The novel, for Milan Kundera, is an art to explore and understand the human condition. In one of his essays on the topic, while arguing about the novel as an autonomous art instead of a mere literary genre, Kundera says that one of its distinctive features is that it has its own morality. And this morality, recalling Hermann Broch, is nothing but knowledge — “a novel that fails to reveal some hitherto unknown bit of existence is immoral; thus ‘getting into the soul of things’ and setting a good example are two different and irreconcilable purposes.” This point is reinforced in another part of the same essay, where Kundera analyses the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho:

Don Quixote tells Sancho that Homer and Virgil were describing characters not ‘as they were but rather as they must be, to stand as examples of virtue to future generations.’ Now, Don Quixote himself is far from an example to follow. Characters in novels do not need to be admired for their virtues. They need to be understood, and that is a completely different matter... All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That—that is the raison d’être of the art of the novel.1

To illustrate this point better, consider one of the first of Kundera’s novels—Life is Elsewhere (1969). The main character of this novel is the young poet Jaromil from Czechoslovakia (when Kundera wrote this novel, he still hadn’t fled to France). Jaromil was born before World War II and died at an early age soon after the consolidation of the communist regime by the end of the 1940s. His attitudes were those of the lyrical poet as conceived by Kundera; that is, a personality that doesn’t look forward to further examination and analysis of reality. Truth is not his concern, but “the magical territory of verse [where] all assertions become true as long as they are backed by the power of experienced emotion.”2 Thus, love and hate, the absoluteness of poetry and the heedlessness of social life, and other opposites are merged with this young poet. All of this paves the way for Kundera to explore, among other things, the relationship between lyrical poetry (or the attitudes of the lyrical poet), youth, love, revolution, and communist totalitarianism.

Kundera's refusal to provide a good example goes so far that it would be unwelcome, if not outright cancelled, nowadays in many circles where political correctness is the rule. This can be appreciated in the cruelty that Jaromil developed during the communist revolution. Bear in mind the violent treatment that he had for his redhead lover.

There are two moments that I would like to recall here. The first is during a moment of intimacy. Here, Jaromil can’t hold back from imagining her being touched by another person (by a doctor in a simple check-up, to be more precise) and that she, unlike him, is not a virgin. His reaction was putting his hands around her throat as if he were choking her, and the mere idea of strangling her and her nonexistence thrilled him — this power over her made him feel that she really belonged to him (a feeling that was destroyed when he learnt that he was not the only one who had touched her and who would touch her in the future).

The second moment was during his last encounter with the redhead girl. They decided to meet at six, but she was more than twenty minutes late. Things were not going well for Jaromil after having had some bad days, and the excuse of redhead girl annoyed him even more: she was talking with a friend who was about to break up with her boyfriend. For Jaromil, this was intolerable; he felt he was being treated with the typical heedlessness with which you treat a woman friend, a customer in a store, or a passerby on the street. Hers, he concluded in hatred and jealousy, was not real love but a paltry imitation of love.

If things were not sufficiently messed up at that moment, the redhead girl, in her efforts to amend the situation, confessed that she was not with a friend—she was with her brother. She was farewelling him because he was planning to emigrate illegally the next day (we learn later that this was also a lie). Nothing could have been more upsetting to Jaromil.

Firstly, the secrecy she showed (for him, love is telling each other everything), and secondly, her brother wanted to abandon the young socialist republic and the revolution! Her brother was now not only someone who could hamper Jaromil’s total possession of the redhead girl (Jaromil interprets on more than one occasion the attachment of the redhead girl to her family as an incapacity to fully love), but also an existential threat to him — “Your brother is on the other side of the barricades. He's my personal enemy. If war broke out, your brother would shoot at me and I at him.”3

At the redhead girl's refusal to comply with Jaromil's request to denounce her brother to the police, he went alone to do so the next morning. To his surprise, both the brother and the redhead girl were taken by the police, and that made him feel virile, excited, and manly.

Later, Jaromil imagined the redhead girl being surrounded by men interrogating her and tearing off her clothes. This time, however, he didn’t feel jealous like he did during the moment of intimacy mentioned above. This time, he realised that she belonged to him more than ever — “her destiny is his creation.” And again, he felt manly – that day, he slept in “the manly sleep of men”.4

Neither words of shame nor regret are found in this novel, nor critiques of Jaromil’s behaviour, nor plot twists where the bad character becomes a good one. Jaromil goes along with himself fine and dies soon after at an early age from pneumonia. Kundera’s characters are not attempts to portray examples of virtue or vice, but devices to explore crucial aspects of human life and behaviour. Moreover, the events that take place in his novels at the hands of his characters are accompanied by comments from Kundera himself. In Life is Elsewhere, he reflects on the relationship between lyricism and revolution: “Lyricism is intoxication, and man drinks in order to merge more easily with the world. Revolution has no desire to be examined or analysed; it only desires that the people merge with it. In this sense, it is lyrical and in need of lyricism.” 5

The lesson from all this pops up more or less clearly: it is not possible to delve into all the corners of the human condition only with a moral compass. In an interview, Kundera puts it very bluntly in a reference to Life is Elsewhere: writing a novel against totalitarianism is banal — everyone knows it is wrong. Much more interesting is exploring why we are so attracted to it. This leads him beyond morality and politics. The totalitarian regime, as he experienced it, is more than a political regime; it is a psychological archetype. It does have generalised support, at least at the beginning; it fulfils a human illusion — the desire for a harmonious society, a society where all individuals are unified by a single will and where there is no demarcation between public and private life.6 It is not possible to explore these dimensions of the totalitarian regime only with nominal categories such as 'good' and 'wrong' or 'virtuous' and 'not virtuous'.

Furthermore, what remains when we approach everything only through these moral lenses? When we have no more than impeccable characters interacting in worlds on the right side of history? I would dare to say — and this is my own interpretation of Kundera — that we get kitsch ideals. These ideals deny those elements of human existence which are considered unacceptable, and they are put into practice by acting as though these elements don’t exist. They are the denial of shit (this is Kundera’s expression) and everything unpleasant. The kitsch, writes Kundera, “excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.”

To illustrate this, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), he describes the inner state of one of the characters as follows:

Sabina's initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cowsheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear—in other words, Communist kitsch. The model of Communist kitsch is the ceremony called May Day.7

Here, a second lesson pops up: this exploratory character of Kundera’s novel provides us with categories to understand or approach many current phenomena. The Communist kitsch recently referred to is not much different than, say, the “Radical kitsch” of many protesters or performers coming from woke and politically correct circles. The kitsch of Netflix and Disney is also worth analysing.

Beyond the kitsch, Roger Scruton has used Kundera’s idea of the uglification of the world to show where the disdain for beauty has led us.8 From a more familiar case, in a letter published in a Chilean newspaper, Daniel Mansuy, a public intellectual from Chile, expresses his worries about the leak of a private conversation between two public figures by appealing to Kundera’s reflections on the concentration camp as a place where all private life has been suppressed — “where we cannot speak privately with our friends, we have lost any semblance of freedom.”9

To sum up, here I hold to the idea that the novel, as Kundera understood it, lets us explore corners of the human condition that are not accessible merely through moral lenses, and that we can extrapolate useful categories from it to understand current phenomena. I just want to add to all this that, despite making many references to political things, the work of Kundera is much broader. He explored politics only insofar as he could find its connection to other aspects of human life. In other words, he was not a political thinker. The emphasis on political things in this article is just the bias of a political scientist writing about something that is beyond his normal topics.

References

1 Kundera, M. (2007). The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts. Harper Perennial.
2 Kundera, M. (2000). Life Is Elsewhere. Harper Perennial.
3 Ibid., 341.
4 Ibid., 356.
5 Ibid., 260-261.
6 Kundera, M. (1980). Milan Kundera. A Fondo Radio Broadcast. TVE.
7 Kundera, M. (2009). The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Harper Perennial.
8 Scruton, R. (2012). Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously about the Planet. Atlantic.
9 Mansuy, D. (2025). Conversacione privadas. El Mercurio.