Milan Kundera, trans. Linda AsherNew York: Harper Perennial, 2007.
$22.95 Hardcover/$13.95 Trade Paperback
Milan Kundera’s The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts seizes upon the idea that each of us has a “curtain” of pre-interpretation in our perception and evaluation of art. This curtain is produced through a combination of cultural attitudes formed by the individual’s cultural education, language, and national identity. Both art’s consumers and producers are, if not blinded by this curtain, happy to make use of it as their daily canvas, but for Kundera, the great artists—specifically the great novelists—are those who “tear through the curtain” and expose the depths of our tragi-comic existence.
Kundera’s essay, however, reads far more ephemerally than that description might suggest. His prose—written in French and translated smoothly to English by Linda Asher—reads like a novelist’s, not like a literary theorist’s. The accessibility of the text is surely tactical on one level. One of Kundera’s most poignant arguments—Kundera considers himself a Franco-Czech novelist who endured Soviet occupation—is that European writers need to not just conceptualize a national literature, bound by languages of origin and immediate national context, but instead to formulate a European literature. In contrast to Hitler’s or Stalin’s plans to unite Europe under a single government, Kundera envisions Europe as the once and future capital of artistic production due to its property of “maximum diversity in minimum space.” The tight packing-in of different cultures, languages, and national histories allows for easy cross-pollination of artistic ideas. The grand project of art, Kundera hopes, can be unchained from the current, dogmatic adherence to national history and instead be constellated in an independent history of Art. This artistic history need not mirror human history nor trail along behind it but might instead move forward at its own pace, and, importantly, never repeat itself as human history appears to do.
While I found the segments on “World Literature” intriguing, the later chapters of the essay read more as poetic musings than thorough analysis. Different readers may find different passages more or less insightful, but taken together they lack the direction and coherency of Kundera’s earlier chapters. It is up to the reader to gather up Kundera’s words of wisdom and synthesize them into a semblance of a whole. The Curtain reads as such thanks in large part to Kundera’s fondness of authorial anecdotes. Kundera is happy to recount his own personal experiences in Prague or Paris as illustrations of his arguments, when he discusses his great authors—Kafka, Proust, Fielding, and Cervantes chief among them—he focuses less on the their biographies than on the history of their artistic contributions. This is somewhat self-fulfilling, since in retrospect we already know these artists will become “great.” In other words, Kundera may cite Cervantes as an author who fearlessly tore through the curtain, but of course after four hundred years of evaluation and esteem, is not Cervantes now very much a part of Kundera’s curtain of canonical artists?
Kundera, as one might guess by now, elevates art to a lofty pedestal. He keeps its essence clean of the vulgarities of common human existence which fosters perhaps the largest complaint that can be made against the book. Upon reading The Curtain, it would appear Kundera has no interest in any kind of folk or popular literature. For him, likely, popular literature is the very essence of writing upon the curtain rather than ripping through it. By his standards, this kind of literature is a mere recapitulation of humanity’s prescribed, false existence. While I can appreciate Kundera’s future-seeking drive, his dismissal—or at least non-mention—of the popular leaves one feeling as if the wagon has left the horse far behind. Must one so readily accept Kundera’s assertions of pre-interpretation and the accuracy of his metaphoric curtain in describing the ideologies and histories which impact the majority of art’s consumers? Furthermore, intentionally or not, Kundera focuses only on the familiar, dead, white men of European literature. Though he cites and defends lesser known Eastern European artists, said artists are no less white and no less male than Proust or Joyce. One suspects that, by ignoring the non-canonical because of its links with the popular literature, Kundera has also missed the ever-growing impact of women and minority writers who have arguably done more to tear through curtains (and glass ceilings and color barriers) than their white, male contemporaries.
Despite these dissonances with the prevailing currents of academic cultural study, The Curtain is a pleasurable, at times even beautiful read. Granted, Kundera’s exceedingly well-written prose obscures not a lack of substance, but a lack of diligence in establishing his assertions. For example at the conclusion of his chapter on “Aesthetics and Existence” Kundera writes: “Hell (hell on earth) is not tragic; what’s hell is horror with not a trace of the tragic” (115). The statement is provocative, so provocative that it perhaps deserves more time than Kundera affords it, but here and elsewhere in The Curtain, as soon as the statement is made, Kundera moves on. Perhaps it is a complement that I concluded The Curtain wanting more; wishing to achieve a whole greater than the sum of the essay’s seven parts. But then, perhaps ‘twas only my own pre-interpretations which kept me from unlocking Kundera’s ultimate genius.
