Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel includes his personal dictionary of 63 words: “A dictionary for your novels. Put down your key words, your problem words, the words you love . . . “
Here, our purpose is to use 63 months on the Big Lucks website to define, for ourselves, for our novels and our lives, Kundera’s words. We will define one word each month, on the 15th, without having read the definitions of each other or Kundera. We invite you to join us these 63 months, with your own comments, definitions, or your introspection, meditation.
Who we are: We are a league of seven writers who do not know of each other or this website yet. This project’s administrator, a writer, has asked us to take part without giving us any information other than the purpose provided to you above, and we have committed to these 63 months with blindness over many aspects, but perhaps with a hope that by making personal definitions of another writer’s chosen group of words, our lives will change, our writing will change, and– a possibility– yours.
Kundera’s first word is Aphorism.
Milan Kundera: From the Greek word aphorismos, meaning “definition.” Aphorism: poetic form of definition. (See: DEFINITION.)
Hilary Plum: The novel has two sides; I would say it is two mirrors back to back. But let us not forget the pane taken for granted, or risk reifying the metaphor, which under any burden strains, if strains exquisitely. The novel tells the same story twice (any I is split from the start, it’s said: into narrator and character, meiosis without end). Each story is the story of a marriage, for example, and the man is dead in the end. But between the Is, the mirrors, between the two perspectival poles—betrayer and betrayed, monster and victim, demon and angel, man/woman and woman/man, writer and lover of animals, writer and suicide—there is a pause. In this novel: a thirteen-page turn toward proverb. The tone is aphoristic. The case makes its way to the vocative. An appeal. Because there is no End. Amen: like a rite this section concludes; the novel goes on. Why this, here, now? Most readers express impatience, befuddlement, disdain. As though into the midst of the masterpiece had fallen a few notes from the writer’s adolescence, once pinned dearly on her wall, copied ever old notebook to new. But murmuring these cheap sayings she may run her finger along the mirror’s cheap edge, measure its thinness. She considers God in the worst way, the manner to which he is accustomed. Then returns to her story, retells it again, shameful and ravenous, as she likes. Witness this failure of aphorism. This is an offering. The novel insists on nothing, yet we prefer it, both to nothing and to any claim of more (any frontier line advancing fatefully within the I). The idolatry of the metaphor. The weight of the equation. “Whatever was whispered that night, as your first love was already disappearing from you into story.” The confusion of God’s arrival into childhood has been well described by Joyce. In the confusion is it God who departs; do we truly become content, a locked room mystery and a window or a darkened mirror. We turn the pages with our clumsy thumbs, inherited from childhood. Every time Einstein opens a window, you say. [see Margarita Karapanou, Rien ne va plus, trans. Karen Emmerich]
Trey Sager: My mother used to say “Actions speak louder than words.” Categorically that’s a proverb, not an aphorism, but my mother was deaf and aphorisms depend upon their speaker. Like “The world is all that is the case,” which is a famous sentence written by Wittgenstein. Aphorisms are supposed to be insightful and bear the ring of truth. A ring is like the telephone with someone calling to say “I can’t tell if I’m thinking more slowly than I used to. Since my brain is the only thing I have for observing how I’m thinking, I can’t be truly objective.” If I were a fish I’d be forced to describe the sea with ponds and lakes and streams. I’m just a part of speech using parts of speeches. Sometimes confusion, not truth, is what gives us the immaculate insight.
Kristen Gleason: Leaves, dropped near play, containing tone or signal, e.g. “East is the way, round is the sound, sounding is the number. Mama, mama, give me a ball.”
Ronnie Scott: When I was younger, I always worried about finding the money for smoking. But when there was always money for cabs and booze and late-night pizzas, of course there was always going to be a little cash for cigarettes. Later on, when my friends stopped smoking, I worried a lot about the ways non-smokers can see smokers: mustard fingers always getting in the way of someone’s face, except if they ever accidentally smelled their fingers. Nowadays it’s harder not to think more about cancer, because I’m also at the age where I have to start grazing on proteins and “good fats” to keep my energy up during the day. If I stopped smoking right now, my risk of lung cancer would take fifteen years to match up with a non-smoker’s. If I stopped smoking tomorrow, you’d maybe add a day. My friend Shannon likes to mix metaphors, and I have a favourite from his assortment. When it comes to smoking cigarettes, I want to make my bed and eat it too. Aren’t smokers the worst people on earth!
Dot Devota: In my poem, a principle expressed tersely is realizing the horizon is bound by general truth, a law of nature among other laws, having found something that interests you then closing the book. I write, to be singled-out you must surround yourself. The horizon baffles. Laws of human belief are in competition with one another. When one law bows another law bends backwards. Do contradictions exist in Science? (Or only flawed premises, issues with your physical intuition. In the quantum world there is no problem being in superposition of two energy states.) And so the obstruction of our experience; you cannot rescue half of a circle with half of another circle. More likely than not, space gets in the way.
Aaron Shulman: Aphorisms—universals sum-ups, usually slickly phrased—are an intriguing literary device in fiction but one I’m wary of using myself. In my writing they often present themselves as occasions for flexing pith and knowingness but end up as embarrassing infelicities I later delete. Embarrassing because, when poorly placed, never mind poorly fashioned, they can reveal a writer’s unwieldy urge to be poetic, deep, or humorous, often at the expense of the writing itself. Apart from my own deficiencies, I also guard a healthy distrust of aphorism because of the particular project I’ve been immersed in for a while now: a novel written in the close third-person. This means—for me, at least—that my opportunities for legitimately earning aphorism are limited to dialogue between characters, the inner monologues of those characters, and isolated instances in which I let my narrator lark out into more sweeping omniscience. (This last I try to avoid.) A first-person narrator, on the other hand, is a different story altogether, and usually a much more aphoristic one. The first-person allows for a voice to go dancing across the page dispensing personal philosophy, editorials on human nature, and insights both local and global. Midnight’s Children comes to mind, or Augie March. The same goes for first-person non-fiction, especially memoir. Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, which I read recently, howls with aphorism: “We always have the ideal image of being on an island but actually being on an island always turn out to be hellish.” Or: “This is what Italians love to do more than anything: to act like Italians.” The dark side of aphorism is its devastating cooperation with—or co-option by—the literature of self-help, reminiscent of the way demagogues can appropriate a documentary about the mating habits of flightless birds that look like they’re wearing tuxedos and repurpose it as proof that gay marriage is wrong. (See March of the Penguins.) But the great aphorists continue to redeem the technique long after they’re gone, elevating it into it a distinct genre. The wit of Dorothy Parker, for example, stands on its own without help from any literary framing devices, as does that of Einstein, to name just two timeless quippers. But back to fiction, which doesn’t draw its lifeblood from aphorism, but would suffer immeasurably without it, at least in my opinion. The quotability of a given work of fiction doesn’t require aphorisms to be present, though aphorisms are likely to be among the passages most quoted. (We can take this phrase as my own attempt at the subject under discussion here—albeit a clunker.) I think this is because there’s something nourishing and thrilling about aphorisms which allows them to resonate beyond any one story, the way they tap you to watch them click, articulating something that feels universal, and for a moment seem to explain the world.
CAConrad: A secretion of idea nerve-endings trundle forth. For. Th. Enemies allow the noose in either wire or rope or your own hair provided you imagine on an empty stomach to remember this by. Remember, it’s the remembering portion of the idea. Mark everything with little stones which are piles of little dried eyes closing in on the message. Torpid manacle as released as any open morning. To close in on an opening. For instance, “To close in on an opening is aphorism at the widest of the bench.”
