The polyphonic spree

WHEN Milan Kundera dies, he will be remembered for the totality of his work, for the writings on art and literature as well as for the novels. His name will invoke a virility, a rigor, but also -- as his new collection of essays, “The Curtain,” establishes -- a beautiful, querulous thread.

“The Curtain” continues Kundera’s inquiry into the art of the novel, its role as the finest vehicle we have for understanding human nature. For him, the novel is not only an entity distinct from history and the vagaries of politics but also a powerful agent of change in its own right, a lens through which to view our wandering selves. In that sense, “The Curtain” takes up where his 1986 book “The Art of the Novel” left off. With its essays on Kafka, Flaubert and Rabelais, “The Art of the Novel” included a condemnation of kitsch and offered the novel, with its polyphonic ability to weave stories and disassemble chronology, as an antidote.

Two decades later, Kundera means to expand his claims for the novel, arguing that its purpose is not to uplift us, or to provide moral guidance, but to make us less afraid. Fear, we all know ever more definitively as we age, is our greatest enemy, and it is certainly the enemy of art, truth and freedom.

“The Curtain” refines Kundera’s ideas on kitsch and also explicates the difference between kitsch and vulgarity, firmly and happily placing the author in the camp of the vulgarians. He refers to a good day in his youthful “libertine Bohemia” as a “three-woman day,” one in which a man sleeps with three different women, and “each woman, seen against the backdrop of the one before, seemed even more unique, and their three bodies were like three long notes played each on a different instrument and bound together in a single chord.”

Twenty-two years ago, in an essay for the New York Times, Kundera criticized Dostoevsky’s sentimentality and hysteria in a discussion of his own attempt to adapt “The Idiot” for the stage. “I reread ‘The Idiot,’ ” he wrote, “and realized that even if I were starving, I couldn’t do the job. Dostoevsky’s universe of overblown gestures, murky depths and aggressive sentimentality repelled me.” What disgusted him about Dostoevsky’s novels, he went on to explain, was their climate -- the tyranny of feelings over truth.

In “The Curtain,” Kundera’s take on Dostoevsky is far more generous. Rather than condemn the Russian’s surfeit of emotion, he praises his “sudden density of life.” Could it be that Kundera’s feelings about feelings have relaxed over the years, that he has become less strident and more willing to split hairs with the rest of us? “To me that theatricalization of the scene is not a mere technical necessity and still less a shortcoming,” he writes of those very qualities he once described as verging on hysterical. “For that accumulation of events, with whatever it might contain of the exceptional and the barely believable, is above all fascinating! When that happens to us in our own lives -- who could deny it? -- it fills us with wonder! Delights us!” Rather than condemn the tyranny of the emotional, the author waxes poetic on the beauty of “[t]he everyday” and our ability to “stamp some personal event with an inimitable singularity that dates it and makes it unforgettable.”

It’s a striking turnaround -- especially when you consider the enmity Kundera’s aesthetics once stirred. Reacting to that New York Times essay, Joseph Brodsky accused Kundera of allowing his sense of history to obscure his judgment. (It’s an artist’s “esthetics that give rise to his ethics and his sense of history,” Brodsky wrote, “not the other way around.”) Among other things, Brodsky claimed that Kundera had fallen into the trap of believing that he somehow “owned” his art, that art had become his “tool.” This ownership complex, Brodsky barreled on, creates a sense of insecurity in the artist: “[H]e looks feverishly around for where to put the blame.” Kundera’s animosity against feelings, Brodsky argued, was a direct result of his tendency to see things in black and white, feeling versus rationality, which stemmed from his view of the world as divided into East and West, a geopolitical determinism that allowed its adherents to position themselves as hero-individuals with important choices to make. Kundera, firmly aligned with the West, wanted to be “more European than the Europeans.” At the same time, he ended up biting the Western hand that fed him, criticizing the culture by aligning with outsiders like Denis Diderot and Laurence Sterne.

Now, Kundera condemns this provincialism, this determinism. “There are two basic contexts,” he suggests, “in which a work of art may be placed: either in the history of its nation (we can call this the small context) or else in the supranational history of its art (the large context).” Kundera refers to a “nation’s possessiveness toward its artists ... as a small context terrorism, reducing the whole meaning of a work to the role it plays in its homeland.” As for Brodsky’s thinly veiled accusations of commercialism, Kundera makes clear his feelings about fame. “Artists’ fame,” he explains, “is the most monstrous of all, for it implies the idea of immortality. And that is a diabolical snare, because the grotesquely megalomaniac ambition to survive one’s death is inseparably bound to the artist’s probity.”

INDEED, much of “The Curtain” reads like a long-considered response to Brodsky’s critique. With time and distance from his turbulent youth -- Kundera was expelled from the Communist Party not once, but twice -- history and politics have taken a permanent back seat to Art with a capital A. “Art,” he writes, “isn’t there to be some great mirror registering all of History’s ups and downs, variations, endless repetitions. Art is not a village band marching dutifully along at History’s heels. It is there to create its own history. What will ultimately remain of Europe is not its repetitive history, which in itself represents no value. The one thing that has some chance of enduring is the history of its arts.”

Of course, beyond these clash-of-titans arguments lie the issues that have shadowed Kundera’s work for years: his guilt at leaving Czechoslovakia for France in 1975; the accusation that, as one critic wrote in 1992, “while the writers inside Czechoslovakia were hounded by the police and forced to wash windows or stoke furnaces, Mr. Kundera was becoming one of the West’s most exalted literary celebrities”; his love-hate relationship with the French; and his increasing anger over critical insistence on the importance of politics in his work. “If I write a love story, and there are three lines about Stalin in that story, people will talk about the three lines and forget the rest,” he told journalist Jane Kramer in a rare 1984 interview. Persistent as well -- although as sentimental as anything he condemns in Dostoevsky -- is Kundera’s sense of homesickness, if only for a community of mind, a way of discussing and interpreting art that remains contagious and unsettling.

“The Curtain” is not one of Kundera’s best books, but to readers for whom he has provided a crucial piece of the literary puzzle, it cannot be missed. Here (do I dare say it?) there is a greater openness, a more revealing sense of the sources of his authority -- namely, his own life. More to the point, there is a vulnerability, as much as Kundera (who is not alone in his desire for seclusion from his readers) might like to deny it. In that vulnerability, he, like his readers, is and will always be vulnerable, full of doubt, homeless if not lost. *