Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

The Demonic as a Template for the Novel

The difficulty of giving closure to a biographical narrative may have led 

Goethe to introduce “the demonic” in a series of interconnected excurses at 

the end of Poetry and Truth. This underlying formal difficulty as well as the 

substance of the excurses on the demonic are both directly relevant to the 

genre of the novel. The developmental-biographical paradigms of the Orphic 

“Urworte” may also be taken as a framework for the “novel of education” 

(Bildungs- or Entwicklungsroman). Poetry and Truth, as a biographical nar-

rative, could be read as an application of a developmental paradigm such 

as that of the “Urworte.” In this reading, the demonic emerges at the end of 

Poetry and Truth as a symptom of the difficulties of fitting life’s events into 

the phases and stages of a systematic conceptual framework. The formal-

ization of life into a system of heterogeneous factors unavoidably relies on 

memory to reconstruct their relations and causations. The demonic emerges 

from such an attempt as a by-product of the confrontation between merely 

subjective recollections and an intended synthesis of life into a coherent 

causal narrative.

In the “Urworte,” the problem of the demonic originates in the unified 

force of an individual’s personality, talents, and drives—in the innate, unique 

productivity of the Dämon, which may produce geniuses like Mozart as well 

as more pathological “demons” like his protagonist, Don Giovanni.

1

 In either 

case, the demonic drive sets the driven individual at odds with society by plac-

ing him (or her)

2

 above, below, or outside of it. Without constructing a canon 

of demonic heroes and antiheroes, the examples of which would be endless, 

one might postulate that especially when protagonists are depicted as excep-

tional—whenever characters are characters with qualities—the demonic is 

in play. The “Urworte” thus pertains to the formation of protagonists and 

“characters,” while Poetry and Truth’s encounter with the limited represent-

ability of such formations exemplifies the ironic relation of narrators to their 

own lack of omniscience.

These two aspects of the demonic may not evidently apply to all novels 

or “life stories.” Kafka, for example, might represent a limit at which the 

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Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

protagonist-narrator polarity dissolves into something more like a dream or 

a pure scenario, driven not by the dynamics of character and limitations 

in the narrator’s perspective but by demonic plot elements related to other 

forms of uncertainty, chance, expectation, and mediation.

3

 Given the vast 

range of possibilities within these approaches, it may be that the paradigm 

of the demonic can include every possible novel—but it can only do so in the 

way that all paradigms relate to exceptions and limit cases. It is not my intent 

to pursue such a paradigmatic-taxonomic project, but, broadly, one might 

surmise that the traditional novel, at least up to Thomas Mann, fits easily into 

the framework of Goethe’s conceptions of the demonic.

This coherence is reflected in Lukács’s 1916 Theory of the Novel, which 

represents a broadly synthetic and retrospective formalization of the 

nineteenth-century novel. Using the methods of the philosophy of history,

4

 

Lukács seeks to perceive the basic form of the genre’s underlying conflicts 

and define the transcendental status of the novel as the latest epic form. He 

treats the novel as a form that has reached its end, tested all of its limits and 

exhausted its possibilities. In order to establish the parameters of the genre 

in such a way as to permit this kind of historicization, he relies implicitly 

and explicitly on Goethe’s idea of the demonic. Lukács’s citation of the most 

enigmatic passage of book 20 of Poetry and Truth gives Goethe’s conception 

striking prominence—but the demonic never emerged as a correspondingly 

central conception in the reception of Lukács’s theory. The reason for this 

is obvious: the demonic was taken primarily for a pathos formula without 

an evident systematic function; The Theory of the Novel barely indicates 

how the demonic fits into the theory, and insofar as it is subordinated to a 

philosophy of history, it can be ignored as a superfluous difficulty. Especially 

if the complexity of Goethe’s concept is not recognized, or if Lukács is not 

credited with a solid grasp of it, the citation from Poetry and Truth looks like 

an afterthought.

Setting aside Lukács’s direct engagements with the demonic, his familiarity 

with it is suggested by the similarity between Goethe’s analytic parameters 

and those of Lukács’s theory. The “Urworte” outline a universal model of 

character development and socialization, whereas Poetry and Truth pres-

ents the demonic as the inability of retrospective knowledge to give univocal 

meaning to a biographical-developmental narrative. These two aspects pre-

cisely reflect Lukács’s focus on protagonists (on the one hand) and the ironic 

perspective of narrators (on the other).

This schematic reduction of the two sides of the demonic to a protagonist-

narrator opposition allows the notoriously convoluted paths of Lukács’s text 

to be circumvented. Complexity-reduction is not an end in itself, however, and 

this formal derivation leaves Lukács’s conception of the demonic essentially 

unclarified. Nevertheless, new perspectives may be opened up by hypotheti-

cally imagining the demonic without Lukács as representing an independent 

framework for theorizing the novel. From this perspective, Lukács appears to 

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Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 

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have been surprisingly successful at synthesizing Goethe’s conception into his 

overall theory. Perhaps this comes as no surprise considering his proximity 

to Goethe biographers like Simmel and Gundolf, but what remains striking 

is the synthetic understanding that allowed him to incorporate the demonic 

into an infrastructure that might otherwise appear Hegelian.

Lukacs’s way of combining the demonic with other conceptions does 

not allow it to be easily differentiated analytically. Goethe himself did not 

produce a theory of the demonic to which one might directly refer, while, 

between Goethe and Lukács, overtly theoretical conceptions such as those of 

Wundt and Freud had begun to explore the demonic’s systematic potential. 

The young Lukács also subjects Goethe’s understanding of the demonic to 

an intense systematization and, like his older contemporaries Spengler and 

Gundolf, he often opposed the demonic (as a figure of modernity) to an idea 

of originary authenticity reminiscent of the Dämon of Goethe’s “Urworte”: 

“The way of the soul [der Weg der Seele] is: To strip everything from oneself 

that does not really belong to it [was nicht ihr eigen ist]; to form the soul to 

true individuality [das Formen der Seele zur wirklichen Individualität].”

5

Rather than presenting a critical, analytical, or philological engagement 

with the paradigmatic potential of the demonic, Lukács wants to realize the