In order to underline this paradoxical aspect still further, Jonas did not reconstruct any of the extraordinary dialogue, forty-five minutes of it, during which Hamsun, instead of chatting about the art of writing, spoke out provocatively on such subjects as Norwegian shipping and the political future of Norway in general, in many ways an attack on Reich Commissar Terboven and an attempt to have him removed, while Hitler persisted in beating about the bush and evading the issues. In the programme all one heard in the background was a low murmur on two different levels: Hamsun’s high-pitched voice — he was all but deaf — and Hitler’s droning attempt to hog the conversation. Thus, in spite of everything, one was given the clear impression of a conflict: an old man, despairing and deeply moved, continually interrupting to insist on a point, and a dictator who was being contradicted and not getting his own way, growing more and more annoyed, raging inwardly — an outstanding scene in itself, worth dwelling on for that alone. According to Dr Dietrich, Hitler’s press secretary for twelve years, who was present in the room, only one man had ever gainsaid Hitler, the most powerful man in the world: the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun.
Instead of reconstructing the conversation, Jonas accompanied this scene with voice-overs of what other writers had said about Knut Hamsun. So, while watching the Norwegian writer and the German leader, one of the most hated people in the world at that time, viewers heard various actors reciting what such diverse authors as Selma Lagerlöf, Johannes V. Jensen, Maxim Gorky, Boris Pasternak, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Isaac B. Singer, Stefan Zweig, Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann had written or said about Knut Hamsun, each tribute more glowing than the one before, to the point where it became almost embarrassing, it being nigh on impossible for any Norwegian to imagine that one of their own could have meant so much to so many of the world’s great writers, nay, that he could have been one of most eminent literary figures of the twentieth century.
The truly outrageous thing about the Hamsun programme, a direct consequence of those paradoxical interludes, was Jonas Wergeland’s suggestion that there might be another way of interpreting a person’s character. What Jonas did, you see, as the old writer — in the shape of Normann Vaage — sat there in his dark pinstripe suit, with the NS badge in his buttonhole and one hand on his cane, was to have him undergo a metamorphosis, one which in many ways followed the same shifts that can be detected in Hamsun’s works. Viewers compared this to the ‘heads-bodies-legs’ pictures of their childhood, or with twisting the end of a kaleidoscope, since some parts of the picture remained the same in each frame, while at the same time the picture as a whole changed. By dint of trick photography, and with the help of NRK’s excellent props department, which played a vital part in the Thinking Big series, Normann Vaage’s clothes and makeup changed from one instant to the next in such a way that he not only portrayed all of Hamsun’s many occupations and roles in life — shop assistant, actor, vagabond, road worker, gambler, tram conductor, farmer — but also the characters from Hamsun’s books. So while Hamsun was sitting there talking to Hitler, in between the panorama shots of northern Norway viewers saw him switch identity, becoming by turns the first-person narrator of Hunger, much as he had looked in Per Oscarsson’s rendering, Lieutenant Glahn, Johannes, the miller’s son, Benoni, Tobias Holmengraa from Segelfoss Town, Isak Sellenrå, August or Abel Brodersen from The Ring is Closed in a brown Ulster with his tie all askew. But first and last he was seen as Johan Nilsen Nagel from Mysteries, with his yellow suit and violin case, the most incomprehensible and bizarre of all Hamsun’s characters. Jonas also had Hitler undergo a slow transformation from the Führer, in a double-breasted grey jacket to the humpbacked manikin, the Minute, thus leaving one with a suspicion that there was talk here of a meeting, outside of time and space, between the visionary and his demon.
For Jonas, this meeting with Hitler illustrated what lay at the very heart of Hamsun’s work: the ambiguity, the juggling with lies that turn out to be true, and truths that turn out to be lies. And, not least, it illustrated Hamsun’s greatest achievement: his vision of the complexity of the human consciousness. After all, how was it possible: to be so stubborn, to fight for what one knows to be a lost cause, to do something as monstrous as shake the hand of the very Devil? By and large, Jonas detected a distinct resemblance between Hamsun and his fictional characters, almost all of whom lacked consistency, who refused to be pigeonholed by such terms as ‘identity’ or ‘set personality’; on the contrary, they were unpredictable, they could set the world on fire one day and retire to a mountaintop to meditate the next. They were many. And many people at once.
While working on the series, Jonas Wergeland became almost obsessed with Hamsun, since it seemed that through Hamsun he had been brought face to face with a problem with which he had been battling all his life, one that Gabriel Sand had put him on the track of in the saloon of an old lifeboat, with his mention of ‘his good friend’ Niels Bohr and the latter’s lecture in Como. For both Hamsun himself and his characters were as much of a puzzle as light: that agency which the physicists of the twentieth century had spent so much time and energy in studying and which they believed to take the form of particles one moment and waves the next. Thus, in Hamsun’s case, Jonas Wergeland felt moved to make some reference to Niels Bohr and the concept of complementarity: an obscure concept but one which hinted, nonetheless, that there were two sides to a story — two mutually exclusive aspects, both of which might nonetheless be necessary in order to arrive at a full understanding of the phenomenon. In other words, where the particle and wave properties of light were concerned, it was a matter of looking at light in two different ways at once. And of breaking out of an ingrained and rigid mindset.