The Art of the Novel: Part One - The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes

"Now, if the novel's raison d'etre is to keep 'the world of life' under a permanent light and to protect us from 'the forgetting of being,' is it not more than ever necessary today that the novel should exist?"

In 1935, Edmund Husserl gave a series of lectures in the Central European cities of Vienna and Prague. In these lectures he revealed his (rather fatalistic) belief that a crisis in the form of man's "passion to know" was ravaging Europe. The roots of this crisis, according to the philosopher, are buried in the beginnings of the Modern Era with Galileo and Descartes. He blamed the "one-sided nature of the European sciences, which reduced the world to a mere object of technical and mathematical investigation." The emergence of scientific thought, he speculated, "propelled man into the tunnels of the specialized disciplines". As a result, the "world of life", or die Lebenswelt, became irrelevant - it was too broad, too vague, toe able to evade technical analysis, so it became useless to modern man. Advancements in knowledge made man less able to clearly see the world as a whole or his self as a free-standing entity. Husserl's student Heidegger called this abandonment of the big picture the "forgetting of being." Man was officially possessed by the forces of technology, politics, and history, which he himself had excavated and exposed. A true Frankenstein horror.

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In part one of his book The Art of the Novel, Kundera, while not exactly disagreeing with Husserl, does call him out on his fatalism. He says Galileo and Descartes should not be the only ones awarded the title of 'founder of the Modern Era'; Cervantes also deserves some kudos. Cervantes, a contemporary of the aforementioned scientists, introduced the art of the novel, the art that is the investigation and exploration of this forgotten "world of life," a perfect foil and counteraction to Descartes and Galileo. In a world where science examines various particularities of existence, the novel sought to discover "various dimensions of existence." Where science looked through a telescope at the surface of a far-off planet, the novelist tore away the lens and was dumbfounded by the largeness of the sky, arrested by the one thing the stars can actually provide to us here on earth: their beauty and their mystery. So Cervantes began the novel's journey to discover these various dimensions by examining the nature of adventure. After him, Richardson examined the interior, the realm of feelings; Balzac, man's roots in history; Flaubert, the intrigue of the quotidian; Tolstoy, the role of irrationality in decision making. Kundera responds to Husserl's fatalist attitude toward the sciences by suggesting that the "passion to know" which Husserl thought quelled artistic creativity actually prompted the novelist to protect man's concrete life against the "forgetting of being," to examine die Lebenswelt in a way never before attempted. From Cervantes onward, the history of the novel is the sequence of discoveries of what the novel can examine.

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The novel was conceived at a time when Europe was in a transition from God-guided to God-less. As man's faith in God began to erode and man's trust in one divine Truth began to decompose into belief in many relative truths, so the Modern Era was born and the novel - "the image and model of that world" - was born as an attempt to make sense of this new, God-less world. Cervantes was the very first to boldly face this world as one of ambiguity and uncertainty, one where one Truth did not exist but rather several truths existed, waiting to be weighed and contrasted. This uncertainty became his guiding force and inspiration, and this is why one who searches for a moral stance in his masterpiece of a novel will come away empty handed: at his novel's core there is no moral stance, only inquiry. On this subject, Kundera states,

"Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands. Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire. They can cope with the novel only by translating its language of relativity and ambiguity into their own apodictic and dogmatic discourse...This 'either-or' encapsulates an inability to tolerate the essential relativity of things human, an inability to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge. This inability makes the novel's wisdom (the wisdom of uncertainty) hard to accept and understand."

Cervantes and Diderot wrote of an unlimited world. Half a century later, Balzac wrote with an awareness of social institutions - police, law, the State - but social institutions that were not yet constricting. He wrote with an idea of what History was - to him, it was a train, forward moving, exciting, driving man closer to opportunity for adventure with every rounding of a bend. For Flaubert, adventure and intrigue could only be found within an individual; the world, the train of History, no longer offered limitless adventure as it once did because these social institutions began to confine the individual instead of free him. Eventually, by the time Kafka was writing, the institutions did not even allow adventure and intrigue to exist within the individual's mind as they had within Emma Bovary's. No, History, omnipotent society, had taken control of man and not even his interior held intrigue anymore. In Kafka's novels, all man can think about is the day-to-day. And this brings us roughly to the contemporary novel.

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Cervantes' unlimited world of adventure, the first theme of the novel, has become something Kundera calls a terminal paradox, the term he uses to define the contemporary era of literature. As Flaubert's was the era of the interior and Tolstoy's was the era of the irrational, we are now in the era of the terminal paradox. That which was once comprehensible is now a laughing matter. The example Kundera gives is in regard to Hasek's novel The Good Soldier Svejk. The book is both a comic novel and a war novel. This comic quality of a subject matter that was once approached with complete seriousness reflects the apparent lack of sense characteristic of all paradoxes. This lack of sense always existed - war was always motivated by a senseless will to exert force, a "will to will," but only recently, within the last century of literature, has the motive been stripped of its rational argument to stand alone, naked; war is shown plainly in all its senselessness in the contemporary era of terminal paradox.

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With the onset of the first European-wide war, something fundamental about existing in the world changed. For the first time, besides his own soul, man had History to grapple with, a complete, exterior force to reconcile. These post-war novels show how under conditions of the terminal paradox, all "existential categories" (and by this Kundera means war, solitude, punishment, unity, etc.) change their meanings. And we can see this in the novels produced in post-War Europe: What is war if it is the setting of a comic novel? Or if those fighting in the war have not the slightest clue what they're fighting for? What is solitude if at every moment, even at his most vulnerable, man is under surveillance? What is public and private, then? These "existential categories" are brought under examination to show how quickly they turn to contradictions in the era of paradox.

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In this discussion of the history of the novel and its progress throughout the centuries, it is natural for Kundera to bring up the possibility of the death of the novel. How can the novel die? Kundera says he has seen the death of the novel, and it does not come from the petering out of artistic spirit, but rather from its suffocation under totalitarian rule. The spirit of the novel is incompatible with the totalitarian universe - where Totalitarian Truth exists, ambiguity and uncertainty cannot. Russian communist novels exist, but they discover nothing new of existence and therefore exist beyond the history of the novel. They do not participate in the "sequence of discoveries" of die Lebenswelt which constitutes the history of the novel. Kundera, who spent much of his life in Soviet Czechoslovakia, who witnessed the growth of the Soviet Union and lived through Prague Spring and witnessed Nazi Germany's occupation of eastern Europe, was for obvious reasons interested in the communist novel. Those of us growing up in the twenty-first century United States can look instead to the novels being produced today in our country and others and ask ourselves, is what Kundera writing about in his 1986 book relevant? In my opinion, some novels being produced today might fall under a similar category of those Russian communist novels: unambiguous, adding little to our understanding of the "world of life."

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The unification of the world is accompanied by a process of reduction. Man's life is reduced to his social function, the history of a people to a small set of events that have been interpreted down to a few pages in a history book. The media amplifies the reduction process to unify the world's history, producing and exporting a definitive narrative where several are necessary to understand the complexity of an issue. And this makes sense to me - in order to create a news bite that can be transmitted quickly and widely, one must take a hard stance and permit minimal nuance from muddling the black and white of the headline. Perhaps this is the only way for news to spread across the wide world; but once this kind of unambiguous thinking becomes the norm not only in the media but in the classroom and office and home, the spirit of the media has already become the spirit of our time. And this is something Kundera states outright: the spirit of our time is one of reduction, of certainty, one without nuance or gradation. The novel's spirit is one of complexity, always seeking to show that things are not so simple simple as they seem. This spirit is irreconcilable with the spirit of the media, the spirit of our time. And now it's Kundera's turn to be fatalistic. If the novel "is to go on discovering the undiscovered...it can do so only against the progress of the world." Kundera admits he is attached to the depreciated legacy of Cervantes. He is sad to see what he believes is the end of Cervantes' lineage and seems in a sense to vow his loyalty to it: "Now, if the novel's raison d'etre is to keep 'the world of life' under a permanent light and to protect us from 'the forgetting of being,' is it not more than ever necessary today that the novel should exist?"