"Georg Lukacs—A Preface"

 Note: Bài này G dịch rồi, nhưng mất cùng với trang fb. Nay post lại, và đi 1 đường còm về nó.

Mr. Tin Văn rành "Bếp Lửa" lắm.

NL.

Có thể nói, tinh thần bài viết về cuốn BL của TTT, của G là từ Lukacs:

Without the revaluation of Hegel and the vision of historical process developed in "History and Class Consciousness", French existentialism is hardly conceivable. Sartre's concept of "engagement"—the commitment of art and the individual to the exigencies of political and social conflict, the realization of individual consciousness through the concrete, historical situation —derives largely from Lukacs.

Nếu không có sự đánh giá lại Hegel và tầm nhìn về quá trình lịch sử được phát triển trong "Lịch sử và Ý thức giai cấp", chủ nghĩa hiện sinh Pháp khó có thể hình dung được. Khái niệm "sự dấn thân" của Sartre — sự cam kết của nghệ thuật và cá nhân đối với những đòi hỏi của xung đột chính trị và xã hội, sự hiện thực hóa ý thức cá nhân thông qua hoàn cảnh lịch sử cụ thể — phần lớn bắt nguồn từ Lukacs.

Nói 1 cách khác, cái gọi là tiểu thuyết mới ở... Quán Chùa, Saigon, là từ Lukacs mà có!

"Georg Lukacs—A Preface"

THE CASE of Georg Lukacs offers a complex, powerful instance of the conditions of spirit in our time. His work has been performed under the stress of ideological conflict and political crisis. It is committed to that stress. Lukacs believes that the work of art and the statement of thought— where they are responsible human actions, rooted-in human need—are inseparable from the historical and political context.

Hence the polemic and deliberately occasional quality of much of his writing. Lukacs argues that there are books which are intensely necessary at a certain focus or moment in society but

which should strive to resolve the problems they engage and thus carry in them their own oblivion. To write 'for eternity' is a romantic posture. It is the more ironic that "History and Class Consciousness (1923) —a book Lukacs has repudiated, not out of political fear, but because he genuinely believes that it misinterprets fundamental notions of dialectical materialism —should endure as the most famous and subversive of his achievements.

But this ambiguity is inherent. Since his transition from Hegelian historicism to thorough Marxism in 1917-1920, Lukacs has found himself hammering out and defending a position which is both central and unorthodox. He is, after Marx, Engels and Plekhanov, the only major philosophic talent to have emerged from the crucible of Hegelian theory and communist fact. But his creative life has been conditioned by the pressure and falsehood of Stalinist rule. Lukacs has striven, with formidable courage and intellectual resource, to keep alive, during the long winter of terror and cliche, the central impulse of Marxist criticism and radical hope.

He survived by tactics of indirect reference. It is his implicit refusal to deal, other than perfunctorily, with Soviet and 'progressive' literature of the Stalinist era, and his determination to write, instead, of Goethe, Balzac, Stendhal, Heine, Pushkin, Thomas Mann, that constitute Lukacs's essential critique. So far as Soviet society has refuted Stalinist practice, and is allowing both in Russia and Eastern Europe a measure of debate and artistic experiment, Lukacs's stubborn optimism has been vindicated. The question of whether dialectical materialism and a communist organization of the means of production must degenerate, necessarily, into totalitarian rule is, at least, open.

To that vital indecision, Lukacs has contributed tremendously. Even where it is clandestine, his influence is profound. Without the revaluation of Hegel and the vision of historical process developed in "History and Class Consciousness", French existentialism is hardly conceivable. Sartre's concept of "engagement"—the commitment of art and the individual to the exigencies of political and social conflict, the realization of individual consciousness through the concrete, historical situation —derives largely from Lukacs. It is the subtle, tenacious insinuation of Lukacs's philosophic radicalism that has given the Italian communist movement something of its humane generosity and cunning to resist the dead hand of Stalinism. Wherever Marxism has engendered independent, heretical life—in Adorno's sociology of music, in the utopian poetics of Ernest Bloch, in Walter Benjamin's brilliant study of technological means and aesthetic forms, in Lucien Goldmann's analysis of the interactions of class and metaphysics in French drama— Lukacs's voice and presence have given the initial impulse. During the time of hideous provincialism and banality im- posed by Nazism on the German language and on German intellectual life, Lukacs, writing in exile, sought to define the roots of the catastrophe ("The Destruction of Reason"), and to shore up against ruin the legacy of German literature ("Gottfried Keller", 1940; "Goethe and His Time", 1947; Thomas Mann, 1949; German Realists of the XIXth Century, 1951).

Today, an awareness of Luka.cs is the touchstone of alertness in Eastern Europe.

The English or American reader will not find Lukacs's work easy of access. Its sheer mass poses difficulties, and only a handful of the thirty books and fifty essays and articles has, so far, been translated. Lukacs assumes a certain familiarity with the vocabulary and argument of German metaphysics, from Kant and Hegel to Fichte and Schopenhauer. But it is a plain, though disturbing fact that Anglo-Saxon literacy has remained generally ignorant of a body of thought from which

have sprung much of the creative complication and nightmare of present history. Moreover, Lukacs presupposes that his reader will have some notion of the classic lineage of Marxism, of the doctrines and revisions that lead from Hegel and Feuerbach to Kautsky, Mehring, Plekhanov. Lukacs's style

and strategy of persuasion are steeped in the special tone and fabric of Marxist debate. We cannot read Aquinas without some inkling of the scholastic mode, or Rousseau as if Hobbes and Locke had not written before him. Here again, however, there is a dilemma of language; many of the canonic philosophic and Marxist texts on which Lukacs founds his argument are, as yet, available only in German. Finally, there is the crucial accident-of Lukacs's own style.

He writes obscurely or with a certain close-meshed, inelegant force, because he believes that criticism and philosophic discourse should differ from "belles lettres", that the critic who seeks to make of his essay an artistic performance is merely betraying his envy of the writer. He writes in an uncompromising prose, bristling with technical qualifications and cross-reference, because he feels that the problems engaged "are" difficult, that we betray where we simplify or sacrifice to ease of presentation the gray, intricate obstinacies of the truth. Like Spinoza, moreover, Lukacs has wrought for himself a language of inner-emigration and exile. Thought he grew up- in Budapest, he wrote only two early works in Hungarian. After 1910, he adopted German, the "lingua franca" of European socialism and post-Hegelian ideology. Between 1933 and 1945, a time in which he composed much of his finest criticism, Lukacs lived as a refugee in Moscow, on the dangerous fringe of Stalinist

suspicion. Increasingly, his German assumed the habits of exile, the stiffness and inward allusion of a language cut off from the roughage of living speech. In 1945, he returned to Budapest, where he still lives, in a great cell of books high above the river. Here, also, his use of German is both a safeguard of independence and a symptom of isolation. In short, he has made of his language a citadel, and one needs patience at the gate.

But once we enter, there is God's plenty. Among critics, only Sainte-Beuve and Edmund Wilson have matched the breadth of Lukacs's response. His heritage is central European, with the literal implication of that which is at the centre, and of a central tradition. A pupil of Max Weber and Simmel,

Lukacs was steeped in the historical and philological erudition distinctive of German social theory. His roots go back to Aristotle and the Stoics; he is profoundly at home in European and Russian literature. Like Marx himself, Lukacs derives much of the tenor of his sensibility from the masters of eighteenth-century humanism, Voltaire, Diderot, Goethe. From the start, his preoccupation with the theory of the novel led him to an equal study of Cervantes and Balzac, of Dickens and Manzoni, of Thomas Mann and Tolstoy. There is in the achievement of Lukacs, as in that of Marx, a distinctively Jewish disregard of national or linguistic barriers, and a sense of history and spiritual form as transcendent energies.

From this massive, close-argued body of work, it is almost impossible to select any one strand and say 'Here is Lukacs at his best.' The local insight or contention interlocks vitally with the totality of Lukacs's own thought, and with the larger sphere of Hegelian-Marxist vision. Moreover, Lukacs has been continually revising and correcting his awn discernments. Self-criticism and self-censorship are not, primarily, the result of Stalinist terror. They represent the effort of the individual Marxist to act out, in his own life and thinking, the organic and historical process of dialectics. Contradiction moves toward synthesis, synthesis splinters into new and creative contradiction. The individual book or essay is a provisional segment—a taking stock—along the continuous path of dialectical inquiry.

Furthermore ( and this is crucial to Lukacs's indictment of Nietzsche), a writer is responsible for all potential misreadings or distortions of his text. No sentence must be allowed to stand if it could, in a changed historical setting, be used to evil or false purpose. Thus it is better to withdraw or even burn books than to let them be subverted. Nevertheless, and in disregard of the surrounding methodological and philosophic material, a number of specific critical achievements can be singled out.

Already in "The Theory of the Novel", a pre-Marxist essay which established his early fame, Lukacs sought to define the relationship between prose fiction and social reality, between the novel and time seen as concrete, historical medium. On that relationship depend essential discriminations between the three principal genres of Western literature: the epic, drama, and prose fiction [Marxism, to which we owe the analysis of the rise of the modern novel out of a mercantile ethic and against the background of a nascent urban middle-class, sharpened Lukacs's concern with the interaction of time and prose narrative. The result is one of his finest works,' The Historical Novel (1955 ) .

Lukacs shows that the form embodies a crisis in European sensibility. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic era informed the consciousness of ordinary men—whose lives had been hitherto essentially domestic or outside history—with a new sense of historical involvement. The private individual was drawn into the stress of history by the totalitarian claims of social insurrection and warfare on a popular or national rather than professional, mercenary scale. Sweeping across

Europe, the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, unlike their eighteenth-century predecessors, politicized the very fabric of [Phần còn lại của bài viết, xin coi stt kế. Do luật của fb không cho post những bài quá dài. Sau fb sẽ post trên tinvan.limo]