Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

Dämon and Tyche as “the non-compatibility of empirical life and the sensory 

immanence of meaning” (das Nicht-eingehen-Wollen der Sinnesimmanenz in 

das empirische Leben, TdR 61).

The immediate unity of life and meaning may look like a sentimental ideal, 

but the current unrealizability of this ideal means that Lukács (unlike Gun-

dolf) does not seek a contemporary epitome (such as Goethe) to show the 

achievability of “heroic” existence. One might want to say that Dostoyevsky 

fulfills this function, with the difference that his epics—perhaps no longer 

novels—anticipate a future life ideal.

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 Lukács saw Dostoyevsky as a figure 

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Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 

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pointing toward the dawn of a new epoch, but there is no unified perspec-

tive available at present through which the meaning of life can be universally 

mediated without lapsing into a subjectivity that would contradict the univer-

sality intended. To get around this problem, Lukács introduces irony in order 

to theorize the novel as a perspectival matrix, a system of foils that prevents 

access to final or authoritative meaning. The alternatives represented in the 

world of the novel are suspended by the limitations of a narrator who recog-

nizes divisions without being able to overcome them. This limited acceptance 

reflects and partially stabilizes the rift at the base of the modern experience 

represented through the novel’s hero.

Given various splits, but especially the one between individual and 

world—Dämon and Tyche, “soul” and “forms”—irony allows the novel’s 

given world to be structured into two perspectives that mark the extremes of 

interiority and exteriority. These perspectives are typically represented by a 

protagonist and a narrator:

[Irony] means . . . an internal splitting [eine innere Spaltung] of the 

normatively poetic subject [des normativ dichterischen Subjekts] into 

[1] a subjectivity as interiority, which stands in opposition to alien 

power complexes [die fremde Machtkomplexen gegenübersteht] and 

strives to imprint this alien world with the contents of its longings 

[die Inhalte ihrer Sehnsucht] and [2] a subjectivity that is able to 

see through the abstractness [Abstraktheit] and thus through the 

limitations [Beschränktheit] of the opposing and mutually alien sub-

ject- and object-worlds [Subjekts- und Objektswelten]; this perception 

[Durchschauen] indeed leaves the duality of the world untouched 

[die Zweiheit der Welt bestehen läßt], but at the same time, in the 

reciprocal conditionality [die wechselseitige Bedingtheit] of the two 

elements that are mutually and essentially alien to one another, it 

catches sight of and shapes [erblickt und gestaltet] a unified world 

[eine einheitliche Welt]. This unity is however purely formal [rein for-

mal]. (TdR 64)

The novel is the genre of the negative—ironic and counter-exemplary—depic-

tion of the unity of fate and character. With irony, the universal lack of unity 

can become the basis of a speculative unification. In order to tell the story, the 

narrator must be able “to recognize as necessary” (TdR 64)—and perhaps 

even to accept, from a standpoint of “resignation” (TdR 61)—the unfathom-

able split within the world. Importantly, this realization “of limits” (TdR 64) 

on the part of the narrator—of the limitations of any unifying perspective—is 

only possible on the basis of the paradoxical and partial knowledge called 

irony and not, for example, by a more stable figure, such as “renunciation” 

(Entsagung), which would seek to unify this perspective into an ethical norm 

and universal possibility of conflict resolution. Novelistic irony, though it 

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Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

walks the fine line between ambivalent resignation and ambiguous moral-

ization, allows problematic subjects to be depicted without moralizing or 

generalizing.

The split between subject and narrator also reflects a temporal split 

between the time of experience and its later narration. In Poetry and Truth, 

in the context of the demonic, Goethe ironically characterizes this idea of 

irony: “That’s what makes it youth and life in general: we generally first learn 

to perceive the strategy after the campaign is over” (HA 10:183). Goethe 

takes irony ironically where Lukács takes it seriously (in that he implies that 

the problem that necessitates it is solvable). Thus the novel does not affirm 

the solution—the Notlösung—of irony, but employs it as a “merely formal” 

device to keep the real problem in focus: that the world is not a utopia but an 

“ever-lost paradise” (ein ewig verlorenes Paradies, TdR 74).

Significantly, irony is less central in part 2 of The Theory of the Novel, 

which focuses on the problems of protagonists. Lukács, it seems, is unable 

to reintroduce irony in its proper place, the narrator-protagonist differential, 

which resurfaces in part 2’s discussions of memory (TdR 110–14). The con-

text makes it clear, however, that hero and narrator are not fixed positions: 

the process of aging—of achieving “mature masculinity” (gereifte Männlich-

keit, TdR 74–75)—turns demonic heroes into ironic novelists.