How the novel became descriptive

BOOK EXTRACT

In his new book-length essay The Curtain, renowned Czech writer Milan Kundera deftly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilisation. In this extract, he discusses the changes that occurred in the art of novel-writing in the early 19th century. Don Quixote lay dying, and yet "that did not keep the niece from eating, the housekeeper from drinking, or Sancho from being of good cheer". For a brief moment, that sentence parts the curtain that hides life's prose.

But suppose we examine the prose more closely? In detail? Moment by moment? How does Sancho's good cheer express itself? Is he talkative? Is he chatting with the two women? About what? Does he keep close by his master the whole time?

By definition, what a narrator recounts is a thing that has happened. But each little event, as it becomes the past, loses its concrete nature and turns into an outline. Narration is recollection, therefore a summary, a simplification, an abstraction. The true face of life, of the prose of life, is found only in the present moment.

But how to recount past events and give them back the presentness they've lost? The art of the novel found a solution: presenting the past in scenes. A scene, even one recounted in the grammatical past tense, is ontologically the present: we see and hear it; it unfolds before us here and now.

When they were reading [Henry] Fielding, his readers became auditors, fascinated by a brilliant man who held them breathless with what he was telling. [Honore] Balzac, some eighty years later, turned his readers into spectators watching a screen (a movie screen before the fact) on which his novelist's magic made them see scenes they could not tear their eyes away from.

Fielding took little interest in daily life (he would not have believed that banality itself could one day become a major subject for novels); he did not pretend to put a microphone to the thoughts going through his characters' heads (he would observe them from the outside and offer lucid and often humorous hypotheses on their psychology); description bored him, and he spent no time on the physical appearance of his protagonists or on the book's historical background; his narration glided happily above the scenes, of which he would evoke only fragments he considered indispensable for the clarity of the plot and for the idea.

The nineteenth century began amidst decades of explosive events that, time and again and from top to bottom, transfigured the whole of Europe. Something essential in man's existence changed then, and forever: History became everybody's experience; man began to understand that he was not going to die in the same world he had been born into; the clock of History began to toll the hour in loud tones, everywhere, even within novels whose time was immediately counted and dated.

The shape of every little object "" every chair, every skirt "" was stamped with its imminent disappearance (transformation). The era of descriptions began. (Description: compassion for the ephemeral; salvaging the perishable.) Balzac's Paris is nothing like Fielding's London; its squares have their names, its houses their colours, its streets their smells and sounds: it is the Paris of a particular moment, Paris as it had not been before that moment and as it would never be again. And every scene of the novel is stamped (be it only by the shape of a chair or the cut of a suit) by History which, now that it has emerged from the shadows, sculpts and re-sculpts the look of the world.

The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts

Author: Milan Kundera
PUBLISHER: Faber and Faber
PAGES: 168
PRICE: Rs 395