2023-07-13 09:45:10
by ALESSANDRO PIPERNO
In the narrative art of the deceased writer Milan Kundera a conception inspired by the old wisdom of Cervantes
Milan Kundera – who died on 11 July 2023 at the age of 94 – embodied a splendidly twentieth-century paradox: while on the one hand he experienced the art of the novel as a kind of bias, on the other he made an essential contribution to its inexhaustible dissolution . I spoke of paradox, not of aporia. For Kundera, in fact, the novel is, and will never cease to be, an exterminated space of freedom, an incomparable tool of knowledge, a formidable invitation to heresy. For the richness of its forms, for the dizzyingly concentrated intensity of its evolution, for its social role, the European novel (like European music) has no equal in any other civilization.
It explains the promiscuous nature, the libertine vocation, the hedonistic inclination of the true novelist, who as such is accountable to no one except Cervantes. Who is the novelist? One who does not attach great importance to his own ideas. The novelists that Kundera reads, comments, recommends are all of the same stuff: whether they are called Cervantes or Diderot, whether they are called Flaubert or Kafka, whether they are called Broch or Gombrowicz, the novelist dear to Kundera is always and only the one who pursues a form.
Any other use of fictional art considered by Kundera an abuse: an abuse that runs the strong risk of degenerating into ideology, and in despicable cases, into propaganda. And if there’s one thing Kundera just can’t stand, it’s novelists who look down on the reader: the puritans, the mandarins, the preachers of the apocalypse. The novel too intelligent not to be an irredeemable daredevil. Suspending moral judgment does not constitute the immorality of the novel but its morality. A morality that is opposed to the inveterate human practice which consists in immediately and continuously judging everything and everyone, in judging before and without having understood. From the point of view of the wisdom of the novel, this fervent willingness to judge the most execrable nonsense is the worst of all evils.
That this is not enough to explain Kundera’s deafness – tinged as it is with distrust and aversion – towards Dostoevsky’s work. What irritates him is the climate of his books, a universe in which everything becomes feeling – in other words: where feeling is raised to the rank of value and truth. To that type of hyper-emotional novelist Kundera opposes the completely antithetical model of the ironic acrobat, of the skeptical, seraphic and sorrowful actor. No novel worth its salt takes the world seriously. Only the novel has been able to discover the immense and mysterious power of futility.
It doesn’t matter that the first sentence is inspired by Sterne’s infinitely loved Tristram Shandy and the second is a gloss on a famous passage by Bovary. What matters is how both fit perfectly with the novels of Kundera himself, especially the first ones, still written in the language of his ancestors.
I confess that recently, at the suggestion of a friend, I re-read The Joke, Kundera’s debut novel. What a book! What a voice! What incredible formal mastery! It is one of the undisputed masterpieces of post-war Central European literature.
Kundera belongs to that small group of writers who, as my grandmother would have said, were born learned. His style will change, as well as the themes and settings, due to the exile and the extremely radical choice to write in French. What has never failed is her way of thickening the sentences, the music of the style, the reckless taste for rhapsody. The spirit of the novel is the spirit of complexity. Every novel tells the reader, “Things are more complicated than you think.” This is the eternal truth of the novel, less and less audible, however, in the hubbub of quick and simple answers that precede the question and exclude it. For the spirit of our time, either Anna is right or Karenin is right, and the old wisdom of Cervantes, who speaks to us of the difficulty of knowing and the elusive truth, seems cumbersome and useless.
This last quotation is taken from a book written way back in 1986. It is impressive to see how prophetic it is, how much it is worth more to us than to the readers of the time. Those who speak of the death of the novel may be alluding to this. Not to the expressive incapacity of the new novelists, but to the uselessness of their field of investigation. Writing about how complex life is, how ineffable and deceptive truth is is not an exercise that can enjoy great popularity today.
Not surprisingly, at some point in his life, at the height of his maturity, Kundera chose a demure retrait. Those who tend to dismiss it as an act of pride do not take into account how such a severe decision is perfectly consubstantial with the idea of self that Kundera has never stopped pursuing. Literature belongs to novels, certainly not to novelists. The novels are there, close at hand, full of good things and bad things, sublime images and obscenities. Novels age and rejuvenate depending on who reads them. The beauty that death does not concern them. That belongs only to novelists.
July 13, 2023 (change July 13, 2023 | 09:28)
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