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Friday
Yesterday, in honor of the late Czech author Milan Kundera, I looked back at past posts about his insights into the nature of authoritarianism. Moving out of politics, today I allude to an essay where I mentioned his reflections on how courtship has changed and then reprint a post where I quote at length from his reflections on The Art of the Novel.
In response to a fine New Yorker piece on “How Dating During a Pandemic Is Like Being in a Jane Austen Novel,” I wrote, “In a world where everything is built for speed and convenience, the slowness of Jane Austen’s relationships is part of their attraction.” That in turn prompted me to recall passages in Kundera’s novel Slowness, including the following on what we have lost:
Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence by a metaphor: “They are gazing at God’s windows.” A person gazing at God’s windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for the activity he lacks.”
Kundera contends that our emphasis on speed changes the very nature of sexuality:
The religion of orgasm: utilitarianism projected into sex life; efficiency versus indolence; coition reduced to an obstacle to be got past as quickly as possible in order to reach an ecstatic explosion, the only true goal of love-making and of the universe.
Whether or not this is true, Kundera’s counsel to live life more slowly and (to use Thoreau’s favorite word) deliberately is worth taking seriously.
In my post “History’s Arc Bends Towards Kafka,” meanwhile, I summed up Kundera’s view that fiction is always a step ahead of philosophy. Here’s the essay.
Reprinted from Oct. 21, 2010
Literature provides a special way of knowing, a way different than, say, philosophy. But it’s hard to prove this because we need to use the language of rational philosophy to make literature’s case. Once we have done so, philosophy can seem more effective than literature. After all, it tells us things straight up, without resorting to stories, images and symbols.
Because of this contradictory situation, there were literary scholars in the 1970’s and 1980’s who claimed that literature was just second-rate philosophy. Or as Czech novelist Milan Kundera himself wrote in 1983, “I’m . . . fearful of the professors for whom art is only a derivative of philosophical and theoretical trends.”
But philosophy can’t convey the same kind of experiential knowing that literature does. Literature takes us inside knowing and, because of this, we come to see the world in new ways. In his Art of the Novel, Kundera gives a succinct and rather dazzling account of how, over the centuries, the novel has been taking up questions that philosophy wasn’t getting around to. I lay out the outlines of his argument here to stimulate your thinking and to get you thinking in new ways about the authors he mentions.
Kundera starts by challenging those philosophers who think that modern thought began with Descartes separating out body from soul. He then takes on the 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger, who claims (in Being and Time) that he was addressing existential themes that had been neglected by earlier European philosophy. Kundera says that the issues Heidegger wrestles with
had been unveiled, displayed, illuminated by four centuries of the novel. . . . . In its own way, through its own logic, the novel discovered the various dimensions of existence one by one: with Cervantes and his contemporaries, it inquires into the nature of adventure; with Richardson, it begins to examine “what happens inside,” to unmask the secret life of the feelings; with Balzac, it discovers man’s rootedness in history; with Flaubert, it explores the terra previously incognita of the everyday; with Tolstoy, it focuses on the intrusion of the irrational in human behavior and decisions. It probes time: the elusive past with Proust, the elusive present with Joyce. With Thomas Mann, it examines the role of the myths from the remote past that control our present actions. Et cetera, et cetera.
Kundera then goes on to elaborate on some of these authors:
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 courage.
What does Cervantes’ great novel mean? Much has been written on the question. Some see in it a rationalist critique of Don Quixote’s hazy idealism. Others see it as a celebration of that same idealism. Both interpretations are mistaken because they both seek at the novel’s core not an inquiry but a moral position . . . .
Don Quixote set off into a world that opened wide before him. He could go out freely and come home as he pleased. The early European novels are journeys through an apparently unlimited world. . . .
[I]n Balzac the distant horizon has disappeared like a landscape behind those modern structures, the social institutions: the police, the law, the world of money and crime, the army, the State. In Balzac’s world, time no longer idles happily by as it does for Cervantes . . . It has set forth on the train called History. The train is easy to board, hard to leave. But it isn’t at all fearsome yet, it even has its appeal; it promises adventure to every passenger, and with it fame and fortune.
Later still, for Emma Bovary, the horizon shrinks to the point of seeming a barrier. Adventure lies beyond it, and the longing becomes intolerable. Within the monotony of the quotidian, dreams and daydreams take on importance. The lost infinity of the outside world is replaced by the infinity of the soul. The great illusion of the irreplaceable uniqueness of the individual—one of Europe’s finest illusions—blossoms forth.
But the dream of the soul’s infinity loses its magic when History (or what remains of it: the suprahuman force of an omnipotent society) takes hold of man. History no longer promises him fame and fortune; it barely promises him a land-surveyor’s job. In the face of the Court or the Castle, what can K. do? Not much. Can’t he at least dream as Emma Bovary used to do? No, the situation’s trap is too terrible, and like a vacuum cleaner it sucks up all his thoughts and feelings: all he can think of is his trial, his surveying job. The infinity of the soul—if it ever existed—has become a nearly useless appendage.
One word of warning: whenever writers set forth such a tight history of the novel, you can be sure that they are framing the tradition in a way that accounts for their own fictional trajectory. Kundera, writing in communist Czechoslovakia, feels that the wide open picaresque and digressive landscapes of the 17th and 18th centuries have steadily been closing down until they culminate in a Kafakesque world that looks a lot like the state repression he has been living in. A different author would trace a different history.
But that being said, Kundera’s observations are still wonderful for how they get us to reflect upon the interaction between novels and great movements of historical consciousness. In Kundera’s view the novel isn’t just an entertainment genre that rides on the waves of history. It is an integral contributor to history. As readers read and begin to see the historical forces that are unfolding, history comes to know itself.