The Conqueror

by Jan Kjaerstad

  The Amundsen programme proved to be the most expensive in Jonas Wergeland’s series. For one thing, it was filmed on location, near today’s Gjoa Haven, and late in the winter at that, both in order to film scenes of the harsh winter conditions – they were lucky enough to catch one of the season’s last storms – and to get some shots of the hunting. And for another, Jonas used a lot of the locals as extras and did not stint when it came to props: teams of dogs, Eskimo suits made from reindeer skin and so on. They even built a rough facsimile of the old Gjoa Haven in a bay, with the Villa Magnet, the Uranienborg astronomical observatory, igloos and all – the boat alone was a set: all they needed was the rigging jutting out of the snow like an antenna. It seemed that Jonas Wergeland did not want to spare any expense when it came to the depiction of a Norwegian who had displayed those rare qualities: curiosity, a willingness to learn – and respect for another people.

  The programme revolved, in other words, around Amundsen the ethnographer, a man who patiently observed the way of thinking and the way of life in an icebound region: an image which broke with most people’s view of Amundsen as nothing but an adventurer on skis, a ruthless egotist who would walk over anybody to get where he wanted. In Jonas Wergeland’s programme, Amundsen came over as a man who took an enormous interest in his fellow men and had a knack for getting on with people. In scene after scene one was shown how keen Amundsen was to learn tricks which could save a life in extreme weather conditions, how he studied the products of the Eskimos’ inventiveness, everything from the five different items which went to make up their footwear to the technique for checking the quality of the snow; from the difficult art of building an igloo to the way in which, when travelling across hard-packed snow, one should allow a thin layer of ice to form on the runners of the dogsled. These scenes must be among the finest ever shown on a television screen when it comes to depicting life amid the snow and ice, something every Norwegian is certainly in a position to appreciate. But above all else, viewers were shown how Amundsen learned the two lessons which would bring him victory in the race to the South Pole: firstly, how to dress in trousers and anoraks of animal pelts, from the skin out – in other words: no woollen underwear – and leave both the inner and the outer anoraks hanging loosely outside his trousers, to create an insulating layer of air between them and prevent a build-up of sweat; and – secondly – how Amundsen and his men, especially Helmer Hanssen, picked up a lot of new and important tips regarding equipment and techniques for handling dogsleds. They learned one particularly vital lesson: in extreme cold and snow the only thing you could depend on was the dogs. ‘On this expedition Amundsen not only conquered the North-West Passage,’ Jonas Wergeland said, addressing the camera during his regular spot in the programme. ‘He also won an insight into the art of survival. When all is said and done, it was here in the north that he conquered the South Pole.’

  The Amundsen programme was full of scenes that caused viewers to avert their eyes. During the last hectic days of shooting outside today’s Gjoa Haven, just before the advent of spring, Jonas Wergeland had been granted permission to reconstruct an old-style hunt for the first wild reindeer of the year, which were felled on land with bows and arrows. Jonas got in plenty of close-ups from the slaughtering, showed the slashing of the knives – most of them pretty primitive – showed the blood, the entrails, the meat being warmed, people gobbling it down, people cracking bones and slurping up the marrow, people scooping up the contents of the reindeer’s stomach and drinking them down; there were pictures of raw meat, dripping grease, bloodstained fingers and lips, dogs baring their teeth: a glimpse of life pared down, quite literally, to the bare bones. And in the midst of this steaming tableau: Roald Amundsen, looking exactly like an Eskimo.

  Here and there Jonas had inserted shots from the collection of Netsilik weapons and artefacts which Amundsen had brought home with him and which was now on exhibit in the Ethnographic Museum in Oslo. With this montage he managed to say something about the gap between the dusty, neatly-arranged glass cases – Jonas himself had found this place deadly boring as a child – and the bloody, ice-cold reality, what a far cry it was from that incredible hunting aid, the kiviutchjervi, as it looked hanging on the wall of the museum, to an actual seal hunt. In one long sequence, filmed in total silence, Jonas Wergeland showed how the Netsilik caught the little fur seals found in that area; how first, with the dogs’ help, and often through a layer of snow several feet deep on top of the ice, they located a breathing hole and how they then, by dint of a number of remarkable devices, chief among them the aforementioned kiviutchjervi, which consisted of a length of reindeer sinew and some tiny bits of wood with a piece of swansdown stretched between them – in actual fact an ingenious sensor which told them when a seal was approaching – were finally able to drive the three-pronged harpoon into the seal, even through a thick layer of snow, just as it was coming up for air. This was the high point of the programme, and Jonas did not stint when it came to detailed shots of the seal lying at last on the ice and the hunters ripping out the liver and kidneys and eating them right there and then, raw. He followed this with a scene inside an igloo, where the animal was being skinned and quartered with the ulo and its entrails dropped into a pot for heating up. As people watched white teeth munching on such delicacies as the seal’s eyes and brains they could almost smell the whale oil burning in the lamps, hear the dogs howling and feel the bite of the icy polar air. Some viewers claimed that they sat there shivering in front of the screen. And afterwards they got themselves something to eat. ‘I’ve never been as hungry,’ was the comment from NRK’s own director.

  Amundsen was no hunter, he didn’t like hunting, but you had to take life if you wanted to survive, kill with your bare hands if necessary. Even so, there was something terribly barbaric about this programme; it was just a little too raw and primitive. There were some who felt that Jonas Wergeland had used unnecessarily shocking effects, as if he were out to break some taboo. I don’t suppose anyone would have been surprised to find that just such a programme, containing so much bloody harpooning of seals, so many red-stained patches of ice, would be studied carefully by forensic psychiatrists, when the man who had made it turned out to be a murderer.

  Jonas Wergeland was also accused more than once of being a con artist. Certain experts maintained that he had chosen the less well known, or at any rate, less well documented aspects of the series’ heroes for obvious reasons: he didn’t know the first thing about them. By highlighting a less well-recognized facet of a character he ensured that fewer people could check the accuracy of the scenes he presented – and the fact that he focused on just one aspect of his heroes’ lives meant that the majority of viewers also believed Jonas Wergeland knew everything about them, that he was just as well informed about the rest of their lives. That is not for me to decide, Professor, I will simply say that if Jonas did not know almost all there was to know about Amundsen, then he hid it well.

  More serious was the assertion that he used the same key to an understanding of all his subjects. He presented them as mediocrities or, to be more precise, mediocrities in every area except one. One could, therefore, be tempted to say that he modelled them on himself. Every one of them had a unique gift for which they found a special use. In Amundsen’s case it was his stubborn, obsessive efforts to learn by experiment – even to the extent of wearing in a new pair of expedition boots by walking up and down Karl Johans gate in them; an almost alarming determination when it came to acquiring as much knowledge as possible about how to survive in snow and ice, in extreme cold. As I say: Roald Amundsen was a champion when it came to doing his homework. Without this, no Norwegian flag at the South Pole.

  For what it is worth, I think it would be truer to say that Jonas Wergeland did not create these people in his image, but that he did try to give himself some hope, by depicting his heroes in the way that he did. If there was any truth in his portraits of Amundsen and the others – well, then there was hope for him, t
oo. Jonas Wergeland wished, in other words, albeit latently perhaps, to create, or attempt to recreate, himself through the images of his subjects. In any case, he saw no point in celebrating a person who had everything going for him and achieved his goal. There was, however, good reason to salute someone who, despite their limited abilities, succeeded in conquering a corner of an unknown world. The message Jonas Wergeland wished to convey was a hopeful one: one, just one, great thought can be enough. One single, unusual thought – and you can do something that no one has done before.

  In the short run, though, no one was thinking along such lines. Since the Amundsen programme was sent out during the winter, people were too busy rushing out into the snowdrifts. All over Norway courses in igloo building were suddenly being arranged. The Evening News did a piece on a hardy family with young children who had lived in a snow-hole for a full week. Jonas Wergeland himself could confirm that there had never been so many ice-fishers on the lakes around Oslo – it was, as he said in an interview, as if the Norwegians had suddenly discovered that they were Eskimos at heart.

  Midpoint of the World

  I still refuse to accept that this cannot be done, Professor, for when Jonas Wergeland stood there with his finger on the trigger, aiming straight at Margrete’s heart, he was still thinking, upset though he was, about the minutes immediately prior to this, when he had seen her sitting with a golden orange in the vacuum between the flickering light of the television and the fading light outside the window, dark-blue with a yellow band at the bottom; he stood there watching the way she contemplated the orange, as if she got more out of the thought of the wonder that it represented, than he got out of a whole World’s Fair; and it is then that he plucks up his courage and says he has to talk to her, and he tries not to say it but says it anyway: ‘Are you still having an affair with Axel?’ – and he thinks she hasn’t heard him, thinks she is too busy watching the television, and ‘Thank heavens’ he thinks, but then she gently puts down the orange and she gets up, and she stands there in his dressing-gown, his dressing-gown, and she looks deep into his eyes before saying: ‘What do you mean?’ – a question so arrogant that he starts yelling, and although she is obviously trying to control herself, she is unable to bite back the short laugh he heard for the first time when the ice palace came tumbling down on Steinbruvannet, and he has to scream at her, don’t stand there and deny it, don’t you bloody dare, you whore, because somebody had told him, she’d been caught in the act, don’t fucking stand there and think you can fool me, because he knows, dammit, he had met someone who knew the whole story, he says and feels the pistol burning a hole in his pocket, a pistol he had had absolutely no intention of using but which all at once is burning a hole in his pocket, suddenly telling him that he might end up pulling it out anyway, at any moment, in fact – a possibility he could never in all his life have conceived of when he packed his case and left for Seville.

  Why did Jonas Wergeland travel? He travelled in order to find the midpoint of the world: an anachronistic objective, of course, since a search for such a midpoint presupposes a belief that the world is flat. Nonetheless – when he reached Seville he was tempted to declare that he had found it, for here, on an island in the middle of a river, the whole world truly had converged.

  And it was not only a midpoint; it was also a personal crossroads. As he sat high in the air in the little monorail – a touch of science fiction there – which carried visitors to the different parts of the exhibition site, he saw how the three pieces from his somewhat wide-ranging education finally slotted together to form a whole, because here the astronomical and the architectural aspects came together – more strikingly than in Jaipur – in a cluster of buildings of every conceivable style, many of them futuristic, standing shoulder to shoulder and making the whole island look like some alien planet. As for television, his third pursuit: the most notable feature of this planet were the screens, everywhere you looked there were screens; one could have been forgiven for thinking that life itself, all communication had been transferred onto gigantic video screens. The theme of Expo ’92, invoking the very spirit of Columbus, was nothing less than ‘The Age of Discovery’. And how apt that was, because Jonas Wergeland had at long last found his terra incognita and was now about to conquer it.

  To anyone who knows Jonas Wergeland’s merits, it may seem obvious that everything in his life was bound to lead him here; Jonas Wergeland was made to visit – or no, not visit: understand, enjoy – a World’s Fair. He darted about like a child at the biggest funfair on earth, stood spellbound before the massive, thousands of years-old block of ice from Antarctica on display in the Chilean house, took the elevator to the top of Japan’s massive wooden building to gaze in wonder at a man demonstrating the art of origami, followed the stream past the tableau depicting a Bedouin tent in the Saudi Arabian pavilion, sat in the dark, feeling very small, watching a laser show at the bottom of a square well in the French cube – and all the time he was on the lookout for inspiration, something that would help him to move on, the way that the Asian music which Debussy heard at the World’s Fair in 1889 had shunted him onto another track.

  Jonas was genuinely proud of the Norwegian pavilion, the main section of which was shaped like a pipe; inside this pipe a stunning multimedia show was presented: sounds and images, all based on the theme of water – the element from which all of Norway’s riches derived: fish, waterfalls, shipping, oil. Downstairs, on a screen set up at the crossover point between the shop and the restaurant, highlights from Wergeland’s own series on Norwegian heroes, including Roald Amundsen, were run non-stop. A foreign magazine compared the Norwegian pavilion to a jewellery box, and in this box, the journalist wrote, the television art of Jonas Wergeland was unquestionably the pearl.

  But Jonas was actually here to work. He was doing a programme on the public’s reaction to the Norwegian exhibit – already in the can, for example, he had an impassioned interview with a French lady, found looking at sweaters in the souvenir shop, who was very disappointed, truly shocked in fact, to find no sign of anything by Per Spook: ‘Norway’s greatest living artist’ as she said. Jonas was also working on a framework for the programme and found it only natural to take water as his theme here, too; to look at the way in which water was used throughout the exhibit: from enormous globes cloaked in a mist of droplets and water running in cascades down the walls, to man-made lakes and canals and fountains of every description – possibly the most memorable feature of the entire Expo, certainly for a Norwegian, a ‘dipper’ – a bird of the falls.

  The programme pretty much made itself, so Jonas had plenty of time to look around, had never felt so good; he was filled with an exhilarating feeling of being in command, of really ruling the world, embracing the earth as if it were his boyhood globe. He saw absolutely nothing of Seville itself, not even the cathedral; he spent all of his time, when not asleep, on La Cartuja, the island in the middle of the river, an artificial, optimistic universe where he could flit from pavilion to pavilion, from gallery to gallery, from café to café, take in a spectacular show every evening – without his feet, as it were, ever touching the ground. At one point he woke up – out of a trance almost – to discover that the film crew had left Seville, that he was on his own, that for several days he had been roaming around, so busy just trying to see and experience a mere fraction of all the things there were to see and experience; he ate in the pavilions of the various countries, in restaurants serving national dishes, drank in the bars, was in the process of turning into a doped-up Ulysses in the land of the Lotophagi. My old neighbour Samson was right, he thought, one evening when he was sitting with a dry martini in front of him, scanning the scene outside the windows of the Belgium pavilion’s stylish bar, as if surveying continents: nowadays you really can travel round the world in a matter of seconds.

  Then, one day, right outside the hall housing the Age of the Future exhibit, he was stopped by a tall, majestic figure with an almost unsettlingly keen gaze – the
word that automatically popped into Jonas’s head was ‘chief’. ‘Jonas,’ this person said. ‘I don’t believe it, it really is you, Jonas Wergeland Hansen,’ said the man standing right in front of him. Jonas was totally at a loss, did not even try to hide it. And who should it be but Ørn, Ørn-Henrik Larsen. Not Little Eagle now but Big Eagle and a company director, head of a well-known firm, Jonas immediately recognized the name, a company dealing with satellite telecommunications, a pioneering concern, constantly cited as one of the leading lights of Norwegian industry. Ørn had, in the end, lived up to his name; it struck Jonas that he was looking at Norway’s answer to Akio Morita, the founder of Sony. ‘We’re in the same boat, you and I,’ Ørn said jokingly or perhaps more in an effort to be pleasant. ‘We are today what Norsk Hydro was at the beginning of the century, with its nitrogen production. We both create assets out of thin air: out of nothing, so to speak.’ He stood there smiling, though with no great warmth. ‘We’ve become the lords of the airwaves,’ he said, giving Jonas a friendly pat on the shoulder, or not so much a friendly pat as a nice way of saying that he had to be getting on, he had a lot to do, they were taking part in the exhibition.