held a whole nation mesmerized; towards the end, if you remember, it became almost a mass psychosis — it was not only Nora Næss and Nanna Norheim and Nina Narum who sat glued to the screen but everyone with eyes to see, so to speak, as if it were the final episode in some long-running detective series or the lead-in to a disclosure that would directly affect their own lives. After each programme the NRK switchboard was inundated with calls from people who did not want to complain but simply to give vent to their heartfelt enthusiasm, who wanted Jonas Wergeland’s telephone number, wanted his address, or those of the actors, Normann Vaage and Ella Strand; or who were insisting that the programme be repeated, at once, as soon as possible. People bombarded the newspapers with spontaneous and frank communications of all kinds. In one ecstatic letter an impotent man declared that watching the programmes had revived his sex life.

They had even less idea of the more long-term effect. Not only was the series showered with awards, including the Prix Italia — for the programme on Armauer Hansen — other countries also evinced an exceptionally voracious interest with the result that a number of television networks bought all or part of the series, even some Third World countries were anxious to screen a few of the programmes. Teachers wrote candid articles in which they described how the series had given them a shot in the arm. Company directors and others spoke out in the newspapers and at seminars, claiming that the series had inspired them. From the lectern in Stortinget, the Norwegian parliament, politicians announced that these programmes had boosted the self-confidence of the nation as a whole.

Again: why? And again: not one study has succeeded in solving the mystery.

Throughout Norway people like Nora Næs from the town of Bryne in Jæren watched those programmes over and over again, and not only that: Nora Næss bought records of music she had never heard, she borrowed books from the libraries, biographies, novels as if the programmes were by no means finished when she switched off the television; she visited museums and galleries, she went to see hitherto unknown films and, during a trip to Oslo, she took out her old figure-skates and went out on the ice for the first time in twenty-five years, together with her daughter; she made excursions to parts of Norway she had never seen, she even travelled abroad several times. Jonas Wergeland received hundreds of postcards, addressed to NRK, from Cairo and the Great Pyramid of Cheops, from Bihar in India, from Stamford Bridge in England. Nora Næss sent him a card showing Saint Peter’s in Rome. ‘I felt as if I was being seduced,’ she told a friend, in strictest confidence, some time later. ‘Of being taken by the hand and led somewhere I had never been.’

And in her heart of hearts Nora Næss could not deny, any more than Nanna Norheim and Nina Narum could, that she eventually became as obsessed with Jonas Wergeland as she was with those celebrated Norwegian men and women. Ultimately, she watched and interpreted the stories of the individuals featured in the television series as extracts from Jonas Wergeland’s own life, with the result that the more she learned about those other people the more she wanted to know about Jonas Wergeland. And so, in spite of this unique and in many ways historic television project, not even Jonas Wergeland was able to prevent the whole thing, in the end, from revolving around him personally.

So there you stand, watching television, amazed in a way by images following images, a soundless flickering, and you stare and you stare at this screen that has won you so much acclaim, a glittering career, you think, doubly so, you think, and one that has led you here, to this bewildered room, and you place your finger on the ‘off’ button while watching images that become more and more baffling the longer you gaze at them, and you click the button, you see the colours fade to black while the set crackles with static, and you feel as if you had switched off yourself, that your life is finished, a pointless programme, you think, and now it is over, you think.

You look at the seven blue jars on the shelf above the set as if they were another programme, a more significant programme, because they remind you of something, Margrete, you think, and you turn back round the corner, to be met by the sight of her figure on the floor, on its back, as if in total surrender, you think, betrayed, you think, and again you are struck by that uncontrollable urge just to collapse, and you look at the Persian rug over by the window between the two armchairs, a Bukhara, you think, or a Sehna, you think, you would not mind collapsing onto that, that’s for sure, onto that rug, disappearing into that pattern, that landscape, to come out in some other land, and you long for your aunt’s dimly-lit flat, for a pile of soft cushions and a time when life was one long story, and you look back at Margrete and only now do you see, or wish to see, that she is lying on a polar-bear skin, and you look and you look, and you cannot figure out what it is doing here, the polar bear, a brother, you think, it doesn’t fit, you think, it feels like a betrayal, you think, as if someone had returned evil for good, and you look at the picture of Buddha, then your eye goes back to the skin and you see only the skin, the red blood against the white skin, as if the bear had been shot, you think, or as if it had been in a fight, you think, between an animal and a human being, you think, and again you look at Margrete, and you feel like screaming a a a a a for so long that it will cover all the a’s you wrote in your copybook in first grade and all the a’s you have written since, to no good purpose, you think.

So there you stand, Jonas Wergeland, disciple of the Kama Sutra, opera lover, climber of Jebel Musa, in the centre of your own living room with an inaudible scream in your ears, and you try to listen, and you think to yourself that this is important, the sounds, that the cause may lie here, and you think that you must remember the sounds, cherish them, and you listen intently, stand stock-still in the middle of the room with your eyes fixed on Margrete’s dead body, and you listen, and you hear a car drive by further down the road, and you hear, or think you hear, a mouth organ far in the distance, if it isn’t a siren, a fire engine you think, something that could save you, you think, and you cross the room and press the remote control, filling the room once more with Johann Sebastian Bach’s fugue, and you think that you would like to crawl inside the organ chest again, you want to be healed, you want to be brought to life, you think, another life, you think, a life far from this room, you think.

You stand there looking at the body of your dead wife, looking and looking, and you don’t know why the tears always have to well up when you hear this music, and you notice how the tears distort your vision, and you fumble in your pocket for something, a prism, before you remember that you have given it away, and you think to yourself that you will never manage to find another angle here, break up the sight before you, veer out of the big picture and into the detail, impossible, you think, impossible in the face of all this blood, you think, so I can see, or at least I try to understand, more than anyone else, why you do not walk across to the telephone, why you do not call the police, why instead you go into the bathroom, why you feel a frantic need to wash yourself, or not wash, but rinse yourself, and you pull off your clothes, toss them in all directions, knock over one of the ferns before climbing into the shower cabinet, turning on the water and shutting your eyes, you let the water stream down over you, turning the hot tap further and further, as if it could never be hot enough for you, for ages you stand there, without reaching for the soap, just letting the hot water stream down over you, until at last you turn it off and step out into a bathroom now filled with steam, like the old Torggata Baths you think, and you stand at the washbasin, and you gaze into a mirror that has misted over and you gaze at all of Margrete’s things on the shelf, at the bath salts, and you remember how Margrete loved taking a bath, how she loved to have the water scalding hot, like the Japanese you think, how much she enjoyed it, how she had this unique capacity for enjoying everything, turning any ordinary day into unadulterated pleasure, you think, and you gaze at all the other strange bottles and jars that are hers, were hers, and you open a perfume bottle, and you sniff, inhale, and suddenly you remember a whole lot of things connected with this scent, and you feel as if your head is beginning to mist over, like the mirror, and you know you are close to passing out, and you hang onto the washbasin and think to yourself that you had better do something sensible, so you pick up your electric razor, the good one, better than the little one in your suitcase, and you start to shave, shaving in exactly the same way as always, doing your best to follow the same pattern as always, as if the simple force of habit, the pedantry of it, could be the saving of you at this moment, keep chaos at arm’s length, or possibly because right now it seems important to consider how you look, in case a television team should show up. ‘How did you feel when you entered the room?’ you think, the sort of question put to sports’ stars, and you go on shaving for so long that the mirror clears and you see your own face, and you pick up a bottle of aftershave to pour a few drops onto your palm, and you think of your mother’s seven lovers, and at the thought of the seven lovers you begin to have some inkling of who you are, as if all this time you had been trying to suppress the knowledge.

You walk back through to the living room, naked, and you remember who you are, it’s being naked that does it, you think, and all at once a name from the bundle of letters comes into your head, the letters you glanced at when you came home, and naked you walk across to the antique bureau where you left the letters and again you flick through them, and you find it, and you read the sender’s name, a woman’s name, you think, the name of a very famous woman, you think, and you remember those women whom you have loved and who have loved you, heartily, you think, deeply, you think, and who have given you of their abundance, and you turn towards Margrete with the letter in your hand, naked, and you realize that one of them, one of these women, might be behind Margrete’s death, one who refuses to let go of you, who still loves you, and you think of your golden balls, and it’s only to be expected, you think, that one day they would be your downfall.