Death is elsewhere
How Milan Kundera rejuvenated and defended the art of the novel
The as-of-last-week late Milan Kundera was many things. The author of the book that made Nicholas Lezard a better lover (so what he himself once called Philip Roth: “a great historian of modern eroticism”). An essayist on world literature, Bohemia and classical music, although in a time of frenetic substackers and piece-thinkers, calling him an essayist doesn’t quite justify his achievement: he wrote essays sparingly and exactingly, treated them like he did novels, always meticulous about their structure. (Even interviews he stopped giving unless he could co-write and -edit them.) For, most importantly, he wrote novels and his most important essays were about them. He was our last great theoretician of the novel.
The novel here doesn’t mean the Czech or French novel of his original and adopted homelands, and defintely not the Anglo-American novel that us anglos and Americans are mostly familiar with. While insistent that the novel was Europe’s “art form par excellence” he knew it was writers from elsewhere - Gabriel García Márqez, Carlos Funetes,
- who’d found in the form new doors and halls, had shown there wasn’t an end yet to the old country pile…Still, he liked especially to champion what he called the Central European pleiad, comprising Robert ‘The Man Without Qualities’ Musil, Hermann ‘The Sleepwalkers’ Broch, Witold ‘Ferdydurke’ Gombrowicz, and Franz ‘all your weird dreams’ Kafka (and also-ran Jaroslav Hašek, whose novel The Good Soldier Švejk he loved for its comic spirit but correctly averred, “Don’t ask me to admire its length!”). These authors were another axis to set across the Joyce/Flaubert one further West, and so expand our notion of the novel, not least beyond our usual, numbing battle-lines.
While today we’re still pitching the bourgeois novel’s complicity in repressive social reproduction against an avant garde whose burbling will any moment now overturn the ideological state apparatus (or: “with every novel published that rejects traditional notions of narrative, structures of material oppression crumble before our very eyes”) Kundera never scorned the novel form. To his last days, when he couldn’t remember which country he was in, he maintained his true homeland was the novel (and his wife. Aw). To his last essays he pointed out the novel’s “unusued, even unperceived” potential.
In his essay ‘Sixty-three words’, a sort of personal dictionary, the entry for ‘Ideas’ makes clear his contempt for ideas novels, engagé art, and the encroachment into art of politics (he wrote that 1984 would’ve worked better as a pamphlet). And yet he believed the novel was, at its best, a supremely intellectual exercise. According to him the progress of the novel took us from told stories - the explicitly narrated ones of the 18th century like Henry Fielding’s - to shown stories - the scenically depicted ones of the 19th century like Dostoevsky’s - to thought stories.
To illustrate what he meant by the latter, he contrasted Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, in which 20th century changes to human experience are incorporated into the novel in a 19th century way via its characters sat around discussing them, with the stories of Kafka, who manifested those same changes via the outlandish ways he told his stories and not what his characters discussed. This is what made Kafka for him the flagship author of anti-realist realism.
And more. In The Curtain: an Essay in Seven Parts, Kundera announced, “Today the only modernism worthy of the name is anti-modern modernism.” And the only worthy authors those who, without becoming primitivist or reactionary, harnessed the modes of modernity to resist modernity’s cultural corrosion.
Against the facts fetishism, rigid intellectual certainties and enlightened self-righteousness that flourished in the modern era through to the present day he held up the novel’s amorphousness, which makes it playful, its provisional assertions, which render it ironic, and its fictionality, which means we can suspend our moral judgements for a change. (Since the characters in novels aren’t real then morally judging them is meaningless, morally exploring them the point.) Against modernity’s specialisation of knowledge and the atomisation of human experience, the novel was the last form trying to take in human experience as a whole. Against the counter-current inherent in globalisation, to silo off literature into separate languages and identities, and post-modernity’s jumble of cultural commodities from any and all eras, Kundera insisted on the novel as a singular unified history of the novel.
Such a history wasn’t enumerative but evaluative. In The Art of the Novel, he related Herman Broch’s protests that his novels were compared with those of fellow Central Europeans, rather than more generally with great literature. “He was only saying that national, regional contexts are useless for apprehending the meaning and value of a work… if he must be compared to someone, let it be Gide and Joyce!” Kundera’s story of the novel, being a single story, and a progressive one at that, was necessarily global, taking as its milestones any author anywhere who pushed the form further, whether in America with William Faulkner or Japan with Kenzaburo Oe.
What does it mean to push a form further? One way might be to refine it, get down to its essentials. In a mass-media era sodden with cultural forms, when films and TV shows have streamlined how to deliver narrative, when painting, comics, photos and ads have saturated us with arresting visuals, then the novel shouldn’t redundantly try to compete in telling stories or in creating lyrical beauty but do only what a novel can.
Which is what? Not interiority - to show us how a person thinks and feels, what it’s like in their head - the usual special claim made for prose fiction if not the novel full stop. For Kundera any contemporary psychological novel was an anachronism, and novels that dwelt on characters’ back-stories, their rational or irrational motives and how they came to be the way they are were at best amusing pastiches - a good impression - of a type of novel already pioneered, perfected and by now self-parodied.
Distinguishing his own novels from the psychologising ones of the 19th century, Kundera spoke of them as if they were a branch of phenomenology: the study of experience, of human being. What the novel and only the novel can do - its raison d’être, its right to exist - is to investigate human situations: both essential ones and the novel ones thrown up by historical changes. Take the Czech concept of litost, “a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery,” according to Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and which he thematically repeated and varied throughout it. Better than an academic paper, better than a literary essay ever could, the novel - fictional, provisional, ironic - investigated litost holistically through the multiple angles of approach a novel allows, and persuasively through the way a novel works through human, hence sympathisable albeit fictional characters. That’s what makes the novel best suited to recreating, defining and expanding the being in being human.
The other way to push the form further, oddly enough in concert and not contradiction with refining it, is to elaborate it (the dynamo, the dialectic of all art forms being between boiling down and frothing up). One of the modern certainties the novel’s playfulness can undermine is the novel form’s perennial death. Kundera was writing merely about the epistolary novel when he exclaimed that he was “dazzled when I think of… its enormous possibilities; and the more I think about it, the more I feel that those possibilities remain unused, even unperceived.” Realised possibilities are what make the history of an art form, a history that isn’t over till all those possibilities are fulfilled or abandoned. And a history that alone is what gives us our grounds to judge the value of this or that work of art in the future or past.
In last week’s newsletter I wrote about choirs, harmony, and counterpoint. Kundera cited the invention of counterpoint in choral music in his closing essay of The Curtain, a passage that captures the case he made for any art form: its potential, its ever-extendable history, the value that this history illuminates, and at the same time everything that’s opposed to it. (His opponents were always the “misomusists”, the haters of art. He’ll be remembered as one of art’s great defenders):
There were long periods when art did not seek out the new but took pride in making repetition beautiful, reinforcing tradition, and ensuring the stability of a collective life; music and dance then existed only in the framework of social rites, of Masses and fairs. Then one day in the twelfth century, a church musician in Paris thought of taking the melody of the Gregorian chant, unchanged for centuries, and adding to it a voice in counterpoint. The basic melody stayed the same, immemorial, but the counterpoint voice was a new thing that gave access to other new things—ever more complex and unexpected. Because they were no longer imitating what was done before, composers lost anonymity, and their names lit up like lanterns marking a path towards distant realms. Having taken flight, music became, for several centuries, the history of music.
All the European arts, each in turn, took flight that way, transformed into their own history. That was the great miracle of Europe: not its art, but its art become history.
Alas, miracles do not endure for long. What takes flight will one day come to earth. In anguish I imagine a time when art shall cease to seek out the never-said and will go docilely back into service of the collective life that requires it to render repetition beautiful and help the individual merge, at peace and with joy, into the uniformity of being.
For the history of art is perishable. The babble of art is eternal.