Irreverence

Abstract

In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera describes the history of the European novel since the eighteenth century as a “cemetery of missed opportunities.” With the rise of realism in the early nineteenth century, he argues, the qualities of irreverence and playfulness lost the salience they once had: “Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Denis Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste are for me the two great novelistic works of the eighteenth century, two novels conceived as grand games. They reach heights of playfulness, of lightness, never scaled before or since. Afterward, the novel got itself tied to the imperative of verisimilitude, to realistic settings, to chronological order. It abandoned the possibilities opened up by these two masterpieces, which could have led to a different development of the novel.” “[Y]es,” Kundera concludes parenthetically, “it’s possible to imagine a whole other history of the European novel,” a history grounded in the ludic tendencies, the “grand games,” of the eighteenth century (Art 15–16). As I have suggested once before, this argument strikes me as entirely plausible. But perhaps it is not necessary merely to imagine this alternate universe; perhaps this “other history” actually did transpire, only somewhere else—somewhere beyond realism’s immediate sphere of influence, on the global periphery of European literature and culture.