There wasn't much of any interest in the debate. Banal comments fired off, one after the other. When my turn came, in a rather hesitant voice I just quoted a comment made by Husserl, in the mid-Thirties, about the crisis in European humanity. He saw the roots of this crisis (so deep that the phenomenologist even wondered if Europe would survive it), in the beginning of modern times, that is at the moment after Descartes and Galileo, when science had begun to reduce the world to a simple object of technical exploration. According to him, it was from that point onwards that man, launched into specialised disciplines of knowledge, began little by little to lose sight of himself, to the extent that he sank into what Husserl's disciple Heidegger called 'the oblivion of being'.

In one of his books, Kundera returned to this analysis, adding a most important correction. According to him, there was a close link between the roots of the crisis and the European art of the novel (the qualifier 'European' designating not a geographical entity, but a spiritual identity born with ancient Greek philosophy and which one might ultimately associate with the word 'western'). Because for Kundera, the founder of modern times was not only Descartes, it was also Cervantes:

"If it is true that philosophy and the sciences have forgotten man's being, it seems all the more evident that with Cervantes a great European art was formed, which is none other than the exploration of this forgotten being."

In other words, the precise raison d'etre of the novel is to protect us from this oblivion of being by maintaining life in a perpetual blaze of light. Thus, the art of the novel is a positive deduction from a malaise beginning with modern times. Expressed in this way, one could better understand the terms of the problem: if the Islamic world generally had difficulties with the novel, it was because it was living to a large extent in an era that belonged to the period before modern times, bogged down in archaisms that were by their essence incompatible with the foundations of the novel: freedom, fantasy, complexity, the ambiguity of all truths and suspension of moral judgement. In this respect, the novel could easily become the battle ground between two civilisations.

Pp. 99-100

¶ 7:58 PM