Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

Risse der Welt], while constantly allowing new unities [Einheiten] 

to be dreamed up [erträumen ließ], which however always contra-

dicted the new essence of the world [dem neuen Wesen der Welt 

widersprachen] and therefore always fell apart again [immer wieder 

zerfielen]. (TdR 29)

The anti-artistic undertone, which appears in the Heidelberg Aesthetics in the 

form of the ironic devil’s advocacy, is more emphatic in The Theory of the 

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Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 

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Novel. The “blinding reflection” (blendender Glanz)

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 of the Greek world, 

carried across the ages in art, makes modernity oblivious to the fragmentari-

ness and artificiality of its own world. A world of constantly dreamt-up new 

creations—which dissolve again like dreams—is a world of superstructures 

that exist only in the denial of their base. Art perpetually re-creates “Greece” 

at the level of mere appearances.

In the Heidelberg Aesthetics, this interpretation of art as an endless Lucife-

rian falling away from being—as a sentimental consolation in the absence 

of true being—reactivates Plato’s suspicions about art. Such metaphysical 

doubts about the Luciferian spell of antiquity may explain Lukács’s focus 

on the novel. The post-Homeric epic, because it has no hope of living up to 

Homer’s perfect unification of art and life on the basis of an underlying unity 

of existence (TdR 46), has no choice but to reflect the fragmentariness and 

disunity of reality. Homer was able to produce a unified totality, not primar-

ily because of the unifying power of his “genius,” but because the world he 

lived in was a unified one. By contrast, all efforts to epically reflect the real-

ity of modernity can only produce works that are fragmentary, incomplete, 

inconsistent, inadequate, abstractly normative-imperative, or subjectively 

moral-ethical in relation to a world for which there is no coherent meton-

ymy to represent its entirety. In the terms of the Heidelberg Aesthetics, the 

novel is not an “aesthetic positing” because it does not create an autonomous 

“world” in opposition to the real one. According to The Theory of the Novel, 

epic form “is never the making [das Schaffen] of a new reality [einer neuen 

Realität], but only always a subjective mirroring [ein subjektives Spiegeln] of 

the reality that already exists [der bereits daseienden]” (TdR 39–40).

It is precisely aesthetic deficiency and heterogeneity that allow the novel to 

avoid the Luciferian. Its lack of autonomy and its dependency on empirical 

reality define the novel’s historicity and set it apart from the other modern 

arts. Epic narration in modernity is always a partial reflection of historical 

reality, a fragment of objectivized subjectivity—or subjectivized objectivity: 

“it is always his subjectivity [that of the narrator] that manages to wrench 

one piece out of the measureless infinity of everything that happens in the 

world [aus der maßlosen Unendlichkeit des Weltgeschehens ein Stück her-

ausreißt]” (TdR 41). The epic narrator, according to Lukács, is responsible 

for the selection and the meaning of what is narrated; the latter stands for 

the meaning of life itself. Unlike dramas, which systematically focus on an 

abstract problem, the novel is engaged in an existential analytic with respect 

to historical reality. Even if the novel’s search for meaning always remains 

projected toward an uncertain horizon—and even if its meaning turns out 

to be sheer meaninglessness, as is typical of the more “artistic” genre of the 

novella (TdR 42)—the epic narrator is responsible for his narrative’s repre-

sentativeness with respect to the meaning of life in all of its material density 

(and not just as a “moral of the story”). The novel is unique among epic 

forms in that it must try to mediate its own process of selection within the 

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Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

totality of everything that it does not and could not possibly hope to address 

(TdR 43). Only at the genre’s limits, in its most exemplary works,

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 are the 

narrator’s subjective limitations made to indirectly appear—passively, by an 

act of grace (Gnade, TdR 44)—such that the boundaries of the novel are 

transformed into those of the world itself (seine Grenze zur Grenze der Welt