Violence in this book is undoubtably prevalent and although terrible, becomes sort of expected as the novel progresses. One thing however still surprises me in its prevalence and affect on the world around the boy. That thing being superstition which is cultural, yes, but to me it seems to fit into the story almost too well.
1. So are the superstitions just there to add to the culture of the setting or do they add to the overall narrative? If so, how? And what themes (if any) do they play into? Give an example or two.
Continuing with the discussion in class about how the boy is being affected and changed by his experiences, I think chapter 10 highlights a clear indication of this very change. One moment specifically stood out to me and that was when the boy describes an officer: “his face was in the sunshine now, and it had a sheer and compelling beauty, the skin almost wax like, with flaxen hair as smooth as a baby’s. Once before in a church, I had seen such a delicate face. It was painted on a wall, bathed in organ music, and touched only by light from the stained-glass Windows”.
2. What do you make of this description? Is it significant to the boy’s development and how he sees people as well as himself? Is it surprising that this would be his outlook on race especially pertaining to his own given what he's gone through?
1. I think in one way the superstitions play into the idea that humans are all small creatures in this big world, and we are all just fighting to survive. We have discussed a lot about how many of the things that characters in the book do are for survival (and many of them go far lengths to survive). The superstitions contribute to the general sense that humans lack control in this world. Their practices or ideas all seem so silly or ineffective, and I think that demonstrates how these people are all grasping to control their lives, but it is not in their hands. They are all fighting to survive in any way they can, even if that means creating some disgusting potion and choking it down 3 times a day. Sometimes it works, and it helps them survive, but sometimes it’s all in vain, and they can do nothing about it.
ReplyDelete2. This description makes perfect sense to me given the boy’s experience. He has been told, without any explanation, that the look of this officer is the best way to be. This has been reinforced by him repeatedly seeing terrible things happen to people who look different. Even though the boy himself does not condone hurting people who are not blond and pale, and he himself looks different, he has grown up accepting that people who look like him are powerless and inferior. He even says, “I wondered what gave people the ability to invent such things. Why were the village peasants unable to do it? I wondered what gave people of one color of eyes and hair such great power over other people” (90). He is not directly putting himself down, but it seems that he has adopted the mindset that one group is superior to the other. And he really believes it because of his experiences. Nobody has ever told him anything else. Again, this is reinforced in the church. The officer looks like someone he saw in a church window, implying that they were pure, good, and important. Nobody has taken much time to talk him and so all his perspectives on the world are coming from observation. His observations are all pointing to the idea that the way he looks makes him inferior. The boy says, “I was genuinely ashamed of my appearance” (114). The ideas promoted by his society have become ingrained in him. He has adopted them and now feels negative about himself.
1. I was thinking about something similar today while doing "The Odyssey." The ancient world of that poem could easily be the world of this novel, a chaotic, unpredictable world where people are like, thinking of "King Lear," flies. There has to be a reason for the world being the way it is, be it the Greece of Homer or the Eastern Europe of Kosinski. Without the superstitions they—we—exist in an abyss. Even Voltaire acknowledged the existence of God in "Candide," a God that had better things to do than deal with the mice in the ship's hold. So superstition is a bulwark here; and it is as much an artifice as the cultural assumptions that Nell brought up in class. When the man is murdered at the wedding, the bloodstains he leaves the boy believes, because the adults around him believe, will draw the murderer back and lead to his death. He does come back—and nothing happens to him. Is this any different than the boy expecting God to save the village during the plague early in the book? God makes no entrance. Maybe he has no time either for his subjects. And people need reasons and rationales for the way the world exists and works.
ReplyDelete2. I'm glad—and not surprised—that you brought this up, Asiya. This is an amazing part of the book. Kosinski fled Communist Poland and spent his early years in the US writing sociological tracts about Communism and Totalitarianism. What I wrote in my book years ago is "The beauty of fascism and totalitarianism." Why did the SS adopt the "striking uniform" with the cap that "glittered a death's head and crossbones, while lightninglike signs embellished the collar"? It's gorgeous; it's beautiful; it makes the wearer gorgeous and beautiful and as "compelling" as Christ's face. It's all, it seems to me, designed to be this way; it's power incarnate. Is it why the Marines wear such a striking uniform? Doesn't that uniform attract young men the way the black SS uniform attracts and dominates the boy? The officer is "resplendent...armed in all the symbols of might and majesty." The brave beaten man who resists the Germans—he becomes an insect that should be squashed in the face of such "neat perfection." The boy is seduced by the resplendence of absolute, total power.
1. I think that the many superstitions are included in order to set the scene, but, in doing so, they also help advance the overall narrative. In other words, these superstitions grant us specific insight into these remote villages, but they also carry far more universal themes. For example, the villagers’ aversion towards physical contact with Jews or Gypsies tells us a great deal about their individual traditions and their more general mode of thinking “lest they get soiled with the diseased blood of the unbaptized, they ripped the linings off the victims’ clothes in search for valuables”(98). This fear of the impure, of contamination, reveals a very dichotomous system of thought. To these villagers, everything is either good or bad, clean or dirty, safe or dangerous. This black-and-white system of thinking then makes these people vulnerable to developing racial prejudices and hatred, since there is no gray area for them between holy and demonic. They view Jews as deserving of death for “refuting the only True Faith, for mercilessly killing Christian babies and drinking their blood”(96). I’ve read in several places that people who see the world very dichotomously, without any nuance, are more susceptible to indoctrination and less likely to challenge the information that people present to them. So I went on a bit of a tangent, but my point is that superstitions, such as avoiding contamination by Jews, are both specific to these regions and more widely relevant.
ReplyDelete2. This description of the “beauty” of the officer’s face was deeply depressing to me. I think that scene shows how deeply he has internalized the racism and antisemitism that surrounds him. When he looks up at the officer, he genuinely feels that he is inferior to the aryan man, and there is no one in this whole novel who would tell him otherwise. Instead of seeing himself for who he is, he now sees himself only through the eyes of others, as a pitiful boy with a “Gypsy face which was feared and disliked by decent people”(114). Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the novel is that this Nazi officer becomes the boy’s idol, the closest thing he has to a role model. The boy sees this officer, who has just killed a helpless man, as a “resplendent being, armed in all the symbols of might and majesty,” while the boy himself is “a squashed caterpillar oozing in the dust, a creature that could not harm anyone yet aroused loathing and disgust”(114). He has no one to tell him he innately has any value, that he deserves to live, so he accepts whatever fate the officer decides upon.
The superstitions reinforce the feeling that the story is timeless, or rather, a horrible fairy tale. If Jerzy Kosinski had made this a story about a little boy surviving the camp at Auschwitz, the world would take a definite time slot in out mind. Instead, Auschwitz is replaced by the Slavic superstitions and fears of Jews and Gypsies, which have probably existed for over a thousand years, alongside with an inhospitable world in which these superstitions can and do lead to acts of brutal violence being committed against the boy and other dark skinned people. This way, its easy to lose yourself and think of this as 19th, 18th, or even 10th century Poland, where hungry and desperate peasants would segregate, steal, hurt, or even murder Jews. One particular paragraph illustrates both the “timeless” feel of this prejudice and how it blends so seamlessly with the time-specific Holocaust.
ReplyDeleteThe villagers gave me even darker looks. “You Gypsy-Jew,” they yelled. “You'll burn yet, bastard, you will.” I pretended that this did not concern me, even when some shepherds caught me and tried to drag me to a fire and toast my heels, as was God's will. I struggled, scratching and biting them. I had no intention of being burned in such an ordinary campfire when others were incinerated in special and elaborate furnaces built by the Germans and equipped with engines more powerful than those of the largest locomotives. [85]
Here, the image of two farmers trying to drag a small little gypsy boy into a camfire, which seems to jump straight out of the middle ages, makes the German furnaces, which most people could probably date back to 1941-1945, seem to be less of an isolated incident in history, but rather a continuation of the tradition. Likewise, the stoning and the pelting of the boy and the other Jew in the next chapter, while seemingly medieval, transitions immediately to the scene in which the SS officer beats and kills the Jew. The hatred and the cruelty in both the Slavic superstitions and the German policy seem to be connected by an intangible line, simultaneously existing in the imagination and the real world.
I think the boy's almost venerating reaction to the SS officer, in which he compares his face to Jesus, is merely the boy's attempt to make sense of a world which makes little sense, especially in regards to the mistreatment of dark haired and dark eyed people. After seeing people like him getting picked on so mercilessly and without good reason, it seems almost natural that the boy would submit so readily to the well-groomed SS officer. 'How could I a ragged little dark boy, ever look as beautiful as him?” I imagine the boy thinking. The boy, confronted with somebody so regal in appearance, accepts this as proof of the blond and blue eyed dominated hierarchy of the world. This reminds me a great deal of the Bluest Eye: in both books we have a protagonist who, unable to reconcile how he/she looks with a world so hostile to it, turns to fawn over the fair looking people, thinking that their high status is proof of their inherent superiority.
1. I think that the superstitions are there to make us, the readers, question the society in which we live. We think that these superstitions are ridiculous and utterly unbelievable, laughable even. We cannot comprehend how someone could believe such things. Yet we believe things that others might find ridiculous as well. So much of our modern society is constructed upon arbitrary things we have assigned meaning to. For instance, fame. We revere celebrities; little kids want to be famous. Yet there is no reason why being an actor is any better than being a plumber, we have just decided that it is preferable. When I was a little kid I loved to help clean the house. Sweeping was one of my favorite activities. I thought it was fun. Now, if my parents ask me to clean the house, to sweep the floor or vacuum the rug or wash the dishes, I am not filled with delight. In fact, I often grumble about having to do the work. So much of what we value is cultural—standard of beauty, music and media, clothing, even food preferences vary widely across the world. Perspective is everything, and by including the superstitions Kosinski is highlighting this for the reader.
ReplyDelete2. I think that this description is important because it shows how easy it is to fall into the trap of compliance, of following the alluring leader. We humans often become sheep, blindly following the shepherd without questioning what we are doing or why we are doing it. This boy, even though he knows that the SS officer is a horrible man, is caught in the same cycle. He is told what is supposed to be good and attractiveness is supposed to be good, so he decides, almost without making a conscious decision, that he will revere, trust, obey, this attractive man. Power is extremely attractive, and the SS officer has all the power in this situation. The boy wants a taste of that power, wants to bask in its light. Aryan Jesus, who is the Jesus depicted in most European and American churches, is no different, really, from this SS officer. He is attractive and powerful and people are told to follow his orders. I don’t think that Kosinski is making a jab at Jesus as being a bad man like the SS officer, but rather critiquing the way Jesus is portrayed and used in Western society because so much death and destruction occurs in the name of Jesus.
ReplyDeleteThey contribute to the intense feeling of the world - the incredible surreality of the story is only enhanced by the fantastic stories that the villagers believe in, and that they let guide their actions. Their existence and the peoples' adherence to them embodies the incredible faith people have in absurd things simply because it is what they've been told. Lice and cat feces cure stomach aches? Absolutely. Lighting hides in the ground, waits seven years, then beckons more? Of course. Anyone with dark eyes and a hooked nose - even a young child - can curse you by looking you in the eye? Jewish people are the problem? People deserve to die because of their appearance? Everyone knows that! And why couldn't these things be true? Why shouldn't these people believe in magic and ghosts and justified slaughter? No one's been told any different. It allows a certain fluidity to their belief system that we as readers can understand - the belief in justified murder and belief in spirits disguised as ravens can exist in the same person simultaneously. I feel like we'd have slightly different feelings about them if the atrocities committed by these backwater, magic-believing villagers, who drink concoctions made of ground horse bone, had instead been committed by "ordinary" city-goers, who drive cars and watch television, and are all-around more "like us." We can recognize and explain brutality in monsters and wraiths, and, apparently, villagers who believe in them - but how different is it in the cities? A medieval-esque village is capable of forming angry mobs? Of course. They'd be willing to drown a child as they would a cat? Absolutely. But would a city-goer? A paper pusher? A musician, a gardener, a politician? Many politicians? A whole government?
It is absolutely tragic, and it absolutely makes sense. The boy has had nothing but affirmation after reaffirmation that he is repulsive, worthless, and dangerous. A few chapters ago he began referring to the (assumedly blond, blue-eyed) people whom he works for as "masters," because they are in control - he describes the German as having an aura of power, and as being somehow superhuman. Only blond, white people have power here. He has seen people who look like him, and they are dead and dying and wretched. How can a child idolize that? How can a child see people who look like him dying by railroads while paler people stand tall and polished, and feel comfortable in his own skin? The contrast is intense and bleak. Lines have been drawn, and the boy is learning which side of the fence he falls on. Given all of this, his idolization of this German soldier is understandable, and all the more terrifying for it.
1. I think the superstitions seem really ridiculous to us, but to the villagers they're what dictates their lives. I think this is a parallel to people in general who believe that Jewish people are lesser because like the superstitions, this is such an ignorant belief that doesn't really make any sense or have any real reasoning behind it. We see the boy wishing he could trade he was ashamed of his appearance in the presence of the officer and how much he admired the way he dressed. Yet prior to this he's struggling to understand the why there's such a mass hatred for Jewish people because there doesn't seem to be any apparent reason as to why they should be treated so terribly. And just like the superstitions, none of them really have any backing or evidence, yet the villagers incorporate all these values into their lives everyday.
ReplyDelete2. Yea I was really surprised. I guess he's still young so he's still very impressionable and naive, but I hadn't expected for him to internalize what these villagers literally beat into him. I guess I should've expected this mindset though considering his circumstances and age, but I think I was unable to think clearly about it because I was still hoping that some way he would be able to find a way out. I think this is significant to his development because if he continues to grow up in this environment and continues to hear these kinds of things he won't be able to form a real sense of identity or an idea of the world around him. He's too submersed in this ideology that'll only further skew his perspective.
1. Superstition demonstrates the utter randomness of life and death in this part of the world. Fear is so prevalent that there are countless superstitions of what can lead to an untimely death, and no one knows a good way to counteract the risk. There are myriad recipes for all sorts of diseases, few of which have any basis in reality. These myths try to limit and counteract danger that is out of the control of the villagers. They can't do anything, so they cling to stories.
ReplyDelete2. This boy has grown up in a world where might makes right. Law is decided by the "traditional right of the stronger and wealthier over the weaker and poorer" (2). In this boy's world, the German is winning. This blond-haired, blue-eyed man could have anyone and everyone in that village killed, and that kind of power is what could guarantee our narrator's survival. Having learned that this kind of power is all you need, and having heard stories of the German geniuses who could make explosives, the boy naturally admires that power. This German seems to have the most ability to control himself and his surroundings in a wild and often uncontrollable world. The boy has learned to worship, fear, and strive for this control.
1. I think that superstition in The Painted Bird is immensely complicated, but that ultimately it serves as a foil to our own "advanced" society. Much like a modern westerner gets their life's "meaning" from societal ethics, the people of these villages get their meaning out of life from superstition. For the villagers, God, demons, wraiths, curses, and justice all serve to provide an explanation for senseless suffering and provide assurance that it will not all be in vain. They provide a sense of control, much like our own ethics do for us. Yet, as a parallel to our own sense of morality they also serve to highlight just how absurd and arbitrary societal constructs can be. Especially when we see how, at base, humans are really just acting with interest for their own survival, I think we are allowed to -- supposed to even -- ask if there is even a difference between superstition and our own ethics; neither of them truly explain the horrific (by western ethics) behavior we have seen out of some of Kosinski's characters.
ReplyDelete2. I was not surprised, at all really. Growing up with an extreme lack of power and surrounded by other people with almost no power makes power extremely seductive. The boy craves control, which the Germans have. The boy craves beauty, which the Germans have. It isn't even just in your head, like American racism has a tendency to be, it is a physical fact that his world is ugly and he can't do anything about it, while the Germans' world is perfect, with their neat beautiful little towns that they can manage themselves. So to suggest that this boy could even possibly resist that temptation is absurd. My uncle used to say that half of latinos wish they are white and the other half is lying -- which probably isn't completely true. But speaking from firsthand experience, it is incredibly hard to resist whiteness' seductiveness -- especially as a young person. Maybe its because I'm bi-racial, so sometimes I pass as white, and I just feel whiteness right there, just beyond my reach, there for the taking if I could just be a bit paler. But when the girl you like is white, its hard not to wish you're white too. When your white family is vastly more successful than your latino family, its hard not to wish that your blood wasn't tainted with that laziness. The boy in this novel faces obstacles leagues bigger than that, so it is literally impossible in my opinion that he couldn't have started to hate himself.
1. I think the superstitions in this novel exacerbate the differences between me, the reader, and the characters in the novel. They represent a completely different culture and a different time period. I think that superstitious people are often viewed as uncivilized or uneducated, which is meant to distinguish these villagers with which the boy always interacts with from the city people he spent his earlier childhood around. But something that consistently surprises me regarding the superstitions is that they often hold true (I think the specific example I’m thinking of happens a little later on in the book). This, to me, validates the originally ridiculous aspects of the societies represented throughout the book. We might initially laugh at the traditions that are foreign to us as readers but if there are instances that show the significance of the role that these superstitions play, we see a new side of this society.
ReplyDelete2. While I was struck by this description, I wasn’t necessarily surprised by it. I think that it makes sense (however sad it is) that this young boy has internalized all of the hate that has been directed at him since he left his parents. This child is tired of all of the pain that has constantly surrounded him and this one glimpse of “perfection” that is right in front him makes this want to eliminate all the hurt from his life. This was the scene where I felt that all of events of the novel had caught up with the boy and I felt like he just wanted an escape. Something that we talked about a little bit in class, the narrator’s reaction to the five-year old Jew who was thrown off the train, was repeated in this scene. This boy didn’t seem to want justice for the people who are being wronged. He doesn’t (or at least didn’t seem to express in these particular scenes) want justice for the Jews so that they don’t have to be thrown off of trains. Just like he doesn’t want the Germans to stop persecuting dark-haired and dark-skinned people completely; he just wants to change his own hair so that he won’t be attacked: “I was genuinely ashamed of my appearance. I had nothing against his killing me” (114). This boy isn’t seeing the wrongdoing that we see in this potential murder, he only sees himself as wrong.
1. When real scientific knowledge is lacking, superstition and religion take its place. I think the reason people resort to religion and superstition is because we’re scared of the unknown, the things that we cannot explain based on our understanding of the world. I’m not exactly sure why we’re so scared of the unknown, but it’s just the way we are. We feel like we have to explain everything so we can feel safe. The superstitions of the villagers hurt the protagonist in many ways, yet despite them hurting him, he believes in them wholeheartedly. The superstitions surrounding lightning were interesting to me. “The lightning was always described as a great fiery bolt hurled from the heavens. Therefore the villagers made no attempt to put out such fires, believing no human power could extinguish them.” (57) Lightning makes the people feel so helpless that even when they could diminish its effects by putting out the fires, they rule that out as an option. When lightning strikes the barn that the boy is hiding in, it might be the only example in the story so far where we see a superstition affirmed.
ReplyDelete2. It makes complete sense to me that he would have this reaction to seeing the officer. I was a little bit shocked that he idealized the officer so much that he was prepared to trust the officer’s decision about whether he would live or die no matter which choice the officer made. The older he gets, the more he sees himself, Jews, and Gypsies, as inferior people, and the more he sees the Germans as people who are doing heroic things, even when he doesn’t completely understand their motives deep down. I also thought that the boy was attracted to the power of the officer. This officer wasn’t a peasant who was scrambling for survival, but a man who was dressed in such a nice uniform that he appeared superhuman.
1. I think that, like all people, these villagers are trying to make sense of the world around them and find reason for all the disaster, death, disease, etc. that plague their everyday lives. However, in doing so, they’ve found greater meaning in things that really have none. Like I said, this is something all people do, so what’s the significance of it here? As far as what Kosinski intended, I don’t know what it is, but I can speak to the effect. When I read those repeated lines about how having dark hair, skin, eyes are unlucky and will bring bad fortune on all those who cross that unfortunate person’s path, I can’t help but be reminded of what I was told about black cats and how I should always avoid them. I now know how ridiculous that is, yet I still find myself walking the opposite direction when I see a black cat. It’s silly, but I do it. These villagers do horrible unspeakable things because they fear the bad luck a little boy will bring on them—not just the bad luck of the Germans raiding their town but also some cosmic force of the universe. We’re meant to draw comparisons between ourselves and the villagers because we’re meant to see how it’s possible to become like them. Even though this book is set ages ago, it has a timeless quality in that the warning it provides will always be relevant. Like a fable, it’s the story of a child who experiences horrible things yet somehow lives, a story of a boy rushed to adult understanding, a story with a lesson. That’s what these superstitions provide.
ReplyDelete2. A lot of this description seems to have to do with power—the power of a uniform, of having light skin and hair, and the power of God. This soldier exhibits the power of God through his control over life and death. He gives the order to kill the wounded man while also giving the order to release the boy. The black uniform and skull and crossbones insignia make his appear a harbinger of death, yet his fair face and hair seem to angelic. He embodies both the wrath and the mercy of God. But what is he really? A man. A human. No different for those he kills of spares. So where did this power come from? Where did he get the idea that he was allowed to dictate who gets to live? How did he become like a god the boy? Those first two questions are ones I always struggle with both in reference to the Holocaust and to our justice system. Judges play God all the time. They take “an eye for an eye” literally and decide whether or not people, human beings, should get a second chance or not. Something about that doesn’t sit right with me, just like with this soldier. The mercy he offers the boy is clouded by the death he gives the man.
1) I had an interesting idea about the superstitions a few days ago while doing the reading. It may be stupid, but I'll describe it anyways. The most outrageous part of the superstitions is there is no way any of them are true, yet they've been able to convince themselves so sternly that they're all true. We see that they're mixtures of lice and horse bones is literally making them sicker, yet they believe it's a medicine. We see things like these even on our own society. We also see this in the Aryan supremacy rhetoric of Hitler and the Nazis. It's very obvious that they weren't the superior race, and that was clear to everyone. If America’s superior technology and weapon advancements weren't proof enough to them, then the Olympics should've made it clear. So unless Hitler is claiming that Jesse Owen didn't actually win any of those races, then they saw. Yet, we see that many of them convinced themselves that Blonde-hair, Blue-Eyed people actually were superior, despite all the evidence against it. This seems very similar to how the peasants have convinced themselves that all of their superstitions are true.
ReplyDelete2) Thank you for pointing this quote out. In class, I was of the opinion that our boy could never be like the peoples of the villages. While I still believe that to a certain extent, I've seen more signs of him becoming victim to the beliefs around him. He's already adopted some of the outlandish superstitions (like not looking at some dead people’s teeth), and this quote shows how he's adopted some of the race rhetoric. The thing that worries me (I really want the best for our boy) is that we haven't seen him question anything. I'm not sure if he has the ability to see the absurdity of anything that's happened as this is all he's ever known. I can see how ridiculous all of this is because I've been educated and raised with American morals. Our boy was thrown into this life before his parents could teach him. Without the ability to question, I'm not sure how long he has before he becomes like everyone else we've seen.