The depreciated legacy of Cervantes
At the beginning of the despised legacy of Cervantes, the author assumes that the entire history of Europe up to America has plunged into a crisis with the development of science and technology.
As a Kundera novelist says, the founder of Modern Europe is Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote.
European novelists focus on various themes. With Cervantes it was an adventure. With Balzac it was the roots of man in History. With Flaubert it was the unknown of the day. With Tolstoy it was an intrusion into the irrationality of human behavior.
The theme of the European Novel lies in the passion to know what the concrete character of life is.
The novel began to have its own phases of life that denied Nietzsche’s theme: Death of God. With Cervantes, the truth was baptized as a dead fossil and a plethora of truths emerged; the character became an imaginary self. The knowledge of good and evil acquires a relativistic character, of ambiguity. Kundera quotes Kafka’s novel The Trial, where an innocent man K becomes the victim of an unjust court.
Don Quixote is a novel where time appears as a juxtaposition between magic and reality. The perspective of time changes when History enters the realm of being. With the arrival of Balzac, the institutions of society such as money, crime, the police, and law and order enter into epic proportions in the novel.
The modern novel is a paradox in which the characters have the flavor of disaster, but there is the triumph of the character.
Although modern Europe characterizes the emergence of rationality, the identity of the self is broken. Europe is entangled in the horror of war. Fate, purposelessness, and anguish take over the character’s life. Values break. There is so much bigotry and bigotry.
The novel becomes a paradoxical enterprise. The author comments on the death of the Novel by the Dadaists and the Surrealists. It paints a bleak picture of the novel in communist totalitarian societies. The novel during the communist regime had to face censorship and prohibitions.
Milan Kundera classifies the novel into four categorical themes: the appeal of play, the appeal of dreams, the appeal of thought, and the appeal of time.
Now, what is the appeal of the game? Do you mean that the novel is a fanciful undertaking? Let’s look at the appeal of the game from the perspective of postmodernism. The postmodern novel is an invasion of character. The texts are a collection of metaphors. There is a tendency to import extreme irony and parody. There is also an inherent tendency to satirize the novels of the past and write in the style of the pastiche.
Now let’s look at the appeal of thought. The author wants to mention that the novel acquires a texture of philosophical entity. The interiority of time becomes a higher plane of thought. An example of the appeal of thought is found in Joyce’s streams of consciousness.
What is the appeal of the dream? The lure of the dream is a juxtaposition of dream and reality. Bach recites magical realism and makes electric sandwiches. The dream allows the manifestation of the unconscious.
What is the attraction of time? Time is paradoxically situated in the interior. Time becomes a vast enigma of irrationality, an oasis of intimacy, narcissism of the soul, an eclectic riot of the mind.
Here the author comments on the search for the novel. The novel points out how elusive the truth is.
Dialogue on the art of the novel
Here Kundera says that his novel is not an opinion of psychological aesthetics. I would like to discuss with him on this point. Aesthetics is the futurism of the novel, the avant-garde novel of writing. The novel should resemble Picasso’s Cubist work, an explanation of Camus’s philosophical work: The Myth of Sisyphus, a piece of Baroque music.
Looking at the novel from a psychological framework we have to face the futility of existential destiny. Disaster marks the triumph of individuality. There will be a tendency for the novel to exorcise the demons of disaster and subvert the identity of the character in a pathos of sympathetic irony.
In the passage, Kundera questions the novel’s ability to capture the self. For Sartre, the self is an entity out of nothing. Postmodernism wishes to subvert the self. It gratifies the ID, deifies the Ego and subverts the Super Ego.
During the time of Cervantes, the self was deconstructed through the piety of chivalry. In Kafka we see the disintegration of the self. The self becomes the victim of tyrannical bureaucratic buildings. In Joyce, the self swims in a sea of streams of consciousness.
The author builds dialogues about the self and History. The self in the novel is a form of revelation. The self is a confessional symptom. The self is an art of lyrical intimacy.
A novelist cannot escape the universal nature of history. The story told in the novel consists of bringing out the voices of dissent and the scent of depression. History suffers from the subjectivity of castrated characterization.
The writer classifies the novel as one of polyhistoric luminosity. What does the term polyhistoric mean? It includes the fusion of various themes in the novel such as art, aphorism, tropes, a pathological characterization of the self.
Dialogue on the art of composition
Here he writes the term Kafkan after Kafka. Use an example to illustrate the term. An engineer from a communist country goes to London and returns to find that the press has slandered him saying that he has spoken ill of the country. He approaches the editor who says he got the story from the home office and when he goes to the home office they apologize saying it was a mistake. The author describes the conflict between the personal and the public as the Kafkan. ‘
The last section of the book is a compilation of a dictionary of terms that he has used for his novels.
Aphorism
The aphorism is very clear and means a concise statement.
Beauty and knowledge
What is the beautiful term in the novel? For Cervantes it was an adventure. For Kafka it was existential anguish, a protest against totalitarian bureaucracies. For Joyce it was the search for art in worldly experiences. What is knowledge? Kundera does not offer a satisfactory explanation for this.
Treason
Describe betrayal as a way to break ranks. The notion of betrayal poses a problem in the novel. Let me illustrate with an example. Judas betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silver. Why did the need to point to Christ arise since he was a popular figure? The problem of betrayal in the novel is problematic.
Border
The border is signified in emotional terms: like hate, love and anguish. The edge in a novel does not have a definable limit.
comic
For the novelist, the comic is not what makes us laugh, but a revelation of the unknown.
destination
Destiny is the conflict of the self. Destiny is absurd and we have to creatively authenticate a destiny.
Excitement
The excitement for the author is erotic.
To forget
Forget is a term used to remember a situation in ironic terms.
Dream
Dream lies in exploiting the ID to create strange enigmatic phantasmagoria.
Irony
The irony for the author is a building of character. Makes the character distressed. As a novelistic technique, irony is sublime in literature.
Kitsch
Kitsch for the author is a sentimental defect. Kitsch is a term where feeling, vulgar and offensive, melodiously gratifies itself in narcissism.
