I believe there are two ways to approach the meaning of Jerzy Kosinski’s novella Being There. One is as an allegory about the nature of corporate power and big business in post World War II America. The other is as a personal statement about the author’s authenticity as a human being. Both allegorical interpretations revolve around a postmodernist concept of the individual in American society.
Being There tells the story of a man named Chance who knows absolutely nothing about his past or his family. All he knows is that he was hired by an old man to tend the garden of a mansion. Other than his job he does nothing but watch television. The idea of tending his garden is lifted directly from Voltaire; it was in Candide that he said, and I paraphrase, that a person can never be happy if they concern themselves with the larger affairs of the world so therefore tending one’s own garden is the only way to avoid misery. Voltaire, a man who really did concern himself with the affairs of the world, was making a snarky commentary on how ignorance is bliss; happiness is for stupid people. Chance’s only objective in life is to tend his own garden. Kosinski’s view on this is not favorable to Chance since he says, and again I paraphrase, that the difference between plants and humans is that humans have the capacity for self-reflection. By this standard of judgment, Chance is more like a plant than a human because he does no self-reflection.
Chance’s only pastime, and only source of intellectual input, is watching TV. It is telling that the author never says what kinds of programs Chance watches because it actually doesn’t matter. Chance sits in the blue glow of the cathode rays like a zombie, never thinking about what he watches or whether he can relate to any of it. He gains some superficial insights into how to behave in public, but that is all. He watches television because it prevents him from thinking.
Everything changes when Chance is forced out of his home because the old man dies. He encounters a woman named EE Rand who puts him up in her home. It is there that he meets her elderly, dying husband. The two of them misunderstand what his name is, mistaking Chance the Gardener as Chauncey Gardiner. The change in names represents a turning point in Chance’s life, although the narrative refers to him as Chance throughout the whole book and only being called “Chauncey Gardiner” in the dialogue. This is significant because he accomplishes nothing through hard work. Chance is in the right place at the right time, makes the right connections, and ends up meeting the American president, appearing on TV, and becoming the CEO of a powerful corporation. He embodies the American dream, only he doesn’t earn it through achievement because he simply makes connections with the right people. The idea of the American Dream is turned upside down because the people doing the hardest work are the domestic servants in the Rand home and they obviously aren’t getting rich.
The catch is that Chance has nothing to talk about. He makes simple statements about gardening that people think of as profound proverbs and disseminations of wisdom. Everybody in the book seems to be more shallow and ignorant than he is, yet that is how he gets ahead – by doing doing nothing, making almost no effort, and superficially imitating the behavior he sees on TV. In the land of the blind, a one-eyed man is king.
The most common interpretation I hear of Being There is that it shows how television, the cult of celebrity, and the power of politics and big business are all hollow, making a huge impression on a society full of simpletons who are too dumb to tell the difference between shadow and substance like 20th century inhabitants of Socrates’ cave. Chance impresses everyone he meets by either talking about gardening or not saying anything at all. He is an empty template for people to project themselves into. When he goes on TV and talks about gardening, people interpret his message as one of optimism about the economy even though he knows nothing about economics. When a Soviet diplomat speaks to him in Russian, he says nothing and so the diplomat assumes Chance is fluent in Russian. EE’s infatuation with Chance is based on her thinking he is everything she wants him to be. He impresses the president and the board of directors for the same reasons. Even the KGB thinks he is a master spy because they can’t dig up any information on him. The message is clearly that we live in a world of fools who think they know everything when it is obvious that they know nothing.
My own interpretation, and the one I think is more dark and poignant, is that Kosinski wrote this book to make a statement about how he saw himself. The main reason for this is that the characters and the events in the story are all drawn directly from his own life. If Chance and Kosinski are the same, then making Chance a blank slate with an unknown childhood makes sense. Kosinski’s and the controversy surrounding his supposedly autobiographical portrayal in his first novel The Painted Bird make it look like he was a man who wanted to forget his past and move on. From there, Chance meets an older woman, EE Rand, with a husband twice her age, paralleling Kosinski’s relationship with his first wife, the heiress Mary Haywood Weir who was also twice his age. In the story, Chance makes an appearance on a television talk show; Kosinski made frequent appearances on TV with Johnny Carson and David Letterman. Then when a literary agent at a party suggests Chance write a book, Chance says he doesn’t know how to write. The agent tells him not to worry because the publishers have teams of editors and ghost writers to do most of the work for him. Kosinski, a Polish Jew who immigrated to America after World War II, always felt like he struggled to express his thoughts in English. Critics in his lifetime accused him of having editors and ghost writers do his writing for him. This passage might be a confession that there is some truth to the accusation. Finally, there are two separate encounters where people try to seduce Chance, but he tells them he prefers to watch while they masturbate rather than having sex with them. Kosinski was known to be a voyeur who spent a lot of time frequenting sex clubs for the purpose of watching other people engage in sex play of all varieties. If the parallels between Chance and Kosinski are legitimate, then Being There can be read as a confession that the author feels he was living a fake life, being an empty man without any substance or authenticity.
This is where the novella reveals itself as a full-on expression of postmodernism. The irony of Chance in “being there” is that he has the essence of nothingness.He is a blank slate for people to inscribe with their own ideas. “Being there” means “not being there”; he is little more than a surface interacting in situations where everyone is nothing but a surface. There is no substance to anything anyone does in the story. It is a society of shallow people who are little more than plants in a garden who never do any kind of self-reflection. This is the postmodernist concept of being permeated with nothingness. And Chance lives in a world where authenticity is irrelevant.
Unfortunately, Being There is not postmodern on the scale of Gravity’s Rainbow or anything by Don DeLillo. You could certainly find points of intersection but Kosinski didn’t put enough into this book to make it what it could have been. Kosinski starts off with big ideas but they don’t get drawn out to their full potential. He doesn’t even reach half their potential. The book finishes with Chance watching people masturbate before he gets hired to run the corporation after the death of Mr. Rand. The book is slim enough as it is, but to have it climax (pun partially intended) with a gratuitous sex scene that plays itself out twice just makes it look like Kosinski ran out of ideas pretty quickly. I’ve played with the idea that the vapidity of this novella is part of the point Kosinski wanted to make, but its hard to tell where to draw the line between making a point like that and not putting enough effort into writing the book out to its fullest extent. Making the claim that the book is vapid because it is about vapid people is more like an excuse than a self-referential framing technique.
Being There simply could have been better. If you know anything about Jerzy Kosinski, then you know he had a complex mind that was fraught with troubles and a painful concept of himself (he committed suicide in mid-life). While I would argue that the standard interpretation of this book as being a commentary on the media and its effects on society is legitimate, I would also argue that the book strikes a deeper chord when read as an autobiographical confession that the author was not satisified with himself at the time of writing. This book is worthy of being read once, but I am not convinced it will be remembered as a great work of its time. But who knows? It might serve as an accessible introduction to postmodernism for future generations.
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