Dramatis Persona: A Cup of Coffee With Kosinski

The room overlooked a graveyard. Jerzy Kosinski, the author of the books punctuated with violent and bizarre death scenes, smiled.

"I like graveyards," he said. "Since we are never aware of our beginning, they create a nice reminder of our ending."

Without a more thorough understanding of Kosinski's philosophy, such remarks, like the violence in Kosinski's books, lend themselves to misinterpretation. One smirks confidently as Kosinski confirms preconceived notions about his perverse morbidity.

But Kosinski represents the antithesis of morbidity. He immerses himself totally in life, in the dramatic moments life can offer, and accepts death cooly as an incontrovertible fact that should motivate one to "live better and fuller."

In an interview last week he noted that because graveyards are not more prominent features in the American landscape "we are not reminded enough [of death]; we live more diluted, emptier lives." If people are aware that their life will end, Kosinski believes they will live with "more dramatic awareness that every moment is what life is about."

Kosinski's novels reflect this notion. His writing style exemplifies it; his protagonists characterize it.

His books, like Blind Date, his most recent work, unfold as a series of brief dramatic episodes. Usually these vignettes bear only tangential relationships to each other, tied together by the slender thread of a common character.

Events seldom lead into each other. They occur, occupying the character's attention for a time, then recede into oblivion... no connections, little continuity.

Kosinski sees life that way... random, unconnected, and without design. He said, "The notion of a plot is fraudulent; there is no central plot to our lives." Denying the plot, the grand design, Kosinski concentrates on the incident, weaving his novels "around a system of conscious moments." The individual, by his very presence in those moments, creates whatever unity exists in life and becomes the "connective element."

Character thus becomes the essential element in Kosinski's fiction. His characters live dramatically, moving in and out of events effortlessly, at times too effortlessly. Through George Levanter, the protagonist in Blind Date, Kosinski provides a vivid example of the "dramatic" lifestyle.

One cannot describe Levanter with the mundane occupational lables that fit most people because tasks do not inform Levanter's existence. Instead, he becomes involved in "situations." Kosinski calls him an "investor," but this is not meant in the Wall Street sense. Levanter invests in himself and others. He invests in the relationsips he forms, "the only meaningful form of shareholding in life," according to Kosinski.

If so, then Levanter is quite clearly more interested in profit-taking than in long-term security. His relationships are intense, but they seldom last long. "If one perceives life as Levanter," Kosinski remarked, "then perhaps relationships do not last into eternity. Drama cannot be endlessly dramatic and relationships have different intensity at different times."

When the intensity ends, Kosinski continued, a person should not consider the end of a relationship a defeat, but merely a part of life. Too often "fraud creeps in and we drag on, the way we drag on with a profession or an apartment," he added.

Living dramatically, moving on to new experiences after old ones lose their intensity, requires a willingness to plunge into the unknown. For Kosinski, the peculiarly American phrase "blind date" embodies this conception of a positive encounter with the unexpected. "A blind date has all the ingredients life should have," Kosinski said. A person embarking on a blind date perceives the next event in life "as a dramatic date."

The phrase also conveys "an excellent sexual connotation" since sexual curiousity impels one to take a chance and accept a blind date. But Kosinski twists the sexual implications of a blind date in his book, using the term to describe a rape technique Levanter learns as a teenager.

The brutality of the rape scene in Blind Date adds to the fuel of those who criticize Kosinski for the insensitive treatment of women in his novels. Told from Levanter's viewpoint, the rape becomes a justifiable act, the logical culmination of his lust. Elsewhere in the novel, female characters seldom rise above the status of sexual playmates to which Levanter, and presumably Kosinski, relegates them.

But Kosinski objects violently to this criticism, His novels always portray women "as equally dramatic partners to the protagonist," he said.

In Blind Date, Kosinski constructs one moral dilemma after another. One particularly gruesome scene depicts Levanter seeking vengeance against a hotel clerk, whose betrayal of one of Levanter's Eastern European friends to the secret police resulted in the brutal crippling of his friend. Levanter lures the clerk to a sauna, knocks him unconscious, then unflinchingly shoves a saber up his rectum. While Kosinski says he himself would not have killed the clerk, making Levanter perform that act confronts the reader with the question: at what moment should life be spared. "The act generates respect for life even though it is about violence," Kosinski maintains.

Levanter's revenge also prompts the question of how far any individual should go in appointing himself judge, jury and executioner, but Kosinski rejects such complications, calling them "standards of Hollywood movies." He believes that life requires every individual to be both judge and jury, that moral decisions necessitate individual choice. Still, he admits that "only an individual with an enormous respect for life, his own as well as others, can single out truly ethical moral standards."

Unfortunately, in a world as complex and unpredictable as the one Kosinski perceives, one must make judgments without any hope of foreseeing the consequences of the choice. To take a moral stand requires a plunge into the unknown, the acceptance of a "blind date." One must pin the carnation to the lapel, stand by the lamppost and await an indefinite fate, a handsome beauty or a dilapidated reject. To Kosinski's frustration and disappointment, most Americans would rather stay home and watch television than stand on the street corner and wait for the unexpected