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UniversiV Micr^ilms International aOON.Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Ml 48106

8508369

Souag, Mostefa

THE THEORY OF LITERARY GENRES IN GEORGE LUKACS

The American University Ph.D. 1984

University Microfilms I nternstionsiSOO N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml48106

Copyright 1984

by

Souag, Mostefa All Rights Reserved

THE THEORY OF LITERARY GENRES

IN

GEORGE LUKACS

by

Mostefa Souag

Submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of The American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

The Requirements for the Degree

of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

Literary Studies

Signatures of^Comyf)tee:

Chairman :

1 / Y Dean of the Coll eg

.-1 /. / f P ^ Date

1984 The American University Washington, D.C. 20016

TES AIŒRICAÎÎ UiîIYEACITY LIBRARY ©COPYRIGHT

BY

MOSTEFA SOUAG

1984

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE THEORY OF LITERARY GENRES

IN

GEORGE LUKACS

by

Mostefa Souag

ABSTRACT

In spite of his high reputation among the contemporary

Intellectual audience, Lukâcs* work is still perceived and treated reductively in parts, especially with respect to his literary theory and criticism . Believing that Lukâcs’ views particularly in this sphere of aesthetic form an evolving whole, this study seeks to construct the most fundamental principles on which he bases his genre theory. This perspective was chosen because, like many critics, I regard genre theory as the formative principle of literary theory as a whole.

Mostly through descriptive method, this study exposes and explains the differences that Lukâcs directly or indirectly makes between modes

(the historically universal categories of the genre system), and genres

(the variables that represent the more concrete changes in the historical process as aesthetically reflected in literary forms).

Throughout his career, Lukâcs established his genre theory on one central category, that of totality. The modes represent the most

ii fundamental types of totality: totality of objects for epic, totality of movement for drama, and to ta lity of the lyrical moment or the subjective for ly r ic .

The genres, on the other hand, are the more concrete forms in which the modes, and thus the totalities, aesthetically objectify themselves. They are, in other words, the aesthetic forms of particular historical moments, such as the epic genre for early Greek society or the novel for the bourgeois society.

Although it contains some weaknesses, Lukâcs' genre theory does form a whole that is deep, rich, insightful, and very useful in understanding the problems of genre, especially from an historical perspective.

iii Dedication :

To Peggy, my wife:

Without her direct and indirect help, this work would have never been completed.

To Lameen and Raji;

For putting up with me. CONTENTS

Chapter

I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

II. LUKÂCS AND GENRE THEORY ...... 7 Constants and Variables ...... 7 The Aristotelian Marxist...... 9 The M o d e s ...... 10 Lukâcs' Concept of T otality...... 13 Totality and Literature ...... 17 Totality and Literary Modes...... 21 The Modes and the Aesthetic Dista n ce...... 31 Complementary R em arks...... 34

III. LUKÂCS' THEORY OF LITERARY GENRES ...... 38 Lukâcs' Definition of Genre ...... 38 The Relationship Between Literature, Genre, and Works ...... 40 The Genres-Modes Relationship ...... 44

IV. CONCLUSION...... 49

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 53

iv I. INTRODUCTION

Writing in 1964, Alfred Kazin judged that George Lukâcs "is

probably the only Communist philosopher and literary c r itic in East

Europe who s t i l l has the power to interest and to teach many readers in

the West."l Much has changed in the la st twenty years, and certainly

other Eastern European intellectuals now receive respectful hearings by

their Western colleagues. Nonetheless, Lukâcs continues to be the most

prominent. In fact. Western in tellectu als with different ideological and philosophical beliefs now widely recognize Lukâcs’ contribution to modern thought.

Although his reputation reached the literary circles of the United

States much later than it did Western Europe, Lukâcs' influence has become increasingly evident in this country since the sixties. Many of his works are translated into English and seem to be well-circulated among a wide range of readers; books, articles, dissertations, and reviews in English are being published with notable frequency. This growing in terest, however, has until now failed to construct an understanding of his works as a whole, as a philosophical-aesthetic system unified by a clear deep world-view that can be called Lukacsian.

^Alfred Kazin, in his "Introduction," George Lukâcs, Studies in European Realism, trans. not mentioned (New York; The Universal Library, Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), p. v. Ubrich Weisstein, in "Modes of Criticism: Studies in Hamlet." Comparative Literature: Method and Perspective, ed. Newton P. Stallknecht and Horst Frenz (Carbondale: Southern I llin o is University Press, 1961), p. 279, ca lls Lukâcs "the dean of Marxist critics and a writer of a great perspicacity." 2

This may be a result of what Paul de Man describes as "the oversimplified

division that has been established"^ concerning Lukâcs's intellectual and

political career.

During his long eighty-six year l i f e , Lukâcs did sh ift his

philosophical and ideological positions, as well as his political loyalty, several times — moves that have created for him an image problem: that of an intellectual drifter or even "disaster."3 His career is usually divided into pre- and post-Marxist stages and each of these is in turn subdivided into smaller blurred stages of intellectual and p o litica l positions. These stages may be glimpsed through the following highlights of his career. At the outset of his lifework. he founded the Thalia Theatre in Budapest (1904) with his friends. In 1910, he published Soul and Form as one of the young neo-Kantians and then The

History of the Development of Modern Drama (1911); when writing The

Theory of the Novel (1914-15), he had become a new-Hegelian, a phase which ended vAen he joined the Hungarian Communist Party in 1918. In

1923, while he was considered a Leninist, he published his famous History and Class Consciousness, which led to repeated attacks on him by orthodox

2paul de Man, "Georg Lukâcs's Theory of the Novel," in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 52.

3see in particular the controversial George Lictheim, "An Intellectual Disaster," in Encounter, vol. xx, no. 5 (May 1963), especially p. 74 and his conclusion on p. 80, in which he judges that

At the age of 78, and after almost sixty years of intensive and far-ranging activity, George Lukâcs has not merely failed to write the Marxist aesthetic his admirers expected from him, he has failed altogether as a responsible writer, and ultim ately as a man. It is one of the worst intellectual disasters of this disastrous age. 3

Marxists. As a Stalinist, he lived in Moscow (1930-31, and again

1933-34) and published several works. Only after he returned to Hungary

in 1945 did he publish his later great works — Goethe and His Age

( 1947), The Young Hegel (1948), Russian Realism in World Literature

(1948), and Thomas Mann (1948) — in which he increasingly tried to integrate classical concepts of art with his Hegelian Marxist philosophy. In 1951, he was indirectly forced to give up his political activities after being attacked for some of his literary and political views by the Hungarian Minister of Culture, Joszef Darvas. He then wrote or published Balzac and French Literature (1952), The Destruction of

Reason (1954), and The Historical Novel (1955). His return to politics as Minister of Culture in Imre Nagy's cabinet (October-November 1956) resulted in his deportation to Rumania after the Sovietization. After his return to Budapest the following year, he devoted the remaining years of his life almost completely to literary writing, especially to his

Aesthetics which was published in two volumes (1963).^

This large body of work (of which some of his early writing still exists only in Hungarian), the variety of activities, and the shifts of loyalty they represent, combined with the fact that in the past most Western literary circles did not take Marxist c r itic s seriously, have all contributed to the difficulty of conceiving Lukâcs' work as a whole. As a literary critic and theorist, he is usually studied or

^Most of this biographical information is summarized from: G. H. R. Parkinson's "Introduction," in Georg Lukâcs: The Man, His Work and His Ideas (New York: Vintage Books, 1970) pp. 1-33; Ehrhard Bohr and Ruth Goldschmidt Kunzer's "Chronology" in George Lukâcs (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1972), pp. vii-x; and L. Stern, "George Lukâcs: An Intellectual Portrait," Dissent 5, 2 (Spring 1958), pp. 162-73. 4

mentioned only in relation to partial literary questions, e .g ., the

theory of one literary issue, such as realism, modernism, or alienation;

or one literary genre, such as the novel or the essay. In the few

exceptions in which his work is considered an evolving coherent whole, he

is usually treated neither systematically nor exhaustively, as we see,

for example, in Paul Hernandi’s Beyond Genre. 5

In this study, I investigate Lukâcs* genre theory which may be

considered the formative principle of at least his literary theory and

the center of his literary canon as an evolving whole. Lukâcs* life-long

direct interest in genre revealed itself as early as 1910 when, in Soul

and Form, he began with his view "On the Nature and Form of the Essay.

In this book, Lukâcs tried to prove the legitimacy of the essay as a

literary genre, not only theoretically, but also practically through the

essays constituting the book. Indirectly, he seems to have been

interested in genre theory and criticism even earlier, as we can see in

"The Main Directions of Dramaturgy During the Final Quarter of the Last

Century" (1907), and History of the Evolution of the Modern Drama (which was completed in 1909 and published in 1911).? This interest in genre was evidently strengthened later by his famous works, such as The Theory of the Novel (1914-1915), The Historical Novel (1955), and his Aesthetics

(1963). Hernandi is very aware of Lukâcs* systematic, consistent view of

Spaul Hernandi, Beyond Genre; New Directions in Literary Classification (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), deals with the vAiole of Lukâcs in no more than seventeen pages, pp. 114-131.

^George Lukâcs, Soul and Form, trans, Anna Bostock (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971), pp. 1-18.

7see Lee Congdon, The Young Lukâcs (Chapel H ill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983), pp. 23-24. 5

literature as a whole, and of literary genres in particular. He remarks

that Lukâcs’

. . . various pronouncements on genre at once demonstrate the impressive range and the basic unity of Lukâcs’ critical interest. . . Throughout his intellectual life, Lukâcs remained faithful to the view that a small number of genres, each determined by a set of recognizable laws of its own, constitute the realm of literature.8

Likewise, in The Political Unconscious, Jameson remarks that

. . . the most developed corpus of Marxist literary analysis in our time, the work of George Lukâcs, spanning some sixty years, is dominated by concepts of genre from beginning to end.9

In spite of his early and continuous preoccupation with genre

studies, Lukâcs has never tried to clearly and comprehensively construct

in one place his theory of literary genres in general and literary modes

in particular or to treat them separately by and for themselves, even in

his great work, A esthetics. ^0 Taken together, his various pronouncements

on the subject do, however, furnish us with enough material for such a

theory.

I must stress here from the beginning the methodological

importance of discriminating between the two established aspects of genre

studies; genre criticism and genre theory. The first treats literary

^Hernandi, pp. 114-15.

9predric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca; Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 105.

I^Georg Lukâcs, Die Eigenart des Asthetischen [The Particular Nature of Aesthetics] (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1963). This work w ill henceforth be cited as A esthetics. A few friends helped me with the research in this book for the material related to my topic. A professional translator translated the selected passages for me, but all the thanks should go to my teacher. Professor Rudolph von Abele, for correcting the translation and making it as perfect as possible. 6

works as "groups or genres on the basis of similarities" and differences

found within them; the second, which is a meta- or a sub-category of the

fir s t, depending on the standpoint from which you consider it , addresses

the principles on which the genres are constructed and the standards by

vAiich they are judged, and tries to "use the existence of such genres to

construct a theory of criticism or a special and perhaps privileged

method of criticism . "11

Lukâcs is both a genre theorist and c r itic , and his works show a

remarkable insightfulness in the treatment of both aspects in this field

of literary scholarship. From a thorough investigation of his writings,

particularly those dealing with literary theory and criticism, I seek to construct the most fundamental principles on which Lukâcs established his

theory of modes and the major genres that he addresses, stressing in particular the relationship between these two essential elements of the system. Because of the limitations of this study, I will not address his views on the minor genres except when directly related to my objective.

11 John Reichert, "More than Kin and Less than Kind; The Limits of Genre Theory" in Theories of Literary Genre, ed. Joseph P. Strelka (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978), p. 57. II. LUKACS AND GENRE THEORY

Constants and Variables

The theory of literary genres, Northrop Frye contends in 1957,

"is stuck precisely where Aristotle left it."1 Th)s may be true in some

respects; our basic conceptions of literary genres, particularly from a

methodological perspective are still firmly under the influence of the

Greek philosopher's Poetics. Following Aristotle's "anatomy" of literary

genres, we still think not only of tragedy and epic in the way the

Poetics presents them to us, but also of the dramatic, epic, and lyric as

the most fundamental categories of literary texts.^ This approach

represents, for the majority of theorists and critics, the most

practical, mature, and "genuinely literary" organizing "principles of

order" in the systematic study of the literary discourse.3

The individual genres undergo incessant change with the continuing

creation of new literary works. In their differences and similarities,

the genres reflect the tension, or, in Marxist terms, the dialectical

relationship between the ever-changing historical consciousness and what

appears to be the literary correlations of some higher categories o f the

1 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism; Four Essays (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1957!), p. 13.

^René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942), p. 227.

3strelka, ed. Theories of Literary Genre, p. vii. 8

human mind or lasting modes of existence. As a result of this

d ialectical movement, many elements in both genre theory i t s e l f and genre

criticism eventually keep changing. In particular, the "modes" — epic,

dramatic, and lyric — remain relatively constant; the genres and

sub-genres — novel, tragedy, short story, the detective novel, etc. —

change.

It is important at this point to clearly distinguish between the

constants, i.e., the modes, and the variables, i.e., the genres. I

believe that the distinction should be made not only on the conceptual

b asis, but as Wellek and Warren suggest in discussing Karl Vietor, on the

terminological level as well:

Vietor suggests, quite properly, that the term 'genre* ought not to be used both for these three more-or-less ultimate categories and also for such historical kinds as tragedy and comedy; and we agree that it should be applied to the latter — the historical kinds,^

Lukâcs, unfortunately, does not address the terminological problem of

genre theory. In his use of terms, Lukâcs does not discriminate between

the "three more-or-less" ultimate categories and "the historical kinds"

or vAiat I have called the "constants" and the "variables," although

conceptually he does. In order to avoid Lukâcs* unsystematic usage of

the terms, I will here consistently use "modes" for the first category,

and "genres" for the second.

There have been various attempts in the history of poetics to

"ignore" genreS or to revolt against the "Aristotelian" approach to

^Wellek and Warren, p. 227.

^Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 24, argues that "... ignoring genre has often meant passively accepting the conventions prescribed by custom or fashion." 9

literatu re, and precisely against his perspective on genre theory in

order to bring about a serious change in the system of genre

cla ssifica tio n , yet none of them has succeeded in constructing a

counter-order that could significantly challenge the classical one in a

radical way. Even a genius aesthetitician like Benedetto Croce, who

persistently opposed the classical theory,"... wielded generic

categories quite profitably in a number of his books."6 Philosophers and

c r itic s have acknowledged the great success enjoyed by the generic

classification approach to literature"... for so long in bridging the gap between critical theory and the practice of literary criticism."?

The Aristotelian Marxist

Talking about literary genres according to A ristotle's orders of classification links them directly with his approach, and Plato's before him, to literature as a category of mimetic forms or what modern poetics called "imaginative discourse." A staunch believer in "realism" as a kind of mimesis that Lukacs c a lls "aesthetic reflection''^ and in the classification of literary works as prescribed in the classical generic model, he may well be described as Aristotelian.9 However, since his conversion to Marxism in 1918, and perhaps even when he wrote his Theory

^Claudio Guillen, Literature as System; Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 108. See also Wellek and Warren, pp.130 , 184; and Hernandi, pp. 10 —12.

?Guillen, p. 107.

^Bela K iralyfalvi, The Aesthetics of Gyorgy Lukâcs (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 61.

9Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London; Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1979), p. 39. contends that Lukacs was the one"... who revived the full thrust of the Aristotelian concept of mimesis." 10

of the Novel a few years e a r lie r ,1® he strongly grounded his views and

works on historical materialism in its Hegelian perspective. He maintained this viewpoint throughout his long and productive career; a

career that rightly earned him a high status as a prominent Marxist philosopher and critic. As a literary theorist, he may thus be considered a more or less Aristotelian Marxist.H

The Modes

Plato was the first to define the modes as formal structural categories of literature based on the sort of address or the degree of

lOpredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century D ialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971)» pp. 180-81, contends that

. . . in the very working out of the problem of The Theory of the Novel itself, there are decisive signs of that shift from a metaphysical to a historical view of the world that will be ratified by Lukâcs' conversion to Marxism.

J. M. Bernstein, The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukâcs Marxism and the D ialectics of Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), carries th is view further in arguing that in The Theory of the Novel ". . .w e have the rudiments of a Marxist theory of the novel." p. x.

IlHernandi, Beyond Genre, pp. 114-15 notices at least that Lukacs "final attempts" were "at integrating Aristotle's and Goethe's concepts of art with the doctrine of historial materialism." Peter Demetz, Marx, Engels and the Poets; Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism (Chicago; The University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 229, asserts Lukâcs' both pioneering efforts in creating Marxist aesthetics and his Aristotelian orientation ;

George Lukacs, with whom a systematic development of Marxist aesthetics commences . . . is rather concerned to return to Hegel, at least in his late work, to combine the spirit of dialectics with an Aristotelian respect for a r tistic form.

Stefan Morawski, "Mimesis — Lukacs' Universal Principle," trans. Molgarzata Munk and Lee Baxandall, in Science and Society, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Winter 1968), p. 27, also contends that ". . . those who say that Lukâcs provides the fir st Marxist system of aesthetics are not mistaken." 11

"impersonation," i.e., "according to manner of'imitation' (or

'representation')."12 in the ly r ic, the poet speaks in his own voice

using his own persona; in the dramatic, the poet speaks through fictiv e

persons behind vrtiich he hides himself; in the epic, it is a mixture of

both, for he "partly speaks in his own person, as a narrator, and partly

makes his characters speak in direct discourse (mixed narrative)."13

However, this method of classification, rooted in the nature of language

and based on its limitations, is usually attributed to Aristotle^ who,

more d ecisively, shaped it in his more comprehensive system of poetics.

Many theorists and critics, particularly within the Aristotelian

traditions, have tried to explore and use the various possibilities

Aristotle's principles offer to explain the fundamental nature of the

modes — how they came into being, and the essential differences between

them.15 Among the criteria used in this Aristotelian-analytical approach

are linguistic components like the forms of address (first person, second

person, third person) and time dimensions (past, present, future), which

all come to enforce the structural characteristics of this system.

I^Wellek and Warren, p. 227.

13Tbid., p. 228. See Plato, The Republic, translated with introduction and notes by Francis MacDonald Corn ford (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), 2(292C-398B), particularly pp. 81-2.

I^Gerald F. Else, A ristotle's Poetics; The Argument (Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 99. And for Aristotle, see P oetics, trans. Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor; The University of Michigan Press, 1980), 48a19-18a24, p. 18.

15gee Wellek and Warren, p. 228. 12

Because it is based on fixed lin g u istic structures, the modes

convincingly appear to be constants.

As an Aristotelian, Lukâcs takes the ontological status of the

three modes and their traditional classification as "given," yet, as a

Hegelian Marxist, he pays little attention to their structural basis,

asserting mostly the formal^^-thematic aspect of their nature as forms of

mimesis.

In contrast to the structural approach ofAristotle and most of

his followers to the theory of literary modes — an approach guided by an

analytical method — Lukâcs’ theory is based on a formal-thematic

approach guided by a socio-historical perspective and a philosophical

method of investigation. This approach is the ultimate consequence of

his general view of the a r tistic work’s existence from a Hegelian Marxist

viewpoint, from vriiich he looks for and asserts the relation of the

art-work to the total socio-historical process in a definite historical

moment or period, or in the whole history of art or the particular sort

Ibpormal is used here in its Lukacsian meaning. For Lukacs, form

. . . is not it s e lf something technical or lin g u istic , as it was for the formalists and later for the structuralists. It is, rather, the aesthetic shape given to a content.

Quoted from David Forgas, "6 Marxist Literary Theories," in Modern Literary Theory; A comparative Introduction, ed. Ann Jefferson and David Robey (Totowa; Barnes and Noble Books, 1982), pp. 139-40. See George Lukacs, "The Ideology o f Modernism," in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London; Merlin Press, 1963)* p. 19, in vrtiich he explains how "content defines form." 13

of art, e.g. literature. Totality is the key word and the principle

concept on and around vrfiich Lukacs constructs his genre theory in general

and his concept of modes in particular.

Lukâcs’ Concept of Totality

Lukâcs’ concept of to ta lity has been widely discussedi?; however,

because of its crucial importance to his concept of modes, I find it

imperative to briefly explain it. Totality is a philosophical-aesthetic

category with socio-historical and ontological dimensions. In his Theory

of the Novel, Lukacs, as he himself reflects in the preface to the 1962

edition, applies the philosophy of Hegel to his polemical treatment of

the epic mode, the epic genre, and its modern bourgeois form, the novel,

as we see in his

. . . comparison of modes of to ta lity in epic and dramatic art, the historico-philosophical view of what the epic and the novel have in common and of what differentiates them, e tc . 18

In its ontological dimension, ’’totality of being is possible only where everything is already homogeneous before it has been contained by form s.’’19 it is the categorical form of the wholeness of the self, the

1?See for example: Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukâcs to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), especially pp. 52-53, 84-97, 101-127, 301-302, 349-350; Bernstein, The Philosophy of the Novel, pp. 65-69; Jameson, Marxism and Form, pp. 183-190; Jameson, P olitical Unconscious, especially pp. 50-57.

l8ceorge Lukacs, Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1978), p. 15. Totality, however, played an important role in earlier works, including Soul and Form, and the unpublished Heidelberg manuscripts on aesthetics, as Gyorgy Markus points out. See Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 86, including footnote 16.

19Lukacs, Theory of the Novel, p. 34. 14

integration of the subject and the object, the inner and the outer, a

phenomenon which existed in the heroic age of the Greeks. Totality, from

this standpoint, is both an "inner necessity that shapes a ll works of

art," and "an inherent need of the human mind."20 The aesthetic

correlative of the integrated Greek experience takes the form of an

existing totality — which is "closed within itself" and "completed,"21

the epic in its Homeric total form In the modern world, th is human need

for totality is not ontologically fulfilled as a form of being, yet it

manifests it s e lf in forms of art and in the novel in particular as an

intentional striving to preserve an integration that is objectively no

longer there.22 in both cases, however, the socio-historical re a litie s

as preconditions of the presence or absence of totality are directly

and/or allusively implied in Lukâcs' book. What is asserted here is the

concept of totality as a form of a subject-object relationship; a

relation that, in the old Greek society, objectified itself, as a mode of

being, in an integration form of subject-object, and as an aesthetic

mode, in the form of epic poetry. In the modern capitalist society, the

relationship between subject and object as a mode of being takes the form

20paul de Man, p. 54.

2lLukacs, Theory of the Novel, p. 34.

22in his "Schiller's Theory of Modern Literature," Goethe and His Age, trans. Robert Anchor (London: Merlin Press, 1979), Lukâcs praises Schiller's aesthetic attempts to overcome the dissonance and fragmentation in bourgeois society; see particularly part IV, pp. 110-113. He does the same in History and Class Consciousness; Studies in Marxist D ialectics, trans. by Rodney Livingston (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971), pp. 138-139, where he sees Schiller as the major contributor to the aesthetic totalization of reality. 15 of alienation, and as an aesthetic mode, takes the form of the novel.

From the beginning of his Marxist career, and particularly in his History and Class Consciousness,23 Lukâcs as we will see, modifies his understanding of this concept to suggest a methodological process based on "an essentially critical and negative, demystifying operation,"24 an understanding that remained an absolutely central category in all of his later works.

As a socio-historical category, totality here is a dialectically dynamic concept that reflects the whole objective reality as historically changing mediations and transformations.25 As a Marxist, Lukâcs, in

"The Tasks of Marxist Philosophy in the New Democracy" (1948), best defines the concept as follows:

The materialist-dialectical conception of totality means first of all the concrete unity of interacting contradictions . . .; secondly, the systematic relativity of all to ta lity both upwards and downwards (which means

23as a result of orthodox Marxists' attacks on th is book, Lukâcs denounced it; nevertheless, in the preface to its 1967 edition, he defended parts of it that he s t i l l fe lt were valid, and prime among them was the concept of to ta lity :

It is undoubtedly one of the great achievements of History and Class Consciousness to have reinstated the category of to ta lity in the central position it had occupied throughout Marx's works and from which it had been ousted by the 'scientism' of the social-democratic opportunists. p . XX.

2^Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 52.

2 5Tom Bottomore, A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 479. 16

that all totality is made of totalities subordinated to it, and also that the totality in question is, at the same time, over-determined by totalities of a higher complexity . . .) and thirdly, the historical relativity of all totality, namely that the totality character of all totality is changing, disintegrating, confined to a determinate, concrete historical period.^6

The emphasis here is on the objective reality of the total

socio-historical process, i.e., "the totality of social development."27

Thus, Lukacs concretizes his earlier understanding of totality as an

historically preconditioned state of consciousness subjectively and

spontaneously reflecting a subject-object relationship that takes a form

of either integration or reification. This concretization transforms

totality into a methodological operation as a category of social praxis

by which the highly conscious or sensitive and honest subject conceives

and formulates a view of the whole socio-historical process. Totality,

thus, is s till a category of mediation, a subject-object relationship;

nonetheless, now it is not subjectively but dialectically28 reflected.

This concept, therefore, may be considered a theory of consciousness.

Lukacs’ concept of totality, thus, changes throughout the course

of his career. During his pre-Marxist appreciation of classical Greece

(particularly in The Theory of the Novel), Lukacs sees totality as a

passive quality of consciousness; Greek culture fu lfills it without

effort. Then, in his Marxist phase, Lukacs regards totality as the

hardest function of consciousness, never to be fully realized actually

26cited in Bottomore, p. 479.

27ceorge Lukacs, Lenin, A Study in the Unity of His Thought, trans. Nicholas Jacobs (Cambridge: TheMIT Press, 1971), p. 18. This book was first published in Germany in 1924.

28ceorge Lukacs, "Critical Realism and Socialist Realism," in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, p. 100. 17

but only in the works of art of this foregone era.

Totality and Literature

Lukacs distinguishes between two basic kinds of totalities,

"extensive" and "intensive." The first, as he points out in his Theory

of the Novel, refers to "the extensive totality of life" given form by

"great epic writing," the second to "the intensive totality of essence"

given form by d r a m a . 29 These totalities are not only infinite but "are

also changing, developing," in social reality as well as in art, which

Lukacs considers a "social phenomenon."30

In order to avoid any misunderstanding of the form of totality in literature, I should briefly deal with two essential questions: (1) the "qualitative" rather than the "quantitative" physiognomy of totality in art, and (2) literature as a mimetic category of social phenomena.

The two questions actually represent two sides of the same coin and answer the "what" and the "how" of literary creation.

It is true that as a raw material for artistic creation, both totalities, "extensive," i.e. everything in the whole and the parts of objective/external reality, and "intensive,"i.e., objective-subjective man's totality in all its complex aspects (thoughts, feelings, and actions), are infinite. Each of them is an appropriate subject of the

29Lukacs, Theory of the Novel, p. 46. Lukacs, as G. H. R. Parkinson, Georg LukScs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 25, remarks, seems to be reintroducing here the idea that he exposed in Soul and Form about tragedy — ". . . namely, that the chaotic nature of lif e is alien to the hard lines of the drama, which trie s to portray the soul in its bare essence." See George Lukacs, "The Metaphysics of Tragedy," in Soul and Form, especially pp. 155-159.

S^Bela K iralyfalvi, The Aesthetics of Gyorgy Lukacs, p. 84. 18

art-work, not quantitatively but qualitatively31 on a dialectically

balanced basis that considers both the "infinitude" of each totality and

the "limitations" of the totality of the work of literature as "a

self-contained w o r l d . "32 The creative process is a mimetic one, and the

totality of the literary work is an imitation of the totality of its raw

subject. However, this imitation in Lukacs’ view is not a mechanical,

photographic, or abstract one; it is, rather, aesthetic.

The Aristotelian concept of mimesis is dominant in Lukacs, but modified to fit his less formalistic-structural, more humanized aesthetic approach. Lukacs' epistemology, lik e that of most classical and Marxist philosophers,

. . . insists upon a fundamental dualism of objective, real, external, and internal worlds that together form a unified and knowable universe.

Our knowledge of the objective/external world, our perception of it , originates as, in Lukacs' words, a "reflection of reality that exists independently of our consciousness."33 As a form of knowledge, the literary work takes the form of consciousness through which reality is perceived; in other words, it imitates reality or aesthetically

31 This qualitative character of totality in art is emphasized by Lukacs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), p. 91, in which he states that :

The difference is not a quantitative one of extent, but a qualitative one of artistic style, artistic form, a difference which informs all the individual moments of the given work.

32Lukacs, Aesthetics, p. 624.

33cited in Demetz, p. 207. 19

"reflects" i t . Lukacs uses both a rtistic mimesis and "aesthetic

reflection" interchangeably3^ to mean the reflection of objective reality in the work of art, not as a mirroring or photographing process35, although Lukacs uses the old metaphor of the mirror,36 but as a "humanized refraction"37 of reality that reshapes it in intensively a rtistic forms.

In order to reflect the dialectical totality, its objective reality "has to pass through the creative, form-giving work of the writer,"38 a process that turns mimesis into a dialectical category representing a dialectical relationship between the perceiving subject and the perceived object.39 a genuine work of literature that is given form by such a humanized, a r tis tic , and d ialectical process is saved from reflecting abstractly the "universal condition humaine"^^ and from trying to copy, in detail, with a pseudo-scientific correctness, the unformed.

3^See G.H.R. Parkinson, "Lukacs on the Central Category of Aesthetics," in Georg Lukacs, The Man, His Work and His Ideas, p. 116.

35Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, p. xxxii.

36oemetz, p. 207.

37Hernandi, Beyond Genre, p. 117.

38Forgas, p. 139.

39jn his preface to the 1967 edition of History and Class Consciousness, p. xxxvii, Lukacs asserts that

. . . it was not just the problem of mimesis that occupied the forefront of my attention, but also the application of dialectics to the theory of reflection. This involved me in a critique of naturalistic tendencies. For all naturalism is based on the idea of the 'photographic* reflection of reality.

^^Lukacs, "The Ideology of Modernism," in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, p. 20. 20 chaotic particulars of the "extensive totality." Both methods, which modernism embraces, are attacked by Lukacs as being the decadent styles of "expressionism," "surrealism," and "naturalism" that would lead "not only to the destruction of traditional literary form; . . . but to the destruction of literature as such."^1 The first method degenerates into

"abstract particularity"^^ or "abstract subjectivity" and "formalism" characterized by an emptiness that cannot appeal to the senses; the second deteriorates into "abstract objectivity,"^3 with its emphasis on verisimilitude and pseudo-scientific exactness that lacks any intellectually significant form.

By using the "aesthetic reflection" method of representation, the writer seeks "the achievement of depth, of intensive to ta lity [which] always has priority over mere extensivetotality.(My emphasis) The qualitatively intensive totality can be achieved only in the literary work that takes the form of a d ia lectica l mediation between the crude raw material of the objective reality and the empty idea of our intellectual

41 Ibid., p. 45.

42ibid., p. 43.

43quoted in Demetz, p. 207. From his early career, not only in his Marxist stage, LukaCs rejects both methods of a r tistic practice as anti-historical and unartistic as well; see for example his "Richness, Chaos and Form," in Soul and Form, in vAiich he, through Jaochim, attacks the English writer L. Stern because ". . .h e produces sentiments just as they are — as raw, unprocessed matter — and makes no effort to unify them, to give them form, however imperfect." p. 126. His sharp critiques, or rather, strong animosity, of naturalism and modernism are widely discussed.

44Lukics, "Critical Realism and S ocialist Realism," p. 100. Lukacs seems to fall into the use of loosely defined terms. "Intensive" here might mean the qualitative use of either the "extensive to ta lity of life ," or the "intensive to ta lity of essence" that has been mentioned e a rlier. 21

concepts. This form of mediation represents "the typical" that embodies

both the universal and the particular.45

Therefore, the writer achieves the "intensive totality," even as

a "totality of objects," through his depiction of the typical — typical

characters performing typical actions in typical situations in typical

scenes, etc.46 Lukacs bases his concept of type, which occupies a

central position in his aesthetic system and is discussed at length in

many of his studies, on four criteria: breadth, essentiality,

enhancement, and self-awareness, which are out of the scope of this

study.47

Totality and Literary Modes

As we have seen, totality in Lukacs is not a metaphysical or an

a priori category and not purely artistic in artworks. It is, rather, a

category of the inner, deep truth of the socio-historical process which

45The mediation is the antithesis of the immediacy for which Lukacs rejects naturalist, symbolist, expressionist, and surrealist writers for their mirroring of reality as it "appeared to them," as D.W. Fokkema and Elrud Kunne-Ibsch, Theories of Literature in the Twentieth Century: Structuralism, Marxism Aesthetics of Reception, Semiotics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977), pp. 118-119, say without digging

. . . for a deeper "essence;" for the coherence between their experiences and the "real life of society," not for the "hidden causes" of their experiences.

For a long discussion of "Totality and Mediation" see Istvan Meszaros, Lukacs' Concept of D ialectic (London: The Merlin Press, 1972), Chapter 6, pp. 61-91. Lukacs considers form as mediation since his early career, as we can see in Soul and Form, for example.

46Lukâcs, The Historical Novel, p. 139.

47por a brief yet very clear discussion of these criteria see: Demetz, Marx, Engels and the Poets, pp. 209-211. For a general discussion of the typical, see Kiralyfalvi, The Aesthetics of Gyorgy Lukacs, pp. 86-87, and James L. Cowan, "Gyorgy Lukâcs' Criticism of Thomas Mann and Avant-Garde Literature," Ph.D. dissertation (Berkeley: University of California, 1977), pp. 40-4?. 22 is aesthetically reflected in the work of art. Lukacs grounds his theory of modes on the most general, fundamental, historically and dialectically universal types of this totality. And although he treats practically both the modes and the to ta litie s on which they are based as constant categories, Lukâcs avoids theoretically describing them in any way that might suggest a static or an historical identity or status. He prefers, rather, to brand them not as "constants" but as "continuous;"

Every artwork, exactly that which determines it s specific aesthetic nature, exists within the continuity of the aesthetic kind (Kunstgatung)- the genre [including the modes], to vAiich i t b e l o n g s .48 (My emphasis)

Following Hegel, as he himself explains in his preface to the 1962 edition of the Theory of the N o v e l,49 Lukacs characterizes the epic, in its most fundamental nature, as the aesthetic mode o f "the extensive totality of life," and drama, as the aesthetic mode of "the intensive totality of e s s e n c e .50 in his attempt later to concretize these two concepts, Lukacs calls the former "the totality of objects" and the latter "the totality of movement," of which both are "totalities of life-process."51

He also modifies his concept of "extensive" and "intensive" to ta litie s . In The Theory of the Novel, Lukacs, as I have said, contends that the drama depicts the "intensive totality ofe s s e n c e , "52 (My

48Lukacs, A esthetics, p. 618.

49Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, p. 15.

50ibid., p. 46.

51Lukâcs, The Historical Novel, pp. 92-94.

52Lukâcs, The Theory of the Novel, p. 46. 23 emphasis) by which he assumes a s p lit between "is," i . e . , lif e as lived and "ought," i . e . , e s s e n c e .53 However, in 1954, for example, while asserting that what the work of art depicts has to appear as a "totality of life ,"Lukacs warns us not to assume that;

. . . every work of art must strive to reflect the objective, extensive totality of life. On the contrary, the extensive totality of reality necessarily is beyond the possible scope of any artistic creation; the totality of reality can only be produced intellectually in ever-increasing approximation through the in fin ite process of science. The totality of the work of art is rather intensive . . . In this sense the briefest song is as much an intensive totality as the mightiest epic.54

By comparing this and similar statements to the concepts laid out in The

Theory of the Novel, one can term the Lukacsian concept of epic and drama in relation to extensive and intensive totalities as follows ; epic is the literary mode that intensively represents theextensive55 to ta lity of objects, whereas drama is the literary mode that intensively represents the intensive56 totality of movement. Lukacs himself actually

53ibid., p. 47.

54ceorge Lukacs, "Art and Objective Truth," in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. and trans. by ArthurD. Kahn (New York; The Universal Library, Grosset and Dunlap,1971), p. 38. Lukacs asserts the same idea in 1955 in "The Meaning of Contemporary Realism," p. 100 and in many of his other studies.

55"Extensive" totality, as Kiralyfalvi, The Aesthetics of Gyorgy Lukacs, p. 85 remarks,

. . . includes all elements of objective reality, whether or not they are o f significant concern to man . . . "Intensive" totality is the depth of "man's totality" . . . but, very importantly, man in the full context of interaction with the relevant elements of his social-historical environment.

Thus in both cases, the intensive quality of the totality of the literary work represents the artistic form which gives significance and meaning to the chaotic, unformed totality of objects or that of movement.

56ibid., p. 85 24 associates this "intensive" quality indirectly with epic itself. In The

Historical Novel, he approvingly follows Hegel's definition of the epic as the form of the totality of objects by his assertion that the totality is created "for the sake of connecting the particular action with its substantial basis."57 This connection, when artistically constructed, is what forms the significant, i.e., the aesthetically intensive, totality of the literary work.

It must be emphasized that the Marxist Lukacs completely drops the "totality of essence" as the categorical characteristic of the dramatic mode. In The Theory of the Novel, Lukacs uses this principle of a metaphysical characteristic to argue that, because of "its formal £ priori nature,"58 drama can find totality even when essence is not present anymore in the world as a form of being. In this sense drama changes, but not into something else. Epic, on the other hand, can never do that because it is against its nature, as the representative mode of

"life," to transcend the "empirical," "historically given" reality without sp illin g over "into the lyrical and dramatic."59

In The Historical Novel, both modes are defined to present the

"objective outer world," and are supposed to "give a total picture of objective reality,"50 or "the totality of life-process." (My emphasis)

57Lukacs, The Historical Novel, p. 92.

58Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, p. 46.

59ibid., p. 46. According to this view, i f a modern novel, for example, proclaims the p o ssib ililty of an integrated objective world, then it would necessarily be a utopian epic of wish-fulfillment, a pure, rather than a mimetic fiction . Lukacs, of course, rejects th is.

GObukacs, The H istorical Novel, p. 90. 25

However, in drama totality "is concentrated round a firm center — the dramatic collision," which is the typical, extremely heightened form of human moral m o v e m e n t s51 . in both modes, the "inner lif e of man" is presented, not as "essence," but

. . . only insofar as his feelings and thoughts manifest themselves in deeds and actions, in a visible interaction with objective reality.52

This is the major distinctive characteristic between these two modes and the lyric mode.53

Before discussing this particular distinguishing trait between the lyric and the other two modes, we have to cla rify some other

51 Ibid., p. 93. It is important to point out that, for Lukacs, art in general and literature in particular, is anthropomophic, i . e . , related to man. Lukacs asserts in the Aesthetics, for example, that the subject of drama and the novel

. . . is not the mere experiencing of reality . . . rather the human or social practice itself; the experiencing of nature becomes the proper subject of structuring only episodically, tightly related to this practice.

Quoted in K iralyfalvi, p. 123.

52Lukics, The Historical Novel, p. 90.

53Lukacs' pronouncements on lyric are considerably minor and unsatisfying, especially if compared to those on epic and drama. Some critics even accuse his aesthetics of not holding when applied to lyric poetry. See for example, Parkinson, "Lukacs on the Central Category of A esthetics," p. 143, and Roy Pascal, "Georg Lukacs: The Concept of Totality," pp. 168, 170. Both essays are in Georg Lukâcs, His Work and His Ideas, ed. Parkinson. For a good discussion of this point, see Istvan Eorsi, "Gyorgy Lukacs and the Theory of Lyric Poetry," in New Hungarian Quarterly, vol. 6, No. 18 (Summer 1955), p. 3. Eorsi relates this view of Lukacs firstly to the fact that he "has devoted relatively little space to" lyric poetry, and secondly to his rather scientific and highly impersonal character. 26

questions about Lukâcs’ view of lyric poetry. With his classical taste

that embraces the doctrine of the purity of art in general and genre in

particular54, à la Lessing55, and in the tradition of Aristotle and

H o r a c e ,55 Lukâcs stresses the importance of the purity of modes, warning

especially against any deterioration of epic or drama to lyric. In The

Theory of the Novel, he specifically argues, as I have said earlier, that

Any attempt at a properly utopian epic must fail because it is bound, subjectively and objectively, to transcend the empirical and spill over into the lyrical or dramatic; and such overlapping can never be fru itful for the e p i c .57

(My emphasis)

The same view is emphasized again in The Historical Novel. In his discussion of Charles de Coster’s novel, Ulenspiegel, Lukacs, after agreeing with Romain Rolland’s enthusiasm about it as an impressive attempt to create a national ep ic, exposes its weaknesses that are embodied mainly in the fact that it remains lyrical;

. . . the merely subjective emotion of the author; i t does not serve as the basis of an objective and richly articulated historical world, complete in itself; it does not become ep ic. From an epic point of view the emotions remain abstract, precisely because they are merely ly r ic a l.58

54Rene’ Wellek, Four Critics (Seattle University Press, 1981), p. 50.

55see Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Ellen Frothingham, (New York: The Noonday Press, 1961), especially Chapter XVI. Lukâcs shows great respect for Lessing’s contribution to the classical poetics.

55see Wellek and Warren, pp. 126, 230.

5?Lukâcs, Theory of the Novel, p. 46.

58Lukacs, The H istorical Novel, p. 220. 27

(My emphasis). This attitude of Lukâcs is not, as it may appear, against

lyric as a literary mode; it is a consistent condemnation of the mixture

of modes.

Lukâcs' treatment of lyric is the hardest to trace. His problem

with this mode may have derived from its apparent resistance to the mimetic theory, and from its being the closest literary form to the claim

of irrationalist philosophy that the work of art does not reflect

reality but represents the ego through its expression of the purely

subjective.59 Lukâcs trie s to discuss lyric in his work mostly through his analysis of some weaknesses in the other two modes. He does, however, briefly now and then address the subject for it s e l f . In The

Theory of the Novel, he sees lyric as "the language of absolutely lonely man" — i.e., monological. It is associated with "lightness," which is

"a loosening of the bonds that tie man and objects to the ground, a lifting of the heaviness, the dullness."70 Lyric functions by creating

"a protean mythology of substantial su b jectivity."71 It represents

"only the great moment;" at which nature and soul are either meaningfully united or meaningfully divorced. This is what Lukâcs calls "the lyrical moment," which is "the interiority of the soul," set apart from time and the "multiplicity of things" and elevated into "substance." The meaningful relationship between soul and nature whether in form of integration or divorce can be produced only at lyrical moments.

59£orsi, p. 35.

70Lukâcs, The Theory of the Novel, p. 45.

71 Ibid., pp. 57-58. 28

Such moments are constitutive and form-giving only for lyric poetry; only in lyric poetry do these direct, sudden flashes of the substance become like lost original manuscripts suddenly made legible; only in lyric poetry is the subject, the vehicle of such experiences, transformed into the sole carrier of meaning, the only true r e a lity .72

These pronouncements, with their slippery, more or less opaque language, seem to suggest on the one hand that lyric poetry is the mode that positively or negatively interrelates the internal and the external worlds, i.e., nature and the soul, the objective and the subjective. On the other hand, they imply at the same time that subjectivity in the

"sudden flashes of the substance" confronts the objective reality from above and imposes it s own form on i t .

Lukacs, indeed, later in the book emphasizes this last view. He contends that lyrical subjectivity imports its symbols from the external world as its only method of self-objectification, for

. . . subjectivity as interiority, never confronts in a polemical or negative way the outside world that is co-ordinated to it, it never takes refuge inside itself in an effort to forget the outside world; rather, it proceeds as an arbitrary conqueror, it snatches fragments out of the atomised chaos which is the outside world and melts them down — causing all origins to be forgotten — into a newly-created lyrical cosmos of pureinteriority. 73

This method allows the lyrical to transform its abstract subjectivity into a more or less concrete form without giving up its pure interiority while confirming Lukâcs’ b elief in a ll literature as a mimetic form.

This view, moreover, is not new. Lukâcs, earlier, in Soul and Form, asserts the same idea in what he calls the principle of "image-creating" by which he explains that poetry — most certainly lyrical — "knows

7 2 i b i d . , p. 63.

7 3 i b i d . , p. 114. 29

nothing beyond t h i n g s . "7^ This lyrical concreteness is present even

in the use of time; lyric poetry never elevates objects to

"timelessness," like drama, or places them in "elapsing time," like

epic. Lyric poetry "gives form to the process of remembering or

forgetting, and the object is only a pretext for lived experience."75

The most coherent attempt by Lukacs, in his Marxist stage, to

define lyric is to be found, as Eorsi asserts,76 in his 1951 essay on

Johannes B e c h e r . 7 7 in this essay, Lukacs formulates his view of the

specific nature of the lyric mode;

. . . the peculiarity of the lyric form, within this general aesthetic sphere — leaving out of consideration transient forms — ties in the fact that in poetry [ i . e . , the lyricj process appears artistically as part of the work of art.

The real i l ty shaped by the poet evolves under our eyes, as it were, in statu nascendi, while in prose and drama — also on the basis of the workings of subjective d ia lectic — it is only the objective dialectic of phenomenon and essence which are represented in the poetically reflected reality. That which evolves as natura naturana, with objective dialectic vitality, in prose and drama, is born before our eyes as natura naturanas in poetry [ i . e ., ly r ic ].78

This asserts what has been b riefly mentioned earlier: that the

object in lyric poetry is a mere "pretext for lived experience." The

74Lukâcs, Soul and Form, p. 5.

75Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, p. 127.

76E orsi, p. 35.

77The famous revolutionary-expressionist poet of the 1920s, . . . later Minister of Culture of the German Democratic Republic and a close friend of Lukacs.

See Ferenc Feher, "Lukacs in Weimar," in Lukâcs Reappraised, p. 102.

78guoted in Eorsi, p. 35. 30

lyric mode is not, thus, the form of the totality of any "life-process" as an assumingly experienced event in an already finished

socio-historical context; it is rather the form of an actual process of the artistic experience occurring at the creative moment as the poet penetrates into the objective, both external and internal, worlds. In other words, it is the form of the poet's consciousness reflecting rea lity .

The immediacy of this form-acquiring/form-giving process prevents the artistic process from creating the subject-object distance that characterizes the great realistic works of epic and drama. Therefore, it forms what may be called "the to ta lity of the ly r ica l moment" — not in its earlier more abstract meaning, but as a concrete state of a subject-object relationship. This is suggested by Lukacs when he says that "the mode of poetic confession is closely connected with the scope of that which is confessed."79 in order to achieve typ icality, as required for epic and drama, lyric must raise the poetic subjectivity, i.e., the personal experiences "to the level of typicality,"80 which is related more to the subject than to his objective environment. Within this context, it may be very accurate to define the lyric as the literary mode of "the totality of the subjective," where the subjective is dynamically in a dialectic giving-receiving relationship with the

79quoted in Eorsi, p. 3 6 .

80ibid., p. 3 7 . 31 objective.81

In his Aesthetics, Lukacs acknowledges, as he does above, that

"the territory of the lyric is governed by subjectivity . . . it s subject is a man who finds himself in one particular situation," through which nature "brings out vdiat is spiritually most important for him at that given moment"82 in a form that represents the unity of the external and internal worlds. This unity is, as Lukâcs says, a form of "a synthesizing reflection of the interrelations between the whole of man of everyday l i f e and the surroundings which awaken in him the relevant experience."83 Lukâcs contends that even when the lyric poem celebrates the beauty of nature, for instance that of spring or winter, it represents, if it is truly poetic, the attitude "the poet takes with regard to the truly great currents and battles of his age."84

The Modes and the Aesthetic Distance

It seems clear now that, like the two other modes, lyric

81 In The Theory of the Novel, pp. 52-53. Lukacs asserts "what is given form" in lyric "is not the totality of life but the artist’s relationship with that totality, his approving or condemnatory attitude towards it." This enhances the interpretation of the lyric as representing the totality of the subjective which is in an authoritative position over the objective.

82parkinson, "Lukacs on the Central Category of Aesthetics," p. 144.

83quoted in Ibid., p. 144. In order to show the importance of the objective phenomena to the expression of the subjectivity, Lukâcs quotes in his Aesthetics

. . . six lines from T.S. Elliot's "The Hollow Men" to prove that even the "innermost" can only be given artistic shape by the roundabout way of "reflecting" (that is using images suggested by) "outward reality."

See Hernandi, pp. 127-28

84cited in Kiralyfalvi, p.123. 32 represents a subject-object relationship that forms a totality. But whereas epic and drama in sist on a decisive distance between the form-giving subject and the life-p rocess that is being formed, lyric does not allow such a distance, maintaining instead the immediate process as it occurs. In other words, epic or drama represents a life-process; lyric is itself the process it represents.

The concept of presence and absence of distance in Lukâcs' theory of modes appears to be the aesthetically formal-thematic counterpart of the Aristotelian structural, linguistic forms of address or degree of "impersonation." By using his own persona, his own voice as the aesthetic "I" of the poem, the poet creates the illusion of a directly "present" relationship with the material to which he gives form. In epic and drama, the poet or the author creates the illusion of an aesthetic distance through his characters. Even when he uses his own voice in epic, the author usually approaches his material as a separate entity from his present s e lf, through an aesthetic temporal or a spatial distance, or other devices, like the analysis of past experiences. If the author fa ils to do so, his work, in Lukâcs' view, takes the formof mixed modes, such as the lyrical novel, on which Lukacs takes a very critical stand.

Although Lukâcs, as I have mentioned earlier, pays very l i t t l e attention to these structural principles of the modes, he occasionally mentions them d irectly or indirectly. In his Soul and Form, for instance, Lukâcs relates the success of Theodor Storm's short stories as epic works to his achievement of

. . . unity of tone through unity of delivery, epic form through the use of direct narration, that most ancient form of the epic which defines its very conditions of existence. Almost all of his short stories are placed 33

within a frame — that is to say, it is not he himself but a narrator specially invented for the purpose who tells them from memory or reconstructs them from old le tte rs or chronicles.05 (My emphasis)

At this early stage of his career, Lukacs seems to use narration as the

structural-ontological condition of the epic mode. Lukacs explains the

function of this method, exactly the way I discussed it, as a means to

create :

. . . a distance . . . from which the con flict between the internal and the external, between action and soul, is no longer visible. Memory, which is the typical form of narration within a frame, does not analyze events, it never expresses events as a sequence of slig h t, almost imperceptibly changing vibrations of the sou l. 86

(My emphasis)

It is this aesthetic distance that prevents the epic from expressing

"events as . . . vibrations of the soul" which are the content and form

of the ly r ic .

Later, in The Theory of the Novel, Lukacs briefly alludes to the

dramatic personae in drama, showing the paradox that exists in tragedy

between the hero’s loneliness as the essence of this genre and the

"dramatic form of expression — the dialogue" that presupposes communion

among the characters if the drama is to be truly "dialogical." The lyrical language, he explains, is "monological."87

Lukacs also d ifferentiates between epic and drama on a temporal

85Lukacs, Soul and Form, p. 74-75.

86ibid., p. 75.

87Lukâcs, The Theory of the Novel, p. 45. See also The Historical Novel, p. 132, in which he asserts that "drama portrays character and action exclusively through dialogue." 34

basis. He discusses approvingly Goethe's and Schiller's views on this

i s s u e ,88 and later uses them to argue for the linguistic validity of the

principle of "necessary anachronism" in epic, against the naturalistic

attitude of Flaubert — in his use of archaic language — toward history

which "leads to a disintegration of epic l a n g u a g e ."89 Goethe and

Schiller, in their treatment of the "public character" of both epic and

drama, see the time dimension as belonging "entirely to the past" in epic

and "entirely to the present" in d r a m a . 90 Lukâcs also stresses, in this

context, the difference between real and aesthetic time in drama and

epic; in the first, "it must be the same as it would be in reality,"

vrfiile in epic "a long stretch of time can be accounted for in a few words" or it may take longer than it does in reality.91 it must be

understood that Lukâcs is talking about aesthetic time not as may be measured by the clock, but in relation to the illusion or impression of time by which the work affects the recipient.

Complementary Remarks

In Lukâcs' theory of modes, the question of aesthetic distance may be important, yet it is secondary in comparison to the issue of

88Lukâcs does so extensively in Goethe and His Age, especially in chapter four, and briefly in The Historical Novel, p. 131. See "On Epic and Dramatic Poetry," in Goethe's Literary Essays, selected and arranged by J. E. Spingar (New York; Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1964), pp. 100-107. The essay is written by both Goethe and Schiller and contains the idea that Lukâcs discusses in the mentioned works.

89Lukâcs, The Historical Novel, pp. 195-96.

90lbid., p. 131. Also Goethe's Literary Essays, p. 100.

91Lukâcs, The Historical Novel, p. 132. 35 to ta lity on which his whole system is based. There are, however, a few

remarks that must be made, at least b riefly, before moving on to the other axis of this system, the genres.

In The Theory of the Novel, Lukacs asserts the idea vrtiich he appears to hold throughout his career, that the three modes "are not the thesis, anti-thesis and a synthesis of a dialectical process," as may be considered in the Aristotelian structural theory, or as is claimed by

Friedrich Schlegel,92 Actually, each one of them is rather a means of giving a different form to the world, and positively endeavors to fulfill

"its own structural l a w s . " 9 3

In addition to this independence of the modes, Lukâcs, in what appears to be an unavoidable acknowledgement of their constancy, asserts that

. . . the genres [i.e., the modes] have an indestructible ability to thrive. Other than lyric, epic and drama, there has developed no new literary kind (literaturgattung) .94

(My emphasis)

Regardless of the type of totality they represent, their aesthetic distance,their independence, and constancy, the modes are never directly placed by Lukâcs in a hierarchically judgmental p osition95 .

Nevertheless, he does seem to indirectly reserve his highest regard for

92cuillen, Literature as System, pp. 413-14. For a long discussion of Schlegel’s view, see Ralph W. Ewton, Jr., The Literary Theories of August Wilhelm Schlegel (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), p. 85 in particular.

93Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel. p. 128.

94Lukâcs, A esthetics, p. 625.

95gee The Theory of the Novel, p. 128. 36

the epic, lowest for the lyric.

The greatest problem with Lukâcs' theory of modes, as well as

with genres, as we will see later, arises from the fact that he seeks to

elevate only certain genres and works into a definition of the mode. He

himself is sometimes aware of this gap in his theory. In The Historical

Novel, for instance, he points out that the principle of "the total

picture" that great epic and drama are supposed to present,

. . . distinguishes them both as regards form and content from the other epic genres, of which the novelle in particular has become important in modern development. Epic and novel are distinguished from all other minor varieties of the epic by this idea of totality.96

The difference, he continues, is not quantitative, but rather "a

qualitative one of artistic style, artistic form."97 in his 1964 long

essay on Solzhenitzyn's novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,

Lukacs faces th is problem when he acknowledges that the novella "does not

claim to shape the vrtiole of social reality, nor even to depict that whole

as it appears from the vantage point98 of a fundamental and topical problem."99

In most of his discussion of drama, in theory and practice, he deals with or thinks of only the great drama like the Greek tragedies,

Shakespeare's tragedies, and historical plays, etc., but disregards or does not consider as "dramatic" that which does not rise to his high and

96Lukâcs, The Historical Novel, pp. 90-91.

97Ibid ., p. 91.

98i.e., totality as a methodological instrument or a perspective,

99George Lukâcs, Solzhenitzyn, trans. William David Graf (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1970), p. 8. 37 particular standards.1^0

The gap, which may be called "the lack of a field theory" able

to hold not only his selected works and genres, but all or most of

existing literary tex ts, is the fundamental weakness in Lukâcs' theory of

literary modes in spite of its generous contribution to this major

literary issue.

fact, in The Historical Novel, p. 91, Lukacs seems to suggest that the dramatic mode o b jectifies it s e l f only in one "total" genre, for he asserts that there are no dramatic forms that correspond to the novella, for example. The one act play, for him, is just a "loosely composed narrative, broken up into dialogue." III. LUKÂCS' THEORY OF LITERARY GENRES

Lukacs' Definition of Genre

Lukâcs' theory of genres, the variables of the genre system, is, in spite of its possible weaknesses, clearer, richer, and more practical than that of modes. It is also considerably more often discussed and applied by contemporary genre c r itic s , especially in novel studies. In his treatment of literary production, Lukâcs "constantly works with their

[genres'] differences and judges by genre c r ite r ia ."1 Probably his best definition of genre is to be found in The Historical Novel, which may be considered his best Marxist study in genre criticism and perhaps the most important single book on the historical novel.2 Here, he conceptualizes the genre as "a peculiar artistic reflection of peculiar facts of life"3

(My emphasis) — facts of lif e qua facts of a socio-historical life-process that represent the historical spirit in a historical moment.4

IWellek, Four C ritics, p. 50.

^Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel ; Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), disagrees with some of Lukâcs' views and judgments of English authors, but acknowledges that he is "the foremost critic of historical fiction," p. xvi. See also Sandra Hermann, "Introduction," in her translation of Alessandro Manzoni, On the Historical Novel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), pp. 53-59.

Bbukacs, The Historical Novel, p. 170. On p. 241, he formulates the same idea in a more abstract way, saying that "A specific form, a genre must be based upon a specific truth of life ."

4lb id ., pp. 13, 89-90, 150-53.

38 39

In this definition, Lukacs asserts both form and content, and mainly on these two major factors and a few minor ones, he constructs his

genre theory and distinguishes between them, constantly emphasizing the

d ialectical relationship between the sp ecific genre and the particular

historical moment. As he does so, Lukâcs is completely aware of his materialist dialectical method and his objective, i.e., fulfilling this

aspect of Marxist poetics. He strongly asserts that

No serious Marxist genre theory is possible unless an attempt is made to apply the theory of reflection of materialist dialectics to the problem of the differentiation of genre.5

By "reflection," vdien applied to poetics and aesthetics in general,

Lukâcs means, as mentioned earlier, mimesis, or "aesthetic reflection."

Lukâcs' theory of genres, then, equally regards artistic principles and the dialectical process of the socio-historical development. From this perspective a genre is conceived as an aesthetic text of an historical context.

In the preceding chapter, we have seen how Lukâcs bases his concept of modes on totalities that are historically, not metaphysically, universal. Consequently, he calls the modes

"continuous" rather than "constant," aiming to avoid any suggestion that they are a p riori, ahistorical or sta tic forms. However, the

"continuous" presence of the modes "from time immemorial,"6 as he himself recognizes, colors them, when seen separately, with a "metaphysical" shade that could be seen as conflicting with their socio-historical

Sibid., p. 15.

^Lukâcs, Aesthetics, p. 625. 40

principles. This apparent problem may have its solution in the

relationship between mode/genre/work, in which constancy claims only a

relative status.

The Relationship Between Literature, Genre, and Works

The question of the relationship between the two major cate­

gories of literary classification, mode and genre, is directly and

indirectly treated by Lukâcs in various locations in his works. In his

Aesthetics, he addresses the issue in the broadest context of literature

as a continuum system of classes and their relationship to each other.

"Continuity" is presented here as a d ialectical relationship between the

"aesthetic consciousness" as the essence of the specific art (in this

case, literature) and that of the individual work. Lukâcs insists on the

social-historical characteristic of continuity, which he defines as

. . . the organic unfolding development of social problems, whose continuous effect — as social mandate — on the genesis of individual artworks is the fundamental principle of this dialectic.7

The aesthetic continuity, in other words, is the aesthetically shaped

historical process. As the content of the work of art, this historical

process changes its aesthetic correlative in some moments of history as

it itself changes. How does this happen?

The essence of each literary work, and precisely the aesthetic determinants of its nature, is a moment in the continuity of its

aesthetic kind, i.e., the mode and genre.8 This dialectical relationship

also exists between genres and works on the one hand and literature on

7Ibid., p. 625.

®Ibid., p. 622. m

the other, a relationship that Lukacs compares to the Aristotelian genus,

specis, and the individual as having a . . seemingly extensive

structural similarity."9 In this context, genres (that is specis) are

viewed as " lit t le exemplars or subtypes of genus art [that is literature]

as individual works are exemplars or subtypes of the genre."10

The relation of the work to its genre is not that of "inclusion"

of the particular within an abstract generalityll or that of

"subsumption." It is , rather, a "relationship o f inherence"12 that

functions as a constant dialectical giving-receiving process which

accounts for both continuity and change in the aesthetic sphere. With

every truly artistic work, the genre principles experience some modification at least, "if not a decisive overturning" as happens in epochs of great literary achievements. This is the major component of the historicity of genres, which in spite of this dialectical relation to individual works, do not only maintain themselves but, moreover, "become internally enriched and deepened asgenre."13 This dialectical process between what Lukâcs calls "continuity and punctuality" is at work as well within the whole aesthetic sphere, including between genres and modes.

Meanwhile, each genre maintains it s identity as a "self-contained world"

9lb id ., p. 632.

lOlbid., p. 631.

Illb id ., p. 622.

12lbid., p. 631.

13lbid., p. 622. Here, Lukacs praises Lessing’s great achievement in demonstrating this relation betwen ancient drama and Shakespeare's. 42

with it s qualitatively unique and, in many aspects, different aesthetic

principles .1^

Because the spirit of a historical moment, like that of Greek

antiquity or the Western bourgeois society, finds its best representation

in one art, like literature, or one sort of art, like epic or novel,

there is usually one genre that is dominant in one historical period. As

the literary representative of the historical period, the dominant genre

is determined by "the total development, which is based on the total

development of forces of production." This socio-historical basis of

genre determines not only the domination of an art or a genre, but also

the death of one or the birth of another. The best example that Lukâcs offers for this view is the death of the epic genre and the genesis of the novel. This example also depicts the "continuity" and "punctuality" of the genres within the continuum of the epic mode as well as "the extraordinary stability of kinds of arts," i.e., the epic mode, in this case. 15

Lukacs forcefully argues that, once established, the genres show the capacity for both continuity and evolution of even "their fundamental principles."16 This characteristic is what makes genres resist any conceptual fixation that would transfer their principles from the aesthetic sphere into "logical-scientific abstraction."1? The

I^Ibid., p. 624.

15ibid., p. 625.

iGlbid., p. 625.

17lbid., p. 630. 43

dialectical relationship between the constant and the variable elements

in genre assures that while the work f u lf ills the genre laws, it broadens

them as w e l l . 18 jt also means that any general conceptualization, to be

correct, has to go beyond a mere transfer of "the aesthetic content into

a concept" into accounting for "the real common characteristics"

contained in the structure of the works as well as in the aesthetic

attitude toward i t . 19 If the genres are formulated in rigid, fixed,

static principles, then, Lukâcs asserts, "we will be dealing with dead

ru le s."20

In his A esthetics, Lukâcs keeps in sisting again and again on

this dialectical relationship between individual works and the genre to

which they belong. His objective is to assert that the concept of genre

(and actually literature and all its categories) is not an a priori one.

It is not deduced from certain higher or fixed metaphysical principles but is a formulation of an aesthetic institution which is inferred from

specific actual works whose aesthetic consciousness affects and is affected by that in stitu tio n . In a conclusive pronouncement, Lukâcs says in his A esthetics,

. . . self-preservation, growth, development of genre and art in general depend, in immediate and compelling necessity, on realization of individual artworks. On the other hand, the dying (obsolescent) forms are dropped from the aesthetic genre process and become aesthetic nothingness.21

ISlbid., p. 639.

19ibid., pp. 630, 638.

20ibid., p. 639.

21 Ibid., p. 640. 44

This socio-historical process is, ontologically and aesthetically, at

work among all different arts and classes of arts, as we have said,

including modes and genres. How does Lukacs see the relationship between

these two classes in particular?

The Genres-Modes Relationship

The previous discussion explains Lukacs’ most abstract and

systematic views on the relationship between literature, genres, and

individual works and how they undergo a continuous exchange of influence, vriiile they are a ll determined by the socio-historical development. It is

true that this theoretical, systematic, and more comprehensive treatment of genre theory occurred late in his career, yet i t actually came as no more than a crystallization of his earlier views, the seeds of which could be traced back to his History of the Development of the Modern

Drama (completed in 1909, but not published until 1911)^2 and ’’Notes

Toward the Theory of Literary History’’( 1910). Under the influence of

Dilthey, ’’Lukacs defined literary history as an organic synthesis of aesthetics and sociology, of the absolute and the historical ,’’23

Therefore, the forms themselves, the genres, must be a synthesis of aesthetic laws and historical development. This idea is also implied in

Soul and Form, where

. . . Lukacs imputes a d istin ct "psychic content" to every "form" of literature as a correlative of the "moment of destiny" v*iich . . . characterizes the "world" typical of a given genre.24

22congdon, The Young Lukacs. p. 24.

23ibid., p. 26; about the same issue, see Parkinson, Georg Lukacs, p. 3; and also Andrew Arato and Paul Breines, The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism (New York; The Seabury Press, 1979), p. 15.

2^Hernandi, Beyond Genre, pp. 115-16. 45

In his Theory of the Novel, Lukâcs clearly embraces the Hegelian

interpretation of the genesis, development, and death of genres as a reflection of the historical process. However, his weakness here is seen

in his attempt to create, in Jameson's words,

. . . a typology, of a characteristically Hegelian working out of pure formal p o ssib ilities in the chronological unfolding of history itself.25

This weakness is to be overcome in the course of his Marxist career, most extensively and clearly in his Historical Novel, in which history is treated, not in the Hegelian Absolute Spirit of The Theory of the

Novel,26 but rather as a concrete socio-economic process.

It seems clear by now that Lukâcs' early preoccupation with the problem of the tension between the genre as an aesthetic category on the one hand and a historical moment on the other, finds its exploration in later works, as I have already shown. However, the mode-genre relationship is a question that has yet to be clarified.

In my discussion of Lukâcs' understanding of totality on which he bases his genre theory in general, I quoted his description of this concept as being a concrete unity made of subordinate totalities which is, at the same time, itself over-determined by totalities of higher complexity. That description is actually similar to his analysis of the relationship between the different arts in the realm of aesthetic phenomena and the various categories within the same sort of art, which is , in our field of interest; literatu re, mode, genre, and works. From this perspective, the relationship between the mode and the genre is

25jameson, Marxism and Form, p. 180.

26jameson, The P olitical Unconscious, pp. 50-51. 46

similar to that of a higher totality to its subordinate. An analysis of

the epic mode in relation to its two prominent genres, the epic poem and

the novel, may offer a clear explanation.

The epic mode, as we have seen, represents the "totality of

objects." This totality is an historically universal category, and thus

its aesthetic correlative, the epic mode, must be a historically-

aesthetically universal category as well. The embodiment of the totality

of objects is typified as a form of a particular/universal synthesis in

a historical moment, lik e the Homeric Greek society which acquires an

aesthetic representation that takes the form of an epic genre, for

instance, the Iliad or the Odyssey. As the individual work is an

objectification of its genre (with an added value, of course, if it is

an aesthetically great work), the genre is an objectification of its mode

(with an added value as well). The genre, therefore, represents decisive changes in the total h istorical development of man and his literature in general, as well as in the aesthetic development of the mode. What are the changes in "the totality of objects" that epic and novel genres represent? In other words, what are "the peculiar facts of life" that each of these peculiar artistic reflections represent?

In The Theory of the Novel, Lukâcs "demonstrated convincingly the historical determinacy of literaryg e n r e s . "27 When the classical

Greek society was s t i l l organic and rounded, the to ta lity of objects

27Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin; An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York; Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 19. 47

objectifiec|28 itself as integration, a harmonious subject-object

relationship in a homogeneous world of no separation, in Lukâcs' view,

between inner and outer, between appearance and meaning. It was a

concrete totality29 of being that found its best aesthetic representation

in the Homeric epic — a form whose totality is a spontaneous,

unconscious reflection of an existing totality of "here" and "now."

In the bourgeois capitalist society, the totality as a mode of

being no longer exists. As an absent category of being, however, it

objectifies itself as alienation. But totality is both an "inherent need

of the human mind" and an "inner necessity" of a ll works of a r t.30 As a

result of "the d ialectic between the urge for to ta lity and man's

alienated situation," the novel, because of its inherent epic capacity to

represent the totality of life-process, emerged as the epic

objectification of the bourgeois society. However, this aesthetic

objectification is not a spontaneous process like that of the Greek epic,

but is, rather, conscious or, in de Man's words, "intentional."31 The

novel's task

. . . is to form and represent a world that is inherently formless and nonrepresentable, fractured, contingent.

28"objectification" is used here in Marxist terms. It is "a universal human process, with its unique historical form under capitalism, which is rather to be designed as alienation;" see Jameson, The Political Unconscious, pp. 50-51, but in the early Greek society, it takes the form of integration.

29£ugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism; A Historical Study of Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1982), pp. 94-95.

30paul de Man, p. 54.

31 Ibid., p. 55. 48

heterogeneous, a nothingness of inessential particulars.32

The change in the epic mode from epic genre to novel represents,then, a socio-historical shift from a preconditioned existence of totality as being to an intentionally created totality as a literary form because

It is no longer a copy, for a ll the models have gone; i t is a created totality, for the natural unity of the metaphysical spheres has been destroyedf o r e v e r .33

Creation does not mean in Lukâcs a pure work of the individual mind. It is rather a d ialectical process mediated by a deep and genuine insight of the artist who, consciously or unconsciously, grasps the inner truth of the h istorical process.

The fragmentary and disintegrated character of the bourgeois society, then, does not permit the novelist, in Lukâcs' view, to mirror reality as formless, chaotic, and disintegrated. The extensive totality of life has to find its aesthetic objectification in an epic form; the novel is the epic genre of the bourgeois society and the novelist has to perform his impossible task, if he is to produce a really epic novel.

32Maire Jaanus Kurrik, Literature and Negation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), p. 97.

33Lukâcs, The Theory of the Novel, p. 37. IV. CONCLUSION

This study has attempted to describe and discuss the most

fundamental principles of Lukâcs' genre theory in its two major classes,

the mode and the genre, and the relationship between them. From the

beginning, the distinction was made between the mode as constant and the

genre as variable, relating the system of classification of genre to its

originators, Plato and Aristotle. Moreover, we have seen that there have

been attempts to radically challenge the Aristotelian system but that

they have failed.

As a classicist in education and taste, in the German tradition,

Lukâcs respects the Aristotelian design of the genre system and so takes

for granted the division between modes and genres. However, as a

Hegelian Marxist with a socio-historical approach to the study of literary phenomenon, Lukâcs bases his own theory of genres on principles different than the classical ones. Instead of using Aristotelian structural rules based on linguistic forms of address or manner of representation, Lukâcs establishes his theory, from a formal-thematic perspective, on "totality" vAiich is a philosophical-aesthetic category with socio-historical and ontological dimensions.

The category of totality is universal but is socio-historically determined, for it objectifies itself in definite and concrete historical moments. In the early Greek epoch, for example, totality took the form of integration; in the bourgeois society, it takes the form of

49 50

alienation. In the Marxist phase of his career, however, Lukâcs develops

this concept to also mean a methodological process, a perspective from

vdiich the subject can correctly conceive the deep truth of the historical

process even after the vanishing of totality as a form of being. Through

this process, the author can, for instance, create a totality in his

literary work. Thus, totality still functions as a subject-object

relationship, but it is now on the basis of an intentional rather than a

spontaneous situation.

This central category of totality in all Lukacs' work is the ultimate principle on which his modes are based. Each one of the three modes is the aesthetic objectification of the most fundamental sub-categories: the totality of objects for epic; the totality of movement for drama; and the totality of the lyrical movement, or the subjective, for lyric. However, while the objective is dominant in both epic and drama, it is the subjective that defines lyric. In this study, this is translated into the category of aesthetic distance and is compared to the Aristotelian degree of impersonation.

Lukâcs also distinguishes between extensive and intensive totality, asserting that in the work of art of any genre, totality must be qualitatively intensive. This is achieved through mimesis as an

"aesthetic reflection" of the to tality through the use of the typical.

Because of the dialectical relationship between the modes and the socio-historical totality, Lukacs asserts that the modes are not fixed but are, rather, continuous categories. In practice, however, he often treats them as constants. The major weakness of his system arises from his attempt to elevate certain works and genres into a definition of mode which results in a selective theory, or what I have called the "lack of a 51

field theory" that can embrace all genres and works.

Lukâcs deals with genres qua variables throughout his career,

using their criteria to discuss and judge literary works. He sees the genre as "a peculiar artistic reflection of peculiar facts of life” in which these facts represent a moment in socio-historical development.

The "reflection" of the particular facts of life fulfills the rules of both the dialectics of the socio-historical process as well as the aesthetic principles of the genre. The genre in Lukâcs, then, is the aesthetic form of a historical moment.

In order to understand his emphasis on the "continuous" rather than on the fixed characteristic of the modes, I discussed the relationship that Lukâcs sees between the different literary classes

(i.e . literature, modes, genre, and work) and concluded that constancy and change are relative terms. The genre is continuous in relation to individual works, as is the mode in relation to the genres. However,

Lukacs repeatedly asserts that with the creation of each true work of literature, the genre is at least slightly modified, enriched, and deepened without losing the aesthetic determinant that accounts for its continuity.

Lukacs compares the relationship between literature, genre, and work to the Aristotelian genus, specis, and individual, in which genres are l i t t l e exemplars of literature, and works li ttl e exemplars of genre.

However, the relationship of the work to each genre is not that of

"inclusion" but is, rather, one of "inherence."

The historical moment and its deep truth are best represented,

Lukâcs believes, in one art, and better, in one genre which is dominant in a particular epoch, for instance, the Homeric epic for the early Greek 52 society and the novel for the bourgeois. This is an example of how genre is historically determined; a determination that causes not only the genesis of the genre but also its death, again as happened with the epic genre, for example.

The relationship between a mode and its genre is like that of a totality to its subordinate totalities: it determines them while being determined by them in a dialectical manner. Thus, the epic mode represents an historically universal totality that is objectified in a more concrete historical moment which in turn is aesthetically represented in a more concrete dominant genre, for example, the epic or the novel. The genre has to give a form to that historical moment whether it is pre-formed as a state of being as in the case of the early

Greek society, or a formless, chaotic existence as in our own moment of history, the bourgeois capitalist society. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by Lukacs

Lukâcs, George. "About the Principles of Dramatic Form." Translated by Bela Kiralyfalvi. Educational Theatre Journal 26 (Dec. 1974):513-21.

Aesthetik, Teil I; Die Eigenart des Aesthetik, 2 vo ls.. Neuwied am Rhein, Luchterlaub, 1963.

The Destruction of Reason. Translated by Peter Palmer. Atlantic Highland: Humanities Press, 1981

Essays on Realism. Edited and introduced by Rodney Livingstone; translated by David Fernbach. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1981.

Essays on Thomas Mann. Translated by Stanley Mitchell. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965.

. Goethe and His Age. Translated by Robert Anchor. London: Merlin Press, 1978.

"The Heidelberg Aesthetics." The New Hungarian Quarterly TSpring 1972).

. The Historical Novel. Translated from the German by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, with an introduction by Fredric Jameson. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist D ia lectics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1982.

"Introduction to a Monograph on Aesthetics." The New Hungarian Quarterly 14 (l964 ):57-72.

"Marx and Engels on Problems of Dramaturgy." International Theatre No. 2 (1934):11-14.

. Marxism and Human Liberation. Edited with an introduction by E. San Juan, Jr. New York: A Delta Book, Published by Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1978.

53 54

The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. Translated from the German by John and Necke Mander. London; Merlin Press, 1979. This text is the same as that of Realism in Our Time; Literature and Class Struggle. Planned and edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen, with a preface by George Steiner. Translated from the German by John and Necke Mander. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1964.

"On Socialist Realism." International Literature 4 TT939):87-96.

The Ontology of Social Being. Vol. I, II. Translated by David Fernback. London: Merlin Press, 1978.

"The Poetry of the Film." New Hungarian Quarterly 15 (Summer 1974):62-67

"The Question of Romanticism." New Hungarian Quarterly 6 (Summer 1965):27-32. Forward to Vol. 6: "French R ealists.

. Review and A rticles. Translated by Peter Palmer. London: Merlin Press, 1985.

"The Sociology of Modern Drama." Tulane Drama Review 9 (Summer 1965):146-70. Translated by Lee Baxandall.

. Solzhenitsyn. Translated from the German by William David Graf. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971.

. Soul and Form. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1980.

. Studies in European Realism. Introduction by Alfred Kazin. New York: The Universal Library, Grosset & Dunlap, 1964.

The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated from the German by Anna Bostock. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1978.

. Writer & Critic and Other Essays. Edited and translated by Arthur Kahm, Ph.D. New York: The Universal Library, Grosset& Dunlap, 1971.

The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1976.

Works About Lukâcs

Arato, Andrew and Breines, Paul. The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism. New York: The Seabury Press, 1979. 55

Bohr, Ehrhard, and Kunzer, Ruth G. George Lukacs. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1972.

Bernstein, J.M. The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukâcs, Marxism and the D ialectics of Form. -Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Congdon, Lee, The Young Lukâcs. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.

Cowan, James Lincoln. "Gyorgy Lukâcs* Criticism of Thomas Mann and Avant-Garde Literature." Ph.D. dissertation. University of California, Berkeley, 1977.

de Man, Paul. "Georg Lukacs: Theory of the Novel," in Blindness and Insight: Essay in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism . New York: Oxford University Press, 1971, 551-59.

Demetz, Peter. Marx, Engels, and the Poets: Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism . Revised and enlarged by the author and translated by Jeffrey L. Sammons. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1967. Includes "George Lukâcs as a Theoretician of Literature."

Eorsi, Istvan. "Gyorgy Lukâcs and The Theory of Lyric Poetry." New Hungarian Quarterly 6 (Summer 1965);35-46.

Heller, Agnes, ed. Lukâcs Reappraised New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Kazin, Alfred. "George Lukâcs on European Realism." Partisan Review3 I (Spring 1964):231-240.

K iralyfalvi, Bela. The Aesthetics of Gyorgy Lukâcs. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.

Lictheim, George. "An Intellectual Disaster." Encounter 10 (May 1963):74-80.

Lunn, Eugene. Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukâcs, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1982.

Meszaros, Istvan. Lukâcs' Concept of D ia lectic. London: The Merlin Press, 1972.

Morawski, Stefan. "Mimesis — Lukâcs' Universal Principle." Translated by Malgorzata Munk and Lee Baxandall. Science and Society3I (Winter 1968):26-38.

Murphy, Peter, comp. Writing By and About George Lukacs: A Bibliography. New York: The American Institute for Marxist Studies, 1976. 56

Parkinson, G. H. R., ed. Georg Lukâcs; The Man, His Work and His Ideas. New York: Vintage Books, 1970.

______. Georg Lukâcs. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977.

Stern, L. "George Lukacs: An Intellectural Portrait," Dissent 5 (Spring 1958): 162-175.

Wellek, René , Four Critics: Croce, Valery, Lukacs and Ingarden, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981.

General Works on Theory of Genre, and Marxist Literary Theory, and Other Related Subjects

Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Gerald F. Else. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1980.

Baxandall, Lee. Marxism and Aesthetics: A Selected Annotated Bibliography: Books and A rticles in the English Language. New York: Humanities, 1968.

Bennett, Tony. Formalism and Marxism. London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1978.

Bermann, Sandra. "Introduction" in her translation of Alessandro Manzoni, On the Historical Novel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984, pp. 1-59.

Bottoraore, Tom, ed. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Else, Gerald F. A risto tle's Poetics: The Argument. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957.

Ewton, Ralph W., Jr. The Literary Theories of August Wilhelm Schlegal. The Hague: Mouton, 1972.

Fleishman, Avrom. The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971 .

Fokkema, D.W. and Kunne-Ibsch, Elrud. Theories of Literature in the Twentieth Century. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977.

Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Forgas, David. "6 Marxist Literary Theories," in Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction, ed. Ann Jefferson and David Robey. Totawa: Barnes and Noble Books, 1982. 57

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism; Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.

Goethe. Literary Essays. Selected by J. E. Spingarn. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1964.

Hernandi, Paul. Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1972.

Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century D ialectical Theory of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.

The P olitical Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981

Jay, Martin. Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Kurrik, Maire Jaanus. Literature and Negation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon. New York: The Noonday Press, 1961.

Plato. The Republic. Translated with Introduction and Notes by Francis MacDonald Cornforb. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Reichert, John. "More than Kin and Less than Kind: The Limits of Genre Theory," in Theories of Literary Genre. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978.

Strelka, Joseph P, ed. Theories of Literary Genre. Yearbook of Comparative Criticism 8. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978.

Wellek, Rene and Warren, Austin. Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942.

Weisstein, Ubrich. "Modes of Criticism: Studies in Hamlet," in Comparative Literature: Method and Perspective, ed. Newton P. Stallknech and Hort Frenz. Carbondale: Southern Illin o is University Press, 1961.

Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. CLARIFICATION

This dissertation is a part of a larger ongoing work on

Lukacs' comprehensive genre theory. Interested readers may contact the author at this address:

Les Jardins, Dellys W. de Tizi-Ouzou A lg e r ia

y

Mostefa Souag