Novels insist on "the beauty of modest sentiments," and the novel is therefore the chosen art form of what Kundera, remembering his early life in Czechoslovakia, calls "small nations." Ignoring the canonized literary traditions of England and America, he makes an unexpected connection between Central Europe and Latin America, "two neglected, disdained, abandoned lands," where reality warps into magic in the novels of Kafka and Broch or Garcia Marquez and Fuentes.
Novels are skeptical about the grandiose controllers of human history. The battle of Waterloo is mere marginal noise in Thackeray's Vanity Fair; the fear of a French invasion mobilizes the troops in Pride and Prejudice and incites an erotic tizz in the Bennet household, but Napoleon is never mentioned. "The novelist," Kundera says, "is never a valet to historians," and this skepticism about the heroic agenda set by generals and politicians secretly helped the cause of subversion in Kundera's oppressed corner of Europe. Hence the Czech fondness for the deserter in Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik, who ingeniously flouted the dictates of the Habsburg Empire. Kundera praises novels for mocking epic, and for deriding poetry. They are "anti-lyrical" because they refuse to believe in the rhapsodic hysteria that "feeds festivals and massacres alike and turns individuals into ecstatic mobs."
Kundera also credits the novel with releasing us from the heady delusion of tragedy, with its emphasis on definitive, self-deifying actions (which usually involve a showy suicide). He describes tragic protagonists as fanatics who "totally identify with the convictions for which they are prepared to die, and do die." This stray remark suggested to me that Shakespeare's tragedies are actually novels. Hamlet has opinions not convictions, and even in his last moments is not prepared to die. Cleopatra knows that death is the only way of avoiding public disgrace, but slyly seeks for "easy ways to die," and ensures that the one she chooses will cause no pain and leave her body unscathed.
The characters of tragedy kill themselves in acts of boastful bravado, like Hedda Gabler aiming her father's dueling pistol at her own head. But Tolstoy, when describing how Anna Karenina kills herself by jumping under a train, emphasizes "the prose of a suicide" and its sober, untheatrical practicality. Anna approaches her death as a technical problem to be solved, with the minimum of fuss. She has to collaborate with the train as it lurches past, inserting herself between the carriages at just the right moment; her first attempt fails because she takes fractionally too long to remove a bag from her arm.
As a victim of East European bureaucracy, Kundera has good reason to despise the clerical strictures of "literary bureaucrats," by whom he means academic critics. His theorizing here is playful, delightfully provisional: lightness may be unbearable as a condition of being, but levity is the leaven of his writing. At times he gives up explaining and instead simply exclaims, voicing an aesthetic wonder and gratitude censured by those who profess literature in universities. Mentioning Smetana's string quartets, he inserts an appreciative parenthesis: "splendid!" Even more eloquently, in a climactic passage about the audacity of the modern novel, he allows words to fail him: "And Ulysses!" he says, leaving the exclamation mark to convey his reverence for it. He reduces me to the same blissful burbling. Ah, Kundera!
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