Books like The Theory of the Novel

Lukacs penned a real headache of a book here. Written around the time of his "conversion" to Marxism, this detailed and viscid work alludes to some of the background thoughts that must have bounced around the back of Gyorgy's mind. The notion that the world is "out of joint". That art reflects man's relationship with his world. That struggle should, if not must, lead to something better, whatever that might be. Simplistically stated, Lukacs views the epic as a golden age where man, his gods, nature, and the world all lived as one in harmony. This also explains why the epic need pass as an artistic form, my apologies to the author of Parliament of Poets. Global assessments lead to peculiar statements from Lukacs to justify his codifications. For instance, he charges the ancient Greeks with only having the ability to answer, not question, due to their epic form of their life & Art. Tragedy provides the rise and necessary separation of the heroic individual from his people, community and world. According to Lukacs, this does not lead to egotism, but rather a stark loneliness that prompts the hero to wonder why all others, who are ostensibly the same as he, and possessing each of like essence, shouldn't "fall into each other's arms" in comradeship. This does not happen, thus paving man's new found plight forward from this drama of separation into the outright conflict of the novel. The novel, by Lukacs' definition, seems to be an epic of chaos(so, no longer an epic) which is bereft of its gods, bereft of its harmony, bereft of its human & world community. The road back to the epic and an epic living world seems to be the hidden goal behind Lukacs' analysis. Tolstoy is the last practitioner of the novel assessed by Lukacs meaningfully in this work, but he's dismissed as a utopian of nature. Dostoevsky is mentioned briefly as not being a novelist, but promptly dropped to end the work. He is Lukacs' herald & hope for the beginning a "new world" and a "renewed epic". Lukacs is very clear, however, that art follows reality like a mirror. This, undoubtedly, is when and where Lukacs' Marxism walks through the door....Right on cue.