The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera

 

NOVEL. The great prose form in which an author thoroughly explores, by means of experimental selves (characters), some great themes of existence.

LETTERS. They are getting smaller and smaller in books these days. I imagine the death of literature; bit by bit, without anyone noticing, the type shrinks until it becomes utterly invisible.

The above two quotes convey the richness and creamy depth along with the playfulness a reader will encounter in this book by one of the giants of modern literature, Czech-born Milan Kundera. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t imagine a collection of essays containing more gems of wisdom on each and every page. And since Mr. Kundera consistently composes his works in a seven part structure to accord with his own artistic, literary and musical sensibilities, I think it only fair that I list seven quotes, one from each of his seven parts, and make my modest comments accordingly.

Part One – The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes
“To take, with Cervantes, the world as ambiguity, to be obliged to face not a single absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths (truths embodied in imaginary selves called characters), to have as one’s only certainty the wisdom of uncertainty, requires no less courage.” 

I recall a lecturer on The Platonic Tradition accusing non-Platonists of being nihilistic skeptics and relativists for denying there is a truth as well as thinking how even if there was a truth it couldn’t be known, and even if it could be known, it couldn’t be communicated. Contrary to this accusation, Mr. Kundera outlines with flair and in some detail how the wisdom of the novel transcends the overly simplified binary categories of good/evil, either/or, black/white in dogmatic discourse.

Part Two – Dialogue on the Art of the Novel
“I’m too fearful of the professors for whom art is only a derivative of philosophical and theoretical trends. The novel dealt with the unconscious before Freud, the class struggle before Marx, it practiced phenomenology (the investigation of the essence of human situations) before the phenomenologists.” 

Mr. Kundera underscores how his novels and the great novels of other writers are not philosophy per se; rather, any ideas or philosophy arises from the specific existential situation of characters.

Part Three – Notes Inspired by “The Sleepwalkers
“The world is the process of disintegration of values (values handed down from the Middle Ages), a process that stretches over the four centuries of the Modern Era and is their very essence.” 

This is a most intriguing section where the author analyzes the historical and cultural context of the various possibilities of freedom we face and how novelist Hermann Broch outlines three such possibilities in his great work.

Part Four – Dialogue on the Art of Composition
“Let me return to the comparison between the novel and music. A part is a movement. The chapters are measures. These measures may be short or long or quite variable in length. Which brings me to the issue of tempo. Each of the parts in my novels could carry a musical indication: moderato, presto, adagio, and so on.” 

We are told how the author was drawn more to music than to literature up to the age of twenty-five. Much of this section delves into some detail in comparing the structure of music with the structures of his novels, enough philosophic material here to keep both musicians and non-musicians ruminating for quite some time.

Part Five – Somewhere Behind
“There are periods of modern history when life resembles the novels of Kafka.” 

The author relates some of his own experience and stories living in Prague under a totalitarian regime. One story is about a mother of a one-year old baby boy who was unjustly imprisoned by the government. Years go by and the mother is released from prison. Then, some years after her release, the author visits the mother in her apartment. He watches as the mother dissolves in tears, waling and heaving, upset at her now twenty-five-year-old son over some minor matter like oversleeping. The author watches all this in shock; he see how the mother has taken the place of the totalitarian state and the son, like many of Kafka’s characters, accepts his guilt.

Part Six – Sixty-three Words
“IDEAS. My disgust for those who reduce a work to its ideas. My revulsion at being dragged into what they call “discussions of ideas.” My despair at this era befogged with ideas and indifferent to works.” 

At another point in the section, he says how novelists who think they are larger than their novels should get another job. Love his frankness!

Part Seven – Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe
“No peace is possible between the novelist and the agelaste. Never having heard God’s laughter, the agelasts are convinced the truth is obvious, that all men necessarily think the same thing, and that they themselves are exactly what they think they are.” 

The agelaste is a man or woman who does not laugh, who has no sense of humor. You know the type – and they hate literary novels like the ones written by Milan Kundera.