Long and wandering, yet fascinating and gripping, Kundera considers various aspects of The Novel, including what history will think of it when the entire form is no longer.

When, one day, the novel’s history will have ended, what fate will await the great novels left after that? Some are unrecountable, and thus inadaptable (like Pantagruel, like Tristram Shandy, like Jacques the Fatalist, like Ulysses). They will either survive or disappear as they are. Others, thanks to the “story” they contain, do seem recountable (like Anna Karenina, The Idiot, The Trial) and therefore adaptable to film, to television, to theatre, to cartoon strip. But that “immortality” is a chimera! For turning a novel into a theatre piece or a film requires first decomposing the composition; reducing it to just its “story”; renouncing its form. But what is left of a work of art once it’s stripped of its form? One means to prolong a great novel’s life through an adaptation and only builds a mausoleum, with just a small marble plaque recalling the name of a person who is not there.

Consciousness of Continuity

It can be said of all novels: their common history puts them in many mutual relationships which illuminate their meaning, extend their effect, and protect them against forgetting. What would we still have of François Rabelais if Sterne, Diderot, Gombrowicz, Vancura, Grass, Gadda, Fuentes, García Márquez, Ki …, Goytisolo, Chamoiseau, Rushdie had not set ringing the echo of his lovely lunacies in their own novels? It is by the light from Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra (1975) that The Sleepwalkers (1929-32) displays the full significance of its aesthetic novelty, which was barely perceptible at the time of its publication; and it is in the company of those two works that Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) ceases to be a merely ephemeral political news item and becomes a great work that, with its oneiric juxtapositions of eras and continents, develops the most audacious possibilities of the modern novel. And Ulysses! It can be understood only by someone familiar with the novel’s old passion for the mystery of the present moment, for the richness contained in a single second of life, for the existential scandal of insignificance. Taken outside the novel’s history, Ulysses would be no more than a caprice, the incomprehensible extravagance of a madman.

Torn away from the history of their various arts, there is not much left to works of art.