Preconceived theory intervening in art degrades the novel to thesis illustration

Evidence

But the essential characteristics of the typical are to be found elsewhere: in particular, it should be noted that for Lukács the typical is never a matter of photographic accuracy. In that perennial confrontation of Balzac with Zola, to which we will return, he points out that the Balzacian character, as melodramatic as it is with its romantic exaggeration and unrealistic grotesqueness, is far more expressive of underlying social forces, is far more profoundly typical, than are the highly schematic, stereotyped characters of Zola (the rich peasant, the miner, the factory owner, the shopkeeper, and so forth), even though the latter would seem at first glance to be far more adequate to the basic aims of realism itself. It is as if, in the works of Zola, the idea, the preconceived theory, intervened between the work of art and the reality to be presented: Zola already knows what the basic structure of society is, and this is his weakness. For him the basic raw material, the professions, the socially determined character types are already established in advance: this is to say that he has succumbed to the temptation of abstract thought, to the mirage of some static, objective knowledge of society. Implicitly he has admitted the superiority of positivism and science over mere imagination. But from Lukács’ point of view, for which narration is the basic category and abstract knowledge a second best only, this means that the novel in Zola’s hands has ceased to become the privileged instrument of the analysis of reality and has been degraded to a mere illustration of a thesis. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 392

Categorization

• XREF: The Balzac/Zola confrontation and the primacy of narration over abstract knowledge echo Lukács more broadly and Adorno’s own hostility to committed art; connects to the reader’s dialectical-criticism thread. — connects to: The novel’s twin poles are ungeneralizable psychology or abstract thesis — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 75; Surrealism rejects novelistic description as a surrender to reified perception — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 199
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that knowing society’s structure in advance is itself a failure — that narration (not conceptual knowledge) is the privileged analytic instrument — is the crux of Lukács’s method and worth sitting with.