Chapter 2

Georg Lukacs

2.1 Introduction:-

Lukacs theory of realism is quite unlike the popular understanding

of literary realism. The usual conception of realism can vaguely allow the

spillover of realistic technique in the Modernist period. Thus Conrad and

Forster are considered modernists though their narrative technique is

largely realist where as Lukacs takes a strident stand against Modernism

of any hue. He poses realism not only as a technique but as a world view

against Modernism, which again he thinks is not only a technique but a

world view. Similarly Lukacs' criticism is basically against formalism, or

any aesthetic view which holds art to be an autonomous realm whether

relative or absolute. But formalism along with its twin new criticism and

structuralism are common critical theories of modernism as well as

literary realism. Formalist criticism is as happy analyzing an

expressionist text as a realist text.

Lukacs' understanding of realism, not the actual realism of 19'̂

and 20* century novels, but of realism as an ideal type or call it Lukacs'

realist aesthetics is for more consistent and conceptually clear than a

more practical and rule of the thumb perception of realism as a reflection

of reality. The philosophical standpoint of Lukacs is defined by a critique

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of Kant's separation of facts and values and an eclectic adaption of

Hegel's dialectics, themes from phenomenology of spirit and philosophy

of history and Marx's analysis of commodity production as a defining

element of capitalism. Lukacs develops his aesthetics in two or three

stages. His theoretical and abstract ruminations are developed in

'Reification and Class consciousness of Proletariat'. His applications of

these insights are made in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, and

The Historical Novel. Though Lukacs holds a kind of existentialist

solipsism solely responsible for the modernist inwardness, it is possible

for him to look at modernism as a result of the split effected between

natural sciences and moral world by Neo-Kantians and sociologists like

Weber and more aggressively by the Analytic philosophy of Russell

Whitehead and Logical Empiricism. Neo-Kantians of Marburg School

posited a system of rules typical of each age, modeled on a scientific

system. Weber had declared that the rational organization of society

under capitalism was govemed by means end relation. This reason was

useful to discover the right means for the desired end not for judging the

rightness of the end itself. Moral values were not the province of

scientific, calculating reason. The logical Empiricism of Vienna School

and the Analytical philosophy of England dismissed any statement that

could not be verified by senses as non-sense. This trend was perceived as

a threat by many who dreamt of a more unified human life.

In fact Naturalism, the philosophy of physical sciences, stands as

an unspoken entity, to which both the modernist - existentialists and

Lukacs respond. Lukacs' criticism of modernism, existentialism and

human sciences makes better sense if seen in the context of the threat

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posed by the naturalist epistemology which had become powerful due to

successes of physical sciences. Lukacs has been portrayed by non

Marxist critics as an orthodox socialist, who was against formal

experimentation and formal disintegration of modernism. He is taken to

task by other western Marxists like Brecht, Bloch and Adomo for not

comprehending the critical relation with reality that Modernists

developed.

These assessments of Lukacs are partial as they disregard Lukacs'

criticism of the dominant ideology of modem capitalist society, which is

modeled on science and technology, made in Reification and Class

Consciousness. Lukacs says - "It is evident that the whole structure of

capitalist production rests on the interaction between a necessity subject

to strict laws in all isolated phenomena and the relative irrationality of

the total process". Lukacs says a little ahead 'Philosophy stands in the

same relation to the special sciences as they do with respect to empirical

reality. The formalistic conceptualization of the special sciences becomes

for philosophy an immutably given substratum and this signals the final

and despairing renunciation of every attempt to cast light on the

reification that lies at the root of this formalism'.^

It is there that he develops a connection between Kantian schema on

of understanding based^ a synthetic a priori and the law-boundness of

modem science. His characterization of Kantian philosophy as well as

the modem society by its passive, contemplative attitude to reality is the

basis of his similar charges against modemism in his later literary critical

works. His development of an alternative praxis philosophy by

combining Hegel's theory of master and slave consciousness with Marx's

25

analysis of the proletariat constitutes the basis of his realist aesthetics

with which he analyses Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann and others. It will be

clearer as we go ahead that it is simplistic to consider that the early

Lukacs of The Theory of the Novel and History and Class Consciousness

was Hegelian and unorthodox whereas the later Lukacs was more under

the sway of official communist position. We will have to study Lukacs in

the unity of his thought.

Lukacs' Reification and Class Consciousness is hailed as a

seminal essay for Hegelian Marxism. He wrote that essay before Marx's

1844 manuscripts and early writings were published in which Marx's

indebtedness to Hegel is evident. In these essays Lukacs connected

several themes and developed a basis for Marxist cultural and

sociological criticism. This was an independent intellectual basis and not

the usual repetition of base-superstructure model in which the culture is a

pure and simple reflection of the material, economic structure. There was

no hypostatizing of material interests on the level of human

consciousness. That is to say there was no reduction of consciousness to

mere effects of material needs as mechanical materialism often does. The

difficult task of relating the cognitive, cultural aspects of human and

social lives to the material situation and yet avoiding to be reductive was

attempted by Lukacs for the first time along with the other Marxist

thinkers like Alexander Kojeve, Ernst Bloch and Karl Korsch. As we

shall see here he managed to maintain human sovereignty within the

framework of historical and economic determinism.

Lukacs illustrates the all pervading phenomenon of reification

through examples drawn from economics, law, science, social

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organization, technology etc. Reification which is a very broad concept

that leaves room for detailed interpretation of individual phenomena was

prevalent in the early sociology of Simmel and Weber. It meant that the

human creation, be it that of a thing or social practice or a system,

acquires an independent logic of its own, even an existence of its own. It

becomes powerful and ruling and its human agents tend to look at it as an

independent self propelling system or a practice. Human beings become

subject to their own creation. This is a typical modem social

phenomenon. Simmel and Weber had developed this thought in their

respective ways.

Max Weber lists the features of modem Western society as

1) The rational organization of work.

2) The rational capitalist organization of legally free labour.

3) Separation of the house-hold from the industrial company.

4) Rational accounting.

5) Calculability of factors those are technically decisive.

6) This calculability is rooted fundamentally in the characteristic

uniqueness of western science, and especially in the natural sciences

grounded in the exactness of mathematics and the controlled

experiment.

Simmel says 'The formlessness of the objectified spirit as a totality

grants it a developmental tempo which must leave that of the subjective

spirit behind by a rapidly growing margin.'*

It is suggested by Habermas that Weber's notion of the Modem

European society based on an instmmental rationality was an ingredient

of Lukacs thought. He traced this idea though to its ultimate source in

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Neo-Kantian fact - value divide and in Kant's idealism and impersonal

moral philosophy. He also rightly showed its connection to Marx's

analysis of capitalism as a logical closed system.

Relating Kantian practical philosophy, Weberian sociology and

Marxian critique of capitalism gave Lukacs a powerful model for the

analysis of social experiences and ideologies.

2.2 Modernism

Lukacs is concemed with the issue of modernity in history and

modernism in literature. The concem with modernity goes to the core of

the Marxist project, which hailed the post French Revolution era, i.e. the

capitalist age as the modem age. This period is markedly distinct from

the preceding ones by the birth of subjectivity or the freedom of the

individual. This subjectivity was expressed in the rational self

determination of life and society by individuals and community. Lukacs,

along with Marx, considers the project of modemity to be both, aided and

hampered, initiated and then stalled by capitalism. This complex

perception needs elaboration which Marx provides through Economics

and Lukacs through cultural/ artistic and philosophical analysis.

Modernism in arts occupies Lukacs through his long intellectual

career. This is obviously related to his analysis of modemity. He

considers Modemism, which is also a contemporary form of literary style

for him, an important stage in the conflict between capitalism and

Marxism. Modemism like Romanticism, Realism and Naturalism before

it becomes a battle ground where the regressive, supporters of capitalist

status quo fight it out with the piogressive critics of the system. So in

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modernist literature as in the earlier periods there are clearly two factions

who represent either the conservative or the revolutionary tendencies.

But there are interesting turns in Lukacs' perception of the history of

literature since the late 18'*" Century.

It would have been natural and consistent with the Hegelian

essence of Lukacs'thought if he had considered all of literature to be anti-

system and progressive. At least that was the Enlightenment and

Romantic position. Kant had considered art to provide answers to the

impasse brought about by the operations of understanding and pure

reason. Art combined specificity of thing with purposive order of reason

in an imagined unity. The subject and object could unite in art. Similarly

Schiller had considered aesthetics to be the resolution of the conflict

between material and mental cultures.

Lukacs too till The Theory of the Novel and 'Reificadon and

Consciousness of the Proletariat'' had considered art and in general any

creativity including that of the worker to be a realization of the reified

and alienating conditions of social life. Art changed from epic to tragedy

to novel over the ages, but these changes were in response to the

successive disintegration of the society within itself, and its dissociation

from nature. The growth in meaninglessness got reflected in the

historically changing forms. Art thus in all its forms was responding to

the social situation. It was responsive and responsible. A genre itself like

the novel or the lyric was implicitly critical of the society. The novel

which sought to reveal the hidden, alienated total perspective of society

had admitted at the outset that the meaningful harmonious totality is not

easily available as it was for an epic poet or even a tragedian.

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Lukacs' distinction between good and bad literature dates from the

Soviet intervention in culture under Stalin in 1930s. The Popular Front

period from 1935 onward consolidated orthodox cultural policies of the

third International. Lukacs' The Historical Novel and The Meaning of

Contemporary Realism are well known examples of this stance. In fact

Lukacs' literary identity is largely defined by his position in Post 1930

period. He too endorsed such a skewed perception of his aesthetics by

engaging in acrimonious debates with Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and

Theodor Adomo during this period. These debates are amusing because

here Lukacs' opponents are either reiterating or extending the literary

critical stand point. Lukacs is in a way arguing with his younger self

through his later career.

Lukacs had never limited himself to talk about a particular kind of

literature before. He spoke for literature as such, but as the partisanship

became inevitable in the stand off between the Soviet Union and the

West he had to choose between the "progressive" and "reactionary"

currents in literature. How much of this choice was imaginary and how

much real is the question asked by Bloch, Adomo and the other Western

Marxists who thought that all genuine literature was at risk in capitalism.

Both the parties were invoking Hegelian dialectics and Marxian social

analysis to substantiate their respective positions.

The debate over German Expressionism and Modernism between

Lukacs and Bloch and Adomo provides us with an interesting view as

Lukacs is hard put to defend his latest views in the face of his earlier

views expressed in The Theory of the Novel, using similar Hegelian

Marxist arguments. The tension in his intellectual position is palpable

30

when Bloch demonstrates that the modem artist does not hve in the

integrated civilization to write well formed, rounded Hterary works. The

totahty that Lukacs insists upon is not available in the artist's experience.

Lukacs contrary to his earlier stance has to insist that such a totality

exists except that it is available reflectively not immediately. The

immediately experienced, fragmented and autonomous areas of human

life need to be transcended by the artist in thought to come to a

perception of the totality of modem capitalist society. This total view can

be a background against which the individual isolated lives can be

viewed and judged.

Lukacs who had valorized the authentic agonistic literature of

modemism especially that of the novel just a decade ago now advocated

a philosophically informed, reflective, unsympathetic and judgemental

literature. In other words he gave up on the autonomous value of

literature and yoked it to philosophy and politics. He undermined

aesthetics. He finds examples to support his position in Mann brothers

and Remain Rolland who continued a critical realist tradition of Balzac

and Tolstoy.

We will be looking in detail at this debate and then The Theory of

the Novel to understand the intricate issues involved. This will provide us

with a framework in which to judge Lukacs' later and more famous

critical works such as The Historical Novel and The Meaning of

Contemporary Realism.

The central issue underlying these debates was the change of

subjectivity that Lukacs leveled against the modernists. Bloch's and

Adomo's attempt was to appeal to the notion of aesthetic objectivity

31

which was different from objective knowledge. The funny part was while

Lukacs was slamming Expressionism for being subjective and unable to

raise consciousness over the immediate surroundings, he himself was

accused of denying objectivity to the knowledge of Nature. In it he had

criticized Engels for applying dialectics to nature which was applicable

only to society. Nature was socially mediated by the consciousness. This

centrality of consciousness is complementary to Lukacs' elevation of the

proletariat at the expense of the party as the Hegelian subject-object of

history. The proletariat due to his singular position vis-a-vis society,

where he is both the foundation of capitalist wealth and yet completely

outside the social and economic sphere, has a unique perspective on how

the material goods needed for society are created and how they are

exchanged excluding the force that produced them. Proletariat is thus

both inside and outside the society. He cannot take over the means of

production as all other ascending classes in the history did, because he

himself is the means of production. To change his situation the labourer

will have to abolish labour itself The labourer is not against this or that

anomaly in the society. He is against the entire social structure based on

exploitation. This puts him outside the society. The proletarian

experience of being out of joint with society is actually similar to that of

the modemist, avant-garde artist such as Proust, Joyce or Kafka. Lukacs

shies from making this obvious comparison. The proletariat's

confrontation with the capitalist society as an incomprehensible, fateful

second nature is alike the alienation and loneliness of modemist

characters and authors.

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With a curious blindness to implications arising from his

characterization of modern society as reified through and through Lukacs

takes the expressionists to task for not seeing the totality of the social

structure. He holds that art should understand 'the objective reality'. Like

Manns the novelist should not only depict the subjective impressions and

expressions of the lost and suffering individual but should also provide

the why and how of that pain. He should provide a comprehensive, plural

total picture of reality which would be accessible from various

dimensions.

The modernists living among the fragments of experience in their

immediate surroundings take them for the reality and produce fragmented

art. It is characterized by montage which is an undirected, unmotivated

juxtaposition of various impressions. Montage would be, like all other

modernist techniques, one-dimensional because it does not reveal the true

nature of reality, the hidden mediated social relationships.

Lukacs expects the artist to occupy a philosopher's vantage point,

and reduce art to knowledge. He derives the lineage of modem art from

naturalism which he so squarely criticizes in The Historical Novel. The

sequence that he considers to be logical of various art movements

without in the least being an advance, but simply a succession of artistic

fashions is - Naturalism, Symbolism, Impressionism, Expressionism,

Stream-of-Consciousness and Surrealism.

He considers all of these to be the art of the age of imperialism.

This is the art of defeat and despair. He refuses to give it the status of

avant-garde, which he reserves for realists. The expressionist movement,

he says, though sincere, was a product of the transitional stage when

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workers spontaneously resisted capitalism under the leadership of

independent Socialists. The politics of Independent Socialists leadership

such as that of Kautsky, Bernstein and Hilferding was counter

revolutionary and the masses were confused and given to idealist

reactions such as pacifism and non violence. Expressionism was an

ideology of this confusion.

Lukacs' criticism of modernism is at once too sweeping and too

narrow. He is insensitive to shifts in artistic perspectives of naturalists,

symbolists, impressionists, expressionists and surrealists. That these

movements not only responded to the changing world but also to the

previous types of art as art had begun to gain autonomy from society is a

fact completely lost on Lukacs. Similarly he overlooks all the formal

experiments and sophistications of modernist literature and art to target

montage as the sole paradigmatic technique. The fragmentation that he

perceives in modem art is more an effect of his perception than the truth

about modem art. The forms are unusual but not thereby absent. More

sensitive studies of these forms were available, even then, as he wrote, by

fellow Marxists such as Benjamin and Bloch not to speak of the

indubitable revolutionary Leon Trotsky and of course Bakhtin and

Volosinov.

The inner logic of artistic form is disregarded by Lukacs in his

obsession with the outer commitment of art to the conceptual

understanding of the totality of society. So like Hegel, Lukacs is

dissatisfied by arts inability to conceptualize. This criticism obviously

stems from valuing philosophical Reason which is abstract and universal

over the concrete sensuous manifestation of truth in art.

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Lukacs in his essay against Bloch 'Realism in the Balance' is far

removed from the insightfulness of his own The Theory of the Novel

There he had characterized modernity and modern novel with greater

penetration. We will provide an overview of the arguments of that

seminal text of western Marxist literary criticism before summarizing an

aesthetic position that emerges out of it. It is that position along with the

History and Class Consciousness, with which the art theory of Theodor

Adomo is originally related.

Later Lukacs on the other hand cuts a sorry figure as a Marxist

aesthetician though The Historical Novel and The Meaning of

Contemporary Realism provide a coherent orthodox communist

aesthetics as a counter point to the truly revolutionary conception of art

of western Marxism.

2.3 The Theory of the Novel (1920)

Lukacs' The Theory of the Novel is subtitled 'a historico

Philosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature,' and its first part

is summarized as "The forms of great epic literature examined in relation

to whether the civilization of the time is an integrated or a problematic

one."^

These two descriptions rectify and amplify the misleading title.

They also indicate the inclination of this master thinker to locate art at the

center of life and seek there solutions or at least the signs of the problems

that beset the society. It is not only the novel as such but the history and

the present state of the civilization itself which is sought to be studied.

The novel, and as Lukacs locates its roots, the epic literature which has

35

survived through the novel form indicates the transformation of the

western civilization from the classical age through the modern age. One

should note here that Lukacs passes the medieval age without much

comment except on Dante's Divine Comedy. In fact the epic and the

novel as the pure forms respectively of integrated and problematic

societies stand at the beginning and at the end of this history.

In a long introduction of 1962 evaluating this early work written in

1914-15, Lukacs lays bare the ideological tendencies that informed it.

Bearing in mind that it is a judgement passed on the Hegelian young

Lukacs by the mature Marxist Lukacs, one can find many observations in

this late preface to an early work quite insightful. As Lukacs admits the

mood was pessimistic, but not nostalgic.

But then the question arose: who was to save us from the western civilization? (11)

His opposition to the barbarity of capitalism allowed no room for any sympathy such as that felt by Thomas Mann for the German wretchedness or its surviving features in the present. (19)

Instead a Utopian vision drives the book and its author. As pointed

out at the beginning, the seeming overvaluation of literature as an

indicator of social malaise which Lukacs would be tempted towards and

battle against through his career, is the consequence of this utopianism.

Literature and art were supposed to be only one ideological construct,

among many according to the orthodox communist mainstream. It had

less value than the 'real' socio-historical events. Lukacs while accusing

Adomo and others of the idealistic epistemology himself seems to be

torn between the increasing value but diminishing influence of art in the

capitalist society and its insignificant role in the progressive politics.

36

In this particular work, the changes in the form and content of arts,

redefining of genres over the time signify for Lukacs the practical and

metaphysical changes in man's conception of himself and the world.

These are not mental changes but the real changes in both the human

condition and human perception, changes which are world historical i.e.

objective and which are also epistemological i.e. subjective. Lukacs goes

beyond the simple reflection model of art right in his first book to which

unfortunately he reverts in his latter works. The idealist dialectics of this

work places art in a dialectical relation of thesis and antithesis or unity

and alienation with the reality. Though rather typical of his times, he

thinks that in the mythological ethos of early history art, society and

nature were at home with each other. They were alienated from each

other as the civilizations got fragmented from within and became

separated from nature. The art of modem times is thus affected in its

form as well as content by this crisis. It also becomes the crisis of the

possibility of art itself In such a world art is imperiled as an activity

which makes sense of things. Lukacs charts the trajectory of art from its

embedded ness to its homelessness in this work. The emergence of the

novel form is a sure sign for him of the ultimate destruction of art or at

least its precariousness. As Hegel predicted the demise of art and its

supersession by philosophy, Lukacs also narrates this sorry tale albeit in

greater detail. The difference between Hegel and Lukacs, which brings

the latter closer to a trend in Western Marxism, namely Frankfurt School,

was, as Lukacs himself admits, his affinity at this juncture with

existentialism of Kierkegaard. He goes beyond Hegel with this

realization that, a world is gone out of joint.

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Though the mature Lukacs condemns this early right turn as 'the

philosophically as well as politically uncertain attitude of romantic anti-

capitalism', it saved him from Hegel's complacence about the philosophy

and politics of his days. Lukacs believed that art has a social function

because it gets affected by the absence of 'any spontaneous totality of

beings'. It cannot any more have well rounded forms because the world

is, contrary to Hegelian claim, far from reaching perfection; in fact it has

lost its unity. Lukacs says,-

—the central problem of the novel is the fact that art has to write off the closed and total forms which stem from a rounded totality of being. (17)

The tension between Lukacs, the critic and Lukacs, the political

activist is clearly visible towards the end of the preface. Indeed this

tension defines the recurrent ambivalence of admiration for and a sharp

delimitation of literature through his writings. Lukacs is tom between, as

he himself so succinctly put, 'the left ethic and the right epistemology'.

But is not this the experience of anyone who makes literature his

occupation in the cruel times that surround us?

In his own words -

He (the author) was looking for a general dialectic of literary genres that was based upon the essential nature of aesthetic categories and literary forms, and aspiring to a more intimate connection between category and history than he found in Hegel himself; he strove towards intellectual comprehension of permanence within change and of inner change within the enduring validity of the essence. (16)

The emphasized dialectics of these lines takes Lukacs beyond the

idolization of Greek life, philosophy and art in particular and the

38

ahistoricism inherent in modernism, a sense of timelessness in general.

Thus he goes beyond Nietzsche and Heidegger, beyond The Birth of

Tragedy and Heidegger's idealization of Greek philosophy.

The hidden dialogue of Lukacs here and elsewhere is with these

thinkers of modernist nihilism. Like Adomo he too ascribes a progressive

role to art. Art is far more socially entrenched for these deviant Marxists

than it ever could be for the radical rightists.

The Theory of the Novel is divided into two parts. The first part

combines theory with history in a Hegelian manner.

The first chapter 'Integrated Civilizations' works onward from the

received wisdom that the Greeks lived total, unified life. This myth of the

perfection of the origin, in vogue, in the 19* Century gave Lukacs, like

others, a standard to judge the latter fragmentation of civilizations. He

establishes his categories chiefly by their inapplicability to the Greek

world. The Greeks had no distinction between the interior and the

exterior. They had no insecurities. There was a perfect match between the

desire and the deed which made the epic possible.

He takes issue with the tendencies which attribute to Greeks a

great struggle to overcome the chaos since they created such perfect

forms. Perfect forms do not necessarily result from the dangerous

struggle; they might as well result from the absence of any according to

Lukacs. Lukacs is most probably arguing with Nietzsche here. This

argument continued from the beginning to the end of his life as his last

major work is 'The Destruction of Reason'' a comprehensive critique of

Nietzsche. Lukacs says'—

39

The Greeks' answers came before their questions. (32)

He claims that the Greek world had no rifts no ruptures. It was a

world of graduated succession either to the highest point or 'the descent

to the point of utter meaninglessness'.

So the Greek attitude "... is a passively visionary acceptance of

readymade ever present meaning". (32) On the other hand "We have

invented the productivity of the spirit: that is why the primeval images

have irrevocably lost their objective self evidence for us". (33)

The Greek society is elevated to the rank of perfection by Lukacs

following the nineteenth century trend. The Greek culture appeared to be

the beginning, a time of original innocence before history began. Greeks

explored all 'the great forms' in their purity. They are the synthesis prior

to the birth of the dialectics of history. Lukacs says -

Totality of being is possible only where everything is already homogeneous before it has been contained by forms; where forms are not a constraint but only the becoming conscious, where knowledge is virtue and virtue is happiness, where beauty is the meaning of the world made visible. That is the world of Greek philosophy. But such thinking was bom only when the substance had already begun to pale. (34)

Keeping in line with Hegelian teleological notion of history,

Lukacs is compelled to find in Greek culture the prototypes of the later

development of European art. It is as if the essential nature of esthetics

and metaphysics gets defined with Greeks. What follows is the gradual

separation fi-om and nostalgia for these original ideals. Lukacs' literary

criticism in general is marked by the desire to measure any given literary

40

piece by some standard which is fixed in advance. He along with

Nietzsche makes a tripartite division of Greek history and Greek art. He

holds that these stages are the great and timeless paradigmatic forms of

world literature: epic, tragedy, philosophy.

Taking this 'conventional' schema of Greek culture as just that, i.e.

a convention, it would be interesting to see what Lukacs makes of it. He

uses a highly abstract category of essence, which has varying relation

with the literary forms as well as the society. In the earliest times when

Homeric epic was the major art of Greeks, the essence was imminent. In

the tragedy the pure essence in its transcendental form 'awakens to life'.

And the real life is made devoid of the essence. The Platonic philosophy

makes sense of this loss. It shows the tragic hero to be just 'a contingent

subject' and his struggle to be 'a miracle, a slender yet firm rainbow

bridging bottomless depths'.

The affinities between Lukacs and Heidegger in positing this

divide between the classical and the modem is quite evident. His

criticism of Kant, here, that it is an utterly subjective philosophy is quite

similar to Heidegger's comparison of the modem philosophy with the

original i.e. Greek ways of philosophizing.

'the subject has become a phenomenon, an object unto itself ;'(36)

Lukacs quite remarkably links the Kantian philosophy with the

modem art. Just as this philosophy is the philosophy of our cognition and

not the cognition per say so 'Art —- has become independent;' He says,

"It is no longer a copy, for all the models have gone, it is a created

totality." (37)

41

Lukacs' characterization of the modern art in contrast with the

Greek art is quite accurate despite the ruefulness of the tone, a strange

combination of classicist nostalgia and progressive dialectics.

He says that today art has become conscious of itself because the

world around it has disintegrated. This autonomy of art has to culminate

in its logical end i.e. its isolation and its problematics of form. There is

no going back to the Greek world.

...any resurrection of the Greek world is a more or less conscious hypostasy of aesthetics into metaphysics ... a violence done to the essence of everything that lies outside the sphere of art, and a desire to destroy it, an attempt to forget that art is only one sphere among many... (38)

While Lukacs notices the exaggerated role of art bom out of

political helplessness, he does not escape the ambivalence towards it. On

the one hand there is a Hegelian pull towards supersession of art by

philosophy and uhimately by politics but on the other hand there is an

enduring belief in art's ability to endow the reality with meaning.

A totality that can be simply accepted is no longer given to the forms of art: therefore they must either narrow down and volatilize whatever has to be given form to the point where they can encompass it, or else they must show polemically the impossibility of achieving their necessary object and the inner nullity of their own means. (38)

The first option ultimately would lead to what Lukacs approved of

in the modem art namely the great realist tradition and the second would

lead to what he finally condemned namely the interiorized art of the

avant-garde. But here in his first work Lukacs comes closest to

42

understanding modernism: the understanding which was lost in diatribe

later.

Lukacs is admittedly the first critic to give a philosophical

explanation of modem novel, in The Theory of the Novel. The loss of

objective meaning for the modern man in a world suddenly grown out of

all proportions into a self contained mechanism or second nature leads

him to interiority, a subjective quest for meaning. Novel expresses this

quest. Here the novels are not divided into good or bad, realist or

naturalist. The genre itself is subjected to a philosophical understanding.

The novel becomes a site where the issues of meaning and purpose of

life, is integration of human world, faith and doubt are worked out in

their fullness.

This perspective on art is shared by him with Nietzsche,

Kierkegaard and Heidegger a company later Lukacs would avoid

assiduously. The difference between this and later works is the shift in

the emphasis from the subjective pole to the objective pole. Lukacs

considers the subject and his relation to society, the world, the meaning

as the modem problematic here whereas in the later works he considers

the arts' relation to the social change as the problem of modem capitalist

society. This shift in perspective produces two completely contrary

versions of the modem novel both of them coherent. Yet The Theory of

the Novel, though preliminary and tentative in characterizing the modem

spirit, is more judicious of the two. The inevitability of the dissonance in

the novel form, the subjective ethical stance needed to hold the narrative

together, the irony and the distance from the life events, the

conventionality and the consequent superficiality of the life-world, the

43

role of the hero as a seeker, the transgressive nature of his/her quest are

some of the motifs of modernist art that Luicacs touches upon though he

does not develop them here. Overall Lukacs tries to understand the Novel

more dialectically here than in The Historical Novel or his later works.

This understanding is from inside or an immanent understanding. He

follows the change in genres and development of the Novel. This makes

him sensitive to the changes in formal aspects and forces him to seek the

meaning of these changes. He does not begin with a paradigm or a

theoretical and historical system in which he can fit the existing novels

and pass judgements on them. Instead, a far deeper and broader, that is a

far truer and more universal aesthetic emerges through a patient

sensitivity to subtle changes in the literary forms. This aesthetics is

further developed by the later western Marxists such as Bloch, Benjamin

and Adorno.

Now the immanent criticism does take the form of a historical

narrative rather than a timeless typology with all the inherent dangers of

narrative being partial and oriented by the personal taste. Lukacs escapes

these possible pit falls by working with essential philosophical categories

derived both from the continental philosophical tradition of life -

philosophy and aesthetics. His translations from ontology and

epistem.ology into aesthetics are creative and normally appear to hit the

mark.

Lukacs defines the novel as "the epic of an age in which the

extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which immanence

of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms

oftotality."(56)

44

Since in an epic the Utopia is immanent i.e. already present there is

a lightness of mood which allows verse to be used, whereas in the world

of a novel the totality of meaning is absent. Life is not coherent so the

mood is heavy. This requires the use of prose.

In an epic, life is rounded from within whereas "a Novel seeks...

to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life."(60) In such

utterances Lukacs goes very close to Heidegger's definition of the truth

as unconcealment. He can be (and by himself also), accused of a mystical

unhistorical subjectivist world view, if the aesthetic philosophy is

simplistically expected to utter absolute truths once and for all. Lukacs

like Marcuse after him finds in existential thought a truth of his times

namely that the human subject is burdened with the task of making sense

of the world. The world appears a veiled and mysterious whole, so

complete in its incomprehensibility that it can either make sense at once

or never. The loneliness of modern subject i.e. that of the modem

individual gives credence to existential thought albeit temporarily. This

position needs to be exhausted before transcending it by Marxist

historical analysis.

Lukacs is doing just that. In The Theory of the Novel he is willing

to look upon the disintegration of form as natural if life itself is rent,

unlike his later condemnation of the modernist montage as one

dimensional. Here he says, 'fissures and rents should be drawn into the

form giving process'. He even considers the crime and madness as

indistinguishable from heroism and wisdom since the modem society

lacks legitimate goals or norms. Lukacs calls 'crime' and 'madness'

'objectivations of transcendental homelessness'.

45

The critic in modern times needs the abihty to seek the form in and

of formlessness. The more art enters the dangerous territory of discordant

life to appropriate it the more the mutilations of given forms occur, which

are in tum molded into a strange, new configurations. A critic has to go

along with literature to see the latent form in ruins and has to turn his

back on literature to go as far away from it as possible to rationally

reconstruct, using the farther possible concepts, the distortions caused by

reason itself as the supreme ruling form of the capitalist society. He says,

Every form is the resolution of a fundamental dissonance of existence; every form restores the absurd to its proper place as the vehicle, the necessary condition of meaning. (62)

This aesthetic resolution is needed in a world which has become

meaningless at both the ends, i.e. at the level of immediate experience

and also at the level of comprehensive totality.

The artist needs to bring the pieces of his own experiences together

into the artistic form which reconciles antagonistic social facts

aesthetically, pointing a way towards possible political charge. Even

Marxist theory is no guarantee for revolution and good art unless it is

understood and practiced by individuals in their own peculiar situation.

Lukacs' sensitivity to subjectivity makes him theorize various

modernist motifs in interesting ways. In one such instance, he has almost

completely anticipated Adomo's essay on lyric poetry and society.

Lukacs like Adomo sees the connection between lyric and the affected

subjectivity. He says,

Only in Lyric poetry is the subject, the vehicle of such experiences, transformed into the sole carrier of meaning, the only true reality. (63)

46

The subject that feels and creates lyric poetry is affected by the

incomprehensibility of the second nature or the social world of

modernity. Instead 'it is a complex of senses - meanings - which has

become rigid and strange and which no longer awakens interiority'. The

subject then acquires a sentimental attitude to nature, which 'is only a

projection of man's experience of his self-made environment as a prison

instead of as a parental home' (64).

Lukacs like Adomo realizes the interpenetration of subject and

object, man and society and man and nature. This produces an insightful

understanding of modem literature. He perceives the novel to be

essentially incomplete, in the process of becoming because a novel is

suffused with subjectivity. It does not have an external objective

correlative as it were. This forces the subject of the novel to rely on the

ethics. The novel is structured by ethics, by personal value choices, by

personal responsibility. Lukacs is indicating here the immense loneliness

of the modem man, which is expressed only in the novel. The novel does

not have any raison de etre except the individual choice. Since the

subject makes itself an object in the novel, the novel is characterized by

irony. Irony is caused by 'self recognition' and self abolition of

subjectivity'. It is in one sense a play of the subject.

'an interior diversion of the normatively creative subject into a

subjectivity as interiority.'(74)

In another sense irony is caused by the inadequacy of subjective

vision to 'appear as the immanent meaning of the objective world.'

47

Lukacs is aware of the hazardous nature of the novel. He describes

the modern novel with great accuracy for instance when he says that a

novel's hero finds both his struggle and its abandonment as useless. Or,

the hero is walled in by incomprehensibility. These same observations

would become occasions of condemnation in The Historical Novel and

The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. It is as though Lukacs has

receded from his earlier complex understanding. He makes demands

from the novel of meaningful statement about reality, which he himself

had declared to be impossible.

Later he is going to criticize the modernists of narcissism and

obsession with self, now he describes the same fact with an air of

inevitability.

The novelists' reflection consists of giving form to what happens to the idea in real life. This reflection however, in turn becomes an object for reflection; it is itself only an ideal, only subjective and postulative; it, too, has a certain destiny in a reality which is alien to it; and this destiny, now purely reflexive and contained within the narrator himself, must also be given form. (85)

Lukacs in fact is also appreciative of the fate of the modem novel,

when he sympathetically writes - 'The need for reflection is the deepest

melancholy of every great and genuine novel'.(85)

Lukacs even realizes the dialectic between art and non art that is

being played in modernism. He notes,

'Pure reflection is profoundly inartistic' The modem novel treads

a thin line between art and non art, the fact young Lukacs did not object

to, but took it as the given. His justification of the modemist aesthetics is

48

rooted in his genuinely Marxist Hegelian epistemology elucidated in

'Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat'. We will first

analyze the philosophical implications of the Reification essay, to

provide a ground for Lukacs' theory of literature.

2.4 History and Class Consciousness

Lukacs is engaging the philosophical tradition in a debate which is

quite rightly hailed as the first of its kind. This work "Reification and the

Consciousness of the Proletariat" is marked as the beginning of

European Marxism as for the first time the emphasis shifts from the

purely economic and political analysis to the analysis of the thought

structure of the bourgeois society, and the theoretical justification of the

role of the proletariat as the new subject of history, as the main

protagonist.

For the theory of art and literature, the interest in this essay lies in

the fi^amework that Lukacs creates for his later denunciation of

modernism. This essay can be fruitfully seen as the foundation on which

early Lukacs' literary criticism is based. There he provides a general case

for bourgeois adaptation of passive, contemplative attitude to life. Later

he is going to criticize all modemist literature for this contemplative

attitude, the tendency to 'show' rather than 'tell'.

Frederick Jameson in his "The case for George Lukacs" mentions

a biographical myth which marked six stages in Lukacs' career, which

are as follows :-

1. Neo Kantian Period - Influence of Simmel, Weber and Lask.

2. Hegelian Period - The Theory of the Novel

49

3. Marxist Period - Political work with the Hungarian communist

party.

4. Hegelian tendencies - History and Class Consciousness.

5. Period of Socialist Realism - Balzac and French Realism, Goethe

and his time, The Historical Novel etc.

6. After the thaw - moderate position, last works - Aesthetics in

two volumes. Ethics and Ontology.^

This periodization requires some modification, especially with

stages four and five. History and Class Consciousness is not as purely

Hegelian as it appears. There is not only admixture of Weberian

sociology but also criticism of Kantian rationalism, less from dialectical

point of view and more from the current quasi-existentialist point of

view. According to several critics such as Perry Anderson, Martin Jay,

Axel Homieth, J. Habermas and others, Lukacs' criticism does not

understand and transcend Kant as much as criticizes it for not

comprehending the facticity of 'thing in itself and human subject.

Secondly this criticism provides a base for the fifth stage, so called

socialist realism. Lukacs' insistence on realism is less in the Stalinist

orthodox communist style more grounded in the philosophical position

elaborated in History and Class Consciousness. The criticism is not

prescriptive, invoking literature to be more politically engaged. That was

the soviet position. Lukacs' criticism is instead negative. He shows

bourgeois literature to be condemned to be politically passive as the

bourgeois world view in tandem with capitalist economy is essentially

contemplative.

50

I will be analyzing Reification and Consciousness to situate

Lukacs's approval of the historical and realistic novel and his distaste for

modernism, without this contextualization his literary stance appears

trivial and is open to criticism. Lukacs sees modernism in art as

symptomatic of a deep social malaise. A diagnosis of this malaise is done

in Reification essay which constituted a necessary context of both his and

Frankfurt school's literary theory.

Major themes of this essay are -

1. In the capitalist society the human relations have been assimilated to

the level of natural laws.

2. Atomic individuals face a rationally ordered system. This system

appears like a pre-existent framework, a second nature.

3. Only one form of truth, is accepted which is deductive- nomological.

4. The loss of totality is coupled with reification. As only the subjectively

created world, social and rational is taken for reality the thing in itself

and the totality become incomprehensible.

5. In a capitalist society bourgeoisie as a class becomes the subject. Its

ways of being, become the general ways of knowing or

consciousness. Its historical conditions are reflected in its

epistemology. Similarly in the post capitalist society the proletariat

will be the subject.

There are several implications of this state of society for literature

and arts -

1. Modernist literatures' withdrawal into self, seen in stream-of-

consciousness novels, impressionism, expressionism and existentialist

51

angst is the result of the domination of the rationality in life in general

and economy, science, technology, law, state, education in particular.

2. The centrality of human reason and experience in the form of

supremacy of logico-mathematical systems and empirical data is

reflected in the literature as a depiction of solitary individual's

subjective experiences, choices, crisis of faith etc. These are generally

the themes of modernist literature.

3. The world becomes unreal as its rational nature lacks substance. This

gets reflected in surrealist and dadaist free reign to fantasy.

4. Through this critique of reification Lukacs demonstrates that it is

possible to cut through the maze of rationalistic categories and

alienating social systems. The same reaching beyond the appearances

is expected out of literature. The realist novelists thus become the

standard of literary responsibility and penetration of reality.

5. This reality is total reality or totality as compared to rational systems

of science, law or economics. Totality becomes a literary category for

Lukacs in all his critical works.

Lukacs develops the notion of Reification from the notion of commodity

fetishism of Marx. The exchange of commodities in capitalist market

with each other hides the fact that they are humanly made and are for

human use. A separate logic of exchange replaces that of use. This

reification is compared with the process of rationalization in capitalist

society that Max Weber highlighted. Lukacs further cormects these two

processes, one economic, another sociological with Kantian assertion that

the reality is regulated by - 1) human categories of perception like space,

52

time, causality, and identity. 2) human understanding that is logical laws

and human reason. Reason's regulation of the reality of modem

subjective idealism is the product of socio-economic reification and

rationalism. Modern physical sciences are also concerned with the facts

of perception and rational laws. They are made the model of

enlightenment philosophy according to Lukacs.

Though Lukacs derives the phenomenon of reification from the

economic analysis of fetishization of commodities and demonstrates its

social prevalence a la Weber, his eye is on a bigger quarry namely

Kantian and Neo-Kantian Philosophy which he thinks are the ideological

expressions of capitalism in the most abstract, philosophical form. It is

his analysis of Kantian philosophy from Hegelian and Marxist

perspective which provided a serious philosophical ground to Marxism.

After Plekhanov and Lenin, Lukacs constitutes the next stage of

development of Marxist philosophy. He belongs to a generation of

thinkers, who independently of each other located the Hegelian element

in Marx, such as Alexander Kojeve, Karl Korsch etc. This was done

before Marx's early writings, which show a critical relationship between

his and Hegel's thought, were discovered and published.

Broadly speaking, Lukacs does two things here and tries to

connect them - 1) He shows the comprehensive sway of instrumental

reason, i.e. scientistic reason which models all rationality on the model of

an ahistorical, autonomous, objective, mechanical version of the methods

of physical science in all the spheres of social interaction. Lukacs here

uses Weber, Simmel and Rickert i.e. Neo-Kantian philosophy of cultural

reason with some modifications. 2) He criticizes Kantian philosophy

53

especially for (a) the fact values divide (b) the limitation on self to only

understand the reality as it appears i.e. the attitude of passive

contemplation and 3) declaring totality to be incomprehensible. This

criticism is based on the Hegelian-Marxist premises of an active

historical subject.

Through these two pronged critique Lukacs develops a

version of Marxist epistemology which is at the basis of his literary

theory and criticism. His literary critical concepts such as modernists'

passive observation of reality, taking reality as given, their unawareness

of totality (which comes in the form of history) and on the other hand

realists' historical sense, their bold shaping of narrative to tell rather than

show the reality etc. derive straight away from this philosophical stand

point. We will discuss later Lukacs' views on literary realism and its

difference from the scientific realism and commonly accepted notion of

literary realism namely - verisimilitude.

Before that it is necessary to discuss Lukacs' critique of Kant and

Kant's contribution as in Kant's philosophy Lukacs finds foundations of

literary solipsism of modernist fiction especially that of Kafl<;a and Joyce.

He discusses at length Kantian metaphysics and criticizes it as he finds

there the clearest of expression of modem philosophy.

Lukacs is one of the first thinkers who found problems with the

conception of knowledge within Cartesian tradition which culminated in

the enlightenment philosophy especially that of Kant's. He later

connected this epistemological inadequacy with the limitations of the

modernist aesthetics.

54

Lukacs criticizes this epistemology from the materiahst point of

view as is to be expected. The central lacuna that he finds is that the

world is considered to be the product of consciousness. The split between

the mental and physical worlds that Descartes executed to establish

knowledge on the firm foundation continued unchallenged. Lukacs says

that there was an arbitrary choice of the methods of mathematics,

geometry and later mathematical physics as the paradigms of knowledge.

He says, there was the equation .... of formal mathematical, rational

knowledge both with the knowledge in general and also with ou

knowledge

Modem rationalism aspired to be the total system. As against pre-

modera epistemology of the middle ages which had ultimately derived

from Plato and Aristotle the modern knowledge had different assumption

where in the middle ages a distinction was supposed between the human

and the divine knowledge the modems held that there was a continuity of

all phenomena. Thus there was no perfect knowledge available in divine

mind in which the human mind could participate. There were not two

distinct spheres such as stellar and sub lunar in which there were two

different orders of knowledge. Instead the same chain of causal

connections operated everywhere. Thus the transcendental connection of

pertaining, sharing or imbibing between pure ideas and individual entities

was discarded. And lastly where the earlier epistemology was marked by

qualitative approach, the modem one used mathematical and quantitative

i.e. categories.

These general features of modem philosophy can be summarized

as growing use of reason to understand the world. The entire world was

55

deemed to be explainable by logical and causal laws which were

discovered in the phenomena themselves and not in some divine order. It

was human rationality which could discern the operation of such laws

and theorizes all these laws in a theory of nature/physical phenomena

which was logically ordered. This is what Heidegger calls a

mathematization of the world. In Kant, the modern mind found the

philosophy which expressed its strengths and exposed its limits. It

showed at once the comprehensive nature of scientific, law bound

understanding stretched to infinity in time and space and also its limits in

practical i.e. moral and esthetic spheres. It also showed that this scientific

reason can not comprehend the transcendental issues such as the purpose

of life and the world, the totality of the world, and the specific nature of

things and individual human beings.

These problems which were so drastically exposed in Kantian

philosophy were in making for at least two hundred years before him that

is after the medieval age was over. The western society entered

modernity in the 16'̂ century or there about. This was an age of radical

break from the past.

The age of faith gave over to the age of reason. The human subject

found himself devoid of order or meaning in both the natural and the

social worlds. The cogito of Descartes proclaimed the birth of the atomic

subject who was capable of reason. A split occurred between the

subjective meaning of human thought and the objective meaninglessness

of the world. Thus nature slowly became determined and law bound

where as the subject was free in thought and action. There was a divide

between nature and humanity. Humanity could impose an order on the

56

world. But that order had no moral sanction such as the idea of divine

law had provided. It also divided the human being from inside as the

feelings, desires, moods, need for faith could not be subjected to the

rational faculty. This diremption i.e. split from within and without could

not be healed by rationalism or empiricism; in fact they together

represented two sides of the split. Rationalism heavily trusted the reason

and capacities of conceptual analysis to create knowledge where as

empiricism projected law bound objectivity on the nature itself and

declared the mind to be tabula rasa.

There were two reactions to this impasse one was a Romantic faith

in the expressive power of nature and self which united the individual

with the organic world and considered all human manifestations-

emotional, intellectual, spirituals as expression of the common spirit. The

Romantic philosophy necessarily was arational if not irrational. But it

sacrificed rational and moral autonomy, because it united man with

nature. The same spirit, desired to express itself through the human being

and nature. Man had to follow his or her inner instincts rather than

rationally dissect or morally choose.

The second reaction was that of Kant's grand project. He salvaged

faith and morality (freedom) by conceiving that human mind is structured

in such a way that the world and its own operations would appear rational

to it

Limits of Lukacs' Critique of Kant:-

The unease over Empiricist and Rationalist debate of the

Enlightenment was rested with Kantian formulation. Kant's admission

that the epistemological certainty about the world is possible only if the

57

synthetic apriori judgements are held vahd opened the door to the

realization that it is the knowing self or the subject which authorizes the

knowledge of the world which was grounded in the subject.

What was needed was a philosophical statement of the modem

scientific and social practice that began with the Renaissance, which was

unhampered by metaphysical belief in inherent spirituality and order in

the universe. The modem practice ascribed various alternative laws and

regularities to the world rather than allowing the divine order to repeat

itself in human mind and society. These invasive explorations in the

world, which may have appeared like discoveries or inventions, were in

need of a philosophy of knowledge. Such a philosophy as conventionally

accepted by historian of thought, was provided both by the British

Empiricist tradition and the European Rationalist tradition. The

empiricist tradition highlighted the objective nature of the external world

and its sensory reception in human mind i.e. the activity of scientific

observation where as the Rationalist tradition held that the analytical and

logical power of reason was the source of true knowledge. Empiricism

led to Humean skepticism as the sensations alone could not guarantee

unity, continuity of operation of subject, things and laws of nature,

whereas rationalism ended in dogmatic assertions about the world out

there when all it should have validly claimed was the order of thought.

Kant provided a solution to this dilemma by positing a notion that

the human mind is so constituted that it can perceive the world only in a

logically causally connected, temporally sequential and spatially

separated form. The laws of perception and understanding are themselves

the guarantee of the order in the world and inevitability of its

58

comprehension in the given form. The questions about the absolute truth

of the claims of human understanding were deemed irrelevant thus at

once skepticism and dogmatism were bypassed. Kant mapped the mind

of human being, not psychologically, but philosophically, producing a

theory of mental faculties each of them with an independent function.

The mind had a constitutive function, through which it shaped,

made meaningful the outside world. It also had a regulative function

which meant that there is an idea of a world out there comprising of

things in themselves and the finite, singular total world which is

homogeneously ordered within which the laws of understanding operate.

The subject of knowledge (which was also a regulatory notion) i.e. the

mind was called 'a unity of transcendental apperception.' It was

indefinite and without any qualities. It was home for senses,

understanding and reason but it was not either of these. It was also

conjectured like things in the world and the notion of the world.

Lukacs' relation with Kantianism is both personal and ideological.

Coming out of the influence of Neo-Kantian Marburg School and Rickert

was a necessity for him in order to embrace Marxism. His criticism of

Kantianism collapses far many philosophical trends into one. He at times

targets the simplification of Kant by Neokantians, at times logical

positivism/ Empiricism of Mach and Avenarius, at times Husserlian

extension of phenomenology. This composite target is described by

Lukacs and criticized. In effect there is somewhat little of Kant in his

critique and more of a general philosophical position which he holds to

be the other of Marxist philosophy. It is not that his characterization of

59

Kant is unsupported. But like Russell and many other critiques of Kant,

he takes his philosopher too much at face value, too literally.

Taken literally Kant becomes a straw man, an easy target. Major

philosophers like Hegel and Nietzsche and percipient historians of

thought like Charles Taylor and Zizek to name only a few, who have

grasped the essence of Kantian shift of paradigm, interpret Kant

allegorically or dialectically as a thought which was in process rather

than a finished product. Lukacs tries to pin Kant down to the logical

contradictions according to a deductive-nomological model. Such

critiques from the point of view of later advances in Mathematics and

Physical sciences of logical inconsistencies do not diminish the historical

value of Kant's contribution. Kant has to be perceived as a fore runner of

Hegel, Marx and later continental philosophy.

Lukacs' strict criticism makes him dogmatically posit notions of

'Praxis' and History as solutions to the Rationalist impasse instead of

evolving these notions dialectically from the dual notion of the thing and

self as phenomenon and noumenon.

Hegel and Marx developed the dual nature of thing as a subject as

well as an object and that of self as an object as well as subject into a

dialectics. This resolved the 'antinomies of pure reason'. Lukacs could

have seen Kantian philosophy as a step in this direction.

Lukacs' criticism of Kant, in my view, acts as a model and a

premonition of his characterizing of modernity. Modernist literature

works for him with the same assumptions that Kant works with. On the

other hand Kantian philosophy operates within a larger framework of

60

presuppositions called the Enlightenment Philosophy. Thus ultimately

Lukacs' critique of modernist literature has to be perceived as a part of a

critique of enlightenment philosophy. Otherwise it can be, and has been

pooh-poohed as a result of Marxist orthodoxy, old fashioned adherence

to realism, inability to comprehend modernist experimentation and so on.

So we will locate Lukacs in a broad anti-Enlightenment philosophical

thought, to begin with then we shall summarize Lukacs' objections to

Kant so that it would provide a framework for his criticism of modernist

aesthetics. Then we will elaborate his altemative perspective on these

issues, which largely derive fi"om Hegel and Marx. We shall be especially

interested in Lukacs' views on history. It is here that Lukacs spells out

how history operates and how we can perceive it. This view of history is

at the basis of Lukacs' great book The Historical Novel.

Lukacs' chooses Kantian philosophy for criticism because it

contains in essence the paradoxes of modemity, the period in which the

individual self whether as an individual with faith was bom on one hand

and on the other the physical sciences. Rationalism accounted for the first

where as Empiricism accounted for the second.

The objectivity provided by sense experience and the logical order

provided by reason were seen eventually to be complementary to each

other. Both of them merged in the perception, intuition and

understanding of the human subject. This objectifying human knowledge

of the outside world radically liberated the human subject. The outside

world was knowable by analysis into its component parts. It followed

certain determinate laws of causality, where as the knowing subject was

characterized only by its ability to think. This radical difference between

61

subject and object or the diremption (i.e. split) though gave moral

freedom and ability to have aesthetic joy to the subject, broke human

mind from the earlier organic unity with nature. It also broke man from

other men and society, social customs, traditions, spirit of myths which

united him with the world. The atomic individual was bom. As the

knowledge of the world was known to be dependent on the subject, the

subject became independent of that knowledge. The atomic individual

could look upon his social and natural surroundings with the equanimity,

using the same tools of rational analysis. This solitary asocial ego gained

immense freedom to believe or not believe, to do good or bad as it was

totally undetermined by any objective law. Thus Protestantism was solely

based on human faith rather than the external authority of the church or

tradition which constituted religion.

Wnen the mind reflected upon itself, the same split was played out

inside the self. The self, in Kantian philosophy, reflected upon itself as

the object. The part of the self as a phenomenon was conditioned by

categories of understanding and conditions of intuition such as time and

space. This constituted synthetic apriori judgments. The mind in its

theoretical knowledge was as law bound as the external nature. The

human knowledge of facts was as objective as the facts themselves in

fact they were one and the same. The 'real' world beyond human

knowledge in its independent existence was once again made alien and

unknown as it was to the primitive man. Kant admitted that man cannot

perceive the reality as it exists. Man can perceive only his perception so

to speak. Man works on phenomena i.e. the perceived reality not the

reality out there. Only the knowledge of the natural world constituted by

62

the human mind acquired a phenomenal reality. Everything else i.e. the

world, human self as a moral agent and aesthetic connoisseur was

essentially unknowable.

The positive aspect of Kant's thought, i.e. his description of

theoretical knowledge or human understanding of the world and mind is

the epitome of the Enlightenment philosophy. This description is

criticized by Lukacs as being from an 'exclusively formal view point'.

There is no consideration of the content or the qualitative aspects. The

points of general criticism of this approach, which can be seen in Lukacs'

criticism too, need to be reiterated.

1) The method of analysis holds that the parts of a whole reveal the

characteristic of the whole, but the whole is always greater than parts

in any living system and especially in social and human facts such as

organization and art objects.

2) The knowledge got by self-evidence and subjective guarantee can be

false.

3) There are many perspectives to knowledge not just the first person

perspective.

4) Knowledge is often contextual.

5) Available mental states, concepts etc. are likely to be conditioned by

the unconscious, background conditions that cannot be discovered

through retrospective self examination.

6) Mental states are not self warranting. Persons observe their selves as

objects as others. So the subject always escapes observation.

63

7) It is not only the mind and thinking being which constitute a human

being. Man is a sensuous being. Man is not mind and body but a

thinking body or sensuous thought.

These are the general objections to enlightenment thought which

Lukacs also shares in his criticism of Kant. He is playing within an anti

Enlightenment trope, that the Enlightenment concept of nature and mind

as rationally comprehensible and manipulable was a projection of the

ordered, calculable, formal and abstract character of the approaching

bourgeois society. Lukacs like anti-Enlightenment thinkers does not give

due credit to Kant's awareness of limits of his conception of reason.

Lukacs admits Kant's honesty in realizing the antinomies within reason.

Kant knew that the phenomenal self where experiences were understood

by categories of mind was different than the noumenal self who

transcended the limits of knowledge and natural laws. To account for this

transcendental self and aesthetic creation and enjoyment Kant

respectively wrote Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Power of

Judgement. Kant was pulled between the picture of human beings as free

imaginative, creative and morally responsible beings and as the beings

formed by their own understanding and reason which imposed natural

limits on consciousness. This naturalness of reason was challenged by

Rousseau and the other romantics who contended that instead of

revealing it, reason suppressed essential human nature. Nature was

organic as against the artifice of reason. The self cannot impose its

mechanical, reified order on the world. The anti-Enlightenment reaction

of romantics, took an exactly opposite view of the mind and nature. They

looked at knowledge and meaning as self-expression both of the human

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mind and the creative power of nature. This organic point of view, I

believe, constitutes the context against which Lukacs' criticism and

characterization of Kant should be seen.

His critique is in two directions. One is that Kant and (by Kant he

means modem philosophy) has reduced the subject to, a knower and a

doer, and the second is that a distorted picture of the world emerges in its

historical and material aspects.

Both these criticisms often illuminate each other, yet for the sake

of clarity we will first see what Lukacs' objection are to the Kantian

understanding of the world and then its effects on a human subject.

Some of the features of Kantian and in general bourgeois

epistemology that Lukacs chooses for criticism are -

1) Knowledge is fully or over determined by the formal categories. This

makes it static. It does not reflect the history of the process of knowing,

things such as the intellectual and social contexts of scientific discovery,

the change in society's understanding of itself, the emergence of new

moral, political, religious paradigms. Knowledge acquires a false

objectivity.

2) Parallel to this, the subject or the self is not the historical individual

but an idealized contemplative subject who is completely undetermined.

He is only negatively defined. Kant calls him only 'a transcendental unity

of apperception.' He is only a place where knowledge takes place or

happens. He is 'topos noeticos' of all validity and scientific control.

3) The knowledge thus created is mechanical. It does not organically

emerge out of individuals, society and nature through mutual interaction.

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4) It hides the subjective partial point of view of its source namely

bourgeois class position. This is a strong claim that Lukacs makes. He

feels the image of neutral, objective knowledge is suspect; it is an

ideological product of the bourgeoisie. The knowledge hides its relative

nature, its relativeness to the historical period and the socio-political

positions.

5) More importantly, Lukacs following Hegel and Marx believes that

human nature as well as the world and its knowledge are basically

contradictory. What Kant shows to be the antinomies or paralogisms of

reason, when Reason the highest rational faculty transgresses the realm

of understanding, namely (i) the infinity of the world due to infinite

causal chain and infinite time and space as against the need for its total

understanding by reason and the perception of totality (ii) Freedom of the

self as a noumenon or thing in itself and its subjection to causal

determination as a phenomenon, are not to be brushed aside as an

undesirable foray of reason in the phenomenal realm. Instead these

contradictions are the moving force behind all change, growth and

progressive unraveling of truths. The contradiction cannot be stemmed

by assigning mutually independent realms to reason and understanding.

Such a separation is gratuitous and harmful.

6) Instead of consciousness being located within objective time viz.

history, time is made into a property of consciousness.

7) The Bourgeois ratio forestalls any progress towards perfection, as the

reason and the present understanding of the world are perfect in their

logical structure.

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8) It cannot calculate what is really novel or unique in the object. It is a

quantitative approach and disregards the quality.

9) Its excessive formalism degenerates into fragmentation. The special

sciences are created for different kinds of contents. They are brought

under the sway of reason by granting them autonomy thus sacrificing the

common element in them, namely all of them constitute the same world

inhabited by humanity. This fragmentation happens because the

substance is disregarded. Philosophy follows in the wake of special

sciences rather than leading them as Lukacs says.

Formalistic conceptualization of the special sciences becomes for

philosophy an immutably given substratum. Philosophy does not

question the specialization and consequent division of the human world

in special sciences. It accepts this split as given. Philosophy's role is

confined to the investigation of the formal presuppositions of special

sciences.

10) Reason is mathematized: calculability is considered to be reason.

There is a subordination and super ordination of systems in Kant's

philosophy. Kant models his philosophy on mathematics. He orders

perception by categories, categories by logical relations and so on. These

systems imply each other logically. This is what Max Weber calls

Rationalization as a defining feature of the modem capitalist society.

11) This rationality is based on Giambitisto Vico's principle that we can

understand only those things which we ourselves have made, man can

understand manmade world. This makes the thing in itself, the pure

object and the totality of the world even theoretically incomprehensible.

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Vico asserted that we may not understand nature as it is made by God but

we can understand the society as we have made it ourselves. Kant too in

the Copemican term he gave Reason, answered David Hume's

skepticism about the things that exist beyond sense perception, that we

can know only what we perceive. But we perceive the world coherently

because our perception is ruled by Understanding and Reason. Logic and

natural laws are the constitutive factors of reason itself. Thus we can be

certain of our knowledge, which obviously excludes the things as they

are and the world in its entirety because we are part of the world.

12) Facts and values are completely sundered. As knowledge, morality is

also unhistorically treated and made independent of any knowledge: the

hiatus between appearance (necessity of the phenomenal world) and

essence (freedom of man) is not bridged.

'even worse than that, the duality is itself introduced into the

subject. Even the subject is split into phenomenon and noumenon and the

unresolved, insoluble and hence forth permanent conflict between

freedom and necessity now invades its innermost structure'.

13) Kant's/ Bourgeoisie morality is completely 'formal and lacking in

content'. He tries to find the principle which will preserve the content

like the principle of non-contradiction of knowledge, namely Categorical

Imperative. But its application to given empirical reality, human desires

become problematic.

These criticisms of Lukacs in my view constitute a blueprint of his

criticism of modernism. There is a direct relation of his philosophy to his

literary theory. Also negatively, this criticism constitutes the foundation

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of his appreciation of Realism. The Realistic novel avoids all these

points. Thus for example he charges modernism with a static view of the

world which is parallel to his criticism that the rational structure of

Kantian philosophy is static. He holds that modemist subject is passive

and suffering rather than acting and dynamic. He is an empty receptacle

of sense impressions. Lukacs charges modemist literature of expressing

the bourgeois class position. The realist literature though written by the

bourgeois writers transcends the bourgeois class position. Lukacs praises

the contradictory points of views depicted in the historical and realist

novel. These multiple perspectives do justice to reality rather than

solipsism of modernism. Lukacs attacks Bergson's theory of subjective

Time as a forerunner of Modemist entrapment in Mental Time. The

connection with Kant's formulation that Time is a mental category is

obvious. In this wav one can see the roots of Lukacs' Literarv critical

views in this purely philosophical work.

Lukacs, very early before it was fashionable, is using the post

modemist anti-Enlightenment trope, that the Enlightenment concept of

nature, as rationally comprehensible and manipulable is only a projection

of 'the ordered, calculable, formal and abstract character of the

approaching bourgeois society. Through this not only Nature was made

rationally explainable, more importantly it naturalized a particular

historical form of reason as the only form of reason. This naturalness of

reason had been challenged by Rousseau who had contended that instead

of revealing, reason suppresses essential human nature. The organic

quality of nature is absent in reason which is a human artifice.

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Lukacs holds that Schiller's view of art transcends both the

rational and organic philosophies. This new conception of the essence of

man envisions "man whose tendency to create his own forms does not

imply an abstract rationalism which ignores concrete content; man for

whom freedom and necessity are identical."(137) But, Lukacs ruefully

notes that this creativity, human action, is limited only to the field of art.

Art is not the real social product which can unite the rational

understanding of natural and social laws with the sense of history i.e. the

possibility of change with the human effort. The freedom of man and the

necessity of the matter get united only in the art object in Schiller's

solution. This productive aspect of human essence and historical

limitation of all understanding, i.e. no understanding is eternal, should

get realized in the human society at large and not be limited to art, where

it becomes reduced to 'play' in Schiller's formulation. Lukacs obviously

is heartened by the direction shown by Schiller. But he has to yet work

out its full social and historical implication.

The path shown by Hegel and Marx's inclusion of history in

thought, takes Lukacs out of the impasse created by Kant's great but

static system. As remarked by Lukacs' contemporary Marxist thinker

Karl Korsch, Kant's philosophy or the philosophy of German Idealism in

general was a grand achievement of a revolutionary epoch of Bourgeois

Revolution. The emancipation from theology and feudal society was

achieved by placing the mind at the centre of the world and making

reasoning to be the distinguishing activity of the human being. Kant's

philosophy was the culmination of this social, religious and political

revolution. Bourgeois individual freedom and rational domination of

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social and natural resources were given their most accurate expression in

Kant's subjective idealism.

Korsch notes that the next great revolution that was brewing under

the calm surface of the nineteenth century capitalist society, namely

proletarian revolution needed an equally accurate theoretical expression

and that was Hegel's and Marx's philosophy. As Kant's philosophy was

a consolidation of the Bourgeois march to progress it had no further room

for change. It created a system out of the categories of understanding.

'Understanding' or 'verstand' in German meant the well defined

concepts which followed the logical laws of non contradiction and the

excluded middle i.e. the laws that stated that a thing or an entity or a

concept is identical to itself. It cannot be both true and false. It either is

true or is not, and it either exists or it does not. These concepts were

produced by human understanding and they summed up the world as

perceived. In doing this, Kant liberated the subject from what he calls

transcendental illusion or the belief in the objective truth of perception or

of concepts. The metaphysical belief in the existence of God or the

absolute truth, ideas, forms like Plato's the realm of ideas as well as the

naive empiricist belief in the naturalness of the laws of nature, their mind

independent existence were rejected by Kant building on Enlightenment

philosophy and Hume's skepticism. But at the same time the model of

knowledge that they subscribed to was that of physical science.

This became evident, I think, in the form of 'Time'. 'Time' takes a

very different significance in human and social life than it does in

physical sciences. Kant hypostatized the physical scientific form of time

and the order of things that is the causal chain i.e. isolated and gave an

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independent status to time by abstracting it from activity. This 'Time' is a

necessary relation between states of objects. It describes temporal events

with definiteness of spatial locations and conjugations. The 'Time' as a

constitutive category of knowledge can allow only new additions in the

causal chain. It cannot allow the uncertainties about future and equally no

new interpretation or revelations about the past. The past is closed to it as

is the future. It is not 'Time' that is objectively present in the course of

events in nature and society. It is modeled on the 'Time' of physics,

which is only a neutral medium of events. The palpable 'Time' of

change, anticipation, retrospection and maturing of social systems,

interactions with nature etc. is absent in this conception.

'Time' is a given state of things. This is a one-sided view of 'Time'

according to the Dialectical thinking of Hegel, Marx and Lukacs. Time

also holds something unpredictable in future and uncomprehended in

past. This is the 'Time' of human social life or the 'Time' of history

which is not given as much as created by human beings and the social

mechanisms such as economic needs, political organizations, religious

beliefs etc.

This creation of 'Time' or human history is also a creation of

understanding of history or gaining a time consciousness. The human

knowledge thus becomes relative to time. The definite nature of concepts

of understanding is seen to be limited as concepts contain their opposites

if seen from the point of view of Absolute Reason or history or totality.

Each concept is seen to be limited by what it is not. The contradictions of

each concept are revealed over time. The History of philosophy is

testimony to such a development. The concepts of understanding are not

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stable over time, or over varying contexts. The realization of this

variance is liberating.

The modem man requires history for his moral choices too, as his

practical, historical life is affected by his moral choices. The facts affect

the values and values affect the facts. In his social life 'Time' as a history

of knowledge, a history of moral choices and action has a conscious and

unconscious force affecting present, future and even past. Time is not just

an abstraction from the events or a way of perceiving them. It is tied to

the social situation. Lukacs' conception of historicity and the dynamic

nature of time within society help him judge the novels in The Historical

Novel. He turns this into a criterion to judge several historical novels. He

shows some of them as truly sensitive to changes, whereas some others

as static.

Lukacs thinks, Kant conceives of the determined, regulated

objective world which would go on till eternity without any unexpected

change. Lukacs alleges that this view is unhistorical. The perfection of a

rationalist system forestalls all novelty. It already has contained all the

foreseeable possibilities. It considers history to be 'an insuperable

barrier'. Lukacs says -

.. .the method itself blocks the way to an understanding both of the quality and the concreteness of the contents and also their evolution, i.e. of history. (144)

Lukacs position is Hegelian. Let us state this point of view in his

own words before elaborating on it. "Only the historical process truly

eliminates the actual autonomy of the objects and the concepts of

objects."(144) and

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"By compelling the knowledge which ostensibly does these factors justice to construct its conceptual system upon content and upon what is qualitatively unique and new in the phenomena; it (historical view/ process) forces it at the same time to refuse to allow any of these elements to remain at the level of mere concrete uniqueness."( 144-45)

The new perspective that German Idealism developed after Kant

and which culminated in Hegelian and Marxian dialectics and historical

thinking did away with several dichotomies that Kant had inherited from

earlier philosophers.

These dichotomies were between form and content or thought and

reality, appearance and reality, universal and particular, subject and

object. This doing away was of course not by fiat, it was not the

unilateral sway of the absolute like in Schelling's philosophy. Schelling

had simply declared nature to be the unconscious reason or 'petrified

intelligence' as against society which was conscious reason, thus

eliminating the need for development from one to the other.

Instead the union of theoretical and historical was elaborated in

detail by Hegel and that constituted a basis for Lukacs and of course

Marx's view of History. The requirement was that the concepts must be

able to determine existence not just describe it. This union of rational

categories and historical process is a dialectical process or a historical

march which has been going on. It is not a return to a theological view

where God or the meaning is immanent in the world.

Hegel considered philosophy to be the crucial medium of

understanding the world. The thought was on its own only in philosophy

and various philosophies revealed the various aspects of the truth that

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were arrived at progressively. Reason, liberated over time, could grasp

now what faith had grasped before. Of course the reason had to be the

philosophical reason or the totalizing reason, not, either the mathematical

or a narrowly scientific or practical reason. This philosophical reason was

at present independent of reality or being. This separation had to be

accepted as a stage in the progress towards absolute unity which Hegel

called Idea or Notion. The philosophy and the history both were

progressive. The historical / philosophical spirit or Geist was operational

in both. Without conceiving such a spirit various phases could not be

united. This spirit was as much the absolute spirit as the human being.

Knowledge for Hegel was always after the event or post hoc.

Man's realization of his possible ideas and powers can be recognized

only after the event. As Hegel famously put it, 'the owl of Minerva flies

only at dusk.' This makes the philosophical method squarely historical.

Lukacs' view of history with regard to the historical novel and in

general with regard to depiction of time in any narrative or dramatic

literature has the above presuppositions. His insistence on comprehension

of the events that are described underlines the central role he gives to

Reason. The great authorial control in narration driven by the author's

vision of the matters is characteristic of Lukacs' criticism. He gives

central role to human agency or human subject. The things and events do

not happen in a haphazard manner. They are causes and consequences of

human reason, understanding, values and choices. The comprehensive

grasp of unity of events is demanded by Lukacs from novelists.

The progressive flow of history is not just a credo for Lukacs; it is

a requirement for understanding the reality. The novelists who are

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sensitive to, the progressive march are better than those who are not.

Though Lukacs does not believe in the metaphysics of Zeit Geist he

beheves in human species' ability and desire for progress. Thus all

literature is a record of this human historical progress towards a freer

world.

Finally Lukacs like Hegel works with the notion that

understanding is necessarily retrospective. The essence is contained in

the persistent element behind changing appearances. Locating that

direction, that movement beneath eddies and flows of the surface can be

either an artistic success or a political success of revolution.

The historical method of understanding which Lukacs adopts from

Hegel explains Lukacs' position halfway. The other half is his orientation

towards future praxis as a Marxist Revolutionary. This aspect is as

important as the earlier one; otherwise one will be hard put to explain his

moral strictures against modernists. The trouble with modernists is not

just that they are trapped in the unmediated understanding of things on

one hand and the abstract system of the self on the other. This naturally

would produce an untrue picture of reality, untrue because only partially

true. But apart from this, the division between perception and values,

knowledge and ultimate reality is politically loaded. It creates a bland

justification of the status quo. It is a result of the real alienation of man in

society.

The philosophy that Modemists adhere to consciously or

unconsciously, which is a logical speculative thought, be that of Kant,

Hegel, Schopenhauer or Heidegger is, in Marx's words when he was

describing Hegelian idealism, "the opposition inside thought itself of

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abstract thought and sensuous reality or real sensuous experience." A

philosopher himself is "an abstract form of alienated man (who) sets

himself up as the measure of the alienated world."^"

As philosophy ended theology, the Marxist project is to end the

need for philosophy. Philosophy especially that of Kant and Hegel looks

at man as self consciousness. This self consciousness is really an

expression of the alienation of man's essence reflected in thought. As self

consciousness is only an abstraction from natural living being so is 'the

thing' which is posited as the object of this self consciousness, also an

abstract thing. It is not something self sufficient and essential in contrast

to self consciousness but a mere creation established by it.

Thus Lukacs' criticism of both modem philosophy and modem

novel is two pronged. On the one hand he exposes their inability to

understand and describe the reality in its concreteness and totality and

secondly he conceives them to be a prey to the general social alienation

which has separated mental and physical labour, knowledge of facts and

ethics of action, philosopher and proletariat.

So he demands from the novel and also philosophy an awareness

of the human being as a real, sensuous suffering and acting being.

Thought itself needs to become sensuous. It is not just history which

reveals the limits of each new categorization and classification of

philosophy and art but also the present choices directed towards future.

Thus the creative act of writing novels or doing philosophy, though

deluded by its self understanding that it is purely artistic or cognitive, is

actually moral and social in its implications. The novels signify whether

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there is a wish to overcome alienation (imposed perhaps by the form

itself) or there is a passive or eager submission to the alienation.

Lukacs, the practical revolutionary, circumscribed art to its proper

place as one activity among many others of the social-material praxis.

For him art obviously did not replace the real politics of revolution. It is

in that sense a pseudo politics. So the received wisdom goes.

But the continued unease within the German philosophy since

Kant over the limits of epistemology and the invariable resolution of

these problems through art theory is a pattern that Lukacs hardly seems

to resist, though he thinks Schiller's aesthetic to be a possible but an

unreal solution because it is limited to the sphere of art. Both Kant in his

third critique, i.e. The Critique of the Power of Judgement, and Schiller

tried to overcome the antinomies and contradictions created by the

Rationalist, subjectivist theory of knowledge.

Kant creates a make believe world of art in which the object in

itself is the carrier of meaning. The categories of understanding are not

imposed upon the object by the self. The aesthetic appreciation pretends

that the object is meaningful. There is no conceptual understanding in the

artistic enjoyment but the concept like coherence exists in art. This

coherence and telos or purposeftilness are present in an illusory form in

the art object.

The artistic synthesis of otherwise disparate concepts held a

revolutionary promise in an increasingly fragmented world of growing

capitalism and technologically driven production. Schiller went a step

ahead to reunite the divisions between freedom and necessity, physical

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man versus the moral man, reality versus the idea, subjective vs.

objective through the play instinct which is realized in Art. Art had thus

this redemptive character in German thought which Lukacs had inherited.

Hegel showed that art culminated in Romanticism and from here

on only philosophical Reason could guide, as art was too enmeshed in

concrete. The Marxist turn to materialism could have rehabilitated art, if

the positivism of Marx's followers had not made such absolute break

between the material factors of history and the mental aspects i.e.

between the base and superstructure. In fact Hegel's demonstration of

Art's concreteness as its limitation ought to have been Art's strength in

Marxist thought as it was all about the concrete history of consciousness.

Though Lukacs falls in line with the orthodox stand point of

official communist policy over art to stress art's complementary role to

politics rather than its centrality, one cannot but help noticing that he

reverts again and again to art criticism, theory of novel and drama, and

aesthetics proper through his career. Art holds a strange attraction for

him.

I think the de facto centrality of art to Lukacs' corpus is indicative

of the deep affinity between revolutionary, historical (i.e. concrete)

reason and art. Art is not just a promise of revolution to come. It is a real

demonstration of an alternative rationality. The scientific, mathematical

reason was exposed by Kant to be deeply divided against itself. It could

not square its practice with its theory. It was too abstract and sterile in its

logic and too pragmatic and shortsighted in its obsessive productive

practice. This rationality which indicated a divided self and as Lukacs

following Marx demonstrated, a divided society, was to be replaced with

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the dialectical historical reason and revolutionary practice. Meanwhile

Arts showed how logic could become concrete, how facts could be

wedded to values, how reality could be mediated by the thinking subject

and reproduced in the form of a meaningful fact or the art objects. Art

was the embodied reason.

Lukacs develops this theory of art slowly and tortuously through

several of his books. Even his History and Class Consciousness which is

apparently a philosophical and political book points the way to an art

theory. What he says about the alternative reason and the role of the

proletariat as a carrier of that dialectical reason is equally applicable to

the production of art and the logic of artistic practice.

Lukacs puts a condition on thought that it should operate as a

material cause of existence or living a situation. This may sound like an

idealist identity between the subject and the object or the concept and the

thing like that put forth by Fichte. But it is far form the hasty idealist

solution to overcome the contradiction. It is an expression of dialectical

materialism. The causal force that Lukacs attributes to concepts is a

reiteration of materiality of human thought. He says -

...all the categories in which human existence is constructed must appear as the determinants of that existence itself (and not merely of the description of that existence). On the other hand, their succession, their coherence and their connections must appear as aspects of the historical process itself, as the structural historical process itself, as the structural components of the present. (159)

One meaning of above is that human thought, because of its being

tied to the material conditions of its emergence as a form of human

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response to the contemporary world, is located in a historical period like

any other thing that human beings invent.

This means more than the simple correlation between history and

thought. This is an entirely new way of thinking inaugurated by Hegel.

History does not remain a repository of past and dead events: it comes

alive as a narrative of human becoming. Lukacs defines history thus "the

substance ... in which philosophically the underlying order and the

connections between things were to be found namely history." and

'Only the historical process truly eliminates the actual autonomy of the objects and the concepts of the objects with their resulting rigidity.' (144)

Lukacs' conception of history forms the foundation of the

aesthetics he prescribes for novel, and its criticism of Kant and

Kantianism develops into his objections to the modernist theory of novel.

His standpoint both through the prescription and criticism is that of the

practical Marxist revolutionary engaged with the world, in order to

change it. It is a partisan attitude but then perhaps no attitude is a neutral

non partisan attitude.

This partisanship of Lukacs makes him link, albeit implicitly, the

role of proletariat as the agent of history and the role of a novelist as a

sort of literary proletariat and also an agent of history. The similarity

between his description of the proletariat's situation in the capitalist

production process and the resultant consciousness and that of the

situation of the novelist is too evident to overlook the obvious conclusion

that the novelist/ artist through the free production that is art can reunite

the alienated divided world consciousness just as the proletariat as the

maker of history or in Lukacs words 'the identical subject-object in

history' can be the agent of the revolutionary change.

We will first look at the conception of history that Lukacs

inherited from Hegel and Marx.

There are two aspects to Hegelian notion of time and history. One

aspect is the connection of the objective world or knowledge and space

with time. The second aspect is that of time's connection and relation

with itself that is the relation among the past present and future.

The objective time of modem science was homogeneous and

empty. It is this time which causes an insuperable barrier to

understanding the reality. Time is alienated from the sentient being that

inhabits it. It is not only Lukacs who is concerned with this problem but

also all the major modernist novelists who have tried to advance their

own resolutions. Proust's and Henry James' psychologizing the passage

of time or Joyce's and Yeats' creation of mythical historical corollary to

the individual experience of existence through time are just various

attempts to grapple with the problem.

Lukacs sees most of these attempts to have been framed by

Kantian incorporation of time into the structure of consciousness. Kant

makes time a constitutive principle to unify consciousness through

various perceptions. But this remains a subjective principle at best. The

temporality of the world of objects and the joint existence of the subject

as an object in that world is lost to the solitary, ultimately solipsistic

subject who can only order his consciousness and cannot comprehend the

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external changes and the determining factors which impinge upon it and

the world.

Time has been appropriated, along with the world of and as

appearance but this Time only serves to unite the consciousness through

the changes. It, thus, is a Time which only helps in recognizing the

identity of objects and the self through changing appearances. It is a time

which annihilates itself by reiterating its permanence. It has failed to

infiltrate the real process of change. It is ultimately narcissistic and

reflects back upon itself endlessly and unchangingly as a transcendent

law. In other words this Time is not subject to time. It is the law above all

changes. Time of physical sciences is only a medium where the causal

law can be exercised, there is no perception of past or future distinct from

present. The scientific observer is an omnipresent observer, for whom big

bang, ice age, human evolution are all alike, only events on a time scale

spread out before him.

The consciousness recognizes things as finite and limited. This is

Kantian perception. This is also perception in immediacy. Lukacs

accuses the modemists of not being able to go beyond this level of

experience. Here the self that feels and the thing felt remain obstinately

in their original intractability. They are stolidly themselves, presenting

each to each an impenetrable exterior. This makes for the modernist

loneliness, where the self feels being thrown in among the objects. This

state is also timeless. There is no overcoming of this isolation.

On the other hand for Hegel time emerges when the spirit mediates

between the object and the subject. Only in Hegelian Dialectic, things are

seen to be an extemalization of the spirit or Geist. Things constitute

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nature which is a spatial dimension. These things as appearances which

Kant's 'consciousness had constituted also have an essence. In fact for

Hegel the appearance does not constitute the reality. As he famously put

it, reality is rational. Reality is the universal and rational concepts behind

facts. The so called facts have to be comprehended and thus appropriated

by reason. This overcomes the alienation that reason has undergone in its

being as a fact. The process of going beyond facts, making sense of them

in the light of reason is the temporal process. This time is not a neutral

given category. It is in fact a time made by reason's dialectical movement

from the fact to reason or from object to subject and vice a versa. Time is

history of absolute reason's self reflection through the mediation of

several concepts ultimately reaching the total knowledge. The history of

consciousness coming to self realization is also the human history.

Various philosophical systems and concepts are parts of this history. No

concept or system is either true or false. Each is partially true. No

concept can be true in isolation from other concepts. Its truth is in

relation to all other concepts especially in the process in which the truth

of one concept is subsumed in the next. This process is historical time. It

is developmental or teleological rather than a neutral relation of

succession between events. History is purposefial and goes towards

perfection or freedom. Hegel assumes that there is life in the world of

objects or nature unlike Kant who says that there is no way to know if the

animals are not really automatons. So for Hegel reason emerges out of

the growth of being i.e. natural and social change. One does not carry a

set of rational laws to the world and apply it. Instead reason emerges out

of things and objects as the subject interacts with them. These concepts

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thus reveal the specific and inner logic of things which simultaneously

transcends that immediacy and specificity to relate it to a greater whole.

Reason is mediation of the immediately apparent reality.

Lukacs uses this notion of history in his expectations from the

novel. Crudely put,a novel as a narrative is akin to history. Thus the

historical novel becomes a paradigm for the novel and literature itself.

That is why Lukacs expects descriptions in novels to go beneath and

beyond immediate appearance to the understanding of social and

historical processes at work in the seemingly plain, disconnected events.

This tradition of thought simply does not give credence to the idea

of objectivity, autonomy of things or experiences. It is the rational

subject who creates the meaningful world. Knowledge is not an alien

system out there somewhere to be discovered empirically or intuited

rationally. It is created by men, even the apparata of knowledge such as

logic, mathematics, scientific method or the artistic techniques are

created in the process of the interaction between man and the world.

If the subject and object are separated into a permanently

insuperable duality as in Kant or empiricists then the modernist night

mare emerges, where the facts appear fragmented and irrational. The

rationality is purely formal and without any relation with content and so

vacuous and meaningless like the law apparatus in Kafka's novels.

The separation of human reason from the world around is

considered false by dialectical thought. The concepts are not just derived

from the reality by observation, abstraction, generalization, comparison,

or logical laws but these concepts actually reside in things. The rational

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or conceptual aspect of reality is due to the immanence of absolute spirit

in the world according to Hegel. The knowledge of the world is the

process of self-knowing of the absolute spirit. Marxian dialectics rejects

this mystical aspect and makes Hegel stand on his feet again as it were.

For Marx the reality is immanently knowable because it is a human

reality. Human beings work upon this given reality nature or world of

things to create society i.e. their own essence. So the identity of the

practical work and knowledge demystifies Hegelian dialectics. Given

these premises of dialectics any break of concepts from things is

untenable and fantastic.Lukacs holds that the forms of mediation i.e. the

universal concepts are to be derived from the objects themselves.

Lukacs along with Marx locates the spirit of history in people.

Hegel had posited world spirit which uses the people and their actions to

come to perfection. The historical characters do not realize that they are

the agents of actions of world historic importance. This theory is rejected

by Marx as metaphysical, which it is.

It is the people themselves who make their own world. They make

it with a certain understanding of their actions. Though in the continuous

progress their actions and thoughts will go on improving, one cannot

claim with Hegel that the understanding will be reached only when

history is finished. Understanding is not just retrospective, and

philosophical.

Marx on the other hand believes in the prospective reason or the

logic of practice. History does not act through people. It is people

themselves who have to take charge of their destinies. At the same time

the people do not act in an ex-nihilo situation. They act with the

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historically given. This is the realist position of Marx and Lukacs which

is an advance over Hegel's Absolute Idealism.

Before discussing the crucial differences between Idealist and

Materialist positions vis a vis relation between the history and subject, it

is important to notice the achievement common to both Hegel and Marx

compared to the earlier philosophy. This achievement deeply colors

Lukacs theory of narrative. The point is that history and subject get

interrelated not only ontologically i.e. in their existence but also in

knowledge. Knowledge, consciousness or other so called voluntary

human actions and features, which distinguished human beings from

their surroundings till then, were again integrated into history and nature.

Subject and history were just two different ways of looking at the same

phenomenon. The explanation of the subject and by the subject could be

brought on the same plane. History was so deeply involved with human

beings that it was both a constituting and constituted factor of, and by

consciousness. The reason was no more an unchanging, permanent

agency. It was creative and so changing. The knowledge, that reason had,

had to be seen as a historical stage among many such. Reason could

transcend it. Reason and the self could not be identical with any one state

of knowledge. Each state of knowledge was a realization of reason, and

only through such realizations it could progress.

The narrative, in the light of these assumptions, becomes a history,

an unended, incomplete history of the formation of subject and

knowledge. It is no more a permanent piece of art but a document of

timely relevance. It is not a master piece but some statement of local

interest. It is something that would be superseded in future because the

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times would change but it has to be produced none the less, because it is

a creation in concrete, which is the only reality. Though Marxist

aesthetics shares with Hegelian philosophy, scaling down of art, for that

matter even morality and placing it in its historical function and context,

yet it grants an unusually important role to art. Art is a paradigmatic

human creation, along with workers the artists are the true mediators of

reality. Just as a worker creates wealth out of nature an artist creates an

art work out of the concrete social and natural substance. This creation is

as much a mediation of the immediate reality through the process of

artistic appropriation and reconstitution as that of nature and technology

by a worker. Art is thus brought on level with the general human creative

activity.

But this is where Hegel and Marx part company. For Hegel the

entire march of reason through successive philosophical systems is

limited to one kind of activity namely mental and intellectual. The

subjects dealing either with the objects of nature or with the other

subjects though evolving to the 'identity of identity and non identity',

though the self consciousness achieves 'the unity of itself with its

otherness' through the common historical spirit, still this entire progress

is purely rational and so in the last analysis contemplative. It can only

contemplate the reality. The mutual recognition of two independent

consciousnesses which unites them both without domination of one by

another does not lead to the common social labour which transforms

nature and society. Hegel's is a formal and abstract dialectics, whereas

Marxian dialectics is concrete and a theory of the transformation of

content.

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Hegel had, in his aesthetics, declared the end of art in

Romanticism, the art which reflected on reality/ nature instead of simply

imitating its beauty like Greek art did. Since art became reflective,

philosophy could do the job of conceptualizing reality better than it. So

Hegel had argued that heretofore philosophy would replace art. Marx in

his turn declared the end of philosophy when he said that the

philosophers have only comprehended the world, the need is to change it.

He noted that philosophy implies a division between being and knowing.

This alienation between life and its knowledge has to be removed by

conscious praxis. Hegel had to be set right. It was not just philosophy or

the effort of man to understand his life which had to be studied

historically. History too had to be perceived philosophically, because it

was only through the process of 'real extemalization/ alienation -

appropriation - alienation' that human society came to realize what

Hegel had only formulated schematically.

History thus becomes a source of ideas. Through history man

could come to a self understanding. Further more this was not history for

sheer contemplation. This was not just a site where the cunning of reason

had exploited particular human lives for its universal designs. This

history was both retrospective and prospective. Man was the center of

this history and not some abstract spirit which would shock human

beings by its occasional revelations.

History was seen to be a self creation of man and so necessarily

incomplete as long as human beings were living and acting. It was also

incomplete because the human beings had not overcome their alienation

in reality. Humanity was in chains everywhere. The worker's work was

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not a creation and reappropriation of alienated nature but a burden

imposed on him. The more the worker worked the more ahenated he

became from his work and the world. In contrast to this Marx conceived

the ideal of labour as an activity which changes nature and in turn

changes the nature of man.The logic of reality that Marx espoused as

against the logic of ideas was at once more comprehensive and more

profound than any thought so far.

Lukacs comes up with the figure of the proletariat as a candidate

for the role of the subject of history. This subject is different from both

the Kantian subject and the Hegelian one. The Kantian subject is an

elusive one, which escapes its knowledge since the subject cannot be

captured in an objective representation. This subject remains

transcendental forever. It provides unity to all the perceptions and

consciousness but can do little else. The Hegelian subject is history itself.

It is mythological and magical. It gets things done with a sleight of hand

behind the back of real historical actors. It is too universal to be

interested in, or affect the local struggles that human beings undergo.

On the other hand Lukacs' subject of history is the proletariat and

analogously the artist and the novelist. As Frederic Jameson puts it

For the Lukacs of History and Class Consciousness the ultimate resolution of the Kantian dilemma is to be found .... In the nineteenth century novel: for the process he describes bears less resemblance to the ideals of scientific knowledge than it does to the elaboration of plot ^\

What is significant is the proletariat's ability to understand and

change the society, or its agency. A novelist too is an agent rather than a

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simple imitator of his/her surroundings. He acts on it, i.e. mediates it with

his own efforts appropriates it and produces something genuinely novel

out of it. It is a mediated unity with nature, a romantic ideal tempered

with Marxian realism and socio economic context. The active

intervention of the novelist and of course the proletariat provides a

completely different model of cognition than that of Kantian rationalism

or scientific empiricism. There is neither a constitutive schema already

present in mind nor a tabula rasa which would dutifully record the

sensations.

Lukacs says,

To leave empirical reality behind can only mean that the objects of the empirical world are to be understood as aspects of a totality, i.e. as the aspects of a total social situation caught up in the process of historical change. (162)

This statement of Lukacs' credo can be further elaborated by

pursuing the analogy with the proletariat, whom Lukacs conceives to be

the agent of history. He says that the proletariat and the bourgeoisie have

different perspectives on the historical process. Bourgeoisie is a single

subject viewing the entire history as an objective necessity. This is the

Kantian type of a subject, who has intemalized time and causality in the

structure of consciousness. Such a consciousness in the end abolishes

time itself. Lukacs notes, while discussing Neo-Kantian efforts to

establish social sciences on the notion of'sollen' or 'ought' i.e. the moral

customs and conventions of each locale and period, that the need for the

extrinsic concept of moral law is coupled with the meaninglessness of

existence. The purely factual and valueless ontology necessitates a

system of morality. Such an ontology Lukacs argues is actually discrete

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states which succeed each other. There is no continuous change or

growth. These states are unconnected. That is why one can conceive of a

complete state of moral oughts as a feasible alternative. The states can

replace each other for an essentially unhistorical subject, whereas for the

proletarian mind the subjecthood is 'an illusion that is destroyed by the

immediacy of his existence'. He realizes that each of his individual acts

is in reality 'an aspect of the production and reproduction of capital.

The forced objectivity and denial of any kind of agency to

proletariat because he/she is integrated into the production mechanism

forces him to go beyond the 'immediacy of his existence', which is like a

wall, and seek mediated understanding of history. Here we are talking

about two kinds of mediation/alienation or reification. One is a concept

of mediation or alienation which was Karl Marx's contribution to

philosophy and history. Here the worker is alienated, objectively from

reality of his own making. He produces and is deprived of his own

labour. He is no more himself. He is used by the machine that is the past

labour by the capital which owns the machine. This historical or

objective mediation of workers subjecthood and its transformation into

an appendage of capital is the negative alienation. There is another

concept of alienation and mediation at work here, which is common to

both Hegel and Marx. This is mediation by the subject or consciousness

of the reality. Here worker as the active being perceives the facts around

him, those of his alienation and capitalist production for what they really

are viz. appearances. Facts dissolve to reveal the economic and historical

reality beneath. The proletariat has to begin with an assumption that total

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history is knowable, unlike the bourgeois who sees only in front of his

nose and notices a few details of color patches and touches.

Lukacs says -

...the methodological function of the categories of mediation consists in the fact that with their aid those immanent meanings that necessarily inhere in the objects of bourgeois society but which are absent from the immediate manifestation of those objects as well as from their mental reflection in bourgeois thought, now become objectively effective and can therefore enter the consciousness of the proletariat. (163)

A few features of mediated understanding and meaning derived

therefrom can be stated -

1) The mediated meanings are immanent.

2) They are not only conceptual or intellectual entities. They have a

reality.

3) These differences are both existential and theoretical, because they

constitute moral, historical choice of the proletariat to liberate itself.

4) They have a character of class situational necessity.

Lukacs' notion of class subject is much maligned. It is considered

to be similar to the historicist notion of the spirit of a time, or an age.

Thus proletariat, who cannot be shown as such, like an individual is said

to be a metaphysical entity, an abstraction which is hypostatized.

This criticism needs to be seen in the context of Lukacs'

endeavour to criticize the modem notion of an individual subject. Along

with Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, Lukacs too is exposing the myth of the

subject, which is a philosophical manifestation of the bourgeois

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individual. The feat achieved by Marx, Lenin and Lukacs tradition is

saving the notions of meaning, form, purpose and action while

surrendering the individual subject's illusionary rationality. Lukacs is

forthright about the inversion of subject-object relation in a bourgeois

society. He maintains that the objects that confront a perceiving subject

are results of the subject's own activities.

This explanation should not be seen only as a simple correlation

between capitalistic economics and Modem philosophy. There has to be

a causal link from one to the other, which is provided by the Hegelian

and Marxist historical interpretations of philosophical positions. This

position holds that 'the subject' is a historically determined concept and

experience. To be precise the individual subject is a 16*-17'*̂ century

event. The Cartesian 'cogito' or the knowing thinking self is the modem

subject. Though historically produced or rather precisely because it is a

historical event it is necessary and welcome. It is a step towards

liberation of society and freedom of man. This subject-hood has to,

through self reflection and careful study of nature and society, realize

that its freedom and ability to think and make the world is limited by the

external objective factors namely the material condition and the historical

development of society (technology, social stmcture, etc.). Though the

subjecthood thus realizes its historicity, that is, 'unnaturalness' so to

speak, yet unlike postmodernists this subject-hood and consequent

notions of rights and duties, tmth and falsehood, i.e. democracy and

knowledge are not to be abandoned in disillusionment. Marxism is a

recognition of the transitariness of subjecthood not its hoax. The

subjecthood of bourgeois political society will be subsumed under the

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true freedom of the communist society where freedom is not in

opposition to the other subject but is in coexistence with him/her.

Marxism gave the historical philosophy of Hegel, the empirical

proofs it so badly needed. By studying the capitalist production based on

the exploitation of producers and their dehumanization, the emptiness of

the subject and knowledge was shown to be a historical fact. The

subjecthood was not yet reality for mankind: it was only an idea. The

facts, or the objective reality that would appear to Kant and Empiricists

as only details, the building blocks which were to be united by the

rational laws with considerable freedom by the subject, became

significant in themselves in Marxists thought. 'The finite' as Hegel said

was not just something to be cast aside. It had its logic inscribed on it.

This inscription had to be read.

Lukacs in relation to proletariat spells these finite immediate

experiences out. For the worker quantitative changes in work such as an

increase of labor time appears to be a qualitative change.

One can cull from Marx numerous passages which show how the

seeming objectivity has a subjective force and vice a versa. For example

the machine is only a past or dead labour and skills. It is only apparently

an object. It actually contains the past of human work and acquisition of

techniques, knowledge. This machine begins to acquire a freedom and a

living human being is enslaved to it as its unskilled, clueless appendage.

Similarly a commodity too contains the labour.

The proletariat as a class undergoes this alienation of its

subjecthood and individual difference. So not as an individual but again

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as a class it has to recover its individuality. The objective character of

economic operations where more than an individual experience is at

stake is time and again emphasized by Marxist thinkers. The immensity

of the historical movement is unlike fate though. The accurate knowledge

of these necessities, recognition of their objective character as a need for

human existence and formation of social structures, can liberate the

proletariat, (that is the most of the mankind) because this knowledge is

the reassertion of its subjecthood.

Lukacs develops the implications of Marxian Economics

especially the discovery of fetish character of commodity and the sale of

labour power imposed upon the worker. The worker as a living

commodity, the human being whose labour power is sold as a

commodity, is 'the first subject in history that is objectively capable of an

adequate social consciousness'. The worker knows the three fold

dialectical transformation between immediacy and mediation, part and

whole and object and subject. His immediate experience is that of an

object in the capitalist market. He is govemed by the quantitative

regulations applied to objects. His work is measured in time, in

productivity. His labour is paid in terms of the things he would need for

the reproduction of the spent energies. He is no more than the machine

for the immediate appearances. On the other hand as the proletariat that is

as a class and not as an individual he knows himself to be a human being.

The quantitative aspect of his labour affects him qualitatively. He is a

subject who is treated as an object. The immediate appearances are a lie,

then, and he needs to look beyond them, and then in the context of the

totality of economic relations he realizes that just as he as a commodity is

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a living being, all other things are relations produced by men. The things

dissolve into processes. The machine and the capital are seen as the dead

accumulated labour. The relations of production such as ownership,

property relations are seen not as absolute unchangeable facts as let out

by the legal structure but as historically evolved, constituted. Thus they

lose their sacrosanct character and are seen to be exposed to future

change. They are in fact seen to be arbitrary and superfluous. The worker

thus sees the present in the light of the past, immediate in terms of

mediation, relations, his part in terms of the social whole and the abstract

laws in terms of concrete experiences. The concepts and theories are seen

as historically constituted things.

The emergence of historicity of consciousness is what Lukacs is

going to carry forward to his literary theory. Economics occupies a pride

of place in this dialectical epistemology. He says that economics is

nothing but the system of forms objectively defining this real life. The

primacy of economics is a capitalist phenomenon, where all relations

between human beings have been reduced to quantitative nature i.e.

economic relations. Thus the proletariat becoming self conscious has a

practical knowledge to change his situation unlike the self consciousness

of the Roman slave or a feudal serf. Their awareness of being reduced to

slavery would not have changed their situation, as there were other ties -

political, religious and their own philosophical understanding would have

condemned them to their slavery.

For the proletariat the economic reality is the sole reality. This

confines him to his self definition. Thus his self knowledge is liberatory.

97

It frees him and the society along with him from the subjugation to

economic relations.

This knowledge of reality is not a sheer reflection of reality,

Lukacs adds. This is an extremely important observation as the Marxist

criticism has received a bad reputation for adhering to simplistic mimetic

model, model of base - super structure or economy and culture. Instead

of these cliche's about Marxist literary theory the model that Lukacs

explains is more true to the Hegelian spirit of Marxism. Lukacs says

surprisingly there is no reality of which knowledge is a reflection, as the

perceived reality dissolves under the gaze of the subject. This reality

tums out to be a historical process. There is no permanent reality.

Reality itself is change. The proletariat knows it to be changing and is

himself the agent of further change.

This reality offers a completely different picture after close

interaction. The so called natural causal connections and temporal order

do not hold. The true objective order is given by the relations of

Bourgeois mode of production. The objectivity is revealed to be the

human activity. It is a product of man. The past and the fiiture are

mediated by human labour and social formation.

This model of epistemology would be crucial to understanding

Lukacs' expectations from the novelists. Not only their effort to

understand the reality, but their perspective too would matter, as it does

in The Historical Novel. The Novelists would have to see the reality from

a specific perspective which is dialectical and which reveals the

economic alienation and rationalized societies in capitalist countries. No

other perspective would pass the test.

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The dialectical perspective of the proletariat, which we have

elaborated, would be the standard against which the Novelist would have

to measure himself. Thus the dichotomies between subject-object, things-

relations, part-whole, present-past/history, immediacy (sensations)-

mediation (knowledge) will have to be perceived by the Novelist and

resolved as one turning into the other.

This can be misinterpreted as an expectation of God's eye view

from the novelist as done by Linda Hutcheon and some other post

modem narratologists. Lukacs does not want the novelist to be above

history. The knowledge that he expects is the practical and participatory

knowledge. The artist like proletariat can change the world by knowing

it. This knowledge is a constantly renewed effort to dismpt the reified

structure of existence by concretely relating to the concretely manifested

contradictions of the total development, by becoming conscious of the

immanent meanings of these contradictions for the total development.

Lukacs is putting forth the idea of knowledge as 'practical problem

solving.' History is like a riddle that art and work have to solve for

liberation and survival. Knowledge is a life and death struggle. This

knowledge is historically relative without being absolutely relative like

that of Nietzsche whom Lukacs criticizes here and elsewhere. The

relativity is real and concrete and not only of perspective.

It is through this provisional knowledge but which has 'an

aspiration towards totality' that the reality is revealed, changed and

realized. This is a prospective view of history unlike Hegel's

retrospective one. This makes the author and the proletariat more bound

to reality, more responsible and sensitive to it and also more aware of the

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I 1 •

movements in the past tending towards the present than the Hegelian

Philosopher-subject.

The individuality, sensuality, is never given up by Lukacs in his

insistence on the grasp of historical forces of change. Let us see him

working this out in his masterpiece The Historical Novel.

2.5 The Historical Novel

Lukacs' contribution to the theory of the Novel is undoubtedly one

of the most important ones. By consistently upholding the great realistic

tradition, quite out of season, he brought to focus the limits of

modernism. His criticism of modernism was, it should be noted,

launched at a time when there was nothing else but modemism on the

intellectual horizon. His reflectionist/ realist model of literature was not

as comprehensive as Bakhtin's or not as sophisticated as Machery and

Balibur's, to compare only two of the recent Marxist attempts at the

literary theory. Yet since it is firmly grounded in the Marxist Philosophy,

it is difficult to parry its thrusts at the subjectivism and idealism inherent

in Modemist esthetics. Also one should remember that Lukacs

formulated his positions on the backdrop of the emergence of

communism as viable alternative to capitalism. This makes his theory

necessarily partisan. Thus Lukacs simplifies the complex history of the

novel form through the last two centuries as a social conflict between the

revolutionary progressive consciousness and conservative regressive

consciousness. He ranges the novelists of the 18"'and 19* centuries either

in one or the other camp. He extends this conflict to the 20"" century,

including modernists among the opponents of the progressive trends in

history.

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In The Historical Novel, Lukacs outlines the birth and the growth

of the Novel as the epic of the modem age. His underlying assumption is

that since the novel is the new literary genre, it would necessarily reflect

the society in transition from religious-feudal order to secular-bourgeois

structure. In fact the novel appears to him well suited to chronicle the

social dynamism unlike the Epic where the established societies found

their expression. The novel is thus an essentially progressive art form.

Lukacs with broad strokes paints a picture of the birth of this

historical vision in the novel among the English novelists of the 18'

century and its eventual demise or rather decay after Balzac and Tolstoy.

The events between these two points are the subject matter of The

Historical Novel. The changes in the Novel form are referred to one

momentous event, namely The French Revolution. The forebodings of

and the shadow of this dramatic change in the social order haunt the

Novel form, according to Lukacs.

The French Revolution polarized the society. The Enlightenment

ideal became manifest historically in the political position of a class.

Lukacs considers the French Revolution as an event which shaped mass

consciousness. At this moment history becomes manifest. The people are

aware of history that is the possibility of change, the possibility of

revolution. Thus the present is no more timeless. It is only a moment in

the progress of mankind towards a better society. The awareness of

transition/ progress characterizes the good novel henceforth. Lukacs

gains an evaluative criterion with his study of the historical novel which

he applies to the later novels, claiming that the great realist novels of the

19' century continued in the tradition begun by Sir Walter Scott.

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What Lukacs is attempting in The Historical Novel is the

formation of a theory of the novel form in a historical manner. He traces

the growth of this genre from its English origins to the fully blossomed

realistic novels of Balzac and Tolstoy. This historical account is also the

playing out of the manifestations of various theoretical potentials latent

in the novel form, in tune with the change in social conditions. The

history of the novel also becomes the philosophy of the novel and vice a

versa. As Hegel's history of philosophy complements his philosophy

proper, Lukacs' historical account provides him with the standards of the

novel form. The historical and realist novels emerge as appropriate

literary genre for capitalist society. Lukacs assumes this dialectical

demonstration when in his later writings he launches his fierce criticism

of Modernism. Thus this book along with History and Class

Consciousness is the foundation of Lukacs' theory.

Lukacs proposes to elaborate 'the classical form of the historical

Novel' in the first chapter, meaning that the later forms of novel are only

variations on or the modifications of this classical form. The historical

novel, as it were, is an ideal. The paradox involved in such a position is

obvious. The novel which is aware of history, i.e. passage of time is a

timeless specimen of high art. Only frankly contemporary art can become

a permanent model or an example. Lukacs demands not just a reflection

of the social conditions of the time of the novel, which would be there

willy nilly in any work, but a conscious self awareness of time, or what

he calls 'historical sense' woven in the fabric of the novel, the epitomes

of which are the novels of Sir Walter Scott, Balzac and Tolstoy.

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He contrasts the 18* century novel with the historical novel

pointing out that the former 'is not concerned to show its characters as

belonging to any concrete time.' The contemporary world is accepted as

something given. The abstraction of the contemporary condition stems

from the Enlightenment philosophy according to Lukacs. He sees a

radical shift in pre and post French revolution periods. In pre-revolution

times history writing was in short ahistorical. It -

serves to demonstrate the necessity for transforming the 'unreasonable' society of feudal absolutism; and the lessons of history provide the principles with whose help a reasonable society, a reasonable state may be created. For this reason the classical world is central to both the historical theory and the practice of the Enlightenment. To ascertain the causes of the greatness and decline of the classical states is one of the most important theoretical preliminaries for the future transformation of society.*^

Though Lukacs notes that this ahistorical view of 'Reason' applies

more to France than to England where the democratic nationalist

transformation had already taken place apparently peacefiilly, still both in

England and France because of their economic and political advancement

the sense of history was of less immediate relevance than the rational

critique of society. History served only as the instances of reasonable or

unreasonable social structures.

The first historical awareness emerged in Germany according to

Lukacs as Germany influenced by French thought was ideologically

advanced and politically and economically backward. This contradiction

needed to be resolved and it was resolved by a 'turn to German History'.

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Lukacs points to the crucial role of the French Revolution in

shaping the historical thought. In a very perceptive analysis he notes how

the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars involved ordinary people in

the shaping of their destinies. Wars were no more fought by a few

mercenaries at the behest of feudal lords, but they enlisted ordinary folks

who fought for New or Old Orders, for ideas. The notion of 'total war'

that emerged in the post-revolution period, where the mass conscription

created a national army, and the triumph of Jacobinism, which gave a

critical-progressive mission to the French nation, brought the sense of

history to the masses.

It is in the nature of a bourgeois revolution that, the national idea becomes the property of the broadest masses. (25)

The popular awareness of Nation and national history lead to the

criticism of a capitalist society. Capitalism could be seen as a historical

period rather than a permanent state. Yet this criticism was not from the

radical, Utopians but from the conservative legitimists in the beginning.

They, according to Lukacs, posited idyllic middle ages, which were free

of the miseries of capitalism. Lukacs calls this type of criticism 'a

pseudo-historicism, an ideology of immobility, of return to the middle

ages'. This legitimizing of the past is romantic in its inclination. It is

home in the need to forge an alliance between the Aristocracy and

capitalism. The compromise, between the older ruling class and the new

one, necessitated reining in of criticism of the past. The past had to be

romanticized. It is against the spirit of the Enlightenment and the French

Revolution. Yet, Lukacs sees in it a progress compared to the abstract,

unhistorical spirit of the Enlightenment.

104

Also this romantic, reactionary view posed a challenge to the

defenders of the Enlightenment to give a historical account of the

progress of human reason. They were forced to have -

...the increasing historical awareness of the decisive role played in human progress by the struggle of classes in history. (27)

The French Historians of the Bourbon restoration period had to

undertake this job of historicizing the march of reason. Lukacs sees a

lineage in the development of historical reason in the works of Condorcet

during the French Revolution, in the criticism of capitalism by Fourier

and lastly in the philosophy of Hegel.

While critical of the limits of the last great intellectual and artistic

period of bourgeois humanism', Lukacs appreciates its universal critical

spirit, its lack of apologetics. Till the crisis of 1848, when the stage

beyond capitalism became visible, the humanist thought exemplified in

the works of Goethe, Hegel and Balzac could acutely sense the

contradictions in society without envisaging a revolutionary resolution of

those.

Lukacs considers this fatalist Humanism to be the basis of the art

of Sir Walter Scott. The only basis of difference between these writers

and Scott is their nationalities. As Scott was a Scotsman, where

democracy already prevailed, apparently without any violent social

upheavals, he could look upon the historical events with an epic

equanimity. As a conservative he belongs to a class which had suffered

due to the Industrial Revolution, yet he does not bemoan the lost power.

Lukacs describes him as an 'honest tory' whose belief in the 'middle

105

way' enables him to represent the warring factions in a broad objective

epic form.

Describing Scott, Lukacs comes up with his famous formula of

bourgeois authors, who are unwittingly honest in their social portrayal.

Lukacs describes them as -

... Those great writers whose depth is manifest mainly in their work, a depth which they often do not understand themselves, because it has sprung from a truly realistic mastery of their material in conflict with their personal views and prejudices. (31)

We should note the standard interpretation of these and such

expressions, i.e. Lukacs' method of historical determinism, which

commits him to look at an author not as an independent commentator but

more of a product of his age and circumstances.

Of course, with Lukacs any such standard pigeon-holing does not

suffice. He looks at Scott with admiration because Scott breaks new

paths compared with both the eighteenth century English novel and the

Romantic rebellion. Scott is not an accident, Scott represents -

A renunciation of Romanticism, .... a higher development of the realist literary traditions of the Enlightenment. (33)

Lukacs couples the optimism and faith in Reason of Enlightenment

with practical, critical Marxist scientific social analysis. He considers

Scott to be the first among the great tradition of humanist realist writers.

Scott rejected a romantic reactionary trend of a demonic hero and instead

created a middling unheroic but a correct hero as in The Heart of

Midlothian and Waverly.

106

Though Lukacs is aware of the genre distinction between the epic

and the novel, he is enamoured of the old epic self activity of man, the

old epic directness of social life, its public spontaneity. The myth of

primitive communism exercises its influence on Lukacs. This streak in

Lukacs of holding the contemporary literature to some ideal is the result

of his commitment to Enlightenment ideals. This can always create a

danger of his not being able to comprehend the present culture in its own

exigencies, and thus misunderstanding it, the misunderstanding that he

displays in his virulent criticism of modernism. But on the other hand,

not developing rationally i.e. theoretically several courses open to

literature for the first time in history, due to the advent of modem secular

society, would rob literary criticism of its explanatory and evaluative

functions.

Lukacs' demand for rational explanation of social crises from

novelists makes him blind to the fluorescence of formal experimentation

of the modem novel as we shall see in the section on The Meaning of

Contemporary Realism.

Lukacs is accused of idealizing a historical period and prescribing

it as a standard, which makes many literary works deviant and decadent.

Though this criticism is broadly true, it would be fair to examine

whether, in raising some tendencies as standard and some as deviant,

Lukacs provides a satisfactory historical explanation.

On close examination one finds in Lukacs an uneasy mix of ideal

notions and empirical justifications. Thus while establishing Scott as a

modem day epic writer Lukacs approvingly quotes Belinsky's ideal

concept of epic hero —

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... the hero of the epic is Hfe itself and not the individual. In epic, the individual is, so to speak, subject to the event; the event over shadows the human personality by its magnitude and importance ...(35)

Further the Hegelian categorization of individuals in History is

directly adapted by Lukacs to his analysis. Contrasting 'maintaining

individuals' (common men) with 'the world historical individuals

(heroes), Lukacs shows how Scott's novels are narratives of common

lives, lives where social and political extremities meet. Through the

average hero who is a 'typical character nationally' a link between

opposing historical forces is provided. Scott's 'mediocre hero' provides

a picture of 'continuation of daily life' amidst a civil war. Edward

Waverly, Sir Wilfred Ivanhoe and Frank Osbaldistone are such heroes

who are caught between the warring factions and whose adventures

provide an opportunity to portray the society. Lukacs recognizes along

with Hegel that this continuation of daily life is an important foundation

for the continuity of cultural development.

It is not just a typical Marxist insistence on 'the common' because

the common means the material base of civilization that drives Lukacs

here. He combines with this sense of necessary economic life a notion of

'great historical movement'. The social change, which is waiting to

happen, is hidden beneath the common life. This propensity to change

gets manifested in the action of the great individual. Lukacs contrasts

Carlyle's 'romantically decorative hero worship' with Scott's attitude. He

says,

108

For him (i.e. Scott) the great historical personahty is the representative of an important and significant movement embracing a large section of the people

and

Scott thus lets his important figures grow out of the being of the age, he never explains the age from the position of its great representatives, as do the romantic hero-worshippers (39)

Here he means Carlyle. The objectivity of historical movements

which affect the individual because they are greater than individuals is

carefully developed by Lukacs in this context. Henceforth, he is going to

relate any kind of subjective element in fiction with the politically

regressive tendency of romantic hero worshipping. In a realist fiction

there are no heroes. Historically great figures play 'the minor

compositional roles' in Scott's novels. These figures appear naturally in

the course of crises. Richard I, Rob Roy MacGregor are such heroes who

emerge from the novel as champions of the down trodden.

Lukacs develops his poetics of realistic fiction further, by noting

that a historical novelist has to dramatize and concentrate the events

rather than depict them in minute details, pursuing the technique of

verisimilitude. Historical here and now is not just the picturesque

description.

The grasp of the general or what Lukacs calls 'the historical factor

in human life' necessitates 'a dramatic concentration of the epic

framework'. He demonstrates with examples that this grasp of the

essential was the common characteristic of the great 18* Century writers.

They did not hanker after the quantitative completeness. This gives

Lukacs another element in the construction of the realistic novel namely

109

- 'the totality of national life in its complex interaction between 'above'

and 'below'. Lukacs is later going to contrast this grasp of totality by

Tolstoy and Mann with its lack in Kafka and Joyce.

The next factor that Lukacs finds present in Scott is the

representation of historical progress through social crisis. The dialectical

progress of history means progress through conflicts and contradictions.

Lukacs says that Scott presents history as a series of great crises. The

oppressed and the rulers clash in almost each one of Scott's novels,

whether it is the Jacobite uprisings or the conflict between Saxons and

Normans. In The Heart of the Midlothian he describes the uprising in the

city of Edinburgh over the execution of two smugglers. Captain John

Porteous who ordered his troops to fire in the mob to quell the rioters was

later killed by the mob which entered the old Tollbooth prison. Against

the background of this crisis Scott handles several themes such as

Jacobitism, a woman's struggle for justice and people's rights.

Lukacs apparently makes Scott's novels into case studies for his

aesthetic. Lukacs finds in Scott a novelist who is aware of the larger

social picture though he is politically conservative. So, Scott can present

social crises in his novels which are the engines of history. Lukacs seeks

to prove that a writer's political opinions do not affect his understanding

of historical movement.

Lukacs has already a well developed set of expectations from the

novel. He only seeks examples from novelists such as Scott, Balzac and

Tolstoy to establish his principles.

110

One principle that Lukacs insists upon is concreteness in art. The

essence of art in contradistinction to knowledge is that it is specific.

Lukacs shows that Scott's novels are about 'here and now'. They have

enough of the local colour.

Predictably Lukacs sees the reason for this ability to evoke a

particular period in Scott's affinity with the ordinary people. That the

popular life should provide the content cf any socially relevant art, and

the popular culture is the main stream of culture are the age old dogmas

of the Marxist populism. They invest the people with some magical

quality of being correct. So, Lukacs quite approves of George Sand's

estimate of Sir Walter Scott -

He is the poet of peasant, soldier, outlaw and artisan. (48)

Lukacs says that Scott portrays the great transformations of history

as transformations of popular life. The familiar division between the

material base structure and the ideal/ conceptual superstructure is used by

Lukacs to cast Scott's craft in the familiar formula.

Scott aims at portraying the totality of national life in its complex

interaction between 'above' and 'below' his vigorous popular character is

expressed in the fact that 'below' is seen as the material basis and artistic

explanation for what happens 'above'.(49)

Here popular life is quite routinely equated with the material base

without any second thought. Lukacs does not even consider the

possibility that the popular life has its own belief system and culture

which can be far from the lived reality. Lukacs holds that Scott does not

romanticize history. It may be true or not but it certainly appears that

Lukacs is romanticizing Scott. Lukacs feels that in Scott's portrayal of

11

common characters, there is a sudden flash of human greatness. He

compares Goethe's portrait of Dorothea and Scott's Jeanie Deans in The

Heart of Midlothian, to show how these common characters suddenly

turn heroic. Here heroic is meant to be in touch with the historical

currents of the times, in a typical Marxist spirit. Lukacs waxes poetic

over the greatness of the people. He says about Scott -

His novels abound in such stories; everywhere we find this sudden blaze of great yet simple heroism among artless, seemingly average children of the people. (51)

Lukacs links this presence of heroism among the people to the

French Revolution which ushered in Democratic politics, only as a bland

statem.ent, without elaborating the connection. He sees Scott extending

this feature by bringing out 'much more strongly than Goethe, the

historical character of this heroism'.(51)

Historical character here is an euphemism for the specific

constraining, limiting circumstances of the character and the awareness

of historical crisis. Lukacs quite literally applies the Hegelian scheme of

dialectics to history and novels, that of progress through contradiction.

Both Scott and Goethe are believers in human greatness as the children

of the Enlightenment of humanism. But both are aware that such 'vast

heroic human potentialities' are the result of the historical crises, they are

not the doings of their individual holders but of the historical spirit,

which underlies people's individual lives.

The epic requirement for such figures to recede after the accomplishment of their mission underlines just how general this phenomenon is.(52)

12

Lukacs quite explicitly applies Marxist theory of History to Scott -

'he presents history as a series of great crises'.

Lukacs perceives Scott writing in an objective spirit. He believes

that Scott comprehends the greater forces behind individual events and

lives. This leads to a contradictory vision - on the one hand Scott

'portrays the complex and intricate path which led to Britain's national

character' but on the other hand "Scott sees the endless field of ruin,

wrecked existences... broken social formations etc. which were the

necessary preconditions of the end result".(54)

Scott thus does not homogenize history. He depicts the conflicting

forces within history. The conflict in his historical narrative

paradoxically stems from his commitment to the conservative middle

way. Lukacs compares Scott with Balzac and Tolstoy saying he 'became

a great realist despite his own political and social views'. But there is no

magic or mystery involved here. Lukacs realizes, to his credit, that this

conservatism itself was the reason why Scott did not romanticize the

past. He could sympathize with the heroic qualities that the past

contained but at the same time could perceive the historical necessity of

its decline.

Lukacs seems to prefer here a political position even though

conservative, over no political position. Scott gains a perspective due to

the definite political stand he assumes. This stand also happened to be

progressive, as he represents the middle of the road bourgeois who were

politically more emancipated (i.e. democratic) than the rest of Europe.

Scott sees in the past 'the necessary prehistory of the present', Lukacs

maintains.

113

Lukacs creates an interesting concept of 'necessary anachronism',

which has a very modem sound to it. Thus history is not confined to the

dead past. Lukacs recognizes that the present can and does shape history

in its own image. But this present perspective about the past is not the

postmodern license but a necessary outcome of HegeHan dialectics of

history which constitutes the theoretical frame for Lukacs thought.

The moment Lukacs posited the notion of historical necessity he

committed himself to the purposiveness of history or teleology. The

historical necessity is not like the scientific necessity where the effect

emerges out of the nature of the cause. It is more of the necessity but of

the hindsight. The effect justifies and explains the cause. Or to put it in

other words the shape of the present make the events in the past appear

necessary. Thus, Scott with his firm belief in the present political order

can look back upon the past as a preparation for it. He can thus stoically

look upon the disintegration of clan life or 'the gentile society' in its

confrontation with the strong central power of the kings and the rising

middle classes. He perceives historical necessity in the downfall of these

noble people. Lukacs hastens to add that the necessity that Scott senses -

... is no other worldly fate divorced from men; it is the complex interaction of concrete historical circumstances in their process of transformation ...(58)

The historical necessity is not imposed from outside. It is 'inner

necessity'.Notion of 'Historical Necessity' is anachronistic as Lukacs

admits. The historical necessity is discovered after the events have come

to pass. History cannot be predicted but the reasons behind events can be

known in hind sight. He justifies it discussing Hegel's thoughts in great

14

detail. History is not complete in itself, it has to be meaningful for us

who live in the present. This does not lead to relativism or multiple

interpretations of History. In fact, a good writer has to objectively assess

the direction of the march of history. There has to be an organic

connection between the past and the present.

Lukacs very frankly puts forth a standard for literature, which

binds literature to a political purpose: that of progress. Progress very

clearly means for Lukacs going beyond feudalism to bourgeois

democratic society and from there on elucidating the contradictions of

capitalism to a communist society. These Marxist objectives determine

Lukacs' canon of novelists. He sees 18* and 19* century novelists

charting a course which culminates in the novels of Balzac and Tolstoy.

The principle of necessary anachronism which expects a novel depicting

the past making the narrative relevant to the present, and the explicit

politics for the present make Lukacs' esthetics quite narrow but at the

same time it gains in clarity. Lukacs considers Cooper as the only

American novelist who followed Scott for obvious reason namely

Cooper's heroes are sympathetic to Native Americans, whereas he

regards Vigny's novels as flawed because Vigny considers the French

Revolution to be a historical Error.

Lukacs lists several authors of both the camps viz. Progressive and

Conservative. Progressive authors include Goethe and Williebald Alexis,

the German authors, Manzoni the Italian novelist, Pushkin and Gogol

from Russia, whereas the conservative tradition consists of Tieck,

Novalis, Wachenroder, the Germans, Vigny the French novelist. The

115

conservative tradition of historical novel fails because of what Lukacs

dubs as decorative subjectivization and moralization of history.

For Lukacs, history, reality are the given facts. The role of an

individual is to discover the essence of the events. For him the author is

not the creator but rather an interpreter of the tendencies of history. Thus

writer's choice of the content and the perspective is limited by his

knowledge of history. For Lukacs imagination is not opposed to reason

but works within the bound set by reason. Lukacs brings literature within

the orbit of politics by this expectation of historical awareness. Lukacs

says about Vigny who is unaware of history

There is thus in Vigny a marked subjectivism towards history which at times amounts to saying that the outside world is fundamentally unknowable. (76)

Lukacs sees this subjectivism in modem literature too. Lukacs

reacts to Hugo who said that the historical novel need not be prosaic and

faithful to history like Scott's -

The romantic poeticisation of historical reality is always impoverishment of this actual specific real poetry of historical life. (77)

Lukacs' anti-Romanticism which comes as a requisite justification

of his anti modernism blinds his aesthetics to the irrationalist trends, to

individual protests against the dominant order and to challenges to the

notions of the rational subject. He summarily couples right wing

reactions with the individualist protests. Yet this strategy has the

advantage of throwing into sharp relief the rationalist progressive

aesthetics for better or for worse. He thus can group or classify novelists

and identify certain formal characteristics of a kind of novel which he

considers to be objectively correct for the times.

116

He perceives a growth in the historical awareness in the French

noveHsts such as Merimee, Stendhal, Vitet and Balzac. Balzac and

Tolstoy seem to him to have even surpassed Sir Walter Scott in their

awareness of historical necessity.

Balzac also signifies an end of classic historical novel as he writes

in a period where the historical problematic of bourgeois society itself

was the central problem rather than the confrontation between feudalism

and capitalism. The end of the classical historical novel did not mean that

the genre historical novel came to an end. In fact the realistic social novel

was a development from the Historical novel. Lukacs assigns the period

between 1830 to 1848 for the flourishing of the realistic novel. After the

1848 restoration of Bonaparte the hopes of any proletarian revolution

were extinguished. The Bourgeois had entrenched themselves. This for

Lukacs spells the decline of Realistic novel, which analyzed the present

historically.

Another important figure in this tradition is Tolstoy. Tolstoy

reflected the central problem of the period between the emancipation of

serfs of 1861 and the 1905 Revolution. Lukacs has a mixed admiration

for Tolstoy. Describing War and Peace as the modem epopee of popular

life, Lukacs also notes that Tolstoy completely fails to understand the

movement of revolutionary democracy already beginning in his time.

After charting the course of the development of novel in external

aspects, Lukacs turns to the formal analysis of Novel. This genre-

criticism is based on the constitutive elements peculiar to each genre or

in other words a recognition of the essences of various genres. Each

genre or literary form has to be distinct from the other. Lukacs

17

complicates the matter further by connecting the formal elements of

genre to the historical situation so at once the autonomous logic of a

genre as an independent literary practice is developed and the

coincidence or rather the causal explanation of a genre's form is sought

in the historical-philosophical condition of society. Lukacs abstracts from

literary history to focus on four major genres and their interrelationships

and differences. These are, the epic, the drama especially the classical

tragedy and the Renaissance drama and the Novel. He conceives

historical connections and similarities between the tragedy and

Renaissance drama on one hand and the epic and the Modem historical/

realistic novel on the other. Though the scheme is artificially quite

symmetrical Lukacs poses himself the following questions -

Given the historical basis of the new historicism in art, why did the latter produce the historical novel and not the historical drama? (89)

Lukacs' question becomes significant because he is trying to

incorporate 'time' in his literary theory. 'Time' is known to have become

a major category, indeed the distinguishing category of the modem

consciousness. Modernity is often defined as an integral awareness of

temporality. By historicizing the formal problematics of literature,

Lukacs is bringing in the categories of time and history in the study of

literature. Lukacs states his program Thus -

One has thus to retum to the basic differences of form between drama and novel, uncovering their source in life itself, in order to comprehend the differences of both genres in their relationship to history. Only if we begin here can we understand the historical developments in both genres- emergence, flowering, decline etc. historically and esthetically. (90)

118

'The historical' and 'the esthetic' are related by Lukacs in a typical

Hegelian fashion. They both form parts of one general i.e. philosophical

system. As a Marxist polemicist Lukacs evidently engages himself on the

side of Hegelian Marxism rather than more orthodox materialist/

economist Marxism. Indeed he is seen as the pioneer, who discovered the

Hegelian strain in Marx's thought even before the publication of early

writings of Marx's such as 'Manuscript of 1844' and the 'Critique of

Hegels's philosophy of Right'.

Lukacs' Hegelian inclinations make him criticize empiricism in

literary criticism but at the same time make him less scientific (less

observant of facts) less sensitive to local variations and subtle details.

For Lukacs historical drama precedes the historical novel and the

epic precedes the classical tragedy. He seems to be of the opinion that a

particular socio-cultural formation prefers a particular genre, that there is

an intrinsic relation, a necessary relation between a genre and a historical

period.

He admits that both the tragedy and the Epic or in modem times

the novel are the genres which depict 'the totality of life process'. They

are great genres as compared to lyric poetry. Lukacs' over estimation of

totality, a lifelong tendency, marks him as an orthodox Hegelian Marxist.

History is an absolute and total system which is completely determined

according to Hegel and some versions of Marx. Lukacs considers this

grasp of totality to be the defining feature of drama and epic.

Lukacs is aware that the artistic experience, both the content of art,

and its performance are necessarily concrete and finite. (If art was

119

conceptual it would be more of a philosophy). Yet art is expected to

communicate an understanding of the totality of historical movement in

society. This understanding is necessarily abstract and conceptual. It is

about general tendencies whereas the work of art is concrete and

particular. He considers it to be the essential paradox of art.

The nature of artistic creation consists in the ability of this relative, incomplete image to appear like life itself, indeed in a more heightened, intense and alive form than in objective reality. (91)

This general paradox of art is sharpened in those genres which are compelled by their content and form to appear as living images of the totality of life. And this is what tragedy and great epic must do. (92)

Lukacs' humanist and rationalist position is evident in his formula

or expectation from tragedy and epic. He says that these genre should

grasp 'the essential and most normative connections of life, in the destiny

of individuals and society.' These general principles have to be given a

new immediacy —

To reindividualize the general in man and his destiny is the mission of artistic form. (92)

Lukacs goes on to distinguish between epic and drama. Epic

depicts the 'totality of object world' where as drama depicts the 'totality

of movement'. What he means is that Epic is far more comprehensive. It

aims at encompassing the society at a particular stage of historical

development of both the material production and culture, whereas Drama

is far more concentrated. It simplifies and generalizes the historical crisis

which has come about due to the collision of two social systems or ways

of living. It is an artistic image of the social movement. It does not

include the material circumstances of its principal actors. Lukacs gives an

120

example of King Lear. Lear's wife is not shown, or even mentioned. An

epic would have required the hero's family to be depicted.

It is drama's distance from the daily life that makes it grasp the

historical changes or revolutionary transformations. Thus Antigone is a

portrayal of 'the destruction of primitive forms of society and the rise of

the Greek polls whereas Oresteia shows the conflict between the dying

matriarchal order and the emergent patriarchal order. Similarly

Renaissance plays, where there was a second flowering of tragedy, show

the death of the feudal order and the birth of the final society divided on

class lines i.e. the capitalist society.

As Lukacs pins the problem of the nineteenth century novel to the

changing conception of history, it is obvious that he sees an evident

connection between the historical consciousness and the narrative act.

This connection is far more profound than simplistic current claims

which consider history and narrative indistinguishable from each other.

Lukacs sees the mid nineteenth century ahistoricism as a reversion

to 'the weakest and most unhistorical tendencies of the enlightenment'.

This retrogression or sliding back is from an 'advanced' Hegelian notion

of history as an essential part of the present. The dialectical relation

between the past and the present means that the past is neither effaced by

nor simply assimilated into the present. This awareness of the troubled,

or contradictory nature of the relation of history to the present state of

society was more complex than the simple confidence in the

unconditional progress of 'now' that the Enlightenment revolutionary

fervour generated. Enlightenment itself, especially, in the shape of

Herder had become aware of the particular historical situations which

121

were unique and so had to be understood with empathy rather than

reason. When Lukacs rues the loss of historicism it is to these trends in

the Enlightenment march of Reason that he refers.

The later period he characterizes as an utter disintegration of

historicism. The denial of history is visible in all fields. Taine,

Schopenhauer are identified as the first ones to have radically denied

history. Later with Ranke attempt was made 'to stabilize anti-historicism

in a historical form'. A few statements of Lukacs here about the

conception of history that he prefers and that he condemns are worth

perusing in detail. They are a pointer to his theory of narrative and then

to the relation of literature to society. Both of these are rooted in a

particular conception of man and society which we may for time being

call 'modem', 'progressive', 'rational', without explaining these terms.

He elaborates his position and that of the ones he criticizes in a few

suggestive but cryptic lines thus -

We find that Ranke and his school are denying the idea of a contradictory process of human advance. According to their conception history has no direction, no summits and no depressions ... history is a collection and reproduction of interesting facts about the past.

Since history, to an ever increasing extent, is no longer conceived as the prehistory of the present, or if it is, then in a superficial, unilinear, evolutionary way, the endeavours of the earlier period to grasp the stages of the historical process in their real individuality, as they really were objectively, lose their living interest. Where it is not the uniqueness of earlier events that is presented, history is modernized. This means that the historian proceeds from the belief that the fundamental structure of the past is economically and ideologically the same as that of the present.(176)

122

Whereas what is required, the alternative that was surpassed, is

stated thus -

Both Hegel's objective idealism as well as the writings of the great historians of the time were permeated through and through with the conviction that objective reality, and therewith history was knowable. Thus the important representatives of this period approached history in a materialist fashion, ... that is they attempted to uncover the real driving forces of history, as they objectively worked and to explain history from them.(177)

Though this is clear, it does give an impression of simplistic

realism. Read carefully, one notices that Lukacs is aiming at a far more

complex theory of temporality, which is much more modem than he is

credited with usually. He is trying to connect the past with the present

thereby preserving the uniqueness of both. The past is of 'living interest'

to the present not only because it determines the direction the present has

taken but also (there is awareness in Lukacs that) the present can 'read' a

particular direction in the past that it chooses to. Without this awareness

the past is in danger of losing its uniqueness. The past, precisely because

it is the 'prehistory of the present' has to be different from the present'

i.e. it has to have its own logic of cause and effect. This uniqueness of

history warrants the belief in materialism and objectivity, without which

there would be slide into 'historical solipsism', the past becoming a

mirror of the present.

Thus understanding the past is a two way process - on the one

hand there is a recognition of the force of history, its own momentum and

the direction it has assumed, on the other hand there is a consciousness of

one's own interest or purpose in knowing history. I think, this is what

123

Lukacs means by 'the idea of a contradictory process of human advance'.

There is no simple reaHsm which hides the human interest, the inevitable

bias of the present, neither is there an attempt to 'modernize', see the past

as an image of the present.

Lukacs wryly concludes -

It seems that the only possible way of understanding the past lies in projecting our way of seeing things, in starting out from our own notions. (177)

He elaborates his pessimistic view of the later 19* century thought

with several details. He terms this tendency Romantic reaction to

capitalism. So in this tendency there is at once a dissatisfaction with

capitalism and thus a nostalgia for history but also an inadequate

awareness of the self and the present, which results in the present rearmg

its head back again in the shape of the past. He refers to Carlyle's critique

which ends in reactionary positions. He says that the fight against

capitalism's lack of culture becomes a fight against democracy.

Lukacs in the section 'The Crisis of Bourgeois Realism' begins to

develop his critique of modernism, which later gave him such a notoriety

as an orthodox Marxist and a blind opponent of experimentation. There is

some truth in such accusations because Lukacs debunks an entire literary

movement and a period as decadent. Though his criticism is often

perceptive and has philosophical and political justification, still, a literary

movement, beginning with naturalism, going on to symbolism and

culminating in modernism (Lukacs' characterization), which has lasted

nearly 100 years and more, cannot be said to possess only negativities,

deviations and errors from a normal healthy form of literature. For

Lukacs anything which is not realistic and historical is abnormal. As with

124

Hegel the march of history mysteriously stops with the Prussian state, so

with Lukacs the development of literature comes to a standstill with

realistic and historical novel, at least in the capitalist society. There are

several things wrong with such a stand, one, he has nothing to say about

other genres such as poetry, or modern drama; two, the positive or

substantive aspects of Modernism i.e. the validity of its critiques of

scientific-capitalist society, of the enlightenment project, its assertion of

artistic autonomy, almost the birth of art per say in modem age, the

resistance of Avant-garde to the mechanization of mind and body etc. are

completely overlooked by Lukacs in his straight and narrow defence of

realism.

There is no need to say that Lukacs' aesthetic position is politically

motivated. He sincerely and rightly believes that realism rallies round

progress and revolution, and Naturalism, symbolism, modernism are

weak whimpers of capitalist status quo. He denies any political

commitment or movement to these trends. They appear to him

symptomatic of malice rather than the standard bearers of the change.

Though his general diagnosis can hardly be denied and rather its timely

recollection is often helpful in guarding literature from being mythical

and cultic yet the genuinely progressive elements of modernism such as

immense explosion of formal possibilities, the depth and

comprehensiveness of the content (from unconscious to criminal and

from futurism to anthropological) is simply disregarded by Lukacs.

Though, this much is obvious, we have to look at his argument

closely, so that we do not debunk him as an old fogey as easily as many

postmodernists do. Lukacs identifies 1848 as the watershed, when

125

Capitalism became entrenched in Europe. He looks at the period

following this year as a time when art and culture turned inward, became

private and apolitical. In his tirade against this trend he misses out on the

historical inevitability of this capitulation. Writing after successful

communist revolutions in twentieth century, it is easy to blame the

bourgeois intellectuals' pessimism and submission to irrationalism in the

mid 19"̂ century. Lukacs fails to notice both the situation and the

subversion of the culture in this period. The way the modemist logic was

taken to its unsavoury conclusions by seemingly irrationalist philosophy

of Nietzsche and existentialists, constituted a fundamental assault on

capitalist-scientific rationality and not just an escapism and solipsism.

Lukacs' criticism is still valuable because it represents a third

position apart from the system and its home grown critics. This is the

position of materialist praxis. It can help us in understanding the

phenomenon of modernism extrinsically, from outside though not

intrinsically. It shows us the political and philosophical limiting

conditions of modernism.

Lukacs begins by asserting that he will deal not with the changes,

in the notion of history in the field of 'history qua science' but with the

mass experience of history itself (172). He believes, like other Marxists

that the historical change in conceptions and attitude need not be

conscious, it is often pre-conscious if not unconscious. He states a

methodological assumption -

However it is not this philologically demonstrable influence which is important, but rather the common character of the reactions to reality which in history and literature produce analogous subjects and forms

126

of historical consciousness. These reactions have their roots in the entire political and intellectual life of the middle class. (173)

Lukacs is asserting here an important methodological principle of

Marxism which also distances it from the phenomenon that he is going to

attack namely the individual artistic cultural responses to capitalism. In

other words he is claiming an objective status to historical and

sociological understanding as well as historical and social tendencies i.e.

to both the subject and object of analysis. It is precisely this objectivity

which is doubted by the modernist tendencies in their extreme

subjectivism, and relativism.

Lukacs polemically asserts a continuity between bourgeois

ideology and the proletarian conception of history -

The proletariat's conception of history matures upon this basis (historical defence of progress), extending the last great phase of bourgeois ideology by means of criticism and struggle and by overcoming its limitation. (173)

For Lukacs, as for Hegel and for Marx, history is greater than the

classes and their struggle with each other. Or rather the class conflict

serves as a vehicle of progress of history. Leaving aside the criticism of

this reification of history into 'the cunning of history' (which is the

essence of historicism) for a while, what Lukacs manages to establish is

the perception of the total process of history. It is this emphasis on the

totality transcending subjectivities, class positions which will serve as a

foundation for the criticism of bourgeois ideological products in post

1848 era.

127

He contrasts the fragmentary 'two nations' view of society of

Disraeli i.e. haves and have-nots with the Marxist formulation. He says -

The latter contained all progressive views on history in a 'sublated' form, that is in the three fold Hegelian sense of the word: they were not only criticized and annulled, but also preserved and raised to a higher level. (173)

The Marxist theory, howsoever, raised to a higher level, did not

have the flesh of working class movements. It was only an ideological

formulation waiting for its day. The working class movement was

besought by the 'two nations' perspective. Lukacs ruefully admits that

"The working class movement does not develop in a vacuum, but

surrounded by all the ideologies of decline of bourgeois

decadence".(173)

This leads to the birth of 'class ideologies in a much narrower

sense'. Both these class ideologies, Lukacs indicates, are bound to be

inadequate if not false, to the true understanding of history. He looks at

the post 1848 culture both that of the bourgeois and proletariat apologists

as a partial response to the social situation. This is his main thrust against

the modem literature.

Lukacs develops his thesis here more by examples and suggestions

rather than by argument. So, though his gist is clear, the order is

haphazard. He begins by discussing changes in conceptions of history

among bourgeois thinkers. The pre-1848 bourgeois ideologists had

admitted to the contradictory nature of progress in history. History

progressed through contradictions i.e. dialectically. Of course Hegel is

the central bourgeois theoretician of this 'progressive' view of'progress'.

128

After 1848 Hegel becomes unpopular. History is conceived as 'a smooth

straightforward evolution'. In fact the new science of sociology does not

admit any conflict as a motor of history. In passing Lukacs gives an

interesting example of the use of science in social analysis. In pre-

revolution days Enlighteners of the 18"̂ century used the knowledge of

biology to dispute the divine order of society. They contrasted and

compared nature with the social world. This was a progressive strategy as

it was 'an advance over a theological view of history', whereas mid 19'

century social Darwinism imported into economics and social analysis by

Malthus and Nietzsche, according to Lukacs, was a reactionary move. It

was 'a perversion and distortion of historical connections.' Though

roping Nietzsche in with Malthus is plain falsification, Lukacs contends

that social Darwinism is turning capitalist competition into an eternal

law. It mystifies capitalist laws of the market.

The use of physical/natural science as a social ideology in the mid

19 century thought spells the end of genuine socio historical analysis.

Lukacs calls this "Disintegration of Historicism". He analyses thinkers

such as Taine, Schopenhauer and Ranke to demonstrate this open denial

of history. He says,

According to their conception history has no direction, no summits and no depressions. All epochs of history are equally near to God." Thus there is perpetual movement, but it has no direction: history is a collection and reproduction of interesting facts about the past. (176)

Lukacs tries to gain an understanding, piecemeal, of the literary

mood of the mid nineteenth century. He surveys a range of thinkers,

philosophers, critics and writers to note certain common motifs. This

129

empirical method surely substantiates his criticism of the decadent

bourgeois culture but fails to give a coherent theory of bourgeois

ideology and culture. This has caused a gross neglect of Lukacs'

otherwise perspicuous and sharp observations. They get lost in the

winding laborious progress through several illustrations. Lukacs

elaborates his central theses which are -

1) Bourgeois ideologues (writers, thinkers) failed to relate organically

with the past.

2) This was because they had got dissociated from the present too.

3) This was the result of the loss of their historic role as the most

progressive element of society. They became entrenched as the

ruling class, and alienated from the proletariat.

4) Bourgeoisie adopted liberalism as their ideology.

5) Both the present as well as the past became assemblages of dead

facts and the individual subjectivity was free to enliven them

arbitrarily.

Though these five theses do not occur cogently together, this

seems to be the gist of Lukacs' diagnosis of the mid century malady. He

offers several instances of it from the writings of Burckhaardt, Nietzsche

and others. These pointed observations amount to, in my view, an

uncanny premonition of modernist and postmodernist trends.

Characteristics, that appear rebellious to the postmodernists, feature as

bad and faithless reason to Lukacs.

We will see these features as we go along. Lukacs concludes that

for the 19* century authors history as a total process disappears; in its

place there remains a chaos to be ordered as one likes. This chaos if

130

approached from consciously subjective viewpoints, succinctly expresses

postmodernist credo. The credit goes to Lukacs that he draws these

conclusions from the 19"' century thinkers such as Nietzsche, Croce and

others. This gives credence to the thesis that postmodernists' position is a

continuation of a philosophical trend from the 19'*̂ century rather than a

purely late 20'*̂ century phenomenon. This brings postmodernism

securely into the compass of ideology-critique.

Lukacs points out features such as history being perceived as a

chaos, and 'a collection of exotic anecdotes', the increase in 'brutality in

the presentation of physical process'. All of these features are so acutely

reminiscent of the recent trends such as the 'end of narrative' and the

celebration of cruelty, brutality etc.

Lukacs subjects Flaubert's and Ferdinand Meyer's work to a

detailed scrutiny to glean the irrationalist, subjectivist trends. In

Flaubert's Salambo he notices the precursor of 19* century exoticism.

Lukacs' critique of this trend seems to be the forerunner of Edward

Said's analysis of Orientalism. Lukacs of course situates the problem not

in the East-West antagonism but in the bourgeois ideological rhetoric.

For this exoticism Lukacs finds fault with the nineteenth century

novelist's social position vis-a-vis his class. The celebrated position of

the author as an outsider is criticized by Lukacs. He says "The

programmatic non partisanship is an illusion". (186)

Lukacs has little sympathy for the writing of this period. The only

thing he concedes is that, the naturalists, of whom he considers Flaubert

to be the pioneer, expressed the brutal seamy side of capitalism. Flaubert

131

could feel free to express his disgust in brutal shape in his historical

novels. The explanation for the descent into naturalistic pathology that

Lukacs repeats quite often is summary and judgemental. Unlike Walter

Benjamin and other Marxist critics who found the critique of capitalism

by the 19'*̂ century bourgeois writers, revelatory, Lukacs looks at it as an

abandonment of a writer's mission. Thus he says of Flaubert -

While he sincerely hates the capitalist present, his hatred has no roots in the great popular and democratic traditions either of the past or present. And therefore has no future perspective. His hatred does not historically transcend its object. Thus if, in the historical novels the suppressed passions break open their fetters, it is the eccentric-individualist side of capitalist man which comes to the fore, that inhumanity which everyday life hypocritically seeks to conceal and subdue. (195)

Thus Lukacs looks at this writing as a gut reaction rather than a

responsible critique. His dismissive mood prevents him from developing

many important insights that he has, as time and again he becomes

prescriptive. It is necessary to highlight his insights which coincide with

the later European Marxists' critical work. He seems to be grappling with

just the right kind of issues that engaged the other thinkers. For example,

Lukacs has something to say about various dialects used by the

naturalistic authors, what is called fashionably now as 'hetero-glossia'.

Lukacs, contrary to, Bakhtin and the rest of dialogists, insists that the use

of archaic language is 'a disintegration of epic language'. In an Epic the

present day writer has to address the present day reader in the current

language. "The characters must be genuine both in content and form; but

the language is necessarily not theirs, it is the narrator's own" (197).

132

Lukacs' sharp separation of the narrator from the world of the

novel is consistent with his literary theory. He considers literature to be

aware of the total picture of the reality. Literature stands above the

society. It is not immersed in the world, it comprehends and guides the

world. This stand also is in line with his notion of history as 'the

prehistory of the present'. The writer-narrator should view the past as

leading to the present necessarily. There is a logical and causal

connection between the past and the present. It is the writer's task to

reveal that connection rather than submit to the archaeological impulse of

naturalistic imitation of the past.

Lukacs describes this tendency as 'antihistorical'. For these writers

history is not a process but a simultaneous display of different periods.

Each period is 'authentically' depicted without one leading to another.

Lukacs terms this as "The principle of the photographic authenticity of

description and dialogue" (198).

Lukacs coins a word 'archaeologism' to describe this tendency. A

corollary of this tendency is Modernization, a perception of the past as

analogous to the present. There is no perception of the real difference

between the two. The feelings and emotions of modem times are

introjected into the past. The past is perceived extemally,

archaeologically. There is no insight into the historical essence whereas

Lukacs as a Marxist does believe in the presence of essences not as a

hypostasis but as a reality beyond the appearances. He summarizes these

tendencies at one place.

In Salambo all the tendencies of decline in the historical novel appear in concentrated form: the decorative monumentalization, the devitalizing, dehumanizing,

133

and at the same time making private of history. History becomes a large imposing scene for purely private intimate and subjective happenings. (199)

What Lukacs mourns here is the loss of social aspect. The true

social understanding is replaced by the perception of a milieu. History is

reduced to the 'real politic' or political intrigue of the powerful. History

is privatized. He analyzes the case of Thackeray's Henry Esmond. In

Thackeray he finds public pathos being played against the private

manners. He says -"Thackeray does not see the people. He reduces

history to the intrigues of the upper classes" (203). He points out that

Thackeray does not perceive that the tragic-comedies and comedies

occurring 'on top' are based on the tragic ruin of the middle farmers,

yeomanry and city plebeians. Thus there is no inkling of class relations in

this 'private' comedy of manners. Lukacs brings Thackeray in also to

compare him with a further low in the naturalist novel especially that of

Zola, hi Thackeray there is at least an attempt to portray the social life of

the upper class if not the attempt to catch the historical movement in the

whole of society. This leads to stylization since the spirit is lacking. But

Zola and the rest replace portrayals by mere descriptions - supposedly

scientific, and brilliant in detail - of things and thing-relationships.

This is the nadir of realism according to Lukacs. If the meaningful

interpretation of history is not insisted upon, then one is left with,

disparate things which are described with the exactitude of the method of

physical science but are scant understood.

Lukacs notices a loss of political consciousness in the working

classes as well as the upper classes. Under the title of 'The Naturalism of

the Plebian Opposition' he discusses novels of Erckmann-Chatrian.

134

Instead of the total grasp of the society 'the two nation theory' prevails in

this period. The working classes are seen in isolation from the social

relations with the other classes. Lukacs thinks that the disillusionment

with the French revolution is the reason for this division between the

inner i.e. the cultural history of the people (or upper classes) and the

external i.e. the political history of the state. Lukacs' commitment to the

working class interest does not blind him to the fact that this portrayal of

the immediate details of working class life is inadequate. History is many

sided and contradictory. Here, I feel, he anticipates Machery's 'Theory of

literary Production' where the hidden contradictions in realistic texts are

exposed. Lukacs even approvingly quotes Lenin saying that 'workers

acquire class consciousness from without'. The operation of history has

its own objectivity, which has to be grasped as a whole. The Hegelian

streak in Lukacs surfaces here. He seems to suggest that historv is a

reflection of the progress of reason. He, surprisingly, talks of the sphere

of interrelationship of all classes (p.213) and 'only outside the economic

struggle' as the sources of this total historical perspective.

He thinks 'The World Historical Individual' i.e. Hegel's hero

exemplifies, if he is really a leader or representative of genuine popular

movements Lenin's 'from without'. Yoking Hegel with Lenin, Lukacs

spells the birth of the new Marxist criticism.

Lukacs holds that Naturalism is bom out of pessimism, because

bourgeois revolutions have betrayed the masses. Naturalism is 'a

contraction of scope of vision' and it glorifies 'mere spontaneity'. It is in

Hegelian terms an 'unmediated knowledge'. Such a knowledge draws

abstract and universal conclusions from immediate sense data.

135

Lukacs also analyzes novels of De Coster, Conrad, Ferdinand

Meyer and others. The conclusions that he derives create a picture of

liberal bourgeois fiction which appears to me to be equally applicable to

the Postmodernist narrative and narrative theory. To take an example,

Postmodernism in fiction is characterized by the 'pastiche' or a parody

without bite, an aimless imitation of past styles, to decenter as it were the

authoritative narrative voice. Keeping this in mind let us look at Lukacs'

criticism of De Coster's novel. Lukacs calls it stylized naturalism.

Naturalism, because the characterization does not take place on the basis

of inner development, but of representative anecdotes; stylization,

because the naive earthiness of the 16"̂ century inevitably assumes a

recherche, exotic manner coming from present day narrator (217).

That Lukacs sees the logical link between naturalism and

stylization ought to be enough to dispel the myth that he simplistically

advocated realism. Lukacs actually, did see that naturalistic abandonment

of meaning leads to anecdotal style, another of postmodemist's favourite,

exoticism and stylization, anti historicism etc. Lukacs' choice of realism

was conscious and well thought out rather than dogmatic and orthodox.

Lukacs notices one more corollary of naturalism viz. brutalization

or dehumanization. Writers ranging from De Coster, Flaubert and Meyer

to Baudelaire trying to escape the banal present are attracted to the

cruelty and brutality in the past. As Lukacs puts it, such a writer -

must, if his writing is to achieve human vividness and artistic clarity, resort to the depiction of animal joys or blind cruelty.(220)

We again see in modemist writing this toying with cruelty as limit-

experiences, experiences which test the civilization as it were.

136

More trenchant than all this is Lukacs observation that naturalism

boils down to philosophical skepticism. Many times modernism also is

tempted by skepticism. Lukacs says -

The prevalent philosophical attitude that the outside world is unknowable receives a new emphasis when extended to the knowability of the present. The philosophic and artistic idealization of an attitude of helplessness, of a refusal to confront basic problems, of a reduction of the essential to the level of the inessential etc. deeply affects all problems of portrayal. (235)

This clearly demonstrates that Lukacs is aware of the philosophical

implications of bourgeois fiction. This makes him relevant for even

current debates. He as it were provides a genealogy of the present

varieties of skepticism, fatalism and anti essentialism.

In such a philosophical framework art acquires exaggerated

function as reason has abdicated its duty to know and make sense.

Lukacs quotes Guayon, who says - Art is intended to exercise the

transforming embellishing function of memory.(231)

Thus art and aesthetics are given an active role of creating sense.

This is not a cognitive act as much as an artifice. Lukacs calls this

subjectivist, aesthetic repudiation of the present.

Due to the tendency to aestheticize the social and political crises,

instead of the real comprehension and solution one gets ideological

compromises with the situation. The terms tend to lose their original

values, only the play of differences remains. Lukacs writes,

Distance (between the past and present)... is no longer something historically concrete, ... Distance is simply negation of the present, difference of life in

137

the abstract, something forever lost, which is impregnated witii memory and desire to give it poetic substance.(232)

Lukacs' acute observations of the nineteenth century novel can be

a great help to locate the literary predecessors of the present capitalist

ideologies. He extends the range of the contemporary debate to the entire

capitalist era. That abstractions would logically lead to sterile play of

differences was inferred by Lukacs in 1930's much before deconstruction

made it an official method.

In the last chapter 'The Historical Novel of Democratic

Humanism', Lukacs grapples with the difficult problem of suggesting the

future course of the novel. This can and does make him open to the

charge of being either prophetic or dogmatic and prescriptive. Ihe

Marxist literary criticism in general, due to its commitment to

revolutionary change out of class societies, is often forced to harness

literature to the idea of the social change. Thus it infringes upon, indeed

questions, the literary autonomy. Instead of analysis or understanding i.e.

the study of literature, it begins to criticize it and what is worse, even

desires to mould it to some non-literary shape.

Lukacs is quite vulnerable to this kind of attack. In his defence,

one will have to see whether his criticism and dictat are rooted in

perspicuous observation, that is to say, whether he wishes for logical

extension of existent tendencies or whether it is a whimsical, extraneous

demand for some artificial effort. Granting some form of

reflection/mimetic theory, which is inevitable for a Marxist objectivist, it

will be interesting to observe if Lukacs comes to a proper surmise of

social situation and its natural relation to the literature of that period.

138

Lukacs works with a complex and ambivalent mimetic theory. On

the one hand he expects the author to know and adapt the popular

consciousness, and objective understanding of history, on tlie other hand

he admits the possibility of a false consciousness. He says -

If a writer is deeply rooted in popular life, if his writing stems from this intimacy with the most important questions of popular life, he can, even with a 'false consciousness', plumb the real depths of historical truth. So Walter Scott, so Balzac, so Leo Tolstoy. (275)

Lukacs goes beyond the simple 'social commitment' and 'party

affiliation' model of orthodox soviet criticism to more complex and so

inclusive model of involvement with the people. He says,

The writer who is deeply familiar with the tendencies at work in popular life, who experiences them as if they were his own, will fill himself to be simply the executive organ of these tendencies, his rendering of reality will appear to him as simply a reproduction of these tendencies themselves. (275)

Thus, it is not a class or political partisanship as much as an overall

involvement in society which gives the insight into 'the great objective

laws' which rule the social change. Lukacs looks at explicitly progressive

literature as only one variety of literature and that too not necessarily the

perfect one.

He explains the complex nature of literature's relation with reality

by demonstrating the political confusion in reality itself According to

him the epoch of Imperialism is simultaneously an epoch of communist

revolutions. There are two clear tendencies in the society one which

contains the worst of capitalism and imperialism viz fascism and another

which is progressive i.e. communism. These tendencies can

139

interpenetrate each other. The communists can be contaminated by

imperiaHst parasitism and become Mensheviks, or the Bourgeois can be,

under the threat of Fascism, inspired by communism and adopt

democratic humanism. Democratic humanist Hterature, though most

progressive and clear, written by figures such as Victor Hugo, Anatole

France, Heinreich Mann, Feuchtwanger, Stephen Zweig, is trapped by its

abstract insistence on democratic and humanist ideals. It distrusts masses.

It gets alienated from the people. Though politically it assumes

progressive positions it does not sympathize and identify with popular

movements. It has the 'attitude that the people, the mass represents the

principle of irrationality, of the merely instinctive in contrast to reason'.

Lukacs concludes -

With such a conception of the people humanism destroys its best anti-fascist weapons. For Fascism's point of departure is precisely this "irrationality' of the mass. (267)

Lukacs considers pre-first World War Bolshevik politics to be

united with the people, whereas the left politics outside Russia -

'abandoned these traditions or allowed them to degenerate into vulgar

democracy' (265). Yet he does not yoke literature with Marxism 'But

Marxism, from a typical point of view is at best the conclusion, certainly

not the beginning of this path. The primary thing is an honest and

consistent coming to grips with the really burning problems of popular

life in the present'. (265) Thus Lukacs considers the possibility of a

correct representation of reality even by a bourgeois author if he has a

mediated understanding of the social totality.

140

Lukacs is continuously insisting on the mediated connection

between the facts and their representation, between the past and the

present, between the idea and its manifestation, in a Hegehan manner.

His criticism of the historical novel of antifascist humanism is that it be

connected with the past especially the Enlightenment "but the restored

connection is nevertheless too direct, too intellectual, too general" (286).

He, it is needless to repeat, finds these mediated connections in

classic historical novel. He shows that in War and Peace there are no

generalizations "more than his (character's) given state of feeling

demands" (287). On the other hand in Heinrich Mann, "the protagonists'

emotional, and intellectual reactions form the central axis of the novel"

(287).

Lukacs is torn between the autonomy and the concrete specificity

of life and art and the abstract ideal. At one place he goes to the length of

saying, "the fact that a given literary trend arises as a result of social and

economic necessity and the class struggles of its times is still no gauge

for aesthetic judgemenf (333).

He is trying to distance himself from the simplistic historicism of

both the idealist, Ranke's school and the materialist, soviet style, variety.

He characterizes this tendency as 'a fatalistic and purely subjective mode

of expression of an individual.'

Lukacs does not ascribe the responsibility of bad art on individual

or the situation alone. Because the reality that is reflected by art "is the

uneven and crisis filled development of popular life" (333).

141

Thus Flaubert and Meyer's 19"̂ century novel was flawed

inevitably. It is a tall order and modern western criticism for which art is

a fetish will never be able to digest it. Lukacs is in effect declaring the

supremacy of reason in the guise of criticism. Just as Hegel had declared

the end of art and the reliance on Reason, Lukacs talks from a position

beyond literature.

Lukacs offers some consolation to literature by hoping that the

new historical novel following in the steps of communist society will

offer once again the epic unity of perspective. Its simplicity i.e.

abstraction shows a tendency towards epic. But till a Utopian society is

bom, the new novel has to follow the complex realism of the classical

historical novel.

2.6 The Meaning of Contemporary Realism

Two of the most famous essays of Lukacs are included in a

collection The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. These are 'The

Ideology of Modernism' and 'Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann'. These two

essays constitute his better known critique of modernism in literature.

Yet these essays are frequently misunderstood because of the lack of

philosophical context, within which these essays make sense, whether

one agrees with them or not.

While interpreting these essays it is necessary to remember

Lukacs' criticism of the rationalization in society and his linking this

overt sway of reason in law, market and other spheres of life with the

transcendental subjectivity of Kant and other Enlightenment

philosopiiies. Lukacs had criticized then the inability to comprehend the

142

object i.e. the thing in itself and the totality, due to the reason's utter

subjectivity. Reason is solitary not only in the sense of being that of an

individual but it is also autonomous and independent of reality, at least

apparently. It impinges on the world, as it were from outside. The

mathematical, scientific structure of reason gives it a form of self-

containedness. It appears to have been derived solely from the logical

laws. These laws are applied to empirical facts, about which Kant was

honest to admit that they were pure phenomena, i.e. they were not the

things in themselves.

In the model of science there is no room for self reflection. The

Hegelian and Marxist contention has been that these laws are relative,

that they are not absolutely valid. They represent only one particular way

of comprehending the reality. The reality can be known in multiple ways.

It is a totality of various ways of knowing it. This awareness would

temper the confidence in the finality of scientific - logical understanding.

It will open the way for a change in perspective, new discoveries etc.

According to Lukacs the same rational structure pervades the

entire modem social consciousness. This homogeneous yet blind

rationality has controlled even the modernist author's perception of

reality. He accuses modemist writers of solipsism, being trapped in their

own experiences, their own selves. He directly carries over his critique of

bourgeois epistemology to literature. Thus, while talking about the

problem of time in modem literature, he notes a tendency towards

disintegration.. ..loss of artistic unity. He goes on to say

Modem philosophy, after all, encountered these problems long before modem literature.... A case in point is the problem of time. Subjective Idealism had

143

already separated time; abstractly conceived, from historical change and particularity of place. As if this separation were insufficient for the new age of imperialism, Bergson widened it further. Experienced time, subjective time, now became identical with real time, the rift between this time and that of the objective world was complete .... The same tendency soon made its appearance in literature. (37)

The features of Enlightenment philosophy such as the ordered

scientific concepts of time, space, causality on the one hand and the real

world on the other are thus seen by Lukacs to be repeated in the modem

literature. This creates an illusion of autonomy of the self as it created an

illusion of independence of reason. In art, the self appears equally

overbearing. Lukacs says -

By separating time from the outer world of objective reality, the inner world of the subject is transformed into a sinister inexplicable flux and acquires - a static character. (39).

This is the phenomenon of 'the second nature' an illusory

objectivity which the science driven modem epistemology too has.

Lukacs notes that the subjectivity takes an incomprehensible and horrific

character. He further characterizes it as a 'static view of the world.'

It is to be noted that Lukacs applies his critique of subjective

idealism almost directly to literature. In the discussion of allegory as used

by modernist writers, he notes that in allegory immanent meaning is

rejected. There is a clear separation between the detail and the meaning.

He says - Detail....becomes an abstract function of the transcendence to

which it points. (43) Now it can be seen that this is exactly how he had

characterized Kantian philosophy.

144

This direct application overrides the particular nature of literature.

Though the philosophy helps him in describing accurately the

problematics of Modernism, it prevents him from appreciating its

aesthetic value justly. This is where Adomo's aesthetics corrects Lukacs

and complements it. Lukacs in his overzealous demand for totality

forgets that there is a place for subjectivity, appearance, contingency in

the totality. The totality is concrete and thus has room for each accident.

Even in Hegel contingency is considered to be a necessary moment. The

inner necessity is not always displayed perfectly in reality. The partial,

subjective experiences that are embodied in art are equally necessary and

in fact show the reality in its ultimate recalcitrance. As Lukacs does not

comprehend the artistic need for specificity he completely

misunderstands modernist experimentation with form, the feelings of

Angst, Impotence and Nihilism. The necessary distortion of the

subjective experience trapped in an absolutely reified world is actually a

pointer to the conflict with the smooth rationality of the capitalist society.

Lukacs on the contrary feels that modernism by its extreme subjectivity

is complicit with the status quo. In Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann he

dismisses all the modernist authors for their interiority.

Though Lukacs does not comprehend the modernist aesthetics

completely he succeeds in a fairly correct characterization of the period.

His diagnosis is surely correct though treatment completely off the Mark.

It is to Adomo we have to turn for a more sensitive understanding of

Modemism.

145

NOTES

1. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney

Livingstone (1968; New Delhi: Rupa, 1993)102.

2. Ibid. 110.

3. Max Weber, Reading and Commentary on Modernity, ed. Stephen

Kalberg (Maiden: Blackwell, 2005) 58.

4. Georg Simmel, Simmel on Culture, eds. David Frisby and Mike

Featherstone (New Delhi: Sage, 1997) 75.

5. Georg Lukacs, The Theory of Novel (1920; London: Merlin Press,

1971) 7. All quotations from the text in this section (2.3) are taken

from this edition. Page numbers in parentheses have been given in

the body of the text.

6. Fredrick Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton UP,

1971) 162.

7. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney

Livingstone (1968; New Delhi: Rupa, 1993) 112. All quotations

from the text in this section (2.4) are taken from this edition. Page

numbers in parentheses have been given in the body of the text.

8. Karl Marx, Selected Works, ed. David Mclellan (Oxford: GUP,

2001)99.

9. Ibid. 97.

10. Jameson, Marxism and Form 189.

146

11. Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley

Mitchell (1937; London: Merlin Press, 1962) 20. All quotations

from the text in this section (2.5) are taken from this edition. Page

numbers in parentheses have been given in the body of the text.

12. Georg Lukacs, Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and

Necke Mander (1957; London: Merlin Press, 1957) 37. All

quotations from the text in this section (2.6) are taken from this

edition. Page numbers in parentheses have been given in the body of

the text.

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