The novel compared with music
Any musical composition involves a good deal of purely technical ability: exposition of a theme, development, variations, polyphonic work that is frequently quite mechanical, filling in the orchestration, transitions, and so on. But it also heads straight for the heart of things: only the note that says something essential has the right to exist. Roughly the same idea applies to the novel: it too is weighted down by "technique", by the conventions that do the author's work for him: present a character, describe a milieu, bring the action into a historical situation, fill time in the character's life with superfluous episodes; each shift of scene calls for new exposition, description, explanation... My imperative is to rid the novel of the automatism of novelistic technique, of novelistic verbalism to make it dense...
Polyphony in music is the simultaneous presentation of two or more voices that are perfectly bound together but still keep their relative independence.
It's not so farfetched to compare the novel to music. Indeed, one of the fundamental principles of the great polyphonic composers was the equality of voices: no one voice should dominate, none should serve as mere accompaniment [this relates with what we talked before about two or three people writing a screenplay]. Polyphony in the novel is much more poetry than it is technique.Another important lesson from music. Like it or not, each passage of a musical composition conveys an emotional expression. The sequence of movements in a symphony or a sonata has always been determined by the unwritten rule of alternating slow and fast movements, which almost automatically meant sad or cheerful moments. I mention it to show that to compose a novel is to set different emotional spaces side by side –and that, to me, is the writer's subtlest craft.
The form of a novel, its "mathematical structure", it not a calculated thing; it is an unconscious drive, an obsession.
A part is a movement. The chapters are measures. These measures may be short, or long or quite variable in length.
There is a fundamental difference between the way philosophers and novelist think. The novelist's ideas are intellectual exercises, paradox games, improvisations, rather than statements of thought.
Tone is crucial. It should be playful, ironic, provocative, experimental, or inquiring.
The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.
Kundera: "I've always constructed the stories on two levels: on the first, I compose the novel's story; over that, I develop the themes. The themes are worked out steadily within and by the story. Whenever a novel abandons its themes and settles for just telling the story, it goes flat. A theme is an existential inquiry.
A novel is based primarily on certain fundamental words.
Farce: A form that puts enormous stress on plot, with its whole machinery of unforeseen and exaggerated coincidences. There is nothing so dubious in a novel now –so ridiculous, so much bad in taste – as plot, with its farcical excesses.
Novels and readers had not yet signed the verisimilitude pact. They were not looking to simulate reality; they were looking to amuse, amaze, astonish, enchant. They were playful, and therein lay their virtuosity.