Summary of “The Art of the Novel”

by Milan Kundera
What is a novel

Written by Bookey
About the book
Beyond science and philosophy, novels are a third
way to see and comprehend existence. While
science and philosophy are mainly concerned with
certainties and aim to solve specific problems,
novels explore uncertainties and aim to ask
questions. Every novelist’s writing reveals the
author's understanding of the novel as art. This
bookey reveals the thoughts of the world famous
author Milan Kundera.
About the author
Milan Kundera is a Czech writer. Kundera has
written many renowned novels, such as The
Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of
Laughter and Forgetting, Life is Elsewhere, to
name just a few. He has won numerous
international literary prizes and has been nominated
for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He’s famous for
his use of irony and humor to describe human
experiences. His works are sophisticated and witty
but, at the same time, easy to read. For that reason,
Kundera is popular in many countries around the
world, and his works have wide appeal.
Chapter 1: Overview
Hi, welcome to Bookey. Today we’ll unlock the
book The Art of the Novel. This is one of his
less-known works, expounding his theories of the
novel. He argues that novels exist for the sole
purpose of revealing a reality that only exists in
fiction. This might sound a bit abstruse, so let us
try to explain it. Kundera suggests that novels are
the third way for us to observe and understand the
world over and above the methods of science and
philosophy. Novels can explore the things that don't
interest science and philosophy. While science and
philosophy are mainly concerned with certainties in
our world and aim to solve specific problems,
novels explore uncertainties and raise questions.
Uncertainty is one of the main themes discussed in
this book; lives are full of uncertainties. The book
provides an example concerning a character called
Jacques in a novel by Denis Diderot. Jacques is a
fatalist. He indulges his lust and hunger for sensual
pleasure by seducing his friend's fiancée, causing
his father to punish him with a vicious beating. In a
fit of rage Jacques enlists in the army. However,
shot in the knee in his first battle, he is lame for the
rest of his life. Jacques intended to start a
love-affair but ended up physically wounded.
You see, in this example, the external environment
is unpredictable. Jacques’ actions are ill-judged,
and the consequences of his actions are uncertain.
How can science and philosophy help with matters
like this? This is why we need novels. When
reading Jacques’ story, we question ourselves. If I
were Jacques, what would I do? Would I act so
impetuously; would I be smarter than him? How
can I avoid his fate? No matter how we answer
these questions, as the story unfolds, we can
imagine the problems we, too, might face in the
future. Now we can read the story again, and we
might understand it in a different way. Discovering
things that only the novel can express is the art of
fiction, and this is the sole purpose of novels’
existence. The proposal comes from the author,
Milan Kundera, who illustrates his point
throughout his many great novels. These include
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of
Laughter and Forgetting, Life is Elsewhere, and
many more. In today’s book, The Art of the Novel,
Kundera sets out his theory of the novel. Kundera
has legendary status. He is Czech, but following
the period of the "Prague Spring" when the Soviet
Union invaded Czechoslovakia, he had to flee his
country and lived in exile in France. Many of his
works, including "The Art of the Novel," were
written there. Kundera has received many
international literary prizes and was nominated for
the Nobel Prize for Literature. Descriptions of the
human experience with irony and humor have
made him famous. His works are sophisticated and
witty while being easy to read at the same time. For
these reasons, Kundera is appreciated in many
countries worldwide and his books are widely
loved. Now, let’s hear about this book in the
following three parts: Part One: Novels are the
third way to understand the world; Part two:
Exploration in the novel; Part three: The art of
composition.
Chapter 2: Novels are the third
way to understand the world
Let’s start with how novels are the third way to
understand the world. Since ancient times,
philosophy was the main method people used to
understand the world; more recently, people have
gradually adopted scientific methods as a second
foundation for knowledge. Nowadays, most people
hold that science and philosophy are the only true
ways of looking at the world. In this book, Milan
Kundera argues that there is actually a third way,
the novel. Both science and philosophy are
concerned with issues of certainty. If something is
uncertain, a scientist will be unsettled. They are
concerned with working out the truth. It’s the same
for philosophers, who must also conceive of a
framework to interpret the world, logically and
consistently. Kundera doesn’t dispute that science
and philosophy are essential. For example, he does
not question the ideas of Galileo or Descartes. He
believes that they are the founders of our modern
world. Galileo proposed understanding grew from
observation and experiment, denying the
opinionated dictates of authority. Descartes
believed that humans form the center of the natural
world. Each person perceives the universe on their
own and from a unique point-of-view. Through the
lenses of science and philosophy, respectively, the
two thinkers denied God, the priesthood, and the
church’s authority. They put forward the
proposition that the world is made of certainties;
every secret of existence is out there waiting to be
discovered. And, most importantly, everyone has
the potential to make such a discovery. Kundera
subscribes to this progressive attitude. However,
the deterministic worldview is rational, precise,
abstract, and even a little cold. In the words of the
philosopher Husserl, science and philosophy
exclude the concrete "life world." The more
knowledge advances, the less easy it is to hold
either a complete world view or a person’s sense of
themselves. Knowledge causes people to spiral
down into what Husserl's pupil Heidegger Called
"the forgetting of being." The two philosophers
use the descriptions "lifeworld" and "being" to
define the trivial matters, the essential things of
ordinary people's daily life. Contrastingly, science
and philosophy concern vast abstract conceptions
of the universe, the world, atoms, living, and the
spirit. It seems that they tend to overlook the
everyday. The modern novel appeared to fill that
empty space. Unlike science and philosophy, the
novel focuses on the world’s uncertainties, real
complicated lives, and the "lifeworld". The writer
who opened the door to the modern novel is the
unclassifiable Spanish novelist Miguel de
Cervantes. Actually, before Cervantes, there were
novels in medieval Europe. At that time,
troubadour tales of chivalry were very popular, and
the plots were all the same—the knight set out for a
quest, went through many trials and hardships, and
at the end fulfilled his goal. Finally he returned as a
hero in triumph, surrounded by admiration. He
usually won the heart of a beautiful maiden.
According to Kundera, although the plots of the
early troubadour stories are alike, they reveal a
single shared problem, and that is that in Europe in
the Middle Ages, the church maintained order.
People lived without questioning or doubting the
church’s overarching truth. Most people spent their
entire lives in a small place. That’s why the plot of
a knight novel was repetitive, with the same things
happening over and over again. It was tedious, and
everything seemed to be under control and entirely
predictable. After the end of the Middle Ages,
science took over from the church as the arbiter of
truth. The singular truth of God was atomized into
a great many contradictory, relative truths. These
created many conflicts that never previously
existed. The world imagined by the knight in
Cervantes’s Don Quixote no longer existed. When
Don Quixote put on his armor, mounted his skinny
horse, and raised his spear, he found that he could
no longer tell who was an enemy and who was a
friend. Suddenly, all people and things have
become uncertain, and everyone needs to explore
the world for themselves. What forms does this
independent exploration take? Novels have a
different means of investigation to those used in
science and philosophy. Both science and
philosophy seek things out, aiming to discern
deterministic or causal relationships between
different things, but a novel will never insist on the
absolute truth. They often use relative and
ambiguous language to explore multiple
possibilities and detail a host of contradictory,
relative truths. In Kundera's view, anything can
happen in a novel, and everything is reasonable,
even if you never have and will never see such a
person, or encounter such a situation, in real life. In
a novel, you feel that it’s possible. In addition, in
the novel’s internal world, there should be no clear
moral judgments. For example, it would be
misleading to conclude unequivocally that in Leo
Tolstoy’s novel, the heroine Anna Karenina is
morally corrupt. This is because one of the goals of
the novel is to let readers share the dilemmas of
fictional characters who are themselves uncertain.
All a novel has to do is probe life’s complexities
and human nature. What a novel explores is
precisely messy possibilities and indecisions
beyond clear-cut morality. Cervantes' Don
Quixote initiated the novel’s exploratory character.
Cervantes transformed literature into an art that
explored existential questions overlooked by
science and philosophy. Kundera believes that
Cervantes’s contributions have been
underestimated. He should be considered a founder
of modern thought, alongside Galileo and
Descartes. Starting from Cervantes, the modern
novel has become a third means to understand our
existence. With "Don Quixote" as a point of
departure, the themes explored in novels have
continuously evolved––from extravagant
adventures to the minutiae of daily life; from
explorations of people’s hearts and minds; then to
humanity controlled by the influence of fate. With
Franz Kafka, absurdity became a new literary force,
pushing the novelist’s art onto another exploratory
level. After the Middle Ages, why was
exploration such a focus for the novel? Just look at
the problems Don Quixote encountered; Cevantes
was reporting on a changing world. The currency
of old beliefs was no longer valid, but new beliefs
were yet to be established. It was the golden age of
exploration. But why did the absurd enter the novel
in Kafka’s era? After the religious authorities
stepped back, two new forces assumed the right to
interpret the world. One was the political authority
represented in uniforms, and the other was the
influence of mass media expressed as kitsch. The
two powers are absurd in themselves. Absurdity
surfacing in the novel is a precise reflection of an
absurd reality. It could seem advantageous for
science and philosophy rather than the church to
assume the right to interpret the world, but
individual lives do not figure in scientific and
philosophical world views. They have absolutely
no interest in the living conditions of the masses.
Their indifference allows the uniforms of authority
and the kitsch of propaganda to fill the gap and
take control. The dictator’s uniform quickly
replaces the archbishop’s robe, and this absolute
power disdains ambiguity. Under a uniformed
regime of control, individual opinions are not
needed, exploration is not needed, there is no space
for doubt. In Kafka's novel The Castle, the land
surveyor Joseph K strives to regain his status as a
land surveyor. But he is eventually lost in the
massive labyrinthine bureaucracy of the castle. His
wish is never realized. K fails, but it seems as if
nothing has gone wrong. Each part of the system
works perfectly, and nobody is directly responsible.
Oppressive social systems bear down on the
characters. Whether they like it or not, they are
swept along by the narrative. Just like the fate of
Mr. K, the protagonists’ inner motivations are
completely insignificant. The power embodied in
the uniform impedes people's ability to explore.
That’s why Kundera believed that any novels that
serve the uniform are dead. Their mission is not to
explore; they are written merely for the purpose of
kitsch. Kundera has strongly criticized the
literary styles known as Kitsch—works of art that
have no personality, no exploration, existing solely
to flatter public taste at any cost. Today’s world is
dominated by a tiny number of mass-media
organizations. They reduce all explanations to a
standardized framework, oversimplify the world,
and maintain a common vulgar spirit, which is
kitsch. Many of today’s novels are just kitsch,
totally lacking exploration. According to Kundera's
definition of novels, they are no longer novels at all.
That’s why some would say, "the novel is dead."
A true novel’s spirit is nuanced. A novel should
have an irresistible urge to explore. Novels need to
revolt against the world’s "progress", which may
not always be positive. In Kundera's eyes, the
world before the Modern Era wasn’t just a dark age;
it also had a positive side, paying attention to the
vitality of everyone's world, believing that every
individual has value. The novel should pass down
this perception. Kundera’s purpose in writing this
book was partly to express this responsibility.
This concludes the first section of the book.
Science and philosophy are concerned with the
certainty of the world; their purpose is to solve
problems. Novels are a third way to understand the
world. They don’t solve problems. They are
concerned with uncertainty. Their purpose is to
raise questions. Cervantes initiated a new modern
era of novels meeting ordinary people’s need for
spiritual exploration in uncertain environments. In
common with Galileo and Descartes, he was a
pioneer of the Modern Era.
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