Jerzy Kosinski’s “Being There”

Jerzy Kos­in­ski’s Being There was a reas­on­ably pop­u­lar book­club book, at least in part because it’s short and thus most people could read it in full (and some even read it twice!). Sev­er­al of us had also seen the film (screen­play also by Jerzy Kos­in­ski). Reac­tions to the book at book­club var­ied, from those who found it deeply pro­found to those (includ­ing me) who did­n’t quite get it and wer­en’t sure what they were meant to “get” either.

A brief syn­op­sis: Chance is a sim­pleton who works as a garden­er for an old man (rela­tion­ship unspe­cified) and spends his spare time watch­ing tele­vi­sion. His exist­ence is com­pletely unknown out­side of the house and garden where he lives and works (no birth cer­ti­fic­ate, no record of exist­ence any­where), and when the Old Man dies, the law­yers who take pos­ses­sion of the prop­erty evict him. Through luck, Chance is taken into the house of a rich, influ­en­tial couple, who assume he is someone of know­ledge and power because of his calmness and the high qual­ity of the hand-me-down clothes from the Old Man. His state­ments about life in the garden are assumed to be deeply mean­ing­ful alleg­or­ies; his know­ledge of human beha­viour as shown on tele­vi­sion meshes with the expect­a­tions of those around him, and he is feted by both report­ers and politicians.

Reviews on Amazon talk about the bit­ing satire evid­enced in the book; the book­club mem­bers spent more time talk­ing about the meta­phors. Chance goes from being lit­er­ally nobody, with no iden­ti­fic­a­tion, and no real name, to some­body import­ant simply due to luck — an exag­ger­ated ver­sion of Andy War­hol’s 15 minutes of fame. People see in him what they wish to see — the wife of the busi­ness­man invents a romantic past for him, the Soviet Ambas­sad­or thinks he speaks Rus­si­an and under­stands Krylov, the US Pres­id­ent con­siders him as the next can­did­ate for Vice-Pres­id­ent — des­pite there being no actu­al basis for any of these assumptions. 

I found the book rather too over the top for my taste; the film was bet­ter and more detailed. Peter Sellers made Chance believ­able where the book shows the holes in the fable. Oth­er book­club mem­bers loved the book though and enjoyed fig­ur­ing out the meta­phors and won­der­ing which bits of the book were inspired by which parts of Jerzy Kos­in­ski’s life. We spent a bit of time dis­cuss­ing what changes would have been required in the book were it writ­ten today, rather than in 1971. Tele­vi­sion is a lot less coy now and Chance’s reac­tions to the attemp­ted seduc­tions might be dif­fer­ent. All in all, I’d rather see the film again than read the book again.