The Third Dimension of Georg Lukacs

...Our sympathies for this side in the inner struggle of Soviet development ought not to mislead us into considering him a free mind or into overlooking the weight of intellectual backwardness in his literary opinions...

...The evils of modernist literature he finds to be abstraction, distortion, subjectivism, formalism—traits objected to by all antimodernists from Eisenhower to Pius XII...

...for Lukacs it has no right to do that in the novel...

...Much in the Lukacs we are presently privileged to read cannot be taken seriously...

...But the bourgeoisie, too, as they sprang out of Marx's mind would be deeper than they appeared in ordinary experience...

...it may be worth pausing on the latter's qualifications as a Lukacs "realist...

...You do not dispose of Kafka through refuting Heidegger nor through finding a comparable "message" in a grade B movie...

...That Marxism, like the polemical varieties of tradi tionalist criticism, for example, that of F. R. Leavis, locates the value of contemporary works in the degree of historical consciousness displayed in them, including the historical significance of their esthetic modes, is of itself almost a guarantee of its pertinence...

...while a personage in an "intellectual" novel, e.g., one by Aldous Huxley, might philosophize brilliantly about abstruse issues yet produce an effect of shallowness...

...Lukacs wants two: bourgeois critical realism and "socialist" (though not Stalinist...

...its very texture is made up of them—e.g., that with Thomas Mann "from The Magic Mountain onwards, socialism never ceases to be a central intellectual and compositional (!) element...

...this puts new art and ideas at a disadvantage in coping with disciplinarians of proper "perspective...

...Will not the literature of the classless society be populated by ghosts...

...For Marx all that was solid was melting in the air...

...Compare the conservative Academician, Kenyon Cox, writing about The Armory Show fifty years ago: "the real meaning of this Cubist movement is nothing else than the total destruction of the art of painting...

...Mann makes his intention explicit in the first volume of the novel through a discourse on how the personality of the young Joseph shades into the images in his gallery of ancestors, so that the hero does not know where his history leaves off and those of Jacob, Isaac and Abraham begin...

...That Othello was endowed with an impressive intellectual physiognomy had nothing to do with his education, his "ideas" or even his mental capacity...

...The complexities and discontinuties of modernist fiction are accompaniments of the breakdown of class fixity...

...Lukacs's thesis that "the essential content of modernism is angst and chaos" (a thesis which can be refuted without much trouble—where is the chaos in Valery or Mondrian...

...Still, "lasting human types" are getting harder and harder to find in fiction, as on the street...

...It was evident to the author of Ivan Ilych, as to the author of Oedipus, that the three-dimensional occupant of social space was a fictional construction, a hollow dummy contrived for the eyes of others, and that in action this made-up shape would crumble—bringing a reversal of the situation and revealing a self belonging to a new order of being...

...For Lukacs modern fiction is an esthetic and moral aberration that has somehow gotten in between the masterpieces of the past and the future...

...They cause the mirror of modern literature to be turned to the wall, so that events take place blindly, while art becomes a copying of monuments in the oversized scale of the "humanist perspective...

...The fear of nothingness cuts Lukacs off from the grand tradition he is so eager to see continued...

...This is another way of saying that the issues of criticism cannot be stated, much less solved, in terms of mere abstract disputation...

...Such opinions are aimed at banishing the incentive to study the masterpieces of our age...

...For this descendent of the materialistic interpretation of history, social reality has become contingent on thought...

...Given this distance it is futile to dwell on the absurdities, exaggerations and misstatements of fact in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism...

...Similarly, new esthetic possibilities are to be fitted into antique modes—"the ancient rules of epic narration"—rather than be developed as instruments of vision...

...One can hardly help sharing Lukac's impatience with glib intimations of an underlying "human condition" that turns real events into mere illustrations of an irresistible sickness...

...The net effect is a pervasive Philistinism...

...Solidity of character belongs to class society: the solid person of fiction is none other than the solid citizen...

...The distinction of Lukacs is that his notion of the downward movement of literature is fitted into a coherent theory of social development...

...To the dramatic poet individual identity has always been precarious and a pathos...

...Intellectual physiognomy" went boldly into the relation of intellect to insight, instead of the usual dodge of pitting them against each other...

...Perspective, in this concrete form," Lukacs assures us, "is central to our problem...

...For Mann, however, the different senses of time represent opposing moral states, neither of which is superior to the other...

...Lukacs sees fictional types as national in substance...

...The density of the Balzacian or Tolstoyan protagonist is the effect of his being cut from a hardened lump of class soil...

...I am not even sure, after these decades, that I actually read the article in which it was contained...

...The writers he praises as "major talents who clung to the standards of nineteenth-century realism" include Eugene O'Neill, the late Thomas Wolfe, the late Brecht, early Norman Mailer, who are either not "realists" or something less than "major talents...

...His "realism" is a literary version of the Leninist program of building the future upon planes of social differentiation which are to be gradually lowered toward a common level under a system of controls, like the locks of a canal...

...Or shall we say, an epoch (our own) of human history...

...We are thus at one with Lukacs to the extent that he examines modern styles from the standpoint of today and tomorrow rather than as incidents in an esthetic totality standing apart from or above time...

...It worries Lukacs that "socialist realist" dogmatism may cause modernist critics to cover up "the deeply problematic nature of modernism itself...

...What is marvelous about Lukacs is that he has developed a philosophy of resistance to change on no other ground than change itself...

...in which varying densities of people are established through dealing with them in confer• ences, cocktail parties, love affairs, the family...

...parallels the opinion concerning contemporary society held by swarms of elegists of cultural decline, most of them reactionaries who hate the industrial age...

...thinking and practice in fiction...

...At any rate, I have long admired the theory of intellectual physiognomy and its author with it...

...Bourgeois critical realism needs to turn toward Socialism as its goal in order to be able to face the present without sinking into angst...

...This vision of the world as chaos results from the lack of a humanist social perspective...

...Lukacs is unable to see that massively contoured social identities ("lasting types") have been rendered obsolete by the emergence of a world culture beyond folkways or cult, and that modern angst is precisely the ambivalent response to the slipping away of established emblems of self...

...All antimodernists, we said, pine for realism...

...But the sum of the contrast is Lukacs's cultural conservatism, as revealed in his praise of Mann for upholding literary tradition: "however unconventional the presentation...

...Mann's organic-mechanical dichotomy corresponds to Bergson's view, which Lukacs repugns, and to the metaphysical split which governs the conversion of data into symbols in Ulysses (e.g., an old woman passing by makes Bloom think of the Dead Sea and salt as against a list representing the elan of growing things...

...in other words, that the social type is the not-self of the individual appearing as a positive shape, while the real self is unknown and awaits disclosure through action...

...Lukacs's version of dialectical materialism demands that conditions be cured in literature before they are changed in life...

...The "realism" thus attained is not Lukacs's "meaning of everyday life" but what Mann calls the "god story...

...The "flatness" of these personae is purposely emphasized by contrast with Peeperkorn, who is blown up to larger than life size, a kind of lumbering deity bumping against the clouds...

...he is obliged to distinguish between pantomimes of despair and its genuine poetry...

...With permanent revolution set in quotation marks, Lukacs has discovered in "human nature" the key for turning Marxism into a species of traditionalism which shores up literature as a trans-historical order against the dissolving processes of twentieth-century development...

...Having once left the nineteenth century,* Lukacs's "realism" is no longer a descriptive category but an ideological wish (even Gorky possesses too many expressionist facets to fit in without doctrinal squeezing)— the wish common to all contemporary "realists," regardless of philosophical, political or esthetic differences, to believe that something is immune to alteration and is there to be described, without needing to be constituted anew in terms of its changing relations...

...Whereas in The Communist Manifesto the nineteenth-century leaps forward into the twentieth, with Lukacs the twentieth-century crawls back toward the nineteenth...

...The novelist of contemporary social fact achieves imaginative veracity through devising formal equivalents of the multiple perspective in which his experience appears: that in which "film" figures flash by in city crowds...

...Modern industrial labor," Marx replies, "modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him [the proletarian] of every trace of national character...

...the proletariat, Marx has informed us, is "denuded...

...Lukacs submerges this problem in the very title of his chapter directed against modern art: it is called "The Ideology of Modernism...

...If Marx was right and "everlasting uncertainty" is a trait of the epoch, the effect after a hundred years would inescapably be to deposit a widespread tinge of angst in almost every feeling, and "continuous agitation" would have made "chaos" an element of contemporary sensibility...

...Reality, Old Faithful, is still there in the streets and drawing rooms if only the novelists would put themselves in a position to see it...

...Lukacs's mechanic's approach to literary creation as the analytical manipulation of facts and situations—"the realistic writer must seek the nodal points of these [social-individual] conflicts, determine what they are at their most intense and most typical, and give suitable expression to them"—raises the suspicion that his good (i.e., cleared of Stalinist perversions) Socialist Realism would result in no better writings than the worst...

...This circumstance weighs heavily on Lukacs's literary judgments...

...Art that takes its shape from the "everlasting uncertainty" is, regardless of its character, mere "naturalism" to Lukacs and inferior to "realistic" works issuing from the mental constructions of "the humanist social perspective...

...My own assent to his reputation was based on Lukacs's theory of "intellectual physiognomy," which explained what made characters in novels and plays profound or trivial...

...But the third dimension can still be achieved through correct perspective: here Lukacs once more recalls Bernard Berenson and his opinion that what made Giotto a great painter was the solidity given to his figures by the new science of perspective...

...Unlike the medievalist, Lukacs accedes to change in the structure of individuals and their relations...

...Lukacs recognizes this (though again blaming on ideology what has occurred in reality, like Stalin blaming on saboteurs and oppositionists a breakdown in wheat production) when he complains that the wispy personages of contemporary literature "presuppose the elimination of all social categories...

...But what if the typical condition of man in the mid-twentieth century is that of workers and intellectuals...

...To de fine modernism as a solution or as a worthy cause is, of course, ridiculous...

...The very physical setting of The Magic Mountain is intended to produce that "chaos" of time and values which Lukacs reprehends as "modernist...

...Both realisms are continuations of the supreme works of earlier epochs...

...But what is this type except the class man of social formations now in distress...

...Such statements as, "Our starting point is really the point of convergence of two antitheses: the antithesis between realism and modernism and the antithesis between peace and war," which line up literary modes on the two sides of current political struggles (are the Chinese modernists or realists...

...Since Mann is the only first-rate twentieth-century writer Lukacs can even pretend to have on his side, and thus the sole ground for believing that "bourgeois realism" is in the running as an important tendency (a chapter in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism is entitled "Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann...

...Disregarding the analogical and symbolic structure of Ulysses he states that in it "the stream of consciousness technique...

...as with the metaphysicians of despair whom he condemns, the issue is that beyond the solid types there exists for him nothing but emptiness and chaos...

...that of the self in its metamorphoses and its absence of space which prevent its being grasped except through myth-making...

...I don't know how accurate a description this is of Lukacs's idea...

...No doubt the problematic is the distinguishing trait of a consciousness truly of this time...

...It took another five years for Lukacs to permit himself a direct thrust at "the disastrous legacy of Stalinism...

...In their indefinite dimensions his characters are closer to those of myth than to Lukacs's nineteenth-century egos, and by the same quality they are affiliated with HCE and Harold-or-Humphrey of Finnegans Wake and with Kafka's K, that is, with quintessential modernism...

...In which case, ought we not trade in Socialism for Dame Quickly's tavern...

...The Lukacs who now comes forward in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, written seven years ago and just published in England and in the United States (under the title of Realism in Our Time),* has nothing to say about intellectual physiognomy nor any concept of comparable originality...

...In a situation that generates angst, angst itself must be driven out by defeating the "ideology of modernism...

...And though he still gets into trouble, it is for belonging to a wing of Party opinion...

...As a Marxist, Lukacs is obliged not only to see this radical period as a culmination, he must hold its upheavals to be a good thing...

...As for the solidity of the characters in The Magic Mountain, Lukacs's ultimate test of realism, Castorp and Ziemssen, Settembrini and Naphta (said to be a portrait of Lukacs himself) perform not as single figures "in the round" like characters in Balzac or Flaubert...

...In finding forms for these states as they are actually experienced, modernist literature and art would represent not a timeless condition but the condition of the time...

...Things are no longer in place and the people seen by the novelist no longer pose against a static background...

...socialist realism" needs to be aware of bourgeois realism behind it in order to be guided by its models and esthetic standards...

...If everything solid has melted in the air, it is the job of the artist to put it together again through "the creative role of perspective...

...Lukacs thus turns out to be a thorough disappointment...

...These realisms, he contends, represent the truths of successive historical epochs, but they are connected with and depend on one another...

...In his Preface to the German Edition of The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, written in Budapest in 1957, he declares his joy at being able at last to speak "openly," then calls for "relentless criticism" with the argument that "only on the basis of such criticism, as with Rosa Luxemburg's complex legacy, can Stalin's positive achievements be seen in perspective" (my italics...

...Lukacs bends his dialectical ingenuity to separate Mann from his contemporaries on the grounds that he differentiates between characters ruled by subjective and objective time...

...A strange complaint for a Communist...

...Only the members of one social class lack thickness...

...art do not "describe reality" and that their "selective principle" is not "applied" but is an effect of imagination, temperament and the works the author has chosen as his tradition...

...Lukacs has set himself against the transitional person of modern democracy...

...Mann's Lotte in Weinar, on the other hand, is superior because in it "the monologue interieur is simply a technical device" (what becomes of the unity of form and content...

...Lukacs, it turns out, has also failed to surmount the insensibility of Marxist criticism to the processes by which a work of literature actually comes into being...

...Nor did I ever try to figure out what intellectual physiognomy had to do with Marxism, unless it implied that the proletariat as conceived by Marx had, despite its illiteracy, a more profound character than the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals...

...In bringing Ilych, the solid, lasting type, to the fictional execution block Tolstoy was something more than a "realist"—as was Marx when he explained that class societies produce "abstract individuals" under which the real individuals are "subsumed...

...Intellectual physiognomy" seemed to me the answer to a deep riddle of fiction: how an Othello or Lear could deliver wonderful utterances yet be convincingly stupid or raving...

...Given a Shakespeare or a Tolstoy for his fictional father, an idiot becomes a genius without ceasing to be an idiot...

...He is stuck with change, and in literature he must ask for more rather than less emphasis on the derangements of the time...

...It is merely a matter of cancelling an epoch of error...

...The test for Lukacs of the realist novelist or playwright is his ability to create solid, three-dimensional characters in contrast to the "shadowy blurs," stylized puppets or unlocated mystics of modernist fiction...

...There is another group that is perhaps in an even worse state: the revolutionary intellectuals...

...In substance Lukacs's objections to modernist productions are familiar to us from other sources...

...Lukacs quotes approvingly the contrast noted by Camus between a character of Dostoyevsky and one of Tolstoy as "like that between a film and stage character" (as silly a distinction as one between a character on a page and one on a stage...

...Like Berenson he harks back to the Renaissance for "tactile values" which, Berenson said, will enable us to "realize his [the artist's] representations more quickly and more completely than we should realize the things themselves...

...and they are composed of patterns of "naturalistic" details doubling as symbols, e.g., Castorp's cigars...

...it leads to the destruction of literature as such.* And this is true not only of Joyce, or of the literature of Expressionism and Surrealism...

...Other anti-modernist critics, say, Bernard Berenson or certain academic "humanists," simply discard this century and its works and glut themselves on the art of other times...

...The sole interest in the present collection of essays is the angle of Lukacs's attack on vanguard literature, the fact that this attack is made from a premise that welcomes the revolution of the twentieth century...

...I have tried to show that these [angst and chaos] form the essential content of modernism...

...one did not expect to encounter this much "Marxism" in the great Marxist thinker...

...Then reality will be back in force...

...The fact that in the midst of this 'permanent revolution,' this endless 'revaluation of all values,' there were [twentieth-century] writers of major talent who clung to the standards of nineteenth-century realism is, therefore, of ethical as much as of artistic significance...

...Faced with extremist art, all antimodernists raise the banner of "realism," whether it be Catholic realism, the common-sense realism of the liberals and the Left, the "socialist realism" of Khrushchev, the taken-for-granted realism of the mass media and of 95 per cent of U.S...

...it was a quality that descended to him from his author as a kind of family resemblance...

...Today matters are far worse...

...In that case, to be truly a realist he cannot duplicate the character scaffoldings of The Human Comedy (admired by Marx, we might remind Lukacs, for its radical insights into the social formations of the time and not because Balzac was conserving Western literary tradition or belief in "human nature...

...for exploring "aspects of Goethe's world which would not have been otherwise available," once more the mechanic's conception of the artist's technique as a tool for working on "reality...

...If he is to judge modernist works as inferior he must do so not for their failure to measure up to the masterpieces of other centuries but for their inadequacies in dealing with the novelties of this one...

...He plays the customary themes on disintegration in Joyce, the nihilism of Kafka and Beckett...

...Works deficient in conscious response to this drama, and the psychological, political, cultural, technical issues mixed together in it, are doomed to tiresomeness and triviality regardless of freshened-up mannerisms...

...The anonymous person and anonymous groups struggling for visibility in modern mass society are to be overlooked by literature until a place has been delineated for them by political authority...

...Lukacs is seeking in literature what he misses in life: the firmly planted "complete" type...

...Poor humanityl To be compelled to endure this same empty threat for decade after decade, from all countries and from all ideologies...

...It ought to be added that with all due reverence for the pathos of Lukacs's resistance to Stalinism, some of his statements fall short of rudimentary honesty...

...Thus he complains of the "selective principle which apparently underlies modernist writing" that "it is not a selection applied to the totality of the reality to be described"—as if it still needed to be demonstrated that works of • Harpers, $j3.95...

...He takes his stand as a Marxist foe of modernist literature—Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Musil—or of modernism in literature, and defends as an alternative, "realism" and the realistic tradition...

...Criticism by fiction of the historical drama in which we are all cast as actors or as victims, and of which there are no disinterested spectators, is what keeps the novel and the play going in our time above their commercial, academic and propaganda functions...

...Frau Chauchat is the personification of disorder—note the rattle of small panes of glass with which she enters the dining hall of the sanatarium and the consciousness of Castorp...

...And not only the Communist, for as a liberal form of Communism, Lukacs's criticism also reflects fairly accurately the cultural outlook of the Left generally and particularly its attitude toward modern art...

...the ancient rules of epic narration are faithfully observed...

...As with antimodernists of the Church, the State, the Rotary Clubs, the "distortion," etc., of vanguard forms is seen by him as owing not to the revolutionary character of present-day reality but to the errors or perversity of writers, their faulty "perspective...

...Yet Lukacs himself introduces into art the war of dogmas when he writes: "We see that modernism leads not only to the destruction of traditional forms...

...Lukacs's discussion of "perspective" reveals that as an alternative to modern styles, "realism" means not the representation of contemporary reality, subjective or social, but its correction through ideological imperatives...

...These writers' attitudes sprang from the ethical conviction that though changes in society modify human nature, they do not abolish it...

...Perhaps someone told me about intellectual physiognomy and I decided that that's what it meant...

...is itself the formative principle governing the narrative pattern and the presentation of character...

...As literary criticism, however, rather than metaphysics, Lukacs's condemnation of philosophies of angst and chaos is beside the point...

...The mold of man is to be set from above rather than be the product of man's own actions...

...wake one up to the distance that today separates one's thinking from what has come to constitute Marxism...

...In the postwar novel and theater, despair, the "void," "loss of self," have become cliches used to organize episodes, language, images...

...Lukacs believes that the malady of shadowiness is getting more serious: already in the time of Zola he observes, it had become extremely difficult to create lasting human types, "the real criterion of literary achievement...

...it requires an effort to believe that it was meant to be, though indubitably it was...

...cial space in the role of the aristocrat on the hill, the merchant in the marketplace, the peasant in the field...

...This abominable coupling of the inspired martyr of German Socialism with the sordid tyrant could have had no other purpose than to display orthodoxy in regard to strains of Marxist thinking condemned by the Party...

...Instead of the citizen surrounded by his possessions, his family, the stable social landscapes, there appears the fellow employee or the professional who comes and goes...

...Adjust this perspective and the social equivalents of distortion (official lies, mass-communication fantasies), abstraction (alienated people, empty relations, things devoid of quality), subjectivism (the collapse and betrayal of ideals) , formalism (the regulation of public and private life by impersonal systems) would presumably be overcome...

...For this Marxist the issue for literature is not its capacity to enter into the range of new human potentialities opened up by the continuous loosening of social forms...

...He condemns modern art in the name of progress, and in so doing exposes more fully than does any political pronouncement of the Communists what the Communist conception of progress is...

...To oppose, as he does, Thomas Mann as a realist to James Joyce as a modernist is both theoretically absurd and esthetically obtuse...

...All that is solid melts in the air . . ." The Communist Manifesto...

...All fixed, fast -frozen relations . . . are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify...

...Creation, he believes (or his critical vocabulary compels him to say), takes place through the "translation" of a "consciousness of reality" into "adequate esthetic form...

...On this theme Kafka would seem to be saying more than any of Lukacs's human-nature-preserving literary emigrants to the nineteenth century...

...To make matters worse for Lukacs and the "third dimension," Mann's other great work, Joseph in Egypt, is set in the land of the frieze, and its protagonists are modelled on the serial figures of Egyptian wall painting...

...This admiration was not lessened by hearing from time to time that Lukacs was resisting Stalin's "socialist realism" and that during the Hungarian uprising he was at the age of seventy thrown into prison by the Russians...

...I remember Lukacs from the thirties as a Marxist literary critic who all agreed was a great, original thinker, though no one I knew had read more than one or two of his pieces...

...they hold the line of narrative and dramatic art through Shakespeare to Homer...

...In time, he hopes, this distortion will be straightened out and the familiar proportions be restored...

...but he accepts it only under the regulation of inherited modes of consciousness in which the class formations of yesterday, or their equivalents, subsist for as long as possible...

...The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, by Georg Lukacs...

...they do their act in antithetical pairs...

...A character acquires three dimensions through being set permanently in so * Lukacs Studies in European Realism (Grosset & Dunlap), also published recently in America, with an introduction by Alfred Kazin, comprises such authors as Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy...