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The novelist is neither historian nor prophet: he is an explorer of existence.
The art inspired by God's laughter does not by nature serve ideological certitudes, it contradicts them.
-Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel
The apparent contradiction between these two statements lies at the root of the surprisingly tentative nature of most criticism of Milan Kundera's works. In an uncharacteristic show of respect for an author's comments about his own work, critics of Kundera's novels have by and large refrained from teasing out the political and ideological critiques in them, thus situating his work in terms of the cultural debates upon which it draws. Adhering with almost naïve simplicity to his injunctions against reading his works only as ideological critiques, most of Kundera's critics have avoided ideological readings altogether.1 But such readings, be they tentative or dismissive, ignore at their own peril the complex ideological awareness that informs not only Kundera's novels but also his thinking about the novel itself as a counter-ideological form. In their efforts to avoid incurring Kundera's disdain by producing reductive ideological readings of his works, such critics have failed to note his broader conception of the novel as inherently (and ideologically) critical: "the novel is incompatible with the totalitarian universe. This incompatibility is deeper than the one that separates a dissident from an apparatchik, or a human-rights campaigner from a torturer, because it is not only political or moral but ontologica!. [...] Totalitarian Truth excludes relativity, doubt, questioning; it can never accommodate what I would call the spirit of the novel" (Art 1 3-14).
The fundamental conflict between Kundera's insistence that his novels are not simply ideological and his broader characterization of the novel as an ideological solvent produces a paradox in his writing:
c'est un paradox, ici, qu'il faut saisir: celui d'une pensée manifestement hostile au modernisme (comme idéologie), mais s'exposant dans une écriture qui ne nie rien des acquis de la modernité (comme esthétique). (Scarpetta 87)
it is a paradox here that we must grasp: that of a thought manifestly hostile to modernism (as an ideology), but revealing itself in writing that denies nothing of the acquisitions of modernity (as an aesthetic).2
By identifying Kundera's ambivalence towards the ideological aspect of modernism, traditionally viewed as an...