27 Texts and History: Georg Lukacs, Terry Eagleton

Mr. Subhadeep Kumar

 About The Chapter 

This module introduces you to the connection in between literary texts and history. Also in this module you will learn about two major theorists; Georg Lukacs, Terry Eagleton and their major theoretical formations. Further, we will discuss some important texts written by these two personalities. In this way you will come to know how their arguments are interconnected and involve with each other. Further, you will be introduced how these two figures have criticised theory formations of themselves. From these we will try to draw a larger picture of literary theory and criticism around involved around these two people in connection with world of the time.

Introduction: 

Terry Eagleton in his book, After Theory notes the demise of literary criticism in literary studies since mid 20th century, its place was taken over by cultural criticism and theory. Historian Eric Hobsbawm had also noted the fact in his book The 20th Century; A Short History, in the demise of ‘Literary History’. In fact the literary text was once seen as a historical testament of a time. Thus Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson or I for Evans’s Short History of English Literature were not just histories of a literary tradition or individual authors’ contribution thereto but were presumed to provide historical knowledge of the development of a culture and the text an authentic sense of the milieu. This idea was premised upon the universality of literature. Its aesthetic capacity to transcend barriers of space and time appeals to everybody.

Texts and History: 

Terry Eagleton in Literary Theory; An Introduction notes the cliche – literature as a mirror of society and adds, if literature is indeed a mirror, it stands at an angle to reality and thus is at best a broken mirror, incorrectly reflecting impressions, contorting them according to its whims and ideological persuasions. The text, together with the author is a product of a particular time, just like any other object. This transformation in our conception of literature is one of the signal insights of 20th century scholarship and if we need to talk of pioneers, Lukacs provided the earliest incitement to this trend.

Georg Lukacs (1885-1971); Life and Career: 

If we assume the world of letters to be factored by various boundaries of language, geography and different histories of cultural production, then we might understand why texts and ideas have varying, non-linear histories of dissemination and effect of them in cultures removed from their original sites of production. These factors are governed by rules of the publication industry, current tastes in different reading cultures and of course the perceived political relevance of the issues at stake. This is more so for emigres and writers in exile like Marx or Victor Serge. Likewise, Georg Lukacs’s ideas has had a very different reception in the Anglo American world than the original contexts of publication of these texts. His landmark theoretical writings were composed between 1909 and the beginning of World War 2.

Lukacs was born in erstwhile Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1888. He studied Political Science at the University of Budapest, from where he graduated in 1909. His dissertation ‘History of the Modern Drama’ was his first major work and he took up the concerns of Life and Form that he deals in this text to develop in his subsequent works up till History and Class Consciousness (1923). It must be noted that this period also coincides with his fervent communist activism, starting as a young idealist foot soldier eventually becoming a party bureaucrat in the short lived Hungarian Socialist Republic. His relation with the Communist party hierarchy had been an issue of dispute within the European Left, as he was seen to retract and compromise his scholastic foundations to (allegedly) conform to regime dictates. Some of the inconsistencies between his earlier works like Theory of the Novel or History and Class Consciousness with his later works like The Historical Novel (1923) is perceived to stem from these conditions.

Lukacs’s major writing phase ranged from the 1910s with the German Publications of The History of the Modern Drama (1909) till the end of 1930s. The English translations of them came out after World War II, in the 1950s and some in 1960s. However, Lukacs had been recognized as a major Marxist philosopher by the early 1920s with the German publication of The Theory of the Novel (1916) and History and Class Consciousness (1923). English readers thus knew of the import of Lukacs long before they could lay their hand on his works. So Lukacs can be said to have had two lives in in his import over the Anglo American Lit. Crit. world – his formulation of a reputedly non-dogmatic Marxism, self- consciously transforming the world and the idea that the literary text is a powerful indicator of the relations or disjunctions thereof between, individual Life and what he calls Form of Social Life in a particular social setting was heard off, but without knowledge of German (or French or Russian) very few could access them.

While his second life, starting with the Translation of his Studies in European Realism in 1950 followed by The Historical Novel 12 years later in the milieu of the rise of British cultural theory and American new criticism had very different kind of vibration. Lukacs in German or Hungarian in the interwar years was seen as a pioneer in Lit. Crit. method. His reading of texts with the larger concern of identifying the disjunction between the individual life and life form, which the literary text is supposed to contain traces of (the disjunction). While the English Lukacs in tandem with similar translations of the works of Gramsci which came out in the same period was noted for his unorthodox handling of the issue of ideology and his concept of ‘reification’ in Modern Capitalist society which he identifies as the prime lacuna of capitalist society.

Some Important Works of Lukacs:

In History of the Modern Drama (1909) and Philosophy of Art (1912) Lukacs is concerned about the relation between ‘Life’ and ‘form’. More specifically there is the added consideration – how does ‘form’ determine Art as a separate sphere of value. For instance in the first book he analyses Homeric epic and concludes that there was no disjunction between individual life and collective life form during the era of the Homeric epic. This he distinguishes from the following Hellenic zeitgeist the era of the Great Greek tragedies. According to him tragedies are conceived at that moment when the individual life cannot conform to the life form, which creates the tragic quotient.

One central concern that runs throughout Lukacs’s oeuvre is about ‘Totality’ in life – i.e. the entire complex of interrelated elements, of which the meaning of any single constituent depends on its relation to the entire set.

Same theoretical persuasion informs his next major work, The Theory of the Novel (1916). Writing in the midst of an unprecedented global war, the novels he discusses seldom remain the object of analysis. Lukacs deals with the novels as refractions of the societies in which the novels were produced.

History and Class Consciousness (1923) was a product of Lukacs’s activist days and concern is not literature proper, not even literature as an object of study to gain insight on larger social forces, but individual and society’s relation to their particular consciousness. The mode of formation of such consciousness, the attendant dialectics in that process and of course the formation of ideologies and maintenance of ruling class hegemony. Literary production is given a merely functional role in the production and generation of ideologies.

The period between writing History and Class Consciousness and The Historical Novel was a period of fervent political writings in Lukacs’s career, most of them ephemeral, topical and engaged in immediate debates of contemporary European politics. His last major work, The Historical Novel (1937) thus stands at a distance from his earlier theoretical positions and indeed, it contradicts his own formulations of The theory of the Novel and History and Class Consciousness.

Criticism against Lukacs: 

It needs to be remembered that Lukacs was a political activist too and at times his larger theoretical objectives had to be adjusted, compromised and earlier theoretical positions were retracted for reasons of political imminence, At a time when the proper subject of socialist art was an issue of fractious dispute among Communists, Lukacs was attacked both from the Stalinist Zhdanovian position for his perceived reticence regarding Socialist Realism and by the Left opposition to Anti-Stalinism for his disinterest of modernist art. Noted anti- Stalinist Marxist playwright Bertholt Brecht criticized him for his constant harking back to 19th century literary realism. ‘Be like Balzac – only up-to-date’ was Brecht’s sardonic paraphrasing of Lukacs’s position. Brecht criticized Lukacs’s prescription of 19th century literary realism as The Form for a literature of social transformation as a ‘fetishization’.  Brecht points out Lukacs’s lacunae of the historical formation of literary forms. To Brecht, forms have an integral relation with the specifics of literary production and a particular form emergent in certain spatio-temporal location cannot be replicated in some other random context. Lukacs considered Brecht’s criticism to be decadent formalism, to which Brecht’s counter was that Lukacs had created a very limited and unduly formalist definition of Realism itself.

Eagleton had pointed out that Lukacs’s theorization of ideology has the contradictory features of – a) ideology as the worldview of different classes and in that way are autonomous, yet he talks of b) the act of instituting a certain class ideology as a hegemony, like the Bourgeoisie ensuring its own ideology to be hegemonic as the ideology of the ruling class. The problem might lie deeper in Lukacs’s formulation of the class subject itself, being fashioned by ideology. His 1937 book – Historical Novel, written under severe pressure to conform to Stalinist dictators, refutes his formulations in History and Class Consciousness. Indeed the 1937 book, happens to be his last major work as he progressively became an academic bureaucrat from then on.

Lukacs’s Theories in Connection to World Affairs of the Time: 

During the popular front period the international Socialist impulse to forge a larger alliance with the liberal bourgeois was evident in his writings. In The Historical Novel his strained attempts at appraising minor anti-Fascist novelists is an offshoot of this pressure; to uphold the vague, incompletely conceived liberal tenet of ‘democracy’ in place of his erstwhile theoretical persuasion of revolutionary socialism. The Historical Novel remains one of Lukacs’s most enduring works. Lukacs sees Marxism critical tradition as part of the larger milieu of 19th century Bourgeois humanism, in its origin and also in their kindred concern against the then rising tide of Fascism in interwar Europe. This politics of immediacy sits awkwardly with his larger theoretical position regarding ideology in literature. In History and Class Consciousness (1923), the classes are assumed to have differing ideologies, autonomous, formative of their contentious world views. Lukacs admits the dynamic nature of forces that constitute ideologies and the power of literature as a tool for espousing and refashioning ideologies, to mould ruling class hegemony out of dominant ideologies,  however to him ideology is also a component of an individual’s social relations, not just a misinformed form of consciousness to be dismissed as ‘false’ as his contemporary Stalinist counterparts were doing.

Lukacs regards the literary work as a ‘spontaneous whole’ which reconciles the capitalist contradictions between essence and appearance, concrete and abstract, individual and social whole. In overcoming these alienations, art recreates wholeness and harmony. Brecht, however, believes this to be a reactionary nostalgia. Art for him should expose rather than remove those contradictions, thus stimulating men to abolish them in real life;

Terry Eagleton (1943-); Life and Career:

Terry Eagleton  is  the  Professor  Chair  at  the  Department  of  English  and Creative Writing at  Lancaster University.  The internationally celebrated  literary scholar and  cultural theorist  started  his  academic  career  as  a  Victorian  critic.  He  works  on  the  history  and literature of the 19th and 20th century literatures. His specialities are literary and cultural theory and the English-language literature and culture. He is also becoming rather more broadly  involved  in  comparative  literature,  and  a  recent  book  on  tragedy  considers  the literature of various European cultures. Eagleton obtained his PhD at Cambridge where he was a student of the famous left-wing literary critic Raymond Williams. He then became a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, the youngest fellow since the eighteenth century, before moving to Wadham College, Oxford in 1968. Later he was John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester and Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford.

Professor Eagleton, who has written around fifty books, is one of the world’s leading literary critics and, according to The Independent, ‘the man who succeeded F. R. Leavis as Britain’s most influential academic critic’. It was, though, his more theoretical work as a Marxist critic which established him as a leading figure within literary studies. Some of his notable works include Shakespeare and Society (1967), The New Left Church (1968), Exiles and Emigrés: Studies in Modern Literature (1970), Myths Of Power: A Marxist Study Of The Brontës (1975) Criticism and Ideology (1976), Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), The Function Of Criticism (1984), The Ideology of The Aesthetic (1990), The Idea Of Culture (2000) and After Theory (2003). Further, he is also the author of the novel Saints and Scholars (1987) and The Gatekeeper: A Memoir (2001). His latest books include: Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (2009), Why Marx Was Right (2011); The Event of Literature (2012); How to Read Literature (2013); Culture and the Death of God (2014) and Hope without Optimism (2015).

In the 1980s, Eagleton engaged extensively with the various tides of continental thought that were impacting upon English Literature and he did so most famously in his book Literary  Theory  (1983)  which  remains  to  this  day  an  academic  best-seller.  Eagleton’s specifically Marxist take on literary theory is evident throughout this book and clearly informs  his  continuing  work  on  ideology,  most  famously  The  Ideology  of  the Aesthetic (1990), and his critique of the postmodern turn in cultural theory, witness The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), and indeed his more recent work Why Marx Was Right (2011).

Important Works of Eagleton:

Criticism & Ideology (1976) was a big break in Eagleton’s oeuvre. Departing from previous concerns of traditional Marxist literary criticism and theology, Eagleton embarks upon situating the Author and the literary text within the domain of production. He analysed the course of 20th century English literary criticism from F. R. Leavis to Ronald Williams, Pierre Macherey and formulated a ‘materialist criticism’ of the literary ‘mode’ of production and ideology. His focus is on the social premises of the Victorian novel and its constitutive influence on the form of the literary text.

Literary Theory: an Introduction (1983, revised 1996) probably his best-known work, traces the history of the study of texts, from the Romantics of the 19th century to the postmodernists of the later 20th century. Eagleton’s approach to literary criticism remains firmly rooted in the Marxian tradition though he has also incorporated techniques and ideas from more recent modes of thought as structuralism, Lacanian analysis and deconstruction

In The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), he embarks on a massive project to chart the history of ‘Aesthetics’ in Western thought. In the process he lays out the moral and political underpinnings of ‘Aesthetics’. He discusses the various philosophical positions regarding the concept ranging from Spinoza to Kant, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger in order to unravel ‘Aesthetics’s prevalent mysticism.

Ideology: An Introduction (1991) sets out to provide a history to ‘Ideology’ in an era obsessed with the possibility of the end of ideology. 25 years from the publication of the book, such messianic claims of End of Ideology seems idiosyncratic and the object of Eagleton’s criticism seem irrelevant, topical, far off, however the veracity of the book – both in its historical comprehensiveness and the analytical rigour that he brings in the study of ideology makes it an essential reading regarding the concept.

After Theory (2003) represents a kind of about-face: an indictment of current cultural and literary theory, He traces the evolution of cultural theory from the mid-50s to 90s, applauding its achievement but more than that, declaiming its shortcomings. As he perceives the ushering in of postmodernism and the resultant effacement of the subject had led cultural theory to overlook issues like truth, fundamentalism, objectivity, coercion or inequality, issues which Eagleton as a Marxist considers to be important.

Criticism of Terry Eagleton:

Terry Eagleton might be the only Marxist critic who also happens to be a professed Catholic. True, Latin American Liberation theology do have eclectic fusion of Marxism and Biblical thought, but rarely do we find a theorist who tries to accommodate these two astoundingly divergent theoretical positions in their work. Statements like ‘to equate Communism with the Stalinist totalitarianism is to reduce the history of Christianity with the excesses of The Inquisition’ does not cohere with his usually rigorous materialist criticism. Critiques had also pointed to his inconsistent handling of the Base-Superstructure distinction in Marxist thought. In places he had taken ‘Base’ to be the determining factor/s of a given relation of production, like in Ideology; An Introduction, while in places he had taken it to be a relational category.

Nonetheless his materialist criticism is a singular contribution in the Anglo American literary scholarship. He upholds the tradition of Literary Criticism at a time when the reigning theoretical mould is Cultural Theory, though he acknowledges his debt to formative Cultural Studies theorists. It is to be noted that the Lukacs in English translation technically becomes a near contemporary of Terry Eagleton (Born 1943) and Eagleton’s critique of Lukacs, especially Lukacs’s conception of ideology is an original contribution of English Marxism.

Summary :

So, in this module you are introduced to the subject of literary texts and its relation with history. At the beginning we have discussed some basic theories related the topic of the module. Further, we have focused on two theorists; Georg Lukacs, Terry Eagleton and their contributions to the field of study. We have also analysed some of their works and theoretical formations. Later on you have seen how arguments of these two theorists are interconnected and how their theories invoke with one another. Further, we have discussed what other critics have said about the formations of Lukacs and Eagleton. Also we have seen issues with their theories and how those connect with social issues and happenings at the World affair of the time. Hope these will be useful for your studies. For more on this module, please find the e- text, learn more and self-assessment tabs.

References

• Jameson, Fredric ‘The Case for George Lukacs’, Salmagundi, No. 13, 1970
• De Man, Paul ‘Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel’, MLN, Vol. 81, No. 5, 1966 Kurik, Maire ‘The Novel’s Subjectivity: Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel’, Salmagundi, No. 28, 1975
• Eagleton, Terry Literary Theory; An Introduction, Wiley India, New Delhi, 2006 Nadal-Melsió, Sara Georg Lukács: Magus Realismus?, Diacritics,Vol. 34, No. 2, 2004
• Gluck, Mary ‘Toward a Historical Definition of Modernism: Georg Lukacs and the Avant-Garde’ Journal of Modern History, Vol. 58, No. 4, 1986
• ‘Interview with Terry Eagleton’, Social Text, No. 13/14,pp. 83-99, 1986 ‘A Conversation with Terry Eagleton’, Atlantis, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2001
• Dupre, John ‘Comments on Terry Eagleton’s “Base and Superstructure Revisited”, New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 2, Economics and Culture: Production, Consumption, and Value, 2000