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 JARNIEWICZSource: The Polish Review, Vol. 49, No. 1, JERZY KOSINSKI AND HIS FICTION (2004), pp. 641-652Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences ofAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25779450 .Accessed: 05/02/2015 19:24

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The Polish Review, Vol. XLIX, No. 1, 2004:641-652 ? 2004 The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America

JERZY JARNIEWICZ

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

"You have made the normality of it all apparent." -Arthur Miller, 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 of representation. (Charles Russell saw Kosinski in the company of other

postmodernist writers such as Thomas Pynchon, Richard Brautigan, Ronald Sukenick and Donald Barthelme,1 a critical context explored at greater length by Jerome Klinkowitz in his various studies of contemporary authors.) As if in support of this parabolic interpretation of the novel, the cover of the Bantam Books edition of The Painted Bird'bore a fragment of

Hieronymus Bosch's painting Das Jiingste Gericht. The commentaries

quoted in the book also encouraged this kind of reading: Anai's Nin

emphasized the novel's success in lifting "the entire experience to the

philosophic, mythological realms of knowledge," and Luis Bunuel observed 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 in Nazi-occupied Poland, the charge clearly based on an assumption of the documentary, autobiographical character of The Painted Bird. Critical works such as Joanna Siedlecka's book Czarnyptasio? accused Kosinski of

falsifying his own biography and revealed the details of the writer's life

during the war, supposedly at odds with the events described in the novel.

1 Charles Russell, "The Vault of Language: Self-Reflective Artifice in

Contemporary American Fiction," Modern Fiction Studies 20.3 (Fall 1974): 349-59. 2 Joanna Siedlecka, Czarnyptasior(Gdansk: Marabut, 1993).


642 The Polish Review

The story of the meandering, changing ways in which 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

example of a wholly fictional work which bears no relation to history, nor as a blatant literary mystification on a par with the cause celebre of that

suspicious genre, Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments, nor as a documentary standing alongside Anne Frank's Diary. Stemming from the actual traumatic

experience of the Holocaust, relying on what Sue Vice calls the author's historical and ethnic authority (Kosinski was a Polish Jew who survived the

Holocaust), The Painted Bird is a hybrid, a bipolar novel, in which history is interlocked with imagination, fact with fiction, autobiography with myth. Interpretations which focus on only one side of these oppositions fail to do

justice to Kosinski's literary endeavor. One of the strategies that Kosinski 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 the American publisher indicates, in the slightly more

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 first weeks of World 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

large city"?is not merely determined by its grammatical function of

introducing an unknown subject, but is a clear refusal on the author's part to

specify the geographical context of his work (a refusal especially evident when seen against the exact age that the Boy is given). It is also a

consequence of Kosinski's attempt to treat the Boy's fate as representative? he is "like thousands of other children"; hence, consistently through the whole narrative, the Boy remains nameless. In this Holocaust 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 Adamczyk-Garbowska, "Some Ideological Aspects in the Polish

Reception of Jerzy Kosinski's Work," in Agnieszka Salska and Marek Jedlinski, eds., Jerzy Kosinski: Man and Work at the Crossroads of Cultures (Lodz:

Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Lodzkiego, 1997), pp. 169-81, and James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: 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: Jerzy Kosinski 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 Jerzy Kosinski '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 Holocaust representations in the whole text of The Painted Bird is the

surprising lack of specific references to war in general in the novel's first 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

subsequent five chapters war is markedly absent? Since in this part of the 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 described in the novel take place at no particular moment in history. On the

contrary, it may seem that the life of the peasants runs its normal course, undisturbed 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, 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 historical tragedy which in Kosinski's novel remains anonymous. It is

significant that these scenes of cruelty and suffering, as well as other ominous images such as "the charred smell" that the wind "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 in my paper, "War and the Absence of

War," delivered during the conference on "Jerzy Kosinski: Man and Work at the Crossroads of Cultures" at the University 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.



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 in Nazi-occupied Poland is reflected in the deaths of the animals to which he compares himself. In

Voicing the Void, Sara Horowitz argues that the Boy "pays with the death of 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 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' "spontaneous" hatred of the Other, the hatred which is neither institutionalized nor ideological, does not differ from the racism that underlies the Nazi ideology and the policy of the Endlosung. In fact, it may constitute its deep substratum.

And yet in the first part of the novel, which builds up the world 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 its utterly gratuitous character. In Chapter 4, the miller who blinds the ploughboy with a spoon in one of the novel's most drastic scenes does so in a fit of jealousy. His act has no racist, ideological motivation; it is not conditioned by the raging Nazi terror, nor inspired by anarchy loosed by the war, 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 in Holocaust 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 Jerzy Kosinski 's The Painted Bird 645

war and the demons that it awoke in the otherwise apparently decent communities?it 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 which the narrative takes place; the gangs of juvenile toughs bullying the

Boy exist not because of the war, but are parallel to it. The racism which motivates the peasants' cruelty to the Boy does not stem from the anti Semitic policy of the Nazis, but is of local breeding. Surprisingly, the Boy suffers at the hands of "normal" individuals and falls victim to their personal fears and frustrations; he is much less threatened by the well-organized, institutional forces responsible for the conduct of the war.

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 and the state of war. Due to Kosinski's 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 first explicit signals of war appear no sooner than in Chapter 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

partisans, become instruments of the Boy's revenge. War is capable of

performing its deadly task in absentia, as a sign, a narrative. The next

chapter is the first where war with its machinery enters the scene of the

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

eyes of the Boy?a part of the world of the half-real woods inhabited by wolves, werewolves, ogres, demons, and ghouls. At the same time, however, by virtue of their language and their nationality, the partisans belong to the



world of the villages which they brutally ransack rather than to the world of

foreign invaders, who are busy implementing the Final Solution. Unlike the

Boy, and unlike the Germans, 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 authorities to appease the commander of the outpost. This decision is motivated 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, 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 evaluated as if the peasants were not handing over a human being to the authorities, but trying to sell cattle: the officer "looked into my eyes while

pulling back my lids, and inspected the scars on my knees and calves" (73). And yet, contrary to expectations, it is a German soldier who sets the Boy free. The Nazis, whose very presence should be the most explicit unequivocal signal of war, act in a way that somehow obliterates the nature of that very war.

Before 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 the many 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

beings but of inanimate objects. The long sequence of images builds up to one of the most 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

majestic grand pianos opening and closing their lids in

flight, obese, clumsy armchairs, skittering stools and hassocks. They were chased by chandeliers that were

falling apart with shrill cries, by polished kitchen pots, kettles, and sparkling aluminum chamber pots. Pages torn out of gutted books fell down, flapping like flocks of scared birds. Bathtubs tore themselves away slowly and

deliberately from their pipes, entwining themselves

magically in the knots and scrolls of banisters and railings and rain gutters. (75)

War is remembered by the Boy as the destruction of household goods. Readers disturbed by the complete silence about human casualties in this


The Terror Of Normality In Jerzy Kosinski'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 the whole Jewish community in Warsaw, description which may be interpreted as an instance of the

strategy of translation?from representing the human losses to the

representation of the ruination of the world of 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 the wall collapse in flame and heat seizes the foundations.9

As has been argued, in The Painted Bird Kosinski represents the Holocaust indirectly by means of implied correspondence between his

literary images and external historical facts. But he does it also by 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 different way of dying, which has nothing to do with war: a brutal fight 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. Kosinski's narrative is thus a carefully organized metaphorical

structure, a deliberate choice on the author's part to present war as something essentially identical with the so-called normal, everyday life led by communities. War in the novel, especially in its first 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

Czeslaw Milosz, in Milosz's Postwar Polish Poetry, Third Expanded Edition

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 75.



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 the German 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 different one, Kosinski also consistently emphasizes another type of

aggression: the struggle that is going on between members of the same

community?in fact, within one community. The clear-cut division between 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

epitomizes this theme, which is linked with other scenes of violence

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

complexion, who?because of his otherness?constitutes an imagined threat to the integrity and 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 the main 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 different means.10 As I have tried to demonstrate, war in Kosinski'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, if by 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. Distrust of the outsiders, the compulsive need to persecute and eliminate anyone who is different, is a rule which governs the peasant communities in 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 in Kosinski's novel

10 See also Jerzy Jarniewicz, "Zniewolenie historia," Odra 2/1990.


The Terror Of Normality In Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird_649

seems to imply that what happened half a century ago in Europe was

terrifying and yet absurdly "normal," since it was 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 the great theater of cruelty. This sociological portrait is a construction based on carefully selected material taken from various sociological, ethnographical, and anthropological sources, a selection made to illustrate the thesis that war is an extension of normal social life.

And yet, in his attempt to universalize the subject, Kosinski goes even further and 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 the miller'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 storks which 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 do not differ: "Behind me I heard ... the alarmed voices of dogs and

people" (162); "I could hear vague voices, human or animal" (26); the comet "was indispensable protection against dogs and people" (28). Even the world of plants is subject to the same cosmic law of cruelty: "In the undergrowth, where careless birds once thrashed, the wind 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 in military terms, such as in "the barricades of

tangled weeds" (30). In this, The Painted Bird seems to turn away from

11 Jerzy Kosinski, Passing By: Selected Essays, 1960-1991 (New York: Random

House, 1992), p. 210. 12 Kosinski, Passing By, p. 211.



history and autobiography, offering instead its own metaphysics of evil, an evil seemingly depoliticized and dehistoricized.

Kosinski's attempts at universalization, his questioning of the

uniqueness of atrocities committed during the World War II, has important bearing on the interpretation of the theme of the Holocaust. If war is nothing more than an extension of social normality, then the Holocaust also turns into an example of the terror that lies dormant in mankind and from time to time emerges in sinister manifestations. With war deprived of its historical

dimension, the Holocaust serves either as a background in a narrative about the sociological law of hate or as a metaphorized example of universal,

metaphysical evil. This view of the Holocaust can be deduced not only from 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, where Kosinski is ready to redefine the Holocaust to make it include the mass sufferings of other nations?Gypsies, Russians, Poles (524).

Kosinski's strategies to universalize the Holocaust may be 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 the University of Lodz whether the mythological 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 last world war, was interpreted by some as a daring yet successful move from the

documentary towards the parabolic and the mythical, by others as an

unacceptable mystification of the past. Among the former one finds Arthur Miller, who praised The

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, the Nazi 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 Jerzv Kosinski's The Painted Bird_651

already discussed, direct references to the Holocaust are hardly present in 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 they wanted to escape the fate of European Jews. By referring to these and other aspects of the novel, Grynberg tries to

prove that Kosinski did not intend to write "a book on the Holocaust." While Kosinski's intention must remain a matter of conjecture, it is true that he often expressed his doubts about monumentalizing the Holocaust, 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

Diaspora and the State of Israel."14 Grynberg observes that the Boy's predicaments would have been exactly the same had the Holocaust never

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 the Middle

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 the writer's evasion of the historical theme, but for the imaginative, though controversial, "translation" of the theme into

metaphorical, mythological images?a translation which has not erased the

history that generated the work 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 the publication of Jan Gross's Neighbors,16 it is hard now to refuse to

acknowledge the novel's documentary validity. What happened in Jedwabne?the burning alive of the whole population of the local Jews by their "normal" Polish neighbors in July 1941?seems to provide specific historical grounding for the novel's narrative. Since Gross broke the silence over the Jedwabne massacre, it has 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 oneiric imagination. In Poland, the publication of Neighbors started a wide

public debate on the hitherto mystified or repressed aspects of Polish-Jewish

relations, resulting in the dismantling of the myth of Polish innocence. It could have been expected that, with this knowledge, Polish critics would

14 Passing By, p. 157. 15 Grynberg, p. 108. 16 Jan Gross, Sqsiedzi: Historia zaglady zydowskiego miasteczka (Sejny:

Pogranicze, 2000).



return to The Painted Bird to revalue their opinions about its fictionality. However, no such thing happened; apart from Tomasz Mirkowicz's brief observations in his introduction to Kosinski's "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, it was read as an

autobiographical testimony. Then, especially after the revelations of his wartime experience in Polish villages, interpreters tended to treat it as an

imaginative allegory. Now the public debate on Jedwabne provides an

important argument for not ignoring the historical and realistic grounding of this still disturbing, highly ambiguous work.


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

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