JERZY KOS INSKI I A STUDY OP HIS NOVELS

David J. Lipani

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

August 1973

BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

556843 ii

Vo. ABSTRACT

The Introduction examined relevant aspects of Kosin­ski’s life in an attempt to establish a relationship between his past experiences and the major themes of his fiction. It was discovered that the author’s exposure to diverse forms of authoritarian control constituted the source of his bias against any external force operating counter to the self’s freedom.

The four novels comprising the Kosinski canon were analyzed in detail, especially as they were directed toward the quest for a viable self in a contemporary world threatening to submerge the individual consciousness. Each protagonist was shown struggling with some variant of social repression» the boy in The Painted Bird faced hostile peasants who, swayed by Nazist ideology, viewed him as a menace to their own safety» the narrator in Steps fled the socialist bloc because there he had no control of his destiny, nor was his being acknowledged as an entity separ­ate from the masses» Chance, in Being There, was subjected to a more insidious totalitarianism--the television medium, whose false representation of reality effectively kneads the individual into an easily manipulated, mindless soul» and Jonathan Whalen, in The Devil Tree, fell victim to the Protestant Ethic, the demands of which left him unable to see himself as something other than an image occasioned by wealth and status.

It was concluded that Kosinski's theme throughout was the elusiveness of self and the self’s efforts to achieve an identity amidst collective societies whose influences upon behavior made such identification difficult, if not impossible. It was determined, furthermore, thatL the author’s attention to characters desiring autonomy of self spoke to the need to expand and define the self, to make the self more aware of its essence and its potential.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PageINTRODUCTION .................................................. '. ... ........................ 1

THE PAINTED BIRD........................................................................... 37

STEPS........................ 79

BEING THERE .......................................................... 131

THE DEVIL TREE.......................................................... 185

CONCLUSION......................... ..................................................... .... . 236

BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................... 258

CHAPTER I» INTRODUCTION

“Non-fiction is outdated by reality. Fiction amplifies reality."

Jerzy Kosinski

2

Perhaps as intriguing as the novels he has written is

the life he has led and the relationship of that life to his

fiction. Certainly the protagonist of his first novel, The

Painted Bird, seems but a thinly disguised Jerzy Kosinski,

and that of the second, Steps, a more literary but still

factually-based version of the same man. Many of the scenes,

incidents, and characters in both works appear to have had

their origin in the author's actual experience.

Yet Kosinski is vehement in his denial of these sup­

positions! he cannot be found in his fictions, he claims.

The denial is a common one among artists, but whereas many

would offer it as a camouflage for their lack of inventive­

ness, it is with Kosinski a significant aspect of his artis­

tic vision. The form and content of his first two novels

depend directly upon his having separated the artist in him­

self from the rest of his being! had he not been able to do

so, his literary efforts would have been too personal, too

subjective to find adequate expression.The reality of

his past had to be transformed into metaphor and symbol

before weaving itself into his fiction.

The bare facts of that past are fascinating in

^This separation of the artist "from the rest of his being" is alluded to in Notes of the Author (p. 11) and more extensively in the note on page Ij" of this chapter (Prom No Third Path) and the remarks following.

3

themselvesi they form a body of material which strikes one

as being the very essence of fiction, so filled is it with

struggle, pain, determination, victory at times and defeat

quite often.

One can assume that until Kosinski was five or six

years old he had a normal, happy childhood. Born on June

14, 1933# be was the only child of Mieczyslaw and Elzbieta

Kosinski. Both parents were educated» his mother was

graduated from Moscow Conservatory and was a pianist (she

was never allowed to perform in public)» Mr, Kosinski had

attended Petersburg University and, among other accomplish­

ments, spoke fluent Latin, as does his son. (When he was

studying in Moscow in 1957» Kosinski would telephone his

father and the two would quickly exchange political gossip

in Latin before the Soviets had time enough to provide a

Latin censor.) Of his father Kosinski has said«

He was born in Russia. He saw the Revolution of 1905» then World War I, then he escaped from Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution, and then he lived through the Second World War. So if anyone had a reason to be fed up, he had. And he withdrew from the twentieth century altogether. He studied ancient Greece, and the origin of the European languages.It was his escape device.

Jerzy Kosinski did not withdraw from the twentieth century,

though he, too, suffered a similar and perhaps more horrify­

ing fate» instead, he studied that century and discovered

^Cleveland Amory, "Trade Winds,” (Interview), Saturday Review. 17 April 1971» P. 16.

4

his own means of escape in so doing.

When Poland was invaded in 1939» his parents believed

that their son would stand a better chance of surviving the

Nazi terror if he were placed with friends» the young Kosin­

ski was dark-haired and dark-eyed—unmistakably Jewish.

Thus he spent the war years as a largely independent waif,

much like the several million other children left homeless

and orphaned in the wake of the German holocaust. Thrust

upon his own resources, cast amidst the genocidal mania of

the Nazis on the one hand, the communists on the other, and

a treacherous peasantry in-between, he fought a perpetual

battle simply to sustain himself. No doubt he had to endure

a number of trials for the duration of the war, and, no

doubt, that which he heard and saw those six years has

forged the basis not only for his first novel but for his

entipe outlook on life» "By the age of eight, in terms of

character ... I was already completely formed.

He was eventually reunited with his family following

the war's end and resumed his formal education. An adept

student, he received an M.A. (in history) from the University

of Lodz in 1953 and another (in political science) in 1955.

Kosinski then studied photo-chemistry at the Polish Academy

of Sciences in Warsaw from 1955 to 1957» and later in that

year embarked upon social research at Lomonosov University,

3Amory, p. 16.

5

Moscow. His experiences in the Russian capital were later

captured in two non-fiction works, The Future Is Ours, Com­

rade and No Third Path, both written under the pseudonym

Joseph Novak and both highly regarded as perceptive social

texts.

The author frequently refers to what he rightly calls

a momentous decision made in the winter of ‘57. By that

time he had become thoroughly disillusioned with the commu­

nist system and desperately wanted to flee its grasp. He

had plotted his escape carefully over a two year period,

establishing himself as a financially successful photographer

so as to avoid rousing the authorities* suspicion when at

last he asked permission to leave the country, He claimed

to have a Chase Manhattan Bank Foundation Scholarship which

would allow him to carry on his studies in the United States.

No such scholarship or foundation ever existed. But Kosin­

ski obtained a passport, flew into Western Europe, and

thence to America, a free man.

Free in more than one sense. He had slipped away

from the totalitarian rule that had literally crushed his

independent spirit, a spirit fostered in him by his youthful

experiences. Free, too, though only figuratively, from that

past which had formed his character.

When I came /to America/, I did not want to do anything that I had done before. I thought it would be dragging a part of my past into an entirely dif­ferent place, and one of the reasons I came here was

6

not to drag anything from the past. It was not really a matter of leaving Poland» it was leaving myself in the Polish context. I was so much a part of that con­text, and I did not like myself. I thought that if I changed the frame of reference, it would also change me into something else. It was, therefore, entirely a literary decision.^

The total significance of this decision will be discussed

more fully in a moment. It is important to note here, how­

ever, that Kosinski had reached a crisis, probably the most

crucial turning point in his life, and one that would inevi­

tably shape his destiny. Had he failed in his attempted

flight, he would have faced an extended prison sentence and

perhaps worse. "But I had rejected that life to the point

where I really could not care less what happened to me, and

if I had been caught, I would have removed myself, one way

or another.Indeed, he carried a cyanide capsule in his

pocket throughout the journey westward.

He arrived in the U.S, with very little money and

almost no knowledge of English, The story he tells of

learning the language must rank amongst the finest anec­

dotes in literary history. Soon after settling in New York

City he surrounded himself with dictionaries and books and

saw several movies daily. Once he had attained a reason­

able familiarity with his new language, he sought to try it

^Douglas Mount, "Authors and Editors," (Interview), Publishers* Weekly, 2o April 1971, p. 14.

5Ibid.

7

out. But with whom? His job offered little opportunity

for conversation and he happened to be located in one of the

most immense and impersonal cities in the world. His solu­

tion was so obvious as to be ingenious. He simply picked

up his apartment phone in the small hours of the morning

and dialed "0!" When the operator answered, Kosinski

explained that he was a foreigner trying to learn good Eng­

lish. Would she listen while he read her a paragraph he

had composed? Would she tell him if any words or phrases

were not good English? Not a single operator refused his

requests and in fact some even offered to call him back

when the switchboard wasn’t busy in order to hear more of

his writings. In this way Kosinski*s initial forays into a

difficult language were gently criticized and amended.

And this about an author whose literary style has

drawn accolades even from his severest critics; Pew

reviewers fail to single out for special comment Kosinski’s

marvelous command of the English language. Like Conrad,

another Pole who wrote only in English and was an acknow­

ledged master of it, Kosinski’s prose has been acclaimed

as among the finest extant. "Intensely visual," "economi­

cal and precise," "lucid as a gem," "direct, unforced"»

these are but a few examples of the kinds of praise he has

garnered since publishing The Painted Bird.

An assortment of jobs, from paint scraper on excur­

sion-line boats to truck driver and photographer, occupied

8

his time until he enrolled at Columbia University in 1958.

It was while working there on his Ph.D. in sociology that

Kosinski produced his non-fiction volumes, The Future Is

Ours. Comrade in i960—less than three years after he had

come to this country as a non-English speaking immigrant—

and No Third Path two years later. During the decade since,

he has married (Mary Hayward Weir, whom he later divorced),

has taught a variety of writing courses at Yale, Wesleyan,

and Princeton, has travelled extensively, lectured at a

number of universities, and has received several awards for

his fictional achievements, including a National Book Award

for Steps (1969).

Such is the bare outline of Jerzy Kosinski’s per­

sonal and professional life. Hidden between the lines are

the psychological factors which must be held accountable

for his development as an artist. Some of these factors

have been mentioned briefly above» the following is a

closer look at the most poignant aspects of his existence

which have contributed to that development.

The years spent during the Polish occupation were

traumatic ones, so much so that Kosinski rarely comments

upon them directly. As if the circumstances of a war-torn

nation were not enough, Kosinski had to confront additional

burdens» he was Jewish, he was very young, and he was alone.

His Jewishness was evident in his features and thus he was

9an easy target for the Nazi invaders and their sympathizers.

He was also prey to the Polish peasantry for the same rea­

son» they feared German reprisals for harboring Jewish

refugees and were therefore frequently willing to report

or arrest persons believed to be Jewish.

This "fact" has been argued violently in the Polish

press which rightly insists that thousands of Jews were

aided by members of the Polish resistance and by the common

people. In their reaction to The Painted Bird, which docu­

ments the atrocities acted upon Jews primarily by Poland’s

rural inhabitants, Polish spokesmen deny that their country­

men were eager to surrender Jews to the enemy and that

Kosinski, like Leon Uris, Michael Elkins, and others, had

joined the legion of writers who have falsely accused

Poland of anti-Semitism. Such authors, they say, have been

caught up in their maniacal vengeance and have blindly

lashed out at all available quarry. The resulting fiction

is just that—fiction.

Kosinski was disturbed by the extreme reaction of

his former countrymen to their mention in his first novel.

(It is interesting to note that in subsequent editions of

The Painted Bird the author deleted "Poland," "Polish," or

any other words indicative of specific places or persons

in that country.) He explained in Notes of the Author

that he did not condemn the peasantry nor judge them

unjustifiably» his object was not to damn an entire race

10

or region.

The names used in The Painted Bird are fictional and cannot with any justification whatsoever be ascribed to any particular national group. The area is only vaguely defined, since the border regions, continually torn by strife, had no unity of national­ity or faith. Thus no ethnic nor religious group has cause to believe itself to be represented, and no chauvinistic feelings need be set on edge. (p. 14)

Moreover, in these notes, which sometimes read more like a

defense of his treatment of the peasant folk than as an

apologia of his artistic purposes (and which first appeared

as an Appendix to the German-language edition, purportedly

in response to anticipated objections from Polish readers),

Kosinski actually defends peasant actions during the war.

Their actions, he says, were instinctive and "their cruelty

/was7 extremely defensive, elemental, sanctioned by tradi­

tion, by faith and superstition, by centuries of poverty,

exploitation, disease, and by the ceaseless depredations

of stronger neighbors.It was a matter of endurance,

and for this reason they might be excused from guilt.

Yet not completely, at least insofar as they exer­

cised their prejudices. Hideous, criminal practices were

common, and if the population at large took little part in

the persecution of Jews, certain individuals within it

made life difficult, not to say miserable, for "misfits."

It must have been especially arduous for a homeless,

¿Notes of the Author. 1965), P. 23.

(New York* Scientia-Faetum,

11

wandering youth such as the boy in Painted Bird, many of whose experiences were probably similar to Kosinski’s own.?

A pre-teen could hardly be expected to fare well independ­

ently in any environment, much less in one characterized by

starvation, plague, and military uprisings. But to those

readers who raise precisely this objection to the "truth"

of The Painted Bird the author hastens to point out that

the human animal, even a very young one, quickly learns to

adapt himself to a given situation, employing those instincts

and natural abilities which will ensure his survival.

Children are rarely given credit for their potential» they

are pampered and kept child-like until some initiation rites

have been performed and they are finally allowed to be

adults. Left to his own devices, however, a child matures

rapidly and is quite able to fend for himself» he becomes a

man in all but physical stature.

Parted from friends and family, Kosinski had to

assume responsibility for his well being. His efforts proved

successful in two respects» he survived, and he evolved into s

a fully independent personality. Both facts are fundamental

to an understanding of the man and his works. They begin to

explain his fierce individuality, the unwavering intensity

?In a number of published interviews and particularly in an address to students at Bowling Green State University (1970), Kosinski has made it clear that events depicted in his first two novels either happened to him, were witnessed by him, or were of a sort likely to have occurred at that time and place.

A

12

of his character, and his perpetual battle to save himself

from victimization. A feasible result of years spent alone-

formative years—he is a loner now, a man who values his

privacy and mobility. At present, he speaks of his "move- V

ment," defined as "the single-minded struggle to avoid

restrictions, limits, regimentation." Such resolve is a

natural outgrowth of his youthful experiences and was further

promoted by the tightly organized, prohibitive communist

system under which he labored for more than a decade. Hav­

ing lived as a "free" spirit for a half dozen years despite

the almost constant threat of death or imprisonment, Kosin­

ski could not easily accept the restraints placed upon the

individual by the communist complex. The escape from his

birthplace was an escape from totalitarianism. He sought

in America a spontaneousness that had been denied him

throughout his adult life. The United States offered him

the opportunity to regain that autonomy he had enjoyed as

a child» it would allow him to lead the unbothered, form­

less life he craved. In addition, he might be able to

unravel the contradictory threads of his being—his child­

hood "liberty" versus the strictly governed environment

of his young manhood—and uncover his true identity,

I wanted to find out what was within me, what was the force that prompted me to do whatever. In Poland, you see, I did not have to provide the frame of

®Mount, p. 14.

13

reference» it was provided from outside. If anything, I had to counteract it. Half of my life was spent fending off influences from outside, and so not defining myself.9

The temptation to see KosinskPs writings as the

working out of that identity is a great one» indeed, some

of his published statements encourage this view. The

Future Is Ours. Comrade and No Third Path analyze in depth

the nature of collective and individual behavior of Soviet

citizens. Both volumes focus upon the dynamics of collec­

tivity in as objective a manner as is possible for one who

lived so closely with his subject, but in the concluding

chapter of the latter work the author speaks directly to

his private dilemma»

When, finally, the outsider reaches such a degree of cohesion and identification with his new environ­ment that he attains an understanding of it, and in addition, when he becomes able to view himself accord­ing to the criteria of that environment, it may be found that he will not succeed in the long run in continuing to accept this new version of himself which he has to maintain in order to continue to live and coexist with the others. This is just what this author has experienced» as suddenly it became clear that his acclimatization was relative and not abso­lute» that somewhere "in the wall of his soul" lay, still alive, a desire for something other than could be supplied to him by that collectivized new world.His subconscious came into conflict with his conscious self, his former self rebelled against his new self.He began to view his surroundings with a suspicious eye—and perceive suspicion in the eyes of his friends. He attempted intensively to "separate himself from his own ego" and to work out a method of becoming,"a detached observer of himself." of observing himself in the most objective and critical manner, in the same manner in which he observed those whom he distrusted.

^Mount, p. 14.

14

As a consequence he ceased to live in harmony with himself, and this in turn made it more difficult for him to retain his self-control and self-possession in his relations with others, and diminished his self-confidence. At some moment during that process he understood that, instead of becoming a good citi­zen and a creative member of the socialist community, he became a bad—because playing unconvincingly— actor who, moreover, was incapable of believing, even for a little while, in the authenticity and relevance of his role and lost with every new moment his sense of unity with the vigilantly watching audience ....

As a result of a closer and broader familiarity with the mechanism of the collectivized society, the writer’s conflict with that society, with its theory and practice, its goals and programs, its propaganda and tenets, became still further magnified. This was no longer merely the personal revolt of an individual who could not find a place for himself in the collec­tive snare but also an intellectual-moral revolt, external and superior to personal considerations . • • .

At such a time there comes a moment of reflection when, as Camus says, it is possible to have the courage to lose one’s own life when so needed. But to look on while the meaning of that life evaporates, while our raison d’ etre disappears—that is unbear­able J

The publication of this book is precisely the expression of such a reflection, the rejection of a choice which has proved unbearable, (pp. 357-59)/italics

<. The last reference is to Kosinski’s decision to

leave the communist bloc. Clearly, he had reached a water­

shed in his career! his concept of self, deeply ingrained,

was threatened by the oppressive forces of totalitarian

society. He had to choose between self-expression and con­

formity! the child Kosinski had been—his former self—and

the individualism synonymous with it, won out. Or rather,

there was no real choice involved, for the specter of the

socialized man—manipulated, a mere puppet of the state—

was the very antithesis of everything he held sacred. For

15

a while he had attempted to adapt himself to his socialist

environment and its manifold restraints, but this "pre­

tender soul," to borrow from Saul Bellow, gave way to his

"true soul"i in the battle of selves, the Kosinski who

valued his essential nature most highly emerged victorious.

His immediate response to the predicament at hand

was flight, yet his recent past was not so easily dismissed.

The time behind the iron curtain had had its effect» the

accumulated weight of years spent under the Soviet aegis

left a strong imprint upon his consciousness. He needed to

break totally free of it. Flight alone was inadequate to

separate himself from what he had become as a participant

in the socialist dream.

America proferred hope. It provided him with con­

crete advantages in his quest, not the least of which was

the freedom to be what he wanted to be. A more important

advantage, however, was the English language itself, since

it "disconnects you, and requires from you—because you do not know all the cliches yet—some of your own."^° It is

the very means by which one can externalize feelings, treat

symbolically what would otherwise be incommunicable. "One

is removed from one’s Pavlovian restraints, so to speak.

The new language has brought for you a new evocative power»

it can evoke your imaginary states but not your traumatic

10Mount, p. 15

16ones."11

Which is to say that English enabled Kosinski to

escape figuratively from what he had already departed liter­

ally. So closely associated is the Polish language to the

author’s memories that to hear or to use it is for him a

traumatic experience. He has confided that whenever

addressed in Polish or Russian, or whenever required to

speak or write them, his "whole manner changes. I get more

rigid, my neck is stiffer, I am more European. My tongue

is even more rigid, my hands are not as mobile. I am much

more manipulative because I am frightened to say something 1?that is not exactly what I want to say." The mother-

tongue, then, is psychologically linked to Kosinki’s Euro­

pean experiences, experiences which he considers traumatic

and which he would sooner cast from his awareness. He

cannot employ it when he wishes to convey the import of

that first quarter-century of his life» it is insufficient

to capture the exact meaning those twenty-five years have

for him.

English became his literary language because with

it he felt unafraid» he had confidence that he could express

himself accurately and unaffectedly. He mastered the

written word faster than the verbal and so began the * 12

^Mount, p. 15.

12Ibid.

17

transformation of his actual life into a literary one

shortly after his admission to Columbia University. The

transformation was a necessity, a part of his plan to

eradicate the stultifying influence of the past, thus open­

ing new paths and new directions for his psyche to follow.

The introductory step in this metamorphosis was the

production of The Future Is Ours. Comrade (i960). It is

largely a series of dialogues between the author and a

host of acquaintances met during his stay in the U.S.S.R.,

organized under such headings as "The Street and the Citi­

zen," "The Soviet Socialist Army," and "In the Hospital,"

each one surrendered to exhaustive investigation. The

whole is unified by a running narrative, usually devoid of

subjective comment but occasionally betrayed by the author's

pity, regret, anger, or abhorrence. There are also a few

statistical charts based on public-opinion polls and ques­

tionnaires examining a range from "What article of daily

use, not counting furniture, would you consider most essen­

tial in the present U.S.S.R. apartment?" to "In your opin­

ion, will a war between capitalism and socialism take place?"

Kosinski's Russian visit was prompted, of course, by

his sociological interests» he was curious to know the

Soviet man's likes and dislikes, his dreams and fears, his

perceptions of the world and his own relationship to it.

To lend authenticity to his research, Kosinski settled upon

18

a scientific approach that would force him to suspend his

critical judgment. He simply asked pertinent questions and

faithfully registered his subjects* observations in their

own words. Thus he composed an impartial portrait of com­

munal life, the principal features of which--"mutual toler­

ance, a sense of reciprocity, a tendency to conformity, and general resignation"^^—rubbed against the grain of his

character. For one nearly self-reared, it was difficult to

accept that, total subordination of the individual to the

group which typifies Soviet society. The notion of a

group’s right to interfere in a man’s intimate life and the

idea that he cannot recognize his own innate being—"Remem­

ber, a man knows himself the least. Other people know thelit

most about him. It can’t be otherwise" —ran counter to

Kosinski*s highly individualistic, private nature. He

could not bear the fanatic social/governmental controls

which circumscribed and monitored his every movement» "The

feeling that I was never alone grew ever stronger in my mind."15 The Future Is Ours. Comrade is a record of the

author’s accelerated desire to free himself from totalitar­

ian chains.

No Third Path is a sequel, published just two years

^Jerzy Kosinski (pseudonym Joseph Novak), The Future Is Ours. Comrade (Garden City, New York» Doubleday, 19o0),P. 19?“

1/1 Ibid., p. 75.

15Ibid.. p. 152.

19

after the first volume appeared. It, too, is a social

expose' and is written along similar lines. The same indirect

castigation of collective behavior emanates from it, yet the

book is somehow more personal than its predecessor, perhaps

because Kosinski gives more space to his own portion of the

dialogues and, on another level, because he grants his

readers a closer view of his intimate friendships and roman­

tic engagements. One such encounter, with a man identified

only as K, yielded the following confession from the author*

"I would like to depend on nobody. You know, to tailor my

life to my own yardstick, and not to rifle around in ready­

made-clothes stores . . .And Zina, a Party candidate

who befriended Kosinski, says*

. . . you are a little egoist, wrapped up in your­self.’ . . . Your naturalistic remembrances of child­hood and the war, your hatred of village life and primitive conditions , . « all this causes the world of today to reach you in a distorted image. You refract it, as it were, in a prism. That most human and humanist institution which is the Soviet collec­tive and our meetings, you consider as contrary to the nature of the "free mani" (pp. 58-59)

Both comments are overt references to Kosinski*s state of

mind» they show his growing discontent with emotional,

spiritual, and mental bonds inflicted upon him, his pre­

occupation with childhood memories and their implications,

^¿Jerzy Kosinski (pseudonym Joseph Novak), No Third Path (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1962), p. 53»

20

and they hint at a developing, if not already formulated,

philosophy of human nature. They point as well in the direc­

tion Kosinski was to take—a third path, so to speak, toward

a kind of "qualified" solipsism wherein both halves of a

split personality could reside in harmony, one half filter­

ing all experience through the self and therefore subjective,

the other existing outside the self, observing objectively.

The whole personality, then, would see simultaneously the

reality and the illusion of events, concepts, etc., and

assimilate them in their respective compartments—self and

"not-self." Figuratively speaking (or perhaps literally),

Kosinski*s self could react normally to his environment

while his not-self collected images of reality later to find

expression in his literature.

As No Third Path makes clear, the political side of

Kosinski*s character realized that such things as freedom

and behavior were relative. Neither democratic nor social­

ist systems make room for true freedom» rather, freedom

is a state of mind and is therefore a matter of attitude.

Behavior is not determined finally by a set of rules

imposed from without» it is a matter of conscience, dictated

by the inner being. Kosinski*s journey to America, then,

When asked what role writing played in his "move­ment," Kosinski replied that it "provides a sort of split, in the sense that once in a while you observe yourself, a certain part of yourself is set apart, permanently, almost as a kind of image collector. I notice this very often. I am struck by something, but it is not I who is struck by it, it is my new novel which is struck." (Mount, p. 14.)

21

can be seen as a retreat from all formal institutions into

a private world where the self reigns supreme.

That segment of his self which had accumulated impres

sions since childhood, however, including those that repre­

sented conflicts between individual and collective modes of

behavior, needed exorcism. He began "translating" these

impressions, first into non-fiction, then into fiction. To

do so, he had to disconnect himself from his self (the quote

on page 13 addresses this point) and view his past as a

detached, objective witness might. The Future Is Ours. Com­

rade and No Third Path were written with this intent. They

were a means of "removing myself from the past by making a

non-fiction out of the conditions of my life ... It was

an attempt to turn a major aspect of my growing up into a- ip

literary experience . . . ."

With a secure grip on the English language, Kosinski

had successfully converted his real experiences into liter­

ary ones through the non-fiction medium. Yet there remained

a quantity of experiences which still beckoned for expres­

sion» these were the events—and the emotions prompted by

them—which had so forcefully embedded themselves in the

author*s sensibility. They demanded a special outlet.

Non-fiction had adequately summoned at least the surface

tensions vexing Kosinski, but beneath them lay an entire

^®Mount, p. 14.

22

complex of impressions acquired over nearly three decades.

These necessitated fictive treatment.

Once more, Kosinski's method was to sever himself

from the reality he proposed to portray. "The most essen­

tial stage of the writing process," states Kosinski in

Notes of the Author.

is the process whereby the writer comes to stand outside the experience he intends to mirror in his book. The chief element of this "alienation" is the conscious desire to examine oneself and the experience from "without," from a standpoint at which both the writer himself and his surroundings lose their concrete features, and separate them­selves from everyday reality after a long period of struggle and uncertainty to enter a fluid and less rigidly limited dimension. This "new dimension" exists only in the writer's consciousness» within it the elements of reality no longer obey the earth­bound laws of gravitation» the minutiae of time and place cease to be important.

Between external reality and his own imagination the writer constructs one curtain after another.(P. 9)

What this means, of course, is that while the content of

The Future Is Ours. Comrade and No Third Path may be

regarded cautiously as autobiographical, Kosinski*s fiction

cannot. Fiction creates something timeless and immutable

within its own world» it resists infusions of fact. The

Painted Bird and Steps, often considered by critics to be

autobiographical, tender material which is at least thrice

removed from reality» the printed word is not reality, nor

are the characters, settings, and happenings because, as

recollected entities (not to say completely invented ones)

23they "lack the hard edge of total fact."^9

The remembered event becomes a fiction, a structure made to accommodate certain feelings. If there were not these structures, art would be too personal for the artist to create, much less for the audience to grasp. There is no art which is reality» rather art is the using of symbols by which an otherwise unstate- able subjective reality is made manifest, (p. IT)

Furthermore, the artist, even when drawing explicitly upon

his actual experiences, selects only fragments from them»

he either understates or exaggerates particular ingredients

of the event abstracted, depending upon the effect he is

after. Thus, he distorts whatever reality his subject

matter may once have possessed.

Such is Jerzy Kosinski*s procedure» to stand aside

from himself in order to view what and where he had been,

thence to manipulate reality with an admixture of imagina­

tion. The results have been gratifying for the author.

His first two novels must betoken, at the minimum, a tempo­

rary release from the pressures of his past. Having

brought his history to the forefront of consciousness, he

has no doubt been better able to understand it and perhaps

to soften its grosser aspects. This is not to suggest that

that past has been altogether obliterated—uprooted cer­

tainly, scrutinized unquestionably. It does suggest, how­

ever, despite Kosinski*s protestations to the contrary, an

examination of the meaning his life has had through an

^Notes. p. 11.

24

imaginative depiction of it.

From another point of view, The Painted Bird and

Steps offer "visions" of the author’s past» metaphorical

fashionings of unconscious states. It is safer to regard

these works in this perspective, especially since Kosinski

is adamant about it. Surely both novels are the product of

fact and fancy molded to a symbolic whole, or as Kosinski

puts it with respect to Painted Bird, "the result of the

slow unfreezing of a mind long gripped by fear, of isolated 20facts that have become interwoven into a tapestry,"

There is no contradiction to seeing either fictional

piece as both a "fabulous" search for the significance of a

real past and as an effort to arrest the crippling conse­

quences of it. Though Kosinski’s first and second novels

may not rightly deserve to be labeled autobiography, they

nonetheless exhume the skeletons of his past in an attempt

to set that past apart from the author’s present and thereby

permit him to function freely.

They have had just this effect. Kosinski is delighted

with his profession because it fits so well into his scheme—

the "movement" alluded to earlier. Fiction writing is rela­

tively immune to limitations» it "requires no place ...

no paraphernalia," and is

freer than any force around you. There is no situa­tion, no setup, that can duplicate the human

2QNotes. p. 14.A

25

imagination. If a writer confronts this aspect of himself . . . then he is able to transcend every single human aspect of existence. He can transcend himself, he can refashion the world around him, carry it into the most hidden part of his own pri­vate universe, which no one else has any access to ... It is an incredible freedom the writer has.It is the freedom to be the maker of the world.No one else has that freedom.21

Encumbered by years of slavery to one or another form of

suppression, Kosinski at last found a proper medium for his

selfAs voice. A tool with which to expand reality, fiction

outdistanced non-fiction. It opened avenues of exploration

long curtailed in an old self, hidden and frightened behind

a socialist guise. What had lain dormant—a vividly remem­

bered body of experience and a creative genius—was ready

to blossom. Non-fiction had carried him part way out of

the past» fiction would finish the job. All that his

earliest work could not collar—the emotional highs and

lows, the "strangeness" of his experience—would be couched

in an idiom specifically designed to capture subtleties and

largenesses alike. Kosinski had waited "to peel the gloss

off the world, to view life without the comfortable conceits

with which we embellish perceptible reality." With the

germ of The Painted Bird firmly rooted in his mind, the

time had come.

21Mount, p. 14.

22 Notes, p.,19.

26

Kosinski*s non-fiction volumes supply some obvious

links to his fiction. Most prominent, perhaps, are the

themes common to both. Actually, only one major theme

emerges from all of Kosinski*s writings, but so broad are

its implications that it encompasses nearly every worthwhile

idea and ideal available to man. The evolution and the

machinations of self, the endeavor to ascertain and estab­

lish one’s identity, the individual conscience in conflict

with mass norms» this is the core of the Kosinski canon.

What strikes the reader of The Future Is Ours. Comrade and

No Third Path most trenchantly is the depiction of a com­

munal society wherein the individual counts for naught» the

state is all-powerful, deserving of men’s self-effacement

and perpetual sacrifice» there is no room for independence,

for ego, for deviation from prescribed behavior» the goals

of the mass are the goals of the single units within it.

Cogs in a wheel» such are the persons encountered in

either work in the midst of whom wanders one soul whose

individual cast will not fit the mold.

Prey to the whims of the socialist monolith, an

already victimized Kosinski—recall the harrowing ventures

of his childhood—sought an unfettered existence. He found

it, in part at least, on American soil. From the distance

of years and miles, and with a first-hand knowledge of what

it means to be oppressed, he set about uncovering the rami­

fications of self. In his fiction Kosinski probes the

21victim/oppressor relationship, the power of love, hate, fear,

vengeance, and the workings of power itself» he dramatizes

the sense of alienation, the failure of institutions to

guide conduct and faith» he studies fierce individuality,

the innate desire for freedom and survival, and the almost

magical ability to metamorphize for self-preservation. Self

is the focus here, and that absorption with self issues

clearly from the incidents related to Kosinski*s non-fiction.

Less obvious is the matter of style. The language

of The Future Is Ours. Comrade and No Third Path is con­

versational while that of The Painted Bird and Steps is

anything but “chatty," Yet all four works exhibit an objec­

tive attitude or tone. This is evident in the non-fiction

where Kosinski enacts the role of a data processor» in The

Painted Bird and Steps, however, it is shown in the detached,

unemotional nature of the narrative. It is as if their

respective protagonists were striving to remain aloof from

their narratives, to conserve or withhold their feelings,

and to maintain control over their material. The language

of both novels is highly imagistic but not colorful» even

the most sensational episodes in each are presented matter-

of-factly and this dry impassivity never waivers. The

effect is an odd one, for though scenes are recounted

impersonally, the emotions elicited are potent.

Finally, there are passages in the non-fiction (pre­

dominantly in No Third Path) which connect Kosinski*s

28

factual past with his fiction. Aside from reminiscences

and general accounts of Soviet life, there exist two char­

acters and one anecdote which play significant roles in his

creative literature. Varia relates the story of a sparrow

she and her young companion caught in a trap. They painted

him purple, then let him rejoin his flock only to see him

plummet from the sky moments afterward, pecked to death by his own kind because he was suddenly different.2^ This, of

course, is the heart of The Painted Bird. And Gavrila, who

with Mitka the Cuckoo educates the boy in Marxist-Leninist

doctrine at the close of that novel, appears here as a man

still convinced "that the only true way for a man to develop 24his versatile talents is in and through the collective."

And K speaks of underground men’s rooms where one can be

completely alone, free to do as he pleases, "like a Greek godi"2-> He is seen in Steps as "The Philosopher," an

unwilling member of the socialist system who eventually com­

mits suicide in a lavatory to escape it.

Themes, characters, happenings, stylistic tones

These are carried over from his social texts to his fiction.

The experiences reflected in those texts, in conjunction

with his childhood memories, furnish the basis for The

23No Third Path, pp. 106-107.24Ibid.. p. 70.

25Ibid.. p. 54.

29

Painted Bird and Steps» their literary embodiments combine

to form a network of symbols without which the artist Kosin­

ski could not have functioned. To convey the immensity,

the overwhelming impact of his youthful experiences, he

needed that unique perspective evolved from twin selves,

one viewing objectively what the other felt internally.

Thus, the locale of these novels became a metaphorical set­

ting against which characters (themselves archetypes)

acted out representative elements of the author’s life.

By stepping back from himself, Kosinski was able to drama­

tize the sensations and experiences which had the greatest

effect upon him.

In Notes of the Author Kosinski explains his use of

memory as both content and framing device. Though Notes

makes reference only to The Painted Bird, what is said

there with respect to the author’s method applies equally

well to Steps. Both novels are episodic, ’’with the links

largely omitted, as is the case with memory.’’ (The

"little dramas" of The Painted Bird are organized chrono­

logically whereas those in Steps—with the exception of a

few consecutive pieces—are not.) "The extremity of the

situations, through heightened action and imagery, repro­

duces also the action of our thoughts and our dreams. The

symbolic quality of the characters and details of the

2^Notes. p. 12.

30situation . . • serve as a method of conserving and under-

2?lining something else, as a concretization of a feeling.”

Each novel blends fictionalized fact with symbolic render­

ings of general feelings entertained and harbored for years»

stored emotions which could not be reproduced or re-lived in

any but a literary way, and prior encounters whose impress

was unshakable, lent substance and structure to Kosinski’s

first novels.

Of his third novel, Being There, nothing has been

said thus far because it departs radically from the format

employed in his earlier productions. Except in the broad­

est sense, Being There has little tangible connection to»

Kosinski’s background, particularly with respect to his

European experience. In fact, although Kosinski is hailed

as an American writer, less than forty pages of his fiction

pertained to things distinctly American until Being There

appeared in the spring of 1971, better than thirteen years

after his arrival in this country. The Painted Bird and

Steps dealt almost exclusively with the author’s turbulent

years in Poland and Russia» the protagonist in each bore

some resemblance to Kosinski himself and therefore warranted,

however tentatively, biographical comparisons. Being There

unfolds wholly on American soil and its "hero" is not at all

^Notes. pp. 12-13.

31like his creator. Chance, an idiot, is television’s child,

28literally the product of the TV set. His misadventures

in high society are related comically, but the novel's

parable form belies a serious message. The social and poli­

tical realms into which Chance is thrust are a composite of

the dreams and illusions fed upon daily by millions of tele­

vision viewers. Politicians, businessmen, and party-goers

alike are all frauds, fearful that the platitudes and com­

plaisances upon which they depend might be stripped from

them by the truth. They are a conglomeration of mass media

freaks, supersaturated with false images of themselves and

their environment, easily persuaded by the superficialities

of the "boob tube.”

Foolish creatures these, subservient to the omni­

present, one-dimensional picture tube which casts back the

favorable images of themselves they are intent to see.

Chance, in his mindless splendor, subsumes this very func­

tion—like a television set, he reflects only what others

want to see in him» his being is theirs to manipulate. He

is what they expect him to be» he speaks the words they

want to hear. They tune him in for those shallow, inane

bits of "wisdom" only an idiot could provide—and only

idiots could believe in.

Kosinski quips about a reviewer who asked, "Would this book, like your other two books, be autobiographical?" (Amory, p. 16.)

With Being There Kosinski has abandoned the past

fully in favor of the present and future. The sociologist’s

concern with his own immediate surroundings is evident in

the author’s analysis and eventual castigation of contempor­

ary man, whom he envisions as little more than a malleable,

unthinking automaton» subject to media propaganda, he loses

a sense of himself in the morass of a stagnant, inhibiting,

conforming universe, seemingly content in his oblivion.

No character in Being There rises above this mire, unless

it be Chance, who might be excused for legitimate biological

reasons. Yet not even Chance, for Kosinski suggests—and

here he acts as prophet—that the Chances of this world are

multiplying rapidly, victims not of birth defects but of

exposure to network programing. Their numbers are growing

and soon our population will be replete with witless human

animals incapable of independent thought. American bureau­

cracy will then have uncontested control of its populace»

those few remaining artists or intellectuals fortunate

enough to have escaped the media’s poison will be isolated

or liquidated.

Extravagant as it may sound, Kosinski is resolute

in his stance. He steadfastly believes that American

society (and all other societies adopting American habits)

is running downhill toward the ultimate wasteland, carry­

ing with it centuries of cultural advancement. Paramount

in his catastrophic vision is the demise of the free-thinker,

33

the creative soul who must suecumb to the might of a mechan­

ized, dehumanized system.

I am basically very depressed about the twentieth century. It is a totalitarian century. This century,I am convinced, will totally and totalitarianly get rid of the liberal mind, the Renaissance man. This is the first time when there is a perfect match between crude political ideas and the complex tech­nology that makes those ideas acceptable.29

The system, a technological Establishment that under­

mines individualism and promulgates adoration of the collec­

tive societal body, receives its most direct and vicious

assault in The Devil Tree. This novel (released in Febru­

ary, 1973) attacks what Kosinski believes is the source of

our current product- and profit-minded Corporate State—the

Protestant Ethic. It is the goals and attitudes implicit

in that ethic—so well ingrained in the American conscious­

ness—which have caused Jonathan James Whalen, the novel’s

protagonist, to flounder between the expectations his family

and society have of him and his personal desire to define

himself internally. Elements external to his self—wealth,

status, connections, et al.—have always determined his

identity» these are the elements that signal the “chosen”

in contemporary America as much as they did several hundred

years ago and are therefore the aims of every "sensible“

American. Jonathan, however, perceives that money and rank

and family history are false measures of the self and that,

29Amory, p. 17

furthermore, they should not be the driving force behind an

individual’s search for fulfillment. He tries unsuccessfully

to elude the traps set by his environment, but they are too

strong» in the end, he relinquishes his quest for self and

accepts his heritage with all that it implies.

Once more Kosinski has tilled American soil for his

subject and unearthed the roots of a pervasive spirit gov­

erning its development. He has done so through a framework

reminiscent of Steps* episodic structure» in generally

brief scenes he combs the past and present circumstances of

his hero to detect precisely the causes of Jonathan’s prob­

lem, Yet while many episodes are written from the detached

point of view emblematic of Steps, several others are quite

personal and explicit in their revelation of Jonathan’s

character. By so blatantly analyzing his central figure

for his readers, Kosinski departs markedly from former

efforts—unwisely, it seems, since a large part of Steps*

magnetism lay in the doubts it raises about the narrator’s

psyche.

Another anomaly, unexpected of a stylistic wizard,

detracts from the book’s impact—style in The Devil Tree

comes dangerously close to the cliche-ridden banalities

of pulp fiction. More than one critic has suggested that

this linguistic lapse is indicative of an artist who is

too deeply involved with his topic. Perhaps this is so,

but more than likely it isn’t» rather, Kosinski is spreading

35his wings, experimenting with his literary capabilities,

feeling his way about in a language to which he has become

far more accustomed. And, too, his European past is at a

further distance from his mind than it was fifteen years

ago» America has assumed a substantial role in his life,

enough so that he is justified in treating his American

experience with as much acumen as he displayed in earlier

works. Though the novel bears only an incidental relation­

ship to his,recent biography, it is nonetheless a distilla­

tion of his views with respect to the propensities he has

witnessed first-hand in his adopted country. Prom the

dark theater of his youth he has moved easily and swiftly

to a new forum equally abundant in fictive material.

Seen in this light, Being There and The Devil Tree

are not so different from their predecessors. True, the

setting has changed as has the fictional structure some­

what, but the root of all four novels is the same« a

totalitarian force—call it the Third Reich, the Soviet

State, the American Bureaucracy, or the Protestant Ethic-

squelches individuality, molds personality to a common

stamp, and dictates every aspect of human endeavor. The

narrator of Steps, the boy in The Painted Bird. Chance in

Being There and The Devil Tree’s Jonathan are in their

separate ways victims of its power. Sometimes hidden but

more often glaring from the pages of these fairy tales—

and they are that« bizarre, inverted fairy tales perhaps,

36

yet fairy tales nonetheless—is the cry for freedom, for the

inception or re-establishment of a sane society wherein a

man might discover his identity and nurture the self within

him.

CHAPTER II» THE PAINTED BIRD

"When I was a little girl ... I wanted to learn all I could about the behavior of various animals. I remember how once a group of us kids caught a sparrow in a trap. He struggled with all his might—tiny heart thumping desperately—but I held on tight. We then painted him purple and I must admit he actually looked much better—more proud and unusual. After the paint had dried we let him go to rejoin his flock ... We thought he would be admired for his beautiful and unusual coloring, become a model to all the gray sparrows in the vicinity, and they would make him their king. He rose high and was quickly surrounded by his companions. For a few moments their chirping grew much louder and then— a small object began plummeting earthward. We ran to the place where it fell. In a mud puddle lay our purple sparrow—dead. His blood mingling with the paint . . . The water was rapidly turning a brownish-red. He had been killed by the other sparrows, by their hate for color and their instinct of belonging to a gray flock. Then, for the first time, I understood ..."

Varvara, in No Third Path

38

In the first weeks of World War II, in the fall of 1939, a six-year-old boy from a large city in Eastern Europe was sent by his parents, like thousands of other children, to the shelter of a distant village • . . In sending their child away the parents believed that it was the best means of assuring his survival through the war.

So begins the story of a child who is never named

and whose adventures unfold in places likewise nameless.

It is at once a simple and a complex tale, horrible in the

barbarisms described, more horrible in its implications.

Events are narrated quietly, calmly, sequentially, but

despite their seeming reality and the effortlessness with

which that reality is posed, they strike one as nightmares,

dark and surrealistic, suggestive of feelings vaguely

remembered and always repressed. Straightforward narrative

it may be, yet the emotions it calls forth are trouble­

some—one has the uneasy feeling that he has been here

before.

The Painted Bird's narrative simplicity is disarming

and misleading. A reader will find himself caught in the

web of Kosinski*s prose and will feel himself struggling

vainly against the novel's seductive episodes. Try as he

might to dismiss the author's portrait of crude, primitive

behavior, he cannot keep from turning the page. This is

not to say that Kosinski offers "sensational” material

along the lines popular in pulp magazines» on the contrary,

his subject matter, though violent and brutal in the

39

extreme, is handled in an artistic manner with an intent to

force some identification with it. A reader is expected

to see in the boy’s reactions to his surroundings some hint

of his own conscious fears, however unrelated the boy’s

specific experiences to the reader's, that reader is

prompted to identify in them certain characteristics common

to his own experience. The boy’s growing hatred toward his

oppressors, for example, is comparable to anyone's resent­

ment of suppression and constant harassment. Thus, when

confronted with KosinskPs lurid tales, one is drawn to

consider them in light of one’s individual psyche. The

result may be a shock of recognition, for the possibility

of containing within one’s self that same enmity inflicted

upon the boy and returned to him in kind, may be present

in each of us.

The novel’s artlessness is also misleading in that

it appears at first glance to be nothing more than another

war story, given a slight twist because told from a child’s

point of view. This might be true if it weren't for the

fact that Kosinski is out for bigger game than is sought

in run-of-the-mill World War II fiction. Kosinski's sights

are higher, he wishes to probe the motivations governing

all human behavior. The anonymity of both boy and environ­

ment lifts the narrative above the level of the personal

and specific into the universal. Indeed, The Painted Bird

is not limited to one man's narrow view of isolated

40

happenings unique only to him, nor does it particularize one

war or one group of persons or one set of circumstances» it

is, rather, a novel which delves into the very nature of

this twentieth century and of those who people it. It is

a work unscrupulous in its examination of a world community

* gone mad, of values turned inside out and institutions

toppled, of a contagious moral degeneracy that has spread

far and wide in the last thirty years or more.

A plot resume* would do an injustice to the novel’s

finer points» moreover, so full is it with action—every

episode compact—that it defies summary. Suffice to say,

then, that the boy wanders from village to village seeking

only to outlast his tormentors. Sometimes he is befriended,

but more often abused. A succession of marvelous characters,

from the witch-like Marta to the sorceress Olga to mad

Garbos and Stupid Ludmila, act upon the boy's sensibilities

as he steadily wends his way toward survival. In the end,

having seen and felt much, he is restored to his family.

On the surface an uninvolved tale, yet The PaintedI

Bird deals with themes of immense import. The boy's odyssey

is an excursion through what most typifies contemporary

life, and that which is held up to inspection, nearly all

of it dismal and disillusioning, forecasts the continuation

of this same bleakness for centuries to come. Essentially,

his journey is a discovery of self, an increasing sense of

41

the relation between self and non-self, and a growing aware­

ness of his capacities to function successfully in an

antagonistic world.

The journey commences when the boy takes residence

in Marta's hut where he attends to household chores and

aids in the concoction of spells and potions. Marta is a

haggard old woman with bony hands "like garden rakes" and a

withered, trembling body. She would serve handsomely as a

witch» indeed, she is absorbed in the supernatural, perpetu­

ally on the watch for evil spirits, busily brewing special

medicines to ward them off. It is she who first makes known

to the boy the powers of the nether world, who introduces

him to the multitudinous superstitions rampant in that

desolate backwoods area, and through her he learns of his

own incantatory faculties—his Gypsy eyes "could bring

crippling illness, plague, or death." Innocent of these

faculties, the boy heeds Marta's warning not to look into

her eyes or the eyes of the farm animals, for to do so

would mean certain death. Nor can he count her teeth, for

each one counted would subtract a year from her life» out

of respect for her age, when "every year was precious,"

he refrains from regarding her too closely.

Marta keeps a snake in her garden since the skin

it shed regularly could be used in one of her magical

drafts. When the snake molts, it sinks into immobility,

then emerges from its wrinkled skin "looking suddenly

42

thinner and younger." At the conclusion of this chapter

Marta, who "sometimes looked like an old green-gray puff­

ball, rotten through and waiting for a last gust of wind to

blow out the black dry dust from inside," dies while sitting

in her rocking chair. The boy, unable to arouse her and

unfamiliar with death, assumes she is undergoing the same

molting process he had witnessed with the snake, and

patiently awaits her rebirth.

The parallel drawn between Marta and the snake is

not accidental, it is significant on several levels. First,

the episode underscores the boy's naivete*, he does not yet

understand even the most common of life's mysteries. As the

novel progresses, this ingenuousness will be replaced by a

knowledge born of misery. Second, the metamorphosis motif

is begun here. The snake's transformation indicates to

the boy the possibility of changing himself to suit a given

situation. Had he the power to alter his appearance as the

snake had done, he could avoid those dilemmas, stemming from

his differentness. In the chapters to follow he dons a

variety of disguises in order to meet the challenges put

upon him, most often he adopts the habits of animals, but

his alterations are mental as well as physical—that is, he

will visualize himself as an animal, imitate its behavior,

and sometimes assume its perspective (e.g. a squirrel's

tree-top view of the scene below), or he will assimilate

and mirror the qualities of an imposing figure (e.g. the

43

Nazi officer who interrogates him). In either instance his

metamorphosis represents an attempt to cope with immediate

danger, and furthermore it is a process through which the

boy achieves an increasing knowledge of his innate abili­

ties, The molting process is also analogous to the boy’s

swift separation from his past» bereft of his family, his

background, his history, the boy must nakedly confront the

violent world about to assault him» he must face it armed

only with his instincts and his will to live. Finally, the

snake image is but the first of a series of animal images

employed by Kosinski to forecast human actions. Just as

the snake’s molting anticipates Marta’s death, so too does

the behavior of cats, rabbits, and birds prophesy corres- %

ponding human behavior.

One such animal is the red squirrel the boy

befriends in a field adjacent to Marta’s dwelling. It is

his only playmate. Some village boys catch the squirrel

one day, soak it with a flammable liquid, then ignite it

while the boy watches helpless from a distance. They

laugh boisterously, prodding the tiny, smoldering body till

it lays motionless. The scene is only one of innumerable

depictions of senseless treachery encountered in the novel,

but beyond that it dramatizes succinctly the boy’s position

in an alien environment. He, too, will be the victim of

unreasonable, brutal acts» like his little friend, he will

find himself repeatedly at the mercy of callous individuals

44

bent on his destruction.

Another animal, this time a "lonely” pigeon, lands

amidst Marta's chickens and begins to court them. His amor­

ous intentions prove fruitless, however, for the flock dis­

dains his presence. While consorting with the hens and

chicks, a black shape swoops upon them» they scurry for

protection—all but the pigeon who "had no place to hide."

He is plucked by a hawk and carried off. The pigeon's

demise illustrates a notion central to the novel. The

pigeon is a "painted bird," different from the rest» as

such, he is shunned as an unwelcome intruder. Easily

spotted, marked by his coloration and isolated because of

it, he becomes the predator's prey. Similarly, the boy's

black hair and eyes and his aquiline features single him

out from his fair-complexioned neighbors» he cannot evade

the notice of those peasants who wish him ill. In effect

Kosinski is saying via natural imagery that anyone who

differs from the norm and who is, therefore, unfortunately

prominent, must suffer the consequences of his uniqueness,

for it is the nature of man and animal alike to detest

whatever cannot fit into the fold.

Freshly initiated into this foreign world, the boy

does not comprehend the reasons for the village lads*

cruelty nor the hawk's choice of victim. He is newly

separated from the security of loving parents and comfort­

ing environs, not yet capable of accepting phenomena peculiar

to him. He is, in fact, in constant expectation of his

mother and father, who will assuredly "come for me any day,

any hour." They don't, though, and the boy is left to

entertain only memories of his mother at the piano and of

his father's broad smile. His reveries transport him to

bappy days when he played with a teddy bear, a fire engine,

and other toys. "But this past of mine was rapidly turning

into an illusion like one of my old nanny's incredible

fables." The luxury of memory is denied him, for the

safety of the past is no defense against an overpowering

present. In the face of daily trials where his very exist-

ance hangs in the balance, he cannot afford to rest his

chances with backward glances to sheltered times, his former

life becomes gradually more meaningless and useless. None­

theless, he clings to it for awhile believing, as he flees

Marta's home (which he has inadvertently set afire), that

he'll meet his family in the ravine. When he doesn't, he

asks: "What were parents for if not to be with their children

in times of danger?" Thus begins his rapid recognition of

the fact that he is alone, unaided, totally dependent upon

his own resources.

Rescue is not forthcoming. The boy realizes this in

stages until he surrenders all hope. Before a year is out

the boy will have abandoned any notions of reunion with his

family, and in the novel's concluding chapters when he is

at last reunited with them, he struggles to free himself of

46

their claims upon him. The boy’s progress, then, is from

dependence to independence» he learns to do without the help

of others, choosing instead to place his confidence in

himself.

Still, at this early point in his story, the boy

needs assistance if he is to survive. Despite Marta’s warn­

ings about the villagers, whom she said would drown him

’’like a mangy kitten" if given the opportunity, he decides

to search for people. Unsuspecting of their perfidy, he

imagines they will welcome him.

Lonely and terrified, he enters a village and is

greeted immediately by chained dogs straining to reach him.

A crowd soon gathers, eyeing him suspiciously before advanc­

ing.

A stone struck me. I lay down, face to the earth, not wishing to know what might happen next. My head was being bombarded with dried cow dung, moldy pota­toes, apple cores, handfuls of earth, and small stones. I covered my face with my hands and screamed into the road dust.

Someone yanked me up from the ground. A tall red­headed peasant held me by the hair and dragged me toward him, twisting my ear with his other hand. I resisted desperately. The crowd shrieked with laughter. The man pushed me, kicking me with his wood-soled shoe. The mob roared, the men clasped their bellies, shaking with laughter, and the dogs struggled closer toward me.

A peasant with a burlap sack pushed his way through the crowd. He grabbed me by the neck and slipped the sack over my head. Then he threw me to the ground and tried to knead the rest of my body into the stinking black soil.

I lashed out with my feet and hands, I bit and scratched. But a blow on the back of my neck quickly made me lose consciousness.

47

This passage serves as an example—a relatively mild

one—of the kind of treatment the boy is to receive at the

hands of his oppressors. Wherever he travels he is: met by

men, women, and children who relish the chance to exercise

their prejudices. Their sadism is never carried too far,

however» they always stop short of murder since the boy,

though a "Gypsy bastard" and therefore a menace to their

well-being, might also be a savior of some sort. A primi­

tive culture such as theirs, steeped in superstition and

not very far removed from the traditions of their ancient

ancestors, makes plausible the possibility that a "special"

child may have been sent by the powers that be to test

their faith. Thus, they are torn between the inclination

to destroy what is hateful and perilous, and the instinct to preserve what might be sacred,1

Several anxious days pass during which the boy is

subjected to further ridicule and maltreatment. Then

Olga the Wise One, much respected in the community, arrives

and inspects the boy. She "buys" him and takes him away

to her dugout, "full of piles of dried grasses, leaves,

and shrubs, small oddly shaped colored stones, frogs,

moles, and pots of wriggling lizards and worms. In the

center of the hut burned a fire, over which cauldrons were

kosinski argues this point at some length in Notes of the Author (pages 21-25).

48

suspended.“ Olga is equivalent to a witch-doctor and the

boy's job is to care for her dwelling and to aid her in the

administration of "medicines." He accompanies her on visits

to the sick where he is required to stare at a wound or

some other painful spot on the patient's body. Because he

is bewitched, as Olga informs him, he can displace evil

spirits, drive away pain-causing phantoms and restore good

health. He is tremendously valuable to her and obedient to

her every wish, for these reasons they get along well.

Olga affects a mother's role, she cares for her ward

diligently. It is she who first enlightens the boy of his

mystical qualities. She calls him the Black One, for he Is

possessed by an evil spirit of whose presence he is unaware.

With it he can cast spells, good or bad. But the boy is

innocent of his strengths, he employs them only at her com­

mand. Nonetheless, he becomes cognizant of the fact that

others believe him to hold potent forces which he might

direct upon them at will* The seed of control has been

planted in him and later he will nurture it.

The winter passes uneventfully, but warm weather

brings plague with it and the village is paralyzed. Olga

and the boy do their best to combat its dissemination, but

are ineffectual. Eventually the boy is afflicted. Olga

buries him to his neck in a remote clearing where, "like

an abandoned head of cabbage, I became part of the great

field." She brings him cool drinks periodically "which

49

seemed to drain right through my body into the earth." As

night falls he feels "as though I were a plant straining

toward the sun • . • that my head had acquired a life of

its own," and he imagines insect armies scurrying to build

nests in his hair and to "eat out my thoughts, one after

another, until I would become as empty as the shell of a

pumpkin. ..." With morning, a flock of ravens alights

nearby and begin to stalk the hapless boy. He tries to cry

out but, so much a part of the earth now, his voice "seeped

back into the soil without reaching the hut where Olga lay."

The birds grow more daring, unfrightened by the boy’s

shouts, and begin pecking at his head. Drawn of energy and

steadily losing consciousness, he hallucinates» "I was

myself now a bird. I was trying to free my chilled wings

from the earth. Stretching ray limbs, I joined the flock of

ravens." Olga liberates him shortly afterward and he

regains his health.

The incident is significant on at least two counts.

The child is disposed to identify closely with the natural

world—he fuses with the earth, "becomes" a plant, then a

bird. He regards himself as an amorphous entity which can

take any shape. Commensurate with this protean spirit is

the lack of self-identity» the boy does not know what or

who he is and as a result molds himself into whatever form

he believes will best meet the situation. Without an

awareness of his human potential or its limits, he readily

accepts that role, animal or vegetable, which he presumes

will elicit the least amount of hostility from his assail­

ants. In his subsequent adventures the boy will continue to

alter his being for purposes of survival until he reaches a

point when he no longer needs anything or anyone to sustain

himself. Conscious of his own nature and confident of his

inherent endowments, he will forge his way as an independent

fully realized personality.

The raven scene offers yet another view of a painted

bird. Like the pigeon among Marta's chickens and like Olga'

precious black hen (a rare fowl hungrily watched by an

albino cat), the boy is chosen as victim. His coloration

and his presence in alien territory mark him an outcast.

When he imagines himself a raven—one of their number and

therefore meriting acceptance—he tricks himself into believ­

ing that they will admit him to the flock. As the novel

makes dolorously clear, the painted bird can never find a

haven.

Chapter two ends the way most of them do, with the

boy fleeing from malicious pursuers. This time he is the

brunt of a spiteful joke. On a riverbank some peasants

disembowel a catfish and extract its air bladder, then toss

it into the water. They grab the boy and throw him upon

it, hurling rocks as he floats downstream hugging the

flimsy bladder. He drifts for hours and miles, unable to

swim and hence leashed to the bladder and its meandering»

when it is pierced by a reed, he finds himself, luckily,

51

touching bottom. Cold and aching, severed from Olga’s safe­

guarding, he seeks food and warmth.

These initial chapters do more than introduce the

protagonist and his predicament, they establish an assort­

ment of patterns which are woven throughout the novel’s

course, patterns that embody Kosinski’s major themes.

Animal imagery abounds in the novel, for Kosinski

means to demonstrate the close correlation between human and

animal behavior. This is why he makes some characters

identifiable by the animals they keep—Garbos and his dog,

Lekh and his birds—and also why "human action is either2first enacted or subsequently repeated in animal images."

There are many instances of the latter, from Marta and the

snake to Rainbow’s rape of a Jewish girl, which is preceded

by the coital seizure of two dogs.

Paralleling animal with human actions is an appropri­

ate means by which to illustrate the boy’s maturation.

Like an animal, he has only his instincts to guide him, and

like so many of the animals delineated in the novel, he is

an outsider, untrusted and unwanted. A "natural" child,

cut off from normal channels of socialization, he "perceives

through and learns from the same symbols as did the prehis­

toric tribes—for example, animal imagery and instinctual

association with the natural.In tracing the evolution

2Notes, p. 17. 3Ibid.. p. 16.

52

of the boy’s mind Kosinski can reconstruct the development

of man’s basic tendencies. What he discovers in the child's

steady movement from innocence to "sophistication” might be

applicable to mankind’s development in general. And since

the boy's virtues are quickly supplemented by vices under

the onslaught of perverse individuals (who are themselves

"natural" in behavior), Kosinski’s prognosis is anything

but optimistic» man, in this perspective, emerges principally

as a creature limitlessly pliable and "brutalizeable."

The boy cannot control his environment nor, there­

fore, his "education." He must gain whatever he can from

observing the phenomena around him and employ the knowledge

acquired thereby to contend with day-to-day existence. He

survives because he cannot do otherwise, because he is a total incarnation of the urge for self- realization and self-preservation. He possesses no ability to limit himself, or to prevent the full force of his potential from developing. Rather he is equipped only with those powers of nature and instinct which further his ability to survive.4

Survival is particularly difficult for a painted

bird, which the protagonist quite obviously is—Kosinski

stresses the point through constant repetition of the

image. Unacquainted with peasant dialect, the boy suffers

an additional burden. He cannot communicate his wants or

fears, nor can he talk his way out of trouble» consequently,

he is further dissociated from the community. In lieu of

4Ibid., p. 16.

53

speech, he rests entirely upon actions, but these are fre­

quently insufficient for his purposes or else they are mis­

understood. Yet the unavailability of language does furnish

an advantage. Since the boy is forced to act in order to

make headway in an antagonistic society, he cannot dilute

experience by verbalizing it» he must confront experience

directly, not vicariously, and in doing so he defines him­

self. Actions—his and others’—literally speak louder

than words and more truthfully. His own behavior is moti­

vated from within—he expresses exactly what his nature

dictates. Without the corrupting influence of language,

the boy is free to heed his conscience and cultivate his

inner being.

Again, without recourse to speech, the boy falls

back upon observation, and this he does brilliantly. His

eyes survey keenly and he records impressions minutely.

Having witnessed the miller, with whom he stayed briefly,

gouge but the ploughboy’s eyes with a spoon, the boy

wonders . . •

whether the loss of one’s sight would deprive a person also of the memory of everything that he had seen before ... I made a promise to myself to remember everything I saw» if someone should pluck out my eyes, then I would retain the memory of all that I had seen for as long as I lived.

The novel owes its graphic detail to the boy's acute per­

ception and, of course, the novel's form simulates the

workings of memory, but more importantly his silent perusal

of adult conduct gives him clues as to how he should behave

&

to gain his own ends. He quickly discerns, for example,

that peasants will go to great lengths for vengeance and so

he, too, becomes vengeful: or that they have an all-consum­

ing greed—the boy averts certain death by luring a car­

penter to buried treasure, then shoving him into a rat-

infested well.

Animal images institute and affirm the boy’s primal

qualities and his relationship to nature, but natural

imagery is equally important in connection with the meta­

morphosis motif, discussed earlier in brief. As mentioned

there, metamorphosis follows two overlapping paths, one

emphasizing the boy's manner of survival, the other accentua­

ting his quest (primarily unconscious) for self-identity.

From the beginning the boy senses his estrangement, but

while he must eventually formulate a sound self-concept to

combat it, he has first to surmount a succession of crises.

"I was myself now a bird," thinks the boy, having surren­

dered to the attacks of ravens—he wishes to grow wings,

thereby escaping torment. As he dozes on the way to his

execution at the hands of partisans he dreams he is a

squirrel "crouching in a dark tree hole and watching with

irony the world below": he then becomes a grasshopper cap­

able of leaps "across great tracts of land" to freedom.

Again, when he learns of salvation through prayer, the boy

vows to change from what he had been, "a small bug that

anyone might squash," to an "unapproachable bull."

These mental metamorphoses suggest the boy’s will­

55ingness to don an appropriate mask so that he might evade

punishment. This last image particularly intimates as well

not only his adaptability but his growing self-esteem» the

progression from bird to bull indicates a strengthening of

his sense of self—his self as a powerful, generating force.

This developing sense of self is borne out by the fact that

the remaining metamorphic images are human-centered. The

transition from animal to human metaphors is evident when

the boy dreams of inventing "a fuse for the human body

which . . . would change old skin for new and alter the

color of the eyes and hair." The metaphor blends the snake-

molting image with the images of the specially-endowed man

which are to follow. "In my dreams I turned into a tall,

handsome man, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, with hair like pale

autumn leaves. I became a German officer ..." marks the

boy’s initial conception of himself as a man and underscores

his passion to be a leader rather than a victim. Just prior

to his announcement the boy had seen a German officer who

struck him as superhuman. His "polished skin," "bright

golden hair," and "pure metal eyes" made him a magnificent

being deserving of respect and obedience» "I felt like a

squashed caterpillar oozing in the dust, a creature that

could not harm anyone yet aroused loathing and disgust. In

the presence of such a resplendent being ... I was genu­

inely ashamed of my appearance." If he had possession of

the magieal fuse, he might join this master race and leave

56

the ranks of the oppressed.

Although the boy does not possess the magic fuse,

he does possess marvelous Gypsy eyes which, according to

the superstitious peasants, lend him supernatural powers.

His gift makes him useful to Olga, with whom the boy's

^powers" are employed beneficially, but once the boy leaves

her he uses his eyes to inflict pain. Though no actual harm

comes to the victim of his piercing stare, the boy intends

injury» he willfully employs his eyes to inflict damage on

his persecutors (e.g. the elderly soldier who gazes dis­

passionately at the bound, captive boy). Similarly, he

takes advantage of the superstitious beliefs inculcated in

him» to spring free of Garbos, who for no ostensible reason

beat him at will, the boy captures a moth with death's-head

markings which will bring a swift end to his malevolent host.

His movement from oppressed to oppressor is further

demonstrated in the increasingly violent nature of his acts.

On his own, following separation from Olga, the boy desper­

ately needs a comet, an instrument without which one would

have difficulty surviving. To obtain one he strikes a shep­

herd and steals his comet. Sometime afterward, surrounded

by belligerent village boys, he smashes a heavy stone into

the largest boy's face. Still later he pokes out an eye

with his skate. His actions become progressively barbarous

until, at length, he aids in the derailment of a train bear­

ing many passengers. From individual encounters he moves to

5?

mass mutilation: his motivation alters from the desire to

survive to the desire for vengeance.

Self-preservation is indeed the initial stimulus for

the boy’s actions and attitudes, but as time passes that

stimulus becomes hatred. A normal, loving son at the out­

set, he constantly meets cruel, deceitful, odious charac­

ters whose near-inhumanity speedily wears down the boy’s

Christian virtues: his simple morals and his innocence can­

not withstand the perverse influences of his peasant cap-

tors. Indifference replaces involvement. Soon after the

boy brushes with injustices, his heart begins to harden,

his humanistic inclinations decay. Having shown mercy and

sympathy for an injured horse, he helps skin the animal

moments after watching it brutally killed. A succession of

events follow wherein the boy, at first caring and compas­

sionate, becomes oblivious to the destruction of the very

object of his concern. A small child thrown from a train

bearing Jewish families to death camps is regarded empa-

thetically, but when he dies the boy feels relieved because

this "intruder,’’ sought by the Nazis, posed a threat to his

own safety: after Mitka slays four villagers in retribution

for their bestial attack upon his comrades, the boy asks

that Mitka shoot a harmless dog: abiding in an orphanage at

the war’s conclusion (a fact the boy regretted since war

was his teacher), he refuses to study his mother-tongue and

falsely accuses his instructors of anti-Soviet sentiments:

58

insulted by a box-office attendant over a minor incident, he

assaults him with bricks. Ultimately, the reunion with his

parents, which should have been the most joyous occasion of

his young life, is met coldly and with disdain.

Furthermore, his only relationships that might be

called "loving" end distastefully. Ewka, young and attrac­

tive, engages the boy in sex. While he excitedly attends

to her sensual desires, eagerly heeding her pleas for

kisses and caresses, she strokes him gently and whispers

fervently. But he discovers her one day in the company of

Makar, her father, and Quail, her brother, and watches with

them as she couples with a goat, lavishing upon it those

undulating motions and soft cries he had thought were

reserved only for him. His education is completed during

his stay with Labina, a sumptuous woman whose amorous pre­

dilections are extended nightly to village men. Her love-

making, carried on in the boy’s presence, is wild and temp-

testuous in comparison to Ewka’s tenderness. The boy looks

upon these affairs "with disappointment and disgust."

So that’s what love was» savage as a bull prodded with a spike» brutal, smelly, sweaty. This love was like a brawl in which man and woman wrested pleasures from each other, fighting, incapable of thought, half stunned, panting, less than human.

Love, he learns, is a crude, valueless emotion which must

be avoided, for if he were to succumb "to emotions of love,

friendship, and compassion, he would immediately become

weaker and his own life would have to absorb the suffering

59

and defeats that he spared others."

Not even the church, which was once a source of good­

ness and salvation to him, can inspire the boy with healthy

ideals—it, too, proves to be fraudulent. A priest who

quartered him with the sadistic Garbos tutors the boy in

Christian philosophy and informs him of special prayers that

can gain him "days of indulgence." Anxious to acquire such

favor and believing that armed with a quantity of indul­

gences he could escape Garbos’ torture, the boy prays

assiduously. But to no avail. On Corpus Christi he serves

as altar boy for the mass. He does his best in this new

situation to express his devotion, yet when he drops the

heavy missal entrusted to him, he is called a Gypsy bastard

and is dragged from the church, then tossed into a pit

filled with excrement. He manages to save himself, but the

experience has caused him to lose his voice and, far more

importantly, his faith.

And so the boy, having striven to find goodness in

his fellow man, having searched for the proper mode of

behavior to suit his precarious situation and failing in

the effort, accepts the Evil Ones as his mentors and moves

to become their disciple* to do so he must "build up a

potential for hatred that would force me to action."

What mattered was that a man should consciously promote evil, find pleasure in harming others, per­secuting and using the diabolical powers granted by the Evil Ones in a manner calculated to cause as much misery and suffering around him as possible.

Only those with a sufficiently powerful passion for hatred, greed, revenge, or torture to obtain

60

some objective seemed to make a good bargain with the powers of Evil. Others, confused, uncertain of their aim, lost between curses and prayers, the tavern and the church, struggled through life alone, without help from either God or the Devil.

So far I had been one of those. I felt annoyed with myself for not having understood sooner the real rules of this world. The Evil Ones surely picked only those who had already displayed a sufficient supply of inner hatred and maliciousness.

The transfer from passive receptor of fate to active agent

of wickedness is relatively easy. Over the years he had

suffered greatly in the clutches of unscrupulous men and

women whose only service was to add their names to a list

of tyrants and imposters.

How many times had I dreamed of the time when I would be strong enough to return, set their settle­ments on fire, poison their children and cattle, lure them into deadly swamps. In a sense I had

; already been recruited by the powers of Evil and had made a pact with them. What I needed now was their assistance for spreading evil.

The way had been prepared: "To train me in hatred they

had first separated me from my parents, then taken away

Marta and Olga, delivered me into the hands of the car­

penter, robbed me of my speech, then given Ewka to the

he-goat."

Now I would join those who were helped by the Evil Ones. I had not yet made any real contribu­tion to their work, but in time I could become as prominent as any of the leading Germans. I could expect distinction and prizes, as well as additional powers enabling me to destroy others in the subtlest ways. People who had contact with me would likewise become infected with evil. They would carry on the task of destruction, and every one of their successes would earn new powers for me.

61

In the months to come the boy's faith in evil is con­

firmed. First he witnesses the strength of the Kalmuks,

who are dark like himself—like them, he can be the object

of fear. Then he meets Gavrila who teaches him individual

worth—a man determines what his life is to be» he is the

only master of his destiny. From Mitka the Cuckoo he

learns the concept of individual justice—a man must take

upon himself the duties of both judge and jury to preserve

his honor or to correct an injustice to his friends. And

in the Silent One he recognizes the power of the man who

decides "the fate of many people whom one did not even

know . . . ."

By adapting their traits to his own character, the

boy changes radically. In the beginning he was a passive,

helpless victim who escaped death because he was a useful

"tool," but during the course of six years he becomes

increasingly cognizant of the outsider he is and conse­

quently cultivates a truculent independence. His exile

teaches him the heartless ways of the world and he learns

not only how to survive in that world but how to conquer it.

He discovers what it is to be a man and discovers as well

that a man is essentially alone.

Every one of us stood alone, and the sooner a man realized that all Gavrilas, Mitkas, and Silent Ones were expendable, the better for him. It mattered little if one was mute» people did not understand one another anyway. They collided with or charmed one another, hugged or trampled one another, but everyone thought only of himself. His emotions, memory, and senses divided him from others as effec­tively as thick reeds screen the mainstream from the muddy bank.

62

It is with justification, then, that he says at the conclu­

sion of his trials» "I would much prefer to be alone again,

wandering from one village to the next, from one town to

another, never knowing what might happen." In this respect

he is much like Huck Finn, who also saw mankind’s depravity

but who desired to be free of it. The boy, however, has

suffered too greatly to dismiss the immediate past» he has

survived man’s cruelty and has identified himself in rela­

tion to it.. For him the pattern is set. He will become an

oppressor as the Germans and the peasants were for him» it

is his fate to inherit and to pass on the curse of hatred.

Several narrative threads have been discussed thus

far» the extensive use of animal metaphor, the metamorphosis

motif, the unrelenting progression from passive acceptance to

active aggression and its corollaries—the development of

increasingly violent behavior and the urgent need for revenge,

and the conversion of love and caring to hate and indiffer­

ence. Other threads or patterns, merely hinted at above,

demand further attention.

Chief among these,; perhaps, is the procession of

"governing principles" that parade across the novel’s pages.

Soon after The Painted Bird begins the boy accepts the

wealth of peasant lore as the basis for life. There is a

superstition to regulate every habit and a fable to explain

every natural phenomenon» all one need do to exist

63

comfortably is integrate these strange beliefs and practices

and abide by them. The Christian Church intervenes, how­

ever, and the boy is re-introduced to God and his mysteri­

ous ways. Especially enlightening are the "days of indul­

gence" one is granted when he prays? the more he prays, the

better his life will be, while fewer prayers meant greater

hardships.

Suddenly the ruling pattern of the world was revealed to me with beautiful clarity. I understood why some people were strong and others weak, some free and others enslaved, some rich and some poor, some well and others sick.

The Corpus Christi incident burst this bubble. One miscue

and the church patrons, so devoutly Christian, leave him

to wallow in filth. "Some greater force," he thinks,

"with which I had not yet managed to communicate, commanded

my destiny. I began to doubt that it could be God or one

of His saints."

For a time, Ewka's attentions take precedence and

the boy’s love for her seems to be the panacea he has

sought. With Ewka he feels a pervading sense of calm and

fulfillment: he is at peace with the world, turning his

thoughts only upon her to the exclusion of calamities. Her

sexual engagement with the he-goat shatters this tranquil­

ity and once again the somber reality of a base, absurd,

deceitful universe is obvious to him. His reaction is

predictable—unable to see purpose in goodness, he welcomes

the Evil Ones who alone offer some meaning, some direction

6b

to existence.

Not long after his first sexual escapade with Ewka

the boy imagines himself a German officer because the one

he had met impressed him as rightfully supreme, somehow

superhuman.

In a world of men with harrowed faces, with smashed eyes, bloody, bruised and disfigured limbs, among the fetid, broken human bodies of which I had already seen so many, he seemed an example of neat perfection that could not be sullied. . . •Every movement of his body seemed propelled by some tremendous internal force. The granite sound of his language was ideally suited to order the death of inferior, forlorn creatures.

So awe-struck is he by the majesty of this officer that the

boy gladly yields his fate to him no matter what his deci­

sion» god-like, he could do no wrong and the boy gracefully

submits to him. It is his coloration which gives the SS

officer his power» small wonder that the German race—immacu­

late, precise, "beautiful"—was bending "black fleas"

like himself to their knees. Yet when the rapacious,

swarthy Kalmuks ravage a village where the boy resides, he

feels proud of the blackness he shares with them. The

Kalmuks are ferocious, untamed, and feared, their dark

color is in keeping with the destruction they wrought, and

the boy is pleased that these stygian souls wield such

formidable power. His pleasure is short-lived, however,

for the horsemen are vulgar, merciless nomads bent on

senseless murder and pillage. Sickened and frightened by

the scene of slaughter before him, he hides in the bush.

65

Now I understood everything. I realized why God would not listen to my prayers, why I was hung on a hook, why Garbos beat me, why I lost ray speech. I was black. My hair and eyes were as black as these Kalmuks•. Evidently I belonged with them in another world. There could be no mercy for such as me.Some dreadful devil had sentenced me to have black hair and eyes in common with this horde of savages.

The black ones, of which he was a member, were indeed to be

despised for their horrible acts and deserved condemnation.

Fate had made the boy destined to be hated» God meant to

punish him by holding love and security beyond his reach.

Evil predominates in his character until he is

tutored by Gavrila in the mechanics of socialism. There; he

learns of yet another order to the world that has nothing

to do with God (who was invented by "cunning priests . . .

so they could trick stupid, superstitious people") or

demons of any sort. Natural order stemmed from individuals

who, through an awareness of their in-born proclivities,

"determined the course of their lives and were the only

masters of their destinies." All supernatural creations,

including God and the Evil Ones, are cast aside leaving the

Self as sole arbiter of personal fortune. Unhappily, there

is a hitch to this argument which the boy soon surmises.

Gavrila explains that from time to time a great man appears

who knows the wants of his comrades and who leads them

accordingly to their goals. Such a man is Stalin, a wise

and gifted leader to whom the masses owe allegiance because

he can devine the proper path of mankind. Aiding in this

cause are Party members, a select number who understand

66

history and its ultimate intention. Together they define

each man’s orbit, the bearing best suited to him and his

fellows. ,

In the Soviet world a man was rated according to others’ opinion of him, not according to his own.Only the group, which they called "the collective," was qualified to determine a man’s worth and import­ance ... He himself became the conglomerate of everything others said about him ...

At every moment he was measured by yardsticks of professional proficiency, family origin, collective or Party success, and compared with other men who might replace him at any time or who might be replaced by him. The Party looked at a man simul­taneously through lenses of different focus, but unvarying precision: no one knew what final image would emerge.

It is this multi-complex system of checks and cross­

checks, this maze of "human aspirations and expectations,"

that worries the boy, for he is uncertain of his inner

core and cannot be sure, therefore, of his acceptance in

such a scheme. He cannot know what the "others" will see

in him and he seems to have no means of being what he thinks

the Party would like him to be. Having no choices, not

deciding for oneself what one will become, being judged and

"graded" by men who may have no knowledge of one’s self—

these factors of the communist system upset the boy even as

he faithfully assimilates Gavrila’s lessons. Eminent in

the boy’s mind is the perception, fostered during countless

trials, that a man must face life essentially alone, depend­

ing solely upon his own wiles and physical prowess, and

that no one but him can fashion his character or delimit

his worth.

6l

Mitka "the Cuckoo," by word and example, drives home

the latter point. Though he is loyal to the Party and sub­

ject to its regulations, he maintains a strong sense of

his individuality. To Mitka, every real man contains

within himself a judge and jury which metes out justice to

those who offend him. Because a man "lives mainly with

himself," he must do whatever is necessary "to preserve his

own image of himself." So it is that Mitka, deeply hurt

and angered by his personal loss, wreaks his vengeance upon

the villagers who slayed his good friends, and thus regains

peace with himself. The boy shares Mitka*s experience and

discovers through it that there is an alternative to the

communal "way" to success, an individual can act separate

from his fellow men and still reach the heights—"a differ­

ent summit, apart from the march of the working masses,"

Where Gavrila put emphasis on the group and the

individual’s obligation to merge his identity with it,

Mitka accents a man’s self-image as the key to existence.

Self-respect and a healthy notion of one’s worth are essen­

tial to survive, without them one might give way to external

forces, lose grasp of some meaning in life. Although the

boy sincerely wants to take Gavrila's words to heart, it is

Mitka’s words which affect him more potently. As the novel

draws to a close, the boy attains complete control of him­

self and is cognizant of his uniqueness as an individual.

He will become a part of the socialist system surrounding him,

68

the epilogue discloses, but having tasted freedom, he will

eventually need to escape and define himself once more.

The concept of freedom is developed carefully and

simultaneously with the boy’s discovery of "ruling prin­

ciples." At the novel’s outset he is relatively unencum­

bered, in part because his senses are not yet corrupted,

but also because Marta and Olga protect him from adversity.

His childish nature is open to the wonders of field and

forest, which he explores with relish. This communion with

his natural surroundings is an on-going process interrupted

only by the incursion of those brutish neighbors who wish

him ill. Whenever he is unbothered by such exigencies, he

partakes whole-heartedly of nature’s marvels and feels at

one with them. Like the flora and fauna he inspects daily,

he regards himself a free spirit destined to grow unmolested.

His fate is otherwise, however, for he is set upon

by egregious characters soon after leaving Olga. Macabre

interludes with the miller and the carpenter are capped

with his capture by a German patrol. He is sentenced to die,

but the soldier who leads him to a remote area where the

execution is to take place lays his rifle aside and allows

the boy to run. In the winter months that follow the boy

enjoys the greatest freedom allotted him during his six

year exile. Since no one can afford to house him in the

bleak, leaden winter season, he roams the countryside alone,

warmed by his comet in which he bakes potatoes and scraps

69

of food, sleeping in burrows fashioned in snow drifts. Food

is easy to come by because it is stored in barns or sheds

some distance from the family dwellings themselves and is

thus accessible under cover of night. Even by day the boy

is safe since bitter cold and deep snows preclude attack

from man or dog.

These few months of liberty are the boy’s happiest.

He will look back upon them—and, in fact, upon the entire

duration of his odyssey—as his finest, freest moments.

Reunited with his parents subsequent to numerous trials, he

fondly recalls the freedom he had while wandering from vil­

lage to village. Facing an imminent, unlonged-for return

to "civilization," he reflects:

My world was becoming cramped like an attic on a peasant’s shed. At all times a man risked falling into the snares of those who hated and wanted to persecute him, or into the arms of those who loved and wished to protect him.

Either is bad, for both make demands and consequently curb

freedom. Yet the boy had mastered the fickleness or

ferocity of peasant, partisan, and Nazi alike and knew how

to endure them. A "normal" world dealt with under the aus­

pices of parents, however, is totally foreign.

I could not readily accept the idea of suddenly becoming someone’s real son, of being caressed and cared for, of having to obey people ... a boy of my age should be free from any compulsion. He should be able to choose for himself the people whom he wished to follow and learn from. Yet I could not decide to run away . . . some inner force restrained me and forbade me to fly off. I suddenly felt like Lekh’s painted bird, which some instinctive force was pulling toward his kind.

70

It would seem that only now does the boy recognize

his role as a painted bird. Ironically, he had passed

nearly unscathed through an inferno and emerged apparently

unconscious of that role. On the other hand, this lack of

awareness is understandable when seen from the boy’s point

of view. Was he not at liberty to make choices? Had he

not existed independently for long stretches of time? And

didn’t Gavrila, Mitka, and The Silent One reinforce his

individual streak? The boy had survived largely on his own

and as a result of his cunning, a fact he did not share

with thousands of other orphaned children. Small wonder

that he saw himself as a distinct and distinctive creature,

self-reliant and unneedful of assistance from his own kind—

who were not "his kind" any longer.

Listening to his mother’s pleas and feeling trapped,

the boy remembers a wild hare Makar once caught which

seemed the esence of freedom. The hare struggled to regain

its liberty but was soon tamed. The cage door was left

open one day by a drunken Makar and the hare jumped out

toward the meadow. The boy watched, anticipating the

hare’s escape» instead, it just sat and listened to sounds

from the field. Unsuccessful in his attempts to make the

hare realize its freedom, the boy sadly understands. He

sees it hop back into its prison.

I closed the door, though it was unnecessary.He now carried the cage in himself» it bound his brain and heart and paralyzed his muscles. Freedom, which had set him apart from other resigned, drowsy

71

rabbits, left him like the wind-driven fragrance evaporating from crushed, dried clover.

Just as the hare had tasted freedom then forgotten

it when its keeper provided all life’s essentials, so the

boy sees his parents as an omen of impending confinement

wherein he will be denied full latitude. Nevertheless, he

is restored to his mother and father, and they find lodgings

in a large city. Almost immediately he takes to sleeping

by day and prowling by night, for he quickly discovers that

while the world was peaceful in daylight, "the war con­

tinued at night." Darkness and the "night people" with

whom he associates—a band of thieves, murderers, and

prostitutes—are his natural element. Only at night among

these people does he feel free and at ease, it is the

situation which most closely approximates his years of

travail.

Eventually he is sent to the mountains in custody

of an -old ski instructor. There he recovers his voice when

answering a phone call from some unidentified source. The

novel ends on this note, and it is an ambiguous one. Per­

haps Kosinski implies that with his new-found speech the

way is open to the boy once more for normal social develop­

ment—he will learn to communicate verbally rather than

physically and thereby re-integrate himself with the

socialization process. Perhaps speech will grant the boy

an added, valuable instrument of power. Or maybe Kosinski

is simply making it possible for the boy to one day tell

72

his story—as the nameless urchin of The Painted Bird or as

the narrator of Steps.

This latter suggestion is not without promise. An

italicized epilogue published only in the original volume

continues the boy’s saga. It explains how the boy had

indeed been better off in the countryside despite his

ghastly experiences, for had he remained in the city he

would have been earmarked instantly for death. Then it

speaks of his gradual absorption into the post-war socialist

milieu, slowly losing "the feeling of isolation and defensive

ness which had previously so dominated him.”

This was not to last. Involvement in collective society became more and more forced. Coercive mea­sures trimmed away the vestigial edges of personal freedom. Relentless supervision curtailed every individual action. This placed a double burden on the youth. During the war years his powers of self- dependence had increased enormously, and the mainten­ance of personal freedom had been the goal to which he had given all his intelligence and energy.

Previously, while living in the forest villages, the boy had been set apart from others by his physi­cal dissimilarity? now, as a young man in collective society, he was set apart by differences of his way of thinking. The experiences of the war years made him unable to conform to the patterns of thought and behavior demanded by collective society. Again he was the outsider, the Painted Bird. Trapped thus in the unyielding meshes of this rigid way of life, the young man realized, paradoxically, that he had been virtually free within the forests and villages, that within the limits of his own determination and skill he could escape from situations that threatened to curtail or end his independence. In his new environ­ment the very means of altering the circumstances were the subject of the strictest controls. The only escape from such pressure and limitation was flight, a journey across an ocean and beyond the confines of a continent where no wings could be spread. In this flight the Painted Bird again became himself.

73

The quote reads like a page from Kosinski*s unwritten

autobiography and is strikingly similar,to material from

No Third Path quoted earlier, but more relevant is the fact

that the author has here furnished a connection between The

Painted Bird and Steps. The narrator of Steps recalls epi­

sodes from his childhood remarkably like those found in The

Painted Bird; he also revives memories of his adolescent

and post-adolescent years under socialist authority, his

escape to America, and his adventures in that country which

either expressed his character or helped to establish it.

All of this can be inferred from the epilogue. Therefore

it can be said, without undue risk, that The Painted Bird and Steps are of a piece,3 and furthermore that the second

novel’s protagonist is none other than the boy grown to

maturity. The fact that all of Kosinski's themes are

repeated and expanded in the second novel, and that the

tone and "vision" of both novels are identical, is added

reason to see them as one unit.

3There is a risk, of course. Kosinski’s reason(s) for eliminating the epilogue from subsequent editions is problematic. Robert Coles, in Harvard Educational Review, proposes that the epilogue is too politically oriented and that nothing in the novel prepares one for the sudden shift in subject; Kosinski, realizing this, withdrew the final section. However, it is certainly possible, in light of Kosinski*s artistic precepts, that he wanted the novels in question to be regarded separately so as to discourage autobiographical readings, or, indeed, because the characters and incidents involved in each are unique to themselves.

74

What are the themes of The Painted Bird? What does

the novel say to its readers? Most obvious is the notion

that anyone who differs from his contemporaries is singled

out and may be shirked, ridiculed, persecuted, ostracized

or even murdered depending upon the degree of different­

ness. Though the novel centers upon one individual and his

uniqueness, it clearly indicates that all men are painted

birds, at least potentially so. Indisputably, that person

whose physical features or mannerisms or personal philosophy

stand out from the crowd is subject to scorn, but even the

"common" man may find himself at odds with his peers over a

political, social, or private issue and will thus become a

victim of their animosity. There always have been and

always will be aggressors, they need not be Hitlers or

Eftissolinis or Stalins, but simple men like the peasants in

this tale or like the citizens of any town or nation. At

any moment they may rise to quell an individual spirit,

suppress a minority movement, or liquidate an entire race.

Once the gesture is made the aggressors leave in the wake

of their attack a body of victims who in turn seek vengeance,

these victims dream of becoming oppressors who, in retribu­

tion for past sins against them, will slay their former

oppressors. A cycle begins and it is kept alive forever by

the fires of hatred.

Surely the idea that hate is everlasting—the "gift"

of each generation to the next—is crucial to Kosinski*s

75

outlook.

... no death is granted to hate» virulent and as vital as life itself, it follows in the wake of life, and as the tail is part of the comet, so is hate a part of life itself.®

It is a gloomy outlook but one with which few thinking con­

temporaries would disagree, for the world is indeed a frene­

tic place which seems almost to encourage it own dissolu­

tion. Embroiled in wars and disputes major or minor, nations

balance precariously above the abyss, their peoples seem­

ingly oblivious to the extinction they face and foster,

interested only in the satisfaction that comes of redress.

From such a world there is no escape unless it be

into the confines of self. Kosinski*s examination of self

is a continuing process—with each publication he adds

deeper insights to this central theme—but preliminary

statements of the self’s evolution are plentiful in The

Painted Bird. That novel sets the groundwork for the

author’s future observations by establishing a context

through which the self can be analyzed. The boy at first

embodies the unformed self which, unconscious of its

strength, is subject wholly to external forces, he is

tossed about gratuitously, apparently in the grips of some

predestined, unscrupulous fate. Chance governs his actions

and his growth until he becomes aware of the potential

within him. At some point in his odyssey and after many

¿Notes, p.29.

76

fruitless attempts to locate the source or sources of power,

he recognizes those energies natural to him and begins

asserting his will. The boy discovers the meaning and

value of freedom, the behavior necessary to ensure survival,

and the knowledge of humankind that is prerequisite to both.

As the novel concludes the boy feels what Kosinski so

finely understands» that the universe is unresponsive,

destructive and unswerving in its propagation of hatred,

that violence is the order of the day, that "man is the

only perverted animal and the only one capable of pervert­ing himself."'7

The self alone, the final outpost, the last frontier

of existence» so Kosinski views the boy and the human pre­

dicament. Amidst totalitarian structures of one sort or

another freedom is abated, individuality stifled; one is

pressed into conformity under penalty of death. The dyna­

mics of totalitarianism necessitates a debasement of human­

ity to its lowest common denominator, thereby encouraging

man’s inhumanity to man. Ignorance and fear repress humane

instincts and collective human degradation results. What

remains is the individual—adrift, isolated.

This lost sense of community is subtly proposed,

yet in conjunction with the theme of self it is Kosinski*s

?Guy Davenport, Rev. of The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski, National Review. 8 February 1966, p. 122.

77

major statement in the novel. Clearly the boy is dissoci­

ated from his peasant captors, but his separateness merely

serves to point up the need for community. Just as the

boy’s interrupted communion with nature lent him a sense

of belonging, so too an acceptance by the peasantry would

have provided him a place, a secure feeling of relationship.

Such was denied him, however, and he was thrust upon his

own ingenuity: perhaps Kosinski meant the boy’s speechless­

ness to symbolize his divorce from the community.

At any rate, the boy represents contemporary man

obliged to find his own way in the morass of civilization,

a civilization itself reduced to the lowest level under the

stress of war and international tension. Without recourse

to cultural norms, driven instead to a point far distant

from mutual relatedness, the boy must become a world unto

himself. In his attempts to meet with the situation he is

transformed into a moral abstraction, one whose experiences

denote the moral dilemma common to twentieth century man­

kind. Through his eyes is seen the wasteland in all its

ugliness and sterility: through him we witness the complexi­

ties of evil and its gradual augmentation to its fullest

dimensions: and in his story we see not the struggle between

good and evil, but the victory evil has already won.

The Painted Bird is not simply a collection of

bizarre tales: it is a vision.

The book is not literal, but it is almost all literal incidents, shown in a way not literal, improved, cut-up, fitted into a pattern. I have

78

used the stones of my life to build a new wall. I took the literal and turned it into something sym­bolic. 8

Grotesque characters and events are the objects and instru­

ments of that vision. Together they form a none-too-optira-

istic picture of modern man made all the more horrible

because it is based largely on real experience. That

"reality" has been transfigured by imagination to produce

a dark, forboding message: that without some sense of being

(self) and belonging (community), one cannot expect to sur­

vive or, at least, to live happily ever after.

There is no happy ending to the novel. Its hero

has been warped. He has lived an inverted fairytale wherein

the witches and goblins and monsters survive to haunt the

future. What will happen to this boy and others like him?

How will he meet life from this point forward? What ele­

ments of his personality will dominate? Steps provides

an answer in the person of yet another nameless self.

oDick Schaap, Rev. of The Painted Bird, by Jerzy

Kosinski, New York Herald Tribune Book Week. 14 Nov. 1965, P. 6.

CHAPTER lili STEPS

"Steps is a fiction reflecting the chaos and moral disarray of Twentieth Century Europe, a work which shows the terrify ing violence always present beneath the crust of civiliza­tion. The distinction of the book is that it deals with disorder through a literary structure that is fiercely ordered, the indiscipline of modern experience through the craft of serious discipline. Mr, Kosinski has been a resi­dent of the United States for little more than a decade, but he is already close to being a master of English prosei he writes with brilliant lucidity and vividness. At a time when our culture is plagued with exhibitionism and wanton display, Mr. Kosinski recalls the tradition of high art as a mode of imaginative order."

—Citation of the Judges National Book Award

80

Kosinski’s second novel, Steps, presents two enormous

challenges. Its form, if not altogether unique, at least

ranks among the most experimental since Joyce's Ulysses, and

its narrator certainly rates comparison to the most complex,

elusive fictive creations in contemporary literature. Com­

pounding the problem of analysis is the peculiar relation­

ship between the narrator and the fictional structure from

which he emerges.

While The Painted Bird followed a chronological

order, identified its characters by name (except for the

boy), and traced a plot to its conclusion, Steps offers no

such comforts» it is plotless, placeless, timeless. Yet

by accepting the invitation to traverse its labyrinthine

course, not only do we explore the depths of the narrator’s

character and glimpse a modern dilemma through his eyes,

but—and this is the novel's chief attraction, its special

fascination—we discover ourselves, particularly those por­

tions of our selves which we would most like to suppress or

deny. Steps is disturbing for this reason as much as it is

for the gruesome events it catalogs. Despite the grotesque

qualities of the novel’s episodes, a reader finds himself

drawn to them, susceptible to their implications even though

repulsed by them. It is precisely this tension between the

reader and the book, between the novel's "intimacy" and the

reader’s rejection of it, that constitutes the conflict in

81

Steps, for the story-line, if it can he called such, is

otherwise lacking in conventional conflict. The predator/

prey relationship predominant in The Painted Bird is here

transformed into the struggle between reader and printed

page; at every turn the reader is literally dared to con­

tinue or else to step out of the narrative—he is the

novel's victim.

Given the reader's experiences (in daily life they constitute the reader's armor in any encounter with a stranger), the reader may perceive the work in a form of his own devising, automatically filling in its intentionally loose construction with his own formulated experiences and fantasies. The reader's gain in each incident of Steps is the result of his own sifting through and refining of much of the novel's imagery. The reader leaves each episode with a hint or recognition, an intimation—no more.l

Thus the reader becomes part of the creative process; it is

his task, if he accepts it, to determine whatever meaning

the novel possesses, or more accurately, what significance

the novel's "message" has for him. He is aided in this

effort by the union of "action, memory and emotion," which

"captivate the mind and compel the reader ... to feel the

need to read on."

The notes to Steps testify to Kosinski's artistic

intentions; he has deliberately composed his fiction in a

manner which approximates our perception of reality. We

Ijerzy Kosinski, The Art of the Self» Essays & Propos Steps (New York» Scientia-Factum, 1968), p. 13.

2Ibid.. p. 14.

82

perceive reality in episodes, he explains, "in groups of

organized 'acknowledgements.Memory (the novel is largely

made up of the narrator’s memories) is a storehouse of epi­

sodes which carry meaning and guide our paths when we

encounter a new situation. Modern art attempts to destroy

these conceits

... in order to create a reality of pure percep­tion, reality before it is formed into episodes. It objects to the imposing on the present a form of the past, an episode, since it claims that original per­ception .precedes all forms.4

Perception is freed from the influence of the past so that

responses are always fresh, not predetermined by knowledge

gained from previous perceptions.

Consistent with this vision, the episodes in Steps

are arranged in a seemingly haphazard fashion and, moreover,

the narrator struggles to evade the impelling force of his

past upon his present so as to act instinctively. The net

result is a novel which appears to have been written "from

the inside" as though events were taking place while we

read of them rather than as incidents occuring in the past.

There is an illusion of no control, of an observer simply

watching events as they happen. A consciousness does per­

vade the work, however, in the same manner as in a dream,

which is to say that there is a controlling consciousness

-^Essays, p. 16.4Ibid.

83

(the dreamer) who nonetheless acts unconsciously according

to the dictates of the self. A reader, caught in the flux,

assumes the role of wanderer just as the narrator does» he

sees what the narrator sees, and by the very nature of thec

novel’s structure, he is made conscious of how he perceives.

The burden of interpretation quite obviously rests

upon the reader’s shoulders. Kosinski proffers some aids

to interpretation, but just as many stumbling-blocks. He

hints, for example, that perhaps many narrators are involved

in his tale, or at best, that the speaker in the dialogue

sections is someone other than the main figure in the epi­

sodes themselves. The convolution of plot—or rather the

absence of plot in an Aristotelian sense—is yet another

hindrance to comprehension. The rapid shift from scene to

scene, the lack of chronological order, the inconclusiveness

of many episodes, the sudden incursion of a first-person

voice, the odd juxtaposition of incidents—all of this dis­

rupts one’s sense of progression, of direction, leads him

to believe he is lost in a maze of unfathomable entities.

Irving Howe, in an insightful commentary, addresses

these problems. He ponders whether or not a reader—even a

sophisticated reader—can accept an orderless fiction. The

amorphous quality of Steps is certainly provocative, but

mightn't human nature be such that it insists upon straight

^Essays, p. 18.

BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

84

and narrow roads, symmetry, uniformity—in short, upon a

recognizable order to fiction? Is "the Aristotelian prin­

ciple of sequence, accumulation, and resolution . . . just

’another’ convention," or is it rather "a principle con­forming to a need of our rainds?"^

. . . stripped though the book is of ordinary per­sonality or character and thereby of individual psychology, and indifferent as it appears to be to precise denotations of significance, Steps arouses an intense eagerness, indeed an accumulating anxiety, for the reestablishment of traditional order: that is, for.taking the panels of incident and arranging them in one’s mind as the coherent "Aristotelian" action Kosinski has declared inappropriate to his material.7

Howe concludes that a reader will not "be content to leave

each episode, let alone the entire work, ’with a tingle

of recognition, an intimation—no more,’" and that

Whatever degree of unconscious activity may go into the composition of a novel, it must be read and evaluated through a rational consciousness. No matter how recalcitrant or obscure a work may be, one must try to discover in it principles of struc­tural order and implications of moral life.8

But how does one grasp the order and meaning of

Steps? The title itself is ambiguous: steps to what or

where? Howe writes that "steps signify some kind of

journey . • . The narrator’s journey comes to seem a

gradual stripping or destruction of social personality as

¿Irving Howe, Rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Harper’s. March 1969, p. 104.

7Ibid.

8Ibid.

85it is enforced by the pressures of social experience «9

Other reviewers have grappled with the possibilities. Hugh

Kenner suggests that "the steps trace a circle," pointing

out that the story begins and ends on a journey and that in

both the first arid final episodes the narrator abandons a

girl in favor of further travels. Every episode, he con­

tinues, is a memory, and "like keys arrayed on a ring, his

/narrator’¿7 recollections imply sequence but not begin­

ning." There is an inner circle as well»

His memories are what he knows, implying three categories» cruelty, ritual, restless love , . . love is restless because ritualized by cruelty; ritual is cruel because loveless; cruelty is the mode of love because the rituals confine experience.One can't say where such a process commences, and it doesn't end. One keeps moving, and there's all the earth to move around on.l°

Thus, the steps are conceived as patterned, restricted

advances leading nowhere or, at best, to the repetition of

fruitless experiences.

The implication, however, is not that these steps

are functionless, the random musings of a "lost" character.

As several critics, Howe among them, hasten to point out.

the narrator's journey is one toward self-discovery and,

simultaneously, a reflection of man's estrangement from the

world about him. Daniel Stern speaks of the American

^Howe, p. 104.

10Hugh Kenner, Rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Times Book Review. 20 Oct. 19o8, p. 5.

86

author’s expanded awareness: where Hemingway, Faulkner, and

Fitzgerald were rooted in the American experience, the post-

World War II "new breed," "who have been to Auschwitz, Hiroshima: the land of zero,"^ can no longer be provincial.

Old World evils, personified in the atrocities of Nazis,

Soviets, and Japanese imperialists, have penetrated the con­

sciousnesses of men, made them accomplices, albeit unwill­

ingly, to mankind’s collective guilt, and have forged each

man’s potential for heinous action. Victims of prejudice,

humiliation, and slaughter cradle within their souls an

overwhelming hatred, a consuming desire for revenge, and

concurrently, an alienation so extreme that it forces them

to view their surroundings through hostile eyes. Their

venom is intact, distorting their vision:

Kosinski is telling us that something new, arbi­trary and deadly is the legacy from the first half of the 20th Century to the second. He tells us, too, what we’ve suspected: that its focus has moved from the Old World to ours.

Many who had seen and suffered much at the hands of

their oppressors have migrated to the United States. These

transplanted men have memories akin to the narrator's, and

so one might safely say that the narrator speaks for per­

haps millions of disenchanted, deeply troubled individuals.

As such he represents that "personality in crisis" or

^Daniel Stern, Rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski,Life. 6 Dec. 1948, p. 24.

8?

self-searching being who dominates contemporary writing. He

is a man who acts as he must, impulsively, not according to

social norms. Yet Kosinski's protagonist seems also cog­

nizant of a self in operation» he does not know that self

completely, but he is intent upon watching it work. His

reminiscences, then, may be seen as an attempt to unfold the

layers of self developed over better than a quarter-century,

as an examination of those past influences which shaped his

character, or they may be an exercise through which the

narrator pushes his self or selves to the limit. All of

these are possibilities» it is important to note here,

simply, that the novel’s episodes can be regarded as steps

toward the discovery or potentiality of self.

In a lecture on Steps. Marc Rosenberg supports the

notion that the narrator perpetually "discovers and re­

discovers his self,that he has no real self, but rather

adopts a different mask to suit each aspect of his self.

Rosenberg proposes a diamond metaphor to signify the multi­

faceted nature of the narrator's being, every facet reflect­

ing a perspective distinguishable from any other. This

many-sided self is correlated with the novel’s structure,

itself a conglomeration of brief tales revealing numerous

elements of the narrator's character. The multiplicity of

perspectives thus acquired are counted as steps toward and

away from the narrator's self. A cinematic effect is

^Marc Rosenberg, Lecture on Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski. Audio Cassette (Deland, Florida: Everett/Edwards, Inc., 1971)

88

achieved wherein the "camera" first scans the scene, then

moves in for a close-up, then out again.

Kosinski offers much the same rationale in The Art

of the Self: Essays a propos Steps. There he uses the

cinematic reference to explain how the novel might be seen

and felt: as in a modern motion picture, images are

flashed before the audience and these images, though inde­

pendently ambiguous, take on meaning when absorbed as a

whole, the collective images produce an emotional response

antecedent to an intellectual one, Episodes or images,

themselves presented unemotionally, yield a montage which,

when viewed as an entity, elicits an emotional reaction.

Meaning stems from pattern, from repetition of images and 14the developing point of view. This organizational prin­

ciple, this blend of seemingly unrelated incidents, cor­

responds to.»the narrator’s means of knowing himself, to

his method of self-discovery.

Everything and the only thing that the protagon­ist of Steps is aware of, is his self, and that is ephemeral. He knows himself by hints, by allusions, he approaches and steps away from himself, he looks for himself in others, hoping that every new situa­tion would bring forth a new "I."15

Undoubtedly, then, the steps of the title wind

around the narrator’s being, his odyssey is one toward

self-awareness and self-expression. He is urged "to pursue

l4Essays. pp. 15-16.

15Ibid., p. 16.

89one experience (self-exposure) after another"^ in an attempt

to lay bare his true self. Yet he has no true self. All of

his roles—he appears as archeological assistant, photog­

rapher, soldier, student, deaf-mute, vagrant, businessman,

laborer—are manifestations of several legitimate selves,

each an integral part of his whole self. But no matter what

role he might be acting out at a given moment, there exist

certain constant elements of behavior or persuasion, an

abiding attitude toward his self and other selves, and it

is this consistency which argues best for there being only

one narrator throughout the novel.

To understand Steps one must understand the narrator

as much as that is possible; to do so is to inquire after

those consistent aspects of his nature« his desire for the

unpredictable, his suppression of imagination and consequent

reverence for reality, his need to shed his past and to

dominate in every relationship, his obsession with control,

and his craving for acknowledgement of self.

Before beginning this analysis, some important

assumptions must be made« first, that the man who narrates

the episodes and who participates or observes (or both) in

them is the same figure who speaks in the intermittent

dialogue sections—there is no concrete proof of

^•^Essavs. p. 14.

90

this,yet, as noted above, the male "character(s)" appear­

ing in the episodes and the dialogues exhibit remarkably

similar traitsj second, that the ’’women" in these dialogues

are one and the same woman (for the same reason), and that

she is the narrator's current mistress; third, that the

dialogues take place in the present while the episodes

entail events having occured in the past—this supposition

is substantiated by the fact that all of the episodes are

related in past tense, but the dialogues are uniformly

present tense. Perhaps the "theory" Mr. Howe propounds is

exercising its powers here; we search for a thread with

which to tie together the novel's errant parts, and, surely,

if we accept the propositions above, such a thread (threads,

actually) is found. Consider the following scheme.

The narrator has met a woman with whom he has an

affair. They speak of their relationship (in the dialogues)

and the narrator, particularly, recalls his past for her

(the episodes). What he remembers aloud has bearing on

some facet of their relationship (specific connections

between the narrator's tales and their reflection uponhis

17 In his Essays. Kosinski comments« "These fragments of conversations may be viewed simply as one more example of the protagonist's past, as his recall of verbalized intimacies. Or they may be considered another self's reac­tions to what the narrator said in the book. In either case they indicate why the narrator-memorist selects certain incidents from his life, and what impact he expects to achieve—or has already achieved—as a result of telling his story." (p. 19)

91

present association with this woman will be discussed later)

many of his reminiscences, for example, are sexually

oriented, which seems a propos since the two always converse

either just before or just after sexual intercourse. When

wes first meet the mistress, she has, to judge from her ques­

tions and innocent comments, only recently involved herself

with the narrator, but as the novel progresses, as she

hears more and more of her lover's enthusiasms, she learns

the soiled truth about him and about the use he had made of

her. For it becomes evident that the narrator has manipu­

lated her like a pawn for his own selfish purposes. In the

end, of no further value, he casts her aside.

If the novel has a plot, that is its outline. But

as Kosinski warns, there is no guarantee that this or any

other interpretation is accurate» his fiction has much to

say without imposing a definite logic to its organization.

Nevertheless, keeping this "plot" in mind will aid in draw­

ing out the author's thematic statements.

As mentioned earlier, the narrator "looks for him­

self in others, hoping that every new situation would bring

forth a new 'I'." "Thus," adds Kosinski, "he seeks unfore­

seen situations to take the place of his predictable imagina-to

tion." Imagination is limited by one's previous experi­

ences» put another way, one's experiential foundation—his

Assays. p. 16.

92

remembered past, knowledge acquired, etc.—greatly deter­

mines the scope or inventiveness of one’s imagination since

one learns and "fancies" metaphorically (or by analogy).

Kosinski would say (with his protagonist) that imagination

is therefore predictable and restricted, it leaves little

room for self-expansion, for growth, for investigation of

one's potential.

A single route is open to the narrator. Because

imagination is linked with the past, he must do his utmost

to slice away that past, leaving him free to confront the

present unimpeded. His object is to establish a "priority IQof reality over imagination," Reality is now, it is what

he can see, hear, touch, it is, furthermore, his sole means

of disclosing his self (selves) as it is, for whatever he

was or might have been is no longer useful to him and is,

in fact, a hindrance to the full extension of his being.

Steps' narrator knows himself through others' reac­

tions to him, another’s words and actions—his pure response

to the narrator—is the solitary guage with which the narra­

tor measures his self in a given situation as well as the

self of that other. He rejects his imaginings, says Rosen- 20berg, so as to avoid the temptation to react to others

based upon what he imagines them to mean or intend by their

19Essays. p. 17.20Rosenberg. These statements are a paraphrase of

Rosenberg’s observations.

93actions. He understands the impossibility of slipping into

another's mind to determine his motives, so he confines

himself to observable phenomena. A case in point is the

meeting between a salesman and the narrator and his mistress.

While adjusting the collar of a coat the woman is trying on,

the salesman places his hand on her neck. Immediately, the

narrator removes his hand. Later, she asks him why he did

this: "He certainly didn't mean to be personal."

"I don't know what he meant and you don’t either.I was thinking about what you might be feeling when he touched you."

"To kill your thought you actually had to remove his hand from my neck?"

"Yes."

The narrator refuses to assume the salesman's intentions»

instead, he acts in a manner that stifles his temptation

to discover either the salesman's or his mistress's feelings.

Endeavors to quell imagination are sometimes success­

ful, sometimes not. In one episode, the narrator is

approached by a man who offers to introduce him to show

girls for an evening's entertainment. He agrees and visits

the man's home for the appointed assignation. He finds,

however, that his eagerly anticipated tryst is nothing more

than a room covered "with hundreds of photographs of the

same woman, all apparently taken throughout her stage career."

No reality here, he cannot function sexually as his host had

obviously hoped.

More often, imagination surfaces to interfere with

or displace reality altogether. While at a zoo watching a

94

much-publicized octopus consume its own tentacles (a meta­

phor, perhaps, for the narrator's obsession with self), the

narrator notices "a young woman staring at the octopus with­

out any apparent reaction." He is intrigued by her, makes

advances, is invited to a gathering at her home, and

eventually arranges to meet her at a hotel.

During the next few days I thought of her con­stantly, recalling every moment I had spent near her. I speculated about the other men at the party, about which of them might have been her lovers, and about various situations in which she had made love. The more I meditated about her, the more concerned I became about our first encounter.

His imagination is irrepressible in this instance; he cannot

keep from visualizing her and their imminent rendezvous.

... We were both naked. There was nothing I wanted so much as to be at ease with her. But the very thought of what she might expect from me made me less aroused. It was almost as though my thinking had to subside before my body could per­form.

It doesn't and he can't. The narrator proves inadequate

because he was relating to this woman through images rather

than in reality; his thoughts confounded his physical reac­

tions such that only in his fantasies could he be successful.

By fantasizing earlier, the narrator had created a wall, a

barrier to free action; the images he had conceived were

beautiful and perfect, but reality could not equal that

perfection.

Later in the novel the narrator becomes enamored of

a girl working in his office. She pays him no notice, however.

95In his obsession to possess her, he plots with a friend who

is to make this girl his mistress, then force her to submit

to a stranger (the narrator) as proof of her love. The

friend succeeds, the girl falls in love, becomes "his

instrument," and is willing to engage in sex with the

stranger while blindfolded, never knowing who he might be.

When the moment arrives, the narrator gazes at the naked

body of his long sought-after paramour and realizes suddenly

"that to her I was no more than a whim of the man she loved,

a mere extension of his body, his touch, his love, his

contempt,"

I felt my craving grow as I stood over her, but the consciousness of my role prevailed over my desire to possess her. To overcome this I tried to recall those images of her which had so often aroused me in the office ....

Again the narrator's thoughts intervene and threaten to cur­

tail his normal functions, his image of the girl was

fashioned in brilliant hues—he saw her as she was ideally,

a perfectly imagined creature wholly desirous—but the

reality of her nakedness and the reality of his actual rela­

tionship to her is something else entirely. To forestall -

failure, he closes his eyes "to shut out her nakedness" and

to preserve his mental image of her, only thus is he able

to perform successfully. At home afterwards, he is troubled

by a split image of the girl, part of her is "the woman in

the office, clothed, indifferent," the other is "the naked

blindfolded girl, giving herself at another man's command."

96

These images at first "refused to merge," but finally he is

"unable to recall the shape or movement of her body," yet

remembers "the smallest details of her clothes." Imagina­

tion has won out, reality is once more a sorry disappoint­

ment.

Both episodes underscore the trap set by imagination»

it leads one to anticipate pleasures greater than can be

achieved in real situations--one behaves unnaturally as if

his actions were predetermined in a dream. But imagination

also "saves" the narrator as it did in the encounter with

his office mate. By retreating to it, he can fulfill his

objectives. Two related incidents will further illustrate

this operation of imagination,

A child during the war, the narrator "was everybody’s

victimj" the peasant folk used him repeatedly as the object

of cruel games and beat him for the fun of it. One day he

is whipped brutally by his master for a relatively minor

offense. In revenge, the child kneads "fishhooks and

crushed glass into balls of fresh bread," then feeds them to

one of his master’s children knowing she will suffer tre­

mendous agony and die a slow death. As she swallowed the

round, wet balls, the boy "looked away from her face, forc­

ing myself to think only of the burning of her father’s whip."

The reality of his deed was too great, too atrocious to face

squarely, in the act of murder he had to set aside the actual

moment and withdraw mentally to a previous time and place

97

when he was victim.

Toward the close of the novel the narrator sets off

to a country in the thick of revolution. Unexpectedly, he

soon finds himself behind a prisoner whom he is required to

behead.

What I was about to do was inescapable, yet so unreal that it became senseless« I had to believe I was not myself any more and that whatever happened would be imaginary. I saw myself as someone else who felt nothing, who stood calm and composed, deter­mined enough to stiffen his arms, to grasp and raise the weapon, to cut down the obstacle in his path.

He simply imagines he is felling a tree.

Toward this prisoner and farmer’s daughter earlier

the narrator cannot be his own man. His self in these

instances will not tolerate the horror before it. Frozen

by the unspeakable evil of real actions forthcoming, immo­

bilized by the actuality of what he feels compelled to do,

he turns his back on reality and flees to an imagined self

acting elsewhere at a time far removed from the present.

Imagination fails him in all these circumstances.

Much as he tries to deny it access to his consciousness, it

nearly always seeps in, a puissant force. In fact, the

narrator sometimes seems to employ his imagination deliber­

ately despite his castigation of it. He fantasizes contin­

ually and desires, apparently, to make his fantasies come

true, to realize them in reality. Thus he often creates

situations—creates realities—to correspond to his cerebral

inventions. When he lusted after the woman met at the zoo

98

or the girl in his office, he foresaw their future union,

pictured their wanton behavior with him, and worked fever­

ishly to make his illusions real. He does the same with a

female acrobat whose astonishing flexibility gives rise to

reveries of unnatural love-makingi again, with a girl

friend whose pliant nature allows the narrator to experiment

willfully in somewhat bizarre sexual practices, all geared

to satiate his appetite for the new and unusual. In every

instance, the narrator explores his self, lured by the pos­

sibility that each encounter with the unpredictable will

yield another form of his self.

Correlative to seeking out new, unpredicted experi­

ences is the narrator’s wish to dominate. (One is particu­

larly tempted here to see the narrator as the boy in The

Painted Bird grown to maturity. Regardless, the episode

involving the youthful narrator’s use of fishhooks in

retaliation for offenses against his person provides sub­

stantial reason for the narrator’s abhorrence of victimiza­

tion.) He longs for the novel, especially in intimate

affiliations, but he fears vulnerability in these matters

because it would leave him open to pain and subjugation.

A loving relationship—in which one is surely vulnerable—

necessitates a merging of selves into one self and, there­

fore, the individual self loses its independence. The

narrator dreads such a predicament because, above all, he

values the autonomy of his self and protects it steadfastly.

99

Any encroachment upon his self is regarded as an attack, a

menace to his self-control. He views relationships, then,

as a conqueror might» the enemy exists to be defeated. His

arsenal consists of his past, the entire body of experiences

which have made him what he is, to be used like a bludgeon

to render his foe helpless.

From the viewpoint of the protagonist of Steps, the only truly satisfying relationship ... is one of growing domination, one in which his experience— a certain form of the past-can be projected onto the other person.21

"Until this hold is gained," Kosinski continues, "the ’prey’

maintains some superiority over the protagonist and remains his rival."* 22

Two examples will suffice to demonstrate the narra­

tor’s penchant for tyranny. In an early episode the narra­

tor and his girl are accosted in a park and she is raped by

several men. Their relationship changes as a result because

the narrator "couldn't think of her except as a body to

make love to»" she has been "polluted," possessed by others,

and is no longer his alone. She becomes an object and

nothing more,, as such he manipulates her, forcing one sexual

experiment upon her after another. She surrenders to his

callousness, totally submissive, and eventually takes up

drinking. Her alcoholic consumption is not discouraged since

it makes her someone different—"Now her passiveness kept me

Essays, p. 20.22Ibid

100

actively preoccupied with her." The girl has a new per­

sonality under alcoholic influence and is thus a fresh chal­

lenge, a being to prey upon. Ultimately, he "gives" her to

the guests at a party after she offers herself to every

available man there; her provocativeness suggests that she

is anyone's for the taking, much as she was the plaything

of those who raped her. Averse to accepting the cuckold’s

role, indisposed to admit she is not his property alone, he

abandons her with a "gracious" gesture, his self-esteem

intact.

One of the last dialogues is taken up with the narra­

tor’s account of an adventure with a woman who lived in his

apartment building. The building was still under construc­

tion when he moved in. On an impulse he installed micro­

phones in several adjacent apartments- and listened in on

their occupants as they were filled. One woman catches his

fancy. He monitors her apartment and discovers much about

her, then begins dating her. After a while he stops seeing

and spying on her.

I felt like a scientist who has completed his study« the specimen he has observed and recorded and analyzed for such a long time has ceased to be a mystery. Now I could manipulate her« she was in love with me.

The narrator has "absorbed something essentially hers, her own past,"23 and that very past was her sole claim to

23Essays, p. 21.

101

independence» without it she is his puppet.

All of his relations with the opposite sex follow this

pattern. He is incapable of love because he cannot acknow­

ledge another’s self, another's freedom to exist independent

of his influence. His mania for control dictates that he

must overpower the identity of his consort, and once he has

accomplished this feat—made her an object, an instrument

of his will—he leaves her and searches for a new conquest*

indifference has replaced challenge. He has won the battle

of selves. He has proven himself dominant.

Kosinski also explains the narrator’s movement "from

threat to conquest, from love to indifference," in terms of

the narrator’s attempts to project his past onto some

other being.

When the narrator has become so intimately involved with this woman that he has succeeded in unburdening himself and grafting his past onto her, when the relationship no longer has any valid func­tion, then he no longer needs her, since the forms of his past and his effort to discard them were the basis of his need.

Not only is the woman no longer needed, she is also no longer wanted. She is now his past, and that he has discarded. Since his past has trans­ferred to another being, he assumes that its can­cerous action will continue in the other person.It was a necessary act because his past was crip­pling him, preventing him from acting fully in the present.2*

0/1.Essays, p. 21. Presumably, Kosinski is referring

mainly to the woman in the dialogues who listens while the narrator recollects his past, but the narrator's habit is extended to several other mistresses. His projections, Kosinski adds,

. . . serve also an opposite function* that of a mutual shield thrust out to prevent the admission of

102

The concept is difficult to grasp because shedding one’s

past seems impossible, no one can obliterate his past. In

this sense the narrator is doomed to fail his objective just

as he failed to efface imagination. But perhaps Kosinski

means "grafting his past" in a simpler sense—as an effort

to relieve the pressures of prior experience. The crushing

weight of a spurious past doubtlessly impedes the narrator’s

freedom, its effects might be lessened if he brings his

troubled conscience to the surface. Rehearsing events

from the past is, of course, a method of self-analysis

aimed at freeing an individual from its adverse influences,

and this may be the narrator's goal, in which case he is

at least partially successful.

Mastery of a woman entails that woman’s acknowledge­

ment of the narrator’s self—an acknowledgement he insists

upon. Unacknowledged, he is powerless. The office girl

who capitulates to her lover’s "test" does not recognize

the narrator’s being, only his presence. Cognizant of this

fact, the narrator is impotent until he can visualize her

and their relationship in an ideal manner, the girl as his

mistress. Similarly, he declines sexual congress with a

woman in a cage (held prisoner by lusty peasants) not

the present and to perpetuate and intensify shared memories.

The hostility discernible in his relationships indicates an occasional recognition of the deception, of the fact that they serve solely as a defense against spontaneity of the present moment, (pp. 21-22)

103

because she is odious and demented, but because she was

incapable of acknowledging him. Again, the narrator is

disturbed by a nurse he meets while on a photographic

assignment in a rest home. She is aloof, paying him little

attention.

Her complacency irritated me. I began to resent the fact that my presence made no difference to her. ... To her, perhaps, there was nothing dif­ferent or unusual about me.

Her detachment spurs him on since she is an enticement, a

potential conquest, a rival still in possession of herself.

His quest ends in calamity; she never succumbs to his amor­

ous advances, but more than that, he finds her one evening

making love to "a creature with a human head, paw-like

hands, and the short, barrel-chested trunk of an ape."

On other occasions the narrator proves heedless of

another’s self. He and his mistress discuss prostitutes

in one of their dialogues.

"When you are with a prostitute, whatever she does or says is pretense; she wants your money, not you."

"Money extends my potency; without it I couldn't be what I am. ... I wouldn't be living the way I do, nor could I afford the experiences I require."

"Still, whatever a prostitute does with you she also does with others, doesn't she? Doesn't that make you jealous?"

"It doesn't concern mei the knowledge that other men have her is not disturbing in her case. So many others possess her that they do not amount to rivals. . . . Since no man is excluded from having her, she appears to be not so much a woman as a desire that all men share in common."

"But after you leave her, she isn't even aware that you exist."

"When I leave her, the awareness of what has hap­pened leaves with me» that awareness is mine, not hers."

104

The narrator makes the prostitute an abstraction, an object

to toy with for his own gratification. She has no identity

but exists solely for his pleasure» he does not acknowledge

her being. Thus his self is permitted to function without

recognizing the prostitute's self» in this instance he

requires no acknowledgement because he considers the prosti­

tute as nothing more than a concept while his self is real

and operative.

When a young man, the narrator makes love to his

high school sweetheart «dille talking on the telephone. After

he hangs up, she berates him.

It upset her, she said, that I could have an erection purely through an act of will .... she stressed the idea of spontaneity, claiming I should have a sense of wanting, of sudden desire.I told her it didn't matter, but she insisted it did, claiming that if I made a conscious decision to have an erection, it would reduce the act of making love to something very mechanical and ordinary.

The girl feels that it is not her he is making love to but

just a female. She believes he must think only of her so

that her self is acknowledged, he must be desirous and

spontaneous, acting naturally rather than in a planned,

machine-like fashion. The narrator, however, thinks differ­

ently. His self is perfectly capable of acting without

recognizing her self as a specific entity.

Steps* protagonist, then, is a man completely alone,

totally wrapped within the bounds of self. His every action

and thought is directed toward self-enhancement. His past

and his imagination obstruct his wish to function liberally,

105

so he does his best to quash both, he cannot tolerate vie-

timization, so he strives to dominate, his self is supreme,

so he is not mindful of other selves. A solipcist through

and through, the narrator perpetually wages war against any­

thing or anyone that might assault his self. And to pre­

serve the sanctum of self, he feels driven to maintain con­

trol at all times. This monomaniacal compulsion to control

is the commanding feature of his psyche.

We have witnessed numerous occasions in which the

narrator has been preoccupied with control, he has been

obsessed with manipulating others and reality itself. Two

of these occasions warrant closer inspection.

When the narrator was a boy subject to the tortures

of his peasant masters—"a target for everyone"—he brooded

over his humiliated state and sought to escape it. He

attends a child’s funeral one day and watches her parents

mourn, lost in their grief. "It became clear to me that

the peasant’s love for their children was • . . uncontrol­

lable." He has discovered a means with which to strike

back against his oppressors, for by carefully observing

them he has detected a weakness—their unsubdued passion

for their children. Shortly afterward he avenges his

master’s punishment by feeding concealed fishhooks to his

daughter, knowing it will cause him the greatest anguish.

From then on I gazed boldly into my persecutor’s eyes, provoking their assault and maltreatment. I felt no pain. For each lash I received ay tor­mentors were condemned to pain a hundred times

106

greater than mine. Now I was no longer their victim;I had become their judge and executioner.

He identifies in uncontrollability the source of debilita­

tion and resolves never to be vulnerable again.

Herein lies the origin of the narrator's perverse

reverence for control. He exercises It incessantly. It

becomes an integral part of his approach such that he is

unable to act free of its spell. He takes on the attri­

butes of a scientist calmly preparing an experiment, then

watching it run its course. Like a scientist he steps back

to perceive and note, distancing himself from the object

observed, but in him this objectivity, this studious regard,

appears callous and cold, unfeeling and even cruel. There

is no emotion, no sympathy, no attempt to give of himself

except as a spectator. It is as a voyeur, as an investiga­

tor, that he undertakes his dalliance with the girl in his

building whose apartment he has ’’bugged." He admits to

his mistress, in telling her this story, that the girl was

for him merely a "specimen" to be scrutinized, and when he

had had enough, he "felt like a scientist who has completed

his study."

The style employed throughout Steps approximates

that in a scientific journal and thereby accentuates the

narrator's insensitivity and rigidity. Kosinski remarks

that the novel "Is written in intentionally non-figurative

language since its narrator censors and suppresses any act

10?stemming from his imagination."2^ While the narrator is not

altogether successful in this venture, he is enough so that

his reflections hear the hard-edge of cold fact. Episode

after episode is reported concisely, matter-of-factly,

barren of any superfluous details or hints of emotion, and

even the dialogues, in which the narrator would assumedly *

be most intimate, are dry and impassive. To depict the pre­

cise attitude of his central figure, to mirror his pro­

tagonist's regimented character, Kosinski has himself strait

jacketed his prose.

The net result is a creature repellent to most

readers, but one must sympathize with the narrator's motives.

Given the fact of the narrator's arduous childhood and an

adolescence spent under totalitarian government, one can

understand his propensity for self-control—it is a matter

of preservation. The way to survive, he believes, is to

maintain the upper hand, and to accomplish this he must be

aggressive and controlled. He cannot afford the luxury of

repose nor the relaxation of his grip on reality, for one

lapse would leave him exposed. Instead, he has always to

be guarded, calculating.

Spontaneity is therefore anathema to the narrator,

one has no control when acting impulsively—extremes of

behavior are possible then, and one is open to defeat.

^¿Essays, p. 18,

108

Likewise, predictability renders one assailable; if one’s

actions or reactions are predictable, his opponent has an

advantage. The narrator endeavors to be unpredictable so

as to attain that advantage, and searches out the unpre­

dictable experience. When he locates it (or creates it),

his instinct is to triumph over it. There is no contra­

diction here. Though the narrator would appear, in his

unpredictability, to respond spontaneously to the unpre­

dictable, his actions are actually governed. His ’•spontan­

eity” in confronting an untried situation is itself a

reflex on the order of a Pavlovian response. There is

intention in his acts; he knows what he wants to accomplish.

A different but related contradiction does exist,

however. The narrator pursues the novel, the unusual, and

he strains to supplant his past in order to meet experi­

ence afresh. Yet he is vexed by the need to restrain him­

self, to exert control. His credo seems synonymous with

that proposed in the novel’s motto, an excerpt from the

Bhagavadgita»

For the uncontrolled there is no wisdom, nor for the uncontrolled is there the power of concentra­tion; and for him without concentration there is no peace. And for the unpeaceful, how can there be happiness?

Steps refutes this philosophy. Kosinski*s intricate tale clearly demonstrates that "control can become a disease."2^

2^H. M. Harper, Jr., Rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Contemporary Literature. 12 (Spring, 1971)» p. 213.

109

The narrator’s obsession rules out the chance of peace and

happiness. If he gains wisdom at all, it is in the know­

ledge-obtained at the expense of others—that he has many

selves. At novel’s end he embarks on yet another adventure,

destined to repeat himself.

All that has been said thus far about the narrator’s

character may be seen in the development of his relation­

ship with his mistress. The dialogues act as a sounding

board for the episodes, they parallel them in several

respects. What is spoken of in the dialogues is elucidated

in the episodes or vice versa, and they are, then, commen­

taries upon one another. The narrator’s story of his one­

time girl friend who is raped and who subsequently becomes

a receptacle for his sexual profligacy is followed by the

dialogue concerning his affairs with prostitutes. Three

consecutive episodes deal with the male sexual organ, they

are succeeded by a dialogue in which the mistress asks

about circumcision. In yet another dialogue the two dis­

cuss an architect friend who designed a concentration camp,

■this is ensued by the marvelous tale of a cemetery care­

taker who had once been held prisoner in a Nazi camp.

As recollections flow from the narrator’s memory,

his mistress espies much about his character, but for quite

a while she is unaware of his real motives for revealing so

much of himself. Their relationship carries on normally

110

until she begins to grasp her lover’s intent. Up to that

time she has made a good accounting of herself, feels con­

fident of her identity and her position with respect to him.

She has not yet discerned the fact that she has given wholly

of herself while her lover has tendered only a portion of

himself, she does not see that she has lost her uniqueness,

her self, that she has been manipulated, dominated, become

an object. But the mistress gets an inkling of her actual

status when the narrator relates his chronicle of the

"apartment woman." Whatever doubts or suspicions she may

have had are brought to focus when he tells her*

It occurred to me then that if I introduced her /the woman in the apartment/ to drugs of a certain kind, and if she became addicted, she might free herself from what she had been. She might emerge as a very different woman, and though I retained possession of her, my knowledge of what she had been would have no more value. A new relationship would begin.

Her addiction might regenerate all that had become flabby and moribund in her and at the same time break down what was stiff and rigid, she would acquire new desires and new habits and liberate her­self from what she thought of me, from what she felt for me. Like a polyp she would expand and develop in unpredictable directions.

It must have struck the mistress at this point that

something had run afoul in their relationship, for in the

attending dialogue she verbalizes her despair. They have

made love, but she objects afterward to his demand that

she caress herself during the act. He counters by stating

that in doing so she was more stimulated and excited, to

which she agrees.

Ill

"Then simply give yourself up to what you feel, enjoy that awareness. Lovers are not snails, they don’t have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self,"

"I never thought of it as you see it, that would not come naturally to me. But you, what do you feel?"

"I want you, you alone. But beyond you and me together, I see myself in our love-making. It is this vision of myself as your lover I wish to retain and make more real."

"But you do want me for what I am, apart from you, don’t you?"

"I don’t know you apart from myself. When I am alone, when you are not here, you are no longer real, then, it’s only imagining again."

"Then, all you need me for is to provide a stage on which you can project and view yourself, and see how your discarded experiences become alive again when they affect me. Am I right? You don't want me to love you, all you want is for me to abandon myself to the dreams and fantasies which you inspire in me. All you want is to prolong this impulse, this moment."

The wish to make real his "vision," to project his

past upon her while holding his self at a distance, is

suddenly and devastatingly clear. She realizes that like

the apartment woman she has been used as a "specimen," and

furthermore that her time has run out. Yet her love for

the narrator is apparently great enough and her desire to

prolong their association strong enough, that she allows

herself to follow her predecessor’s path, in the next

dialogue, a dealer brings them drugs.

The moment is a crucial one for the narrator, too.

He has been troubled all along by the urges of a powerful

ego, a relentless, driving self. Earlier he had reached

a crisis. Having spent a quarter-century in Russia and

Eastern Europe (one surmises), he felt his life had been a

112

waste. In the strictly governed, tightly regimented environ

ment of a totalitarian state, his world had become claustro­

phobic, predictable. Escape was tantamount to survival, and

so he boards a plane bound for America.

Had it been possible for me to fix the plane per­manently in the sky, to defy the winds and clouds and all the forces pushing it upward and pulling it earthward, I would have willingly done so. I would have stayed in my seat with my eyes closed, all strength and passion gone, my mind as quiescent as a coat rack under a forgotten hat, and I would have remained there, timeless, unmeasured, unjudged, bothering no one, suspended forever between my past and my future.

Rosenberg rightly suggests that during this suspended

moment the narrator has a sense of pure self, of self alone,

inactive, freed from constraints of time and the judgments of others.2? It is a magic but all too transient moment,

for the self cannot be inert. There is no way to erase the

past, forestall tomorrow, or protract the immediate; destiny

awaits the narrator and he must rush to meet it. Nonethe­

less, the episode exemplifies the narrator’s torment, sig­

nifying especially his ambition to expunge his past self

and solicit some new self or selves in a virgin land.

He fails, of course, just as he did before. His

American experiences do not provide an ultimate self nor,

in dealing with his new country, does he behave in an

original manner. In fact he soon detects another sort of

totalitarianism in America, one which is equally stifling.

2?Rosenberg, (Lecture on Steps).

113Americans are creatures of habit, chained to the dream of

success, wealth, and power. They are greedy, materialistic,

frightened by the slightest threat to their security. Con­

niving, eovetous, in constant search for the pot of gold,

convinced of the rightness of private enterprise no matter

how ruthless its means, America is no better setting for

peace and contentment than was Europe. The narrator catches

on to the dog-eat-dpg game and masters it quickly. He

repeats his past performances, most appallingly, perhaps,

in his "romance" with his mistress.

They have completed the cycle. It began when he

offered her adventure much as he did in the first episode

with a young peasant girl who was fascinated by his credit

cards and their promise. They went through the motions of

love, but those gestures were empty on his part. Now her

usefulness is at an end, she must be tossed aside.

And yet the narrator is not entirely aloof from the

situation. Immediately after the dialogue quoted is an

episode describing the narrator’s walk through a deprived

area of a city. In regarding its depraved inhabitants he

undergoes an experience similar to that on the airplane.

Far from revulsed by the black man’s sickness and poverty,

he finds himself envious of "those who lived here and seemed

so free, having nothing to regret and nothing to look for­

ward to," as if suspended indefinitely. "They live

unattached," he thinks, "each of them aware only of himself."

114

If I could magically speak their language and change the shade of my skin, the shape of my skull, the texture of my hair, I would transform myself into one of them. This way I would drive away from me the image of what I once had been and what I might become, would drive away the fear of the law which I had learned, the idea of what failure meant, the yardstick of success, would banish the dream of possession, of things to be owned, used, and con­sumed, and the symbols of ownership—credentials, diplomas, deeds. This change would give me no other choice but to remain alive.¿8

Obviously the narrator is once again perplexed, his dilemma

is the same that existed years before. Trapped in the

whirlpool of polluting smokestacks, streams of automobiles

and highways, unending rows of carbon copy suburban homes,

harried workers, computers, and all else composing the

social complex, he yearns for a new self, but instead of

desiring that self to hang in the balance between past and

future, he imagines it lashing out to destroy its keepers.

In a bitter, vehement outpouring of his self in that

instant, he dreams of assaulting everything the city and

modern life represent—its sterility, servility, and stag­

nation.

A low point, indeed. And the narrator is quite

serious. The very brief dialogue (actually, a monologue)

which proceeds directly from this vituperative passage

indicates the road he will take»

"If I could become one of them, if I could only part with my language, my manner, my belongings."

2ftNote the transformation theme here, the magic fuse in The Painted Bird.

which recalls

115

We find him next in a foreign country where he assumes the

role of a deaf-mute, later expanding it to include spastic

movements. Thus, he has abdicated language, manner, and

belongings, and is very careful to conceal his true identity

It is his way of fulfilling the zeal for anonymity, and an

attempt to metamorphose his being into one complete self.

Shrugging off the common denominators of identity—one’s

style, conduct, possessions—he believes he can create an

autonomous self. "The abandonment of linguistic expression,

Kosinski adds, "signifies his desire to rely on the power 29of gesture; his destiny is thus made and not expressed."

Words cannot define him nor can he employ them to manipulate

reality; actions will determine his fate and, in part at

least, he will be a vassal to reality’s whims.

He rapidly discovers, however, that to lack identity

altogether is hazardous. When a man is murdered in a bar

the narrator visits, he realizes he will be a prime suspect:

"There could be no explanation for my dress, my acts, or my

presence .... I would be accused of this crime, the sense

less act of a defective. My mask would trap me . . . ." He

evades arrest through a clever ploy: still in character,

he picks up "a tray of dirty coffee cups" and disappears

into the kitchen.

Not long afterward he is hired by a woman to care

2^Essays, p. 19.

116

for her apartment occasionally. On one of his visits she

leads him to the bedroom and the two make love. In this

instance, however, she is in command and uses the narrator

who is to her but an object essential for her ecstasy. It

is a reversal of the narrator’s normal practice, but because

he has no identity, no reality for her except as an instru­

ment, he can only capitulate to her wild passions. The

scene is the antithesis of all those previous episodes in

which the narrator refused to acknowledge his partner's self.

His trials are not over. When he hears rumors of a

revolution in another country, he journeys to it since it

promises a novel experience—"I had never seen or been

involved in a revolution, all I had ever done was read about

them or watch them on television newsreels." The reality

of a bona fide revolution beckons him. He arrives, joins

one of the warring parties, and commences his deaf-mute

eharade once more, and once more it places him in a pre­

carious position. Unable to talk his way out of an unfore­

seen dilemma, he is required to assasinate a prisoner.

Though the novel continues for a page or two, our

contact with the narrator concludes here. What has happened

in the last few episodes? First, the narrator has deserted

his mistress. Their relationship traced the lines of his

previous encounters with the opposite sex. His repudiation

of, or inability to, acknowledge her self as a separate,

estimable entity, and his need to dominate and manipulate

117

her for his own selfish ends, combined to ravage their union.

Ironically, he is destined to endure the same fate at the

hands of an hysterical woman. It seems an apt finale for

one so sadistic; perhaps Kosinski meant it as a punishment

for his heartless protagonist, and perhaps we are to assume

that the narrator has been shown the error of his ways.

Certainly we are left with the impression that the narrator’s

methods have been cruel, that such fanatic self-control is

base and ruinous—this, unquestionably, is one of Steps*

major statements.

Second, we are shown (it cannot be determined whether

or not the narrator "sees") that a self cannot exist happily

in isolation, that to bar one’s self from communion with

other selves is to be forever restless, unsatisfied, in

ceaseless pursuit of something spiritual or tangible to fill

the void left by a reclusive "soul." And the quest for

one’s whole being, the limits of its possibilities, though

admirable if handled in moderation and guided by healthy

intentions, may become a sickness which affects not only

the individual but those with whom he comes in contact. The

mania for control and the frenzy with which the narrator

extends his self into many selves cause him to lose control,

to be injurious to himself and others. He is a man dis­

tinct, but terribly alone in his distinction, tormented by

an obsession grown too large, haunted by memories, doomed

to wander in fruitless search for an answer which does

118

not exist.

For the narrator, control is both a reality and an

illusion. He knows the reality, he is aware of his behavior,

of his actions which seem to adhere to a script. Yet he

does not sense that he is incapable of checking his mechani­

cal responses, he is apparently oblivious to the fact that

he is a slave to his obsession. Even his conscious effort

to cancel out his past is am illusion, in the final

italicized comment, his mistress taunts him,

“When I’m gone, I’ll be for you just another memory descending upon you uninvited, stirring up your thoughts, confusing your feelings. And then you’ll recognize yourself in this woman."

It is as if to say, See what you have done, what you have

made me. You cannot flit in and out of one’s life without

leaving your mark. I have absorbed you, you have become a

part of me. And I have become a part of you, eternally

and indestructably. I am a portion of your past, a reflec­

tion of your being, and you shall not be rid of me. You

have not won, you have not escaped your past, but merely

added a memory, another obstacle to your course.

Surely this is one of Kosinski’s purposes in writing

Steps, to demonstrate the unfeasibility of erasing memory,

of denying all those experiences which have established

one’s self. It is simply impossible to begin anew, to wipe

clean the mind’s tablet and start from a naive self to

explore the universe. We are what our experiences have

made us.

119

The quote above reminds us, too, of another purpose

Kosinski no doubt had in mind. For its readers Steps has

had an overwhelming impact, it has become a memory not

easily forgotten, stirring our thoughts, confounding our

feelings. We see in the narrator something of ourselves

though we try to dismiss it. Perhaps it is first and fore»

most the need to unearth our "true" identities, or the often

subtle, unconscious wish to be more than we are or what we

have not yet been. Most of us can sympathize as well with

an alienated individual warped by his experience,

beleaguered by inner and outer pressures. A sensitive man

recognizes the contradictory forces at work in the con­

temporary world, knows that what one was taught to believe

in is nowhere found in reality. And we also strive to

return to that kind of innocence which precedes exposure to

corruption, ugliness, bestiality, to locate some meaning in

human behavior. Finally we realize that each man’s past

influences, if not determines outright, his present, that

a bleak, traumatic past presages a twisted personality.

The narrator incorporates all of this and so he speaks to

us all, forcing us to view ourselves through his actions

and philosophy, to uncover the depths of our own selves through those fantasies he stimulates in us.^°

Yet we struggle with the book, refusing to identify

3°Katherine Jackson, Rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Harper's. Nov. 1968, p. 160.

120

with it. Its horrors are too gross, implications too

threatening. The depiction of cruelty, deceit, impersonality,

degradation, futility—these, we say, don’t apply to our

lives. They belong out there in a separate universe,

vaguely perceived, from which we are sheltered. Further­

more, though such base creatures and crass acts are known

to exist, we have been so saturated with reports of them

that we are presently immune to their import. We tend to

react toward them numbly, assume it is all as it should be—

the way things are. Kosinski, who "sees his protagonist as

the sum total of Western culture, ’trauma perceived as a

normal condition,'" says that "this is how we come to terms with what oppresses us. We assume it’s normal."3^

It isn't quite, of course. Normal in the sense of

"common," yes; our world is permeated by violence and preju­

dice and blasphemy. Ethics seem to have disintegrated on a

wide scale, values transformed or lost, faith diminished or

replaced by indifference. But that such chaos can be

accepted as a normal condition, the natural offspring of

mankind—this is what Kosinski asks us to consider. More

than that, he begs us first to actually see the atrocities

around us rather than to turn our backs on them.

The events in Steps, and the characters who make them happen—students, soldiers, peasants, govern­ment officials, prostitutes, workers, gangsters,

^William Kennedy, "Who Here Doesn’t Know How Good Kosinski Is?" Look. 20 April 1971» p. 12.

121

priests, city folk and villagers, citizens and out­casts—are those we know very well exist around us but shrink from recognizing for what they are. We take great pains not to see evil close to us, we do not wish to see evil in our very selves. We try as hard as we can to make evil unreal, to deny its existence in reality, in our reality, by passing it off as abstraction. But evil is real. Real and around us and not in the abstract.

Everywhere, says the narrator of this novel, evil has face, heart, voice, mind. Everywhere evil has the power to destroy love and even the willingness to risk loving. Steps is the story of the narrator’s struggle for love and of his struggle against the many terrors that beset him (and humanity), including the terror of anonymity, a reflection of what the evil experienced early in his life has done to him.One of the central problems of the novel is the narrator’s battle to pick from the confounding echo- chamber of existence the particular voice which is really his own.

Nightmares? Yes. But they are nightmares of men awake and not those of men asleep. These are the scenes of living reality that we are all too anxious to turn our eyes from, the truths that we are all too eager to deny the existence of, the horrors we rush to say could not possibly be.32

Mr. Zeldis* remarks are as apt a summary of the

novel's significance and effect as could be hoped for. One

might humbly add that Kosinski displays the extremes of

behavior to which the human species is prone under stress

either internal or external, that via the narrator human

potentiality is charted, that those values and traditions

generally left immune to criticism—the various myths of

religion, success, etc.—are here questioned, severely

challenged. Once again, the reader inherits the task of

evaluation and choice.

32Chayym Zeldis, Rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Book Reporter. Oct. 19o8, p. 7.

122

In the quote above, Chayym Zeldis hits upon two fac­

tors deserving of amplification. He notes the "terror of

anonymity" preponderant in the narrator's consciousness.

Indeed, the narrator dreads being unacknowledged, is intoler­

ant of anyone who obscures his self. Kosinski writes*

"Today, the basis of horror is often the theft of the self, the fear of having one's identity overshadowed."33 One's

only defense is to maintain control, never allowing the self

to be victimized, submerged beneath a self more potent.

Thus, the narrator’s impulse toward domination and self-

possession is explained. The violent behavior stemming

from this obsession can be justified as well if one honors

the author's definition of sin—"any act which prevents the

self from functioning freely . . "Protective agencies"

are the culprits here* religion, law, society en masse are

restrictive forces serving primarily to mold individuals,

coercing them into conformity and thereby negating their

unique personalities. Under these circumstances destruc­

tiveness and perversion may be viewed as creative acts, the

single means by which one can counteract oppression, assert one’s self.35 The narrator's violation of standard moral

and social codes is therefore his way of claiming independ­

ence, freedom, individuality.

3ssays, p. 29.^Ibid.. p. 22.

35ibid.

123

His attitudes are definitely "a reflection of what

the evil experienced early in his life has done to him."He is one "schooled by atrocities,"* 3^ the victim of war,

prejudice, heartlessness, totalitarianism. Small wonder

that he has shielded himself from adversity, from the very

source of adversity—his past. There should be no astonished

reaction to his habits for he is the progeny of a world gone

mad. Sanity hangs in the balance and the narrator simply

yearns to preserve his own.

The enemy is any collective that denies indi­viduality and thereby encourages death of the self: a brutal peasantry perhaps, a totalitarian bureaucracy . . . even the cancerous accumulations of a man’s past, which might erode his ability to survive the present. The key survival words are Endure, Manipulate. The aim is subversion of the enemy.37

Abominable experiences constitute this man’s history and

that of millions like him; they are also largely our own

and we must face them. Kosinski makes it a prerequisite

to an understanding of his work.

How are we to judge the narrator? Neither he nor Kosinski pass judgment in the novel,3® so they yield us

3^Rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Time. 18 Oct. 1968, p. 114.

3?Kennedy, p. 12.

3®Except in one or two instances, notably in the lengthy episode concerning the caged, demented woman.There the narrator accosts a local priest who knew of the woman’s existence and what was done to her, but who did not put an end to her brutalization. The narrator chastises this priest, pointing out his fraudulence, un-Christian conduct, and miscarriage of duty.

124

no guidelines directly and perhaps even discourage us from

the attempt. Yet just as we are impelled to find order in

the novel, so too do we seek a verdict upon its narrator

and creator. The suggestion throughout this analysis has

been that while we may sympathize with the narrator’s plight

and his efforts to overcome it, he is nonetheless a cold,

intimidating, loathsome figure, and a failure as well. But

this evaluation should be offset by another. Chayym Zeldis,

once more, speaks best for the affirmative point of view.

Kosinski shows how much of what is complacently termed "self” is actually societal, how much of it is defined and even created by profound and perva­sive societal pressure. And he finds that until that fact is recognized and dealt with by a person, there is no real opportunity to discover individuality, to draw strength and sustenance from it.

In Kosinski’s society violence, brutality and perversion—potentials in the self—are in the very thick of everyday life, they are far from being the sensational rarities people are always trying to persuade themselves and others they are. His narrator comes face to face with this brutal fact and with another central issue of human destiny, the conflict between the weight of a man’s past and his wish to fashion a future out of the reach of the deadliness arid poison within that past. Will the fearsome past destroy him? Or will he find enough strength to will the future in another, better way?

And, as in The Painted Bird, the narrator is not defeated by what he sees, though what he sees is the very depths of the abyss. For one man alone and for society as a whole to really live means to admit the possibility of and to take the risk of extinction by looking into the abyss. The author of Steps knows this fact very well. As writer and thinker he takes the risk, and in doing so he achieves a triumph of the will and spirit and an act of love, an act in which is enshrined all that is transcendent in humanity.39

39Zeldis, (Steps), p. 8

125There is actually little discrepancy between Zeldis*

observations and those presented earlier. Both see Kosinski

as a genius to be applauded for his forthright inquiry into

the modern condition, and both admit that the portrait of

his nameless central character is brilliant and disturbing,

disturbing because the narrator is a soul possessed, driven

to the outer reaches of human potential. The difference

lies in Mr. Zeldis* view—implied, not stated—that the

narrator is somehow a champion, the Grail Knight in search

of Truth or Reality or Absolutes. This writer, however,

feels that Steps* protagonist is too self-absorbed, ego­

tistical, and compassionless to quest for anything bene­

ficial to all mankind. Rather, the credit goes entirely

to Kosinski who, despite whatever weaknesses or drawbacks

his narrator may have, is himself a seeker and a seer. He

has done us a good turn by exposing the actualities of our

planet and by asking the right philosophical questions.

Answers there may not be, but the accolades are his for

bringing us eye to eye with the quandaries which give rise

to them.

Some final comments, Marc Rosenberg remarks that

Steps is structurally and thematically a contemporary novel,

noting especially that its form is a perfect vehicle for

its content and meaning since the novel's disjointedness is

an accurate reflection of modern disorder and dissociation.

126

The cinematic technique is relatively new to fiction and its

undertaking is still a hazardous one, in the hands of a

lesser artist the juggling of time and place might be dis­

astrous—a mere hodgepodge that corresponds to its creator's

mind and talents. But while reading Steps one senses the

presence of a gifted, knowledgeable craftsman in complete

command of his prose and his intentions, of a guiding

intelligence leading each reader through the barely compre­

hensible distortions of self and society. A master is at

work here, that we know, and we are in awe both of his

willingness to confront the darker side of life and his

ability to make it lucid.

Patterns are seen weaving in and out of the narra­

tive mosaic, these, hopefully, have been made evident. At

their center rests a subject highly relevant to our con­

temporary scene—transactional relationships. Rosenberg,

again, makes much of the fact that today's psychologists

lean more and more heavily toward the definition of self

attained through that self's interrelationships—"the

individual comes into being only in relation to environment 40and to others." This mode of analysis contradicts the

Freudian approach to personality which emphasizes the study

of an internal and unobservable ego. Kosinski*s method

suggests that the individual psyche (assuming such an

4°Rosenberg, (Lecture on Steps).

127

entity exists) might be measurable quantitatively. As his

novel illustrates, the self is an extremely complex, versa­

tile, ever-changing entity whose mysteries, if they are at

all explicable, exist solely as potentials that can be dis­

covered only as they come into being via the self’s rela­

tionships with nature and other selves.

Sex, quite evidently a hallmark of much contemporary

literature, is a mainstay of Kosinski*s fiction as well.

Several critics have sought for the roots of the author’s

preoccupation with sexual matters. Some have offered the

obvious, that sex, being a natural biological function,

must necessarily be a factor in any realistic portrayal of

life, or that because the taboos have been lifted from sex,

writers are free to revel in what they have long repressed

in their work. More to the point, however, is Stanley

Kauffmann’s intimation that for European Jews during the

war (Kosinski is Jewish) sex was often a means of survival,

if not directly in the sense that sexual competency might

gain them favor among their Nazi captors and thus prolonged

life, then in the sense that sex was the only possession

not taken from them—it was the solitary reminder that they

were, indeed, still human.As such, sexuality was proof

that one existed, had an identity. Steps’ narrator might

easily be seen as one who requires sex as an indicator of

^Stanley Kauffmann, Rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, New Republic, 2o Oct. 1968, p. 22.

128

his humanity, as conformation of his existence. Without

doubt, the acknowledgement of self he craves is predicated

upon the acknowledgement of his sexual prowess.

Daniel Stern suggests that the narrator's extravagant,

outrageous sexual performances stem from his wartime experi­

ences. Those traumatic experiences alienated him from

conventional norms and he was pushed to behavioral extremes;

the turmoil of perpetual conflict instilled a belief in

and acceptance of violent action as the normal human condi­

tion—". . . sexual experience becomes what the experience

of the war was, a battlefield on which is tested one's

endurance, one's imagination and perhaps most of all, one’s 42detachment from the accepted norms."

Both views have validity; each points to the narra­

tor's inner compulsion to express his self outwardly. Sex

is but another instrument with which the narrator can

manipulate his victims as if in revenge for past offenses;

his wantonness is itself a manifestation of his desire to

dominate. Yet neither Stern nor Kauffmann emphasize enough

the futility of the narrator's sexual escapades. He is

repeatedly frustrated, forever unsatiated. His sexual

appetite is enormous, but his efforts to quell his hunger

leave him empty and unfulfilled. Far from bringing him

closer to his self and others, sex isolates him further;

^2Stern, (Steps), p. 24.

129

as an act of reciprocal communion, it falters and leaves him

miserable, even as a deliberately cruel act, it affords him

only temporary satisfaction.

Perhaps, on a smaller scale, Kosinski is hinting at

something which looms larger on the horizon. His narra­

tor’s sexual ambivalence is allied to a condition frequently

elaborated upon in recent fictions, particularly those

authored by Americans. Many heroes of the fifties and

sixties have been similarly obsessed by sex and beset by

the same contradictions posed to Steps'narrator. The rea-

sons for this are manifold, but one of them may be that

there is something in the American experience which negates

the possibilities for wholesome, gratifying, meaningful sex.

The narrator's childhood and adolescence in Europe is doubt­

less the source of his problem, but his exposure to the

American way of life did not alleviate it, in fact, he dis­

covered in his new country societal pressures which rein­

forced his attitudes. The Protestant ethic, the lure of

wealth, the myth of success—these and other symbols of

America propel one toward materialistic pursuits to the

denegation of compassion and love. Sex becomes an impersonal

goal, an object free of emotional strings. In this wasteland

Kosinski's protagonist roams, but he is not alone. J

43-'The Devil Tree examines more closely and fully the implications here. In that novel the influences of the American Dream upon one's sexual outlook is granted a central position.

130

Sexual aridity and the ramifications of self are not

themes peculiar to the twentieth century alone, but they

are the focus of much contemporary deliberation and they

are seen now in the light of current events which are unique

to this generation, Kosinski braves these themes in a

form suitable to their evocation, one that captures their

modern flavor and mirrors their complexity. Steps, then,

is undeniably a contemporary achievement thematically and

structurally, and it deserves recognition as one of the

finest examples of experimental fiction in our day.

CHAPTER IV« BEING THERE

We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless

Alasi

T. S. Eliot

132

At first glance, Being There seems a drastic depar­

ture from Kosinski's initial works, yet the differences

between it and either The Painted Bird or Steps are largely

superficial. Beneath its simplistic exterior and readily

accessible surface movements lie those same intricate,

involved themes which wound throughout his earlier fiction,

seen here from a new perspective but no less tellingly.

It is a slight tale, hardly long enough to qualify

as a novel, and its structure is less that of a novel than

of a fable or parable. In essence, this third book is the

story of a young man who in one week literally drifts from

obscurity to vice presidential candidacy. His name is

Chance, a name acquired because he was born by accident to

parents who are never identified. All that is known of his

mother is that her mind was damaged and as a result, Chance,

too, is mentally defective. A wealthy recluse referred to

only as the Old Man gives Chance a room in his house and

access to the walled-in garden, but restricts him to these

quarters, not allowing him to wander outside the premises.

The wall effectively shuts out the street, and though Chance

from time to time enters the main rooms of his guardian's

home, the windows are heavily curtained, thus closing off

the real world entirely. In these cloistered confines

Chance has been since childhood sheltered from the environ­

ment without his room and garden.

133

But Chance has had a color television set for several

years which he watches whenever he isn't tending flowers,

bushes, and trees. He spends hours each day watching one

program after another, having no books to read nor company

to keep beyond occasional brief conversations with the Old

Man and his maid. Everything Chance knows stems solely

from his exposure to television and to his garden. As a

consequence, whenever confronted by real experience (after

his expulsion from the Old Man’s residence) he either

retreats to the language of the garden or searches his

feeble mind for a television program which most closely

approximates his new experience, gearing his actions accord­

ing to those he has seen performed by television personali­

ties.

When the Old Man dies and his estate is settled,

Chance must move from the only place he has ever known, for

there are no records of his existence. He cannot prove that

he has lived all his life as a gardener in this home since

his name does not appear in the Old Man’s will, nor is

Chance's signature found on any legal documents, there is

no accounting for his presence there and no evidence what­

ever of his being. Equipped with a suitcase and attired in

an expensively tailored suit from his master's wardrobe,

Chance is forced to step into actuality.

Almost immediately he is struck by a car, injuring

his leg. The driver of the limousine and the woman for whom

1>

he is chauffeur persuade Chance to accompany them to her

mansion where he can be cared for and amends might be made.

She is Elizabeth Eve Rand, called EE, wife of Benjamin Rand,

an aging, extremely wealthy, influential financier. On the

way, Chance is asked his name, he replies, "I am Chance . . .

the gardener." EE mistakenly hears "Chauncey Gardiner" and

from that point on Chance has a new name. They arrive, a

doctor administers to him, and he meets Mr. Rand, who fancies

him instantly. In their encounter Chance responds to Rand’s

complicated questions on big business affairs in the only

idiom with which he is familiar—garden terminology. His

ingenuous statements are taken at their metaphorical value

and he is assumed to be an insightful connoisseur of the

national economy. As such, he is invited to remain the

Rand’s houseguest.

Soon thereafter the President of the United States

visits them and he, too, misinterprets Chance’s innocuous

comments, seeing in Chance’s talk of plant growth and seasons

an analogy for the Gross National Product. In the vegetable

world there are droughts and poor yields, but these are

followed by fertile periods when produce is abundant, like­

wise, the nation’s economy suffers intermittently, yet

always bounces back better than ever. Chance’s naive senti­

ments buoy the President’s faltering spirits, he has been

under attack from critics worried about the current reces-’

sion and who have demanded positive action to counter a

135

slumping market. Buttressed by Chance's inspiration, he

delivers an optimistic speech to the Financial Institute,

borrowing Chance's garden metaphor and mentioning him by

name. The speech is a success and everyone, especially

reporters and newscasters, wonder who Chauncey Gardiner is.

He is presumed to be an advisor-in-the-know, a prominent

businessman, and "a strong candidate for one of the vacant

seats on the board of the First American Financial Corpora­

tion."

A snowball effect results. Chance is swarmed upon

by a host of journalists and government officials anxious

to pick his brain. They seek to discover what secret plans

he and the President have devised to bolster the economy.

They implore him for his memoirs, beseech him to tell all

to an eager television audience, plead with him to divulge

his sources and his prophesies. Within a day's time, he is

catapulted to fame, his name on everyone's lips, his face a

front page mainstay in newspapers throughout the country,

his televised image the subject of admiring, inquisitive

millions. Soon he is courted by foreign ambassadors, pub­

lishers, society women, and even by EE, who like countless

thousands of hero worshippers, has fallen in love with him.

Chance becomes an overnight celebrity as can happen

only to one captured by the media, but in the wake of his

meteoric rise floats a packet of unanswered queries. Who,

indeed, is Chauncey Gardiner? What is he and where did he

136

come from? Attempts to uncover even the most common fact of

his existence prove fruitless. He has no birth certificate,

driver’s license, bankbook, credit cards—nothing at all to

define him. Oddly, it is just this absence of personal

history that makes him the unanimous choice as the Presi­

dent’s running-mate in the upcoming election. Others con­

sidered for the post had to be disqualified because some­

thing in their backgrounds was considered censurable, but

Chance has no discernible past and therefore couldn’t be

faulted. We leave Chance as he steps out of a grand ball­

room, crowded with admirers and sycophants, into an adjoin­

ing garden, he is bewildered, lost, thoughtless.

A slender plot, certainly, and its credulity is

stretched to the limits. Yet, despite Being There * s

exaggerated framework and nondescript characters, its

readers have found in it more than an idle half-hour's

fancy. Compact, suggestive, open-ended, the novel invites

a variety of interpretations, and though some of them may

border on the frivolous, each contains the germ of themes

far more profound.

Several critics see in its mythic qualities an up­

dated version of Genesis, heralding the birth of a new man

and a new world—"TV man" in the electronic age. In some

respects this vision is edifying. By the countless anony­

mous millions who view him on the screen, Chance is

ascribed those traits Americans hold most dear. Like

137

Beowulf, Achilles, and Aeneas before him, he embodies the

best features of his countrymen, their greatest strengths,

their finest values, their fondest hopes. Blessed with

certain natural assets—he is tall, handsome, full-voiced—

his projected image rounds him out. People see behind his

reticence a thoughtful, cautious individual, his shy facade

hides an engaging personality, his measured diction speaks

to their level and belies an erudite thinker, a philosopher-

physician who taps the nation’s pulse. They witness in

Chance the attributes which most closely define the ideal

American* he is direct, forceful, all-knowing—a leader

among men.

The irony here is superb, for Chance’s IQ, were it

known, would relegate him to an institution for the mentally

retarded. His mind is no more developed than a six-year

old’s, yet he is thought to be a genius because a populace

eager “for a hero and susceptible to media propaganda are

easily fooled. They are gullible, the brainwashed residue

from two decades of media mania. They have been trained to

see with a camera eye and with no greater intellection than

a camera possesses, what’s more, they readily accept any­

thing offered them, especially if neatly packaged. Thus,

from a confused, trusting audience, super-saturated with

network persuasion, Chance emerges as a modern culture hero.

Negative aspects intoned by this irony are borne out

by alternative interpretations of Being There. Daniel

138

Stern suggests, with a touch of sarcasm, that Chance is the

Jesus of computer technology ensconced in the TV Bible,

"hailed as a saviour of hope by a desperate world.

Indeed, he is looked upon as the Messiah come to guide the

faithful out of financial doldrums. His pithy remarks—

actually the mumblings of a vacuous intellect—are seized

as inspired aphorisms and as harbingers of an affluent

heaven on earth.

In a,more serious vein, Anatole Broyard describes

the novel as an allegory equating Chance’s odyssey to

Adam’s fall.

The Old Man is God? Chance is pre-existential man. TV is his mythology. A strict and narrow life was the price he paid for sanity ana security.The lawyers, the architects of the secularized world, are the angels who expel him from paradise into "democracy." In his new life, Chance has no identification papers, no history. He is no longer the servant of God; he must start from scratch.

Elizabeth Eve "takes him home to tempt him with the for­

bidden fruits of popularity and power," and so Chance’s

(Adam’s) downward arc begins. The moral«

After our first expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Kosinski suggests, we lived a mindless plant or vegetable life. Our thinking was still done for

. us by God, the Old Man. We were still fundamentally innocent. Then existential awareness, the terrible two-edged sword of selfhood, came to cleave our consciousness and threaten us with a crippling ambivalence toward our possibilities. Given a chance (or Chance), Americans do not choose onto­logical maturity, but conformity. Nostalgic for

■^Daniel Stern, Rev. of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, Life, 30 April 1971, p. 14.

139

our long-lost natural state, we allow ourselves to be seduced into false paradises, tricked out by technology.2

It is doubtful that Kosinski had quite so rigorous

a parallel in mind when he penned Being There, yet Broyard’s

analysis, whether or not tongue-in-cheek, has much to

recommend it. Chance is unquestionably an Adamic figure,

naive as a modern soul can be, and he falls victim to the

idiosyncrasies of our day. His origin is the garden, and

like the flowers and shrubs tended there, he grows without

any sense of purpose, unworried about phenomena larger than

himself. The garden sustains him, it is his sanctuary, the

only haven he knows, and peace is his within its bounds.

Prior to banishment, this isolated ground was Chance’s

single source of reality, the only context within which he

could function. Though the biological operations of

vegetable life remained a mystery to him, he at least/understood the natural cycle of growth and decay, and knew,

too, what sort of nourishment was necessary to protract life

Beyond this elementary knowledge, this slight contact

with real entities, Chance had little. Television advanced

a series of pleasing pictures, hypnotic in effect but hav­

ing no meaning for Chance, who had no basis for comprehend­

ing them. Chance saw only images on a tiny screen, they

had no more reality than dreams and passed as easily from

2Anatole Broyard, Rev, of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Times. 21 April 1971, P. 45.

140

consciousness. These images soothed him, yet their sense

was lost on him, he retained only the memory of shapes and

sounds, floating on the television’s surface.

Chance was unprepared for his date with reality, but

Kosinski makes it clear that "Chauncey's” new-found

acquaintances weren’t prepared either. They, too, have

been victimized by television, newspaper headlines, and

pulp magazines. It is their ignorance and trustful nature

which has propelled Chance to implausible heights, for

their willingness to evade actuality and approve a gilded

concept of themselves has divorced them completely from

reality. Witless and insecure, from Rand and Eve to Mrs.

Franklin and the President himself, they are all lost

sheep in search of a shepherd. Media talents make Chance

accessible to the herd and he is quickly snatched up in

their haste to discover a miracle worker since only he, it

seems, can give them guidance. Kosinski aims his most

potent weapons at these incompetents, through his imbecilic

protagonist and that comic/tragic figure's preposterous

rise to eminence, he excoriates that which has become this

nation’s distinguishing feature* mindlessness. Mindless­

ness and a staunch refusal to see reality for what it is.

Still, some reviewers have criticized both the

brevity and banality of the novel’s content claiming that

while Being There was diverting, it would have fared better

as a short story cleaved of verbal excesses and superfluous

141

details. Perhaps, Kosinski might well have condensed his

fiction to a three or four page parable, have made his point

and been the happier, but to do so would have been to

eliminate the marvelous ironies which permeate this work,

to cast out its nuances and its suggestibilities. It is

an absurd story, but not nearly so absurd as it might first

appear. There are beneath the wrappings a number of perti­

nent observations concerning the nature of our media-

oriented culture, some undeniable truths about our habits

of mind, and a serious warning that the events recounted

in Being There, humorous and ludicrous though they appear,

may indeed be an accurate forecast of our future. The

extent to which Kosinski has gone in terms of page length

and imaginativeness is justified by the weight of his

monition. He accuses his readers of the same sort of mind­

lessness depicted by his characters and cautions that unless

reality is restored to us, unless we become more aware of

ourselves and our actual environment, we may indeed allow

bona fide idiots to govern us while we obliviously sink

deeper into idiocy.

This is not to suggest that Being There is restricted

to the political forum. Kosinski is anxious about our

choice of elected officials, no doubt, but he is interested

more in the method of our choosing, and more generally, in

our perceptions of reality which inform all our choices of

every kind. He sees in this country a propensity for

142

conformity despite our flag-waving assertions of individual­

ism, a mad rush to discover what’s "in" and what’s "out"

as if to console ourselves in the safety of numbers* what

the group does, so do I. There is security on the band­

wagon, but the cost of boarding it is extreme. One loses j

one’s identity, one’s sense of self, in following the ! random fads and fetishes which characterize our society. (

A thoughtlessness predominates, a willing suspension of

judgment and a headless, headlong leap into dilettantism.

We are so much at the sway of Madison Avenue and network

chairmen that we do little or no thinking, instead, we give

ourselves over, beg to be led like sheep, and ask only to

be entertained. We don’t question, we absorb. We don’t

reflect, we simply catch reflections fleetingly and let

them vanish in a commercial. Tragically, we see only what

we want to see, nothing else exists.

So it is with those who view Chance. They regard

him as they would a television set or as someone appearing

in a broadcast. It isn’t him they see but an image manu­

factured to satisfy their expectations. To each individual

whom Chance meets he is nothing more nor less than what

that individual wills him to be, a fabrication propagated

by wishful thinking. Tabula rasa par excellence, or as

Skrapinov calls him (believing it to be a code name),

"blank page," Chance is the unwitting receptor of everyone

else’s presumptions about him. In this sense he is the

143

clean sheet "upon which others can print whatever they suppose him to be,"* 3 but he is as well, in a related sense,

"a blank page upon which has been written the secondhand

knowledge of the world gained by TV viewing,"4 "a palimpsest upon which television writes, erases, and writes anew."3

The fantastic amount of information channeled

through the tube and the innumerable diviners of this

enlightenment combine merely to confuse the public. Under

the onslaught of fact upon fact, little attention is paid

their accuracy, nor, in the long run, their import. Over-

communication effects stupefaction, and worse, no one cares

or even realizes it. Reality has been subverted, twisted

and edited into orderly, consumable episodes; it is this '

"oddly distorted secondhand view of reality which mass

media package and sell as the real thing.

No surprise, then, that Chance is swept along on the

tide of ignorance. Devoid of character, he is nonetheless

granted qualities that could not be his simply because the

multitudinous television watchers glued to their sets day

and night assume too much. Bombarded daily with a steady

^ev, of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, Time3 Literary Supplement. 11 June 1971, P. 667.

\tbid.

3Geoffrey Wolff, Rev. of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, Newsweek. 26 April 1971, p. 95A.

^Times Literary Supplement, p. 667.

144

diet of cinema kings and queens, commentators, analyzers,

fact-finders and such, they naturally suppose Mr. Gardiner

to he "one of them," a somehow gifted man who warrants

exposure to the masses. Why else would he be on television?

What other reason could exist for his being there?

Being there is the problem. Chance’s being survives

only when he is displayed on the media or while his acquain­

tances react to him on the basis of his media-created image.

The "difference between ’being there’ in a video image and •living here’ in the real world"? is shadowed for those who

view Chance, they cannot separate the man from his image,

indicative of their common inability to distinguish reality

from illusion. For them, Chance is the matinee idol who

graces the late-night screen, the chiselled front-page pro­

file, the handsome, mysterious stranger in their daydreams.

He is nothing if not the product of others’ imagination, an

entity nonexistent except when scrutinized by those others.

Chance himself innocently remarks on this propensity«

As long as one didn’t look at people, they did not exist. They began to exist, as on TV, when one turned one’s eyes upon them. Only then could they stay in one’s mind before being erased by new images.The same was true of him. By looking at him, others could make him be clear, could open him up and unfold him, not to be seen was to blur and to fade out.

Visual sensation is thus the sole determinant of reality, of

?Jerzy Kosinski, from a televised interview with Robert Cromie on PBS's "Book Beat," 18 June 1971.

145

existence, and Chance, sensing this, is eager to be

"created," made real, he therefore rushes to meet the world

outside his garden, to literally come into existence.

Successful in one light—Chance does attain promi­

nence—he is nevertheless a fraud, an empty shell filled by

the caprices of gullible, misguided Americans. As such,

Chance’s existence is tenuous. At any moment he might dis­

solve Into the void from which he came. It is this notion

of unsubstantiality, of rarefied being, to which the title

refers.

Kosinski apparently borrowed Heidegger's concept of

"dasein" ("being there") to illustrate a contemporary

dilemma he believes is solidly entrenched in this country.

"Being there" . . .

refers to the way man is "placed" in life and the world. He differs from animals and plants in being aware of himself, in having his existence at least partly under his own conscious control. But he is also ontologically insecure, Heidegger says, he is always in danger of losing his being to "das Ver­fallen," a falling away into the nothingness of everydayness. He can easily disappear, unless he i3 careful, into his contingencies.8

Chance beautifully embodies this idea on every count.

Kosinski begins his story by noting that

Plants were like people, they needed care to live, to survive their diseases, and to die peacefully.

Yet plants were different from people. No plant is able to think about itself or able to know itself, there is no mirror in which the plant can recognize its face, no plant can do anything intentionally, it

8Broyard, p. 45

146

cannot help growing, and its growth has no meaning, since a plant cannot reason or dream.

Chance is like a plant, and his entire world, initially, is

encompassed by the garden where he fits in well with those

of his kind. He is repeatedly compared to the vegetable

life around him« "He would be as one of them, quiet, open-

hearted in the sunshine and heavy when it rained"»

• .. the soft soil of his brain, the ground from which

all his thoughts shot up"« "his freshly pressed dark suit

fitted his body as bark covers a tree"« "He felt that the

roots of his thoughts had been suddenly yanked out of their

wet earth and thrust, tangled, into the unfriendly air."

The garden image is an apt one, too, for Chance’s limited

knowledge of passing years; he measures time in terms of

growth periods and seasons, remembers when bushes and trees

were planted and judges the time since by how much they

have grown. When Mr. Franklin, a lawyer handling the Old

Man’s-estate, questions Chance's employment at that resi­

dence, Chance replies»

I have worked in the garden in back of the house all my life. As long as I can remember. I was a little boy when I began. The trees were small, and there were practically no hedges. Look at the garden now.

Parallels drawn between Chance and his garden serve

to emphasize his uniqueness. He is unlike the rest of

humanity, or at best, he exemplifies what man was in pre­

mass communication days, man only slightly familiar with

his potential, uncorrupted, guided by the laws of nature.

147

But Chance finds himself in a modern setting and in it he

cannot function normally. A stranger there, unaware of

reality, his actions are circumscribed by his narrow

experience. As it happens, his homely allusions to the

garden protect him and, in fact, make more of him than he

is capable of being, yet beyond his quaint knowledge of

plants and animals Chance is well out of his depth. His

only other source of information—the television set in

his room—is insufficient to lift him above the level of

inadequacy, on the contrary, television is responsible for

his warped perceptions.

From the beginning Chance was enthralled with TV.

It fascinated him.

The set created its own light, its own color, its own time. It did not follow the law of gravity that forever bent all plants downward. Everything on TV was tangled and mixed and yet smoothed outs night and day, big and small, tough and brittle, soft and rough, hot and cold, far and near. In this colored world of television, gardening was the white cane of a blind man.

A world unto itself, brilliant and neatly organized, Chance

was drawn to its flickering images, trying to absorb the

events he saw there, which were much more varied than those

in his garden. And no matter how complex or confused, the

TV universe would straighten itself out—a magnificent,

self-sufficient, balanced world, worthy of Chance’s esteem.

He stared at it perpetually, marveling at its magic.

By changing the channel he could change himself.He could go through phases, as garden plants went through phases, but he could change as rapidly as

148

he wished by twisting the dial backward and forward.In some cases he could spread out into the screen without stopping, just as on TV people spread out into the screen. By turning the dial, Chance could bring others inside his eyelids. Thus he came to believe that it was he, Chance, and no one else, who made himself be.

Several things are particularly striking in this pas­

sage. Chance's mistaken notion that he could transform him­

self is an illusion stemming partly from his seeming con­

trol of the viewing situation; a mere turn of the wrist and

his situation is altered. God-like, he commands the TV to

transport him, change his surroundings and his identity.

He deludes himself, feeling that he is master of his fate,

able to define himself, give himself being—an understand­

able error given the fact that saturation with vicarious

experience could lead one to believe that the world was his

creation, subject to his whim. The illusion originates as

well from his belief that television images were exchange­

able with his own corpus« in a later episode, Chance is

invited to appear on a television broadcast and immediately

ponders the consequences.

He wanted to see himself reduced to the size of the screen; he wanted to become an image, to dwell inside the set ....

He wondered whether a person changed before or after appearing on the screen. Would he be changed forever or only during the time of his appearance?What part of himself would he leave behind when he finished the program? Would there be two Chances after the show» one Chance who watched TV and another who appeared on it?

Chance, obviously, has a perceptual problem. He believes

the tiny creatures on his television set are real, that they

149

have actually been reduced in size to accommodate the small

screen, and he imagines he, too, will be transformed into a

diminutive human being when he steps before the cameras.

To his eye and mind physical objects and persons can be

miniaturized for television broadcasting, and furthermore

the resultant image can be made to expand or contract or

vanish altogether. Such confusion contributes greatly to

Chance’s misconception of his own powers and of the reality

behind electronic gadgetry.

Television’s influence on Chance is therefore extra­

ordinary. Lacking knowledge, he submits to the unreality

which is reality to him.

He sank into the screen. Like sunlight and fresh air and mild rain, the world from outside the garden entered Chance, and Chance, like a TV image, floated into the world, buoyed up by a force he did not see and could not name.

He succumbs to television reality, identifies with it, takes

it as his own. When he switches off the set, his mind goes

as blank as the picture tube and reality dies.

The process of watching is his prime mode of engaging reality and reality exists for him only as long a3 images remain before his eyes on the screen. When the set is turned off, images die, and with them the people, places and events they represent.9

But while it casts its sounds and colors he is engrossed in

a make-believe world he assumes is real. It isn’t, however,

9 John. Aldridge, Rev. of Being There, by Jerzy Kosin­ski, Saturday Review, 24 April 1971, P. 2?,

150

as Chance discovers upon leaving the Rand home. Walking on

the street he sees and hears cars, people, buildings, all

of them "images already burned into his memory," but images

only, not concrete substances. Though Chance believes he

is familiar with the tangible entities he first encounters—

"So far, everything outside the gate resembled what he had

seen on TV"—he betrays his defect, the outcome of so many

hours in front of a tiny screen—"if anything, objects and

people were bigger, yet slower, simpler and more cumber­

some." The well-rehearsed, diagrammed movements and

patterned speeches of actors and actresses are not there,

men and women fumble, stop and start, gesture awkwardly,

move at random paces. Certainly their actions are not the

tailored ones of edited film, yet this is what Chance had

counted upon.

For real life, Chance thinks, follows TV life, and

so he plays it. Literally. Out among strangers and strange

places, he behaves as if a performer in a television series,

governing his conduct according to that he has witnessed in

others on various programs. When, for example, EE talks to

him about complicated family matters, he gets lost in her

words, completely befuddled, but knowing he should evidence

interest, he resorts "to repeating to her parts of her own

sentences, a practice he had observed on TV." Asked to

join the Rand’s for dinner, Chance, "deciding how to

behave , . . chose the TV program of a young businessman

151

who often dined with his boss and the boss's daughter."

Again, when required to read a letter—he cannot read or

write—Chance estimates the amount of time necessary to

accomplish the feat, remembering similar occurrences on

television.

Numerous occasions such as these arise and repeatedly

Chance retreats to network fare in order to meet them.

Most often his enactments are successful; his behavior is

even misconstrued in his favor. His quiet nature, reserve,

secretiveness, and apparent self-assurance—all the product

of his feeble mind and others' blindness—-endear him to

everyone. Indeed, he is enviedJ Yet at times Chance is

unable to elicit aid from his video background, especially

where genuine feeling is called for. He does not know, for

instance, how to register fear when the doctor prepares a

syringe to numb his wounded leg, though he searches through

"all the TV incidents in which he had seen injections being

given." Later, EE seduces him—or rather, tries to—but

her feminine wiles are insufficient to arouse Chance. He

has never experienced sexual feelings. In their encounter

he imitates the ardor of romantic lovers, but stops short

where television does—at the moment of physical love.

Since television morality precludes the display of sexual

acts, much less overt eroticism, Chance is stymied beyond

the point of kissing and petting. He doesn't know what

to do because he has no model to mimic and, devoid of true

152

emotion, whatever limited feelings he manages to educe are

counterfeit.

Chance’s reliance upon TV and his consummate belief

in the images reflected there are further demonstrated by

his attitude toward the future. He trusts that each suc­

cessive moment is the right one, that somehow every event

is planned in advance, very nicely worked out to everyone’s

satisfaction—just as it is on TV. He therefore passively

awaits the next occurrence as if watching himself and his

circumstances on television. A case in point is that in

which Chance suspects he may be asked to leave the Rand

household after his leg has healed. The prospect does not

bother him.

... he knew that eventually he would have to go but that, as on TV, what would follow next was hidden, he knew the actors on the new program were unknown. He did not have to be afraid, for every­thing that happened had its sequel, and the best that he could do was to wait patiently for his own forthcoming appearance.

There is a scheme working itself out and Chance indifferently

watches it unfold. He waits for incidents to take place,

imagining they must do so of necessity, as part of the

"script,” himself a helpless bystander caught by surprise

in an unperceived drama manipulated by an author likewise

undisclosed,

ing something

remembers her

scene, 1« • • ♦

Thus he says to Mr. Rand, "I was just expect-

to happen when I had the accident." EE later

first impression of Chance at the accident

he did not seem surprised, his face was

153without expression, his manner calm and detached. He

behaved as if he had expected the accident, the pain, and

even her appearance."

Emotionless, without passion or natural, deep-felt

response, Chance's feelings were never fully evolved, for

he was not allowed to brave experience directly, and as a

oonsequence of his secondary acquaintance with real life,

he cannot be receptive to anyone’s entreaties or acknowledge­

ments, nor can he react from the heart. Attentions paid him

are unfathomable to his weak mind except insofar as they

correspond to those paid others on television, then he may

relate to them and find appropriate means of counteraction.

Unless he locates in memory some situations parallel to

those arising from his stay with the Rands, he is impotent,

insouciant. Nothing stimulates or excites him unless it

be the anticipation of approaching events, and even these

are met with neutrality.

Television has been mother and teacher to Chance,

nurturing him on pallid images, fraudulent renditions of

actuality, false realities of every sort, and instructing

him adversely in the means with which to face the external

world. Formed but unfilled by paltry network offerings,

Chance is TV man incarnate—hollow, unthinking, unfeeling,

a will-o’-the-wisp commandeered by printed circuits. His

total being mirrors the television set even to the last

detail of speech and mannerism. Gestures are affected, in

154

imitation of what he has seen on TV, and his language pat­

terns are nondescript; intensely investigated by the Soviets,

who are in a frenzy to unearth Chance’s governmental affilia­

tions, he escapes detection for "it proved impossible to

determine in any way whatsoever his ethnic background or to

ascribe his accent to any single community in the entire

United States." Chance has been standardized by TV where

dialects and localisms tend to vanish into "common" American

English,

In addition, television has made Chance an observer,

the "ultimate spectator." Rather than act or react, he

simply watches. It has become his custom, the singular

behavior he has known and practiced. He enjoys staring,

mesmerized, as people flit past his view. This bent extends

to activities large and small, but is best typified in two

episodes where sex, once again, is involved. In the first,

a homosexual engages Chance at a social gathering, hoping

for an illicit, fervent tryst, but Chance, not understanding

his intentions and fearing entrapment in a situation with

which he could not cope, offers merely to watch the man per­

form. "I like to watch very much," he says, and does so

in the ensuing, wildly comical scene. Later that same even­

ing, EE steps into Chance’s bedroom and confers herself

upon him, making overt her desire and her willingness to

surrender propriety for his love. She caresses him,

literally accosts his flesh in her zealousness; Chance, in

155

turn, "extended his hand and let it slide over her neck and

breasts and belly," but "he did not know what else to do

and so he withdrew his hand."

He wanted to tell her how much he preferred to look at her, that only by watching could he memorize her and take her and possess her. He did not know how to explain to her that he could not touch better or more fully with his hands than he could with his eyes. Seeing encompassed all at once, a touch was limited to one spot at a time. EE should no more have wanted to be touched by him than should the TV screen have wanted it.

Again Chance offers to watch and proceeds to do so through­

out EE’s autoerotic debauch.

This scene underscores the fact that, for Chance,

visual perception is everything. Vision, to him, encom-

passes all because the visual aspect of his awareness con- '

stitutes the total extent of his consciousness. The "TV j

man" is capable only of watching and obtains pleasure and

security solely through the visual act—all else is meaning­

less or foreign. Chance’s eyes, therefore, are the only

truly living organs in his body. They, like TV cameras,

wish merely to record, and the images assimilated, like

those on the television screen itself, should not want to \

be touched, just viewed. The set makes no other demands, I

nor should EE or anyone else. The image alone counts, not /

the reality it reproduces. /

Obviously Chance is a queer fish, and out of water

at that. His own element, where he felt safe, found mean­

ing and function, has been denied him. Adrift in a sea of

new faces and peculiar actions, he no longer has control of

156

his person. In this alien environment, Chance lives up to

his name, for him, every movement is at the mercy of fate.

He is pampered, cajoled, enticed, beseeched, constantly

manipulated by forces he cannot conceive. Ruled exclu­

sively by chance, he is tossed about like a toy, risking

injury and, worse, annihilation, for should his deception

be discovered, he will certainly be condemned to obscurity,

to "everydayness." Thus, Broyard’s definition of modern

man holds true for Chance, he is uncertain, subject to

accident, in danger of "losing his being to ’das Verfallen.’"

Yet Chance is not Kosinski’s primary target except

in the prophetic vein—future Americans, he foresees, may

well become what Chance is through over-exposure to vicari-

out experience. Chance is future man brought backward to

the contemporary scene, an example of the dire consequences

of too much imagined participation and too little involve­

ment in real affairs. Already his fellow men are trapped

by the media, television especially, which blurts out of

bedrooms, basements, and bars, in department stores,

restaurants, camp trailers (where people "get away from it

all"), and even automobiles. Everyone is watching, eyes

affixed to little shapes prancing about, gesticulating,

uttering sounds sometimes heard, frequently ignored. Too

many are like the Old Man’s foreign-born maid who spends

hours before the set though she doesn’t understand very

much of what is happening there—as if the set’s radiant

157light vzas its prime justification for being and its major

delight. There is something spellbinding about the fusion

of light and sound which lures them to it almost in spite

of the program’s content. Such bondage is staggering, dis­

turbing, and ultimately contemptible.

Its influence is as extraordinary as its magnetism.

Television has an astounding impact upon its devotees who,

like Chance, assimilate vast quantities of half-truths or

untruths and think them legitimate. One result of this

credulity is nation-wide discomfiture, a confusion over

mixed fact, rumor, and platitude. Where is reality to be

found? Television, certainly, doesn’t proffer an answer;

indeed, it prompts more questions than solutions, estab­

lishes more and more curtains between the self and reality.

One begins to "worship images, forms without content"in

lieu of real objects and people, "taking the medium’s mes­

sage not as a substitute for experience, but as a versionof it."10 11 2 Kosinski believes that "people tune out reality

12when they turn on TV sets," happy to escape life’s pres­

sures and content to wallow, instead, in the mire of washed-

out, hackneyed accounts of their world.

They are all too eager to bow before a pleasant image

10Barton Midwood, Rev. of Being There. by Jerzy Kosin ski» Esquire. Oct, 1971, p. 63.

^Times Literary Supplement, p. 667.

l2Jerzy Kosinski, (Interview on "Book Beat").

158

and will even go to great lengths to make an image more

wholesome. Most are "creatures who perceive life wholly in

terms of images offered them on TV and who therefore create 13personages they see on TV in the image of their hopes." J

"A person is what he appears to be and he can be made to

appear as almost anything his sponsors or public wish him to be."* 14 Chance falls into this category, he Is mechanically

fashioned to suit the requirements of a hero-hungry audience,

a total fabrication whose real character is unknown. His

actual being is not important to the myriads who view him,

nor is Chance particularly concerned about them—neither he

nor they have a reality.

The. people who watched him on their sets did not know who actually faced them, how could they, if they had never met him? Television reflected only people’s surfaces, it also kept peeling their images from their bodies until they were sucked into the caverns of their viewers* eyes, forever beyond retrieval, to disappear. Facing the cameras with their unsensing triple lenses pointed at him like snouts, Chance became only an image for millions of real people. They would never know how real he was, since his thinking could not be televised. And to him, the viewers existed only as projections of his own thought, as images. He would never know how real they were, since he had never met them and did not know what they thought.

Chance becomes a property of his viewing public, his unique­

ness and independence lost because his reality has been

submerged in an image. No feeling is interchanged, no

^Aldridge, p. 26.

14Ibid.. p. 27.

159

communication effected: the entire experience is impersonal,

de-humanized. "He feeds the expectations of a people nour­

ished by stock responses, condensed books, the language of

telegrams, spectator sports, shorthand and speed reading.

The audience that views Chance is stalked by illiteracy, by

the death of sensation.No one cares to delve deeper

into the reality supporting the facade, no one responds

naturally to the man within the image.

Chance's identity is defined through externals, by

accidents and circumstances. Since he has no papers nor

other means to lend himself an identity, he is free to be

whatever others* wish him to be, and that is precisely

what befalls him—on him is grafted a composite of every­

thing ideal in human nature, none of it applicable to the

real Chance, who does not even have a sense of his own

self. He passively accepts his new roles, never considering

the power bestowed upon him.

But Kosinski is aware of Chance’s power. "The fatal

power of the media is to confer instant celebrity upon

anyone simply through exposure and through that celebrity

comes the ability to influence, to control the thoughts and

actions of millions .... Extend this power and you have

horror and absurdity.Here, again, is one of Kosinski’s

^Newsweek, p. 95A.

^Aldridge, p. 27.

160

major themes—the existence or threat of totalitarianism.

It was paramount in his non-fiction and lurked in the

shadows of the earlier novels; in Being There it is allotted

its fullest fictive treatment. Chance is the modern demi­

god, but unlike his predecessors Hitler and Stalin, who

parlayed their strong voices, forceful natures and ambi­

tious designs upon a volatile crowd, he slips into the

political foreground quite by accident, wrenched from

obscurity by an easily pacified audience. Lacking Hitler’s

fierceness and Stalin’s persuasion, he is nonetheless thrust

into prominence because he has access to a medium the others

did not and because his viewers, nurtured on commercial

tripe, are no longer able to think for themselves. Tele­

vision has converted the American public to a spineless,

manipulable mass, ready victims for an electronically con­

trived leader. "Chauncey Gardiner" is Kosinski’s ironic

offering here, but as the novel vigorously suggests, it

could be anyone in our contemporary milieu. Even a modest

campaign over the air waves might effortlessly elevate one

such as Chance to a position of power, and what would

happen then?

The question goes unanswered, yet Kosinski obviously

intended his readers to pursue it. His own response can

be substantially documented; in several articles Kosinski

addresses the contemporary scene in terms of predilections

currently active in this country.

161

He launches his attack on the visual media by assert­

ing that they are "destroying the abstract . . . that the

culture increasingly tends to ’shift to the external,’bringing reality ’into our homes as nonreality.'"17 18 "If it

is unedited, like life," he continues, "it is not reality,1 o

it is a bore." The real event is unnerving, threatening,

and must consequently be avoided so as not to disrupt the

tranquility of vicarious experience. "The direction of

modern society is to externalize events, to make man a pas­

sive spectator of his own condition, and therefore he is manipulated.”19 20 "The progress of mankind," Kosinski adds,

"is toward making the human being ’easier,’ making him a

composite of external forces, rather than a bastion of

human resources . . . ." Pushing man to define himself

according to what is outside rather than inside his self,

making him "easier" to control, is a means of rendering

him submissive as effective as that employed by Hitlerite

or communist propaganda. Man is reduced to the level of a

loyal dog, subservient, anxious to please his master. His

master in this case is subtle, television and motion pic­

ture screens most often eschew the lies and corruption

l7"The Conscience of the Writer," Publishers* Weekly. 22 March 1971, P. 27.

18Ibid.

19Ibid.

20Ibid.. p, 16.

162

veiled behind everyday political and social deeds, emphasiz­

ing instead the very best of collective behavior. Honesty,

trust, patriotism and the like are held out as the national

coat of arms, concealing the squalid reality beneath.

"We face a mechanized society that seeks to enforce

its own collective values" by blasting us electronically

with ideal images of ourselves, rarely asking us to doubt,

to question. The visual media rely upon their capacity to

soothe, to smooth over the rough spots: they are aided by

the fact that pictures please and call for little scrutiny

beyond the superficial.

Today, people are absorbed in the most common denominator, the visual. It requires no education to watch TV. It knows no age limit. Your infant child can watch the same program you do ... . Television is everywhere. It has the immediacy which the evocative medium of language doesn’t.Language requires some inner triggering: television doesn’t. The image is ultimately accessible, i.e,, extremely attractive. And, I think, ultimately deadly, because it turns the viewer into a bystander.Of course, that’s a situation we have always dreamt of . . . the ultimate hope of religion was that it would release us from trauma. Television actually does so. It "proves" that you can always be an observer of the tragedies of others. The fact that one day you will die in front of the live show is irrelevant—you are reminded about it no more than you are reminded about real weather existing out­side the TV weather program. You’re not told to open your window and take a look: television will never say that. It says, instead, "The weather today is . . ." and so forth. The weatherman never says, "If you don’t believe me, go find out."

From way back, our major development as a race of frightened beings has been towards how to avoid *

21Peter Prescott, Rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, Newsweek. 19 Feb. 1973, P« ¡56?

163

facing the discomfort of our existence, primarily the possibility of an accident, immediate death, ugliness, and the ultimate departure. In terms of all this, television is a very pleasing medium« one is always the observer. The life of discomfort is always accorded to others and even this is dis­qualified since one program immediately disqualifies the preceding one.22

"Television is my ultimate enemy,"23 24 states Kosinski.

He turned toward literature to counteract in himself what

he saw happening to others—their refusal to face life

squarely, to see the evils and ugliness there as well as

the splendor. The printed page requires involvement,

necessitates participation in the conflict with reality,

gross as it may be. A conscientious author does not shirk

the mundane, the carnal, the grotesque if he is serious in

his attempt to reach below the surface to the actuality

underneath. He engages himself and the reader in a quest

for real feeling, honest sensation« together they travel

a road that asks each to share awareness and acute percep­

tion. "When you read about a man who dies, part of you

dies with him because you have to recreate his dying inside

your head." The same does not take place on television « . .

because he dies on the screen in front ofyou and at any time you can turn it off or select another program. The evocative power is torpedoed by the fact that this is smother man« your eye somehow perceives him as a visual object .... The very

22George Plimpton and R. Landesman, "Jerzy Kosinski," (Interview), Paris Review, 14 (Summer 1972), pp. 204-205.

23Ibid,. p. 205.24Ibid.

164

fact that it is happening on the screen tells the viewer two things« one, it is not about him, and two, it is not real. It is already there, it is artificial, it is about someone else.25

Thus is television’s impact on the masses. One ele­

ment of those masses has evinced Kosinski*s especial con­

cern—young people, particularly his students. To them he

once declared, "I am merely trying to save myself from what 26has happened to you," implying their isolation from

reality and from one another, their reliance on secondary

or group experience. During an interview on NBC’s Comment,

he was more explicit in his condemnation of youthful

"scholars"»

I am appalled by what I think emerges as the dominant trait of the students of today--their short span of attention, their inability to know or believe anything for more than half an hour,I feel it was television which turned them into spectators, since by comparison with the world of television, their own lives are slow and uneventful. When they first believed that what they saw on TV was real, they overreacted, only to feel cheated when the next program demanded a new emotion. Later, they felt simply manipulated by whatever drama they witnessed. By now, they have become hostile, and so they either refuse to watch the TV altogether or they dissect the medium and throw out all that upsets them.

It was from the daily log of TV that they accepted the world as single-faceted and never complex. After all, if it was accessible to TV cameras, it couldn’t possibly be otherwise. It was digestible and motionlessly marching in front of them. From TV's comic cartoons they first deducted /sic/ that death is not final, since their hero, no matter how dead, would rise. It

25paris Review, p. 205. 26Amory, p. 17.

165

was TV that taught them that they need not be experienced but avoid it ... .

... As a professor of prose I am constantly reminded of television's legacy. The students don't describe. They announce, as if an ever­present screen orchestrated their meaning for everyone. In hundreds of essays, none of them approached killing, illness, passion. All this was dismissed by shorthand, mutilated, suffered, feeling bad. A lover throbs innocence. The recipient sweats sweetness.

During their scholarly and leisure pursuits, they switch with exactly the same intensity and staying power from subject to subject, as if changing TV channels. Fifteen minutes is all a teacher can hope for .... Whether discussing Vietnam or what’s for lunch or a film, they seem incapable of reflecting.2?

Some few young persons have apparently wakened to

the dangers of television, specifically with respect to

its influence upon the political system. In an interview

for The Paris Review Kosinski comments,

As for Being There, the reaction from younger audiences concerns their relationship to Chauncey Gardiner, they're afraid they're being turned into Chauncey Gardiners, that their parents have already elected him—a Reagan, the impact of the Nixon-Kennedy debate, the value of image making. They're upset by the findings of one candidate whose private poll showed that only 50 of those who voted for him knew his views, while the remain­ing voters claimed they liked him because he came across well on television. There’s more and more preoccupation with the visual aspects of American, political life. Think of the priorities given to the looks of our candidates. They all come across well on TV. Do we have a hunchback? A man with a missing jaw? A man with a nervous tic? No, he simply wouldn’t make it.28

2?Jerzy Kosinski, "Children of TV," (Remarks made on NBC’s Comment) in Destination Tomorrow, Jack Carpenter, ed., (Dubuque, Wm. C. Brown, 1973)» PP* 227-28.

2^Paris Review 202

166

Nonetheless, the majority of Americans, young and old,

thinks Kosinski, are under the sway of the television mon­

ster. Its method touches more than the political arena,

reaching out to every facet of life, public and private.

Our discussion of Being There has thus far hit upon several

of them—the passivity of viewers, their ’’voyeurism,'* the

displacement of reality by images, the confusion and even­

tual disinterest stemming from superabundant information.

Some other effects attributable to television are worthy

of brief notice« they are either overtly demonstrated in

the novel or broadly hinted at.

First, as the characters in Being There prove, there

is no real communication among people. They are each con­

tent to remain separate from one another even in crowded

places, preferring to ogle a TV screen rather than to con­

verse« Chance is not alone in opting to watch. They are

intent upon surfaces, not depths of character, anxious to

promote an idealized front and equally desirous to accept

only the facade of others. Their conversations are blinds

to their actual personalities«

When one was addressed and viewed, by others, one was safe. Whatever one did would then be inter­preted by others in the same way that one inter­preted what they did. They could never know more about one than one knew about them.

The television habit has committed them to thoughtless

observation, trained them to see people as objects, and

since they have constructed false concepts of themselves

16?

based on images, they judge themselves and their contempo­

raries on externals. No attempt is made to search a man’s

mind, pluck at his emotions and philosophy, as if to do so

were to risk unpleasantries, shatter the calm. Instead,

one surmises a good deal from the cut of his suit, the tone

of his voice, the length of his hair, and thereby neglects

the real person beneath. Such facile practices lead to

misinterpretation and a dearth of communion.

Second, a growing absence of individualism has crept

steadily into our culture. Television, once more, is at

least partially responsible for this. The vast quantity of

inferior television productions has tended to function as

efficiently as propaganda toward the destruction of unique

selves. Young and old are molded to fit a standard of

behavior approved by the general public. Freedom of expres­

sion is frowned upon wherever it contradicts the norm, and

self-assertion is eyed with suspicion. Conformity is the

password of the age.

In view of Kosinski’s previous works, both fiction

and non-fiction, it is readily understood why he paints so

devastating a canvas of American life. Having matured

under the dictatorship first of the Nazis and later the

Soviets, he has a built-in abhorrence of authoritarian

rule. Anything which smacks of restriction is repellent

to him. America, he had hoped, would provide the landscape

of freedom within which he might rediscover and cultivate

his self. Regrettably, he found on these shores a

168

totalitarianism as pervasive and smothering as he had

endured earlier. In the unseen nuances of pulp magazines,

dime store novels, and television lay the instruments of

mind control. From them develops a mass psychology suffi­

cient to frustrate attempts at independence, more than

adequate to squelch personal freedom.

Who are the perpetrators of this assault against

individuality? The Painted Bird began to expose the social

doctrines of Germans and Russians which were motivated,

however wrong-headedly, by humanitarian concerns, yet these

served only to crush the individual self. Though the com­

parison wasn’t made in that novel, the American government

is likewise fostering a prohibitive code of behavior and it,

too, is corrosive. In the latter sections of Steps. Kosin­

ski points an accusative finger at materialists who, in

their greed for wealth, think solely of worldly possessions

to the exclusion of their fellow man. Certainly the profit

motive looms large in the divorce of self from self, but

larger still is the widespread indifference born of too

little contemplation, too much submission to powers outside

the self. The habits of mind punctuated in Being There are

the symptoms of this malaise« the causes are many. Tele­

vision is but the symbol Kosinski has chosen to illustrate

the breakdown of personal values and independent, uncoerced

judgment. Through it he portrays the slack-jawed inepti­

tude of those who surrender thought to entertainment,

169

exchange labor for peripheral, inconsequential pursuits,

and who pass decisions to invisible "experts." Television

is merely one means of converting action to inaction,

distancing reality until it loses meaning. Its effect is

subtle but dangerous: it deadens sensibilities, enslaves

the will, forces one to drop his hold on reality and eradi­

cates the skepticism needed to maintain balance in a world

gradually losing all semblance of unity.tv man, of

whom Chance is surely not the only example, has sacrificed

nearly everything which makes him human for a few moments

of peace.

Self, quite clearly, is again at the center of

Kosinski’s interest. As in the first two novels selfhood

is closely scrutinized. Attention focuses on Chance whose

being wildly diverges from that of the boy or the narrator,

yet whose experiences nevertheless exhibit anew the pres­

sures foisted upon the individual. Resemblances between

Chance and the boy of Painted Bird are few—both share an

innocence and a willingness to step forward into experience.

The similarity ends there. Steps* protagonist is far too

complex a character to warrant comparison with Chauncey

Gardiner, yet Being There, oddly, sounds more echoes from

Steps than from the earlier novel. It grapples with pre­

cisely the same quandaries which agonized the narrator,

¿^Aldridge, p. 26.

170

but «fliere the offices of self worked for the narrator in

Steps, they operate against Chance as if he were the inverse

of his predecessor.

Chance begins in the state Steps' narrator strives

to reach. Within his contracted environment he has control,

he is king in his garden and his room and commands the

television set to do his bidding. Peace and happiness are

his because, untroubled by the world outside his domain,

he leads a seemingly complete, uncluttered life. Even dur­

ing his excursion to reality he is regarded as a beautifully

balanced, natural, "truly peaceful man." Wisdom is accorded

him as well, and so he epitomizes the ideal man commended

in the Bhagavad Gita excerpt.

His contentedness, of course, is an outgrowth of

ignorant bliss. Steps' motto implies a man conscious of

his desires, knowledgeable of human foibles, which Chance

isn't. Armed only with secondary experience, Chance pro­

tects himself against the incursions of unfamiliar events

by adopting a reserved attitude. Fortunately (or unfortu­

nately?) for him, his diffident air is interpreted as

savoir-faire and his reticence to speak of worldly affairs

(he couldn’t) is seen as a measure of his self-sufficiency.

Thus EE can remark that "she could not remember encounter­

ing anyone who relied more on his own self"—as inaccurate

a statement as can be imagined.

The mystique surrounding Chance gives rise to

171

fantasies of many sorts. Diplomats woo, society matrons

adulate, image-gatherers dream, all believing Chance to

possess charms which aren't really his. He quietly accepts

this flattery. The narrator would have used it to advantage,

employing such eminence as one more instrument of control.

Chance, however, is oblivious of his powers. Unknown to him,

his modest nature instills covetousness in others who seek

to steal or tap his hidden reservoir of talents. He has no

control over this "gift," nor can he prevent those others

from desiring him. Chance is therefore a victim to what

should have been a tool of assertion.

His fatal attractiveness is most evident in his rela­

tionship with Elizabeth Eve, a relationship that is the

obverse of the narrator's typical situation. She is well

aware of the emotions he kindles in her, aware of the

"innumerable selves that he evoked in her."

The thought of seducing him, of making him lose his composure, excited her. The more withdrawn he was, the more she wanted him to look at her and to acknowledge her desire, to recognize her as a will­ing mistress. She saw herself making love to him— abandoned, wanton, without reticence or reserve.

EE has switched roles with the narrator. She is on the

attack, she fantasizes, she manipulates, and her prime

motive, like the narrator’s, is to be acknowledged, to

have her self accepted for itself. She fails because

Chance is impotent and because he is more interested in

watching television than in playing parlor games. She

saves face, though, by assuming that Chance simply doesn’t

172

want to exploit her body,

. . . you want to conquer the woman from within her very own self . . . you want to infuse in her the need and the desire and the longing for your love.

The words are almost verbatim from Steps.

She tries again the next day, a determined lady, but

meets with a more ambivalent Chance. This time he declines

contact altogether and implores her to let him watch her

love-making. He does so with the objective, scientific,

unemotional coldness reminiscent of Steps' dispassionate

narrator. Following her performance, EE says,

I am so free with you. Up until the time I met you, every man I knew barely acknowledged me. I was a vessel that he could take hold of, pierce, and pollute. I was merely an aspect of somebody’s love-making .... You make me free. I reveal myself to myself and I am drenched and purged.

Again, this reads much like a page from Steps, but here

Chance approximates the narrator’s role of voyeur without

the latter's selfish intentions. EE, meanwhile, sounds

like the narrator’s mistress after her discovery of his

real interest in her. She has been used as an object and

was responded to only as an essential part of someone

else's fantasy. Her reality was not acknowledged, she was

not seen as an individual entity, as a complete self. With

Chance, she claims (as did the mistress early in their

affair), her self is recognized and bhe therefore reacts

openly. In the process, she allows her natural feelings

to flow, finding uncharted selves while purging her self

173

of all it contains.

Footfalls from Steps accent Kosinski’s continued

examination of selfhood. With Being There he has created a

self at the opposite pole from the narrator, particularly in

two aspects« 1) Chance has no crippling past, and 2) he has

no control over himself or circumstances. It is as if

Kosinski has set out to show that neither extreme personality

can hope to secure fulfillment in our age, that neither an

egoistic nor an ego-less individual is likely to find happi­

ness. Indirectly, he hints that the perfect medium lies

somewhere between the two, despite the "failure" of his

protagonists, Kosinski implies, through the fictional under­

taking itself, that a "best life" is attainable—limited,

less than ideal, but one granting the individual his broad­

est scope. A correlative implication» the self’s freedom

is relative to the total milieu within which it operates

and to the degree to which it recognizes the potency of

that milieu. Two of Kosinski’s protagonists thus far have

consciously sought a course of action that could feasibly

lead to peace and happiness, their quests involved an aware­

ness of their social situations and a sense of their capaci­

ties to thrive in them. Chance begins at a disadvantage,

as a non-self, he forfeits his right to purposeful conduct

and never gains a notion of his potentialities or society’s.

The fact that none of these "heroes" attains lasting freedom

insinuates that an individual cannot have or be issued free

174

will—to live among men is to preclude such a possibility.

But Kosinski’s novels do suggest that the individual can

achieve more freedom than most of his fellows if he expands

his understanding of the social complex affecting him and

defines his relationship to it. By measuring the dictates

of his own being against the demands society must place upon

him, he is better able to gauge the bounds within which he

can function« he can reconsider his personal values as they

concur or conflict with community values, amending them in

such a way as to minimize dissension with himself or that

community. More knowing of his essence and more conscious

of the factors acting upon its expression, he might find

the best means by which not only to endure but to exercise

his self fully.

Certainly the narrator has gone too far with the

knowledge of self and others he has gained, and just as

certainly Chance and his associates have not gone far

enough, if they have made the attempt at all« neither lead­

ing character wins peace or happiness or wisdom. In his

fourth novel, The Devil Tree, the author offers still

another lost soul whose self is likewise buffetted by cir­

cumstance and who also tries to cope with its burden« in

that novel Kosinski is more concrete in his depiction of

the causes of discord in the self, but, as we shall see,

his latest protagonist cannot overcome the pressures

besetting him« though he identifies the core of his dilemma,

175

he is not strong enough to counteract it—the wholly inte­

grated self, therefore, has not yet materialized in Kosin-

ski's art.

At the outset of this chapter it was noted that

Being There seemed an anomaly amidst the author’s remaining

works, yet in fact its thematic concerns are exactly the

same as those found in The Painted Bird and Steps. I trust

these relationships have been demonstrated satisfactorily.

Its form and its special content, however, do differ remark­

ably from that of the earlier volumes and a few words on

these matters are therefore warranted.

With respect to content, several years ago, Anne

Halley wrote an engaging piece on the fairy tale qualities

of The Painted Bird. In her article she pointed out numer­

ous examples of folk motifs ranging from the foundling

child "restored by means of the traditional identifying

birthmark to his parents," to the huntsman performing a

ritual killing, to the enspirited enterprises of witches,

enchanted animals, and so onj but always, she said, they

were presented "with that ’realistic’ twist, or reversal,

which shows that there is neither justice, nor reason, nor

black or white magic to help one in extremity. Only chance."3° Halley’s observations are pertinent because in

^Anne Halley, Rev. of The Painted Bird. Nation.19 Nov. 1965, P. 425.

176

The Painted Bird Kosinski has consciously adapted mythopoeic

characters and situations and, by distorting them, has

forced us to examine their meaning in a new light. Tempted

to suspend ourselves in a familiar land of little boys and

forest nymphs, of giants and potions and Camelots we all

read about or listened to as youths, our expectations are

repeatedly frustrated instead, the frog (or colored bird)

we know will turn into a prince at story's end never sheds

his tattered garments. It is as if Kosinski were coaxing

us down a well-known path only to close it off ahead and

behind in order to shake our complacency. The comforting

fictions we cling to—which separate us from actual experi­

ence—are suddenly shattered and we are left to contemplate

reality. It is a method aimed at cutting down the space

between vicarious existence and felt life we normally fill

with illusions.

Steps, too, offers strange creatures and stranger

events, and it also strikes one finally as an enormous bad

dream. Though Being There is more lighthearted—a blithe,

comic interlude between two weighty novels—it is both

nightmare and tainted fairy tale, but a fairy tale we know

"is not a realistic description of life, but ... a

frighteningly real symbolic abstraction of life.Which

is to say that Kosinski has taken a particular aspect of

3^Aldridge, p. 27.

w

our culture—a dependence upon images as accurate reflectors

of reality—and extended it to its logical conclusion.

Something he finds basic to the American way of life is

satirized so as to point up its fallacies and the inevitable

harm it will wrought. The sketch he draws of a populace

duped by sophisticated propaganda is not very far from the

truth« an abstraction it may be, yet it is grounded in a

painfully obvious reality, and while satire is his mode of

attack, he is less interested in satire per se than in

"understanding the nature and meaning of the human condi­

tion, the relation ... of human values to the terms of

existence in an essentially amoral and surely anarchistic universe."32

The intent of all three fictions is thus the same«

in each (and in the forthcoming Devil Tree) the quality of

life is examined with special attention paid to the self’s

relationships to itself and the environment bounding it,

and to the moral implications arising from their conflicts.

Each novel likewise suppresses authorial comment so that a

reader must on his own cull from the sparse material

volunteered those themes and inferences Kosinski merely

hints at. An encounter between reader and book or reader

and writer is the result, with discovery (or awareness) the

objective. Although most fictional works offer this

32Aldridge, p. 25.

178

challenge, few require as great a reliance upon self-

knowledge and quick, accurate perception as do Kosinski’s.

Yet Being There represents something new for Kosin­

ski. Except for a few pages in his second novel, both The

Painted Bird and Steps are restricted to a European setting:

both refrain from exact denotations of time and place and

therefore speak on a universal level—their common themes

are evident without necessitating on the reader’s part a

knowledge of specific historical, geographical, or philo­

sophical data: both pertain primarily to past actions and

their influence upon their respective protagonists. Being

There addresses matters peculiarly American, the whole

evolving in the present or near future. One wonders why

the author chose to narrow his focus from cosmic to finite.

The answer is two-fold. First, Kosinski is com­

mitted to the novel as an art form. His two critical works

which accompany The Painted Bird and Steps testify to this

fact, and elsewhere he directs his observations to the

function of literature: in one interview after another, an

opportunity to expound on the place of art in human thought

and development is seldom missed. Eventually his comments

wend their way toward a comparison of fiction with other

media. Fiction always emerges with the laurels because

more than any other popular medium it demands an audience’s

imaginative involvement: where visual media are confined

by actual physical presences, literature allows the mind

179

to concoct faces, voices, scenes and actions according to

the individual consciousness—it permits us to exercise all

our faculties and reintegrates our biased perceptions of

the world with the reality of that world.

. . . the novel must remain an abstract medium ... it /Is7 being seriously threatened by media "that insist that events must be externalized, grounded in the external, like television and biography, which explains why biography is so popu­lar in this country. . . .You are neither a par­ticipant nor an observer, you have nothing whatso­ever to do with the event” . . . the conscience of the writer must compel him "to be defensive, to. insist again and again, no matter how few read it, on explaining why you get up, why you exist at all, and to do it by means of the imagination, the abstract medium. The writer is no more than the reverse of the reader. ... He and his readers are the arms of the same clock, but the hour is late."33

A warning and an incitement. Unless we take measures to

halt our steady march toward an extraneous definition of

ourselves and our surroundings, we will join the growing

legions of men and women insensitive to the intricacies

of reality, the novelist’s duty is to restore our sense

of self as an active sharer of experience, a distinct

entity which nonetheless belongs. He accomplishes this

feat best by expanding the novel as a form of communication,

extending the novel's boundaries, he can find fresh means

with which to startle a reader into a recognition of his

plight. Kosinski has selected the ancient parable form,

made it stand as both a metaphorical mirror of our modern

33Publishers' Weekly. p. 26.

180

crisis and a prophetic proclamation of impending doom, infus

ing the whole with material easily identified and therefore

relevant to this generation. Restricting his subject in

Being There to things typically American, he prompts his

readers’ association with well-known American practices«

having captured their interest, he then challenges their

habitual perceptions with his own shrewd insights, which

are anything but the formula rationale of pulp fiction.

If you do not ask yourself the existential questions

(what meaning exists? why not commit suicide? etc.), says

Kosinski, "you are still a being, but you are not a being here any more« you are a being there."3^ Kosinski has all

along asked these questions of himself and his readers, but

nowhere are they more evident than in Being There. This

"fairy tale" explores our immediate condition and the role

chance plays in it while it simultaneously penetrates the

forces which make us more susceptible to fortune, good or

bad. His object is to describe a present situation as he

sees it, underscoring our lack of being, our pointlessness,

thereby waking us to a state of awareness. In doing so he

executes the novelist’s task» "The pursuit of writing is

the pursuit of one’s own condition. ... It is very ego­ist and very social» very personal and very missionary."* 33

J Mount, p. 15.33Publishers* Weekly, p. 27.

181

This brings us to a second reason why Kosinski has

tapered his concentration to fit a smaller stage. There

has been in his overall production a progression from non­

fiction—which factually reported literal events—to fictive

rendering of past occurrences—occurrences of which, we

assume, the author partook—to a fanciful (yet grave) inter­

pretation of contemporary affairs. Such steady movement

suggests that Kosinski had stridden beyond an examination

of his past when he set about composing Being There. Hav­

ing exorcized the demons of that past, he was ready to do

battle with new contingencies—those which had presented

themselves since his arrival in America. Much has happened

to Kosinski in the last fifteen years: he has witnessed

many changes in American culture. In Being There he deals

with these changes because they affect him,

I am confronted with a changing society. I think the point is to notice them and yet not allow yourself to be seduced by them.36

Again he addresses what is closest to him, seeking to

clarify his vision in literary terms; and, as with The

Painted Bird and Steps, he writes for his personal satis­

faction in concert with a "missionary" zeal.

I must now amend a statement made, earlier, Being

There does represent a narrowing of focus, but only in the

sense that it directs its beams upon one specific area

that demands remedy. Yet even here Kosinski cannot be said

^Mount, p. 16.

182

to have shifted from the cosmic to the finite, for the

implications stemming from his attack on television are far-

reaching. Nothing less than the question of free will lies

at its heart. Kosinski speculates about the future of free

will* can it survive the onslaught of propaganda and the

numbing effects of sophomoric media? can the self ever

determine its course amidst a world incrementally falling

victim to random accident? These queries surely deserve

\ ranking amongst the most significant dealt with in litera­

ture and are comparable to the questions Kosinski has asked

in his two previous novels.

The structures within which Kosinski has carried on

his inquiries have altered from book to book. They are

consistent, however, in that each is equipped to manipulate

ideas rather than actions, in other words, they are vehicles

for philosophical expression, not for simple adventure or

escapism. In this respect, Kosinski is a European novelist

whose

greatest teachers have evidently been Kafka, Camus, Sartre, and perhaps Dostoevsky, men who have possessed not only unusual creative power but the ability to deal directly with concepts of being— in the largest sense, with ideas—and to use them in their fiction as concrete modes of dramatic action. This has always been the central strength of the later European novel« that in it ideas are as important as physical sensations and may even be experienced with all the force and acuteness of physical sensations. And this also is a quality the American novel has almost completely lacked, if only because it is part of our frontier mythology to believe that ideas belong to one sphere of per­ception and sensations to another—ideas to pallid and passive thought, sensations to the life of real

r

18337men in the real world of robust action.

John Aldridge speaks here« he goes on to note reasons for

the American antipathy toward ideas, then adds»

As a European Kosinski is fortunately free of this kind of grass-roots anti-intellectualism.Not only does he deal explicitly with ideas in his fiction« he is fully conscious of the extent to which they determine the cast and content of his creative vision. . . . Kosinski reminds us of a truth which most American novelists, just because of their abiding distrust of ideas, would much prefer us to forgett that in the most accomplished literary artists vigor of execution is finally inseparable from vigor of conception. The quality of the work can be determined only by the extent to which the work provides a powerful imaginative rendering of a powerful idea.38

Kosinski has, in every instance, employed a form

suitable for the presentation of significant human prin­

ciples. The episodic architecture of The Painted Bird

drew attention to the boy’s (or the author’s) reconstruc­

tion of his past, placing emphasis on the evolution of his

mind, the development of his attitudes« Steps original

arrangement of "scenes” perfectly embodied the associational

means with which we confront experience while delineating

the relativity of the narrator’s self« Being There assumes

the form that is most natural for the novelist of ideas, the form of parable, the metaphorical and analogical statement of an idea—in this case, one that happens not only to be powerful in itself but to have the widest conceivable relevance to the condition of society at the present time. Once again, as in The Painted Bird, he is concerned with the innocent and helpless victim—there a

37Aldridge, p. 26.

3®Ibid.

184

lost child, here a man with the mind of a child— who Is destined to become the object of what Henry James saw as the worst human atrocity, the usurpa­tion by others of the privacy and integrity of the individual self.

The Painted Bird was primarily a parable of demonic totalitarianism of that form of Nazi bestiality which is not a politics but a violence of the soul and blood. Being There has to do with a totalitarianism of a much subtler and even more fearful kind, the kind that arises when the higher sensibilities of a people have become not so much brutalized as benumbed, when they have lost both skepticism and all hold on the real, and so fall victim to those agencies of propaganda which manipulate their thinking to accept whatever the state finds it expedient for them to accept. This fascistic enslavement of the will, the corruption by others of the power of individual choice, is implied in Sartre’s famous remark that "Hell is other people," and is explicitly characterized by Kosinski in The Art of the Self when he speaks of "the inability to escape from others who prove and prove again to you that you are as they see you"—or that they are as they wish you to see them.39

Although the form and certain aspects of content in

Being There do contrast with what is found in the earlier

novels, this third volume assuredly bears the Kosinski

stamp.. It follows the line of inventive, intelligent,

provocative, unquieting fictions that have become the hall­

mark of this man’s genius. The Devil Tree, its successor,

once again demonstrates the author's versatility and his

inclination to elucidate complex matters of self. We turn

to it with a moment’s hesitation, for, as with Being There,

we are struck initially with its seeming deviation from the

Kosinski norm.

^Aldridge, p. 26.

CHAPTER V, THE DEVIL TREE

This is the tragedy of Jonathan, that he’s born into the society which in some way is promiscuous enough within its Protestant tolerance to allow him to consider himself an event, without any mercy given to the pursuit of one’s self as a meaningful event.

—Kosinski

186

Jonathan James Whalen is a young man who should have

brilliant prospects. He is handsome, intelligent, diversely

experienced, and best of all, he is heir to an enormous

family fortune acquired through the genius of his father,

an industrial magnate. The finest life has to offer is his

for the buying« for years he has travelled extensively

around the globe, making do on a $25»000 per month allow­

ance, visiting the world’s capitals, spending freely and

none too cautiously.

But Jonathan is unhappy. Neither his expensive

habits, his erotic girlfriends, nor the opulent accouter­

ments of his station afford him more than passing pleasure.

He wanders about aimlessly, accumulating experiences that

would make a James Bond envious—unless he would look closely

at the emptiness of Jonathan’s experience. For Jonathan,

poor little rich boy, has suffered greatly from the inatten­

tion of his mother and the indifference of his father such

that no experience has any valid impact upon him. No quan­

tity of fast cars, fast girls, and jet-set adventures is

sufficient to rouse him from the lethargy underlying his

existence« none can replace the love and affection denied

him as a child.

So Jonathan searches alone for an identity, for some

meaning in a life that seems wholly purposeless. Having

tried drugs, encounter groups, and all the pseudo­

187

psychological paraphernalia available to him, he decides

upon one last path to the source of his dilemma« an investi­

gation of his roots. He gathers information from family

friends, household servants, his father's business associ­

ates, doctors, nurses, and the like. What he learns is

confided to Karen, an equally young and misguided society

child, yet Karen is more headache than help, she is just

another detour on the road to self-discovery. Alas, in the

end poor Whalen takes sick, spiritually crippled by the fact

that he is misunderstood, baseless, deprived of the means to

assert his uniqueness as an individual.

If this sounds like a familiar soap opera or B-movie

script, it is all the more puzzling that Kosinski used this

character and format As the basis for his fourth novel, The

Devil Tree. After the carefully measured, cleverly struc­

tured Painted Bird and Steps, both composed of vividly real­

ized episodes and striking, singular personalities, and

even Being There, likewise evidencing skillful management

of word and scene despite the fantastic nature of its plot,

it is something of a letdown to confront the banalities of

Kosinski’s latest effort. Not only is the plot overworked,

but the writing itself is below the caliber evinced in the

earlier novels. Where the sentences were clear, precise,

shorn of superficial details and occasionally poetic in the

initial fictional works, those of The Devil Tree are some­

times embarrassing in their transparency. Dialogue and

188exposition in scattered instances are riddled with cliche's

and pop-cult jargon, barely rising above pulp-fiction level.

There is an occasional flatness in the prose and a flabbi­

ness of expression one wouldn’t expect from a proven master

of the language.

It might be wise to consider the style of The Devil

Tree before pursuing its thematic content because Kosinski’s

choice of expressive mode may indicate one of his artistic

purposes. Possibly Kosinski intentionally used an inflated

diction for its ironic effect, hoping to emphasize through

it a major point. The alternatives, certainly, are not

complimentary to the author: either Kosinski has become

thoroughly Americanized to the degree that he has warped

his fine sense of lucid prose, or he has sold out to best-

seller-itis, or he has lost his touch altogether. In light

of the exquisite idiom displayed throughout the first three

novels, Kosinski merits a benefit of the doubt.

The Devil Tree is structurally akin to Steps. Like

its predecessor, it is arranged in generally brief epi­

sodes, some of them presented as successive events, others

representing flashbacks in random array, but where Steps

resisted chronological ordering, the action of The Devil

Tree can be roughly determined sequentially. Most of the

narrative is delivered by Jonathan in the present tense,

with third person passages, past and present, interspersed.

Backward and forward leaps in time and a mixture of points

189

of view produce a montage effect reminiscent of Steps and

is therefore in keeping with the author’s motion-picture-

frame method of plot and character development. Finally,

"the dispassionate calm of an observer recording what he sees"1 applies equally well to Jonathan and the narrator.

Yet The Devil Tree is not nearly as powerful a work

as Steps. It somehow lacks the driving energy of the

former novel and gives rise to the suspicion that its author

might not be totally in control of his technique.

At intervals in this short novel there are brief reminders of the Kosinski of his sometimes striking first two novels—a certain power of evocation—of mystery, of starkness, of cruelty, of void« but these fragments appear fleetingly in the book’s vacuum only to disappear without a trace« flicker and go out.2

The sustained high level of image-creating incidents and

spare, terse diction are missing, as is an intense central

figure—Jonathan, more recognizable, more readily access­

ible, seems to be an inferior substitute for the awe

inspiring, troubling, savagely complex narrator. There are,

however, moments when Jonathan commands the attention and

deference so easily accorded the narrator, and moments, too,

when an episode grips us completely—an extended tale of

Jonathan and Barbara in Rangoon wherein he leads her to

^ohn Barkham, Rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, Toledo Blade. 18 Feb. 1973» P» 5»

¿Rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, New Republic. 10 March 1973, p.' 3^.

190

believe he has murdered their hostess, and another of his

revenge upon a belligerent police officer come to mind—

and these are perhaps sufficient to warrant Stanley Kauff­

mann’ s remark that the novel "is a mosaic of fiercely

charged molecules, in continually unpredictable and con­tinually gratifying patterns,"3 that "in its almost pain­

fully insistent distillation, in the way it agonizes a4thematic order out of the seemingly banal and chaotic"

it is a masterpiece of its kind.

In an informative, perceptive analysis of The Devil

Tree Kauffmann lavishes praise upon Kosinski’s latest

effort. When he says

Again as in Steps. Kosinski cannot dissociate his fresh vision of his themes from a fresh way of stating them. His manner of seeing is, as usual with good artists, itself part of what he sees. His method might be called recrystalliza­tion. He dissolves masses of experience and observation, discards the superfluous, then solidifies the rest into new, sharp crystals, arranged in a new order so that the patterns burn coldly.5

he speaks truthfully about Kosinski’s procedure, but he

does neglect to mention that the edge has been taken off

slightly in The Devil Tree. The composite episodes add

up to something below the standard set in Steps, and with

^Stanley Kauffmann, Rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, World. 27 Feb. 1973, P. 42.

4Ibld.

5lbid.. p. 46.

191

respect to style and structure, The Devil Tree is less

satisfying than the earlier novel.

Though not entirely alone in his adulation, Kauff­

mann has few supporters. Some say that the novel isz 7

"satisfyingly readable," "precise and economical, but

the majority of reviewers are unanimous in condemning The

Devil Tree. So vehement are their charges that it becomes

a sport to determine who among them is most derogatory.Q

"No control," "arbitrary," "pointless," "kaleidoscopic,"

says one. "Too abstract: the violence and cruel sex is

introduced too mechanically, as if the author had been programmed to produce it,"^ intones Ronald De Feo, who adds

that the episodes are often implausible and that "the

fractured narrative scheme is diverting for a while ....

But eventually the intellectualized pornography, the shallow

ness and pseudo-toughness of the entire performance get to us."^° Robert Alter agrees with De Feo in noting that "the

use of a pulp formula even produces an inadvertently comic

^Rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, Pub­lisher’s Weekly. lT Dec. 1972, p. 33.

?Prescott, p. 86.pElliot Anderson, Rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy

Kosinski, Chicago Tribune Book World. 4 March 1973. p. 5»^Ronald De Feo, Rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy

Kosinski, National Review. 16 March 1973» P. 322.10Ibid.. p. 323»

192effect."11 12 3 He continues»

Kosinski’s latest novel unfortunately demon­strates • . . the thinness and abstraction with which he conceives both humanity in general and fictional characters, his imagination here slips again and again into unpleasant self-indulgence or sheer slackness. . . ,

. , . from beginning to end it is a loose web of stylistic and cultural cliche's, Kosinski’s prose, with its series of short sentences occasionally embellished by an elaborate simile, runs readily to the characteristic vice of "simple" styles, which is to fall into the hack­neyed formulas of mass journalism and pulp fic­tion. . . .

... He /Jonathan/ constantly mouths the most worn therapeutic formulas about acceptance, insecurity, sense of unworthiness, exposing of real self . . . and he is not above the most barbaric therapoid jargon. . . .12

Alter*s assessment is acid enough, but my own choice

for top honors goes to Pearl Bell, the reviewer for The

New Leader who begins almost gently by comparison.

The Devil Tree reads as though it had been written by a tape recorder, or a Xerox machine, or an unprogrammed computer—in fact, by almost anything except a writer.13

11Robert Alter, Rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Times Book Review. 11 Feb. 1973» P» 2.

12Ibid., p. 3.

l3There is an irony of sorts in this comment, for Kosinski did in fact dictate the majority of the novel.In an interview with Paris Review, he explains that, his eyesight endangered, he began dictating his novel to a tape recorder, "I noticed I developed a new kind of free­dom—the tape recorder prose seems to be looser, less con­trolled than the typewriter prose of Steps. . . . Afraid that I would lose my sight any minute, I prevented myself from editing, all I wanted to do was to develop the ability to be articulate while dictating." (p. 195) Apparently Kosinski did not revise his new text as stringently as he had the first three volumes.

193

then warms up»

Kosinski’s prose is so doggedly flaccid that he reduces everything to a state of trivial inertia.

The icing on the cake» "a lumpy bundle of mindless blather."14

Obviously, this fourth novel was not well received

in the main. No doubt the critics cited above exaggerate

the novel’s faults to some extent, yet a ring of genuine

disappointment or disbelief runs throughout most reviews,

and even those more receptive are generally guarded in

their appraisal. There is a hesitancy to accept The Devil

Tree for what it appears to be—a poorly written fictional

piece by an author who should have known (and done) better.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s title, "Bad By Design? Or Just

Bad?" capsulizes the undercurrent of surprise and chagrin

common to all but a handful of critical estimates. I quote

Mr. Lehmann-Haupt at length below since the attitude voiced

in his article and the questions he intones are identical

to my own when I first read The Devil Tree, and because he

suggests—without fully believing them himself—two

approaches to the novel’s style and content which might

ultimately redeem it.

... I tried to convince myself that the stupefying effect of The Devil Tree was inten­tional on Mr. Kosinski’s part. X kept telling myself that his hero, Jonathan James Whalen . . •

ih.Pearl Bell, Rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy

Kosinski, New Leader. 19 Feb. 1973» P* 17.

t

194

was meant to be a cliche' . . . that Mr. Kosinski intended his prose to be as deadly as it seems."When Karen mocks and attacks me," the novel's hero reports, "she unlocks the child within me."Then later in the book, he tells us, "I still suffer from my father’s rejection and my mother’s indifference," And elsewhere, "Why do I always choose women who cannot give of themselves, whose concept of love is based on repression and unde­clared competition?" "The barriers that exist between Karen and me derive from her resistance to commitment."

As my head began to nod over sentences like these, I kept arguing that it was not because I was reading old copies of True Romance, or an anthology of dime-store psychology. . . .15

. • . but rather, because Kosinski deliberately tried to

capture the flavor of such popular dribble in an attempt

to satirize and reprove this sort of trash and the ignor­

ant reading public which swallows it whole. Somewhere,

the critic surmises, a link exists between this sophomoric

twaddle and all the talk of roots and branches in the

baobab tree (from which the title derives).

It was all connected somehow, the rootless­ness of the devil trees and the rootlessness of the novel’s language: the sterility of the trees and the lifelessness of the novel’s form; the curse of the baobab and the curse of America: the death of the young ones: the upside-downness of everything: the devil in the works.

Yet Lehmann-Haupt cannot discover that connection, nor can

he combat the dulling effect of Kosinski’s narcotic prose

long enough to find anything more inspiring than a second­

er third-rate rehash of threadbare aphorisms.

^Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Times, 13 Feb. 1973» P» 39.

195The kindest thing I can think of saying is

this» Assuming for the sake of argument that Mr. Kosinski has not simply written incompetently (and this is not an assumption on which I’d now be willing to wager a fortune), assuming instead that the banality and hollowness of the book were meant by the author to imitate the novel’s sub­ject—namely, the banality and hollowness of America, then Mr. Kosinski has committed what academic estheticians of the nineteen-fifties called The Fallacy of Imitative Form. . . .Instead of art, The Devil Tree ends up being another product of the very culture that it is attempting to anatomize. Instead of a prognosis of the disease, it ends up being a symptom.Instead of a healing surgical slice, it ends up being an overdose of ether.1®

The gist of Mr. Lehmann-Haupt*s essay is that Kosin­

ski may have consciously adopted the semi-literary cant of

newsstand magazines in order to beat American illiteracy

and mindlessness over the head with its own weapon, but in

doing so he lost all claim to artistry. This latter

indictment may be inescapable, particularly if one agrees

that a structure imitative of its subject matter is in all

cases a perversion of art. Let us consider for the moment,

however, the first part of this critic’s imputation since

it should illuminate the second.

Shortly after the publication of Being There, which

concerned itself largely with the harmful influence of

television upon viewers, Kosinski became a frequent visitor

to late-night talk shows, and in at least two of his appear­

ances he came armed with a folder full of excerpts from

16Lehmann-Haupt, p. 39.

196

True Confessions. Modern Romances. Man's Magazine. and the

like. In each instance he read selections which typified

the stock characters and situations, hyperbolic language,

and formula writing conventional in one and all. His point

was that these confessional stories bore no resemblance to

reality and merely reinforced popular myths of male and

female relationships while leaving unchallenged the reader's

imagination, perception of actuality, and knowledge of self.

He elaborated on his findings in an article titled

"Packaged Passion," published in the spring issue (1973) of

American Scholar. There Kosinski stated more succinctly

than in his brief television stints those elements of pulp

fiction he thought most objectionable. Chief among them

were the accusations that magazine writers and editors

"have created a model so basic, so crude, that it denies

the complexities of modern existence and pretends to offer

an easy alternative to a confusing reality:" f that the

believing, trusting reader is insulated from the real world

since his experience, like any given protagonist's, "leads

to no enlightenment about the world or the self, which 18might be applied to future experience:" that the events

and behavior recounted, no matter how bizarre or unnatural,

are presented as normal so as to reassure the reader that

^?Jerzy Kosinski, "Packaged Passion," American Scholar. (Spring, 1973)» P. 196.

18Ibid.

197his own digressions from morality are not uncommon. Further­

more, an "emotional monotone" runs throughout such litera­

ture effecting a detachment of reader from material, one

need not be overly concerned with the trials and trauma of

fictional figures since their troubles are ultimately

resolved in a neat, manipulated happy ending,

The reader is never required to be involved beyond his simplest feelings and perceptions.The dramatic situation is encoded in order to reinforce in the audience a sense of predicta­bility, or normalcy. . . . the stories always end with a palliative vision, some measure of order and balance is always restored. The reader returns to the emotional kindergarten while his psyche slips back into the trouble­free sleep.15

After Kosinski uttered remarks like these to millions

of television viewers, he received, to his amazement, count­

less letters which "revealed that the majority of readers

considered the magazines accurate in their reflection of

’real events* and accepted the stories uncritically, as vivid slices of contemporary life."* 20 From this he concludes

that there i3 a demand for bad art, an art chosen to remove the reader from his own condi­tion, and by doing so to abstract him from the human condition in general. Ironically, since the reader continually isolates himself from others by reading stories that demand nothing of him and never extend him beyond the most prosaic emotions, he becomes a victim, impoverished by his own unex­panded, underdeveloped self. ... As they resign themselves to the imaginative vacuum of the stories, the readers admit to a double bankruptcy, if in their vicarious lives they settle for the fraud

^"Packaged Passion," pp. 196-97.

20Ibid.. p. 204.

198

implicit in these magazines, one can only speculate on the experience component of their actual lives. Although it may be assumed that man’s natural instinct is to avoid experience, to prevent the possible failure and consequent knowledge of the self as an ultimate loser, it is significant that in a society that is continually tending toward the individual's isolation, there is so little aware­ness of this trend. In fact, there seems to be an increasing desire on the part of mass audiences to reinforce social divisions and barriers, and to ensure individual isolation. As the primary exponents of this sterile self-protection, the confession magazines cannot be dismissed as just another stream of popular trash, as the epitome of preferred bad art. They reveal a significant popular need for yet another soporific» a litera­ture that can defuse the imagination, dismiss emo­tion, and ultimately leave the reader disarmed, unable to face his very self or to cope with the unknown~his own existence.21

Much like his attack upon the television medium, this

blast at cheap magazine fare is geared to the subversive

elements common to both. A reader of trashy literature

(some of the "better" pulp magazines command a monthly

readership in excess of ten million) is guaranteed no more

than a flowery rendition of reality, laden with false con­

cepts of human nature and societal maneuverings leading to

expectations which could not likely be fulfilled. There

is a dearth of honest, authentic insight, little understand­

ing of what it is to be human, as with poor television

programs, one’s mind is not expanded nor refined, nor are

perceptions sharpened, but rather one is drawn further

away from the real world, further away from oneself as an

21 Packaged Passion," p. 204.

199

active participant in life. This is Kosinski*s point—that

the media are removing us all from first-hand experience,

retarding our growth as independent, thinking persons.

Through exposure to this kind of media—low forms of what

could be elevating, enlightening—an individual has little

opportunity to discover truth and develop his sensibilities»

instead, he becomes an "impoverished" self, divorced from

reality, less responsive to it, and therefore the victim

of a vacuous existence.

Media power, acting subtly but in a nonetheless

authoritarian manner, is again Kosinski’s subject, yet while

his argument is clear in the article quoted, and though with

respect to his earlier novels it is of a piece with his

repeated assaults on totalitarianism and mindless collective

behavior, it is debatable whether or not he intended The

Devil Tree to represent an ironic thrust at the written

medium’s vacuousness. Certainly the majority of his critics

fail to perceive any such intent» there is, however, an

argument favoring this possibility. A reader's tendency,

given stock language and synthetic events, is to deem

Jonathan and his story as simply another bit of froth, but

Kosinski may have formulated his novel in such a way as to

counteract precisely this tendency. In other words, just

as he consciously used different fictional forms in The

Painted Bird. Steps, and Being There respectively to shock

us into awareness, he may have deliberately employed pulp

200

fiction techniques which make The Devil Tree appear super­

ficial while actually providing insightful comments oh

pertinent issues. In his previous performances Kosinski has

chosen forms which belied his real purposes» The Painted

Bird appears to be a chronicle or diary similar to hundreds

of others that do little more than recount memoirs, yet its

design digs deep into a reality we often deny. Steps strikes

one as unstructured until, absorbed by the repetition of

images, he becomes aware of patterns—patterns that embody

the novel’s principal statements, Being There seems but a

simplistic parable, yet the cogent ideas it conveys are

fostered by that very form, the cool, detached prose of all

three novels precipitates a reader’s imaginative involvement,

thereby luring him into a profound consideration of his own

self. In short, the novels invariably appear to be some­

thing they are not, their architectures and language thus

echo one of Kosinski’s themes—that people and events and

ideologies are not always what they seem to be.

It is reasonable, therefore, to assume that the pulp

elements of The Devil Tree are merely a screen to the

author’s artistic purposes. In the past Kosinski has made

a point of challenging his readers, he takes delight in

teasing them into awareness, baiting them with the appar­

ently obvious, then exposing the real configuration

beneath to those who accept the invitation. Since it is

unlikely that Kosinski has abandoned this habit, may we not

201

view The Devil Tree * a trappings as a mask to serious inten­

tions? Perhaps the novel is an ironic testament to the

American penchant for shallow pastimes, ironic in that the

book itself is a parody of pulp fare and also in that, by

fleshing out a familiar confessional magazine story with

real complexities and honest responses, it contradicts the

"easy alternatives" of sensational literature. And perhaps

the peculiar blend of the commonplace and the complicated

is the means through which Kosinski "fills old bottles with

new wine" or, to change the metaphor, forges untrodden paths

through well-worn territory.

Surely with regard to the handling of characters and

scenes, Kosinski’s novel differs substantially from the

pulp fiction norm. The following examination of The Devil

Tree's parts should make this clear, but some preliminary

comments are in order. To begin with, while Jonathan is

the rational, sexually-oriented male typical of magazine

heroes, and though his problems with women and business

interests are likewise typical, he finds no ready-made,

facile solutions to his dilemma, nor are the causes of his

plight presented in homely terms. The sources of his

anxiety are rooted in his discordant past and in the Ameri­

can experience, both highly intricate and puzzling. Rather

than summon elementary explanations of Jonathan's enigmatic

situation, Kosinski scrutinizes the American milieu seeking

clues to the national character» his investigation thus

202

sheds light not only on his protagonist but on those social

and historical aspects of culture that fashion all con-

temporary Americans. In doing so his readers look past

the artificial surface rendering of personality and environ­

ment with which a lesser writer would have been content to

the essential nature of that personality and environment.

Secondly, where the language of popular fiction

appeals to the lowest levels of one's understanding, calling

solely for conventional responses, the répertoriai diction

most often evident in Thé Devil Tree elicits a reader's emo­

tional participation in the drama unfolding. The sub-

literary declamatory practices Kosinski imitates are actu­

ally far less plentiful than his critics claim, most of his

prose is akin to that manifested in his earlier works. This

intimates that the author occasionally planted a rhetorical

flourish to remind us of his parodic aims, only to pull us

back into the reality of his own momentous observations.

Most often his dry, unruffled voice has an effect opposite

to the bathetic claptrap of pulp melodrama, it draws us

inward to an emotional association with the protagonist?’d

cosmic predicament.

22It might be instructive to measure the similari­ties and dissimilarities between Jonathan and Chance. Both men are handsome, persuasive in their separate ways, and each cuts a dashing figure. Ironically, Chance, who has neither intellect nor ambition, becomes a success (albeit a hollow one) while Jonathan, mentally alert and purposeful, fails in the only realm he cares about—the establishment of a true self. Each man, however, appears to have reached

f\

203

What this means is that Kosinski has once again

cleverly manipulated his literary style and form in a man­

ner that catches us off guard. He has thrown us out of

kilter by offering a seemingly artless fiction which actu­

ally harbors a veritable treasure of relevant insights to

humanity. His first three novels proposed persons and

settings beyond the ken of most Americans, yet they

revealed significant intimations of mankind’s estate which

too frequently go unrecognized or unacknowledged, The Devil

Tree entertains figures and affairs closer to our own

experience, but ones we are inclined to overlook in depth

because we’ve been saturated with inane accounts of them.

The Devil Tree corrects this propensity. It parlays the

customary aspects of pulp fiction into a brilliant vision

of what it is to be an American, it transforms standard

formulae into a vehicle for the expression of salient ideas.

This novel, then, cannot be said to signal a loss of

artistry (as Lehmann-Haupt believes), quite the contrary, it

the heights, the summit of the American Dream—Chance as a political power, Jonathan as a wealthy materialist. Since neither accomplishment is pictured as a genuine achieve­ment, Kosinski may be suggesting that something exists in the American way of life which negates the possibility of success on any level. This is especially promising when one recognizes that The Painted Bird and Steps treated the hopelessness of self-aggrandizement in Nazist/socialist countries, while Being There and The Devil Tree address an equally insuperable oppression of the self’s freedom in America.

204

proves anew that Kosinski is a resourceful artist capable

of lifting the ordinary to the extraordinary.

One of his central ideas here is the fraudulent use

of stratagems whose effect is similar to that of magazine

fiction. Jonathan Whalen, like so many youths confounded

by a knotty, contradictory world they did not create,

searches for a safety valve, a means either of fleeing or

surmounting obstacles to sound health. For the masses,

television and escapist literature provide a way out of

troublesome, real circumstances} Jonathan and his peers

reach further—toward drugs, encounter groups, meandering

travel, expensive toys, or free sex.

Jonathan tries them all. His monied position allows

him to ride a helicopter above Manhattan where his wealth

is stored, to drive a Ford powered by a thunderous twelve-

cylinder Italian engine, to fly his own glider, to hunt

African game, or to hire an Olympic champion to teach him

skiing. Material possessions and extravagant enterprises,

however, are no cure for the emptiness Jonathan feels.

Nor do journeys to far countries fill the hollowness of his

existence» Jonathan's roots, which he searches out, are

American,, not to be found in foreign soil.

Drugs provide temporary relief, "but the inner peace

I sought was not to be had so easily." Opium promised to

work magic on his tightly controlled sensibilities, open

205

new avenues of expression, and increase his awareness, yet

even this effectual drug failed its purpose. "My predilec­

tion for self-repression, not liberation, was heightened,"

he says. "It seems that vzhat I really want is a drug that

will increase ray consciousness of others, not of myself."

Indeed, Jonathan admits a need to communicate, to

step closer to other selves despite his penchant for

secretiveness and detachment. He recognizes that he has

many selves, each battling for precedence at a given moment,

and furthermore that two portions of his personality domin­

ate—"the manipulative, malevolent adult who deceives and

destroys, and the child who craves acceptance and love."

For most of his life the treacherous half of his character

has held sway, causing him to become estranged, separate,

inflexible, constantly defensive of his private self,

aggressive as a public individual. In his own words, he

is a "master of concealment," a man self-controlled to an

extreme. He realizes, too, that this tough inner and outer

shell has prevented him from fully acting, he hasn't given

of himself any more than he has accepted from friends and

family. What's left is a sense of unfulfillment, a lack

of reason for existence, and a horrible disorientation.

At last he knows "that I have really tried to conceal the

child at the expense of the adult," and sets about to mend

his ways.

Regrettably, his initial movement toward redemption

206is a mistaken one, mistaken because he confuses love with

sex. In the past Jonathan had always had his way with

women. He alludes to several of his conquests, usually

derogatorily-—their affairs concluded quickly, dispassion­

ately. None of these women accepted his self fully except

Anne, who tolerated his abuse and loved him all the more,

oddly, her complacency and willingness to surrender her

being unquestioningly finally drove him away. As he con­

fessed later, girls who proffered no challenge to his

tyranny could not maintain his interest (one of his fondest

memories is of an intractable prostitute who rebuffed his

every advance). He had no use for easy victories, despised

those who took him at face value.

In each of his liaisons sex did not perform the

miracle Jonathan anticipated. Rather than foster communion

of souls, it severed them. Sex, Alan Hislop points out, is always an isolating act in Kosinski’s fiction.23 it is so

in Jonathan’s relationship with Karen, his current mistress.

Try as he does to make the sexual act a bridge to total

commitment between himself and Karen, their association dis­

integrates in a mire of distrust and misconstrued motives.

Though Karen "unlocks the child" within him, thus seeming a

perfect instrument of rehabilitation, a kind of psycho-

therapist-lover, and in spite of Jonathan's earnest endeavor

^Alan Hislop, Rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, Saturday Review of the Arts. March 1973» P. 71»

207to surrender his closeted emotions, his impulse toward

repression wins out. The sexual act for them is never a

consummation of love but an exercise in futility: far too

much responsibility is laid to sexual performance and it

becomes a mere cover-up for emotional inadequacy.

As a final measure of Jonathan's sincere desire to

expand his awareness and make himself more approachable,

he joins an encounter group, hoping to uncover some hidden

facets of his subconscious. His first attempt at participa­

tion fails miserably, he decides to play several roles,

never giving in to his real emotions, sustaining a strict

self-control. One member resents his ability to "act out

a tragedy one minute and a burlesque the next," thereby

presenting as truth a false image of his real self, "She

said that I would always resist my impulses and remain

detached."

He discusses his encounter group experiences with

Karen and agrees with her that its entire principle is a

forgery. After two days of meetings he notes,

... we are still strangers, anxious to return to our individual existence, and all the tears and hugs and screams and anger seem vacuous and unreal.This concept of instant intimacy annoys me more than anything else about the encounter group. It breaks down resistances and makes people feel good by allowing them to think that they are really get­ting to know one another. Yet in the end nothing has happened: we know no more about ourselves and the others than we would after a cocktail party.

An encounter group is supposed to make easy the admission

of guilts and fears» within its bounds one gradually casts

208

off restraints and lets his inner being flow freely. In

brief, one makes his self accessible. Underlying this con­

frontation method is the theory that "secrets" shared with

one’s oonoerned comrades can ultimately be placed in a

rational context as if every individual's peculiar psyche

fits a universal pattern well known to the group's psycholo­

gist-leader, and that through exposure of guarded aspects

of personality one's self can be defined. Jonathan knows

from the start that he and the rest are raulti-selved per­

sons, and any one self or combination of selves may emerge

at a given time only to be replaced by a new self. If his

session-mates were to evaluate his character on the basis

of one of his selves, surely they would misinterpret him,

their "rational" schématisation of his character would be

founded on partial truth.

Not even that. It is nearly impossible for one to

identify all of his various selves so that the whole person

is rarely, if ever, capable of disclosure. Certainly a

conglomeration of people lacking knowledge of psychological

refinements could not be expected to piece together a uni­

fied self from scraps. Profound understanding is required

to do so, and as Jonathan remarks, understanding "takes

years to develop and occurs only when people feel free to

expose themselves to one another." Such freedom is absent

from this assemblage. "No one understands anybody else.

We are wandering around in dark caves, holding our little

209

private candles, hoping for some great illumination" which

doesn’t come.

In addition, absolute honesty with respect to one’s

innermost being is inordinately difficult. How does one

surmount so-called defense mechanisms, sentries to painful «

memories and unacceptable impulses which have been accumula­

ting and rigidifying for years? Normally, one projects an

image of himself suitable for the moment, reflects a state

of mind, perhaps, which fits the immediate situation.

Amidst a crowd, one is inescapably an actor presenting a

version of himself. Needless to say, his behavior is a

deception.

Jonathan perceives this and knows as well that at

least one more hindrance to self-evocation exists. Lan­

guage itself acts as a deterrent to veracity. On one hand,

words are simply inadequate to convey emotions or abstrac­

tions of any sort. More importantly to Jonathan, "language

pronounces judgments ... it has the power to confine mean- 24ings, reduces and cripples us." It has lost its capacity

to impart the spontaneous because words carry specific

denotative value. One chooses them carefully when desiring

to make his meaning clear, but since individual emotions

are unique, inexpressible in the language available, one is

forced to borrow words which he hopes will approximate his

24Daniel Cahill, "The Devil Tree« An Interview with Jerzy Kosinski,” North American Review. 258 (Spring 1973)» p. 60.

210

feelings. He keeps in mind the fact that his listeners may

take his words explicitly, thus classifying him according

to their comprehension of what his words mean—and their

comprehension may be faulty, in which case he will seem to

be what he is not. Jonathan, aware of this ambiguity in

language, distrusts its use. Though language "is the only

way to make himself accessible to himself? as well as to

others—the only way he can bare his emotions and thereby

gain acceptance—he rejects itj in doing so, he "pronounces

a verdict, a tragic verdict, upon himself." He declines "to

formalize a whole hazy body of feelings that are underneath,

because to formalize them is to define them and be the thing

they say." Jonathan's feelings are not so easily collared,

and because he desires honest representation of them, he

refrains from speaking outrightly—or at all.

I suspect that whenever I articulate ay thoughts or translate my impulses into words, I am betraying the real thoughts and impulses which remain hidden. Instead of expressing myself, I produce a neatly ordered document about someone else's state of mind.

Jonathan Whalen, then, has given several potential

panaceas a chance to operate in an unsuccessful bid to step

outside his well-fortressed self. Some of them have been

sideward steps calculated to dismiss the oppressive facts

of his existence, but his relationship with Karen and his

flirtation with the encounter group signify a sincere desire

^Cahill, (Interview), p. 61

211

to brave the depths of his identity. We meet Jonathan at

a point when he faces what may rightly be termed an iden­

tity crisis. Upon his return to America (the novel begins

with his arrival) Jonathan is urged from within to discover

who he is. Having spent years abroad, he is about to

inherit a massive fortune, and with it the decision to

remain what he has been, accept the role of responsible

millionaire, or become something else entirely. To »Bake a

proper decision, he must first ascertain who the real

Jonathan James Whalen is or might be.

He commences his investigation by realizing that he

has always been defined externally. Three factors, par­

ticularly, have functioned as constrictors of his character—

money, parents, and the Company.

The Devil Tree opens with Jonathan asking to board

a helicopter for a half hour ride over New York City.

Because he is shabbily dressed and unshaven, his request is

not taken seriously until he unfolds a thick packet of bills;

even then he must submit to frisking before takeoff. Upon

his return he is apprehended by police who demand identifica­

tion papers which Jonathan does not have. They believe he

is a vagrant or thief or both and are on the verge of

arresting him when Jonathan suggests they call his banker.

He is quickly cleared and apologized to, but Jonathan learns

from this experience that his physical appearance and lack

of identifying credit cards and their like have caused him

212

unexpected trouble. He has been judged not according to 26his self, but only with respect to superficial details.

Money saves him, it speaks a language everyone understands.

Money has been and continues to be a liability for

Jonathan. Women are attracted to him because of it—or

rather to jit, not him—and con-artists as well. One such

shady character wants Jonathan to be a partner with him in

a swindle involving travellers checks, and another sees in

Jonathan an excellent means of acquiring the names of

wealthy individuals who might not mind parting with their

riches. Beyond this, money serves almost as a name tag

for Jonathan, people literally see it on his lapel and it

blinds them to the figure beneath. To these people,

Jonathan is money and they regard him as such, nothing

more. When they look at him, they envision yachts, rou­

lette tables, beautiful girls, expensive cars. Thus, by

way of example, the members of his encounter group dis­

criminate against him because of his privileged status.

They "see exactly what they want to see, and what they want

to see is a spoiled rich boy, dissatisfied with life."

The empire Whalen Sr. built has a vested interest

in Jonathan's well being. As the conglomerate's figurehead

and one of its major stockholders now that his father is

2 ¿In this case, he escapes unscathed. By contrast, an old, poorly attired Negro Jonathan sees on the subway is mercilessly accosted by two policemen who regard him as one of the penniless, shiftless dregs of society. The man has no money nor any connections (i.e. no identity) and is therefore without hope.

213dead, Jonathan's vulnerability is a principal concern of

company executives. His potential for decision-making is

unimportant: his legal value to the business, however, is

cardinal, and therefore he must be protected. Knowing

Jonathan's risky habits, Mr. Macauley, a Company (as it is

reverently referred to) official, has him tailed by a team

of detectives to ensure his security. Jonathan resents

this because the Company cares only for his image or

symbolic worth, not for his worth as a human being. He

has become, inadvertently, a product of the Company, a

treasured object: his self has been defined according to

Company profits, investments, etc.

Finally, Jonathan's father has had a detrimental

influence on his development as a fully-realized individual.

From the beginning, young Whalen was acknowledged as his

father's son and treated correspondingly. This oversight

of his own unique being might have been accepted gracefully

were it not for Mr. Whalen's phlegmatic attitude toward his

only offspring. The two rarely spent time together so

their bond, which should have been a close, carefully cul­

tivated one, never materialized as a normal father-son

relationship. Predictably, Jonathan grew to hate his father

and felt guilty about it.

The psychological impact of this loveless association

follows classic patterns. Examples are plentiful in the

novel. As a child, Jonathan revels in biographies of great

214

leaders because the heroes’ parents are infrequently men­

tioned.

These men seemed to have been born without fathers; no wonder they had always been strong and powerful, able to mete out punishment whenever they pleased. They were born fathers.

Clearly, Jonathan views his father as an authoritarian

figure too mighty and high-minded to deal with petty per- 27sonal matters like a little boy's needs. No doubt

Jonathan's later life style was chosen in part to imitate

his father's power'and partly as a defense against his

father's indifference. Leading the drifter's life was a

means of flaunting independence while debunking the goals

and aspirations a successful businessman's son was supposed

to cherish. By countering the image of an up-standing,

responsible adult, Jonathan attacks the very foundation of

his father's values.

Feelings of guilt are sometimes the result. In one

instance, Jonathan deliberately terminates an affair with

Maria, "creating an artificial system of guilt from which

there was no escape." He recognizes afterward

that I was concerned less with leaving Maria than with losing contact with her father. I was setting myself up to be judged and condemned by a man whom I respected and to whom I felt curi­ously close.

27Later Jonathan comments that Whalen Sr. felt his duty was to provide for the thousand laborers who depended upon the Company; this was a finer ideal than heeding the wants of a single child.

215The illustration is self-explanatory» Jonathan craves a

real father, one solicitous enough to worry over his son's

actions—and he wants those actions judged. Still, Whhlen's

foremost motivation seems to be revenge upon his father's

apathy. He does whatever he can to insult his father,

eventually murdering Mr. Howmet, his father's business

associate and a kind of father-surrogate.

In short, Jonathan has struggled for self-esteem

against near insurmountable odds. His entire upbringing

amidst an environment ill-conducive to healthy psychological

maturation has estranged him from himself and others. He

has steadily acquired a complex set of contradictory

impulses which pull him in opposite directions simultaneously.

When he becomes aware of his intricate situation, his

unsettled state of mind, he begins taking measures to solve

the puzzle of his existence. First he wonders whether or

not to destroy his real self—which he believes is intensely

private and malicious—or to contain it, or set it loose,

then decides to face his contradictions squarely in order

to gain perspective. Love and hate, power and vulnerability,

past and future all conspire to retard Jonathan's quest for

a whole self.

The spectre of conformity looms above Jonathan, its

antithesis, freedom, is what he seeks, but at every turn

some aspect of his past emerges to curb freedom. Family,

status, and the all-pervasive Company have repeatedly

216

influenced his behavior in such ways as to countermand his

affirmative instincts. Because of them his earnest desire

to "connect" has been stultified—every movement toward

communion has met with a stronger impulse to fend off close

ties. All his attempts to expose the estimable self within

liim have ended in a retreat to his former inscrutable nature.

And though he tries to act beneficently, he inevitably

reverts to some callous gesturej at one point, Jonathan

animatedly argues that Skid Row bums should receive finan­

cial aid, especially since the Company once donated two

hundred thousand dollars to the Evidence of Human Soul

Society, yet he is perpetually ruthless toward his mis­

tresses and friends. Furthermore, he detests his parents’

indulgences while he is indulgent to an extreme, and he

abhors power even as he uses it—two contradictions which

betoken his divided self.

Jonathan attaches himself to Karen in a desperate

move to find harmony in his chaotic existence. She appears

initially to be a wise choice of confidante. He gives his

notes to her (apparently he has kept a journal or else

wrote his thoughts and memories shortly before coming back

to the U.S.--at any rate, his observations may constitute

some of the novel’s episodes) because he wishes "to show

her something tangible from ray past to make her understand

it"—an obvious mark of his intent to share portions of

himself previously masked and thereby to offer his self

217completely. With her he feels no compulsion to hide the

ugly or bizarre, but with others he had feared "that some

incident from /his7 past /would/ destroy other people's

affection" for him. Something about Karen lures Jonathan

to full expression*

My impulse is not to speak or write, but to remain elusive, to present Karen with cartoons of my fears and sexual desires rather than my real ones. But her own elusiveness makes this impossible* she intimidates me into talking frankly.

This "elusiveness" is similar to Jonathan's; like

him, Karen yearns to be conquered on one hand while on the

other she insists upon a dominant role in their relationship.

Her fluctuation and Jonathan's prevent the two from loving

one another. In the beginning the prospects for love looked

promising; he experiences a freedom with Karen that he had

felt only once before and is therefore excited about the

possibility of intimacy with her.

I begin to feel that I could be loved for what­ever I am, not for my actions or my appearance.Everything about me would be acceptable; every­thing would be a reflection of my central self.I'm sure there are aspects of my personality buried within me that will surface as soon as I know I am completely loved.

Their affair is doomed, however. Karen is too competitive;

she wants Jonathan to love her in order to give herself

power over him, yet she relentlessly beats down her own

inclination to love him in return. Love is what Jonathan

needs and he wants proof of Karen's devotion, but she

resists commitment. He tries to convince her that neither

218

fate nor time nor money nor the past controls them, that

they are free to be and do as they wish. It isn’t true, of

course. Karen has her own tormented past and a design for

the future that doesn't include Jonathan, Jonathan cannot

shake his history either. Star-crossed lovers they are not.

Resemblances between the two are remarkable, the

nature of their similarities explains why they cannot

achieve union. Jonathan notes» "I could never love some­

one who despised herself, nor could I respect anyone who

didn't share my perception of myself." Karen fits both

categories, She refuses to accept Jonathan on his own

terms, yet she cannot dismiss him outright because for a

while he challenges her self-concept.

Karen always chooses men with the power to destroy her, unless she feels threatened, she becomes so bored that she leaves. She vacil­lates between seeing herself as the predator and as the prey.

Like Jonathan, she hopes in part to be subdued by her part­

ner, in part to defeat him. She alternatingly flirts with

and repulses him, when she is responsive, Jonathan takes

the initiative only to trigger an opposite reaction—she

turns cold and her resistance "sets off explosions" in

Jonathan such that he feels "totally vulnerable." They

never meet on a happy middle ground.

Karen claims that Jonathan's "biggest hang-ups" are

his "lack of spontaneity," "steadiness," and "unyielding

self-control," "as though she weren't the most self-

219

controlled woman I had ever met." Indeed, he recognizes

that Karen "had no spontaneity, no imagination. She seemed

imperturbable, as if she existed in a vacuum," and further­

more, "she had infected me. I had already begun to exist

with the same deadness, the same unwillingness to react."

Clearly, Jonathan's confidence in Karen had been misplaced:

instead of allowing his whole being to shine through, she

served only to close him up more tightly.

For Jonathan, Karen represented a path to freedom

never made manifest, but he knew beforehand the perils of

the journey. Earlier he admitted he felt free "only when

completely independent." This meant independence from

others, an almost automatic distancing especially of those

who assumed familiarity with him because of his social

renown: "when people claim to know who I am, I can no longer

act freely." Members of his encounter group did this—judg­

ing him solely by his appearance—and Anthony, formerly his

father's valet, does much the same. Anthony tells Jonathan

that he envies the latter's freedom—"meaning money"—and

Jonathan quickly explains,

. • . the freedom I have always desired has nothing to do with being able to travel or with surrendering responsibility: it means not being afraid, not disguising myself and not performing, not structuring my feelings to gain another’s approval.

The road to true freedom is thus blocked by men and

women who can't see past Jonathan's exterior and, more

specifically, by the heritage that has given him that

220exterior. His roots are planted in monied soil, money

breeds power and power, in Jonathan’s case at least, neces­

sitates a loss of freedom. The industrial state which gave

birth to Jonathan has a strangle hold on him, he can’t flee

or deny it, and as a consequence his future is severely

limited. This conflict between a disordered past and pros­

pects for the future is actually the central dilemma in

Jonathan's life. All that the past encompasses—insensible

parents, failed romances, shiftless wandering, aborted

flings with drugs and sex, obligations to the Company—

block the way to an uncomplicated, self-fulfilling life.

Kosinski explains the problem by saying that

Jonathan fails to see himself as an "event"—which trans­

lates roughly to "individual." He has no individuality

because his being has been defined by things outside him­

self and he cannot shake them. The environment surrounding

him—his roots—is meaningless to him, without a meaningful

source from which to branch out, he is condemned to fail at

every gesture toward self definition, and

. . . because of the absence of knowing exactly who he is, because of the inability to know who the others are, because of being incapable of creating a lasting and meaningful relationship of any kind, either with his own past, or with his future. . .28

he resorts to game playing. Such games are postponements

or blinds to the development of a sound sense of self.

28Cahill, (Interview), p. 60.

221Ultimately Jonathan abandons his potential eventfulness

altogether and accepts the image imposed upon him.

James Hutchinson locates the instant of capitulation

in the scene where Jonathan is arrested at the deserted

family mansion in Pittsburgh. Jonathan had picked up a

Negress in a bar and took her to the house. There he sifts

through old letters, some of them written to him by his

father, others to the senior Whalen from various notables

(including the President of the United States); he wanders

about the rooms, taking in the now unused furniture and the

wall hangings, all of them bringing back memories of his

childhood; a yearbook and a photograph album recall the

days before his disillusionment. Obviously, this nostalgic

trip was meant as an effort, perhaps a final one, to reclaim

his origins.. It is interrupted by the police who arrest him

and the girl for trespassing. They are about to take them

away when Jonathan threatens to phone the mayor, & family

friend. "At this crucial moment," says Hutchinson, Jon­

athan "gives up his quest of the self. He gives in to the 'trust* of his father."2? This means, in essence, that

Jonathan has used his father's influence (which is his

inheritance) to escape a difficult situation. Rather than

rely upon his self, he chooses the easier method—he

exercises the power granted him by his name. In other

29james Hutchinson, "Authentic Existence and the Puritan Ethic," University of Denver Quarterly, 19 (April 1973), P.TW;

222words, though Jonathan wished to deny his birthright, he

turned to it naturally when put to the test.

When one succumbs to external forces, admits to being

a mere number in an impersonal world, he becomes a victim of

that world, but he also becomes an aggressor and is there­

fore dangerous. Vengeance upon those familial and societal

instruments which have hindered self-discovery, upon the

Establishment that has made such discovery insuperable, is30the only possible act "in the service of authentic being.

Thus, Jonathan seeks revenge against his father, the Company,

and all else that has prevented him from being his own event.

He selects the Howraets, old family friends closely linked

with the Company, as his target. He escorts them to a

remote coastal region off the Indian Ocean, then to a sandbar

well off shore where they will presumably picnic. After see­

ing to their comfort, he dons skin diving equipment, sets

their boat adrift, and leaves them to the mercy of an incom­

ing tide. In murdering them he vicariously kills his father,

his roots, and everything the Howmet's symbolize. Shortly

thereafter, Jonathan takes illi the novel concludes with

him recuperating (or dying?) in a Geneva clinic. It is as

3°Hutchinson, "Authentic Existence and the Puritan Ethic," p. 104-.

223

though he has finally relinquished himself to his destiny. 31

The significance of The Devil Tree is tied to the

symbolic meaning of the tree itself, but just what the

baobab tree connotes is ambiguous—it appears to have

several plausible meanings. Its only reference in the novel

is a brief one. While Jonathan and Mr. Howmet eat breakfast

before their fateful trip to the sandbar, Jonathan points to

a baobab in the garden.

The native calls the baobab "the devil tree" because he claims that the devil, getting tangled in its branches, punished the tree by reversing it. To the native, the roots are branches now, and the branches are roots. To ensure that there would be no more baobabs, the devil destroyed all the young ones. That's why, the native says, there are only full-grown baobab trees left.

Nothing more is said of the baobab, but coming as it does

just prior to Jonathan's murderous action suggests that

Jonathan finds it a token a propos of his own private hell.

Jonathan, too, is entangled in roots and branches.

Like a painted bird, he expects (or should have expected)

sustenance from his own kind, his privileged circumstances

^Hutchinson, again, interprets Jonathan's sickness as "mythological"»

"A culture's myths impose archetypal limitations upon the authenticity of self. Stultified by the collec­tive consciousness, man longs for self-identification, a measure of dignity, a definition for 'me.' Such a longing becomes the 'prelude to recovery.' Why then, one ponders, does the hope of change 'tire' man? The weight of myth perhaps has become too overpowering as it settles on his chest« he is exhausted by his efforts to discover authenticity amidst the unauthentic conditions of culture.

224

offer him the chance to spread his wings. But these roots

actually work to cut him off from growth; they are twisted

and become noxious. Jonathan’s world turns topsy-turvy

until all his anticipations are thwarted. He finds himself

adrift and alone in a chaotic place, incompatible with his culture and with authentic existence.32 Success, which was

his by reason of birth, proves hollow; power, he discerns,

contains the seeds of its own corruption; the values with

which he was raised are shown to be distorted; and the

American Dream gets muddled and dark as a nightmare.

By implication, many young people have faced and

will face the same shock. They, too, will become aware of

a sterility they hadn’t foreseen and a standard they cannot

live up to nor emulate. Their fathers, who constructed an

industrial society they felt was the epitome of human

achievement, expect their children to push forward toward

greater heights; the new generations, however, feel they

are incapable of advancing a society that has already been

created and which has begun to come apart at the seams.

And this is another predicament of the societal devil tree. How does a child fulfill the trust of the parents if the periods are separated by pro­found changes in society in which the very notion of the trust is changed? I mean trust morally speaking, even. And in a protestant society par­ticularly, how does a child match the vested energy of the parents who went very often into the empty countryside and populated the countryside with chimneys and skyscrapers and businesses, when the

32Hutchinson, p. 113.

225child is already born into this jungle? The very idea that the child is supposed to do better than the parent can be metaphysically and sociologically a tragic idea. It implies somehow a cumulative power which grows with generations, while one could argue that it is the very opposite. Such power diminishes, it gets diluted in a large collective process in which the individual matters less and less and less.33

The youth of America have not been given the opportunity to

contribute to society's making: rather, they have been held

at a distance from the reality of the social network.

The young person is growing into society, yet he is kept really outside of the society into which he is growing. ... He is kept within a peculiar dimension in which his roots are not really brought into practice. The schools are not emphasizing tradition, history, heritage or family origins. As if they are not important and may be safely dis­carded. At the same time schools are not moving into another dimension of values. So there's a strange and a very curious way in which young people are emotionally retarded. They may be intellectually trained, but they are ill equipped emotionally to confront the turbulence of modern society. They are removed from the source of emotional turmoil which is functioning within the industrial society. . . .To me, this is one of the reasons why so many young people turned to drugs, to reinforce themselves, to create some sort of stimulus from within in order to make up for their inability to function from without. They felt that they were not equipped emotionally, and therefore they needed an injection of strength: and some of them took to drugs to pro­vide this misleading reinforcing element.34

Jonathan is one of these floundering youths. He can­

not "engage . . . complex issues" nor "confront his own

self." He is "a wealthy American who rejects the history

imposed on him—that is, the life of responsible action in

^•^Cahill, (Interview), p. 58.

^Ibid.. p. 63.

226

the whole corporate web of social reality." He "cannot

embrace heavy industry as the spiritual origin of /his7 development,"33 and therefore finds it infeasible to locate

some basis for his existence, some aim for his life. Like

other young people, Jonathan has not acquired the knowledge

nor the tools with which to understand a world so fantas­

tically convoluted that it defies comprehension, a world so

packed with social, economic, and political stresses that

one is dispossessed of purpose, of direction.

Jonathan Whalen functions in a highly schizoid environment, an increasing pressure we all feel.Life loses meaning. It neither terrifies us nor pleases us. We are in a strange limbo of growing indifference not because of ideological reasons— because simply it would take too much energy to understand the chaos of our times.3o

The Company—to one reviewer, at least, the villain

of the piece—is an apt metaphor for the jumbled complexi­

ties of modern life. It is too vast for any one man to

comprehend. So large and complicated is it, in fact, that

it has lost sight of its own center; it has gotten out of

hand, broken contacts with its origins, disenfranchised its

supporters. The devil is in its works, so to speak»

frustration, alienation, and suppression are its products.

From here it is a short step to reach the Marxist

conclusion that capitalism is under indictment in The Devil

33Cahill, p. 63.36Ibld., p. 62.

227

Tree. Thomas Edwards, in support of this thesis, proposes

that the novel is "about the materials of contemporary

'alienation,* the stuff our culture offers to replace an authentic sense of self."^7 Jonathan, he says, exploits

these materials but they "give him no pleasure. As a

capitalist, he recognizes the world as his product and finds

it dreadful."

Presumably Kosinski is thinking about how the "legitimate" political-economic order, founded on aggression, declines into the petty violence of postcapitalist reality, where the heirs, bored by the indulgences of material freedom, re-enact the acquisitive experience in more visibly and liter­ally destructive ways, all in the name of "self- realization. "3°

The Devil Tree does depict many evils in the American

culture, but though capitalist society may be suspect in

Kosinski’s view, his novel is not a diatribe in the Marxist

manner. However, Kosinski plainly indicates that something

in the American experience has backfired in the twentieth

century. That something he identifies as the Protestant

Ethic.

Throughout The Devil Tree Kosinski alludes to those

qualities that are reputedly the special property of Ameri-

Ciins. Since its inception, the story goes, America has bred

a tough strain of men who could overcome adversity with

inventiveness and determination. Always skillful and clever,

37Thomas Edwards, Rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Review of Books. 22 March 1973, P« 29«

38lbid.

228

they harnessed energy and brought nature to its knees

through honest labor and God’s good graces. No American

could resist the challenge of the New World nor the tempta­

tion to strive on toward more illustrious conquests. Ambi­

tion, fortitude, a strong shoulder, a glorious destiny—

these have been the traits governing the American character.

It is a marvelous myth that has remained intact to the

present day. It is essentially an outgrowth of the Puritan

spirit, a spirit so infused in this country that it has

become "the American way" and will not likely be replaced.

As might be expected, Kosinski has a jaundiced view

of this heritage: he’s suspicious of its long-range effects,

recognizes its fallacies, and, with beautiful irony, points

up its most ludicrous results. Fair cities with gold-paved

streets are seen here as masses of concrete and steel,

populated by impersonal if not brutal citizens, all of them

fixated by profit margins. The novel is studded with

industrious characters, not the least of whom is Mr.

Macauley, a man intensely proud of his office with all its

sophisticated electronic equipment—so sophisticated, in

fact, it seems inhuman, frightening. Mr. Whalen himself

epitomizes the rags-to-riches urchin who, with the most

admirable intentions and the sweat of his brow (and quite

a bit of cash) makes good in true Horatio Alger fashion.

Even Mrs. Whalen is shown to be the product of an hier­

archical society oriented to the perpetuation of big business.

229In a brilliant, all-too-brief vignette, Kosinski satirizes

the typical sentiments of upper class snobs: during his

visit to the Pittsburgh mansion, Jonathan unearths his

mother’s yearbook from the Samuel Tewk Upper School for Girls.39 Behind the yearbook he finds a prize-winning essay

Mrs. Whalen wrote prior to graduation. A portion of it

reads:

Searching for a stage on which to enact the drama of free enterprise, American industry has evolved an architecture unique in the history of mankind: these magnificent towers of glass are the very soul of Homo Amerioanus. Yet once he has erected such noble structures, he still per­severes, never satisfied, never stopping to enjoy the fruits of his labors. These buildings are America’s greatest contribution to art, a monu­ment to its restless energy.

"Never satisfied, never stopping to enjoy the fruits of his

labor" perhaps best describes the folly or the sickness of

Americans. The struggle for survival or enhancement of

one’s position is a valid, commendable effort, but never to

rest from labors, never to relish one’s accomplishments, is

3^The real Samuel Tewk was an early nineteenth cen­tury reformer who altered the existing treatment of the mentally ill. Disturbed persons were beaten and handled callously because the evil spirits in them had to be expelled.

"But what we need to do, Tewk believed, is to make the afflicted people function socially in an acceptable way so that they will not upset those who are not mentally ill. And therefore he was hailed as a very humane philosopher, since he did away with the cruelty. Now the mentally afflicted were to be trained how to behave at tea parties» and they were taken to church, and then dressed the way everyone else was dressed, so no one would recognize them as being mentally ill. Of course the pain they suffered, and the anguish of the mentally ill remained their private

230foolish, wasteful, ridiculous, it cannot help but drive a

man to an early grave. And for what? What does he gain

from his enterprises?

Jonathan realizes that the Homo Americanus his mother

venerates is an imprisoned animal trapped by his own tire­

less energy. When speaking to a Company representative, he

is informed that of the candidates "interviewed for an

important executive spot". . .

More than forty percent complained of heart palpitation, tension, breathing difficulties or headaches. We established that close to ninety percent of these otherwise outstanding business­men had psychic complaints which included anxiety, insomnia, depression, forgetfulness, sweating and ulcers.

Jonathan suggests the Company hire Peruvian Indians» "They

never develop ulcers."

"Peruvian Indians?""Yes. But, apparently they lack ambition,

don’t compete, and don’t plan ahead.""Jonathan, it’s too bad but we have people

like that right here in this country. All on welfare."

property, so to speak. We, presumably the healthy ones, were not supposed to be disturbed by the presence of those whose universe was so different from ours."

(Cahill, pp. 62-63.)Tewk’s method is significant in that it parallels society's determination to force conformity upon the masses even if the coercive measures taken to accomplish this feat are cruel and misguided. Moreover, it suggests that non­conformists—the Jonathan Whalens of the world—must be brought into line with agreed-upon national goals, codes.of behavior, and the like. Finally, Mrs. Whalen in an example of the kind of person so saturated with heady ideals that she mechanically mouths the platitudes passed on to her by her parents, her teachers, and history books. Eventually, Jonathan, too, falls victim to this "madness." If a single

231Yet Jonathan, despite his awareness and his rejection

of Homo Americanus values, is condemned to be one of their

number. Having fought the Establishment and lost, he finally

submits to it—at least, with half a heart. In an agoniz­

ing formal ceremony, Jonathan is inducted into the Brother­

hood of an unnamed professional Order.

Whalen was acutely aware that he had let himself get caught in an irreversible process. Only now did he understand what Susan once said to Karen,"Of all mammals, only a human being can say ’no,*A cow cannot imagine itself apart from the herd.That’s why one cow is like any other. To say ’yes* is to follow the mass, to do what is commonly expected. To say ’no’ is to deny the crowd, to be set apart, to reaffirm yourself."

The Secretary reached the lecturn, caught his breath, and then in a trembling voice intoned,

"Every association of men with common objectives should set itself certain goals which its members hope to attain through the strength of their mutual sympathy and fellowship. We have declared the following to be the aims of this Order: to foster the high ideals of manly character and achievement, to improve our character through intellectual pur­suits, and to unite ourselves in lasting friendship and loyalty.

"But in the enthusiasm of our striving we must not forget that the individual comes first along with his virtues, honorable ambition, fair speech, pure thoughts, and straightforward action."

The stated goals are in direct contrast to the actual per­

formances of the Brotherhood’s members and they surely do

reason for this submission need be chosen, it might be, as Stanley Kauffmann recommends, that Jonathan, in spite of his ambivalence toward power, is unwilling to forsake it.

"For Whalen, psychic isolation is complicated by, caused by, the fact that he is not merely rich, he is a world master who has not earned his mastery, who has only contempt for the systems that produced his power, who is not abso­lutely certain that he likes his power, but is absolutely certain that he would not give it up." (p. 437

232

not conform to Jonathan's personal values, yet he rises and

makes

i; covenant with the Brothers of this Order present and absent to obey the constitution, traditions and bylaws of this Order and to forward in every way within my power the objectives and aims for which it exists. So help me God.

He then proceeds to murder Mr. and Mrs. Howmet.

The baobab can be seen as Kosinski*s image for a contradictory modern condition» the Protestant ethic, once the source of both material impulse and spiritual assurance, has been turned upside down. The branches (the fortunes that have been acquired) are now buried treasure, no longer flaunted, the roots, the moral-divine justification for having acquired the treasure, are now waving in the air, unnourished. Whalen, the heir of the high Protes­tant ages, has inherited wealth but no conviction of its sanctity, the money without the assurance of moral worth that once went with it.40

Within the Protestant ethos, because of the constant stress on action and on societal aspects, the element of individual expression is always questionable. To what degree is an individual experience a valid experience? Hence our constant stress on autobiography, our attempt to dismiss the imagination and to ground the experience as narrated, as having actually taken place in a spe­cific environment, to ground it in an acceptable mode of events. Therefore, Whalen's conflict begins when he begins to see himself as an event. His father would never say that, his father would say "I consider an event what affects thousands of people. When it affects me it is of no importance, therefore, my own son is not an event to me. The events are the children of my workers, of people who are not even my workers." This is the tragedy of Jonathan, that he's born into the society which in some way is promiscuous enough within its Protestant tolerance to allow him to consider him­self an event, without any mercy given to the pur­suit of one's self as a meaningful event.211 * 4

4¿Kauffmann, (World), p. 43,

4lCahill, (Interview), p. 60.

233

Jonathan’s pursuit of his own self is eventually abandoned

because he has not been allowed to define himself in his

own fashion. Neither his actions nor his words have been

taken a.s designations of his private, distinct being»

instead, they have been interpreted within his total social

context, as expressions of the collective which gave him

birth. His "imagination has never been allowed to emerge 42as a meaningful way of communicating." Thus, "the only

avenue left to the definition of the self, and the only43avenue left to self expression has been really blocked." J

Not only Jonathan but the entire society—the tree,

as it were—will suffer from this closed-mindedness, this

cramped freedom.

It is the society on which a terrible punishment is being inflicted, because the society needs—we all do—we need Whalens. ... If the society is going to destroy the young ones, and only the full- grown Baobabs will be left, then we are in trouble, because then we, very much like Whalen, are at the mercy of forces which are not of "today." Then we would be strangled by the roots of the past which have nothing to do with our branching out into the contemporary society.44

We began this investigation of The Devil Tree with

an implicit query« does this novel signal a loss of Kosin­

ski's powers as an author? The answer, I trust, is clear.

^Cahill, (Interview), p. 61.

^Ibid.

^Ibid., p. 64.

i : 234No, Kosinski has not lost contact with the relevant themes

which typified his earlier works. If he strayed somewhat

from the inventive, careful, tersely worded language of his

original fictional creations, he has not, at least, abdi­

cated his position as one of this country’s foremost inter­

preters of the human condition. The novel is abundant with

the kinds of people and the kinds of problems well known to

us all, but seen here in a new light, perhaps even for the

first time. By that I mean that although we know these

creatures and dilemmas exist, we are not truly aware of them

until they are presented in such a way as to force our real

perception of them. Unlike the confession magazine approach

to life’s mysteries, which clouds them over or solves them

simplistically, Kosinski delves to the roots of the predica­

ment and invites us to join him in the search for meaningful

answers—or, at the minimum, for an understanding of the

actual causes and effects of contemporary quandaries.

Therefore The Devil Tree takes its place alongside

The Painted Bird. Steps, and Being There as a response to

that popular brand of fiction which cheats us of insight to

ourselves, to others, and to our environment. It offers

not the paltry entertainments of an aimless hour, nor the

pleasantries that separate us from real experience, but

plunges us headlong into our deepest selves, there to dis­

cover our own relationship to ourselves and to the world

about us. Less gripping than The Painted Bird, not as

235technically sound as Steps nor as imaginative, perhaps, as

Being There, it is nonetheless an intelligent work replete

with examples of the genius that typifies all of Kosinski's

writings. Certain episodes lack the dramatic power and con­

cision of, say, the best scenes in The Painted Bird, and

unlike the Kosinski of Steps, the author here exposes the

underpinnings of his protagonist’s psyche, thereby making

him far more accessible than the narrator, whom he resembles

in numerous respects. Literary style in The Devil Tree is

also less impressive than in the earlier volumes, but it is

not nearly as monumental a disappointment as some reviewers

would have us believe. Despite its flaws, with his fourth

novel Kosinski has again done a service to serious readers,

and again proven that he has much to say of consequence.

In these terms, The Devil Tree is assuredly a success.

CHAPTER VI, CONCLUSION

"A man who is more aware of himself and of his environ­ment is by the very nature of the awareness more human. The more human he is, the better for all of us . , . . The more I understand myself . . • the more at peace I am with myself .... And I think this is the ultimate belief, that the act of awareness, the act of experienc ing oneself in a process in which one can state certain things about oneself and one’s connection with reality is a profoundly human process.”

Jerzy Kosinski

257

One would be ill-advised to estimate Jerzy Kosinski’s

worth as a contemporary novelist without first considering

major aspects of his biography. No attempt will be made

here to repeat in full the significant biographical informa­

tion addressed above, but it must be remembered that the

author’s childhood experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland, his

eventual involvement in the Soviet bloc, and later his

encounters on American soil have all had a marked influence

upon his fictional performances. It is expected, of course,

that a writer’s personal history will surface in his liter­

ary pursuits, but in Kosinski’s case the ties between biog­

raphy and fiction are uncommonly close. Events from his

youth not only appear, imaginatively transformed, in the

pages of at least two of his novels, but they also inform

his adult philosophical outlook, several years under com­

munist rule led to an analysis of the Soviet state in two

non-fiction works, both of which accented the author’s

growing concern for man’s place in an environment he found

rapidly deteriorating to a condition antithetical to normal,

healthy human development—these volumes established Kosin­

ski’s vision, his later fictional style, and his principal

themes, exposure to American culture fostered the double

view insinuated into his last two novels particularly—the

view of a foreigner trained in Marxism and European thought

who becomes an American by choice, acquaints himself with

238

its life style, and thus attains a relatively rare perspec­

tive on habits of mind and practice dominating this con­

tinent.

It is important to recall Kosinski’s background

when estimating the worth of his achievement as an artist

not simply because it explains the origin of his themes

and attitudes, but because he has had the strength to sur­

vive tremendous difficulties, the courage to face the

ugliest realities our world has had to offer, and the moral

fortitude necessary to see some hope for the future amidst

a portentous present. Perhaps in a hierarchy of critical

values these facts of Kosinski’s spirit are his greatest

claim to literary eminence. Pew authors have suffered as

deeply as has Kosinski and of them far fewer have mustered

the power to see beyond life’s sordidness to the prospect

’of an improved human condition. This fundamental optimism,

given the circumstances of his history, is indeed unusual

and is a tribute both to the man and to his artistry.

At first glance Kosinski's novels seem anything but

optimistic. They exhibit man at his cruelest and societies

at their lowest ebb; they are saturated with violent acts

of every imaginable sort and do not blink from the grossest

psychological torments. Like Kafka, Kosinski risks .the

abyss of absurdity, and like Conrad, he intrudes upon the

heart of darkness, yet throughout each novel there is an

implicit revulsion against the immoralities and obscenities,

239

the coarse actions related. In the themes and motifs which

appear consistently from novel to novel, and in the language

employed, likewise essentially of the same cut in all four

works, Kosinski searches for a voice with which to awaken

his readers, and always his message emerges clearly from

the depths, the need for "visibility" and understanding.

The Painted Bird serves as an excellent starting

point for a review of Kosinski’s thematic predilections

since, as his initial fictive creation, it introduces or at

least hints at every major concern with which he deals in

subsequent efforts. Of prime importance is the painted bird

image itself. That image effectively stresses the dilemma

confronting all of the author’s protagonists, whether to

assert one’s independence at the risk of isolation, or to

conform to flock specifications in order to gain acceptance

and security and love. There is little opportunity for

choice on the boy’s part because of his coloring: in the

earliest days of his adventures he feverishly desires com­

munion with his fellow villagers, but his physical features

mark him an outcast and as such he remains. Literally forced

upon his own reserves for survival, he naturally develops a

keen sense of self as well as a severe umbrage toward his

persecutors. He gradually reacts with increased ferocity

to successive violations of his person, yet even while

describing the boy’s and the peasants’ most savage acts,

Kosinski decries the necessity for them: such barbarous,

240

inhuman behavior should not be the response between man and

man, no matter what their differences.

How, exactly, can we surmise that Kosinski’s depic­

tion here of cruelty and humiliation is ultimately meant to

portray something inherently good in human nature? I defer

on this topic to Chayym Zeldis’ eloquent defense of the author’s altruistic intentions.1 Mr. Zeldis begins by

noting Kosinski’s

profound regard for the truth of life as it happens and as it is experienced. With awesome courage, the author describes events not only as they were but as the child-hero felt them to be.Nothing of the truth is spared, neither truth of the outer world nor truth of the mind.

Indeed, the novelist does not blench from reporting the

crudest details of human degradation, his novel is laden

with scenes of torture, defilement, sexual violation and

perversion, all of which signify a world polluted by wicked­

ness, unsuitable for life, and one that, seemingly, neces­

sitates mankind’s perpetual "sliding back into the slime of

brutish nature."

Yet it is a novel of the triumph of the human spirit over the bestial, the blind, the absurd.The thunder of its evil is counterbalanced at every point by the magnificent human music of the author’s soul.

How so? Because Kosinski’s small boy is able

to bear his suffering. It is not that he accepts it, that is, that he accepts the fact

1In the following paragraphs Mr. Zeldis* remarks.are paraphrased, expanded, or quoted directly. Chayym Zeldis, Rev. of The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski, Jewish Frontier. 6 March 19^7, pp.22-26.

241

that the suffering must be—for he is always trying to find an explanation for it, a way out of it, an end to it—but that he accepts the fact that it is. His strength goes, therefore, not into denying it but into carrying its ter­rible weight.

From start to finish the boy is beset by a multitude

of tragedies, but as each presents itself he attempts first

to put it into a rational scheme so as to justify its

existence; thus he adopts the tenets of superstition to

explain the peculiar attitude his peasant neighbors reserve

for him, honors the inherent supremacy of the Aryan race

and accepts his own foul blackness, believes the Evil Ones

have bought his soul and made him despicable. Failing

explanation, he seeks escape. Often this takes the form

of a mental metamorphosis in which he fancies himself a

grasshopper or squirrel or bull capable of flight. And,

too, the boy wishes he did not have to behold the atrocities

committed both upon others and himself; the very tone of his

description of Ludmila’s murder, the Kalmuk’s pillage, and

his own maltreatment by Garbos speak to a genuine anxiety,

an appeal for the return of normalcy.

He knows he does not want and does not deserve the pain and the suffering that are his lot; nor does he want others to incur them. His views— staggering in their nakedness and simplicity—of the ghastly scenes he witnesses are a profound testimony to his compassion and sorrow.

These ghastly scenes, as horrifying in their explicit­

ness as any in the entire corpus of literature, leave their

mark upon the boy, yet though they warp his assessment of

242

mankind, he struggles to understand their cause: "pos­

sessed of fantastic strength and awareness," he "questions—

as did Job. Why should it be? He questions—and in the

questioning is the revolt." Time and again the boy ponders

why he has been singled out for abuse, why he is seldom

comforted, why dark-haired people are scorned, and at one

point he believes he might be able to cure all the world's

ills as he knew them—by inventing a magic fuse that would

transform all dark-colored races to the purer fair-skinned,

blue-eyed ones. Some powerful inner force obviously works

to combat what would ordinarily crush a lesser being: a

vigorous will, perhaps, infuses this "supremely tried human

spirit which does not surrender, neither to death, nor to

insanity, nor to the evil that stalks it every inch of the

way."

The same must be said about Kosinski, for the boy's

story is, in essence, Kosinski’s own. Like his fictive

creation, he has seen and endured much, and to face his

ordeals squarely, to be honest with himself, to keep alive

his sanity, he has had to picture minutely the reality of

his experience. The scene he draws in The Painted Bird and

elsewhere is a landscape of horror, and we, as readers, are

compelled to view it along with him. Together we are

repulsed by what we see and strive to deny it, but if ever

we are to cope with the nether side of humankind, we must

first recognize what we are, admit to the bestial in us,

243

then do our best to understand and ultimately, we hope, to

correct our faults. This confrontation with the worst our

selves contain, that part of our selves we often insist is

nonexistent, is the most difficult but essential step

toward awareness—and awareness is one of Kosinski’s per­

sonal goals as well as the final object of his art.

Before pursuing the subject of awareness, I think it

best to continue a review of patterns and attitudes dis­

played in The Painted Bird and to correlate them with their

appearances in the remaining novels. Most prominent of

Kosinski’s concerns are the self—which holds a central

position in all his work—and the analysis of modern society

as a whole, from both of which issue the motifs of meta­

morphosis and speechlessness.

An embryonic self—the boy’s—is seen passing

through various stages of development from its initial purity

to its final corrosion. The boy begins as a loving child,

responsive to nature, eager to learn and to please, obedient,

and unsuspecting of the duplicity in others’ hearts. He

soon discovers, however, that his self is perpetually and

unreasonably besieged simply because he has alien features.

It does him no good to plead his innocence: he is indelibly

branded an outcast. Afforded no alternative, he studies,

then imitates, the behavior of his oppressors in order to

survive. To preserve the sanctity of his self, which he

knows is precious, he erects a barrier between it and whatever

244

or whoever assails his being. This barrier is a natural

defense against unwarranted assaults, but it operates as an

offensive weapon as well, from it he strikes back at the

•’predators" who beleaguer him and even those who do not,

thereby evolving into the same sort of hate-filled, blindly

prejudiced soul as that which typifies his enemies. Result*

a self closed off, distrustful, uncommunicative, fearful of

love or any commitment that would render itself vulnerable,

shorn of spiritual vestments, skeptical of traditional

values, steeled by the greed and malignancy he has been

partner to, the boy risks becoming what he mdst detests—an

insulated, unwanted wanderer among men.

Kosinski’s message is transparent. A society of

spineless people, governed by a sovereign force—in this

instance, the Nazi regime and peasant superstition—to a

degree such that humane elements of character are subverted

and replaced by mindless adherence to authority, will never

willingly grant freedom of expression to one of its members

when that individual wishes to assert his uniqueness. The

collective will do its utmost to press everyone into the

mold. In this environment an intelligent being cannot

expand his self or let it develop naturally, instead, that

self must become cunning, deceitful, and eventually danger­

ous—for the self which cannot give full vent to its

inclinations, the self constantly harassed by others and

buffeted by circumstance, will finally rebel. At the very

245

least, it will remain at odds with the society surrounding

it, perhaps feel compelled to combat it destructively; at

its worst, it may never reach its potential nor recognize

itself as a singular entity, an "event."

There is, however, an infusion of hope subtly inter­

jected through the novel’s course. At all times the author

begs for an understanding of the human predicament; in the

person of his youthful protagonist, he asks that we become

aware of the guilt and hatred harbored in us and passed

along to our progeny, beseeches us to find harmony before

it is too late. The boy illustrates a lesson we might all

heedi that it is possible to find meaning even under

adverse circumstances, and possible, too, to maintain one’s

sanity and dignity. This lesson—the need for balance and

reason and compassion—is embodied directly in every one

of the boy’s experiences, but also symbolically in. his

peculiar relationship to speech. For a while he attempts

communication with man and the powers that be; repulsed in

these efforts, he loses his voice as if signifying defeat.

Yet, reassured by Mitka and Gavrila and later his parents

that some people do care about his welfare, he is reunited

with the mainstream of life. When he regains his speech,

he surmounts the alienation that has plagued him for years

and leaves himself open to a brighter future. If this

interpretation is valid, then surely Kosinski has meant us

to share the boy’s agonies only to emerge confident of our

2b6

own potential to transcend the ignoble in us.

But his examination of the tormented self does not

end with the boy's example. Kosinski pushes forward into

new realms of being, beginning with the portrait of a man

haunted by his obsession with self. Steps' narrator seems

a projection of the boy in Painted Bird. As with his

predecessor, life has dealt him so harsh a blow that he is

impelled to divorce himself from its source. He cannot

love nor give of himself in any way that would lay himself

open to restitution. Instead, he strives for the upper

hand in every relationship, seeking to affirm his dominance

and thereby to protect his self-concept from violation.

In the process, he evolves into a heartless, cruel indi­

vidual: because of his insensitivity he is estranged from

everyone he meets and from the societies with which he

comes in contact. XAnother painted bird, of course, and the reasons

for his "differentness" are much the same as the boy's.

His physical features do not work against him, but he is

colored by the brutal realities he has seen—the political

and sexual perversion of people bent upon the accumulation

of power: by the propagandistic measures used in collective

societies to quash individualism: by others' refusal to

acknowledge his being. He finds these sub-human elements

universal: in Soviet Russia and its satellites, a dictator­

ial government imposes strictures to free expression of any

2b7

sort, while in America a hidden, unobtrusive control over

the thoughts and opinions of its populace is exerted just

as effectively as that in a military state. Totalitarian

structures such as these do little to enhance one’s notion

of his own essence, rather, they bind the self, limit its

horizons, pound it into a shape suitable for manipulation.

In retaliation the narrator becomes an agent of dis­

solution against society en masse and particular individuals

within it—and, ultimately, he himself disintegrates into a

pitiable creature. Blame can only be laid to societal

pressures—their unswerving attempts to eliminate anything

that smack3 of distinctness or deviation from regimented

norms. As he recalls his past (a potent force from which

he seeks deliverance), the origins of his final impotence

surface. In each recollected episode he wears a mask that

bespeaks his desire to try out his numerous selves, this

metamorphosis, like the boy’s, is sometimes geared to help

him escape perilous situations and at other times to cloak

his devious intentions. No matter what his motives, the

donning of disguises makes explicit the narrator’s ambiguous,

tenuous kinship with himself, with friends and mistresses,

and with the community as a whole.

Again Kosinski’s depiction of man and the modern

condition is a gloomy one unless one considers the narrator’s

circumstances in their entirety, the pervasive influence of

his personal history, the decay of community spirit, the

248

increasing separation of man from man, the totalitarian

mechanisms of mind control, the general corruption of tradi­

tional values. Small wonder that the narrator or any man

in this age cannot easily locate meaning in the chaos

around him; he cannot call upon religious doctrine for

guidance, does not trust existing governments, and is not

allowed to cultivate his self as he wishes; one's responses

are limited to rebellion, extinction, or surrender to death-

in-life. Quite obviously, Kosinski abhors the situation he

reflects in Steps. It is to his credit that he dares fac­

ing the horrors he knows are there, and even more so that,

through his central character, he makes us cognizant of

them, too. Kosinski's purpose, in Steps as in The Painted

Bird, is not to glory in evil but to censure it. While he

admires the fortitude of the boy and empathizes, perhaps,

with the narrator, he wishes that life eould be somehow

gentler, more conducive to varieties of ideas and life

styles so that there need never be persons like the boy

and the narrator. Far better, he says, to grant the co­

existence qf unique identities than to pave the way for an

avalanche of personalities akin to his protagonists.

Identity is at least something the boy and narrator

possess; Chance has none whatsoever. He is the strangest

of Kosinski's painted birds because he takes his color,

chameleon-like, from an assortment of television per­

formers. By adopting roles familiar to him through constant

249

exposure to network programing, he undergoes metamorphosis

of sorts, but in his case the stimulus to alter his being

is as much external as internal—though he literally changes

character to accommodate a given occasion, he is also made

to be anything others desire him to be. Either way, he has

no control of his self and is thus the antithesis of Kosin­

ski’s other protagonists, but in choosing a non-self as

"hero,” Kosinski can train his sights on those aspects of

culture which forge the individual psyche.

Being There, then, focuses upon the overpowering

persuasiveness the television medium wields in this country.

Little is said or done that does not stem from television’symisconceptions or slanted presentations of "truth.’’ More

poignant, however, is the fact that everyone Chance meets

is so addicted to watching images that his perceptions of

reality are clouded. Nothing is seen as it really is.

Therefore, Chance is mistakenly thought to be something he

isn’t and is propelled, in true movie star fashion, to

overnight stardom. His projected image, totally unlike his

actual self, is all that is demanded of him, those who

"view" him are comforted by their spontaneous familiarity

with the "real" Chauncey Gardiner—they need go no further

to discover his self. The self, unacknowledged and power­

less to an extreme, is thereby shown to be as frustrated

and misunderstood as the dynamic selves characterizing the

boy and narrator, and just as susceptible to intrusions

250

from without.

Kosinski pursues another, related subject in Being

There that was slightly less noticeable in his earlier fic­

tion. I refer here to the concept of dasein—"being there"

in reality, a part of one's environment and an integral

factor of it. One's freedom to be what he is is relative

to his sense of place or sense of belonging. When an unan­

ticipated event disturbs known reality, the self is thrown

off keel and finds itself in the midst of absurdity where

it must abandon its normal functions in order to endure.

Precisely this happens to Chance—he resorts to role-playing

to cope with new, befuddling contingencies: the boy fell

back upon his fantasies, Jonathan and the narrator adjusted

their personalities, shifting to alternate selves. The

point implied is that in the twentieth century, when the

unexpected is likely to happen—when authoritarian powers

urge us toward mindlessness and thus leave our selves

unprepared for novel experience—we cannot rely upon our

selves for preservation. Kosinski warns that unless we

shake free of artificial knowledge, unless we question the

reality presented to us, we may forfeit our very beings and

stand victimized by a societal energy which will not respect

nor tolerate individuality.

Such an energy has flourished unimpeded in America

for centuries—the so-called Protestant Ethic. Jonathan

Whalen is heir to its tenets? he is the culmination of its

251

objectives. His inheritance, however, is detrimental

because the ethos within which he functions proves sterile.

The money and status synonymous with the American Dream are

hollow entities that circumscribe his self; they encourage

a false image which he is incapable of vanquishing.

Jonathan essays to escape his roots and define himself

according to that essential nature—child-like in its trust­

fulness, compassion, and sincerity—he knows lies buried

beneath a tough outer skin. All his attempts to be honest

with himself and others fall short; he simply cannot avoid

slipping into unauthentic roles while dealing with people

who judge him by his appearance, and when he earnestly

endeavors to bare his soul to Karen, she dismisses him.

Failing these efforts, he succumbs to the fraudulent char­

acter foisted upon him—the wealthy, patriotic citizen, a

standard-bearer of his community, determined to oil the

business' machine.

The Devil Tree, then, probes still another form of

totalitarianism and its impact upon the individual. As it

"peels the gloss off the world" and its confused, half-

belligerent, half-penitent protagonist, this fourth novel

exposes the symptoms of putrefaction on all sidesi a

nation so absorbed in profits and mass welfare that it no

longer recognizes the single human unit and his wants; a

history of enterprise that has run away with itself, lost

its original justification and associated values; a community

252

that is a community no more, where an individual finds it

excessively onerous to communicate with anyone else and who

is not himself acknowledged as an unique being. To illus­

trate his vision, Kosinski calls upon the same fictional

devices employed earlier. Again there is an outsider, a

painted bird divorced from its covey but soliciting read­

mittance, one who masquerades in several guises while seek­

ing his true self, again there is an exploration of the

past, a quest for causes and answers and understanding,

and once more we are privy to repeated examples of violence,

detachment, and grotesquery, all of them forming a backdrop

against which the tragedy of self is enacted. And here, as

always, Kosinski detests the hideousness he is constrained

to dramatize, he retreats from violence, criticizes those

cultural and societal standards that obscure the self’s

identity, and asks sympathy for the oppressed.

Kosinski’s fiction is uniform in its persistent

championing of the self, this compendium, though incomplete,

verifies that fact. His small but substantial canon is

replete with specimens of very real, identifiable selves

caught in the contemporary flux. The dilemmas he examines

befit an age that appears to have forgotten its foundations,

its former regard for individual rights has lapsed in the

wake of a frenzied chase after some amorphous utopian ideal.

Jonathan, Chance, the boy and the narrator are victims of

253

this frenzy—and so are we all to a degree we may not

realize.

A voice is required to shock us out of our lethargy—

the voice is the boy’s though he loses it, the narrator’s

though he feigns its loss, Chance’s though he can only

mumble idiocies, and Jonathan's though no one hears. It is

Kosinski’s voice to which we listen as he speaks of the

horrors we try to repudiate. In even tones he burrows into

our subconscious, there to expose the fears and ambitions

which somehow restrict us from full comprehension of our

selves and our fate as individuals or as members of a com­

munity. His novels do not shirk from disclosing the sign­

posts of impending doom, we see with him the growing iso­

lation of the individual, one's inability to communicate

on any but the most superficial levels: we are witness to

the most heinous acts of which man is capable, acts that

are repeated with increasing regularity as the century

progresses: and we must watch while Kosinski unmasks one

autocratic institution after another, each of them desperate

for power to the detriment of the self.

The voice that braves such frightening vistas is one we would be wise to heed because the immediate future, *

given a continuance of current trends toward collectivity,

proffers a doleful promise—the annihilation of individual­

ism. Kosinski cannot bear its actuality: he has seen the

fruition of communist/socialist doctrine and sees in America

254a comparable movement toward passivity and identification

with the mass consciousness. The unique self is being

steadily supplanted by flesh and blood robots unknowing of

their identities, subservient instead to the Idea of the

State, and cognizant only of their worth as promoters of

group-imposed ideals. This is a sin in Kosinski’s eyes—

the self’s freedom is negated. In defiance he pits his

protagonists against malevolent, tyrannical forces. The

fact that none of them wins out (except in the sense that

they endure) does not herald defeat; on the contrary, it

re-emphasizes man’s innate will to assert his individuality.

Kosinski’s "heroes" may not have been successful as social

reformers, but they did succeed in making themselves—for a

time at least—visible; they averred their respective

natures despite (or because of) pressures to conform. Their

combined efforts in the direction of self-definition and

their inquiry into the principles underlying our motives

and aspirations is a reflection of Kosinski’s entreaty that

we all take steps toward self-awareness; as a consolidated

venture we might not only find peace and fulfillment within

present social structures, but we might also institute a

course that leads forward to a kind of renaissance of

mankind.

This is neither too large nor too cheerful a con­

clusion to draw from the author’s novels. Characteristics

255

of The Painted Bird referred to in this chapter---the search

after truth, the confrontation with self and environment,

the desire for joyousness and concord—apply to all of

Kosinski’s works and they point to a consistently hopeful

posture. As a body they address the preeminent affairs of

humanity with an eye toward understanding them and amending

their vulgar aspects,

The moral equipoise which Kosinski seeks is the ascendent step, a direction opposite from that which he fictionalizes, a new world in which the control, peace, and happiness of The Bhagavad Gita is restored to the life of man". 2

Aside from specific details of plot and tone, another

element contributes to the core optimism imbued in Kosinski’s

novels—the literary experience itself. On several occa­

sions Kosinski has expounded on the value of literature as

a humanizing tool,

. » . the act of connecting the imagination of the reader with the imagination implicit in the language is . . . an attempt at the self, in this case the self which is reading. Hence any act of reading ... is an act of activating the projecting ability of the self. . . . the very act of perception is already humanizing, since it activates the profoundly human ability to project oneself into another situation. If I were to define the goals of the literary experi­ence, this would be the ultimate goal—to make the man more aware of who he is, and of how eventful he is, since he is event to himself.

pDaniel Cahill, "Jerzy Kosinski, Retreat from Violence," Twentieth Century Literature, 18 (April, 1972), p. 130.

^Cahill, (Interview), pp. 65-66.

256The emphasis is on awareness—how fiction can "bring man

closer to what he is" by breaking down and expanding his

self-knowledge. Of course, the caliber of reading material

determines the level of awareness one might reach: Kosin­

ski’s novels, unlike pulp fiction, certainly offer abundant

opportunities for soul-searching. In their offer of valid

insights to what is most human in us, they support his

"contention that life is the pursuit of awareness, that

men have a desperate need to understand one another and the

universe they inhabit."We all should find out what is

the source of what oppresses us, or what is the source of

what gives us joy, and confront it directly" so as to

come to terras more fully with our essences and the nature

of the world in which we function.

... a man more aware of himself is less of an animal. A lion or a mouse are not aware of who they are. A man who is more aware of himself and of his environment is by the very nature of the awareness more human. The more human he is, the better for all of us. The more human I am, the better for me. The more I understand myself,I think, the more at peace I am with myself, with my ultimate plight, the unfortunate death which somehow no author can escape, nor for that matter a reader. And I think this is the ultimate belief, that the act of awareness, the act of experiencing oneself in a process in which one can state certain things about oneself and one’s connection with reality is a profoundly human process. I remarked

Il .Paris Review, p. 206.^John RIcAleer, Rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski,

Best Sellers. 1 Nov. 1968, p. 316.^Cahill, (Interview), p. 57.

257

somewhere in the past that the animals react even to music but they do not react to the printed word. The principle of literature is a sublimely human principle. It activates the brain, and of course it utilizes the brain, and only the brain. And because of this,

literature carries "an implicit moral statement."' It pro­

vides us a mirror to life and implores that we judge its

viability. Is it as good as it might be and are we effect­

ing our potential for goodness?

The Painted Bird. Steps, Being There, and The Devil

Tree ask these questions and beseech us to answer them.

They furnish readers a graphic context with which they can

associate and a set of standards against which they might

test their own conceptions; they postulate not an absurd

world where nothing has purpose, but one which has an

order and meaning worthy of our continued quest for them.

In the end we owe a debt of gratitude to Kosinski for

sharpening our senses and leading us along the path to

recognition of our total existence. And finally, I believe,

we must join William Kennedy in this query and its implied

conclusion« "Who Here Doesn’t Know How Good Kosinski Is?"

7Cahill, (Interview), p. 59

258

i

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

260

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

I, Works by Kosinski

The Art of the Self« essays a propos Steps. New York« Scientia-Factum, I968.

Being There. New York« Harcourt, 1971«

"Children of TV," in Destination Tomorrow. Jack Carpenter, ed., Dubuque« Wm. C. Brown, 1973, PP. 327-328.

The Devil Tree. New York« Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973»

The Future is Ours, Comrade. Garden City, N.Y.» Doubleday, i960, published under pseudonym Joseph Novak/

"The Lone Wolf," American Scholar. (Autumn, 1972), pp. 513- 514, 516-519.

No Third Path. Garden City, N.Y.« Doubleday, 1962. pub­lished under pseudonym Joseph Novak/

Notes of the Author. New York« Scientia-Factum, 1965.

"Packaged Passion," American Scholar. (Spring, 1973), PP» 193-204.

The Painted Bird. Boston» Houghton Mifflin, 196$,

Steps. New York: Random House, 1968.

II. Articles. Reviews. Biography and Criticism

"Album From Auschwitz," rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Times Literary Supplement. 8 May 1969, p. 481.

Aldridge, John W. "The Fabrication of a Culture Hero," rev. of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, Saturday Review,24 Apr. 1971, pp. 25-27.

Alter, Robert., rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Times Book Review. 11 Feb. 1973, PP. 2-3.

iz Amory, Cleveland. "Trade Winds," Saturday Review, 17 Apr. 1971, PP. 16-17.

261

Anderson, Elliot, rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, Chicago Tribune Book World."4 Mar. 1973, P. 5»

\/ Ascherson, Neal. "Chronicles of the Holocaust," rev. of The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Review of Books, 1 June 19§7, PP. 23, 25.

Bailey, Paul. "’Stuff’ and Nonsense," rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, London Magazine. May 1969, p. 112.

Barkham, John. "A Modern Morality Tale on Sterility of Hedonism," rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, Toledo Blade. 18 Feb. 1973» P. 5*

Bauke, Joseph P. "No Awakening From Nightmare," rev. of The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski, Saturday Review,13 Nov. 1965, p. 64.

Bell, Pearl K., rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, New Leader. 19 Feb. 1973, P» 17»

"Bird of Prey," rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Time.18 Oct. 1968, p. 114.

Blumenfeld, F. Yorick. "Dark Dreams," rev, of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Newsweek. 21 Oct. 1968, pp.~l.04, 108.

Boyers, Robert. "Language and Reality in Kosinski’s Steps." Centennial Review, io (Winter 1972), pp. 41-61.

Broyard, Anatole. "The High Price of Profundity," rev. in Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Times, 21 Apr, 1971, p7^5.

Cahill, Daniel. "The Devil Tree« An Interview with Jerzy Kosinski," North American Review. 258 (Spring 1973)» pp. 56-60.

______"Jerzy Kosinski« Retreat From Violence," Twen­tieth Century Literature. 18 (Apr. 1972), pp. 121-132.

Capitanchik, Maurice. "Private Lives," rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Spectator. 9 May 1968, p. 621.

"Chance Encounters," rev. of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, Times Literary Supplement. 11 June, 1971» p. 067.

Coale, Samuel. "The Quest for the Elusive Self« the Fic­tion of Jerzy Kosinski," Critique. 14 (1973)» PP* 25-37«

7 Coles, Robert. Harvard Educational Review. 37 (Summer 1967), , pp. 493-496.

262Compton, Neil. "Dream of Violence," rev. of The Painted

Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski, Commentary. June 1966?“pp. 92- 95.

J "The Conscience of the Writer," Publishers* Weekly, 22 Mar.( 1971. PP. 26-28.

Cooke, Michael. Yale Review. 61 (Summer 1972), pp. 603-604.

Davenport, Guy, rev. of The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski, National Review. 8 Feb. 1966, pp. 119-120, 122.

De Feo, Ronald. "Two Disappointments, One Failure," rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, National Review.16 Mar. 1973, PP. 322-323.

Delaney, Paul, rev. of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Times Book Review. 25 Apr. 1971» PP. 7» 58-59.

The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, Publishers* Weekly. 11 Dec. 1972, p. 33.

Edwards, Thomas. "Jonathan, Benny, and Solitude," rev. in The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Review of Books. 22 Mar. 1973» P. 29.

\/ Evanier, David, rev. of The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski, Commonweal. 1 July 1966, pp. 422-423.

Felheim, Marvin. "The Haunted Edges of Consciousness," rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Michigan Daily. 24 Nov. 1968, p. 6.

Field, Andrew. "The Butcher’s Helpers," rev. of The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski, Book Week. 1? Oct. 19^5» PP. 2- 3, 26.

Finn, James. "A Rich Parable," rev. of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, New Republic. 26 June 1971» PP. 32-33.

Fremont-Smith, Eliot. "Log of Atrocities," rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Times Book Review. 21 Oct. I968, p. 45.

Furbank, P. N. "Fiction’s Feelingless Man," rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, The Listener. 8 May 1969» P. 655»

Gardner, Marilyn, "a lifelong nobody and a would-be somey body," rev. of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, Christian Science Monitor, 2? May 1971» P. 11.

263Garmel, Marion S. "Is Mr. Kosinski’s Hero a Savior With

Bluff?" rev. of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, National Observer. 1? May 1971, p. 19.

Glaser, Alice. "Making It," rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosin­ski, Book World, 3 Nov. 1968, p. 6.

Glassgold, Peter. "Taking a Bad Chance," rev. of BeingThere, by Jerzy Kosinski, Nation. 31 May 1971, PP. 699- 700.

Golden, Robert. "Violence and Art in Postwar AmericanLiterature» A Study of O’Connor, Kosinski, Hawkes, and P^nchon," Dissertation University of Rochester 1972. /Dissertation Abstracts International, 33 (1972), 3HA/

Gosling, Ray, rev. of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, The Times (London), 20 May 1971, P. 7.

Halley, Anne. "Poor Boy Spreads His Wings," rev. of The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski, Nation. 19 Nov. 19 ¿>5, pp. 424-426.

Harper, H. M. Jr, Contemporary Literature. 12 (Spring, 1971), PP. 213-2147'

Hicks, Granville. "Sadism and Light Hearts," rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Saturday Review. 19 Oct. 1968, p. 29.

Hislop, Alan, "Company Men," rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, Saturday Review of the Arts. Mar. 1973, pp. 70-71.

Howe, Irving. "From the Other Side of the Moon," rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Harper * s„ Mar. 1969, pp. 102- 105.

. rev. of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, Harper’s. July 1971, p. 89.

Howes, Victor. "Under the Microscope» a Novel in Bits and Pieces," rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, Christian Science Monitor. 18 Apr. 1973» P. 11.

Hutchinson, James. "Authentic Existence and the PuritanEthic," University of Denver Quarterly. 19 (April 1973), pp. 106-114.

Ivsky, Oleg, rev. of The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski, Library Journal. 1 Oct. 1965, PP. 4109-4110.

Jackson, Katherine G., rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Harper’s. Nov. 1968, p. 160.

26b

\J "Jerzy Kosinski (Nikodem), 1933“»" Contemporary Authors.Vol..17-18. Detroit« Gale Research, 1967» PP« 2o9-270.

Jones, D. A. N. "Lean Creatures," rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Review of Books. 27 Feb. 1969» pp. 16-18.

Jordan, Clive, rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, New States­man. 9 May 1969, p. 666.

Kauffmann, Stanley. "A Double View," rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, World, 27 Feb. 1973» PP. 42- 4JT46.

. "Out of the Fires," rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosin­ski, New Republic. 26 Oct. 1968, pp, 22, 41.

L/ Kennedy, William. "Who Here Doesn’t Know How Good Kosinski Is?" Look. 20 Apr. 1971» p. 12.

Kenner, Hugh. "Keys on a Ring," rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Times Book Review. 20 Oct. 1968,P. 5.

Kluger, Richard. "A Scapegoat in Need," rev. of The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski, Harper’s. Oct. 1965» pp. 126, 12IP130.

Laie, Meta and J. Williams. "The Narrator of The Painted Bird« A Case Study," Renascence. 24 (Summer 1972), pp. 198-206.

Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. "Bad By Design? Or Just Bad?" rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Times. 13 Feb. 1973» p. 39.

McAleer, John, rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Best- Sellers. 1 Nov. 1968, p. 3I0.

Midwood, Barton, rev. of Being There. by Jerzy Kosinski, Esquire. Oct. 1971» P. ¿3.

Morgan, Edwin. "President Chance," rev. of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, Listener. 10 June 1971» P. 760.

\/ Mount, Douglas N, "Authors and Editors," Publishers’Weekly. 26 Apr. 1971» PP. 13-16.

Mudrick, Marvin, rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Hudson Review. 21 (Winter 1968/l9o9)» P. 7o0.

265Rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, New Republic.

10 Mar. 1973, PP. 33-34.

Nichols, Lewis, rev. of The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Times Book Review. 31 Oct. 1965, P. 8.

Plimpton, George and R. Landesman. eds. "Jerzy Kosinski," Paris Review. 14 (Summer 1972), pp. 183-207. /interview/

Poore, Charles. "Things Like These Happen to People WeKnow," rev. of The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Times Book Review. l6 Oct. 1965, p. 25.

Prescott, Peter. "The Basis of Hoi'ror," rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, Newsweek. 19 Feb. 1973, PP« 5>86.

Pritchett, V. S. "Clowns," rev. of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Review of Books, 1 July 1971, P« 15«

Rayraont, Henry. "National Book Awards« The Winners," New York Times Book Review. 11 Mar. 1969, P. 42.

Richey, Clarence. "’Being There* and Dasein« A Note on the k Philosophical Presupposition Underlying the Novels of

Jerzy Kosinski," Notes on Contemporary Literature, 2 (Sept. 1972), pp. 13-15.

Rosenberg, Marc. Steps. Audio Cassette, Deland, Florida» Everett/Edwards, 1971.

Schaap, Dick. "Stepmother Tongue," rev. of The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Herald Tribune Book Week,14 Nov. 1965, p. 6.

Sheppard, R. Z. "Playing It By Eye," rev. of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, Time. 26 Apr. 1971, p. 73«

Skow, John. "Strike It Rich," rev. of The Devil Tree, by Jerzy Kosinski, Time. 19 Feb. 1973, P« 887

Stern, Daniel. "An Old World Evil Moves Westward," rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Life. 6 Dec. 1968, p. 24.

_______ , "Candide in the Electronic Age," rev. of BeingThere, by Jerzy Kosinski, Life. 30 Apr. 1971, p. 14.

Tucker, Martin. "A Moralist’s Journey Into the Heart ofDarkness," rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Commonweal. 29 Nov. 1968, pp. 319-320.

_______ , rev. of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, Commonweal.7 May 1971, PP« 221-223«

Updike, John. "Bombs Made Out of Leftovers," rev. of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, New Yorker, 25 Sept. 1971» pp. 132-134.

Waugh, Auberon, rev. of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, Spectator. 22 May 1971» p. 703.

Weales, Gerald. "Jerzy Kosinski« The Painted Bird and Other Disguises," Hollins Critic. 9 (Oct. 1972J» PP« 1-12.

Wedde, Ian, rev. of Being There. by Jerzy Kosinski, London Magazine. Oct./Nov. 1971» PP. 150-151.

Weinstein, Sharon R. "Comedy and Nightmare» The Fiction of John Hawkes, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Jerzy Kosinski, and Ralph Ellison," Dissertation Utah 1971. /Disserta­tion Abstracts International, 32 (1971)» 3336A_/

West, Paul. "Portrait of a Man Mooning," rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Book World. 3 Nov. 1968, p. 18.

Wiesel, Elie, "Everybody’s Victim," rev. of The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski, New York Times Book Review,31 Oct. 1965, PP. 5» 46.

Wolff, Geoffrey. "The Life of Chance," rev. of Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski, Newsweek. 26 Apr. 1971, PP» 94-958.

Zeldis, Chayym, rev. of Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, Book Reporter, Oct. 1968, pp, 7-8.

. "Job, the Child," rev. of The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski, Jewish Frontier. 0 Mar. 19o7, PP» 22-26,