Home Literary Studies 3. The Emptiness of the Arabesque: Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel
Chapter
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

3. The Emptiness of the Arabesque: Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel

View more publications by University of Toronto Press
Forms of Modernity
This chapter is in the book Forms of Modernity
Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel presents us with a challenge commonly associated with canonical works of literature: the hermen-eutic task of attempting to read it within the moment it appeared. Few other works of literary theory are so obviously tinged by subsequent interpretive history; therefore, it is necessary at some moment to ac-knowledge its specificity, that is to say, to lift it from the author’s life-work and appreciate it as a work unique to itself. The young Lukács began writing this essay on the eve of the First World War, and first pub-lished it in 1916 in the German journal Zeitschrift für Aesthetik und allge-meine Kunstwissenschaft (nos. 3–4), several years before his transformation into one of the foremost Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century. The interpretive thrust of most subsequent criticism of The Theory of the Novel has been simultaneously (and, of course, paradoxically) to di-vorce it from and connect it to his later writings. Indeed, Lukács himself could not resist such an attempt to appropriate his own past and make it adequate to his present when he wrote a prologue to a 1962 edition. After putting forth a number of observations concerning the intellec-tual indebtedness of this work to other thinkers that prove to be at the same time useful guideposts and red herrings, the Georg Lukács of 1962 sets out some limits for the ‘correct’ reading of this essay: it can be read as a ‘pre-history of the important ideologies of the 1920s and 1930s,’ but will only disorient the reader looking for guidance in the book (TN 23). In other words, Lukács argues in 1962 that not only should this book not be read in its own right as containing interesting or useful ideas about the genre of the novel, neither should it be read with-in the context of its actual historical moment, Lukács’s pre-Marxist per-iod, but rather in relation to the Marxist ideas of the following decades.1The older Lukács’s reference to this essay’s disorienting effect is not 3 The Emptiness of the Arabesque: Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel
© 2017 University of Toronto Press, Toronto

Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel presents us with a challenge commonly associated with canonical works of literature: the hermen-eutic task of attempting to read it within the moment it appeared. Few other works of literary theory are so obviously tinged by subsequent interpretive history; therefore, it is necessary at some moment to ac-knowledge its specificity, that is to say, to lift it from the author’s life-work and appreciate it as a work unique to itself. The young Lukács began writing this essay on the eve of the First World War, and first pub-lished it in 1916 in the German journal Zeitschrift für Aesthetik und allge-meine Kunstwissenschaft (nos. 3–4), several years before his transformation into one of the foremost Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century. The interpretive thrust of most subsequent criticism of The Theory of the Novel has been simultaneously (and, of course, paradoxically) to di-vorce it from and connect it to his later writings. Indeed, Lukács himself could not resist such an attempt to appropriate his own past and make it adequate to his present when he wrote a prologue to a 1962 edition. After putting forth a number of observations concerning the intellec-tual indebtedness of this work to other thinkers that prove to be at the same time useful guideposts and red herrings, the Georg Lukács of 1962 sets out some limits for the ‘correct’ reading of this essay: it can be read as a ‘pre-history of the important ideologies of the 1920s and 1930s,’ but will only disorient the reader looking for guidance in the book (TN 23). In other words, Lukács argues in 1962 that not only should this book not be read in its own right as containing interesting or useful ideas about the genre of the novel, neither should it be read with-in the context of its actual historical moment, Lukács’s pre-Marxist per-iod, but rather in relation to the Marxist ideas of the following decades.1The older Lukács’s reference to this essay’s disorienting effect is not 3 The Emptiness of the Arabesque: Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel
© 2017 University of Toronto Press, Toronto
Downloaded on 9.10.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.3138/9781442694187-007/html?licenseType=restricted&srsltid=AfmBOoo5j4VzWJ2OdaU5gVD1Td7MMIW769Pq0yZ7btVrpY8ejqzeO4pW
Scroll to top button