And in the midst of all this — with all the experts being trooped out, on tape, in inserts which were so intricately worked in that Jonas’s thoughts went to poor Vivi, the script girl up in the control room, whose job it was to keep track of all the VT spots — Jonas did nonetheless try to defend himself, even if for the most part he simply sat there, saying ‘ah’ or ‘well’ or ‘no’ or ‘yes, but’, interspersed with the odd ‘it’s possible’ and on a couple of occasions: ‘I don’t know’ — this last alone was something of a sensation, enough in itself to establish the programme as a milestone in television history: that a man, and a Norwegian at that, should appear on television and say ‘I don’t know’.
The truth is that Jonas Wergeland could not think of anything profound to say, even though he was dismayed to note that the whole discussion presented an example of a particularly Norwegian way of thinking: when you cannot see the moral in something, which is to say, when you do not recognize the moral, you call it ‘immoral’ or, at best, ‘nihilism’. Here, under a firmament of irritating spotlights, Jonas saw more clearly than ever how the entire case against him could be boiled down to the following: his programmes were reprehensible because they were different, because they could not be understood or explained in traditional terms or by recourse to good old-fashioned ideology. Because that is the way of things in Norway: if something does not claim quite explicitly — in block capitals underlined in red, basically — to deal with morality, people are incapable of opening their minds to the idea that it might, nonetheless, deal with morality, and they had even more trouble in accepting — perish the thought — that, as in Jonas Wergeland’s case, it might actually deal with another and arguably more important link in the chain of causality that leads to ethical standpoints: namely, the imagination.
But, thought Jonas, he was also guilty of an even worse crime: he had ventured to question the established perceptions. To Jonas it often seemed as if the Norwegian race — more than other races — considered itself to be complete and fully evolved in much the same way as it took the theories of its day for granted, regarding them as unshakeable truths. Nothing could be harder than getting a Norwegian who had finally and painfully managed to absorb new ideas to understand that even the theory of relativity, or quantum theory, or Darwinism, were merely temporary, that in a hundred years they would be a thing of the past.
But how was he to say that, how to protest against this deep-seated need for old habits and the status quo; how to find an angle that would get round this endless deadlock between ethics and aesthetics?
Jonas almost laughed out loud when a guy with a handheld camera stepped into the arena and proceeded to move, hunkered down, around the set, getting shots of Veronika from below while she was talking. Looking back on it, it is easy to see how, ironically, this whole programme, with its bombastic assertions regarding Jonas Wergeland’s aestheticism, owed so much to the Thinking Big series — and would indeed have been unthinkable had it not been for it. Never had the artistic form been employed more deliberately in a current affairs programme. Not only did the Colonel use video inserts in an experimental fashion, he even had Normann Vaage, dressed up as Henrik Ibsen, saunter onto the set once or twice to say a few words direct to the handheld camera. On the graphics side, too, by dint of the character generator, the Colonel produced quite a few innovative effects and demonstrated a couple of new ways with the digital special-effects system. The vision switcher said later that he had never made such great or varied use of the buttons on his control panel — and this in a live debate programme. The Colonel was to reap the greatest plaudits of his career for this broadcast.
But none of this was of any help to Jonas. He did not feel up to becoming involved in all this; he simply sat there thinking of irrelevant things, like the time he had lifted a 150-kilo cabinet, or the time he had raised the Comorian flag over the schoolyard, or the time he had broken a circle of stones on the top of Mount Sinai; he did his best to follow what was going on, really concentrated, but then he found himself marvelling at Tangen’s cleverness, his ability to be mentally one jump ahead, coming up with other questions, other lines of attack, while at the same time listening intently — Tangen, that is — to Veronika’s tirades.
‘Pull yourself together, for Christ’s sake,’ Tangen said to Jonas, while an excerpt from the Hamsun programme was being shown in all those thousands of homes. Tangen had received an irate message ‘in his ear’ from the Colonel. ‘Surely you can at least defend yourself!’ Tangen said.
Jonas sat there, staring up at the huge round scoop lamp, which was casting a special kind of light over him. Why should he defend himself? Was this a court of law?
‘So tell us: according to your programme, what is the truth about Hamsun? Was he a Nazi or not?’ It was Veronika’s voice, insistent.
Jonas heard the question. Recognized it. And knew that he was close to giving up. Because if there was one thing that the programme on Hamsun, the whole series, had taken issue with, it was this: the Norwegian’s demand for Great Simplicity. Light had to be either waves or particles. No Norwegian would accept that it could be both. The third option.
Again, Jonas was struck by a wave of nausea, because he was being forced to rise high in the air, to a point where all detail is lost and only the clear lines are discernible, because they were forcing him, in front of two million viewers, to give a simple answer, compelling him to conform to a pattern they could recognize.
Satori
And do not forget, either, the story which is bound up with, and indeed, lies at the root of this torment in a television studio, even if it did take place at an earlier point in time and on another continent, but which began with that same ominous feeling of nausea, mixed with a generous helping of dizziness. He had been sitting, lost in his own thoughts, over a notebook, when he heard a cry from outside. Although he was sure that his ears must have been deceiving him, Jonas went to open the window. On a narrow ledge outside the corresponding window of the next-door apartment stood a man. Ten storeys above the ground. Jonas was instantly struck by how appallingly simplified the whole situation was, so pressing that it made his stomach sink, and Jonas knew, as his limbs began to tremble, that this called for a swift and, above all, a simple response.
‘I’m gonna jump,’ the man said.
Jonas’s first thought was that this was a quite impossible situation, wrapped in such grotesque banality that it tipped over into unreality. He shut his eyes for a second and offered up a silent prayer to the Great Planner, that he might be spared this, but when he opened his eyes the man was still there, and he looked, what is more, as if he were gathering himself, was about to jump. All at once, Jonas found this confrontation quite comical; it had an age-old familiarity about it, there was something so hopelessly hackneyed about the whole scene — the combination of a desperate man on a narrow ledge and his potentially imploring helper — that the words ‘like a movie’ inevitably sprang to mind. The whole scenario was like some obligatory nightmare, a test, something to which every human being was subjected, to some extent, at some time in their lives.