Milan Kundera is considered one of the greatest novelists in 20th century, thus he is in the right position to talk about this topic, the art of the novel.
Although Kundera in the preface to The Art of the Novel writes, “I have tried to express here the idea of the novel that is inherent in my own novels,” the book is not restricted to his own work but rather addresses broader questions concerning the genre, such as the uniqueness of the form, its vitality, and its future. Divided into seven chapters, the book appears to be fragmented because of the different forms (essay, dialogue, public address, and dictionary entries) employed and the disjointed style that resulted from the pieces being written over a period of several years and published in various journals and newspapers. Kundera insists, however, that the sections were conceived of as a book. As one reads, certain themes and ideas recur and complement one another. Thus, although initially the chapters seem unrelated in form and content, a whole emerges.
The opening essay, “The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes”—first published in 1984 in The New York Review of Books under the title of “The Novel and Europe”—outlines the history of the European novel. Kundera traces the adaptations that the novel has made over the four centuries, changes made in response to an evolving society. Paraphrasing Edmund Husserl, Kundera argues that the modern age began when Galileo Galilei and René Descartes elevated the importance of that which can be measured, resulting in a degradation of those things that were not scientific or technical. As the sciences became more and more specialized and exclusive, the world became more and more fragmented. Man could not hope to comprehend the world and as a result could not even comprehend himself. In Don Quixote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes opposed this trend toward measurement and focused on the forgotten self. Indeed, it is the novel which illuminates, and recovers from the oppressiveness of science, various aspects of man’s existence.
The great novelists throughout history have modified the novel to accommodate changes in society. Cervantes encountered a world that had lost its sense of certainty. God no longer retained the supreme position that He had held in the Middle Ages. As a result, Cervantes focused on the ambiguity that confronts man as he realizes that there are no absolutes and therefore finds himself faced with unrestrained freedom. Thus, the world of Don Quixote is one of adventure: Anything is possible. A hundred years later, Samuel Richardson examined the interior life of the individual. In the nineteenth century, Gustave Flaubert faced a world bounded by institutions and government; he chronicled the trivial events of daily existence. In the twentieth century, Marcel Proust explored the effect of the past on the individual, and James Joyce questioned the ability to know the present. Kundera argues that soon all accepted value systems will be discredited and abolished, resulting in the dominance of irrationality. Modern novelists, including Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Hermann Broch, have already addressed this situation. Of all the genres, only the novel has been able to reflect the changes in perception that have accompanied the emergence of modern man.
In this part is the lecture, given in Vienna and Prague, on the crisis in the humanities, by Edmund Husserl. By “European,” Husserl meant that “passion to know” which began in Greece, and which has since characterized the Western philosophic tradition. It began its modern secular trajectory when Galileo and Descartes narrowed the emphasis of thought to what could be demonstrated scientifically; they wholly neglected the Lebenswelt , Heidegger’s “beautiful and almost magical phrase,” for the concrete experience of living in the world. Cervantes founded another vital modern tradition: the novel with its chosen concentration on being. Cervantes took up the problem of adventure; and there followed him other writers who “discovered other dimensions of existence one by one.” There was Samuel Richardson with “what happened inside,” the “secret life of the feelings”; Balzac, with man’s rootedness in history; Flaubert, and the quotidian dimension of life; and later Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce and Mann all devoted themselves to exploring new areas; for, as Kundera, quoting his Austrian master, Hermann Broch, wrote: “the sole raison d’etre of a novel is to discover what can only be discovered by a novel.”
Descartes faced the world as a “thinking self”; Cervantes in a world apparently devoid of any divine order, faced it as a “welter of contradictory truths,” where the only “certainty” was the “wisdom of uncertainty.” The open adventurous spaces of Cervantes’ world were gradually foreclosed in the 19th Century. There is some possibility of adventure still left in Balzac, but there is no such possibility for Emma Bovary; the lost infinity of the world can only be replaced by the “irreplaceable uniqueness of the individual.” This process goes much further in Kafka, where the “suprahuman force of an omnipotent society” takes over, and adventure is reduced to “a petty squabble with the administration over a mistake in the file of Kafka’s K.”
Is the novel, then, now over? Kundera asks. He answers no, but, gravely threatened by the “whirlpool of reduction” of the media, it can continue “only against the progress” of the “spirit of our time.” Kundera ends the Cervantes essay by asking himself what he is personally attached to? “My answer is as ridiculous as it is sincere; I am attached to nothing but the depreciated legacy of Cervantes.” Such is Kundera’s wry assertion of his devotion to the diminishing inheritance of the novel.
Two dialogues:
How does the necessary complexity get into Kundera’s fiction? The process is illuminated in The Art of the Novel by two dialogues which draw on detailed illustrations from his novels and which valuably help one to understand how they work. Although Kundera throws away much traditional apparatus – elaborate description of character and setting, psychological realism, interior monologue, historical background, and so on – he insists that the concentration on his characters’ existential situations that this permits does not make them less life-like. A character, after all, is not a real person but a kind of ‘experimental self’, and the novel in Kundera’s hands is a ‘meditative interrogation’ conducted in the hope of getting to the heart of that self in that situation.
Vital aids to this process are certain key terms. To understand Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being you have to grasp what is meant by vertigo; Life is elsewhere was originally titled ‘The Lyrical Age’ and enquires into the connections between youth, lyricism and revolution; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is based on the words ‘forgetting’, ‘laughter’, ‘angels’, litost, and ‘border’. The analysis and definition of such terms make up a novel’s theme, which is itself worked out by the story. Story without theme – narrative with no element of existential enquiry – makes a book go flat, in Kundera’s view. A film can hardly dwell on the fundamental words which articulate a theme in the way a novel can, and (despite the favourable reception of the movie version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being) it must remain doubtful whether a Kunderan text is in any real sense transferable to another medium. Although he formerly taught in a film school, Kundera nowhere mentions cinema in The Art of the Novel, nor does he acknowledge that it has had any influence on his narrative methods. Film would also find it difficult to accommodate the authorial intrusion that is so marked a feature of the Kunderan manner. The author himself may discuss a novel’s key word in one of those digressions which come naturally to an admirer of Sterne, but he is quick to disclaim any special authority when doing so; he admits to being provocative merely, playful, expressing one possibility among the many which it is the business of the novel to display but not to decide between.
Kundera was a musician before he was a writer, and musical considerations have profoundly affected his ideas about composition. One of the most liberating features of his style is the extreme variability of the length of his narrative units. This gives him a remarkable, and clearly consciously exercised, control over tempo. Kundera himself compares Part Five of Life is elsewhere (81 pages, 11 chapters, moderato) with Part Four (20 pages, 25 chapters, prestissimo). Tempo naturally governs mood and emotion, and Kundera’s mastery of it helps to give his novels their fascinating flexibility and ambiguity – and lightness. He also makes analogies between the effect of a sequence of musical movements and the juxtaposition of different sections of a novel. All Kundera’s works except The Farewell Party have a seven-part structure, and he is eager to appeal to the parallel case of Beethoven’s Op. 131 Quartet, a seven-movement work. The Art of the Novel itself is a collection of pieces written for widely varying occasions: internally consistent but not continuous, it too has seven parts.
The reason Kundera’s seven parts are no more than seven must ultimately be that they are not eight, as Lear’s fool would say. Why that number feels right to him cannot be explained. This readiness, amid so much highly self-conscious self-explication, to let the irrational have its head goes with such things as Kundera’s hostility to allegory and the hospitality he shows to ‘oneiric’ or dream-like narrative. In allegory events are there for a reason, planted by the novelist to assist his thesis. Kundera prefers the mysterious power of happenings which, like dreams, are unwilled but which carry with them their own seductive poetry. Nevertheless, some theatres of the irrational in Kundera’s work do not get much discussed in The Art of the Novel, brilliantly self-aware though it is. In a talk appended to the Penguin edition of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera notes that ‘with me everything ends in great erotic scenes, and explains that such scenes generate a sharp light which reveals the essence of the characters and their situations. Sexuality is so important in Kundera’s stories – and not least because he presents it in so unpornographic a way – that it isn’t just vulgar curiosity which makes one wish he had discussed it more fully here. ‘Sixty-Three Words’, the little dictionary included in The Art of the Novel, has a laconic gloss on ‘excitement’ as ‘the basis of eroticism, its deepest enigma, its key term’ – which may be true but hardly takes us very far.
One technical reason for the success of the erotic in Kundera is his eagerness to throw out the predictable and the superfluous, the method of what he here calls ‘radical divestment’. The modern world has become so complex that one cannot treat it comprehensively without being condemned to endless length and therefore sacrificing shape. The answer is ellipsis. Janáček is admired for his courage in discarding conventional musical note-spinning – exposition, development, variation, and so on – and going for the essential. Similarly, Kundera wants to ditch those familiar parts of the novel that are just ‘technique’, automatic verbalism, filling-in. His ambition ‘to bring together the extreme gravity of the question and the extreme lightness of the form’ could hardly be more sympathetic.
Kundera plausibly supplies the vocabulary in which his work seems to ask to be discussed, and there may be a danger (as in the case of Henry James) that the novelist’s unusual critical intelligence will lure us into taking him too much on his own terms. There must, for instance, be more to be said about the connections between his fiction and recent history than Kundera offers. He claims that in order to read his novels no knowledge of Czech history is necessary beyond what they themselves contain. The Prague spring in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is not presented as a specific political crisis but as a ‘fundamental existential situation’; the basic donnée of The Jokeis not just a local illustration of how the Czech Communist Party behaved at a given time. But perhaps Kundera’s wish to detach his work from too particular an application and to play down its real-life sources is partly due to the understandable desire of a writer to universalise – or at least to Europeanise – his art when deprived of a continuing relationship with his community.
Kundera, however, is consistent, in that he sees Kafka’s situation in a similar light. If life in Prague at certain times has come to resemble the world of Kafka’s novels, it is not because Kafka was or aimed to be a political prophet, but because of his insight into a fundamental possibility of man’s existence which history has subsequently caught up with. Kafka is, in Kundera’s sense, a true novelist: non-allegorical, non-engaged, ideologically autonomous, committed only to the discovery of truth through the fusion of reality and dream. Kundera’s chapter on him – in itself highly perceptive as an introduction to its subject – ends with a heartfelt declaration of his desire to hold onto Kafka’s artistic legacy.
Dan Jacobson alludes adversely to Kundera in an essay (on Sinyavsky) collected inAdult Pleasures, but only in passing. His charge is one of whimsicality, and it may be true that in practice there is more difficulty in combining the novel of play with the novel of existential discovery than Kundera concedes. At first sight, Adult Pleasureslooks to be a rather miscellaneous assembly of articles and reviews (some of which first appeared in LRB), and – although adapted and expanded – their original format means that while remaining admirably economical, they are also sometimes frustratingly underdeveloped and short on illustration. Dan Jacobson’s subjects range from Byron to Isaac Babel, from Theodore Herzl the Zionist to the South African Olive Schreiner, and also include some mordant reflections on a D.H. Lawrence conference at Sante Fe and a note on the biblical genesis of his own novel The Rape of Tamar. There is, nevertheless, more continuity in the volume than might be expected, and its different parts have clearly, and rightly, been seen by the author as having interconnections that carry his arguments absorbingly forward.
The first section mostly derives from papers given to an academic audience and is, as Jacobson titles it, speculative. There is nothing pedantic or pedagogic in either his procedure or his propositions, however: in fact, one of Jacobson’s most useful purposes is to question the idea that the experience of literature is inherently and beneficially didactic. ‘The real teaching which an imaginative work offers us’, he insists, ‘the very source of whatever truth it contains, is the pleasure we get out of it.’ What ‘pleasure’ might mean in this context is the subject of some of the book’s best and most human pages. Great books, even when written by Tolstoy, do not help us to live our own lives better, nor are great writers to be valued as unacknowledged legislators or ‘antennae of the race’, their insights validated by the history they foresee. To treat literary works as oracles is a form of philistinism, because it extracts only one element from the multiplicity of fluctuating, warring and interdependent events that truly make them up. For the reader, the book must be the process of going through the whole of it, thus ‘miming’ what the author went through in creating it, with all his self-contradictions and internal irresolutions, and with all the failures to realise his original conception forced on him by the recalcitrance of the material.
It will be seen from this that Jacobson, like Kundera, thinks that reports of the author’s death have been much exaggerated. At one point, he sarcastically pities Babel for not realising that his sense of selfhood was an illusion because his works were really just the product of intertextuality and linguistic convention. But it is more than a joking matter since what happens in the self in its fantasy and as it relates to other selves in the world (both the self that writes and the self that reads) is the central field of Jacobson’s enquiry and the principal interest of his book.
Forster once complained that people simply wouldn’t realise how writers floundered about, and many of Jacobson’s most searching passages involve stimulating suggestions about authorial inconsistency. (We are not so far from Kundera’s uncertainty principle after all.) As an early example of those ‘contractions and compactions of feeling’, those ‘reversals and diversions of sympathy and hostility’ out of which novels are written, Jacobson cites the case of Emma Woodhouse’s rudeness to Miss Bates. Emma feels bad about it when rebuked by Mr Knightley, but shouldn’t Jane Austen feel so too, since she has herself been mocking Miss Bates all along? The reflexive element is found, writ large and portentously, in Byron’s narrative poems, whose heroes carry such a flamboyant burden of unexplained guilt. The central hollowness of Lara and Co., Jacobson suggests, may be an index of Byron’s doubts about his sincerity, his ‘self-battlement’, his fear that he – and they – may be faking it.Don Juan succeeds because reader and narrator both know that you can’t trust a word the latter says. Other cases discussed where the biography and the oeuvre are at odds include Disraeli (whose ‘aristocratic reveries’ are so at variance with his political behaviour) and Tolstoy (where the letters and the novels seem to be written by two different, and incompatible, people).
These inconsistencies are not the ‘fissures’ pounced on by those critics who like to think of texts as sites and are naturally alert to faults in the ideological sub-strata; their interplay is interior and dynamic. As Jacobson shows with much force, this appears with particular clarity in the Brontës. The dialectic between isolation and imagination dramatised in Jane Eyre is also taking place in her creator; the novel is full of fantasy which is then condemned for being that. Out of such ‘self-confounding’ desires the novel’s nature and vitality spring. Similarly, the ‘moral’ of Wuthering Heights is not to be found in the author’s approval or disapproval of any of its principals, but in those ssionate ambivalences’ in the author herself which she compels us to live through too. There is no sense that, in exposing such deep internal divisions, Jacobson is cheaply showing up genius. His point about Lawrence’s Women in Love – that it condemns in its characters that hypertrophy of the will only too plainly apparent in the author – is made with the proper respect: proper, because the reader’s self, like the author’s, is not one but many.
Loved quotes:
A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibilities. But again, to exist mean: ‘being-in-the-world.’ Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities.
Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it’s either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless.
The unification of the planet’s history, that humanist dream which God has spitefully allowed to come true, has been accompanied by a process of dizzying reduction. True, the termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories. But the character of modern society hideously exacerbates this curse: it reduces man’s life to its social function; the history of a people to a small set of events that are themselves reduced to a tendentious interpretation; social life is reduced to political struggle, and that in turn to the confrontation of just two great global powers.
Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands. Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire. They can cope with the novel only by translating its language of relativity and ambiguity into their own apodictic and dogmatic discourse. They require that someone be right: either Anna Karenina is the victim of a narrow-minded tyrant, or Karenin is the victim of an immoral woman; either K. is an innocent man crushed by an unjust Court, or the Court represents divine justice and K. is guilty.
This ‘either-or’ encapsulates an inability to tolerate the essential relativity of things human, an inability to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge. This inability makes the novel’s wisdom (the wisdom of uncertainty) hard to accept and understand.
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