Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

zu verwandlen, TdR 44).

Limit-cases define the novel in Lukács’s theory. If a novel rivals Homer’s 

achievement in its synthesis of reality into an aesthetic whole, or if it tran-

scends the novel in the direction of another genre, it may be at once the most 

aesthetically satisfying and the most Luciferian. The most ideal syntheses do 

not ring true, because as long as it is a novel, formal autonomy has the poten-

tial to conflict with the external reality whose meaning the epic is obliged to 

supply. Irony thus functions as a corrective when it reveals the novel’s ide-

alizations to be relative or counterfactual. According to Lukács’s summary 

at the end of the fourth section of the first part, the meaning of a novel can 

never be totally internal and aesthetically autonomous, because this meaning 

ultimately refers to “a specific problematic of the world” (eine bestimmte 

Problematik der Welt, TdR 72). Lukács thus characterizes Dante’s immanent 

depiction of transcendence as follows:

However, only in a transcendent beyond [nur im Jenseits] is the mean-

ing of this world [der Sinn dieser Welt] able to become concretely 

visible and immanent [abstandlos sichtbar und immanent]. In the 

world itself [in dieser Welt], the totality is one that is either unstable 

[eine brüchige] or merely yearned for [eine ernsehnte] . . . (TdR 51)

Dante is able to harmonize the reality of this world and its meaning only by 

recourse to transcendence. A meaningful totality is possible only by com-

pletely separating the world from its meaning, by positing an alternate world 

as the meaning and fulfillment of this world. In novels, however, aesthetic 

harmoniousness becomes dissonant with respect to the randomness and 

incomprehensibility of the world.

With the help of Virgil, who gave him a guided tour, Dante was able to 

postulate a transcendent totality. The novel’s narrator and protagonist, on the 

other hand, must search for it in the ruins of a world that cannot be imma-

nently “harmonized” without giving lie to the novel’s meaning. By defining 

the novel as a process in which meaning is sought, the lack and absence of 

given meanings (and thus a certain state of the world) is presupposed (TdR 

51). Even when seeking reaches an end, when a given plotline reaches its 

fulfillment or the seeking subject finds its object, it takes the form of a tem-

porary insight into “the meaning of life” (der Sinn des Lebens, TdR 70, 134) 

which can only occur against the backdrop of a world in which fulfillment 

is not the norm (TdR 53) and in which the “finding” is often a source of 

disillusionment. The hero’s accomplished insight into the searching-process 

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Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 

149

of his own development can only have the character of an exception, which 

precisely does not stand for the general experience of everyone, but rather 

displays what the world and life normally are not. Most do not seek, and 

most seekers do not find. Exceptional moments of the immanent unification 

of world and meaning—Makarie moments—allow the merely formal closure 

of the novel’s world by way of an exception that proves the rule. Thanks to 

such moments of subjective illumination, the hero’s experiences can be expe-

rienced vicariously, as exceptions to the norm that occur despite the novel’s 

faithful reflection of the fragmentariness and meaninglessness of the world. 

The exemplarity of the novel’s resolutions is counter-exemplary (TdR 53) 

and at odds with “the world as it is” (das Leben, so wie es ist, TdR 27) and 

thus also—anticipating the next step of Lukács’s argument—ironic.

In the transition to the idea of irony, Lukács discreetly alludes to the