Realism in The Balance - Realism and Great Literature

Realism and Great Literature

Lukács believed that those authors willing to try and capture this social totality produced better works, both in aesthetics and in revolutionary potential, than the writers of the Modernist schools. Cleverly paralleling the dialectical developments of larger society, Lukács writes that the "monotony" of Modernist works proceeds inexorably from the decision to abandon any attempt to mirror objective reality ... this approach permits no creative composition, no rise and fall, no growth from within to emerge from the true nature of the subject-matter.

In particular, Lukács expresses his support for the German author Thomas Mann. Citing the title character of Mann's work Tonio Kröger, Lukács writes that:

when Thomas Mann refers to Tonio Kröger as a ‘bourgeois who has lost his way’, he does not rest content with that: he shows how and why he is still a bourgeois, for all his hostility to the bourgeoisie, his homelessness within bourgeois society, and his exclusion from the life of the bourgeois. Because he does all this, Mann towers as a creative artist and in his grasp of the nature of society. (1039-1040)

But Lukács did not only prize the work of leftists. He felt that any author, regardless of political affiliation, would be better served by displaying the "real" nature of social totality. This explains Lukács' support of the works of Balzac, who, as a royalist, was diametrically opposed to Lukács' Leninist beliefs.