A Conversation with Milan Kundera
บทสัมภาษณ์ Kundera โดย Lois Oppenheim เป็นบทความเก่าเมื่อ 20 ปีก่อน คนที่เคยอ่านเล่ม The Art of the Novel และ Testaments Betrayed คงคุ้นเคยกับแง่มุมความคิดที่มีต่อศิลปะนวนิยายของเขา
ฉลาด ลึกซึ้ง เฉียบแหลม เขาเปรียบเสมือน Diderot แห่งยุคสมัยปัจจุบัน
LO: This seems entirely reasonable to me. In fact, I cant see what more could be wanted than the guarantee of authenticity that the copyright provides. You have provoked many discussions about Central Europe, All of your fiction takes place in Czechoslovakia and even in your theoretical work, The Art of the Novel, Central Europe is very important. Would you mind clarifying just what this notion of Central Europe represents for you, just what its real perimeters are?
MK: Lets simplify the problem, an enormous one, and limit ourselves to the novel. There are four great novelists: Kafka, Broch, Musil, Gombrowicz. I call them the "pleiad" of Central Europes great novelists. Since Proust, I cant see anyone of greater importance in the history of the novel. Without knowing them, not much of the modern novel can be understood. Briefly, these authors are modernists, which is to say that they are impassioned by a search for new forms. At the same time, however, they are completely devoid of any avant-garde ideology (faith in progress, in revolution, and so on), whence another vision of the history of art and of the novel: They never speak of the necessity of a radical break; they dont consider the formal possibilities of the novel to be exhausted; they only want to radically enlarge them.
From this as well there derives another rapport with the novels past. There is no disdain in these writers for "tradition," but another choice of tradition: they are all fascinated by the novel preceding the nineteenth century. I call this era the first "half-time" of the history of the novel. This era and its aesthetic were almost forgotten, obscured, during the nineteenth century. The "betrayal" of this first half-time deprived the novel of its play essence (so striking in Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot) and diminished the role of what I call "novelistic meditation." Novelistic meditationlets avoid any misunderstanding here: Im not thinking of the so-called "philosophical novel" that really means a subordination of the novel to philosophy, the novelistic illustration of ideas. This is Sartre. And even more so Camus. La Peste. This moralizing novel is almost the model of what I dont like. The intent of a Musil or a Broch is entirely different: it is not to serve philosophy but, on the contrary, to get hold of a domain that, until then, philosophy had kept for itself There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize. This said, these novelists (particularly Broch and Musil) made of the novel a supreme poetic and intellectual synthesis and accorded it a preeminent place in the cultural totality.
These authors are relatively little known in America, which I have always considered an intellectual scandal. But really it is a matter of an aesthetic misunderstanding that is quite comprehensible when one considers the particular tradition of the American novel. In the first place, America didnt live through the first half-time of the history of the novel. In the second, at the same time that the great Central Europeans were writing their masterpieces, America herself had her own great "pleiad," one which would influence the entire world and which was that of Hemingway, Faulkner and Dos Passos. But its aesthetic was entirely opposed to that of a Musil! For example: a meditative intervention of the author into the narrative thread of his novel appears in this aesthetic as a displaced intellectualism, as something foreign to the very essence of the novel. A personal recollection: The New Yorker published the first three parts of The Unbearable Lightness of Beingbut they eliminated the passages on Nietzsches eternal return! Yet, in my eyes, what I say about Nietzsches eternal return has nothing to do with a philosophic discourse; it is a continuity of paradoxes that are no less novelistic (that is to say, they answer no less to the essence of what the novel is) than a description of the action or a dialogue.
LO: You refer constantly to the European novel. Is this to say that for you the American novel is generally less significant?
MK: You are right to mention this. It really bothers me to not be able to find the right term. If I say "Western novel," it will be said that I am forgetting the Russian novel. If I say "world novel," I am concealing the fact that the novel I am speaking of is the one historically linked to Europe. That is why I say "European novel"; but I understand this adjective in the Husserlian sense: not as a geographical term, but a "spiritual" one which takes in both America and, for example, Israel. What I call the "European novel" is the history that goes from Cervantes to Faulkner.
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