Essay Excerpts: Being There

Mock Trial season has just come to a disappointing end, so hopefully a little normalcy can be restored to my frightfully trivial life. Rest assured faithful reader(s), a thoughtful (though admittedly biased) discourse on contemporary politics will soon return to TheLiberalConviction.com! In the meantime, start cookin' your electrical bananas and mixin' your psychedelic love potions: here's some of my essay on Jerzy Kosinski's iconoclastic novel Being There, where reality is a little less real, and life is just a state of mind:

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).

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).

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 in strikingly apparent: Chance lives a pure and unadulterated life, while Chauncey simultaneous occupies an abstract false reality. He is both a stunning example of life rooted in existence and a disheartening embodiment of life constructed through image. 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).

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; it loves Chauncey only as much as it loves itself.

Read the rest of the essay. It's worth it.