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

Iain, MALONEY

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

https://doi.org/10.20557/00003515

名前 / ファイル	ライセンス	アクション
H06_Maloney.pdf (200.3 kB)

Item type

紀要論文 / Departmental Bulletin Paper_02(1)

公開日

2023-05-18

タイトル

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

言語

eng

資源タイプ

資源タイプ識別子

http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501

資源タイプ

departmental bulletin paper

ID登録

10.20557/00003515

ID登録タイプ

JaLC

著者

Iain, MALONEY

抄録

内容記述タイプ

Abstract

内容記述

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).

言語

書誌情報

椙山女学園大学研究論集 : 人文科学篇・社会科学篇・自然科学篇
en : Journal of Sugiyama Jogakuen University. Humanities, Social sciences, Natural sciences

号 54, p. 59-75, 発行日 2023-03-31

出版者

椙山女学園大学

ISSN

収録物識別子タイプ

ISSN

収録物識別子

24369632

書誌レコードID

収録物識別子タイプ

NCID

収録物識別子

AA12936941

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