Hope or Memory in the Irony of the Romantic Disillusionment: Lukác’s “Theory of the Novel”

The Theory of the Novel is an early work by György Lukács, a work that Lukács actually repudiates later in his career. Today I was reading the chapter entitled “The Romanticism of Disillusionment”, which is the second novel form he theorizes after the “abstract idealist” novel that he seems to identify with Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

In the quotation below, Lukács has moved from his account of the problems with the romantic novel — he esteems Flaubert’s Sentimental Education as the best work of this period, but it seems also to be mostly an exception — to its promise, and that seems to be located in the function of hope and memory in relation to the alienation characterizing the episodes occurring in the narrative.

“Everything that happens may be meaningless, fragmentary and sad, but it is always irradiated by hope or memory.”

Lukács repeatedly says that irony characterizes the novel (tout suite!), namely a certain alienation or opposition between the subject and the world. This statement had led me to take irony as more of serious object of reflection. Of course, I wouldn’t be much of a historian of philosophy if I hadn’t encountered irony, the most famous of which is typically identified with Socrates (and Kierkegaard), but I’d permitted my research interests to eclipse these questions … well or ill, who can say?

This book was borrowed from the Free Library of Philadelphia.