Lukacs

9/30/10:


Even the most sympathetic critics of the works of Lukacs turn away from his texts feeling disheartened and cynical, marking the turn towards Western relativism. However, despite the turn towards this ideal, there is still the dismissal of Marxism as a legitimate philosophical tradition in Western thought. It is, in essence “historical materialism,” which rails against culture and exposes class antagonisms. This Marxist dialectical tradition is thus rejected due to its inability to be reduced to a pure logical form. It is in this manner that Lukacs’s work is also rejected. Yet, Jameson asserts that the seemingly incongruous literary stages of Lukacs’s work actually are a continuous and novel examination of the narrative and its structures.

Lukacs first inspects literature using the common Hegelian method of interpretation of the abstract against the concrete. It is important to note that “alienation” and “abstract” are, in essence, descriptive of the same object, yet it is in the concept of the abstract that forces individuals to hold onto the idea of the concrete. In the art of pre-industrialized society, there was an immediate meaningfulness in the very outset of its element. In modern society, the technique of symbolism is now utilized as a method of delegating meaning to a seemingly dehumanized and unrelated element of art or literature. Thus, it is concluded that concreteness in art allows people to understand individual humanism and understand this feeling of totality.

In the Theory of the Novel, Lukacs begins his discussion of the opposition between meaning and the proceedings of simple daily existence through his discourse on the three basic stages of Greek literature. The first is the epic, which, in Lukac’s words, is the only source genuine narration. When the “Utopia” of this work begins to dismantle itself, there appears the Greek tragedy, which is no more than episodic sequences of crises, losing its narrative qualities. The last stage is simply Platonic philosophy, which has lost all narrative aspects and has become completely worthless. However, the modern novel has become a method to regain this lost narrative. Yet, the novel is problematic in the sense that the hero can never truly attain reconciliation with his environment. Thus, freedom can never be achieved by the hero of the novel, but rather by the novelist himself, for he attains reconciliation in writing the story.

Lukacs criticizes the middle-class philosophy in its form, thus laying the groundwork for a new Marxist theory of knowledge. This is a theory of “collective self-interest,” and this influence of class consciousness is felt in the form and how the details of reality are arranged. Thus, the initial and immediate meaning of objects manifests itself only when the connection between labor and production are once again revealed. Therefore, the idea of the concrete is described as the desire to return to the epic, to that narration. This is dependent upon the moments where society as a totality must be recreated. Lukacs’s work, then, is a structure where the relationship between narrative and totality are reaffirmed. Like Lukacs’s philosophical discourse, Marxism is above economic theory and is a way of recovering the self.