236
ALF~ED
KAZIN
of the present.
If,
like Lukacs, he insists that "society," the socialism
that he believes is its last and necessary stage, will carry out the
realistic traditions of Western literature, one can certainly question his
abstract argument. But though Lukacs lacks the creative wit and
ease of the great critics, he does write as a humanist with their
tradition "in his bones" ; he embodies the spiritual and intellectual
values of the literature he loves; he can make these values necessary
issues to us today.
The great value of Lukacs's book- and this despite the syco–
phancy that shows what it is like to write a book in the repressive
atmosphere of Stalin's "Socialism"-is the way in which his deep
and earnest sense of literary tradition operates in relation to realism.
Though a century now separates us from the great masterpieces of
Balzac and Tolstoy, "realism" as a literary idea is still associated
with the materialism and vulgarity of our own society. But Lukacs,
who thinks that writers like Flaubert and Zola did surrender to
capitalism (hence their aesthetic weakness of trying to reproduce
society literally), values in Balzac and Tolstoy exactly their superiority
to contemporary society, which he thinks sprang from their positive
and "older" ideals. Speaking of the great passage in the
Iliad
where,
as Lessing said, Homer describes the
making
of Achilles's weapons
and not just their appearance, Lukacs goes on to say- in a passage
that expresses better than any other in the book the creative and
liberating meaning he gives to realism-"The really great novelists
are in this respect always true-born sons of Homer. True, the world of
objects and the relationship between them has changed, has become
more intricate, less spontaneously poetic. But the art of the great
novelists manifests itself precisely in the ability to overcome the
unpoetic nature of their world, through sharing and experiencing the
life and evolution of the society they lived in. It is by sending out
their spontaneously typical heroes to fulfill their inherently necessary
destinies that the great writers have mastered with such sovereign
power the changeful texture of the external and internal, great and
little moments that make up life."
A "typical" hero to Lukacs is not a hero like others but one
who concentrates in himself all the forces of change at a particular
time; as a character he brings certain influences to the point of
action and becomes himself a determining influence. This positive
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