On the Purpose of Novels

You know you’re headed on the right path when your interview with Milan Kundera starts out by declaring the psychological novel dead. And then you get

Broch is an inspiration to us not only because of what he accomplished, but also because of all that he aimed at and could not attain. The very incompleteness of his work can help us understand the need for new art forms, including: (1) a radical stripping away of unessentials (in order to capture the complexity of existence in the modern world without a loss of architectonic clarity); (2) “novelistic counterpoint” (to unite philosophy, narrative, and dream into a single music); (3) the specifically novelistic essay (in other words, instead of claiming to convey some apodictic message, remaining hypothetical, playful, or ironic).

I think this vision of the novel quite a bit, and it was more or less in this spirit that I interpreted David Shields’ call in Reality Hunger.

The full interview is fairly interesting, although Kundera does run roughshod over the poor interviewer, and there are a few exceedingly naive questions, such as, “But why would a novelist want to deprive himself of the right to express his philosophy overtly and assertively in his novel?”

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