The Historical Novel, by Lukacs

[p019] The Historical Novel. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. This is an important work of Marxist literary scholarship, perhaps the most important ever to have been written in this field. The author, Georg Lukacs, is acknowledged as the most important literary critic living. He has been at work on the problems of Marxism and literature for more than 60 years and is immensely erudite. He began his career as a follower of Hegel; but he soon became a Marxist and in 1919 he was Commissar for Culture in the Hun- garian Soviet Republic headed by Bela Kun. After the defeat of the Revolution, Lukacs went into exile, first to Vienna, then to Berlin, and later to Moscow. After the Second World War Lukacs returned to Hungary to take up an academic appointment as Professor of Aesthetics in the Uni- versity of Budapest. In 1956 he joined the short-lived government of Imre Nagy at the time of the Hungarian Revolution as Minister of Culture. During the fighting he took refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy in Budapest; deported to somewhere outside of Hungary for six months, he returned to Budapest in the Spring of 1957 and now lives there in retirement. . Lukacs has been in trouble with the Stalinist ‘revisers’ of Marxism for the greater part of his life. He has frequently been accused of Hegelian idealism and of right-wing deviation- ism. He owes his physical survival to his willingness to pay the price of repeated acts of ‘diplomatic’ self- criticism: he has always bent to the prevailing wind, returning to his former path as soon as possible after-- wards, Although he has been sub- By George Cukacs, tr. Merlin Press, 1962, 350 pp., 36s. from the German by jected to political criticism, and held political office in two Hungarian governments, it is as a literary figure, and not as a politician, that he must be considered. He enjoyed considerable prestige inside Hungary, particularly among the Party intellectuals, but he was not well known among the members of the Communist Party generally. He had been cut off from the Hungarian working class by his 30 years of exile and by the bureaucratic methods of the Communist Party. When he returned he was too old and too isolated to lead any political move- ment—even if he had wished to do so. His real interests were always in literature: all he wanted was to be left alone to pursue those interests, and to develop new ideas about the relationship of economic and social forces to literary creation. — It was these ideas which led to his conflicts with the Stalinist bureau- cracy, both in Russia and Hungary. One of these is the so-called ‘partisan theory’ of the relationship between a poet and the Communist Party. Lukacs accepted it as natural that a poet should be a member of the Party and support its policies; where he clashed with the bureaucracy was on the form that this support should take. The poet, he maintained, was a militant of a special kind, fighting in his own way through the medium of his: poetry. This is a problem which is not touched on directly in the present book. Another of the literary problems which interested Lukacs was that of the ‘realism’ of the great writers. He tried to show that there was often a contradiction between a writers’ 57 Book Reviews political outlook and the nature of the work he produced. A really great writer, he maintained, had the ability to portray reality in all its actuality; for this reason it did not matter whether or not he accepted reaction- ary political views. His work would in fact transcend political boundaries; his incapacity for falsehood as an artist would make it possible for him to write great works. The prime examples of this process, according to Lukacs, were Balzac and Scott, both of whom were reactionaries in their views, but whose work was progressive because they portrayed accurately the decline of feudal forces and the rise of the advancing bour- geoisie. This is a theme dealt with ‘at some some length in the present book, and I will return to it later.. _ The absence of any serious Marxist examination of the problems of literature has long been a serious weakness in the development of the Marxist movement both in Britain and elsewhere. This has left the field open to all kinds of ‘reformist’ and ‘revisionist’ approaches to literature. - The appearance in English of Lukacs‘ The Historical Novel provides an opportunity to begin an effort to over- come this weakness. Marx and Engels made frequent references to the appli- cation of the methods of materialism to literary themes in their works and in their letters; but they never had the occasion to concentrate their attention on this subject. In Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks are contain- ed the markings and comments he made on books of philosophy and literary criticism, and they show the great stress he laid on the pro- gressive, materialist tradition of

[p020] 58 Russian thought, and in particular of Chernyshevsky. He was concerned, too, with the problem of the dialec- tical process of cognition and the dictum that the dialectical way of apprehending objective reality is in the transition from living perception to abstract thought and from this to practice. In his book Literature and Revolu- tion (written in 1923), in his article on Tolstoy, and in others of his works, Trotsky was concerned with similar problems. He demonstrated the falsity of the concept, ‘proletarian culture and art’; and he outlined the policy of the Marxist party’ towards art and literature. This must be ‘to help the various schools of‘art which have come over to the Revolution to grasp correctly the historic meaning of the Revolution, and to allow them complete freedom of self- determination in the field of art’. Nearly all of the themes contained in the work of previous Marxist scholars are taken up in Lukacs’ study and there is a serious attempt made to advance new ideas. The circum- stances under which the book was written —in Moscow in 1936 —and Lukacs ‘diplomatic’ turn of mind are responsible for certain weaknesses and faults of emphasis; but these should not be allowed to detract from the real merits of the study. Because of the great richness of the material and the wealth of new ideas which are contained here, it is not yet possible to make a real critical assessment of the book. There is matter here for much research and hard thinking. I shall content myself for the present with outlining a few of the book’s main arguments. The historical novel’s appearance in the early 19th century, first in England and later in France, was a consequence of the economic and social changes which had taken place in those countries. The ‘social’ and satirical novels of Lesage, Swift, Voltaire and Diderot were not set in any specific place or period, they were of ‘never and nowhere’. Their authors grasped realistically some of the. salient characteristics of their world, but they did not see things historically. It required the overthrow of feudal society in the French Revolution of 1789 and the revolutionary wars which followed to break down the isolation of the European masses ~ LABOUR REVIEW—Summer, 1962 from their rulers and to make history a ‘mass experience’. England had already gone through the political revolution of the 17th century and was in the midst of great transforma- tions laying the basis for the Indus- trial Revolution of the 19th century. The contrast between the relative stability of English society and the turbulent state of affairs. in Europe generally, channelled Scott’s historical feeling into what Lukacs calls ‘a broad objective, epic form’, the historical novel. His objectivity was heightened by- the fact that he stood in a ‘middle’ position in society; he was not directly involved, either in the rapid expansion of capitalist interests, or in the ruin which overtook tradition’s pathetic supporters. He was an ‘honest Tory’ who sympathised with the people in their hardships but who was also a supporter of progress. Nevertheless he kept his gaze averted from the present and wrote only of the past. He ‘discovered’ a form for the novel which enabled him to portray realistically the clashes of the social forces of the past. which had moulded history. He constructed plots which enabled him to display. through the deployment of a number of characters the historical reality of the great crises in English history. Scott’s heroes are always ‘middling’ men, never very heroic or very aristocratic; they are the mediocre English gentlemen: the Waverleys, the Osbaldistones, the Mortons and so on. This corresponds with Scott’s own position, it is also an artistic device which, since the mediocre hero himself enters into relationship with both camps, enables him to present both parties involved in the conflict, and to enlist the sympathy and interest of the reader. The great figures of history appear in Scott's novels, but none occupies a central place. They appear only to fulfil their historic missions in a crisis, the nature of which has already been made clear in detailed descriptions of smaller people. The lives of the leaders are directly interwoven in this way with the lives of the people. Scott’s important figures do not make a sudden appearance miraculously wrapped in a Weberian charisma, they grow out of the conditions of their age and appear only to solve definite tasks in genuine historical crises. Scott’s achievement is not merely to relate the sequence of historical events, it is to bring to life the people who figure in those events so that his readers can re-experience the social pressures and individual motivations which led the men and women of a past age to behave as they did. He makes history live as a series of great crises. He shows how the progress which occurs in society—Scott is a defender of progress—is a process full of contradictions and antagonisms. These are the real antagonisms of classes and nations which Scott, without any of the theoretical equip- ment of Marxist historical material- ism, recognised and accurately port- rayed. The artistic intuition of the genius enables him to penetrate below the surface of reality and discover the objective forces which are really at work. As Lukacs writes: ‘What in Morgan, Marx and Engels was worked out and proved with theore- tical and historical clarity, lives,. moves and has its being poetically in the historical novels of Scott.’ The impetus imparted to the novel by the work of Scott was felt in many countries of Europe. Only Balzac, however, carried forward Scott’s work in a conscious way and created a hitherto unknown type of realistic novel, He was not content to portray past history, he went on to display the present as history. ‘The only possible novel about the past was exhausted by Walter Scott’, wrote Balzac. ‘This is the struggle of the serf against the nobility; the nobility against the Church, of the nobility and Church against the monarchy.’ The development of capitalism in France had created a new situation. ‘Today equality in France has pro- duced endless nuances. Formerly the caste gave every person his physio- gnomy which dominated his indi- viduality; today the individual re- ceives his physiognomy himself.” The direct causes for the extension of the historical novel into the present were not aesthetic but social and historical. Scott had grown up in a period of peaceful development in Britain’s history; he could look back on the remote past with calm and objectivity. But Balzac’s youth had been one in which the volcanic character of the social forces was clear. In Balzac’s novels is presented the artistic history of the bourgeois society of France at that time.

[p021] BOOK REVIEWS One of the questions which Lukacs poses is: why did not the cir- cumstances of the 18th and 19th centuries produce historical drama instead of novels? In order to answer this question he relates both of these artistic forms to their histories. Both historical tragedy and the novel portray the totality of all the life- processes occurring at a. particular period. They do so in different ways, but in both cases it is through the creation of a specific artistic structure within which the most important features of objective reality can be mirrored and concentrated. This involves necessarily a selection, but it must give the appearance of totality. It is in the nature of artistic creation to make the incomplete image appear more real than life itself. Lukacs quotes Hegel’s distinction between the epic (i.e., the novel) and ‘the drama. In the novel there is created a ‘totality of objects’, (By this he means the totality of the stage of historical development in human society, in which all the objects and artefacts are displayed in their interactions with human activity.) The human society created in a novel is a complete one which contains all the features of the processes of life itself. To the ‘totality of objects’ of the novel, Lukacs counterposes the ‘totality of movement’ of the drama. The life that is reflected in the drama centres upon a great collision. Every- thing inessential is omitted; the portrayal is reduced to the minimum in order to represent only the most important and the most characteristic attitudes of men; only that which is required for the working out of the collision. Lukacs cites as an example of this ‘totality of movement’, Shakes- peare’s King Lear. The totality represented there is that of the break- up of a family and a kingdom. All the possible and necessary human attitudes which make the collision inevitable are included. Any addi- tion to them would be superfluous. The central theme of historical drama is the collision of social forces at their most extreme and acute point. The great periods of tragedy coincide with periods of great historical changes in human society. There is no space here to elaborate these arguments of Lukacs, or to mention the numerous other themes on which he touches. All I have tried to do here is to arouse the interest of the reader so that he goes to the book. It is perhaps, necessary to add a few words pointing out the importance of the understanding of literature for the working class at the present time. There will be no rest or tranquility for the members of the present or of several succeeding generations. Great historical conflicts are preparing. We are entering a period of intensifying social crisis. The old constricting chains which hold together capitalist society must be snapped. All existing forms of exploitation must be ended. Those who are born during this tempestuous period of human history are indeed fortunate. They have the opportunity to display limitless creative ability, initiative, enthusiasm and heroism. Each can make an individual contribution to the greatest of all causes: the libera- tion of humanity from war, disease, poverty, ignorance and oppression, the creation of a socialist society. Some will contribute as members of the Marxist party, as militants, organisers and _ political leaders. Others will do so as artists, drama- tists, poets and novelists. The only force able to carry out the tasks outlined above is the working class, who form the over- whelming majority of society. This class is the sole heir to human progress. It must wrest its inheritance from the dead grip of the false claimant, the monopoly capitalists and their dismal supporiers: police- men, parsons, priests, politicians, public-relations experts, property tycoons, and all the other parasites on society. The party which heads the working class has the task of raising the level of understanding of the whole class so that they shall take over power and abolish classes. This understanding can be acquired relatively quickly in a period of social upheaval, but it is necessary to pre- pare for this long in advance. Struggles of all kinds must be waged against the supporters of the bourgeoisie: theoretical, political, organisational and so on. _ The struggles against reformism and revisionism in literature and in literary criticism must be waged together with all the other struggles. The great realist traditions of the poets, novelists and dramatists of the 19th century have been abandoned. 59 The bourgeoisie can no longer bear to face reality. Those who create literature today, the petty-bourgeoisie, are in general cut off from the working class, the source from: which they might renew their art. In recent years some of the literary petty-bourgeois artists have made an attempt to draw closer to the working class. The work of such writers as Wesker, Sillitoe, Doherty, Barstow, Braine, Lessing, Delaney and others is a part of this trend. In many cases this approach is based on a disgust for the bourgeoisie rather than on any real understanding of the working class. These writers resent the hypocrisy, the mental vacuity, the open commercialism and the false human relationships which they see as a part of capitalism. They have yet to discover that the working class movement can provide them with an insight into the problems of their art and introduce them to real situations which will enable them to be more effective as artists. For this to be possible the Marxist movement itself must become aware of the ‘literary and philosophical problems with which Lenin, Lukacs dealt, and Trotsky J.B. Spain: the unheeded warning