The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts by Milan Kundera

Author:Milan Kundera [Kundera, Milan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780060841959
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-12-25T16:00:00+00:00

4. What Is a Novelist?

To Understand, We Must Compare

WHEN HERMANN BROCH WANTED TO BLOCK out a character, he first seized on the character’s essential position and then progressed to his more individual traits. From the abstract he moved to the concrete. Esch is the protagonist of the second novel of The Sleepwalkers. In essence, Broch says, he is a rebel. What is a rebel? The best way to understand the phenomenon, Broch goes on to say, is by comparison. Broch compares the rebel to the criminal. What is a criminal? A conservative, who relies on the present order and wants to join it, who considers his thefts and his frauds to be professional activity that will make him a citizen like everyone else. The rebel, by contrast, fights the established order to bring it under his own domination. Esch is not a criminal. Esch is a rebel. A rebel like Martin Luther, Broch says. But why am I discussing Esch? It’s the novelist who interests me! And to whom shall we compare the novelist?

The Poet and the Novelist

To whom shall we compare the novelist? To the lyric poet. The content of lyric poetry, Hegel says, is the poet himself; he gives voice to his inner world so as to stir in his audience the feelings, the states of mind he experiences. And even if the poet treats “objective” themes, external to his own life, “the great lyric poet will very quickly move away from them and end up drawing the portrait of himself’ (“stellt sich selber dar”).

Music and poetry, Hegel says, have an advantage over painting: lyricism. And in lyricism, he continues, music can go still further than poetry, for it is capable of grasping the most secret movements of the inner world, which are inaccessible to words. Thus there does exist an art in this case, music that is more lyrical than lyric poetry itself. From this we can deduce that the notion of lyricism is not limited to a branch of literature (lyrical poetry) but, rather it designates a certain way of being, and that, from this standpoint, a lyric poet is only the most exemplary incarnation of man dazzled by his own soul and by the desire to make it heard.

I have long seen youth as the lyrical age, that is, the age when the individual, focused almost exclusively on himself, is unable to see, to comprehend, to judge clearly the world around him. If we start with that hypothesis (necessarily schematic, but which, as a schema, I find accurate), then to pass from immaturity to maturity is to move beyond the lyrical attitude.

If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a “myth,” that genesis looks to me like a conversion story Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world.

A Conversion Story

From my bookshelf I take a copy of Madame Bovary, the pocket edition from 1972. There are two prefaces, one by a writer, Henry de Montherlant, the other by a literary critic, Maurice Bardèche.

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