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PROSE

Why the novel matters

Milan Kundera, Faber and Faber, 2007, p.168,

Rs. 395.

The novel is the book of life.

Anyone who desires to know what the novel is all about — as I have all my teaching life — will find a valuable hoard of information in Milan Kundera’s slim, yet stimulating, book, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts. A longer book would have made monotonous, irritating reading. A time there was when it was felt that the genre novel had not received as much critical attention as poetry had. As though to correct this imbalance, we have a whole lot of critics who have written most perceptively on the poetics of fiction. Henry James, D.H. Lawrence (a lifelong apologist for the novel), Virginia Woolf, besides academic critics such as Wayne Booth and David Lodge have discussed the form of the novel in terms of its craft: structure, plot, characterisation, technique of narration, etc. All these discussions culminated in what has now come to be termed “Narrratology”.

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s book-length essay is a different matter altogether. Not for him the jargon-laden, argumentative, arid prose of the academic! Written in his own inimitable, allusive, aphoristic style, The Curtain may be taken as a sequel to his earlier ruminations on prose fiction, Testaments Betrayed (1992) and The Art of the Novel (1985). Kundera’s basic proposition is that at birth we enter a “prei nterpreted” world, carrying with us lots of assumptions that get ingrained in our psyche. The novel tears down the curtain (whence the title of the book) that obstructs our view, enabling us to have a total and inclusive vision of the world we inhabit, and the ages of life concealed behind the curtain. “A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose” (p.92).

Through the seven linked essays, Kundera takes us on an exhilarating pan-European tour of the history of the novel. We are offered awesome insights through a discerning reading of Rabelais, Cervantes (who, for Kundera, is the founder of the art of the novel), Sterne, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky and the central European writers, Kafka, Musil and Broch. The analyses of short passages and the relating of anecdotes reveal a sharp mind steeped in the novelistic traditions of the world. Novels are never confined to their national, linguistic boundaries. They transcend them. Dostoyevsky was better understood by the French, and Ibsen by the Irish. Hemingway and Faulkner were brought to light by the French. “Geographic distance sets the observer back from the local context and allows him to embrace the large context of world literature, the only approach that can bring out a novel’s aesthetic value” (p.36).

To Kundera, the novel is not a “literary genre”: it is an autonomous art, sui generis. “A novel that fails to reveal some unknown bit of existence is immoral.” (p.61). He prefers the “existential” novel that sheds light upon the human condition to the “psychological” novel that explores character and motives for action. A great deal of American and British fiction that we hold canonical belongs to the latter variety.

The Curtain revels in strikingly provocative observations such as these: “Since its birth, the novel is suspicious of tragedy: of its cult of grandeur; of its theatrical origins; of its blindness to the prose of life” (p.12 3). A novel need not (rather should not) produce “uplifting pictures”; rather it should aim to reach into “the soul of things” and the “enigmas of existence”. “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’etre of the art of the novel” (p.10). Steering clear of platitudes, Kundera prophesises the future of the novel: the existential, problematic fiction that deals with man’s day-to-day life, the “epistolary” novel replete with episodes and digressions that dethrones the omniscient narrator are some of the audacious possibilities that the buoyant, rejuvenated novel eagerly looks forward to!

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