Besides claiming that the novel is knowledge and a great art form, the title couldn’t be more obvious. The art of the novel, Kundera emphasizes the value of the unbelievable, as a literary source that 19th-century realism left aside, and which Kafka took up again. What this essay calls the novel’s four appeals—that of play, that of sleep, that of thought, and that of time—are the main points of his aesthetic criteria for determining the range of values ​​of relevant novels. By breaking the idea of ​​the plausible realist, which involved the functional concealment of the author in what is narrated, the novelist can approach one of those four calls, disturbing to critics and to readers of naïve realism, who take for granted what He denied that Kundera sentence about the folly of trying to make the reader believe that his characters are really alive. In its own way, it is a direct criticism of the usual place of unbearable “based on real events” that seems to justify any mediocrity. Fiction is what its name suggests: an invention completely different from its real inspiration, due to novelistic composition and language. Not to understand this is to expose oneself to the risk of misinterpretation, impoverishing distortions that are deep down the result of a lack of humor, a lack of ability to understand the comic dimension of the novel, even the most serious, as it winds to a conclusion. in The art of the novel.

Rehearsing the novel: Milan Kundera (1)

His next essay appears here, Betrayed wills. Of his four books of essays, this is the largest, most ambitious, and most complex, with a totally integrated sense, which, although it can be read in any of its nine parts, its linear reading turns out to have a musical composition as motifs come and go, come and echo in different parts . This narrative arrangement also makes it an exemplary piece of essayistic narrative. However, it does not pretend to be a treatise, although Kundera’s strength and conviction occasionally gives it the attributes of indispensable poetics for that genre. This is shocking to timid readers and critics. Make no mistake: Kundera’s belief is not self-imposed, it is the result of a vital experience that he brings to the fore.

The reasons are clear: Kafka is in the second, fourth, eighth and ninth parts. This is the central motif of this book, which I consider the highest reflection of the novel at the end of the 20th century. The title alludes to Kafka’s “testament” of two letters in which he asks Max Brod to destroy his novels and other minor works. A will that has not been executed. Other reasons are the approach of novelists (Rabelais, Rushdie, Diderot, Gombrowicz, Thomas Mann, Musil, Tolstoy, Broch, Hemingway), some of which are discussed in The art of the novel, and adds two musical figures: Russian composer Stravinsky and Czech Leos Janácek. Here the fundamental idea of ​​”betrayal” that writers and musicians suffer from translators, interpreters and critics is deepened. From the French translators of Kafka, which Kundera corrects by explaining the paragraph from Kafka’s novel entitled before America and now known as It’s missing, up to the interference in Janácek’s opera work by Kovaric, the director of the Prague Opera, or Ansermet in Stravinsky’s musical pieces, not to mention Theodor W. Adorno’s criticisms always aimed at the subjugation of the artistic to the ideological. These mediations, like those of critics who look for references or explanations based on the author’s life in the work, deny or make invisible what the work itself offers. These mediators or readers become judges of the work of art. They are not censors of totalitarianism, but in the end they are just as harmful because of their goodwill, militancy or political correctness. The core of this conflict is understood in the deep sense of the betrayal of Max Brod, for whom Kafka had a religious, mystical meaning. Publishing the entire work, even in its remains, fragmentary or unfinished—the reason why Kafka wanted it destroyed—means that it is only the stages, the sketches, the remnants of a more important and transcendent quest. Kundera says no. The Czech author denies this supposed transcendence, summed up in the cliché that life is more important than art. Art is more important because it manifests individual freedom that should be respected with all that is. He insists that Kafka’s novels are not well read. Causes and explanations are always sought in the life of the author, while what the author was probably pointing to was a comic vision, a sense of humor that is not captured by putting transcendence first, which ends up fraternizing with that end that justifies the means of totalitarianism (and fundamentalism, I add ). The artistic aspect of the novel is its concrete language, its compositional sense, free humor for the outrageous. The rest – the idea of ​​good, the context of the country of origin, identity, lyrical intention, furious confession, good feelings, the idea of ​​justice, be it social or personal – are ghosts of interpretation that guide readers. on distant roads. Kafka is not only a Jew who is tormented by sex, failed courtships or procedural labyrinths. One of his favorite writers, Dickens, d empty house, is more Kafkaesque in the sense of bureaucratic absurdity. We have to talk about “Dickesian”. Kafka is what it counts Disappeared, Process, Castle, even if it was about truncated novels. Have we really read them?

It remains to address Kundera’s location in Central Europe and the Slavic empire with the powerful vision of the novel. (OR)