Lukács: idealist treatment of Shakespeare

Historical Novel' in 19361937, at the height of the Moscow Trials and in the period when the Popular Front alliance with liberals and middle-class radicals was being developed by the Comintern.

He had been Minister of Culture in Bela Kun's revolutionary government in Hungary in 1919 and, after its overthrow, had become a member of the Comintern in the early 1920s.

He played a prominent part in the 'Bolshevization' of the Communist Parties that took the form of a bureaucratic removal of all opponents of Stalin within the international And in line with Hegel, he looks for those 'personalities' whom he sees as making history and for whom, as it were, history and the conflict of classes exist.

11.00 7.30 8.00 9.10 communist movement and that, because it involved the artificial and enforced development of young Communist Parties, beheaded many of these Parties.

Organizational Lukács succumbed politically to Stalinism, in that he saw Bolshevism as a series of organizational tasks, not as above all a problem of the theoretical development of Marxism and its application to the specific problems of different countries.

He followed every twist and turn of the Stalinist line although he was more intelligent than many intellectuals and writers who became mere servants of Stalinism.

'The Historical Novel' is a product of this Popular Front period and very much inferior to his 'Studies in European Realism'.

It is not only that Lukács gleans world literature for all those writers who can be FRIDAY 3.30 p.m. More Best Sellers: "The Fabians'. 4.00 Judi Dench and Hatty Town. 4.55 Lost In Space. 5.50 News From ITN.

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But it is also that Lukács' inability and refusal to break with Hegelianism, which would have taken him towards the Left Opposition, joins up with the philosophical and political needs of world Stalinism.

The deep theoretical degeneration in the Comintern that inextricably accompanied the destruction of the Old Bolsheviks in the mid-1930s pervades Lukács' book.

Interaction

He announces in his introduction that the book aims to trace 'the interaction between the historical spirit (sic) and the great genres of literature which portray the totality of As always, Lukács is looking for supra-historical laws of personal and artistic developTV 8.30 Hawaii Five-O. 9.30 Curry and Chips. 10.00 News At Ten. 10.30 What's A Girl Like You.. 11.30 Man In A Suitcase: 'Web With Four Spiders' with Richard Bradford. 12.55 a.m. Responsibility For Italian Cinema: 'La Efida' (The Challenge) directed by Francesco Rosi with Rosanna Schiaffino and Jose Suarez.

Although he constantly pays lip-service to historical materialism, he turns Marx and Engels back on to their Hegelian head.

This is the supra-historical law of fictional development that he announces in the early pages:

'If any form of knowledge pretends to be absolute, ignoring the dialectical character of the merely relative, i.e., incomplete, reproduction of the infinity of objective reality, it is inevitably falsified and distorts the picture.'

Compromise

He softens and compromises the dialectic into being not the conflict of opposites through which development takes place, but into the mere relatedness of objects in which gentle and Utopian progress takes place.

The development of consciousness takes place not at he sharp point of conflict be. tween theory and practice, but as an approximation to what is and always has been there in objective reality.

In other words, although Lukács claims to treat literature historically, objective reality does not develop so far as he is concerned, but is given and fixed.

Perhaps his long section on Shakespeare best clarifies Lukács' method.

Shakespeare wrote on the threshhold of the English bourgeois revolution-at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century.

His work spans the transition from Elizabeth's to James I's reign.

The period of Elizabeth's reign seemed to allow some compromise between the Crown and the rising bourbut the enormous development of capitalism during her reign prepared the even greater clash between the two classes that came to head in the first half of the 17th century.

Shakespeare, like many writers, hoped to find a middle way in this clash, but found that there was none.

On the one hand, he romanticized chivalric feudalism in characters like Hotspur in 'Henry IV', though the overblown and overstated language implies his criticism of the dreamy and historically expiring aristocrats.

In later plays he softened this into the idealized portrait of the passive, spiritualized and historically unsubstantial aristocratic Cordelia.

On the other hand he disliked the 'new men', the representatives of the capitalist class, exponents of realpolitik like Bolingbroke, unimaginative and, so far as he was concerned, treacherous.

He recognized that there was no way out of the revolutionary clash that was to take place in the middle of the 17th century as result of which the bourgeoisie was to take political power.

He was extremely sensitive to the social shifts taking place at the turn of the century and that affected all layers of society.

If his greatest work is in the tragedies, that is because he sees the downfall of the aristocracy as tragic.

Acute

The conflict is inevitable and Shakespeare • recognizes that the Lears of the world must perish.

He is the most historically and artistically acute of all English writers.

Lukács though, seeks to transform Shakespeare into a type of early liberal, acceptable to the many liberals that were incorporated into the counter-revolutionary work of the Popular Front.

This is how he characterized Shakespeare's writing :

'Therefore Shakespeare states every conflict, even those of English history with which he is most familiar, in terms of typical-human opposites; and these are historical only insofar as Shakespeare fully and directly assimilates into each individual type the most characteristic and central features of a social crisis.

The 'only' in the sentence tells all.

The very essence of Shakespeare's art is that there is no differentiation between the 'human being' (in Lukács humanitarian terms) and the social and historical forces that create him.

Everything is falsely compartmentalized in Lukács' Later he writes that Shakespeare 'is historically faithful and authentic because the human features absorb the most essential elements of this great historical crisis' Lukács always writes of a human soul' or human 'features' or a human 'nature' that pre-dates the whole of man's history.

Lukács' 'The Historical Novel', for all its apparatus of historicism and praise of concreteness, presents literature as a very pale reflection of an abstract process.

It is, above all, as a philosophical idealist that Lukács could strike his compromise with the Stalinist bureaucracy. 'THE HISTORICAL NOVEL' By Georg Lukács