Lukacs Studies in European Realism

Belphegor's notes on Lukacs Book for the rhizzone

Background Info:

Lukacs published “Studies in European Realism” in 1950 and he says that it was mostly written ten years before that. The version I read had an introduction from 1964 by this guy ‘Kazan’. The introduction is alright but Kazan is a new york liberal and it shows.

Lukacs’ more famous book on Lit Crit is his one on the ‘Historical Novel’. People read that one all the time but don’t seem to read this one. I don’t know why

My opinion on the book:
This is a keen marxist critic and a deeply perceptive reader writing clearly and movingly. The preface alone is only 20 pages and well worth the time of anyone interested in Marxism and Literature. This is a kind of writing that hasn’t been seen in a long time.


What I see as the thesis of the book, in Lukacs words:

“Realism is the recognition of the fact that a work of literature can rest neither on a lifeless average, as the naturalists suppose, nor on an individual principal which dissolves it’s own self into nothingness. The central category and criterion of realist literature is the type, a peculiar synthesis which binds together the general and particular both in characters and situations. What makes a type a type is not its average quality, nor its more individual being, however profoundly conceived; what makes it a type is that in it all the humanly and socially essential determinants are present on their highest level of development, in the ultimate unfolding of the possibilities latent in them, in extreme presentation of their extremes, rendering concrete the peaks and limits of men and epochs.”

On the two extremes:

“A Joyce-like shoreless torrent of associations can create living human beings just as little as Upton Sinclair’s coldly calculated all-good, all-bad stereotypes.”

Man is inextricably a member of a community - there is an internal logic to to what a character’s background (class, nation, gender, etc) while make him and what possibilities that allows.

Lukacs on his methods:
“
 In the past, western critics and readers in their approach to Tolstoy
and others took for their guide the views on society, philosophy,
 religion, art, and so on, which these great men had themselves
expressed in articles, letters, diaries and the lake. They thought to
find a key to the understanding of the often .unfamiliar great works
of literature in these conscious opinions. In other words reactionary
criticism misinterpreted the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski by
deriving the alleged spiritual and artistic content of these works
from certain reactionary views of the authors.
The method employed. in the present studies is the exact opposite
of this. It 1s a very simple method : it consists in first of all
examining carefully the real social foundations on which, say,
Tolstoy's existence rested and the real social forces under the
influence of which the human and the literary personality of this
author developed. Secondly, in close connection with the first
approach, the question is asked : what do Tolstoy's works represent
what is their real spiritual and intellectual content and how does
the writer build up his aesthetic forms in the struggle for the
adequate expression of such contents. Only if, after an unbiased
examination,  we have uncovered and understood these objective
relationships, are we in a position to provide a correct interpretation
of the conscious views expressed by the author and correctly
evaluate his influence on literature.
“

Lukacs makes an observation somewhere, and I lost the page number, but the gist of it is this:
A good writer, if asked to choose between his prejudices about the world and the truth of the world, will always fall on the side of the truth. This is how Balzac is able to be one of the greats in spite of his reactionary monarchism.
A bad writer will present the world as he wishes it to be, or as he falsely believes it to be.

The stirring conclusion to Lukacs preface:
“
 There is to-day in the world a general desire for a literature
which could penetrate with its beam deep into the tangled jungle
of our time. A great realist literature could play the leading part,
hitherto always denied to it, in the democratic rebirth of nations.
If in this connection we evoke Balzac in opposition to Zola and
his school, we believe that we are helping to combat the sociological
and ·resthetic prejudices which have prevented many gifted authors
from giving their best to mankind. We know the potent social
forces which have held back the development of both writers and '
literature: a quarter~century of reactionary obscurantism which
finally twisted itself into the diabolical grimace of the Fascist
abomination.
Political and social liberation from these forces is already an accomplished fact, but the thinking of the great masses is still bedevilled by the fog of reactionary ideas which prevents them from
seeing clearly. This difficult and dangerous situation puts a heavy
responsibility on the men of letters. But it is not enough for a
writer to see clearly in matters political and social. To see clearly
in matters of literature is no less indispensable and it is to the solution of these problems that this book hopes to bring its
contribution.”

The eight essays in the book are Lukacs applying his methods to specific authors and Novels. I didn’t read all of these. He limits himself mostly to the 19th century. He thinks this is when European Realism reached its peak with Balzac and Tolstoy (the Russian realists being heirs to the French, in his view). Zola is still a great writer, but his genius is hampered by a false idea that realism should attempt to be an ‘average’ of society. Joyce, too, is still a great master but makes the mistake in the other way, being too personal and psychological that it fails to reflect broader social forces. Stendhall idk I can’t recall anything he said about.

In discussing Zola, Lukacs says he is in some ways an heir of Victor Hugo. Lukacs finds a great quote from Goethe about Hugo:

 Goethe's opinion of Victor Hugo was; the exact opposite of his
attitude to Balzac. He wrote to Zeiter: "Victor Hugo's 'Notre
Dame ' captivates the reader by its diligent study of the old scenes,
customs and events, . but the characters show no trace of natural
animation. They are lifeless lay figures pulled about by wires;
they are cleverly put together, but the wood and steel skeletons
support mere stuffed puppets with whom the author deals most
cruelly, jerking them into the strangest poses~ contorting them,
tormenting  and whipping them, cutting up their bodies and souls,
--but because they have no flesh and blood, all he can do is tear
up the rags out of which they are made : all this is done with considerable historical and rhetorical talent and a vivid imagination;
without these qualities he could not have produced these
abominations . . . "

Prose review I wrote for Goodreads:

This is a book of Marxist literary criticism, unabashedly. It was published just after Fascism got its ass kicked in World War Two, thanks in large part to the Soviets. I had to laugh when I read the introduction to the American edition published some decades later during the Cold War. Adam Kazan, apparently some Liberal New York intellectual, makes repeated apologies for Lukacs’ politics. He is only kowtowing to Stalin, we are told, he’s no Marxist Zealot, he’s a free thinker! He does Marxism purely for the love of the game of it all!  Actually, I detect no insincerity or revisionism in Lukacs’ essays. I guess no English publisher would have touched it without a big “Not Really Communist” sticker on the front, so I should be grateful to Kazan. Anyways, I was saying, the book came out at the end of WW2.

Lukacs put these essays out when he did for a reason. He wanted to make an intervention in the trends of thought at an important inflection point in history. Fascim must never be allowed to reappear and threaten the progress of mankind to a better existence free of class society. The battle is to be fought on all fronts, political, social, and even literary. Lukacs mentions that his purpose in the set of essays is to combat certain tendencies in literature and literary criticism.

The main argument is this: The point of realism is to get at the truth. To Lukacs, the greatest Realists were Tolstoy and Balzac. They saw sooner, clearer and further than  everyone else what was happening to us and what was coming for us. They showed us ‘the whole of the individual in the whole of society’ when their inferiors only showed us fragments, and cloudy ones at that. These giants were the ones who were able to invent ‘types’: types of people, types of situation. Lukacs says that in types : “all the humanity and socially essential determinants are present on their highest level of development in the ultimate unfolding of the possibilities latent in them, in extreme presentation of their extremes, rendering concrete the peaks and limits of men and epochs.”

Lukacs says (realist) writers miss the mark in one of two ways:  you go one way and you are only a calculator, making a lifeless average of people and events. This is what he accuses the ‘Zola school’ of doing. The other way is to be too introspective, too individual, like Joyce. Lukacs probably wouldn’t rate Knausgaard very high, if I had to guess. Pretty much nobody makes the Zola mistake anymore and everyone goes the other way.

As for Victor Hugo, Lukacs apparently agrees with Goethe’s view that Hugo created beautiful, epic stages  but instead of filling them with people he filled them with ragdolls. As Lukacs says,  ‘no writer is a true realist if he can direct the evolution of his own characters at will.’ They must follow the logic inherent within them, and are not kens and barbies who can be made to kiss or die on a whim.