Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

thetics, but it does so with respect to familiar dualisms. The interjection of 

the demonic shows Lukács himself to be ironically focused on the potentials 

of Luciferian heroes. He casts himself as a demonic ironist—a narrator who 

sings the downfall of the Luciferian in the face of the demonic. But even when 

his own discourse reflects the narrator’s demonic irony, it leads him back to 

the problems of the heroes. Though he knows the demonic, the modern, he is 

fixated on mythic and tragic heroism, on divinely secured and representative 

experiences. The Luciferian hero promises an experience and perhaps even a 

victory that can, the narrator hopes, just as easily happen without gods or in 

defiance of them. The experience of the Luciferian, of the realization of art’s 

promise—even vicariously, artistically, and in its failure—may be the best the 

modern world can hope for.

The constant permutation of the ancient-modern dualism (projected, for 

example, onto the protagonist-narrator relation) follows a logic of “overex-

tended transcendence”

32

 that results from the condemnation of this world. 

The problem is brought to a point at the end of part 2 of The Theory of the 

Novel in words borrowed from Fichte on the “perfected sinfulness” (vol-

lendete Sündhaftigkeit, TdR 137–38) of the modern and (novelistic) world. 

In context—with Dostoyevsky pointing to the horizon—this stereotypically 

“Gnostic” insight into the utterly debased state of the historical world clearly 

contrasts with a promise of future redemption. The assumption of a cosmic 

conflict between a heroic Redeemer and an incompetent Creator whose main 

attribute is Schadenfreude ironically reflects the extremes of the narrator’s 

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Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

possible relation to the hero, but it may also be a symptom of Lukács’s search 

for a real hero to restore meaning to the world. The demonic is invincible 

to the extent that it is defined by the limits of time and space, whereas the 

Luciferian, incarnated in the demonic hero “who thrives on the impossi-

ble,” represents the possibility of the demonic’s impossible overcoming. The 

Luciferian is only Luciferian as long as it falls and fails. If Lucifer succeeds, 

he turns out to be the Redeemer. If he succeeds, he lives up to his name—

“light-bringer”—and restores meaning and unity to the world. The demonic 

in Goethe’s conception, by contrast, does not imply an eschatological horizon 

or a philosophy of history; to the contrary, its philosophy of history, to the 

extent that one can speak of one, posits the absence of such horizons. Goethe 

also does not dualistically pit various aspects of the demonic against each 

other; his famous words on the demonic from Poetry and Truth proceed 

strictly through figures of negation (“not divine, . . . not human, . . . not devil-

ish,” etc.) and resemblance (“resembled,” “appeared”).

Lukács perceived that the problem of the demonic has two sides (a seri-

ous one and an ironic one), but he was not ironic enough—perhaps not old 

enough—to perceive that consequent irony will always trump the philosophy 

of history. As a reader the young Lukács took the problems of heroes seri-

ously, whereas the aging Goethe, when he came to write about the demonic, 

looking back on his youth in his later years, is clearly a “narrator” in Lukács’s 

sense. And this represents the minimal premise of a demonic philosophy of 

history: demonic irony, Schadenfreude, comes after the age of heroes.