Milan Kundera, Ali Smith, and the Novel as an Anti-Cartesian Art Form

What is the Novel? In his biography of the novel, Michael Schmidt (2014) wrote more than 1000 pages in an attempt to define what the novel form is, which perhaps is a lesson in itself. While the name derives from the fact that it was a once new art form, in the twenty-first century this is at best an interesting piece of trivia. Something that Schmidt reckons to be over 700-years old—and calculated to be much older by those with a less English-language-centric view of these things—cannot in fairness be called new by any but an immortal. Schmidt’s book charts the twists and turns the form has taken over the centuries; the developments, the tangents and the dead ends. A reader looking at Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (c. 1100) and The Goldenacre (2022) by Philip Miller would be forgiven for thinking that the two have little in common, yet both are labelled “novels” and there must be a reason for that beyond simple bookshelf convenience. It may just be something to do with length, a metric that differentiates it from a short story or novella, though that seems superficial. Rather, I would argue, there is a kernel, a single coordinate where the Venn diagrams of every novel converge, and that point is the definition of the novel as a literary form. In The Art of the Novel (1986/1988), and in further detail in Testaments Betrayed (1993/1995), The Curtain (2005/2006), and Encounter (2009/2010), Milan Kundera proffers his conclusions on the novel form from a lifetime of not only writing novels, but of writing novels that deliberately and openly engage with the novel: novels about novels, novels that are explorations of the novel form peopled with characters that facilitate the journey, like the shrunken submarine crew in Fantastic Voyage (1966) traveling the blood vessels of their host. Published in French in 1986, it is an essay in seven parts that is “a guide to Kundera’s conception of the history of the novel as it is embodied in his own work” (Doyle, 2019, para 2). While Kundera doesn’t limit himself to novels in the English language, as Schmidt does, Kundera—a Czech writing mainly in French—still pulls his horizon tight around him, his interest never straying beyond the boundaries of Europe, going so far as to claim “The novel is Europe’s creation” (Kundera, 1986/1988, p. 6). Still, he is much more willing than Schmidt to nail his colours to the mast: “The sole raison d’être of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral” (Kundera, 1986/1988, pp. 5–6).