Tomorrow, April 13th, the master of the theory of literature would complete 130th years-old. So, this post is a tribute to him, His writings help the people to understand better and consequently appreciate more this noble art called literature. This post is a summary of four articles. The first was published at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gy%C3%B6rgy_Luk%C3%A1cs. The second was published at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lukacs/#AesReaWorArtCloTot. The third was published at http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry/critical_define/crit_marx.html. The fourth was published at http://newleftreview.org/II/91/franco-moretti-lukacs-s-theory-of-the-novel
Gyorgy Lukacs (1885-1971) was a Hungarian philosopher, writer and literary critic. He developed and contribute to Marxist Theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was especially influential, because of his theoritical developments of realism and of the novel as a literary genre. Lukacs was born in Budapest, to the Banker József and his wife Adele, who were a wealthy Jewish family. He studied at the Budapest and Berlin, and received his doctorate in 1906. Lukacs developed Leninist ideas in the field of philosophy. His major works in this period were the essays collected in "History and Class Consciousness"(1923). Altough these essays display signs of what Lenin referred to as "ultra-leftism", they provided substantive philosophical basis. In 1925, he published a critical review of the historical materialism. He advocate a democratic government of the proletariat. After Lukacs' strategy was condemned by The Communist International, he retreated from active politics into theoretical work. During the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Lukacs was present at debates of the anti-party, while remaining part of the party apparatus. In Lukacs' view, the parties could win social leadership only by persuasion instead of force. In addition to his standing as a political thinker, Lukacs was an influential literary critic of the 20th century. His important work in literary criticism began early in his career, with "The Theory of the Novel" (1916) a work in literary theory, an investigation into its distinct characteristics. Lukacs literary criticism includes the well-known essay, "Kafka or Thomas Mann?" in which Lukacs argues for the work of Thomas Mann as a superior attempt to deal with modernity, while he critises Kafka's brand of modernism. Lukacs was opposed to the formal innovations of modern writers like Kafka, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, preferring the traditional aesthetic of realism. "The Historical Novel", is his most influential work of literary history. In it he traces the development of the genre of historical fiction. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars brought about a realisation of the constantly changing, evolving character of human existence. This new historical consciousness was reflected in the works of Walter Scott, whose novels use representatives characters to dramatise social conflicts and historical transformations. Lukacs argues that Scott's new brand of Historical Realism was taken up by Balzac and Tolstoy, and enabled novelists to depict contemporary social life not as a static fixed types, but rather as a moment of history, constantly changing, open to the potential transformations. Although abstraction can lead to the concealment of objective reality, it is necessary for art, and Lukacs believes that realist authors can employ it "to penetrate the laws governing objective reality, and to uncover the deeper, hidden, mediate, not immediately perceptible of relationships that go to make up society" After a great intellectual effort, Lukacs claims a realist can discover these objective relationships and give them artistic shape in the form of a character's subjective experience.
According to this conception of art as a mode of reflection, the function of a art is to present humans with the totality of the objective, historical reality within an "homogeneous medium". The medium of specific form of art establishes laws that allows the work of art to adequately present the whole world of humanity from a specific standpoint. For this reason, such works of art allow us to comprehend the universal aspects of our existence and to consciously participate in the collective life of humanity. A successful work of art can thus have the effect of "catharsis", transforming the "whole person" of everyday life into a "person as a whole", the person who realizes their humanity by acquiring a sense of self-consciousness regarding the richness of human relations that constitute the historical development of humankind. Lukacs' commitment to a conception of the work of art as a closed totality, structured by the laws of its medium and objectively reflecting the development of humanity in the mode of mimetic evocation, has considerable implications for his own judments as an aesthetic theorist. However, as far as Lukacs' commitment to realism reflects the demand that works of art should present a totality of meaning that is not alien to the life of individuals, but rather overcomes the alienation they suffer from in everyday life, it expresses an intuition that sustains Lukacs work from the beginning: the desire for an overcoming of the tension between human life and the objective social forms that constitute modern society.
Marxist criticism is a type of criticism in which literary works are viewed as the product of work and whose practitioners emphasizes the role of class and ideology as they reflect, propagate, and even challenge the prevailing social order. Two critics stand out: Mikhail Bakhtin and Gyorgy Lukacs. Bakhtin viewed texts in terms of discourses and dialogues. Lukacs appreciated realistic novels that broadly reflected cultural totalities and were populated with characters representing human types. In Germany, critic Belfort Brecht critized Lukacs for his attempt to enshrine realism at the expense of poetry and drama, which Lukacs ignored. Theodor Adorno attacked Lukacs for his dogmatic rejection of nonrealist literature and for his elevation of content over form.
When Lukacs is still mencioned nowadays in connection with the study of the novel, it is either for "Theory of the novel" or for "The historical novel", The second is a very useful book, written by a serious professor. The first it is an essay, where the critic is always talking about the ultimate question of life. And in fact, whenever this book talks about the novel, the reader senses that through the oblique refraction of books, something much more momentous is at stake. But what? What is the ultimate question that the Theory of the novel is trying to address? An initial answer could be: it is the transformation of social existence, at some unspecified moment between Dante and Cervantes, into a world of convention whose abnormality Lukacs tries to captures through the metaphor of the nature. Nature, because the embracing power of convention subjects the social world to laws whose regularity can only be compared to that of physical nature: strict laws, without exception or choice, that are, this is the decisive passage, the embodiment of recognized. What "The Theory of the Novel" has to say. But just as important as what the book has to say is the way it says it. But what kind of book is this? Certainty, no one that worries solely about knowledge. Make no mistake: there is plenty of knowledge in the pages of the "Theory" dispensed in countless well-wrought allusion by its prodigiously author. Yet that is not the book is about, It is not after knowledge: it is after meaning. After meaning, by way of its style. The style of the essay: reflection plus emotions. It is the heat of emotions that extracts meaning from this world that has become rigid and alien. 'Every art form' we read in the Theory, is defined by the metaphysical dissonance of life. Lukacs, too, placed a methaphysical dissonance as the foundation of his book, and then tried to resolve it with the prodigious plasticity of his style. Beauty and knowledge together, was a miracle that would not be repeated. But perhaps, the future of literary theory lies in accepting its fundamental dissonance without lookinf for a resolution.
