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Realism in Our Time
With a new introduction by Dr Gary Day, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK An argument for literary realism as opposed to modernism, contrasting Mann and Kafka. The book also argues for socialist as opposed to critical realism in literature.
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First published January 1, 1967
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About the author
György Lukács
452 books403 followersGyörgy Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian and critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideological orthodoxy of the Soviet Union. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.
His literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture as part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.
His literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture as part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.
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May 10, 2017
I have always been attracted to the idea that art was more than about taste. Tabooed by postmodernism, which understands art and its appreciation to be wholly contingent social constructs serving various and sundry vested interests, this intuition that art could be not merely pleasing or instrumental but actually true has the allure of the illicit. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth writes contemptuously of
Can I really believe this? I would have to believe in some prior security for truth—God is the most popular—to believe that art could body forth reality and not someone's or some group's self-serving notion of what reality is. In other words, I find the above as untenable and intolerable as you do, ridden with metaphysics and implicitly imperial. But I am, as I said, attracted to it. It has for me the forbidden, almost erotic glow exhibited by many forbidden ideas, often for no better reason than because they are forbidden, and sometimes for good reason. This is the basis of my long dalliance with the literary criticism of Georg Lukács, which I was reminded of when I added the early Lukács to my personal canon; but it was not necessarily only the early Lukács that exerted a certain fascination for me. My joke in graduate school was, "Lukács is my Heidegger." In other words, while all the other theory boys were worrying over their affinity for the Nazi philosopher, I—who found and find Heidegger disagreeable-to-incomprehensible, his vatic abstractions and woodland divagations totally at odds with my urban, novelistic sensibility—was worrying over my affinity for the Stalinist critic.
One of the ironies of the last century is that the defense of art as truth—which will scan to most younger western readers today as a conservative or reactionary position—was most ardently defended by Marxist critics, none more than Lukács in his later work, after he had abandoned the revolutionary romanticism of his early criticism and philosophy. Without the "right-wing anti-capitalism" (Lukács's own later term of self-reproach) of The Theory of the Novel and perhaps even History and Class Consciousness, the Western Marxism of Benjamin and Adorno would not have been possible. But Benjamin's and Adorno's negative dialectic, their insistence that wholeness can only be intuited through the inspection of ruins, their identification of culture as both the flower of and the justification for oppression, would be abandoned in the name of progressive and humanist optimism by the older Lukács.
If modernist Marxists like Adorno and Benjamin saw art as the photo negative of truth, the classical Marxist Lukács, in his hatred of modernism, believed art could be the photograph itself—or, to vary the metaphor and allude to the classics, "a mirror up to nature." Communist criticism in the middle of the twentieth century inherited the traditional aesthetic canons of western civilization; liberal and fascist aesthetics, intersecting at any number of points from Nietzsche and Wilde to Sontag and de Man, were far more revolutionary in their sundering of art and truth.
The Meaning of Contemporary Realism was written in the mid-1950s. The Stalinist era had ended, and Lukács, who had been a Communist loyalist since the 1930s, finally felt free to criticize both Stalin and socialist realism as fatally out of touch with the realities of Soviet life. The purpose of the book is twofold, largely because it is addressed to both Western and Eastern audiences.
For the Westerner, Lukács arraigns literary modernism as, at best, an evasion of history or, at worst, an adjunct of fascism or nuclear war (Lukács argues in this book that the peace movement must take precedence over the struggle of the world proletariat if World War III is to be avoided; this seems to be the main reason for his overture to Western European audiences). Modernist literature, he claims, upholds a pessimistic worldview, promotes a distorted and ahistorical sense of time, champions the morbid and eccentric at the expense of the typical, and makes artistic form—rather than truth or progress—an end in itself. Whether the meaningless subjectivism of Joyce and Faulkner or the nihilistic surrealism of Kafka or Beckett, modernism enervates the historical subject just when he should be readying for historical struggle toward, first, peace, and second, communism. His case to the Eastern audience can be put more shortly: Lukács stresses that socialist realism, with its utopian fantasias of unreal Communist achievement, is no less vitiating to true progressives than is modernism; not unlike Kafka, socialist realism also puts a subjective fantasy in place of reality.
Against these dominant but decadent aesthetics of the Western and Eastern blocs, Lukács champions "critical realism"—the attempt to capture the complexity of real social life through the portrayal of socially typical protagonists engaged in dynamic struggles. That the great critical realists were bourgeois or even aristocratic—his heroes are Balzac, Tolstoy, and Mann—is no obstacle, provided the bourgeois novelist understands that socialism is the future, at least in the sense that it is the logical, even if it will not be the phenomenal, outcome of the class struggle.
Lukács's twentieth-century canon will look absurd to the contemporary reader—to prefer Mann to Kafka is arguable, but to elevate Sinclair Lewis over Joyce is, ultimately, not. Admirers of Joyce and Kafka will boggle at Lukács's insensitivity to their political insight; admirers of Balzac, Tolstoy, and Mann will laugh at his inability to recognize their own perversity.
My question, though, is the following: are we as far from Lukács as we might think we are when turning his pages, laden as they are with a largely bygone and rebarbative jargon?
Sontag, in her brisk review of this very book when it was published in the U.S. in the early 1960s, understood the stakes well; to the review she appended this more sweepingly dismissive postscript in Against Interpretation:
You might say: To scrutinize aesthetic objects as political, to insist that all art is propaganda and that the personal is the political, is unavoidably to advance a totalitarian position. To politicize everything is to designate everything as subject to centralized control. (This is, among other things, what it means to "descend from Hegel and Marx," as the left does. Reading Lukács, I am fascinated to recognize how many words are unproblematically circulated in liberal discourse today, such as "humanist" and "progressive" and "oppression," that have their proximate origin in the lexicon of Communist propaganda.)
To this, the political critic will reply that the warrant for this anti-liberal totalization of art is clear enough: liberalism leaves so many unfree, perhaps as the condition of its own possibility, that the freedom it does provide is either a sham or the ethically unjustified enjoyment of an elite class. Lukács defines freedom very differently from the liberal:
Am I saying that contemporary political critics should shut their Rorty and open their Lukács? Only for the sake of their intellectual consistency, and not because I want to disseminate Communist ideals. For myself, reading this book was enough to glut my illicit appetite for now. I return to my defense of art's autonomy, which is either the effect or, more radically, the cause of the individual's autonomy—even if I too have days where my answer to Lukács's question, "Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann?" is for the latter. (Was I the only person lured to Marxism by a preference for the classics?) One virtue of individualism, though, is that it always allows you to reply to a question like that not with an answer but with a question of your own: who says I have to choose?
those who will converse with us as gravely about a taste for Poetry, as they express it, as if it were a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry. Aristotle, I have been told, has said, that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: it is so: its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony, which gives competence and confidence to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal. Poetry is the image of man and nature.The aesthetic is often attacked in the name of morality, but "morality," in its association with moeurs and mores—local, relative, and even provincial customs—is just another way of saying "taste." Victorian morality proscribed unpunished adultery; ours proscribes unpunished racism. Morality's doubles in today's critical discourse are compassion or empathy, but these are less reliable even than taste, as they are little better than moods—capricious, evanescent, blown hither and yon by every propagandist with a tearjerking photo or a few resonant phrases. Ethics and politics are higher than morals, which is to say also that principle is superior to compassion. One point of aesthetics, so Wordsworth implies above, is to bring principle (or truth) alive in the heart through passion. If art's passionate incarnation of truth is made subject to the merely moral, is put to the test of making us feel better about each other or—what is actually being asked for in most moralistic criticism today—feel pity for our inferiors, then its actual service in bringing our human emotion into accord with the truth will be obviated. To make art about morality, no less than making it about taste, is to cleave truth from passion.
Can I really believe this? I would have to believe in some prior security for truth—God is the most popular—to believe that art could body forth reality and not someone's or some group's self-serving notion of what reality is. In other words, I find the above as untenable and intolerable as you do, ridden with metaphysics and implicitly imperial. But I am, as I said, attracted to it. It has for me the forbidden, almost erotic glow exhibited by many forbidden ideas, often for no better reason than because they are forbidden, and sometimes for good reason. This is the basis of my long dalliance with the literary criticism of Georg Lukács, which I was reminded of when I added the early Lukács to my personal canon; but it was not necessarily only the early Lukács that exerted a certain fascination for me. My joke in graduate school was, "Lukács is my Heidegger." In other words, while all the other theory boys were worrying over their affinity for the Nazi philosopher, I—who found and find Heidegger disagreeable-to-incomprehensible, his vatic abstractions and woodland divagations totally at odds with my urban, novelistic sensibility—was worrying over my affinity for the Stalinist critic.
One of the ironies of the last century is that the defense of art as truth—which will scan to most younger western readers today as a conservative or reactionary position—was most ardently defended by Marxist critics, none more than Lukács in his later work, after he had abandoned the revolutionary romanticism of his early criticism and philosophy. Without the "right-wing anti-capitalism" (Lukács's own later term of self-reproach) of The Theory of the Novel and perhaps even History and Class Consciousness, the Western Marxism of Benjamin and Adorno would not have been possible. But Benjamin's and Adorno's negative dialectic, their insistence that wholeness can only be intuited through the inspection of ruins, their identification of culture as both the flower of and the justification for oppression, would be abandoned in the name of progressive and humanist optimism by the older Lukács.
If modernist Marxists like Adorno and Benjamin saw art as the photo negative of truth, the classical Marxist Lukács, in his hatred of modernism, believed art could be the photograph itself—or, to vary the metaphor and allude to the classics, "a mirror up to nature." Communist criticism in the middle of the twentieth century inherited the traditional aesthetic canons of western civilization; liberal and fascist aesthetics, intersecting at any number of points from Nietzsche and Wilde to Sontag and de Man, were far more revolutionary in their sundering of art and truth.
The Meaning of Contemporary Realism was written in the mid-1950s. The Stalinist era had ended, and Lukács, who had been a Communist loyalist since the 1930s, finally felt free to criticize both Stalin and socialist realism as fatally out of touch with the realities of Soviet life. The purpose of the book is twofold, largely because it is addressed to both Western and Eastern audiences.
For the Westerner, Lukács arraigns literary modernism as, at best, an evasion of history or, at worst, an adjunct of fascism or nuclear war (Lukács argues in this book that the peace movement must take precedence over the struggle of the world proletariat if World War III is to be avoided; this seems to be the main reason for his overture to Western European audiences). Modernist literature, he claims, upholds a pessimistic worldview, promotes a distorted and ahistorical sense of time, champions the morbid and eccentric at the expense of the typical, and makes artistic form—rather than truth or progress—an end in itself. Whether the meaningless subjectivism of Joyce and Faulkner or the nihilistic surrealism of Kafka or Beckett, modernism enervates the historical subject just when he should be readying for historical struggle toward, first, peace, and second, communism. His case to the Eastern audience can be put more shortly: Lukács stresses that socialist realism, with its utopian fantasias of unreal Communist achievement, is no less vitiating to true progressives than is modernism; not unlike Kafka, socialist realism also puts a subjective fantasy in place of reality.
Against these dominant but decadent aesthetics of the Western and Eastern blocs, Lukács champions "critical realism"—the attempt to capture the complexity of real social life through the portrayal of socially typical protagonists engaged in dynamic struggles. That the great critical realists were bourgeois or even aristocratic—his heroes are Balzac, Tolstoy, and Mann—is no obstacle, provided the bourgeois novelist understands that socialism is the future, at least in the sense that it is the logical, even if it will not be the phenomenal, outcome of the class struggle.
Lukács's twentieth-century canon will look absurd to the contemporary reader—to prefer Mann to Kafka is arguable, but to elevate Sinclair Lewis over Joyce is, ultimately, not. Admirers of Joyce and Kafka will boggle at Lukács's insensitivity to their political insight; admirers of Balzac, Tolstoy, and Mann will laugh at his inability to recognize their own perversity.
My question, though, is the following: are we as far from Lukács as we might think we are when turning his pages, laden as they are with a largely bygone and rebarbative jargon?
Sontag, in her brisk review of this very book when it was published in the U.S. in the early 1960s, understood the stakes well; to the review she appended this more sweepingly dismissive postscript in Against Interpretation:
What all the culture critics who descend from Hegel and Marx have been unwilling to admit is the notion of art as autonomous (not merely historically interpretable) form. And since the peculiar spirit which animates the modern movements in the arts is based on, precisely, the rediscovery of the power (including the emotional power) of the formal properties of art, these critics are poorly situated to come to sympathetic terms with modern works of art, except through their "content." Even form is viewed by the historicist critics as a kind of content.But we have just been informed, as I was saying, that art as autonomous form is an idea that has been abandoned and discredited. Freedom in the liberal sense—the individual's freedom from organized social interference—is the political premise of apolitical, i.e., autonomous art.
You might say: To scrutinize aesthetic objects as political, to insist that all art is propaganda and that the personal is the political, is unavoidably to advance a totalitarian position. To politicize everything is to designate everything as subject to centralized control. (This is, among other things, what it means to "descend from Hegel and Marx," as the left does. Reading Lukács, I am fascinated to recognize how many words are unproblematically circulated in liberal discourse today, such as "humanist" and "progressive" and "oppression," that have their proximate origin in the lexicon of Communist propaganda.)
To this, the political critic will reply that the warrant for this anti-liberal totalization of art is clear enough: liberalism leaves so many unfree, perhaps as the condition of its own possibility, that the freedom it does provide is either a sham or the ethically unjustified enjoyment of an elite class. Lukács defines freedom very differently from the liberal:
'[F]reedom' [is] understood here, of course, as conscious acceptance of historical necessity—a necessity which subsumes much that is apparently arbitrary.It follows logically from this that the purpose of art, for Lukács as for Wordsworth and Aristotle, is not to be free but to provide images of the necessity to which we are subject, so that we may accede to it. On the nature of this necessity, they differed; my point is their shared conception of the purpose of art. This is what it means for art to be about more than taste; it has to be about knowledge or faith or else a certainty of the truth that the facts portend, which makes knowledge and faith indivisible. Call it God or History, it helps you write your plot and tells you the hero is. That art could have no purpose, no plot, no hero, was once a new idea and is now considered a superseded one. But so far, as I have said above, it has only been superseded—admittedly, at times, supremely intelligently and very movingly—by appeals to moral judgment, itself as arbitrary as autonomous aesthetic criteria.
Am I saying that contemporary political critics should shut their Rorty and open their Lukács? Only for the sake of their intellectual consistency, and not because I want to disseminate Communist ideals. For myself, reading this book was enough to glut my illicit appetite for now. I return to my defense of art's autonomy, which is either the effect or, more radically, the cause of the individual's autonomy—even if I too have days where my answer to Lukács's question, "Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann?" is for the latter. (Was I the only person lured to Marxism by a preference for the classics?) One virtue of individualism, though, is that it always allows you to reply to a question like that not with an answer but with a question of your own: who says I have to choose?
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July 25, 2025A short volume constituted by three continuous essays on the question of "realism" and "modernism" and their relative aesthetic credits and values.
At its heart Lukács provides a much more subtle argument than the one I had remembered, though this subtlety generally only lasts for the first two essays. The last essay, on socialist and critical realism, is rather weak and outdated, though it still introduces some interesting notions (e.g. "the typical" or das Typisch most importantly).
The question is for Lukács, being a socialist, which of the two forms of literature best represent reality? Which best interrogate the truth of the social whole, bring it out, make it an object of contemplation for the reader? Implicitly, which form of literature contributes to the production of a correct class-consciousness? For him, it is realism that does this over the modernism of, say, Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, etc.
His treatment of Beckett and Joyce is notoriously tortured, though I think his treatment of Kafka, and the depth of his engagement, shores up genuine points of interest which he revisits later. It seems to me his definition of realism is so wide as to allow the possibility of a re-reading of Kafka as a "realist" in his conception.
The notions of totality, mediations, "the typical" etc., are all introduced in support of his arguments. In brief, the realist work is that work which presents the social totality typically (briefly, a detail that represents the whole authentically) and allows for the contemplation and interrogation of mediations by the auditors of the work. The realist accepts that there is a reality to be represented, that there is a truth, and that it is historically conditioned. For Lukács the realist is akin to a scientist who observes all sides and qualities of an object and can observe its conditionedness and tendencies. This is the realist perspective.
The modernist perspective is one which is essentially ahistorical. Lukács identifies the notion of allegory, drawing on Benjamin, as a primary way in which the modernist presents the world. It is full of details substitutable for eachother, things cannot be fixed in a totality, and hanging over this is a cloud of isolation, subjectivism, and existential angst. This notion of angst as being made fundamental to much of modernist literature, presenting a static endlessly substitutable world (e.g. Kafka's die Verwandlung, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, etc) is reminiscent of comments made by Adorno in Negative Dialectics, although ironically purposed against many of the literary greats Adorno admires.
The realist is also distinguished in two camps. The critical and the socialist. The former sees the contradictions of the social whole as contradictions felt internally that is, in Mann's work contradictions are embodied in the personalities and interactions of the bourgeois. For Lukács, the critical realist is condemned to view the social tendency toward socialism merely from the outside. The socialist realist, however, views it from the inside, and can thus present the tendency in the social whole from the inside. Thus, says Lukács, yields the difference between a Mann and Sinclair from Gorky etc.
Much of this ends up being quite interesting reading actually. Most importantly, the strange reluctance of Lukács to dismiss Kafka which he seems to later regret. This is, however, marred by the historical stain of the failure of the Soviets. It makes much of the talk about socialist historical tendencies seem rather anaemic. Further, the notion of das Typisch needs work.
In sum, it's not the work of dogma Adorno made it out to be, nor is it simply an uncomplicated orthodox Marxist treatment of literature. His favouring of the boring socialist realists is strained, and it is for this exact reason the text needs re-reading. Lukács had more complicated things to say than he is given credit for.
At its heart Lukács provides a much more subtle argument than the one I had remembered, though this subtlety generally only lasts for the first two essays. The last essay, on socialist and critical realism, is rather weak and outdated, though it still introduces some interesting notions (e.g. "the typical" or das Typisch most importantly).
The question is for Lukács, being a socialist, which of the two forms of literature best represent reality? Which best interrogate the truth of the social whole, bring it out, make it an object of contemplation for the reader? Implicitly, which form of literature contributes to the production of a correct class-consciousness? For him, it is realism that does this over the modernism of, say, Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, etc.
His treatment of Beckett and Joyce is notoriously tortured, though I think his treatment of Kafka, and the depth of his engagement, shores up genuine points of interest which he revisits later. It seems to me his definition of realism is so wide as to allow the possibility of a re-reading of Kafka as a "realist" in his conception.
The notions of totality, mediations, "the typical" etc., are all introduced in support of his arguments. In brief, the realist work is that work which presents the social totality typically (briefly, a detail that represents the whole authentically) and allows for the contemplation and interrogation of mediations by the auditors of the work. The realist accepts that there is a reality to be represented, that there is a truth, and that it is historically conditioned. For Lukács the realist is akin to a scientist who observes all sides and qualities of an object and can observe its conditionedness and tendencies. This is the realist perspective.
The modernist perspective is one which is essentially ahistorical. Lukács identifies the notion of allegory, drawing on Benjamin, as a primary way in which the modernist presents the world. It is full of details substitutable for eachother, things cannot be fixed in a totality, and hanging over this is a cloud of isolation, subjectivism, and existential angst. This notion of angst as being made fundamental to much of modernist literature, presenting a static endlessly substitutable world (e.g. Kafka's die Verwandlung, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, etc) is reminiscent of comments made by Adorno in Negative Dialectics, although ironically purposed against many of the literary greats Adorno admires.
The realist is also distinguished in two camps. The critical and the socialist. The former sees the contradictions of the social whole as contradictions felt internally that is, in Mann's work contradictions are embodied in the personalities and interactions of the bourgeois. For Lukács, the critical realist is condemned to view the social tendency toward socialism merely from the outside. The socialist realist, however, views it from the inside, and can thus present the tendency in the social whole from the inside. Thus, says Lukács, yields the difference between a Mann and Sinclair from Gorky etc.
Much of this ends up being quite interesting reading actually. Most importantly, the strange reluctance of Lukács to dismiss Kafka which he seems to later regret. This is, however, marred by the historical stain of the failure of the Soviets. It makes much of the talk about socialist historical tendencies seem rather anaemic. Further, the notion of das Typisch needs work.
In sum, it's not the work of dogma Adorno made it out to be, nor is it simply an uncomplicated orthodox Marxist treatment of literature. His favouring of the boring socialist realists is strained, and it is for this exact reason the text needs re-reading. Lukács had more complicated things to say than he is given credit for.
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May 8, 2021yeah, man, this is essential for the problems I'm trying to think through re: Beckett at the moment. I am thinking about the political stakes of non-referential aesthetics, which is perhaps another way of asking about the political valence of non-realist art (or, like, art that's not set in a particular identifiable time and place). Lukács, imo, falls into the same trap of reading Beckett as non- or apolitical as the existentialist philosophers whom Adorno blasts in "Trying to Understand Endgame"; that is, he reads Beckett as exploring or uncovering an essential "human condition" underlying our cultural and social practices. he (GL) reads Beckett as falling prey to a modernist ideology of individuality and ontologism, of adopting "perversity and idiocy as types of the condition humaine" (32).
Adorno's response to Lukács, which I suspect poses problems for the whole Deleuzian-Bergsonian "philosophical" uptake of Beckett's work, is that the decimated status of human subjectivity, the "return" to the Cartesian doubt-space in the late prose works, is not a reduction to the basic irreducible elements of human existence so much as a depiction of the outcome of a historical process. Adorno leaves me wanting more historical specificity; he talks about the bomb and the holocaust and, I presume, there is the standard culture industry stuff about the reification and degradation of human life underlying his assessment that bourgeois subjectivity has been destroyed—Old Reliable, in other words. but it's, imo, a very persuasive response to the Lukácsian assertion that "the literary representation of [concrete totality] implies a description of actual persons inhabiting a palpable, identifiable world" (24). we can simply say that Beckett's world, in which decrepit bodies crawl through the mud and murder each other with can openers for scraps of food, in fact is an identifiable world. hence the (hilarious) title of that work: How It Is.
I don't really want to put GL on blast here, though, because despite the fact that I disagree strongly with him about my two dads (Joyce and Beckett), I think his general account about the role of literary representation generally and the novel specifically in delineating the status of bourgeois subjectivity from Walter Scott to High Modernism is spot on, and totally essential reading for any Genuine Jamesonian like I hope one day to be. what this book will do for me is help me frame the terms of my essay on Beckett's non-referential aesthetics: specifically, by pointing out the danger of depoliticization in any high-formalist literary enterprise; by forcing me to think about how experimental fiction almost always runs the risk of getting into a headass game of "look at me" rather than thinking hard about How The World Is Changing.
Adorno's response to Lukács, which I suspect poses problems for the whole Deleuzian-Bergsonian "philosophical" uptake of Beckett's work, is that the decimated status of human subjectivity, the "return" to the Cartesian doubt-space in the late prose works, is not a reduction to the basic irreducible elements of human existence so much as a depiction of the outcome of a historical process. Adorno leaves me wanting more historical specificity; he talks about the bomb and the holocaust and, I presume, there is the standard culture industry stuff about the reification and degradation of human life underlying his assessment that bourgeois subjectivity has been destroyed—Old Reliable, in other words. but it's, imo, a very persuasive response to the Lukácsian assertion that "the literary representation of [concrete totality] implies a description of actual persons inhabiting a palpable, identifiable world" (24). we can simply say that Beckett's world, in which decrepit bodies crawl through the mud and murder each other with can openers for scraps of food, in fact is an identifiable world. hence the (hilarious) title of that work: How It Is.
I don't really want to put GL on blast here, though, because despite the fact that I disagree strongly with him about my two dads (Joyce and Beckett), I think his general account about the role of literary representation generally and the novel specifically in delineating the status of bourgeois subjectivity from Walter Scott to High Modernism is spot on, and totally essential reading for any Genuine Jamesonian like I hope one day to be. what this book will do for me is help me frame the terms of my essay on Beckett's non-referential aesthetics: specifically, by pointing out the danger of depoliticization in any high-formalist literary enterprise; by forcing me to think about how experimental fiction almost always runs the risk of getting into a headass game of "look at me" rather than thinking hard about How The World Is Changing.
May 6, 2025
An interesting critique of the literary modernism of Kafka and Faulkner in negative comparison with the "critical realism" of Thomas Mann, Dostoevsky, and others. Lukacs is trying to get away from Stalin era literary rigidity and formulate a proper basis for an alliance between the critical and socialist realists, much like Lenin's call for an alliance of non-communist and Marxist dialectical materialists, but he still issues such a sharp polemic against Kafka that it becomes almost comical. There are interesting bits of philosophical foreshadowing that preempt his Ontology, particularly in nodding towards teleological positing with the artist's intent as well as the nature of social being (31, 75).
The third chapter, "Critical Realism and Socialist Realism," is the most valuable in laying Lukacs' thoughts on socialist realism and his critique of "socialist naturalism" during the Stalin era. What is more interesting is his (seemingly unconscious) philosophical affinity towards Mao and the Chinese Marxists and active (unknowingly) polemic against Khrushchev. First, he argues that "people are only transformed when they participate in the transformation of reality," very similar to Mao's own arguments against material incentives (105). Lukacs states, with an eye towards critiquing Stalin and revolutionary romanticism, "the fact that in emergent socialist society there are still antagonistic contradictions is ignored by these writers. They do not see that the non-antagonistic character of contradictions only gradually prevails, and that even in the socialist society there may be insoluble conflicts" (121). He criticizes Stalin's rhetoric of "imminent communism" as a result of revolutionary romanticism, a mistake Khrushchev would repeat as a prime cause of the Sino-Soviet split in the "state of the whole people" thesis (128-131). Yet Lukacs then moves to defend productivism and material incentives as a criticism of Stalin era "asceticism" (131-133). Lukacs' dedication to a wide-ranging critique of the Stalin from both ends leaves him out in the cold regarding the philosophical aspects of the Sino-Soviet split, and he ends up backing the worse horse in his mechanical condemnation of Chinese grievances a decade later.
The third chapter, "Critical Realism and Socialist Realism," is the most valuable in laying Lukacs' thoughts on socialist realism and his critique of "socialist naturalism" during the Stalin era. What is more interesting is his (seemingly unconscious) philosophical affinity towards Mao and the Chinese Marxists and active (unknowingly) polemic against Khrushchev. First, he argues that "people are only transformed when they participate in the transformation of reality," very similar to Mao's own arguments against material incentives (105). Lukacs states, with an eye towards critiquing Stalin and revolutionary romanticism, "the fact that in emergent socialist society there are still antagonistic contradictions is ignored by these writers. They do not see that the non-antagonistic character of contradictions only gradually prevails, and that even in the socialist society there may be insoluble conflicts" (121). He criticizes Stalin's rhetoric of "imminent communism" as a result of revolutionary romanticism, a mistake Khrushchev would repeat as a prime cause of the Sino-Soviet split in the "state of the whole people" thesis (128-131). Yet Lukacs then moves to defend productivism and material incentives as a criticism of Stalin era "asceticism" (131-133). Lukacs' dedication to a wide-ranging critique of the Stalin from both ends leaves him out in the cold regarding the philosophical aspects of the Sino-Soviet split, and he ends up backing the worse horse in his mechanical condemnation of Chinese grievances a decade later.
November 30, 2024
Essential reading for anyone interested in aesthetics as a site of knowledge production. Even when Lukács is wrong (his hang ups against modernism), he’s profoundly right (what he strains to protect — the value of the novel’s aesthetic meaning/perspective).
December 17, 2015
Lukács está demasiado cegado por su ideología como para hacer un análisis artístico sólido. Para él, el arte y la literatura no sirven si no están al servicio de una postura revolucionaria y crítica; por ello, echa por tierra toda la vanguardia y las aportaciones de escritores que reflexionan sobre e individuo, su soledad y su conciencia -como Kafka y Musil, por mencionar solo dos de las más impresionantes omisiones.
June 2, 2023
Tyckte inledningen av kritiken av modernismens framställningsätt var intressant; att romanen berättas från åskadarens perspektiv i kontrast till realismen som har deltagarens perspektiv. I Tolstoj är det tillfälligheternas nödvändighet som driver handlingen genom det nödvändiga sambandet mellan de gestaltande ting och skeenden som förmedlas genom personernas handlande och upplevelse. Modernismen å andra sidan framställer lösfrångjorda bilder genom det monografiskt uttömmande beskrivandet som underordnar tidigare epokers berättande, och människan skådeplatsen. Den moderna romanen är den statiska formen av romaner, som vägrar den historiska dynamiken som är inneboende i realistisk representation; i förstörelsen av människans förmåga att förverkliga sin existens som social varelse; i användningen av allegori som behandlar det partikulära som en abstraktion utan att insistera på dess typicitet.
Modernism, menar Lukács, leder naturligt till naturalism, det vill säga en litterär stil som betonar de hopplösa detaljerna i vardagen. Som Alfred Kerr uttryckte det, "vad är poetiskt i vardagen? Neurotisk aberration, flykt från livets trista rutt." Och, som Lukács konstaterar, innebär detta "den poetiska nödvändigheten av det patologiska [som härrör] från den prosaiska livskvaliteten under kapitalismen."
Men allt som var någorlunda intressant förekommer i den första delen av boken. Allt eftersom boken fortskrider framträder en allt mer dogmatisk ton.
Lukács gör en besviken genom att släppa insikterna från den tidiga delen för att göra en direkt och grov koppling mellan en författares underliggande världsbild och den då aktuella utvecklingen i kapitalismen och internationell politik. Han är inte tillräckligt grov för att skylla enskilda författare för fascism – men han påpekar upprepade gånger att de bygger sina verk på samma världsbild som accepterar exploateringen och alienationen som är implicit i det kapitalistiska systemet.
Modernism, menar Lukács, leder naturligt till naturalism, det vill säga en litterär stil som betonar de hopplösa detaljerna i vardagen. Som Alfred Kerr uttryckte det, "vad är poetiskt i vardagen? Neurotisk aberration, flykt från livets trista rutt." Och, som Lukács konstaterar, innebär detta "den poetiska nödvändigheten av det patologiska [som härrör] från den prosaiska livskvaliteten under kapitalismen."
Men allt som var någorlunda intressant förekommer i den första delen av boken. Allt eftersom boken fortskrider framträder en allt mer dogmatisk ton.
Lukács gör en besviken genom att släppa insikterna från den tidiga delen för att göra en direkt och grov koppling mellan en författares underliggande världsbild och den då aktuella utvecklingen i kapitalismen och internationell politik. Han är inte tillräckligt grov för att skylla enskilda författare för fascism – men han påpekar upprepade gånger att de bygger sina verk på samma världsbild som accepterar exploateringen och alienationen som är implicit i det kapitalistiska systemet.
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January 15, 2026Quite interesting- his arguments defending or criticizing certain authors range from understandable (his love of Balzac, the merits of Tolstoy) to baffling (his critiques of Joyce). Ultimately though, I can see where he is coming from even on his wilder opinions- if you are committed to the development of a socialist realism in literature (and art more broadly), and I believe Lukacs was genuine in his commitment, then it's natural to make the argument against towards sterile formalism inherent in modernist literature. I personally enjoyed his ruthless criticisms against dos Passos, as someone who has never understood what others see in that guy. The first two essays are particularly readable- I understand better his position first laid out in The Theory of the Novel by Georg Lukacs unknown Edition Paperback(1974) .
March 2, 2020
The absolute gall of Lukacs to imply that a Jewish man's horrific reflections on fascism are ideologically similar to Nazism.
The aggressive literal mindedness in his readings of Joyce, Beckett and Kafka are all pretty maddening.
The good part is the last essay, which manages to understand the awful excesses of Stalinist socialist realism, but the rest is pretty unforgivably bad.
The aggressive literal mindedness in his readings of Joyce, Beckett and Kafka are all pretty maddening.
The good part is the last essay, which manages to understand the awful excesses of Stalinist socialist realism, but the rest is pretty unforgivably bad.
February 16, 2024
Basic to understand the history and history novels. And Walter Scott
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