From "What is a Novelist?" in the current (10/9) issue of The New Yorker (available online only though library subscriptions--try Emerson's library website if you're interested):
"Artists' fame is the most monstrous of all, for it implies the idea of immortality. And that is a diabolical snare, because the grotesquely megalomaniac ambition to survive one's death is inseparably bound to the artist's probity. Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional--thus not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious--is contemptible. This is the novelist's curse: his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania."
October 6, 2006
Milan Kundera on ambition & fame
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6 comments:
Cynical mediocrity or megalomaniac monstrosity: Gah! I hate having to choose!
I actually employ both. I CRAVE immortality but approach it via the dull poem.
I'm pretty sure it's working. I'm feeling pretty strong. Plus it's really easy.
I wonder if the same could be said for poets?
this essay is one of the best i've read in a long, long time. and i think much of what kundera writes is applicable to those whose chosen form of written word is not the novel (though certainly what he says is best suited to that breed), as i count myself among that group. surely we could all heed his call to embrace the "ethic of the essential", no?
I liked the part about having to outgrow the "lyrical" to become a real novelist. Great essay.
I also thought his part about outgrowing the lyrical was the most compelling, and wrote a bit about that in Lit Matters. In some ways, this psychological development lies at what is fundamentally unique about the novel as a form for Kundera: its perspectivist nature that allows for point and counterpoint to exist in a way that it doesn't in other mediums.
"Ployphony" is the word he uses to describe this in his book, The Art of the Novel. This essay seemed like an abridged version of that book.
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