BOOKS
THE ART OF KUNDERA
THE ART OF THE NOVEL. By Milan Kundera.
Harper and Row. $ 17.95.
Kundera's remarkable little book of essays is at the opposite pole
from the ponderous, jargonized theories dominating the academic critical
journals that use art and literature as ideological fodder. Against conceptual
agility and sociological ingenuity, Kundera's display of insight and literary
imagination seems old-fashioned. Like most of the classic novelists and poets
who also write critical essays - such as Eliot, James, Lawrence, Coleridge–
Kundera writes about fiction as a practitioner of fiction, as one who writes his
own novels with the history of the novel in his head. In the preface to
The
Art of the Novel,
Kundera says, "Need I stress that I intend no theoretical
statement at all, and that the entire book is simply a practitioner's confession?
Every novelist's work contains an implicit vision of the history of the novel,
an idea of what the novel is; I have tried to express here the idea of the
novel that is inherent in my own novels."
The book contains discussions of Cervantes, Kafka, Broch, Musil, Dos–
toevsky, Tolstoy, Sterne, Flaubert, Balzac. There are luminous and
provocative observations about life in Czechoslovakia, about totalitarianism,
Stalinism, kitsch, the cu lture of Europe, modernism, realism in fiction, the ra–
tionalist tradition. Kundera has some very acute comments on Stalinism,
particularly in Czechoslovakia, on totalitarianism in general, and on the
reasons for the susceptibility of intellectuals to the virus from the East.
He is discursive, ironic, playful, incisive, shocking, traditional, and orig–
inal - at times seeming to be proceeding simultaneously in a number of
different directions. But the sprawling commentary, darting in and out
of its subject, is united by several themes. Kundera keeps coming back to
the tradition of European cu lture, mostly as expressed in the history of
the novel, to the meaning of modernism in fiction, and, though it is
vaguer in its formulation, to the fact that modern man has lost his
bearings.
The essays on Cervantes and Kafka are particularly suggestive, not
only in their original treatment ofthe two writers, but also in exploring their
Editor's Note : Both
The A7·t
of
the Novel
and this review were written before the
changes, due largely to the effects of
glasnost
and
perestroika,
on the political scene
today.
