Kundera agrees to the holy trinity of modernist writers Joyce, Proust, Kafka but awards the modern liberation

on of the novel solely to the last one. It is Kafka, according to Kundera, who first explored the constricted possibilities of existence in a modern world. And if there is any question regarding the validity of the constriction, look no further for a supporting argument than the disappearance of open grounds, landscapes, and the unknown darknesses of yore, the sort of universe that was available to Cervantes for germinating fabulous adventures. Kundera called Kafkas world (and perhaps ours too, though Im not sure), one of terminal paradoxes, where the rule of the irrationality of faith was being replaced by the rule of the irrational without any faith. Man had, by then, become the ruler of a Godless world, and had shortened it enough to feel trapped. By reducing the scope of his own being, man had set a forgetting-of-being as Heidegger suggested, and Kundera concurred with. Kundera finds verification of his argument in the fact that Man had by then already indulged in a war that could truly by called a world war whose inception and denouement happened on one continent, but from which the whole planet, civilized or as yet savage, could not remain unaffected. Every substantial event in history, by then, was already a progress towards a total cataclysm, he argues. And the argument holds water to me. To my mind, and as may be obvious, the raison-d-etre for Kafkas work, and his exploration of existence, was his vision of the world as a bureaucratic, irrational office, run by an irrational will. While Kafkas art may be attributed to that vision coming alive around him, both personally and politically, his reputation may also have something to do with it. Kafka, perhaps, became so important for the European novel not so much because of the first war but because of the second, where his vision indeed came alive, with all its terrors and its prophecy-like power, and played out in the life of the individual, who had by then accepted the worldly hell as his residence. I argue here that it was in the second war that the process that man set about in the first one came to its culmination; by its end man truly became obsessed with the total absence of God, with the fruitlessness of being-in-life, and began to accept the demonic side of his irrationality as easily and as communally. Kafkas famous short story, In the Penal Colony, will serve here to accentuate my first point, of Kafka as the prophet. Sartres movement from phenomenology to existentialism; Camus and his interpretation of the history of rebellion in The Rebel; and Thomas Manns Doctor Faustus (used by Kundera as well) should provide a useful chronology of the individuals intellectual life in those times, a supplement to my second point. But my intention here is not to link Kafka and his literary value to the occurrence of the biggest event in human history. It is to do that to Kundera. A rather frivolous view: it is to the two wars and to the opportune existence of a genius in Kafka in between them, that someone like Kundera, and others of his ilk that I am as yet unaware of (but

have a sense that Ismail Kadare is one), may owe their very existence as novelists. In this light, Kunderas tribute to the man is well understood. But then, isnt that as tautological as knowing that the wars took place and changed humanity. The exploration of the possibilities of existence in Kunderas novels can be explored only by keeping in mind the following points: 1. Kunderas total disagreement with Joyce on the presence of the author within the book. Joyces worry in fact was not the author (The author was culled from the novel way before Joyce; the culling was canonized by Henry James after him), it was the narrator. Joyces spectacular achievement was not so much in putting a microphone inside Blooms and Dedalus head, but in making the microphone invisible. Joyce as Joyce is absent from his work; but Joyce as narrator is absent too it is his invisible microphone that reads the book just as the reader reads it, in the ephemerality of the present moment, in its constant pastification. (Some will argue that because of the usage of the past tense in Ulysses, the microphone has a lag, but let us not get into that, because there is always a lag in what our hands touch at one moment and when our brain registers the touch for more on this google a man called) Some googling may bring us to the point of culling a remark by Joyce the essence of which is that the role of a narrator may be understood to push-start the novel, and after that clean his nails or do whatever he wishes to. Such theory finds perfect practice in his work. It also explains why Joyce wrote what he wrote for a writer whose obsession is to remove the narrator from the narrative, nothing else but the innermost lives of his character remains the recourse. The domain of actions is not viable for this writer, stuck as he is to the third-person, and averse as he is to the age-old ploys and ruses of narration. All in all, once Joyce decided to kill the narrator, stream-of-consciousness, or the placement of an ultra-receptive microphone inside the most banal characters, was the most intelligent option. Joyces reputation of course, does not rest on these items of theory. Joyce is what he is today, because of painstaking fulfilment of his initial promise. The present moment, and nothing else the nano-reality of life. Joyce opened a Pandoras box. A new way of looking at the novel that did in fact affect the course of the art form for ever, its most obvious legacy being the interior monologue, something that fascinated writers in the second half of the century as they began to overcome the trauma that had just hit humanity and began to look at giving a new life to the novel