The Terror of Normality in Jerzy Kosinski's "The Painted Bird"

THE TERROR OF NORMALITY IN JERZY KOSINSKI'S "THE PAINTED BIRD"
Author(s): JERZY JARNIEWICZ

Source: The Polish Review, Vol. 49, No. 1, JERZY KOSINSKI AND HIS FICTION (2004), pp. 641652
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences of
America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25779450 .

Accessed: 05/02/2015 19:24
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
University of Illinois Press and Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences of America are collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to The Polish Review.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 132.206.27.24 on Thu, 5 Feb 2015 19:24:51 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Polish Review, Vol. XLIX, No. 1, 2004:641-652

2004 The Polish InstituteofArts and Sciences ofAmerica
JERZYJARNIEWICZ
THE TERROR OF NORMALITY IN JERZYKOSINSKI'S

THE PAINTED BIRD
"You have made
it all apparent."
-Arthur
Miller,
the normality of
in a letter to Jerzy
Kosinski
The Painted Bird, originally published in 1965, was greeted as a

Holocaust
classic, another personal, autobiographical
testimony to be
included in bibliographies of Holocaust writing. However, other readers and
critics soon pointed out the novel's allegorical and mythological character,
seeing in Kosinski's work an attempt to break away from the dominating
realistic convention or even an example of postmodernist aesthetics which,

far from offering a documentary account of history, problematizes the issue
in the company of other
of representation. (Charles Russell saw Kosinski
as
writers
such
Thomas
Richard
Pynchon,
Brautigan, Ronald
postmodernist
Sukenick and Donald Barthelme,1 a critical context explored at greater
in his various studies of

length by Jerome Klinkowitz
if
As
in
of
this
support
authors.)
parabolic interpretation of
cover of the Bantam Books edition of The Painted Bird'bore
Jiingste Gericht. The
Hieronymus Bosch's
painting Das
contemporary
the novel, the
a fragment of
commentaries
in
the
kind
book
also
this
of
quoted
reading: Anai's Nin
encouraged
success
in
the
"the
novel's
entire
lifting
experience to the
emphasized
and
Luis
Bunuel observed
realms
of
knowledge,"
philosophic, mythological
that the novel moves beyond realism, being "a trip into the world of
nightmare and anxiety." Polish responses to the novel, at first almost
unanimously hostile, attacked it for the supposedly biased, distorted picture

of life inNazi-occupied
Poland, the charge clearly based on an assumption
of the documentary, autobiographical character of The Painted Bird. Critical
accused Kosinski of
works such as Joanna Siedlecka's book Czarnyptasio?
own
of the writer's life
the
details
revealed
and
his
biography
falsifying
during the war,
supposedly at odds with the events described
in the novel.
Self-Reflective Artifice in
Russell, "The Vault of Language:
Fiction
Studies 20.3 (Fall 1974):
Modern
American
Fiction,"
Contemporary
349-59.
2
Joanna Siedlecka, Czarnyptasior(Gdansk: Marabut, 1993).
Charles

642
The Polish Review
The story of themeandering, changing ways inwhich Kosinski's first novel

was received is itself an intriguing narrative to read.3
The problem with The Painted Bird is that it cannot be treated as an
nor as
example of a wholly fictional work which bears no relation to history,
cause
on
a
a blatant literary mystification
celebre of that
par with the
a documentary
nor
as
suspicious genre, Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments,
standing alongside Anne Frank's Diary. Stemming from the actual traumatic
relying on what Sue Vice calls the author's
experience of the Holocaust,
historical and ethnic authority (Kosinski was a Polish Jew who survived the
Holocaust), The Painted Bird is a hybrid, a bipolar novel, inwhich history is
interlocked with imagination, fact with fiction, autobiography with myth.
Interpretations which focus on only one side of these oppositions fail to do
literary endeavor.
justice toKosinski's
One of the strategies thatKosinski adopts in turning his Holocaust
experience into a mythological narrative and extending it beyond the limits
of realism is the suppression of specific historical and geographical details.

They have been deliberately reduced to open the possibilities of more
universal, less time-specific interpretations. The setting is somewhere in
Eastern Europe, or, as theAmerican publisher indicates, in the slightlymore
specific "Slav villages." (Indeed, the names of the peasants are Slavic rather
than, for example, Lithuanian.) The novel opens with a prologue which
provides the few details of historical and geographical background: "In the
firstweeks ofWorld War II, in the fall of 1939, a six-year-old boy from a
large city in Eastern Europe was sent by his parents, like thousands of other
children, to the shelter of a distant village." In this very first sentence of the
novel, preceding the narrative proper, the use of the indefinite article?"a
not merely determined by its grammatical function of

large city"?is
an
unknown
introducing
subject, but is a clear refusal on the author's part to
the
specify
geographical context of his work (a refusal especially evident
is given). It is also a
when seen against the exact age that the Boy
to
of
treat
the
Kosinski's
consequence
attempt
Boy's fate as representative?
he is "like thousands of other children"; hence, consistently through the

whole narrative, the Boy remains nameless. In thisHolocaust classic, whose
lack of specificity dismayed many readers, the term "holocaust" does not
appear (except for the publisher's
commentary on the cover), and the
3
Monika
"Some Ideological Aspects in the Polish

Adamczyk-Garbowska,
inAgnieszka Salska andMarek Jedlinski,
of
Kosinski's
Work,"
Jerzy
Reception
and Work at the Crossroads of Cultures (Lodz:
eds., Jerzy Kosinski: Man
1997), pp. 169-81, and James Park
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Lodzkiego,
Sloan, JerzyKosinski: A Biography (London: Penguin, 1997). A later revised
and expanded version of Adamczyk-Grabowska's
essay was published as "The
Return of the Troublesome Bird: JerzyKosinski and Polish-Jewish Relations,"
in Israel Bartal and Antony Polonsky, eds., POLIN: Studies in Polish Jewry,
Vol. 12 (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1999), pp. 284-94.

The Terror Of Normality In JerzyKosinski
's The Painted Bird
643
processes of the Final Solution, apart from the scenes with death trains, find
no direct representation. But even more significant than this absence of the
text of The Painted Bird is the
Holocaust
representations in the whole
war
to
in general in the novel's first
lack
of
references
surprising
specific
few chapters.
Although, as observed, in the introductory paragraph of The Painted
Bird Kosinski defines the time setting as that of World War

II, in the
war
five
in
is
Since
this
absent?
subsequent
markedly
part of the
chapters
novel the word "war"
is never even mentioned,
the reader without
knowledge of the prologue, which (being italicized and rendered in the third
person) clearly stands apart from the rest of the book, has the right to assume
that the horrifying repetitive incidents of murder, mutilation, and rape
in the novel take place at no particular moment in history. On the
it
contrary, may seem that the life of the peasants runs its normal course,
described
by great political turmoils. For one fourth of the novel's

narrative, the reader can look in vain for any mention of armies, soldiers,
partisans; there are no echoes of distant fighting heard. Not a single object of
military equipment appears, not even a rifle cartridge or a mine which,
undisturbed
implicitly invoking the raging war, will play such an important function in
one of the later chapters.
The reader's knowledge of the war spreading all over Europe,
evoked in the initial paragraph of The Painted Bird, has been deliberately,
though unobtrusively suspended. Only upon a careful reading of the imagery
in the first few chapters of the novel can one recognize distant echoes of the
ongoing processes of genocide; war is not represented, nor even mentioned,
but rather suggested by a series of menacing images of violence that form a
consistent metaphoric structure. The narrative offers numerous examples of
such potentially metaphoric images?for example, the squirrel burnt alive by
the boys; Malta's dead body circled by flames in her burning hut that turned
into "a furnace" (ll)5; or Olga's burning the wound of a child with a
gangrenous leg as the smell of charred flesh fills the room. All these images
can be read as powerful though indirect evocations of the Holocaust,
the
It is
in Kosinski's
novel remains anonymous.
historical tragedy which
significant that these scenes of cruelty and suffering, as well as other
ominous images such as "the charred smell" that thewind "carried over the
fields" (13) and "a narrow thread of smoke" (13) drifting upward into the
sky, evoke the Holocaust specifically, not violence or war in general, since
4
Fragments of this article appeared inmy paper, "War and the Absence of
War," delivered during the conference on "JerzyKosinski: Man andWork at the
Crossroads of Cultures" at theUniversity of Lodz in 1995, and published in the
proceedings.
5
All quotations are from The Painted Bird (New York: Bantam Books, 1981).
Subsequent references to this edition will be made by page number in the text.

644
The Polish Review
they all involve burning and scorching, and therefore refer directly to the
etymological meaning of "holocaust" as destruction by fire. In this way,
Kosinski establishes an implicit parallel between his imagery, set outside the
war context, and the unnamed horrors of the Holocaust. Though the Boy
survives all the ordeals, his possible fate as a Jew inNazi-occupied
Poland is
to which he compares himself. In
that
theBoy "pays with the death of
argues
Voicing
animal surrogates, closely identified with him."6 When he is captured and
drawn in a cart by the partisans, he imagines himself to be a squirrel. And
though for the Boy, in all his naivete, this image connotes freedom, it also
recalls, ironically, the death of the animal which the village boys burnt alive.
The narrative in the first chapters of the novel is therefore not free
from scenes of brutality and cruelty, though paradoxically war does not
reflected in the deaths of the animals
the Void, Sara Horowitz
mark its presence there. It might be suggested that the theme of the
Holocaust has been "translated" into these scenes of local horrors,7 that there
is a metaphorical correspondence between the atrocities of which the Boy is
a victim and/or an eyewitness and the actual processes of the Holocaust.

This correspondence, traced in the proliferation of the images of burning, is
also invoked in the motivation of those who commit the violence, the
motivation which is clearly racist. The Boy suffers from cruel persecutions
in the villages he visits because of his racial otherness, because he is

"painted" as an outsider of different complexion: while "the local peasants,
isolated and inbred,were fair-skinned with blond hair and blue or gray eyes,
the boy was olive-skinned, dark-haired and black-eyed" (2). The peasants'
hatred of the Other,
the hatred which
is neither
"spontaneous"
institutionalized nor ideological, does not differ from the racism that
underlies theNazi ideology and the policy of theEndlosung.
In fact, itmay
constitute its deep substratum.

And yet in the firstpart of the novel, which builds up theworld of
horror outside the war context, one also finds scenes of violence which do
not stem from the peasants' racism or their unconscious fear and hatred of
the Other. The cruelty with which the village boys torture and kill the
squirrel suggests itsutterly gratuitous character. In Chapter 4, themiller who

blinds the ploughboy with a spoon in one of the novel's most drastic scenes
does so in a fitof jealousy. His act has no racist, ideological motivation; it is
not conditioned by the raging Nazi terror,nor inspired by anarchy loosed by
thewar, nor spurred by its unleashing of genocidal forces?it seems totally
ahistorical. In Chapter 5, the story of the atrocious rape and murder
committed on Stupid Ludmila again shows no connection with the raging
6
Cited in Sue Vice, Holocaust Fiction (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 187.
7
For a discussion of "translated" terms inHolocaust literature,see Sue Vice and
also Lawrence Langer, The Holocaust
and the Literary Imagination (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

The Terror Of Normality In JerzyKosinski

war
's The Painted Bird
645
the demons that it awoke in the otherwise apparently decent

is an outburst of collective sadism which seems to inhabit
the human psyche, irrespective of historical circumstances.
The Boy suffers pain and humiliation not because the peasants are
afraid of the tough German repressive measures. The carpenter's cruelty and
Garbos's
sadism are gratuitous, independent of the historical moment in
and
communities?it
the narrative takes place; the gangs of juvenile toughs bullying the
not because of the war, but are parallel to it. The racism which
exist
Boy
motivates the peasants' cruelty to the Boy does not stem from the anti
Semitic policy of theNazis, but is of local breeding. Surprisingly, the Boy
suffers at the hands of "normal" individuals and falls victim to their personal
which
fears and frustrations; he is much less threatened by the well-organized,

institutional forces responsible for the conduct of thewar.
It is a sign of Kosinski's
literary skill that he conducts his narrative
in such a way that, in the course of the novel, war emerges gradually, first as
a meaningful, menacing absence, then as a distant element of the novel's
background, before finally being named and foregrounded. Its carefully
prepared, gradual emergence from the scenes describing the peasants'
normal life in villages somewhere at the periphery, far away from the
horrors of history, constitutes the theme of continuity between normal life

to Kosinski's
and the state of war. Due
strategy of eliminating any
references to war, however indirect or oblique, while at the same time
multiplying the scenes of violence, the reader is gradually introduced to the
world of horror, so when war eventually enters the scene the situation does
not alter in any significant way. There is no caesura between the state of
everyday normality and the state of emergency, no evident break between
the atrocities happening in normal life and those inspired by war.
The firstexplicit signals of war appear no sooner than inChapter 6,
when the Boy takes his revenge on the carpenter, whom he succeeds in
luring away to an abandoned military bunker full of rats by making use of
local stories about partisans hiding their war trophies and supplies there.
War itself remains absent, unrepresented; yet war narratives, stories about
instruments of the Boy's
is capable of
revenge. War
partisans, become
as
a
a
in
narrative.
The next
its
task
absentia,
sign,
deadly
performing
scene
war
enters
of the
the
with
its
is
the
first
where
machinery
chapter
Boy's drama. The word "Germans" appears for the first time in the narrative
(apart from the prologue) when drunken peasants discuss the threat that "the
Gypsy brat" may constitute to the village. Yet surprisingly enough, it is not
the occupying German troops who remind the Boy of the ongoing war and
signify death, but "mysterious mounted guests, who carried rifles and
revolvers" (69). This mysteriousness of the partisans makes them?in the
inhabited by
eyes of the Boy?a
part of the world of the half-real woods
same
At
the
time, however,
wolves, werewolves, ogres, demons, and ghouls.
by virtue of their language and their nationality, the partisans belong to the

646
The Polish Review
world of the villages which they brutally ransack rather than to theworld of
foreign invaders, who are busy implementing the Final Solution. Unlike the
Boy, and unlike theGermans, the partisans are locals, insiders. It is into their
hands that the Boy falls, after which the partisans decide to deliver him to
the German
to appease the commander of the outpost. This

by their fear that the peasants may be persecuted and
the village burnt for giving shelter to a single Gypsy bastard. The Boy is thus
handed over to a German officer in a scene of a nearly ritualistic exchange,
decision
authorities
ismotivated
which emphasizes the continuity between the two parties of evil. In the eyes
of the Boy, peasants, partisans and Germans join forces in their attempts to
destroy him. In a characteristic gesture of social mimicry, when a young
Nazi officer appears and the German soldiers, straightening their uniforms,
stand at attention, the peasants do the same: they "tried to imitate the
soldiers and also drew themselves up servilely" (73). The Boy is then
as if the peasants were not handing over a human being to the
authorities, but trying to sell cattle: the officer "looked intomy eyes while
pulling back my lids, and inspected the scars on my knees and calves" (73).
evaluated
And yet, contrary to expectations, it is a German soldier who sets the Boy
free. The Nazis,
whose
should be the most explicit
very presence
a
act
in
of
that
somehow obliterates the nature
war,
way
unequivocal signal
of that very war.
his release, while waiting for what might have seemed an

inevitable execution, the Boy starts recollecting the first days of the war,
trying to imagine themany ways there are of dying. His memory recreates
the images of the aftermath of a bombing in his native city, which is
recollected in a series of images depicting the annihilation not of human
Before
beings but of inanimate objects. The long sequence of images builds up to

one of themost memorable metaphors in the novel, worth quoting in full:
I saw the brown surfaces of doors, ceilings, walls with the
pictures still clinging desperately to them, all falling into
the void. Like an avalanche rushing to the street came
grand pianos opening and closing their lids in
flight, obese, clumsy armchairs, skittering stools and
hassocks. They were chased by chandeliers that were
majestic
falling apartwith shrillcries, by polished kitchenpots,
kettles, and sparkling aluminum chamber pots. Pages torn

out of gutted books fell down, flapping like flocks of scared
birds.
tore themselves
and
away
slowly
from
their
themselves
deliberately
pipes,
entwining
in the knots and scrolls of banisters and railings
magically
and rain gutters. (75)
War
Bathtubs
is remembered by the Boy as the destruction of household

disturbed by the complete silence about human casualties
Readers

goods.
in this
The Terror Of Normality In JerzyKosinski's
The Painted Bird_647
recollection might rightly inquire about the victims of the bombing. It is only
after the apocalypse of the trivia that the reader learns about dead human
bodies tossed around the ruins of the building. This is another case of
Kosinski's
strategy of translating: human tragedy is represented in a
translated form of images that depict the destruction of objects, just as the
genocide of the absent war is represented in a translated form as violence in
normal communities of Eastern European peasants.8 Czeslaw Milosz's
poem
"A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto," written in immediate response to
the outbreak of the Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising, makes use of a similar,
dehumanized description of the destruction of thewhole Jewish community

inWarsaw,
description which may be interpreted as an instance of the
of
translation?from
losses to the
strategy
representing the human
the
of
ruination
of
the
world
of
representation
objects:
It has begun: the tearing, the trampling on silks,
It has begun: the breaking of glass, wood, copper, nickel,
silver, foam,
Of gypsum, iron sheets, violin strings, trumpets, leaves,
balls crystals.[...]
Torn is paper, rubber, linen, leather, flax,

Fibre, fabrics, cellulose, snakeskin, wire.
The roof and thewall collapse in flame and heat seizes the
foundations.9
has been argued, in The Painted Bird Kosinski represents the
indirectly by means of implied correspondence between his
it also by
literary images and external historical facts. But he does
juxtaposition, when two seemingly different images follow one another. The
Boy's image of the remembered war as the destruction of household goods
during an air raid is supplemented in his mind by another cruel memory, that
of a differentway of dying, which has nothing to do with war: a brutal fight
As
Holocaust
between two peasants at a reception. The difference between the two types
of death is only in degree; the second slaughter is, the Boy remarks, less
spectacular only than the grand spectacle of the air raid.
narrative is thus a carefully organized metaphorical
Kosinski's
structure, a deliberate choice on the author's part to present war as something
identical with the so-called normal, everyday life led by
essentially
communities. War in the novel, especially in itsfirst part, has been radically
and intentionally marginalized, to the point of allowing the reader to forget
8
Vice, p. 68.
9
"A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto," translated by Peter Dale Scott and
inMilosz's Postwar Polish Poetry, Third Expanded Edition
Czeslaw Milosz,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 75.

648
The Polish Review
about it, and yet the book depicts anything but a peaceful world. The
narrative is a real catalogue of atrocities and horrors, a detailed index of
various forms of violence and suffering. The atrocities which the Boy
experiences, either as a victim or as a witness, are no smaller because of the
absence of war. Indeed, the actual arrival of the war machinery onto the
scene of the novel does not make much difference. On the contrary, it can
mean deliverance and relief to the Boy, as in the case of theGerman soldier
who disobeyed the orders to kill him or of the SS officer who handed him
over to a priest.
In this novel about the persecutions of an outsider, the Other, the

also consistently emphasizes
different one, Kosinski
another type of
on
members
the
that
is
between
of the same
aggression:
struggle
going
one
within
The
clear-cut
division
between
fact,
community?in
community.
the invader and the invaded, which is posited by the notions of war and
occupied territories, is overshadowed by the brutal fight within the same

social group. The image of rats murdering each other in a military bunker
is linked with other scenes of violence
epitomizes this theme, which
performed within communities, suggesting perhaps that evil impulses spring
not from the external, foreign world, but from the inside. The same function
is played by the recurrent episodes with partisans who "fought each other"
(69). This theme, however, culminates after the proper regular war is over in
a scene of a bloody fight,when, as Kosinski writes, "brother fought against
brother, fathers swung axes against sons in front of their mothers. An
invisible force divided people, split families, addled brains" (182). This
aggression is not caused by the appearance of an intruder of a different
an imagined threat
of his otherness?constitutes
complexion, who?because
to the integrityand uniformity of a group, undermines its clear-cut divisions
and certainties, and serves as the projection of their aggressions.
Kosinski's
vision of war as the extension of normality which I see
as themain theme of The Painted Bird recalls the classical definition of war
given by Claus von Clausewitz, a Prussian writer: according to Clausewitz,

war is the continuation of politics performed by differentmeans.10 As I have
tried to demonstrate, war inKosinski's novel is a continuation of normality,
yet one could repeat here Clausewitz's definition verbatim and claim that in
The Painted Bird'war is precisely a continuation of politics, ifby politics one
understands processes which govern the life of a community, affect public
affairs, and pertain to such institutions as, for example, property, the family,
education, class structure, religion, individual rights, duties, and obligations.
of the outsiders, the compulsive need to persecute and eliminate

who
is different, is a rule which governs the peasant communities in
anyone
which the Boy tries to find shelter. The same rules govern the community at
war as they do at peace. The meaningful absence of war inKosinski's novel
Distrust
10
See also Jerzy Jarniewicz, "Zniewolenie historia," Odra 2/1990.

The Terror Of Normality In JerzyKosinski's
seems
to imply that what happened half a century ago in Europe was

terrifyingand yet absurdly "normal," since itwas a realization of the supra
historical laws of social life,which always call for the killing of any painted
bird.
In interpreting the novel as an allegorical depiction of social
mechanisms which are at work in all communities, whether at war or at

peace, one has to remember that The Painted Bird is a book written by a
professional sociologist. The novel can then be interpreted not so much as a
portrait of an archetypal child who passes through brutal initiation rites but
as a portrait of a social community, which functions as a collective actor in
portrait is a construction based
from various
sociological,
sources, a selection made to illustrate
the great theater of cruelty. This sociological

on
selected material
taken
carefully
ethnographical, and anthropological

the thesis thatwar is an extension of normal social life.
And yet, in his attempt to universalize the subject, Kosinski goes
even furtherand traces the laws of cruelty also in nature, changing the social
classification of the phenomenon of evil into a cosmic one. Most of the
scenes of physical cruelty which the Boy witnesses, or takes part in, have
their parallels in the world of nature. Kosinski himself, in his Notes of the
Author on The Painted Bird, writes about the behavioral and psychological
analogy between people and animals: "A forceful example is the dinner
scene at themiller's, when the two cats are used to evoke the heightened air
of sexual tension."11 Symptomatically, the first scene of aggression that the
novel relates is the scene of violence in the world of nature: the hawk
swooping down on a defenseless pigeon, tearing it apart. In Chapter 5, the
Boy tells a story about storkswhich kill a faithless hen for bearing a gosling.
It is no coincidence that this story comes immediately after the story of the
jealous miller and his faithless wife. "The coital seizure of dogs," Kosinski
explained in Notes,
"provides an expanded parallel to the situation of
Rainbow and the Jewish girl."12 In numerous images in the novel, Kosinski
juxtaposes the natural and the human, as if implying that the two essentially
the alarmed voices of dogs and
do not differ: "Behind me I heard ...
people" (162); "I could hear vague voices, human or animal" (26); the comet
"was indispensable protection against dogs and people" (28). Even theworld
of plants is subject to the same cosmic law of cruelty: "In the undergrowth,
where careless birds once thrashed, thewind ruthlessly scourged and sheared
the gray shagginess of the tall thistles and shifted the rotting stalks of potato
plants from place to place" (52). War frequently emerges in the images of
nature which are rendered inmilitary terms, such as in "the barricades of
tangled weeds"
(30).
In this, The Painted Bird
11
JerzyKosinski, Passing By: Selected Essays,
House, 1992), p. 210.
12
Kosinski, Passing By, p. 211.
seems to turn away from
1960-1991 (New York: Random

650
The Polish Review
history and autobiography, offering instead its own metaphysics of evil, an

evil seemingly depoliticized and dehistoricized.
Kosinski's
his questioning of the
attempts at universalization,
uniqueness of atrocities committed during theWorld War II, has important
Ifwar is nothing
bearing on the interpretation of the theme of theHolocaust.
more
than an extension of social normality, then the Holocaust

also turns
into an example of the terror that lies dormant inmankind and from time to
time emerges in sinister manifestations. With war deprived of its historical
serves either as a background in a narrative about
dimension, theHolocaust
the sociological
law of hate or as a metaphorized
example of universal,
can
not only from
evil.
This
view
of
the
Holocaust
be
deduced
metaphysical
the indirectness with which Kosinski handled the theme of war in The
Painted Bird. It re-emerges in an explicit form in The Hermit of 69th Street,
to make it include the

where Kosinski
is ready to redefine the Holocaust
mass sufferings of other nations?Gypsies,
Poles
Russians,
(524).
Kosinski's
the Holocaust
be
may
strategies to universalize
considered part of his attempt to get rid of historical bondage: during his first
visit to Poland in 1989, when asked at a meeting at theUniversity of Lodz
whether themythological vision can be used in relation to the events which
are historical and still remembered, Kosinski answered briskly that he did
not want to be constrained by history. Such an attitude, however inconsistent
it might
be
in Kosinski's
public pronouncements, provoked ambivalent

reactions. His publicly declared dismissal of history, his unabashed disregard
of the unique character of the historical experience during the lastworld war,
was
from the
interpreted by some as a daring yet successful move
documentary towards the parabolic and the mythical, by others as an
unacceptable mystification of the past.
the former one finds Arthur Miller, who praised The
Among
Painted Birds
attempt to question the uniqueness of the Nazi terror. In a
letter to the author, reprinted in an American edition of the book, Miller
writes about it explicitly: "To me, theNazi experience is the key one of this
century?they merely carried to the final extreme what otherwise lies within
so-called normal social existence and normal man. You have made
the
normality of it all apparent." Miller's words seem to characterize best the
aim of the narrative method employed by Kosinski which foregrounds the
continuity between the laws (or lawlessness) of war and the laws (or
lawlessness) of normal life in remote peasant communities hardly affected
by the great historical cataclysm.

On the other hand, in his article written in response to James Park
Sloan's essay in The New Yorker, Henryk Grynberg questions the validity
of all claims to label The Painted Bird a Holocaust
classic.13 Indeed, as
13
Henryk Grynberg, "A New Look at The Painted Bird," To Be Quarterly 5-6
(1995), p. 108.

The Terror Of Normality In JerzvKosinski's
are hardly present in

already discussed, direct references to the Holocaust
Kosinski's narrative. The Boy is said to look like a Gypsy or a Jew (in that
particular order); in the novel he is often identified only as a Gypsy.
Presumably his parents had to go into hiding because of their prewar anti
Nazi activities and not because theywanted to escape the fate of European
Jews. By referring to these and other aspects of the novel, Grynberg tries to
prove thatKosinski did not intend towrite "a book on theHolocaust." While
intention must remain a matter of conjecture, it is true that he
often expressed his doubts about monumentalizing
theHolocaust, an attitude
which to him "diminished, at least in the popular mind, the memory and
knowledge of cultural contributions made to civilization by both the Jewish
and the State of Israel."14 Grynberg observes that the Boy's
Diaspora
predicaments would have been exactly the same had the Holocaust never
Kosinski's
happened. "The wartime background of The Painted Bird might just as well
have been World War I, or the Russian Civil War, or a war in theMiddle
Ages."15 This is exactly what Kosinski was trying to do in The Painted Bird,
with Bosch on its cover and BunuePs
commentary: and yet Kosinski's
method does not stand for thewriter's evasion of the historical theme, but for
the imaginative, though controversial, "translation" of the theme into

translation which has not erased the
metaphorical, mythological
images?a
history that generated thework and underlies it.
In conclusion, it should be said that this relation between history
and its allegorical translation is far from being stable or defined. Recently,
what might have been interpreted as Kosinski's poetics of intensification, his
allegorical, parabolic mode, turned out to be closer to historical truth.With

it is hard now to refuse to
the publication of Jan Gross's Neighbors,16
the novel's
in
acknowledge
documentary
validity. What
happened
Jedwabne?the
burning alive of the whole population of the local Jews by
to provide specific
their "normal" Polish neighbors in July 1941?seems
historical grounding for the novel's narrative. Since Gross broke the silence
over the Jedwabne massacre, ithas become more and more difficult to read
Kosinski's
novel only as a poetic vision. What in The Painted Bird seemed
to be an almost Sadean sounding of the darkest recesses of human psyche
proved to have had its realizations in actual history. History entered and
annexed the world of the novel, stripping its horrors of the safety layer of
started a wide
oneiric imagination. In Poland, the publication ofNeighbors
or
on
Polish-Jewish
of
the
hitherto
debate
repressed aspects
mystified
public
relations, resulting in the dismantling of the myth of Polish
could have been expected that,with this knowledge, Polish
14
Passing By, p. 157.
15
p. 108.
Grynberg,
16
Jan Gross, Sqsiedzi:
Historia
zaglady
zydowskiego
innocence.
miasteczka
Pogranicze, 2000).

It
critics would
(Sejny:
652
The Polish Review
return to The Painted Bird to revalue their opinions about its fictionality.
brief
However, no such thing happened; apart from Tomasz Mirkowicz's
in his introduction to Kosinski's
observations
"Obecnosc
podzielona"
(reprinted in this issue), the novel has not been invoked in the Jedwabne
debate.
The history of the reception of the novel has gone through several
stages. First, in view of Kosinski's own accounts of his life, itwas read as an
autobiographical
testimony. Then, especially after the revelations of his
wartime experience in Polish villages, interpreters tended to treat it as an
the public debate on Jedwabne provides an
imaginative allegory. Now
important argument for not ignoring the historical and realistic grounding of
this still disturbing, highly ambiguous work.


The Terror of Normality in Jerzy Kosinski's "The Painted Bird"

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Terror of Normality in Jerzy Kosinski's "The Painted Bird"

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

THE TERROR OF NORMALITY IN JERZY KOSINSKI'S "THE PAINTED BIRD"

Author(s): JERZY JARNIEWICZ

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25779450 .

This content downloaded from 132.206.27.24 on Thu, 5 Feb 2015 19:24:51 PM

The Polish Review, Vol. XLIX, No. 1, 2004:641-652