Master and the Middle

[This essay is about Milan Kundera’s book ‘The Art of the Novel’. It is not a book review, however. In an imaginary universe where I  would have  the privilege of writing a foreword for that book, this essay would be my submission.]

I like having a bookshelf. It allows you to revisit a book from the past, whether it’s one you really enjoyed; or one you did not finish or abandoned for one reason or another. While revisiting, sometimes you flip to a passage you remember fondly to rekindle the joy you felt the first time round; sometimes, while looking for one thing, you find something else that escaped your attention in the past and end up discovering some new facet or a new passage that you enjoy. And sometimes, you give a discarded book another go, to see if this time you will get into it, like it, understand it.

This quality of bookshelves proved to be particularly fruitful for me one night this past spring. I woke up in the middle of the night and could not fall back asleep. I tossed and turned trying to find that elusive sleep but instead my mind kept wandering. After a while, I turned on the bedside lamp, went to the bathroom, and on the way back to bed, I picked out Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel from my bookshelf. I had bought and tried to read this book back in December in Kathmandu and I just could not engage with it at all. I fiddled with it a few times, starting from the beginning, trying some passage in the middle. There was just no spark. In picking out this book, I was partly thinking, yes, this should put me back to sleep easily, I remember finding this boring and not liking it at all. But, no, that night instead of sleep, I found something else that was even more joyful. In the dim light of the nightstand, Kundera’s prose sparkled, his thoughts seemed to radiate and illuminate my mind at that hour. I happily gave up trying to go back to sleep. I finished one essay and devoured a few more in quick succession. As the dawn broke, I thought, wow, this is one of the best things I have read recently.

The book is a collection of essays by Kundera, written at various points in his literary career. As the title suggests, the essays revolve around his reflections on the art of writing, his thoughts about the evolution of the novel as an art from in European civilization over the last few centuries. I think the reason I was so enamored with this book that particular night was because of this essay in there called Somewhere Behind, which is where I started that night. For me, that essay , more than anything I had ever read before, articulated why Franz Kafka was able to produce such scintillating works that were funny, absurd, paradoxical, which also elevated into the realms of theological. That essay expressed thoughts that were buried maybe somewhere deep within me, not fully formed, which I neither had the depth of knowledge nor the gift of words to articulate.

I do not pretend to be an expert on European literature. But the little that I do know tells me that Kafka is a seminal giant of Western literature, whose works shine as brightly today as they did a hundred years ago. Thanks to his sheer brilliance as a writer, he is widely read, and even more widely discussed, analyzed, critiqued. What does Gregor Samsa waking up metamorphosed into a beetle one morning tell us about his psychological state and his relationship with his family? Was his family immoral and cruel to throw him out like garbage in the end? In The Trial, was Joseph K innocent or guilty of the crime that neither he knows about nor us the readers? A longstanding puzzle in my mind had been how Kafka was able to produce works such as The Trial and The Castle, which seemed to foretell the totalitarian societies that emerged in Europe in the decades after his death. Was he a prophetic writer who understood the direction of history and society because he was devoted to finding that direction?

Broadly speaking, Kundera’s explanation for this question is slightly paradoxical, Kakaesque if you will. He posits that Kafka’s works achieved this prophetic quality mainly because he was not trying to be prophetic and comment on the direction of history. As a writer, as an artist, Kafka’s sole devotion was to exploring the depths of his characters and society, to creating original images and stories that vividly depicted absurdities, paradoxes that his characters encountered in their private lives, in the institutions of family, of an office, of the judicial system. It is precisely because he stayed true to that pursuit only, his works achieved a quality that elevated them to a rarefied level, wherefrom they shed light on the confusion and helplessness that labyrinthine social institutions had created for the modern man. In the end, his works wound up speaking to the historical arc of society and politics much better than other writers whose focus was not on the art of writing itself but sociopolitical commentary and prediction of the direction of history.

Besides that essay, there are several other gems in the book. The first essay, The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes is also particularly enjoyable. It details the broad evolution of novel as an art form alongside that of European civilization, from dethronement of God by Science by Man; followed by dethroning of Man by the Machine and Bureaucracy. In his essays, Kundera warns against over analysis, hasty judgments and arbitration of works of art through a moral scale used in everyday life. Sometimes such analyses detract from the pleasure and enjoyment that works of literature are valuable for. It also reminds me of an essay by Herman Hesse that I read many years ago in which he replies to a letter that he received from one of his readers asking him how best to understand and interpret Kafka. Hesse’s response to the reader, to paraphrase, was along the lines dear reader, you have the key to a door, but you are analyzing the key and the door too much, just go in. Explore and enjoy for yourself. So it would be ironic to bore you more with my own thoughts and analyses of Kundera’s essays. I have a feeling that if you read this essay thus far, you will enjoy the book. I hope you discover for yourself. And if you don’t like it at first attempt, may be bury it somewhere in your shelf and it will strike a chord at some future date. I still have not read a couple of the essays there, I hope to revisit them maybe on another sleepless night.