War against artifice

According to American literary critic Harry Levin, the modern novel is born from a war against artifice. The problem is, How is a novelist to create an appearance of life-like realism? The answer, from Cervantes on, is to reject “that air of bookishness in which any book is inevitably wrapped.” By exposing the literary machinery, the novelist attempts to break down the distinction between art and reality.

As Justin Beplate points out in a TLS review of a new collection of essays by Milan Kundera, “There is a strange double-movement at work here.” The novel attempts a “‘repudiation’ of literary artifice,” but this is in fact only a renunciation of “particular formations of literary tradition that no longer answer to the needs of later generations.” In short, “repudiation of artifice is . . . an artful ploy, one that throws up the apparent paradox that the novel’s ambition of ‘getting into the soul of things’ [Flaubert’s phrase] very often proceeds by way of increased contrivance.”

Kundera continues this same tradition, the same fictional war against lyricism and poetic artifice. Kundera continues the war under the cover of a war against kitsch. In a famous passage from The Unbearable Lightness of Being , Kundera writes, “Kitsch cases two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass. It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.” Kundera’s fiction is an effort to penetrate the “rosy veil thrown over reality,” to get behind the curtain.

In modern literature, this veil in rent in several stages. “Cervantes, in breaking decisively with the pretensions of romance, clears the way for a new vision of the prosaic.” Later novelists, including Flaubert, focus on character, and thus offer a psychological realism. But with Kafka comes “the first real break with Flaubertian – ie, psychological – realism and a turn toward what he describes as ‘existential realism,’ the mode that best responds to our experience of an increasingly bureaucratized world, where it is forces exterior to ourselves that most profoundly shape our lives.” Being turned into a giant insect is not realistic in an obvious sense; but it captures the question posed by modern political society: As Beplate frames it, “at what point does an individual relinquish his or her identity when outside forces – whether they be familial or political – demand it?”

Beplate refers to Kundera’s distinction between the Central European horror of kitsch and French modernism, motivated more by horror of vulgarity. Kundera describes how he told a risque story to a group of French intellectuals in an effort to break through an “aura of respectable sadness” and the “lighten an atmosphere weight down by the big words of History” (the latter is Beplate, not Kundera). It didn’t work. The story was rejected as tasteless. Kundera says, “What held us apart was the clash of two aesthetic attitudes: the man allergic to kitsch collides with the man allergic to vulgarity.”

How to evaluate this description of the novel? On the one hand, there is an admirable effort to destroy allusion and look at the world with unblinking honesty. On the other hand, what becomes of beauty, or faith, in the prosaic world of fiction? By Kundera’s standards, can the novelist revel in the beauty of the world without becoming kitschy?