In Praise of Milan Kundera's Hypocrisies By Arthur Phillips Discussed in this essay: The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts by Milan

Kundera, Translated by Linda Asher One way to start writing a novel is to have a theory about what a novel is supposed to be for like healing our wounds, holding a mirror up to the American family, or engaging with the political issues of the day. If you know, as the novelist Milan Kundera knows, that your first duty as a novelist is to explore and explain hitherto unknown "existential problems," then, assuming you can dig up a hitherto unknown existential problem, you have a good start on your novel. A theory like that gives you a guide to creating your characters, a subtext for your dialogue, a clothesline from which to suspend your sex scenes and flashbacks. Be careful, though: after a while, you may find yourself wishing for a little freedom from your own big ideas. That clothesline can turn into a boa constrictor. Kundera, best known for his nine novels, has now published his third book of literary theory and criticism. The Curtain; An Essay in Seven Parts follows 1993's Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts and 1986's The Art of the Novel, an essay in seven parts (though it doesn't say so on the cover). Twenty-one years and twenty-three parts later, devoted admirers like me may be forgiven for feeling that the ground of Kunderan thought is tramped pretty flat, considering as well that several of his novels come cushioned in afterwords, prefaces, and dense author interviews, Kundera the essayist wants us to know what Kundera the novelist was thinking, and in The Curtain, through short, breezy sections, he explains himself again, fiddling with the theoretical knots he has been tying for years. Although he loosens them somewhat, he is still, in the end, well and truly hound by them. In a voice surprisingly gentler (but no weaker), he returns here to the topics he addressed in the previous criticism: the construction and function of die novel, the menace of kitsch, the provincialism of governments, the idiocy of academic critics. With each book, he has found new lenses through which to examine his subjects. The Art of the Novel, for example, was a writer's book, "a practitioner's confession," that looked at his literary theory in its relation to nuts-and-bolts composition and technique. Kundera discussed chapter length, the use of word repetition, the structure of novels by Kafka, Sterne, and Broch, and tied these practical matters to his idea of the underlying existential mission of novels. Testaments Betrayed was angrier a prophet's rant, examining how artists' rights are betrayed by executors,

publishers, and ideologues. Repeating the same theory of literature from his first book of essays, he paid special attention to Kafka's incompetent translators, Rushdie's persecutors (and feeble defenders), even the composer Stravinsky's treacherous conductors. The Curtain is less gloomy, more of a reader's celebration, and the same ideas are now viewed through the prism of literary history, the works and thoughts of Kundera's masters: Cervantes, Tolstoy, Flaubert, and several others, well-known and obscure, classic and modern. The enraged lament in Testaments Betrayed that the novel and Western culture were in their death throes is now quieted, mercifully replaced by the more hopeful reminder that the novel has "a freedom that no one can delimit and whose evolution will be a perpetual surprise." With similar tolerance, Kundera admits early in The Curtain to the possibility of aesthetic judgments that differ from his own. "In the realm of art," he calmly writes, "there are no precise measures. Each aesthetic judgment is a personal wager; but a wager [that] does not close off into its own subjectivity." In other words, we all have our opinions. I happen to agree, but I also admit that since the rules of judging are so personal, this game of Flickering over our favorite stories can feel, to use Kunderan language, unbearably light. As a result, the instinct to charge the novel with a weightier purpose is hard to overcome. Kundera has always been tempted by weightiness, and, despite his new hedging, his theory of fiction in The Curtain still rings out, above alt, as important. The new, supposedly more relaxed Kundera is not terribly convincing, and after those opening caveats, he doesn't make many more appearances in The Curtain. His disclaimers did not for long rid me of the feeling familiar from reading his fiction that certain Laws of Nature were being explained, more or less patiently, and that only a child would try to resist the cold facts of the matter. "Indifference to aesthetic value inevitably shifts the whole culture back into provincialism," he soon reminds us, and the talk of personal wagers is left behind. For him, the novel still fulfills one specific and vital purpose, and the ultimately serious value of this "playful" art cannot he overstated. The Curtain explains again how the novel hears humanity's hopes for something morally crucial indeed. We are all born with the realities of life hidden from us, behind a curtain of received ideas hence the book's title. We cannot see things as they really are. Novels, though, like experience itself, reveal existence to us, and the "morality" of fiction lies in its ability to pierce this curtain and shine light, without judgment, on existence and the range of human possibility, good and bad, The novel says "what only the novel can say," and in so doing, opens our eyes. The novel tears the

curtain. How does the novel do this? By expressing only doubt, never certainty, Kundera has long argued that any novel worth the name is an ironic (in the sense of "uncertain") inquiry into the nuance and complexity of life, overthrowing tired wisdom, showing up easy simplifications, and replacing them only with questions. He has said that the novel is a "realm where moral judgment is suspended," "the imaginary paradise of individuals where no one possesses the truth, neither Anna nor Karen in." The novelist's only truth: "Things are not as simple as you think." The novel takes the form of a question rather than an answer, because any answer, by definition, adds a new stitch to that curtain of pretty lies, Kundera praises Flaubert for never writing "to communicate his judgments." A didactic novel tells you what you should do; Kundera says a real "ironic" novel tells you only what people could do. A novel examines "the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of." Opposed to this high calling is not light genre fiction (Kundera says he has "never minded Agatha Christie's detective novels") nut humorlessness, simplification and myth-making, inherited dogma of any sort. Chief among these villains is kitsch, the "supreme aesthetic evil" defined by Kundera over the years as "the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling" and, memorably, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being as "the absolute denial of shit." Kitsch, "a rosy veil thrown over reality" (even better: "bread drenched in perfume," according to Robert Musil), is to Kundera the ultimate sin, an act of willful anti-understanding curtain repair. Although Kundera is easier on his old enemies in The Curtain than in Testaments Betrayed, he very entertainingly prosecutes Victor Hugo and George Sand, among others, for crimes of kitsch. The forced happy ending, the obvious evil, the easy choice, the upright and unflinching hero, the novel that confirms everything you believe, the story that promises redemption: Kundera will have none of that. This abhorrence of kitsch is not merely a matter of taste to him. It is a matter of morals, because by exposing our naive desire to view the world in black and white, by cracking our certainties, by making things personal and thus showing the idiocy of generalizing ideologies, the novelist necessarily disillusions the reader (and himself, for he is never the same at the end of writing a book as he was years earlier, at the start). And, by showing us truths other than our own, the novel makes indifference to others less easy. The rights of man, Kundera argues, depend upon a shared belief in human individuality, which requires an effort to understand other people's points of view. The novel is therefore nothing less than a bastion against intolerance. Why

do totalitarians and ayatollahs and priggish town councils ban novels? The answer: the novel is modernity's "most representative creation," the ultimate proof of individuality, indigestible to medieval thinkers of any faith. Writing fiction to fulfill this ideal makes strong technical demands upon the writer and on translators. (In Testaments Betrayed, for instance, the varied emotional and intellectual effects of a single paragraph of Kafka are analyzed through tour subtly different translations.) The novelist must be scrupulous, Kundera argues, removing every trace of his own authority and opinion, in case any idea in the novel gains a false glow of seemingly inarguable truth. In The Curtain, Kundera insists that "novelistic thinking" is "fiercely independent of any system of preconceived ideas; it does not judge; it does not proclaim truths; it questions, it marvels, it plumbs." In Testaments Betrayed, analyzing an essay-like section in one of his own favorite novels (Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers), Kundera worried that the passage could "readily he taken for the author's own thinking, for the novel's truth, its statement, its thesis, and thus damage the relativity that is indispensable to novelistic space." If the novelist backs a particular truth, then his efforts to illuminate our essential truthlessness are doomed. Kundera's temptingly clear standards seem to offer the critic an almost scientific method for reading fiction: try to find, in every novel, what new element of human possibility is being revealed and where such a discovery places the novel in relation to the discoveries of predecessors and contemporaries. And since "a novel that tails to reveal some hitherto unknown bit of existence is immoral" (so much for the softer, more tolerant Kundera), hook reviewers can confidently send immoral books off to their kitschy, curtained hell. But what is the mechanism for determining which hit of existential truth was or was not previously known? And to whom? Subjectivity will always worm its way into any aesthetic theory, eroding even the best ones at their foundations. Set out rigorously, phrased brilliantly, glowing with morality, Kundera's standard, like all the others, still relies on an imaginary, even kitschy, premise: a homogeneous readership, everybody equally impressed by, and agreeing on, newly discovered existential insights. But humans are a varied bunch (which Kundera accepted as one of his premises), and my existential revelation is your grandmother's moth-eaten proverb. Kundera's theory offers no more usable standard of literary criticism than any other, no perceptible "history of values" at all, unless you happen to be Milan Kundera. I discovered Kundera's novels in college, before I knew I was going to

be a writer, and I devoured them. Later, as a closet novelist undeniably under his influence, I read The Art of the Novel. I was astounded. Ready to absorb any lesson from my master, I discovered a theory of art entirely contradictory to his own fiction. I felt he had read himself wrong. I loved his novels, often because I felt forced to wrestle with him and his opinions, with what I saw as his fiction's most identifying feature the aggressively disillusioning ideas put forth as facts by a haughty, brilliant, moody narrator. But his theory of "irony" and novelistic "relativity" derided just such tyrannical narrators and the lessons they meant to teach. My deep admiration for Kundera (an admiration paradoxically defined in part by frustration over and anger at "his" beliefs when they contradicted my own) WHS an admiration for precisely what he claimed with his essayist's pen to disdain. Kundera's apparent personality is very difficult to separate from his novelistic style the intrusive narrator's voice that so marks his work, full of a certain sort of black-turtleneck gloom. In one of my favorite passages from The Unbearable Lightness of Being after a wide-ranging discussion of Stalin's son and prison camps, of ancient ideas about sex and defecation in Eden, of memories of his own childhood reading the narrator concludes: "Without shit there would he no sexual love as we know it." How he arrives here is not important, but one thing was clear to me: he, the narrator, who seemed to go by no other name than Milan Kundera, believed it, and wanted me, sitting in my dorm, to believe it too. And again: what of the chapter of Life It Elsewhere that begins, "If a woman fails to live sufficiently through her body, she comes to regard her body as an enemy"' Or: "Men who pursue a multitude of women fir nearly into two categories"? Or this wonderful old-man crankiness, from Ignorance: "If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time a flood of everything jumbled together sewage-water musk in which music is dying"? I often had the impression reading his novels that Kundera was on a campaign to rid his audience (me) of certain illusions the lasting power of friendship or love or democracy, the promise of the future or the innocence of children. This is part of the unique thrill of Kundera novels, and reading them, I couldn't believe that these passages were nor statements of judgment, issued by a wickedly opinionated man promoting a worldview at least partially incompatible with my own (or at least with somebody's). But wait: it, as the essayist insisted, the novel's wisdom was the "wisdom of uncertainty," why was the narrator Kundera so certain? The essayist instructed me that a novelist must say only, "Things are not as simple as you think," but I heard this novelist saying mostly, "Things are simply much worse than you think."

No, no, says the essayist, you misunderstand: "Tone is crucial. From the very first word, my thoughts have a tone that is playful, ironic, provocative, experimental, or inquiring." I can't claim that Kundera didn't intend that tone, though I am dubious. But I can certainly argue that, novel after novel, I failed to hear it, and fail still, even having read and enjoyed every explanatory essay. To take one of the examples above, the woman who has failed "to live sufficiently through her body" and now regards "her body as an enemy" is a character, Jaromil's mother. Kundera could have begun the chapter, "Jaromil's maman had failed to live sufficiently through her body, and had even come to regard her body as an enemy." This would have fulfilled his ideal of authorial recusal; the ideas would have been attached specifically to the character, and a reader would have been free to extract those ideas for their possible implications. Instead, Kundera chose a more powerful and intrusive opening "If a woman fails" and then later claimed as an essayist that we should have "heard" his joshing tone and not taken his lesson too seriously. But Kundera's explicit goal of illuminating existential problems is a generalizing goal; an existential problem is one we might all face, and so he is prone to generalizing statements, "If a woman fails" Such pronouncements sound suspiciously like an opinionated narrator. Kundera is a man of impassioned beliefs. One of those beliefs is that the novel is not the place to teach impassioned beliefs. The problem is, he can't help himself he's as didactic as any Victorian vicar or Soviet realist. The good news, though, is that his literary theory is forgivably wrong: Kundera's novels are beautiful because they carry his angry, sad, laughing didacticism in them. That double paradox he preaches non-preachiness and cannot practice it is what makes his novels Kunderan, the high calling of the inimitable achieved by him because he is torn between incompatible ethics and aesthetics. In any case, it's not his ideas but his style of exploring those ideas that makes his fiction fly. (Some of these ideas about, to name a few, "lyrical" womanizing vs. "epic" womanizing, totalitarianism, music, history, children, or toilets are profound, some inane, some offensive, some patently wrong. Figuring out which is which is part of the game.) Kundera admiringly cites Flaubert, the novelist who seeks to disappear behind his work, but Kundera's work is beautiful because he is so visible in it that intrusive narrator against whom his own theory tells him to rage. He wants to stay cool; he can't stay cool. It no longer bothers me that I love Kundera's novels for the very opposite reason that he would hope for. But I suspect it would bother him. He believes, I think, that the discernment of existential wisdom is not subjective as is, say, the emotion a story provokes, or the beauty

of the writing, or the charm of a character, or a good laugh. But all these qualities share the same destination: the mind of the beholder. This is not to say that Kundera the essayist is completely wrong only to point out that in the world of humans, much is inevitably lost between the writer's intention and the reader's experience, whether that writer's intention is to stitch the curtain or to tear it. Kundera has faith that the novel will arrive in the reader's head as it left the writer's hand, but how can he look at the history of the novel and of criticism and then believe any such impossible kitsch as that? Kundera believes that a writer's favorite writers have more in common than just their shared fan. They form a "personal history of the novel," a mission that the writer discerns, inherits, and carries forward. Without such a unifying theory, a "history of values," literature is just a "storehouse of works whose chronologic sequence carries no meaning." More starkly, it is "babble"; the individual works are nothing. According to Kundera, literary history is therefore like geographic exploration and cartography, a process of accumulating wisdom. He lays out in The Curtain his history of the novel as a series of discoveries about life, filling in a map of knowledge, slashing at that curtain of ignorance. But wisdom is locked inside a story, or hovers around it. It's not what's left after you throw the story away. That's just a flimsy moral. As the Hungarian novelist Sndor Mrai wrote, "There is no such thing as a 'new thought,' only a new expression" that "gives new tension to the old thought." Kundera has written in the past of his "disgust for those who reduce a work to its ideas," but that is what he does in The Curtain, in his history of novelists as existential pioneers. A literary history of discovered wisdom is dull stuff, a bucket of great thought nuggets, a critical history of fortune cookies, and in parts of The Curtain, Kundera shrinks his own favorite novelists to mere messengers of a certain rueful common sense: life goes on humbly, even when people die (Cervantes); insignificance is where most of us live (Sterne); the most important moments of our lives are surrounded by an envelope of prosaic, boring detail and outright stupidity, "inseparable from 'human nature'" (Flaubert); bureaucracy is stealing our identities and our capability for individual adventure (Kafka); our decisions in everything, from politics to suicide, are made irrationally, from a jumble of stimuli (Tolstoy). You can reduce Kundera's own novels to such "insights," usually without having to go much past his titles: being can feel unbearably light and meaningless; the corrosiveness of laughter and forgetting condemn to futility much of man's serious efforts and beliefs; the tendency to lyricism is closely tied to youth and easily harnessed by totalitarian

bullies. (Life Is Elsewhere was originally titled The Lyrical Age.) But the problem with ranking literature for this sort of achievement is that you miss all the mysterious pleasure of reading those moments of joy and beauty and wisdom that are hauntingly tied to you and your life but are quite unrelated to the great men's "discoveries." I don't look back on my favorite novels and cherish their existential illuminations except perhaps in the case of Kundera's work. What I recall, what I savor when reading, what is funny, what is profound, what is beautiful, all of this is subjective, and that's an objective fact. So how can the "history of the novel" be a series of life lessons I don't recall learning from novels? Kafka taught me to mistrust bureaucracy? I learned that in driver's ed. No, Kafka taught me how hard it is to keep a blanket on your stomach when you turn into a dung beetle. At times in The Curtain, Kundera seems to relax and describe his own masters' books somewhat less theoretically. Praising Haek for The Good Soldier Svejk or Musil for The Man Without Qualities, he is generous with exclamation points. To an American eye these enthusiasms appear at first to be some sort of devastating double back-flip irony. But the arch-ironist is, I think, charmingly genuine and excitable about them, as in the beautiful passage imagining the history of the novel seen from a different writer's point of view, one of Kundera's lodestar heroes, Witold Gombrowicz, the author of Cosmos and Ferdydurke. Kundera imagines Gombrowicz tracing "for you the whole post of the novel's history, and in so doing will give you some sense of his own poetics of the novel, one that belongs to him alone and that is therefore, quite naturally, different from that of other writers." These are exciting ideas in Kundera's hands, but they also nullify much of what has come before in The Curtain. When I was trying to teach myself to be a novelist, I, too, assembled my personal history of literature, tried to make sense of that storehouse of beautiful works, I read my favorites and the favorites of my favorites: Kundera led me to Musil, Mann, and Gombrowicz; Nabokov led me to Bely and Borges; Hemingway and James led me to Flaubert; Perec led me to Calvino; Stoppard led me to Schnitzler; Woolf led me to Proust. But I was also led down paths where I found the bloodstains of literary duels, ghosts slashing at ghosts: if Nabokov hates Mann and James, if Robertson Davies mocks Graham Greene, if Gombrowicz calls Borges pretentious, then what am I to do with my affection for all of them when it comes time to sit down and write? I found this old sniping painful, as if my parents were fighting in front of me and my friends. As I put clown one book to pick up the next, I came upon a puzzling problem: my history of the novel was populated by incompatible writers who loathed each other more often than they liked each other. Unlike Kundera's favorites, very few

of mine seemed to share goals or aesthetic intentions, and as a result I was repeatedly blocked from forming my own unifying theory of literature. There seemed to be limitless variety not only in style and method but in purpose as well. If I were to believe Kundera that the novel is "for" existential illumination, then I must somehow either forsake Nabokov, or co-opt him, or make yet another exception to my feeble theory. And, in the meantime, what does it mean it I give my new character a happy childhood or a bad haircut? On what principles do I make the ten thousand decisions involved in writing a chapter? Vladimir Nabokov (I feel pretty confident in this necro-ventrilocriticism) would have dismissed The Curtain with a laugh. Nabokov's history of the novel was not a history of existential discovery but a history of style. For him, beauty was found in the specifics, in the detail as described by an inimitable genius. To understand Ulysses, Kundera says you need to know the history of the novel's obsession with the single moment; Nabokov says you need a map of Dublin, Kundera says the novel is a device for exploring ideas; Nabokov says, "I prefer images to ideas." Nabokov says, "I am supremely indifferent to the 'problems of a writer and the future of the novel,'" but without these issues (without the very words "problems" and "future of the novel"), Kundera's marvelous essays are inconceivable. Kundera seeks the existential truth about life; Nabokov says, "Life does not exist without a possessive epithet," and the word "existential (used seriously)" is itself deeply suspect. Kundera seeks to explain the function of the novel; Nabokov says, "One of the functions of all my novels is to prove that the novel in general does not exist." And yet Nabokov and Kundera lined their shelves with works by many of the same writers: Tolstoy, Flaubert, Kafka. Somehow they drew opposite aesthetic lessons from the same books. Flaubert helped Nabokov write like Nabokov and Kundera like Kundera, without their ever sharing a theory or purpose. They were both right. When, in The Curtain, Kundera writes with erudition and enthusiasm about the untapped sources of artistic inspiration to be found in Rabelais or the epistolary novel, when he praises authors as varied (and, refreshingly, as living) as Carlos Fuentes, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Salman Rushdie for their style and imagination, he seems released from his self-assigned weighty duties. Speaking of Picasso, Fellini, and Beethoven as old men, he savors their "joyful irresponsibility." Their "vesperal freedom is a miracle, an island." He praises these artists for achieving an indifference to the opinions of others and a uniqueness available only to the old. And I happily hear Kundera giving himself that same freedom, perhaps to enjoy in his own artistry something other than a responsibility to illuminate existence for us.

For an author obsessed with exploring ideas, for whom the novel is an inquiry into ideas, he seems, at moments in The Curtain, aware that there is something else hidden inside these strange stories we love to read. When he mocks "the futility of literary theory helpless before a work of an," the mockery applies no less to his own provocative essays about his own provocative art. The mystery at the heart of beauty, even a beauty spun from ideas, is penetrable only in flashes. It is when relishing Kundera's unmistakable opinions (a pleasure impermissible by his own lights) that I feel I am reading a book that could have been written by no one else, Perhaps that is my unifying theory. The Curtain is to be savored, more than memorised or followed rolled around the palate, not for its revealed truths but for its continually revealed style, going wonderfully strong in Kundera's eighth decade. Forget the theory, enjoy the man; as he concludes a discussion of novelistic scene structure, he begins to reminisce. "It brings to mind the libertine Bohemia of my youth: my friends used to declare that there was no more gorgeous experience for a man than to make love to three different women in a single day." That's why you read Kundera, whether he likes it or not. -----------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright of Harper's Magazine is the property of Harper's Magazine Foundation and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.