Here, in his most full-throated fashion, Kundera sets forth his central thesis that art—and the novel, in particular—operate above and beyond History. I don’t begrudge him the point, at least as it pertains to history with a capital H. But he’s wrong, I believe, to suggest that a novelist can escape the duty to hold up a mirror to human life. And, to the extent that human life changes only so much, so will novelists find that retreading old narrative ground is part of their lot.

It would be ridiculous to write another Human Comedy. Because while History (mankind’s History) might have the poor taste to repeat itself, the history of art will not stand for repetition. Art isn’t there to be some great mirror registering all of History’s ups and downs, variations, endless repetitions. Art is not a village band marching dutifully along History’s heels.

Another passage from the new Kundera book.

We will understand nothing about the novel if we deny that it has its own muse, if we do not see it as an art sui generis, an autonomous art. It has its own genesis . . . its own history . . . its own morality (Hermann Broch said it: the novel’s sole morality is knowledge; a novel that fails to reveal some hitherto unknown bit of existence is immoral . . .).

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.

Would you mess with this fellow? He is Shiva—Shiva the Destroyer, to you and me. In the Mahabharata (according to Priya Hemenway, author of Hindu Gods), he bears no less than 1,008 names, a different one for each of his many incarnations: the Lord of Sleep, the Lord of Songs, the Lord of Fire, the Lord of Tears, and the lord of much, much else. Along with six arms and hair that represents the flow of India’s sacred rivers, Shiva possesses a third eye from which he can send out flames of wrath to those who do him wrong.

Yet Shiva readily calls upon more earthly powers when the occasion calls for it. From a recent New Yorker piece on the illegal trade in Indian antiquities:

When, in 1986, the Indian government sued for the return of a twelfth-century bronze Shiva that had been looted from a village in Pathur, it did so on behalf of the offended god himself: Shiva was named as a plaintiff in the case. “In the south, people still don’t tell lies in Shiva’s temple,” Ashok Shekhar, a former state arts and culture official in Rajasthan, [said]. “These are very hotheaded deities.”

I’m a jogger. Putting my legs through piston-like paces, revving up my heartbeat, giving the gland that secretes endorphins a good bitch slap—for me, this is a critical therapy. I do it because I need to. But for simple enjoyment, nothing beats a stately, vigorous stroll through congenial terrain. So I take Jan Morris’s point in this passage from Pleasures of a Tangled Life, a collection of essays.

The human race was designed, in my opinion, not to jog for its physical recreation, but to walk. Most people look silly jogging, but one can walk with swank, one can walk with style, one can feel like General de Gaulle parading down the Champs-Elysées, one can observe with dignity the passing scene, one can converse without panting, smile without strain, and take one’s exercise with the composure that evolution evidently intended, when it stood us on two legs and made us lords of nature.

TV makes you stupid. It’s not an original insight, but back in 1980 the writer George W.S. Trow wrote an essay in the New Yorker that cast a particularly cold and waspish eye on the subject. Television, he suggested, had settled on the land like a slow, soft apocalypse, laying waste to every force in American culture that had formerly supported independence of judgment—and, indeed, the very possibility of adulthood. Trow died in obscurity late last year. Reading a retrospective “appreciation” of him in the New York Sun (via James Wolcott) led me to take a look at his essay, published in book form as The Context of No Context.

The work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no context and to chronicle it.

*

The important moment in the history of television was when a man named Richard Dawson, the “host” of program called Family Feud, asked contestants to guess what a poll of a hundred people had guessed would be the average American woman. Guess what they’ve guessed. Guess what they’ve guess the average is . . .

“You said . . .”

“Our survey said . . .”

Ah, distinctions—tart little appetizers for the mind. I like this one, from Within the Context of No Context, by George W.S. Trow (1981):

A tease is a con. You press a spot because you know that it can be pressed, and while the sucker is feeling the pleasure or the pain resulting from the pressure, you take something from him. “Do you have the money? Good. Good. She’ll be right down. Wait here; she’ll be right here.” And then, nothing. A flirt doesn’t do that. A flirt does a dance in the context of giving pleasure. Referring to this, referring to that. And suddenly, following the references, you find a little surprise.

In my review of Brick, I commented on the retro glamour that spreads a shimmery finish across a lot of film and fiction in the noir mode, obscuring the bleak vision underneath. Scraping away that finish can be a good thing, and so it is in Brick. But the style and scenery of classic hard-boiled writing are still nice to behold—as in this passage about a “swank big-city nightclub” that I found in Halo in Blood, a 1946 detective romance in the Raymond Chandler tradition. The author is Howard Browne, and the narrator is Paul Pine, Chicago private eye.

We went into the silk-drapery and crystal-mirror elegance of a foyer crowded with people in evening clothes waiting for tables. Beyond red-velvet ropes strung across an arched opening was [a] semicircular swath of tables about the glistening dance floor.

Music, with plenty of brass and a barrel-house piano, blended with the clatter of tableware, the murmur of voices and the slither of dancing feet to form a curtain of sound like the backdrop of a stage. …

A man in a dress suit with tails, his face the color of wet lime, bowed to us and said, “Good evening, Miss Sandmark.” He curled a lip at my tuxedo, and pushed aside a flunky and unhooked the velvet rope for us himself.

We followed him right down an aisle and around to the right to a table for two bordering on the dance floor. He slid Leona’s chair under her with a flourish, removed her wrap with a flourish, whisked a “Reserved” card off the table with a flourish and handed us wine cards—with a flourish. He jerked his chin up and around, like Mussolini on a balcony, and crooked a lifted finger at a passing runt of a waiter and it stopped the little guy as if he’d run into a wall.

Adam Gopnik, in a piece about Kingsley Amis (“The Old Devil,” The New Yorker, April 23, 2007), adduces a transatlantic divide in favored types of satire:

The Larry David character [in "Curb Your Enthusiasm"] doesn’t mind keeping up the nice-guy act so long as he never actually has to do anything unselfish; the Amis men expect that they will eventually have to act unselfishly, since that’s what life and the world squeeze out of you, but they hate having to keep up the nice-guy act. . . . One kind of comedy comes from having to show more than you can really feel, the other from the embarrassment of feeling more than you ever want to show.