2 - Epic subjects

Summary

Epic and novel provide the double theme of George Lukács's Theory of the Novel. Analyzing the world-views special to the two genres, Lukács consigns them to distinct “historico-philosophical realities” and, in terms equally vatic and social-scientific, announces their ultimate irreconcilability. The confidence of epic lies in a sense of “the immanence of meaning in life,” a condition that allows a representation of “the extensive totality of life.” To this level of comprehensive significance the novelist aspires, Lukács concedes, but the old epic wholeness derives from an authority no longer available (a casualty of the post-Enlightenment era in which the novel originates). Whereas “epic gives form to a totality of life that is rounded from within,” the “novel seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life” (emphases added). In other words, the modern novelist must resort to schemes and designs of huge proportions in order to recover – merely to simulate, Lukács would contend – the sense of complete meaning that the epic poet enjoyed as the benefit of his cultural situation.

That Lukács began to compose his critical book in the same season that witnessed the beginning of Joyce's eight-year labor on Ulysses – the last spring before the Great War – is more than coincidence; it is context. If mass technological war is about to give the final lie to the nineteenth-century myth of progress through technology, if the utopian gaze will turn accordingly from the future to the past, then the nostalgia Lukács analyzes (and occasionally succumbs to) in his eloquent diagnosis is timely indeed.