The Legacy of Cervantes
In the essay on Vladislav Vančura (Umění románu), Kundera asks whether the grand epic is still possible in our time. Along with Hegel and Georg [György] Lukács, Kundera believes that the time of the epos is past, since in the era of modernity the unity of the individual and society supported by myth no longer exists. Its place has been taken by the novel, which depicts a human being who has become a stranger in the world (see Chvatik, Die Fallen 38, 40). Kvĕtoslav Chvatík has stressed the relevance of these ideas in Kundera’s novels (39, 42). One might object to this, however, by pointing out that when Kundera wrote the essay he was still in his lyrical period; later, as an established novelist, he no longer bemoans the individual’s detachment from society, but sees in it the essence of modernity.
Modernity and the novel
The collection of essays published in his 1986 The Art of the Novel opens with the essay “The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes,” in which Kundera elaborates his conception of the European novel. The scope of the essay is both narrower and broader than a history of the novel. On the one hand, Kundera does not propose to deal with the whole history of the novel or even its main periods, as this would not be possible in a brief essay. Rather, he presents “a practitioner’s view” or a “confession” (see Oppenheim 11) of what he considers to be essential in the history of the novel; this functions as an introduction to his own poetics of the novel. On the other hand, within the brief scope of the essay Kundera deals with something more than the history of the novel: he believes that through the novel he can elucidate some of the essential and distinctive features of modern human existence.
The essay begins with a reference to Edmund Husserl’s lectures on “the crisis of European humanity” given in Wien and Prague in 1935 (3). The lectures were published in 1936 in book form, under the title Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology). Husserl observes that in the modern age European thinking has been dominated by the natural sciences and that this is one-sided. Greek philosophy, the beginning of Western scientific and rational thinking, had approached “the world as a whole” as a question to be solved; thus European culture was born from a “passion for knowledge” which had seized humanity. At the beginning of the modern age, however, the concept of knowledge narrowed significantly:
The roots of the crisis lay for him [Husserl] 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 mechanical investigation and put the concrete world of life, die Lebenswelt as he called it, beyond their horizon. . . . 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. (The Art 3-4)
This narrowed conception of knowledge, the view of reality as a field of interplay between mechanical forces, and the split of science into “the tunnels of specialized disciplines” have driven the European individual—Kundera resorts here to a Heideggerian notion—into the “oblivion of being,” in which one has lost sight of oneself and of one’s actual experience of the world. Our concrete existence, our life-world (Lebenswelt, in the sense of Husserl and Heidegger) “has neither value nor interest: it is eclipsed, forgotten from the start” (4)
Kundera does not go more deeply into Husserl’s critique of scientific thinking. He does not, for example, compare it to Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which Adorno and Horkheimer show how the pursuit of purely technical rationality ends up with its opposite, that is, irrationality. Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument resembles Kundera’s conviction that the prevalence of scientific-technical knowledge does not release us from the constraints of nature, but on the contrary leads to our subjection to the machineries we have set into motion, namely, technology, politics, and history. In the contemporary debate on humanity, history, and society, similar questions have been raised, for instance, by Jürgen Habermas, a follower of Adorno and Horkheimer’s “dialectic of Enlightenment” and yet a proponent of the “project of modernity,” by Michel Foucault in his analyses of the interrelationship between power and knowledge, and by the theoretician of the postmodern, Zygmunt Bauman. Kundera’s primary concern, however, is not a critique of scientific rationality, but the other side of European culture, which Husserl does not touch upon: “Indeed, for me, the founder of the Modern Era is not only Descartes [whose philosophical principles were derived from Galileo’s mechanical-mathematical explanation of nature] but also Cervantes” (The Art 4). For if science and even philosophy “have forgotten about man’s being, it emerges all the more plainly that with Cervantes a great European art took shape that is nothing other than the investigation of this forgotten being” (4–5). Thus, where Husserl sets up his philosophy of phenomenology derived from an analysis of human cognition in order to counterbalance the one-sided concept of knowledge in European philosophy, Kundera asserts that such a counterweight has always existed. It is found in the novel.
Drawing an analogy between science and the novel as a form of exploring human existence, Kundera emphasizes the cognitive aspect of the latter:
Indeed, all the great existential themes Heidegger analyzes in Being and Time—considering them to have been neglected by all earlier European philosophy—had been unveiled, displayed, illuminated by four centuries of the European 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 into 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. . . . A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality. . . . The sequence of discoveries (not the sum of what was written) is what constitutes the history of the European novel. (5-6)
In Kundera’s account, the novel “unveils,” “displays,” “illuminates,” “elucidates,” “discovers,” “inquires,” “examines,” “unmasks,” “explores,” and “probes.” The object of the exploration is human existence, the human life-world, which the science and philosophy of the Modern Age have condemned to the “oblivion of being.” This exploration is the “sole raison d’être” of the novel, its “only morality” (5–6). The exploration characteristic of the novel differs from that typical of modern science and philosophy not only in its object, but also in its methods and its conception of knowledge. Instead of the certainty of truth formulated mathematically, the novel comes up with “a welter of contradictory truths” (7). The novel represents a world where “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” (6). In a Hegelian mode, Kundera speaks of Descartes’s heroism of setting the solitary thinking individual against the whole universe. As a counterpart to this Cartesian heroism, however, he sets Cervantes’s courage and willingness to confront an ambiguous world in which no absolute truth can be discovered. Kundera finds that there are two different conceptions of truth at stake here—for Descartes, truth is universal and incontestable and for Cervantes it is relative and ambiguous—but he does not elaborate on this. He merely adds that these “relative truths” are embodied in the characters of the novels, who are to be conceived of as “imaginary selves” (7).
Kundera is not interested in giving a detailed description of the history of the European novel nor in placing the novel in a wider literary-historical context, for example, in searching for its historical roots or comparing it to non-European literatures. In Testaments Betrayed he comments that “there are of course other novels, the novel of China, of Japan, the novel of ancient Greece, but they are not bound by any continuous evolutionary line to the historical enterprise that began with Rabelais and Cervantes” (28); what actually interests him is the novel which examines modern human existence. We can therefore say that his perspective in the study of the “legacy of Cervantes” is not actually historical, but phenomenological; Kundera seeks to grasp the essence of the European novel in the modern era.
The concept of “phenomenological approach” has sometimes been used to characterize Kundera’s own art of the novel (see The Art 32). He finds this characterization of the exploration of human existence in his novels acceptable as long as the use of the term does not obliterate the differences between the novelistic approach and the philosophical one (32). Provided that this distinction is taken into account, the term “phenomenological” also applies to Kundera’s method in his “novelistic essays” (The Art 71), for instance, to his definition of the legacy of Cervantes. Similarly to Husserl in his phenomenological analyses, Kundera rejects the search for any explanation of a phenomenon in terms of historical contextualization; rather, he endeavors to eliminate all that does not belong to the phenomenon itself. Moreover, in accordance with the phenomenological method, he ignores all that is characteristic merely of some representatives of the phenomenon—that is, of individual novels—and seeks what is common to all of them. He is in search of the essential, definitive traits that make a work a novel.
Kundera’s phenomenological method, however, differs from the approach of philosophical phenomenology in that he actually relies to a great extent on particular examples. For example, he defines the Cervantean tradition in universal terms as an exploration of human existence, and further explains it by enumerating discoveries made by individual authors from Cervantes to Thomas Mann; in other contexts, he refers to such writers as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez or Salman Rushdie (see Testaments 4, 14, 22, 72; The Curtain 81). Similarly, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being the notions of “weight” and “lightness” or the antagonism of body and soul are considered abstractly, but they are also dealt with more concretely through the experiences of the protagonists Tomas and Tereza. The explication of a notion thereby becomes more vivid, but less definitive and less closed than in an abstract conceptual definition. The same technique is applied for instance in the essay “Sixty-three Words” in The Art of the Novel, where Kundera discusses concepts important in his own works, but, as he believes, in the whole of European culture as well. In addition to “the novel,” his key terms include, for example, “transparency,” “imagination,” and “reflection.” The definitions are illuminating and thought provoking rather than comprehensive or exhaustive. “Transparency,” for instance, is exemplified by André Breton’s metaphor of living in a glass house, in addition to a more general and abstract discussion of the difference between public and private (152–53). “Imagination” is explained by the example of a dreamlike episode from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, where imagination is presented as an alternative to realistic narration (The Art 131–32). As a whole, rather than operating with abstract and conceptual definitions, Kundera tends to illuminate a phenomenon in terms of its function in a given context (e.g., in a novel), by means of examples (dreamlike narrative) or through metaphors (glass house). In addition, the concepts to be explained are often themselves metaphorical, such as “weight,” “lightness,” or “infantocracy.” If Kundera’s novels are often, as he says, “a long quest for some elusive definitions” (The Art 143), we can add that—unlike the purely abstract mode of defining concepts in philosophy and science—his definitions are novelistically concrete, elliptical, and metaphorical.
In Kundera’s view, the novel is a modern phenomenon and therefore connected with a particular period in history; nevertheless, he does not consider it as determined by history or as following the course of history in its development. Rather than a product of history, the novel is the very core of European cultural history. According to Kundera, the plurality of truths unveiled by the novel corresponds to human experience of the world in the modern era. His definition of the essence of the novel is thus conceived to be valid for the four hundred years of the modern novel, but he pays no attention to the changes in the function of the novel.
Despite the fact that Kundera’s definition of the essence and function of the modern novel is general and in a sense historically nondifferentiating, he does consider the novel to have its own internal history, a history of discoveries of the possibilities of human existence. In the passage quoted above, Kundera refers to certain important novels which allow us to discern the main line in the history of the genre as he understands it. This method could be called elliptical, in that only a few illustrative points are chosen to make the main line visible. The historical line sketched need not remain exactly the same when Kundera returns to the topic. In Testaments Betrayed, for example, he places the beginning of the modern novel with Rabelais rather than Cervantes (31–32; see also Phillips 145). This does not imply that he has changed his mind; he merely chooses another novelist from among the most important ones to illustrate what is essential in the historical development of the novel. In what follows, I analyze more closely a few authors in Kundera’s sequence whom I consider to be useful in clarifying his conception of the modern novel. Where these authors are concerned, Kundera’s omissions are as important as what he actually says about them.
The Enlightenment and Romanticism
In seeking a phenomenological definition of the modern novel, Kundera excludes everything he considers inessential by using a few large strokes, often at the cost of historical accuracy. This is the case when, in an obvious parallel to the young Lukács in his The Theory of the Novel, he describes how Don Quixote set out on his adventures “in the absence of the Supreme Judge” and came to experience the “fearsome ambiguity” of the world and the fragmentation of the Truth, once based on God, into innumerable human, relative truths (The Art 6). The Nietzschean idea of the death of God is here applied to Cervantes’s novel from the beginning of the seventeenth century without giving a thought to the fact that Nietzsche, writing in the late nineteenth century, spoke of this event as a recent one. Actually, in the seventeenth century religion had not yet lost its position. For Descartes in the mid-seventeenth century and the creators of philosophical systems following him, God was still a fundamental element of the system and a warranty of truth, even if the foundation on which the construction of the system of knowledge rested was the individual as the autonomous subject of knowledge. Through the method of systemic doubt, Descartes arrives at the incontrovertible proposition “I think, therefore I am,” but goes on to conclude that our ideas, insofar as they are clear and distinct, derive from God and must therefore be true: “For reason does not require us to believe that whatever we see or image is true; it does, however, insist that all our ideas or notions must have some basis of truth. Otherwise it could not be that God, who is altogether perfect and trustworthy, should have placed them in us” (Discourse 125).
In contrasting Descartes’s search for truth with the ambiguity and “the wisdom of uncertainty” of the novel (The Art 6–7), Kundera is right with respect to Descartes in that for him, and for the Enlightenment thinkers of the following century, truth is not relative. The subject of the acquisition of knowledge is the individual human being, but in following universally valid principles of perception and reason in the pursuit of knowledge, the individual attains unquestionable truth. Truth is relative only in comparison to God’s absolute knowledge, encompassing all that exists. Human knowledge is finite and its advancement an endless process (see Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff”; Kondylis). Kundera, however, claims that in contrast to this, the truths in Cervantes’s novel are only relative. He points out that in some interpretations, Don Quixote is seen as criticizing the idealistic attitude of its hero, while in others it is regarded as praising this idealism. According to Kundera, both interpretations are wrong in that they assume that the novel proposes one, single truth. It is precisely the ambiguity and “essential relativity of things human” that the novel strives to express (The Art 6–7).
However, Kundera’s view is anachronistic in that he does not take into consideration the fact that the debate over Don Quixote’s alleged idealism emerged only in the era of Romanticism. As pointed out by Anthony Close in his study, The Romantic Approach to Don Quixote: A Critical History of the Romantic Tradition in Quixote Criticism, from the time of its publication until the late eighteenth century, Don Quixote was read as a comic novel, entertaining readers with the adventures of the mad knight who had lost his mind from excessive reading of chivalric romances. That he takes the windmills for giants was seen as parodying chivalric romances and not as questioning of the prevailing conception of reality. Don Quixote belongs to a metaphysically defined world, in which the individual observer—assuming he is not mad—does not construct his own, individually colored conception of the world. Only toward the end of the eighteenth century did the early German Romantics such as Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, Solger, and Schelling project the conception of the world of their idealistic philosophy onto Don Quixote and reinterpret the character’s madness as a nonconformist world view. By making the mad knight an idealistic rebel against the reality of the prosaic world, they made him one of their own contemporaries. Even though Kundera refutes both the idealistic and the realistic interpretation of the novel, he nevertheless adopts the Romantic anachronism of seeing the novel as being about different views of the world.
Since the point of my discussion of Kundera’s essay on the legacy of Cervantes is not to evaluate it as a study in literary history but to gain insight into Kundera’s view of the tradition of the novel with which he affiliates himself (see The Art 20), it is irrelevant to point out his “errors,” where he illustrates his views with examples from literary history; however, I cannot ignore the differences between his ideas and those of contemporary literary scholarship. The modern idea that truth is relative insofar as its validity depends on the point of view of the interpreter or the individual’s experience does not go back either in the novel or in European culture as far as the seventeenth century, but originates from the late eighteenth century. That human existence is embedded in history and that our views of the world therefore vary both historically and individually was an idea elaborated in Johann Gottfried Herder’s writings from the 1770s to the 1790s (see, e.g., Herder, Ideen, Vom Geist; Nisbet; Taylor 368–78; Steinby, “Rehabilitation”). This means a questioning of the Cartesian concept of universal reason and of the anthropological concept of a universal human essence. For Herder, Goethe, and the early German Romantics, the subject of experience is the human being whose individuality determines how the world manifests itself to him or her. With their conception of the individual human being as an autonomous, creative subject of knowledge and action, and their notion of the value of individuality, a new period of modernity was launched questioning the Enlightenment’s view of universal reason and the generically defined nature of human existence. The era of individualism continued until the dawn of the postmodern age in the latter part of the twentieth century, when the individual’s standing as the autonomous subject of judgment and action began to be questioned (see, e.g., Saariluoma [Steinby], Der postindividualistische; Taylor 184–85, 384–400). With regard to the still ongoing debate on individuality and subjectivity, it is necessary to note that the Romantic emphasis on autonomy and individuality is often mistaken for seeing the individual as self-sufficient. In fact, Herder stresses the individual’s immersion in contemporary culture, where each culture and era creates its own reality with its own values, meanings, and truths. The individual’s actions and works are to a great extent determined by his or her culture and historical era (see, e.g., Herder, Ideen 336–45).
Kundera, however, does not distinguish between the Enlightenment view of the individual’s autonomy in the acquisition of universally valid knowledge—which actually is usually not called “individualism”—and individualism in the sense of individual differences in worldview and in the interpretation of affairs, which originates from the Romantic era. In his definition of “les Temps modernes” or the “modern era” in “Sixty-three Words,” Kundera identifies the vanishing of the religion-based worldview directly with the birth of individualism. The modern era is for him the era in which “God becomes Deus absconditus [the hidden God] and man the ground of all things. European individualism is born, and with it a new situation for art, for culture, for science” (The Art 151). In the “Jerusalem Address,” subtitled “The Novel and Europe,” Kundera calls individualism the core and “precious essence of the European spirit” (The Art 165); he also praises individualism as the primary characteristic of the “legacy of Cervantes.”
In my view, Kundera’s misconception is a consequence of the fact that after Romanticism an individual-centered way of thinking became part of the common European heritage. Individualism is often thought to have originated in the Renaissance, a misunderstanding that goes back—as Johan Huizinga and Walter Haug have shown—to Jacob Burckhardt’s The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy (1928). Haug notes that the spirit of the Renaissance was “highly normative, searching for an eternally valid measure of beauty, politics, virtue or truth” and that Burckhardt’s error was that he confused cultural creativity with distinct individuality (293–94). Often, however, the question of the precise historical onset of individualism is not posed at all; actually, not until the “death” of the autonomous individual with poststructuralism and postmodernism did a common awareness emerge of the fact that the individualistic way of thinking is situated historically (see Giddens; Taylor). Thus Kundera is not alone in his confusion concerning the content and historical origin of individualism. It remains to examine in what sense the modern novel in Kundera’s view has to do with the individual human being and what individual identity actually means for him.
Although the novel focuses on the individual, it stands, in Kundera’s view, in opposition to lyrical subjectivity. To him, lyricism means exposing oneself to the gaze of others, surrendering oneself to the power of real or imaginary emotions, and elevating feelings to the status of highest value. Lyricism longs for infinity: merging with others, a dissolving of the boundaries between the self and everything else, and an enlarging of one’s emotions so as to encompass everything there is. Kundera sees lyrical subjectivism as the true legacy of Romanticism. This view is not without historical foundation. The Romantic subject is driven by a longing to escape the isolation of his or her individual existence and to rediscover a lost unity with others. He or she seeks to merge with the human community and an all-embracing feeling of unity, of being absorbed into the Absolute (existence as a whole). This appears in Romantic works of art, from Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde (1799) and Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (1865).
While for Friedrich Schlegel the novel was the definitive Romantic genre (Fragmente 186–87, Athenäums-Fragmente 114), Kundera sees the novel as the opposite of lyricism and Romanticism. He declares that the novel is not a subjective confession by the author, nor does the novelist aim at securing the reader’s sympathy and compassion; rather, the novelist’s discoveries concerning the various possibilities of human existence invite the reader to engage in further inquiry and reflection (The Art 143–44). The novelist stands for a critical distance against mergence, and for inquiry against emotional identification; as a detached observer of phenomena, he or she assumes an attitude similar to that of the scientist, although the object of study is the human life-world (Lebenswelt). Ridiculing and criticizing the sentimental or lyrical over-exalted Romantic subjectivity—a topic in his novels from Life Is Elsewhere to Immortality—Kundera nevertheless disregards the fact that the idea of the relativity of truth, which he considers to be central to the modern novel, presupposes the Romantic idea of individual subjectivity.
In some respect Kundera’s ideas about the methods to be applied by the novelist recall the Enlightenment, especially the French Enlightenment, more than Romanticism. In speaking of his admiration for the literature of the French Enlightenment in Slowness, he remarks that what impresses him is not its hedonism as such, but the analytical mode in which it is discussed (8–9). An example occurs, for instance, in Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew (1774) which—along with another literary work greatly prized and often mentioned by Kundera, Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons (1782)—reveals the true motifs, thoughts, and attitudes of the lecherous upper class. In addition to hedonism, the literature of the Enlightenment examined other typical human attitudes: Diderot’s The Nun (1796), for example, inquires not only into sensuality, but also into sadism, aggression, and superstition within the walls of a cloister. Although the analytical method in Kundera’s works derives in the first place from his Central European “Pleiades” (see Steinby, “Ein mitteleuropäischer”), his analytical and critical attitude toward the object is shared by many of the authors of the French Enlightenment.
Kundera paid homage to the Enlightenment and especially to Diderot by adapting the latter’s novel, Jacques and His Master (1796), for the stage. He rejects the notion of “adaptation” and prefers the musical notion “variation,” a variation on Diderot’s themes but by the same token an “homage to the principle of variation” applied in Diderot’s novel, in which each of its three intertwined stories is actually a variation on the others (Kundera, Jacques 15–17; Testaments 77). The structure is similar to that of Kundera’s novels, a composition which is free from the obligation to follow a single story and in which the author may any time interrupt the narration by reflections. What Kundera praises in Diderot’s work is its playfulness, its nonserious, humorous, or ironic tone (The Art 24), a feature he also discovers in Cervantes, Rabelais, and Sterne. In addition, he is fascinated by the way in which Diderot depicts the effects of unpredictable events on human life; as in many of Kundera’s novels, the title of Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste et son maître introduces the main theme through a negation in that the work actually challenges and ridicules fatalism. Among the writers of the French Enlightenment, Kundera also praises Voltaire, although less as a novelist than as a “caustic spirit.” It is in this sense that Ludvík in The Joke is characterized by his fellows as “Voltairean” (see also Testaments 13; The Book of Laughter 123).
Kundera rarely speaks of the novel of the Romantic era. He mentions Novalis on a few occasions—in his view it was Novalis who introduced the dream into the novel, an innovation which was realized in its full potential by Kafka and García Márquez (The Art 81–82, 16; Biron 5)—and he refers to the novels of Victor Hugo as typical of nineteenth-century kitsch (Raddatz 107; Testaments 173). In general, Kundera finds that the German Romantics contributed little to the art of the novel: “turning away from the real world, [their fanciful imagining] was seeking after a different life” (The Curtain 73). There is one significant exception, Goethe, who for Kundera alone represents the achievement of the Romantic era in the field of the novel. Goethe, of course, did not consider himself a Romantic; on the contrary, he opposed the Romantics because of what he regarded as their excessive subjectivism. Although Kundera does not analyze any of Goethe’s novels, we often encounter Goethe’s name in his writings. In Testaments Betrayed, where Kundera gives a sweeping historical-geographical sketch of the development of the novel, Goethe occupies a prominent place: “First Italy with Boccaccio, the great precursor; then France with Rabelais, and Spain with Cervantes and the picaresque novel; the English novel in the eighteenth century and then, toward the century’s end, the German contribution, with Goethe: the nineteenth century, which belonged almost entirely to France, along with the Russian novel in the last third, and, immediately thereafter, the arrival of the Scandinavian novel. Then the twentieth century and its Central European adventure with Kafka, Musil, Broch, and Gombrowicz” (28). In The Art of the Novel, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is presented as following Richardson in focusing on the inner life of the protagonist (24). In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the grand poet of the Czechs (most likely referring to the Nobel Laureate Jaroslav Seifert) is named “Goethe.” Calling him and other Czech poets who take part in a “symposium” by names derived from the history of lyrical poetry is a playful gesture, not devoid of irony. In Immortality, the historical Goethe, with Bettina Brentano at his side, is the main character in one of the subplots. Here Bettina—as Kundera refers to her in his text—stands for everything negative that Romanticism signifies to Kundera, and since Goethe is the object of her plotting, the irony aimed at her falls partly upon him as well. Still, Kundera refers to Goethe as “a figure placed precisely in the centre of European history. Goethe: the great centre” (Immortality 84). What exactly is meant by this he does not explain.
One possible interpretation is that Kundera uses the figure of Goethe to distinguish between that which is invaluable to him in the literature and culture of the late eighteenth century—forming the very core of modernity—and that which is Romanticism (incarnated in Brentano), that is, modernity in a spurious, distorted form. The distinction is valid in the sense that Goethe was actually one of the first novelists to represent the unique experience of an individual without a moralizing schematism, like that of Richardson and even Fielding, or an interest in classifying individuals according to their characteristic oddities, like Sterne, but also one who rejected the Romantic idea of pursuing the Absolute through an individual’s experience. In Goethe’s conception, the individual’s experience is perspective bound and nonabsolute and is subject to a constant process of reinterpretation (see Saariluoma [Steinby], Erzählstruktur). From what Kundera says of Goethe in Immortality and his other writings, however, we cannot with certainty conclude that he intends such a distinction.
Despite the fact that Kundera bestows upon Goethe the status of “the great center” of European history and recognizes Goethe’s significance in the history of the novel, it is obvious that in his phenomenological understanding of the modern novel, Goethe does not play any important role. This implies that Kundera’s novels stand only in a remote relation, if any, to those of Goethe. Goethe’s significance is on a more general level: he represents the spirit of the modern era as a whole. This is certainly not an original idea; on the contrary, in the German and Central European cultural sphere Goethe has been commonly venerated as an icon of this kind. Thus, rather than speaking of discoveries which he himself has made in studying Goethe’s novels, Kundera follows here the common view. Considering Goethe as a great novelist is probably a result of the reasoning that if Goethe epitomizes modern European culture and if it is the novel that lies at the very heart of European culture, it follows that Goethe must be a great novelist. Nevertheless, Goethe’s importance for Kundera is in ideas concerning the modern individual rather than the history of the novel. I add that Kundera never ceases to temper his veneration of Goethe with playful, teasing, even mocking tones.
In addition to individualism, Kundera’s Cervantes essay raises two further issues essential to his concept of the novel connected to Goethe and Romanticism, namely, the function of art in a modern world dominated by science and the historical nature of human existence. With regard to the function of art Kundera follows Goethe and the Romantics, while with regard to history he takes a different course.
Husserl and Heidegger were not the first to criticize the one-sidedness of scientific knowledge and the way modern society ignores the human life-world; on the contrary, already at the end of the eighteenth century criticism of this kind was not uncommon. The Romantics deplored the way in which the splitting of the sciences into narrow, specialized fields deprives the individual of a synthetic, all-inclusive view of the world (see Schmidt; Bürger, Bürger, and Schulte-Sasse). Schiller criticized his contemporaries for turning the individual into a small cog in a machine, a being ruled by external forces. Rather than encouraging human beings to develop their personality as a whole and valuing them as such, modern society expects its members to specialize and pursue their goals in a particular, narrowly defined professional field (Schiller 21). The arguments of Schiller and others conform to a great extent with certain recent views on the process of modernization. According to Niklas Luhmann, for instance, in the premodern class society the identity of an individual was determined by the class into which he or she was born, whereas in the modern society which emerged in the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, individuals are identified functionally according to their occupations (both of these are unfavorable for the realization of Schiller’s ideal of personality; see Luhmann, Gesellschaftsstruktur, e.g., 66, 155). This means that modern society recognizes only one part of the individual’s humanity, namely his or her occupation (see, e.g., Luckmann 309). As Siegfried J. Schmidt puts it, “The individual acts in each of his different roles no more as a total subjectivity, but in abstract fragments only; i.e., the wholly differentiated social structure allow nothing more than fragments of individual destiny. . . . A person and his occupation fall apart” (69).
Goethe, Schiller, and the Romantics believed that art and literature could counteract this functionalization of the human being; we might say that they opposed human reification, had the term been used in their time. In accordance with their ideas, recent research on social modernization and the emergence of the modern institution of art has shown that at the turn of the nineteenth century a new role was ascribed to literature. The task of literature was to resist the fragmentation of reality and human beings by offering an all-encompassing view of the world and an opportunity for self-reflection. To quote Schmidt again, “The arts shall now reconcile what is separated and, as a kind of device that creates unity between individual and the world, theory and practice, reflection and morality, nature and liberty and, by doing this, so to say compensate the damages caused by the differentiation” (415). Obviously, literature took over this task in a situation in which religion had lost its position as the keystone of human action and our world view. As Luhmann puts it, religion now becomes merely one among other subsystems, whereas earlier it was a universally penetrating principle in all realms of social life (Luhmann, Gesellschaftsstruktur 295–357; see also Taylor 310).
Kundera’s description of the task of the novel at the beginning of his Cervantes essay coincides to great extent with this view: the novel after “the death of God” resists the disappearance of a human perspective in experiencing the world, caused by the dominance of the natural scientific thinking. Moreover, in his essay on Broch in The Art of the Novel, Kundera explicitly takes up Broch’s idea—reaching back to Romanticism (see Schlegel, Athenäums-Fragmente 114)—that the novel is a genre which strives toward totality: “In the age of the excessive division of labor, of runaway specialization, the novel is one of the last outposts where man can still maintain connections with life in its entirety” (67).
Nevertheless, Kundera’s own novels can scarcely be said to strive toward the totality of life; rather, any such attempt is rejected by Kundera, who associates it with lyricism and ideology. Rather, what he considers vital is the never-ending search for and revelation of new dimensions of human existence. What is common to Kundera’s thinking and the approach of the Romantics, however, is the conviction that the epistemological function of art is fulfilled through or along with its aesthetic function. Where the classical concept of literature postulated that art should teach universal, well-known truths in a pleasant form—a principle which goes back as far as Aristotle’s Poetics and holds until eighteenth-century neoclassicism—for Kundera and the Romantics the role of art is to discern and reveal what has not yet been discovered. Beauty in art can only be achieved through truth: “Whatever aspects of existence the novel discovers, it discovers as the beautiful” (The Art 122). The connecting of the aesthetic with the cognitive function in art brings Kundera close to Heidegger, who in his philosophy of art relied on the Romantics, especially Hölderlin (see Heidegger, The Origin, Erläuterungen).
History and adventure
In one crucial issue, the significance of history, Kundera’s concept of modernity and the novel as its core deviates from what has commonly been assumed since the late eighteenth century. In a certain sense, Kundera defines the novel as a negation of historical thinking, which arose at the same time as the modern concept of the individual at the turn of the eighteenth century. The idea of the historical nature of human existence and the optimistic nineteenth-century philosophy of history and nationalist way of thinking constitute the background against which Kundera, in The Art of the Novel and in later writings, elaborates his own, divergent views on the novel and its history.
When eighteenth-century thinkers started to envisage the human being as an autonomous subject of cognition and action, they also discovered history as the domain of human actions. The world opened up toward the future, which seemed to be something to be built up by human effort (see, e.g., Koselleck). Beginning with the Enlightenment, philosophers began to think of history as an opportunity given to human beings to harness nature so as to satisfy their needs and to find the best possible ways to organize society and to educate the individual. According to this train of thought, history as a human achievement takes over the function of the eternal, divine order of the universe. From the early nineteenth century onward, historical research and the philosophy of history—whose purpose is to discover the inescapable, inner logic of historical developments—replaced theological and metaphysical truth.
The individual’s embeddedness in history is not in conflict with his or her individuality; on the contrary, at the end of the eighteenth century the two were conceived as inherently interconnected. According to Herder and Goethe, human beings, in all their individuality, are part of history. In Herder’s view, the mode of our experiences and actions is determined by our particular culture and historical situation. In his autobiography, Truth and Poetry, Goethe presents an entire historical period through the life story of a single representative individual (see also Jannidis; Meinecke; Müller). The individual is both shaped by and creates history. From the early nineteenth century onward the idea of human existence as historical and as taking part in history refers mainly to national history. In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, nationalist thinking spread across Europe; history was thought to be realized through nations (see, e.g., Hobsbawm). A commitment to the nation gives life a meaning which transcends the meaning of individual existence. What is more, by working for his or her nation the individual participates in the progress of the history of mankind. Hegel and Marx, the most prominent representatives of the nineteenth-century philosophy of history, conceived of this progress as a gradual realization of human freedom.
In the interview with Liehm in 1966, Kundera’s stance on the individual’s historical existence follows the main line of European thought. What is more, he explicitly connects this historical view of the individual with the blossoming of the novel since the beginning of the nineteenth century: “When man lacks any eternal substance but is, to say it in a Hegelian way, a product of his own activity in history, the literary genre that is most capable of grasping him as such is the novel” (Liehm, Interview 107). However, in Kundera’s later view, as presented in his novels and essays, history is no longer a realm within which we create ourselves or within which human freedom is realized; rather, it is a domain of external compulsions. Now he claims that the novel does not explore our historical existence but the ahistorical, anthropological possibilities which are left to us in spite of history. The events of a narrative plot might be set in a historical context; nevertheless, the novel’s purpose is not to elucidate history itself, but to inquire into the universal, ahistorical possibilities of human existence which appear in a particular historical situation. History is a kind of “une situation existential en agrandissement” (L’Art 53; “magnified existential situation”). A human possibility which appears in the life of an individual may during a particular historical period be realized on a larger scale, at the level of a whole society or nation (see also Finkielkraut 39). History can, for example, demonstrate that being a killer exists among human possibilities, and it is precisely these human possibilities that interest Kundera: “So the anthropological question—the question of what man is capable of—is always there [in his novels] behind the political [or historical] one” (McEwan 33).
Thus, Kundera has made the move from history to anthropology, to the study of the individual’s existential possibilities as revealed but not created by history. Yet Kundera does not deny human freedom: the individual makes choices even under conditions in which history exerts the severest constraints upon him. Here Kundera’s thinking exhibits a resemblance to Existentalism. Kundera, however, would not place himself in this context. He has articulated his antipathy, not to existential philosophy as such, but to the manner in which in the novels of Camus and Sartre the philosophy precedes the work, the novel acting merely as an illustration of preconceived philosophical ideas (du Plessix Gray 48; Oppenheim 9). In the existential analysis of his novels, he instead considers himself as a follower of his Central European “Pleiades.”
In contrast to history, which imposes constraints upon the individual and restricts our freedom, the history of art represents for Kundera a realm in which human freedom can be truly realized. In Testaments Betrayed he writes:
Here I am making a declaration of involvement in the history of the novel, when all my novels breathe a hatred of history, of that hostile, inhuman force that—uninvited, unwanted—invades our lives from the outside and destroys them. Yet there is nothing inconsistent in this double attitude, because the history of humanity and the history of the novel are two different things. The former is not man’s to determine, it takes over like an alien force he cannot control, whereas the history of the novel (or of painting, of music) is born of man’s freedom, of his wholly personal creations, of his own choices. (15–16)
For Kundera, History—which he occasionally spells with the capital H to refer to the process of world history or the history of nations—does not actually confer on human beings the mastery of the world, or grant us the ability to change it so as to better meet our needs and wishes. History is not human made, but appears as an external force which intrudes into the life of the individual and the whole nation and subjugates or even destroys them. Freedom, if possible at all, can be realized through the individual’s choices and actions not within History, but only outside it. Such realms of freedom include in Kundera’s view the novel and art in general.
While History does not determine what we as human beings are, it sets limits on us by reducing our freedom to certain existential possibilities. In addition, where in the mid-1960s Kundera found that at the beginning of the nineteenth century history opened up new possibilities for the individual, he now—twenty years later—sees the matter in exactly the opposite way: the closer we approach our own time, the tighter becomes the grip of History. This idea is propounded in the following passage in the Cervantes essay, where Kundera outlines certain stages of the history of the novel:
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. The opening of Jacques le Fataliste comes upon the two heroes in mid-journey; we don’t know where they’ve come from or where they’re going. They exist in a time without beginning or end, in a space without frontiers, in the midst of a Europe whose future will never end. Half a century after Diderot, in 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 and Diderot. 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. (The Art 8)
Here Kundera expresses a pessimistic conception of History which is the opposite of the Enlightenment or liberalist belief in historical progress and of Hegel’s and Marx’s philosophies of history, where his process of history advances not toward greater but lesser freedom. As a genre rooted in freedom, the novel voices the escalating lack of it. Although not entirely independent of History, the novel thus works against its force and attempts to escape it by seeking and exploring the existential possibilities of human life.
What is essential in Kundera’s conception of the “legacy of Cervantes” is the setting out for adventure. Kundera’s comments on Don Quixote in the Cervantes essay lack any reference to the fact that the novel parodies the incredible adventures encountered by the knights of chivalric romances on their wanderings (see, however, The Curtain 6). In fact, he never tells us how he understands adventure in the pre-Cervantean novel. However, the fact that he ascribes the “discovery” of adventure to Cervantes indicates that he is using the word in a quite specific sense. We have to ask what Kundera actually means here by “adventure,” and why he regards its discovery as the birth of the modern genre of the novel.
Adventure, of course, was an essential constituent in the early novel, from the Greek novels of love and adventure of the first centuries AD to the chivalric, pastoral, and picaresque novels of the Renaissance. Yet adventure in this sense has no connection with the ambiguity of the world discussed by Kundera at the beginning of his Cervantes essay. Rather, one might argue that in its original sense, adventure exemplifies precisely an undisputed and unchallenged metaphysical order to the world. The primary purpose of adventures in the novels of late antiquity and in chivalric romances was to entertain the reader, with the secondary aim, by means of an exemplary story, of teaching a moral lesson. Adventures serve as a trial of the knight’s integrity or of the constancy of the prince and princess, who have to overcome a series of hardships in order to be reunited in love. In the comic picaresque novel the hero’s adventures confront him with the deceitfulness and baseness of the world, from which at the end he withdraws. Thus, adventures exemplify the already established and accepted truths about the world. The prevailing worldview is not called into question; adventures are unexpected only with regard to the occurrence of particular events but do not open up any new perspectives in the experience of the world (see, e.g., Bakhtin, “Forms of Time”).
In speaking of Cervantes’s “discovery” of adventure, Kundera is using the term in a specific sense to refer to the characteristic modern mode of human existence. He claims that the modern individual is given no eternal, indubitable truth concerning the essence of the world, but any knowledge about the actual world has to be won piece by piece in the course of experiencing the world. Thus, the adventures of modern individuals do not in their content repeat any eternal, pregiven truth. “Adventure” for Kundera actually means an encounter with the new and unknown, an openness toward something that does not belong to any known order of things. What Cervantes “discovers” is thus not adventure in the conventional sense of the word. Originally used to denote something temporary, transitory, and episodic, an “adventure” in this new sense contributes something to one’s view of the world or of human beings. In claiming that adventure has been the grand theme during the “four centuries of the European novel” (The Art 5), Kundera uses the term in precisely this sense, to refer to the process-like or open nature of encountering reality.
Kundera claims that by discovering adventure in this specific sense Cervantes established the modern tradition of the novel. He enumerates other novelists who made further significant discoveries; in fact, the history of the novel in Kundera’s view consists of a series of successive discoveries (6). Richardson unveils the inner life of the individual; Balzac examines how the individual is determined by history; Flaubert discovers everyday life and depicts “the infinity of the soul,” which replaces the lost infinity of the external world—in The Curtain (127) we are told that Flaubert discovered stupidity “as an indissociable part of ‘human nature’”; and Tolstoy explores the irrational in human action (The Art 5–9, 57). Although according to Kundera the horizon of adventure starts to shrink already with Balzac, he still considers all novelists down to Kafka or Fuentes—or himself—as adventurers in the sense of being explorers of new realms of being. Yet, as it was Cervantes who discovered adventure as the exploration of the unknown, his discovery is not just one among others. We could call it the “arch-discovery,” although Kundera himself does not use this term, in that it opens up the domain within which the subsequent discoveries of other novelists take place.
Kundera does not look for a historical explanation as to why it was precisely Cervantes who discovered adventure or why, as he thinks, this happened in the early seventeenth century. Cervantes’s invention takes place outside History insofar as it cannot be traced back to any historical circumstances. Kundera is inclined to think of Cervantes as one of the creators of the modern era, rather than being himself a product of his time. In a way, the arch-discovery of adventure is an act of resisting and transcending History. The history of the novel takes place outside History, in the realm of the novelist’s freedom to explore human existence. In fact, in Kundera’s view the history of the novel embodies a “counter-history” of European humankind; or, as he puts it in Testaments Betrayed, a “revenge on History itself” (15). It is the history of human freedom, which Kundera considers much more significant than the uncontrollable History that has trampled on Europe, that subdues individuals and nations. The history of the novel is not a product of History, but it has substantially, as culture, contributed to the shaping of human history. In Kundera’s view, the novel has profoundly affected the spiritual formation of the European individual (see Raddatz 105), who is unthinkable without the novel that created him or her (Weiss 407). In Kundera’s view, History and the history of the novel are contrasting entities corresponding to the opposites of necessity and freedom, of History and adventure.
The contemporary world against the novel and the novel against its history
When Kundera declares that the legacy of Cervantes has long been “depreciated,” he means two things. First, he is claiming that a Europe oriented toward science and technology has neglected the novel, which in fact constitutes its cultural core. Since Europe is unaware of its own identity, the significance of the process whereby the world has become incompatible with the novel has remained generally unrecognized. Second, Kundera is suggesting that novelists themselves have left the possibilities of the genre to a large extent unexploited.
According to Kundera, the incompatibility between the world and the novel has constantly increased. Where Cervantes’s or Diderot’s heroes are free to go wherever they like and return when they wish, in Balzac’s novels freedom starts to diminish as social institutions and historical processes begin to limit the horizon. In Kafka’s works the world has already turned into a trap. By trap Kundera means a world in which human beings are no longer allowed to live as they wish. To counter the loss of the infinity of the external world, the nineteenth century set up the infinity of the soul, but in a world turned into a trap this is no longer of any use: the protagonist of Kafka’s The Trial cannot even daydream, as once Flaubert’s Emma Bovary did: “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 and his surveying job. The infinity of the soul—if it ever existed—has become a nearly useless appendage” (The Art 9). When History manages to grasp us and deprives us of all our freedom of action, adventure becomes impossible:
What is adventure if a K.’s freedom of action is completely illusory? What is future if the intellectuals of The Man Without Qualities have not the slightest inkling of the war that will sweep their lives away the next day? What is crime if Broch’s Huguenau not only does not regret but actually forgets the murder he has committed? And if the only great comic novel of the period, Hašek’s Schweik, uses war as its setting, then what has happened to the comic? Where is the difference between public and private if K., even in bed with a woman, is never without the two emissaries of the Castle? And in that case, what is solitude? A burden, a misery, a curse, as some would have us believe, or on the contrary, a supremely precious value in the process of being crushed by the ubiquitous collectivity? (The Art 12-13)
The arc of the history of the novel is thus tilted; and this is closely connected with History’s ever tightening grasp, proving that eventually not even the novel will be able to escape the constraints of History. Indeed, this is what the twentieth century witnessed: Kundera calls the age of Kafka, Musil, Broch, Hašek, and Gombrowicz the era of “terminal paradoxes” (The Art 12). In the last moment before its disappearance, the novel reveals the human condition in which the novel becomes impossible. Kundera includes himself in this final stage of the history of the novel, just before it becomes extinct.
For Kundera, History entered the stage in the nineteenth century. In the beginning, “the train called history” seemed to promise new adventures (The Art 8), but the twentieth century changed its appearance. Ever since World War I it has been clear that it is impossible to escape History. The situation became further aggravated during World War II and afterwards, when Central Europe fell under Russian hegemony and “for the first time in its modern history” (11) a great part of Europe was amputated. For Kundera, the death of modern Europe also meant a death sentence for the novel. In the Soviet Union and the communist-ruled Central European countries a great number of works called novels were published, but “these novels add[ed] nothing to the conquest of being” (14) and consequently did not perform the function of the genre. Rather than exploring the unknown, they merely repeat and reinforce that which already exists: “By discovering nothing, they fail to participate in the sequence of discoveries that for me constitutes the history of the novel; they place themselves outside that history, or, if you like: they are novels that come after the history of the novel” (14). The novel as the core of modern Europe is thus shown to be mortal: “And we now know how the novel dies: it’s not that it disappears; its history stops: after that comes nothing but a period of repetition in which the novel keeps duplicating its form, emptied of its spirit” (15).
In the Cervantes essay Kundera describes the death of the novel from the perspective of his Czechoslovak experiences. When he wrote the essay he was already in France, which means that moving to the West did not change his views as to the incompatibility between the contemporary world and the novel, or even as to the world turned into a trap. Kundera came to realize that even in the West the intellectual atmosphere is not—or at least, as he believes, is no longer—favorable to the novel. In his view we have been caught in a “whirlpool of reduction” (The Art 17), driven by the media: “they distribute throughout the world the same simplifications and stereotypes easily acceptable by the greatest number, by everyone, by all mankind” (18). We find ourselves in a world where everybody has “the same view of life, reflected in the same ordering of the table of contents, under the same headings, in the same journalistic phrasing, the same vocabulary, and the same style, in the same artistic tastes, and in the same ranking of things they deem important or insignificant” (18). The simplifying and leveling spirit of the mass media which dominates our contemporary society is in Kundera’s opinion contrary to the spirit of the novel: “The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: ‘Things are not as simple as you think’” (18). The novel is dead, through failing to continue to discover the yet unknown; it has placed itself outside its own history and turned into what Kundera calls “the endless babble of graphomaniacs” (19). While he criticizes philosophers of history not only for their trust in progress but also for their belief that a pattern or inner logic can be discerned in History, Kundera here draws a line for History—a pessimistic one. The Modern Era, he claims, begins with the individual setting out on a series of adventures and ends up with him or her being entrapped, deprived of freedom. The history of the novel, like an arc spanning through four centuries, preserves “safe as in a treasure chest” (The Art 165) the history of the modern European individual and his or her intellectual adventures—a history which is now about to come to an end.
Kundera’s pessimistic vision is no less prone to criticism than the optimistic Enlightenment view of history. For instance, one might argue that Balzac does not depict a narrowing down of the space for adventure, but rather a world which promises more freedom and which is opening up to more individual initiative. The new bourgeois, capitalist society portrayed in Balzac’s novels allows much greater social mobility than the ancien régime ever did, enabling the individual to make choices and to take control of his or her own life. One explanation for Kundera’s perception of the nineteenth century as gradually imposing more and more constraints may be the fact that in the literature of the nineteenth century—above all Balzac’s novels—the social mechanisms which force the individual to conform are portrayed more vividly than ever before. As a consequence of fundamental changes in the society, these mechanisms have now become visible, whereas earlier the social structure regulated the life of the individual in an unquestioned, self-evident, and therefore inconspicuous way. In other words, increased understanding of the functioning of society and a more acute analysis of the constraints it imposes on the individual may make those constraints more prominent, even though individual freedom has actually increased. One might also challenge Kundera’s view of historical development having taken a course unfavorable to the novel. We may doubt whether there has ever been an era of European history in which plurality, relativity, and complexity of truths was the dominant view. What are, then, the reasons for Kundera’s pessimism, and how does it impact upon his novelistic work? And what options, in his view, are available to the individual in a world turned into a trap?
For Kundera, the “depreciation” of the legacy of Cervantes also means that some aspects of the potential of the novel have remained unexploited. He claims that the history of the novel embraces several discoveries which have fallen into oblivion or remained generally unexplored. The title of his second essay collection, Testaments Betrayed, echoes this idea and reflects its crucial importance in his thinking. Has not the genre of the novel failed to fulfill its freedom, since its history recalls “a cemetery of missed opportunities, of unheard appeals” (The Art 15)? In the Cervantes essay Kundera enumerates four such appeals: the appeals of play, dream, thought, and time, possibilities that are opened up in some remarkable novels from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century: “Afterward, the novel got itself tied to the imperative of verisimilitude, to realistic settings, to chronological order” (15).
In several of his later writings, Kundera contrasts the “first half-time” in the history of the modern novel, the period from Rabelais to Sterne and Laclos, with the “second half-time,” which includes nineteenth-century realism, starting with authors such as Walter Scott and Balzac (“On Criticism” 14; Encounter 439; “Esch Is Luther” 270; Testaments Betrayed 57; see also Gambarota 48–49; Maixent 2; Oppenheim 8–9). He often expresses his enthusiasm for the novels of the first half-time for their nonseriousness, their irony and playfulness, their freedom of composition, and their liberty to interrupt the narrative by the author’s reflections. These opportunities were lost under the severe regime of the realist conventions of the nineteenth-century novel. In Kundera’s view, the norms of realism imposed great limitations upon the novel. He refers to this established set of norms as “the long tradition of psychological realism” (The Art 33). The restrictive conventions, which gained the status of “inviolable standards,” were the following: “(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 behaviour 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” (33–34).
In the modernism which comes after the second half-time, the brief period of the “post-Proustian novel” which Kundera also calls (paradoxically) the “third half-time” in the history of the novel, authors such as Kafka, Broch, Musil, Gombrowicz, García Márquez, and Fuentes take up possibilities offered in the novels of the first half-time (Oppenheim 8–9; Testaments 72–75). Kafka restores the dream to the novel (The Art 16, 81; Testaments 48) and assumes a manner of writing which “breaks the plausibility barriers,” as does García Márquez, who names Kafka his predecessor and model (Testaments 50–51). Musil and Broch, in turn, restore authorial reflection to the novel, making of it a “supreme intellectual synthesis” (The Art 16). In the Cervantes essay Kundera writes that the issue of time is still waiting to be expanded beyond the possibilities of Proustian personal memory to embrace collective time, “the time of Europe,” enabling Europe to come to grips with its own history (16). In Testaments Betrayed he contends that Fuentes has contributed to the inquiry of collective time and that in Terra nostra, Fuentes grasped the essence of the Mexican terra “in the form of a dream novel where various historical periods telescope into a kind of poetic and oneiric metahistory” (14).
Kundera’s discussion of these neglected but later rediscovered and rehabilitated possibilities of the novel suggests that even in a world turned into a trap the novel might still have some freedom of choice, if it only knew how to make use of it. The “unheard appeals” Kundera describes are possibilities that are exploited again after the period of realism; or, more accurately, in the “post-Proustian” period (suggesting that Proust and Joyce did not actually abandon the “long tradition of psychological realism”). In his own novels Kundera avoids descriptions which serve merely to enhance the illusion of reality. The reader is rarely informed about the characters’ pasts, and the narrator feels free to interrupt the narration with his own contemplations and reflections, traits that signify his allegiance to the post-Proustian third half-time of the novel (e.g., Testaments 75). In Testaments Betrayed he sketches a similar three-stage development in the history of music, and concludes by expressing his attachment to the third phase in the histories of both arts: “I am deeply, passionately fond of that third period, that ‘sky ablaze at the end of the day,’ fond of that period which I believe I myself am part of, even if I am part of something that is already finished” (75).
If we read Kundera’s essay on the legacy of Cervantes as a study in the history of the novel, we have to admit that he enjoys freedoms that befit a novelistic writer of essays. Yet, as noted earlier, it is not my intention to evaluate Kundera’s achievement as a literary historian, but to consider the essay, along with his later writings on the same subject, as an attempt to construct a history of the novel that gives credence to his own oeuvre. Highlighting certain important points in the course of the history of the novel, he is aiming at a phenomenology of the novel, that is, at a definition of its essence, which can serve as the basis of his own poetics of the novel. There is nothing unusual about an author refraining from becoming absorbed in the “otherness” of other writers’ work and instead choosing his own predecessors so that the course of history leads up to his own work—an idea that was made popular by Borges’s essay on Kafka and his precursors. A singular feature in Kundera’s conception, however, is his radical dissociation from the historical thinking which is characteristic of the modernity of the last two centuries—except with regard to the internal history of the novel. Before we proceed with our discussion of Kundera’s understanding of the novel by comparing it to novelists close to him, let us therefore look at his first novel, The Joke, which brings to the surface certain crucial circumstances concerning Kundera’s hostility toward history.