Art of the Novel (eBook)

Christian Salmon: I’d like to discuss the aesthetic of your novels. But where shall we begin?

M.K.: With this assertion: My novels are not psychological. More precisely: They lie outside the aesthetic of the novel normally termed psychological.

C.S.: But aren’t all novels necessarily psychological? That is, concerned with the enigma of the psyche?

M.K.: Let’s be more precise: All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: What is the self? How can the self be grasped? It is one of those fundamental questions on which the novel, as novel, is based. By the various responses to that question, if you wanted, you could distinguish different tendencies, and perhaps different periods, in the history of the novel. The psychological approach wasn’t even known to the first European storytellers. Boccaccio simply tells us about actions and adventures. Still, behind all those amusing tales, we can make out this conviction: It is through action that man steps forth from the repetitive universe of the everyday where each person resembles every other person; it is through action that he distinguishes himself from others and becomes an individual. Dante said as much: “In any act, the primary intention of the one who acts is to reveal his own image.” At the outset, action is thus seen as the self-portrait of the one who acts. Four centuries after Boccaccio, Diderot is more skeptical: his Jacques le Fataliste seduces his friend’s girl, he gets happily drunk, his father wallops him, a regiment marches by, out of spite he signs up, in his first battle he gets a bullet in the knee, and he limps till the day of his death. He thought he was starting an amorous adventure, and instead he was setting forth toward his infirmity. He could never recognize himself in his action. Between the act and himself, a chasm opens. Man hopes to reveal his own image through his act, but that image bears no resemblance to him. The paradoxical nature of action is one of the novel’s great discoveries. But if the self is not to be grasped through action, then where and how are we to grasp it? So the time came when the novel, in its quest for the self, was forced to turn away from the visible world of action and examine instead the invisible interior life. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Richardson discovers the form of the epistolary novel in which the characters confess their thoughts and their feelings.

C.S.: The birth of the psychological novel?

M.K.: The term is, of course, inexact and approximate. Let’s avoid it and use a periphrasis: Richardson set the novel on its way to the exploration of man’s interior life. We know his great successors: the Goethe of Werther, Laclos, Constant, then Stendhal and the other writers of his century. The apogee of that evolution is to be found, it seems to me, in Proust and in Joyce. Joyce analyzes something still more ungraspable than Proust’s “lost time”: the present moment. There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable, than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events, and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our heads. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant. Now, Joyce’s great microscope manages to stop, to seize, that fleeting instant and make us see it. But the quest for the self ends, yet again, in a paradox: The more powerful the lens of the microscope observing the self, the more the self and its uniqueness elude us; beneath the great Joycean lens that breaks the soul down into atoms, we are all alike. But if the self and its uniqueness cannot be grasped in man’s interior life, then where and how can we grasp it?

C.S.: Can it be grasped at all?

M.K.: Of course not. The quest for the self has always ended, and always will end, in a paradoxical dissatisfaction. I don’t say defeat. For the novel cannot breach the limits of its own possibilities, and bringing those limits to light is already an immense discovery, an immense triumph of cognition. Nonetheless, after reaching the depth involved in the detailed exploration of the self’s interior life, the great novelists began, consciously and unconsciously, to seek a new orientation. We often hear of the holy trinity of the modern novel: Proust, Joyce, Kafka. In my view, that trinity does not exist. In my own personal history of the novel, it is Kafka who provided this new orientation: a post-Proustian orientation. His way of conceiving the self is totally unexpected. What is it that defines K. as a unique being? Neither his physical appearance (we know nothing about that), nor his biography (we don’t know it), nor his name (he has none), nor his memories, his predilections, his complexes. His behavior? His field of action is lamentably limited. His thoughts? Yes, Kafka unceasingly traces K.’s reflections, but these are bent exclusively on the current situation: What should be done then and there, in the immediate circumstances? Go to the interrogation or evade it? Obey the priest’s summons or not? All of K.’s interior life is absorbed by the situation he finds himself trapped in, and nothing that might refer beyond that situation (K.’s memories, his metaphysical reflections, his notions about other people) is revealed to us. For Proust, a man’s interior universe comprises a miracle, an infinity that never ceases to amaze us. But that is not what amazes Kafka. He does not ask what internal motivations determine man’s behavior. He asks a question that is radically different: What possibilities remain for man in a world where the external determinants have become so overpowering that internal impulses no longer carry weight? Indeed, how could it have changed K.’s destiny and attitude if he had had homosexual inclinations or an unhappy love affair behind him? In no way.

C.S.: That’s what you say in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.” But what does that mean, “trap”?

M.K.: That life is a trap we’ve always known: we are born without having asked to be, locked in a body we never chose, and destined to die. On the other hand, the wideness of the world used to provide a constant possibility of escape. A soldier could desert from the army and start another life in a neighboring country. Suddenly, in our century, the world is closing around us. The decisive event in that transformation of the world into a trap was surely the 1914 war, called (and for the first time in history) a world war. Wrongly “world.” It involved only Europe, and not all of Europe at that. But the adjective “world” expresses all the more eloquently the sense of horror before the fact that, henceforward, nothing that occurs on the planet will be a merely local matter, that all catastrophes concern the entire world, and that consequently we are more and more determined by external conditions, by situations that no one can escape and that more and more make us resemble one another.

But understand me: If I locate myself outside the so-called psychological novel, that does not mean that I wish to deprive my characters of an interior life. It means only that there are other enigmas, other questions that my novels pursue primarily. Nor does it mean I object to novels that are fascinated by psychology. In fact, the change in the situation since Proust makes me nostalgic. With Proust, an enormous beauty began to move slowly out of our reach. Forever and irretrievably. Gombrowicz had an idea as comical as it is ingenious: The weight of our self, he said, depends on the size of the population on the planet. Thus Democritus represented a four-hundred-millionth of humanity; Brahms a billionth; Gombrowicz himself a two-billionth. By that calculation, the weight of the Proustian infinity—the weight of a self, or a self’s interior life—becomes lighter and lighter. And in that race toward lightness, we have crossed a fateful boundary.

C.S.: “The unbearable lightness” of the self is your obsession, beginning with your earliest writings. I’m thinking of Laughable Loves—for example, the story “Eduard and God.” After his first night of love with the young Alice, Eduard is overcome by a strange malaise, one that is decisive for him: he looks at his girl and thinks “that her ideas were in fact only a veneer on her destiny, and her destiny only a veneer on her body; he saw her as an accidental conjunction of a body, ideas, and a life’s course, an inorganic structure, arbitrary and unstable.” And again in another story, “The Hitchhiking Game,” in the final paragraphs of the tale, the girl is so upset by her uncertain hold on her identity that she sobs, “I’m me, I’m me, I’m me …”

M.K.: In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tereza is staring at herself in the mirror. She wonders what would happen if her nose were to grow a millimeter longer each day. How much time would it take for her face to become unrecognizable? And if her face no longer looked like Tereza, would Tereza still be Tereza? Where does the self begin and end? You see: Not wonder at the immeasurable...