Jonas’s triumph remained unmarred until one Saturday morning, one of those beautiful summer mornings when everything is just perfect: the weather, one’s mood, the contents of the refrigerator, Margrete’s fresh-baked bread. All that was lacking were the tabloids, so he had taken a stroll down to the subway station to pick them up. On the way to the station he nodded amiably to people he met, and they for their part returned his greetings with the sort of odd smiling respect that left one in no doubt as to what they would say when they returned home: ‘Guess who I saw down at the newsagent’s!’ If he had not done so before, then certainly now, after the television series, Jonas Wergeland felt like a duke, a real prince. He sat down at the breakfast table feeling thoroughly — one hundred per cent — content. Margrete was pottering about in the bathroom, Kristin was out playing. He took a sip of his coffee and opened the newspaper.
There it was: a murderous piece penned by Veronika Røed, the incisive overture to four probing articles promised for the coming week. I do not intend to devote any space here to citing the content of a critique with which most people — Norwegians at least — are already familiar. But it may be worth pointing out that it was, in fact, the Classic Norwegian Discussion. In these articles Veronika Røed accused Jonas Wergeland of something which, in other countries, would raise very few eyebrows but which in Norway was sheer dynamite: namely, of pursuing aesthetic experience as an end in itself. ‘Jonas Wergeland ascribes to television a function that transcends good and evil,’ she wrote. So there you had it, Norwegian moralism raising its head yet again, and not surprisingly she cited the Hamsun programme in particular as a warning example.
There were times when Jonas Wergeland had the feeling that the country of Norway was a reversing boat and that he was in danger of being sucked in by its propeller.
Not that Jonas had not known all along that the bubble was bound to burst, that it had all gone too smoothly, but he was surprised at how quickly and how easily the great majority allowed themselves to become caught up in the witch-hunt. It was as if someone had snapped their fingers and an entire nation had woken out of a hypnotic trance and turned into a bellowing ape mountain. And as if that were not enough, a great many of these people seemed happy to have been told, with all the empty rhetoric and images frequently resorted to in Norway when it comes to anything new, whether important or not, that this was nothing but ‘art for art’s sake’, that ‘the emperor had no clothes’. Every tired old cliché in the book was trotted out — each one merely serving as a clear sign that everything was, reassuringly, just as it had always been. What annoyed Jonas most of all was the fact that people did not trust their own judgement, their feeling that the programme had really mattered to them, had given them something; that they were willing to deny their own instincts the minute some village idiot started bawling cheap slogans.
Then of course, after Veronika’s attack — that tactical tour de force of ingratiating populist phrase-mongering — the grand debate was off and running, like a collective attack of bitter hindsight, as unstoppable as a juggernaut; all at once grave doubts were being expressed as to the authority of the series. A whole host of academics and experts in this field and that, all of whom usually did nothing but sit around gathering dust in various offices and seats of learning, saw this as the chance of a lifetime and came racing out on to the course, screaming and shouting, to ride their hobbyhorses, to become celebrities for a week, to give vent to decades of pent-up ambition and bitterness, all of which now hit Jonas Wergeland full on. Even his colleagues at Broadcasting House saw this as a welcome opportunity to stab him in the back, under cover of some watertight excuse or other, not uncommonly a concern for the well-being of the medium of television. The debate raged fiercely in the press for several months. Not since the EEC debate of 1972 had such nigh-on hysterical fury emanated from so many column inches. Jonas did not lack for defenders, but taken all in all, these pieces most definitely worked against him, and even though many of the accusations against him fell flat, being nothing but petty personal attacks and harmless hair-splitting, the main current of criticism followed the lines laid down by Veronika Røed: divested of all its trappings, Jonas Wergeland’s series was an empty form, devoid of any real substance. But Jonas also sustained many a cut that stung more than he would admit, for in a debate of this kind just about everything is dragged into the open. ‘Can one trust a man,’ wrote one indignant mathematician in connection with the programme on Abel, ‘whose academic career consists of ten credits in astrophysics and two credits in mathematics, a man who, in some respects, never got beyond Prelims?’
Jonas Wergeland sat in the studio, surrounded by a landscape of his own making, constructed out of stills from Norway’s most talked-about television series, a room lined with pictures from a former triumph, suddenly transformed into a torture chamber. He heard Veronika Røed reiterating her arguments — now honed and polished, as seductive as diamonds — for the benefit of two million viewers, a whole nation gathered in front of their television screens, with Audun Tang occasionally breaking in to ask her to amplify some point, or elaborating on them himself, delivering the odd brilliantly sarcastic remark, reading out carefully selected quotes from a sheet he had conscientiously prepared in advance; other times he interrupted Veronika’s flow of words, almost apologetically, finding it necessary, for the sake of appearances, to ask Jonas for his comments, whereupon Jonas would make some brief, inconsequential reply. It was almost as if he were letting himself be mowed down, mangled, because he seemed to have nothing to say for himself, he felt sick, frozen to the marrow, taking a fatalistic view of the whole thing, there was nothing he could do about it; he made such a poor show of replying that even Audun Tangen eventually began to feel unhappy about it: the discussion was too unbalanced, a walkover, it didn’t even make for good entertainment, it was not achieving the effect that Tangen was looking for, the sort that would remind the viewers of his greatness, of his heyday, his quick-fire interviews, or the times in election programmes when he, the Grand Inquisitor, caused representatives from various political parties to go absolutely berserk and even reduced one to tears, a legendary feat; but there would be none of that here; Jonas Wergeland was too distant. Tangen could see it, inwardly lamented it; he tried to provoke Jonas with references to Veronika Røed’s fusillades, but sadly it did no good; Jonas just sat there, gazing at the clock on a pillar behind the cameras, following the second hand, circling and circling, and the big hand inching its way slowly towards the end of the programme without his having said anything of any consequence, anything that might redress the impression which the people of Norway now had of him, after Veronika’s successful campaign in the press and now here, live on TV; what could he do or say anyway, in the face of such a torrent of moral indignation, expressed with such tremendous seriousness, such assertiveness, what answer could there possibly be to the eternal pathological Norwegian fear of the word ‘form’, the horror of that enduringly intolerable foreign word ‘aesthetic’? Jonas sat there listening to Veronika repeating, hammering home, assertions the gist of which was that his programmes were totally devoid of any ethical substance; there was nothing behind the style, Veronika said, or pronounced, nothing but a lot of technical wizardry, and thus the entire series was really an evocation of pure, unadulterated nihilism — the most offensive word in the Norwegian language, a tag synonymous with some terrible, infectious leprosy.