Not many writers can take you on a journey through the mysterious realms of psychology, stylistics, and philosophy. Only a few can open doors to the unknown and spark the imagination, making you lose track of time and place. Milan Kundera is one of them.
What makes Kundera’s writing so unique? How does he put together the images in his novels? Why did he strictly control the translation of his works? And how will he be remembered in world literature?
Milan Kundera was born in Brno/Czechoslovakia but has been living in France since 1975 (he left home because of the totalitarian regime). He wrote ten novels, six in Czech and four in French. In his collection of essays, “The Art of the Novel,” he even mentioned that he wasn’t sure whether he was a Czech or French author.
Milan’s family was part of the cultural elite in Czechoslovakia. His father was the rector and a pianist at the Academy of Arts, so when Milan was young, he studied music and took composition lessons that he would later apply while writing his books.
I bring this up because polyphony is basically like music—or perhaps a concert. To put it simply, it is many voices all woven together on one page.
Polyphonic writing
In practice, this writing style incorporates multiple voices or perspectives, allowing for a rich, multi-layered narrative. You often hear this term in connection with literature, especially when discussing novels that showcase various characters’ viewpoints or different storylines that intertwine with each other.
This idea is closely related to Mikhail Bakhtin, who discussed “polyphony” in the context of Dostoevsky’s works. It is important to remember that in polyphonic writing, each voice stays unique and independent, making the themes and ideas more complex and dynamic.
What is not polyphony, then?
It's not the books with chapters that represent the point of view of one particular hero - you can see that a lot in modern literature. For example, there are books where we have five heroes going on vacation, and each one gives his or her view of the murder or the love affair in a separate chapter. This is NOT polyphonic writing.
To clarify more, polyphonic writing must have:
1. Multiple voices: Various characters or narrators share their perspectives, often within the same chapter.
2. Dialogue and interaction: The voices might interact with each other, creating a dialogue that adds depth to the story.
3. Thematic depth: This technique allows you to explore themes (political, philosophical, scientific) more deeply by presenting different viewpoints that might clash or complement each other.
Attention!
- Give all the voices you include equal weight and importance. This means each voice has its own space to breathe.
- Include a variety of voices: race, gender, sexuality, and religion can add to this diversity.
- Polyphonic writing isn’t about creating a “hierarchy” of voices. Instead, the goal is to foster a conversation and gain insight into your story’s main problem.
Let’s see what Kundera himself tells about polyphony in his book, “The Art of Novel”:
“The chapters are like the measures of a musical score! There are parts where the measures (chapters) are long, others where they are short, still others where they are of irregular length.
Each part could have a musical tempo indication: moderato, presto, andante, et cetera. Part six of Life Is Elsewhere is andante: in a calm, melancholy manner, it tells of the brief encounter between a middle-aged man and a young girl who has just been released from prison.
The last part is prestissimo: it is written in very short chapters and jumps from the dying Jaromil to Rimbaud, Lermontov, and Pushkin.
I first thought of The Unbearable Lightness of Being in a musical way. I knew the last part had to be pianissimo and lento: it focuses on a rather short, uneventful period in a single location, and the tone is quiet.”
Do you know why it is so difficult to read your writing?
Yes, I read at least 30-40 posts daily, and some are really difficult to take in. And no, not because your phrases are long (or short). I just feel like I’m at the funeral, it leaves me a little cold, if I can say so…
Most of the writers seem to be blissfully ignorant of the long historical tradition of the novel and the history of ideas that this tradition represents. Writing is NOT only about finding the right word, a cool phrase, or inventing a fancy new syntax. Writing is NOT a genre. And writing is NOT about being into the psychological realism that so many people seem to read nowadays. I think reading this kind of prose over and over and over is harmful and a big reason why a lot of fiction in the bookshops looks so similar. Where are you—the modern-day Cervantes, Swifts, Rabelais, Ecos, Brochs, Pynchons, and Gombrowiczs?
The art of conversation
Milan Kundera’s books are like music to the ear. In “The Curtain,” we’re not just reading about Rabelais, Cervantes, and Márquez; we feel like we’re having a secret conversation with those writers. You can hear “the soul of all things, all at once, in one chapter.” A musician has to express the soul through sound, while a novelist has to “muffle the cry of his own soul” by weaving in the voices and characters.
“A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred; existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility. But again, to exist means 'being-in-the-world.' Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities.”
Kundera often included songs and quotes from different composers in his writing. In “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” we hear Beethoven and the writer’s father, who gradually loses the power of speech.
The book has seven short stories that come together in the final chapters (united by common themes). They include Márquez, rhinos, emigration, music, allusions, Marxism and endless metaphors. The book’s unique mix of erotic and sexual themes may encourage you to see life from a different perspective, too.
And this is what I love about Milan Kundera… He is not afraid to write about sex. In fact, he presents it in such a fantastic way that even I—who absolutely can’t read erotical or romance fiction without cringing or laughing—enjoy it.
The music of the novel
Because polyphonic writing is tied up to music, let’s take a look at the pace.
“Pace is really important to me. It’s one of the first ideas I have for a new novel, and I start working on it long before I start writing it,” Milan Kundera says.
To create a good polyphonic novel, try this:
1. Think about what kind of mood it represents.
2. Choose a technique for each chapter:
- Staccato/detached
- Legato/smooth
- Adagio/slow, calm, reflective
- Ostinato/repeating
- Arpeggio/broken
- Crescendo/increasing
- Choose the speed at which you want a chapter to be told.
What if I’m not a musician, Angela? What can I do?
I hear you. I’m not a musician myself (by the way when I asked my mother if I could go to the music school because I was chosen from my class, she said no. Well, she always said no to everything), but I’m definitely a poet at heart. WE ALL ARE. It’s wired in us. Everybody can write poetry. That’s why we love music…
If you are a poet at heart, it automatically makes you a poet in prose. And this is polyphony, my friend!
“In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of endless length. The art of ellipsis is absolutely essential. It requires that one always go directly to the heart of things…”
Philosopher and humorist
Milan Kundera is also a philosopher with irony and a great sense of humor. After all, he was not born on April 1 for nothing… Humor is a cross-cutting theme in his work.
Kundera says that humor gives a novel its life. Once, my friend told me he spent an entire lecture at the university discussing a phrase in which Kundera doesn’t only say Franz Kafka is a humorous writer but insists: “Kafka did not suffer for us! He had fun for us!”
True or not? Well, reread Kafka; maybe you’ll find some examples that support this idea :)
Next stop: “Farewell Waltz”. This is the novel where Kundera first started writing about sex and the problem of getting pregnant without planning it. To be honest, when you read it for the first time—especially as a young person—all you feel is hopelessness and sadness. But as an adult, you can see beyond the story… Overall, it’s a remarkable and captivating novel exploring themes of fate and predestination.
Kundera captures the intense desire that women have to be beautiful. The women in the story naïvely believe that beauty is the sole factor that will bring them happiness and success. He also discusses how women judge one another based on their beauty, which resembles to him a form of racism rooted in appearance.
Counterpoint
What does Milan Kundera want us to know about “novelistic counterpoint” - a musical style where more than one voice is used aka the union of philosophy, narrative, and dream in a single art form?
“In my view, the basic requirements of novelistic counterpoint are:
1. the equality of the various elements;
2. the indivisibility of the whole.”
I remember that the day I finished “The Angels,” part three of “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative. The text was made up of the following elements:
(1) an anecdote about two female students and their levitation;
(2) an autobiographical narrative;
(3) a critical essay on a feminist book;
(4) a fable about an angel and the devil;
(5) a dream-narrative of Paul Eluard flying over Prague.
None of these elements could exist without the others; each one illuminates and explains the others as they all explore a single theme and ask a single question: “What is an angel?”
This is a good example of how to weave various styles, forms, and voices into a single narrative— in your next book. Or check out this note with a humble attempt from Angela :)
Kundera’s most famous novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” is a story about the tragic events in Prague in 1968. However, it is famous not because it was written about tragic events but because it is one of the 20th century’s most profound and complex philosophical and psychological novels.
Theme and idea: Life is easy because we live only once, meaning it is somewhat random. At the same time, life is hard because we always feel like we have to be perfect. The characters in his novel exist within this unstable framework. And let me tell you, Milan Kundera is the best at showing how fragile and uncertain life is.
About novel as the art
For Kundera, “the art of the novel” refers to more than just the techniques or knowledge of a great genre. He always considered the novel as a unique, complex, and specific way of seeing the world. He believed that this way of seeing the world first appeared in Miguel Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” at the start of the New Age before the novel existed in its current form.
According to Kundera, the novel emerged in Europe as a response to the specialization of knowledge in science, which, as Heidegger (German philosopher) stated, leads to “the oblivion of being.” In other words, people become so focused on using science to understand the world that they lose sight of what it truly means to know something. A man ceases to know himself.
What type of writer are you? Take a few minutes today to reflect on it.
To criticize or to be criticized—and why you shouldn’t care
I often feel that Milan Kundera is misunderstood, and I have met people online who passionately hate his writing. Perhaps this is how the lives of prominent artists unfold: they are either adored to the extreme or simply hated.
Despite his status as a “classic,” Kundera’s texts have always been uncomfortable, unfashionable, and polemical. Joseph Brodsky once called him a “Czech bull” for his article on Dostoevsky.
Another example? In his book “Distant Reading,” the sociologist of literature Franco Moretti wrote, “As far as connections within Europe are concerned, the continent that falls in love with Milan Kundera deserves the fate of Atlantis.” But why exactly Milan Kundera deserves it, and where this crush comes from, Moretti does not explain…
Some critics have accused Kundera of using fake philosophy in “Immortality,” writing pornography in “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” and being a grumpy old man in “Slowness” (the last one is partly true, I guess LOL). But they never said he was heavy-handed or confusing, even though his plots are often non-linear and involve multiple characters.
While Kundera’s novels have complex structures inspired by music, the language is very clear. This is partly because some of the stories were written primarily for translators when Kundera’s books were banned in his home country, and others were written in non-native French, although he mastered it during his long period of emigration.
Well, as I see it, using simple language and speaking in a relaxed way is also somewhat of a creative principle. This is what sets Kundera apart from other postmodernists.
A Glimpse of Immortality
In “Immortality,” Kundera doesn’t seem particularly fond of the main characters. I believe he aims to criticize overly sentimental romance because the story revolves around a person’s exaggerated emotions and aggressive defense of love. Examples: Laura - struggling with a failed love affair, and Bettina - pursuing the aging Goethe. In both cases, the usual idealized glow of a love story is missing.
At times, the main problem for these characters is excessive confusion and their own egos, ultimately leading to their downfall.
One of the chapters of “Immortality” is called “Homo sentimentalis.” In this chapter, Kundera criticizes Dostoevsky for making feelings too important. According to Kundera, Homo sentimentalis is “a man who elevates his feeling to dignity. As soon as we recognize feelings as dignified, everyone wants to feel them, and since we like to flaunt our dignity, we also flaunt our feelings.”
This makes it easy to understand why Kundera’s advice to simplify our emotional lives is still relevant today!
However, we will discuss this further, along with the immortality of both the artist and a human being on Earth, next time…
“My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.” — Kundera
to be continued…