Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

The historical novel, then, is, to use the term that the philosophically erudite Lukács himself repeatedly employs with full intent, an eminently critical form, a form that constructs societies as radically historicized and complexly determined totalities.

      All this is to say that the historical novel, when fully itself, represents for Lukács a triumph of realism, and the latter, not the former, is in Lukácsian terms the most salient generic category. For the defining characteristics of historical realism like Scott’s are equally to be found in the genuinely realistic novel set in a society contemporary to the novel’s production. The novel of contemporary realism understands the historicity of the present; that is, it represents contemporary society as a mutable, historical totality, the result of complex but comprehensible social developments and one that has by no means arrived at any sort of finality or stasis. Despite the extreme closeness of contemporary society, a realistic representation does not cast it as “natural” or unproblematically given, but as part and parcel of the historical flux. Of course, there are obviously all sorts of minor differences between novels set in the past and those set in the present, but not what Lukács would define as an essential difference, or what we might designate a radically generic difference. Thus it is that Lukács considers Balzac to be the most legitimate immediate heir to Scott (a relationship, indeed, of which the French novelist was quite consciously aware). Thus it is—to choose perhaps the most prominent single example—that Tolstoy practices fundamentally the same kind of art in Anna Karenina (1878) as in War and Peace (1866).

      There is, however, a radical break in the history of the novel as construed by Lukács. It comes not between historical and contemporary realism, but between realism itself and what might be termed the postrealist novel that emerges out of what Lukács sees as the disintegration of realism into naturalism (and later, into impressionism and modernism). The crucial loss here—closely connected, in Lukács’s reading, to the increasingly reactionary role assumed by the European bourgeoisie after the failed revolutions of 1848, and the concomitant abandoning of the progressive, democratic elements within bourgeois ideology—is the occlusion of the vital critical perspective of totality. Instead of portraying society as an interconnected whole in which objective and subjective elements are dialectically bound together—thus making possible the “typical” characters of realism; that is, psychologically individuated characters who also incarnate objective trends of sociohistorical development²²