Freedom from tragedy: remarks on the early Lukács

ABSTRACT

This essay explores some of the ways in which, between 1907 and 1911, the young Lukács articulated a conception of life as that which could not be formed or transformed under the fallen and inauthentic conditions of a modernity profoundly if contradictorily shaped by capitalism. This baleful social ontology made it so any self that could serve as the pivot for true change was beset by dissonance and fragmentation. In what his diary entries and letters reveal to be a profoundly personal and gendered conception of life’s impasses, the transformability of everyday life appeared as the nemesis of the formability of true life. At the heart of this vision of a blocked or formless transformation and of a waning selfhood, we encounter Lukács’s effort to think the historical, ethical and metaphysical prerequisites for modern drama, and whether that drama can indeed take the form of a modern tragedy. The essay’s conclusion touches on the young Lukács’s fleeting effort to look not in tragedy but in non-tragic drama for the possibility of a self-transformative life.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• life
• György Lukács
• non-tragic drama
• tragedy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Andrew Arato, commenting on Lukács’s 1909 essay on the Hungarian poet Endre Ady, notes that like Ady, ‘the young Lukacs was already a revolutionary but, in 1909, a revolutionary in a country with no revolutionary movement’ (Arato 1971, 129). On the significance of Ady to the young Lukács, see also Kadarkay 1980, 247–8; Miller 2022, 45–7.

2 For a compelling and sophisticated exploration of Lukács’s conception of tragic form which homes in on his 1909 dissertation The Developmental History of Modern Drama, see Wetters 2023. Arato comments on the presence of a Marxist sociology of class in Lukács’s pre-Marxist writings on dramatic forms in Arato 1971. For a corrective argument that Lukács’s sociology of dramatic forms in 1909 is underwritten by Lebensphilosophie and ultimately hostile to historical materialism, see Kavoulakos 2015.

3 Heller summarises the lovers’ tragic dissymmetry as follows: ‘Irma Seidler could not integrate her love with her art, and that is why she formed her own tragedy through death. Georg Lukacs integrated his love into his work, and this was his tragedy’ (105).

4 Commenting on the heroine of Ernst’s play Ninon de Lenclos, Lukács had written: ‘As a result of the struggle for freedom which she has fought against herself, she has become strong enough to be able to breathe the air of tragedy, to live within the periphery of tragedy. But, like all human beings of her particular kind, she lacks the final consecration of life. She is the highest of an inferior species: this is the verdict which the dramatic form passes upon the value of her life. She wanted to attain the highest for herself, and has attained it – the highest, which is freedom, but her freedom is simply liberation from all bonds, not, in the last analysis, a freedom organically born out of her innermost self, identical with the highest necessity – not the completion of her life. Her freedom is the freedom of harlots’ (Lukács 2010, 197–8). Misogyny has rarely been given such a Hegelian cast! Yet while the case of Ninon de Lenclos is definitive, for Lukács the jury seems to be out on the possibility of (modern) tragic woman: ‘Such self-liberation of a woman is not the fulfillment of her essential necessity as is the real self-liberation of a tragic man, and the conclusion of the play raises a question which Ernst the theoretician had foreseen long before: can woman be tragic in herself and not in relation to the man in her life? Can freedom become a real value in a woman’s life?’ (198).

5 As Heller’s translator, Etti de Laczay, notes: ‘In the Hungarian folk ballad Kömives Kelemenné (The Mason Kelemen's Wife) a mason's wife is immured to guarantee the strength of the fortress’ (Heller 1979, 103). As Furio Jesi has shown, this myth of female sacrifice is also at the heart of Mircea Eliade’s ‘religion of death’ (Jesi 2011).

6 While I cannot explore it here, the problem of imprinting form (whether as Form or Gestalt) on a refractory life will be crucial for the metaphysics of conservative revolution, especially in the writings of Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger.

7 It is intriguing to note that Lukács credits a teenage encounter with Max Nordau’s Degeneration and its panorama of decadent literature for his wish to become a writer (Lukács 1983, 30).

8 Fable is a genre that the Martinican dramaturg and theorist Edouard Glissant will also juxtapose to tragedy in the context of trying to think a modern Caribbean drama half a century later.

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Notes on contributors

Alberto Toscano

Alberto Toscano teaches at the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (2023) and Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum (2023).