Lately I have been inspired by The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera. It is a collection of essays, notes and dialogues that covers his ideas about the history, content and purpose of the novel. I have borrowed this copy from a university's library and it smells delightfully of old book though it is not old itself, and, because it is a library copy, I have been copying out whole paragraphs into my journal so that I may revisit them when I have returned the book. If I was not so scrupulously conscientious I might call the library and tell them I 'lost it', but my ideals regarding honesty will not allow such behaviour.
Kundera can be obscure and difficult to understand in some places, as though he expects his audience to authomatically know what he's talking about, but I simply go on reading and aim to get out of it what I can. The Art of the Novel is a book well worth reading more than once for anyone who appreciates novels as more than the notion of 'best seller'. What follows are some of the ideas I have gleaned that particularly struck me as needing to be remembered; this post is by no means a comprehensive review of the book or of Kundera's complete set of ideas, and I don't think any of my posts will ever serve such a function.
I particularly appreciate Kundera's comments on the general public's idea of how the novel should behave, and the writer as well. He denies that novels ought to be realistic, that they must reflect life exactly as it is. 'A character is not a simulation of a living being. Is it an imaginary being. An experimental self... Making a character "alive" means: getting to the bottom of his existential problem. Which in turn means: getting to the bottom of some situations, some motifs, even some words that shape him. Nothing more.' p 34, 35 According to Kundera's ideas, the writer should not be obligated to give an account of the character's entire history of childhood, beliefs, and every thought process, which one finds in so many novels written over the course of the novel's history. Nor should the writer be restricted to simply telling the character's story. Kundera states that he often discusses what the character may be thinking, or what the character might decide to do. This is all in opposition to the traditions of psychological realism, which include the standard that 'The author with his own considerations must disappear so as not to disturb the reader, who wants to give himself over to illusion and take fiction for reality.' p 34 As an aspiring writer who does not want to write according to a set of instructions that say what publishable work needs, I really appreciate what Kundera is explaining, that the art of the novel is malleable and necessary, and that the novelist must aim at something profound: the exploration of existence. It is an understanding that grants the writer the freedom to put in only what is necessary to the story, and not pander to common ideas of what the reader needs to know.
I shall complete this post with a paragraph out of the first essay in The Art of the Novel, 'The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes', which presents a daunting challenge for the writer who would be true to it: 'The novel has accompanied man uninterruptedly and fiathfully since the beginning of the Modern Era. It was then that the "passion to know," which Husserl considered the essence of Eurpean spirituality, seized the novel and led it to scrutinise man's concrete life and protect it against "the forgetting of being"; to hold "the world of life" under a permanent light. That is the sense in which I understand and share Hermann Broch's insistence in repeating: The sole raison d'être of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.' p 5
