Milan Kundera: The extreme seriousness of the unification problem and the extreme frivolity of form are the aspirations of my life

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This interview is the product of several encounters in Paris and Milan in the autumn of 1983. We met in his penthouse apartment near the Montparnasse district, working in a small room where Kundera used to be his office. The shelves were full of books on philosophy and musicology, with an old-fashioned typewriter and a desk, which looked more like a student dormitory than the study of a world-renowned writer. On one of the walls, two photographs hang side by side: one of his father, a pianist, and the other of Lyoshjanacek, a Czech composer he loved very much.

We had several free and lengthy discussions in French; instead of a tape recorder, we used a typewriter, scissors, and glue. Gradually, in the discarded waste paper, after several modifications, this text surfaced.

Kundera's latest novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Life, was a bestseller as soon as it was published, and this interview takes place shortly after that. The sudden arrival of fame made him uncomfortable; Kundera must have agreed with Malcolm Laurie, "Success is like a terrible disaster, worse than a fire in a man's home." Reputation burned the soul of the family. Once, when I asked the media about some of his novels, he replied, "I only care about my opinions!" ”

Most commentators study writers, preferring to study their personality, political opinions, and private lives, rather than their work. Kundera, who did not want to talk about himself, seemed to be an instinctive reaction to this trend. "Getting bored with having to talk about yourself makes the genius of fiction different from the genius of poetry." Kundera told New Observer magazine.

Therefore, refusing to talk about oneself is a way of putting literary works and forms at the center of attention and focusing on the novel itself. This discussion of creative art is precisely for this purpose.

—Christian Salmon, 1983

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Paris Review: You have said that in modern literature you feel closer to the Viennese writers Robert Muzier and Herman Bloch than to any other writer. Bloch argues that, like you, the age of the psychological novel has come to an end. Instead, he believed in what he called "erudite fiction."

Milan Kundera: Muzier and Bloch attached a great sense of mission to the novel, which they regarded as the highest synthesis of reason, the last treasure where humanity could doubt the world as a whole. They were convinced that the novel had a great combined power, that it could combine poetry, fantasy, philosophy, aphorisms, and prose.

In his letter, Bloch made some far-reaching observations on the subject. However, it seems to me that Bloch has obscured his intentions by mistakenly choosing the term "erudite fiction".

In fact, Bloch's compatriot, Adelbert Stifft, an Austrian prose master, whose 1857 book Little Yang Chun was a truly erudite novel. The novel is famous: Nietzsche considers it one of the four greatest works of German literature.

Today, it is difficult to comprehend because it is full of materials on geology, biology, zoology, handicrafts, the art of painting, and architecture; but this vast, exhilarating encyclopedia actually leaves out the human condition and of human beings themselves.

Precisely because it is erudite, "Little Yang Chun" completely lacks what makes the novel special. This is not the case with Bloch. opposite! He sought to discover "what the novel can discover on its own." The specific object that Bloch likes to call "the study of fiction" is existence. It seems to me that the word "erudition" must be precisely defined as "bringing together every means and every form of knowledge in order to explain existence". Yes, I do have a sense of affinity for such a way.

Paris Review: A long article you published in the magazine New Observer made the French discover Bloch again. You praise him highly, but you are also critical. At the end of the article, you write: "All great works (precisely because they are great) are partially incomplete. ”

Kundera: Bloch is an inspiration to us, not only because he has achieved it, but also because of all those things that he intends to achieve but cannot achieve. It is the incompleteness of his work that helps us understand the need for new art forms, including: first, the radical removal of the essence (in order to capture the complexity of the modern world without losing structural clarity); second, "the melodic fit of the novel" (in order to compose philosophy, narrative, and ideal into the same piece); and third, especially the novel-style essay (in other words, to preserve hypothetical, banter, or irony, rather than conveying an absolutely true message).

Paris Review: These three points seem to permeate your entire artistic plan.

Kundera: To turn a novel into an existential erudition, you must master the technique of omission, or you will fall into a bottomless trap. Muzier's Man Without Personality is one of my favorite two or three books. But don't expect me to love its huge unfinished parts!

Imagine a castle so big that it's incomplete at a glance. Imagine a string quartet lasting nine hours. There is an anthropological limit, such as the limit of memory—the human equilibrium—that should not be breached. When you're done reading, you should still remember the beginning. If not, the novel loses its form, and its "structural clarity" becomes ambiguous.

Paris Review: Laughter and Forgetfulness consists of seven parts. If you hadn't dealt with them in such an omitted way, you might have written seven different, complete novels.

Kundera: But if I wrote seven separate novels, I would lose the most important thing: I would not be able to capture the complexity of human existence in the modern world in a single book. The art of omission is absolutely essential. It requires a person to always go straight to the point. At this point, I always think of a Czech composer I have loved since childhood, Lyoshjanáček.

He was one of the most eminent masters of modern music, and his decision to strip music to the point of essence was revolutionary. Of course, each musical work involves a lot of techniques: the unfolding of themes, their development, their variations, polyphonic effects (often mechanical), filling in instruments, transitions, and so on. Today one can compose music with a computer, and the computer is always in the composer's mind—if necessary, they can write a sonata without an original idea, simply by extending the rules of composition on the computer program.

Yanacek's purpose was to destroy this computer! Brutal juxtaposition, not transition; repetition, not change—and always straight to the point: only those notes that have important words to say have the power to exist. Almost the same is true of the novel, which is dragged down, from "skill", from the rules that complete the work for the author: introducing a character, describing an environment, taking action into its historical context, filling the character's life with useless fragments. Each change of scenery requires a new presentation, description, and explanation. My aim is the same as That of Yanacek: to abandon mechanical fictional techniques and to abandon lengthy and exaggerated fictional texts.

Paris Review: The second art form you mentioned is "the melodic fit of the novel".

Kundera: The idea that fiction is a great synthesis of knowledge almost automatically creates the conundrum of "polyphony." This dilemma still has to be solved. For example, the third part of Bloch's Sleepwalker consists of five confounding elements: first, a "novel" narrative based on three protagonists—Pasna, Ash, and Hugono; second, an anecdote about Hannah Windlin; third, a true description of life in a military hospital; fourth, a narrative of a Salvation Army girl (written in rhymes in part); and fifth, a philosophical essay on the degeneration of values (written in scientific language). Every part is beautiful. Despite the fact that they all deal with simultaneity in an uninterrupted alternation (in other words, in a polyphonic way), the five elements are still separate, that is, they do not constitute a true polyphony.

Paris Review: Applying it to literature by using polyphonic metaphors. In reality, haven't you ever asked for a novel and couldn't do it?

Kundera: Fiction can absorb external elements in two ways. Don Quixote, during his travels, met different people who told him their own stories. In this way, the independent story, inserted into the whole, merges with the framework of the novel. This kind of writing is often found in novels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Kobloch, instead of putting Hannah Windlin's story into the main story of Ash and Hugono, let them unfold simultaneously.

Sartre (in Delay), and his predecessor Dospathos, also used this simultaneous technique. However, their purpose was to blend different novel stories, in other words, homogeneous rather than heterogeneous elements like Bloch.' In addition, their use of this technique gives me the impression of being too mechanical and lacking in poetry. I can't think of a better term than "polyphony" or "melodic fit" to describe this form of writing, and musical analogies are useful.

For example, the first thing that bothers me in the third part of Sleepwalker is that the five elements are not equal. The equality of all voice parts in the melody of the music is a basic procedural rule and a necessary condition. In Bloch's work, the first element (the narrative of the novel by Ash and Hugono) occupies more practical space than the others, and more importantly, it is associated with the first two parts of the novel, enjoys certain privileges, and thus undertakes the task of unifying the novel.

So it attracts more attention and turns other elements into pure decoration. The second thing that bothers me is that, although a Bach poem can be given a voice, Hannah Windlin's story or prose about the degeneration of values can be regarded as outstanding independent works. Viewed individually, they do not lose a single bit of meaning or quality.

In my opinion, the basic conditions for the melody of the novel are: first, the equality of the different elements; second, the indivisibility of the whole. I remember the day I finished the third chapter of "Laughter and Forgetting", "Angels", and I am extremely proud. I'm sure I've found a new way to integrate narratives.

The text consists of the following elements: first, an anecdote and their sublimation of two schoolgirls; second, an autobiographical narrative; third, a critical essay on a feminist book; fourth, a parable about angels and devils; and fifth, a narrative of Paul Arúya's dream of flying through Prague. None of these elements can still exist apart from the others, and each explains the others, as if they were all exploring the same subject, asking the same question: "What is an angel?"

The sixth chapter, also called Angels, consists of: first, a narrative of a dream of Tamina's death; second, an autobiographical account of my father's death; third, a reflection on musicology; fourth, a reflection on amnesia, which was widely prevalent in Prague; and what is the connection between my father and Tamina's torture by the children? To borrow the famous imagery of Lautreamon, it is "a sewing machine and an umbrella" "a chance encounter" on the dissection table of the same theme. The polyphony of fiction is more poetic than technical. I can't find any other example in literature that has such a polyphonic poetic, but I was amazed by Alen Renai's latest film, whose use of melodic and artistic use is amazing.

Paris Review: The melodic fit is not so obvious in The Unbearable Lightness of Life.

Kundera: That's my goal. There, I wanted to dream, narrate, and think about a river of invisible, completely natural water. But the polyphonic character of the novel is evident in part VI: the story of Stalin's son, theological reflections, a political event in Asia, Franz's death in Bangkok, Thomas's funeral in Bohemia, all connected by the same eternal question—"What is kitsch?" This polyphonic passage is the backbone that underpins the structure of the novel as a whole, and is the key to unlocking the secrets of the novel's structure.

Paris Review: By summoning "an essay of particularly fictional style", you express several reservations about the depraved prose that appears in Sleepwalker.

Kundera: That's a very nice essay!

Paris Review: You had doubts about the way it became part of the novel. Bloch did not abandon any of his scientific language, and he expressed his views in a straightforward way, rather than hiding behind one of his roles—as Mann or Muzil would have done. Isn't that Bloch's real contribution, his new challenge?

Kundera: Indeed, he knows his guts very well. But there is also a risk: his prose will be seen, understood as the key to the novel's ideology, as its "truth," which will turn the rest of the novel into a pure illustration of thought. Then the balance of the novel is disturbed; the truth of the prose becomes too heavy, and the delicate structure of the novel is in danger of being destroyed.

A novel with no intention of dealing with a philosophical thesis (Bloch hated that kind of novel!). It may end up being interpreted in the same way. How does one combine an essay into a human novel? One basic principle is important in the mind: once thinking is incorporated into the body of the novel, the essence changes.

Outside the novel, one is placed in a vibrant kingdom: every philosopher, politician, janitor, is convinced of his own words. But the novel is a territory where no one asserts; it is a land of entertainment and fiction. Thinking in fiction is assumed, which is determined by its nature.

Paris Review: But why would a novelist, in his novel, want to deprive himself of the right to express philosophical views openly and arbitrarily?

Kundera: Because he didn't! People often discuss Chekhov's philosophy, or Kafka's, or Muzir's, but only to find a coherent philosophy in their writing! They express their opinions in notes that develop into intellectual exercises, playing with paradoxes, or improvisations, rather than a philosophical assertion. Philosophers who write novels are but pseudo-novelists who use the form of novels to articulate their views.

Neither Voltaire nor Camus knew "what the novel itself can recognize." I know only one exception: Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist. What a miracle this is! Crossing the boundaries of the novel, the serious philosopher becomes a playful thinker. There is not a single serious word in the novel — it's ridiculous from head to toe.

That's why the book is so lowly rated in France that it's frightening. In fact, everything that France lost and refused to regain was included in Jacques the Fatalist. In France, there is more emphasis on ideas than works. Jacques the Fatalist cannot be transformed into the language of thought, and therefore cannot be understood by the birthplace of thought.

Paris Review: In Jokes, it was Yaroslav who developed a musical principle, and the presumptive character of his thinking is thus evident. But the musical reflections in Laughter and Forgetfulness are the author's and yours. So should I think they are hypothetical or positive?

Kundera: It's all about the tone. From the earliest writings, I intended to give these reflections a tone of playfulness, sarcasm, provocation, experimentation, or skepticism. The entire sixth part of The Unbearable Lightness of Life (The Great March) is an essay on kitsch, dealing with a major thesis: kitsch is the complete denial of worthless existence.

This kind of thinking about kitsch is crucial to me. It is built on a lot of thinking, practice, research, and even passion. But the tone is never serious; it is picky. This essay is unthinkable outside the novel, it is a pure fictional reflection.

Paris Review: The polyphony of your novel also contains another element, namely the narrative of dreams. It occupies the entire second part of "Living Elsewhere", it is the basis of the sixth part of "Laughter and Forgetting", and through Teresa's dream, it runs through "The Unbearable Lightness of Life".

Kundera: These chapters are also the most misunderstood, because people try to find some symbolic information in them. There was nothing to decipher in Teresa's dream. They are poems about death. Their significance lies in their beauty, which fascinates Teresa. By the way, do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka just because they don't want to decipher him? Instead of obsessing themselves with Kafka's unparalleled imagination, they search for allegories and come to the conclusion that there is nothing but clichés: that life is absurd (or that it is not absurd), that God is untouchable (or touchable), and so on.

You don't understand anything about art, especially modern art, and if you can't understand that imagination is valuable in itself. Novalis knew this when he appreciated the dream. "Dreams keep us away from the tastelessness of life," he says, "and the joy of playing with them frees us from seriousness." He was the first to recognize the role that dreams and dreamlike imaginations could play in fiction. He planned to write the second volume of his Heinrich von Oftdingen into a narrative in which dreams and reality were so entangled that they could no longer be distinguished.

Unfortunately, the second volume leaves only annotations, in which Novalis describes his aesthetic intentions. A hundred years later, his ambition was fulfilled by Kafka. Kafka's novels are a fusion of dreams and reality; i.e., they are neither dreams nor reality. Most importantly, Kafka caused an aesthetic revolution. An aesthetic spectacle.

Of course, no one can repeat what he has done. But I shared with him, with Novalis, this desire to bring dreams, the imagination of dreams, into fiction. I do this by polyphonic confrontation, not through a fusion of dream and reality. The narration of dreams is one of the foundations of melodic coordination.

Paris Review: The last chapter of Laughter and Forgetting is not polyphonic, but it may be the most interesting part of the book. It consists of fourteen verses that recount a man, Jan, an erotic moment in his life.

Kundera: Another musical term: this narrative is a kind of "variation of the subject." The theme is the boundary, and things lose their meaning when they cross the boundary. Our lives unfold closest to that boundary, and we risk crossing it at any time. Verse fourteen are fourteen variations of the same circumstance—eroticism above the boundary between intentional and unintentional.

Paris Review: You described Laughter as a "variation novel", but is it still a novel?

Kundera: There is no plot unity, which is why it doesn't look like a novel. One cannot imagine a novel without that unity. Even the experiments of the "new novel" are based on the unity of plot (or non-plot). Stern and Diderot were happy to make unity extremely fragile. Jacques and his master's journey takes up less space in Jacques the Fatalist; it is nothing more than a comedic pretext for anecdotes, stories, and reflections.

Nevertheless, for the novel to have a novel feel, this pretext, this "framework", is necessary. There is no longer any such excuse in "Laughter and Forgetting", but the unity of themes and their changes give coherence to the whole. Is it a novel? yes. A novel is a reflection on existence through fictional characters. Form is infinite freedom. Throughout the history of the novel, it has never known how to exploit its endless possibilities; it has missed an opportunity.

Paris Review: But with the exception of Laughter and Forgetting, your novels are also based on the unity of the plot, although The Unbearable Lightness of Life is indeed a looser category.

Kundera: Yes, but other, more important ways of unification complete them: the unity of the same metaphysical problems, the unity of the same central ideas, and the unity of the central idea of the patriarchy in Farewell. But I would like to emphasize in particular that the novel is first and foremost based on many basic words, like Schoenberg's twelve-tone column. In Laughter and Forgetting, the words are listed as follows: forgetting, laughter, angels, "Li desit", boundaries. In the process of advancing the novel, these five keywords are analyzed, studied, defined, and redefined, and thus transformed into categories of existence.

The novel is built on these categories, like a house built on its beams. The beams of The Unbearable Lightness of Life are: Heaviness, Lightness, Spirit, Flesh, Great March,, Kitsch, Enthusiasm, Vertigo, Strength, and Weakness. Because of their clear characteristics, these words cannot be replaced by synonyms. This always has to be explained over and over again to translators who—out of consideration for a "beautiful style"—try to avoid repetition.

Paris Review: With regard to structural clarity, I was very impressed that all your novels, all but one, are divided into seven chapters.

Kundera: When I finished my first novel, Jokes, it had seven chapters, which was no surprise. Then I wrote Living Elsewhere. When the novel was about to be completed with six chapters, I felt unsatisfied, and suddenly I had an idea to include a story that took place three years after the hero's death—that is, outside the time frame of the novel.

Now this is the sixth of the seven chapters of the novel, called "Middle-Aged Man." The structure of the novel suddenly became perfect. Later, I realized that this sixth chapter was strangely similar to the sixth chapter of Joke (Kostka). "Ke" also introduces an outsider character and opens a secret window on the wall of the novel academy. Funny Love started out as ten short stories and together became the final version, and I deleted three of them.

The collection became very coherent, foreshadowing the writing of Laughter and Forgetting. There is a character, Dr. Harwell, who connects the fourth and sixth stories. In Laughter and Forgetting, chapters four and six are also connected by one character: Tamina. When I wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Life, I decided to break the spell of the number seven. I had been determined to use a six-chapter outline for some time, but the first chapter always made me feel out of shape, and finally I found that it was actually made up of two parts.

Like conjoined twins, they need to be separated from each other by precise surgery. The only reason I say this is to show that I am not addicted to certain superstitious mannerisms related to magical numbers, nor do I do a rational calculation. Rather, it was driven by a deep, subconscious, incomprehensible need, a formal archetype from which I could not escape. All of my novels are variants based on the structure of the number seven.

Paris Review: You want to synthesize the most heterogeneous elements into a unified whole, using seven neatly divided chapters, of course related to this goal. Each part of your novel is always self-contained, and because of its own special form, one is very different from the other. But if the novel is divided into a limited number of chapters, why are these chapters divided into a limited number of sections?

Kundera: The knots themselves must create a small world of their own; they must be relatively independent. That's why I've been pestering my publishers to make sure those numbers are clearly visible and clearly distinguished from section to section. The festival is like the beat of the sheet music! Some chapter beats (knots) are long, others are short, and some are of irregular length.

Each chapter has an indication of the speed of the music: medium speed, rapid board, row board, and so on. The sixth chapter of "Living Elsewhere" is a board: in a calm, melancholy way, about a middle-aged man meeting a young woman who has just been released from prison. The final chapter is Speed: consisting of very short knots, jumping from the dying Jeromir to Rimbaud, Lermontov, and Pushkin. I started thinking about "The Unbearable Lightness of Life" in a musical way.

I know that the last chapter must be extremely weak and slow: it focuses on a relatively short, mundane period of time, in a single place, and the tone is calm. I also know that this section must have an extremely quick foreword, which is the chapter of The Great March.

Paris Review: There is one exception to the rule of the number seven, and the Farewell Round Dance has only five chapters.

Kundera: The Farewell Round Dance is based on another typical form: it is a complete homology, dealing with a theme, narrating at a speed; it is very dramatic, formatted, and takes its form from farce. In Funny Love, the story called "Symposium" is also constructed in exactly the same way—a five-act farce.

Paris Review: What do you mean by farce?

Kundera: I mean emphasizing the plot, emphasizing all its unexpected and untrustworthy coincidences. There is nothing more suspicious, ridiculous, clichéd, stale and tasteless than the plot of a novel and its farcical exaggeration. Since Flaubert, novelists have tried to remove the plot. As a result, the novel becomes even more dull than the most dull life.

But there is another way to avoid suspicion, to avoid irreplaceable plots, and that is to liberate it from the demand for possibility. You tell an unlikely story, a story that voluntary choice becomes unlikely! That's exactly how Kafka conceived of America.

In the first chapter, When Karl meets his uncle through a series of the most unlikely coincidences, Kafka enters his original "surreal" world through the gates of farce, into his original "fusion of dreams and reality."

Paris Review: But why did you choose the form of farce for the novel without entertainment at all?

Kundera: But it's a form of entertainment! I don't understand the French's contempt for entertainment and why they are so ashamed of the word "pastime". Fun is less risky than boring. They run the risk of falling into kitsch, those sweet, lying decorations of things, soaked in a rose-colored halo, even in works of such modernism, such as Elujah's poems, or Itosgora's recent film The Ball (which can be subtitled "The History of French Kitsch").

Yes, kitsch, not entertainment, is a real aesthetic disaster! The great European novel began with entertainment, and every true novelist misses it. In fact, the subjects of great entertainment are very serious – think Cervantes! In Farewell to the Round Dance, the question is, is humanity worth living on this planet? Shouldn't there be someone who "helped the earth escape the clutches of mankind"? My lifelong desire is to unify the extreme seriousness of the problem with the extreme frivolity of form.

It's not a purely artistic craving. A frivolous form, and a serious subject, the combination of the two at once exposes the truth to our dramas—those that take place between our beds, and also on the great stages of history, and their terrible meaninglessness. We have experienced an unbearable lightness of life.

Paris Review: So you can also name Farewell to the Round Dance after one of your most recent novels?

Kundera: Every novel of mine can be called The Unbearable Lightness of Life or Joke or Funny Love; the names are interchangeable, and they reflect a small number of themes that haunt me, define me, and limit me. Outside of these topics, I have nothing to say or write about.

Paris Review: There are two typical types of writing in your novels: first, polyphony, which unifies outlier elements into the structure of the number seven; and second, farce, homogeneous, dramatic, eschewing impossibleness. In addition to these two models, will there be another Kundera?

Kundera: I always dream of some wonderful accidental infidelity, but I haven't been able to escape from my state of bigamy.

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