Neither of Kosinski’s first two novels prepared his readers for his third, Being There. The Painted Bird (1965) is a fairly lengthy, nightmarish picaresque of a dark-complexioned young boy’s survival in the eastern European countryside during World War II. Stylistically, The Painted Bird is a vigorous synthesis of elements of the panoramic realist novel and of the folktale. Steps (1968), a thin novel with very little chronology or other narrative structure, presents incidents in the existential life of a young eastern European exile in the postwar period. Stylistically, Steps is as spare and as restrained as its protagonist is undemonstrative and self-contained. Although the two novels do share some thematic concerns, just about the only surface similarities between them are that both protagonists remain unnamed and many of the events that are depicted are horrifically ironic. Some critics have suggested that although Kosinski won a National Book Award for Steps, he should have won it for The Painted Bird, and the judges were, to some degree, compensating for their earlier oversight.
Compared to these first two novels, Being There seems a slight book, a contemporary fable, a secular parable, a light satire on the nature of celebrity, influence, truth, and understanding in American politics and high society. Indeed, viewed in the context of Kosinski’s whole corpus, Being There remains his most anomalous work. Ironically, because of the success of the highly regarded film adaptation starring Peter Sellers, Being There may now be Kosinski’s most widely known work.
The novel’s main character is an amiable cipher named Chance. For reasons that are never explained, Chance was raised and continued to live entirely cut off from the rest of the world within a walled property in a large city. He has filled his days and years tending the estate’s gardens. His only human contacts have been the owner of the estate (presumably his grandfather but referred to simply as the “Old Man”) and a maid, both of whom treat him as if he is simpleminded or emotionally damaged. His only exposure to the outside world has been through the television shows that he watches but for which he has developed no context for understanding. Chance is imperturbably contented with this existence but seemingly unprepared for anything else.
Then, when the Old Man dies, the lawyers serving as the executors of his estate have no choice but to evict Chance from the premises. Not only has the Old Man not mentioned Chance in his will, but there is no documentation of their relationship and, in fact, no documentation whatsoever of Chance’s existence. Chance is put out into the street wearing one of the Old Man’s suits and carrying a single suitcase. It contains more of the expensive but outdated suits and shirts that the Old Man had kept pristinely stored in the attic and that would have been disposed of or donated to charity. In a very ironic turn of events, these suits will mark Chance as a well-bred person of means and serve as his pass into the broader world of wealth, privilege, and power.
Chance has barely left the walled estate in which he has spent his whole life when he is struck by the chauffeured limousine of E. E. Rand, the wife of the industrialist Benjamin Rand. Chance’s leg is injured, and she insists on taking him back to her estate, where her ailing husband is receiving around-the-clock medical attention. When she asks Chance his name, he responds, “Chance, the gardener,” which she hears as “Chauncey Gardiner.” And thus begins the process by which the Rands and their circle construct a new identity for Chance. In conversation, he talks literally about gardening and television because those are the only things about which he has any knowledge, and everyone accepts his remarks as profoundly metaphoric.
Rand is an informal adviser to the president of the United States and is so impressed by what he interprets as Chance’s very carefully expressed insights that he introduces him to the president. Like Rand, the president is taken by Chance’s pithy, seemingly figurative observations about the current economic situation, and soon after their meeting, he credits Chance in public with having seen and expressed what other experts, in the president’s view, had missed in their economic analyses. Overnight, there is much speculation in the media about this mysterious figure who has suddenly emerged as a major new “player” on the Washington political scene. Chance is even invited to appear on several television news programs. When he is asked questions about current events and about his own background to which he has no answers, he simply sits there silently and sedately, and his behavior is interpreted as unshakable self-assurance and an extraordinary ability to maintain his composure.
When it becomes widely known that Chance has no personal history that any investigative agency can uncover, there is initially a great deal of suspicion about who has insinuated him into a position of influence. Then, when no sinister connections can be substantiated, some begin to see his combination of personal anonymity and public celebrity as a tremendous political asset, and there is even talk of a vice presidential nomination. As Benjamin Rand nears death, he guesses the truth about Chance, but he also recognizes his inherent goodness—or his Edenic absence of evil—and his wife’s attraction to Chance. Despite Chance’s simplicity, he sees enough in him to put him at peace with dying. In one of the novel’s most notorious scenes, E. E. Rand tries to seduce Chance, who is asexual, and when he becomes transfixed with the television and states that he likes to watch, she interprets this to mean that he wants to watch her masturbate. In a hilarious irony, she has one of the most satisfying sexual experiences of her life.
Nonetheless, most of the novel is more flatly than hilariously ironic, understated rather than pointedly comical. Interestingly, when the novel was adapted to film, the director chose to include a series of outtakes among the closing credits. These outtakes demonstrated how difficult it had been for Sellers to play Chance as a placid cipher for whom all things pleasant and unpleasant are equally ambiguous or amorphous. The outtakes are hilarious where the film is not. Likewise, in the novel, Kosinski prevents us from dismissing Chance as an absurdity but never permits us to take him very seriously. The novel seems to be told from a third-person limited point of view, but for the sake of clarity and of continuity in the narrative voice, there are sections in which the narrator is forced to reveal a little more than what Chance is capable of understanding. If Being There is a parable, it is a postmodern parable in which the reader is left with the conundrum of explaining just how the experiences of an almost completely weightless character might embody some substantive and meaningful insight into contemporary life. In effect, the reader is left to construct a meaning for the novel just as the characters around Chance construct an identity for him as Chauncey Gardiner. And just as Chance does not seem to care one way or the other about what that identity might entail, Kosinski seems ultimately not to care what “moral” might be assigned to his narrative.
Sources
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Carter, Steven. “‘Plants Were Like People’: Kosinski’s Being There.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 28 (November 1998): 6–9.
Griffiths, Gareth. “Being There; Being There: Kosinski and Malouf.” In Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, edited by Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin, 153–166. Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 1990.
Grigsby, John L. “A Mirroring of America and Russia: Reflections of Tolstoy in Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 17 (September 1987): 6–8.
Holstad, Scott C. “The Dialectics of Getting There: Kosinski’s Being There and the Existential Anti-Hero.” Arkansas Review: A Journal of Criticism 4 (Fall 1995): 220–228.
Lazar, Mary. “Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There, Novel and Film: Changes Not by Chance.” College Literature 31 (Spring 2004): 99–116.
Lupack, Barbara Tepa. “Chance Encounters: Bringing Being There to the Screen.” In Critical Essays on Jerzy Kosinski, edited by Barbara Tepa Lupack, 208–220. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998.
———. “Hit or Myth: Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There.” New Orleans Review 13 (Summer 1986): 58–68.
Murray, Raymond B. “‘That Certain Krylovian Touch’: An Insight into Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 19 (March 1989): 6–8.
Tepa, Barbara J. “Jerzy Kosinski’s Polish Contexts: A Study of Being There.” Polish Review 22, no. 2 (1977): 52–61.
Wood, Dave. “Censors ‘Who Like to Watch’ Curricula: Jerzy Kosinski and the Banning of Being There.” In Censored Books, II: Critical Viewpoints, 1985–2000, edited by Nicholas J. Karolides, 51–57. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2002.
Ziegler, Robert. “Electing the Video Self: A Note on Being There.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 19 (March 1989): 2–3.
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