On The Novel: Thank You, Milan Kundera II

 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 and On The Novel: Thank You, Milan Kundera I. 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. 

With Kundera's death, The Paris Review released its interview with the man from behind its paywall. His Art of the Novel opened my eyes. He expresses some of the same ideas in Milan Kundera, The Art of Fiction No. 81:

INTERVIEWER

You have said that you feel closer to the Viennese novelists Robert Musil and Hermann Broch than to any other authors in modern literature. Broch thought—as you do—that the age of the psychological novel had come to an end. He believed, instead, in what he called the “polyhistorical” novel.

MILAN KUNDERA

Musil and Broch saddled the novel with enormous responsibilities. They saw it as the supreme intellectual synthesis, the last place where man could still question the world as a whole. They were convinced that the novel had tremendous synthetic power, that it could be poetry, fantasy, philosophy, aphorism, and essay all rolled into one. In his letters, Broch makes some profound observations on this issue. However, it seems to me that he obscures his own intentions by using the ill-chosen term “polyhistorical novel.” It was in fact Broch’s compatriot, Adalbert Stifter, a classic of Austrian prose, who created a truly polyhistorical novel in his Der Nachsommer [Indian Summer], published in 1857. The novel is famous: Nietzsche considered it to be one of the four greatest works of German literature. Today, it is unreadable. It’s packed with information about geology, botany, zoology, the crafts, painting, and architecture; but this gigantic, uplifting encyclopedia virtually leaves out man himself, and his situation. Precisely because it is polyhistorical, Der Nachsommer totally lacks what makes the novel special. This is not the case with Broch. On the contrary! He strove to discover “that which the novel alone can discover.” The specific object of what Broch liked to call “novelistic knowledge” is existence. In my view, the word “polyhistorical” must be defined as “that which brings together every device and every form of knowledge in order to shed light on existence.” Yes, I do feel close to such an approach.

Jason M. Wirth's Man Thinks, God Laughs: Remembering Milan Kundera from Hedgehog Review makes a point that is revelant here:

Philosophy, by contrast, argues to prove a point and, with its own multifarious means, tries to be right and reach conclusions. Kundera’s novels, however, are expansive and support irreconcilable yet arguably valid points of view. They employ polyphonic complexity and are rife with irony and ambiguity, all the better to explore the full range of human experience. One could drop (as Broch did in the final book of his masterpiece, The Sleepwalkers) a philosophical essay into a novel, and it becomes a point of view among points of view, an element among elements. Even Kundera’s authorial voice in his novels, while providing acute, even aphoristic philosophical commentary, is subject to the same irony. It is finally no more than one perspective among many. Nor does its “authority” lead to resolutions or secure conclusions.

Here, I may fail with "Love Stinks" - its ambiguity is not in its conclusion. It is only part of a longer story, and the whole does have  - for now, it is ion my head - an ambiguous ending for in the end the principals and their family are left in the wider world of 2017. But the irreconcilable... that I need think about. Back to The Paris Review's interview:

INTERVIEWER

A long essay you published in the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur caused the French to rediscover Broch. You speak highly of him, and yet you are also critical. At the end of the essay, you write: “All great works (just because they are great) are partly incomplete.”

KUNDERA

Broch is an inspiration to us not only because of what he accomplished, but also because of all that he aimed at and could not attain. The very incompleteness of his work can help us understand the need for new art forms, including: (1) a radical stripping away of unessentials (in order to capture the complexity of existence in the modern world without a loss of architectonic clarity); (2) “novelistic counterpoint” (to unite philosophy, narrative, and dream into a single music); (3) the specifically novelistic essay (in other words, instead of claiming to convey some apodictic message, remaining hypothetical, playful, or ironic).

INTERVIEWER

These three points seem to capture your entire artistic program.

KUNDERA

In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of endless length. Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is one of the two or three novels that I love most. But don’t ask me to admire its gigantic unfinished expanse! Imagine a castle so huge that the eye cannot take it all in at a glance. Imagine a string quartet that lasts nine hours. There are anthropological limits—human proportions—that should not be breached, such as the limits of memory. When you have finished reading, you should still be able to remember the beginning. If not, the novel loses its shape, its “architectonic clarity” becomes murky.

INTERVIEWER

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is made up of seven parts. If you had dealt with them in a less elliptical fashion, you could have written seven different full-length novels.

KUNDERA

But if I had written seven independent novels, I would have lost the most important thing: I wouldn’t have been able to capture the “complexity of human existence in the modern world” in a single book. The art of ellipsis is absolutely essential. It requires that one always go directly to the heart of things. In this connection, I always think of a Czech composer I have passionately admired since childhood: Leoš Janáček. He is one of the greatest masters of modern music. His determination to strip music to its essentials was revolutionary. Of course, every musical composition involves a great deal of technique: exposition of the themes, their development, variations, polyphonic work (often very automatic), filling in the orchestration, the transitions, et cetera. Today one can compose music with a computer, but the computer always existed in composers’ heads—if they had to, composers could write sonatas without a single original idea, just by “cybernetically” expanding on the rules of composition. Janáček’s purpose was to destroy this computer! Brutal juxtaposition instead of transitions; repetition instead of variation—and always straight to the heart of things: only the note with something essential to say is entitled to exist. It is nearly the same with the novel; it too is encumbered by “technique,” by rules that do the author’s work for him: present a character, describe a milieu, bring the action into its historical setting, fill up the lifetime of the characters with useless episodes. Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations. My purpose is like Janáček’s: to rid the novel of the automatism of novelistic technique, of novelistic word-spinning.

I think this, again from The Paris Review, tracks what I read in Kundera's book that led me to thinking of the novel as a collage. It was afterwards, I read Dos Passos' USA Trilogy. My posts on Dos Passos are here. (Then, when I re-read Ross Lockridge Jr's Raintree County at the end of my prison career, I found I had run across another version of disaprate parts, Lockridge's imaginary newspaper articles, and simulaneity when I was a teenager. My notes from re-reading Raintree County are here. But he falls under Kundera's criticism of homogenity. I think of the imaginary newspaper pieces as a counterpoint - yes, KH, there is where I got the idea!)

KUNDERA

The novel can incorporate outside elements in two ways. In the course of his travels, Don Quixote meets various characters who tell him their tales. In this way, independent stories are inserted into the whole, fitted into the frame of the novel. This type of composition is often found in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century novels. Broch, however, instead of fitting the story of Hanna Wendling into the main story of Esch and Huguenau, lets both unfold simultaneously. Sartre (in The Reprieve), and Dos Passos before him, also used this technique of simultaneity. Their aim, however, was to bring together different novelistic stories, in other words, homogeneous rather than heterogeneous elements as in the case of Broch. Moreover, their use of this technique strikes me as too mechanical and devoid of poetry. I cannot think of better terms than “polyphony” or “counterpoint” to describe this form of composition and, furthermore, the musical analogy is a useful one. For instance, the first thing that bothers me about the third part of The Sleepwalkers is that the five elements are not all equal. Whereas the equality of all the voices in musical counterpoint is the basic ground rule, the sine qua non. In Broch’s work, the first element (the novelistic narrative of Esch and Huguenau) takes up much more physical space than the other elements, and, even more important, it is privileged insofar as it is linked to the two preceding parts of the novel and therefore assumes the task of unifying it. It therefore attracts more attention and threatens to turn the other elements into mere accompaniment. The second thing that bothers me is that though a fugue by Bach cannot do without any one of its voices, the story of Hanna Wendling or the essay on the decline of values could very well stand alone as an independent work. Taken separately, they would lose nothing of their meaning or of their quality.

In my view, the basic requirements of novelistic counterpoint are: (1) the equality of the various elements; (2) the indivisibility of the whole. I remember that the day I finished “The Angels,” part three of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative. The text was made up of the following elements: (1) an anecdote about two female students and their levitation; (2) an autobiographical narrative; (3) a critical essay on a feminist book; (4) a fable about an angel and the devil; (5) a dream-narrative of Paul Eluard flying over Prague. None of these elements could exist without the others, each one illuminates and explains the others as they all explore a single theme and ask a single question: “What is an angel?”

Part six, also entitled “The Angels,” is made up of: (1) a dream-narrative of Tamina’s death; (2) an autobiographical narrative of my father’s death; (3) musicological reflections; (4) reflections on the epidemic of forgetting that is devastating Prague. What is the link between my father and the torturing of Tamina by children? It is “the meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella” on the table of one theme, to borrow Lautréamont’s famous image. Novelistic polyphony is poetry much more than technique. I can find no example of such polyphonic poetry elsewhere in literature, but I have been very astonished by Alain Resnais’s latest films. His use of the art of counterpoint is admirable.

***

KUNDERA

Because he has none! People often talk about Chekhov’s philosophy, or Kafka’s, or Musil’s. But just try to find a coherent philosophy in their writings! Even when they express their ideas in their notebooks, the ideas amount to intellectual exercises, playing with paradoxes, or improvisations rather than to assertions of a philosophy. And philosophers who write novels are nothing but pseudonovelists who use the form of the novel in order to illustrate their ideas. Neither Voltaire nor Camus ever discovered “that which the novel alone can discover.” I know of only one exception, and that is the Diderot of Jacques le fataliste. What a miracle! Having crossed over the boundary of the novel, the serious philosopher becomes a playful thinker. There is not one serious sentence in the novel—everything in it is play. That’s why this novel is outrageously underrated in France. Indeed, Jacques le fataliste contains everything that France has lost and refuses to recover. In France, ideas are preferred to works. Jacques le fataliste cannot be translated into the language of ideas, and therefore it cannot be understood in the homeland of ideas.

Again, Man Thinks, God Laughs provides me some thinking here. 

Central to Kundera’s cynicism in a world that thinks it has all the answers is the novel’s refreshing humility. When accepting the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society in 1985, Kundera mentioned that he had always been inspired by the Jewish adage, “Man thinks, God laughs.” He liked to imagine that the medieval French comic genius (and former Franciscan monk) François Rabelais “heard God’s laughter one day, and thus was born the idea of the first great European novel.” It pleased Kundera to think that “the art of the novel came into the world as the echo of God’s laughter.” This laughter undermines our ready truths and self-assured certainties, a disturbance that many of us find unsettling. This laughter gave rise to one of Kundera’s most memorable phrases: “But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master? The planet is moving through the void without any master. There it is, the unbearable lightness of being.” 

Yet lightness and uncertainty are invaluable ways of knowing the world and our place in it. Plato and Aristotle, each in his own way, argued that philosophy was born in the wonder that emerges when our certainties collapse. Wonder and a healthy cynicism about our grand historical certainties are what made Kundera’s work such valuable investigations of reality. Although his fictions’ proximity to philosophy is striking, Kundera resisted being characterized as a philosophical novelist. In an interview with the writer Christian Salmon, the latter suggested that Kundera’s novels could be characterized as “phenomenological.” Although Kundera could appreciate Salmon’s point, he confessed that he was wary of such terms because he was “too fearful of the professors for whom art is only a derivative of philosophical and theoretical trends.” The novel is not philosophy by other means. It does not illustrate philosophical ideas or stealthily make philosophical arguments.

What has been said about my "Love Stinks" can be said here: it is like a reality TV show. What was meant is a comedy. Dark, but with laughter. I think readers can laugh at the characters, and they can find times to laugh with the characters. None of which seems to have come through by my readers outside of prison. (Still waiting on you, niece and MW and T2, as I write this.) 

But what about laughing at literary tradition when that tradition gets in the way of telling a story? KH tells me I have made "Love Stinks" difficult with its formatting. I thought the problem would be the intrusions of memory, flashbacks, which I saw as being like in a film, a quick cut in and out. No, what bothered him were what I designated the counterpoint scenes. In those scenes, I have the assembled group watching a video made by one of the children, and I formatted what was going on the TV screen as if it were a screenplay while also recording the reactions of the audience. The latter are displayed in parentheticals. What is recorded functions as an objective counterpoint to the subjective sections of the principals.  The reactions are what I think would okay in reaction to the recording. I knew no other way to get what I wanted in another way. So, I wrote it the way it unspooled in my head and assumed the form could handle my methods. Now, it seems I did not think of readers.

INTERVIEWER

In The Joke, it is Jaroslav who develops a musicological theory. The hypothetical character of his thinking is thus apparent. But the musicological meditations in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting are the author’s, your own. How am I then to understand whether they are hypothetical or assertive?

KUNDERA

It all depends on the tone. From the very first words, my intention is to give these reflections a playful, ironic, provocative, experimental, or questioning tone. All of part six of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (“The Grand March”) is an essay on kitsch which expounds one main thesis: kitsch is the absolute denial of the existence of shit. This meditation on kitsch is of vital importance to me. It is based on a great deal of thought, experience, study, and even passion. Yet the tone is never serious; it is provocative. This essay is unthinkable outside of the novel, it is a purely novelistic meditation.

***

 

INTERVIEWER

What do you mean by farce?

KUNDERA

I mean the emphasis on plot and on all its trappings of unexpected and incredible coincidences. Nothing has become as suspect, ridiculous, old-fashioned, trite, and tasteless in a novel as plot and its farcical exaggerations. From Flaubert on, novelists have tried to do away with the artifices of plot. And so the novel has become duller than the dullest of lives. Yet there is another way to get around the suspect and worn-out aspect of the plot, and that is to free it from the requirement of likelihood. You tell an unlikely story that chooses to be unlikely! That’s exactly how Kafka conceived Amerika. The way Karl meets his uncle in the first chapter is through a series of the most unlikely coincidences. Kafka entered into his first “sur-real” universe, into his first “fusion of dream and reality,” with a parody of the plot—through the door of farce.

INTERVIEWER

But why did you choose the farce form for a novel that is not at all meant to be an entertainment?

KUNDERA

But it is an entertainment! I don’t understand the contempt that the French have for entertainment, why they are so ashamed of the word “divertissement.” They run less risk of being entertaining than of being boring. And they also run the risk of falling for kitsch, that sweetish, lying embellishment of things, the rose-colored light that bathes even such modernist works as Eluard’s poetry or Ettore Scola’s recent film Le Bal, whose subtitle could be: “French history as kitsch.” Yes, kitsch, not entertainment, is the real aesthetic disease! The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious—think of Cervantes! In The Farewell Party, the question is, does man deserve to live on this earth? Shouldn’t one “free the planet from man’s clutches”? My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form. Nor is this purely an artistic ambition. The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well as those that we play out on the great stage of History) and their awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being.

Think about it - the human imagination is the limit of the novel.

Which, I think, brings me to On the Aesthetic Turn by Anastasia Berg from The Point. She discusses the morality of art from the perspective of the reader. As I am learning, if the reader does not understand, or accept, the artistic venture fails. Yes, yes, there are plenty of examples of where art failing to find a contemporary audience finds one in the future - there is the career of Van Gogh and there is the history of Moby Dick. I am neither. I do not mean throwing away the work - did that once and see that as an act of cowardice that I cannot repeat. I do mean it means listening carefully to the criticism (contrary to some of our American politicians, criticism is neither canceling nor censorship) to pick out the changes justifiable in light of the project, and revising to communicate better get across one's vision. Neither Van Gogh nor Melville needed to revise their vision - their vision being quite clear in the works - and did need until the day that people saw better their visions. No, I want to turn to Ms. Berg's essay for why not to give up, which I think is not alien to the vision of Kundera:

If good art and its criticism can free us from anything, it can free us, first and foremost, from the totalizing fantasies that are fed by such images—whether of mountains shot by fascists, or of the perfect faces generated by algorithms, or of a society cleansed of its treacherous elites or deplorables. It can liberate us, in other words, from the comforting delusion that we can ever transcend our human limits, defeat death, unhappiness and evil once and for all, or live in anyone’s vision of heaven on earth. This does not mean, however, that we can ever be liberated from the infinite pull of beauty itself, or be able to attend to images only when we feel like it. It is rather like this: we can decide what to do, but we can never decide what to dream.

And then back to Man Thinks, God Laughs:

In the later years of his long life, Kundera worked hard to tidy up his works, supervising and revising translations, and deciding on the final form, contents, and appearance of his oeuvre. He presented his works, not himself, to those that would find their dogged humility and sense of wonder and humor inspiring, even liberating. The work of the novelist is not to promote one’s own inner or outer life but to produce works that, for all their difficulty and ambiguity, seek to illuminate the ever-unfolding mystery of all things human. 

 Whatever may be my faults as a writer, I started writing as part of therapy and I continued to pay witness to the lives I have seen. They have value, and if I can write a proper story - one that captures their lives with a language that matches their value, then I will feel successful.  Whatever may be your faults, keep working - keep scribbling and thinking and revising. The novel has a place in the life of humanity. The novel combines the psychological, the rational, the historical in a manner that, I think, sidesteps the decadence of Western culture proclaimed in Beyond Progressivism, even if the novel cannot give us a declarative answer to being human, only to join us with humanity in all its weirdness. That I think is what Kundera and Cormac McCarthy were about. We should all try for the same goal.

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