2 - The theory of the novel and the autonomy of art

Summary

The theory of the novel

We have invented the productivity of the spirit: that is why the primaeval images have irrevocably lost their objective self-evidence for us … We have invented the creation of forms: and that is why everything that falls from our weary and despairing hands must always be incomplete.

Lukács, Theory of the Novel

At several points in The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukács advanced the claim that the novel is a form of epic literature characteristic of “disintegrated” civilizations or of what Weber called the “disenchanted” world. “The novel,” Lukács says, “is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.” If the epic world is “rounded from within,” so that, as Hegel said in his Aesthetics, each individual action and each object in it is the reflection of a totality complete in itself, then the novel reflects the “transcendental homelessness” characteristic of the subject in the modern world; this is a world in which man is “unsheltered,” deprived of the metaphysical comfort provided by the gods or of access to a natural context of desire, yet hard-pressed to derive any ultimate meaning from the world itself. Lukács places the origins of the novel in Cervantes' Don Quixote on the edge of a great upheaval of values.