This week, I’m reading The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, by Milan Kundera. The book, fresh from the presses (the New Yorker published excerpts from it earlier this year), is Kundera’s latest attempt to construe a poetics of prose—a deep theory of the novel as a distinct art form. Here, he begins to make his core argument that, because art has a history, it must either move forward or fail. Incidentally, I take issue with that argument, or at least with the dead-end fetish for innovation toward which it leads.
Let us imagine a contemporary composer writing a sonata that in it form, its harmonies, its melodies resembles Beethoven’s. Let’s even imagine that this sonata is so masterfully made that, if it had actually been by Beethoven, it would count among his greatest works. And yet no matter how magnificent, signed by a contemporary composer it would be laughable. At best its author would be applauded as a virtuoso of pastiche. . . .
[I]t is only within the context of an art’s historical evolution that aesthetic value can be seen.
