Soc (2009) 46:275284

DOI 10.1007/s12115-009-9194-9

CULTURE AND SOCIETY

The Novelty of Modernity

Martin J. Plax

Published online: 27 March 2009

# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009

The novel uncovers what is hidden in each of us.

Milan Kundera
That we live in a modern, that is, new world seems
indisputable. Thomas Friedman has described it as flat.
By that he meant, a world with unlimited horizons, one that
has expanded for anyone able to come to terms with
technology and economic globalization. What was new
about Modernity was an interest in change and the
measurement of change. It was this focus that presaged
the discovery of History and historical consciousness,
which promised Humanity even greater freedom because
it provided more certain, more reliable knowledge of the
link of past and present.
At the same time that modern science was developing
however, the novel also had its origins. To speak of
Modernity, therefore, means to speak of two novel ways
of perceiving, thinking, and judging. While the sciences
seek certitude about Nature, the novel investigates the
existential and aesthetic truth about human existence.
But the novel doesnt stand in contrast to the hard
sciences only. It also stands in contrast to todays scholarly
studies of music, graphic arts and literature, all of which
have increasingly become scientific, informed by philosophic doctrines and encased in historical consciousness.
Studies of novels now claim that novelists offer doctrines
that are meant to be edifying, or even more radically, that
what the author intended is of no consequence, since every
M. J. Plax (*)
Department of Political Science, Cleveland State University,
2121 Euclid Ave.,
Cleveland, OH 44115-2214, USA
e-mail: m.plax@csuohio.edu

reader, in reading a novel, rewrites it. Yet another contrast

exists between the novel and biographical studies of
novelists which claim to demonstrate, with certitude, that
the works of a novelist can best be understood as
projections of the novelists personal histories. But most
subtly, the novel stands in contrast to those works of fiction
that are thinly disguised confessions, score-settlings, or
biographies that reveal private indiscretions meant to lead
readers to judge an historical person, if not to denounce him
or her. The true spirit of these works, in contrast to the
novel, is the spirit of the trial.
To support these claims, I shall call as my expert
witness, the contemporary novelist Milan Kundera who
has argued that what has been happening to the novel is the
key to understanding what Modernity is. What is happening
to the novel is that it is being deprived of its very raison
detre, leaving humanity with a single narrative of what is
truth, even about Modernity.

Kunderas Two Testimonies

First Testimony
Like most Americans who are familiar with Kundera at all,
I learned about him from the movie made of one of his
novels, one with an intriguing title: The Unbearable
Lightness of Being. The movie told a story, setting the
characters in the context of Prague Spring, the Soviet
invasion of Czechoslovakia and made it appear that the
characters were shaped exclusively by political events.
Because the movie insufficiently explained the title, I
read the novel. What a different experience! (How many

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times I have heard movie-going friends say, the novel was

better than the film.) The novel revealed something less
unified that a simple story, hence less propagandistic and
far more existential.
At the very start of the novel, Kunderas narrator speaks
about the mysteriousness of the doctrine of eternal return.
Suddenly the story that had been portrayed in the movie
took on a different coloration. The narrator described that
doctrine as a myth. Why did the narrator call it a myth?
Because he is a modern man for whom time is linear, that
is, for whom the past is dead as soon as it becomes the past,
which is, from moment to moment.
Why would the narrator even think about eternal
return? Is there something problematic about linear time
that he wished to raise in the narrative that followed? What
became apparent to me immediately was that the story
portrayed in the film had a context in the novel that
would force me to think about the question of Time, but not
simply in its immediate political, cultural, sociological or
even historical context.
The narrator then asked, what does it mean for someone
to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it
and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum? As a
person educated in a culture that encouraged us to think in
linear time, the question came as a shock. The linear view
of time (history) implies that what happened once cannot
happen exactly the same way. Time always creates new
contexts. Only those unique contexts allow us to understand
the actions that take place.
But this way of thinking poses at least two paradoxes.
Since contexts occur just once, can anyone in the future,
living in a different context, truly understand anything in
the past? Doesnt understanding anything in another time
and context depend on the principle, even if it is a myth, of
eternal return?
The second paradox is about moral judgments in the
light of linear time. Kunderas narrator was asking: how is
it possible to make moral judgments about a persons
responsibility for any action? How can a person know what
is the right thing to do in that specific context, since the
context is unique and transitory? If one is bound to linear
time, then contexts pardon every crime in advance.
Everything would have to be, cynically, permitted. Here I
heard echoes of Nietzsches analysis of Nihilism. So did
Kunderas narrator, who discovered that in accepting the
linear view of time (history), his judging of others could not
be separated from his avoiding any confrontation with his
own moral perversity.
To demonstrate just how radically problematic that was,
the narrator wondered how he could condemn Hitler for
having destroyed members of his family in the concentration camps. He discovered that the feelings of moral
outrage that he had, were, in reality, feeling aroused by

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nostalgia, about how the loss of his family affected the

dreams he had about missed opportunities during the rest of
his own life.
Only by accepting the doctrine of Eternal Return could he
overcome the burden he carried in making this discovery. Yet
Eternal Return is a burden which weighs us down. If we relive
events over and over, one must accept the burden of
responsibility for ones actions. Eternal Return is the only
view of time that allows for true moral judgment. By contrast,
we become light when we live in linear time only. The
question posed by the narrator was: which is preferable
lightness or weightiness? The Unbearable Lightness of Being
was an exploration of this question as an existential question
for all humans.
Second Testimony
In addition to his novels and plays, Kundera has written
three volumes of essays on the novel: The Art of the Novel
(hereafter, AN); Testaments Betrayed (TB); and The
Curtain (TC). Reading them has proven to be as much an
adventure as has reading his fictional works.
Why would a novelist feel compelled to write discursive
pieces about the novel? In addition to what was said above,
Kundera wrote these books for novel readers, now and in
the future, and for potential novel writers. In his judgment,
those people have developed prejudices that betray the truth
about the novel, yet they neither believe that their beliefs
are prejudices, nor that they are betraying the novel in the
way in which they read (or write) novels. In the
introduction to The Art of the Novel, Kundera asserted that,
(e)very novelists work contains an implicit vision of the
history of the novel (and) an idea of what the novel is (AN,
1). In other words, every novel contains a reflection on the
ontology or true Being of The Novel.
What is also unique about the novel is that it seeks to
discover the truths that exist where the bridge between a
cause and an effect has collapsed (AN 162). Recalling
Anna Karenina, Kundera argued that Tolstoys great
contribution to human wisdom was his ability to demonstrate that sense lies outside rationally apprehensible
causality (AN 58). It is not reason that governs the world
and human actions, but the irrational, which can only be
fully exposed in the novel but even though exposed, cannot
be mastered.
Other examples abound. Richardson explored the secret
life of feelings; Balzac examined mans rootedness in
history; Flaubert, what is hidden in everydayness, that
is, the stupidity which is an inseparable dimension of
human existence (AN 164); Tolstoy, the intrusion of the
irrational in human behavior; Proust, the elusive past;
Joyce, the illusive present; Thomas Mann, the role of myths
of the remote past that control our present lives.

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Kundera explores the way people tend to view their past

dramatically and in either/or terms. Kundera refers to Czechs
who, now free from Communist rule, view that past as totally
terrible. They forget how much freedom they actually did
have under those conditions. Such people are guided by
abstract moral positions, which simplify the past by erasing
the ironies and contradictions of that previous regime and
their ordinary, daily lives under that regime. In other words,
remembering is a form of forgetting (TB, 128).
Kundera reminds us that we all exist in a framework
endowed by antithetical motifs (TB 139). Novelists
investigate this forgotten being (AN, 5). They are, one
might say, like archaeologists, but with one difference:
novelists also dig up what is buried in the present. If there
are laws of human action, they are both polyphonic and
paradoxical.

What Is Truly Novel About the Novel?

The Comic
The novel stands in contrast to the spirit of seriousness.
Kundera reminds us that the origins of the novel are coeval
with the spirit of humor. Both in Cervantes and Rabelais
one finds the comic, which is neither mockery nor satire.
The comic does not automatically provoke laughter; rather,
it renders everything it touches ambiguous. (TB 5) The
comic attacks certitude. It reveals that we humans are other
than what we think we are. The comic (as opposed to the
satirical) exists only for someone who has stopped taking
seriously mens seriousness (TC, 109). The opposite of the
person who sees the comic in things is the agelaste, a word
used by Rabelais to describe the person who does not
laugh.
Kundera reminds us that Don Quixote intended to be
heroic, but instead became a legendary figure in a lower
world, the world of prose. In that world, heroism is
flattened by the course of daily life. Intensity gives way
to modesty, in the context of which beauty is not
experienced by ecstasy but in its innocence. Here, in this
novel, and in later novels, for example, those by Flaubert,
one discovers the power of the pointless.
The world created by heroism and edification induces
people to imitate the virtuous. But such imitation is at best,
ambiguously realized. The impact of all actions is limited;
when one seeks to understand the world, the best result is
that one can make peace with what is the truth of things and
live life as an adventurer whose adventures are not always
dictated by reason or by ones own will.
Kundera identifies the wisdom of the novel as congruent
with a Jewish proverb, which says: Man thinks, God
laughs. What makes God laugh? His laughter is His

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response to the fact that when man thinks, the truth escapes
him. This is particularly the case when it comes to the
matter of self-perception. What makes the scientific
perspective on the world comic is that it has not heard
Gods laughter at its belief that reason can free the world of
contradiction, of the unexpected, and of paradox by means
of rational thinking.
Im reminded of something that happened when I
worked, full-time, teaching political science at a university,
in the early 1970s. I was teaching Machiavellis The Prince,
using a bi-lingual edition. One of my students had been
born and raised in Italy and he pointed out a marvelous joke
in the text. Soon after Pope Alexander VI had died and was
replaced by Julius II, who was poisoned soon after
assuming the position of Pope, Machiavelli reports that he
was talking to Lorenzo dMedici (Alexanders son) and
said to him You cant create your own Pappa. When
capitalized, the word Pappa means Pope, but when not
capitalized, it means father. My student noted this,
suggested that if Machiavelli was talking to Lorenzo he
was saying two things: you cant create your own Pope,
suggesting that Machiavelli knew that Lorenzo had killed
his own father and replaced him with a Pope more to his
political interests, but that Machiavelli was punning, saying
that Lorenzo couldnt create his own father. Just as the first
is impossible, so was the second. Yet the pun was lost when
the translator read the phrase literally only.
After pointing this out to me, my student then told me
that theres a pun a page in Machiavelli. While, at the time,
I didnt know the word agelaste, I realized what a
difference it makes when one sees that Machiavelli was as
comic as he was serious. It made me hesitate to take his
historical examples and advice too literally. (A year later I
gave a seminar on Hamlet, advertising it as the political
problems of a young man who spent too many years at the
university.)
Irony
Exposure to the comic makes the irony of human action
visible. What is irony? It is generally associated with some
kind of dissembling. Perhaps the most famous ironist is
Platos Socrates. But rarely is Socrates understood to be
comic. Rather, scholars identify Socratic irony with the
ways in which the philosopher disguised his true wisdom,
proclaiming only his ignorance.
But how is this to be distinguished from simple lying?
Scholars claim that Socrates dissembled for the sake of
others, so as to expose their ignorance and lack of selfawareness. But would true irony not have to reveal how
Socrates also examined the ways in which he dissembled to
himself, about himself and in doing so, discovered that he
was not the person he thought he was? In light of this

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criterion, can anyone rightly claim that Socrates lived an

examined life?
In novels like Don Quixote one discovers that the selfdissembling of the hero is exposed only though the comic.
There the comic is like a mirror that doesnt reflect, but
transforms. It exposes paradoxes that leave people uncertain about who they are. That is why self-ridicule is not the
same as the comic. Self-ridicule, which has become the
stuff of entertainers, is a defensive tactic. Even though it
is expressed, there is nothing that follows in the comedians
repertoire that provides any evidence that the comedian has
been changed by his or her discoveries.
Kundera makes the ambiguities and paradoxes of the
comic clearer when he observes that the novelist, like all
others who write, or generally create, desire fame
simultaneously to desiring to discover and expose some
Truth. While the latter is what contributes to the writers
immortality, can anyone be certain that this desire is the
prime motivation for the person writing? Isnt it likely that
the writers megalomania contributes to the creative
process? If one doesnt acknowledge this isnt one
engaging in self-deception or dissembling? This is a
question that can be asked of any seeker of Truth, including
scientists, who produce something for a public audience.
The works of literary biographers and biographicallyoriented critics cant answer it either. Thats because the
novelist, as novelist, has no stable identity that can be
captured by a biography. The novelist, as novelist, is
transformed by the discoveries he or she makes in the act of
creation. The only meaningful biography of a novelist is the
chronicling of the changes that occur in that person as a
result of the discoveries made during the process of writing
a novel. The novel owns the novelist, not the reverse.
The Tragic: Ancient and Modern
In the past, the comic stood in contrast to the tragic.
Ancient tragedies were constructed on the basis of a
confrontation of two absolute claims. Yet the very existence
of the opposing claim relativizes the rightness of both. The
tragedy arose out of the actions each took to try to
eliminate the opposing claimant. What made that tragic?
Consider, for example, Creons conflict with Antigone
that ended with Antigones suicide. Initially, both combatants imagined themselves to be Heroic. What made the
conflict tragic was not Antigones death, but Creons guilt
which arose when he realized that his pursuit of the
absolute rightness of his claim, on behalf of the City over
the claims of the Individual, rendered the absolute rightness
of his claim questionable. With Antigones death, he came
to recognize that he had been engaging in self-dissembling.
The source of his guilt was that discovery. It led him to

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question his heroism and thereby to moderate his belief in

the absolute rightness of his claim. He came to recognize
that his heroic absolutism made him comic. Ancient tragedy
was about self-discovery. It was not defined in moral or
moralistic terms.
In modern times, Tragedy has taken on a new meaning.
It is defined by moral absolutism. Modern moral absolutism
encourages people to believe that all representatives of Evil
are interchangeable, that is, different manifestations of the
same essence. All humans judged to be Evil cease to be
humans; instead, they become symbols. Symbolization
suppresses any state of mind that could contribute to
moderation or reconciliation. Moral absolutism seeks to
insure the triumph of Good over Evil, which means, it seeks
to destroy all possibilities of Tragedy.
Moral absolutists resist anything that would lead to
consider that they may be self-dissembling; they are
committed to continually judging themselves as Heroic.
That is why moral absolutists (who are often also critics
and scholars) believe that novels should be edifying, that is,
they should exert some moral instruction, if they are to be
judged good art.
This subject was addressed by Kundera, not by reference
to a novel, but to a musical composition, Igor Stravinskys
Rite of Spring and to the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who
accused the composer of glorifying barbarism.
Kundera observed that Stravinsky gave barbaric rites a
grand form because he wished to make barbarism
humanly understandable. Barbarism is an expression of
human nature. Giving barbarism expression did not mean
that Stravinsky condoned it. What induces barbarism is
its hidden beauty, a fact that is denied by Moral
Absolutists. It is the beauty of violence that attracts
people to violenceto both engage in violence and to
indignantly reject it.
Kundera argues that violence and barbarism are induced
by ecstasy. What is ecstasy? Rather than give a dictionary
definition, Kundera recalled the ecstasy he experienced
when, as a young man, he threw himself into passionate
improvisations on the piano, for which I needed nothing
but a C-minor chord and the subdominant F minor, played
fortissimo over and over again (TB 845).
Ecstasy, he discovered, was the absolute identity with the
present instant, which results in the total forgetting of past and
future (TB 85). The experience of ecstasy is the experience of
the negation of time. That means that the future is blocked
out. This, Kundera discovered, is the existential meaning of
ecstasy.
Ecstasy does something more, which Kundera reveals in
his contrasting jazz and rock music. Jazz musicians are both
performers and listeners (to the other performers); audiences at jazz concerts, by tradition, applaud after a solo, a sign

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of distance between the performer and listener. Rock music,

on the other hand, induces ecstasy. The music transforms
individuals into a collective body.
The hideous may be, in truth, beautiful, but that does not
in the least diminish its hideousness. Hideousness is also an
aesthetic judgment. Kundera reminded us that it was the
Austrian writer, Robert Musil, a novelist whom to many
Americans will be not likely be familiar, in his voluminous
novel The Man Without Qualities, revealed that the grounds
of sympathy and antipathy are not differences over
interests, but differences over aesthetic judgments.
Humans treat Evil as ugliness and Ugliness as Evil. The
rejection of outsider groups are legitimated and justified
by aesthetic judgments, by depictions of members of that
group as ugly. It is the spell that beauty holds over us that
makes people susceptible to becoming sensitive to ugliness.
It was the effort to overcome these differing aesthetic
judgments that legitimated the social science doctrine of
cultural relativism, the limiting of concepts of beauty to
separate cultures. Yet even that doctrine, paradoxically,
took on the form of moral absolutism. People who
condemn other cultural criteria of beauty as inferior are
condemned morally by the Relativists.
That paradox leads to the following discovery: there is
hidden beauty in hideous violence, a beauty that evokes
ecstasy, both in the perpetrators of the violence and in those
who strongly express moral indignation towards the perpetrators of the violence. This is true, in particular about indignant
responses to genocides, which ironically insures that unspeakable actions are always repeated over and over again.
Kundera reminded us that ecstasy contributed to the
reactions that followed the publication of Salman Rushdies
Satanic Verses. From the start, this novel is Rabelaisian.
Rushdies two protagonists fall from the sky, chattering,
singing and carrying on in comic and improbable fashion.
In this contemporary work, as in Rabelais, the comic and
the dreadful come together, rendering both the serious and
the dreadful ambiguous. The culture shock of immigration
induces a sense of vertigo, as though one were falling from
an airplane. The fear that accompanies the vertigo inspires
humor as a measure of self-preservation.
After Rushdie was accused of heresy and a fatwa was
issued against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini, intellectuals
defended his right to be heretical, but failed to ask whether or
not he was being heretical or whether he was exposing what is
comic in the immigrant experience. At no time did any of
those defenders address the issue that Rushdie was addressing
in the novel. Rather, they exposed themselves as equally
fitting the category of agelaste as the Ayatollah himself.
Instead of the comic standing in contrast to the tragic,
Modernity has contributed to the opposition of the Comic
and the Moral.

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What Is Novel About Modernity?

Modern Science and Scientists
Modern Science took on Religion as a battle between two
Absolutes. There was something heroic about the founders
of modern science, best characterized by Galileo and his
persecution by the Church. In order to insure freedom from
persecution, philosophers like Bacon promised that the aim
of modern science was to relieve mans estate. This was
aimed at reinforcing the self-image of modern scientists as
heroes, much like Christopher Columbus and his discovery of the New World.
Thanks to Kundera, I became aware of the Cuban
novelist Alejo Carpentier. That paradox was explored by
Carpentier, in his novel, The Harp and the Shadow. A
twentieth century Pope seeks to have Christopher Columbus beatified, as a way of capitalizing on Columbus
accomplishment and fame to strengthen the influence of the
Church in Latin America. Not only does the Popes effort
fail, but, in that part of the novel in which Columbus, on his
deathbed, waiting for a priest, rehearses that confession,
we discover another failure. Unlike the portrait of Columbus as an heroic explorer, in truth he knew of land on the
other side of the ocean, and he also knew that the Vikings
called it Vinland. Therefore, he also knew that he was
taking no risks that he would fall off the edge of the world.
Furthermore, he, and the crew that manned his ships, were
converts from Judaism and Islam, but converted not out of
faith but by compulsion. In the rehearsal, Columbus
discovers that he was not heroic, but megalomaniacal and
that he was not the man whom even he thought he was.
The existential truth about Man is that he no one sees
clearly where he is going. Mankind lives is a fog. Is there
any reason to believe that the same doesnt apply to men of
science, those explorers armed with the scientific method?
In science, any report of findings of research must be
grounded in some review of past research. This rule is
justified by an expectation of continuity (or operating
within an agreed upon paradigm). In truth, however, such a
review is also a method designed to bury that past.
In light of modern scientific investigations into the truth
about Nature, what happened to the gods? They were
allowed to return, but only as myths, which were then
explored by means of the sciences of history and
psychology. These sciences have become the theology for
the Secular (that is, scientifically-grounded) Society.
Most recently, science has been met with two resistance
movements. The first was Creationism, whose proponents
claimed that what science discovered had been predicted by
the Bible. More serious opposition has come from
Intelligent Design. Some scientists have wondered whether

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Darwinian science can account for certain properties, of the

eye for example, by its traditional theory evolution. The
response of scientists has been to reject the latter because it
does not fit their definition of what science is and what
scientists do. But independent of the truth of the claims of
Intelligent Design, one has to wonder if scientists
absolutism isnt turning science into an ideology and
thereby relieving them of any questions about their own
self-dissembling.
History
As noted earlier, modern science rested on an interest in
change and the measurement of change and it was this
focus that presaged the discovery of History and historical
consciousness. Perhaps no better summary of the change
brought on by modern science exists than in Nietzsches
observation that in modern life, the morning news had
replaced the morning-prayer. The fleeting and ever changing present replaced the permanent.
Modernity has made humans aware of History. Today
people are inclined to argue that everything must be
understood in its historical context. Kundera reminds us
that in War and Peace, Tolstoy demonstrated the meaning
and impact of history as a new dimension of human
existence (TB 238), that is, a world that is subject to
perpetual change. Humans today live with little or no sense
of continuity, the world of their old age is markedly
different from the world in which they were born. But it is
not just external events that change. Tolstoys characters
have protean ideas and values. Internally, humans are never
identical to themselves. They are certainly not what they
think they are.
Tolstoy saw that even the most powerful are merely
involuntary tools of history and that the results of their
strivings are, in truth, concealed from them. Intentions or
goals are less influential on the outcome of actions than
anyone would like to believe. In Dostoyevskys The Idiot,
chance events and coincidence became the basis of
adventures of the characters. Some of these incidents appear
implausible to contemporary readers, yet, as Kundera
reminds us, similar events characterize the daily lives of all
humans and reveal the power of the pointless as the
existential condition of humans. Our daily lives are like
dreams. Humans live their lives as one proceeds in the fog.
The discontinuity of lives in modern times was anticipated
in the earliest novels. Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy are
novels that do not follow a story line. What provides unity in
the lives of both characters consists of numerous pointless
actions. It is these mundane events that the existential
condition of humans in the modern world is revealed.
Kundera referred to a novelist who may still be obscure
to the novel-reading public, Witold Gombrowicz. The

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author of three fascinating novels (Fedydurke, Cosmos

and Pornographia, and three volumes of explosive
Diaries) Gombrowicz understood the change in yet another
way. He got at the fundamental shift that occurred during
the twentieth century. Until then, mankind was divided in
twothose who defended the status quo and those who
sought to change it. (TC 55) Now that historical
consciousness has made us aware that even everything is
moving, even the status quo, a progressive and a
conformist can be the same person. The vision of the
world divided into Liberals and Conservatives is yet
another instance where humans are not what they think
they are. What, then, is a persons Identity? It would
appear that the concept of Identity is a noble lie, meant to
create the illusion of stability in a perpetually changing
world. If so, then the many studies of national, ethnic,
religious, and personal identities are searching for a dream.
Behavers vs. Actors
Perhaps the greatest irony of modernity is that as modern
political life continues to seek greater freedom for humans,
the development of the modern administrative state has
increasingly deprived humans of their freedom. Thats
because modern bureaucracies organize the actions both
of those who are employed by the organization and those
outside who are affected by the decisions made by those
employees.
This was the subject of several of Franz Kafkas novels:
man in conflict with a world transformed into an enormous
administration. (TC 63) It is a world that closely resembles
a labyrinth. It is a place where one cannot find ones way.
Both The Trial and The Castle reveal that the more rational
an institution becomes the less rational are the behavior of
the people in that institution.
Work is organized on the basis of rational principles.
Each part is integrated into a whole, or system. Each branch
of the system creates its own procedures, some of which are
known by other branches, some not known. The division of
labor often cause delays in the work of other branches and
thus of the organization as a whole. The delays often induce
re-thinking of decisions that can result in rescinding of the
initial decision in favor of an alternative. Systems can and
do cover over incompetence and stupidity within their
midsts. Worse, there are few mechanisms for revealing to
the incompetent that they are not what they think they are.
The Kafkan world is most often portrayed as a world
that corresponds to totalitarianism. But Kundera argues that
it is found in the democratic world as wellin the
bureaucratic procedures that depersonalize everyone. In a
bureaucratized universe one discovers that there is a
distinction between action and behavior. Action and acting
takes place in freedom. Behavior and behaving takes place

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in the absence of freedom. It is not accidental that

behavioralism was the term used to describe what social
scientists called their studies as data became quantified.
When social scientists began to examine correlates of
action, they robbed the actors of their freedom and hence
of their actions. Instead, people were studied engaging in
some form of behavior.
Freedom and Privacy
What is also being buried is any notion of Privacy. Kafka
had observed the decline of privacy in The Castle. In one
scene, K and Frieda are making love in a place they believe
is private. But Kafka reveals that they were being observed
by two assistants from the Castle. Their presence indicates
how even in our most intimate of moments, in a world
governed by administration, our privacy is being intruded
upon.
Today, biographers and the media, especially the
paparazzi, insist that the only healthy society is one in
which everyone lives a life of transparency. When one
wishes to hide anything, that is, to protect his or her
privacy, the media claim that the First Amendment protects
their right to expose any and all secrets. But as Kundera
observes, the only successful realization of this dream of
total transparency is a society totally monitored by the
police (TB 260).
Computers have contributed to the death of privacy.
More importantly, they have become, sometimes for good,
the prelude to police surveillance. Because so little in our
lives is private any longer; at the same time that freedoms
and democracy are expanding, the distinction between State
and Society, the foundation of the modern, liberal,
democratic state, is rapidly crumbling.
Why is this significant? Because a persons identity is
best defined by what he or she wishes to do in private.
Privacy protects peoples secrets, those untold events
which, when told, induce a sense of shame. What shames
us actually defines our true identity. The distinction
between free and totalitarian societies is being blurred, if
not entirely blended. In our time, in a transparent society,
the only way to express ones individuality is by acting
shamelessly. This expression of megalomania hides, even
from ourselves, who we are.

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Soldier Schweik. For Schweik, the army is yet another

bureaucracy that makes senseless decisions. He simply does
not understand why Germany is going to war against
Serbia. To preserve his sanity, he turns the world into a
joke, yelling on to Serbia, all the while he is trying to
exempt himself from service in the army.
Deserters are not indifferent to things and values around
them. Their desertion is a response to something that
appears to them as a dream, something that is implausible.
When decisions are imposed on them which they find
implausible, reality itself becomes implausible, and when
that occurs, the old values that they held and by which they
oriented themselves, seem to them to be distant. They do
not believe, however that they are the deserters of those
values; rather, they believe it is the values that have
deserted them.
There are ways in which people attempt to hold onto
those old values. Hermann Broch, whos The Death of
Virgil was highly praised by Hannah Arendt in Men in Dark
Times, wrote a novelistic triptych. The Sleepwalkers
explores three possibilities left to humanity in the context
in which values are dissolving. The first is the Romantic
possibility, characterized by people holding a sentimental
attachment to an inherited value. The second is the
Anarchist possibility, characterized by people ignoring the
value as it becomes more distant, yet simultaneously
making that value an imperative, not just for themselves,
but for everyone. The third is the Realistic possibility,
which emerges after an imperative is no longer characterized as an imperative and people experience freedom from
all imperatives and thus from all the values that they
inherited. Under these conditions, people become lawless;
they also become guilt-free.
In Michael Ignatieffs The Warriors Honor, there is a
chapter titled, The Seductiveness of Moral Disgust In it
Ignatieff discusses short-lived Western military interventions in Bosnia, Rwanda, Angola, Zaire, Somalia and Iraq.
With the exception of the last, the West, he argues, has
found it easy to disengage and to, exercising the Realist
possibility, claim that those who are killing each other
brought it all on themselves and should be left to solve
their differences by themselves.
Desertion is a fundamental category of being in the
modern age.

Deserters
What Is Modern About the Novel?
Technology has increasingly turned people into statistics
and it has made speed a supreme value. In spite of what
appears to be enhanced engagement, however, technology
and history have contributed to the production of a new
category of human beingThe Deserter. Kundera finds the
model for this kind of person in Jaroslav Haseks The Good

Modernity had its origins in the contrast with the way of

thinking of the Ancients. But, in light of the novel, is that
distinction not misleading? It is worth recalling that Rabelais
opens Gargantua with reference to Platos Symposium. Why
would Rabelais have turned backwards to look forwards?

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Was Socrates the model for Gargantua? Perhaps he was;

Gargantua, when trying to decide if he should marry,
consults experts from every field and discovers that they
could not provide him with a satisfactory answer.
The setting of The Symposium is a drinking party and
those who attended, throughout their discussion, got drunk.
The discussion was about what love is and the ways in
which the search for love has led to disappointments. In one
section, a drunken Alcibiades chides Socrates for not being
the person he thinks he is, especially when he used irony
against others. While worshippers of Socrates readily
dismiss Alcibiades, on many grounds, in light of Socrates
actions in other dialogues, there may be reason to believe
that Alcibiades was properly describing Socrates and what
Socrates heard about himself revealed to him his own
self-dissembling.
Rabelais likely saw in the Platonic dialogues the comic
element that had been suppressed, if not actually denied, by
subsequent philosophers, starting with Aristotle. He wished
to recover the comic, through his own work. But that
recovery points to the possibility of reconsidering what has
been hidden about Platos dialogues.
Consider the Crito. Crito, having been in Socrates cell
for a long time, awakens his friend only near dawn, when
any possibility of escape is impossible. When Socrates
reports on the dream he was having before Crito awakened
him, is not the image he created of the beautiful woman,
one that could readily evoke a sexual fantasy, a joke aimed
at the agelastic Crito? The joke is not evident because it is
truly comic. It informs Crito that Socrates knew that, in
waiting until it was too late to do anything but talk, Crito
woke him and that this hesitance, Critos justification to the
contrary, revealed that his friend had no balls.
In light of the laughter in the Platonic dialogues, one is
entitled to wonder if Plato posed one form of philosophy
a poetic and comic formthat differs from the agelastic
form of Aristotle. If so, then the turn to treatises represents
a non-poetic path for philosophy that represents the second,
not the first path. In light of this discovery, one can see that
Plato was not a philosopher, in the traditional sense of
philosophy as has come down to us from Aristotle, but a
pre-novel novelist. Who is a novelist? Kundera argues that
it is one who disappears behind his work. It is the work that
is important, not the author. By this definition, unlike
Aristotle, Plato was a novelist, perhaps the first novelist. If
the novel reveals that the only certainty in the modern
world is the wisdom of uncertainty, one might find the roots
of the novel in the dialogues of Plato, in which Socrates
claims that the only thing he knows with certainty is that he
does not know.
Kundera considered the history of the novel as a cemetery
of missed opportunities, or unheard appeals. (p. 15). By that
reasoning, the novel may have had its development in modern

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times, but as a recovery of the lost opportunities for revealing

the truth of Humanitys existential condition that were
illuminated by Plato, but buried by Aristotle. Modernity may
not be as novel as the founders of Modernity claimed, but
rather, an instance of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same.

Eternal Recurrence
In writing discursively about the novel, Kundera looked to
the origins of the novel, in Rabelais and Cervantes, to create
the next stage of the novels historywhich amounts to
giving life to the idea of eternal recurrence of the same. the
question that opens Kunderas The Unbearable Lightness of
Being.
Thomas Mann had already challenged the idea of the
Autonomous Individual by demonstrating how myths
which are passed on to succeeding generations control us
all, even in our suffering. While each person tends to
believe he or she is a unique individual, our lives are led
imitating mythical heroes (including our immediate ancestors). The truth about our lives is that they are constant
reincarnations.
In his tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers Mann demonstrated that Memory is as existential, as it is the recollection
of facts from the past. What is existential memory? It is
the eternal recurrence of the existential options faced by
humans at other times and other places.
Carlos Fuentes, who is probably best known to Americans
for the movie adaptation of his novel The Old Gringo, also
wrote Terra Nostra, which is an exploration of the theater
of memory. It examined the meaning of collective time in
the world in which we live, and reveals that it takes
several lives to make one person. (AN 56) Memory of the
past unwittingly invokes a reincarnation of that past.
Memory is existential, not just factual. Existential memory
means the eternal recurrence of the existential options that
have been ignored by scientific history.
Kundera, speaking beyond the novel, addressed the
matter of existential memory through modern music and
its relationship to the history of musical composition. In
Testaments Betrayed, Kundera wrote about Arnold Schoenberg, the creator of the revolutionary twelve-tone system,
who leaped over the nineteenth century composersthose
who emphasized melodyand returned to Bach and
Mozart for inspiration. From those two composers he took
the idea of a developing a musical theme that from
beginning to end, is based on a single set of notes that are
both melody and accompaniment.
Turning to Stravinsky, Kundera demonstrated how
modern music sought to overcome the architecture of the
Romantic Movement by reaching further backto twelfth,
fourteenth and fifteenth century composes. Why did

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Stravinsky do this? Kundera suggests that it was his

response to what he took to be the sign of the death of
European music, as manifested in nineteenth century
Romanticism, with its emphasis on melody and the
evocation of feelings. Like a person who, facing death,
recalls his entire lifetime, Stravinskys music was aimed at
providing a history of the musical art of composition.
Since then, there have been a wide variety of natural sounds
which have been incorporated into musical compositions
birdsongs, even womens chattering, that is, spoken language.
But modern music has gone even further. In Varese and
Xenakis, Kundera found music freed from human subjectivity,
the nonhuman beauty of the world before or after mankind
moved through it (TB, 71). The profound is what touches on
the essential, what is the being of music. To know music is to
consider what the ontology of the art of music is.
If novelists in the nineteenth century chose one path,
novelists of the twentieth took another. They returned to the
original novels, just as Stravinsky returned to ancient
music. But the return was not a simple return, but a
transformation. The novels of Broch, Gombrowicz and
Musil represent the inauguration of a third period in the
history of the novel. This period is best characterized as the
time when the novel began to take over domains that had
been previously reserved for philosophy. Unlike Sartres
novels, which Kundera characterize as philosophy using
fiction for propaganda purposes, the novels of these three
were thinking novels cast in the comic tradition of
Cervantes and Rabelais.
Unlike the recollection of factual memories, novels
explore existential memories. Rushdies The Satanic
Verses, for example, is composed of the present lives of his
characters, the Koranic story of the origins of Islam and the
trek to Mecca across a sea that the pilgrims believed theyd
cross dry-footed, in which they drown. These themes, says
Kundera, lead to the question, who put the verses in the
head of the woman who led to HajjGod or Satan?
Furthermore, what is the meaning of the drowninga
tragedy or a trip to Paradise? Such a question reveals the
uncertainty that is the very grounds of human existence.
Kundera found in Robert Musils The Man Without
Qualities the discovery that even historical events are
interchangeable, permutable; for the dates of wars, the
names of victors and vanquished, various political initiatives, all result from the play of variations and permutations
whose limits are determined by deep, hidden forces. Often
these forces manifest in ways that are far more revealing in
some other variation of History then the one that did
happen to play out (TC, 164).
What leads humans to make the choices they do? Is it the
charm of the unknown? Nostalgia? Is it a noble generosity
that prefers the weak to the powerful? Or is it the pleasure
of creating a new world ex nihilo? For any particular choice

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or decision, all of them may be at work. In effect, there is

no single, clear and distinct explanation. To impose one
explanation on readers, via a single narration, as scientifically trained scholars do, amounts to distorting the lifeworld.
That may explain why many novels contain at least two
narratives, if not more. Kundera cites Tolstoys Anna
Karenina, which structurally contains two narrativesone
about Anna and the other a character named Levin. The
novel closes, not upon Annas dramatic suicide, but
afterwards, as the story shifts to Levins prosaic life. In
reality, the dramatic blends in the prosaic.
Faulkners As I Lay Dying, has multiple narrators, each a
member of a family who are accompanying their mother to
the graveyard. His Wild Palms, contains two autonomous
stories. The characters of one have no knowledge of the
characters of the other.
Many years ago, I discovered in Melvilles Billy Budd
that the narrator spoke in more than one voice. In the
opening, the narrator contrasts his own time with the time
before steamships. The story he told was about that earlier
period, yet what interested me as much was his reference to
men living after the time of steamships, in particular
utilitarians, historians and dictionary makers.
There is something comic present in the novel. When the
narrator referred to John Claggart, he described the Master of
Arms as being accused by sailors of being Naturally
Depraved. He then informs the reader that he sought a
definition of that term and found it in an authoritative
dictionary of Platonic words. The definition was: depraved
by nature. Only an agelaste would not laugh at this joke,
which demeaned the worth of this authoritative book.
Throughout, the narrator also contrasts the character of
sailors and landsmen, latter being capable of irony, the
former not. Yet it became evident that the narrator spoke
in both voices in telling his story. I asked myself, which
voice was the true narrative and concluded that both were,
each voice served to overcome the self-dissembling of the
other.

Looking Backwards
Modernity, as understood by science, has not been shown
to contain nor solve the enigmas of human existence that
modern sciencephysical and socialpromised to expose
and resolve. Being totally serious, the physical and social
sciences fail to reveal the comic elements of human
existence. Moderns do laugh, but we laugh at others, and
sometimes ourselves; but we do not laugh at the human
condition. Yet perhaps what is most comic about Modernity
is Bacons promise that the aim of modern philosophy and
the sciences was to relieve mans estate.

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That promise may be the greatest joke of all. The

July/August, 2008 issue of The Atlantic Monthly featured
an article titled Google is Making Us Stoopid? What the
Internet is Doing to Our Brains. In it, Nicholas Carr
claims that those who depend on the internet and on
computer search engines have become good at scanning
information, but not thinking deeply about that information. Additionally, computers and the internet, which
connect humanity globally and made the world flat,
easing communications, commerce, and information flow,
have also contributed to world wide identity theft, sexual
predation and all the other illegal and immoral activities
that humans are prone to. As people all over the world are
increasingly living in a world of virtual reality, our daily

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waking lives are more like dreams and in some cases,

nightmares.
Kundera concluded that mankind grows younger all the
time (AN 63). Modernity may not be projecting humanity
towards greater maturity, but on the contrary, towards
greater immaturity. Perhaps there is some truth to the story,
told in Platos Statesman, of the Reversed Cosmos. For
every advance brought on by modernity, humans and
human societies are getting younger and less mature. Is it
possible that we are all headed for infancy?
Martin J. Plax was Cleveland Director for The American Jewish
Committee from 1976 to 2000. He now teaches political science, as a
member of the adjunct faculty at Cleveland State University.