The Ideology
of modernism
GEORG LUKACS
ARAVIND R NAIR, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, DEPT. OF
ENGLISH,SH COLLEGE, THEVARA
Georg Lukacs – Hungarian Marxist Theoretician
1923 book – ‘History and class consciousness.
The end of any novel is the restoration of the
wholeness of life.
Modernist novels have forsaken this end.
György Lukács (1885-1971), Hungarian literary critic and political
theorist, born in Budapest, and educated at the University of
Budapest. By 1918, when he joined the Communist Party, he was
already considered a major European literary critic. He served in
the regime of Béla Kun, leader of the short-lived Hungarian
Soviet Republic. When Kun's government collapsed in 1919,
Lukács fled to Vienna, where he continued his writing. After
Hitler's rise to power, Lukács moved to the USSR and worked at
the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Science.
Lukács returned to Hungary in 1945 and became a member of
parliament. In 1956 he took part in the Hungarian revolution;
after its failure he lost his influence with the Communist Party, but
was allowed to live in retirement and continue his writing.
In Lukács's work Marxism is combined with his belief in humanism.
Among his major books are History and Class Consciousness
(1923; trans. 1971), Studies in European Realism (1948; trans.
1950), and The Destruction of Reason (1955).
Modernist Anti-Realism
Modernism has become ideological.
Ideology tends to keep reality from
being understood.
It is a kind of deception.
Other critics focus on stylistic
differences.
Try to define modernism by style
But the real difference is in ideology.
The same stylistic device can be used in
Realistic and Anti-realistic ways.
Eg. Interior Monologue: stream of consciousness,
is a narrative mode or device that depicts the
multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass
through the mind.
Ulysses – James Joyce 1918.
Lotte in Weimar – Thomas Mann 1939.
Joyce – interior monologue becomes the
“formative principle governing narrative
pattern and the presentation of character”
“technique is absolute”
Mann – “simply a technical device” “allowing
the author to explore aspects of” the
characters’ world.
Joyce’s aim is not to develop his characters
into fullness or wholesomeness.
His technique neglects character
development.
Thomas Mann – pierces into the core of his
character.
Definite direction and aim in the narrative.
Two opposed viewpoints – static and
dynamic.
2: What determines style?
How does the intention realized in the work
determine its style?
The view of the world, weltanschauung, ideology
underlying the writer’s work.
Style is rooted in content; it is the specific form of
a specific content.
Content determines style.
The content of all literature is Man.
Man is zoon politikon – a social animal.
Literature explores this social animal.
All literature is therefore social.
Examples of great realistic literature that is
also social and historical in nature:
Achilles - Homer
Werther - Goethe
Oedipus - Sophocles
Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
Antigone - Sophocles
Anna Karenina – Tolstoy
Modernism however shuns society
Man is asocial, solitary, unable to enter into
social relationships with others.
Basic solitariness of man. – Solitariness as
‘conditione humaine’.
Modernist Philosophy of Solitude
Heidegger – 1889 – 1976 – German Philosopher
Existentialist philosopher.
Existence is “throwness into being”
(Geworfenheit ins Dasein”
Impossible to determine origin and goal of
existence.
Man is ahistorical. Two implications of this in
litt:
The hero is confined to his own experience.
The hero is without personal history.
Potentiality in Literature
Consequences of this type of literature: How
potentiality is realized.
Potentiality = possibility.
Richer than real life. Imaginary possibilities are
also part of potentiality.
Out of all imaginary possibilities only a small
percentage will be realized.
Abstract and Concrete (or real) Potentiality.
Abstract potentiality cannot be realized in
actual reality.
Modernism – gives importance to abstract
potentiality.
The result is melancholy and fascination over
never to be realized possibilities.
Hoffmansthal –
The burden of these endlessly pored-over
And now forever perished possibilities…
Faulkner.
The potentialities that can become real –
these ought to be the basis of realist writing.
In litt, the revelation of a potentiality which
circumstances have kept from coming to the
fore can be dramatic. These are real or
concrete potentialities.
The literature of realism aiming at a truthful
relection of reality must demonstrate both the
concrete and abstract potentialities of
humans in extreme situations.
Ideology of Modernism
When subjectivity is exalted at the expense of
objective reality of his environment, man’s
subjectivity itself is impoverished.
Human personality must necessarily
disintegrate
Several ideologies underlie modernism in litt.
Rejection of narrative objectivity
Surrender to subjectivity
Pseudo-realization of abstract potentiality
Eliot on human personality:
Shape without form, shade without colour
Paralysed force, gesture without motion.
The negation of reality
The outside world is inexplicable.
Gottfried Benn: “there is no outer reality,
there is only human consciousness, constantly
building, modifying and rebuilding new
worlds out of its own creativity”.
Reality is ghostly for modernists.
Kafka – full of detail- but objective reality is
replaced by “angst ridden vision of the
world”. “Ghostly unreality of a nightmare
world whose function is to evoke angst”
Stream of consciousness of mad characters.
Faulkner’s ‘Sound and Fury’, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy.
(1951)
Attenuation of reality and dissolution of personality go
hand in hand – both based on lack of a consistent view
of human nature.
Eliot :
Ah, but we die to each other daily
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. And they have
changed since then.
To pretend that they and we are the same
Is a useful and convenient social convention
Which must sometimes be broken. We must also
remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
Keirkegaard – 1813-55 Danish philosopher
Objective reality and subjective reality cannot
be distinguished between
Man lives in an eternal ‘incognito’.
Echoed by post WW2
poets and writers.
This argument makes
them innocent of their
Nazi sympathy.
Why realism is necessary?
The opposition between a man and his
environment determines the development of
his personality.
Robert Musil – Austrian writer – 1880-1942
Modernist
One must either run with the pack or
become a neurotic.
The question of Psychopathology.
In Musil, psychopathology becomes the goal
of literature.
Freudian psychoanalysis is another modernist
discipline that is obsessed with
psychopathology.
Psychopathology can be avoided if one
avoids the argument that man is a solitary
being.
When man is considered as a social being,
the contradictions within individuals and
society can be understood in the context of
a dialectical unity.
People with violent passions can still be
understood as belonging to society. They
need not be cast out as ‘sick’.
