In Jan Kjærstad’s novel The Seducer everything begins with a “Big Bang”: people die, people fall in love, people make love, people break up, and people find each other, etc. Everything intermingles within itself. The Seducer is the first of the epic biographies in the trilogy about the protagonist Jonas Wergeland, who is a charismatic Norwegian TV-documentary producer. The three biographies are written by three different women making three different cartographies, each producing another Wergeland by telling another story. The novels unfold in a vital form of constant movement which cements the fact that modern (or minor literature) is not based on finite truth, qua the obvious difference between the three biographies. On the contrary, it is a literature constantly inventing the world simultaneously with its construction hereof.
Jonas Wergeland seduces the Norwegian people through his TV-program “Think Big.” In 23 programs he portrays famous Norwegian personages like: Edward Munch, Roal Asmundsen, Liv Ullmann, etc. as a reaction towards the symptoms of the Norwegian illness, e.g. that the nation has lost its empathy in the tragic. The treatment is to tell a different story and revalue the nation’s involvement with life, both non-Norwegians and their own lives. It is a novel about a life (the persons Wergeland portrays) having an encounter with life. Several places we encounter the question:
“How does a life work at all?” and the TV-programs produced by Wergeland could be understood as an answer to that question: It is about becoming more human.
One way to illustrate how the three novels are composed as an ontological heterogeneity is to compare them with the DNA (a metaphor Kjærstad uses). The DNA was discovered as a double helix by Francis Crick and James Watson in 1953, a discovery they later were honoured for with the Nobel price in 1962. The human being consists of many cells, where each cell consists of a nucleus in which there are 46 chromosomes. These chromosomes are built by a double helix string, which is intermingled like spiral stairs. These stairs consist of 46 chromosomes, which again consist of 4 different molecules (G, C, T, and A). The chromosomes, which are inside the cells, are connected in pairs, meaning that the DNA consists of 23 pairs of chromosomes and 22 of those are the same whether one is a girl or a boy, which leaves only one pair of chromosomes to decide the sex. A boy is combined with an X and Y pair, whereas a girl has two X chromosomes (variations do occur, e.g.
a girl with 3 X chromosomes, etc.). The DNA dwells inside the chromosomes along with our entire
genetic heritage. Many have compared this genetic heritage with a lexicon of 23 volumes, each volume consisting of approximately 2-4000 pages. Now imagine: if you start at a random place on the bookshelf, then another and so forth, then it becomes obvious that in order to read number 17, you have not necessarily read number 16. When collecting our knowledge, e.g. in a lexicon, one can choose different forms of organizing the knowledge, i.e. hierarchical, chronological, alphabetical.
In Kjærstad’s trilogy, he blends every element of Jonas Wergeland’s life into molecules. He is basically inside Wergeland’s chromosomes, but that alone does not clarify the narrator’s position – after all there are 23 options (23 is a magical number in the novel, i.e., 23 TV-programs, 23 women he seduces, 23 chromosomes, 23 quotations from authors such as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill etc.
that he uses at various occasions). Within the area of gene-technology scientists have tried to split the DNA up into approximately 100,000 genes (The Human Genome Project). Based on that number we could wonder about whether each gene has a possible story to actualize. By asking question such as: “What is the most important thing in Wergeland’s life?” the narrator wishes or tries to bring some sort of organizing principle into play. The problem is, however, that a life does not play one specific tune. “Life is a collection of stories as complicated as the DNA…a small part can consist of everything.” The refrain of the novel is: “let me tell you a different story,” initiating a polymorphic perspective inviting one to follow the flow or the rhythm of a life. Any point of view could be the cause of anything, but in order to avoid any causality, the narrator asks: “HOW does a life work”, and never why. When asking how it implies a necessity in the life of Wergeland, whereas a why would imply a multiple choice of appropriate answers, Deleuze writes: “If probability presupposes causality, the certainty which is born of causal reasoning is also a limit and a particular case of probability.”94 Stating that would make certainty a matter of causality which again is limited by its own possibility, i.e., not necessarily certain. By asking HOW it becomes evident that the life of Jonas Wergeland is not the sum of those varying perspectives, each perspective is only one out of a multiplicity, a probability. “’It is a ridiculous thought that each human being should have only one identity. ‘I don’t understand what you mean’ [says Jonas] ‘I mean that all human beings have a multiple personality’…’That is why you should be an actor, Jonas, to understand this more clear.
Reinvent yourself. Become a king. Become a duke!’”(ibid: 87 & 91). Human beings can transform and change identity. The hypothetical question is whether the number of identities equals the number of genes, i.e. app. 100,000? Kjærstad, for instance, only wrote three biographies about Wergeland although that would not be enough and never be adequate. If each human being consists
of many different identities, then the biography is, at most, just a possible cartography outlining one aspect of a person’s life.95
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The story about Wergeland seems well structured as different stories unfold in and out of other stories, which leaves the novel somewhere between unity and diversity. Wergeland does not read; he is a visual person making his life into a play, as a kind of social relation between persons arranged by images. The novel can best be described as a montage, constituting different molecules into an open flow.
The montage is actualized when the narrator draws the images together and makes them work collectively by transversalising them. Guattari develops the concept of transversality, which we can best describe as a bridge drawing a line across or through different strata in an ontological dimension; it breaks with horizontal and vertical coordinates creating the possibility to think in three dimensions. “Transversality remains a line rather than a point. A line that picks up speed in the middle as it travels between relatively autonomous components of subjectification,”96 connecting dissimilative thought processes. Transversality is making the molecules (images) operative within a modified and open assemblage. Therefore, it would be a mistake to try to locate a structure or order of origin, which the text (or a life) refers to. There are only minor visualizing elements of Wergeland’s life, creating various affects and chocking effects being actualized when accelerating in the middle of the process. A life is like a montage, or like a bazaar in Jerusalem filled with many different shops (molar), which contain even more different products (molecular) - one can do his grocery shopping in any wishful order and buy any products, but to reduce the bazaar and the shopping to a system of coding would be wrong (there can be many reasons for buying milk, after all it might even be a mistake - mutation).Since we cannot locate a structure we might add a “z”
coordinate (a 3rd dimension) to the x and y axes. There is always something else, an otherness at play.
Wergeland is, for instance, not only his parent’s son, Margrete’s husband, TV-producer, a seducer, etc. He is something other than that too, e.g. becoming the persons he portrays when including some of their qualities into his own life. Life pulses through him. He never owns them but he is affected by their effective investment in life, a life he translates into language. A person does not have one signification, but several. Wergeland’s translation is a repetition with a difference. “If meaning is
becoming, it is a becoming-other. It is the alienation of the same in the different, and the sameness of the different in its alienation from itself. The non-relation is a separation-connection.”97
Equally important, Kjærstad’s novel should not be read as a deconstruction of Wergeland’s life, but as a novel deconstructing any idea of temporality and space. For that reason we find it appropriate to use Guattari’s concept of “ontological heterogeneity” because it defines time as a creation, forming the experience into an ontological time depending on the variety of memory emerging through the novel. It is an ontological heterogeneity caused by a transversal recollection.
In his inquiry on schizoanalytic metamodelisation, Guattari states: “schizoanalysis… will work towards its complexification, its processual enrichment, towards the consistency of its virtual lines of bifurcation and differentiation, in short towards its ontological heterogeneity.”98 Wergeland is not a classical labyrinth with one entrance and one exit; on the contrary, he is an open network. An open network does not have one privileged entrance or exit: one can begin anywhere and take any direction within the traits of the network. Each biography about Jonas Wergeland is a part of the network articulated from different perspectives. I believe that an open network is a suitable picture of life, it consist of many confluent traits. A life, Wergeland’s life, is always more, a multiplicity of kind.