Unmasking, Thought, and Analysis in the Post-Proustian Novel
Kundera considers himself to belong “under the same roof” with what he calls “the Pleiades of great Central European novelists”: Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hašek, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, and Witold Gombrowicz (The Art 124; Oppenheim 9). This affinity means not only a shared view of the function of the novel in general and similarities in its construction, but also a parallel perspective on human existence in today’s late modern world. In The Art of the Novel, Kundera explains his conception of the construction of his novels as making use of possibilities originally expounded by Broch, and several of the essays in Testaments Betrayed deal with Kafka. All five writers are for Kundera great novelists who in their work have captured new aspects of existence for human knowledge. In this chapter, I examine these authors primarily in terms of how the “inquiry into human existence” in their novels relates to Kundera’s objectives and how Kundera’s interpretation of his predecessors brings them into concurrence with his own views on humanity, history, and the novel.
Kafka, Hašek, Gombrowicz
The term “Kafkan” describes for Kundera the experience of living in a trap. Kundera formulates the crucial and radically new question raised by Kafka as follows: “What possibilities remain for man in a world where the external determinants have become so overpowering that internal impulses no longer carry weight?” (The Art 26). For Kafka, being crushed by external determinants does not follow from specific historical circumstances. For Kundera, Kafka is neither a prophet who foretold the advent of political totalitarianism—although his works were banned in Czechoslovakia after 1948 (see Thomas 13, 102)—nor a sociologist who depicted capitalism critically. Instead, Kafka described in the individual’s experience a general, “anthropological” human possibility, which a few decades later in a particular historical situation became the collective experience of a society (The Art 111; Finkielkraut 39). Likewise, the themes of culpabilization and the violation of privacy, associated with the experience of being entrapped, appear in Kafka’s works at a familial level, whereas—as Kundera remarks—in totalitarianism they reappear on the large scale of History (The Art 103–12). We may note that in seeing these major Kafkan themes exclusively in the context of the author’s family background (on the power of the family as a trap, see The Art 109–10) and in ignoring any historical or social contextualization, Kundera acknowledges the relevance of biography in the interpretation of an author’s work.
According to Kundera, Kafka has discovered the possibility in human existence of being in a trap formed by circumstances (see, e.g., McEwan 36). Kundera, however, never mentions that the metaphor itself derives from Kafka. Among Kafka’s short stories is a tale entitled “A Little Fable,” in which the metaphor of the trap is presented very much in the Kunderan sense. Because of the brevity of the tale, I give it here in its entirety: “‘Alas,’ said the mouse, ‘the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap I must run into.’ ‘You need only to change your direction,’ said the cat, and ate it up” (445). The individual’s experience of the world, which originally appeared infinitely vast, is described as growing increasingly confined. Kundera does not mention this tale as a source of his “trap” metaphor. In Testaments Betrayed, however, he praises Kafka’s metaphorical imagination, which he characterizes as existential or phenomenological rather than lyrical, noting that Kafka’s metaphors reveal the meaning of the situations in which his characters find themselves. Kundera gives the example of Kafka’s description of a sexual encounter between K. and Frieda in The Castle, in which the lovers, desperately seeking something from each other, are described metaphorically as dogs pawing the ground (Testaments 104–05). The words, Kundera says, do not express “a visual image of what is happening but rather express an ineffable existential situation” (105). This is even more obviously the case in “Small Fable,” where the running mouse represents humanity in a world which has become a trap. Kundera also finds existential or phenomenological metaphors in Broch and Musil (see Testaments 104, The Curtain 70; on Kafka, see, e.g., Corngold; Corngold and Gross; Petrović; Stach; Strelka).
Kundera expresses his admiration for Kafka’s ability to depict even “life-denying” situations of “tragic entrapment” with astonishing beauty and poetry (The Art 121; Testaments 220–24). What makes this beauty possible is that human freedom is not completely extinguished even under the most severe conditions. As an example, Kundera refers to the end of The Trial, where Joseph K. is on his way to be executed. Despite being absorbed in the situation, in a fleeting glimpse he looks at the world as Tolstoy sees it, “a world where, even at the harshest moments, characters retain a freedom of decision which gives life the happy incalculability that is the source of poetry” (Testaments 224).
Certain themes, attitudes, and techniques in Kafka’s work are central to Kundera’s practice of constructing the novel. One striking similarity is that neither author endows his characters with complete names. The characters are either anonymous or are identified by a single name rather than a first name and surname. This practice—which we find in other works of the “Pleiades” as well—contradicts the aim, characteristic of literary realism, of creating an illusion of reality. In general, Kafka is for Kundera a great antirealist writer who showed twentieth-century authors such as García Márquez “that it’s possible to write another way” (Testaments 50). It was, likewise, Kafka who introduced dreamlike narration in the modern novel (The Art 16; Testaments 48–49). In so doing he actually renewed the novel in a manner that, according to the surrealists, was accomplished in poetry only (Testaments 48).
The roots of what Kundera calls Kafka’s “profound antiromanticism” may in his opinion lie in Kafka’s view of sexuality (Testaments 44), and Kafka is for Kundera one of the first analysts of sexuality. He is also the first to represent sexuality from the viewpoint of its inherently comical character. An example is the description of the “unfortunate sexual mishap with a housemaid,” because of which the sixteen-year-old protagonist of Amerika was cast out of the parental home and sent to the US. The realization that the “utterly trivial” event of what Kundera characterizes as a “minor copulation” is the cause of everything that later happens to the hero is depressing, but, as he further remarks, the triviality of the cause makes the matter appear in a comical light as well (Testaments 44–45). This specific kind of the comical is another feature which fascinates Kundera in Kafka’s work. He contends that in Kafka’s world “the comic is not a counterpoint to the tragic (the tragicomic) as in Shakespeare; it’s not there to make the tragic more bearable by lightening the tone; it doesn’t accompany the tragic, not at all, it nips it in the bud and thus deprives the victims of the only consolation they could hope for: the consolation to be found in the (real or supposed) grandeur of tragedy” (The Art 104–05).
Another example analyzed by Kundera in Testaments Betrayed is the passage in The Trial where K. is first summoned to appear before the tribunal. He literally runs across the city to arrive in time. Kundera wonders why K. does not take the tram and underlines Kafka’s irony: “The reason: he refuses to take the streetcar because ‘he had no desire to humble himself before the committee of inquiry by a too-scrupulous punctuality.’ He runs to the tribunal, but he runs as a proud man who will not be humiliated” (208). The effect of the comical arises from the unmasking of something ridiculous in characters which they themselves are not aware of or which they want to conceal unconsciously from themselves. Laughter deprives a person of his or her dignity, yet it does not make the matter appear amusing. This mode of laughter comes close to the comic which we encounter in Kundera’s own novels. The importance of laughter is indicated by the fact that the words “laughable,” “joke,” or “laughter” occur in the titles of several of his works: Laughable Loves, The Joke, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Kunderan laughter is neither cheerful nor benevolent nor innocent; on the contrary, it is cold, taunting and mocking, denying the dignity of the person or the value of the matter we are laughing at. As Calvin Bedient notes, Kundera’s laughter is more an expression of pain than of happiness or joy (96). It is ironic and strips subjects of their dignity by making them seem ridiculous. As Kundera himself puts it in his definition of the word “comic” in “Sixty-three Words,” “by providing us with the lovely illusion of human greatness, the tragic brings us consolation. The comic is crueler: it brutally reveals the meaninglessness of everything” (The Art 125).
In addition to Kafka, the other great Prague novelist praised by Kundera as a classic writer of the comic is Jaroslav Hašek (in another context, Kundera refers to Vančura as the Czech writer he loves most [Testaments 229]), but he does not include him in his “Pleiades” of the great Central European novelists). While Kafka’s characters are not only entrapped but also the victims of ridicule, Hašek’s protagonist, the good soldier Schweik, invites readers to laugh together with him at the very machinery by which he is gripped. The comical does not originate in the denial of someone’s dignity but is a form of resistance, thus offering the possibility of freedom under the coercive machinery. By obeying the most senseless orders with extreme accuracy, Schweik makes the system itself ridiculous. Yet, surprisingly, Kundera does not emphasize the critique of the military and administrative system in Hašek’s laughter; rather, he interprets the laughter as an expression of the experience of the absurd. The mere fact that war has become the subject of a comic novel proves that the comic has arrived at its paradoxical end (The Art 10). Schweik “adapts so easily (and with such delight!) to the reigning order not because he sees some sense in it but because he sees it has none at all. He amuses himself, he amuses other people, and by his extravagant conformism, he turns the world into one enormous joke” (The Art 49). Kundera’s interpretation follows to a certain point the Czech reading of Schweik, who to his fellow countrymen represents the tradition of skepticism and laughter in which any lofty idealism is ridiculed (see Steiner, The Deserts 16). According to Kundera’s understanding, however, Schweik’s laughter signifies a universal denial of meaningfulness, “the non-acceptance of power through the refusal to take seriously anything at all” (The Art 49). Expanding the target of laughter until it is all inclusive dulls its edge as a tool of criticism of a certain system. In Kundera’s interpretation, Hašek’s laughter is in fact—contrary to what Kundera says about Schweik’s amusing himself and others—fundamentally joyless, an expression of the existential experience of senselessness. This interpretation of Hašek tells us much about Kundera’s own view of the comic (on Hašek see, e.g., Beall; Fábry; Němcová Banerjee; Petrović; Steiner, “Cynic Hero”; Thirouin, De Hašek; Winner).
On several occasions, Kundera refers with admiration to Gombrowicz, in particular his first novel Ferdydurke (1938). He considers Ferdydurke to be one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century, one which would have greatly influenced the history of the genre had it not been written in the language of a “small” nation and had not the outbreak of World War II blocked it from reaching an international audience (Testaments 248–50). The novel became known in the West only after 1959 (see Anonymous, “The History” 8; on Gombrowicz, see, e.g., Goddard; Ziarek Płonowska). Kundera considers Gombrowicz, along with Musil and Broch, an “anti-ideological” writer who believed neither in progress nor in revolution and an example of how an author can speak in his own voice in his work (The Art 34). In “Sixty-three Words,” Kundera illustrates the concept of “absolutely modern” with a passage from Ferdydurke where the hostess displays her modernity by openly signifying her intention to go to the toilet (142). While such brief comments make it difficult to establish what Gombrowicz actually means to Kundera, by looking at the novel itself, however, it becomes possible to unearth some of the reasons why he praises Ferdydurke and considers it close to his own work.
Ferdydurke corresponds to Kundera’s definition of the modern novel, in that in its own way it strives to solve “the secret of the self.” As Gombrowicz puts it in the afterword to the English translation, the novel shows how in other people’s eyes we appear civilized and mature, while to ourselves we are immature, incoherent, and lacking a unified, stable identity (288). The protagonist Johnnie Kowalski is searching for the “inner truth” within himself, but cannot find it. In fact, an individual consists of “a conglomeration of physical and mental parts” (Ferdydurke 74), yet not even these are his own: “We shall soon begin to be afraid of ourselves and our personalities, because we shall discover that they do not completely belong to us. And instead of bellowing and shouting: I believe this, I feel that, I am this, I stand for that, we shall say more humbly: In me there is a belief, a feeling, a thought, I am the vehicle for such-and-such an action, production, or whatever it may be” (86). Thus the individual’s identity is deeply problematic.
Closely connected with the problem of identity is that of immaturity, which is an equally important theme in Kundera’s work. In the beginning of Ferdydurke, the thirty-year-old hero, who is accused of immaturity on the basis of his “Diary from the Time of Maturation,” written during his search for his identity—Gombrowicz wrote a text with this title before Ferdydurke—is forced to go back to school and tolerate being treated like a sixteen-year-old. The improbable and absurd situation, which immediately manifests the author’s distance from the realist mode of narration, leads to the revelation of further absurdities. The main character has to witness a “moue competition” between two schoolboys who represent the parties of “innocent youth” and “lewdness.” When the leader of “the lewd” loses, he cannot bear his defeat and forces his victorious rival to listen to the filth he whispers into his ears, which the other cannot endure but falls ill and eventually dies. However, “immaturity” manifests itself not only in the schoolboys’ actions, but in the similar behavior provoked by Johnnie among the members of the family who provide him with accommodation. The parents and their teenage daughter have constructed their self-identity on allegedly being “absolutely modern,” but the protagonist brings about the collapse of the form on which they have based their identity. He escapes his hosts’ house in a scene where family members attack two men who have intruded into the daughter’s room with amorous intentions—one of them is the professor who has forced Johnnie back to school—and start biting, beating, and kicking them. When Johnnie decides to flee with a school comrade to the estate of one of his aristocratic relatives, the outcome is once again a breakdown of civilized forms of behavior and Johnnie has to run away again.
Kundera is indebted to Gombrowicz for two of his recurrent concepts: “immaturity” and the “absolutely modern.” By the latter, both understand an acquired attitude, a strategy whereby the individual constructs himself or herself by professing to be what counts as the most avant-garde. It is important to observe that “avant-garde” here means the same as the dernier cri or the fashionably modern, not the creation of something new and innovative. An even more important concept is “immaturity,” which, however, the two authors understand in a significantly different way. In Kundera’s conception, “immaturity” is closely associated with such concepts as “sentimentality,” “lyricism,” “ideology,” and “youth.” Although he does not define the opposite of “immaturity” in terms of any single concept, it is for him clearly a maturity or adulthood associated with such concepts as “skepticism” and “insight into the relativity of truths,” or, in some connections, with “epic” or “novelistic.” His characters are divisible into mature and immature ones. In Ferdydurke, immaturity is connected with youth or with being “green,” yet its counter-concept is not “maturity” but “form.” “Form” is what people want to accomplish in the eyes of others and in their own, but the form assumed actually hides their incoherence, their nonrational, chaotic immaturity, which nevertheless is also the source of creativity. Both “form” and “immaturity” are thus to be found in every individual. Johnnie’s immaturity has the effect of a catalyst in the unmasking of that of other, apparently well-behaved and respectable people; all three catastrophes in Ferdydurke unveil disintegrating immaturity.
For Kundera, the Gombrowiczian unveiling of immaturity is related to Kafka’s unsentimental, analytical representation of sexuality and Hašek’s laughter at the irrationality of the machinery of war. Along with the discoveries of the other members of the Pleiades, they offer him a model for penetrating the possibilities of human existence. Gombrowicz is especially important, because he dares to lay bare what one tries to conceal not only from others but even from oneself. There is something shameful and gruesome hiding in human beings—the acts and omissions of the characters in Ferdydurke are determined partly by shame—something primitive and ignoble whose physical counterpart would more appropriately be the claws of animals and the barking of dogs than human hands and speech. Passing by a village on their way to his relatives’ estate, Johnnie and his school comrade are puzzled by the absence of the locals and the high number of dogs. They are told that the peasants have all turned into barking, snarling, biting, howling, and quarrelling dogs in order to evade the influence of the expanding urban culture (202–04). Gombrowicz’s view of man can justifiably be called pessimistic, as Czesłav Miłosz does in his introduction to Ferdydurke (xv), but we might actually go a step further and describe it as misanthropic. It holds true for Kundera as well that his study of human nature often involves the revelation of things one does not want to be faced with because they contradict one’s adopted, idealized image of oneself. However, for Kundera this is not equally valid for everyone; while for Gombrowicz everyone is at least to some extent “immature,” for Kundera, “mature” men and women do exist.
Furthermore, the influence of Gombrowicz’s narrative technique and the architecture of his works on Kundera’s art of the novel is beyond doubt. The main storyline in Ferdydurke is interrupted by two digressions, both of which begin with Gombrowicz’s abstract reflections and continue by narrating the imaginative, nonrealistic stories of various characters and events that have no connection whatsoever with either the main storyline or each other. In the first digression, in fact, the author tells us that his work consists of unconnected, disjointed fragments, exactly like human beings are in reality (74). Kundera is fascinated by the absurdly comic in Gombrowicz’s work and by the manner in which Ferdydurke is constructed from a mixture of fantastic, dreamlike, and grotesque-realistic elements, representing—just like Kafka’s novels—a novelistic counterpart to the surrealism of lyrical poetry. Gombrowicz’s way of building up a whole out of narrative passages and abstract reflections corresponds to that which Kundera praises in Broch’s The Sleepwalkers and that he wants to develop further in his own novels.
Analysis, irony, and the question of authenticity in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities
Kundera claims that Musil and Broch introduced “thought” as a structural element and principle into the novel. He talks about the “appeal of thought” as a possibility of the novel which so far has remained underused by other novelists: “Musil and Broch brought a sovereign and radiant intelligence to bear on the novel. 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” (The Art 16). However, the description leaves unclear what a novel that follows the “appeal of thought” is actually like. Following the appeal of thought, according to Kundera, does not mean that a novel is constructed out of abstract philosophical ideas, but that “rational and irrational, narrative and contemplative” means are used. It is thus difficult to see what exactly differentiates these novels from other kinds of novels, except possibly a higher level of intellectual achievement. In fact, I believe that what is special in Musil’s and Broch’s novels—as well as in Kundera’s—might be more adequately grasped through the term “analysis” than “thinking” or “thought.” “Analysis” means that the contents, ingredients, and concatenations of experiences are described with far more accuracy than the characters themselves are able to do. The purpose is to let the invisible become visible and accessible to judgment. Analysis thus does not appeal to the reader’s empathy but to our reason (on Musil, see, e.g., Corino; Freed; McBride; Payne, Bartram, and Tihanov; Pike; Thiher).
Musil’s colossal unfinished novel, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930–52, The Man Without Qualities), is pervaded by irony. The setting is Vienna in the years prior to World War I and the events of the novel are focused on a so-called “Collateral Campaign” planned by the upper circles of Austrian society. To eclipse the celebrations of the thirtieth anniversary of the German emperor’s ascent to the throne, prominent circles in Austria are planning to launch a “Year of Austria” in 1918 in honor of the seventieth anniversary of the coronation of emperor Franz Joseph. The intention is thus highly patriotic, but the celebration still lacks a deeper foundation in a leading idea: what is the grand idea that Franz Joseph and Austria might represent that would have universal relevance? The idea must be “grand,” but no one knows what it actually is.
Just as the Collateral Campaign is obscure, the participants in the great plan are equally opaque to themselves; in general, the individuals’ actions and experiences are far less unified and rational than they imagine and contain much that escapes their own notice. Musil identifies this as the condition of modernity: unlike in Kundera’s work, in Musil’s work we do not find an exploration of human existence outside History. His characters stand outside History only insofar as they do not apprehend the historical moment in which they exist, but their confusion as such ensues from the fragmentation of the modern world. This fragmentation is demonstrated already in the first chapter, starting with the description of a beautiful August day in Vienna. A day that in an old-fashioned form of speech would be described by the phrase “the weather was fine” is depicted in terms borrowed from meteorology, in a discourse characteristic of the natural sciences. The irony continues in the following passages: upon witnessing an accident, a passer-by is comforted only when she is given a statistical account of the frequency of traffic accidents and is assured that the event does not exceed the limits of the normal. The chapter is about the alarming pluralism of different discourses and reveals that the reassuring effect exerted on us by the discourse of the exact sciences may not be rationally founded.
Musil’s method of unmasking consists of a detailed depiction of a character’s state of mind—emotions, perceptions, thoughts, and expectations—and of relationships among the characters. The following quotation, which describes how Count Leinsdorf originally came up with the idea of a great patriotic action, is a good example:
For Count Leinsdorf there lay in this allegory of the aged sovereign the thought both of his country, which he loved, and of the world, to which it was to be an example. Great and agonising hopes stirred in Count Leinsdorf. He could not have said whether what moved him was more pain at not seeing his country occupying the place of honour due to it “in the family of nations,” or whether it was jealousy of Prussia, which had thrust Austria down from the place (in 1866, by trickery and cunning!), or whether he was simply filled with pride in the nobility of an old state and the desire to show the world that it was exemplary; for in his view the nations of Europe were all whirling along in the vortex of a materialistic democracy, and he envisaged a lofty symbol that would be to them at once an admonition and a signal for a change of heart. It was clear to him that something must be done that would put Austria at the head of all, so that this “magnificent demonstration of the spirit of Austria” should be a “landmark” for the whole world, so helping it to find the way back to its own true nature, and that all this was bound up with the possession of an eighty-eight-year-old Emperor of Peace. (100)
The count’s emotions and thoughts are hazy and their interconnections vague. Some details may be accurate, for instance the idea that the events of 1866 represented a turning point, but his comprehension of these events and their causes is nonrational and emotional (the Prussians thrust Austria out of its place “by trickery and cunning”). The nebulous idea of “the Year of Austria” grows out of the Count’s conservative, patriotic emotions—his love of his fatherland, his conviction of the exemplariness of his country for the world—his aristocratic pride and his abhorrence of democracy, his emotionally colored interpretation of a historic turn (the events of 1866), his gratuitous wishes (Austria as an elevated symbol which admonishes the world to self-scrutiny), and a number of clichéd phrases lacking content such as “a magnificent demonstration of the spirit of Austria,” “the family of nations,” “a landmark for the whole world.” This conglomeration of emotions and thoughts is depicted with great precision, but the analytical accuracy of the depiction does not mean that the thoughts lose their vagueness; on the contrary, the analytical accuracy lies in the great precision with which Musil grasps the vagueness that is characteristic of a person’s thinking.
In Musil’s narrative, what is in a person’s mind but remains unrecognized is identified and made visible. The description follows the feelings and thoughts of a person closely, but in its analytical definition of the various elements the representation differs from how the person sees himself or herself. The difference is in the degree of awareness. Characters certainly have all these feelings and thoughts, but are not able to analyze and name them; they are usually content with an approximate, often strongly idealizing picture of their own self and actions. Consequently, the sheer precision of the description gives the narration an ironic tone.
Musil’s art of depicting the processes in the human mind is an example of what Kundera means by his claim that a novel should study the human condition but avoid psychological realism. In a psychologically realistic description a character’s actions have to be psychologically motivated, while Musil’s narration of unmasking does not strive to reveal the characters as they understand themselves. Musil instead endeavors to surpass the limits of characters’ self-understanding and to reveal the disparate elements that constitute their emotions, thoughts, and actions. Where psychological realism sought to construct an unbroken chain of causation, Musil focuses on particular phenomena; no rationality holding the whole of events together is to be found. The irony in Musil’s novel derives from the characters’ inability to realize the lack of rational connections in their thinking or in their experience of the world.
In Kundera’s view, “the novel is, by definition, the ironic art” (The Art 133). The main tool of irony in his works, as in Musil’s, is the analytical precision of description. The following example from Life Is Elsewhere describes the feelings of the poet’s mother upon reading her son’s poems for the first time:
She read them and she cried. Maybe she didn’t know why she was crying, but it’s not difficult to guess; flowing from her eyes were four kinds of tears: first of all, she was struck by the resemblance between Jaromil’s poems and the poems the painter had lent her, and the tears poured forth, tears for a lost love; then she felt a vague sadness emanating from her son’s lines, recalling that her husband had been absent from the house for two days without having said a word, she shed tears of offended humiliation; but soon there were tears of consolation flowing from her eyes, for her son, rushing to her with so much confidence and emotion to show her his poems, had spread a balm on all her wounds; and finally, after reading the poems several times, she shed tears of admiration, because Jaromil’s lines seemed unintelligible to her, and she therefore told herself that his poems contained much that she couldn’t understand and that, as a consequence, she was the mother of a child prodigy. (Life 51)
The narrator’s ironic distance from the mother’s outburst of feelings is underlined through the orderly listing of the different kinds of tears she shed, the entries separated by semicolons. Of course she is actually incapable of making such an analysis of the mixture of different feelings behind the tears, she merely feels moved; and for Jaromil, Mama’s (as she is called in the novel) tears serve as convincing proof of the efficacy of his poems. She is incapable of commenting on his poems, but in her husky voice and her damp eyes he discovers “a sacred guarantee of his poems’ power; of their real, physical power” (51). These quotations from Musil and Kundera show why an exact analysis of a person’s experiences, thoughts, and emotions is needed: human beings live in “the oblivion of being” in the sense that we are not transparent to ourselves. A false self-image, a lack of clarity concerning the motives of our actions, clichéd attitudes, self-palliation, or even self-deception are not the exception but the rule.
The ironic tone in Musil’s novel is sometimes reinforced by a poetic device I call the “antilyrical simile,” a device Kundera has picked up from Musil to exploit in his own work but which he does not mention, speaking only of existential or phenomenological metaphors in Kafka, Broch, and Musil. For instance, Count Leinsdorf is characterized as a person who acts aptly when it comes to practicing his governmental duties. He manages to make objective decisions without succumbing to the influence of his religious feelings. Yet every now and then, during official meetings of the Upper House, he cannot help voicing his hope that “life would return to the simplicity, naturalness, supernaturalness, soundness and inevitability of Christian principles,” and during these moments “it was as though a contact-pin had been pulled out, and he flowed in a different circuit” (113). A servant girl’s excitement in the presence of an attractive young guest is expressed by saying that “her heart was thudding like sugar being pounded in a mortar” (212). When the spiritually refined Arnheim falls in love with the equally spiritually refined “Lady Diotima,” it is said that the “magic spell” often leads to “propping up one’s devotions with a solid scaffolding of thoughts and convictions” (218). The concepts of “religion,” “heart,” or “love,” which people tend to incorporate into the realm of idealities, are dragged away from this sphere by the use of terms from technical or everyday discourse: “contact-pin,” “electric circuit,” “mortar,” “scaffolding.” While lyrical similes or metaphors elevate the ordinary to a higher sphere—when for instance the beloved is compared to the goddess of beauty—Musil’s antilyrical similes and metaphors have the opposite effect: they bring overheated feelings and effusive attitudes down to the level of everyday life by approaching them from a cool, technical perspective.
In The Art of the Novel, Kundera speaks of the “rational and demystifying lucidity” of the Pleiades of the great Central European novelists (124). In an interview, he has commented that his early experience in Czechoslovakia brought about for him a demystification of the great symbols that determined the twentieth century (Finkielkraut 37); later, demystification becomes a central aspiration in his oeuvre (see Donahue 67; Scarpetta xii). His shift from lyrical poetry to the novel actually signifies for him questioning everything that he considers lyrical, in other words everything sentimental, ideological, elevated, or collectively respected as a symbol. One of the means for this demystification is the antilyrical simile and metaphor borrowed from Musil. Where the existential or phenomenological metaphor is used to convey the contents of existential situations, the antilyrical metaphor creates an ironic distance from the object. In Immortality, for example, the narrator says of the young man called Rubens, who was preoccupied with his search for a great love, that he was “ready to put the hot pot of his feelings on the fire and wait for the boiling point at which feeling would turn into passion” (315). When in Life Is Elsewhere the young poet Jaromil is tormented by jealousy, his girlfriend’s tears are capable of dissipating his anger, for “tears are excellent stain removers” (172). The narrator comments on Jaromil’s self-suggestion of great feelings as follows: “We can laugh at the poet’s immaturity, but we must also marvel at it: in his words there is a droplet that has come from the heart and gives his verse the radiance of beauty. But this droplet has no need for a real experience to draw it out of the poet’s heart, and it seems to me rather that the poet himself sometimes squeezes his heart like a cook squeezing a lemon over the salad” (180).
In The Man Without Qualities Musil shows that the modern world has become overwhelmingly complex for the individual: we are no longer even able to construct a coherent self from the complex material offered to us by the world. Whether the Goethean dream of the individual who can synthesize all his/her dispositions and experiences into a harmonious personality has ever been realizable or not, it certainly is no longer applicable as an ideal today. This is manifested in Arnheim, the man who enjoys the reputation of uniting in his person “capital and culture,” that is, possessions and spirit. Musil makes him appear in an ironic light by ridiculing his intellectual achievements. For example, when Arnheim praises the Collateral Campaign for being in concordance with the spirit of the times and “profoundly necessary,” since for him, “the mere fact that a meeting like today’s was possible anywhere proved its profound necessity” (203), this is a parody of the Hegelian idea that what is real is also rational and necessary.
One impediment in the construction of a coherent self is that one cannot distinguish between that which is one’s “own” and that which is imposed upon one by the environment (in Gombrowicz’s opinion, in fact, these cannot be distinguished at all [see Ferdydurke]). In Musil’s novel the marriage of the Jew Leo Fischel and his non-Jewish wife deteriorates as the general atmosphere turns more and more anti-Semitic. The narrator comments, “The destiny of these two spouses to a great extent depended on a dreary, tough, under-ordered stratification of thoughts that were not even their own but were part of public opinion and had changed with it, without their being able to protect themselves against the process. Compared with this dependence, their personal dependence on each other was only a tiny fraction, a madly over-estimated residue” (244). Public opinion—Heidegger’s “das Man” (“the they,” see Being and Time)—intrudes into the realm of the private and overwhelms it, while individuals do not apprehend what is happening to them. In this case, too, Musil articulates with great accuracy something that as an experience is dim and scarcely graspable for those who undergo it.
In Musil’s novel, the characters who live in the “oblivion of being” and whose acts are grounded in a beautified, stupid, or poorly reflected construction of the self are contrasted with the central character, Ulrich, the “man without qualities,” a contrast that has no parallel in Gombrowicz, for whom everyone is “immature.” In the fictional world of the novel Ulrich personifies Musil’s point of view, insofar as he is aware of the problems in the existence of modern humanity. If the self is not born “naturally,” so to say, by itself, how does it actually come into existence? How do we choose our qualities? What remains of the self after the layers of imposed attitudes and clichés are peeled off? His inclination for reflection prevents Ulrich from identifying himself not only with the fashionable views and attitudes of the day, but also with any particular actions and qualities whatsoever. This is why his friend Walter calls him the “man without qualities”: in his eyes Ulrich never seems to be completely present in anything he does. He never totally identifies with his own feelings or actions, but his self-reflection always offers him a position from which he can perceive other viewpoints, alternative modes of being or acting. Thus he is always at a distance, observing his own actions and experiences, and can always imagine himself acting differently.
The difference between Ulrich and the rest of the characters is one between two opposing types of personalities, the reflective and the nonreflective, the latter of whom are not transparent to themselves. Musil speaks of individuals with “a sense of reality,” and of others with “a sense of possibilities” (11–14). The former take the world and themselves self-evidently to be as they know them from experience, and identify with their own actions as well as with the personal qualities manifested in these actions, whereas the latter always reflect upon the numerous alternatives beyond the directly perceptible and accessible. Musil’s categorization resembles Heidegger’s division of human beings into those who are occupied by “das Man” and constantly act in an inauthentic manner without being conscious of it and those who strive for authenticity, who question their own actions and weigh different alternatives to these actions. Human existence is equally problematic for both types, but only the latter are aware of it. This is why the latter type is spared from Musil’s irony, although in Ulrich’s case its place is taken by the character’s self-irony.
A contrast comparable to that of Musil’s “man of the real” and “man of the possible” appears in Kundera’s novels as well. The two types can be called the “inauthentic,” or “sentimental,” and the “authentic,” the individual who strives for authenticity. The division, however, does not entirely correspond to Musil’s. Kundera’s lyrical or sentimental individual and Musil’s “man of the real” are both actually “men of the unreal,” who identify with an embellished and falsely coherent image of themselves. However, the opposite for Kundera is not the “man of the possible,” to whom no qualities “adhere”; rather, it is the individual who endeavors to distinguish between the inauthentic and the authentic and to choose the latter, even if this means giving up any idealization of himself or herself. Whether or not it is possible for a human being to possess an authentic core is a recurring issue in Kundera’s fiction.
Similarities in Musil’s and Kundera’s works can also be seen at the level of particular themes and motives. The motorcycle, for example, is for both writers a symbol of the ugliness of the modern way of life, of thoughtless rush and of a desire to be noticed: “A motor-cyclist came shooting along the empty street, thundering up the perspective, bow-armed and bow-legged, on his face all the solemn, monstrous self-importance of a yelling baby” (The Man 64). This could be a quotation from any of Kundera’s novels (see The Joke 286; Immortality 23; Slowness 3–4). Moreover, as a narrator Kundera follows the line of Musil in that in his novels he reflects in his own voice on the issues which surface through the experiences of the fictional characters. In The Man Without Qualities—as in Kundera’s novels—these reflections may take up entire chapters, such as the chapter entitled “The ideal of the three treatises, or the Utopian idea of exact living.” However, in Musil’s novel these reflective digressions are always connected with a particular character. The reflection does not form a distinct line parallel to the fiction, as is the case in the third part of Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers. This is why Kundera praises Broch as the inventor of the “polyphonic” novel (The Art 73).
Art as knowledge and beauty in Broch’s work
In Broch’s novel Kundera discovered ways of exploring human existence similar to those in Musil’s work (on Broch see, e.g., Cohn; Harrington; Lützeler, Hermann Broch; Pérez Gay; Sera). Indeed, along with the great impact of Broch’s novelistic technique on his own, which he emphasizes in two of the essays in The Art of the Novel, Kundera was also influenced by Broch’s views as to the cognitive function of the novel.
For Broch, art in general is essentially knowledge: “Scientific and artistic knowledge are two branches of one and the same trunk and this trunk is knowledge itself,” he states categorically (“Denkerische” 48). Broch differentiates between the kinds of knowledge typical of the natural sciences and of the arts, as Kundera does in his Cervantes essay (see The Art). For Broch, the function of art in modernity is to overcome the fragmentation of our experience of the world brought about by the breakup of scientific knowledge into separate specialisms. What is essential in art is its striving for a totality and its stress on the value aspect of human existence. Science, which is positivistically limited to what is directly accessible (“Denkerische” 46), cannot possibly provide “an ethical-metaphysical world organon such as Christian-Platonic scholasticism” (43). Where science consists of an innumerable amount of tiny bits of knowledge, aiming at grasping a totality but never attaining it, the arts represent the “impatience of knowledge,” since “every work of art is a prefiguring symbol of the prefigured totality” (48–49). Broch traces the roots of this conception of art back to Goethe, who, in emphasizing the autonomy of art, was not denying its cognitive function; to the contrary, he was assigning art the task of grasping totality in an intuitive, anticipatory, and symbolic way beyond the limitations of science (45–46). Broch thought of himself as a follower of Goethe’s “polyhistorical novel” (see Gambarota 65). Like Goethe, he sees Romanticism in an explicitly negative light, although the Romantics similarly prescribed art, and especially the novel, the task of imaginatively reaching the totality of existence. Broch accuses Romanticism of beautifying reality spuriously and sentimentally, of elevating the common to the sphere of the absolute. Romanticism, as he sees it, turns art into kitsch or pseudo-art, which uses the means of art but aims merely to please and avoids the demanding path of the search for truth (Broch, “Kitsch” 162–63). This view corresponds to how Kundera thinks of Romanticism.
Broch’s interest in the cognitive function of the novel is shared by Kundera; however, there are several essential points on which their conceptions of the novel differ greatly, although Kundera himself does not pay any particular attention to these differences. As pointed out by Paola Gambarota, Kundera’s view of the novel as a genre is characterized by playfulness and skepticism, as well as by an awareness of the relativity of all truths, which is far from Broch’s thinking. In The Sleepwalkers, truths are relative only insofar as they belong to the different value systems represented by the characters in the novel, yet it is precisely this kind of relativization of values that troubles Broch. In Kundera’s fiction, it is only in The Joke that the relativity of truth is bound to the different ideologies represented by the four types of communists (Gambarota 54). In Kundera’s later works the relativity of truths is roughly equal to hypotheticality or skepticism: to the doubtfulness of all truths and the inexorable uncertainty of any meaning attached to human existence. For Broch, the idea of truth as necessarily hypothetical is completely alien, and skepticism, as also noted by Gambarota, is for him a negative concept (55). Moreover, for Kundera, the novel as a whole does not symbolically anticipate the attainment of the totality of existence; rather, it is a thematic composition which uncovers particular aspects of human existence. But he again agrees with Broch—without relying explicitly on Goethe—that knowledge and beauty are in art intertwined inseparably: “Whatever aspects of existence the novel discovers, it discovers as the beautiful” (The Art 122).
Actually, more resolutely than Goethe—who was a practitioner rather than a theoretician of literature—it was the early German Romantics, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, who were among the first to claim that art reveals truth not discovered anywhere else; thus they oppose the classical view of literature as an illustration of truth that in abstract form is known in philosophy. For Schlegel and Novalis, literature is something that essentially transcends everyday experience. Novalis’s “magical idealism” was aimed at revealing the presence of the Absolute, that is, the totality of existence in the particular (on this, see, e.g., Frank, “Die Philosophie”; Heinrich; Uerlings), while Schlegel’s “transcendental novel” Lucinde concerns the subjective conditions of knowledge in creating a meaningful order of the world (see Engel 381–443). It is true that neither Broch’s nor Kundera’s work suggests that the novel can reveal the absolute or even transcendental truth about the creation of knowledge; rather, the “truths” of the novel concern important phenomena in the modern world. With respect to the cognitive function of the novel, however, there exists a continuity from the early Romantics’ concept of the novel to Broch and Kundera, which both of them overlook in their criticism of Romanticism.
Despite fundamental differences between Schlegel and Kundera, there are conspicuous similarities in their conceptions of truth and aesthetic value in the novel. Kundera argues that the unveiling of truths in a novel “causes surprise and the surprise aesthetic pleasure or, in other words, a sensation of beauty” (Elgrably 6). In another context, Kundera writes that a “work of art is a crossroads; the number of paths that meet in it seems to be closely related to the work’s aesthetic value” (“Umbrella” 44). He quotes with approval Lautréamont’s formula, “as beautiful as when a sewing machine meets an umbrella” (44) and suggests a variation of it to characterize the art of the Martinican author René Depestre (45). Beauty and knowledge, then, are created in art by the unexpected encounter of things which are usually not thought of together. This closely resembles Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of “Witz” (wit), that is, the ability to gain unexpected insight into things by combining what is usually thought of as separate (see Engel 391, 400, 440; Frank, Das Problem 29, 32–35). This conception of how (new) truths appear in a novel and are perceived as beauty “explains” in a sense Kundera’s liking of paradoxes. Obviously, Broch does not show any such sense of paradox in his conception of art.
The main thesis in The Sleepwalkers is the disappearance of a comprehensive, tenable system of values in the contemporary world. The trilogy describes the final phase of the process of modernization, in which the traditional Christian-Platonic system of values—which used to serve as the general basis for all human judgment and action—loses its validity without being superseded by a new one. Broch distinguishes three different phases of this process of disintegration, corresponding to the three parts of the trilogy. The first, Pasenow, or Romanticism (1931), takes place in the year 1888. Its protagonist, Lieutenant Pasenow, perceives the disintegration of the values of the traditional world, but reacts to this by holding on to the old world order, above all to Christianity—and to the army uniform, without which he feels naked. Esch, or Anarchy (1931) takes place fifteen years later, in 1903. The central character, Esch, an accountant, feels that he is living in a state of anarchy, since he cannot find any values that would constitute a sound basis for his actions. The third part, Huguenau, or Realism (1932), is again set fifteen years later. Through its central character Huguenau, a businessman, it describes the ultimate disintegration of values. In his professional life, Huguenau acts according to the principles of business life, which are in a sense rational, but their rationality is limited to the business sphere only and does not cover any other aspects of life. Accordingly, in other spheres Huguenau completely lacks any valid guiding principles, which is why he can succumb to the impulse of the moment and even kill a person—who happens to be Esch—without being subsequently concerned by his act. Thus, the last phase of the disintegration occurs when the absence of values is no longer even perceived.
Broch’s representation of the differentiation of various types of rationality in modern society—the rationalities of religion, private life, and business life—resembles the analysis of Max Weber and the sociologists who followed him. It is not difficult to recognize a similarity between Broch’s critique of technical rationality, as represented in Huguenau, and Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s critique of scientific rationality (Horkheimer and Adorno; Weber). Comparing the disintegration of values as represented by Broch with the problems of modern man’s being in the world in Musil and Kundera, we see that the difference is not so much in their interpretations of the modern condition as in the perspectives from which they approach the issue. While the ongoing decay of the traditional, universally shared system of values fills Broch with anxiety and with the wish that the process could yet be reversed (“Evil in the Value-System of Art” 38–39; Gambarota 54; Steinecke), for Musil and Kundera, this state of affairs is nothing to regret, but is a given fact and the starting point of the analysis. Accordingly, while Broch focuses on the disintegration process itself, Musil and Kundera study the individual’s condition after the completion of the process of modernization. They inquire on what foundation the modern individual can base his or her existence. While Broch denies that values can be founded in the individual, Kundera, like Musil, analyzes precisely the existential situation in which the individual has to rely on himself alone. In Kundera’s view, this autonomy is actually the source of modern man’s dignity.
Like Musil, Broch analyzes what goes on within the characters but which they themselves do not comprehend clearly. The purpose of the description is not to make the reader identify with the characters but to make visible what is occurring within their minds and to expose it for reflection. For Broch, values are not primarily scrutinized by the characters themselves—which is often the case in Kundera’s fiction—but rather are treated as an aspect inherent in all human action, thought, and emotion. Let us take as an example the description of the sexual act, which Broch, like Kundera later, found an interesting object of study. He considers the mystification of sexuality to be a characteristic feature of Western culture, which he accounts for as arising out of the hostility of the bourgeois-puritan spirit toward sexuality. According to Broch, puritan bourgeoisie could not tolerate sexuality without embellishing it, disguising erotic desire as a super-terrestrial passion: “Every ordinary and incidental copulation is elevated to the celestial sphere, built up into an absolute or rather a pseudo-absolute, transformed into an unchangeably eternal Tristan-and-Isolde scene” (“Kitsch” 164; Broch’s and Kundera’s perspectives on sexuality in literature are with reference to German-language literature). For Broch, this is an example of an approach of kitsch. In contrast, his depiction of sexuality in The Sleepwalkers is matter-of-fact, unembellished, and analytically accurate. The casual sexual encounter between Huguenau and Mrs. Esch takes place in the restless atmosphere of World War I when Mrs. Esch’s husband has left for the city and she is worried about him.
Why . . . did the woman have such a lamenting voice? why did she have the wrong reaction? He wanted her to comfort him, and instead of that he must keep her here and comfort her, and all on account of Esch too! She was still beseeching him: “Where is he?” and she was still clutching him by the shoulder. Both embarrassed and furious he stroked her thick arm as if she were a weeping child, he could even haven gladly shown her some kindness, he ran his hand up and down her arm, but his mouth spoke unkind words: “What are you sniveling about Esch for? haven’t we all had enough of the schoolmaster? . . . after all, you’ve got me . . .” and only while he was saying this did he himself become aware that he was making a more brutal demand on her . . . as a sort of substitute for what she had failed to give him. Now she guessed what he was after: “Herr Huguenau, for God’s sake, Herr Huguenau. . . .” And already almost bereft of will power, she made scarcely any further resistance to his panting urgency. Like a criminal trying to save the hangman trouble she undid her underclothes, and without even a kiss he fell with her on the sofa. . . . Afterwards her first words were: “Save my man!” Huguenau felt indifferent about that. (609-10)
The sexual act is without any emotion or significance and it is just as incidental and inconsequential as any other trivial everyday event. Shortly afterward, Huguenau runs into Esch in the street and kills on the impulse of the moment, for no obvious reason.
The need to depict human experiences in an analytical manner arises in Broch, too, from the fact that human beings are not transparent to themselves. They are “sleepwalkers,” lacking an awareness of what is going on inside them and why they act as they do. In the fictional world of The Sleepwalkers, there is no character who comes close to the narrator’s ability to reflect upon matters, like Ulrich in The Man without Qualities. The character who approaches most closely this condition is Pasenow’s friend Bertrand, yet his perspective never appears independently, but only filtered through Pasenow’s point of view. Abstract reflections on various questions raised by the experiences of the characters are more self-standing in Broch’s writing than in Musil’s; in the last part of the trilogy, the issue of the disintegration of values is elaborated upon in a series of no less than ten essays.
Kundera claims that in the “post-Proustian” novel, History is regarded as a destructive external force that imposes itself upon human beings and the novel represents the individual’s escape from the grip of History, allowing us to establish an independent existence outside its realm. However, this does not hold true for Broch (see Gambarota 58; Saariluoma [Steinby], “Kundera, Broch”). The development of human existence depicted by Broch is a process that takes place within History. What he describes as the disintegration of values is for him the most significant historical process of the contemporary era. The course of History does not lead to a morally superior world, but to the disintegration of value systems. This process of historical disintegration, however, takes place within individuals and is manifested through their concrete and everyday actions. In Kundera’s “Grand Narrative,” it is not morality that is at stake as it is in Broch, but primarily the individual’s autonomy, discovered in one phase of European history but then forfeited. A novelist of the age of “terminal paradoxes” such as Kundera looks back on the era of European adventure with a deep longing, but what remains for him or her is only to explore human possibilities in a world turned into a trap.
The ten essays devoted to the disintegration of values in the third part of The Sleepwalkers form a continuous line, running in parallel with the different subordinate storylines and the main thread of Huguenau and the Esches. The term used by Kundera to refer to such a structure, borrowed from Broch (see “Das Weltbild” 117), is “polyphonic,” and he regards himself as Broch’s successor in developing the polyphonic architecture of the novel.