THE TERROR OF NORMALITY IN JERZY KOSINSKI'S "THE PAINTED BIRD"
The Painted Bird, originally published in 1965, was greeted as a Holocaust classic, another personal, autobiographical testimony to be included in bibliographies of Holocaust writing. However, other readers and critics soon pointed out the novel's allegorical and mythological character, seeing in Kosinski's work an attempt to break away from the dominating realistic convention or even an example of postmodernist aesthetics which, far from offering a documentary account of history, problematizes the issue of representation. (Charles Russell saw Kosinski in the company of other postmodernist writers such as Thomas Pynchon, Richard Brautigan, Ronald Sukenick and Donald Barthelme,1 a critical context explored at greater length by Jerome Klinkowitz in his various studies of contemporary authors.) As if in support of this parabolic interpretation of the novel, the cover of the Bantam Books edition of The Painted Bird'bore a fragment of Hieronymus Bosch's painting Das Jiingste Gericht. The commentaries quoted in the book also encouraged this kind of reading: Anai's Nin emphasized the novel's success in lifting "the entire experience to the philosophic, mythological realms of knowledge," and Luis Bunuel observed that the novel moves beyond realism, being "a trip into the world of nightmare and anxiety." Polish responses to the novel, at first almost unanimously hostile, attacked it for the supposedly biased, distorted picture of life in Nazi-occupied Poland, the charge clearly based on an assumption of the documentary, autobiographical character of The Painted Bird. Critical works such as Joanna Siedlecka's book Czarnyptasio? accused Kosinski of falsifying his own biography and revealed the details of the writer's life during the war, supposedly at odds with the events described in the novel.