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Historical Novel

Jameson’s Precis, Marxism and Form

• Goethe, Scott, Balzac, Tolstoy
• Doesn’t agree with the condemnation of modernist literature that Lukacs will later claim on the basis of theses in this book
• Characters: typicality
  • “stand…for something larger and more meaningful than themselves, than their own isolated individual destinies” even though they do have “concrete individualities” (191)
• Historical novel judged by extent to which characters successfully typify a previous time
  • Jameson asserts that Lukacs’ goal here is the same as Marx/Engels’ first literary argument, against Lassalle’s play about 1848 German revolutionary Sickingen
    • Marx and Engels: his story isn’t a tragedy about a moral flaw, but instead about his failure to recognize the real social situation and failure to sympathize with concrete goals of the revolutionary peasantry
    • Lukacs also uses this criterion: did you choose the actual historical dilemma? does your character represent the real problem at hand?
• More About Types
  • Difficulty: not turning characters into boring allegories
    • Jameson: doesn’t mean you should have one character represent the bourgeois, one the aristocrat, one the proletarian, etc
  • For example, Lukacs notes that the grand historical figures (Napoleon, Galileo, etc) must have at most a temporary, secondary appearance, not at center of work, because that’s not how reality is experience by people!
  • Types “never a matter of photographic accuracy” (194)
    • For example, Balzac more powerfully represents social forces with his grotesque, romantic exaggerations than does Zola with his science and schemas
      • Photographic accuracy often just stereotypes, preconceived: too abstract, pretends to know everything objectively already; thus static
      • Zola is damned as just proving a thesis
    • Balzac understands that history is all about movement, change, never static, so he doesn’t create stereotypes
      • Instead, the character represents the entire historical moment, the conflict of forces (not allegory because the character doesn’t just equal one static “type” of person), not “one to one correlation” (195)
• Anti-Symbolism
  • Realism seen as “antisymbolic”
  • Symbolism is not realistic
    • Merely imposed on object by writer, which is silly because the writer is trying to make an entire world by himself
    • Gets us away from actual meaning of objects (social relations)
  • Symbolism is defeat: writer can’t represent meaning firsthand, but must have it at a distance, secondhand
    • You shouldn’t be this disconnected from reality: “This original meaningfulness of objects becomes visible only when their link with human labor and production is unconcealed. But in modern industrial civilization this link is hard to find: objects appear to live a life of their own.” (197)
  • Relevant examples of bad symbolism: Spoils of Poynton stuff; Dickens’ London; D H Lawrences’ landscapes
  • Jameson’s critique of Lukacs: L seems to suggest that the writer has had some freedom in determining symbolism if that symbolism is to be taken as arbitrary and misleading (wouldn’t it be more consistent to think that the author can’t “choose” the symbolism but will be “led” to a correct one by conditions)
    • Mirrors problem in Marxism itself: apparently revolution will come when it comes, but then again, how did Lenin make it happen by himself?
    • Also admits that Lukacs’ critique of modernism follows pattern of many conservative, reactionary critiques on whatever lit happens to be new (cf Hegel and Goethe’s reactions to Romanticism)
• Description
  • Symbolism is an example of this problem
  • Description = static way of looking at life
  • Description = replicates bourgeois philosophical objectivity
    • “description begins when external things are felt to be alienated from human activity” (201), “when even the human beings who inhabit these lifeless settings become themselves dehumanized, become lifeless tokens” (202)
    • could this be what’s wrong with James in Ivory Tower?
  • What It Ruins
    • Sense of conflicting forces: “individual confrontations” that show “some basic general truth of life” (200)
    • Faith in action: “vital relationship to action…has broken down” (201) because you just run to having tons and tons of description
  • Why You Run to It
    • Modern life seems bereft of events
    • Writers either create pseudoevents (such as having overblown, unrealistic conflicts or seeing conflict in terms of absolute good and evil; which are really just melodrama) or they abandon plot altogether
    • For example, it’s “bad” that Joyce should see the events of a day to stand in for life itself
• Critique of Modernism
  • As metaphysical, hence ahistorical
• Good Writers
  • Must be a part of their historical milieu, can’t be apart from it, must be engaged
    • “Flaubert is condemned by his historical situation to a life of monotonous tourism amid industrial monuments that mean nothing to him.” (204)
  • Not simplistic: Zola (think J’accuse) was “political,” and yet Balzac did do a better job showing life-forces
    • Zola merely did his homework (research, visits, notes), instead of living it
  • Good writers will have these forces of history working inside themselves (for example, Balzac’s continual buying and furnishing of houses with his latest finds, only to do it all over again, shows Jameson: he LIVES accumulation, I would conclude)

Problems

• I say that Lukacs constantly trying to impose strictures on writers pretends that writing is completely ahistorical. He tries to shut off the engine of time, despite all of his talking about historical times.
  • Historical realism was a genre that only could work at its own particular time.
  • As Jameson notes, Flaubert failed to understand the life of things b/c of his historical moment (204) whiles Balzac was lucky in his historical moment (204 as well). “depends on these privileged historical moments in which access to society as a totality may once again somehow be reinvented.” (205)
  • So what it amounts to is him recommend would-be writers to born at a certain moments and not others.
  • Only certain transitional moments in history allow such a perspective.
• How are books that are written about a time PRIOR to author supposed to reflect social whole in a meaningful way for present readers? I thought you wanted writers to talk about their own present, so how can backward-looking books really help the modern novelists? Seriously, the distance is what matters here, what creates the perspective on social totality!
  • His answer: a society must understand the reasons why it has fallen or decayed before it can become truly revolutionary: examination into its history leads to finding out the criteria for a “reasonable” society and hence to agitation for that state (200)
  • His answer: “the past to life as the prehistory of the present” (53)

The Historical Novel

• Drafted 1936-7
• Jameson’s intro
  • Calls Lukacs the most important 20th century Communist thinker
  • Most important and comprehensive example of a Marxist, dialectical literary criticism
  • Central job of any Marxist interp: show the connection of text and context
  • This book shows connection between creation of a new form (historical novel) and a new consciousness (of historicity)
    • Historical consciousness not an end in itself, but one step along the way of understanding forces behind historical moment
  • Frequent objections to Lukacs
    • Too moralizing
      • Jameson’s response: Leavis and Winters just as bad, and you don’t understand subtleties of dialectical thinking; you are just projecting your own moralizing tendencies on L
    • Stalinist (after all, L’s major works written in Moscow under Stalin; L gives some nice asides to Stalin)
      • Quote: “My party card is my entry-ticket to History.”
      • Jameson’s response: L’s works are coded, and when decoded, can be seen as critiques of Stalin’s socialist realism
  • For Lukacs, lit work is valuable when it can “open a totalizing and mapping access to society as a whole” (7), so that the judgment against a work is based on its exclusions
• Lukacs Goals
  • to show “the social basis of the divergence and convergence of genres, the rise and withering away of new elements of form within this complicated process of interaction” (14-5), to show rise, development, and decay of the genre according to changes in social form
  • “a preliminary contribution to both Marxist aesthetics and the materialistic treatment of literary history” (15)
  • A part of his anti-Fascism: historical novel genre used against fascism (the last section of his book deals with these works)
• Bad Books
  • Have abstract, generic historical background: take it for granted: naive
• Historical Novel Genre
  • Prehistory: Smollett and Fielding, who have particularity of social background
  • Populist, collective, not about the great men of history (instead we have anonymous “heroes”)
    • Follows Hegel’s assertion that art is for “the nation as a whole,” not just small sections of it, and that we need to see the present as connected chain-like, causally to past, “clear and accessible” says Hegel
    • Lukacs calls this a “living connection with the past” (53)
  • Biggest example: Sir Walter Scott: beginning with Waverley 1814 (genre as a whole started about when Napoleon is defeated)
    • Scott: “What Engels shows scientifically…this Scott portrays.” (57) and “what in Morgan, Marx and Engels was worked out and proved with theoretical and historical clarity, lives, moves and has its being poetically in the best historical novels of Scott.” (56)
    • Scott: history as “series of great crises” esp “revolutionary” ones
    • He “affirms the result” even while he “sees the endless field of ruin” (54): he is not romantic or elegiac: he likes them (ie the “past social formations”, but also admits “necessity” of their death, failure. He always defends progress even while seeing its dialectical conflict.
      • Thus, Scott’s identity as a petty aristocrat doesn’t manage to get in the way of realism, L notes, because Scott’s own personality had the “dialectical interpenetration” (54) of both views
  • Before around 1815, historical novels were only history as window-dressing: superficial, didn’t actually reflect the times (“artistically faithful image” with characters derived “from the historical peculiarities of the age” are what he wants 19)
  • Ends because of the revolutions of 1848, which are bourgeois facing proletariat, which prompt middle class to search for a form that won’t suggest that the masses should get the rights and privileges of the bourgeoisie: to contain its own universalism
    • After this time, becomes mere projection of present states and forces back onto the future (ex: Flaubert’s Salammbo) Or gets into “dead decorative spectacle” (ex: naturalism)
• Why Should This Dead Genre Matter Now?
  • Needs to be revitalized, updated for current needs
• Theses
  • “the entire development of literary forms, and here in particular the novel, is nothing more than a reflection of social development itself.” (140)
• The Event
  • Conflicts aren’t isolated but given context
  • Should aspire to condition of the Odyssey, in which “not a single circumstance depicted is mere circumstance, but a real event, the result of an action, the driving cause of a further encounter between the contending forces” (146)
• Objectivity
  • Scott is not nostalgic (doesn’t cry out for how awful the loss! but instead sees the necessity for loss) or cruel (he does recognize that what is lost did have some good qualities), but objective
  • “objectivity…only enhances the true poetry of the past”
  • For example, Scott uses middle-of-the-road heroes, not huge historical figures

More on Historical Novel

• Tries to strike bargain between formalism and politics
  • Parallels Stalinist clampdown on autonomous art forms and its refusal to allow experimentation outside of questions of social realities
  • How does he keep form in such a situation? Because form is not separable, not independent from life
  • History is also form.
• Vocab: uses “epic” as term for novel (even though the novel isn’t as good as the original Greek epic)
  • Lukacs’ three types: narrative (epic), dramatic, lyric
• Middle-of-road figure ensures that hero is “life itself and not the individual” (35)
  • Any mention of large world-historical figures can’t “neglect any of the complex, capillary factors of the development in the whole society” (127); any heroes should grow organically out of the social situation and therefore explain it
• Everyone is a part of politics in the modern world: mass experience of revolution
  • “see in history something which deeply affects their daily lives” (24): this is new in history, begins with Napoleonic Wars, which Lukacs describes as a kind of early world war where “the whole of Europe” is the “arena” of war (25), so all people can see war, see history
  • Napoleonic Wars stoked French nationalism, as well as nationalism of the countries France invaded: the result of Napoleon getting out of these territories is nationalism that means “real mass movements—inevitably conveyed a sense and experience of history to broad masses” (25)
  • This nationalism leads to interest, awareness of national history (some are progressive, some not, but still, similar historicity)
• Other ways to fan the flame of historicity
  • Theorists of capitalism develop “notion of Capitalism as a definite, historical era of human development” right after fall of Napoleon too
    • L’s example: Sismondi, French economist who developed theories of economic cycles and anticipated Keyne’s aggregate economics; he also worked on French and Italian history
  • Reactionary pseudohistories that say national histories develop “organically” and thus shouldn’t be riven with silly revolutions
    • Ex: Chateaubriand’s romanticization of Middle Ages peasantry
  • People begin to look to future, ex: Fourier
• Hegel: provides a way to justify French revolution: history as series of conflicts
  • Revolution, not just evolution, because of change from quantity into quality
  • “total life of humanity as a great historical progress” (29)
  • Lukacs’ problem w/it is that Hegel seems to think that all revolution is behind us now: was necessary, but now we can succeed by evolution alone
• Challege of 1848 Revolutions: you must now affirm the necessity of revolution or become capitalist apologist (30), like Carlyle
• Scott
  • Neither read Hegel nor could have understood Hegel; doesn’t know enough about present to write about present
  • His petty aristocratic biography could not have created his “truly relastic mastery…in conflict with their personal views and prejudices”
  • He did however read lots of 18th c realistic novels esp English
    • Why English? England was post-revolutionary culture long before France, Germany, he reminds us, had already had its bourgeois revolution in 17th c, which was quite stormy and had its big or small, successful or not violent conflicts
      • Because it already had its stormy stuff, the 19th century was relatively stable, gave them time to develop their epic form, the novel
  • Middle View: didn’t just indict industrialism or praise it; he was part of social class that was diminished by industrial development; yet he saw that the conflict of 2 sides always landed in a “middle way” (cf Wars of Roses leading to Tudor family; Cromwell versus Glorious Revolution coming into parliamentary monarchy)
    • Chose rather boring, mediocre English heroes, decent but not passionate: this middle hero is “clearest proof of Scott’s exceptional and revolutionary epic gifts” (33) b/c doesn’t retreat into romanticism (romanticism sees no connex between past and present, glorifies individual)
      • Sure, his historical subject is romantic, but his treatment of it is not through “his capacity to give living human embodiment to historical-scoial types” (35) so that the individual never overshadows the event: life is the real hero
    • Boring hero allows the person to “represent social trends and historical forces” (34)
      • Whereas bad art would have (L is describing Burckhardt’s Renaissance) “a freely roaming subjectivity that can fasten where and how it likes” (182), leaving a “grandeur” that is merely “pictorial,” having no power b/c real history has been drained out of it
• Pushkin, Stendhal also good realist writers; Pushkin and Manzoni are good historical realists
  • This historical view allows him to conceive of a future (32), though he doesn’t ever talk about the present (33) (I find this incoherent)
• What does Lukacs want authors to do?
  • Literary forms “cannot stand higher than the society which brought them forth” (348), but instead show the “deepest human laws, problems and contradictions of an epoch”
  • Not to look at future b/c that ignores the forces at work now, thus could impede progress
  • Not to create a “simple renaissance” of classic historical novels but instead to show “negation of a negation” (350)
    • Because we are alone the line of historical development, after all
    • We need to keep the laws that these books showed us and “translate” them for our time (249) though he doesn’t seem to give us any indication how to do that
    • Above all, don’t separate your characters from the “real driving forces of an epoch” (179)
• “Not essential for an author to portray significant people in significant situations” (127)
  • Anyone anywhere can demonstrate forces
• Personality and private crisis of the hero MUST illustrate larger social collisions
• 63, 83: “necessary anachronism:” Scott characters can characterize their problems with greater clarity (ie get the benefit of Scott’s own historical distance) to ensure communication b/c it’s written to tell the history OF the present, not mere antiquarianism
  • As long as the content is correct, it’s fine if expression seems to “outstrip” the actual level of consciousness they would’ve had
  • Balzac shows this: “present as history” that is, how the present is necessary because of our past
• Emphasizes transitional moments in history (35)
• Genres arise out of particular historical moments
• Key words: concreteness, necessity, totality, typicality

Miscellany

• Quoting Marx: “The difference between the personal individual and the class individual, the accidental character of the individual’s conditions of life makes its appearance only with the appearance of the class which itself is a product of the bourgeoisie.” (qtd 141)
  • Private v public persona is product of division of labor, which becomes independent from social relations
  • People become separate parts: individuality and class identity