Jerzy Kosinski's Being There, Novel and Film: Changes Not by Chance

College Literature, Spring 2004 by Lazar, Mary

A Polish-Ruthenian Jew, born in 1933 and looking very much like a Gypsy, managed to survive the Holocaust and eventually succeed as an intriguing yet controversial American writer. Highly intelligent, trained to dissimulate and adapt, he saw strength rather than weakness in the revision of his works even after their publication. Regarded by critics as a naturalist, existentialist, and/or postmodernist, Jerzy Kosinski both fascinated and challenged readers for nearly thirty years before his death in 1991. One example of his artistic elasticity involves the novel Being There (1970) and the script he later wrote for an award-winning film of the same title which appeared in 1979. Unlike most cinematic adaptations of novels, Being There allows us to witness and judge the original writer's reconception of his own work for a different genre, and although the two pieces are consistent in tone, three thematic shifts reveal Kosinski's evolving attitude toward American culture and visual media: racial tensions receive more attention than Cold War politics; a minor character, Benjamin Rand, gains importance as a symbol of American capitalism; and the revised ending implies that the Fool may actually be a saint.

Before examining these changes, however, let me set the scene: Kosinski's career was complex and multi-faceted. A contemporary and friend of Roman Polanski-they were both born in Lodz, Poland, in the early 1930s-Kosinski wrote many novels which focused on establishing individual identity within differing cultural milieus. After emigrating to the United States in his mid-twenties, he began writing sociological works about conditions under Soviet rule, but he soon turned to fiction. Unlike many other writers of his generation, he tried to diminish the importance of nationality when exploring human behaviour. His art offers what one of his favorite philosophers, Paul Tillich, called "boundary situations." Kosinski believed that we cannot trust the forces which shaped our childhood, that we can only define our "selves" when confronted with deviance, often in terms of violence and/or sexuality. Religion and mores provide comforts which we can ill afford in an age when those same forces launched terrifying experiments in the name of progress and righteousness. Kosinski's creative tactics were also unusual; in many of the novels, his analyses of modern cultures and what he dubbed the "Master Charge" attitude toward life and love led him to abandon plot structures in favor of a picaresque approach. His work troubles rather than comforts; it invites us to decide what we believe and why.

Before his suicide at the age of 58, he had written nine novels, two of which had been extensively revised and republished, two works of non-fiction, and numerous essays. He was president of PEN for two years and helped to effect the release of both rightist and leftist writers from prisons in Iran and Eastern Europe. And his biography, imagination, outlook, and compositional tactics place him both within and beyond the title "American writer." Kosinski was, as his colleague KurtVonnegut might say, "unstuck" in space, if not in time. He dealt with human situations which are independent of locale, nationality, and, occasionally, even sexual identity. Regarding art as a dynamic, he responded to critical input as well as to his own incisive perceptions of reality and politics. His novels often depart from the conventions of characterization, plot, and transition; he regarded his art as fluid, and he crafted ambiguous denouements, thereby inviting us to a mental strip tease. We reveal ourselves through our interpretations and reactions. Being There, novel and film, exemplifies these traits.

"Being There could have, as a prime concept, innocent man versus the media-the Byzantine, more or less, versus the simple," Kosinski told Michael Schumacher (1990, 184). The origins of the story are based in reality, however. In an unpublished account sent to me by Mrs. Katherina von Fraunhofer Kosinski, his widow, the author recalls visiting the home of a retired New York businessman when he was married to his first wife, Mary Weir. Secluded for years, the ageing man allowed Mary to look at some of his furniture since she wanted it to be donated to a museum rather than sold after his demise. Leaving his wife for a few minutes, Kosinski encountered a well-dressed gardener who was fascinated with television and who claimed to have lived in the house. Kosinski described him as "Peaceful-no anguish, calm, sweet, pure at heart, innocent" (2002b).

Praised for his "marvelous balance" as "a truly peaceful man" in the novel, the main character, a gardener named Chance, and later dubbed "Chauncey Gardiner," is at peace with himself. And to the reader, all things seem possible-except sex (Kosinski 1970, 42). Eschewing all but the most fundamental physical descriptions, Kosinski invented a protagonist who is productive only in the sense that he is a gardener. In a press release for the play adaptation of Being There staged in Poland, his widow revealed information which Kosinski provided about his intentions: