The rise of the sciences propelled man into the tunnels of the specialized disciplines. The more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly could he see either the world as a whole or his own self, and he plunged further into what Husserl’s pupil Heidegger called, in a beautiful and almost magical phrase, “the forgetting of being.”
It was then that the “passion to know,” which Husserl considered the essence of European spirituality, seized the novel and led it to scrutinize man’s concrete life and protect if against “the forgetting of being”; to hold “the world of life” under a permanent light. That is the sense in which I understand and share Hermann Broch’s insistence in repeating: The sole raison d’être of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.
The aggressiveness of force is thoroughly disinterested; unmotivated; it wills only its own will; it is pure irrationality.
The work of one single Truth and the relative, ambiguous world of the novel are molded of entirely different substances. Totalitarian Truth excludes relativity, doubt, questioning; it can never accommodate what I would call the spirit of the novel.
But aren’t there hundreds and thousands of novels published in huge editions and widely read in Communist Russia? Certainly; but these novels add nothing to the conquest of being. They discover no new segment of existence; they only confirm what has already been said; furthermore: in confirming what everyone says (what everyone must say), they fulfill their purpose, their glory, their usefulness to that society. By discovering nothing, they fail to participate in the sequence of discoveries that for me constitutes the history of the novel; they place themselves outside that history, or, if you like: they are novels that come after the history of the novel.
Thus the death of the novel is not just a fanciful idea, it has already happened. And we now know how the novel dies: it’s not that it disappears; its history stops: after that comes nothing but a period of repetition in which the novel keeps duplicating its form, emptied of its spirit. Its death occurs quietly, unnoticed, and no one is outraged.
The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it’s either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless.
But the spirit of our time is firmly focused on a present that is so expansive and profuse that it shoves the past off our horizon and reduces time to the present moment only. Within this system the novel is no longer a work (a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future) but one current event among many, a gesture with no tomorrow.
I don’t know. I merely believe I know that the novel cannot live in peace with the spirit of our time: if it is to go on discovering the undiscovered, to go on “progressing” as novel, it can do so only against the progress of the world.
There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable, than the present moment. And yet it eludes is 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.
For Proust, a man’s interior inverse 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 behaviour. 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.
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.
Take Life is Elsewhere, the third part: The hero, the shy Jaromil, is still a virgin. One day, he is out walking with a girl who suddenly lays her head on his shoulder. He is overcome with happiness and even physically aroused. I pause over that mini-event and note: “The greatest happiness Jaromil has ever experienced up to this point in his life was having a girl’s head on his shoulder.”
And then a further definition: Tenderness is the creation of “a tiny artificial space in which it is mutually agreed that each will treat the other like a child.” You see, I don’t show you what happens inside Jaromil’s head; rather, I show what happens inside my own: I observe my Jaromil for a long while, and I try, step by step, to get to the heart of his attitude, in order to understand it, name it, grasp it.
C.S.: Let’s summarize. There are several means of grasping the self. First, through action. Next, through the interior life. As for yourself, you declare: The self is determined by the essence of its existential problem. This view has a number of consequences for your work. For example, your insistence on understanding the essence of situations seems to you to render all descriptive techniques obsolete. You say almost nothing about the physical appearance of your characters. And since the investigation of psychological motives interests you less than the analysis of situations, you are also very parsimonious about your characters’ past.
A character is not a simulation of a living being. It is an imaginary being. An experimental self. In that way the novel reconnects with its beginnings.
Because making a character “alive” means: getting to the bottom of his existential problem. Which in turn means: getting to the bottom of some situations, some motifs, even some words that shape him. Nothing more.
M.K.: Heidegger characterizes existence by an extremely well-known formulation: in-der-Welt-sein, being-in-the-world. Man does not relate to the world as subject to object, as eye to painting; not even as actor to stage set. Man and the world are bound together like the snail to its shell: the world is part of man, it is his dimension, and as the world changes, existence (in-der-Welt-sein) changes as well. Since Balzac, the world of our being has a historical nature, and characters’ lives unfold in a realm of time marked by dates.
A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility. But again, to exist means: “being-in-the-world.” Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities. In Kafka, all that is clear: the Kafkan world does not resemble any known reality, it is an extreme and unrealized possibility of the human world.
To understand man flung into the vortex of that process, to understand his gestures, his attitudes— that’s all that matters.
M.K.: If the writer considers a historical situation a fresh and revealing possibility of the human world, he will want to describe it as it is. Still, fidelity to historical reality is a secondary matter as regards the value of the novel. The novelist is neither historian nor prophet: he is an explorer of existence.
There is thus a radical difference between The Sleepwalkers and the other great twentieth-century “frescoes” (those of Proust, Musil, Thomas Mann, etc.): In Broch, it is continuity neither of action nor of biography (a character’s or family’s) that provides the unity of the whole. It is something else, something hidden: the continuity of one theme (that of man facing the process of disintegration of values).
The world according to Kafka: the bureaucratized universe. The office not merely as one kind of social phenomenon among many but as the essence of the world.
For, terrible as it is to be condemned to death, it is intolerable to be condemned for nothing, to be a martyr to senselessness. Despite his innocence, K. therefore, consents to his guilt and searches for his offense.
Schweik is the opposite of K. He mimics the world around him (the world of stupidity) in so perfectly systematic a fashion that no one can tell if he is truly imbecilic or not. He adapts so easily (and with such delight!) to the reigning order not because he sees some sense in it but because he sees it as none at all. He amuses himself, he amuses other people, and by his extravagant conformism, he turns the world into one enormous joke.
Only at the end (the end of a love, of a life, of an era) does the past suddenly show itself as a whole and take on a brilliantly clear and finished shape.
The silence has lasted rather a long while when the woman suddenly, “involuntarily, reflexively,” starts to talk about mushrooms. Then silence again, and the man casts about for a way to declare himself, but instead of speaking of love, “on some unexpected impulse” he too talks about mushrooms. On the way home they go on discussing mushrooms, powerless and desperate, for never, they know it, never will they speak of love.
Back at the house, the man tells himself that he did not devalue his love because of the memory of his dead mistress, which he cannot betray. But we know perfectly well: It is a false excuse he invokes only to console himself. Console himself? Yes. Because we can resign ourselves to losing a love for a reason. We would never forgive ourselves for losing it for no reason at all.
This very beautiful little episode is a kind of parable for one of Anna Karenina’s great feats: bringing to light the causeless, incalculable, even mysterious aspect of human action.
What is action?— the eternal question of the novel, its constitutive question, so to speak. How is a decision born? How is it transformed into an act, and how do acts connects to make an adventure?
Out of the mysterious and chaotic fabric of life, the old novelists tried to tease the thread of a limpid rationality; in their view, the rationally accessible motive gives birth to an act, and that act provokes another.
She throws herself beneath the train without having taken the decision to do so. It is rather the decision that takes Anna. That overtakes her. Like the man who talked about mushrooms instead of love, Anna acts “on some unexpected impulse.” Which does not mean that her act is senseless. But its sense lies outside the rationally apprehensible causality. Tolstoy had to use (for the first time in the history of the novel) an almost Joycean interior monologue to reconstruct the subtle fabric of fleeting impulses, transient feelings, fragmentary thoughts, to show us the suicidal journey of Anna’s soul.
Kirilov kills himself because he is forced to it by very clearly defined interests, carefully delineated intrigues. His act, however mad, is rational, conscious, meditated, premeditated. Kirilov’s character is based entirely on his strange philosophy of suicide, and his act is merely the perfectly logical extension of his ideas.
Dostoyevsky grasped the madness of reason stubbornly determined to carry its logic through to the end. The terrain Tolstoy explores is the opposite: he uncovers the intrusions of illogic, of the irrational. That is why I mention him. The reference to Tolstoy places Broch in the context of one of the great explorations of the European novel: the exploration of the role the irrational plays in our decisions, in our lives.
Broch shows us that it is the system of con-fusions, the system of symbolic thought, that underlies all behaviour, individual as well as collective. We need only examine our own lives to see how much this irrational system, far more than any reasoned thought, directs our attitudes: a certain man who, with is passion for aquarium fish, evokes some other who in the past cause me some terrible misery will always excite insurmountable mistrust in me . . .
The irrational system rules political life no less: along with the last world was Communist Russia won the way of symbols: it succeeded for at least a half-century in providing the symbols of Good and Evil to the great army of Esches who are as avid for values as they are incapable of discriminating among them.
I also think of those daily slaughters along the highways, of that death that is as horrible as it is banal and that bears no resemblance to cancer or AIDS because, as the work not of nature but of man, it is an almost voluntary death. How can it be that such a death fails to dumbfound us, to turn our lives upside down, to incite us to vast reforms? No, it does not dumbfound us, because like Pasenow, we have a poor sense of the real, and in the sur-real sphere of symbols, this death in the guise of a handsome car actually represents life; this smiling death is con-fused with modernity, freedom, adventure, just as Elisabeth was con-fused with the virgin. The death of a man condemned to capital punishment, though infinitely rarer, much more readily draws our attention, rouses passions: confounded with the image of the executioner as a symbolic voltage that is far stronger, far darker and more repellant. Et cetera.
Man is a child wandering lost— to cite Baudelaire’s poem again— in the “forests of symbols.”
(The criterion of maturity: the ability to resist symbols. But mankind grows younger all the time.)
He also knows that the novel has an extraordinary power of incorporation: whereas neither poetry nor philosophy can incorporate the novel, the novel can incorporate both poetry and philosophy without losing thereby anything of its identity, which is characterised (we need only recall Rabelais and Cervantes) precisely by its tendency to embrace other genres, to absorb philosophical and scientific knowledge. So in Broch’s perspective, the word “polyhistorical” means: marshalling all intellectual means and all poetic forms to illuminate “what only the novel can discover”: man’s being.
In the age of the excessive division of labour, of runaway specialisation, the novel is one of the last outposts where man can still maintain connections with life in its entirety.
C.S..: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is made up of seven parts. If you had treated them less elliptically you could have written seven separate full-length novels.
M.K.: But if I had written seven separate novels, I’d have no hope of “encompassing the complexity of existence in the modern world” in one single book. This is why I see the art of ellipsis as crucial. It insists that we go directly to the heart of things.
Now, since its very beginnings, the novel has always tried to escape the unilinear, to open rifts in the continuous narration of a story. Cervantes tells the story of Don Quixote’s journey, which is quite linear. But as he travels, Quixote meets other characters who tell their own stories. In the first part there are four such. Four rifts that allow us to step outside the novel’s linear framework.
The Possessed. If you analyze that novel from the purely technical viewpoint, you see that it is made up of three lines evolving simultaneously, each of which, if need be, could make an independent novel: (1) the ironic novel of the love between Madame Stavrogin and Stephan Verkhovensky; (2) the romantic novel about Nikolai Stavrogin and his amorous relationships; (3) the political novel about a revolutionary group. Since all the characters know one another, a subtle storytelling technique easily manages to tie the three lines into an indivisible entity.
That ellipsis lightens the structure tremendously. Second, the chronological displacement: The events of Part Six occur after the events of the seventh and last part. Because of that dislocation, the last part, despite its idyllic quality, is flooded with a melancholy that comes from our knowledge of what is to happen.
M.K.: First, one thing is certain: the moment it becomes part of a novel, reflection changes its essence. Outside the novel, we’re in the realm of affirmation: everyone is sure of his statements: the politician, the philosopher, the concierge, within the universe of the novel, however, no one affirms: it is the realm of play and of hypotheses. In the novel, then, reflection is essentially inquiring, hypothetical.
M.K.: Even if I’m the one speaking, my reflections are connected to a character. I want to think his attitudes, his way of seeing things, in his stead and more deeply than he could do it himself.
Is it a novel? Yes, to my mind. The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.
M.K.: I’ve always constructed them on two levels: on the first, I compose the novel’s story; over that, I develop the themes. The themes are worked out steadily within and by the story. Whenever a novel abandons its themes and settles for just telling the story, it goes flat.
M.K.: A theme is an existential inquiry. And increasingly I realize that such an inquiry is, finally, the examination of certain words, theme-words. Which leads me to emphasize: A novel is based primarily on certain fundamental words. It is like Schoenberg’s “tone-row.” In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the “row” goes: forgetting, laughter, angels, litost, border. Over the course of the novel, those five principal words are analyzed, studied, defined, redefined, and thus transformed into categories of existence.
Each character is lighted at a different intensity and in a different way. Lucie, who is one of the most important characters, has no monologue of her own; she is lighted only from the outside by Ludvik’s and Kostka’s. The absence of interior lighting gives her a mysterious, elusive quality. She stands, so to speak, behind the glass; she cannot be touched.
M.K: Another important lesson from music. Like it or not, each passage of musical composition conveys an emotional expression. The sequence of movements in a symphony or a sonata has always been determined by the unwritten rule of alternating slow and fast movements. Those emotional contrasts soon become an oppressive stereotype that only the great masters could overcome (and even they not always).
Not even Beethoven in his Sonata Opus 26 avoids the stereotype— he follows a funeral march (the third movement there too) with a cheerful finale. But the fourth movement in the Chopin sonata is altogether strange: pianissimo, fast and short, with no melody, absolutely unsentimental: a distant gust, a muffled sound that heralds the ultimate forgetting. The juxtaposition of these two movements (sentimental-unsentimental) makes you gasp. It is absolutely original. I mention it to show that to compose a novel is to set different emotional spaces side by side— and that, to me, is the writer’s subtlest craft.
I even used to think that the form that obsessed me was some sort of algebraic definition of my own personality, but one day several years ago, as I was studying Beethoven’s Quartet 131, I had to give up that narcissistic and subjective conception of the form. Look:
First movement: slow; fugue form; approximately 7:30 minutes
Second movement: fast; unclassifiable form; 3:30
Third movement: slow; exposition of a single theme; 1:00
Fourth movement: slow and fast; theme and variations; 14:00
Fifth movement: very fast; scherzo; 5:30
Sixth movement: very slow; exposition of a single theme; 2:00
Seventh movement: fast; sonata form; 6:30Beethoven is perhaps the greatest architect in all of post-Bach music. He inherited the sonata conceived as a cycle of three or four movement, often in rather random sequence, the first of which (written in sonata form) was always more important than the following movements (written in the form of rondo, minuet, and so on)
Yet the early novelists had no such qualms about the improbable. In the first book of Don Quixote, there is an inn someplace in the middle of Spain where by pure happenstance everybody turns up: Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, their friends the barber and the priest, then Cardenio, a young man whose fiancée, Lucinda had been carried off by a certain Don Fernando, and then in comes Don Fernando’s own abandoned fiancée, Dorotea, and later Don Fernando himself with Lucinda, then an officer who has escaped from a Moorish prison, and then his brother who has spent years searching for him, then his daughter Clara, Clara’s lover pursuing her, himself pursued by his father’s men . . . An accumulation of totally improbable coincidences and encounters.
C.S.: So there are two archetype-forms in your noels: (1) polyphonic composition that brings heterogenous elements together within an architecture based on the number seven; (2) farcical, homogenous, theatrical composition that verges on the improbable.
M.K.: I dream constantly of some great unexpected infidelity. But so far I have not managed to break out of my bigamy with those two forms.
Poets don’t invent poems
The poem is somewhere behind
It’s been there for a long time
The poet merely discovers it.—Jan Skacel
The engineer is confronted by a power that has the character of a boundless labyrinth. He can never get to the end of its interminable corridors and will never succeed in finding out who issued the fateful verdict. He is therefore in the same situation as Joseph K. before the Court, or the Land-Surveyor K. before the castle. All three are in a world that is nothing but a single huge labyrinthine institution they cannot escape and cannot understand.
There are tendencies in modern history that produce the Kafkan in the broad social dimension: the progressive concentration of power, tending to deify itself; the bureaucratization of social activity that turns all institutions into boundless labyrinths; and the resulting depersonalization of the individual.
Totalitarian states, as extreme concentrations of these tendencies, have brought out the close relationship between Kafka’s novels and real life. But if in the West people are unable to see this relationship, it is not only because the society we call democratic is less Kafkan than that of today’s Prague. It is also, it seems to me, because over here, the sense of the real is inexorably being lost.
In fact, the society we call democratic is also familiar with the process that bureaucratizes and depersonalizes; the entire planet has become a theatre of this process. Kafka’s novels are an imaginary, oneiric hyperbole of it, a totalitarian state is a prosaic and material hyperbole of it.
But why was Kafka the first novelist to grasp these tendencies, which appeared on history’s stage so clearly and brutally only after his death?
What the Party never managed to do to the mother, the mother had managed to do to her son. She had forced him to identify with an absurd accusation, to “seek his offense,” to make a public confession. I looked on, dumbfounded, at this Stalinist mini-trial, and I understood all at once that the psychological mechanisms that function in great (apparently incredible and inhuman) historical events are the same as those that regulate private (quite ordinary and very human) situations.
In the bureaucratic world of the functionary, first, there is no initiative, no invention, no freedom of action; there are only orders and rules: it is the world of obedience.
Second, the functionary performs a small part of a large administrative activity whose aim and horizons he cannot see: it is the world where actions have become mechanical and people do not know the meaning of what they do.
Third, the functionary deals only with unknown persons and with files: it is the world of the abstract.
To place a novel in this world of obedience, of the mechanical, and of the abstract, where the only human adventure is to move from one office to another, seems to run counter to the very essence of epic poetry.
A totalitarian state is in fact, a single, immense administration: since all work in it is for the state, everyone of every occupation has become an employee. A worker is no longer a worker, a judge no longer a judge, a priest no longer a priest. They are all functionaries of the State. “I belong to the Court,” the priest says to Joseph K. in the Cathedral. In Kafka, the lawyers, too, work for the Court. A citizen in today’s Prague does not find that surprising.
But in that case, what does history (the mutable) represent for the poet?
In the eyes of the poet, strange as it may seem, history is in a position similar to the poet’s own: History does not invent, it discovers. Through new situations, history reveals what man is, what has been in him “for a long time,” what his possibilities are.
If “the poem” is already there, then it would be illogical to impute to the poet the gift of foresight; no, he “only discovers” a human possibility (“the poem” that has been there “a long long time”) that History will in its turn discover one day.
Kafka made no prophecies. All he did was see what was “behind.” He did not know that his seeing was also a fore-seeing.
BORDER. “It takes so little, so infinitely little for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything- love, convictions, faith, history- no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter” (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting).
COLLABORATOR. Historical situations, always new, unveil man’s constant possibilities and allow us to name them. Thus in the course of the war against Nazism, the word “collaboration” took on a new meaning: putting oneself voluntarily at the service of a vile power. What a fundamental notion! How did humanity do without it until 1944? Now that the word has been found, we realize more and more that man’s activity is by nature a collaboration. All those who extol the mass media din, advertising’s imbecilic smile, the neglect of the natural world, indiscretion raised to the status of a virtue- they deserve to be called collaborators with the modern.
A novel is often, it seems to me, nothing but a long quest for some elusive definitions.
My dear Italian publisher, Roberto Calasso, declares: “The mark of a good translation is not its fluency but rather all those unusual and original formulations [“not the way to say it”] that the translator has been bold enough to preserve and defend.” Including unaccustomed punctuation. I once left a publisher for the sole reason that he tried to change my semicolons to periods.
FORGETTING. “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” That remark by Mirek, a character in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, is often cited as the book’s message.
IDEAS. My disgust for those who reduce a work to its ideas. My revulsion at being dragged into what they call “discussions of ideas.” My despair at this era befogged with ideas and indifferent to works.
Inexperience as a quality of the human condition. We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we’ve gained from a previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don’t know what it is we’re heading for: the old are innocent children of their old age. In that sense, man’s world is the planet of inexperience.
And in Farewell Waltz: “Raskolnikov experienced his crime as a tragedy, and eventually he was overwhelmed by the weight of his act. Jakub was amazed that his act was so light, so weightless, amazed that it did not overwhelm him. And he wondered if this lightness was not more terrifying than the Russian character’s hysterical feelings.”
To base a novel on a sustained meditation goes against the spirit of the twentieth century, which no longer likes to think at all.
Diderot was forty-seven when he set up a remarkable hoax that got the Marquis de Croismare to believe that an unhappy young nun was asking to put herself under his protection. Over the course of several months Diderot sent the excited marquis letters signed by a non-existent woman. His novel The Nun was born of that hoax: one more reason to love Diderot and his century. Mystification: the active form of refusing to take the world seriously.
NOVEL. The great prose form in which an author thoroughly explores, by means of experimental selves (characters), some themes of existence.
The novelist makes no great issue of his ideas. He is an explorer feeling his way in an effort to reveal some unknown aspect of existence. He is fascinated not by his voice but by a form he is seeking, and only those forms that meet the demands of his dream become part of his work. Fielding, Sterne, Flaubert, Proust, Faulkner, Céline.
According to a well-known metaphor, the novelist demolishes the house of his life and uses its bricks to construct another house: that of his novel. From which it follows that a novelist’s biographers unmake what the novelist made, and remake what he unmade. Their labor, from the standpoint of art utterly negative, can illuminate neither the value nor the meaning of a novel. The moment Kafka draws more attention than Joseph K., the process of Kafka’s posthumous dying begins.
PSEUDONYM. I dream of a world where writers will be required by law to keep their identities secret and to use pseudonyms. Three advantages: a drastic reduction of graphomania; decreased aggressiveness in literary life; the disappearance of biographical interpretation of works.
Richness of vocabulary is not a value in itself: Hemmingway, it is the limitation of vocabulary, the repetition of the same words in the same paragraph, that makes the melody and the beauty of the style.
TRANSPARENCY. A very common term in political and journalistic discourse in Europe. It means: the exposure of individual lives to public view. Which sends us back to André Breton and his wish to live in a glass house in full view. The glass house: an old utopian idea and at the same time one of the most horrifying aspects of modern life. Axiom: The more opaque the affairs of state, the more transparent an individual’s affairs must be; though it represents a public thing, bureaucracy is anonymous, secret, coded, inscrutable, whereas private man is obliged to reveal his health, his finances, his family situation, and if the mass media so decree, he will never again have a single moment of privacy either in love or in sickness or in death. The urge to violate another’s privacy is an age-old form of aggression that in our day is institutionalized (bureaucracy with its documents, the press with its reporters), justified morally (the right to know having become first among the rights of man), and poeticized (by the lovely French word transparence).
Since Kafka’s time, because of the great systems that quantify and plan life, the uniformization of the world has made enormous advances. But when a phenomenon becomes universal, quotidian, omnipresent, we no longer notice it. In the euphoria of their uni-form lives, people no longer see the uniform they wear.
The novelist is one who, according to Flaubert, seeks to disappear behind his work. To disappear behind his work, that is, to renounce the role of public figure. This is not easy these days, when anything of the slightest importance must step into the intolerable glare of mass media, which, contrary to Flaubert’s remark seems to me a kind of warning: in lending himself to the role of public figure, the novelist endangers his work; it risks being considered a mere appendage to his actions, to his declarations, to his statements of position.
When Tolstoy sketched the first draft of Anna Karenina, Anna was a most unsympathetic woman, and her tragic end was entirely deserved and justified. The final version of the novel is very different, but I do not believe that Tolstoy had revised his moral ideas in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another voice than that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.
Stimulated by that conviction, science energetically explores the why of everything, such that whatever exists seems explainable, thus predictable, calculable. The man who wants his life to have a meaning forgoes any action that hasn’t its cause and purpose. All biographies are written this way. Life is shown as a luminous trajectory of causes, effects, failures, and successes, and man, setting his impatient gaze on the causal chain of his actions, further accelerates his mad race toward death.
Against that reduction of the world to the causal succession of events, Sterne’s novel, by its very form, affirms that poetry lies not in action but there where action stops; there where the bridge between a cause and an effect has collapsed and thought wanders off in sweet lazy liberty. The poetry of existence, says Sterne’s novel, is in digression. It is in the incalculable. It is beyond causality. It is sine ratione, without reason. It is beyond Leibniz’s statement.
But the most shocking, the most scandalous thing about Flaubert’s vision of stupidity is this: Stupidity does not give way to science, technology, modernity, progress; on the contrary, it progresses right along with progress!
Some eighty years after Flaubert imagined his Emma Bovary, during the thirties of our own century, another great novelist, Herman Broch, wrote that however heroically the modern novel may struggle against the tide of kitsch, it ends up being overwhelmed by it. The word “kitsch” describes the attitude of those who want to please the greatest number at any cost. To please, one must confirm what everyone wants to hear, put oneself at the service of received ideas. Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling.
Up until recent times, modernism meant a non-conformist revolt against received ideas and kitsch. Today, modernity is fused with the enormous vitality of the mass media, and to be modern means a strenuous effort to be up-to-date, to conform, to conform even more thoroughly than the most conformist of all. Modernity has put on kitsch’s clothing.