This 2005 book, subtitled “An Essay in Seven Parts” is a pretty good follow-up to Kundera’s 1988 collection of interviews and essays The Art of the Novel. While The Art of the Novel focuses more on (as the title implies) the art of writing and, in particular, Kundera’s own writing, The Curtain looks more at the history of writing (of prose writing: novels, or “prosai-comic-epic writing” as Fielding dubbed the art form).
The Curtain comes to the novel from many different directions — its place in the history of writing, its place in nationalism, its place in world history, its role in memory, etc. Like The Art of the Novel, The Curtain provides a decent list of books/authors one should read to get a sense of where the novel has been, starting with Rabelais and Kundera-favorite Don Quixote, and continuing on through Tristram Shandy, Kafka (another favorite) and Joyce. He also mentions some worthwhile lesser-known writers, condemned by geography and history and nation of birth, to remain off the canon (as a Czech writer, Kundera’s interest and expertise lay in that region of Europe).
Noticeably, any female writers (on or off the canon) are completely absent from both books. (It’s been a few years since I read The Art of the Novel, but I’m pretty sure on this.) This was starkly obvious in his discussion of Flaubert’s “deep aesthetic intention: to de-theatricalize the novel” (p. 19):
“The everyday. It is not merely ennui, pointlessness, repetition, triviality; it is beauty as well; for instance, the magical charm of atmospheres, a thing everyone has felt in his own life; a strain of music heard faintly from the next apartment; the wind rattling the windowpane; the monotonous voice of a professor that a lovesick schoolgirl hears without registering; these trivial circumstances stamp some personal event with an inimitable singularity that dates it and makes it unforgettable.” (20)
Kundera from here then continues on to discuss Tolstoy and Joyce. Joyce certainly makes the trivial readable, novel-worthy so to speak, but so did his contemporary Virginia Woolf, and any discussion of the trivial in literary history is lacking without a look at her work. Her Mrs. Dalloway is a “day in the life” novel just like Ulysses… a little more readable, but no less literary for that. The omission was striking to me, and I’m curious if Kundera has not been exposed to female writers he finds worthwhile or if it is simply an accident of book space and/or memory.
One other theme throughout this book is nation and context — context of the writer, the written, and the nation (within the world). Kundera is, for example, insistent that had Kafka written in Czech, not German, he would not be as widely known. That’s probably pretty accurate, though the reasons for such a fate are various. As a Czech expatriate, Kundera’s take on the historical fate of the Eastern European region is interesting, especially considering that in a modern context, despite the fall of the USSR and other factors, much of the region is still in upheaval and national identity still in question.
“The word ‘Munich’ has become the symbol of capitulation to Hitler. But to be more concrete: at Munich, in the autumn of 1938, the four great nations, Germany, Italy, France and Great Britain, negotiated the fate of a small country to whom they denied the very right to speak” (p. 32).
“‘A faraway country of which we know little…” Those famous words by which Chamberlain sough to justify the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia were accurate. In Europe there are the large countries on one side and the small on the other; there are the nations seated in the negotiating chambers and those who wait all night in the antechambers.//What distinguishes the small nations from the large is not the quantitative criterion of the number of their inhabitants; it is something deeper: for them their existence is not a self-evident certainty but always a questions, a wager, a risk; they are on the defensive against History, that force that is bigger than they, that does not take them into consideration, that does not even notice them” (p. 33).
“In the 1960s I left my country for France, and there I was astonished to discover that I was ‘an East European exile.’ Indeed, to the French, my county was part of the European Orient. I hastened to explain to all and sundry what was the real scandal of our situation: stripped of national sovereignty, we had been annexed not only by another country but by a whole other world, the world of the European East which, rooted as it is in the ancient past of Byzantium, possesses its own historical problematic, its own architectural look, its own religion…” (p. 43).