The novel came into being with nothing but novelty to recommend it. Classical precedents were lacking: it disparaged epic swagger, and democratized the haughty seriousness of tragedy. It even flirted with the demolition of literature, since novels could be written by characters who — like Defoe's Crusoe keeping his diary or Richardson's Pamela scribbling her correspondence — were not writers at all. From the first, novelists had to double as theorists, defining and justifying their heterodox form. Cervantes in Don Quixote examines the glories and fallacies of chivalric romance, and Fielding in Tom Jones interrupts the story with essays that explain the mock heroic procedures of his storytelling.
Milan Kundera has inherited that wittily self-conscious duality. His novel Immortality, for instance, is about the immortality of the novel, which throughout the 20th century kept alive the idea of individuality, defying ideologies that insisted on "service of the collective life" and a docile "uniformity of being." Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady bravely sets out to discover her destiny; Mrs. Dalloway whimsically insists on buying the flowers herself. Such initiatives sum up what Kundera sees as the gospel of the form: novels preserve and validate the unpredictability of human behavior. They show that truth is relative, and therefore remind us why fiction is necessary.
The English novel begins, thanks to Defoe and Richardson, with semi-literate individuals telling their stories, which the novelists merely edit. Character breaks free from narrative and, as Kundera says in this zigzagging history of the form, "appropriates total freedom of speech."
The tyrannical author is "dethroned," in a revolution that is at once political and aesthetic. We are introduced to "a carnival of separate truths," a playground of "lovely lunacies." Mrs. Shandy, mentally unsynchronized with her husband, interrupts their love-making to ask if he has wound up the clock. Dickens's Uncle Dick babbles about King Charles' severed head, while Mrs. Gamp erects her infinitely extensible umbrella. In a happy accident organized by Rushdie at the beginning of The Satanic Verses, a jumbo jet explodes above London, extruding two characters who float unharmed to earth, delighting in the cosmic chaos that the bomb has revealed to them.
The curtain of Kundera's title is the veil of prejudice or pre-interpretation that occludes our view of reality. It is thick and stiff, "woven of legends"; Cervantes tore through it when he released Don Quixote from romance into a world of nakedly comical prose, and this "destructive act" is the creative boon of "every novel worthy of the name." Only by ripping the curtain can novelists ask the existential questions about truth, identity and love that define the form. Those questions can never be answered: humor or irony require us to be content with ambiguity, to accept the apparent absence of meaning. The laughter Kundera extols in his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting welcomes imperfection and incompleteness. In a nudist colony, Kundera's heroine Edwige surveys the bodies and says that, despite their paunches and puckering, all are beautiful. Nature, like the novel, is instinctively irregular, smilingly impartial.
George Eliot regretted the "spots of commonness" that defaced her characters, but to Kundera, such ordinary defects establish our human commonality and enroll us in a community of feeling: Sancho Panza, though heartbroken, is of good cheer while keeping a vigil at the deathbed of Don Quixote.
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