‘What do you read?’ someone asks. ‘I read novels’, I reply. And in this exact moment of the conversation, I usually think to myself how would I describe or translate this word: novel. Comically though, writing stories don’t appear to me as inconsequential and time-wasting as reading them. Probably because there’s fame and money involved in the former, while spending time and money (and gaining nothing material) in the latter. But is a novel just a story? And if so, what is a story? A story is an organized set of constituents: theme (topic), characters, trajectory, conflict, climax, resolve… combine all of this in written form, and you have a story, or a novel for that matter.
But as with any word, the word ‘novel’ carries with it a history as well, and when we strip it down to its most basic and deprived meaning ‘a story’, we are doing it injustice. So if I elaborate further that novels are stories, ‘afsaaney’ in Urdu, then I’d have reduced not only the novel that I would be currently reading, but all the novels I’ve read, to a dry and dismissing conclusion. A novel is much more vibrant, alive, and consequential than a mere story. Since it is written with intent, the novel contains nuance and depth, insights and drama, action and thought, that a story, whether repeated from a real life event or a spoken tale, or even a story on the screen in form of a film – direly lacks. In the very process of being written, the novel attains the form of being the peak of stories.
So, why do I read them? It has a very simple answer: because they are fun. Not only in the ‘being entertained’ sense, which comes as an immediate implication of that answer, but also in a much deeper and inward sense: it is fun to my intellect, fun to my emotions, fun to my thinking – a worthy musing for my solitary consciousness. Then how better that there are plenty of them. However, a more urgent question for me is: why should I write a novel? Or can I? To the second question, yes – but you’d truly know it once in the process. Like all experiences, the act of writing and being in its process, cannot be sufficiently or successfully contemplated from the outside. To the first question, because I want to tell a story. Why? Because I think it will be a good one, people will like reading it. Why? Because it is tragic in its events yet hopeful in its detached and objective perspective; the ending accepts the story as a muslim accepts fate – contently accepting regardless of how things actually went. What if the readers don’t like it, supposing it does come out to be a good novel? I think I’ll be fine by that outward failure. But if the novel doesn’t answer to my earnest and long-sought requirement of telling a successful (by which I mean complete) – then I’ll be utterly disappointed.
On the contrary, however, there’re
writers who write books (also novels, sadly) for the very purpose of earning money.
In this case, the relationship between writer and readers becomes purely
transactional. For me, when I read a book, I seek something that cannot be purchased
or acquired in one transaction. I may buy the book instantly by paying cash, but
I could never pay cash to live the reading of the book. My payment, then, is only
for the cost of pages and printing, and out of courtesy, to the writer who
might depend on selling their books. The novel itself, however, provides me
with something abstract, obscure, challenging, or exhilarating – food for thought
– if you will. This invaluable relationship between a novelist and reader is what
makes the outcome of these intertwined activities (writing and reading) so
unique, timeless, and indestructible: the outcome of being endlessly curios and
searching. Writers who write for money have already given up on this relationship
since their motive become specific; and their readers, too, by becoming a
hoarder to either plastic information or elusive stories.
Kundera’s nonfiction book, based on seven parts (as per his fascination with the number 7 in all his books), goes into a delicious and appetizing critique of the novel as an art form. Here, Kundera distinguishes the novel as a separate and upstanding form of art amongst others. This distinction fascinated me since I was of the understanding that novel is just a tool that is used to tell stories. Kundera’s insights into the particulars and history of this art form is truly admirable, while being something totally new for someone like me who hasn’t studied literature in an academic setting. But it’s not in any way resembling a textbook either: this book is fun, interrogative, stimulating, and consistently amusing. Quite a few times, I expressed a ‘wow’ to myself, yet immediately recomposing, I doubted its profundity to be as betraying as all profundities are – (humans are sad creatures in the realm of thought). But it did impress me deeply on quite a number of occasions with its ‘dazzling truth’. (And yes, it dazzled gradually – I’m not blind but enlightened). Although it talks of ‘the European novel’, relating to its geography, it didn’t really distract me much since I know next to nothing about the existence of any other novel, or even that there’d be any difference. The meticulous dissection of the novel as an art form in this book is relevant and insightful for all readers and writers, and wanna-be writers, a like.
Part 1 begins the history of the European novel with Cervantes. Don Quixote was adventurous and in that lied its greatness, claims Kundera. Since Cervantes wasn’t condemned to the evolving structures around the novel, as later novelists became, his book had action and adventures at its setting, that continues with a fantastical ease of not caring about making sense. It allowed Cervantes to explore, to discover: the only aim of the novel according to Kundera. In Part 2, Kundera is involved in a dialogue on the art of the novel, where he stretches its history from Cervantes all the way to Kafka, and to his own novels. While Cervantes sought action as the basis of self, Diderot finds there a disruption: his characters don’t resemble their action. Kundera writes that this was a significant discovery in the novel, wherefrom the attention for the ‘basis of the self’ turned from outside to in. Then came Proust, who tried to grasp the self in ‘memory’ and ‘in search of lost time’; Joyce on the other hand, tested the novel on something still more ungraspable: the present. Joyce’s microscopic study of a man’s consciousness in the present moment was an attempt to express the self in its entirety, yet the irony was that the more he zoomed in, the more ‘the self’ escaped, became elusive. Moreover, an even greater turn came in the art and history of the novel when Kafka discovered that there is not self at all – that his characters’ selves, beings, and personhoods were dictated from the outside, and that there was no will, no action, no consciousness within them.
The evolutions of forms in the novel, as Kundera explores in Parts 3 and 4, came from Broch’s ‘The Sleepwalkers’. The novel form was experimented with when Broch wrote a trilogy, each covering 15 years, unrelated to each other, yet connected with the single theme of the disintegration of values. Not only that, but Broch also included excerpts from other art forms: essays, poems, philosophy, dream, music, etc., all while maintaining the ‘architectonic clarity’ (structural clarity) of the novel. Kundera claims that Broch’s greatness lied in exploring such a possibility, such an expansion of the novel’s art form, however, his own attempt at it left a lot to be desired. And so, Kundera writes how he and other writers are continuing in this young legacy, and explains the elements of such a ‘radical divestment’ of the novel, and in encompassing them successfully.
Part 5 titled ‘Somewhere Behind’, reveals that all great works are discovered, and not invented. And when discovered, the discoverer in ‘dazzled’. Kundera writes how he himself was dazzled when he first read Kafka’s ‘The Castle’ when he was fourteen. Kafka’s novels only discovered, since he couldn’t have invented or predicted, the dawn of bureaucracy and how it will dominate and penetrate in to the lives of the individuals. The astonishing logic placed within this chapter, along with such clear and effective understanding of the capitalist society, not only added to my deep fascination and admiration for Kundera, but also disillusioned me as how to logical and complex the novel can be, both in its setting and in its implications. Chapter 6 is a dictionary of 63 words: and Kundera writes that a novel is often nothing but a long quest for some elusive definitions. A fun, striking, and tendering chapter. The last part, Part 7, is a speech by Kundera for recognizing the Jerusalem literary award. Here, I felt more closely what Kundera meant by European, and felt also its distance, yet despite it, Kundera’s poignant observations about how novel is against the spirit of ‘proving’ (tenderness decreases as we prove - ) and that it dazzles with its irony, ambiguity, and discoveries. I’m utterly delighted that this whole chapter begins and ends with one of my favorite proverbs: Man thinks, God laughs.
So, what is a novel? A Discovery. A
discovery through storytelling where boundaries can be pushed, and the outside
and inside world can combine to attempt at a meaning for the self, for life,
for existence. It is not a serious inquisition like sciences or philosophy, but
a comical one. Its spirit is that of humor. It knows that stupidity (discovered
by Flaubert in the age of great scientific discoveries) is not a result of
human action through lack of thought, but rather it is an innate part of human,
the nonthought. Novel is a humorous exploration set within the comical planet of
inexperience whose discoveries, already there, dazzle us. I aim to dazzle as
well.
March 29, 2025.