The Stories We Tell.(The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts)(Book review)

The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, by Milan Kundera (HarperCollins, 176 pp., $22.95)

THE chief concern of this, Milan Kundera's third volume of essays, is the modern novel. His own novels of course might be called a giant essay on the political and cultural life of the modern era; the best known, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), opens with a discussion of Nietzsche's myth of eternal return, and the entire sixth book of that novel is an essay on kitsch. He takes seriously what Georg Lukacs, the Hungarian Marxist literary critic, had to say in Theory of the Novel: "The need for reflexion is the deepest melancholy of every great and genuine novel."

Kundera would perhaps deny an affiliation with Lukacs, but his writing about the novel differs from that of such English practitioners as E. M. Forster and, lately, David Lodge, both of whom seem indifferent to literary theory or history and instead focus on the craft of writing. Kundera is uninterested in literary nuts and bolts (point of view, unreliable narrator), conventions that, in his estimation, do the author's work for him. His subject is the way in which the novel records the transmission of values, both its own and those of Western secular culture: Not only do Tolstoy's interior monologues preface those of Joyce 50 years down the road, but Alonzo Quijada, who set out 400 years ago to become a knight-errant, has returned as the land-surveyor K.

Modernity--which Kundera dates from Don Quixote, not Descartes--has a twin sister: forgetting. Memory's failure has been a major theme of Kundera's literary works. The novel since Rabelais and Cervantes (for Kundera, the two progenitors of the genre) constitutes a kind of archive of the hitherto unrevealed possibilities of human existence during that centuries-long march. The Curtain makes a tour, in no particular order, in seven mini-essays, of those writers who have revealed these possibilities and, in the process, held up a mirror to modern European man and woman.

Why a mirror? Again, let me return to the Marxist literary critic: "The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God." The notion of man's transcendental homelessness is common post-Enlightenment intellectual property, and Kundera, above all things an Enlightenment secularist, has clothed this abstraction in novelistic flesh throughout his career. Whether in the novels of life in his Soviet-dominated Czech homeland (e.g., The Farewell Party, Life Is Elsewhere) or, since his emigration to France in 1975, in those set in the consumer-manipulated West (Immortality, Identity), Kundera's characters live in internal exile from their prosaic environment. It is not an environment of their own choosing, but a world into which they are born and which is "already made-up, masked, reinterpreted." It is not the task of the novelist to sugarcoat this situation (that would result in kitsch), but, instead, to "tear through the curtain of pre-interpretation."

As Kundera has made clearer elsewhere (e.g., his acceptance speech in 1985 for the Jerusalem Prize), this lack of illusion is less a depressing prospect than a liberating one since, in losing the certainty of truth, man becomes an individual, free of the tyranny of those who impose totalizing visions (the commissars, the imagemakers). Such, at least, is Kundera's vision, or perhaps the distillation of the wisdom of his own literary forefathers. He admits, after all, in one of the essays in this small volume ("Getting into the Soul of Things") that a novelist writing about the art of the novel is really talking about the writers who have "a secret presence in his own work." The writers to whom Kundera returns over and over include Laurence Sterne (who highlighted the "problematic nature of action" in the modern world), Gustave Flaubert (who brought to our attention "the running water of everyday life" but, above all, stupidity, which marches right along with the march of progress), Robert Musil (who "brought thinking into the novel"), Franz Kafka (who breached the borders of the plausible), and Hermann Broch (who integrated different historical eras into a single composition). As Kundera acknowledges: "No great novelist can exit from the history of the novel."