Happy days. Lukàcs's “Theory of Novel”1

“Happy are those ages” – no, we are not reading an old hippy's song about lost paradises. This is not a scene of smiling Lotus-eaters. It's just a wrong translation of an expression that we may find in a text called “Theory of Novel”: “selig”, blessed. It doesn't mean people then were happier than we are. But they were blessed. And we are not.

“Selig sind die Zeiten”, Lukàcs wrote, “Blessed are the ages”, and we might remember: “Blessed are”, beati sunt, Jesus. And also the Italian translator, choosing a more elegant “Beati i tempi...”, proves he didn't understand. Because in German it would have been possible to eliminate the verb “sind”. The first words recall Jesus Christ's Mount Sermon because the author of this “Theory of the Novel” wanted it to do so. He is presenting himself as a preacher.

The “blessed ages”, Lukàcs is telling us, are gone. But why does he consider them “blessed”? For them, “the starry sky is the map of all possible paths”, we read in the English translation. Interesting? Just an assertion of an ancient way of thinking: somewhere in the sky, men thought, our destinies are written. This may have been reassuring, but why should we cry about the loss of this idea that good or bad, everything is written? In German, the author's explanation sounds different: he talks about ages “für die der Sternenhimmel die Landkarte der gangbaren und zu gehenden Wege ist”. This is not only an assertion, it's beautiful. “Sternenhimmel” ends in “Himmel” (with a front vowel and a bilabial consonant), which for Germans is both the sky full of stars and heaven (maybe “starlit sky” would have been somewhat nearer to the original). “zu gehende und gangbare Wege” is presenting a minimal paradigmatic variation of the verb “gehen” (to walk), something typical for modern poetry, and means “paths to walk on and walkable”: “ways that we have to walk and can walk on”. These paths are “illuminated by the light of the stars”, the translator writes, but originally the paths are “erhellt” by the light of the stars: Lukàcs is not talking about street illumination by gas or by electricity, he does not use “beleuchten”, but something like “lightened”. The man writing is a poet.

Both a preacher and a poet, Lukàcs is writing a book with the title “Theory of Novel”. Mixing science and art, he inserts himself in the Romantic tradition, writing what in German we call an “Essay” (not to be confused with the anglosaxon one). This is a writing tradition born in Germany with early Romanticism, when passing limits between genres and knowledge fields was programmatic.² Probably as a reaction against the heavy academic style of German professors at the time, the essay was very popular around 1900 amongst intellectuals in the German speaking world. It's so common that Robert Musil defines a whole way of living as essayism, as a life without ultimate ideological and material safeties. Musil defines: the essay as “the unique and unalterable form assumed by a man’s inner life in a decisive thought”. That is, the essay is expression of something considered “inner life”, and it's linked to thought. What does this mean?

Adorno, in writing an essay about the essay, and adopting views that had been elaborated earlier by young Lukàcs, tries to explain. An essay, Adorno notes, takes its leave on a cultural object (e. g. not jungle trees, but rather poems on trees), it does not start with principles and definitions and does not proceed systematically. It uses words from common language. It has to be both beautiful and true, hence it rejects the division of art and science.

Inner expression and thought, an essay cannot be simply true or false. It has to be profound, profoundly true (similar to what washing powders do nowadays, as Roland Barthes pointed out), and there is no way of discussion about profoundness. “Der Essay ist unerwiderbar” (“an Essay is not answerable”) , a famous essayist wrote, and that means it doesn't give way to rational discussions. It wouldn't make any sense writing about “The Theory of Novel”: “Lukàcs is wrong. The stars lightened also paths people could not take.”

In giving the title “Theory” to this book, Lukàcs is cheating. This is not a theory, it's something else, a long essay, as personal and as true as any literary text may be. In the English translation, you wouldn't have guessed.

1In English: Georg Lukàcs: Theory of the Novel (transl. Anna Bostock) London (The Merlin Press) 1971, repr. 1988. Online: https://analepsis.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/georg-lukacs-the-theory-of-the-novel.pdf (15/4/2015).

2Some say it's a genuine Hungarian tradition. See: Reinhard Laube: Karl Mannheim und die Krise des Historismus : Historismus als wissenssoziologischer Perspektivismus, Gòttingen (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) 2004.