Narration vs. Description in Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness

Imerrcxts. \ol. 6, No. 2,2002 Narration vs. Description in Georg Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness John Pizer L O U I S I A N A S T A T E U N I V E R S I T Y GeorgLukacs’sessaycollectionPvoblcmcdesRcnlismus{Vroh\cn\sofReal¬ ism, 1955) includes aprovocative piece entitled “Erzahlen oder Beschreiben ?” (“Narrate or Describe?” 1936). Though Lukacs’s question implies that the writer of prose fiction may choose between these two categones dominant structural modes, he makes it clear from the outset of the essay thatgood(realistic)writingisgovernedbynarration,whilebad(naturalis¬ tic)writingismarkedbydescription.AlthoughLukacsrecognizesthateven realists must describe and naturalists must narrate, he defines “narranon in w’hich w'eaves a a s this essay as akinetic stylistic approach to imaginative prose plot’sdiscreteelementsintoadynamictotalityandallow'Sthereaderto experience(“mitleben”)theaction.Bycontrast,“description”focuseson minutedetailattheexpenseoftemporalmovement,creatingstatictexts markedbydissolution,fragmentation,andennui,whichturnbothnarrator andreaderintomereobservers(“Zuschauer”).While,forexample,oas NanaandTolstoy’sAnnaKareninabothdepicthorseraces,themcein Nana, despite its vivid, virtuosic description of horses, riders, audience,isnotconvincinglyboundupw'iththenovelasawhole,antus turnstheseelementsintolifelessobjects,things.Byfocusingontheuman conflicts central to Anna Karenina^ the novel’s race scene is dynamic tension and successfully integrated into the work as aw Zola presents us w'ith amere dead image, Tolstoy’s race - ^ genuine living moment, and experienced as such by the rea er. other naturalists-for whom he neveraesthetic reception of realists arc tvell imbued by 'hole. Wliile i s m o v e m e n t . a c t i o n , a Lukacs’s hostility to Zola and to theless felt political sympathy—and his positive such as Tolstoy and Balzac—who aroused his political antipath)^. ^ established.2 The outdated, indeed antediluvian character of Lukacs s attempttoportraynarrationanddescriptionasantitheticalcategoriesanto establishtheformerasaestheticallysuperiortothelatterhasbeendemon¬ strated by Laurent Stern. Less recognized in the analysis of Lukacs saesthet¬ icsistheremarkableconsistencyw'ithwhichheusedthefundamentalfea¬ turesofthenarration/descriptiondichotomyinhisliterarycriticism.Tobe sure,thetermsusedinexpressingtheseantinomiesvary;othermanifesta¬ tionsincludestasisvs.progress,atomizationvs.inclusiveness,contemplation vs. action, even life vs. living. Nevertheless, only rarely does one come across the recognition that these essentially parallel sets of binary oppositions are Lukacs’s primary vehicle for distinguishing benveen w'hat he felt was good I N T E R T E X T S 1 4 6 and bad literature, which is to say between realism and everything else. Fredric Jameson is one of the few Lukacs scholars who have recognized t!ie centrality of the opposition between narration and description in Lukdes’s discussion of prose fiction. He notes that “the principal characteristic of lit¬ erary realism is seen [by Lukacs] to be its antisymbolic quality; realism itself comes to be distinguished by its movement, its storytelling and dramatiza¬ tion of its content; comes, following the title of one of Lukacs’ finest essays, to be characterized by narration rather than description” {196). Jameson’s use of the contrast between narration and description to implicidy subsume all the other antipodes through which Lukacs territorial¬ izes realism as the exclusive domain for creating estimable prose literature is appropriate because these categories alone define such praxis in aesthetic o v e r terms. Lukacs’s preference for conservative realists (Balzac, Tolstoy) leftist naturalists (Zola, Hauptmann) is obviously aesthetic ratlier than polit¬ ical in nature, though his preference is grounded in abelief that realist authors—often in spite of their own intentions—are alone capable of microcosmically mirroring an epoch’s genuine sociopolitical landscape. What prior writing on Lukacs has failed to establish, however, and what this paper will attempt to demonstrate, is that Lukacs’s most consistent aesthetic dichoto¬ my is atacit but seminal structural element, akey dialectical tool, in his most well-known nonaesthetic work. History arid Class Consciousness (1923). We will see that the lifeless, stadc resonance of the objects frozen into the images of naturalistic description pilloried by Lukacs in Describe?” is delineated in terms quite similar to those used in analyzing effects of capitalist reification in History and Class Consciousness. Iwill also argue that Lukacs’s articulation of the vibrant, organic totality experienced by the reader of great realist novels and associated with narration in the 1936 essay is prefigured by his delineation of the dynamic, evolving coming to consciousness of the proletariat in the sociohistorical essays first published collectively in 1923. In other words, Lukacs’s critique of reification in Histo¬ ry and...