The Curtain by Milan Kundera

Author:Milan Kundera [Milan Kundera]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571367436
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Silvery Bridge

A FEW YEARS AFTER THAT PRAGUE ENCOUNTER, I MOVED TO France, where, as chance would have it, Carlos Fuentes was the ambassador from Mexico. I was living in Rennes, and on my brief visits to Paris I would stay at his place, in a garret of his embassy, and we would have breakfasts that stretched into endless discussions. Suddenly I saw my Central Europe as an unexpected neighbor to Latin America: two edges of the West located at its opposite ends; two neglected, disdained, abandoned lands, pariah lands; and the two parts of the world most profoundly marked by the traumatizing experience of the Baroque. I say “traumatizing” for the Baroque came to Latin America as the art of the conqueror, and it came into my native land carried by an especially bloody Counter-Reformation, which roused Max Brod to call Prague the “city of evil.” I was seeing two parts of the world that were familiar with the mysterious marriage of evil and beauty.

We would talk, and a bridge—silvery, light, quivering, shimmering—formed like a rainbow over the century between my little Central Europe and the immense Latin America; a bridge that linked Matyas Braun’s ecstatic statues in Prague to the mad churches of Mexico.

And I thought, too, about another affinity between our two homelands: they held key positions in the evolution of the twentieth-century novel: first the Central European novelists of the 1920s and ’30s (Carlos called Broch’s Sleepwalkers the greatest novel of the century); then, some twenty or thirty years later, the Latin American novelists, my contemporaries.

One day I discovered the novels of Ernesto Sábato. In The Exterminating Angel (1974), which overflows with thinking like the books of the two earlier Viennese, he says explicitly that in the modern world, abandoned by philosophy and splintered by hundreds of scientific specialties, the novel remains to us as the last observatory from which we can embrace human life as a whole.

A half-century before him, on the other side of the planet (the silvery bridge was still vibrating above my head) the Broch of The Sleepwalkers, the Musil of The Man Without Qualities thought that same thought. At the time the surrealists were elevating poetry to the topmost rank of the arts, those two were awarding that supreme place to the novel.

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