[Kundera] argues not only that self-conscious literary artifice is artistically necessary, but that it is philosophically and historically necessary. For Kundera, the world is essentially meaningless and contingent, its real existence always hidden by comfortable myths, and the only way to give it meaning, to live authentically, is to courageously rip away these myths. Kundera uses the phrase "the curtain" -- a concept that recalls both Plato's allegory of the cave and the Hindu concept of the veil of Maya -- to refer to those "judgments" and "pre-interpretations" of the world that stand in our way. The great novels refuse the consolation of essentialism, of received beliefs; they tear the curtain. In short, Kundera advocates a kind of dynamic fictional existentialism, in which each act of creative transgression reawakens what the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl called "the world of life," and what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called "being." (For Kundera, "existence" would seem a more apropos term, but he favors Heidegger's metaphysical word.)

¶ 8:24 PM