The Novel in the Post-Truth World: Revisiting Milan Kundera’s ‘The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes’ in 2020
In the early 80s when Milan Kundera wrote ‘The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes’ the juggernaut that mass media is had been already steamrolling the complexities of human affairs, their localised nature and specificities of relevant set of issues, into templates of seemingly objective and easily digestible facts. What didn’t fit the template often got left out, a practice that has taken root since and that continues to dictate the way we consume most information from around the world.
This cognitive ease of simplifications and stereotypes at the expense of a nuanced and informed exploration of issues seldom comes up for discussion around the crisis of ‘alternative facts’. Far from affirming a pluralist view of the world, that no two lives are the same, the term sets up a contest for the status of fact without disputing the limitations of facts as tokens of truth.
We know that our preconceptions form one factor that plays an immensely important role. Between two competing and contrasting pieces of information we are more inclined towards the one that confirms our biases and is in line with our system of beliefs and values.
In this regard, the imperative for intellectuals today is to counter this welter of misinformation and lies. And to achieve this within the formal confines of social media — after all it has come to be as influential as mass media if not more — requires the ingenuity for gnomic utterances; to convey substance in an economy of words. Knowledge illuminates; but the need for the striking effect that the verb ‘illuminate ’speaks to was perhaps never more keenly felt.
At the same time, it is equally important to realize that in a culture of such uniform modes of expression and perception, the substance of life recedes further and further. It makes it inconceivable to inquire into existence with all its variety, contradictions, and inconsistencies without first unraveling them as separate strands into neat categories. Kundera may have written the essay decades ago but his words remain as relevant as ever.
The Modern Era established the centrality of man, of the human subject, in the cosmos. It inaugurated a world bereft of the imposing edifice of dogma and its apodictic truths. Instead, Man as a rational being was now free to inquire into the nature of things.
Cervantes responded to the crisis with a work that captured existence in a world of relative truths where erstwhile assurances were losing their robustness. The world was now a multitude of perspectives and each perspective suggested its own version of the truth. For Kundera, this inaugural moment encapsulates the task that confronted the novelist and continues to do so with unflagging urgency — to inquire into the world of life without paring down the uneasy ambiguities of modern existence. And Cervantes is as much a founding figure of the Modern Era as are Descartes and Galileo.
The Novel will never replace the methods of scientific inquiry. To establish a hierarchy between their truths would be a futile gesture and against the very spirit of the novel that never claims to ordering reality in terms of priority. What the novel does share with its modern counterparts of inquiry is their subject matter — the world of life. It stakes claim to inquire into the existential categories of life. To seize on them and to explore them is the task of the novel. In this sense the novel as a genre does share a relation to its age. The relation is not one of simple verisimilitude; the relation is of illuminating the hitherto unknown areas of existence.
Don Quixote finds himself in a seemingly endless landscape where to seek adventure. Time idly passes by and there is unrestricted freedom of movement, to return home at will. Rastignac’s social ascension is a testament to high society replacing the landscape of adventure to accommodate the parvenu ambitions that are no longer feasible outside of this setting. Is it any wonder then that Rastignac’s rise comes with Vautrin’s fall? Or, that the latter is a fatherly figure, crucial to Rastignac’s learning? With Joseph K., the absurdity of bureaucratic entanglements catches up to human existence in an all-powerful garb.
But the mantel of inquiry also places an imperative on the writer: to always attempt to explore previously neglected segments of human existence. Thus, to continue to write the kind of novels that have already been written would be immoral. For Kundera, such novels do not form a part of the living history of the novel. They are novels that were written as if at the end of the history of novel.
The wisdom of novel is the wisdom of uncertainty. Or, the only certainly the novel assures us of is the certainly of ambiguity in life when considered in all its concreteness. The novel does not offer categorical assertions. At best we get a spectrum of relative values, a graduated schema where the extremes seldom play a meaningful role. The truth of the novel is plural. Therefore it is often subjected to censorship, bans, and denounced as immoral by those who are troubled by its ambiguity, those who would like to force its truth into simplistic binaries of either-or. Kundera himself lived under the monolithic Truth of Totalitarianism during his time in Czechoslovakia.
Over the course of the modern era, Reason gnawed at one value-system after another. And in the meantime, it established its own set of values and myths — of progress, of history, and the absolute superiority of its mathematico-quantitative and technical modes of inquiry. Today Man, whom Descartes had crowned as the proprietor and master of nature, finds himself a mere object to the forces of history, politics, and technology. The disasters of the past century and those looming on the horizon that threaten the very existence of the human race, foremost among which must be global conflicts and climate change, are a result of forces that have dislodged Man for his vaunted place; he is now one mere factor in their operation.
Man has always sought the assurances of a value-system that promises to order the manifold that is the world around us. Liberated from dogmas of particular value-systems, this innate desire to jump to conclusions, to judge before we comprehend, and by-pass the patience and waiting that understanding demands has ushered in world where the brute force of will dominates its objects. It fashions objects to resemble the idea of what it seeks. So that in the course of time humanity has witnessed the absurdity of a will that wills itself in macabre spectacles of wars of expansion that were fought for the sake of expansion. The irrationality of rational technological and political forces that descended humanity into world wars continues to this day. Instead of serving humanity, these forces have objectified humanity in their uncompromising pursuits.
The present-day plague of misinformation also betrays a will that above all else desires itself and the indisputable supremacy of its own logic. Fake news is a turning away from facts. And, the impulse that refuses to reckon with reality is also one that chooses instead to remain within a personalized version of the world. Often, it is because the issues do not directly impact our day-to-day life. Or, if they do concern us, then the nature and sale of the problem is yet to give itself to us individually, in our experience. The massive scale of misinformation around the corona virus pandemic, ranging from conspiracy theories of theories of malicious corporate/ state intent behind its engineered nature to promising cures, is a striking example of this.
To label misinformation as ‘alternative facts’ is a spin doctor’s slip of tongue nightmare, or maybe the acme of astute branding in the age of mass media. But what is noteworthy is that it does capture the essential kinship that intentional lies and falsehoods today share with truth that circulates in the form of facts. We have grown so used to the self-manifest nature of truth (in popular understanding, video recordings are the epitome of self-evident truth) that a mere formal semblance makes misinformation so potent on social media.
Kundera concludes the piece with a vow to stand for the ‘depreciated legacy of Cervantes’ — the Novel; not Country, God, Individual, or People. Such an adherence to the novel at the expense of the others that he mentions would seem preposterous to people across the political spectrum for what it purports to neglect. But the choice is deceptively blasé; Kundera has chosen the arduous task to stand for the concrete world of life.
