Zondag 11 november 2007 - Jerry Kosinski: 'Being there...

De laatste roman van Kosinski heet ‘Being there’: ‘Aanwezig’ heet de nederlandse vertaling. En dat kon natuurlijk veel beter, vermoed ik. Want het boek gaat over de scherpe kanten van de conditio humana, het enige belangwekkende dat je over ‘mens-zijn’ kunt zeggen.

De hoofdpersoon van de roman ‘Being there’ heet Chance, en dat betekent gewoon ‘toeval’. Statement van Kosinski: je kunt van de mens niks zeggen en als je tóch iets zegt, bedenk dan dat het noch het eerste woord is, noch het laatste. Het doet er eigenlijk niet echt toe. Chance leidt een bijzonder leven: nooit verlaat hij de tuin waarin hij leeft. Hij heeft namelijk geen behoefte om de tuin te verlaten. Hij heeft zijn handen vol aan wat hij in een straal van een meter om zich heen ziet. Alleen maar hier en nu.

‘Bijzonder prettig aan de tuin was dat Chance, staande op een nauw pad of midden tussen de struiken en bomen, op elk moment kon beginnen te lopen zonder ooit te weten of hij vooruit of achteruit liep, onzeker of hij zich nu vóór of achter zijn voorafgaande stappen bevond. Het enige dat ertoe deed was dat hij bewoog in zijn eigen tijd, als de groeiende planten.’ (p. 10).

"I believe life goes on," he says, "and that makes me a pessimist... what many people are unwilling to realize is that their daily life comes to them the way fiction does. They must imagine themselves in what they are going to do. They must make decisions in their lives - whether the man next door is a threat or not, whether they are in love or about to be betrayed by a lover, or whether they want to leave a relationship. And if so they will have to mobilize their energy. And that's how I think my fiction comes to them - not pre-judged, relatively un-pre- packed. You have to project yourself into it and you have to judge it, my characters, the way you judge people in your daily life."

The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.
Not all critics agree, however, and negative assessments of the novel outnumber the positive. Anatole Broyard, who liked Kosinski but not his work, summarizes the chief objection: "A banality dressed up as a profundity is the stock in trade of parables or 'symbolic' novels. Kosinski gives us one on almost every page. . . . He has renounced almost all the ingredients of fiction for a few scraps from the philosopher's table".
Kosinski does not aim for "profundity" in Being There, but he provides far more than "scraps." His satire has depth; at least three levels operate at the same time. On the first, the fool is taken for a man of distinction and business acumen because he possesses what Willy Loman calls "personal attractiveness." In addition, Chance is the product of a programmed environment, and the fact that he doesn't even realize this provides an obvious lesson. Wanting only "to be seen by people he had never been seen by before" (Kosinski 1970, 42), Chance lacks intellectual, emotional, or sexual desires and serves others by providing the perfect eye. He loves to watch and is neither threatening nor judgmental; he both reflects and absorbs, leaving others free to speculate and manipulate.
On a deeper level, however, Kosinski implies that this videot possesses an enviable, but perhaps dangerous, inner peace. Despite the placid endings of both the novel and the film, the reader-viewer remains slightly uneasy. As Kosinski told Tartikoff, "The end of Being There is . . . foreboding. In terms of our individual fate, we can no longer influence Chauncey Gardiner's, while he is unwillingly influencing ours, a process we are unable to stop, indeed, are not quite aware of its taking place day after day. . . . [A]mong all of us Gardiner is a man to watch. . . . He functions smoothly; but we don't" (14-15). Being There also evokes Plato's scenario wherein people, chained facing a wall, are conditioned from birth to believe that the two-dimensional silhouettes and shadows projected upon that wall are, indeed, reality. Like the released prisoner in Plato's cave, Chance catalogs the experiences of one who is forced to assimilate a new order of being. The parallel should not be pursued too far, however, for Chance learns no ultimate truth. And neither do Kosinski's readers. Thematic differences between the film and the novel reveal a shift in Kosinski's artistic view, but they do not culminate in certainty. As always, truth remains elusive. After all, he once defined it as "the temporary resolution of various contradictions" (Teicholz 1993b, x). The novel depicts a prisoner who is unaware of his boundaries. The film suggests that the prisoner has no physical bounds.
Certainly Kosinski's concentration on visual media, capitalism, and politics rather than on moral conflict may be regarded as a rather obvious social critique, one which those who purchased the novel would already have internalized. But if one agrees that social and political commentary are still the stuff of legitimate art, Being There emerges as a delightful yet poignant diversion. Kosinski offers more than the banal. He has created a Zen counterpart to Shakespeare's fools and those who wait in Beckett's Waiting for Godot. We remain confused by, attracted to, and slightly uneasy in the presence of Chance.