Kosinski, Jerzy. The Painted Bird. New York: Grove Press, 1995.
Reference books
- Alvin H. Rosenfeld. A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature. Pages 76-77.
- Lawrence L. Langer. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. See Page Refs below…
Page 166-192. Langer discusses Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird. – According to Langer, nowhere in the literature of atrocity, is conception of “metaphor an instrument of dehumanization more effectively exploited than in Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird. Langer makes comparisons with Dante’s Inferno – noting that this work is a “model of pattern and causality, with each torture a logical extension of the victim’s sin, and the total panorama of Hell the supreme expression of a divine justice”…
Page 167. But, Langer goes on to note, “Auschwitz was built on unhallowed ground. And Kosinski seeks to Transform its Legacy into Primary
truths more basic and universal in our time than the single Primary Truth which is the culmination of Dante's vision. Humanities inescapable complicity in evil is his Fame. Cosmic Love Is Not absent from University creates, but and I'm known, and I'm discovering, rather than a forgotten force. In Kosinski's hands metaphor is an instrument of desecration, a tool of the imagination shaping a world populated by creatures whose values coincide with those of Auschwitz, as if no other had ever existed. In such a well man appears as a fugitive from his animal origins, a Heritage reinforced by the graph to the novel, taken from Mayakovsky:" and Only God, omnipotent indeed, knew they were mammals of a different breed."
Page 168. Since the power of discourse is one of the distinguishing features of the Civilized human being Kaczynski Spanish is it from a fictional see to stop the painted bird is literally a speech list number totally lacking in dialogue and containing less than four dozen fragments of language presented to direct quotation. It's setting is a series of identified area of Eastern Europe, the overrun by the Germans...
Page 169. In The Painted Bird,
in the attempt to recall the Primitive, the symbols are sought more pertinently and immediately then through the superficial process of speech and dialogue. In addition, the sense of alienation is heightened by depriving the characters of the ability to communicate freely. Observation is a silent process, without the means of participation The Silent One must observe. This feeling of alienation floats on the surface of the work and manifest the author's awareness, perhaps unconscious, of his break with the wholeness of self."
Page 171. The boy in The Painted Bird is totally alone. “Temporally and spatially, physically and spiritually, the boy is abruptly sundered from civilization and the roots that nourished him there. He is a immersed in primary emotions that gradually awaken similar feelings in himself, in his elementary struggle for survival. His extreme youth of his Kosinski an opportunity to trace the evolution of a still unformed human creature's response to atrocity.”
Page 171. Langer states that The Painted Bird “completes the dissociation between two worlds…Human life, man’s expectation, is inverted, and he welcomes each new day, who sees not the promise of the sun, but feels the threat of storm. (Kosinski notes pp 15-16.)
Page 171. TABOO : Langer brings up the subject of taboo, because one of the roots according to psychologists, ‘lies in the spirit of taboo.’
Page 172. According to Langer, Kosinski “employed the principle of using another word to denote through symbolic action as well as through language certain objects and beings that are too awful to name.”
Langer notes that “the Nazis, especially the framers of the "Final Solution," put this principle to viciously cynical use. Kosinski employed the principal with more honorable aims, combining the idea of metaphor as a means of expressing the inexpressible with actions that themselves invariably were related to a fear of superstition growing out of a taboo. " Kosinski used this as a major device for evoking the atmosphere of terror in L'univers concentrationnaire.
Page 173-175. Langer notes that the eyes are frequently in this novel, a cause of fascination and inspiration for fearful revenge/reverence…Kosinski explains the eye-gouging passage and peoples’ tendency to reject it/ or not be able to read it – this way – Once he met a woman who told him she could not read his book further after getting to the eye-gouging out bit…Kosinski told her there are worse things in our reality – asking the woman if she had heard of concentration camps and of gas chambers. – She has responded, “certainly, this I understand very well, but gouging out someone’s eyes, how can you explain that?... AND THIS IS KOSINSKI’S POINT…. “
Langer approaches the Taboo, the awful truths of Auschwitz,
by circling about them, contemplating the "distinctive elementary symbols" , in Kosinski's terms, as "simple keys to the European culture of the mid-twentieth century." (Kosinski Notes pp. 12-20) Rather than diminishing the evil horror of the real atrocities, they make them seem less strange, less Unique, less alien to the recognizable human experience, a common Universe of suffering, though set in a preliterate and almost preconscious media, is paradoxically more terrible and more tolerable than a private and artificial corner of Hell from with all but the immediate victims are exempt.
Page 1 75. " The Concentration Camp as such is a symbol you can live with very well. We do. It doesn't really perform any specific function. It is not as close to us as the eyesight is. When you describe the atrocity of the concentration camp you are immediately reminding the reader that this is not reality. You say it happened in such and such a place.... But when you describe the eyes being gouged out, you don't make it easier for the reader, he cannot help feeling his own eyes disappearing somehow, becoming blind."
Page 175. In 1968 Kosinski was interviewed and he said " you make yourself even more vulnerable, the tragedy for instance of East European jewelry was when they were, well, collected perhaps I should say, by the Germans and transported to the concentration camps; until the last second they did not believe that they would perish in the gas chamber. They heard of it, but they did not believe it. They said, it is simply incredible. Why would a civilized nation do something of that sort? The inability to see the trauma of daily life as such breeds future victims."
Page 175. Finally, Langer explains that this novel is very much concerned with dramatizing the “trauma of daily life” so as to “produce a shock of recognition” …
Page 178 Kosinski carries much further than his predecessors the breakdown of the “integration of self” The fugitive boy in the novel is subjected to multiple physical assaults…all which “accelerate his alienation from his civilized heritage and identifies him with those primitive creatures who crawled from the ooze at the birth of time…” “Each new day for the boy, as for the camp inmate, is a threat, not a promise: any values beyond the physical have no opportunity to develop as all his energies are exhausted by the mere effort to keep the body in existence.”
Finally, LAGNER WRITES: “The Painted Bird dramatizes this un-Darwinian descent of man from the pedestal of civilization into the mire of brutish endurance, for at its end, the boy has lost his last link with his human heritage- the power of speech.”…
What Kosinski has finally managed to do, is: create “a reader engagé, a direct emotional participant in the experience of atrocity.” On Page 63-64 of The Painted Bird – there is a most gruesome paragraph describing the horrendous death the boy in the novel witnesses.
Page 187. Langer comments:
if men can inure themselves to the most gruesome event through a feeling of relief that they share no complicity in it, art, (such as this paragraph) purges them of complacency - and where it is not simply repudiated - introduces a quality of horror into the modern imagination which must radically alter perception of reality. This is what finally happened to the boy in The Painted Bird, whose life henceforth radiates not from an "old" beginning symbolized by the creation of the world but a "new "departure based on the destruction of man.
Page 190-191, The boy's restoration to his parents at the end of his adventure does not mark a return to civilization any more than the Concentration Camp survivors' liberation or assured his restoration to the world of pre-war values from which the mechanisms of destruction had immured him. In the end, he recovers the gift of tongue, speech, but it's significance is qualified by the ominous image that accompanies its reinstatement:
Langer remarks that the "barrier is must surmount as with the narrator of Night is the obstacle of memory, and given the quality of this remembered life, it may well be insurmountable. "
Page 199. In finishing a chapter called “Men into Beasts”, Langer discusses how military triumph brings hollow satisfaction as survivors “face the dismal prospect of surviving in a provisional universe incapable of assuring them that they are human. The victim turned beast of prey in captivity, and finally prey itself, cannot recover the image of his lost humanity through the mere gesture of release; like the narrator at the end of Night, he must carry through life the uncertainty about his own nature, and about all human nature, that l’univers concentrationnaire bequeaths to him.”
