The Art of the Novel

Author: Milan Kundera

• In 1935, three years before his death, Edmund Husserl gave his celebrated lectures in Vienna and Prague on the crisis of European humanity. For Husserl, the adjective “European” meant the spiritual identity that extends beyond geographical Europe (to America, for instance) and that was born with ancient Greek philosophy.

• The crisis Husserl spoke of seemed to him so profound that he wondered whether Europe was still able to survive it. The roots of the crisis lay for him at the beginning of the Modern Era, in Galileo and Descartes, in the one-sided nature of the European sciences, which reduced the world to a mere object of technical and mathematical investigation and put the concrete world of life, die Lebenswelt as he called it, beyond their horizon.

• The rise of the sciences propelled man into the tunnels of the specialized disciplines. The more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly could he see either the world as a whole or his own self, and he plunged further into what Husserl’s pupil Heidegger called, in a beautiful and almost magical phrase, “the forgetting of being.”

• Once elevated by Descartes to “master and proprietor of nature,” man has now become a mere thing to the forces (of technology, of politics, of history) that bypass him, surpass him, possess him.

• I would say rather that the two great philosophers laid bare the ambiguit y of this epoch, which is decline and progress at the same time and which, like all that is human, carries the seed of its end in its beginning.

• 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.

• The novel has accompanied man uninterruptedly and faithfully since the beginning of the Modern Era. It was then that the “passion to know,” which Husserl considered the essence of European spirituality, seized the novel and led it to scrutinize man’s concrete life and protect it against “the forgetting of being”; to hold “the world of life” under a permanent light.

• The sole raison d’etre 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.

• I would also add: The novel is Europe’s creation; its discoveries, though made in various languages, belong to the whole of Europe.

• In the absence of the Supreme Judge, the world suddenly appeared in its fearsome ambiguity; the single divine Truth decomposed into myriad relative truths parceled out by men. Thus was born the world of the Modern Era, and with it the novel, the image and model of that world.

• Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands. Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire.

• This “either-or” encapsulates an inability to tolerate the essential relativity of things human, an inability to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge. This inability makes the novel’s wisdom (the wisdom of uncertainty) hard to accept and understand.

• 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.

• The Good Soldier Schweik is perhaps the last great popular novel.

• The death of the novel has been much discussed for a long time: notably by the Futurists, by the Surrealists, by nearly all the avant-gardes. They saw the novel dropping off the road of progress, yielding to a radically new future and an art bearing no resemblance to what had existed before.

• The appeal of dream: The slumbering imagination of the nineteenth

• The slumbering imagination of the nineteenth century was abruptly awakened by Franz Kafka, who achieved what the Surrealists later called for but never themselves really accomplished: the fusion of dream and reality.

• Not to transform the novel into philosophy, but to marshal around the story all the means—rational and irrational, narrative and contemplative—that could illuminate man’s being; could make of the novel the supreme intellectual synthesis. Is their achievement the completion of the novel’s history, or is it instead the invitation to a long journey?

• If the novel should really disappear, it will do so not because it has exhausted its powers but because it exists in a world grown alien to it.

• The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off.

• Once upon a time I too thought that the future was the only competent judge of our works and actions. Later on I understood that chasing after the future is the worst conformism of all, a craven flattery of the mighty.

• But if the future is not a value for me, then to what am I attached? To God? Country? The people? The individual? My answer is as ridiculous as it is sincere: I am attached to nothing but the depreciated legacy of Cervantes.

• The apogee of that evolution is to be found, it seems to me, in Proust and in Joyce. Joyce analyzes something still more ungrasp-able than Proust’s “lost time”: the present moment. There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable, than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely.

• Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant. Now, Joyce’s great microscope manages to stop, to seize, that fleeting instant and make us see it.

• We often hear of the holy trinity of the modern novel: Proust, Joyce, Kafka. In my view, that trinity does not exist. In my own personal history of the novel, it is Kafka who provided this new orientation: a post-Proustian orientation. His way of conceiving the self is totally unexpected.

• All of K.’s interior life is absorbed by the situation he finds himself trapped in, and nothing that might refer beyond that situation (K.’s memories, his metaphysical reflections, his notions about other people) is revealed to

• All of K.’s interior life is absorbed by the situation he finds himself trapped in, and nothing that might refer beyond that situation (K.’s memories, his metaphysical reflections, his notions about other people) is revealed to us.

• For Proust, a man’s interior universe comprises a miracle, an infinity that never ceases to amaze us. But that is not what amazes Kafka. He does not ask what internal motivations determine man’s behavior. He asks a question that is radically different: What possibilities remain for man in a world where the external determinants have become so overpowering that internal impulses no longer carry weight?

• That’s what you say in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.” But what does that mean, “trap”? M.K.: That life is a trap we’ve always known: we are born without having asked to be, locked in a body we never chose, and destined to die. On the other hand, the wideness of the world used to provide a constant possibility of escape. A soldier could

• That’s what you say in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.”

• That life is a trap we’ve always known: we are born without having asked to be, locked in a body we never chose, and destined to die.

• I’m too fearful of the professors for whom art is only a derivative of philosophical and theoretical trends. The novel dealt with the unconscious before Freud, the class struggle before Marx, it practiced phenomenology (the investigation of the essence of human situations) before the phenome-nologists.

• Indeed, two centuries of psychological realism have created some nearly inviolable standards: (1) A writer must give the maximum amount of information about a character: about his physical appearance, his way of speaking and behaving; (2) he must let the reader know a character’s past, because that is where all the motives for his present behavior are located; and (3) the character must have complete independence; that is to say, 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.

• Man does not relate to the world as subject to object, as eye to painting; not even as actor to stage set. Man and the world are bound together like the snail to its shell: the world is part of man, it is his dimension, and as the world changes, existence (in-der-Welt-sein) changes as well.

• Here are some of my own principles. First: All historical circumstances I treat with the greatest economy.

• Second principle: Of the historical circumstances, I keep only those that create a revelatory existential situation for my characters.

• Third principle: Historiography writes the history of society, not of man. That is why the historical events my novels talk about are often forgotten by historiography.

• I can understand Don Quixote without knowing the history of Spain. I cannot understand it without some idea, however general, of Europe’s historical experience—of its age of chivalry, for instance, of courtly love, of the shift from the Middle Ages to the Modern Era.

• A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of.

• The novelist is neither historian nor prophet: he is an explorer of existence.

• The uniform is that which we do not choose, that which is assigned us: the certitude of the universal as against the precariousness of the individual.

• When the values that were once so solid come under challenge and withdraw, heads bowed, he who cannot live without them (without fidelity, family, country, discipline, without love) buttons himself up in the universality of his uniform as if that uniform were the last shred of the transcendence that could protect him against the cold of a future in which there will be nothing left to respect.

• “It takes several lives to make one person.”

• What is action?—the eternal question of the novel, its constitutive question, so to speak. How is a decision born? How is it transformed into an act, and how do acts connect to make an adventure? Out of the mysterious and chaotic fabric of life, the old novelists tried to tease the thread of a limpid rationality; in their view, the rationally accessible motive gives birth to an act, and that act provokes another. An adventure is a luminously causal chain of acts.

• All great works (precisely because they are great) contain something unachieved. Broch is an inspiration to us not only because of what he brought off but also because of what he aimed for and missed. The unachieved in his work can show us the need for (1) a new art of radical divestment (which can encompass the complexity of existence in the modern world without losing architectonic clarity); (2) a new art of novelistic counterpoint (which can blend philosophy, narrative, and dream into one music); (3) a new art of the specifically novelistic essay (which does not claim to bear an apodictic message but remains hypothetical, playful, or ironic).

• Of all the great novelists of our time, Broch is, perhaps, the least known. It is not so hard to understand why. He had scarcely completed The Sleepwalkers when he saw Hitler in power and German cultural life annihilated; five years later he left Austria for America, where he remained until his death.

• There are anthropological limits—the limits of memory, for instance— that ought not to be exceeded. When you reach the end of a book you should still find it possible to remember the beginning. Otherwise the novel loses shape, its “architectonic clarity” is clouded.

• Polyphony in music is the simultaneous presentation of two or more voices (melodic lines) that are perfectly bound together but still keep their relative independence. And polyphony in the novel?

• Now, since its very beginnings, the novel has always tried to escape the unilinear, to open rifts in the continuous narration of a story. Cervantes tells the story of Don Quixote’s journey, which is quite linear. But as he travels, Quixote meets other characters who tell their own stories.

• The nineteenth century developed another method of breaking out of the linear mode, the method that—for want of a better term— we can call polyphonic.

• While the three lines in The Possessed, though different in character, are of the same genre (all three are novelistic), in Broch the five lines differ radically in genre: novel, short story, reportage, poem, essay. That integration of non-novelistic genres into the polyphony of the novel was Broch’s revolutionary innovation.

• To recapitulate: In Broch’s work, the five lines evolve simultaneously, without meeting, united by one or several themes. I’ve described that sort of construction by a term borrowed from musicology: polyphony.

• Polyphony in the novel is much more poetry than it is technique.

• There is a fundamental difference between the ways philosophers and novelists think. People talk about Chekhov’s philosophy, or Kafka’s or Musil’s, and so on. But just try to draw a coherent philosophy out of their writings! Even when they express their ideas directly, in their notebooks, the ideas are intellectual exercises, paradox games, improvisations, rather than statements of thought.

• Part Two of The Unbearable Lightness of Being begins with a long meditation on the interrelations between the body and the soul. Yes, it is the author speaking, but everything he says is valid only within the magnetic field of a character: Tereza.

• From time to time, I like to intervene directly as author, as myself. In that case, tone is crucial. From the very first word, my thoughts have a tone that is playful, ironic, provocative, experimental, or inquiring.

• That essay is unthinkable outside the novel; it is what I mean by “a specifically novelistic essay.”

• I’ve always constructed them on two levels: on the first, I compose the novel’s story; over that, I develop the themes. The themes are worked out steadily within and by the story. Whenever a novel abandons its themes and settles for just telling the story, it goes flat. A theme, on the other hand, can be developed on its own, outside the story. That approach to theme I call digression. Digression means: abandoning the story for a moment.

• I make a distinction between theme and motif. Motif is an element of the theme or of the story that appears several times over the course of the novel, always in a different context.

• One particularly well-known example I’ve always admired is the Chopin sonata whose third movement is a funeral march. What more is there to say after that great farewell? Finish the sonata in the usual way with a lively rondo? Not even Beethoven in his Sonata Opus 26 avoids the stereotype—he follows a funeral march (the third movement there too) with a cheerful finale. But the fourth movement in the Chopin sonata is altogether strange: pianissimo, fast and short, with no melody, absolutely unsentimental: a distant gust, a muffled sound that heralds the ultimate forgetting. The juxtaposition of these two movements (sentimental-unsentimental) makes you gasp.

• Beethoven is perhaps the greatest architect in all of post-Bach music. He inherited the sonata conceived as a cycle of three or four movements, often in rather random sequence, the first of which (written in sonata form) was always more important than the following movements (written in the form of rondo, minuet, and so on). Beethoven’s whole artistic evolution is marked by the determination to transform that assemblage into a true unity. Thus, in his piano sonatas, he gradually shifts the center of gravity from the first to the last movement; he often reduces the sonata to just two parts (sometimes separated by an interlude movement, as in Opus 27, No. 2, and in Opus 53, and sometimes directly juxtaposed, as in Opus 111); he utilizes the same themes in different movements;

• Beethoven is perhaps the greatest architect in all of post-Bach music. He inherited the sonata conceived as a cycle of three or four movements, often in rather random sequence, the first of which (written in sonata form) was always more important than the following movements (written in the form of rondo, minuet, and so on). Beethoven’s whole artistic evolution is marked by the determination to transform

• Beethoven is perhaps the greatest architect in all of post-Bach music. He inherited the sonata conceived as a cycle of three or four movements, often in rather random sequence, the first of which (written in sonata form) was always more important than the following movements (written in the form of rondo, minuet, and so on). Beethoven’s whole artistic evolution is marked by the determination to transform that assemblage into a true unity.

• Beethoven is perhaps the greatest architect in all of post-Bach music. He inherited the sonata conceived as a cycle of three or four movements, often in rather random sequence, the first of which (written in sonata form) was always more important than the following movements (written in the form of rondo, minuet, and so on).

• Novelists before Kafka often exposed institutions as arenas where conflicts between different personal and public interests were played out. In Kafka the institution is a mechanism that obeys its own laws; no one knows now who programmed those laws or when; they have nothing to do with human concerns

• Novelists before Kafka often exposed institutions as arenas where conflicts between different personal and public interests were played out. In Kafka the institution is a mechanism that obeys its own laws; no one knows now who programmed those laws or when; they have nothing to do with human concerns and are thus unintelligible.

• Raskolnikov cannot bear the weight of his guilt, and to find peace he consents to his punishment of his own free will. It’s the well-known situation where the offense seeks the punishment. In Kafka the logic is reversed. The person punished does not know the reason for the punishment. The absurdity of the punishment is so unbearable that to find peace the accused needs to find a justification for his penalty: the punishment seeks the offense.

• But this correction does not dispose of the question: How is it possible that in Prague Kafka’s novels merge with real life while in Paris the same novels are read as the hermetic expression of an author’s entirely subjective world?

• Totalitarian states, as extreme concentrations of these tendencies, have brought out the close relationship between Kafka’s novels and real life. But if in the West people are unable to see this relationship, it is not only because the society we call democratic is less Kafkan than that of today’s Prague. It is also, it seems to me, because over here, the sense of the real is inexorably being lost.

• In fact, the society we call democratic is also familiar with the process that bureaucratizes and depersonalizes; the entire planet has become a theater of this process. Kafka’s novels are an imaginary, oneiric hyperbole of it; a totalitarian state is a prosaic and material hyperbole of it.

• The woman in question had been arrested in 1951 during the Stalinist trials in Prague, and convicted of crimes she hadn’t committed. Hundreds of Communists were in the same situation at the time. All their lives they had entirely identified themselves with their Party. When it suddenly became their prosecutor, they agreed, like Joseph K., “to examine their whole lives, their entire past, down to the smallest details” to find the hidden offense and, in the end, to confess to imaginary crimes. My friend managed to save her own life because she had the extraordinary courage to refuse to undertake—as her comrades did, as the poet A. did—the “search for her offense.”

• I looked on, dumbfounded, at this Stalinist mini-trial, and I understood all at once that the psychological mechanisms that function in great (apparently incredible and inhuman) historical events are the same as those that regulate private (quite ordinary and very human) situations.

• The famous letter Kafka wrote and never sent to his father demonstrates that it was from the family, from the relationship between the child and the deified power of the parents, that Kafka drew his knowledge of the technique of culpabilization, which became a major theme of his fiction. In “The Judgment,” a short story intimately bound up with the author’s family experience, the father accuses the son and commands him to drown himself. The son accepts his fictitious guilt and throws himself into the river as docilely as, in a later work, his successor Joseph K., indicted by a mysterious organization, goes to be slaughtered. The similarity between the two accusations, the two cul-pabilizations, and the two executions reveals the link, in Kafka’s work, between the family’s private “totalitarianism” and that in his great social visions.

• The famous letter Kafka wrote and never sent to his father demonstrates that it was from the family, from the relationship between the child and the deified power of the parents, that Kafka drew his knowledge of the technique of culpabilization, which became a major theme of his fiction.

• Totalitarian society, especially in its more extreme versions, tends to abolish the boundary between the public and the private; power, as it grows ever more opaque, requires the lives of citizens to be entirely transparent.

• The ideal of life without secrets corresponds to the ideal of the exemplary family: a citizen does not have the right to hide anything at all from the Party or the State, just as a child has no right to keep a secret from his father or his mother. In their propaganda, totalitarian societies project an idyllic smile: they want to be seen as “one big family.”

• Lyrical souls who like to preach the abolition of secrets and the transparency of private life do not realize the nature of the process they are unleashing. The starting point of totalitarianism resembles the beginning of The Trial: you’ll be taken unawares in your bed.

• Kafka’s heroes are often seen as allegorical projections of the intellectual, but there’s nothing intellectual about Gregor Samsa. When he wakes up metamorphosed into a beetle, he has only one concern: in this new state, how to get to the office on time. In his head he has nothing but the obedience and discipline to which his profession has accustomed him: he’s an employee, a functionary, as are all Kafka’s characters;

• In the bureaucratic world of the functionary, first, there is no initiative, no invention, no freedom of action; there are only orders and rules: it is the world of obedience.

• A totalitarian state is in fact a single, immense administration: since all work in it is for the state, everyone of every occupation has become an employee. A worker is no longer a worker, a judge no longer a judge, a shopkeeper no longer a shopkeeper, a priest no longer a priest; they are all functionaries of the State.

• Poets don’t invent poems The poem is somewhere behind It’s been there for a long long time The poet merely discovers it.

• The writer who determines to supervise the translations of his books finds himself chasing after hordes of words like a shepherd after a flock of wild sheep— a sorry figure to himself, a laughable one to others.

• Czechoslovakia. I never use the word in my novels, even though the action is generally set there. This composite word is too young (born in 1918), with no roots in time, no beauty, and it exposes the very nature of the thing it names: composite and too young (untested by time). It may be possible in a pinch to found a state on so frail a word, but not a novel. That is why, to designate my characters’ country, I always use, the old word “Bohemia.”

• A novel is often, it seems to me, nothing but a long quest for some elusive definitions.

• It seems that in the whole of Europe the cultural elite is yielding to other elites. Over there, to the elite of the police apparatus. Here, to the elite of the mass media apparatus. No one will ever accuse these new elites of elitism. Thus the word “elitism” will soon be forgotten. (See: Europe.)

• In one of his letters, Chopin describes his stay in England. He plays in the

• Flow. In one of his letters, Chopin describes his stay in England. He plays in the salons, and the ladies always use the same term to express their delight: “Ah, how beautiful! It flows like water!” Chopin found it exasperating, as I do when I hear a translation praised in the same terms: “It really flows.”

• Forgetting. “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” That remark by Mirek, a character in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, is often cited as the book’s message.

• We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we’ve gained from a previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don’t know what it is we’re heading for: the old are innocent children of their old age. In that sense, man’s world is the planet of inexperience.

• In the nineteenth century, Gogol is a melancholy humorist: “The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes,” said he.

• I reread Sartre’s short essay “What Is Writing?” Not once does he use the words “novel” or “novelist.” He only speaks of the “prose writer.” A proper distinction.

• The novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel.

• Only when a person reaches old age can he stop caring about the opinions of his fellows, or of the public, or of the future. He is alone with approaching death, and death has neither eyes nor ears; it has no need to be pleased.

• Only when a person reaches old age can he stop caring about the opinions of his fellows, or of the public, or of the future. He is alone with approaching death, and death has neither eyes nor ears; it has no need to be pleased. In the face of death a man can do and say what he pleases”

• Translators are crazy about synonyms. (I reject the very notion of synonym: each word has its own meaning and is semantically irreplaceable.)

• Axiom: The more opaque the affairs of the State, the more transparent an individual’s affairs must be; though it represents a public thing, bureaucracy is anonymous, secret, coded, inscrutable, whereas private man is obliged to reveal his health, his finances, his family situation, and if the mass media so decree, he will never again have a single moment of privacy either in love or in sickness or in death.

• Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.

• But in art, the form is always more than a form. Every novel, like it or not, offers some answer to the question: What is human existence, and wherein does its poetry lie?

• Eighteenth-century rationalism is based on Leibniz’s famous declaration: Nihil est sine ratione—there is nothing without its reason.

• Some eighty years after Flaubert imagined his Emma Bovary, during the thirties of our own century, another great novelist, Hermann Broch, wrote that however heroically the modern novel may struggle against the tide of kitsch, it ends up being overwhelmed by it.

• It is that wisdom of the novel I wanted to honor in this speech of thanks. But it is time for me to stop. I was forgetting that God laughs when he sees me thinking.