"All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual"

Milan Kundera’s declaration that “All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual” offers a provocative vision of the novel’s deepest nature. He conjures bisexuality not solely in a literal, sexual sense, but as a metaphor for the novel’s internal dynamism, its capacity to embrace dualities, to inhabit both masculine and feminine sensibilities, and to transcend any single perspective. The greatest novels draw from and gently subvert both poles of human experience, fusing energies that might otherwise seem oppositional.

At the heart of this assertion lies the idea that the novel, unique among art forms, invites empathy with the inner lives of a multitude of characters, regardless of their gender. A “true” novel penetrates the boundaries of the self and allows its author and readers to channel desires, aspirations, and sorrows from any vantage point. The novelist, in creating both male and female characters as living presences, practices a kind of imaginative androgyny, blurring the lines between genders in the act of storytelling. The novel thrives not when it affirms a univocal gendered voice, but when it allows dissonances, the meeting of opposites, and ambivalence to coexist.

This bisexuality is a refusal of dogma and narrowness. By evoking both masculinity and femininity within their pages, great novels enact the human complexity Kundera champions. They resist the reduction of characters to stereotypes or biological determinism. They challenge the reader’s assumptions, urging them into zones of ambiguity where empathy and irony flourish. The bisexuality of novels is thus also their moral and philosophical richness, their power to complicate rather than resolve, to ask unanswerable questions rather than teach lessons.

Kundera’s insight deepens our understanding of what makes the novel form so vital. Its greatness is measured by its amplitude, the swelling coexistence of plural, even contradictory perspectives. True novels inhabit the liminal space between opposites, and from this tension, lasting art emerges.