Originally, if this source is to be believed, Jonas wanted to include scenes from Sigrid Undset’s sojourn on the Swedish island of Gotland and her later visit to Carl Linnaeus’s home, Hammerby Manor near Uppsala, its rooms papered with drawings of flowers; Jonas was particularly keen to highlight the legendary moment when she leans down in this chapel to nature and kisses von Linnaeus’s desk, just as pilgrims kiss the statues of saints. In his head Jonas had a clear idea of how telling this scene would be: Undset virtually kissing the ideal of the Grand Scheme of Things, the Great Classification, in which everything falls neatly into a certain order – a parallel to Catholicism; but his colleague had managed to foil this suggestion, thereby, as he saw it, not only saving NRK the considerable cost of a trip to Sweden, which was now cancelled, but also laying the foundations of a better programme – and receiving no credit for it. To his mind, he was the Ezra Pound to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
I am not sure that he is right, Professor. If you examine the key scene in the Undset programme, the walk through an English forest, you will notice how it seethes with botanical life; one could quite safely say that this scene was a visual kiss from Linnaeus. I think his colleague underestimated, and misunderstood, Jonas Wergeland’s creative genius: was blind to the way in which he was forever reworking his original ideas to produce simpler and simpler solutions, moved by a desire – ideally, at any rate – to reduce the chaotic raw material of each life to a few surprising strands, preferably no more than two, which he could twine together, like a double helix, in such a way that they nevertheless provided a picture of a complex, organic life.
You could say that with their ‘unveilings’ the newspapers were only giving Jonas Wergeland a taste of his own medicine, since that’s exactly what he set out to do to his heroes, to unveil them, as in removing the veil from them. This is demonstrated in exemplary fashion in the opening scene of the Undset programme in which the central character slowly, lingeringly, looking straight at the camera, unbinds her coil of hair, that characteristic braid so often seen in pictures of her, and lets her long locks tumble down over her shoulders – this in itself coming as a shock of relief to many viewers, especially faithful women readers of Sigrid Undset’s books who were used to the standard book-jacket portraits: the chaste features and the hair pinned up tightly on the top of her head, like a crown of thorns, an image which, even before one opened the book, spoke of a content suffused with momentous gravity, with the weight of the dark weft of human lives. Right at the very start Jonas Wergeland shattered this main cliché about Undset and showed her to be – apparently, at least, and thanks largely to Ella Strand’s magnetic presence – a lusty woman, a woman capable of torrid embraces and passionate kisses, of enjoying a drop or two, of laughing even.
A nigh-on impossible thought: Sigrid Undset laughing. It was almost indecent, like being offered a peek inside the legendary Undset shell. But this was the very aspect which Jonas Wergeland highlighted, because in his eyes – and setting aside her undeniable gifts as a storyteller – the key to Undset’s artistic success lay in her sensuality, her recognition of the power of the senses, of love as an unstoppable primal force, reminding one not so much of historical novels as of the books of an author she herself greatly admired: D. H. Lawrence. In a way – and this is something which many people considered paradoxical – the programme on Sigrid Undset was the most erotic in the whole of Jonas Wergeland’s television series with its undercurrent of almost startling lust, a covert voluptuousness which was perceived more by the intuition than by the eye.
Personally – if I may say so – I consider the Undset programme as a prime example of how well Jonas Wergeland succeeded in conveying the essence of a life simply by twining two aspects together to good effect. One of the programme’s two main elements was a walk around the National Gallery in London, the other a stroll through the vestiges of an ancient oak forest outside the city in Middlesex – in Sigrid Undset’s life both of these events took place on her honeymoon in 1912, during the six months spent by the newlyweds in England, possibly the happiest half-year of her life, a time when she herself was in love, when she made mad, passionate love – a thought almost as alien to her readers as the idea that their own parents must once have had sex.
Sigrid Undset strolls among the huge, old oak trees, through the countryside in which she felt most at home, just as Shakespeare and Chaucer were possibly her greatest sources of inspiration. She is walking with her husband, the painter Anders Castus Svarstad; it is late summer, she is pregnant, although it doesn’t yet show. The scene is vibrant with light and colour; the camera cuts occasionally to shots of wild flowers and small birds, all the things in which Undset took an interest. Jonas spent a lot of time working on the mood of this scene, to give the viewers an impression of how the forest embodied both light and dark, how it was positively vibrant with mythology and history – and, not least, with the spirit of the age of chivalry. It was during this stay that Sigrid Undset started making notes for a book on King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. At one point the couple stop in their tracks, and one hears the distant sound of battle, sword on sword. Through the use of trick photography Jonas suddenly showed them walking along clad in medieval dress, Sigrid Undset wearing a striking brooch pinned to her dress, on loan from the University Museum of Antiquities: a round, silver brooch ornamented with an exquisite tracery.
In the second sequence, a parallel walk which was woven, or crosscut, into the first, one saw Sigrid Undset strolling through London, an industrial city full of the clamour of machinery, with a book in her hand, smoking a cigarette; Sigrid Undset, a modern woman, walking through the doors of the National Gallery – she had originally wanted to be a painter – where the camera followed her through rooms filled with pictures, this too a mythological forest of sorts, until she stopped in front of Botticelli, one of her favourite painters, in front of his ‘Venus and Mars’, a painting which depicts the almost transcendental character of Nature and of the two figures resting in the forest.
These two elements merged together, therefore, when the newlyweds – back in the strand formed by the first sequence, came to a clearing in the forest where they sat down on the grass, Svarstad leaning back with his eyes shut, she looking pensive, such that they assumed exactly the same positions as Venus and Mars in the Botticelli painting in the gallery. Jonas had Undset glance fleetingly at the sky, as if she really were looking in the direction of Venus – not knowing, of course, that a crater on that planet would one day be named after her – before letting the couple drift into a passionate embrace. This scene encapsulated two key ingredients in Undset’s universe: a couple succumbing to carnal desire, in rapturous performance of the sexual act, and the dense forest in the background, a symbol of the inescapable dark side of life. The programme closed with a blatant sex scene, lingering kisses and ecstatic embraces in the grass, on the bounds of the permissible, and yet with a touch of the religious about it, as if there were a connection between physical love and religion. Not unexpectedly the NRK management had to put up with complaints from the Christian Broadcasting Circle.
Towards the end of the scene Jonas had the camera pull up to reveal that the couple had now moved – if, that is, they had not been there all the time – to the Palace Gardens in modern-day Oslo; the camera panned across the city, down towards Karl Johans gate and the Parliament building. It is not unreasonable to imagine that, with this surprising device, Jonas Wergeland wished to make a point about Norway being stuck in a permanent Middle Age.
Because that is what Undset had taught him: that Norwegians, even those people walking down Karl Johan with their mobile phones and their laptop computers, were living in the Middle Ages, mentally at least and to a greater extent than other nations in Europe; that they were barely done with the sagas, that deep down they were at odds with their own time. Norway had gone from the Middle Ages to a welfare state in the atomic age in just one century – in other words, so quickly that they w
ere still stuck, psychologically speaking, in the medieval peasant society, still had their roots in the earth. Like Undset, most Norwegians cherish an ineradicable mistrust of everything that smacks of a belief in progress and hope for the future. Like Undset, deep in their souls they believe in a static human nature, a heart that never changes. Undset had, in fact, made an invaluable contribution to the understanding of the Norwegian identity: the citizens of Norway – even those sitting back in their comfy new Stressless chairs – are medieval people. There is a very simple reason why Norwegians perceive Sigrid Undset’s historical novels as contemporary fiction: the people of Norway are still living in the past.
To be fair, though: viewed from another – one might almost say, opposite – angle, it could just as well be that, by dint of that same device, Jonas Wergeland wished to say something about what was possibly Sigrid Undset’s greatest achievement: she dragged the Middle Ages out of the darkness so to speak, out of oblivion. She believed that the Middle Ages should be able to shed light on modern-day problems – individualism, materialism, the idea that mankind could be used as a yardstick for the universe – since many of the things lacking in modern society could still be found in medieval beliefs and culture. Sigrid Undset’s positive view of this era anticipated the general reassessment of the Middle Ages made by researchers many years later.
In any case, Jonas Wergeland also realized something else: that there could be no better reason for working with television than this, since television was the perfect medium for ‘medieval people’, folk who lost themselves in fictions, who yearned for simplicity and coherence. Now and again he had the feeling that Norwegians did not regard the unique individuals around whom he built a television series as heroes, but as saints: that in all secrecy, when no one was watching, they kneeled down in front of the TV screen and kissed those images.
Cold, calm, clittering as Ararat’s topmost chunk of ice
(Henrik Wergeland: Det Befriede Europa)
Jonas sometimes wondered whether he had been to Yerevan three times or just the once. He remembered standing outside the Matenadaran, a building not unlike a temple, situated a little way up a hillside in the north of the city, surveying the scene below and feeling a kind of light washing over him, something which, for want of a better word, we will have to call a religious experience. It was December, but not uncomfortably cold. Beneath the landscape there sounded a low, barely audible note, or a hum, as if from a colossal dynamo lying somewhere deep under his feet.
In his memory he could see a person, a man smoking a pipe, but occasionally all he recalled was the sight of the mountain before him. Because there, just across the border from Turkey, lay Ararat’s vast massif – Little Ararat to the left, Great Ararat to the right, the latter almost 17,000 feet high, Little Ararat roughly 4,000 feet lower and more conical in shape, not unlike Mount Fujiyama in Japan. It was not hard to guess that this had in the past been a volcanic region. From where Jonas was standing, right below the Matenadaran, the two peaks seemed almost transparent, like a mirage, and the way the sunlight glittered on the glacier at the very top of Great Ararat made Jonas think of Theodor Kittelsen’s painting of the boy standing gazing at Soria Moria Castle, the golden glow on the ridge facing him: ‘A long, long way off he saw something glittering and gleaming.’ Jonas stood there, quite certain of what he would find in the sparkling chunk of ice at the very top – were he suddenly, magically, to find himself up there: a pearl, a pearl ear-stud encased inside the ice.
But there was something else too: something special about that mountain. Tradition had it that Noah’s ark had been left high and dry on the top of Mount Ararat when the floodwaters subsided. A number of expeditions had set out to search for remains of the ark in the glacier at which Jonas was gazing. He had always been fascinated by the story of Noah. It was a tale of survival. About being many and then all at once so few. Being chosen. Like being born again, being given a second chance. Jonas gazed at Mount Ararat, was put in mind of a slumbering dragon, could not take his eyes off that mighty silhouette. He had planned to spend a couple of days in Armenia, but suddenly he felt like staying longer, in some way that he could not explain he felt at home here. If one believed in the legend of Noah, this place was also the cradle of mankind. And there were plenty of down-to-earth historians who maintained that the Indo-European race had its origins in this part of the world. If they were right, and if he were to go far enough back in time, Jonas actually had a distant link with this place.
He stands there gazing out across the town, listening spellbound to the deep thrum beneath or above the landscape, like the note produced by the pedals of an organ: a dark note, or voice, emanating from the very bedrock. The confirmation of a calling. Anything, absolutely anything can happen, thinks Jonas. Anything is possible. At any moment.
Why had he gone to Yerevan? He went there to see this almost transparent mountain on the horizon, an unbelievably wondrous sight. Jonas stood under a distant sky and looked at a mountain, let it take up residence inside him, seep into his body. Jonas Wergeland was struck by the pure sense of being alive and the knowledge that the meaning of life could be something as simple as four minutes one morning in December when one is thirty-five years of age, at the zenith of one’s life – that the intensity and beauty of those four minutes could define an entire life, in the same way that a pretty unexceptional book of seven hundred pages might have four lines on page 351 which lift the whole thing up onto another plane, which have the power to transform both past and future.
A journey need not be long, in terms of time, for it to turn everything upside down. A day or two in a strange place can change your life.
Blowin’ in the Wind
What a wealth of cross-connections! I can see a hundred paths we could take from here, but for the moment we must stay with matters Biblical, albeit with a Bible of a different sort. No one was surprised when Jonas’s brother, Red Daniel, that uncompromising Marxist-Leninist, virtually took refuge aboard a Noah’s Ark of sorts by finally completing the university course he had dropped out of in the seventies – in theology. The leap from theology to the Marxist-Leninist movement had been as painless as the somersault back again – in both cases because of an unshakeable faith, also known as fundamentalism: Das Kapital by Marx, volume I, page 49, the Gospel according to Mark, chapter four, verse nine.
I think I ought to say something about why Daniel forsook the Norwegian Marxist-Leninist Party, since this did not, as some have maintained, have anything to do with him falling out with those cadres who defended the support given to strikes staged by well-paid workers – people earning two or three times as much as Daniel knew he could ever hope to make. And even though this ought to have been reason enough – since only a fool could claim that the aim of socialism is to line the pockets of prosperous high-achievers – it was a lesser, but equally shocking matter which finally made Daniel see the Marxist-Leninist movement for what it was: sheer cretinization masquerading as ideology.
One day Daniel heard something which he could not believe to be true but which did in fact prove to be so: that Dag Østerberg – whom Daniel, even in his most one-dimensional Marxist-Leninist phase, could not have brought himself to imagine was anything other than a brilliant sociologist, best known as the translator into Norwegian of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, one of the books which had inspired Daniel to study theology – that this man did not get the post at the Architectural College in Oslo for which he had applied, a lectureship in architecture and sociology, tailor-made for a man of Østerberg’s calibre. The teachers had, of course, been all for Østerberg, but the members of the Students Council – which is to say, the people who would have derived the greatest benefit from being able to consult such a mine of information – were unanimous in rejecting him and instead ensured that the post was filled by an applicant with the right Marxist-Leninist credentials: a perfect example of Berufsverbot in reverse, one of the most shameful blunders in the history of Norwegian further edu
cation. It was too much, even for Red Daniel – after this demonstration of Maoism in practice he basically stopped taking any active part in things, although it was a while before he actually left the party.
What sort of person was Daniel? I admit that even I, of all people, find it hard to curb my curiosity when it comes to Daniel W. Hansen, the man who actually informed – if that is the right word – on Jonas, saying that it was for his conscience’s sake. Personally, I think Daniel must have felt very relieved to find himself back in the theology faculty reading room, cut off from the world by a wall of concordances and synopses, dogmatic outlines and summaries of ecclesiastical history, making great forays into the frontiers of language, or logic rather, where one had to walk the fine line between the concepts of Christ as being ‘uncreated’ and yet ‘born’ and be able, at the drop of a hat, to explain the impossible parity between tres personae and una substantia. Having first sought in vain for the truth somewhere in the gap between the historical figure of Jesus and the fantasy fostered by the early Christians, he began increasingly to home in on, or back towards, the study of the Old Testament because, as with the abbreviation for a certain type of car, the initials GT – standing in Norwegian for the Gamle Testamente – tell you that here you can step on the gas, here you can really have some fun.
After taking a first-class degree Daniel got a job as a research assistant, commonly known as an RA, and began to concentrate in earnest on the Pentateuch, which was neither an engine nor a camera, but the Greek name for the first five books of the Old Testament, traditionally ascribed to Moses: a fretwork of accounts by different authors and a real treat, not to say a genuine playground, for any ambitious researcher. One soon realized that Moses could not possibly be the source of all these texts: very few writers actually describe their own deaths, after all, and it had gradually become customary to operate with at least four different levels of text – the Four-Source Hypothesis – denoted by the abbreviations J, E, P and D. With childlike enthusiasm, the student Daniel had made different coloured marks in the margins of his Bible Hebraica to indicate the different layers, interlocking like some intricately designed zip-fastener – there were places where the chapters looked exactly like rainbows. Anyway – to cut a long, a very long, story short, Daniel was most interested in J, which is to say the Jahwist strand, which probably also represents the oldest source. That a later theory also suggested that J was a woman only goes to show that Daniel had not lost his touch.
The Conqueror Page 20