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PARTISAN REVIEW
cian than a poet and thinker; in other words, the different elements
he uses (verses, narrative, aphorisms, reporting, essay) are juxta–
posed but never coalesce in a genuine "polyphonic" unity. The excel–
lent essay on the degradation of values, although presented as a text
written by one of the characters, may be easily recognized as the
author's meditation on the truth of his own novel, a summary of it,
its thesis.
It
therefore alters the indispensable relativity of novelistic
space. And the "polyhistoric" intention, for its part, requires an ellip–
tical technique that Broch could never locate (nor could Musil for
that matter) and whose absence affects the architectonic clarity of the
entire work.
Now , all great works (precisely because they are great) have
something unfinished about them. Broch has inspired me not only
because of his successes but also for all that he attempted to achieve
without success. The unfinished aspect of his work made me under–
stand the need for a new art of "novelistic counterpoint" capable of
blending music, philosophy, narrative, and dreams; a new art , a
radical honing that allows the inclusion of the vertiginous complexity
of the world without the loss of architectonic clarity ; and an essayis–
tic art that is specifically novelistic, that is, that does not attempt to
bear an apodictic message but rather limits itself to a hypothetical,
ludic, or ironic point of view.
History destroyed central Europe. And the great novel of cen–
tral Europe dethroned history. Hasek pronounced history to be an
absolute futility . Musil saw it hidden like a beast getting ready to at–
tack an unaware world . Broch presented it as a clockwork of the irra–
tional. And Kafka announced its decline,
the end of modern times,
the
moment when man sees himself dispossessed of nature and of
himself. These novelists wrote twenty, thirty years before Camus's
famous polemic against history (a deified, judge-like history). His
work constitutes the formidable countercurrent opposed to the "lyric
illusions" and the "revolutionary eschatology" that mark the politics
and the art (above all that of the avant-garde) in Europe.
I identify myself (in opposition to an Eluard or a Neruda) with
that antilyric countercurrent. I identify myself specifically with the
heritage of Broch because he demonstrated (in opposition to an Or–
well or a Zinoviev) that the antilyrical (skeptical , demystifying)
countercurrent does not authorize the novelist to renounce the high–
est esthetic aspirations, by which I mean poetry.
Milan Kundera, the exiled Czechoslovakian novelist, is the author
cifThe
Unbearable Lightness of Being,
recently published by Harper and Row.
