Proletarian truth dissolves reified objects into conflicting historical tendencies, like plot

Evidence

We may now draw some conclusions as to the implications of History and Chss Consciousness for the literary problems with which Lukács had previously been concerned. It would indeed seem that it is epistemology, and abstract philosophy in general, which tends under its own internal momentum to reduce the phenomenon of reflection to a static type of mental image more or less adequate to the realities outside. What Lukács describes as proletarian truth is, on the contrary, a sense of forces at work within the present, a dissolving of the reified surface of the present into a coexistence of various and conflicting historical tendencies, a translation of immobile objects into acts and potential acts and into the consequences of acts. Indeed, we are tempted to claim that for the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness the ultimate resolution of the Kantian dilemma is to be found not in the nineteenth-century philosophical systems themselves, not even in that of Hegel, but rather in the nineteenth-century novel: for the process he describes bears less resemblance to the ideals of scientific knowledge than it does to the elaboration of plot. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 383

Categorization

• XREF: Directly lineates Jameson’s dialectical criticism to Lukács’s epistemology and its anti-Kantian thrust — the method the reader came to trace.
• QUESTION: The claim that the novel resolves the Kantian dilemma better than Hegel is provocative; worth noting how far Lukács himself would have assented.