Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel (1920)

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from: Georg Lukács. The Theory of the Novel. A historico-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971.


Exzerpt

Preface

  • 11 - L. presents the motives for this essay as the outbreak of WWI and his personal rejection of it; also, he explains that it was originally meant to be a series of dialogues in the manner of the Decameron
  • 12 - this introduction to the context of the essay's production is necessary as it "will facilitate a proper understanding of it"; L. declares that the essay goes back to and was influenced by "the so-called 'intellectual sciences' school"
  • 13 - he can now see the limitations of the school's method, which "scarcely succeeded in surmounting positivism", summarises the methodological approach as a "fashion to form general synthetic concepts on the basis of only a few characteristics - in most cases only intuitively grasped - of a school, a period, etc., then to proceed by deduction from these generalisation to the analysis of individual phenomena, and in that way to arrive at what we claimed to be a comprehensive overall view" and proceeds by giving examples of mistakes which the "author of The Theory of the Novel" - as he speaks of himself - made in his interpretations
  • 14 - highlights the well made "analysis of the role of time in L'Education sentimentale"
  • 15 - praises the text for being "the first work belonging to the 'intellectual sciences' school in which the findings of Hegelian philosophy were concretely applied to aesthetic problems", and especially "the historicisation of aesthetic categories"
  • 16 - explains the author's intention as "looking for a general dialectic of literary genres that was based upon the essential nature of aesthetic categories and literary forms, and aspiring to a more intimate connection between category and history than he found in Hegel himself"
  • 17 - solution found only on Marxist ground some 15 years later; the text opposes Hegel's view that "art becomes problematic precisely because reality has become non-problematic" by saying that "the problems of the novel form are here the mirror-image of a world gone out of joint"
  • 18 - compares this last notion to Gottfried Benn's expressing the non-existence of reality, adding that the essayist's view, of course, was "more critical and more thoughtful"; in defence against Bloch's criticism, he states that "the contradiction between The Theory of the Novel and Hegel [...] is primarily social rather than aesthetic or philosophical in nature" and explains this by his then strong influence by Sorel, Fichte and, foremost, Kierkegaard
  • 19 - he draws a line from Hegel to Kierkegaard and Marx and hence to "present-day French philosophy" before he states that "[t]he socio-philosophical basis of such theories is the philosophically as well as politically uncertain attitude of romantic anti-capitalism"
  • 20 - although the text may well be called naive - based on Hegel, Goethe and Romanticism - it is "not conservative but subversive in nature"
  • 21 - detects a further feature, which followed French thinkers but preceded the German authors Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno: "the author of The Theory of the Novel had a conception of the world which aimed at a fusion of 'left' ethics and 'right' epistemology (ontology, etc.)", with other words: "The Theory of the Novel was the first German book in which a left ethic oriented towards radical revolution was coupled with a traditional-conventional exegesis of reality"
  • 22 - criticizes the meeting of the German philosophers, including Adorno, in the 'Grand Hotel Abyss'
  • 23 - concludes that The Theory of the Novel gives insight into and helps understanding the ideologies of the 1920s and 1930s but warns against taking it as a guide

The forms of great epic literature examines in relation to whether the civilisation of the time is an integrated or a problematic one

Integrated civilisations

  • 29 - "Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths - ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars" [cf. introduction to the Oxford Illustrated History of Literature]; "philosophy [...] is always a symptom of the rift between 'inside' and 'outside' [...]. That is why the happy ages have no philosophy, or why [...] all men in such ages are philosophers, sharing the utopian aim of every philosophy."
  • 30 - when "[t]he soul goes out to seek adventure [...]. Such an age is the age of the epic. [...] When the soul does not yet know any abyss within itself [...]. For the question which engenders the formal answers of the epic is: how can life become essence? [...] the secret of the Greek world: its [31] perfection"; Homer's works as the only real epics
  • 31 - "When we speak of the Greeks we always confuse the philosophy of history with aesthetics, psychology with metaphysics, and we invent a relationship between Greek forms and our own epoch."
  • 32 - suggests "to inquire into the transcendental topography of the Greek mind, which was essentially different from ours and which made those forms possible and indeed necessary" in whose world "even the separation between man and world, between 'I' and 'you' cannot disturb its homogeneity"
  • 33 - the Greek man accepts that "a long road lies before him, but within him there is no abyss"; "The circle within which the Greeks led their metaphysical life was smaller than ours. That is why we cannot, as part of our life, place ourselves inside it." [our seemingly inferior world sounds like a superior one]
  • 34 - "We have invented the creation of forms: and that is why everything that falls from our weary and despairing hands must always be incomplete. [...] that is why our essence had to become a postulate for ourselves and thus create a still deeper, still more menacing abyss between us and our own selves" [sounds like a punishment for the original sin]; the Greek world is a close-off circle which enables totality and completeness whereas our is richer but also more dangerous and doomed for incompleteness
  • 35 - the process, in which "substance was reduced from Homer's absolute immanence of life to Plato's likewise absolute yet tangible and graspable transcendence" is marked by distinct stages, "no gradual transitions", and results in "the great and timeless paradigmatic forms of world literature: epic, tragedy, philosophy"
  • 36 - the three stages produce "Homer's living men", "the tragic hero", "Plato's new man, the wise man"; the latter, "however, was the last type of man and his world was the lat paradigmatic life-structure the Greek spirit was to produce"; what comes after, i.e. "[t]he new spirit of destiny", "would seem 'a folly to the Greeks'", e.g. Kant
  • 37 - "Art, the visionary reality of the world made to our measure, has thus become independent: it is no longer a copy, for all the models have gone; it is a created totality, for the natural unity of the metaphysical spheres has been destroyed forever."; the "dream of new unities" as the grounds for the rise of religion: "[t]hus the Church became a new polis, [...] the leap became a ladder of earthly and heavenly hierarchies"
  • 38 - L. sees "a new equilibrium no less perfect than that of the Greeks: an equilibrium of mutually inadequate, heterogeneous intensities" in Giotto, Dante, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Pisano, St. Thomas and St. Francis, "aesthetics became metaphysics once more" but also for the last time; since the disintegration of unity, since totality can longer be simply accepted, "the forms of art [...] [39] carry the fragmentary nature of the world's structure into the world of forms"

The problems of a philosophy of the history of forms

  • 40 - "As a result of such a change in the transcendental points of orientation, art forms become subject to a historico-philosophical dialectic; the course of this dialectic will depend, however, on the a priori origin or 'home' of each genre."; the formation of a new genre occurs not according to the Greek principle based on "a change in mentality" but when "the same mentality" is forced "to turn towards a new aim which is essentially different from the old one. It means that the old parallelism of the transcendental structure [41] of the form-giving subject and the world of created forms has been destroyed, and the ultimate basis of artistic creation has become homeless"
  • 41 - "German Romanticism [...] drew a close connection between it [its concept of the novel] and the concept of the Romantic" because, ultimately, "the novel form is [...] an expression of this transcendental homelessness"; while the Greek forms lasted until they reached their end, "[a]rtistic genres now cut across one another, with a complexity that cannot be disentangled, and become traces of authentic or false searching for an aim that is no longer clearly and unequivocally given"; "an essence that is divorced form life and alien to life can crown itself with its own existence in such a way that this consecration, even after a more violent upheaval, may pale but will never disappear altogether. That is why tragedy, although changed, has nevertheless survived in our time with its essential nature intact, whereas the epic had to disappear and yield its place to an entirely new form: the novel"
  • 42 - "It is the relationship of the essence to a life which, in itself, lies outside the scope of drama that renders necessary the stylistic duality of modern tragedy whose opposite poles are Shakespeare and Alfieri. Greek tragedy stood beyond the dilemma of nearness to life as against abstraction because, for it, plenitude was not a question of coming closer to life, and transparency of dialogue did not mean the negation of its immediacy."
  • 43 - "Not the remotest possibility of a certain nearness-to-life such as might destroy the dramatic form exists for either", i.e. the homogeneous Greek speaker and chorus; "Life is not organically absent from modern drama; at most, it can be banished from it."; "The other kind of tragedy consumes life. [...] In this way the condition of the hero has become polemical and problem-[44]atic; to be a hero is no longer the natural form of existence in the sphere of essence, but the act of raising oneself above that which is merely human"
  • 44 "the polemical emphasis on heroism (even in abstract tragedy) leads, of necessity, to an excess of purely lyrical lyricism. Such lyricism has, however, yet another source which also springs from the displace relationship between life and essence.", i.e. loneliness
  • 45 - "Loneliness is the very essence of tragedy [...]. The language of the absolutely lonely man is lyrical, i.e. monological; in the dialogue, the incognito of his soul becomes too pronounced [...]; loneliness has to become a problem unto itself, deepening and confusing the tragic problem and ultimately taking its place. [...] Such loneliness gives rise to new tragic problems, especially the central problem of modern tragedy - that of trust."
  • 46 - "This loneliness is not only dramatic but also psychological [...]; and if psychology is not to remain merely raw material for drama, it can only express itself as lyricism of the soul."; main opposition: "Great epic writing gives form to the extensive totality of life, drama to the intensive totality of essence."
  • 47 - "epic poets in those times did not have to leave the empirical n order to represent transcendent reality as the only existing one", e.g. "in Homer's time [...] the transcendent was inextricably interwoven with earthly existence, and Homer is inimitable precisely because, in him, this becoming-immanent was so completely successful"; main difference between the epic and the drama: the epic is bound "with reality as it is"; two different concepts: "The concept of essence leads to transcendence simply by being posited, [...]. The concept of life, on the other hand, has no need of any such transcendence captured and held immobile as an object"; "The character created by drama [...] is the intelligible 'I' of man, the character created by the epic is the empirical 'I'."
  • 48 - "The 'should be', in whose desperate intensity the essence seeks refuge because it has become an outlaw on earth, can objectivise itself in the intelligible 'I' as the hero's normative psychology, but in the empirical 'I' it remains a 'should be'. [...] The 'should be' kills life, and an epic hero constructed out of what 'should be' will always be but a shadow of the living epic man of historical reality"
  • 49 - "There is such a thing as great epic literature, but drama never requires the attribute of greatness and must always resist it."; moreover, "In the epic, subject and object do not coincide as they do in drama, where creative subjectivity, seen from the perspective of the work, is barely a concept but only a generalised awareness; whereas in the epic subject and object are clearly and unequivocally distinct from one another and present in the work as such."
  • 50 - "In the minor epic forms, the subject confronts the object in a more dominant and self-sufficient way. [...] Completeness in the minor epic forms is subjective: a fragment of life is transplanted by the writer into a surrounding world that emphasises it and lifts its out of the totality of life; and this selection, this delimination, puts [51] the stamp of its origin in the subject's will and knowledge upon the work itself: it is, more or less, lyrical in nature."
  • 51 - "The subject's form-giving, structuring, delimiting act, his sovereign dominance over the created object, is the lyricism of those epic forms which are without totality."; "The immediate, flowing power of such lyricism is bound to increase in proportion with the significance and gravity of the life-segment selected; [...]. In the short story, [...] such lyricism must entirely conceal itself behind the hard outlines of the event [...]. The short story is the most purely artistic form; it expresses the ultimate meaning of all artistic creation as mood"
  • 52 - L. separates between the short story and the lyric-epic form: when the event is meaningful itself, the narrator has to speak up to put this meaning in relation to the absolute; "Only when the idyll transcends its form and becomes epic, as in Goethe's and Hebbel's 'great idylls', [...] must the author's own voice be heard and his hand must create the salutary distance [...]; when the object, the event that is given form, remains isolated as indeed it should, but when the lived experience that absorbs the event and radiates it out also carries within it the ultimate meaning of life, the artist's sense-giving, life-conquering power. This power, also, is lyrical [...]"
  • 52 - "Neither can a totality of life which is by definition extensive be achieved by the object's being annihilated - by the subject's making itself the sole ruler of existence. [...] The humorist’s soul [...] wants to give form to everything, and precisely for this reason succeeds only in mirroring a segment of the world"; conclusion: "This is the paradox of the subjectivity of the great epic, its 'throwing away in order to win': creative subjectivity becomes lyrical, but, exceptionally, the subjectivity which simply accepts, which humbly transforms itself into a purely receptive organ of the world, can partake of the grace of having the whole revealed to it."
  • 53 - praises Dante for having achieved this in Divina commedia, Goethe in Wilhelm Meister, Cervantes in Don Quixote; criticizes Sterne and Jean Paul for speaking too much - "This is not a value judgement but an a priori definition of genre: the totality of life resists any attempt to find a transcendental centre within it, and refuses any of its constituent cells the right to dominate it."; e.g. "Dante's Paradiso is closer to the essence of life than Shakespeare's exuberant richness."
  • 54 - the constructed totality in Goethe's Elective Affinities and Hebbel's Song of the Nibelungs causes both to be failures as opposed to "the story of the Iliad, which has no beginning and no end, a rounded universe blossoms into all-embracing life"

The epic and the novel

  • 56 - "The epic and the novel, these two major forms of great epic literature, differ from one another not by their authors' fundamental intentions but by the given historico-philosophical realities with which the authors were confronted. The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality."; L. rejects the distinction by verse vs. prose but nevertheless describes different forms of verse: "Tragic verse is sharp and hard, it isolates, it creates distance. [...] Dramatic verse [...] reveals what-[57]ever triviality there may be in the artistic invention [...]. Epic verse, too, creates but in the sphere of the epic (which is the sphere of life) distance means happiness and lightness"; i.e. epic verse abolishes triviality and approaches essence
  • 58 - "In times to which such lightness is no longer given, verse is banished from the great epic, [...]. Only prose can then encompass the suffering and the laurels, the struggle and the crown, with equal power"
  • 59 - e.g. Goethe used verse for idylls but prose for his Meister; "In the world of distances, all epic verse turns into lyric poetry [...], for, in verse, everything hidden becomes manifest"
  • 60 - "The epic gives form to a totality of life that is rounded from within; the novel seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life."; "the fundamental form-determining intention of the novel is objectivised as the psychology of the novel's heroes: they are seekers"
  • 61 - contrary to the novel, "the epic and the tragedy know neither crime nor madness", "For crime and madness are objectivations of transcendental homelessness"
  • 62 - "Where no aims are directly given, the structures which the soul, in the process of becoming-man, encounters as the arena and sub-stratum of its activity among men lose their obvious roots in supra-personal ideal necessities [...]. They form the world of convention, [...] it is a world that does not offer itself either as meaning to the aim-seeking subject or as matter, in sensuous immediacy, to the active subject. It is a second nature [...] and therefore it is incomprehensible, unknowable in its real substance."
  • 63 - Lyrical poetry establishes a "relationship between soul and nature", "in the epic forms the subjective experience remains inside the subject: it becomes mood"
  • 64 - "Estrangement from nature (the first nature), the modern sentimental attitude to nature, is only a projection of man's experience of his self-made environment as a prison instead of as a parental home." [would this be Hamlet's problem?!]; "The first nature, nature as a set of laws for pure cognition, nature as the bringer of comfort to pure feeling, is nothing other than the historico-philosophical objectivation of man's alienation from his own constructs."
  • 65 - "The nature of laws and the nature of moods stem from the same locus in the soul: they presuppose the impossibility of an attained and meaningful substance, the impossibility of an attained and meaningful substance, the impossibility of finding a constitutive object adequate to the constitutive subject."; the subject "can only avoid falling prey to laws and moods if the arena of its actions, the normative object of its actions, is made of the stuff of pure ethics" [Kant's imperative?!]
  • 66 - "The epic individual, the hero of the novel, is the product of estrangement from the outside world. When the world is internally homogeneous, men do not differ qualitatively from one another [...]. The autonomous life of interiority is possible and necessary only when the distinctions between men have made an unbridgeable chasm"; "The epic hero is, strictly speaking, never an individual" because the epic's "theme is not a personal destiny but the destiny of a community"
  • 67 - "Epic heroes have to be kings for different reasons from the heroes of tragedy (although these reasons are also formal). In tragedy the hero must be a king simply because of the need to sweep all the petty causalities of life from the ontological path of destiny [...]. What is symbol in tragedy becomes a reality in the epic: the weight of the bonds linking an individual destiny to a totality. [...] the epic hero, as bearer of his destiny, is not lonely, for this destiny connects him by indissoluble threads to the community whose fate is crystallised in his own. As for the community, it is an organic - and therefore intrinsically meaningful - concrete totality [...]."
  • 68 - "Dante is the only great example in which we see the architectural clearly conquering the organic, and therefore he represent a historico-philosophical transition from the pure epic to the novel. [...] The combination of the presuppositions of the epic and the novel and their synthesis to an epopoeia is based on the dual structure of Dante's world: the break between life and meaning is surpassed and cancelled by the coincidence of life and meaning in a present, actually experienced transcendence."
  • 69 - Dante's hero did not have to be socially superior because his "experience was the symbolic unity of human destiny in general"

The inner form of the novel

  • 70 - "The totality of Dante's world is the totality of a visual system of concepts. It is because of this sensual 'thingness', this substantiality both of the concepts themselves and of their hierarchical order within the system, that completeness and totality can become constitutive structural categories rather than regulative ones"; this is the reason why Dante could create an epic "at a time when the historico-philosophical situation was already beginning to demand the novel"; totality in a novel can only be established in abstract concepts (cf. Hegel) which cause certain risks:
  • 71 - "the risk of overlapping into lyricism or drama, the risk of narrowing reality so that the work becomes an idyll, the risk of sinking to the level of mere entertainment literature", all of which can only be avoided by understanding nature as "fragile and incomplete"; "Every art form is defined by the metaphysical dissonance of life it accepts and organises as the basis of a totality complete in itself [...]. The dissonance special to the novel, the refusal of the immanence of being to enter into empirical life, produces a problem of form whose formal nature is much less obvious than in other kinds of art, and which, because it looks like a problem of content, needs to be approached by both ethical and aesthetic arguments, even more than do problems which are obviously purely formal. [...] The novel is the art-form of virile maturity: this means that the completeness of the novel's world, if seen objectively, is an imperfection, and if subjectively experienced, it amounts to resignation."
  • 72 - "The creation of forms is the most profound confirmation of the existence of a dissonance. But in all other genres - even, for reasons we can now understand, in the epic - this affirmation of a dissonance precedes the act of form-giving, whereas in the novel it is the form itself. [...] In the novel, [...] ethic - the ethical intention - is visible in the creation of every detail and hence is, in the most concrete content, an effective structural element of work itself."
  • 73 - "[...] the novel - unlike other genres - has a caricatural twin almost undistinguishable from itself in all inessential formal characteristics: the entertainment novel" which is "entirely meaningless"; "As form, the novel establishes a fluctuating yet firm balance between becoming and being; as the idea of becoming, it becomes a state. Thus the novel, by transforming itself into a normative being of becoming, surmounts itself. [...] The 'half-art' of the novel, therefore, prescribes still stricter, still more inviolable artistic laws for itself [...] [74]: they are the laws of tact."
  • 74 - "[...] the inherent danger of the novel [...] that, instead of an existent totality, only a subjective aspect of that totality will be given form, obscuring or even destroying the creative intention of acceptance and objectivity which the great epic demands. This danger cannot be circumvented but can only be overcome from within. [...] The self-recognition and, with it, self-abolition of subjectivity was called irony by the first theoreticians of the novel, the aesthetic philosophers of early Romanticism."
  • 75 - irony in the novel is not irony in satire: "In the novel the subject, as observer and creator, is compelled by irony to apply its recognition of the world to itself and to treat itself, like its own creatures, as a free object of free irony: it must transform itself into a purely receptive subject, as is normatively required for great epic literature. The irony of the novel is the self-correction of the world's fragility [...]. Thus a new perspective of life is reached on an entirely new basis - that of the indissoluble connection between the relative independence of the parts and their attachment to the whole"
  • 76 - the attachment is not a true connection but a concept; this is why "although the characters and their actions possess the infinity of authentic epic literature, their structure is essentially different from that of the epic", i.e. "the difference between something that is homogeneously organic and stable and something that is heterogeneously contingent and discrete." This is the reason why independent parts "must have a strict compositional and architectural significance, whether this takes the form of contrasting lights thrown upon the central problem (as with the novellas included in Don Quixote) or of the introduction, by way of a prelude, of hidden motifs which are to be decisive at the end (as with the Confessions of a Beautiful Soul)." Problems occur if this is done too obvious "as with the Romantics or with the first novel of Paul Ernst."
  • 77 - "The outward form of the novel is essentially biographical. [...] In the biographical form, the unfulfillable, sentimental striving both for the immediate unity of life and for a completely rounded architecture of the system is balanced and brought to rest: it is transformed into being."
  • 78 - "Thus in the biographical form the balance of both spheres which are unrealised and unrealisable in isolation produces a new and autonomous life that is, however paradoxically, complete in itself and immanently meaningful: the life of the problematic individual."; "The contingent world and the problematic individual are realities which mutually determine one another."
  • 79 - "[...] self-destruction of reality [...] appears in two different forms. First, as disharmony between the interiority of the individual and the substratum of his actions [...]. Second, as the inability of the outside world, which is a stranger to ideals and an enemy of interiority, to achieve real completeness [...]: in other words, the outside world cannot be represented. Both the parts and the whole of such an outside world [...] acquire life only [...] when they become objects of mood or reflexion. This is the formal reason and the literary justification for the Romantics' demand that the novel, combining all genres within itself, should include pure lyric poetry and pure thought in its structure."
  • 80 - "The inner form of the novel has been understood as the process of the problematic individual's journeying towards himself, the road from dull captivity within a merely present reality - a reality that is heterogeneous in itself and meaningless to the individual - towards clear self-recognition. [...] The immanence of meaning which the form of the novel requires lies in the hero's finding out through experience that a mere glimpse of meaning is the highest that life has to offer, and that its glimpse is the only thing worth the commitment of an entire life, the only thing by which the struggle will have been justified. [...] The inner shape of the process and the most adequate [81] means of shaping it - the biographical form - reveal the great difference between the discrete, unlimited nature of the material of the novel and the continuum-like infinity of the material of the epic. This lack of limits in the novel has a 'bad' infinity about it: therefore it needs certain imposed limits in order to become form; whereas the infinity of purely epic matter is an inner, organic one [...]. The novel overcomes its 'bad' infinity by recourse to the biographical form." [circular argumentation?!]
  • 81 - "The beginning and the end of the world of a novel [...], thus become significant landmarks along a clearly mapped road."
  • 82 - "In the epic, the central figure and its significant adventures are a mass organised in itself and for itself, so that the beginning and the end mean something quite different there, something essentially less important [...]. Once more Dante's position is a special one; [...] what is contained between the beginning and the end escapes the biographical categories of the process: it is the eternally existent becoming of ecstasy [...]."
  • 83 - "The novel comprises the essence of its totality between the beginning and the end, and thereby raises an individual to the infinite heights of one who must create an entire world through his experience and who must maintain that world in equilibrium [...]. But just because the novel can only comprise the individual in this way, he becomes a mere instrument, and his central position in the work means only that he is particularly well suited to reveal a certain problematic of life."

The historico-philosophical conditioning of the novel and its significance

  • 84 - "The composition of the novel is the paradoxical fusion of heterogeneous and discrete components into an organic whole which is then abolished over and over again. The relationships which create cohesion between the abstract components are abstractly pure and formal, and the ultimate unifying principle therefore has to be the ethic of the creative subjectivity, an ethic which the content reveals. But because this ethic must surmount itself, [...] it needs a new ethical self-correction, again determined by the work's content, in order to achieve the 'tact' which will create a proper balance. This interaction of two ethical complexes, their duality as to form and their unity in being given form, is the content of irony, which is the normative mentality of the novel. [...] Wisdom can be expressed through the act of form-giving: it can conceal itself behind the forms and does not necessarily have to surmount itself, as irony, in the work."
  • 85 - "For the creative individual's reflexion, the novelist's ethic vis-à-vis the content, is a double one. His reflexion consists of giving form to what happens to the idea in real life, of describing the actual nature of this process and of evaluating and considering its reality. This reflexion, however, in turn becomes an object for reflexion [...]. The need for relfexion is the deepest melancholy of every great and genuine novel. Through it, the writer's naivety suffers extreme violence and is changed into its opposite. (This is only another way of saying that pure reflexion is profoundly inartistic.) And the hard-won equalisation, the unstable balance of mutually surmounting reflexions - the second naivety, which is the novelist's objectivity - is only a formal substitute for the first: it makes form-giving possible and it rounds off the form [...]. The novel is the form of mature virility: its author has lost the poet's radiant youthful faith 'that destiny and soul are twin names for a single concept' (Novalis); and the deeper and more painful his need to set this most essential creed of all literature as a demand against life, the more deeply and painfully he must learn to understand that is only a demand and not an effective reality. This insight, this iron, is directed both at his heroes [...] and against his own wisdom [...]. Indeed, the irony is a double one in both directions."
  • 86 - "[...] whilst irony depicts reality as victorious, it reveals not only that reality is as nothing in face of its defeated opponent, not only that the victory of reality can never be a final one, [...] but also that reality owes its advantage not so much to its own strength, [...] as to the inner (although necessary) problematic of the soul weighed down by its ideals." The problem becomes that of adults in general. It is based on the dual understanding that the gods of our youth will no longer speak to us and whatever else might speak to us, will not do it quite as clearly. "Fallen gods, and gods whose kingdom is not yet, become demons [...]."
  • 87 - a soul searching for essence, i.e. home, will "take the first path that seems to lead there": "That is why tragedy knows not real difference between God and demon, whereas, if a demon enters the domain of the epic at all, he has to be a powerless, defeated higher being, a deposed divinity." [interesting, cf. Döblin's Babylonische Wandrung, or Rushdie's Satanic Verses]
  • 88 - "The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God. The novel hero's psychology is demonic; the objectivity of the novel is the mature man's knowledge that meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that, without meaning, reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality. [...] The mental attitude of the novel is virile maturity, and the characteristic structure of its matter is discreteness, the separation between inferiority and adventure. [...] The dramatic hero knows no adventure [...]. The dramatic hero knows no interiority [...]. Therefore the dramatic hero does not set out to prove himself [...]" [Problem with definition: L. explains away a counter-example by saying that it is misplaced and [89] criticizes modern drama, esp. Ibsen, for unfolding a problem "which the dramatist should have completed [...] before beginning to write it."]
  • 89 - "The novel tells of the adventure of interiority; the content of the noel is the story of the soul that goes to find itself, that seeks adventures in order to be proved and testes by them, and, by proving itself, to find its own essence. The inner security of the epic world excludes adventure in this essential sense [...]." The epic hero is passive by definition, the novel hero can but need not be passive - a question of psychology and sociology which enables structural variations.
  • 90 - "The novel hero's psychology is the field of action of the demonic. [...] The writer's irony is a negative mysticism to be found in times without a god. It is an attitude of docta ignorantia towards meaning, a portrayal of the kindly and malicious workings of the demons, a refusal to comprehend more than the mere fact of these workings; and in it there is the deep certainty, expressible only be form-giving, that through not-desiring-to-know and not-being-able-to-know he has truly encountered, glimpsed and grasped the ultimate, true substance, the present, non-existent God. This is why irony is the objectivity of the novel."
  • 91 - In order to free himself, in order to succeed, the author has to realize the norm and understand the present condition. "Thus his freedom is subject to a double categorical dialectic, a theoretical and a historico-philosophical one; [...] when the historical categories are not sufficiently developed, the wish to achieve immediate silence must inevitably lead to mere stuttering. But when the form is perfectly achieved, the writer is free in relation to God because in such a form, and only it in it, God himself [...] is completely embraced by its system of categories."
  • 92 - "For the novel, irony consists in this freedom of the writer in his relationship to God, the transcendental condition of the objectivity of form-giving. Irony, with its intuitive double vision, can see where God is to be found in a world abandoned by God [...]."
  • 93 - "Irony, the self-surmounting of a subjectivity that has gone as far as it was possible to go, is the highest freedom that can be achieved in a world without God. That is why it is not only he sole possible a priori condition for a true, totality-creating objectivity but also why it makes that totality - the novel - the representative art-form of our age: because the structural categories of the novel constitutively coincide with the world as it is today."

Attempt at a typology of the novel form

Abstract idealism

The romanticism of disillusionment

Wilhelm Meister's Years of Apprenticeship as an attempted synthesis

Tolstoy and the attempt to go beyond the social forms of life

Summary and Comment

  • Preface: L. creates a distance between his contemporary self and the author of the essay and criticizes the old method for taking some features of a movement, analyzing a book according to these and then focusing on the special characteristics. Yet, he does the same thing again: identifies his 50-year-old text with the 'intellectual sciences school' and then points out the specialties.