Lukcs' Theory of the Novel The Theory of the Novel by Gyrgy Lukcs; Anna Bostock Review by: Graham

Good NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter, 1973), pp. 175-185 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345432 . Accessed: 20/02/2013 10:49
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:49:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Review Essay
Lukacs' of Theory theNovel
GRAHAM GOOD We do not expect lyricism from our literary critics any more, especially from a famed Marxist one. So the opening of Lukacs' Theory of the Novel' may come as a shock: "Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths ... ." The author, after this paean to the "integrated" civilization of classical Greece, goes on to confound our modem taste for being reassured every now and then, by means of dates, names of writers and books, quotations and so on, that we know where we are: long reaches of Lukacs' essay go by without these comforting little markers. Its lyrical-abstract style is the product of its period (it was written in 1914-15 and first published in a periodical in 1916 and in book form in 1920), a decade which saw feverish cults of Holderlin and Kleist, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, as well as much millenial talk about the "god-abandoned world." The intellectual tone of that decade in Germany is wonderfully recaptured in parts of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, and Lukacs' turns of phrase are often reminiscent of those passages. Indeed, both Lukacs in his 1962 introduction and the publisher in his 1971 advertisement seem to stress historical and biographical interest as the book's major claim on our attention. It is, of course, a fascinating juncture in Lukacs' intellectual career: as he informs us, he was "in process of turning from Kant to Hegel" before finally arriving at Marx in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Nevertheless it would be a mistake to dismiss the essay as simply a period piece: despite its remote style and its other shortcomings, its intellectual substance can make a valuable contribution to the current debate on the theory of the novel.

Lukacs begins his argument from the concept (central to much of his later work also) of totality. By this he means, both in art and in life, a whole within which everything is complete and from which nothing is consciously excluded; there is no need of anything beyond it to explain it. In certain ages (such as Homer's or Dante's) this completeness is given to art, and does not have to be established by the art-work itself. This idea is the basis for Lukacs' principal generic distinction: "Great epic writing gives form to the extensive totality of life, drama to the intensive totality of essence." But here we should pause to clear up a possible confusion of generic terminology. Like other aestheticians in the German tradition, Lukacs treats the novel as a form of the epic. He subsumes the epic proper
1 Trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, and Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1971), 160 pp.

This content downloaded on Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:49:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

176

NOVEL

WINTER

1973

(die Epopoe) and the novel (der Roman) under the general heading of die grosse Epik, which is here usually, though not consistently, rendered as "great epic literature" or "great epic writing." It is often important to know whether "epic" in the English is Epik or Epopoe in the German, and it is not always clear. The epic and novel, then, taken together as die grosse Epik, are distinguished from drama (in practice Lukacs seems to equate this with tragedy) as different forms of artistic totality. Tragedy posits an essence or meaning (these terms appear to be roughly interchangeable, or else they are used in tandem) which is embodied in the hero and which proves to be incompatible with life as it is in reality. The tragic hero's function is "to make transcendence visible" through his death. Thus the role of the sensuous presentation of life on the stage is simply to show life's inadequacy to a higher principle. This does not mean that drama is not a totality, since the transcendence, the death, is still closed within the work; tragedy forms a totality in which life still contains essential meaning but can only hold it for a brief and crucial period, that is, intensively. Because of this brevity, because it is an intensive totality, tragedy is able to survive as an artistic whole in periods which are not themselves totalities, that is, cultures in which essence and meaning are felt as divorced from real life. Tragedy can still shape itself around a glimpse of that meaning even as it transcends life. This faith in a higher principle becomes, in modern tragedy, a problematic faith in others, in whom the hero vainly hopes to find the same essence that is in himself. Tragedy, then, Lukacs writes, can survive more or less intact. But epic writing (die grosse Epik), when it is confronted by the same divorce between life and meaning, ceases to be the true epic (Epopoe) and turns into the novel. All epic writing is an "extensive totality of life," and as such can only be a harmonious whole in cultures which are totalities, in which meaning and essence are felt as everywhere present and immanent within real life. At these times epic writing "did not have to leave the empirical in order to represent transcendent reality." The Homeric gods were felt as freely penetrating the empirical world, transcendence was immanent, and meaning and essence were everywhere in life. Dante, who represents the transition from the true epic to the novel, is confronted by a meaning that is beyond life; yet his work is a totality because he brings that beyond to life. Where Homer finds meaning in life, Dante gives life to transcendent meaning. After Dante, however, the gap can no longer be jumped in this way, and we enter the age of the novel (Lukacs does not say much about medieval romance, but does refer parenthetically to the "novels" of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Gottfried von Strassburg). "The novel," he writes, "is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, and which yet still thinks in terms of totality." This key definition leads into a discussion of verse and prose: where tragic verse conveys the isolation of the hero, his "distance" or estrangement from everyday things, and epic verse gives a joyful "distance" or novelty to all the familiar things of life, prose is the only medium for the novel, for only prose can encompass both the struggle for essence and meaning in the midst of a spirit-

This content downloaded on Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:49:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

GRAHAM

GOOD

LUKACS

ON

EPIC

AND

NOVEL

177

less reality, and the rare attainment of them. Epic writing can no longer be consistently poetic. The novel is looking for something in life which it cannot often find: "The epic (Epop6e) gives form to a totality that is rounded from within (eine von sich aus geschlossene Lebenstotalitdt), the novel seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life." A totality of life and meaning is given to the epic, the novel has to make its own. The structural differences between the two follow from this. The epic has an organic, not a constructed unity: since meaning and essence are immanent in every part of life, the epic can simply accumulate parts, each of which contains its own meaning within itself. The meaning of each part does not depend on its structural relationship to other parts. Lukacs avers that "in the story of the Iliad, which has no beginning and no end, a rounded universe blossoms into allembracing life." The novel, however, is not the presentation of a totality virtually present in every part, but is constructed around the search for such a totality. This search is embodied in the psychology of the novel's heroes: "they are seekers." This gives the novel what for Lukacs is the abstract and imposed form of the biography, the life story of a single separated individual. The parts of the novel are meaningful not in themselves (as with Homer) but only in relation to the hero's quest for meaning; they are not self-justifying, but have to be justified architecturally as incomplete and unsatisfactory stages of the quest, or as thematic parallels to it. "Thus the novel, in contrast to other genres whose existence resides within the finished form, appears as something in process of becoming." The novel's heroes are seekers, but not necessarily finders: there is no guarantee of the reality, worth, or attainability of their goals. Here, crime and madness can only tentatively be distinguished from heroism and wisdom. Lukacs calls the novel the art form of "transcendental homelessness," and crime and madness objectify respectively the homelessness of action and value in the world. Of course these things may appear in epic or tragedy; but there, vengeance tends to follow crime, and death to follow madness without the protracted moral lostness of the novel. Society is of little help in this search for value. The hero encounters society and its laws as something no longer absolutely binding upon him. In fact, it is something alien, and confronts him as what Lukacs calls a "second nature," not dumb and sensuous like the first nature, but "a complex of senses-meanings-which has become rigid and strange, and which no longer awakens interiority; it is a charnel house of long-dead interiorities .. ." Lukacs derives the Romantic and post-Romantic feeling for nature from this sense of the fossilization of society: "Estrangement from nature (the first nature), the modern sentimental attitude to nature, is only a projection of man's experience of his self-made environment as a prison instead of as a parental home." The "great moment" of lyric poetry can still affirm "the meaningful unity of nature and soul or their meaningful divorce," but "second nature" remains stubbornly unpoetic and demands detached or "essayistic" treatment. Society, then, has become something rigid and external: the novel hero no longer takes part in its values and rituals, accepting their meaning as his meaning,

This content downloaded on Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:49:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

178

NOVEL

WINTER

1973

as the epic hero did. Social customs and laws are no longer a living part of his reality. This is reflected in his different social status. The tragic hero has to be a king to symbolize his significant isolation and elevation above his community; the epic hero also has to be a king, but for him this position is a significant link to his community: the epic joins "an individual destiny to a totality." The first is an intensive connection (soon to be broken in death), the second an extensive one (enduring through many vicissitudes); but the novel hero has neither. The value system of his society, no longer organic, but fossilized into convention, allows a part of itself (the novel hero) to become self-enclosed and to find itself as a separate interiority, that is, a personality consciously distinct from others; the rounded totality of the epic cosmos never allows this. The novelist's reality no longer presents him with the organic wholeness of life and meaning complete alike in characters, communities and objects. Instead, he has to make an abstract systematization "which emphasizes the conventionality of the objective world and the interiority of the subjective one." There are now two types of reality instead of one. They can only be related artistically by making the subject to whom meaning is present as an unrealized ideal, go on the impossible search for an object adequate to it. The search can only end in despair, compromise or resignation; yet it can be illuminated by a momentary vision of the totality of life and meaning, which, however, cannot be extensively incorporated into daily life. "The immanence of meaning which the form of the novel requires lies in the hero's finding out through experience that a mere glimpse of meaning is the highest that life has to offer." Lyrical meaning remains an isolated "great moment" or epiphany; it can never become extensively immanent in the real world, to whose laws the novelist must remain equally faithful. He has to hold the balance between subjective mood and objective, essayistic reflection. This accounts for the German Romantics' demand that the novel should include both pure thought and pure lyric poetry, thus representing both poles of the experience of reality. Such, then, is the plight of the novel. "Der Roman ist die Epop6e der gottverlassenen Welt," Lukaics writes. "The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God. The novel hero's psychology is demonic; the objectivity of the novel is the mature man's knowledge that meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that, without meaning, reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality." The epic hero, whatever his tribulations, is god-guided; but the novel hero has only a demon (Dimon is a term Lukacs has borrowed from Goethe to signify a spiritual force that, enclosed within the individual, is no longer part of a cosmic order like the Olympiad). This demonism confronts the spiritless and God-abandoned world as an interiority seeking to know itself and prove itself through adventures. The epic hero does not have quite this moral isolation in his adventures; whatever his sufferings and doubts, he fundamentally trusts that what happens to him is in some way meaningful, is meant to happen. Though he may have to wait for enlightenment, he does not bear the sole onus of interpreting events. Irony, the incongruous interplay between the demonic spirit of the seeker and

This content downloaded on Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:49:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

GRAHAM

GOOD

LUKACS

ON

EPIC

AND

NOVEL

179

the dispirited, inertly self-perpetuating world he wanders in, is the formal principle of the novel. Lukacs calls irony "an attitude of docta ignorantia towards meaning," "a negative mysticism to be found in times without a god." The idealism of the seeker, though it must be balanced and checked against an objective account of reality, is no mere aberration, but presents a metaphysical absence whose implications extend far beyond his own personal sufferings. Irony "apprehends the demon that is within the subject as a metasubjective essentiality, and therefore, when it speaks of the adventures of errant souls in an inessential, empty reality, it intuitively speaks of past gods and gods that are to come .... " The demons who drive the heroes of the novel are lost and displaced gods, no longer integrated with a cosmic order. Here, and again with his mysterious hints at the end of the book that Dostoevsky already "belongs to the new world" either as its forerunner or as its Homer or Dante, Lukacs reveals the millenial hopes that form a persistent undercurrent in the book. A new age, a new integrated totality, is coming. In a conclusion reminiscent of Heidegger's valuation of Holderlin and Rilke as poets "in a destitute time," Lukacs defines the novel as that form of the grosse Epik whose structure corresponds to the time of waiting for the return of the gods. In our present literary context, this is certainly a fresh way of looking at the novel. II Lukacs' "Attempt at a typology of the novel form" (the sub-title of the second part) derives two principal types of novel from these theoretical presuppositions: "The abandonment of the world by God manifests itself in the incommensurability of soul and work, of interiority and adventure. .. either the soul is narrower or it is broader than the outside world." Lukacs calls the narrowing of the soul "abstract idealism;" it is demonic, obsessively blind to reality, and it assumes that because the ideal should be that it must be. The hero of this type of novel has to be an adventurer: since he refuses to acknowledge the meaninglessness of reality, he can only try to impose his ideals in action. Here the archetype is of course Don Quixote: "a maximum of inwardly attained meaning becomes a maximum of senselessness, and the sublime turns to madness, to monomania." For Lukacs "Don Quixote is the first great battle of interiority against the prosaic vulgarity of outward life;" but afterwards, as the world becomes progressively more and more prosaic and conventional, the demonically narrowed soul becomes merely a grotesque; no longer idealistically defying the inessentiality of the life around him, he simply flouts and negates the bourgeois concept of decent behavior. Lukacs, in an unfortunately very sketchy way, outlines this development of the quixotic pattern through Sterne to Dickens, Gogol and Balzac. The second type of incommensurability, where the soul is wider than its lifeworld, comes to the fore in the nineteenth-century novel (this transition too is inadequately accounted for). Where abstract idealism had to translate itself into defiant and active conflict with the outside world, here the tendency is towards passivity and the avoidance of conflict. Any struggle to realize the soul amid the

This content downloaded on Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:49:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

18o

NOVELIWINTER

1973

conventions and meaningless laws of society is abandoned as hopeless. The despairing lyricism which renders the hero's experience is informed by the mood of "disillusioned romanticism": a Utopia is projected in the certain knowledge of its defeat. Where in the novel of narrow-minded idealism "subjectivity gave rise to the heroism of militant interiority," here the central character only demands sufficient material from the world to form himself as if he were a work of art. Lukacs gives Jacobsen's Niels Lyhne and Goncharov's Oblomov as examples; he might well have added Huysmans' Des Esseintes or Wilde's Dorian Gray, and we might add the artist-philosopher heroes of Proust, Joyce, Mann and Musil. However, this subjectively created world apart is doomed to decay from within into dreary pessimism by the passage of time. Here Lukacs enters on the discussion of time in the novel which has often been singled out as the book's most impressive feature. Alone among literary forms, he says, the novel contains time among its constitutive principles. (Lukacs, however, seems to apply the idea only to his second novel type.) In tragedy "the unity of time signifies a state of being lifted out of the duration of time." The time of the epic, such as the years of the Trojan war or of Odysseus' wanderings, is part of the magnitude of events, but "men and destinies remain untouched by it." Age is assimilated into character: "Nestor is old just as Helen is beautiful or Agamemnon mighty." "In the epic the life-immanence of meaning is so strong that it abolishes time," but in the novel "meaning is separated from life, and hence the essential from the temporal." In the novel of romantic disillusionment "poetry, the essential, must die, and time is ultimately responsible for its passing." Lukacs now picks up his idea of the novel as the art form of the waiting period between two integrated civilizations. Time flows through the events of the novel, and implies that "all this had to come from somewhere, must be going somewhere; even if the direction betrays no meaning it is a direction none the less." Meaning, like God, is past and future: thus within the stream of time hope and memory "are experiences in which we come as near as we can, in a world forsaken by God, to the essence of things." There is comfort in the fact that however empty the present may be, something must have preceded it, and something must follow. Much of this is relevant to Proust, whose work Lukacs did not know at the time of writing, but his points are adequately anchored in a discussion of L'Education sentimentale. Two satisfying chapters on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and on Tolstoy conclude the book. Lukacs places Goethe's novel "aesthetically and historicophilosophically" between the novel of abstract idealism and that of romantic disillusionment (this point is stretched a little, at any rate in the historical aspect: Dickens, who is associated with the first novel type, died more than seventy years after Wilhelm Meister was published). "Its theme is the reconciliation of the problematic individual, guided by his lived experience of the ideal, with concrete. social reality." Goethe includes both the heroic activity of abstract idealism (Meister's "mission" to regenerate society through a national theater) and romantic passiveness, which interiorizes action and reduces it to contemplation (as in the example of the schone Seele); the synthesis lies in "the possibility of human and

This content downloaded on Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:49:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

GRAHAM

GOOD

LUKACS

ON

EPIC

AND

NOVEL

181

interior community among men, of understanding and common action" (the Society of the Tower). The social world is therefore shown as "a world of convention, which is partially open to penetration by living meaning." The idea of community is also present in Tolstoy, "whose great and truly epic mentality ... aspires to a life based on a community of feeling among simple human beings closely bound to nature" (this ideal is somewhat different from Goethe's enlightened elite). But Tolstoy is unable to unite the three layers of his work, which correspond to three separate conceptions of time. The world of social convention is timeless, "an eternally recurring, self-repeating monotony." Beneath this is the great and continuous rhythm of nature, of the seasons, of birth, maturity and age, which invades each individual destiny in the same impersonal way. Thirdly, there are "the great moments which offer a glimpse of essential life," but which remain isolated from the other two. Yet these moments, if they could be spread out into an extensive totality, "would require a new form of artistic creation: the form of the renewed epic." III Even from this outline it is clear that The Theory of the Novel is a flawed or incomplete work. Lukacs acknowledges its datedness in his 1962 introduction, and points out the inadequacy of his twofold typology to cope with such novelists as Defoe, Fielding and Stendhal. From his later Marxist viewpoint he blames a lot of the book's faults on the inherent limitations of the Geisteswissenschaft method. From our own point of view, we can add other reproaches. "Architecture" is as overestimated in the novel as it is underestimated in the epic.2 The notion of community as a synthesis of the estranged individual and the conventional world of society is hardly unique to Goethe or Tolstoy. Lukacs' historical transitions are sometimes too sketchy to be convincing: for example, Goethe is the only novelist between Cervantes and Balzac to get more than a mention. Despite all this, the theory is of major importance. It is still, as the author's introduction suggests, the best Hegelian treatment of the novel available to us. Lukacs points to other intellectual debts (to Goethe for the idea of the demonic, to Friedrich Schlegel and Solger for irony as a modern structural principle), besides the methodological influences of Dilthey, Simmel and Max Weber. But the fundamental thrust of his thinking in this work is thoroughly Hegelian. Hegel himself has only one or two substantial paragraphs on the novel in his Aesthetics. Not surprisingly in the 1820's, he did not anticipate the flowering of the novel into a major, if not the major, genre of nineteenth-century literature. He defines it as "the modern bourgeois epic" (die moderne biirgerliche Epopoe). It contains, he says, the richness and multiplicity of a total world and an epic presentation of reality. Yet what it lacks is the original poetic state of the world from which the true epic proceeds. The novel, in Hegel's view, sets out a reality already ordered into prose, and one can see here an affinity to Lukacs' notion of "second
2

Cf. the elaborate formal architecture and symmetry the Heroic Tradition (New York: Norton, 1965).

traced in the Iliad by Cedric H. Whitman

in Homer and

This content downloaded on Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:49:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

182

NOVEL

WINTER

1973

nature." In each case the wholeness of essence and life uncovered everywhere by poetic intuition, is said to have been dissipated by the systematization of social and scientific law, in which meaning is abstracted from life and exists in the system of relationships rather than in the individual phenomena themselves; poetic wholes are turned into parts in need of architectural support and outside elucidation. Yet poetry, for Hegel, is still present in the novel: one of the genre's most frequent conflicts is between the poetry of the heart and the prose of circumstances. This conflict can be resolved in two ways: either the character recognizes what is genuine and substantial in the society he has rebelled against, and reconciles himself to it in reality; or he rejects the prose of life and replaces it with a new reality related to beauty and art.3 Here we can see the basis for Lukacs account of Wilhelm Meister (which Hegel may also have had in mind), and for his second type of novel, where the disillusioned romantic retires into his own aesthetic world (the disillusionment is added by Lukacs, whose examples are in any case post-Hegel; Hegel himself may have been thinking of Novalis' Heinrich von Ofterdingen). Lukacs' first type, the novel of abstract idealism, seems to owe something to Hegel's comments on Don Quixote,4 where, he says, we find the adventurousness of a noble nature, in which chivalry has become madness, in the midst of a reality that is precisely depicted in its outward relations. This produces the comic contradiction between a rational and self-ordered world, and the isolated mind of one who seeks to create this order and stability for himself simply through his own chivalric effort. Quixote is old, and dies; he is supplanted by the "youthful knights" of the novel, who run into conflict with bourgeois society out of idealism, ambition or love, but who end up settling for wife, children and job much like everyone else. Hegel takes a much more sarcastic view here of the "reconciliation" or "compromise" type of novel than he does in the previously discussed passage. Yet for all these similarities, there is a fundamental reorientation of Hegel's perspective in Lukacs. Hegel saw the "prosing" of the world essentially as a triumph, as the realization of thought in the consciously planned state. This made art problematic because it had been surpassed: the ideal was being realized in life, and its realization in art was no longer truly necessary. But the young Lukacs does not accept this prose world with Hegel's apparent complacency: for him, nearly a century later, the prose world is a place and a time of waiting for a greening of Europe, for new gods, a new epic, a new Greece (a longing to which Hegel, for all his nostalgia for the Greek "art-period," never succumbed). What Hegel welcomed as the fusion of reason and reality has in our century more and more been assaulted as a despiritualized "technological rationality," under which art, far from being redundant, is a necessity for spiritual survival: this is Lukacs' position here, and it finds many contemporary analogies. But this reorientation is, I feel, more or less forced on any neo-Hegelian in one form or another by the actual course of history since Hegel's death, even more so
3 I am paraphrasing the passage furt: Europaische Verlagsanstalt,
4

in Hegel, Asthetik, 1955), II, 452.

ed. Friedrich

Bassenge,

intro. by Georg Lukacs

(Frank-

Hegel, I, 566.

This content downloaded on Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:49:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

GRAHAM

GOOD|LUKACS

ON

EPIC

AND

NOVEL

183

now than in 1914. However, one does not have to share the young Lukacs' millenial hopes any more than Hegel's satisfaction with things in order to appreciate a perspective in which the novel is approached, not positively, as the rise of realism, but negatively, as the decline of the epic. IV How does this Hegelian approach to the novel compare with theories of fiction current in the English-speaking world? These are usefully grouped and discussed in Bernard Paris's essay "Form, Theme and Imitation in Realistic Fiction."5 Roughly speaking, Paris divides our classics of novel theory into two groups: those which emphasize imitation (which he himself prefers), and those which emphasize form and ethical theme. In the first category is Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel. "Formal interests cannot be paramount in a 'genre' which, as Watt describes it, 'works by exhaustive presentation rather than by elegant concentration.' Like E. M. Forster, Watt sees 'the portrayal of "life by time" as the distinctive role which the novel has added to literature's more ancient preoccupation with "life by values."'" In the same category Paris places Auerbach's Mimesis, which concerns "the contrast between the classical moralistic and the existential problematic ways of presenting reality. The distinction is basically between the representation of life in terms of fixed canons of style and of ethical categories which are a priori and static, and a stylistically mixed, ethically ambiguous portrayal which probes 'the social forces underlying the facts and conditions.' "6 Paris commends criticism based on this type of definition of the novel, as against that which seems to him to transfer techniques developed primarily for use on poetry and poetic drama, genres in which formal and ethical patterning is tighter. As examples of this he gives the dictum "No theme, no story" from Understanding Fiction by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, and the insistence he finds in Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction on the necessity for moral intelligibility ("the clear thematic ordering of fictional materials"), and on the omnipresence of the author as moral interpreter, whether overt, as in earlier novels, or covert, as in the novel after Flaubert and James. Paris states that we go to the novel not for moral and formal definiteness, but for immersion in the inner and outer lives of the characters, and that critical method should reflect this. Whichever of these two approaches is preferable, it is clear that Lukacs is offering a third avenue. Both of the methods outlined by Paris define the novel primarily in relation to the drama: the "imitation" critics stress the differences between the two genres, whereas the "form and theme" critics implicitly stress the similarities by treating novels as if they were organized in much the same way as a Shakespeare play. Either way, drama vs. novel is the contrast which
5 NOVEL,

I, (Winter 1968), 140-49.

6 Coming out of the Germanic tradition, Auerbach is often closer to Lukacs. For example, his treatment of the story of Odysseus' scar contains the idea that, as meaning was present in every part of Homeric life, no The two authors give similar accounts of Dante. But genre part of the epic can be called a digression. definitions play hardly any role in Mimesis. The notion of genre seems almost an obstacle to realism, and Auerbach's method of reviewing excerpts rather than overall structures seems to reflect this.

This content downloaded on Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:49:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

184

NOVEL

WINTER

1973

underlies discussion. Ian Watt, in his chapter on "Fielding and the Epic Theory of the Novel," specifically rejects that theory by quoting Richardson's dismissive comments on the epic's bellicosity and superstitious paganism, and by treating Fielding's "epic" theory as an attempt to establish respectable neo-classical credentials for his work while using dramatic comedy as his generic point of departure. For Watt, the novel "rises" mainly away from the drama. Wayne Booth, though he several times mentions Homer as a provider of clear moral certitudes, also usually turns to drama for support in justifying authorial guidance. He concedes to Watt that the novel exists in a "more ambiguous, relativistic, and mobile world" than the classical genres, but suggests that, rather than yielding to the ambiguity, "the novelist must work harder at providing, within his work, the kind of definition of his elements that a good production gives to a play."7 Instead of these views of the novel as a modified drama or as a non-drama, created by a new historical situation which elicited a more internalized, extended, particularized and formally loosened picture of experience, Lukacs presents us with the novel as modified epic or epic manque, created by a new historical situation which deprived the epic of immanent spirituality, isolated its hero, and turned it from verse into prose. The extensiveness and the wealth of concrete particularity which appear to be new elements if you are looking mainly at seventeenthcentury drama, are viewed by Lukacs as common to all "great epic writing," and are thus constant in the transition from the epic to the novel: the "loss of totality" is the new element. Among recent books, only Robert Scholes' and Robert Kellogg's The Nature of Narrative offers us a unitary approach of similar scope: their term "narrative," like Lukacs' Epik, covers both the epic and the novel, as well as other types of fiction. Yet, as they imply in using "nature" rather than "history" in their title, their procedure is Aristotelian where Lukacs' is Hegelian: after general chapters on the oral and classical heritages of narrative, the bulk of the book is made up of a synchronic treatment under the categories of Meaning, Character, Plot and Point of View. More of Lukacs' ideas in The Theory of the Novel are to be found in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism than in any other current English-language work on genre-theory. Frye's first section begins by outlining a historical progression from myth, through romance, high mimetic and low mimetic to ironic, all of which are defined as stages of the hero's declining power in relation to his human and natural environment. Epic and tragedy belong mostly to high mimetic, comedy and realistic fiction to low mimetic. Though the categories are more numerous, the general sweep of this perspective is close to Lukacs'. But Frye is here classifying what he calls "modes"; "genres" he distinguishes by "radicals of presentation." "Epos" is defined by its medium of oral address, "fiction" is the "genre of the printed page." Here, and in his subdivision of "fiction" into novel confession, anatomy and romance, Frye says he is practicing "rhetorical" criticism, where the "modes" are established by "historical" criticism. Thus the types of
7 The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 387-88.

This content downloaded on Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:49:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

GRAHAM

GOOD

LUKACS

ON

EPIC

AND

NOVEL

185

fiction are treated as available to any period, while the modes follow in historical succession. Lukaics,however, is practicing what his introduction calls "an historicization of aesthetic categories:" within the overall genres (though Lukacs' three -Epik, lyric and drama-seem to be as synchronic as Frye's four- epos, lyric, drama and fiction) the sub-genres follow a rough "historico-philosophical" progression. Frye produces both a historical and a generic perspective (as well as two others) which he wants to keep separate; Lukacs wants to fuse the two into a description of the "inner form" of works (Frye's "radicals of presentation" are, in effect, "outer" form). Though we can find scattered resemblances to the ideas of Lukacs' book among our present pantheon of fiction theories, it still places the novel in what for us is an unusual light. We are accustomed to oppose the novel to "the classical genres," either to claim for it their aesthetic dignity as Flaubert and James first did, or to claim for it a vigorous multiplicity of life that bursts the restraints of classical form, to give us, as Ian Watt puts it, "exhaustive presentation" rather than "elegant concentration." But it is rare for the epic to figure in this notion of "classical form." By making his basic distinction (between epic writing's "extensive totality of life" and drama's "intensive totality of essence") philosophical as well as formal, and by contrasting the epic to the novel within the first category, Lukacs reminds us that the classics are not all elegantly concentrated. Homer's extended presentation of human action and physical reality in all their crowded detail is the great precedent for these aspects of the novel, and is actually older than the severe shapeliness of Greek tragedy. The word "epic," which we instinctively want to use of certain novelists, such as Tolstoy, need not be banished from the vocabulary of novel criticism. There is a real continuity here, and within it, for Lukacs, the novel is not the sudden product of eighteenthcentury England's bustling middle class, but a historical mutation within the West's senior literary form. Cervantes is working in the same form as Homer, Vergil and Dante, but for Lukacs he inaugurates a new version of it: the novel, the art-form of sadness. The search of its isolated heroes for meaning in life is only momentarily lit up by flashes of the old epic radiance, and its realism is the disenchantment of the world.

This content downloaded on Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:49:52 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions