Being There

Chance has spent his entire life tending the private garden of an elderly benefactor, absorbing everything he knows about human interaction from television, and when his employer dies and turns him out into the world for the first time, he has no autobiography to offer anyone, only a wardrobe of expensive inherited suits and a handful of flat, literal sentences about plants and seasons. Kosiński's satire depends entirely on what Washington's elite do with that emptiness: because Chance speaks in calm, unhurried non sequiturs about gardens, listeners primed to hear a Delphic economic metaphor in every sentence supply the depth Chance never claims to have, mistaking his total vacancy for reticence, his television-trained blankness for gravitas.

Benjamin Rand, the dying financier who takes Chance in and mistakes his gardening talk for shrewd allegory about the national economy, becomes the novel's engine for elevating Chance, now renamed Chauncey Gardiner, toward the President's own inner circle, and Kosiński never lets Chance correct anyone's misreading, because Chance genuinely cannot tell that a misreading is occurring; he has no interior life sophisticated enough to recognize the gap between what he means and what everyone around him hears. Eve Rand's attraction to him works the same way in miniature: Chance's total incomprehension of desire reads, to her, as serene detachment rather than blankness, one more instance of an empty vessel filled entirely by whoever happens to be looking at it.

Kosiński gives Chance one recurring, literalized gag for how completely television has replaced any independent sense of self: when a real situation stops matching what he expects from a screen, Chance instinctively reaches for a remote control that isn't there, trying to change the channel on his own life. The joke does real satirical work, since the same reflex that makes him useless at ordinary conversation is precisely what convinces powerful men he's above it. Kosiński wrote the novel at the height of American television's cultural dominance, and Chance's condition reads less like an exaggeration than a diagnosis pushed one honest step further than anyone around him is willing to follow.