The Theory of the Novel
by Georg Lukacs
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Book Summary Information
Author: Georg LukacsEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1974-01-15
ISBN: 0262620278
Number of pages: 160
Publisher: The MIT Press
Book Reviews of The Theory of the Novel
Book Review: A conveniently short, even if out-dated, piece of literary theory
Summary: 3 Stars
It is a rare book that begins with an author's preface repudiating everything in the book and urging the reader to reject the book's message "root and branch." But then again, this is Lukacs, the man who once lived in under and defended enthusiastically Stalin's Soviet Union, the man who, although involved in the Nagy government of 1956 Hungary, publicly abandoned his earlier views, engaged in self-criticism and ratted out his former colleagues in order to ensure a place for himself in the post-1956 Hungarian communist party, even as his former colleagues were either executed or fled to the West.
That said, unless you are an enthusiastic devotee of western Marxism, the repudiation preface will seem somewhat unpersuasive. Lukacs' primary criticism of his prior self is the over-emphasis placed on a single criterion by which to distinguish novels, which criterion leads to an incomplete reading of such novels (there is more to the novels than can be summed up by application of the criterion). Lukacs has several other criticisms, generally of the kind one would expect to be made of a Marxist materialist against any argument built on Hegelian and Weberian premises. The Theory of the Novel presents a somewhat troubling argument, but Lukacs' reasons for rejecting the book do not entirely reflect my own concerns.
Chapter one of the book sets forth a historicentric framework of analysis that attempts to organize "ages" or "civilizations" of mankind based on the binary difference between integration and non-integration. Evidentiary basis for the analytical framework is found in Greek and medieval classics - the epics of Homer, the tragedies of the Greek dramatists, and the philosophical schools of ancient Greece, and the writings of Dante and St. Thomas, among others. This is a decisively early 19th century German idealist (and Hegelian) influence at work in Lukacs' thinking and is presumably the sort of intellectual move Lukacs in the preface is rejecting when he describes his flawed method as involving the formation of a general synthetic concept based on a few characteristics of a particular period, then analyzing individual phenomena from the generalizations that supposedly constitute a comprehensive overall view. What I find objectionable in this framework is the idea that "ages" or "civilizations" are characterized by a binary conceptual distinction as abstract and ambiguous as "integration". There is an interesting intellectual exercise (loose and fuzzy as it may be) to be had in contemplating the degree to which an individual "soul" (Lukacs' term) is "integrated" or not. (To be integrated appears to mean that one's sense of reality is an inclusive one that is not subject to revision or challenge; as a result, all experience is given a place within your sense of total reality and your actions are all taken and given meaning based on this stable sense of what is real, valuable, right and wrong; the opposite is the sense in which there is a chasm between what we aspire to and the sense of reality that is at our disposal). But it seems silly to then attempt to impose such a binary dichotomy onto civilizations and ages, especially with such shallow evidence as the scrapes of literature which we have inherited from Greece. Further, it seems to me that the "integration" - "non-integration" dichotomy that Lukacs sets forth (to the extent that it can be made plausible at all as a means of evaluating character) is more accurately a continuum of degrees, not a dramatic duality. Only the superhumans and fools approach experience anything remotely like a self awareness of feeling "integrated" in Lukacs' sense. The rest of us are condemned to greater and lesser degrees to experience a gap separating what we experience and what we expect, subverting our notions of the "way life is" even as we attempt to navigate through life. But isn't that precisely why we find novels so interesting in the first place? And isn't this the young Lukacs' over-arching point: that the novel (or at least, some novels) effectively illustrates that "non-integration" that is so characteristic of our experiences as human beings?
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