LUKACS
237
conception of realism as necessarily in conflict with the acceptance
of capitalism as "reality," this conception of the hero as one who
brings to dramatic focus the social forces that are embodied in
himself and thus opposes them, explains why Lukacs's book has
meaning for those who, like himself, think of the novel as carrying
on the epic and dramatic tradition of Western literature. Lukacs is
always critical of naturalism, for he feels that with the eclipse of
revolutionary faith among intellectuals after 1848, pessimism- and
resignation became the order of the day and deprived even the most
gifted writers of the necessary weapons against society. For Lukacs
it is the dynamic opposition of the human spirit to a given social
order, as shown by the gigantic figures of Balzac, who despise a
society they feel to be unworthy of their creative power, that makes
"true" realism so bracing and exciting. And although, as a good
Communist, he evades the vital point in
this
book and in his writings
on contemporary writers/' it is obvious that Lukacs's admiration for
"true" realism, by which he means the example of Balzac, is not
likely to extend to the "positive" hero of "Socialist" realism. In Soviet
literature, not only is "realism" prescribed for all writers as
if
it
were
an offense against one's neighbors to write in any other literary
spirit, but the "positive" hero is usually a cipher, a slogan in human
form, and is valued as "typical" only in the sense that he is average.
For Lukacs the "typical" means the concentration of all the forces
already moving to social change; for Soviet literature, it means the
common. The essence of Lukacs's admiration for realism is that it
produced the heroes of Balzac and Tolstoy-men who are exceptional
not because they are isolated, like the heroes of romantic literature,
but because
all
that is seething in the social conflicts of their time
has come to dramatic consciousness. To Lukacs, indeed, the heroes
of Balzac and Tolstoy are made heroic through their more resolute
and heroic consciousness; they are heroes in the grand authoritative
style of the nineteenth century. Like Balzac and Tolstoy, and of course
like Marx above all, these heroes make themselves forces equal to
the force of the society they resist and seek to transform. For Lukacs,
the hero of a literary work must in some sense be equal to the
achievement of a new society; the individual, though in his social
4. See
The Meanmi 01 Contlmporary Realism
(London, 1962) .
