The Arts Of The Novel

Abstract

One of most persistent, but unusual features of Martin Heidegger's philosophy is his attempt to wed his understanding of importance of concrete, sensual and embodied language of poetry and art to his consideration of seemingly abstract question about meaning or truth of Many post-Heideggerean thinkers have suggested that this odd coupling does not serve either poetry or ontology very well, and have tried to show how it forces Heidegger to miss what is really going on in art, which seems to have nothing to do with question of being.1 In this essay, I address this problem by exploring Heideggerean motifs in Milan Kundera's work, primarily by examining sense which Kundera gives to phrase the forgetting of being. I focus in particular on Kundera's collection of essays Art of Novel' and his novel Immortality.31 argue that Kundera's theory of novel provides a way of thinking about question of literarily. I show that when we reconsider Heidegger's philosophy in light of this literary formulation and in light of significance of literary genre, we are presented with an understanding of meaning of truth of in modernity that weds ontological significance to concreteness. In The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes, lead essay in Art of Novel, Kundera starts up an ambivalent dialogue with Heidegger. To begin with, Kundera is somewhat critical of Heidegger for carrying over from Edmund Husserl a certain monocular perspective on history, particularly with regard to historical meaning of modern era. Focusing on Husserl of Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology4 and Heidegger of The Question Concerning Technology,5 he claims, first, that both philosophers take up traditional philosophical narrative that sees Descartes has having inaugurated modern European philosophy and science, but secondly, that they do this in order to explain pickle into which Europe has gotten itself. Since Kundera sees greatest insight of modern Europe as its attentiveness to self, he particularly highlights paradoxical consequences that Husserl's exposition of modern Europe's crisis and Heidegger's exposition of modern Europe's forgetfulness of have for self which modern Europe has constructed. However, for Kundera, any sense in which Husserl and Heidegger have revealed paradoxes inherent in existence of modern self will be incomplete because their vision of history is too one-sidedly philosophical. While he endorses ambiguities that their thought has probed, he rejects their characterization of this ambiguity as wholly philosophical. To my mind, this ambiguity does not diminish last four centuries of European culture, to which I feel all more attached as I am not a philosopher but a novelist. Indeed, for me, founder of modem era is not only Descartes but also Cervantes. Perhaps it is Cervantes whom two phenomenologists neglected to take into consideration in their judgment of Modem Era. By that I mean: if it is true that philosophy and science have forgotten about man's being, it emerges all more plainly that with Cervantes a great European art took shape that is nothing other than investigation of this forgotten being. Thus, Kundera sees philosophical bias towards absolutes reflected in a history that occludes development of novel, wherein meaning is always mediated through perspective of a particular character. Nonetheless, in Kundera's use of phrase the forgetting of being in this quote, we can also see beginnings of what turns out to be a massive gesture of appropriation that positively links Kundera's work to that of Heidegger. Kundera explicitly associates his theory of novel with existential and ontological themes of Heidegger's work. For Kundera, primacy that character has in his theory of novel depends on opportunity that examination of character affords us for understanding and interpreting different existential possibilities, in sense that these terms have in Being and Time. …