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the imagination of
JERZY KOSINSKI
by
ROBERT J. LEWIS
_____________________
Imagination
is the voice of daring.
Henry Miller
Our imagination
flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
Vladimir Nabokov
JERZY
KOSINSKI - BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL
If there is a
contemporary novelist who intuitively grasps the workings,
evolutionary purpose and value of the imagination it is Jerzy
Kosinski, whose work, from Steps (1969)
to Pinball (1982), reads like an homage, in catalogue
form, to experience for its own sake. The exhilarating immediacy
of his prose originates in language that has been liberated
from all excess; it reads like a a phenomenological demonstration
of pure literary experience.
Not unlike the
‘on the road’ genre, where the going takes precedence
over destination, Kosinski’s books are often plotless,
populated with an improbable assortment of characters who
appear only long enough to illuminate situations that the
average imagination has been conditioned to turn away from.
In thrall to the here and now, Kosinski characters are cut
in distinctly sacrificial cloth; he makes them forgo the depth
and complexity we come to expect of western literature’s
best in deference to experiences that are their own terminus.
As semiotic devices,
his personages typically open doors to forbidden worlds to
the effect that the surprised reader, consequent to the vicarious
literary experience, comes to better understand his own inclinations,
which in turn allow him to choose and reject more wisely in
real life.
Early in the game,
Kosinski understood that the conventional modalities of narrative
literature would not be able to provide a syntax elastic enough
to answer to what would become his signature ‘vignettism’
out of which his style is forged. The result is a made-to-measure,
12-tone syntax that corresponds to the multiplicity and desultoriness
of experience: chapter is replaced by semi-autonomous vignette
whose effects are cumulative. The reader reaches for Kosinksi
in full expectation of being arbitrarily thrown into situations
that play by their own rules, and he takes the plunge because
it is literature, meaning there are no consequences. Without
ever passing judgment, Kosinski allows his characters to ply
their trade between good and evil, where life at the extremes
reveals every reader’s dark side of the moon and willingness
to visit places that betray the many secret worlds we all
inhabit. With a scalpel for a pen and razor sharp depiction
that is its own precedent, Kosinski autopsies experience which
he then embalms in language whose most lasting effect has
been to give birth to a community of readers for whom the
present subjunctive is the operative shibboleth.
I can think of
no other modern writer who offers such a diverse feast of
experience for the hungry reader. Kosinski makes the case
that the imagination is the ideal testing ground for real
life situations, and no matter how far out or unthinkable
an imagined experience may be, as a cognitive act of immaculate
conception it enjoys the blessings of nature that bears directly
on the innumerable choices we must make over the course of
a lifetime. The workings of the imagination and life are not
separate realms; indeed, without the former, the latter is
fated to be cognate with those myriad forms of life that will
never be lifted by the wind, carried by a current, or stirred
by things unseen and unsung – and never know why.
Among post 1950
writers, Kosinski does not rank with the likes of Patrick
White (Riders of the Chariot), Cormac McCarthy (Blood
Meridian), J. M. Coetzee (Disgrace), unless
we submit that his work is indeed significant for the reasons
argued above, and that the literary establishment’s
dismissal of Kosinski as a serious writer has been premature.
Before Kosinski’s
suicide at the age of 57, he had surely imagined its physical
impact and finality, and the afterlife commentary and analysis
it would generate. Looking hard and long down the road not
taken, the reader must surely wonder whether his imagination
-- that single-handedly enlarged the possibilities of literature
-- somehow spectacularly failed him or if his last act was
the perfect response to an imagination that had done its homework.
Either
way, Kosinski left the world a substantial body of work that,
in the tradition of Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes and ‘on
the road’ literature, underscores our willingness to wholly
identify with works of the imagination and experiences that
are either impossible or uncountenanced in real life.
THE IMAGINATION
When Charlie Sheen
and fellow platoonists were sent into the jungle on a reconnaissance
mission, they couldn’t see more than an ominous few
tropical green leaves ahead. Everything there was either hidden
or imagined, including the enemy: the Viet Cong. Every rustle
of leaf or snapping twig was a potential prelude to a burst
of gunfire and death. Twisting in my seat, listening to the
pounding of my heart, the fitfulness of my breathing, I was
so fearful, the tension and expectation so unbearable, I seriously
contemplated leaving the theatre during the viewing of Oliver
Stone’s Platoon, even though I knew that every
frame of the film was pretend -- shot and expertly sequenced
for my entertainment and edification.
I knew the soldiers
weren’t real soldiers but actors playing the part, just
as actors were playing the part of the enemy. I knew that
no one really got napalmed, raped, or blown up. And yet there
I was, in my purchased cinema seat, responding physically
and emotionally as if I were soldiering in the jungles of
Nam. Even more disturbing, that rational part of my brain
(the slippery seed in the watermelon) was sufficiently disengaged
to recognize that only two of my five senses were engaged:
sight and sound. I couldn’t taste, touch or smell the
war in Viet Nam and yet I was unable to prevent myself from
reacting as if the film were real.
Marshall McLuhan,
in The Gutenberg Galaxy, tells us that when people
from primitive cultures are exposed to cinema for the very
first time, they are mystified by the sudden disappearance
of a character that leaves the screen; they look past the
edge, wondering what happened to him. Such is cinema’s
unrivaled authority in being able to wholly engage the viewer,
and why ‘the magic of cinema’ remains the medium’s
most endearing association. Every viewer, without exception,
is knowingly tricked or wants to be tricked into regarding
as real an art form, that by design, offers but a simulacrum
of reality.
The experience
of reading is even more remarkable since none of the senses
is engaged except sight to read the words, which the mind
then transmutes into a plausibly connected series of images
that tell a story. When I was brought to tears over the fate
of Hans Castorp (from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain),
I knew Hans didn’t exist, that the only thing real going
on was myself reading in my chair, which meant my lachrymose
state was produced by the activity of the imagination.
So if we know
the book or film is unreal, but we remain unable and unwilling
to rationally respond to the unrealness, what are we forced
to conclude about the propensity (susceptibility) of the mind
to reify -- to regard as concrete -- works of the imagination?
Why has natural selection seen fit to preserve the kind of
intelligence we are that responds to events we imagine --
or events imagined for us -- as if they are real? The discomfited
George Steiner asks how is it that literature moves us to
respond to a stranger’s cry in the night but we will
not respond to that same cry in real life? Could it be that
the armchair academic, no matter how universally venerated,
is the last person to learn that the act of self-preservation
will always trump the power of literature? The latter is an
indulgence the former refuses and is what decisively moves
us to remove ourselves from harm’s way -- the vicinity
of the cry.
We are a species
disposed to creating mental worlds that are so vivid and persuasive
we physiologically respond as if they are factual, meaningful.
If there was a prototype humanoid without imaginative faculties,
it didn’t survive precisely because it was unable to
fabricate imagined alternative worlds that uniquely grant
the imaginer glimpses (pre-experience knowledge) of situations
that approximate or parallel real life ones.
Prior to defending
its one and only well, a tribe will be better prepared if
it has already imagined the various kinds of assaults that
are likely to occur, just as after reading about the downward
spiral unto death of a heroin addict, I’m less likely
to be tempted by the culture of heroin.
The evolutionary
paradigm that disposes us to emotionally identify with situations
described in film and literature (or works of the imagination)
is the built-in, no-consequences guarantee. This de facto
impunity-immunity clause frees the imagination to conjure
up hypothetical outcomes to possible real life situations,
which is exactly what nature teleologically intends.
Since every individual
life is limited by fear and finitude, we depend on the imagination
to bridge the gap between human curiosity and the infinite:
traversing the Gobi, fighting a war, denouncing war, being
a mother, a father, a great artist, a criminal, a rapist,
the raped, being rich, poor. I can imagine myself in any number
of bizarre, taboo, dangerous situations that I would shy away
from in real life for fear of the consequences or restrictions
imposed by my upbringing or social milieu. If it weren’t
for the imagination, the muscle that stirs our curiosity to
explore the world in its breathtaking diversity would soon
atrophy.
French writer
Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) describes courage
as the lack of imagination. Properly imagined, we would probably
refuse what are commemorated as courageous acts -- jumping
into icy waters to save a stranger from drowning, throwing
oneself on a live grenade for the sake of the platoon -- because
the imagination will have disclosed the possible life-threatening
consequences the ‘unmediated’ experience doesn’t
allow.
Our maturation
and evolution over the course of a lifetime would be severely
retarded if not for the imagination. Paul, one of the characters
in John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation,
explains, “how unbearable would the act of self-examination
be without the faculty of the imagination.” Without
the capability of imagining beyond, let’s say, the ignorance
we confess to on our better days, we will be less disposed
to admit to it and end up doing nothing about it.
Not all cultures
are equally friendly to the free play of the imagination.
Roland Barthes, in his essay, Lesson in Writing,
which is an unintended argument for and incitement to travel,
notes that Japanese culture is mistrustful of the effects
of purely imaginative works on especially the psyche of children.
In Japanese Bunraku (puppet) theatre, the audience can observe
the puppeteers above the stage manipulating the puppets as
well as the actors and crew at the wings of the stage responsible
for the dialogue, song and sound effects. Which makes Bunraku
the cinematic equivalent of the filming of the making of a
film. As theatre, it is anti-theatrical since it appeals to
reason by subverting the immediate impact of the experience
for the sake of its more sober epistemological certainties.
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COMMENTS
abrett3ab@gmail.com
He is beginning to get recognized as top ranked writer.
David Foster Wallace listed Steps among his five
underappreciated U.S. novels
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