Milan Kundera, Life and Letters, “What is a Novelist?

ABSTRACT: LIFE AND LETTERS about novels and novelists, notably Flaubert, Proust and Cervantes… To whom shall we compare the novelist? To the lyric poet. The content of lyric poetry, Hegel says, is the poet himself. Lyricism is not limited to a branch of literature, but, rather, designates a certain way of being…from this standpoint, the lyric poet is only the most exemplary indication of a man dazzled by his own soul. I have long seen youth as the lyrical age. To pass from immaturity to maturity is to move beyond the lyrical attitude. The novelist is born out of the ruins of his lyrical world… Discusses Flaubert's comment that “Bovary bores me, Bovary irritates me…” Complaining that his characters are mediocre is the tribute he is paying to what has become his passion: the art of the novel and the territory it explores, the prose of life…. The anti-lyric conversion is a fundamental experience in the curriculum vitae of the novelist: separated from himself, he suddenly sees that self from a distance, astonished to find that he is not the person he thought he was. After that experience, he will know that nobody is the person he thinks he is… A man becomes famous when the number of people who know him is markedly greater than the number of people he knows. Artists' fame is the most monstrous of all, for it implies the idea of immortality. Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value. This is the novelist's curse: his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania… Writer discusses how the revelation that the character of Albertine in Proust's “In Search of Lost Time” was based on a man lodged in his head like a virus. Proust's novel stands, without question, at the opposite pole from autobiography. He quotes Proust: “The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is proof of the book's truth.”… The work is not simply everything a novelist writes-notebooks, diaries, articles. It is the end result of long labor on an aesthetic project. The ethic of the essential has given way to the ethic of the archive. (The archive's ideal: the sweet equality that reigns in an enormous common grave.”… Before Cervantes had completed the second volume of his novel, another writer preceded him by publishing his own sequel to “Don Quixote.” Cervantes reacted at the time the way a novelist would react today: with rage. The novelist is the sole master of his work. He is his work.

The New Yorker, October 9, 2006, p. 40