Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

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Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

wants works to be concrete utopias in themselves and simultaneously to pro-

mote concrete utopia in the world. These imperatives are contradictory—and 

the second is explicitly forbidden in Lukács’s theory’s rejection of the politi-

cal or ethical transcendence of the immediacy of aesthetic positing. As long 

as this transcendence is disallowed, art’s production of short-lived virtual and 

subjective utopias will constantly divert energy from the real utopian project 

of creating a more just world. Thus Lukács suspects—against the prevail-

ing assumptions of aesthetic theory and practice—that art is a source of a 

breakdown in the historical dialectic whose ultimate ends were supposed to 

be reason and progress.

A somewhat unexpected consequence of this is that the unified life ideal 

of the Greek epic

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 invoked in the opening of The Theory of the Novel—

“Selig sind die Zeiten” (“blessed were the days,” TdR 21)—cannot be taken 

as an ideal of artistic perfection. When Greek life, reflected in Greek art, is 

the ideal toward which modern art strives, modern art becomes Luciferian. 

Greece is the ideal for Lukács, but this ideal is profoundly misunderstood 

if it is taken only as a model for artistic imitation. It is Greek life—which 

produced the “art”—that must become the model for the transformation of 

the world. “Art” as aesthetic positing is a phenomenon of modernity that 

stands in contrast to Greek culture.

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 In the role of the “metaphysical enemy” 

of art, Lukács believes that this original unity can be re-achieved. The epic 

unity of subject and object, of inside and outside—“the world is wide and 

yet like one’s own home” (die Welt ist weit und doch wie das eigene Haus, 

TdR 21)—cannot be achieved “through art” (von der Kunst aus, TdR 137).

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The turn from aesthetics to culture—and to politics—marks the point, 

one might say (contra Lukács), where it gets really Luciferian. A divided or 

alienated existence may not be the worst thing imaginable. In comparison, 

the possibilities of inauthenticity and self-alienation presented in Goethe’s 

Orphic “Urworte” represent resigned realism. For Lukács, on the other hand, 

in keeping with his aesthetics’ general basis in an idea of “spheres”—the 

transcendental equivalent of fields, disciplines, or genres—the historical ten-

dency of art’s autonomy and “virtuality” is increasing mutual exclusivity and 

pluralization. At the limit, each individual—each work—will define its own 

sphere, and the overwhelming proliferation of such works would cause art 

to fail even in its negative function of casting critical light on a deficient real-

ity. Aesthetic positing thus ultimately posits the disparateness of aesthetic 

spheres in an equally disparate experiential reality.