Comparison of A.S. Byatt and Thomas Hardy’s conflict of society and individual, Pt. 2. Kundera’s The Art of the Novel.

 

The scientist views life as an abject to be studied. Such is the legacy of the modern world according to Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel. But Kundera is a novelist, and he wants to take the study of an objective world beyond that objectivity and into a realm that exceeds mere “being” (3-4). The novelist aspires to take human existence beyond the scientific, the historical, the political, to give the individual his/her right to illuminate “the various dimensions of existence” (5). In the determinist works of nineteenth-century naturalism, such as Thomas Hardy’s novels, such illumination is sought for desperately by the characters only to be thwarted by an omnipresent social construct that determines a tragic fate. For example, Jude’s aspirations to live a life of the mind are brought low by his need to engage in stonemasonry in order to support his wife and children, only to have those children, and his partnership with Sue Bridehead, taken away from him by a cruel and violent fate. What makes the novel, though, is Jude’s search for something beyond the cruelty of fate. Likewise, the sisters in A.S. Byatt’s The Game are confounded in their search for meaning through writing novels (Julia) and romanticizing about science (Cassandra) by their constant return to a cruel game they invented in their childhood in which each sister is forever trying to dominate the other. The early modernist Hardy and the early postmodernist Byatt show Kundera’s thesis in a similar fashion, the attempt to get beyond the objectivity of the world brought on by deterministic circumstance.

 

According to Kundera, the novel, or any form of artistry, is a proclamation of the individual who is caught in a trap. Firstly, the trap of history confines the individual and keeps him/her from free expression of identity. Beyond history, according to Steiby’s interpretation of Kundera with which I agree, is “an anthropological trap in which humankind finds itself caught from the very beginning and which thwarts an autonomous and authentic mode of existence” (207). The novel has the unique ability to show the tedium of life that is the result of resigning one’s self to the trap of history and to traps of gloom and cynicism.

 

The novel is also the agent that can transport the individual from the tedium of his/her traps. The traps would render the search for identity nonexistent. But, as Steiby writes, “In Kundera’s view, identity is not a possibility of human existence either, but rather the main issue with which the novel has been preoccupied throughout its history” (208). Hardy’s novels show Kundera’s position in their questioning of an inevitable determinism that renders the individual helpless despite a dogged determination by that individual to determine identity. Byatt takes this defiance one step further by comparing her twentieth-century characters to the idealistic individuals of a century (or more) earlier. Byatt’s comparison is a longing for relative identity, for instance the sisters of The Game constantly wrestling with each other’s emotions using Biblical and medieval imagery, Eden-like serpents and knights from Arthuriana.

 

The novel tells the dilemma of the individual as he/she attempts to escape the inescapable. Steiby writes of Kundera’s use of character, “Aging, forgetting and the selectivity of memory, being trapped in a body, and mortality are no longer examined as the existential problems of particular individuals, but appear more directly as inescapable aspects of human existence” (209). Kundera escapes from the inescapable through dreams. “The dream” he writes, “is the only model for the sort of imagination that I consider the greatest discovery of modern art” (81). His characters pursue dreams outside of the history which binds them.

 

As a novelist looking back on the form and themes of the modern novel, Byatt reflects this pursuit of dream. The Game of the sisters is a trap, but it is also a means of escape from chaos. This chaos is explained by Cassandra’s scientist bfriend Simon:  “the individual fate—the fate of the species, or of the individual creature—is different from what may seem laid down by general laws of change or fate. We don’t know shy almost all reptiles died. Nor do we know why these did not” (61). In contrast, Thor, Julia’s lusty fisherman husband, chastises her for her obsession with hopelessness. He says, “All this about the sister you never see—you will positively wear yourself out if you take everything with this personal intensity, really. Try a bit of deliberate and conscious selfishness for a change. You’re an artist…and artists have got to be detached and ruthless” (67, italics are Byatt’s). Turn away from your chaos, Byatt is saying. Turn inward 9as if dreaming perhaps) toward what keeps you from fostering hopelessness. Such delving into your inner psyche is the definition of art, and the path to happiness.

 

Hardy’s student in spirit, D.H. Lawrence wrote of the turn to the inward world in the individual within the novel. Writing his novels in the decades after Hardy had put up his novel-writing pen in favor of poetry, Lawrence’s type of sensory post-romanticism reflects the turn away from society’s oppression in favor of the individual’s inward turn inward to achieve happiness. In Lawrence’s turn inward, though, the spirit and the body are one and must be treated as one, especially by the novelist: “Let us learn from the novel. In the novel, the characters can do nothing but live” (47). Lawrence’s view of life he defines as “Me alive ends at my fingertips” (43). Anything beyond the body is beyond the spirit also, unalive to the individual. Byatt’s admonition to the artist to delve inward in order to escape hopelessness means to delve into the body/spirit as one. The oneness separates the individual from the traps that Kundera sees upon us. The oneness is the dream, but it is also, as with Lawrence, the only reality the individual has. The novel points this out to us all, and that is it’s worth, it’s necessity. A necessity, I suppose, as needed as turning Kundera’s thoughts on the novel back to D.H. Lawrence.

 

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References

Byatt, A.S. The Game. Random House, 1967.

Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. [1986] trans. by Linda Asher [1988], Harper, 2000.

Lawrence, D.H. “Why the Novel Matters” in The Book of Twentieth Century Essays, ed. Ian Hamilton. Penguin, 1999, 43-48.

Steiby, Lisa. Kundera and Modernity. Purdue UP. ebook Academic Collection (EBSOhost), Comparative Cultural Studies, 2013. Accessed Feb. 2025.

 

Nicholas Harris

Blog. March 6, 2025.