The Novel as a Form Based on Paradox: Contradictions and Their Function in Reader/Text Relationships

What distinguishes a great novel? It is hard to believe that the art of the novel needs to remain completely unconscious, passed down through the osmosis of reading great literature and marking down the toils of life without, as an aide, some sort of conscious understanding. More interestingly, if conscious understanding of the greatness in great novels is possible, could the lack of some conceptual leap prevent even an extraordinary writer from writing an extraordinary work?

Milan Kundera argues that, starting with Cervantes, the novel must allow the reader to "face not a single absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths (truths embodied in imaginary selves called characters), to have as one's only certainty the wisdom of uncertainty (7)." Ignoring this, Tolstoy, in an early draft of Anna Karenina-which he would later declare as being "truly a novel, the first in my life"-morally condemned his heroine, Anna (Pevear).

She was created hideous, both in sight and personality. Her husband, Karenin, was clearly the better person: warm, loving, and truly hurt by Anna's adultery. Thankfully for us readers, by the final text both characters changed remarkably. After Tolstoy's revisions, both Anna and Karenin evoked in the reader contradictory judgment and opinion. To have "Anna Karenina I am mentioning Anna Karenina both because of Tolstoy's obvious literary influence and in the noteworthy declaration that Anna Karenina was, in Tolstoy's view, "truly a novel." To Kundera, Tolstoy's work was "truly a novel" because it presented a contradictory set of truths which avoided an "either-or" judgment.