Jerzy Kosinski’s novel, The Painted Bird, filled with vignettes of violence perpetrated against innocence, is more compelling than ever in an age when media presents us with confirmation that such things occur on a daily basis in our world. Whereas CNN’s truth is of one sort, Kosinki’s is of quite another. In Kosinki’s nameless child, we witness consciousness in process, a soul trying to discern intelligibility in a relentless succession of what appear to be meaningless atrocities.
The novel tells of a child, separated from his parents at the beginning of World War II, who wanders through Eastern Europe, relying upon his wits and no small measure of luck or Providence or randomness to survive a harrowing gauntlet of violence. It is a world in which moral norms have been turned upside down—a dark recasting of the beatitudes—in which the only people who treat the boy with compassion are a Nazi soldier and a Stalinist sniper while the pivotal trauma, which leaves the boy mute until the end of the novel, occurs when an angry mob of villagers chases the boy from a church.
In such a morally perverse world, one might expect that a child’s primary response would be to ask: why? But the question, why, is the question posed by a normal child in an environment conducive to healthy nurture and inquiry; there is nothing normal about this child nor about his environment. He notes the events with a matter-of-fact detachment which is unsettling, and his attempts at understanding are delivered as hypotheses—almost scientific in their tenor. Most of his attempts at understanding reflect the superstition and syncretism of the villagers he encounters. One of the first people to “own” the boy is a woman named Olga who believes that, because of his dark complexion and black hair and eyes, he is possessed, perhaps even a vampire. “From her I learned for the first time that I was possessed by an evil spirit, which crouched in me like a mole in a deep burrow, and of whose presence I was unaware. Such a darkling as I, possessed of this evil spirit, could be recognized by his bewitched black eyes which did not blink when they gazed at bright clear eyes. Hence, Olga declared, I could stare at other people and unknowingly cast a spell over them.” Later, the boy comes under the care of a man who allows him to visit the local church. He sees how the various rituals and incantations of the church are more splendid, and for that reason more powerful, than anything he has learned from Olga. He speculates that perhaps the reason he has suffered while others have prospered is that he has failed to earn indulgences by saying prayers, and so he begins to pray incessantly, building up an enormous store of indulgences. But the violence continues, and so this hypothesis, like all those before it, is thrown aside.
The copy of the book I read was printed in 1981 and includes a biographical note which implies that The Painted Bird is artfully-expressed, yet thinly-disguised, autobiography, that there is an underlying psychological authenticity which comes from the fact these horrors were lived by the author. But in 1990, Kosinski committed suicide and there surfaced allegations which raise questions about the authorship of his novels. In particular, it is likely that Kosinski’s childhood was nothing like the childhood portrayed in his novel, and it is possible that he hired a ghost writer to complete the book. However, this is merely a diversion. There are three questions which might be asked of this novel. The first—who wrote it?—is a distraction and not a particularly interesting distraction at that. The second—is it a good novel?—is easily answered in the affirmative. The writing is crisp; its account is disturbing; its images are indelible; and it speaks to the fundamental theme of a continuing existential dialogue in which we all participate. The third question—what can we learn from the fact of a debate about authorship?—is not so easily answered.
We live in an age which elevates authorship to an almost cultish status. We seem incapable of judging a work’s merits without also reading into the text the author’s reputation, or, at the very least, the reputation of the author’s critics. In an earlier rant, I presented Siva Vaidhyanathan’s deconstruction of authorship in mainstream american culture. He argues persuasively that the author is a culturally contingent construct. It is convenient to speak of a work as having an author, but even in seemingly clear-cut cases, the author is as much a work of fiction as the book. Author and book are equally products of the culture which produces them. Both are constituted by, participate in, and perform a constituting function in their culture, so that it becomes impossible to detect where culture ends and author begins, where author ends and writing begins, where writing ends and culture begins.
From the point of view of theological reflection, authorship may have a further meaning, and our anxiety around the question of authorship may indicate a deeper anxiety around the question of our authorship. In the broad sweep of things, we have sprung from a culture which rested for thousands of years upon the certainty of its authorship from a divine pen. Until recently, this was indisputable. We are not yet comfortable in our newfound skepticism. And so, within the narrower confines of a novel, when our skepticism calls into question the novel’s authorship, we follow the promptings of our anxieties in a drama that moves us at different times to condemn the novel, to search relentlessly for its “real” author, to look for autobiography or signs of intention within the text. But, finally, these questions belong to our anxieties and not to the novel. At the end of the evening, when we have turned the last page and set down the book, all that remains are the words. These alone are the proper objects of our reflection and judgment.
And, in the case of The Painted Bird, we find that the words haunt us; they deserve to be savoured.