lyrical blindness in a time of Terror, which for me was the period when 'the poet reigned along with the executioner' (Life Is Elsewhere). I would think about Mayakovsky then; his genius was as indispensable to the Russian Revolution as Dzherzhinsky's police. Lyricism, lyricization, lyrical talk, lyrical enthusiasm are an integrating part of what is called the totalitarian world; that world is not the gulag as such; it's a gulag that has poems plastering its outside walls and people dancing before them.
More than the Terror, the lyricization of the Terror was a trauma for me. It immunized me for good against all lyrical temptations. The only thing I deeply, avidly, wanted was a lucid, unillusioned eye. I finally found it in the art of the novel. This is why for me being a novelist was more than just working in one 'literary genre' rather than another; it was an outlook, a wisdom, a position; a position that would rule out identification with any politics, any religion, any ideology, any moral doctrine, any group; a considered, stubborn, furious nonidentification, conceived not as evasion or passivity but as resistance, defiance, rebellion. I wound up having some odd conversations: 'Are you a Communist, Mr. Kundera?' 'No, I'm a novelist.' 'Are you a dissident?' 'No, I'm a novelist.' 'Are you on the left or the right?' 'Neither. I'm a novelist.' Since early youth, I have been in love with modern art-with its painting, its music, its poetry. But. modern art was marked by its 'lyrical spirit,' by its illusions of progress, its ideology of the double revolution, aesthetic and political, and little by little, I took a dislike to all that. Yet my skepticism about the spirit of the avant-garde never managed to affect in the slightest mv love for the works of modern art. I loved them, and I loved them all the more for being the first victims of Stalinist persecution; in The Joke., Cenek is sent to a disciplinary regiment because he loves cubist painting; that's how it was then: the Revolution had decided that modern art was its ideological Enemy Number One even though the poor modernists wanted only to sing its praises; I'll never forget Konstantin Biebl: an exquisite poet (ah, how many of his lines I knew by heart!) who, as an enthusiastic Communist, after 1948 took to writing propaganda poetry of a mediocrity as alarming as it was heartbreaking; shortly thereafter, he threw himself from a window onto a Prague pavement and died; in this subtle being, I saw modern art betrayed, cuckolded, martyred, assassinated, self-destroyed.
My allegiance to modern art was thus as much a passion as my love for the antilyricism of the novel. The poetic values dear to Breton, dear to all modern art (intensity, density, the unbound imagination, scorn for 'the null moments of life'), I went seeking only in the unillusioned territory of the novel. But that made them all the more important to me. Which may explain why I was particularly allergic to the kind of boredom that irritated Debussy when he listened to the symphonies of Brahms or Tchaikovsky; allergic to the rustle of spiders hard at work. Which may explain why I long remained deaf to Balzac's art and why the novelist I particularly adored was Rabelais.
The dichotomy between themes and bridges, between foreground and background, is unknown to Rabelais. He moves nimbly from a grave topic to a list of the methods the little Gargantua invented for wiping his ass, and yet, aesthetically, all these elements, frivolous or grave, have equal importance in his work, give me equal pleasure. That is what delighted me about him and about other early novelists: they talk about what fascinates them and they stop when the fascination stops. Their freedom of composition set me dreaming: of writing without fabricating suspense, without constructing a plot and working up its plausibility, of
writing without describing a period, a milieu, a city; of abandoning all that and holding on to only the essential; that is to say: creating a work in which the bridges and the filler have no reason to be and in which the novelist would never be forced-for the sake of form and its dictates-to stray by even a single line from what he cares about, what fascinates him.
Modern art: a revolt against the imitation of reality, in the name of the autonomous laws of art. One of the first practical requirements of this autonomy: that all the moments, all the particles of a work have equal aesthetic importance.
Impressionism: landscape conceived simply as an optical phenomenon, so that a man in it has no greater value than a bush. The cubist and abstract painters went still further by eliminating the third dimension, which, inevitably, divided a painting into planes of varying importance.
In music, the same trend toward aesthetic equality of all moments of a composition: Satie, whose simplicity is simply a provocative rejection of inherited musical rhetoric. Debussy, the enchanter, the persecutor of erudite spiders. Janacek doing away with every note that is not indispensable. Stravinsky, who turns away from the Romantic and Classical heritage and seeks his models among the masters of the first half of music history. Webern, who returns to a monothematicism of his own (a twelve-tone one, that is) and achieves a spareness that no one before him could imagine.
And the novel: the questioning of Balzac's famous motto 'the novel must compete with the etat civil' (the state registry of citizens); this questioning is nothing like the bravado of avant-gardists parading their mod-ernness to make it visible to fools; it simply (discreetly) renders pointless (or almost pointless, optional, unimportant) the apparatus for fabricating the illusion of reality. In this regard, a small observation:
If a character is to 'compete with the etat civil' he must start by having a real name. From Balzac to Proust, a character without a name is unthinkable. But Diderot's Jacques has no patronymic and his master has neither first nor family name. Panurge-is that a first or a family name? First names without family names, family names without first names, are not names but signs. The protagonist of The Trial is not a Josef Kaufmann or Krammer or Kohl, but Josef K. The one in The Castle loses even his first name and has to make do with just a letter. Broch's The Guiltless: one of the protagonists is designated by the letter A. In The Sleepwalkers^ Esch and Huguenau have no first names. Ulrich, the protagonist of The Man Without Qualities, has no family name. Already in my early stories, by instinct, I avoided naming the characters. In Life Is Elsewhere., the hero has only a first name, his mother is known only by the term 'Maman,' his girlfriend as 'the redhead,' and her lover as 'the middle-aged man.' Was that mannerism? At the time, I was operating with a total spontaneity whose meaning I understood only later: I was obeying the aesthetic of the 'third (or overtime) period': I did not want to make readers think my characters are real and have an official family record.
Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain. The very long passages of data on the characters, on their pasts, their way of dressing, their way of speaking (with all the language tics), etc.; very detailed description of sanatorium life; description of the historical moment (the years just preceding the 1914 war): for example, the social customs of the time: the recently discovered passion for photography, a chocolate craze, sketching blindfolded, Esperanto, solitaire, phonograph listening, spiritualist seances (a true novelist, Mann characterizes an era by practices soon to be abandoned and that ordinary historiography misses). The very prolix dialogue reveals its informative function whenever it departs from the few principal themes, and in Mann even dreams are descriptions: after his first day in the sanatorium, the young hero, Hans Castorp, falls asleep; in his thoroughly commonplace dream, all the day's events recur in faintly distorted form. This is very far from Breton, for whom dream is the well-spring of a released imagination. Here the dream has one function only: to make the reader familiar with the milieu, to confirm his illusion of reality.
Thus a vast background is meticulously depicted, before which are played out Hans
