The Historical Novel Book

I have yet to read the entirety of this magnificent work of literary criticism. What feedback I can offer is only regarding the first 100 pages or so, notably on his section on Sir Walter Scott, for a course I am taking on American realism.

Sir Walter Scott and the Importance of Historicity in the Novel

Lukács lists various techniques Scott used to make possible the historicity of the modern novel. Knowing some of these techniques may assist one in gaining insight as to why history mattered so much to Lukács: recognizing historicity as era-dependent peculiarity and not "accuracy" within the bounds of his societal context (in the USSR) illuminates the double standard one can see in many of Lukács's comments while influencing how we approach the term "realism."

One technique Scott employed was that he made his characters to "represent social trends and historical forces . . . always regarding them socially and not individually" (Lukács 34). This, Lukács comments, greatly differs from literature before the nineteenth century, when novels mainly had only historical milieus, in which the characters' "manners . . . are entirely those of the writer's own day" (Lukács 19). Scott's characters were also "mediocre . . . rather than [the epic] eminent and all-embracing" (Lukács 33, 36). Lukács explains that this is crucial because these characters worked "to bring the extremes [of two sides of anything] whose struggle fills the novel . . . into contact with one another" (Lukács 36).

This portrayal of characters in light of social trends by Scott is important because it helps reveal what history means to Lukács and why it is so important to the novel. First, Scott's technique demonstrates historicity as peculiarity rather than accuracy. For Scott, historical "authenticity means . . . the quality of inner life, the morality, heroism, capacity for sacrifice . . . peculiar to a given age," and more specifically, "the genuine hic et nunc (here and now) of [characters'] inner motives" (Lukács 50, 60). The attempt "to portray historical reality as it actually was" simply means being psychologically and philosophically relative to the age in which a book's setting takes place (Lukács 41). Mikhail Bakhtin, a Marxist and Structuralist literary critic, further explains this concept in Discourse in the Novel (1936), coining history as series of events which are written in the socio-ideological language that dominated a given society at that time. Bakhtin explains how this is connected with the novel, that the novel and historical context both influence each other:

"The internal politics of style . . . is determined by its external politics . . . in artistic prose, and especially in the novel, this dialogization penetrates from within the very way in which the word conceives its object and its means for expressing itself, reformulating the semantics and syntactical structure of discourse . . . [But for this to work,] individual differences and contradictions [must be] enriched by social heteroglossia." (Leitch 1208)

Secondly, Lukács notes that Scott saw history as "a series of great crises . . . a process full of contradictions," and to be historically "accurate," one must have "a felt relationship to the present" and demonstrate "the life of the people themselves" despite the dialectical nature of history, among other things (Lukács 53, 55). People's individual crises all "coincide and interweave within the determining context of an historical crisis . . . It is always a fate suffered by groups of people connected and involved with one another," truly Hegelian and Structuralist (Lukács 41).

This two-fold definition of history to Lukács'that it is 1) always peculiar to a given age and is therefore different from other ages, and that it is 2) an on-going process of dialectical struggles propelling each other forward'reveals the double standard that can be seen in many of Lukács's comments. Lukács adheres to the censorship regulations in the context he lived in, allowing him to continue writing. It does not appear that Lukács goes agains Marxist literary criticism (then again, he could not), which states that literature is a product of a given society's socio-economic struggles and past. Supporting this theory could conflict with his emphasis on the hic et nunc of "real people's" inner motives'how far can that go without angering a communist government? However, he manages to hold onto both ends of the spectrum in his careful, one may say, disassociation from particular concepts (the hic et nunc, perhaps) while associating more with others (such as Marxist criticism). Furthermore, how can viewing historicity not as "accuracy" but as "peculiarity" change how we view the ever-elusive term known as realism?