The depreciated legacy of Cervantes
At the beginning of the depreciated legacy of Cervantes, the author assumes that the entire history of Europe to America has entered into crisis with the development of science and technology.
As a novelist, Kundera affirms that the founder of Modern Europe is Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote.
European novelists focus on various themes. With Cervantes it was adventure. With Balzac was the roots of man in history. With Flaubert it was the unknown of the day. With Tolstoy it was about intrusions into the irrationality of human behavior.
The theme of the European novel lay in the passion to know what the concrete character of life is.
The novel began to have its own phases of life that reneged on Nietzsche’s theme: The 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 cites Kafka’s novel, The Trial, where an innocent K becomes the victim of an unjust court.
Don Quixote is a novel where time exists 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 take on epic proportions in the novel.
The modern novel is a paradox in which the characters have the taste of disaster and yet there is the character’s triumph.
Although modern Europe characterizes the rise of rationality, the identity of the self is broken. Europe is entangled in the horror of war. Fate, lack of purpose and anguish take over the character’s life. values are broken. There is a lot of intolerance and fanaticism.
The novel becomes a paradoxical undertaking. The author comments on the death of the Novel by the Dadaists and Surrealists. He paints a bleak picture of the novel in totalitarian communist societies. The novel during the communist regime had to face censorship and prohibitions.
Milan Kundera classifies the novel into four categorical themes: the lure of play, the lure of dreams, the lure of thought, and the lure of time.
Now, what is the appeal of the game? Do you mean to say that the novel is a fantasy enterprise? Let’s look at the appeal of the game from the perspective of postmodernism. The postmodern novel is an invasion of characters. Texts are a collection of metaphors. There is a tendency to import extreme irony and parody. There is also an inherent tendency to lampoon the novels of the past and to write in the style of pastiche.
Now let’s see the attractiveness 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 attraction of the dream? Dream lure is a juxtaposition of dream and reality. Bach recites magical realism and mouth electric sandwiches. The dream allows the manifestation of the unconscious.
What is the attraction of time? Time is paradoxically situated in interiority. 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 to the elusiveness of truth.
Dialogue on the art of the novel
Here Kundera discusses that his novel is not a dictum 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 be a resemblance to the cubist work of Picasso, an explanation of the philosophical work of Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus, a piece of baroque music.
Looking at the novel from a psychological framework we have to confront 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 character’s identity 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. Gratify the DI, deify the Ego and subvert the Super Ego.
In the time of Cervantes the self of chivalric piety is deconstructed. In Kafka we see the disintegration of the self. The self becomes a 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 is one of bringing out the voices of dissidence and the scent of depression. The story suffers from the subjectivity of castrated characterization.
The writer classifies the novel as one of polyhistorical luminosity. What does the term polyhistorical 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 that he got the story from the Home Office and when he goes to the Home Office, they apologize saying it was a mistake. The conflict between the personal and the public is described by the author as Kafkaesque. ‘
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 term beautiful in the novel? For Cervantes it was the adventure. For Kafka it was existential angst, a protest against totalitarian bureaucracies. For Joyce it was the search for art in mundane experiences. What is knowledge? Kundera does not provide a satisfactory explanation in this regard.
Treason
He describes the betrayal as a breaking of ranks. The notion of betrayal poses a problem in the novel. Let me illustrate by giving an example. Judas betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silver. Why did the need arise to point to Christ being a popular figure? The problem of betrayal in the novel is problematic.
Edge
The border is represented with emotional terms: like hate, love and anguish. The border in a novel does not have a definable limit.
comic
The comic for the novelist is not what makes us laugh but a revelation of the unknown.
destiny
Fate is the conflict of the self. Destiny is absurd and we have to creatively authenticate a destiny.
Excitement
The arousal for the author is erotic.
forgetting
Forgetting is a term used to bring to mind a situation in ironic terms.
sleep
The dream consists of exploiting the DI to create strange enigmatic phantasmagorias.
Ironically
Irony for the author is character building. It makes the character anxious. As a novelistic technique, irony is sublime in literature.
kitsch
Kitsch for the author is a sentimental defect. Kitsch is a term where sentiment, vulgar and offensive, is melodiously gratified in narcissism.