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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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
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- '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
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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
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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
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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
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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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