There is an absurd contrast between the stature of novelist Louis Paul Boon, whose masterly novels have won international fame, and the curious, reductive, biographical interpretations to which he is subjected in his own backyard. Some Flemish literary theorists have already convincingly distanced themselves from this approach in their study of Louis Paul Boon’s novels. In this book I will follow a path not yet taken in this form, in this way and to this end. I will explore Louis Paul Boon the novelist, who, like Kafka, was one of the main discoverers of the novel’s potential and one of the great European innovators of the genre.

The Czech novelist Milan Kundera maintains that we can only do justice to great novelists by viewing their work in the context of the history of the genre, a history to which they as novelists belong:

“To my mind, great works can only be born within the history of their art and as participants in that history. It is only inside history that we can see what is new and what is repetitive, what is discovery and what is imitation; in others words only inside history can a work exist as a value capable of being discerned and judged. Nothing seems to me worse for art than to fall outside its own history, for it is a fall into the chaos where aesthetic values can no longer be perceived.”

It is against this backdrop that Kundera writes with undisguised frustration about the way in which Max Brod betrayed the literary legacy of “his great friend” Franz Kafka by serving him up to critics as a patient, a case for psychological study. Kundera writes in a similar vein about the composer Jánacek, whom he admires: how he was initially not understood, but towards the end of his life finally succeeded in having his work performed in his own country, albeit “directed by the conductor who for fourteen years had dismissed him, who for fourteen years had had only contempt for his music.” The artist himself was “obliged to be grateful” for “that humiliating victory (the score was reddened with corrections, deletions, additions).” Als een familie er niet in slaagt haar zwarte schaap te vernietigen, dan kleineert ze het met moederlijke toegeeflijkheid.” But what annoys Kundera most of all is that the “common view in Bohemia, meant as favorable” had torn him from the context of modern music and caged him “in local concerns.” His fellow countrymen assign him a place in history as a true Bohemian, with a passion for folklore, the fatherland and women. “If a family doesn’t succeed in annihilating its unloved son, it humiliates him with maternal indulgence.” In the meantime, Kundera claims, he suffers the worst possible fate that could befall an artist: not a single major study has appeared on “the aesthetic newness of his work.”

For Kundera, the “aesthetic value” and the “aesthetic newness” of an oeuvre are inextricably linked to the raison d’être of art, to its specificity, its true function, which should not be confused with the function historically assigned to it by critics and which almost inevitably means a betrayal of artists and their art. Poor Kafka! Poor Jánacek! sighs Kundera. On the whole, Testaments Betrayed is a defense against the tendency to “betray” novelists by delivering them up to the caprices of contemporary, local criticism. Criticism assigns a contemporary function to the novel in its cultural and political context, one which is often at odds with its true mission and raison d’être.

Kundera reveals himself in his essays as one of the rare apologists of the novel. He contemptuously ignores the library of academic studies, generated by structuralistic narratologists, on the novel as a “literary form.” For Kundera the novelist, the genre is not an accidental or random form, but an ontological or anthropological “invention,” and one of the great discoveries of the modern era. The evolution of the novel has not centered around the “innovation” of “form,” but around the laying bare of an essentially new relationship to reality. Although exposing reality has always been a problem, it is not so much rhetorical, stylistic or literary in nature, as novel criticism incorrectly assumes, but instead is ontological and epistemological. The problem is that reality seldom shows us its unadorned, everyday, prosaic face (these are Kundera’s words, but he is supported here by many writers and philosophers); instead, it comes to meet us in a “mythologized” form, grandiose, as in “bad verse.” Prose is diametrically opposed to this, “for prose is not only a form of discourse distinct from verse; it is also an aspect of reality, its daily, concrete, momentary aspect, and the opposite of myth.” The function, the specific task of the novel, is to discover the world of prose. “This goes to the deepest conviction of every novelist,” Kundera writes:

“[T]here is nothing so thoroughly disguised as the prose of life; every man seeks endlessly to transform life into myth — seeks, so to speak, to transcribe it into verse, to shroud it in verse (bad verse). If the novel is an art and not merely a ‘literary genre,’ the reason is that the discovery of prose is its ontological mission, which no art but the novel can take on entirely.”

We could counter here that Kundera’s purpose in these essays is first and foremost to defend his own novel program. For instance, it is clear that he is implicitly defending himself against the dull socialist realism under which he himself suffered as a Czech writer. This is not to say that his thoughts on the novel do not provide a fruitful framework for studying this genre and in particular for reflecting on the significance of some critical moments in its innovation. It is precisely these attempts at demythologizing a naive and conventional realism that seem to have been decisive for the novel’s development in the 20th century. A novelist like Louis Paul Boon is also best understood as part of this evolution. Quite early on, he made demythologizing a theme of his writing, claiming for the first time in 1946 that he wanted to portray “life itself.” Like the great writers and painters before him, whom he studied carefully, quoting them in his reviews during this stage of his development, he was attempting to come to grips with his own time. The war and the bitter post-war years fashioned him, like Kafka, into a discoverer of prose. Boon’s most important discoveries as a novelist were made between 1945 and 1949. This book is devoted to Boon as a novel innovator. Not only was he an important link in the evolutionary chain of the European novel, uniquely, his work also affords an ideal opportunity to track the process of this evolution. This is because Boon presented his writing experiences, his surprising discoveries and his critical reflections on them to the readers of his newspaper columns on an almost daily basis. His contributions on art and literary criticism to daily and weekly newspapers and to literary journals have in the meantime been collected, and they make an excellent springboard for exploring the very distinctive dynamic of Boon’s development as a novelist.