Lukacs ranked royalist Balzac above socialist Zola on artistic fidelity to totality.

Evidence

In developing Engels’s now famous dichotomy between realism and naturalism - the former, exemplified in the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Balzac, reconciling objective world and subjective imagination organically; the latter, best illustrated in Zola’s writings, mechanically reflecting the artist’s unassimilated phenomenal environment - Lukacs pursued an important distinction neglected by orthodox Zhdanovists. Zola, despite his sympathy for the oppressed, so Lukacs maintained, is artistically inferior to the royalist Balzac, whose artistic imagination allowed him to portray the historical totality with greater fidelity. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 536

Categorization

• XREF: Lukacs’s realism/naturalism distinction surfaces again in The Historical Novel and his debate with Brecht; connects to the Frankfurt School’s own later aesthetic writings. — connects to: Romanticism embodies the neutral term in Balzac’s character system — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 3985
• QUESTION: How did the Frankfurt School itself respond to Lukacs’s defense of the historical novel and Scott?

Broader Connections

• Romanticism embodies the neutral term in Balzac’s character system #expands (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 3985