"All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual"
About this Quote
Kundera’s line is a provocation dressed as a literary axiom, the kind of heresy that forces you to reveal what you think a “true” novel is for. He isn’t making a claim about authors’ or characters’ bedroom lives so much as smuggling in a theory of form: the novel at its highest level refuses purity. “Bisexual” works here as a metaphor for doubleness - an appetite for contradiction, a willingness to desire what doesn’t neatly belong together, a talent for crossing borders without asking permission.
The insistence on “all great” and “all true” is classic Kundera swagger, part manifesto, part trap. By overstating, he pushes back against the novel reduced to moral instruction, national allegory, or psychological case study. In his Central European context - where ideology demanded clean positions and art was routinely audited for loyalty - ambiguity wasn’t a stylistic flourish; it was a survival skill. Calling the novel “bisexual” is a way of celebrating its capacity to court multiple perspectives, to flirt with the enemy idea, to let irony and sincerity coexist in the same room.
The subtext is also anti-identity in the narrow sense: the novel’s job is not to perform a stable self but to stage the self’s internal pluralism. A “true novel” seduces you into empathy, then reminds you empathy is unstable. It wants both/and, not either/or - not as a slogan, but as an engine for freedom on the page.
The insistence on “all great” and “all true” is classic Kundera swagger, part manifesto, part trap. By overstating, he pushes back against the novel reduced to moral instruction, national allegory, or psychological case study. In his Central European context - where ideology demanded clean positions and art was routinely audited for loyalty - ambiguity wasn’t a stylistic flourish; it was a survival skill. Calling the novel “bisexual” is a way of celebrating its capacity to court multiple perspectives, to flirt with the enemy idea, to let irony and sincerity coexist in the same room.
The subtext is also anti-identity in the narrow sense: the novel’s job is not to perform a stable self but to stage the self’s internal pluralism. A “true novel” seduces you into empathy, then reminds you empathy is unstable. It wants both/and, not either/or - not as a slogan, but as an engine for freedom on the page.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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