The Novel's Only Morality

on the death of Kundera and the destiny of the novel

Pablo Picasso, Casagemas nu (1904), detail (cited as the cover image on the first edition American hardcover of Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed [1995])

As the major writers of the late 20th century leave us month by month, we should ask ourselves what irreplaceable elements of our literary culture are vanishing along with them. With Martin Amis went the Nabokovian-Bellovian commitment to literary style as both an end in itself and as an ethic of precise observation encapsulated in his famous phrase “the war against cliché”; with Cormac McCarthy was lost the willingness of publishers not only to keep on the books but positively to nurture an idiosyncratic if un-lucrative visionary in the event that his works would eventually find their public, as McCarthy’s did in the end.

What, then, has gone with Milan Kundera, who died this week at the age of 94? Writing in The New Republic, Jared Marcel Pollen proposes that an idea of Europe, along with the literary forms it embodied, will disappear with the Czech novelist and essayist, self-exiled to France, who championed the novel’s amoral and comic spirit of inquiry:

The tragedy of the Cold War was first in the bisection of Europe, through which nations that had been firmly within the West culturally suddenly found themselves as part of the East. But it was also in the failure of the West to recognize that the colonization of Central Europe—which gave us Kafka, Musil, Freud, structuralism—represented a breakup of its own culture. In Western Europe, Kundera argues, this severance was seen as sad, but ultimately peripheral. The partitioning of Europe was regarded as a geopolitical tragedy, perhaps, but not a cultural one, because the West no longer takes its own culture seriously…

Pollen’s thesis reminded me that I’d found myself thinking about Kundera a year and a half ago, just after Russia invaded Ukraine. I’d admired Kundera since reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) as a teenager, but I’d found it a fairly dry and abstract novel, a philosopher’s novel, without enough of the sensuous, concrete life I had come to expect of the best fiction in writers like Dickens, Conrad, Joyce, Faulkner, or Hemingway. All I tended to recall of the book were the author’s theses and speculations—on kitsch, shit¹, the folly of progressivism, the myth of eternal return—rather than its plot and characters. A later reading of Immortality (1988) confirmed my judgment; there, too, I can only remember the reflections on fame, music, Goethe, Rilke, sentimentalism, France vs. Russia, etc., but don’t ask me about the story.

In his Thomas Bernhardian rant in the guise of a book on D. H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage (1997), Geoff Dyer captures the essentially essayistic dimension of Kundera’s fiction:

Milan Kundera’s faith in the novel is the equal of Lawrence’s but the logic of his apologia for the form actually carries him beyond it. Kundera takes inspiration from the unhindered exuberance of Rabelais and Sterne, before the compulsive realism of the nineteenth century. ‘Their freedom of composition’ set the young Kundera dreaming of ‘creating a work in which the bridges and filler have no reason to be and in which the novelist would never be forced—for the sake of form and its dictates—to stray by even a single line from what he cares about, what fascinates him’. Kundera duly achieved this in his own fictions, the famous novels ‘in the form of variations’. In his ‘Notes Inspired by The Sleepwalkers’, meanwhile, Kundera paid tribute to Broch who demonstrated a need for ‘a new art of the specifically novelistic essay’. Novels like Immortality are full of ‘inquiring, hypothetical’ or aphoristic essays like this but compared with these, my favourite passages, I found myself indifferent to Kundera’s characters. After reading Immortality, what I wanted from Kundera was a novel composed entirely of essays, stripped of the last rind of novelisation. Kundera duly obliged. His next book, Testaments Betrayed, provided all the pleasures—i.e. all the distractions—of his novels with, so to speak, none of the distractions of character and situation. By Kundera’s own logic this ‘essay in nine parts’—more accurately, a series of variations in the form of an essay—which has dispensed entirely with the trappings of novelisation, actually represents the most refined, the most extreme, version yet of Kundera’s idea of the novel.

‘A book which is not a copy of other books has its own construction,’ warned Lawrence and the kind of novels I like are ones which bear no traces of being novels. Which is why the novelists I like best are, with the exception of the last named, not novelists at all: Nietzsche, the Goncourt brothers, Barthes, Fernando Pessoa, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Thomas Bernhard…

Dyer and I are both complaining—Dyer because he finds the novelistic gestures in Kundera’s fiction superfluous, me because I find them under-developed—but both of us are pointing to the way Kundera in the late 20th century anticipated a major 21st-century style in the novel typified by authors like W. G. Sebald, Michel Houellebecq, Karl Ove Knausgård, Tom McCarthy, Teju Cole, Valeria Luiselli, Jenny Offill, and more: the vogue for autofiction, essay-fiction, theory-fiction, a fiction of ideas and of quotidian life, a fiction of everything except those traditional novelistic contrivances of character, plot, and description.

Still, I thought the outraged and outrageous Dyer had a point when he suggested that writers with such interests should just write essays rather than pretending to write novels. Kundera may have agreed; he noted in his essay collection Testaments Betrayed (1993) that the European novel, though it began with such exuberance in Cervantes and Rabelais, had attenuated by the end of the 20th century into barrenness, leaving the field to be occupied by the densely plotted and ebullient novels of magical realism then issuing from the Global South.

In our own century, for the first time, the important initiatives in the history of the European novel are appearing outside Europe: first in North America, in the 1920s and 30s, and then, in the 60s, in Latin America.

[…]

The tendency of the novel in the last stages of its modernism: in Europe: the ordinary pursued to its utmost; sophisticated analysis of gray on gray; outside Europe: accumulation of the most extraordinary coincidences; colors on colors. The dangers: in Europe, tedium of gray; outside Europe, monotony of the picturesque. (trans. Linda Asher)

Accordingly, I never bothered to read more of his novels than the two I’d already read; I thought of him less as a novelist than as the author of The Art of the Novel (1986). In that slim book, Kundera claims an identity between the novel and the European spirit. The novel is the artistic corollary of Europe’s inexorable Promethean quest for truth at all costs:

The novel has accompanied man uninterruptedly and faithfully since the beginning of the Modern Era. It was then that the “passion to know,” which Husserl considered the essence of European spirituality, seized the novel and led it to scrutinize man’s concrete life and protect it against “the forgetting of being”; to hold “the world of life” under a permanent light. That is the sense in which I understand and share Hermann Broch’s insistence in repeating: The sole raison d’être of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.

I would also add: The novel is Europe’s creation; its discoveries, though made in various languages, belong to the whole of Europe. The sequence of discoveries (not the sum of what was written) is what constitutes the history of the European novel. It is only in such a supranational context that the value of a work (that is to say, the import of its discovery) can be fully seen and understood. (trans. Linda Asher)

Like the scientific method it resembles, the novel attains this truth by suspending moral, religious, and political dogmas—in a word, ideology—and proceeding with a disinterested inquiry into practices and values:

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. They require that someone be right: either Anna Karenina is the victim of a narrow-minded tyrant, or Karenin is the victim of an immoral woman; either K. is an innocent man crushed by an unjust Court, or the Court represents divine justice and K. is guilty.

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. (trans. Linda Asher)²

These ideas are what returned to me in the early days of the war in Ukraine,³ for that beleaguered small nation’s defenders often seemed to strike Kundera’s note of a pan-European spirit of tolerance and democracy violated by the autocrat Putin’s invasion. This sat oddly, I thought, with the ideological language we in the west have learned to speak in the years since the Cold War ended—the language of postmodern multiculturalism, which has discredited Europe’s claim to distinction as the spurious warrant of the white man’s conquest and “disinterested inquiry,” scientific or artistic, as the dissimulation of the white man’s power.

Why else did Toni Morrison pause in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), an essay about the occluded presence of African-Americans in the white American canon, to discuss Kundera, a Czech novelist who fled communism, began writing in French, and declared himself and his art European? Morrison wrote:

Kundera’s views, obliterating American writers (with the exception of William Faulkner) from his own canon, are relegated to a “smugness” that [New Yorker reviewer] Terrence Rafferty disassociates from Kundera’s imaginative work and applies to the “sublime confidence” of his critical prose. The confidence of an exile who has the sentimental education of, and the choice to become, a European. 

I was refreshed by Rafferty’s comments. With the substitution of certain phrases, his observations and the justifiable umbrage he takes can be appropriated entirely by Afro-American writers regarding their own exclusion from the “transcendent ‘idea of the novel.’” 

For the present turbulence seems not to be about the flexibility of a canon, its range among and between Western countries, but about its miscegenation. The word is informative here and I do mean its use. A powerful ingredient in this debate concerns the incursion of third-world or so-called minority literature into a Eurocentric stronghold. 

Kundera’s later celebration of García Márquez and Rushdie notwithstanding, when he insists on the novel’s uniquely European provenance and of its commitment to individualism and secularity, he does imply the paradox of a cultural particularism speaking in the name of an inquiry that, if it is “scientific,” should maintain no such parochial allegiances—that should rather be truly universal. At least in her own essay, however, Morrison does not put forth a truer universalism but a concession to the writer’s inevitable particularity instead:

The question of what constitutes the art of a black writer, for whom that modifier is more search than fact, has some urgency. In other words, other than melanin and subject matter, what, in fact, may make me a black writer? Other than my own ethnicity—what is going on in my work that makes me believe it is demonstrably inseparable from a cultural specificity that is Afro-American?

Here the individual’s commitment to truth halts before the superior force of “cultural specificity.” The writer is the emissary not of a private and elusive sensibility, still less of a universal truth, but of a racial metaphysic (later in the essay Morrison refers to her heroine Sula as “metaphysically black”). Since Morrison claims that such particularism was the essence of Kundera’s bad-faith “European” individualism and universalism all along, we never really had a choice but to accept a politics and aesthetics of identity. The writers who followed Kundera and produced essayistic novels about their own minuscule lives would seem to agree with Morrison—more than she agrees with herself in this instance, given that her own novels resemble the epics and sagas Kundera celebrated from the Global South.⁴

If Jared Marcel Pollen is right, then what vanishes with Kundera is the possibility of a European or more broadly western fiction capable of believing in itself as a bearer of global and disinterested (if secular) truths rather than culturally particular claims. What vanishes, in other words, is the possibility of a European or more broadly western fiction at all (as opposed to autofiction, essay-fiction, theory-fiction)—and in fact, this fiction vanished from Kundera’s own work long before his death.⁵

John Pistelli writes

Grand Hotel Abyss

1. I’ll give one example of Kundera’s novelistic essayism and of the debates it has the potential to provoke. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera makes what we might call the scatological argument against the existence—or at least the omnipotence—of God:

Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely, that man was created in God’s image. Either/or: either man was created in God’s image—and God has intestines!—or God lacks intestines and man is not like Him.

The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus ate and drank, but did not defecate.

Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man’s crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the Creator of man. (trans. Michael Henry Heim)

For this, Kundera earned a memorable rebuke from the Marxist art critic and novelist John Berger in his brief essay, “A Load of Shit”:

In one of his books, Milan Kundera dismisses the idea of God because, according to him, no God would have designed a life in which shitting was necessary. The way Kundera asserts this makes one believe it’s more than a joke. He is expressing a deep affront. And such an affront is typically elitist. It transforms a natural repugnance into a moral shock. Elites have a habit of doing this. Courage, for instance, is a quality that all admire. But only elites condemn cowardice as vile. The dispossessed know very well that under certain circumstances everyone is capable of being a coward.

Elsewhere in his Selected Essays (2001)—edited, incidentally, by Geoff Dyer—Berger celebrates Joyce’s Ulysses not for its scientific discovery of everyday life and the dilation of time, as Kundera does, but for offering “offal with flecks in it of the divine. The first and last recipe!” This is also a gnostic formulation, but one that revels in matter, even waste matter, rather than recoiling from it as Kundera does. Leaving aside Berger’s sentimentalizing of the supposed earthy wisdom of “the dispossessed”—which Kundera might label “kitsch”—these differing spiritual sensibilities perhaps account for the infamously coprophilic Joyce’s sensuous aesthetic as opposed to the coprophobic Kundera’s abstraction.

2. Those seeking evidence of “judgment” might find it in Kundera’s New York Times obituary, two of whose 13 paragraphs are devoted to misogyny in the writer’s work. On the one hand, the spirit of disinterested inquiry would rule out no topic on any occasion, not even on the day of someone’s death; on the other, putting a writer on ideological trial in an obituary has something of the Soviet about it. Ironically, the witness the Times cited for evidence of Kundera’s misogyny, the British feminist critic Joan Smith, would herself likely be denounced in the same organ on any other occasion for her gender-critical opposition to trans activism. Kundera held polarized left-right cultural criticism in contempt. In one passage of Testaments Betrayed, he mocks Theodor Adorno’s Marxist music criticism—

What irritates me in Adorno is his short-circuit method that, with a fearsome facility, links works of art to political (sociological) causes, consequences, or meanings; extremely nuanced ideas (Adorno’s musicological knowledge is admirable) thereby lead to extremely impoverished conclusions; in fact, given that an era’s political tendencies are always reducible to just two opposing tendencies, a work of art necessarily ends up being classified as either progressive or reactionary; and since reaction is evil, the inquisition can start the trial proceedings. (trans. Linda Asher)

—while in another, too long to quote here, he derides at length an apparently conservative American critic who tries to make an anti-abortion parable out of Hemingway’s subtle and suggestive “Hills Like White Elephants.” In his UnHerd obit for the author, David Samuels sums up his anti-politics:

Kundera was never particularly interested in or engaged by politics. Instead, his work was a passionate defence of the right to pursue one’s own individual desires and lusts against bureaucratic maniacs of whatever stripe who wished to colonise individual experience on behalf of the state. To his critics on both the Right and the Left, Kundera’s stance was borderline immoral, not to mention hopelessly bourgeois. While the Left preferred Che and the Right preferred Solzhenitsyn, Kundera insisted on the human right to be left alone.

3. As implied by my statement that the war in Ukraine brought these thoughts to mind, elements of the next few paragraphs appeared, in a slightly different form, on my Tumblr blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, in February 2022. In that post, I compared Morrison’s endorsement of “cultural specificity” to Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin’s advocacy of a “multipolar” world, which may have helped to inspire or at least to lend intellectual legitimacy to Putin’s autocratic and imperial aggression:

The global unipolar hegemonic order should be replaced by a more realistic multipolar world with different sets of ideologies and values. Chinese values for Chinese, African values for Africa, Muslim values for Muslim world, European values for Europeans. If you become Russian—please, become Russian! You will share with us tradition, conservative society, monarchy, authoritarianism, for the best or worst. And, in response to your question, if American or European civilization prefers to be liberal capitalist democracy, it’s absolutely up to you to base your society on those principles.

In this multipolar world, there is not one universal truth. No such thing. Some great civilization could propose something as universal, but it shouldn’t be imposed. Nobody can be the absolute universal judge. That is multipolarity. It is not ideal, it is just something that is absolutely necessary in our situation.

My point was not to hang Dugin’s Eurasian imperialism (which has plausibly been called “fascist,” though the philosopher disavows this term) around the neck of the leftist multicultural project Morrison represents—and, in any case, Kundera himself, with his sense of European destiny and his belief that “the Russian occupation of my country represented a forced de-Westernization” (Testaments Betrayed), could equally be said to anticipate the Duginist thesis of separate ethnic and geographic ontologies, if from the other side. I wanted, rather, to suggest that we in the west, whether we are celebrants (Kundera) or critics (Morrison) of western civilization, are as torn as anybody between the universal and the particular.

4. If it’s not indecent to promote myself in a guest post, I’m currently writing a novel called Major Arcana, which you can read in serial for paid subscribers to my Substack, Grand Hotel Abyss. Faced with the task of narrating and dramatizing the present in all its online-era fragmentation and dispersal of micro-cultures and micro-individualisms, I felt I could not do without some of Kundera’s essayism just to explain the different “realities” my characters occupy in this realistic novel. On the other hand, I try to synthesize this abstraction with a panoply of concrete characters and situations in a saga-like plot (including, yes, some instances of what we might call “magic”) resembling García Márquez, Rushdie, and Morrison more than Kundera. In other words, I am attempting a synthesis of the Old World and New World novels, trying to reinvent the form once again, and to gather the whole world into one book. And at least for the length of this one book, I think I’ve solved the problem of the novel to my satisfaction. Please read Major Arcana’s Preface for more details if this sounds enticing to you.

5. In tribute to Kundera, I’ll let the resonantly grim “European” ending of the essay stand in the body of the text and put the real ending, the happy “American” ending, down here in a footnote. Happily, I am a good American—one whose forebears strove within living memory to get out of what they regarded as Europe’s dead end and come for their salvation to the New World—and don’t believe we need to make invidious cultural claims to keep our arts alive, whether Morrison’s “metaphysical blackness” or Kundera’s “essence of European spirituality.” There is, first of all, a case to be made that the novel begins in the multicultural world of the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity rather than in modern Europe—if it doesn’t in fact begin with Homer and the Hebrew Bible—not to mention, for example, Arabic influence on the proto-novelistic medieval tale-telling of Boccaccio and Chaucer or even on Cervantes himself, captive for five years in Algiers and Istanbul. What Morrison calls “miscegenation” has always been the novel’s natural condition and no obstacle to its disinterested and humanistic vision, as New World novelists from Melville to Bolaño would surely agree.