Well, for what may be my last Books go Boom contribution (grad school is starting up and I'm also thinking about trying to start my own, bi-monthly series), I decided to do a more conventional project (for me), and also finally (eight months after the fact) get to reviewing my tab-mark filled copy of Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird. Even in format, I went back to my older preferences; spending time engaged with the author's background before sidling into the book (something of particular importance in this case).
Anyway, thanks for reading, especially since I don't actively participate in much else on DailyKos beyond my own diaries and the Elections subsite (not every one finds polling analysis, fundraising reports, and media updates on hundreds of different campaigns as interesting as I do, understandably). And a thanks and shout out to Brecht for sharing his series with me.
Unorthodox as it may be, I still prefer to engage in the personal history of the author when discussing their literary works—especially in a first review of that particular author. However, I dislike fusing the biographical discussion with the literary discussion, and allow, instead, for the two elements to settle out. The intended purpose is both for biography to inform the reader’s opinion of the novel as a supplement.
Biography becomes especially important in the case of someone like Jerzy Kosinski. Especially important and yet more difficult. Born Jozef Lewinkopf to a well to-do Polish-Jewish family June 14th, 1933, Kosinski committed suicide May 3rd, 1991, at age 57, his reputation tarnished and his work already sliding into obscurity. He made it to America in 1957 from Poland aged 24, and in 1962 married American Steel heiress Mary Weir. They would divorce in 1966.
Beyond the simply framework of dates and matter-of-fact notation, Kosinski became one of the most sensational authors of the mid-1960s to early-1970s, starting with his dramatic and disturbing 1966 novel The Painted Bird, which he quickly followed up with Steps in 1968, winner of that year’s National Book Award, and his 1971 novel Being There. All three were bestsellers that received critical praise and vaulted onto college reading lists. Being There would even become a 1979 film, with a screenplay coauthored by Kosinski, and staring Peter Sellers in what was his last role. The critically successful film, a satire about politics and people in the era of media and television soundbites is perhaps more prescient today that it was thirty-four years ago (and the subject of a past critique of mine).
With such a rapid stream of successes, it comes as a surprise, at first, to see what a rapid downfall came for Kosinski. This downfall began with a 1982 Village Voice article “breaking” the news that The Painted Bird was not autobiographical at all, and also claims that Kosinski had not written the novel. These claims permutated into various other attacks over the 1980s—that Kosinski wrote the book in Polish and had it translated, that it was actually ghostwritten with editors, and combined with a voracious and to me, astonishingly personal campaign of attacks against Kosinski, culminating posthumously in the play More Lies About Jerzy, a 2001 play about the author that ridicules him. These attacks jeered Kosinski’s writing, declared him a liar and a thief, and attacked his general moral scruples.
Obviously this is the short version, but to unravel the byzantine maze of accusations and attacks and defenses would take an entire book. The end result cannot really be denied however; Kosinski’s reputation faded away and he faded into obscurity, a process his suicide only accerbated. He published only a single novel after 1982, and unlike earlier successes, it made a small ripple in the literary world.
My judgment on the matter is that Kosinski seems ripe as a future rediscovery, if the right catalysis ever comes about. The allegations about plagiarism, ghostwriting, translators, all strike me as ridiculous. Having delved deep into the entire history and unsuccessfully navigated the limited resources in preparation for this review, all I’ve seen are thinly sourced tabloid level stories. The very scandal of novel not being “autobiographical”, as the critical 1982 Village Voice article promoted, are frivolous, for no less a reason than that the 1976 reprinting of The Painted Bird (the copy I own), has an extensive author’s note from Kosinski disavowing any autobiographical content, and he even explains:
My purpose in writing a novel was to examine “this new language” of brutality and its consequent new counter-language of anguish and despair. […] Moreover, as English was still new to me, I could write dispassionately, free from the emotional connotation one’s native language always contains.
As the story began to evolve, I realized that I wanted to extend certain themes, modulating them through a series of five novels. This five-book cycle would present archetypal aspects of the individual’s relations to society. The first book of the cycle was to deal with the most universally accessible of these societal metaphors: man would be portrayed in his most vulnerable state, as a child, and society in its most deadly form, in a state of war. I hoped the confrontation between the defenseless individual and overpowering society, between the child and war, would represent the essential anti-human condition.
Whether or not Kosinski was, like many authors, a liar who in private liked to present the tales of the book as straight from his personal experience, and even though many critics and editors marketed the book early on as autobiography in fictional trappings (something Kosinski doubtless had a hand in), does not change the fact that he Kosinski made conscientious efforts to step this back and present the work as what it was: an intellectual exercise in the field of literature. Nor is it appropriate to judge this as having any pertinence to the book’s literary worth, or to assume that much of the book is not a product of the traumas Kosinski witnessed as a child (even if he spent the war sheltered and secure with a Polish family, as some claims suggest). His introduction to the work, along with the work itself, embody much of the ideology behind Holocaust literature and trauma literary theory. Lawrence Langer, an esteemed literary critic on the literature of the Holocaust, even uses
The Painted Bird as an example of the use of the surreal and fantastic—the taking of story to new grotesque levels in order to express a psychological state and the mood of despair.
Likewise it fails to even be poor opinion and slides right into the gutter of ridiculousness to claim that Being There, a novel about 1960s media culture in New York City and political satire (and perhaps inspired by Kosinski’s sudden elevation into the world of wealth and power through his marriage to Mary Weir), is simply a rote plagiarism from a 1932 Polish bestseller. After having tried to search through some of these referenced criticisms, I have bumped into various unsavory pieces of anti-Semitic garbage and overreaching moralistic takes on his novels or on him as a person (something which is not only irrelevant, but far beyond the ability of any of these people to do, to say nothing of their legitimacy in doing it). It speaks to my biases and how I am about to review his work that I reject these overblown and over-milked controversies as I begin my review of his brilliant novel, The Painted Bird.
--
If there were a single quote to encapsulate the novel, it would be this passage that strikes the vulnerable reader towards the end of the tale:
Every one of us stood alone, and the sooner a man realized that all 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 knew only himself. […] Like the mountain peaks around us, we looked at one another, separated by valleys, too high to stay unnoticed, too low to touch the heavens. (pg. 233)
Within these few lines the solitary character of the bleak weltanschauung of the novel culminates in the sociopathic rejection of communication, people, and even spirituality.
The Painted Bird ultimately precludes the possibility of human enlightenment, describing humanity as a set geographical feature, “too low to touch the heavens,” while rejecting the idea that any true understanding exists even between individuals and communication.
The central character of the novel never receives a name, an origin, or a background. Rather, because of the young boy’s dark hair, eyes and complexion, the Polish peasants assume him to be a gypsy orphan. Throughout the story, Kosinski deftly manipulates romantic notions and the vulnerability of the child-figure to heighten the isolation and alienation. The boy receives, in varying degrees, abuse, suspicion, superstition and neglect, and lives in a constant fear, unable to understand the rationality behind the world presented to him. At one point, he ponders the Germans, wondering, as the reader might have as well, “Was such a destitute, cruel world worth ruling” (pg. 91).
For such a compact work, The Painted Bird stretches out long and vivid in the mind of the reader, more fantastic than many fantasy novels, more intimately gruesome than many war stories. In one scene, a man is eaten alive in a basement overfilled with starving trapped rats, while in another titular scene, peasants capture a bird and paint it bright colors, then entertain themselves watching as its flock attack and kill it when it attempts to return. The parable is obvious, yet no less poignant and stunning, in such a creative and unexpected trapping.
Magic and superstition damask the story, and at one point, the boy even believes his gaze actually has the power to cause misfortune to others. Eventually this superstition evolves into an affinity with organized Christianity, as he recites endless Hail Mary’s, imagining a God above keeping count, and that when enough Hail Mary’s were offered up, this God would send angels down to protect him and punish those who hurt him. After he is tossed into a pit of sewage by an angry church congregation and nearly drowns in the filth, and after he loses his first experience of love, he progresses beyond Christianity, rejecting the morality of goodness as incongruous with the world around him. This forms a frightening and sociopathic ideology, both sensible and utilitarian.
From the moment of signing a pact with the Devil, the more harm, misery, injury, and bitterness a man could inflict on those around him, the more help he could expect. If he shrank from inflicting harm on others, if he succumbed to emotions of love, friendship, and compassion, he would immediately become weaker and his own life would have to absorb the suffering and defeats that he spared others. (pg. 152)
The young boy even berates himself for not having understood the rules of the world sooner. His discovered spirituality of brutality explains his world—even down to the success and supernatural power of the Germans. In this moment of the book the absolute corruption of humanistic values occurs, a prelude to the final conclusions of the book, which sever all connections from the individual.
The Painted Bird is such a striking work, well-constructed and written in a terse, flat style that creates a vibrant nihilism, and it embodies much of Holocaust literature and what that literature attempts to do (receiving high praise from Elie Wiesel and various scholars of Holocaust literature).
Kosinski even captures the difficult to understand emotions of the victim facing the victimizer; provides a glimpse into the psychology and expression of that emotion and reality. When the boy stands before a German SS officer, he feels “like a squashed caterpillar oozing in the dust, a creature that could not harm anyone yet aroused loathing and disgust. In the presence of this resplendent being, armed in all the symbols of might and majesty, I was genuinely ashamed of my appearance. I had nothing against his killing me” (pg. 114). The prose captures the collapse of the individual in too vulnerable and isolated a position, and the boy, as a tabula rasa figure without name or origin, internalizes and accepts whatever beliefs the world of people inscribe on him, until at last he becomes a monster of sorts himself and rejects that world, separating himself from those in it.
Very few novels have affected me as deeply and irrevocably as The Painted Bird. Debates over the authenticity of the novel, or how the self-aggrandizing Kosinski presented the novel in private the 1960s and early 1970s should have no relevance, and the writing style of this novel has little inconsistency with the distinctive style that runs in both of his other major works. In general, I take issue with attacks on literature that have no other basis than to bemoan a work that tackles darker issues. I certainly did not find the novel to be pornographic so much as its antithesis, repudiating lust and in the end even human contact, perverting the norms and ideals of lust and love as it sought to capture the pathos of war and genocide, to create the new language of trauma. Relatively little of the novel involves sexual acts, while critiques of the violence seem to come from those who would rather stick their heads in the sand and ignore that which is unpleasant rather than stare it down and accept its challenge to ideals, morals, and the deified preconceptions that readers bring with them as they read. Although I am not untroubled by Kosinski’s stereotyped and negative depiction of the Poles, the truth here lies in the spirit and atmosphere, both co-opted to the creation of this challenging, anti-humanist philosophy and attempt at inverting the human civility that underpins the normal, modern doxa of the world. The Painted Bird is a harrowing and emotionally poignant read both engaging, memorable, and intellectually challenging, and places among the few books I consider must-reads.
P.S. While DKos does have reader gauges, these aren't entirely accurate. I always appreciate users who vote in my poll as that gives a more accurate count of readership, and always get an idea of what my readership looks like; how familiar they are with my topic; how I may have influenced them, etc. Which is always nice to know for something you worked hard on; sucks to feel like you are talking to a wall, that is why every diary I've ever written contains a poll.