憂小說憂民的YV坐在碧湖邊哭泣

米蘭‧昆德拉的 L’Art du Roman 哀悼現代小說的死亡。對昆德拉而言，小說的「道德」是「認識」：假如一部小說並未發現一種可能的事物，它就是不道德的。今天的小說之所以示微，便是「小說存在於一個錯誤的時代」。

在〈被貶低的賽萬提斯傳承〉一章裡，昆德拉將YV的心情拉到最低點，不是因為這個事實有傷YV的飯碗，YV早在十八歲的時候就知道這個事實，二十二歲時又考慮過一次。昆德拉的這些話像一把小剪刀，將外表癒合的傷口剪開，膿痂破開，綠膿漸次流出：

The unification of the planet’s history, that humanist dream which God has
spitefully allowed to come true, has been accompanied by a process of dizzying
reduction. True, the termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life:
even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories. But the
character of modern society hideously exacerbates this curse: it reduces
man’s life to its social function; the history of a people to a small
set of events that are themselves reduced to a tendentious interpretation;
social life is reduced to political struggle, and that in turn to the confrontation
of just two great global powers. Man is caught in a veritable whirlpool of
reduction where Huserl’s “world of life” is fatally obscured and being is
forgotten.

Now, if the novels raison d’etre is to keep “the world of life” under
a permanent light and to protect us from “the forgetting of being,”
is it not more than ever necessary today that the novel should exist?

憂小說憂民的YV坐在碧湖邊哭泣，因為YV認識昆德拉L’Art du Roman的道德。