Milan Kundera ja romaanin monet totuudet

The unification of the planet's history, that humanist dream which God has spitefully allowed to come true, has been accompanied by a process of dizzying reduction. [---The character of modern society] reduces man's life to its social function; the history of a people to a small set of events [---], social life is reduced to political struggle [---]. Man is caught in a veritable whirlpool of reduction where Husserl's 'world of life' is fatally obscured and being is forgotten. (Milan Kundera 1983/1988 "The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes", The Art of the Novel.)

Milan Kundera kirjoittaa romaanimuodon historiasta inhimillisen todellisuuden kartoittamisen jatkumona.

Hän lainaa Edmund Husserlia ja tämän kritiikkiä modernin filosofian tavasta redusoida elämä ja todellisuus tieteellisen tutkimuksen objekteiksi sekä unohtaa se, mikä on kaikkein tärkeintä, konkreettinen eletty todellisuus: elämismaailma, die Lebenswelt.

Tälle vastaiskuna romaanitaiteessa (joka myös on modernin aikakauden tuote) on piillyt mahdollisuus elämismaailman tutkimiseen. Cervantes, Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoi, Joyce ja Kafka - ja monet muut - ovat Kunderan mukaan kartoittaneet inhimillistä todellisuutta, kun filosofit ovat siinä epäonnistuneet. He ovat tarkastelleet seikkailua (Cerventes), tunteita ja yksilön sisäistä elämää (Richardson), olemista osana historiaa (Balzac), jokapäiväistä elämää (Flaubert), irrationaalisuutta (Tolstoi), mennyttä ja nykyistä (Proust ja Joyce), unen ja todellisuuden sekoittumista (Kafka) ja monia muita asioita.

Romaani onkin mahdollisuus ymmärtää olemisen monimielisyyttä, taistella yksinkertaistusta, reduktiota, yhtä totuutta ja totalitarismia vastaan.

A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality, Kundera kirjoittaa. Ja muistelee totalitaristista yhteiskuntaa, joka ajaa romaanitaiteen vääjäämättä tuhoonsa. Kundera sanookin saman kuin Mihail Bahtin jo 1930-luvulla. Romaani kertoo maailman moninaisuudesta, tietämisen vaikeudesta, totuuden pakenevuudesta. Sen moraali on tietoisuudessa, ei virallisessa totuudessa siitä, mikä on oikein tai väärin.

As God slowly departed from the seat whence he had directed the universe and its order of values, distinguished good from evil, and endowed each thing with meaning, Don Quixote set forth from his house into a world he could no longer recognize. In the absence of the Supreme Judge, the world suddenly appeared in its fearsome ambiguity; the single divine Truth decomposed into myriad relative truths parceled out by men. Thus was born the world of Modern Era, and with it the novel, the image and model of that world.

To take, with Descartes, the thinking self, as the basis of everything, and thus to face the universe alone, is to adopt an attitude that Hegel was right to call heroic.

To take, with Cervantes, the world as ambiguity, to be obliged to face not a single absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths (truths embodied in imaginary selves called characters), to have as one's only certainty the wisdom of certainty, requires no less courage.

What does Cervantes' great novel mean? Much has been written on the question. Some see in it a rationalist critique of Don Quixote's hazy idealism. Others see it as a celebration of that same idealism. Both interpretations are mistaken because they both see at the novel's core not an inquiry but a moral position.

Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands. Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire. They can cope with the novel only by translating its language of relativity and ambiguity into their own apodictic and dogmatic discourse. They recuire that someone be right: either Anna Karenina is the victim of a narrow-minded tyrant, or Karenin is the victim of an immoral woman; either K. is an innocent man crushed by an unjust Court, or the Court represents divine justice and K. is guilty.

The 'either-or' encapsulates an inability to tolerate the essential relativity of things human, an inability to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge. This inability makes the novel's wisdom (the wisdom of uncertainty) hard to accept and understand. (Kundera 1988, 6-7.)