The Curtain

Ever heard of a word called 'agelast?' It's a neologism coined by Rabelais from the Greek, used to describe people who do not laugh and are not 'at peace with the comical.' The concept is explained in Milan Kundera's The Curtain, a seven-part essay on the art of the novel. The names of the chapters (like Getting Into the Soul of Things; The Torn Curtain) and the subheads (sample The Beauty of a Sudden Density of Life, The Soft Gleam of the Comical, And If the Tragic Has Deserted Us? Going Down Into the Dark Depths of a Joke, The Theatre of Memory) mesmerised me. I bought it, hoping to read it on a rainy night with ginger tea for company. But I read the first page and all thoughts of a rainy night faded. I liked the way the book began [something we all must have thought of at some point] - he asks whether in these times, it is possible to produce a work of art that may become a real 'classic' in the future.
Kundera later talks about the origins of the novel, the novels that gave birth to the genre and how the 20th century novel acquired new dimensions, thanks to surrealism and existentialism (All part of undergrad syllabus - the giant called literary criticism that every literature student had to conquer!). But it's those nooks and crannies, where he shines his brilliant torch to reveal dazzling thoughts about concepts and incidents in novels, that unveil a new world.
He quotes Julian Gracq: "A history of literature, unlike history as such, ought to list only the names of victories, for its defeats are no victories for anyone." This is because unlike ordinary history, which is a chain of events, the history of art is about the history of timeless, universal values. Also startling are his readings of Anna's death in Anna Karenin - he reveals one more reason for Tolstoy's framing the love story by the double death motif in a railway station. He defines 'provincialism' as the inability or refusal to see one's own culture in the 'larger context' and dicusses how Europe moulded the novel according to its requirements and sensibility. Homer, Euripedes, Sterne, Smollett, Defoe, Flaubert, Balzac, Baudelaire, Proust, Tostoy, Dostoyevsky, Camus, Kafka, Joyce, who freely borrowed elements from each other, find their way into this 168-page slim volume
Kundera reflects upon Hegel's definition of tragedy to arrive at the conclusion that in modern life, tragedy has deserted us. Nothing's tragic anymore. Hegel had defined tragedy as a situation in which two antagonists fight each other for a partial, justified truth (here I think of the blind men and elephant tale) that's correct and end up destroying the other. Both are right and guilty. Such great conflicts cannot be simplistically reduced to a fight between Good and Evil. Since wars (Doesn't the US call the war against Iraq a fight for good, justice, bla-bla?), rebellions and uprisings are now seen as battles waged between good and evil, the tragic has deserted us.
For Kundera, the novelist is no 'valet to historians.' His job is to 'concentrate on the essential.'For him, the identifying art of the novel consists of 'tearing through the curtain of pre-interpretation,' an act that was first carried out by Cervantes through his Don Quixote (Who isn't in love with this book?) He ends his book with these beautiful lines - "For the history of art is perishable. But the babble of art is eternal."