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Theory Novel

About Lukacs

• Believed that Marxism has to build up from bourgeois culture, not tear it away
  • He’s not a good figure to look for to talk about Marxism and modernism: he believed that modernism was an enemy to the realism that helped the Revolution, and his ties to bourgeois culture make Marxism sound boring to modernism
• Modernism inimical to setting up the human norms we need, so it’s an enemy to humanism
• “Textual chaos of modernism writing is not a response to, but an accurate reflection of, capitalist society” (Eysteinnson 141)
• Believed it was still possible to use realism now for “presenting a totalized reflection of society” (Eysteinnson 186) “in all its contradictions” (188)
  • “Critical realism” of folks like Mann, whom he loves, versus the “decadent avant-garde of folks like Kafka, whom he hates
    • (Though Mann thought of himself as going away from realism through his use of parody, which he thought made him close to Joyce)
• Lack of social awareness when crafting the perspective is responsible for this increased awareness of consciousness

Lucaks

• Founder of Western Marxism
• Hungarian revolutionary
  • Involved in various governments and revolutions by communists/socialists
• Born to Jewish family, Budapest, 1885 (d. 1971)
• Stages (which Jameson denies)
  • Until 1917, familiar with socialist circles, anarchists (read Sorel) liked modernism; in Budapest
    • Meets Simmel, Weber, Bloch, George while spending time in Berlin
    • Kantian phase yields to Hegelian phase
    • Writes Theory of the Novel, 1914-5 which is published later (1920)
  • Russian Revolution leads him to find Marxism
    • Joins Communist Party, 1918, becomes quite active politically (ie, orders death of 9 people)
    • Meets the Mann brothers (after one revolution makes him have to flee)
  • Stalinism
    • Height: 1930s-1940s
    • Theorist of realism: Balzac, Goethe, Russian stuff
    • Culminates 1955 The Historical Novel
  • “De-Stalinisation”
    • Late 1950s, starts to critique Stalin
    • On Critical Realism, Aesthetics
    • Gets back to Kant, but adds Marx to it
• Works
  • History and Class Consciousness (1923) (the major work)
    • First document of Western Marxism
      • Studies effects of class membership upon “mind’s capacity to apprehend external reality” (182 Marxism and Form)
      • Middle-class ideology refuses to “come to terms with the category of totality itself (Jameson compares this with Marx’s own critique of political economy, which is only about details and doesn’t fit them in a general schema)
    • Jameson: Lukacs is the first one to apply problem of philosophy (Kant’s transcendental ego; Hegel’s Absolute Spirit; both of which try to create totality) to social reality
      • Also the first one to see it as affiliated with class identity (ie, it’s a bourgeois failing)
    • Our relation to objects
      • Middle class: sees it as static, not in terms of production or use
      • See them through contemplation rather than through history: thus, no possibility of change
      • Also illustrates link of Kantian problems with Lukacs social analysis: middle class can’t see the source of what’s going on, the underpinning, just as Kant says we can understand everything except things-in-themselves, the conditions of thought itself (Jameson: capitalism is “first thing-in-itself” 186)
      • (Further note: Hegel tries to solve this problem by showing dialectic of subject and object
    • Proletarian consciousness
      • Provides solution for the limitations of bourgeois consciousness
      • Don’t see world in static fashion b/c don’t have the leisure to do so
      • His alienation prevents him to see anything else as an object: he himself knows he’s an object
      • Yet his self-consciousness, when it does come, is privileged: it is self-consciousness of the object, so the proletarian will understand the nature of capitalism better then bourgeois
      • Lukacs: “his consciousness is the self-consciousness of merchandise itself…the revelation to consciousness of capitalist society based on commodity production and exchange” (187)
      • Because we see the world through a model of commodities, this view is significant
    • Understanding Commodities
      • Bourgeois: static object without history: timeless and natural; frozen, reified
      • Proletariat: as in a process of change, production (they help making it, so see interrelationships, causal chains, tools and raw material coming together): melts the reification
    • Why does it matter? Well, the way to go is change: praxis, action; the realm of the proletariat
      • Thing-in-itself now seen as a mystification, as a silly, wrong abstraction
      • Real world is process, becoming
      • Now we see world as result of social process, not of nature: that consciousness is created by mode of production, and that the one we need (prol) is the true mover and shaker of the world (the worker)
    • Vision of the World
      • Instead of a static picture, you have “forces at work within the present, a dissolving of the reified surface o the present into a coexistence of various and conflicting historical tendencies, a translation of immobile objects into acts and potential acts and into consequences of acts.” (189 Marxism and Form) (how does this relate to symbolism?)
      • Jameson notes that this seems to describe novels more than knowledge (190), esp b/c Lukacs always liked narration as the combination of subject and object, “neutralizing” them: not about things-in-themselves or about just people, but somewhere in between
    • Elaborates on ideology, reification, class consciousness, false consciousness, alienation
      • Reification: social relations are objectified due to commodity culture, so class consciousness is prevented
    • Marxism will always struggle with its dialectical opponents, revisionism and utopianism
    • Take up Lenin’s ideas even better than Lenin did
      • ie, follow Marx’s methods, not any of his actual theses: “scientific” method, not a “sacred” book
      • but realize that “scientific” means you have to see that objectivity is the result of an historical period, so many “scientific” laws are not laws at all, for example political economy
    • “Only when the core of existence stands revealed as a social process can existence be seen as the product, albeit the hitherto unconscious product, of human activity”
      • Romantic bourgeois “individual” is just ideology: truth is social
  • “Realism in the Balance” 1938
    • Meant to rail against Expressionists, praise Gorky, Mann, Rolland
    • Rejects the “ism” history of modern art (naturalism, symbolism, impressionism, Surrealism)
      • Shouldn’t oppose history of art (ie its forms in history), but rather the social totality
    • What’s wrong with Modernism?
      • Too immediate, subjective, and abstract, rather than mediated, objective, and concrete
      • They don’t obey the Marxist command that capitalism creates social totality (capitalism “closed integration”)
      • They only show isolated piece of life
      • Their emphasis on subjectivity is too immediate, doesn’t reflect social truth: they are superficial
    • What’s wrong with subjectivity?
      • It’s too much a part of bougeois ideology: life is so inculcated with capitalism that you must distance yourself from immediacy to sift out what is ideology and what is objective
      • Example: money, which looks like a phenomenon of its own, but really should be understood within network of transactions, hence social relations
    • What should they be doing?
      • Representing appearance (subjective, immediate experience) as product of essence (social totality of modern capitalist world)
      • Scrutinize reality to find the deeper, hidden truths, then embody those in a subjective narrative: good narrative reflects the whole
      • Represent experience of the masses
    • Modernists don’t represent social reality but instead they create a “home-made model of the world.”
      • Home work?
  • “Kafka or Thomas Mann?”
    • Hint: Mann
    • Kafka
      • Formal innovations (also Beckett, Joyce) not good
    • Mann
      • Part of realist tradition, whose heros are Balzac and Scott
      • Critical of bourgeoisie

Preface to Theory of the Novel

• T of the N written as response to outbreak of WWI
  • Very anti-war: “Who is to save us from Western civilization?”
  • His mood: utter despair
• Original Form
  • Meant to be “series of dialogues” modeled on the Decameron, this time avoiding war rather than the plague
• Influences
  • He was really into Simmel, Weber, Dilthey, which he calls “intellectual sciences” school
    • Says that this book is basically a book of that school (he’s embarrassed about it now)
    • This school was not objective, didn’t escape positivism
      • Find few characteristics, synthesize a concept, generalize it wildly to create an overall theory
  • Sorel: L takes up his use of Fichte’s pessimism (F: “the age of absolute sinfulness”)
  • Kierkegaard: says that K was in the air during the 20s, but that he was into K before he was fashionable
    • K’s influence is in the irrationalism part
    • “Romantic anti-capitalism” = the basis of the irrational Marx strain
      • ie Carlyle esp Past and Present, which he calls “preliminary form of socialist critique” (19)
      • Cobbett
      • They protested against “horrors and barbarities” of early capitalism
      • Seen in Mann, “Meditations of an Unpolitical Man”
    • Yet Lukacs separates himself and T of the N from his strain; merely sympathetic, possibly conservative
  • Vico
    • Human knowledge should not focus on nature, but instead on the man-made world (the social)
• Purpose
  • “subversive” though utopian
  • Proving that “man can spring from the disintegration of capitalism and the destruction…of the lifeless and life-denying social and economic categories” (20)
  • “Fusion of ‘left’ ethics and ‘right’ epistemology” (latter: “traditional-conventional exegesis of reality”), which he says happens in Bloch, Benjamin, and early Adorno, and later in Sartre
    • Admits that it’s outdated now
  • Today, what it’s good for: understanding “pre-history of the important ideologies of the 1920s and 1930s” (23)
• His Own Critique
  • He was being naively utopian (he wanted a new world, he admits)
    • Claims that lots of people were also being that way in the 20s (only later would such an impulse towards social reform get reactionary)
  • Didn’t have real method (as Jameson notes in M and F, he needed Marxism)
  • Too abstract b/c cut off from social and historical life
• Notes that he uses Bergson’s duree in this book (even before he read Proust or Joyce)
• “At least it was Hegelian!”
  • He celebrates it b/c it was a move against “flat rationalism” of Kant and positivism
    • Notes that moving from Kant/positivism was a step towards the “irrational” (15), citing Simmel as an example
  • Says he’s the first to apply Hegel to aesthetics (cf his history of lit), “general dialectic of literary genres”
• Art
  • “reality no longer constitutes a favourable soil for art….the central problem of the novel is the fact that art has to write off the closed and total forms whcih stem from a rounded totality of being” (17)
    • As the book itself says, “there is no longer any spontaneous totality of being” (qtd 18)
• Fight! Fight!
  • Gives blame to Bloch for their disagreement, saying he “invoked” this “grotesque situation” by making a “polemic” against Lukacs
• Grand Hotel Abyss
  • Originally appears in discussion of Schopenhauer, “The Destruction of Reason”
  • Here, applies it to Adorno and other German thinkers
  • “a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.”

Theory of the Novel

• Wesen (essence, meaningfulness) versus Life (existence)
  • As the two terms for a basis of a dialectic of art
• Example: Greek literary history
  • 1) Epic
    • The two elements are together, unified
    • Concrete, immanent
    • Daily life is comprehensible
    • Ex: narrative
  • 2) Tragedy
    • The two elements oppose each other
    • At the crisis, the hero forces them to come together, but at the cost of his/her life
    • Ex: drama (not continuous, but discrete scenes)
  • 3) Platonic philosophy
    • Retreat into the first form
    • Not privileged (pure thought never has “absolute value as a privileged means of access to reality” 171 Jameson, M and F)
    • Meaning only abstract/intellectual
    • No room for daily life
• L thinks the novel strives to be an epic
  • Novel tries to reconcile the two domains, always in a new way (“must be reinvented at every moment of its development” b/c it depends on sustained disconnection of hero from society 172)
  • This won’t actually happen until real world has been changed
  • True epic no longer possible, but realist novel comes close
    • Ex: hero always isolated, solitary, never connected to social world unproblematically
      • Each novel must “fail” to reconcile hero b/c then the excuse for the novel (dislocation of subject from social world) disappears
    • Hero can’t reconcile the two, but the author in effect DOES solve it, does create unity
      • “the novelist, who in telling the story of failure succeeds” (Jaesmon 173): artistic creation itself reconciles the two, “matter and spirit”
      • Thus, narration itself is the only place for Utopian thought to be seen correctly b/c narrative gives the thought concreteness
• Exception: the creation of the “remembering hero” who does perceive a retrospective unity (Flaubert’s Education Sentimentale)
  • This is where Bergson comes in: hero experiences the flow of time (in which loss happens, events occur) AND duration (unity wherein nothing is lost, all is connected; it is the basis of narrative itself)
• Novel must be created anew each time, no “preconceived guidelines” to follow
• Problems with T of the N, as explained by Jameson
  • L talking about hero always wanting to find a home violates his dictum that novel has no preconceived guidelines
    • Why is that a problem? I say b/c it denies historicity of narratives, ie creates a timelessness out of all narrative
  • Silly inaccurate Greek history makes the rest of it seem silly by reflection
  • Weakness of accepting a blank Hegelian framework
    • Doesn’t actually work out (L admits it; for example by saying that Flaubert is only example of one of his three principal genres)
• In the secular age, after death of God, the novel replaced the epic as the correct mode of cultural production.
  • Very prescriptive, saying this is the genre you should write in, esp against the “entertainment novel” which is “meaningless”
  • Wanted progressive society shown in novels: where you have in a totalized social, political, and economic context the workings of the contradictions of capitalism moving towards utopia
  • It can critique society now or point to a new answer
  • Naturalism bad, too concerned w/sensuous detail (Zola, I’m looking at you), a kind of aestheticism

• Random
  • All of these themes help me realize why Veblen’s important
    • See the Prince and Charlotte as proletarians, as objects
    • Veblen’s concepts of servitude in function as vicarious leiure or vicarious consumption can be interpreted as an historically tinged attempt to come to terms with reification; authors use the “service” model of understanding the worker because that’s what they’re used to and can understand historically, that is, something they’re familiar with and can interpret more freely and objectively than directly analyzing industry
    • Reified folks in novels about leisure class represent thought about industrial organization in a funny way, unintentionally