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Portrait of the Marxist as a Young Hegelian: Lukács' Theory of the Novel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

David H. Miles
David H. Miles*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia, Charlottesville
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Abstract

Composed in the tradition of German idealist aesthetics, Lukács' Theory of the Novel (1916) establishes him not only as an heir to Hegel but, more important, as a forerunner of Benjamin, Adorno, Goldmann, and Auerbach. Lukács begins by constructing a phenomenology of narrative mind in which modern consciousness is played otf against its Other, against the epic vision of earlier poets. Whereas the Homeric epic is characterized by a wholeness of sensibility and vision, novelistic consciousness is ironic, alienated and self-divided. Thus the novelistic hero's journey becomes a Hegelian one into the problematic realms of inwardness, memory, and imagination: from Cervantes to Flaubert we witness a retreat from participation in the world to interpretation of it. Lukács' philosophical meditations prefigure much in recent novel theory: Benjamin's and Adorno's commentaries on alienation in narrative, Goldmann's notion of the problematic hero, and Auerbach's concept, in Mimesis, of Homeric realism.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 94 , Issue 1 , January 1979 , pp. 22 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

Notes

1 The first quotation, which refers, in context, to Socrates, is from Georg Lukács, Soul and Form (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974), p. 93. The second quotation is from Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), p. 41.

2 Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), p. 348, and Levin, “Toward a Sociology of the Novel,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 26 (1965), 150.

3 The most important studies of Lukács' literary criticism that have appeared so far are: Peter Demetz, Marx, Engels, and the Poets (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 220–27; George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1970), pp. 325–40; Lucien Goldmann, “Introduction aux premiers écrits de Georges Lukács,” Temps modernes, 195 (1962), 25480; Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 51–59; Gunter Rohrmoser, “Lit-eratur und Gesellschaft,” in Deutsche Romantheorien, ed. R. Grimm (Frankfurt: Athenaum, 1968), pp. 396–411; Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Dell, 1969), pp. 82–92; Manfred Durzak, “Der moderne Roman: Bemerkungen zu G. L.‘s Theorie des Romans,” Basis, 1 (1970), 26-48; George Lichtheim, George Lukács (New York: Viking, 1970); E. Bahr and R. Kunzer, Georg Lukács (New York: Ungar, 1972); Fritz Raddatz, Georg Lukács (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1972); Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 160–206; Graham Good, “Lukács’ Theory of the Novel,” Novel, 6 (Winter 1973), 175-85; J. Matzner, ed., Lehrstück Lukács (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974); Bela Kiralyfalvi, The Aesthetics of György Lukács (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975); Agnes Heller et al., Die Seele und das Leben: Studien zum frühen Lukács (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977); Sung-Wan Ban, Das Verhältnis der Ästhetik Georg Lukács' zur deutschen Klassik und zu Thomas Mann (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1977).

4 Adorno, “Erpresste Versöhnung,” in Noten zur Literatur, ii (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1961), 152.

5 Thomas Mann, “Brief an Dr. Seipel,” Gesammelte Werke, xi (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1960), 782. Mann's interest in Lukács (who was ten years younger) was particularly strong in Mann's earlier years: important parts of Death in Venice (1912) are taken from a chapter on platonic love (“Longing and Form”) in Soul and Form (1911); Mann's chapter on “Bürger-lichkeit” in The Reflections of an Unpolitical Man (1918) opens with praise for Lukács' essay “The Bourgeois Way of Life and Art for Art's Sake” in Soul and Form; between 1913 and 1922 Mann visited Lukács' parents in Budapest several times; in 1922, in Vienna, he met Lukács for the first and last time; in the Magic Mountain (1924) he painted a (distorted) portrait of Lukács in the figure of Naphta, a fanatical Communist and Jesuit Jew, whose ideas on the coming “Kingdom of God” closely resemble those of Lukács in his 1912 essay “Von der Armut am Geiste” (trans, as “On Poverty of Spirit,” in The Philosophical Forum, 3 [1972], 371-85); and in 1929 in an open letter to the Austrian chancellor. Dr. Seipel, Mann pleaded successfully for Lukács' political asylum in Vienna (Lukács was to leave for Moscow the following year).

6 See Ferenc Feher, “The Last Phase of Romantic Anti-Capitalism: Lukács' Response to the War,” New German Critique, 10 (Winter 1977), 141-43.

7 On this general point see G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 1092. Hegel, incidentally, was not the first to use the term bürgerliche Epopöe (which Knox translates as “popular epic”); J. C. Wezel had used it in 1780 to define the genre of the novel in the introduction to his own Hermann und Ulrike. And Fielding, of course, had defined the novel as a “comic,” or lower-class, epic in his 1742 preface to Joseph Andrews.

8 The concept of “absolute sinfulness” Lukács borrows from Fichte's Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), although it also ties in with his earlier interest in Kierkegaard.

9 On Kant's and Schlegel's terminology for differentiating the ancients from the moderns (Schiller's “naive” and “sentimental”), see Arthur Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1948), Chs. ix-xi.

10 Erich Kahler made use of this insight of Hegel's in The Inward Turn of Narrative (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), and I have done so in my article “The Picaro's Journey to the Confessional: The Changing Image of the Hero in the German Bildungsroman,” PMLA, 89 (1974), 980-92. The journey from epic to novelistic consciousness in general is also traced by Marthe Robert in The Old and the New: From Don Quixote to Kafka (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977); she does not, however, refer to the Hegelian-Lukácsian tradition.

11 See Goethe's “Maximen und Reflexionen,” No. 938. Goethe, of course, is referring to the author, whereas Lukács is referring to the hero, but the notion of an informing (subjective) consciousness in the novel is central to both. For Lukács on the “pan-poetism” of the Romantics, see Soul and Form, p. 48. For Schopenhauer, see Essays and Aphorisms (Baltimore: Penguin, 1970), p. 165. For Mann's view, see his still untranslated essay “Die Kunst des Romans” (1940; in Gesammelte Werke, Vol. x [Frankfurt: Fischer, 1960]), which draws liberally (without saying so) on the Hegelian-Lukácsian tradition by pointing out that the novel is postepic, prosaic, ironic, bourgeois, and so forth. Mann's description of the modern novel as “creative consciousness,” however, is taken from Merezhkovsky.

12 For the points made in this paragraph see Ferenc Feher, “Is the Novel Problematic? A Contribution to the Theory of the Novel,” Telos, 15 (1973), 47-74. On the Budapest School, see Lukács himself in the Times Literary Supplement, 11 June 1971.

13 As Lukács points out in his 1962 preface to Theory of the Novel, the subjective sense of memory in Flaubert is close to that of Proust (p. 14). I am indebted to both Marianne Hirsch and Michael Ryan for helping me rethink and reformulate Lukács' complex ideas on time here.

14 See Lukács' similar comments on the collapse of time in the drama in Soul and Form, pp. 158–59.

15 These two paths have since been explored by Thomas Mann, in his essay “Goethe and Tolstoy” (1922; in Essays of Three Decades [New York: Knopf, 1947]), in which he plays off the spiritualists Dostoev-sky and Schiller against the sensualists Tolstoy and Goethe; and by George Steiner, whose Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1959) is openly indebted to Lukács' Theory of the Novel.

16 See, for a recent example, Laurence Lerner's “The Triumph of Scylla: Lukács' Theory of Realism,” Encounter, 49 (Aug. 1977), 36-49, esp. p. 49.

17 On the German idealist tradition, see Wimsatt and Brooks's Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Vintage-Random, 1967), Ch. xvii, and Lovejoy, Chs. ix-xi.

18 The Aesthetics was first published posthumously, in 1835, but it was originally delivered as a series of lectures in Berlin in 1820.

19 See Lukács, Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset, 1964), p. 153;Solzhenitsyn (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 20–21. De Man, for some reason, informs us that Lukács' “insistence on the need for totality” is a “definitely post-Hegelian element” (p. 54; italics mine). In actuality, the will to Ganzheit, or “totality,” together with its privileging of the symbol, plays a major role in the aesthetics of the Goethe-zeit and actually culminates in Hegel. Benjamin, for example, in his Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: New Left Books, 1977, p. 186 et passim), mounts his theory of allegory and the luminous fragment as a sort of dialectical counterpart to this dominant notion of the symbol and the organic whole in German idealist aesthetics. Moreover, Lukács himself openly admits to taking the term “totality” from Hegel (Studies, p. 151). For more on Lukács' concept of totality, which is central to any understanding of his aesthetics, see G. H. R. Parkinson, ed., Georg Lukács (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 1970), pp. 147–72, Lucien Goldmann, Lukács and Heidegger (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 40–52; Kiralyfalvi, pp. 84–88; and Martin Jay, “The Concept of Totality in Lukács and Adorno,” Telos, 32 (1977), 117-37.

20 See “Erzahlen oder beschreiben?” (1936)—trans, as “Narrate or Describe?”—-in Lukács, Writer and Critic (London: Merlin, 1970). For Lukács' comments on Lessing, see Studies, p. 152; for Engels' comments on Balzac, see his letter to Margaret Harkness in 1888, published in Marx and Engels, On Literature and Art, ed. L. Baxandall and S. Morawski (St. Louis: Telos, 1973), pp. 114–16.

21 See Lukács' comments on the Romantics' use of this term (Soul, p. 48).

22 See Adorno, $AUsthetische Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 44, and Noten zur Literatur, ii, 178. It should be noted, however, that the problem of a nostalgia for an unmediated, organic mode of existence is an enormously complicated one and obviously transcends Nazism. As Rene Wellek has reminded us, it derives ultimately from Plato and Aristotle and carries on down through Schiller, Hegel, and Marx to T. S. Eliot's “dissociation of sensibility,” Heidegger's “Being,” and to the agrarianism of the Southern New Critics (Wellek, “The New Criticism: Pro and Contra,” Critical Inquiry, 4 [1978], 616-17). See also Jeffrey L. Sammons, Literary Sociology and Practical Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 57–63. The problematic notion can also be found, in different forms, in Barthes and Foucault.

23 Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 157.

24 For both essays by Benjamin—the one on Leskov and the other on “The Work of Art”—see his Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 83–111, 217-53.

25 On the Frankfurt School, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston: Little, 1973).

26 See Negative Dialectics (New York: Seabury, 1973), p. 191, and Minima Moralia (London: New Left Books, 1974), p. 245. I am very grateful to Michael Jones for alerting me to these particular passages in Adorno. For two excellent studies of Adorno's complex aesthetics, see Fritz Raddatz, “Der hölzerne Eisenring: Die moderne Literatur zwischen zweierlei Ästhetik: Lukács und Adorno,” Merkur, 31 (1977), 28-44, and Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press-Macmillan, 1977), esp. Ch. iii, “Dialectics without Identity.”

27 For Adorno's essay see Noten zur Literatur, i (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1958), 61-72.

28 Auerbach, Mimesis (New York: Anchor-Double-day, 1957), pp. 3–4.

29 See Wellek, Concepts, p. 236, as well as his “Auerbach's Special Realism,” Kenyon Review, 16 (1954), 299-307.

30 The Hedgehog and the Fox (New York: Simon, 1953), pp. 1, 36-37.