This proved to be Jonas’s key to Hamsun. The writer showed him what a little way we have come in terms of understanding a man, or how the pieces of a life fit together. In studying Hamsun, Jonas discovered how dangerous it could be to hang onto some time-honoured psychological theory, to saddle an individual with an identity, a persona, an essence: and equally dangerous to cherish the belief that there has to be some sort of continuity, a thread running through life, as if without this comfort one were liable to become lost in a maze. Such notions prevented one from imagining that there could also be leaps, that there could be interruptions in a life, that it might not hang together at all, at any rate not in the way one thought. So it was with Hamsun. It was only when one held him transfixed, in a still shot, so to speak, that he became either a Nazi sympathizer or the great writer. But Hamsun was both at the same time and something more, something you could never quite put your finger on; and it was this, this great and unsettling enigma, which so few Norwegians seemed able to come to terms with. In the presence of Adolf Hitler, Norway’s worst enemy, Hamsun set out to plead Norway’s cause, tried to do something for Norway, for the people of Norway: a moral endeavour in the midst of immorality, good and evil merging into one. If one is to gain any insight into a man like Hamsun, it is necessary, as Niels Bohr demonstrated in his field, to forsake classic perceptions and plain language. Anyone who says he can think about Hamsun without his head spinning is simply giving away the fact that he has not understood the first thing about Hamsun. It is paradoxical — but also very comforting — that an author, a wordsmith, should constitute a mystery that defies description.
And yet this is exactly what Hamsun’s books are all about: writing the impossible. And it was this that inspired Jonas Wergeland to attempt something similar in his television programme, primarily by introducing an element of undermining, ironic distance to the scene in which Hamsun shook hands with Hitler, and in which Wergeland conveyed both Hamsun’s awe at actually being there in the lion’s den and, with equal force, his knowledge that this was a repellent and monstrous act. One could say that, by dint of its thoroughgoing ambivalence, this programme — one illusion meeting another illusion, two visionaries talking at cross-purposes — dealt as much with the way in which this entire tableau presented a challenge to the creative faculty, that basic element of human life; it dealt, in other words, with something that went beyond all talk, all demands, with a simple message. Consequently, this creative effort on the part of the mind itself became one of the key elements in the programme: that mind with which one perceives, that mind from which spring dreams and illusions and, hence, literature. As much as being a programme about Hamsun, this was a programme about an attempt to stretch the imagination far enough to accommodate this disquieting man by the name of Knut Hamsun. Or, to put it another way: it was about our need for stories. At heart, the whole programme questioned the viewers’ ability to create fantasies, and what part such fantasies — as, for example, those brought into service in understanding a situation as impossible as Hamsun’s meeting with Hitler — actually play in our lives. Hence the reason that this programme with its almost indescribable subject matter — an old man and a tyrant by a panorama window — had a particularly strange effect on the viewers. Everyone enjoyed it, everyone was profoundly intrigued by it, but no one could say exactly why.
The Third Option
So do not, whatever you do, forget the rest of the story of Jonas Wergeland in a studio at Marienlyst, being grilled by Audun Tangen, the Grand Inquisitor himself, ably assisted by Veronika Røed, ace reporter and — who would have thought it? — Jonas’s cousin. Jonas was suffering from an interminable mental block; all he could do was to sit there, staring at the cameramen working feverishly, with the Colonel’s voice sounding impatiently in their headsets, issuing orders to zoom and tilt and pan, and give me a total, and shift a bit to the right; the very sight of those headsets, together with the robot-like cameras, put Jonas in mind of creatures from an alien planet and gave him a sense of having withdrawn from the world, a feeling that none of this mattered at all. Then, at long last, he managed to say: ‘All I really wanted to do was to teach the viewers to think big.’
Veronika gave a soft exultant laugh, as if she had tricked him, all unwittingly, into confessing to a crime: ‘You’re wrong on two points, Jonas Wergeland. For one thing, television does not teach people to think big. TV teaches people to think flat. TV reduces everything to two-dimensional images, it appeals almost exclusively to one sense: vision. Everything that appears on television is automatically rendered flat and banal.’ Jonas could not help but admire her persuasive body language, her elegant suit, her flawless makeup, her unbeatable combination of sex appeal and seriousness. ‘And for another, and more importantly, you are inherently wrong in using the word “teach”,’ she said, almost indulgently, as if she were talking to someone who was dull-witted. ‘Television cannot ever be anything other than sheer entertainment. You are guilty of grossly overestimating the medium. You have not taught anyone anything at all. You have amused them. You have reduced a bunch of famous names to a slick bit of show business. Nothing more.’
‘Could you be a little more specific?’ Audun Tangen interjected.
‘Certainly. Take the programme on Knut Hamsun,’ said Veronika, addressing Jonas. ‘Could you have come up with any more entertaining scene from his life, anything more visually comical than his meeting with Hitler?’
A dramatic still from the Hamsun programme had been used as part of the set decor, along with other easily recognizable shots from the series, including the vignette: a prism splitting the white letters of the title, Thinking Big, into a rainbow. This last hung right behind Jonas; he was not sure whether this had been deliberate.
‘But the pictures themselves cannot be considered in isolation,’ he ventured. ‘You have to look at how the programme as a whole has been made, the way in which it has been constructed.’
He could not have laid himself more wide open. The sparks veritably flew from Veronika; sitting there in her chair, she let fly a whole cannonade of crushing assertions which Audun Tangen did not lift a finger to interrupt. He did not even try to hide his smile, not that he needed to, since up in the control room the Colonel was keeping the camera on Jonas’s face, on his pain, his suppressed anger, his dreadful disappointment.
For long enough the response to the Thinking Big television series had been, as we have seen, overwhelming. After some rather noncommittal reviews in the wake of the first few programmes — as is always the way in Norway: no one dares to say what they think before they know what everyone else thinks — came the jubilation, and once begun there was no end to it. For that, too, is always the way in Norway; when something is good, there are no limits to how good it can be. Even Jonas could see that much of the praise was laughably undiscriminating. As a child watching his father playing the organ, Jonas had always wondered that one small person could produce so much sound, and the response to Thinking Big left him with the same sense of wonder; how could one single, solitary human being cause such a stir simply by making a number of television programmes? Occasionally he had the notion that he, too, was playing an organ of sorts, an utterly unique organ, with the television masts on the tops of windswept Norwegian mountaintops as its pipes: Gausta, Tron, Jetta, Lønahorgi, Sogndal, Nordfjordeid, Narvik, Kistefjell — main transmitters all lying more than 1,000 metres above sea level. Or that through these he could set the stops of a whole nation’s emotions, that he had discovered a ‘Tutti’ button which gave voice to a great, many-voiced song of praise.