Growing Poisonous Flowers
WOLFF, GEOFFREY
WRITERS & WRITING Growing Poisonous Flowers By Geoffrey Wolff There is a persistent question, never precisely answered: To what is art morally responsible? To truth, of course, but the artist...
...Civilized torture is explained by more primitive barbarism...
...if not, they soon submit to his vision of the world...
...But readers are wont to comment on its uncommon beauty of expression...
...In short, The Painted Bird manipulates symbols of man's regression, gives them an objective habitation...
...Steps is—the locution is unavoidable —a beautifully written book...
...Some of the peasants blasphemed God, whispering it was He himself who had dispatched His only son, Jesus, to inevitable crucifixion, in order to redeem His own sin of creating so cruel a world...
...One passage in Steps describes the gradual death of butterflies burned by matches...
...The writer is not bound to an arbitrary proportion within this ethical mix...
...The luxurious abandon of a gross fantasy may provide an occasion for fine writing, but such wayward provision, with no further motive, seems deformed and self-indulgent...
...We do not ask, though, why Hawthorne wrote his story...
...Who are these people...
...Kosinski's power and talent are not in doubt...
...Fiction has its own responsibilities, however much in flux their contours may be...
...Kosinski's first novel, The Painted Bird, also abounds in cruelty and perversion...
...It is precise, scrupulous and poetic...
...To truth, of course, but the artist defines his own truth...
...Nonetheless, the use he has set his power to is in doubt...
...That is fine writing, very stylish...
...This is a partial list...
...Why, they wonder, must their children die...
...Why did he cultivate them...
...It is a study in the pathology of a hateful man rather than a study of men...
...For revenge he murders their children by rolling ground glass in bread and making them eat it...
...So the primary question about this book, as with all literature that seeks to do more than entertain, is why was it written...
...Prospero's wand will work only so long as we continue to believe in its magic...
...A man has eavesdropped for weeks on a girl in a nearby apartment...
...His readers may revile his fiction, or ignore it, but no court will try him for perjury, no priest will require confession of him...
...Others insisted that Death had come to dwell in the villages to avoid the bombed cities, and the war, and the camps where the furnaces smoked day and night...
...It likens their wings to petals in a bouquet: "When the last of the petals had dropped onto the pile of corpses, we raised the jar to reveal a palette of lifeless wisps...
...The only lesson it can teach is that insane men are best avoided...
...Kosinski seeks a false resonance which is, finally, more corrupt than none at all...
...It demonstrates a curiosity that is no longer radical, no longer even surprising: Prose can have a life apart from the beauty or ugliness of what it describes...
...One must question its morality...
...He speculates that it can be a way to self-fulfillment: "To possess hate is to possess great power, and the wielder of that power has control of magnificent gifts...
...The violence increases in subtle modulations as communal hysteria intensifies...
...The fictional world a writer creates cannot be proven a lie...
...It does terrible injustice to those who really suffered, really died...
...The novelist may, through his imagination, possess limitless power to shape life according to his fancy and his need...
...These are little dramas, self-contained, connected to one another only through the presence of the speaker's voice...
...We meet an array of criminals and victims...
...it is lifeless and perverse and deceitful...
...We marvel that a story so ugly, the brutalization of a child in Eastern Europe during World War II, can have so purifying an effect on us...
...The writer has ultimate power over his environment and its morality...
...And power abused is power abandoned, in art if not in life...
...The concentration camps are near...
...None are named...
...Yet we judge him not only by his dexterity with this power, not only according to the measure of his talent, but also, and fundamentally, by his responsibility to the power he commands...
...Their relationship is wholly sexual...
...In that novel the hero becomes encased by hate for his oppressors...
...The description is poetic and elegant...
...No man will stay his hand...
...God knows this passage is not engineered to titillate us...
...none have life outside the boundaries of the particular episode they endure in Steps...
...The fanners are mystified...
...In The Painted Bird people hate, and punish, what they cannot understand...
...It goes beyond guilt, ignores love...
...The world may be composed of hope and futility, of mercy and cruelty, of kindness and injustice...
...His purpose is serious, I am sure, but he misreads our tolerance...
...sometimes he merely witnesses it...
...Later in the same essay Kosinski expands on the quality of hate as an attitude...
...But its very coolness is shocking...
...Repellent...
...A man narrates Steps...
...These worn speculations present themselves insistently when considering Jerzy Kosinski's second novel, Steps (Random House, 148 pp., $4.95...
...Yet any such judgment is complicated by Kosinski's remarkable talent...
...But we retain the power to judge his imaginary world, to pass sentence on its truths...
...But what, we ask, is its function...
...Steps has no symbolic life, no similar resonance...
...I can think of few writers who are able to so persuasively describe an event, set a scene, communicate an emotion...
...sometimes he collaborates in it...
...She says: "I feel the blood staining our bodies as if your hardness made me bleed, as if you had flayed my skin, and had eaten me, and I was drained...
...Pointless evil is true to life, if not to art...
...But evil that tries to bridge fiction and history through perverted analogy is in some way deeply sinful...
...She performs fellatio on him: "I loved what was ejected from you: like hot wax, it was suddenly melting all over me, over my neck and breasts and stomach...
...Because it was in his Faustian character to subvert nature...
...Quite cool...
...We cannot punish the crimes that transpire in a fictional universe (and want no such power), but we shall judge their motive and purpose...
...He relates episodes of inhuman darkness...
...While pointless evil can illuminate little for us, at least it reveals the truth that evil seldom has a point...
...He insists on making love to her while she menstruates...
...Things are as he sees them to be...
...There is a clue to Kosinski's purpose in an afterward he wrote to translations of The Painted Bird...
...He can shape the world as he wills: Prospero's wand becomes revenge...
...He manages to meet her, becomes her lover, but doesn't mention that he knew her most intimate life beforehand: "I felt like a scientist who has completed his study: the specimen he has observed and recorded and analyzed for such a long time has ceased to be a mystery...
...Within its brief compass are contained such a quantity of unnatural acts as to constitute a tour de force: bestiality, iustless seduction, male prostitution, female prostitution, homosexual prostitution, rape (of various kinds), pandery, revenge, murder, decapitation, mutilation, voyeurism, torture, incest, criminality...
...It is a repugnant book: morbid, cruel, perverse, salacious...
...Now I could manipulate her: she was in love with me...
...There is none...
...We can only assume that the "I" always refers to the same character...
...Like Prospero he rules his kingdom and justice is meted out according to his will...
...He may torture them barbarously...
...Kosinski defines the nature of the hatred and remarks that it and the boy's desires for revenge "cease being directed at any single person or group...
...We do ask why Kosinski wrote his novel...
...Although its episodes are extreme, they seem to suggest aberrations that are recognizably human...
...One expects gore and hysteria in the presence of murder and torture...
...Folded within the narrative are italicized passages of dialogue between a man and his lover...
...The novel leaves no orifice unexploited...
...We may charge him with weighting cruelty above kindness but we cannot, with any certainty, accuse him of violating his own fictional Tightness through a conscious imbalance...
...The breeze blew away the smoke?it seemed as if some of the corpses trembled, ready to take wing again...
...Sometimes he commits the crime under consideration...
...The isolated inversion of the terms of a sacrament is verbal sleight-of-hand, without reference beyond itself...
...The event provides an excuse for its composition...
...As a boy the narrator of Steps is cruelly treated by farmers reminiscent of the primitives in The Painted Bird...
...The novel has great resonance...
...Kosinski gives us no hysterical chopping and hacking, but rather measured surgical strokes of refined evil...
...There is a fragile barrier that separates psychosis from esthetics in this statement...
...Here, as in several other places in Steps, the image of the camps' smoking furnaces is introduced arbitrarily and gratuitously...
...Its episodes are prose analogies for those exquisite poisonous flowers grown by Rappaccini in Hawthorne's tale...
...now they become attitudes, deeply ingrained, the well-spring of the purpose of his life, the basis for his behaviour in all situations" (Kosinski's italics...
...The writer may murder his fictional children...
...I felt as though I were being christened: it was so white and pure...
...It looks, as Kosinski has said elsewhere, to archetypes...
...He has created what never was on land or sea and arrogantly expects us to take his creations, his self-consuming octopus, his other monsters, as emblems...
Vol. 51 • October 1968 • No. 19
