The Seducer

The Story Teller

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.

Right or wrong as this may be — I prefer, as I pointed out earlier, to say as little as possible about Veronika Røed — she hid her ulterior motives well, sitting there in that television studio, quivering with aggression, attacking Jonas Wergeland for having confused an important discussion; Veronika was so het up that she was starting to contradict her own statements regarding television’s limited potential: ‘Alright, so you were telling a story,’ she said. ‘But that still only presents one snippet of a life, you still have not explained how all of these fragments are supposed to build up into the truth about a person? Because that’s what it all comes down to, Jonas Wergeland, and you can’t get away from it: the truth!’

Audun Tangen was all set to move on, even though he, the Grand Inquisitor himself, felt that all this labouring on about the truth was going over the score, but Jonas put his hands in the air, stopped him, indicated that he wished to answer, but that he just needed time to consider, and so there was this pause, ten seconds maybe, an eternity on television, with Audun Tangen constantly on the point of breaking in even though he could see how effective it was, how it created a sort of tension: Jonas Wergeland sitting as if frozen stiff, with his hands in the air; ten vital seconds for Jonas, those were, when suddenly he found himself recalling details he had seen in his life, a fir tree growing out of the rock-face on the banks of the Zambezi, the bicycle wheel trimmed with Monte Carlo cigarette packs, the rivets in a ship’s side slipping past only inches away, other such things, and the sum of all these details seemed to be telling him a story of a tangent, something else entirely, a way to shoot out of a wicked circle, out of the constant repetition, because all at once he was taking a critical view of his own success, and he realized that this room, that all Marienlyst, could not possibly be the hub for which he had always been searching, and of course it was Veronika’s question about the truth that was boring into him; Jonas would have liked to have stopped the world, stopped time, because suddenly the studio was acting like a thinking cap, charging him up, the whole of that tense situation, sitting there in front of three cameras, with his face being broadcast to one and a half million television screens, and his hands raised to a studio firmament filled with dazzling lights as if he were praying or having a vision — indeed people had later said that his face had shone with an inner light during those ten seconds, which is not so surprising since, during those moments it was revealed to Jonas Wergeland that this situation in which he now found himself need not determine anything: that this, which to others must have seemed to be the most decisive moment in his career, might just as easily be of no consequence whatsoever. After all, who was to say that it was in television that he was to do the work against which his life would one day be measured? Or, to put it another way: Jonas Wergeland realized that he had not stopped growing, that those ten years at NRK might well be no more than an insignificant parenthesis in his life; from this point onwards he could do anything at all, become something completely different, and yet again he felt a finger describing circles on his brow and then, abruptly, a straight line shooting out from it, a leap.

Ten seconds — an eternity — pass before he replies to Veronika’s question: ‘Again you’re forgetting what it all comes down to: fantasy. Stimulating our creative faculty. You’re doing what we Norwegians always do: Underestimate. You’re underestimating the viewing public. You’re forgetting that a viewer can easily create a whole picture out of fragments.’

Now, here, Jonas was back in his proper element, in front of television cameras that brought him straight through the screen and into millions of homes, and I mean through, because he almost seemed to be there in their living rooms. ‘You’re right,’ he said, knowing he could afford to indulge in an argument verging on the banal, knowing that his audience would consider it to be absolutely spot-on anyway: ‘I’ve left a lot up to the viewers’ imagination. You could say that I created a caterpillar, but only because I believe that a generous viewer has the ability to metamorphose it into a butterfly.’

Veronika could feel her victory slipping away from her. ‘A lot of very seductive talk,’ she said, fuming. ‘But you still haven’t answered my question as to what becomes of the truth.’

‘I’m not a minister,’ Jonas said, ‘I’m a storyteller.’ And from that moment on Jonas took over the show completely, because he had the idea of telling a story, to show what he meant, and to provide the only adequate response to these accusations, and he had many stories to choose from. He could tell them about a man playing opera music among the glaciers on Greenland, or he could tell them about an actor who sustained a cut to the eye, or he could tell them about an old lady who went around buying up fine works of art. Or why not the story of Hjallis’s fall or, even more incredible — not to say, improbable — the story of Norway’s expansion, how Norway multiplied its geographical area several-fold in the early sixties without anyone, not a single Norwegian, although they were normally such avid protesters, saying so much as a word? Instead, speaking straight to the camera, straight into people’s living rooms, he said that he was going to tell them the story — no more and no less — that had prompted him to make a television series about twenty-odd Norwegian men and women whose names have become part of the international vocabulary. So he told this story, he told it succinctly and well; it was the story of the beetle, and he told them, the viewers, just what a challenge, what an inspiration this story of the beetle was to the imagination and how it had given him the urge to make a series about a clutch of Norwegians who had not done what Norwegians are better at than anything else, namely, tearing down, moaning, criticizing, but who had, instead, done their part to build up, had helped the world to grow; people who showed that even Norwegians could think big. And he concluded with an appeal of sorts, to the effect that the entire future of Norway — a nation of only four million frozen souls — should ‘not be dependent on German interest rates, but solely on how we, the people of Norway, every single inhabitant, use our imaginations.’

It was one of the most extraordinary programmes in the history of NRK. It stuck in people’s memories in much the same way as Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream …’ speech; they were genuinely moved, sat there with lumps in their throats, and all because of a man who said, quite simply: ‘All I have done is to tell a story about thinking big.’

Then, just before the end, seeing that she was not going to get her answer anyway, Veronika leapt out of her seat and lunged at Jonas, ripping the ‘mic’ off her lapel in the process, and dealt him a clout round the ear, a resounding slap, right there, on camera.

Up in the control room, the Colonel was working frantically, hardly able to believe his luck, firing off orders simultaneously to the vision switcher and the cameramen. He had obtained some wonderful close-ups of Jonas Wergeland’s reaction, as it passed from a glare to a smile — possibly because he, Jonas, had guessed that Veronika had a motive known to few others: the front page of her newspaper — and a beautiful total in which Audun Tangen was seen trying to call Veronika Røed back as she stomped off the set, livid and lovely; after which the Colonel switched to the overhead camera up on the ceiling, to give an illusion of drifting away. And then, the trump card, the real stroke of genius; they showed the clout round the ear again, in slow motion, for two million Norwegians who were still rubbing their eyes in disbelief. The Colonel had borrowed a slow-motion controller — the sort used mainly for live coverage of athletics events — on the chance that something dramatic might happen. ‘Have you got it?’ he called. ‘Okay, run it slow!’ The sequence was shown over and over again while the credits rolled, and I hardly need say that that clip was to become a classic, regularly featured in programmes dealing with high points in the history of NRK.

Nonetheless, it was Jonas Wergeland who won the day; if anything his fame actually went up an extra notch after this programme. But it did not, as he thought, come down to two faces, but to two stories: Veronika’s had to do with a man who seduced an entire nation with his lies — this, too, a fascinating tale — while Jonas’s story was about a beetle in a cowpat. And if there is one laudable thing to be said about the Norway of the nineties it is that it allowed Jonas Wergeland’s enigmatic appeal to the imagination to win over Veronika Røed’s insistence on an unequivocal answer.