Quote of the Week
From Milan Kundera's THE ART OF THE NOVEL
As I flipped off the television last night and opened up Don DeLillo’s immense novel, Underworld, a book I’ve been dipping in and out of throughout the fall, on now into winter, I read back through parts of the opening 50 some pages, which give a dizzying account of the famous 1951 baseball game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, a game that ended with the “shot heard round the world,” Bobby Thomson’s walk-off homer hit clean out of the park that sealed the deal for the underdog Giants. In this prelude, point of view flits quickly from a young boy who sneaks through the turnstiles and past the guards, to Jackie Gleason and Frank Sinatra, and even J. Edgar Hoover, who were all in attendance at the actual game. It’s one of the most breathtaking openings to anything I’ve ever read, and even though I had been watching a pretty good television show (an episode of The Bear), it paled in comparison to how DeLillo’s muscular, rushing prose caused my synapses to fire. Earlier in the day, I had spent hours reading and re-reading and taking notes on Hemingway’s “A Way You’ll Never Be” (my next podcast episode), and so I was already tuned into the way good fiction pushes you into the heart of mystery.
With that I scanned my shelves to find the great Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s nonfiction book The Art of the Novel, and thumbed through to find the following passage underlined, an exclamation point in the margin:
The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it's either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless.
Good fiction (good literature) throws you into that “elusiveness of truth,” those in-between moments where no obvious point is being made. Earlier in the book, Kundera quotes Hermann Broch’s “The sole raison d’être of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover.” Literary meaning is by nature non-reductive, and it is simply not possible to re-state that meaning fully in a non-literary, rational manner.
I’m reminded of attending a reading by Marilynne Robinson in graduate school. She had just published her stunning first novel, Housekeeping. During the Q&A after the reading, a graduate student asked something like, “Clearly the lake in the town of Fingerbone bears deep symbolic meaning. Might you say a few words about what you were going for there?” Robinson quickly replied, “If I knew what it meant, I wouldn’t have written the novel.”
Kundera, who sadly died this past summer, would certainly have admired Robinson’s reply. I think, too, of Flannery O’Connor, who in her book Mystery and Manners (a collection of lectures about the writing process), famously admitted that she frequently didn’t know the endings of her stories until just a few lines from the end. She urged young writers to think of meaning not as something you “crawl out of” the story to find. “The whole of the story is the meaning,” she said.
I share Kundera’s concern that in our time this kind of complex, “elusive” understanding of meaning is “too cumbersome” for most, especially as the Internet and AI make their absolute promises and people push to find “answers” from Tik-toks and Instagram Reels.
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I love Kundera and read his Unbearable Lightness of Being over and over again when I was in my 20s. "Good fiction (good literature) throws you into that “elusiveness of truth,” those in-between moments where no obvious point is being made. " Love this--we've been talking about those in-between spaces in AP Lit. I think I'm going to have them read this post. Thank you.
This resonated, yours (and Kundera's) ultimate point about what truths exactly fiction tries to get right, then, the connection to Robinson and O'Connor- bravo.