Lukacs 1937

Lukács, György. The Historical Novel. Pub. 1937. University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Print.

• Read with Griffiths 2016, Underwood 2013, Shirley (Charlotte Bronte, 1849), Anderson 1983, Walter Benjamin
• 19: The historical novel arose at the beginning of the nineteenth century at about the time of Napoleon’s collapse (Scott’s Waverley appeared in 1814).

…in the most famous “historical novel” of the C18, Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, history is likewise treated as mere costumery [what critics following Eagleton and Gallagher accuse Brontë of in S] What is lacking in the so-called historical novel before Sir Walter Scott is precisely the specifically historical, that is, derivation of the individuality of characters from the historical peculiarity of their age.

• 21: This unawareness [in Adam Smith] of the significance of the historical sense already present in practice, of the possibility of generalizing the historical peculiarity of the immediate present, which had been correctly observed by instinct, characterizes the position which the great social novel of England occupies in the development of our problem. It drew the attention of writers to the concrete (i.e. historical) significance of time and place, to social conditions and so on, it created the realistic, literary means of expression for portraying this spatio-temporal (i.e. historical) character of people and circumstances. But this, as in the economics of Steuart, was a product of realistic instinct and did not amount to a clear understanding of history as process, of history as the concrete precondition of the present.

• 23: It was the French Revolution, the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall of Napoleon, which for the first time made history a mass experience, and moreover on a European scale.

• 24: Hence the concrete possibilities for men to comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned, for them to see in history something which deeply affects their daily lives and immediately concerns them.

• 25: Thus in this mass experience of history the national element is linked on the one hand with problems of social transformation; and on the other, more and more people become aware of the connection between national and world history. This increasing consciousness of the historical character of development begins to influence judgments on economic conditions and class struggle.

• 27: Progress is no longer seen as an essentially unhistorical struggle between humanist reason and feudal-absolutist unreason. According to the new interpretation the reasonableness of human progress develops ever increasingly out of the inner conflict of social forces in history itself; according to this interpretation history itself is the bearer and realizer of human progress.

• 30: We have attempted to outline the general framework of those economic and political transformations which occurred throughout Europe as a result of the French Revolution; in the preceding remarks we briefly sketched the latter’s ideological consequences. These events, this transformation of men’s existence and consciousness throughout Europe form the economic and ideological basis for Scott’s historical novel.

• 31: Pushkin writes of him: “…The influence of Walter Scott can be felt in every province of the literature of his age. The new school of French historians formed itself under the influence of the Scottish novelist. He showed them entirely new sources which had so far remained unknown despite the existence of the historical drama of Shakespeare and Goethe…”

• 32: He finds in English history the consolation that the most violent vicissitudes of class struggle have always finally calmed down into a glorious “middle way” [Scott’s conservatism – Brontë is not similarly comforted]

• Scott ranks among those honest Tories in the England of his time who exonerate nothing in the development of capitalism, who not only see clearly, but also deeply sympathize with the unending misery of the people which the collapse of old England brings in its wake; yet who, precisely because of their conservatism, display no violent opposition to the features of the new development repudiated by them [e.g., capitalism].

• 34: Scott endeavours to portray the struggles and antagonisms of history by means of characters who, in their psychology and destiny, always represent social trends and historical forces.

• 35: Scott’s greatness lies in his capacity to give living human embodiment to historical-social types. The typically human terms in which great historical trends become tangible had never before been so superbly, straightforwardly and pregnantly portrayed. And above all, never before had this kind of portrayal been consciously set at the centre of the representation of reality.

• 36: Scott’s heroes, as central figures of the novel, have an entirely opposite function [to epic heroes like Achilles]. It is their task to bring the extremes whose struggle fills the novel, whose clash expresses artistically a great crisis in society, into contact with one another. Through the plot, at whose centre stands this hero, a neutral ground is sought and found upon which the extreme, opposing social forces can be brought into a human relationship with one another.

• 41: But for Scott the historical characterization of time and place, the historical “here and now” is something much deeper. For him it means that certain crises in the personal destinies of a number of human beings coincide and interweave within the determining context of an historical crisis. It is precisely for this reason that his manner of portraying the historical crisis is never abstract, the split of the nation into warring parties always runs through the centre of the closest human relationships. Parents and children, lover and beloved, old friends etc. contront one another as opponents, or the inevitability of this confrontation carries the collision deep into their personal lives. It is always a fate suffered by groups of people connected and involved with one another; and it is never a matter of one single catastrophe, but of a chain of catastrophes, where the solution of each gives birth to a new conflict. Thus the profound grasp of the historical factor in human life demands a dramatic concentration of the epic framework.

• 42: What matters therefore in the historical novel is not the re-telling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events. What matters is that we should re-experience the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality. And it is a law of literary portrayal which first appears paradoxical, but then quite obvious, that in order to bring out these social and human motives of behaviour, the outwardly insignificant events, the smaller (from without) relationships are better suited than the great monumental dramas of world history.

• 43: The historical novel therefore has to demonstrate by artistic means that historical circumstances and characters existed in precisely such and such a way [realism – is it showing or telling?]. What in Scott has been called very superficially “authenticity of local colour” is in actual fact this artistic demonstration of historical reality.

• 60: …Scott, in sharp contrast to the post-1848 development of the historical novel, never modernizes the psychology of his characters.

• 61: But does faithfulness to the past mean a chronicle-like, naturalistic reproduction of the language, mode of thought, and feeling of the past? Of course not…. “Whatever in the past we evoke, in order to recite it after our own fashion to our contemporaries, we must grant a higher culture to the ancient happening than it in fact had.” … Hegel in an aesthetic-conceptual generalization of the problem speaks already of necessary anachronism in art…. “The inner substance of what is represented remains the same, but the developed culture in representing and unfolding the substantial necessitates a change in the expression and form of the latter.”

• 63: Scott’s “necessary anachronism” consists, therefore, simply in allowing his characters to express feelings and thoughts about real, historical relationships in a much clearer way than the actual men and women of the time could have done. [Seems rather teleological?]