Being There: Kosinski’s Reality

Mankind’s vivid dreams and fears occupy a realm of fleeting abstraction known only in the mind. Ideas and emotions – engulfing thoughts, passionate desires, and dark secrets – cannot be touched or smelled or tasted; they cannot be set down in a dresser drawer or studied with magnifying glasses. Ideas are but ephemeral concepts dancing naked in our psyche, blissfully disconnected from a tangible reality. The five senses work to connect the brain’s helpless abstraction to the world’s cold sterile reality; thus, ideas are important not in-and-of themselves, but as means of influencing and interpreting the perceived world. Images and words, inherently limited in scope and narrow in dimension, are powerful and dangerous vehicles of reality distortion: they become mere projections of one’s intellectual landscape, rather than accurate representation of the world. Polish writer Jerzy Kosinski, in his iconoclastic novel Being There, examines the delicate relationship between the mind, the media and reality, famously contending that “life is state of mind” predicated on abstract expectation.

Chance, the novel’s existential antihero, is a simple man of simple intent. He tends to a garden from within mansion walls he has never set foot beyond and he watches television to learn of a society he has no interest in inhabiting. He has no family, no true name, and indeed no intellect by which to protest his servility. He is a prisoner ignorant of his chains. He is a man without a self.

However, like the plants within his garden, Chance is firmly rooted in existence. Awareness of eventual annihilation is an ever-present fact of human life; it motivates actions and limits intentions – it shapes life absolutely. However, Chance has no conception of his own self and thus is blissfully unaware of his own imminent destruction. Instead, like a plant, he grows from within himself, unphased by his own precarious position within the inevitable cogs of the universe, yet warmly content with his place in the garden. “Plants were like people; they need care to live, to survive their diseases, and to die peacefully. Yet plants were different from people. No plant is able to think about itself or able to know itself; there is no mirror in which the plant can recognize its face; no plant can do anything intentionally: it cannot help growing, and its growth has no meaning, since a plant cannot reason or dream” (3-4). Kosinski contends that life is merely a distinction manufactured from within the mind; that in the fundamental perspective of the universe, the death of one man is merely the birth of another, and so turns the cycle of life. Like a garden, life provides for death, and in turn that death facilitates and nourishes new life: “And yet, with all its life, even at the peak of its bloom, the garden was its own graveyard. Under every tree and bush lay rotten trunks and disintegrated and decomposing roots. It was hard to know which was more important: the garden’s surface or the graveyard from which it grew and into which it was constantly lapsing” (5). Life is merely a mental state in which man decides that he owns his self. Chance, unaware of his self, lives and dies in peace: “A breeze fell upon the foliage and nestled under the cover of its moist leaves. Not a thought lifted itself from Chance’s brain. Peace filled his chest” (140). The words “breeze,” “foliage” and “moist leaves” personify the intimate connection Chance has with the cyclic advancement of nature: his life is merely fertilizing other life.

Thus, “being there” is the state of human existence where a man stands as a man. Chance dissociates from the solipsistic life of self-contemplation, yet rejects an understanding of the world around him; instead he peacefully wanders without directions, occupying a realm of sincere existence. “What was particularly nice about the garden was that, at any moment, standing in the narrow paths or amidst the bushes and trees, Chance could start to wander, never knowing whether he was going forward or backward, unsure whether he was ahead of or behind his pervious steps. All that mattered was moving in his own time, like the growing plants” (4). Chance does not know of his position in the universe, so, like the plants, he is unaware of whether he is traveling towards death or towards birth, whether he is traveling forward or backward.

When Chance is forced into the world beyond his secluded garden, two fundamentally different concepts of reality emerge. In the outside world, Kosinski argues, existence is predicated on visual stimulation and mental interpretation. “As long as one didn’t look at people, they did not exist. They began to exist, as on TV, when on turned one’s eyes on them. Only then could they stay in one’s mind before being erased by new images” (14). On the other hand, to a man foreign to mental interpretation, reality is real merely because it is there, “Thus he came to believe that it was he, Chance, and no one else, who made himself be” (5). When two lawyers enter Chance’s mansion after its owner died, the reality antithesis is exposed: “‘We shall need some proof of your having lived here,” Mr. Franklin said firmly,” Chance responds, “‘You have me. I am here. What more proof do you need?’” To Chance life is self evident. To others, life is merely a state of mental abstraction: if you are not seen and contemplated, then you do not exist.

When Chance is exposed to the world, he unknowingly begins to embody the philosophic duality between corporal reality and mental reality; in effect, he simultaneously is two opposite reflections on the universe. Chance, the man, lives within himself, but has never existed. His counterpart, Chauncey Gardiner, the image, from the moment he enters the world to the moment he dies, exists in everyone’s mind, but has never lived. The irony is strikingly apparent: Chance lives a pure and unadulterated life, while Chauncey simultaneous occupies an abstract false reality. Before appearing on television, the schism is examined, “What part of himself would he leave behind when he finished the program? Would there be two Chances after the show: one Chance who watched TV and another who appeared on it?” (61). Essentially, Chance is both a stunning example of life rooted in existence and a disheartening embodiment of life constructed through image.

Television – by definition – is the world’s most effective forum for reality construction; it exacerbates the potential for image dispersion and distortion by allowing millions of viewers to project their own hopes and fears on the two-dimensional images that pass by their faces: “Television reflected only people’s surfaces; it also kept peeling their images from their bodies until they were sucked into the caverns of their viewers’ eyes, forever beyond retrieval, to disappear. Facing the cameras with their unsensing triple lenses pointed at him like snouts, Chance became an image for millions of real people” (65). The words “sucked,” “caverns,” “disappear,” and “peeling” construct in the reader’s mind a vacuous reality where emptiness replaces firm existence.

Chauncey Gardiner, perhaps mostly because of television, is a social fabrication. Chauncey, unlike Chance, is an image constructed by society’s boundless hopes and desires, existing only in the fleeting but passionate realm of the mind, personifying society’s exalted expectations, and reflecting its aggrandized interpretation of its own form. In short, society sees Chauncey with an expectation of itself, “When on was addressed and viewed by others, one was safe. Whatever one did would then be interpreted by the others in the same way that one interpreted what they did. They could never know more about one than one knew about them” (34). Elizabeth Eve (EE), for example, becomes infatuated not with Chance the man but with the idea of Chauncey; however, she loves him only to the extent that she loves herself: “‘You make me free. I reveal myself to myself and I am drenched and purged” (116). Likewise, the Russian ambassador sees in Chauncey what the ambassador sees in himself: “‘I must tell you, our firm conviction is that Gardiner is, in fact, a leading member of an American elitist faction that has for some years been planning a coup d’état” (128). To businessmen, Chauncey is a thorough-bred capitalist, “‘He’s personable, well-spoken, and he comes across well on TV! And, as far as his thinking goes, he appears to be one of us. That’s all. It’s clear what he isn’t. Gardiner is our one chance’” (139). And finally, to a disparate nation he’s a unifying voice of optimism, “‘Thank you, thank you, Mr. Gardiner. Yours is the spirit which this country so greatly needs. Let’s hope it will help usher spring into our economy. Thank you again, Mr. Chauncey Gardiner – financier, presidential adviser, and true statesman!’” (68). Chauncey, the image, becomes an embodiment of what others see in themselves.

Kosinski’s haunting assertion that “life is a state of mind” must be considered through the analytical lenses of Chance as an existential traveler and Chauncey as a media construction. Chance said to the world, “‘In a garden, things grow…but first, they must wither” (67). Those who listened added profundity to his words based on the complexity of their own lives – his words quickly became manifestations of society’s deepest hopes and fears. Thus, in one sense, life is a state of mind because our world seeks truth from mental abstraction rather than simple existence. In quite another sense, however, his words were profound, if only because they were true. Indeed, it wasn’t the profundity that was false, it was the complexity; perhaps, life really is a garden where men and women need only “care to live, to survive their diseases, and to die peacefully” (1), Kosinski seems to suggest. Chance is but a simple gardener; Chauncey is a by-product of mental abstraction. One man is both the solution and a chilling reminder of the problem. When the two spheres collide, reality seems a little more like an empty state of mind.