Vast questions on literature are being asked again. Here is a redoubtable Franco-Czech novelist holding forth on the history and value of the novel in Western civilisation. Call it the power of continental Europe as the second half of the 20th century belonged to it, novel-wise.

Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, José Saramago— the list is long. Here comes a compelling book of essays that talks about the ferment in making great novels by Milan Kundera, the world’s most successful and most translated author of Czech origin. 

Summative of almost all what Kundera had written before— love, death, the imperfection of human bodies, the volatility of human identity, laughter and forgetting, yearning for privacy in the stereotyped, aggressively collectivised world, culture and thoughtfulness as against commerce, advertising, loud music in public places and boredom— this book is another gem from the indefatigable writer, poet, playwright and translator, who wrote memorable fiction like Laughable Loves, The Joke, The Farewell Waltz, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, not to speak of his classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 

Kundera’s empirical observations in The Curtain about the role of reading (and writing) novels, from Cervantes to Rushdie, can be found in his many works of fiction but in ample measure in The Art of the Novel (1988) and Testaments Betrayed (1995), his other two works of non-fiction. According to Kundera, reading a novel is essential for a coherent “moral” understanding of human nature and circumstance.

In The Art of the Novel Kundera explains how the history of the novel and the history of European culture are inextricably bound together. Starting with Cervantes and passing through the works of authors such as Richardson, Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, Mann, and Kafka, he traces the route of the experience of existence.

This route starts from a world of unlimited potential, moves to the beginning of history, the shrinking of possibilities in the outside world, the search for infinity in the human soul, the futility of this search, and into the realm where history is seen as a monster that can offer nothing helpful.

Therefore, Kundera infers, the message of Don Quixote is bleak: “human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That— that is the raison d’être of the art of the novel”. Expansively: “Isn’t ‘insignificance’ actually one of our greatest problems? Isn’t that our fate?”

“The novelist,” Kundera avers, “is never a valet to historians”, and one can see why Kundera is much fond of the deserter in Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, who ingeniously flouted the dictates of the Habsburg Empire. He is all praise for novels for they mock epic and deride poetry. They are ‘anti-lyrical’ because they refuse to believe in the rhapsodic hysteria that “feeds festivals and massacres alike and turns individuals into ecstatic mobs”.

Because the novels are no respecters of those who are in charge of history, Kundera cosies up to them.
Kundera wants the novels to aim for the large context. He is against literary provincialism. He exhorts us to be wary of kitsch. In Central Europe, kitsch represents the supreme aesthetic evil. Without a long exposure to kitsch, however, French modernists had no occasion to develop an aversion to it. In France there’s no harsher aesthetic reprobation than vulgarity.

Kitsch-phobic
Kundera is ethically opposed to ‘kitsch’ (a term that has its origin in Munich art circles in the 19 Century) as it refers not simply to a species of bad art but to the deliberate sentimentalisation of reality. From stream-of-consciousness to existentialism, from epic to lyric poetry, from realism to modernism nothing escapes his encyclopaedic sweep of vision.

The writer calls Musil, Kafka, Broch, and Grombrowicz— solitaries, visionaries, quiet rebels, inner émigrés and heroes— “the Pleiades of Central Europe’s great novelists”; who all conceived the novel to be a great antilyrical poetry. They subscribe, as Kundera proudly does, to Goethe’s notion of Die Weltliteratur: World Literature. And then Kundera sets about his own political agenda. He ignores the canonised literary traditions of England and America, and connects Central Europe to Latin America, ‘two neglected, disdained, abandoned lands’, where reality welds into magic in the novels of Kafka and Broch or García Márquez and Fuentes. Somehow the agonised and anguished fate of the two disparate parts of the world is united in a common, homogeneous platform of victimhood.

Kundera is visceral to those who do not share his sense of humour. 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 Kundera, are driven by a, “visceral disaccord with the nonserious.”

“The novel alone,” Kundera says, “could reveal the immense, mysterious power of the pointless.” This is a book about the triumph of literature over state, its borderless transcendentalism and its immutable power to defy the inconsequence of human lives: “For the history of art is perishable. The babble of art is eternal”.