In my ongoing series of comments by writers on writing comes a new essay by Milan Kundera on the uses of the novel. Plausible Story readers will have no trouble guessing why the following caught my attention. (Note that I'm not sure why he uses "problematic" as a noun; perhaps it's a fluke of translation [though no translator is named in this essay], or perhaps I just missed that era of lit-crit jargoneering. In any case, it's not a problem, or a typo.)
Two great stars brightened the sky over the twentieth-century novel: that of surrealism, with its enchanting call for the fusion of dream and reality, and that of existentialism. Kafka died too soon to know their writers and their aesthetic programs. Still, and remarkably, the novels he wrote anticipated the two aesthetic tendencies and—what's more remarkable still—bound the two together, placed them in a single perspective.When Balzac or Flaubert or Proust wants to describe someone's behavior within a specific social milieu, any violation of plausibility is out of place, aesthetically inconsistent, but when the novelist focuses his lens on a problematic that is existential, the obligation to give the reader a plausible world no longer comes into play as rule or necessity. The author can be far more casual about the apparatus of data, descriptions, and motivations meant to give his story the appearance of reality. And, in some borderline cases, he can even find it worthwhile to put his characters in a world that is frankly implausible.
. . . .The more attentively, fixedly, one observes a reality, the better one sees that it does not correspond to people's idea of it; under Kafka's long gaze it is gradually revealed as empty of reason, thus non-reasonable, thus implausible. It is that long avid gaze set on the real world that led Kafka, and other great novelists after him, past the frontier of the plausible.
—Milan Kundera, from "Getting into the Soul of Things," Tin House 30, Winter 2007
If you can get your hands on this essay you should read it. Although he does set up an entire straw man of an argument in defense of the novel's right to inject philosophical treatises into its pages. Somebody must have written a bad review of The Unbearable Lightness of Being long ago.
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