Tamás Seregi:

A System of the Arts and the Theory of the Novel

As if it all had been there from the very beginning, as a logos spermatikos, a germ
awaiting to spring and grow into an organic totality. As if all of Lukács’s convictions and
predilections had been already there from the early 1910s, waiting for a world to inhabit, an
existence and reality, i.e. an ontological concreteness, to acquire. Lukács’s great conversion to
Marxism at the end of the 1910s brought about a turn only in his political, and not in his
aesthetics views: the ideological revolution in Lukács’s intellectual carrier merely yielded to
what had been already prevalent in his thought. In his aesthetics, only his enemies continued
to multiply in time: impressionism, naturalism, avant-gardism, taylorism, expressionism,
documentarism, irrationalism, existentialism – almost every ism, including what he thought to
be inauthentic forms of realism. There is no totality without exclusion. Lukács did not openly
subscribe to this thesis, but demonstrated it in his thought by a paradox that he was so fond of:
the greater totality grows the more exclusion it entails. No matter if conversion aims at a
religious or a communist utopia, the Kingdom of Heaven and the Paradise on Earth have at
least one thing in common: both set up a closed world, an immanent totality which necessarily
excludes something, even if it is nothing more than the present, this very world here and now,
the world which this totality still and inevitably continues to mirror.
In 1910 Lukács gave a talk entitled ‘The Roads Have Diverged’ at the Galilei Circle in
Budapest. In this he praised a group of Hungarian painters who called themselves The Eights.
Lukács’s main statement was that impressionism had come to a decline due to the appearance
of a new kind of painting that was, once again, after almost a century, devoted to things
themselves. The argument, eventually published in the journal Nyugat and republished three
years later in Lukács’s Esztétikai kultúra [Aesthetic Culture], erects a huge metaphysical
structure in a few pages, a structure that contains almost every element one would encounter
in his philosophy in the following six decades. Firstly, he makes a distinction between
transience and permanence, and by identifying the former with instantaneity he deprives time
of the very capacity of change. The past and the future, along with the present, are turned into
thing-like, almost timeless entities. Lukács underlines this timeless notion of permanence also
by (implicitly) identifying it with the ontological quality of solidity. With this he deprives
solid objects of the capacity of temporal alteration, and, by the same token, deprives every
other ontological quality, and dynamics in general, of the capacity to obtain a form. The
ontology that arises this way is, as Bergson would say, that of motionless solid objects.

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Lukács also states that only solid things possess any depth; non-solid, i.e. changing, ‘things’
are, therefore, deprived of the qualities of mass, volume, and extension. All non-solid things
become mere surfaces and must, at least potentially, depend on something else: they need a
supportive, solid depth in order to exist, that is, to function as a surface. Adding an extension
to this ontology in logic, Lukács sets up a parallel dichotomy between necessity and
contingency, and – as one might expect – connects necessity to the past and its solidity, and
contingency to the presence and its non-solidity. Finally, he makes his ontology complete by
attributing order and harmony to solid things and disorder to non-solid ones. In sum, for the
young Lukács what exists in the real sense of the term is something permanent (timeless),
solid, deep, necessary, and well-ordered.
This ontology is supposed to be confirmed by an epistemology. Confirmed but not
justified. From this on Lukács could have followed the road leading to the rehabilitation of
solidity and thingness as opposed to the sensualism and psychologism of the late 19th century.
He could have come forward, as Michel Serres would sixty years later (or as the Speculative
Realists do nowadays), with the claim that in the last two centuries western philosophy had
overdone its epistemological attack against solidity and thingness, turning everything solid
and permanent into a pure appearance. He could have urged to re-examine the quality of
solidness and its way of being, that is, to reconsider Descartes’s wax argument. His train of
thought could have led to a genealogy of solidity and permanence in both ontological and
epistemological (or even in aesthetical) terms, with which the very notion of a thing could
have been reopened or rehabilitated (as it was for Serres: 1972). But Lukács chose a different
path: in terms of epistemology he identified the instantaneous (and the non-solid) with
subjectivity, and the permanent (and the solid) with objectivity. Therefore, what Lukács
attempted to do was not a genealogical examination of these terms, but the construction of
two separate regions of being: he divides the world into two realms and declares that the
subjective part is not real (or not real enough) and lacks any “inner” possibility of
(self)realization (objectivization) brought about, for instance, by a consciousness of time,
habitualization, or even reflection. In his view, the subjective only exists as a stream of
moods, feelings, and associations lacking permanence, stability, and consistency. Therefore,
subjectivity is formless, superficial, something on the surface, or a surface itself – never a
whole, though still self-enclosed.
It is worth taking a closer look at this step in the argument. for we have come to a
point where the notions of time and space are connected. Here Lukács could have turned to
the problem of what kind of ontological status could be attributed to subjectivity and

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objectivity respectively, or what possibly common ground they emerge from. He is obviously
aware of the problem: “But this independent Ego who made his own image of everything has
also melt away during this melting. The Ego emanated into the world, and he dissolved it
through his moods. But during this dissolution he got to be dissolved too, the world emanated
into him and there was no distinction between them anymore.” (Lukács 1977: 282 – my own
translation). Here Lukács faces one of the characteristic questions of the era, a problem that
encouraged philosophers like Henri Bergson, Ernst Mach, the young Husserl, and William
James to find a new starting point for philosophy from which they could genealogically derive
the concepts of subjectivity and objectivity (the Ego and the World) instead of merely
presupposing them. Where they saw a new philosophical possibility, however, Lukács
perceived only an ongoing philosophical crisis which he intended to solve by making further
bisections. He remained blind to the problem, inherently there in his own philosophy and
haunting him throughout his subsequent works, that if subjectivity is dissolved into a stream
of dispositions and associations then how could one tell what belongs to the subjective and
what to the objective realm. As he goes on arguing a few sentences later: “Everything became
a question of opinion; everything was but a view, nothing more than a personal stand. And
each personal stand got any significance only by its personal quality, and there was no
difference in significance between opinions at all.” (Lukács 1977: 283) Lukács’s point here
clearly differs from the one quoted above: here he is concerned with the difference between
private and public, not between subjective and objective. Should this be a cultural diagnosis
of the late 19th century, one could even agree with it. But he proposes it as a philosophical
statement which fails to answer where this “mine-ness”, this quality of something being mine
comes from, where to locate the vantage point from which we can tell the difference between
inside and outside, and from which the purely subjective might turn into truly private. These
questions, with which most of his contemporaries were preoccupied, Lukács do not even seem
to notice.
It might be somewhat unfair to criticize a twenty-five-year-old youngster with the
hindsight of a century of philosophical development that has passed since then. However, we
can witness here some of Lukács’s intellectual obsessions that he was never able, or willing,
to revise, regardless how often he came to quote those philosophers mentioned above. Some
of the limitations in his thinking that can be detected in this early writing would prevail all
along his intellectual carrier and determine his responses to a wide variety of trends and
movements in art and philosophy. In these early years, the most important object of Lukács’s
criticism in the visual arts is impressionism. He comes to identify the impressionist movement

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with radical subjectivism, or, more precisely, with his own interpretation of subjectivism. It
does not occur to him that if things do not possess depth then subjects cannot have depth
either by which they could make their subjective sensations private. If everything, as Lukács
puts it, is a mere surface, then pictures (and images) are also surfaces, no matter if they are
located on the objects (as in the case of decorative ornamentation) or on the retina of the
viewer. Images cannot be located within us, because, for impressionism, there is no inside.
The retina as a surface would not make the image private either, only subjective. The
subjectivity the retina provides is real but not objective: it is real inasmuch as the image
located on it might be the same in the case of every viewer, and, as such, interchangeable with
the artist’s original vision. In impressionism there is no room for the private, only for the
subjective. And if this is so then impressionism works exactly in the way that Lukács
demands art to work: “only what is common can be communicated”. In this sense
impressionism provides what is the most common in art – a commonality without perspective,
without distance.
The real problem, therefore, is not of the divide between subjectivism and objectivism,
but the question of individuation, i.e. the genesis of the individual. Lukács bypasses this issue
altogether, and makes a “leap” forward (the notion of “leap” would become a crucial concept
in his late philosophy) to the opposition between the internal/external experience and the thing
that “delimits to the outside and makes everything infinite in the inside” (Lukács 1977: 434).
For Lukács “inside” and “outside” imply a third dimension, not just a limit (contours, for
example) but a sense of depth. This is once again a metaphysical presumption, and in the
argument it draws in further metaphysical notions (solidity, limit, density, resistance,
closeness, equilibrium, permanence) which Lukács does not feel necessary to justify either.
Lukács is all the more metaphysical here as he equates thingness with form, and by denying
that individuality can be constituted by pure pictorial means, by pure forms alone, he excludes
every form of individuality from painting. Lukács is going to maintain this conviction even in
his late aesthetics, regardless all the artistic movements (neoplasticism, purism and the like)
that would in the meantime come to openly contradict it.
The first step that Lukács takes already in this early text is to present sculpture as a
fulfillment of painting, not in the outward direction (as in the case of the relief), but inwardly,
by constituting volume and space. What Lukács aspires to construct here is a general ontology
under the pretext of a philosophy of art. Each and every art form is evaluated strictly
according to its significance in the constitution of a world. In the case of painting this means
that Lukács abandons pictorial terms and sees only problems of genre – a conservative move

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once again, as genres had been traditionally interpreted according to the ontological hierarchy
of their respective subject matters. In his ‘Lecture on Painting,’ which is not dated but most
probably was written during the 1910s, Lukács’s starting point is already and explicitly a
theory of objects, or, to be more precise, its ontological equivalent, a theory of things. This is
the vantage point from which he can refuse Konrad Fiedler’s conception of “pure visibility”,
and make the claim that “the task of painting is the constitution of a world” (Lukács 1977:
812). In Lukács’s view this “world” is to be “constituted” from already-constituted elements,
i.e. things – that is why he ranks still life the lowest among all pictorial genres: it remains the
closest to the “pure painterly” (malerische) where mood emanates on the surface of things. (In
this theory there are no surfaces without things, that is, without depth.) While still life is stuck
in the prosaic region of the world, when its depth becomes visible on the surface a new genre
appears, the portrait, which occupies the region of the soul. Lukács obviously puts these two
genres in a dialectical relation: the latter is a denial of the former with a third element of a
triad soon appearing in the form of the landscape. However, the landscape is not the
fulfillment of painting in general, because its definition (“a thing in the reality”) already
signals that it lacks something: the presence of a human being. When a human being fills the
void, the ultimate and most complete genre (in Lukács’s term: a “great composition”) has
emerged.
In this process of (world)constitution one can detect two consecutive ontological
“leaps”. The first is the appearance of the soul in the form of depth; the second is the
appearance of the world. The logic of this dialectics follows an intricate though simple
pattern: something from “within” emanates to the “outside” in the form of a mood; then this
emanated “external” begins to deepen, becomes a mirror unto itself and in the form of the soul
becomes interior again, leaving behind the solidity of things on the surface (external interior);
finally, this internal becomes once again external in the ultimate interior, i.e. the world, in the
form of a spirit. This last step brings about the real synthesis: the soul spiritualizes as well as
it is spiritualized, i.e. becomes a spirit; the soul is a being-in-the-world as soul and a being-
world as spirit. Along this ontological process unfolds the evolution of the arts: painting
comes first, then sculpture, and finally a moving, perceiving, acting sculpture appears on a
scene, and, by a Pygmalion-effect, begins to talk – this is the birth of the art of language, the
birth of literature. This last move appears to be a very Hegelian one; however, the differences
between Hegel and Lukács are more important than what they have in common. On the one
hand, from Lukács’s system of arts a crucial Hegelian element is missing: architecture; on the
other, as compared to Hegel, Lukács changes the sequence of sculpture and painting in the

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evolution of art. These modifications reveal a very important feature in Lukács’s aesthetic
system: there is no art without image. For Lukács it is the image that makes art possible; no
wonder that architecture remains almost completely alien to his aesthetics (Lukács 1965b:
410-466). Lukács changes the sequence of sculpture and painting for the same reason: image
must come first – and not any kind but a distant image. Even when sculpture turns into an
image it is still too close to us to be a perfect image because it is in this world where we
beholders are and not able to constitute a world on his own. Sculpture can only appear as
internal painting – that is why there is no place for sculpture in Lukács’s late aesthetics, not
even on its margins. And for the same reason the most perfect painting for him can never be
an actual piece of art exhibited in a gallery: what he envisions is a pure (mental) image
without medium in the realm of pure visibility.
With defining the condition of possibility of art by the concept of image, further
problems become manifest that remained hidden as long as painting was conceived only as a
surface (and a mood). A process seems to unfold in which painting permeates sculpture, then
architecture, and finally nature itself as a terrestrial space. According to Lukács this process of
fulfillment is a process of concretization, that is, a process of establishing proportions, order
and unity. This is why space in this sense is terrestrial and not cosmic: in the latter case space
would be endless, it would start to flatten out and then become a surface again (a sphere with
infinite radius is a surface). A picture to emerge as a world needs a terrestrial horizon. But
where does this alleged order within this world come from?
In the 1910s the Hungarian painter Károly Kernstock was Lukács’s main reference in
art. Taking a look at Kernstock’s Lovasok a vízparton [Riders on the shore], painted in 1910,
one can ponder how it compares to the impressionists in terms of order and unity: it seems
definitely more proportioned, but less ordered and less unified. On the other hand, if one
scrutinizes it as a painting and not as an image, one might also realize that an impressionist
painting would achieve more unity and more order precisely by the way it handles the surface.
(No wonder that Clement Greenberg refers to impressionism as the first instance of all-over
painting.) But even if we stay on the ontological level Lukács proposes and look at paintings
as images depicting something, then the only difference we might see is the visible presence
or absence of a medium – the medium in and of the picture.
In pictures proportion and order gives structure. But there is another crucial aspect that
Lukács does not even mention: that of the frame. In this regard Kernstock’s Lovasok a
vízparton seems to be more unified than impressionist paintings usually are because he does
not bisect anything, neither the moves nor the glances of the figures portrayed (with one

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exception) are directed toward the external “world” of the picture; therefore the frame does
not appear to be contingent. Still, Kernstock’s painting remains to be a cut-out image, which
means that it is not able to constitute a picture, mostly because of the structure of its pictorial
space. Kernstock creates a distance between the surface of the painting and the closest
depicted plane of characters. By this distance the viewer is located somewhere out of the
scene; we need to look into it. A typical impressionist painting, by contrast, would fill the
space of the picture with the medium, consequently the image would come forward to the
surface, or even closer, to our retina. Unlike Kernstock who distances the viewer from the
image, an impressionist would pull her/him into its space. In the latter case we feel the picture
to be a detail approaching to its surface from inside out. Kernstock’s painting evades this
effect, but, in turn, it becomes more and more detailed as we move beyond the surface to the
more distant planes: the space is expanding but at the same time it increasingly becomes part
of a bigger whole. The complete and self-contained character that Lukács demands from
painting cannot be achieved in none of these ways. Here the pictorial space itself and the
notion of painting as a framed image become problematic.
One might have a better understanding of Lukács through the notion of “great
composition” that he considered the ultimate goal of painting. Although in his ‘Lecture on
Painting’ he fails to provide any examples for it, one might find a few in the history of
pictorial realism. The notion of “great composition” was an outcome of a problem that already
emerged in Courbet’s realism. As Lukács reminded his readers of it in his ‘Art and Objective
Truth’: “Lenin’s theory of revolutionary practice rests on his recognition of the fact that
reality is always richer and more varied than the best and most comprehensive theory that can
be developed to apprehend it.” (Lukács 1970: 29) The paradox of realism in art is that the
very fact must be acknowledged, in the Hegelian sense of the word, and surpassed at the same
time. And, what is more, artworks must achieve this without producing a real synthesis (as
Aufhebung), because art, even if it is “total”, always remains art and as such can form only a
part of an always greater whole, the world. The way the avant-garde movements of the 1910s
acknowledged this condition – that is, by acknowledging the work of art as a concrete object
and by turning art into a concrete action or production (see Benjamin 1998: 85-103) – was
unacceptable for Lukács. The option that remained for him was the “great composition” with
which Lukács attempted to attach art to reality as totality through an image. The “great
composition” had a wide tradition in realist painting from the Studio of Courbet (1855) to the
murals of Siqueiros, Rivera and Orozco. Nevertheless Lukács, unlike most theorists of social
realism, rejected this tradition and continued to prefer an ideal of which he could hardly ever

7
mention but one example. Still, this ideal of his might be defined as an expanded Kernstock
painting. There is a rather simple difference between the two: the tradition Lukács rejected
had something that Lukács called “homogeneous medium”, but he saw this medium
insufficient to construct a world out of the picture. The Studio of Courbet and the Mexican
murals lacked this world-constructing element. When they portrayed concrete individuals as
social types, they were not located in a world because they were not doing anything that
would connect them to a world and to each other (Courbet). When they portrayed concrete
activities, the characters that were carrying them out were not concrete individuals but mere
social types, not located in a concrete place (Siqueiros, Orozco, Rivera). These versions of the
“great composition” were allegorical; Lukács thought it should be analogical instead and
express the celestial harmony of the world and the human being: “The world is wide and yet it
is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the
world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become
permanent strangers to one another, for fire is the soul of all light and all fire clothes itself in
light.” (Lukács 1971: 28) In order to turn allegory into analogy two ingredients are needed:
concrete people and a concrete world. For Lukács, the realist tradition lacked both. In his
view, those paintings could never solve any problems of pictorial arts: they remain in the
region of pure visibility only by becoming soulless (flat); they can embrace all the contents of
the world only by becoming chaotic (allegorical); and they can relate to the external only by
becoming external themselves, by reaching out of the frame to the plane of the wall where
they hang, by expanding to the concrete space (infinite universes instead of closed worlds).
They possess the same homogeneous medium that Leó Popper discussed in his 1910 ‘Peter
Brueghel der Ältere’: a medium which “brings everything to the same plane” (Leó Popper
1993: 35). However, Lukács interprets (or misinterprets) Popper’s concept the other way
round: according to him, this medium is not the pure visible plane but the pure visible space.
With this Lukács could have effectually criticized those who (from Mondrian to Greenberg)
wanted to identify painting with pure flatness: he could have deemed this kind of painting a
tangible flat sculpture. But he chose, once again, a different path and suggested that the
perfect painting is more than a painting, it is something that is painting and sculpture and
nature at the same time, something that is enclosed without a pictorial frame and still moving
and living. Painting surely cannot meet these requirements – the question is if literature can.
Literature, or rather the novel, can surely solve one problem, that of the frame. In this
respect the novel has a clear advantage not only over visual arts, which are, due to their
media, always restricted by a frame, but even to theater. Unlike in Hegel’s, in Lukács’

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aesthetics the drama is not a synthesis of literary genres just as painting is not a synthesis of
the visual arts. The main reason for the structural interchange between the drama and the epic
is the necessity of frame in the theater. The frame is too concrete in the theatre and
paradoxically this concreteness prevents the drama from becoming a concrete totality that
determines all its components from within. The concrete presence of the drama, i.e. the spatial
scale of the scene and the temporal scale of the actions and events (even the corporeal scale of
the actors), hinders the drama in becoming more than a mere part of the world of the
audience. This is why the frame in the theater must necessarily cut off, close out and deepen
in even more than in painting. Drama, as a moving, living, talking entity, must distance itself
from life precisely because it is too close to it. It has to turn into an abstraction in order to
become something interior, has to focus on the abstractly essential by excluding the world.
“There is such a thing as great epic literature, but drama never requires the attribute of
greatness and must always resist it. The cosmos of the drama, full of its own substance,
rounded with substantiality, ignores the contrast of wholeness and segment, the opposition
between event and symptom. For the drama, to exist is to be a cosmos, to grasp the essence, to
possess its totality.” (Lukács 1971: 49) The cosmos, however, is not equal to the world; the
possession of its own totality does not coincide with possessing totality itself. The cosmos is
not the world but an existence condensed into its own essence; an existence that still can be
plural in the Leibnizian sense: what the characters in the drama share is not their lives, or life
in general, but merely the tragedy of their loneliness. In the drama the subject and the object
are not distinct yet, so there are only people and they are distinct precisely because there is no
mediation of a common world. For Lukács, the drama is the realm of individuality, even if
this individuality is inherently plural.
As for literature, it is not poetry but drama that gives birth to the individual, just as in
visual art it is sculpture and not painting that serves the same purpose (even if Lukács is rather
ambiguous on this point). The appearance of plurality is a logical necessity in this process:
when the homogeneous being (pure quality) projects out itself by self-denial, it gives birth to
quantity (the one and the many), first “in the determination of self-equivalence”, then, through
a positing, as a “limited quantity”, i.e. a quantum (Hegel 1991: §§ 100-102). This second
stage is represented by the individuals in the drama however the drama itself also represents it
by its frame. The drama itself is an individual too: it exists in the same eternal present as its
characters regardless of their actions and passions. A character in a drama does not have a real
story just as the drama does not have a real plot: all they have is a duty to guard their essences
or to look for it. As Lukács summarizes this in ‘Narrate or describe?’: “Goethe demands that

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epic poetry treat all events as past in contrast to the drama, which contemporizes all action.
Thus Goethe perceptively defines the stylistic distinction between drama and epic. A drama is
concentrated about a single conflict.” (Lukács 1970: 127)
For Lukács, therefore, the crucial problem with drama is that it is too abstract: it
individualizes and is stuck in the present, hence the need for abstraction. It is unable to
properly introduce language into art or stage a human being, a living, talking, acting
personality. Drama is capable of turning life into form at the highest level, but no matter how
easily a human being becomes the medium for this form, eventually this still remains a
version of reification if it is not reintroduced into life. And, according to Lukács, this act of
reintroduction can take place only in the inward direction. Thus, the drama as such is
problematic: however much it might be able to put the human being in the center, it has no
real world on its own, therefore it turns human life into a thing-like entity. What we see here
is that the theory of reification that Lukács elaborated in the 1920s permeated and determined
even the theory of genres he worked on in the 1930s, and made drama as such an emblematic
example of reification.
What remains clear, however, is that for Lukács the novel is an expansion of the
drama. As we see in the first two parts of his ‘Narrate or Describe?’, this conviction only grew
upon him during the 1930s, that is, in a period when the new currents in novelistic practice
attempted to focus on the story of those thing-like entities (geographical spaces or urban
scenes, a day, or an object) that are not able to act as human beings do. What many novelists
of the era (mainly in the movement of Neue Sachlichkeit and other forms of objectivity) were
preoccupied with and upheld as a renewal of the genre (Platzroman, Tagesroman,
Dingroman), for Lukács evidently counted only as further symptoms of the reification of the
human being in modern capitalism.1 Here, once again, he saw only his enemies multiplying.
A laconic sentence in ‘Narrate or describe?’ is especially telling in this respect. Lukács
insists on the interconnection of drama and novel by claiming that the readers of a novel
become the audience of a drama of human actions: “We are the audience to events in which
the characters take active part.” (Lukács 1970: 116. I replaced the original emphasis.) Lukács
underlines this correspondence when he goes on arguing that descriptions in a novel provide a
picture that the reader can observe as a painting, while when reading a narrative readers
become more audience-like. With this, the drama gets wedged in between the descriptive and

1
Mentioning only some exemples for each: place novel: John Dos Passos: Manhattan Transfer (1925), Alfred
Döblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929); day novel: James Joyce: Ulysses (1921), Lajos Nagy: Kiskunhalom
(1934); thing novel: Józsi Jenő Tersánszky: Az elveszett notesz (The Lost Notebook) (1932), Józsi Jenő
Tersánszky: Mesék a kerékpárról (Tales of a Bicycle) (1933).

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the narrative novel: description implies an internal cognitive medium that effaces every
ontological difference between genres and detaches the reader/audience from the world. For
Lukács, the descriptive novel is a picture with an internal medium, a tableau of the mind; the
drama is an immediate image for it has no medium, but is detached from us by physical
distance and the frame, i.e. a framed mental image in the world. Consequently, the narrative
novel also should be a pure image without a medium, without cognitive or physical distance,
and also without frame. That is, it should not be an image at all. How is this possible? It might
be in many ways, but the problem remains that there can be no theory of mimesis without a
picture theory even if the medium of the picture happens to be a living body.
Consequently, for Lukács the (narrative) novel is a story made up by actions and
events; it differs from the drama only insofar as it has wider temporal and spatial horizons,
still it functions in much the same way. Even the narrator is there only to keep the focus on
the present of the reading process by orienting and informing the reader. The ideal narrator is
a pure mediator, has no personality yet knows everything (in spatial and temporal terms as
well). Omnipresent in time and space, this ideal narrator guides, as a Vergil, the reader
through the story, provides security and comfort in the world of the novel. “Of course, the
reader doesn’t know the conclusion in advance. He possesses an abundance of details of
which he cannot always and immediately determine the importance. Certain expectations are
awakened which the later course of the narrative will confirm or refute. But the reader is
involved in a rich web of variegated motivations; the author in his omniscience knows the
special significance of each petty detail for the final solution and for the final revelation of
character since he introduces only details that contribute to his goals. The reader takes
confidence from the author’s omniscience and feels at home in the fictional world.” (Lukács
1970: 128-129) As a transcendental subject the omniscient narrator might go through an
ontologization by getting anchored in the world. This is exactly what Lukács does here: he
claims that the plot has to be located in the past and thus the narrator enters the world of the
novel only in the sense of existing after the events, however abstract this “after” may be.
Lukács does not demand anything more from the narrator, because in any further
concretization he probably would see a limitation of omniscience. He may be right on this
point, but still the problem remains whether omniscience has anything to do with one’s
temporal location. Omniscience per definitionem cannot have any temporal index unless we
assume that the only knowable things are that have already taken place – and this would be a
very vulgar epistemology even for Lukács. On the other hand, retrospective narration in itself
does not secure knowledge either. All that it suggests, falsely, is that by the ontologization of

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the plot we can solve every problem regarding the narrator’s ontological and epistemological
status.
By taking a closer look on Lukács’ essay, however, it becomes clear that what he is
concerned with here is not an elaboration of the narrator’s ontological status, but a problem of
genres: how can we deduce the novel from the drama? Or more concretely, how can we turn
the audience of a drama into readers of a novel? In the first two chapters of the ‘Narrate or
Describe?’ Lukács keeps on returning to the drama over and over again, he attributes dramatic
qualities to institutions, objects, locations (see p. 204), and considers the dramatic quality the
most important achievement in the modern novel. As he puts it: “the new, decisive element in
the composition of the novel” is “the dramatic element.” (ibid. 118) Since for Lukács
language is a transparent medium, there is no need to confront narratological questions or the
communicative situations typical of the novel. Consequently, he has no other device to
distinguish the novel from the drama than setting the plot of the former in the past. This is a
very high price to pay indeed, for thus every story that is either openly fictitious or located in
the future has to be deemed inauthentic. Here, and it needs to be stressed again, what Lukács
is concerned with is not an epistemological but an ontological question: “Life itself sorts out
the essential elements in the subjective as well as in the objective world. The epic poet who
narrates a single life or an assemblage of lives retrospectively makes the essential aspects
selected by life clear and understandable… The use of the past tense in the epic thus a basic
technique prescribed by reality for achieving artistic order and organization.” (ibid. 128)
These remarks not only suggest that stories have to be (organic) wholes to be tellable at all,
and that the narrator needs to adopt an external perspective to be able to narrate. What Lukács
really wants to insist on here is that the plot of a novel simply revitalizes the pure essence it
receives from the drama, that the drama converts itself to a story. A story that had always
been there in the past awaiting someone to tell it.
Compared to the formless life of experience-reality (a concept Lukács elaborated in
his early aesthetics), life appears here on a higher level. This higher level is reached by the
story synthesizing external superficiality and internal essentiality. Strictly speaking, the drama
has no story because it is not told; or, when it is, it is not a drama anymore. The story is a
conservation of the drama in a peculiar way: it does not fossilize the drama but, on quite the
contrary, fills it with life. For it is only life that is able to remove from the drama its frame
which gave it its form and individuality in the first place but enclosed it in the present at the
same time. Only by conservation can drama fulfill itself as reality, but only as a past reality.
Here time is a surrogate of the frame we encountered before. And even the future is closer to

12
this past than the present, for even future might show more unity and necessity than the
present conceived as transience. What is more, the reality of this past does not stem only from
its distance. Lukács must, if only implicitly, face the question, already an essential element of
Hegel’s logic, whether reality is not merely a problem of mediation (of the whole and the part,
or the internal and the external), but that of modality. If, as Hegel claims, reality must be
rational or at least necessary (Hegel 1991: §§ 142-149), then only an ontology of modalities
can possibly underpin a theory of reality. The question of modality remains to be a crucial
problem for the theories of realism in the following decades, regardless of taking the whole
(as Sartre did) or the part (as Barthes did) as reality. Barthes and Sartre both assume that
reality is something contingent, even if the former locates it in the insignificant detail, while
the latter finds it in the transcendental illusion (to use Husserl’s phrase) of the world as a
whole, which includes human existence as an even more radical contingency. Lukács, as he
usually does, shortcuts the problem: the ontological modality of reality is necessity. That is
why he assumes that the present, as a sensation, that is, as an event, can never become reality.
This lies behind his argument against description (see Lukács 1970: 112).
In aesthetics the equivalent of reality as necessity is the concept of the organic. For
Lukács the organic is not an ontological concept. Although he is very obscure on this point,
his notion of the organic does not seem to coincide with any ontological concept of the
organic. Lukács disapproves of what he sees as inorganic, or, in the 1930s, as a reification of
the world, in Zola. As far as Zola’s ontology is concerned, Lukács’s accusations are simply
false: if for anyone, for Zola ontology is deeply organic. For Lukács, Zola’s organicism was a
mere play of metaphors, and in Zola’s narrative devices he merely saw the micro- or
macroscopic vision of scientific observation reifying the world, but failed to recognize the
gaze of the physician who is not dissecting a dead corpse but observing the living body of
society, searching for symptoms coming to the surface to make “a healing intervention” (see
Fried 1987).2 On the other hand, Lukács himself had an ontology that was less organic that he
probably wished for: one might call it a humanistic organicism. The organic and the living
were basic categories for Lukács in his early aesthetics, but first he subordinated them to the
concept of form, then, eventually, after his Marxist turn, to the notion of the human. And in
this notion there was no place for naturalness or animality, or, for that matter, anything
somatic: the only way of relating to nature is through labor, and nature means only its

2
On the aesthetic ideology of the organic see George Kubler (1962): The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History
of Things. New Haven: Yale University Press and Peter Bürger (1974): Theorie der Avantgarde. Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp.

13
cultivated form, garden. (As Lukács still insists in his late aesthetics: nature has a history only
to the extent it is related to labor.) For Lukács, the human being becomes the sole focus: as he
quotes Marx in the motto of ‘Narrate or Describe?’: “The root of humanity, however, is man
himself” (Lukács 1970: 110).
This reduction to a reduced notion of the humane denies Lukács the possibility to
acknowledge one of the most important merits in Zola’s descriptive method: that it moves
between perspectives of different scales, and, as such, enters different ontological realms.
Lukács sees Zola as someone who turned everything into a surface, thereby looks at
everything from the same distance and with the same aloofness. The latter might hold in some
respect, but the former is definitely not true. Compared to narration, description (in the
Lukácsian sense) has the advantage of zooming in and out an object, or the world as a whole,
thereby opening up a wide range of ontological spheres from a variety of perspectives of
various scales. Through this, the vantage point of description is not simply within or without,
below or above, near or remote to the object, but, as Merleau-Ponty would say, is in the
world, everywhere around us.
The first chapter of Zola’s The Belly of Paris perfectly demonstrates this. Florent, the
protagonist, enters the city through a barrier in a vegetable cart, and when after a short sleep
wakes up inside the city, he gazes upwards to the tall buildings as if being swallowed by the
stomach of a huge living organism. A counterpoint to this perspective can be found in the
opening scene of Zola’s late Paris, which, reminding one of the popular pictorial genre of the
era, opens a wide vista unto the city: „That morning, one towards the end of January, Abbe
Pierre Froment, who had a mass to say at the Sacred Heart at Montmartre, was on the height,
in front of the basilica, already at eight o’clock. And before going in he gazed for a moment
upon the immensity of Paris spread out below him.” (Zola 1893: 5) For Zola, description’s
capacity of shifting scales of perspective has an ontological as well as an epistemological
consequence; Lukács, however, due to his humanism, fails to recognize the significance of the
ontological metamorphoses by which Zola turns the grand market of Paris into a stomach, the
city itself into a sea, or, on an even higher level, into the head of an even greater organism,
France. In The Beast Within Zola describes the web of French railways as follows: „It was
like a huge body, a gigantic being stretched across the earth, the head at Paris, the vertebrae
all along the line, the limbs expanding with the embranchments, the feet and hands at Le
Havre and at the other termini.” (Zola 1890: Ch. II). In this novel, on the other hand, Zola
used perspective not to move away from the human body, but, on the contrary, to enter it, and

14
focus on its internal realm, the desires and instincts within people. The English translation of
the title expresses this intention even more clearly than the French original (La bête humaine).
There is a further epistemological problem that Lukács fails to recognize. For him,
while description reifies, narration arranges and through the proportions thus constituted it
(re)vitalizes the world. However, as the quotations above have shown, Zola also looks for life
which is not merely human but organic. Because not only the soul but the corporeal can be
organic too, and the corporeal is not merely an object but also living flesh, a substance or
medium that can be penetrated. Description for Zola is not a way of reification, but a search
for the optimal distance, in the course of which search sometimes we must wait till our vision
clears up: the first scene of Paris depicts the city as a “mystery, shrouded by clouds, buried as
it were beneath the ashes of some disaster”, but then the fog lifts and the vista begins to clear
up. A similar process of clearing up runs its course in the first pages of Nana, this time
affecting our senses. Here, theater becomes a social or human equivalent of the “chaos of
stone” typical of Paris and the overwhelming abundance of goods and products at the Market
Hall. In the (epistemological) oscillation of perspectives and the (ontological) self-refining
clearing of vision, typical of Zola, Lukács sees only homogenization and reification. He fails
again to confront his conception of investing a world into the drama with the epistemological
and ontological problems of nature (matter, medium, body) and intersubjectivity (from the
individual to the crowd).
The world must be anthropomorphized – this is the imperative Lukács’s aesthetic
ideology wants to follow, hoping that Marxism would provide the necessary means. As far as
nature is concerned the means are given by labor. Already in the last pages of The Theory of
the Novel nature appears to promise the way of returning the novel to the totality of the epic.
As Lukács claims, Tolstoy has elaborated “a great and truly epic mentality, which has little to
do with the novel form, aspires to a life based on a community of feeling among simple
human beings closely bound to nature, a life which is intimately adapted to the great rhythm
of nature, which moves according to nature’s cycle of birth and death and excludes all
structures which are not natural, which are petty and disruptive, causing disintegration and
stagnation.” (Lukács 1971: 145-146). Nevertheless, for Lukács even Tolstoy failed to reach
this level of perfection – it is quite understandable that for an objective idealist philosopher
such as Lukács perfection never can be reached. Even if his late ontology appropriates the
concept of teleology as a moment of the concept of labour (Lukács 1980), perfection for
Lukács serves as a teleological ideal, the ideality of which however he needs to deny. Lukács
conceived the work of art as a product which on a higher level still proves to be natural. In the

15
field of aesthetics, the above mentioned ontological modality of necessity is the paradoxical
expression of this denial, and the “past-ness” of the art is the ontological means by which to
conceal this very ideality. The ultimate goal for Lukács is to unite nature and culture by labor
– this is what Tolstoy hopelessly tried to achieve. As Lukács puts it, the difference between
epopeia proper and the novelistic practice of Tolstoy lies in that “the natural organic world of
the old epics was, after all, a culture whose organic character was its specific quality, whereas
the nature which Tolstoy posits as the ideal and which he has experienced as existent is, in its
innermost essence, meant to be nature (and is, therefore, opposed, as such, to culture).”
(Lukács 1971: 146)
In this light, the notion of labor is supposed to resolve the dichotomy. Lukács had been
preoccupied with the concept of labor since the 1920s, but he did not achieve much even in
his late ontology (see Lukács 1980). And he achieved even less in the field of aesthetics. In
the first volume of his late aesthetics he once again severely criticizes Konrad Fiedler, and, by
referring to Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, stresses that even our
most basic senses have developed in connection with labor – apart from this hypothetical
statement he fails to give a real analysis of this development, even in the aesthetic sense
(Lukács 1987: I/208-213). When stigmatizing Fiedler as an idealist, Lukács does not even
seem to know about Fiedler’s argument according to which the crucial problem with realism
(both in the objective and the subjective sense) is that it takes reality itself granted. Fiedler,
instead, sees reality as a result of the elaboration that the primarily given goes through in our
sensual and cognitive apparatuses. This elaboration is what Fiedler calls poiesis, even if he
does not restrict it to aesthetic theory.3 If Lukács had really wanted to ground his aesthetics on
the notion of labor (and make labor not only a medium between nature and the human being,
but also between nature and the artist, and the artist and the audience as well), then he should
have relied on, or at least recognized, those theories from the Russian Constructivists through
the aesthetics of the Bauhaus to Walter Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer” (Benjamin:
1998), which made, contemporaneously with Lukács, more successful attempts to rearrange
the relations of production and labor in art. From their work Lukács would have approved as
much as that analysis is indeed necessary to correctly and comprehensively mirror the world,
but he would have objected that “the labour of the realist is very arduous, since it has both an
artistic and an intellectual dimension. Firstly, he has to discover these relationships
intellectually and give them artistic shape. Secondly, although in practice the two processes

3
See Fiedler’s „Moderner Naturalismus und künstlerische Wahrheit” in his Schriften zur Kunst Vol. I. pp. 133-
183.

16
are indivisible, he must artistically conceal the relationships he just discovered through the
process of abstraction – i.e. he has to transcend the abstraction. This twofold labour creates a
new immediacy, one that is artistically mediated; in it, even though the surface of life is
sufficiently transparent to allow the underlying essence to shine through (something which is
not true of immediate experience in real life), it nevertheless manifests itself as immediacy, as
life as it actually appears.” (Lukács 2001: 1042)
Be it as it may, this concealment is nothing else than a restoration of the illusion that
art is a part of nature, an illusion of totality which implies that art is denied of any truly
creative and productive capacity. While mediation between the depth and the surface and
between the past and the present can never be perfect and, in addition, such an image
engenders which seems too necessary to be formed and too distant to be given as “an
exigence and a gift” (Sartre 1988: 67). In the Lukácsian aesthetics art proves to be an ideology
and, simultaneously, a critique of that very ideology. It turns into an “abstract intellectual”
labour (Lukács 1987: I/209) which is inaccessible for both poiesis and praxis.

17
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