Incidentally, and nonwithstanding that I posted only about six hours ago, I have decided to stick up my current progress in my essay before I sleep. It’s roughly half-done in terms of length, and is presented completely raw - ie, the only editing it has had is a basic spellcheck and the occasional “hrm, that sounds odd, rephrase” moment. This is in no way the final product, although it is probably very reflective of the form it will take. The primary editing will be, after all, on the word/sentence level, not really on the concept level.

That said, if you’re feeling interested, or perhaps just want to see what random caffeinated Australians come up with with a reading of Kundera and Kafka, feel free to click.

As the world of literature and literary theory moves further from the original roots of the modern novel in the late nineteenth century, traditional applications of technique and ideas which texts must hold to in order to be considered true novels have held less sway, and have indeed been extended or even replaced by additional and different purposes and viewpoints of the novel’s actual purpose. No work of literature exists in a vacuum, and many of these changes can be seen to mirror changes in social perspective and attitude, or perhaps even to trigger such changes, or influence their parent societies in creating change. A growing theme, as the novel form itself grows, concerns the potential for alienation; the alienation of the character, of the author, of the audience, and of the novel itself. In a world that has been observed to grow even more controlling, with echoes from National Socialism and the Communist Party of the USSR still reverberating in modern life, and also with the spectre of societies such as those foretold by George Orwell looming, it is perhaps inevitable that society would begin to feel the repressive instinct that accompanies the presence of a ‘Big Brother’ figure watching over them. This figure, present as it is primarily in the collective consciousness and not necessarily in reality can nevertheless be seen to shape human behaviour, with nationalist pride and political paranoia becoming almost omnipresent in the 21st century world. The feeling of inevitable subjugation to the world and to greater forces than the individual are, however, not new concepts in the field of literature or literary theory. Rather, these concepts were expressed in novel form as early as the second decade of the 20th century, by novelists such as Franz Kafka.

The writer and literary theorist Milan Kundera wrote in his book, The Art of the Novel, that the traditional view of the novel as a psychological exercise was not entirely correct or applicable. In the extract entitled Dialogue on the Art of the Novel, he writes, “we are more and more determined by external conditions, by situations that no one can escape.” The notion that the novelist, or the novelist’s creations, are entirely bound up in and contained by the world in which they exist is present throughout his text. In this text, which Kundera presents as a dialogue between two persons, labeled M.K and C.S, Kundera explores his notion of what the modern novel both means and must be, in order to be a true novel. When the C.S character asks Kundera where he would begin to define his own aesthetic of the novel, he receives the reply, “My novels are not psychological. More precisely, they lie outside the aesthetic of the novel normally termed psychological.” (Kundera, Dialogue). According to Kundera, this definition is not incredibly precise and yet is rather apt when depicting his own novels. What then, he is asked, can his novels possibly be concerned with, as surely all novels are psychological in that they are concerned with the enigma of the psyche? The psyche, however, is not the enigma that Kundera claims to be attempting to resolve in his writings, at least not entirely. Kundera writes that his novels are concerned solely with the enigma of the self, and with the expression of the self and its fundamental existence, or perhaps its fundamental nonexistence.

The notion of the sense of self being the core of the ideal of the novel is a very existentialist one. Kundera showcases this existentialist root further in his essay, as he points out to his companion in conversation that the questions, “What is the self? How can the self be grasped?” are in fact fundamental questions on which any novel must be assessed and determined. Can the self, in fact, be said to exist at all outside the realm of the perceiver? How does the self come to exist within the framework of a novel, let alone that of a reality? Kundera’s aesthetic view of the self, moreover, is not bound up within the traditional technique of the novel that had existed since the beginning steps of the novel form. An illuminating example is given when Kundera decries the traditional means of creating character, giving several steps that are usually followed in order to flesh out a person for the audience to read. According to the traditional view, the writer must know every detail of his character, he must physically know the character down to the smallest detail, and more precisely, he must convey many of these details to the reader. Kundera rejects these views, claiming that they are irrelevant to the true novel, that the physical depictions of the character are incidental and unnecessary for the audience. He goes even further, stating that the internal, or psychological narration of the character is almost as useless, and that in fact the creation of character in order to play the necessary roles in the novel requires nothing of the traditional technique at all. (Kundera, Dialogue). Kundera is not making a simple academic claim here, he states that he himself practices these techniques in his own work, making The Art of the Novel, in fact, a “confession of a practitioner” rather than an abstract theoretical text.

The sense of self that Kundera extols, and states must be addressed within the framework of the novel underpins his notion of the literary aesthetic. It is not the author’s sole task to complete the visualisation of the character through which the audience participates and engages with the work, rather it is a joint effort between the novelist and the reader to complete the work, with the reader’s imagination filling in the blanks, as it were, to finish the vision of the author himself. The audience acts in concert with the author to fulfill the author’s intention: namely that of conveying the enigma of the self to the understanding of both parties involved. In the Dialogue, Kundera makes clear the fact that the sense of self that is conveyed by his own characters in his novels is done so via this process. He details the examples of Tomas and Tereza in The Lightness of Being, in which Tereza is described physically but Tomas is not. When ‘questioned’ by the character C.S about the matter, Kundera says emphatically “the reader’s imagination automatically completes the writer’s. Is Tomas dark or fair? Was his father rich or poor? Choose for yourself!” (Kundera, Dialogue). According to Kundera, what the author wishes here is effectively irrelevant. There are, he writes, several means of grasping the self, including action and the interior life of the character. These pale however when compared to the existential problems that the self possesses: to Kundera, these existential flaws within the self are what truly define it. The novel, concerned as it is with the pursuit and the isolation of the existential idea of the self, should reject all extraneous input or data, as such information is not necessary and is thus detrimental to the focus on the essence of the self. As the character C.S comments, to Kundera, the novel can be effectively defined as a poetic meditation on existence. This notion is not held by Kundera alone, though he perhaps extols it in a more overt fashion. An example of a novelist who Kundera sees as practising the techniques he is extolling, and incidentally considered by Kundera to be one of the four greatest novelists of all time (Kundera, Online Interview Reference Here), is Franz Kafka.

In his novel The Trial, Kafka’s main character, despite the presence of an “overly abstract” nature, has been written in such a fashion that he still remains alive, or perhaps lifelike. Joseph K. at times seems able to leap off the page despite possessing very little of those traits which Kundera mentions, and then rejects, as necessary to the proper formation of a character portrait. Joseph K., the Chief Clerk at a local Bank, does not seem to exist primarily within the realm of action and description. He never receives a physical description within Kafka’s text, in fact, very few of the characters present within the text, and the number is not small, receive very little physical detail. K. himself never receives more of a surname then a letter, and is commonly referred to as simply Herr K. or K., without any further elaboration on the lack or presence of a proper surname. This lack of identity is not, however, limited to K., indeed many characters in the story are referred to either by single names, or by their job function or a brief description. In this manner, at least, Kafka’s tale progresses through its chapters in a fashion deemed suitable by Kundera.

Where Kundera’s analysis of the text seems to stumble, however, comes in the actual differentiation between the idea of an existential reflective presence alone, and the melding of this poetic meditation and a more overt stream of the character’s psychological presence. K., despite being physically almost non-existant, manages to convey much of his situation through the continual thought processes running through his on-page consciousness. The primary mode of advancing the plot of K.’s Case is shown both through reflection by K. himself, and by his ruminations with other characters, many of whom exist only as labels, or as brief identities. It is interesting to note that K., extolling his own virtues and having them extolled back to him by almost every character he meets apart from those he himself regards with prior hostility, is unable to realise the actual nature of the problems that afflict him, and the root causes from which they spring. These causes are, perhaps naturally, the subject of intense debate, but the fact remains that K. himself is oblivious to anything of his own doing that might result with him being at fault. Here then, we see the rather existential nature of K.’s problem rising to the fore. K. himself is not able to step outside himself to look at his Case dispassionately and objectively, rather he is caught up within it because his Case is, in effect, both of and related to his self. This also showcases the lack of objectivity that all the other characters within the piece address K.’s case by, from the Wardens of the court to his defense lawyer, all of their viewpoints are given through the lens of K’s self, and are therefore as unable to step outside and provide new perspective as K. is. He is trapped, not only because of the very fact that he has been arrested and is due to be eventually tried, but because his own persona, his own self is both the root and the object of his current situation.