Means of grasping the self
In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera, in conversation with Christian Salmon, discusses the difficulties of grasping the self. He states:
All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted with the question: What is the self?
And he continues to categorize the responses to that question into “three different tendencies, perhaps different periods”:
1. Through action
Kundera begins with early storytelling, where the stories would primarily focus on actions:
The psychological approach wasn't even known to the first European storytellers. Boccaccio simply tells us about actions and adventures...
2. Through inner life
He then moves toward the psychological novel, especially Proust and Joyce, where the self is approached through inner life:
Joyce analyzes something still more ungraspable than Proust’s ‘lost time’: the present moment. […] In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events, and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our heads. […] Now, Joyce's great microscope manages to stop, to seize, that fleeting instant and make us see it.
3. Through external factors
Finally, Kundera moves on to Kafka, who, for him, provided a new orientation to the novel. Kafka's character K. is not defined by his inner life; we know nothing about it, only the current circumstances surrounding him. Kundera asks:
What possibilities remain for man in a world where the external determinants have become so overpowering that internal impulses no longer carry weight?
