The Modern Never Gets Old for Kundera

Books | Review of: The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts

By ALEC SOLOMITA
January 31, 2007

In his fanciful routine, "A Twenties Memory," Woody Allen tells F. Scott Fitzgerald that his latest novel is "a good book but there was no need to have written it because Charles Dickens has already written it." One can almost say the same for Milan Kundera's "The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts," so closely does it resemble his 1988 book "The Art of the Novel."

Yet in "The Curtain," amid lucid repetitions of familiar obsessions — the history of the novel; the invaluable legacy of Cervantes, François Rabelais, and Laurence Sterne; the primacy of their legatees, 20th-century modernists Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, and Witold Gombrowicz; the lightness of being; the nature of forgetting; kitsch — Mr. Kundera also offers witty and edifying improvisations on these favorite themes, and adds some new ones. And the reader is grateful, too, for omissions: Mr. Kundera, as cocky as ever, preens less than in his previous nonfiction books. There are no interviews featuring lengthy discussions of his novels, no precious chapters defining favorite words, no musical scores of his writing or the writing of others.

The many short sections of "The Curtain" neatly move the main arguments along, assisted by Linda Asher's elegant English translation, which preserves the author's mostly charming stylistic idiosyncrasies. And, although Mr. Kundera still annoys with gratuitous neologisms ("pre-interpretive" for "conventional") and the occasional smug pronouncement, this book is quieter and more assured than "The Art of the Novel" and "Testatments Betrayed" (1992).

Mr. Kundera's insights into the history of the novel are a delight. Every important novel, he asserts, flows ineluctably from all that came before while simultaneously performing the feat that is the sine qua non of a great novel — disclosing "some hitherto unknown bit of existence." Cervantes discovered the "beauty of modest sentiments" in "Don Quixote"; in "Tom Jones," Henry Fielding "flung wide the windows of episodes and digressions"; and Sterne in "Tristam Shandy" dethrones the idea of "story" completely. These writers, and all novelists worth reading, Mr. Kundera avers, tear through the "curtain of pre-interpretation," of "conventional poses," and "hackneyed symbols," that obscures what is real.

Mr. Kundera also trenchantly observes the advent of "density," or theatrical compression, in Balzac and Dostoevsky and the narrative uses of the quotidian in Flaubert and Tolstoy. Particularly moving is his delicate exegesis of Anna Karenina's death, an almost midrashic elaboration of themes outlined in his earlier criticism.

When he tells us what a novel ought to be — rather than how the thing works — Mr. Kundera is less persuasive. He tirelessly champions, for example, early modernists such as Gombrowicz and Musil for spurning plausibility and chronology, mixing genres, interrupting the narrative, and other "playful" stratagems.

This privileging of the "aesthetic of the modern novel … ironic, hypothetic, hyperbolic," and diverse in form is surprisingly exclusive. Only the fantasists and magicians, the pranksters and ranters, can join Mr. Kundera's club. This bias discloses an apparently robust remnant of European elitist contempt for the orderly, sober, middle-brow middle class. It blinds Mr. Kundera to a simple fact: The desire to hear a coherent story, told from beginning to end and illuminating the human predicament, is not merely one aesthetic choice among many. It is an authentic human pang.

Mr. Kundera's enthusiasm for the reliably disgusting Francois Rabelais also discloses a lingering urge to épater le bourgeois. In "Testaments Betrayed," Mr. Kundera gleefully retails a favorite passage — the revenge of a spurned Panurge in which our hero sprinkles the spurner's gown with the "minced genitals of a bitch in heat," resulting in the woman being urinated on by a horde of dogs. In "The Curtain," he refrains from repeating this knee-slapper, but he does belittle those who don't share his sense of humor. He assails them with the sobriquet "agelast: a neologism Rabelais coined from the Greek to describe people who … do not understand joking." Those who don't like Rabelais or the tricky Laurence Sterne, says Mr. Kundera, are driven by a "visceral disaccord with the nonserious." It doesn't occur to this author, who adores practical jokes and the "delectable art of the hoax," that the opposite may be true. We may be driven by a visceral disaccord with the nonfunny.

Arguing with Mr. Kundera when he is arrogant is almost as much fun as agreeing with him when he is brilliant, which is a more frequent occurrence. Anyone interested in the novel will delight in this book.

Mr. Solomita's writing has appeared in many publications, including the Mississippi Review, the Adirondack Review, and Eclectica.