Against Interpretation (12 page)

Exactly in the same spirit as Robbe-Grillet disavows the traditional empirical content of the novel (psychology, social observation), Lévi-Strauss applies the methods of “structural analysis” to traditional materials of empirical anthropology. Customs, rites, myths, and taboo are a language. As in language, where the sounds which make up words are, taken in themselves, meaningless, so the parts of a custom or a rite or a myth (according to Lévi-Strauss) are meaningless in themselves. When analyzing the Oedipus myth, he insists that the parts of the myth (the lost child, the old man at the crossroad, the marriage with the mother, the blinding, etc.) mean nothing. Only when put together in the total context do the parts have a meaning—the meaning that a logical model has. This degree of intellectual agnosticism is surely extraordinary. And one does not have to espouse a Freudian or a sociological interpretation of the elements of myth to contest it.

Any serious critique of Lévi-Strauss, however, must deal with the fact that, ultimately, his extreme formalism is a moral choice, and (more surprisingly) a vision of social perfection. Radically anti-historicist, he refuses to differentiate between “primitive” and “historical” societies. Primitives have a history; but it is unknown to us. And historical consciousness (which they do not have), he argues in the attack on Sartre, is not a privileged mode of consciousness. There are only what he revealingly calls “hot” and “cold” societies. The hot societies are the modern ones, driven by the demons of historical progress. The cold societies are the primitive ones, static, crystalline, harmonious. Utopia, for Lévi-Strauss, would be a great lowering of the historical temperature. In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Lévi-Strauss outlined a post-Marxist vision of freedom in which man would finally be freed from the obligation to progress, and from “the age-old curse which forced it to enslave men in order to make progress possible.” Then:

history would henceforth be quite alone, and society, placed outside and above history, would once again be able to assume that regular and quasi-crystalline structure which, the best-preserved primitive societies teach us, is not contradictory to humanity. It is in this admittedly Utopian view that social anthropology would find its highest justification, since the forms of life and thought which it studies would no longer be of mere historic and comparative interest. They would correspond to a permanent possibility of man, over which social anthropology would have a mission to stand watch, especially in man’s darkest hours.

The anthropologist is thus not only the mourner of the cold world of the primitives, but its custodian as well. Lamenting among the shadows, struggling to distinguish the archaic from the pseudoarchaic, he acts out a heroic, diligent, and complex modern pessimism.

[
1963
]

The literary criticism of Georg Lukács

T
HE
Hungarian philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukács is the senior figure living today within the borders of the Communist world who speaks a Marxism that it is possible for intelligent non-Marxists to take seriously.

I do not believe (as many do) that Lukács is the figure who speaks the most interesting or plausible form of Marxism today, much less that he is (as he has been called) “the greatest Marxist since Marx.” But there can be no doubt that he has a special eminence and claim to our attention. Not only is he the mentor of new intellectual stirrings in Eastern Europe and Russia; outside of Marxist circles as well, Lukács has counted for a long time. His early writings, for instance, are the source of many of the ideas of Karl Mannheim (on the sociology of art, culture, and knowledge), and through Mannheim upon all of modern sociology; he has also had a great influence on Sartre, and through him on French existentialism.

He was born Georg von Lukács, of a wealthy, recently ennobled Jewish banking family, in Hungary in 1885. From the start, his intellectual career was an extraordinary one. While still in his teens he wrote, gave public lectures, founded a theater, and launched a liberal journal. When he came to Germany to study at the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, he astonished his great teachers, Max Weber and Georg Simmel, by his brilliance. His main interest was literature, but he was interested in everything else as well. His doctoral dissertation, in 1907, was
The Metaphysics of Tragedy.
His first major work, in 1908, was
The Development of Modern Drama.
In 1910, he published a collection of literary and philosophical essays,
Soul and Form;
in 1916,
The Theory of the Novel.
Some time during the First World War he moved from neo-Kantianism, his earliest philosophical view, to the philosophy of Hegel, and thence to Marxism. He joined the Communist Party in 1918 (dropping the
von
before his name).

From here on, Lukács’ career is a stunning testament to the difficulties of a free intellectual committed to a view which has taken on more and more the character of a closed system, and, in addition, living in a society which listens to what intellectuals say and write with the utmost gravity. For, from the beginning, Lukács’ interpretation of Marxist theory was free-wheeling, speculative.

Shortly after joining the Party, Lukács, for the first of two times in his life, took part in a revolution. Returning to Hungary, he became Minister of Education in the brief Communist dictatorship of Béla Kun in 1919. After the Kun regime was overthrown, he escaped to Vienna, where he lived for the next ten years. His most important book of this period was a philosophical discussion of Marxist theory, the now almost legendary
History and Class Consciousness
(1923)—of all his works, perhaps the one most esteemed by non-Marxists, and for which he immediately came under strong and unremitting attack from within the Communist movement.

The controversy over this book marked the defeat of Lukács in his battle with Kun for leadership of the Hungarian Communist Party, a battle which was fought in those years of exile in Vienna. After being attacked throughout the Communist world by everyone from Lenin, Bukharin, and Zinoviev on down, he was expelled from the central committee of the Hungarian party, and deprived of the editorship of his magazine
Kommunismus.
But throughout this decade Lukács defended his books, standing firm and retracting nothing.

Then, in 1930, after a year in Berlin, he went to Moscow for a year to do research on the staff of the famous Marx-Engels Institute (whose brilliant director, N. Ryazanoff, was to disappear in the purges of the late thirties). What was happening, subjectively, to Lukács at this time is not known. The facts are that, after returning to Berlin in 1931, he went back to Moscow in 1933, when Hitler came to power; and the same year publicly repudiated in the most abject terms the
History and Class Consciousness
and all his previous writings as infected by “bourgeois idealism.”

Lukács lived on as a refugee in Moscow for twelve years; even after his recantation, and numerous attempts to bring his work more into line with Communist orthodoxy, he remained in disfavor. Nevertheless, unlike Ryazanoff, he survived the terrible purges. One of his finest books,
The Young Hegel,
dates from this period (it was written in 1938, but not published until a decade later), as well as a vile simplistic tract against modern philosophy,
The Destruction of Reason
(1945). The contrast between these two books is typical of the vast fluctuations of quality in Lukács’ later work.

In 1945, when the war was over and a Communist government assumed power in Hungary, Lukács returned permanently to his native country to teach at the University of Budapest. Among the books he wrote in the succeeding decade are
Goethe and His Time
(1947) and
Thomas Mann
(1949). Then, at the age of seventy-one, came a second and incredibly moving venture into revolutionary politics, when Lukács emerged as one of the leaders of the revolution of 1956, and was named a minister in Imre Nagy’s government. Deported to Rumania and put under house arrest after the suppression of the revolution, he was permitted to return to Budapest four months later to resume teaching and to continue publishing both at home and in Western Europe. Only Lukács’ age and his immense international prestige, one supposes, saved him from the fate of Imre Nagy. At any rate, among all the leaders of the revolution, he alone was never put on trial nor has he publicly recanted.

Immediately after the revolution he published
Realism in Our Time
(1956), and last year brought out the first part, consisting of two huge volumes, of his long-awaited
Aesthetics.
He continues to be attacked by cultural bureaucrats and older Communist critics, though much more in, say, East Germany than at home, under the increasingly liberal regime of Kadar. His early writings (which he still strenuously repudiates) are increasingly studied in England and Western Europe and Latin America—he is widely translated in French and Spanish—in the light of the new interest in the early writings of Marx; while for many of the new generation of intellectuals in Eastern Europe, it is the later work which is the touchstone for the cautious but inexorable overthrow of the ideas and practices of Stalinism.

Obviously, Lukács has a great talent for personal and political survival—that is, for being many things to many different men. He has, in effect, accomplished the difficult feat of being both marginal and central in a society which makes the position of the marginal intellectual almost intolerable. To do this, however, he has had to spend a great deal of his life in one or another form of exile. Of the external exile, I have already spoken. But there is also a kind of internal exile, evident in his choice of subjects to write about. The writers Lukács is most devoted to are Goethe, Balzac, Scott, Tolstoy. By virtue of his age, and the possession of a sensibility formed before the advent of the canon of Communist culture, Lukács has been able to protect himself by (intellectually) emigrating out of the present. The only modern writers who receive his unqualified approval are those who, essentially, continue the 19th century tradition of the novel—Mann, Galsworthy, Gorky, and Roger Martin du Gard.

But this commitment to 19th century literature and philosophy is not just an aesthetic choice (as, indeed, there can be no purely aesthetic choices in a Marxist—or a Christian, or a Platonic—view of art). The standard by which Lukács judges the present is a moral one, and it is notable that this standard is drawn from the past. The wholeness of the vision of the past is what Lukács means when he speaks of “realism.”

Another way Lukács has partly emigrated from the present is in his choice of the language in which to write. Only his first two books are in Hungarian. The rest—some thirty books and fifty essays—are in German; and to continue writing in German in the Hungary of today is decidedly a polemical act. By concentrating on 19th century literature and stubbornly retaining German as the language in which he writes, Lukács has continued to propose, as a Communist, European and humanist—as opposed to nationalist and doctrinaire—values; living as he does in a Communist and provincial country, he has remained a genuinely European intellectual figure. Needless to say, knowledge of him here is long overdue.

*   *   *

It is perhaps unfortunate, though, that the two works which hereby introduce Lukács to an American public are both works of literary criticism, and both of the “late” rather than “early” Lukács.
9
Studies in European Realism,
a collection of eight essays dealing mainly with Balzac, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Zola, and Gorky, was written in Russia during the late thirties, at the time of the purges, and bears the scars of that awful period in the form of several passages of a crude political nature; Lukács published it in 1948.
Realism in Our Time
is a shorter work, written in the fifties, less academic in style and more sprightly and rapid in argument; in the three essays, Lukács reviews the alternatives for literature today and rejects both “modernism” and “socialist realism” in favor of what he calls “critical realism”—essentially the tradition of the 19th century novel.

I say this choice of books may be unfortunate because, while here is a quite accessible Lukács, not hard to read, as he is in his philosophical writings, we are forced to react to him as a literary critic alone. What is Lukács’ intrinsic value and quality as a literary critic? Sir Herbert Read has praised him lavishly; Thomas Mann called him “the most important literary critic of today”; George Steiner regards him as “the only major German literary critic of our epoch” and claims that “among critics, only Sainte-Beuve and Edmund Wilson have matched the breadth of Lukács’ response” to literature; and Alfred Kazin clearly regards him as a very able, sound, and important guide to the great tradition of the 19th century novel. But do the present books support these claims? I think not. Indeed, I rather suspect that the current vogue for Lukács—promoted by such effusions as the essays of George Steiner and Alfred Kazin offered as prefaces to the present translations—is motivated more by cultural good will than by strictly literary criteria.

It is easy to sympathize with Lukács’ boosters. I, too, am inclined to give Lukács all the benefit of the doubt, if only in protest against the sterilities of the Cold War which have made it impossible to discuss Marxism seriously for the last decade or more. But we may be generous toward the “late” Lukács only at the price of not taking him altogether seriously, of subtly patronizing him by treating his moral fervor aesthetically, as style rather than idea. My own inclination is to take him at his word. Then, what about the fact that Lukács rejects Dostoevsky, Proust, Kafka, Beckett, almost all modern literature? It is scarcely adequate to remark, as Steiner does in his introduction, that “Lukács is a radical moralist … like [the] Victorian critics.… In this great Marxist, there is an old-style Puritan.”

This type of shallow, knowing comment, by which notorious radicalisms are domesticated, amounts to a surrender of judgment. It is cute or appealing to discover that Lukács—like Marx, like Freud—is morally conventional, even positively prudish, only if one has started with a cliché about an intellectual bogey-man. The point is: Lukács does treat literature as a branch of moral argument. Is the way he does it plausible, powerful? Does it allow for sensitive and discriminating and true literary judgments? I, for one, find Lukács’ writings of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s to be seriously marred, not by his Marxism but by the coarseness of his argument.