When Charlie Sheen
and fellow platoonists were sent into the jungle on a reconnaissance
mission, they couldn’t see more than an ominous few tropical
green leaves ahead. Everything there was either hidden or imagined,
including the enemy: the Viet Cong. Every rustle of leaf or
snapping twig was a potential prelude to a burst of gunfire
and death. Twisting in my seat, listening to the pounding of
my heart, the fitfulness of my breathing, I was so fearful,
the tension and expectation so unbearable, I seriously contemplated
leaving the theatre during the viewing of Oliver Stone’s
Platoon, even though I knew that every frame of the
film was pretend -- shot and expertly sequenced for my entertainment
and edification.
I knew the soldiers
weren’t real soldiers but actors playing the part, just
as actors were playing the part of the enemy. I knew that no
one really got napalmed, raped, or blown up. And yet there I
was, in my purchased cinema seat, responding physically and
emotionally as if I was soldiering in the jungles of Nam. Even
more disturbing, that rational part of my brain (the slippery
seed in the watermelon) was sufficiently disengaged to recognize
that only two of my five senses were engaged: sight and sound.
I couldn’t taste, touch or smell the war in Viet Nam and
yet I was unable to prevent myself from reacting as if the film
were real.
Marshall McLuhan,
in The Gutenberg Galaxy, tells us that when people
from primitive cultures are exposed to cinema for the very first
time, they are mystified by the sudden disappearance of a character
that leaves the screen; they look past the edge, wondering what
happened to him. Such is cinema’s unrivaled authority
in being able to wholly engage the viewer, and why ‘the
magic of cinema’ remains the medium’s most endearing
association. Every viewer, without exception, is knowingly tricked
or wants to be tricked into regarding as real an art form, that
by design, offers but a simulacrum of reality.
The experience of
reading is even more remarkable since none of the senses is
engaged except sight to read the words, which the mind then
transmutes into a plausibly connected series of images that
tell a story. When I was brought to tears over the fate of Hans
Castorp (from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain),
I knew Hans didn’t exist, that the only thing real going
on was myself reading in my chair, which meant my lachrymose
state was produced by the activity of the imagination.
So if we know the
book or film is unreal, but we remain unable and unwilling to
rationally respond to their unrealness, what are we forced to
conclude about the propensity (susceptibility) of the mind to
reify -- to regard as concrete -- works of the imagination?
Why has natural selection seen fit to preserve the kind of intelligence
we are that responds to events we imagine -- or events imagined
for us -- as if they are real? The discomfited George Steiner
asks how is it that literature moves us to respond to a stranger’s
cry in the night but we will not respond to that same cry in
real life? Could it be that the armchair academic, no matter
how universally venerated, is the last person to learn that
the act of self-preservation will always trump the power of
literature? The latter is an indulgence the former refuses and
is what decisively moves us to remove ourselves from harm’s
way -- the vicinity of the cry.
We are a species
gifted with the faculty of imagination, disposed to creating
mental worlds that are so vivid and persuasive we physiologically
respond as if they are factual, meaningful. If there was a prototype
humanoid without imaginative faculties, it didn’t survive
precisely because it was unable to fabricate imagined alternative
worlds that uniquely grant the imaginer glimpses (pre-experience
knowledge) of situations that approximate or parallel real life
ones.
The evolutionary
paradigm that disposes us to emotionally identify with situations
described in film and literature (or works of the imagination)
is the built-in, no-consequences guarantee. This de facto
impunity-immunity clause frees the imagination to conjure up
hypothetical outcomes to possible real life situations, which
is exactly what Nature teleologically intends.
The imagination
is the all-embracing answer to human curiosity in the infinite
variety of life that is beyond the compass and exploits of any
single life: traversing the Gobi, fighting a war, denouncing
war, being a mother, a father, a great artist, a criminal, a
rapist, the raped, being rich, poor. I can imagine myself in
any number of bizarre, taboo, dangerous situations that I would
shy away from in real life for fear of the consequences or restrictions
imposed by my upbringing or social milieu. If it weren’t
for the imagination, the muscle that stirs our curiosity to
explore the world in its breathtaking diversity would soon atrophy.
French writer Louis-Ferdinand
Céline (1894-1961) describes courage as the lack of imagination.
Properly imagined, we would probably refuse what are commemorated
as courageous acts: jumping into icy waters to save a stranger
from drowning, throwing oneself on a live grenade for the sake
of the platoon, because the imagination will have disclosed
the possible life-threatening consequences the ‘unmediated’
experience doesn’t allow.
Our maturation and
evolution over the course of a lifetime would be severely retarded
if not for the imagination. Paul, one of the characters in John
Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation, explains,
“how unbearable would the act of self-examination be without
the faculty of the imagination.” Without the capability
of imagining beyond, let’s say, the ignorance we confess
to on our better days, we will be less disposed to admit to
it and end up doing nothing about it.
Not all cultures
are equally friendly to the free play of the imagination. Roland
Barthes, in his essay, Lesson in Writing, which is
an unintended argument for and incitement to travel, notes that
Japanese culture is mistrustful of the effects of purely imaginative
works on especially the psyche of children. In Japanese Bunraku
(puppet) theatre, the audience sees the puppeteers above the
stage manipulating the puppets as well as those seated at the
side of the stage responsible for the dialogue, song and sound
effects. Which makes Bunraku the cinematic equivalent of the
filming of the making of a film. As theatre, it is anti-theatrical
since it appeals to reason by subverting the immediate impact
of the experience for the sake of its more sober epistemological
certainties.
If there is a contemporary
novelist who intuitively grasps the workings, evolutionary purpose
and value of the imagination it is Jerzy
Kosinski, whose work, from Steps (1969)
to Pinball (1982), reads like an homage, in catalogue
form, to experience for its own sake, or a phenomenological
demonstration of what constitutes pure literary experience.
Not unlike the ‘on
the road’ genre, where the going takes precedence over
destination, Kosinski’s books are often plotless, populated
with an improbable assortment of characters who appear only
long enough to illuminate situations that would otherwise remain
obscure or unknown to the average reader. In thrall to the here
and now, Kosinski characters are cut in distinctly sacrificial
cloth; he makes them forgo the depth and complexity we come
to expect of Western literature’s best in deference to
experiences that are their own terminus. As semiotic devices,
his personages typically open doors to forbidden worlds to the
effect that the enraptured reader, consequent to the vicarious
literary experience, comes to better understand his own inclinations,
which in turn allows him to choose and reject more wisely in
real life.
Early in the game,
Kosinski understood that the conventional modalities of narrative
literature would not be able to provide a syntax elastic enough
to answer to what would become his signature ‘vignettism’
out of which his style is forged. The result is a made-to-measure,
12-tone syntax that corresponds to the multiplicity and desultoriness
of experience: chapter is replaced by semi-autonomous vignette
whose effects are cumulative. The reader reaches for Kosinksi
in full expectation of being arbitrarily thrown into situations
that play by their own rules, and he takes the plunge because
it is literature, meaning there are no consequences. Without
ever passing judgment, Kosinski allows his characters to ply
their trade between good and evil, where life at the extremes
reveals every reader’s dark side of the moon and willingness
to visit places that betray the many secret worlds we all inhabit.
With a scalpel for a pen and razor sharp depiction that is its
own precedent, Kosinski autopsies experience which he then embalms
in language whose most lasting effect has been to give birth
to a community of readers for whom the present subjunctive is
the operative shibboleth.
I can think of no
other modern writer who offers such a diverse feast of experience
for the hungry reader, who so effectively makes the case that
the imagination is the ideal testing ground for real life situations,
and that no matter how far out or unthinkable a particular experience
may be, as a cognitive act of immaculate conception it enjoys
the blessings of Nature and bears directly on the innumerable
choices we must make over the course of a lifetime. The workings
of the imagination and life are not separate realms; indeed,
without the former, the latter is fated to be cognate with those
myriad forms of life that will never be lifted by the wind,
carried by a current, or stirred by things unseen and unsung
– and never know why.
Among post 1950
writers, Kosinski does not rank with the likes of Patrick White
(Riders of the Chariot), Cormac McCarthy (Blood
Meridian), J. M. Coetzee (Disgrace), unless we
submit that his work is indeed significant for the reasons argued
above, and that the literary establishment’s dismissal
of Kosinski as a serious writer has been premature.
Before Kosinski’s
suicide at the age of 57, he had surely imagined the uninterrupted
unfolding of his life. In the wake of his decision, we are left
wondering whether his imagination -- that single-handedly enlarged
the possibilities of literature -- somehow spectacularly failed
him or if his decision was the perfect response to an imagination
that had done its homework.
Either way, Kosinski
left the world a substantial body of work that, in the tradition
of Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes and ‘on the road’
literature, underscores the workings, purpose and our readiness
to wholly identify with works of the imagination for both their
whimsical and practical insights into experiences real life
does not permit.
