Lukács moves from metaphysical to historical framing of the novel’s hero

Evidence

Yet when we turn to the chapters on Goethe and Tolstoy, we find that, perhaps without any conscious awareness on Lukács’ part, this metaphysical second term, the world, has imperceptibly glided into a new one, namely society. But at this point everything changes, and the very quality of the opposition is different: the new tension is not a metaphysical but a historical one, and man’s relationship to his social environment is no longer the static and contemplative one of his metaphysical situation in the universe. For society is an evolving and changing organism, and for the first time it is given to the hero of the novel as Lukács sees him not only to contemplate his distance from external reality in a fixed manner, but to change it. Now external reality is not alien to him, but of the same substance as himself, for it is history, and the result of the activities of men. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 372

Categorization

• XREF: This is the shift from Lukács’s pre-Marxist Theory of the Novel to his Marxism — a hinge Jameson reads as internal to the aesthetic problems themselves. Connects to Lukács’s own retrospective reading of this development. — connects to: Lukács’s Theory of the Novel harbors a form-content contradiction that undermines its conclusions — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 368; Lukács holds that epic rebirth awaits social transformation, not the novelist’s will — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 367; Lukacs distinguished closed epic culture from the god-abandoned novel — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 263
• DEEPTHINKING: Jameson reverses the commonsense causality — that narration’s internal problems forced the Marxist framework, not that politics externally impinged on literary theory. This inversion is a signature dialectical move the reader wants to trace.

Broader Connections

• Lukacs distinguished closed epic culture from the god-abandoned novel #expands (0.90) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 263