On The Novel: Thank You, Milan Kundera I

If you are not interested in writing fiction, or my navel-gazing meditations on my own writing, feel to move on. I continue what I started in Cormac McCarthy's Style - Commentary on MFAs Writing the Future. Here I am thinking out loud and keeping notes for myself and offering ideas for others. That my "Love Stinks" has received rather negative views has been a bit of a shock. Working through this shock, the material coming out when Kundera died, impelled this run of writing.

By the way, The prison writing group liked "Love Stinks" with one exception.

See, I wrote "Love Stinks", I was under the influence of Milan Kundera's Art of the Novel.

I found the following when I started drafting this post. I add them in lieu of my boxed away notes. Some will be critical of Kundera's ideas.I add my own comments, but do so briefly.

 Review: Milan Kundera, L'Art du Roman from Reading This Book, Cover to Cover ... blog:

At the end of it all, Kundera formulates a definition of the novel:

“La grande forme de la prose où l’auteur, à travers des egos expérimentaux (personnages), examine jusqu’au bout quelques grandes thèmes de l’existence » ( page 179)

This is, of course, written not without irony but it does identify the Things Good To Think With ( les choses bonnes à penser – Lévi-Strauss) with which the novelist specifically works: characters.

One might say (and I tried to say this in the lectures on aesthetics which I gave in the 1980s and 1990s – see www.selectedworks.co.uk) that each of the traditional and great art forms has its own specific things “good to think with” or perhaps more accurately “good to express with”. For the potter, it is clay. For the sculptor, stone or metal. For the composer, sound and silence. And so on. 

When the novelist works with characters, he or she has the chance to discover and bring into focus ways of human being and possibilities of existence which would have eluded discovery in mere prose.

Nelson Algren's Nonconformity pointed me towards what could be written. 

 Rather than smarmy beady-eyed Horatio Algers, Algren lauds Dreiser, Mencken, Veblen, Steffens, and Lewis. Our singular American genius Mark Twain towers among even that splendid company. Algren skewers popular novelists who disingenuously yearn only ‘to give pleasure to the reading public” and plead they have “no right to impose [their] views on race and religion.” So then, Algren deduces, ‘if it isn’t the writer’s task to relate mankind to the things of the earth, it must be his job to keep them unrelated.’ Repelled by the businessman’s creed that “no values are greater than thrift, self-preservation, and piety,” Algren speaks of outward show, of a ‘neon wilderness’ (an Algren title) dominated by whitewashed high-rise sepulchers full of schemers. He flatly accused the American middle class of adoring “personal comfort as an end in itself” which “is, in essence, a denial of life.”[20] He detested cozy ingrown literary cliques, pulling themselves up the ladder by each other’s Gucci bootstraps. “When [a writer] sees scarcely anyone except other writers,” says Algren,  “he is ready for New York” and what Algren terms “bellhop writing” – writing to order.  “No book was ever worth writing that wasn’t done with the attitude that ‘This ain’t what you rung for, Jack – but its what you’re damned well getting.”

I gave up my ideas of writing fiction when I saw no way to do with Indian what Faulkner did with Mississippi, and could not find my world in what Saul Bellow had written in Humboldt's Gift. But in Algren's people I recognized many of my clients, several of my friends, and many acquaintances. Character being what comes from the press of history and environment is one thing is that I got from Algren. More importantly, he reminded me what Henry David Thoreau also taught me - the virtues of nonconformity. Kundera emphasizing the character as the cornerstone of the novel, pointed me to how to write. Not that the characters of my "Love Stinks" are Algren's downtrodden, they are the middle-class types I knew of in an Indiana factory town - hanging on to their existence in the face of economic and environmental changes. Albeit my characters are more improvisational, more non-conformist than some of my acquaintances. Follow this link to what I have written on Algren.

From Welcome to ME blog, Notes on The Art of the Novel:

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.

 From Books & Boots blog, The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera (1986):

There is no mention of American fiction: from Melville through Twain, Hemingway and Faulkner (OK, Faulkner is mentioned right towards the end as one of the several authors who want nothing written about their lives, only their works), Updike or Roth or Bellow. No reference to science fiction or historical fiction or thrillers or detective fiction. Or children’s fiction. There is no mention of South American fiction (actually, he does mention a novel by Carlos Fuentes), or anything from Africa or Asia.

Some exceptions, but by and large, it is a very very very narrow definition of the Novel. Kundera can only talk as sweepingly as he does because he has disqualified 99.9% of the world from consideration before he begins.

This might be the one criticism, I will criticize. Well, quibble over. It is true, but the context is of European, perhaps even more accurately Central European writing. Another writer who opened my eyes to what could be done with the novel was Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his One Hundred Years of Solitude. Not that "Love Stinks" has anything smacking of magical realism. That is to be found in other stories. I point this out, just as noted Algren above, is to, in some degree, in response to this point. Follow this link to what I have written about Marquez. 

Two other Latin American writers I found influential: Mario Vargas Llosa's Letters to a Young Novelist and Carlos Fuentes' This I Believe (for pointing me also towards Don Quixote.) Follow this link to what I have written about Llosa.

***

According to Kundera, before one writes one must have an ontological hypothesis, a theory about what kind of world we live in. For example The Good Soldier Švejk finds everything about the world absurd. At the opposite pole, Kafka’s protagonists find everything about the world so oppressive that they lose their identities to it.

After all, What is action? How do we decide to do what we do? That is, according to Kundera, the eternal question of the novel. (p.58)

Through an analysis of the plots of the three novels, Kundera concludes that what Broch discovered was the system of symbolic thought which underlies all decisions, public or private.

***

Specific words are more important to Kundera than other novelists because his novels are often highly philosophical. In fact, he boils it down: a novel is a meditation on certain themes; and these themes are expressed in words. Change the words, you screw up the meditations, you wreck the novel.

If anything, "Love Stinks" is about themes, but ones that are in all of my fiction - history, memory, epistemology, economic systems, colonialism, ethics. These I see making up the world, and people either follow along or fight against the effects of each.

***

The greatest promoter of kitsch is the mass media which turns the huge human variety into half a dozen set narratives designed to make us burst into tears. We are confronted by a three-headed monster: the agélastes, the nonthought of received ideas, and kitsch.

Kundera sees European culture as being under threat from these three forces, and identifies what is most precious about it (European culture), namely:

• its respect for the individual
• for the individual’s original thought
• for the right of the individual to a private life

Against the three-headed monster, and defending these precious freedoms, is set the Novel, a sustained investigation by some of the greatest minds, into all aspects of human existence, the human predicament, into human life and interactions, into human culture.

It seems to me today (7/21/2023) what Kundera feared is to be feared even more now. It might sound as if he were biting off a lot for the novel, so was Algren. You should get a copy of Nonconformity from here.

John Milbank's Beyond Progressivism: Toward a Personalist Metaphysics of History from The Hedgehog Review feels pertinent. Milbank argues that Western culture is decadent, with its emphasis on identity and disdain for rationality. He offers the possibility of a solution from the Russians, and (while passing over the influence of Orthodox Christianity in the following) one that I see as encapsulating the prime purpose of the novel: capturing persons in their complexity.

To answers these questions in turn, we might draw on those Russian thinkers whose situation “between” Europe and Asia tended to encourage them to make this combination. I am thinking especially of Vladimir Solovyov and another one of his of his followers, Lev Karsavin, whose thought is only now emerging from its Soviet-era obscurity.⁹

For both thinkers, the key to a metaphysics of history was not rational logic, material exigency, or disembodied spirit, but the embodied or incarnate person. Their rigorous skepticism, anticipating the postmodern, disallowed any traceable rational or material necessary links between unity and variety, despite the inescapable truth that all our reality consists in such. For Solovyov and Karsavin, the only clue to this linkage lay in our experience of interpersonal love: Both individually and collectively, personality expresses and realizes ineffably an erotic-agapeic fusion of the one with the many.

It is just for this reason that “character” is the most palpable yet most elusive reality, the most predictable yet most inexhaustibly unpredictable. Always and everywhere, universal realities are constituted only by individual examples, yet these examples exhibit what the genus consists of far more than any abstracted generalization can. A single human being shows us what humanity consists of more than any summation of common attributes does. If this is indeed the case, it is more logical that we think of general humanity as a single archetypal “man,” as did Gregory of Nyssa and other Church Fathers.

For the mystical Russians, their personalism cohered naturally with a Platonic account of genera as transcendent “ideas.” In the case of a third thinker in the tradition of Solovyov, Pavel Florensky, both person and idea can equally be thought of as “icons.”¹⁰ The primacy of the personal always goes along with the primacy of the symbolic, because a personalist philosophy understands the rationally “expressed” to be but the ineffable mingling of two impenetrable sources: of the depths of material world, on the one hand, and the heights of spiritual inspiration, on the other. Without the “passionary” meeting of these two, human reason is ultimately void of all but formal and self-referring content.¹¹

From The Irish Times, Old Favourites: The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera, translated by Linda Asher (1986):

Fittingly, Kundera is a stern defender of the “great European art” he practised: “A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.” He celebrates the novel’s spirit of complexity, irony and moral ambiguity, and calls for an art of “radical divestment” – that is, for novelists to pare away as much superfluity as possible and “always head straight for the heart of things”. Fellow practitioners could do worse than to write by Kundera’s core maxim: “The novel’s sole raison d’être is to say what only the novel can say.”

The Literary Review's Man of Sixty-Two Words The Art of the Novel By Milan Kundera can be read in full only by subscribers, but I went there and it did not feel complete without mentioning this review.

 My own notes are so buried in the boxes of paper I here, I worry my memory has forgotten too much, might have led me astray. Kundera led me to think of the novel-as-collage; which is confusing most of my readers out here. I did like the novelistic essay, and even more, putting short story into the novel. No one out here has yet seen that section of the novel. Unlike Kundera, I did try to give a reason for character. But it is character that is caught in history and memory and eventually their culture, which I think is made of history and our internal reaction to history.

Quick takes for Kundera: Is a good novel smarter than its author? Kundera thought so…

Next, I will go to Kundera in his own words, which will go up here tomorrow.

sch 7/21