Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

with irony, thereby causing reality’s triumph over “the youthful faith of all 

poetry” to appear ambiguous. The meaning of his defeat remains uncertain, 

especially with regard to its justice. The hero may end up in the wrong on 

the world’s terms, but the world is not thereby vindicated. In Lukács’s hero-

centric conception, the narrator’s staged reflection of “world” and “soul” 

leads to the insight that, regardless of the inevitability of the soul’s submis-

sion to the world’s ironclad necessity (Ananke), the latter is illegitimate as 

long as Tyche defines its essence. The protagonist may fail, but the soul can-

not be made to forsake itself, its Dämon or nature: soul remains soul, and 

world remains—mere fortuna.

To illustrate this, Lukács recalls the mythic heroes of antiquity (die Helden 

der Jugend, TdR 75)—and of modern operas—who eternally incarnate the 

“naive faith of all poetry” in the unity of fate and character. Even heroes like 

This content downloaded from 

176.88.30.219 on Fri, 22 Jan 2021 23:33:11 UTC 

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

---

154

 

Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

Ariadne, “crying on solitary isles,” or like Orpheus or Dante, “who plum-

met to the very gates of hell,” are always “led” (geführt) by a god who gives 

their path “the atmosphere of security” (TdR 75). This vision of heroic youth 

predictably introduces a contrast between the ancient unity of life and its 

modern dissolution. Out of this familiar setup, Lukács attempts a freehand 

reading of the demonic. Unlike Goethe, for whom the demonic is always only 

a placeholder for the various possible combinations of life’s basic determi-

nants, Lukács interprets it as the modern lack of a coherent and universal 

system of meaning, causation, and determination. In Goethe, all conceptions 

of the demonic in all eras are relatively unsuccessful attempts to give reason 

and coherence to underlying uncertainty. But for Lukács, the term declares 

the bankruptcy of the modern world when it comes to providing coherent 

paths that would offer even the “atmosphere” of security.

One might attribute the difference between Goethe’s conception and 

Lukács’s either to the increasing uncertainty of the modern world, or, on the 

other hand, to an increased expectation that the world is meant to be a safe 

place. Lukács addresses this question of modernity’s theological or meta-

physical deficits: “The gods that have been driven out [vertrieben], or which 

have not yet come into power, become demons” (TdR 75). Lukács’s image of 

modernity is that of an interim, the long interim that followed the dissolution 

of the ancient world. Though literally ancient history, this collapse remains 

utterly contemporary for Lukács. The holdover in modernity of all poetry’s 

misguided “youthful” faith in the formative power of character produces the 

hero’s “Luciferian defiance” (luziferischer Trotz, TdR 80). Heroes may have 

always been defiant, at least potentially, but what makes them modern and 

Luciferian is the complete deregulation of this defiance in a “godless world” 

(TdR 81). The young hero, even in modernity, wants to be a real hero, a hero 

for all time, who can live up to the standards of antiquity. No longer “led” 

by divinity, he is possessed of a “demonic” psychology (TdR 79)—closed and 

self-sufficient “like a work of art or a divinity” (TdR 86). This modern situ-

ation makes him even more heroic and precisely demonic because, without 

divine guidance, he must stage and execute the entire performance himself. 

What this hero lacks, however, in his emulation of the heroic feats of antiq-

uity, is the narrator’s knowledge, gained through hard experience, that the 

heroic model is no longer current—no longer possible. The narrator knows 

that modern heroes are not led by gods, but must search for them—only to be 

abandoned. Antiquity’s Luciferian role in the modern world causes modern 

heroes to fail. The modern world is seduced into believing in unified forms 

that no longer apply. The Orphic “Urworte” may have once defined a coher-

ent system, but for us their relation has dissolved into a complete non-relation.

The demonic in Lukács’s theory of the novel thus breaks into two variants: 

(1) on the side of the hero, there is the “Luciferian” aspect, which stands for 

the pressure that ancient ideals exert in the modern age. The Greek inheri-

tance becomes virulent whenever it is approached with the expectation of its 

This content downloaded from 

176.88.30.219 on Fri, 22 Jan 2021 23:33:11 UTC 

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

---

Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 

155

modern realizability. Further complicating matters is the fact that precisely 

this expectation seems to be not only that of artists or heroes in novels, but of 

numerous political programs. (2) The second aspect is the “demonic” irony 

located on the side of the narrator. Demonic insight into the demonic means 

recognizing that there is no divine plan. This perspective knows the truth 

about the “Luciferian” status of inherited ideals and knows the hopelessness 

of all attempts to realize them in the current state of the world. The sum of 

these two aspects is that in modernity—and in the novel—the demonic irony 

of the narrator’s perspective trumps and relativizes the hero’s “Luciferian” 

defiance. The latter has only the status of a misunderstanding, a misplaced 

classicism. The demonic quality of the modern world is displayed in the novel 

as the incoherence of an existential coordinate system that would be both 

subjectively meaningful and objectively valid. The “demonic” atheism of a 

world without gods ultimately impacts not only the modern applicability 

of ancient Urworte, but every conceivable system of relation and coherence, 

whether it be fate and character, individual and society, means and ends, 

history and progress, law and order, lifeworld and system, and so on. In the 

completely ironic novel, every thinkable basis of narration would be retracted 

and crossed out. A “demonic” or “godless” world is one of the instability 

of every attributed meaning. Attributed meaning is the only meaning: sig-

nificance can be generated relatively and subjectively—ironically—but never 

presupposed as immediately given or collectively or intersubjectively reliable.

The theological master-narrative that emerges from Lukács’s reading of 

the demonic is that of the failure of Christian monotheism

31

 to replace the 

gods that it displaced. The resulting power vacuum produced a world of 

fragmented powers with limited jurisdictions. A Gnostic situation domi-

nates: “the being of the new God is borne [getragen] by the passing away 

[Vergehen] of the old one” (TdR 76). At the very end of the section, Lukács 

introduces this “Gnostic” theologeme even more dramatically as the culmi-

nation of a series of metaphysical poles that narrative irony, “itself demonic,” 

encapsulates in the “metasubjective Dämon” of the hero. Irony, unable to 

find a world proper to itself even after it has finished tracing the path of the 

martyrdom of the protagonist’s subjective interiority, encompasses (1) the 

narrator function as “the Schadenfreude of the creator-God at the failure of 

all weak insurrections [das Scheitern aller schwachen Aufstände] to overturn 

His powerful yet insignificant, botched creation [sein mächtiges und nichtiges