Jerzy Kosinski: Steps (1968)

Despite having won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1969, Jerzy Kosinski’s Steps has silently slipped into obscurity over the last few decades, just like its author. Not even props from David Foster Wallace have been capable of counteracting the rapid devaluation of Kosinski’s literary reputation, which has been by marred by disputes over the authorship of his first novel, The Painted Bird (editorial assistants, including Paul Auster, are rumored to have written much of it), questions about the truthfulness of his autobiographical claims (especially concerning where he spent WWII), and even bizarre rumors that the CIA helped publish his works. The power of such gossip is a shame, since this a devastatingly harsh and bleak book that demonstrates a rare, cold purity. The narrative is a series of short, disconnected vignettes told by a narrator who is mostly an emotional and psychological void, an impassive witness of cruelty and atrocities, except for when his aggressive sexual desires are aroused. The book avoids using proper names for people and places, offering a generalized, Hobbesian view of the “life of man as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Roughly beginning in communist Poland, the book unsentimentally recounts the narrator’s late childhood and early adulthood. He is traumatized as a child by his bullying peers, shown the murderous absurdities of the Party organization while doing his military service, and publicly shamed by the student union at the university for his lack of involvement. As time passes, he blankly observes an extreme variety of brutalities, including rape, bestiality, incest, and suicide. Routinely, humans are reduced to bare life that can be humiliated, harmed, and eliminated without concern. The holocaust, of course, is one major source for this perspective. For example, the narrator knows a functionalist architect who helped design concentration camps during WWII. “[I]n the concentration camps my friend designed, the victims never remained individuals; they became as identical as rats. They existed only to be killed.” But rather than resist the forces that reduce humans to instruments or objects, the narrator often internalizes them and forcefully wields them against others. For example, in one most of the most disturbing sections of the novel, the narrator’s girlfriend is gang raped while he is held down by her tormenters. But shortly after this horrific event, the narrator begins to sadistically treat his girlfriend as an object, adopting, with little ado, the dominating position of her attackers. Midway through the novel, everything appears ready to change as the narrator gets on a plane to head for a new life in the U.S. After the flight takes off, the narrator comments, “I would have remained there, timeless, unmeasured, unjudged, bothering no one, suspended forever between my past and my future.” Of course this ideal state cannot be maintained, and he soon faces the same kinds of systems of cruelty and absurdity in his new capitalist home. He immediately runs into problems with money and work, so he gets involved with the criminal underworld, adopting its exploitative practices as easily as he adopted those of his former country. At one point, he expresses a love of driving and skiing, the latter seeming to encapsulate his tendency to actively throw himself into rather than resist the (typically monstrous) movements that his environment pushes him toward: “[When skiing,] I had to project myself beyond my body into a motion that had and not yet begun but was imminent and irreversible.” Yet he finds a possibility of something better in the lives of the poor and racially marginalized, whom he manages to safely observe in their bars and neighborhoods by acting like a deaf-mute. He wishes he could become one of them, believing it “would banish the dream of possession, of things to be owned, used, and consumed, and the symbols of ownership – credentials, diplomas, deeds. This change would give me no other choice but to remain alive.”