![]() It is the case that the narrator manipulates a young girl who is dazzled by the narrator’s credit cards at the very beginning, but there are no traces of a gradual progression from the mind of a sovereign subject who deploys a dominant culture for his own purposes to one who recognizes his subjection to that culture. The putative author, Jerzy Kosinski, was surely mistaken (or was otherwise disingenuous and willfully misleading) when he claimed in an interview that the book progresses from “the formed mind of the protagonist (in the beginning of the novel) when he sees himself as a unique manipulator of others, to the stage (at the novel’s end) when he realizes that he is nothing but a composite of various steps of culture.” To speak of a “progression” in any strict sense would be inaccurate. And if a continuous link binds the episodes together (the “steps” of the title), it is the guiding thread of submission and domination, the only two forms of relationship of which the subject is capable. If a unified authorial consciousness embraces each transformation, holding together the death and reformation of the subject in each instance, this can only be discerned in the articulation of the individual episodes. Each self belongs to a “present” instant that is disconnected from the series of instants that precede it, each of which is itself displaced from history. ![]() At the beginning of each of the forty-six episodes into which this fissiparous book is sharded, an “older” self is negated (not cancelled out entirely but absorbed and preserved in the memory of the work) and a “new” one forms and takes its place. The subject of Steps undergoes a continual metamorphosis throughout its pages. What is one to make of the fact, then, that Steps, a novel that bears Kosinski’s name and yet was not composed in his language, is one of the most intensely powerful novels of the twentieth century? One smirks amusedly and bemusedly at these works as the artifacts of an interesting life. What Kosinski once fobbed off as his own creation is now surrounded by an embarrassed silence. Indeed, this very signature preempts any of “Kosinski’s books” from being taken seriously. ![]() His authorship has long since been discredited as fraudulent all of the writings to which he gave his signature have been dismissed as the trickery of a confidence trickster. Jerzy Kosinski did not write his books alone. ![]()
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