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Conversation with Milan Kundera on the Art of the Novel Author(S): Linda Asher and Milan Kundera Source: Salmagundi, No

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Conversation with Milan Kundera on the Art of the Novel Author(S): Linda Asher and Milan Kundera Source: Salmagundi, No Conversation with Milan Kundera on the Art of the Novel Author(s): Linda Asher and Milan Kundera Source: Salmagundi, No. 73, Milan Kundera: Fictive Lightness, Fictive Weight (Winter 1987), pp. 119-135 Published by: Skidmore College Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40547920 . Accessed: 29/06/2014 11:19 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Skidmore College is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Salmagundi. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 82.12.176.78 on Sun, 29 Jun 2014 11:19:50 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Conversationwith Milan Kunderaon theArt of theNovel (Translatedfrom the French original by Linda Asher) ChristianSalmon: I'd liketo devotethis conversation to theesthetic of yournovels. But whereshall we begin? Milan Kundera:With this assertion: My novelsare notpsychological. More precisely,they lie outsidethe estheticof the novel normally termedpsychological. C.S.: But aren'tall novelsnecessarily psychological? That is, con- cernedwith the enigma of thepsyche? M.K.: Let us be moreprecise: All novels,of everyage, are concerned withthe enigma of the self. As soon as youcreate an imaginarybeing, a character,you are automaticallyconfronted by thequestion: What is theself? How can theself be grasped?It is one of thosefundamental questionson whichthe novel,as novel,is based. By the variousre- sponsesto thatquestion, if youwanted, you could distinguish different tendencies,and perhapsdifferent periods, in thehistory of the novel. The psychologicalapproach wasn't even knownto the firstEuropean storytellers.Boccaccio simplytells us about actionsand adventures. Still,behind all thoseamusing tales, we can makeout a certainconvic- tion:it is throughaction that man stepsforth from the repetitiveuni- verseof the everyday where each personresembles every other person; it is throughaction that he distinguisheshimself from others and be- comes an individual.Dante said as much: "In any act, the primary intentionof himwho acts is to revealhis own image."At the outset, actionis thusseen as theself-portrait of himwho acts. Fourcenturies afterBoccaccio, Diderotis more skeptical:his Jacquesle Fataliste This content downloaded from 82.12.176.78 on Sun, 29 Jun 2014 11:19:50 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 120 MILAN KUNDERA seduces his friend'sgirl, he gets happilydrunk, his fatherwallops him, a regimentpasses by,out of spite he signs up, in his firstbattle he gets a bullet in the knee, and he limps till the day of his death. He thought he was startingan amorous adventure,and instead he was settingforth towardhis infirmity.He could never recognize himself in his action. Between the act and himself,a fissureopens. Man hopes to reveal his own image throughhis act, but that image bears no resemblance to him. The paradoxical natureof action is one of the novel's greatdiscov- eries. But if the self is not to be grasped throughaction, then where and how are we to grasp it? So, then,the time came when the novel, in its quest forthe self, was forcedto turnaway fromthe visible world of action and examine instead the invisible interiorlife. In the middle of the eighteenthcentury, Richardson discovers the formof the epistolary novel in which the charactersconfess theirthoughts and theirfeelings. C.5.: The birthof the psychological novel? M.K.: The termis, of course, inexact and approximate. Let's avoid it and use a paraphrase: Richardson set the novel on its way to the explo- rationof man's interiorlife. We know his great successors: the Goethe of Werther,Constant, then Stendhal and the other writersof his cen- tury.The apogee of that evolution is to be found, it seems to me, in Proust and in Joyce. Joyceanalyzes somethingstill more ungraspable than Proust's "lost time": the presentmoment. There would seem to be nothingmore obvious, more tangibleand palpable, than the present moment.And yetit escapes us completely.All the sadness of life lies in thatfact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight,hearing, smell register(knowingly or not) a horde of events, and throughour heads therepasses a parade of sensationsand ideas. Each instantrepre- sents a little universe, irrevocablyforgotten in the next instant.Now, Joyce'sgreat microscope manages to stop, to seize thatfleeting instant and make us see it. But the quest for the self ends, yet again, in a paradox: the more powerfulthe lens of the microscope observing the self, the more the self and its uniqueness escape us; beneath the great Joyceanlens thatbreaks the soul down into atoms, we are all alike. But if the self and its uniqueness cannot be grasped in man's interiorlife, then where and how can we grasp it? This content downloaded from 82.12.176.78 on Sun, 29 Jun 2014 11:19:50 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TheArt of theNovel 121 Photographof Milan Kundera byAaron Manheimer This content downloaded from 82.12.176.78 on Sun, 29 Jun 2014 11:19:50 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 122 MILAN KUNDERA C.S.: Can it be grasped? M.K.: Certainly not. The quest for the self has always ended, and always will end, in a paradoxical dissatisfaction.I don't say defeat. For the novel cannot breach the limitsof its own possibilities,and bringing those limitsto light is already an immense discovery,an immense tri- umph of cognition. Nonetheless, afterhaving reached the depths in- volved in the detailed explorationof the selfs interiorlife, the great novelistsbegan- consciously or unconsciously- to seek a new orienta- tion. We oftenhear of the holy trinityof the modern novel: Proust, Joyce,Kafka. Yet in my own personal historyof the novel, it is Kafka who provided this new orientation:a post-Proustianorientation. His way of conceiving the self is totallyunexpected. What is it thatdefines K. as a unique being? By neitherhis physical appearance (we know nothingabout that),nor his biography(we don't know it), nor his name (he has none), nor his memories, his predilections,his complexes. By his behavior?His field of action is lamentablylimited. By his thoughts? Yes, Kafka unceasinglytraces K.'s reflections,but these are bent exclu- sively on the currentsituation: What should be done thenand there,in the immediate circumstances? Go to the interrogationor dodge it? Obey the summons of the priest or not? All of K.'s interiorlife is absorbed by the situationhe findshimself trapped in, and nothingthat mightrefer beyond that situation(K.'s memories, his metaphysicalre- flections,his notionsabout otherpeople) is revealed to us. For Proust, a man's interioruniverse comprises a miracle, an infinitythat never ceases to amaze us. But that is not Kafka's amazement. He does not ask himself what the internal motivationsare that determine man's behavior. He asks a question thatis radically different:What possibili- ties remain for man in a world where the externaldeterminants have become so overpoweringthat internal impulses no longer carryweight? Indeed, how could it have changed K.'s destinyand attitudeif he had had, say, homosexual inclinationsor an unhappy love affair behind him? In no way. C.S. : That's what you say in The Unbearable Lightnessof Being: "The novel is not the author'sconfession; it is an investigationof human life in the trap the world has become." But what does thatmean, trap? This content downloaded from 82.12.176.78 on Sun, 29 Jun 2014 11:19:50 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TheArt of theNovel 123 M.K. : Thatlife is a trap-well, that we've alwaysknown. We are born withouthaving asked to be, locked in a body we neverchose, and destinedto die. On theother hand, the wideness of theworld used to providea constantpossibility of escape. A soldiercould desertfrom thearmy and startanother life in a neighboringcountry. Suddenly, in our century,the world is closingaround us. The decisiveevent in that transformationof the world into a trapwas surelythe 1914 war,called (and forthe firsttime in history)a worldwar. Wrongly"world." It involvedonly Europe, and notall of Europeat that.But theadjective "world" expressesall the moreeloquently the sense of horrorbefore thefact that, henceforward, nothing that occurs on theplanet will be a merelylocal matter,that all catastrophesconcern the entire world, and thatconsequently we are moreand moredetermined by external condi- tions,by situationsno one can escape, and which,more and more, makeus resembleone another. Butunderstand me: If I locatemy own work outside the so-called psychologicalnovel, that does not mean thatI wish to deprivemy charactersof an interiorlife. It meansonly that there are otherenig- mas,other questions that my novels pursue primarily. Nor does it mean thatI opposethose novels fascinated by psychology. The changein the situationsince Proust, in fact,makes me nostalgic.Along with Proust, an enormousbeauty is movingslowly out of our reach- foreverand irretrievably.Gombrowicz had an idea, as comicalas it is ingenious: The weightof our self,he said, has to do withthe size of thepopula- tionon theplanet. Thus Democritusrepresented a fourhundred mil- lionthof humanity;Brahms a billionth;Gombrowicz himself, a two billionth.According to thatcalculation, the weightof the Proustian infinitude-the weightof a self, of a selfs interiorlife- becomes lighterand lighter. And in thatrace toward lightness, we havecrossed a fatefulboundary. C.S.: "The unbearablelightness" of the self is yourobsession, beginningwith your earliest writings.I'm thinkingof Laughable Loves- forexample, the story "Edward and God." Afterhis firstnight oflove with the young Alice, Edwardis seizedby a bizarrediscomfort, one thatis decisivefor him: he looks at his girland thinks"that her convictionswere in factonly something extraneous to herfate, and her fateonly something extraneous to herbody.
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