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From Márkus’ paraphrase of Lukács’ earliest works: in art the “many facts and elements of life can be arranged and combined into meaningful structures by means of form.” Lukács in his own words: “It is the form that prescribes speed, rhythm, fluctuation, density and liquidity, hardness and softness; that accentuates what is deemed important while removing what is deemed unimportant; that places some things at the center, others into the background, structuring each group within itself.” This is just what we mean by “form” in this grammar.

As for the other side of Lukács’ soul–form antinomy, the “soul” as expressed in art is “the process of rendering life meaningful and conscious, overcoming the vicissitudes of life situations and life contexts … Every art work entails a kind of glancing at and through life.”⁴⁹⁵ For now-anachronistic notion of “soul,” we would substitute “meaning function.”

In the case of the novel, we want to make a distinction between text as form and novel as genre. Novels are text, and almost purely so compared to information books which rely more heavily on layout and image. The layout of information texts facilitates non-linear readings, with their granular and clearly headed sectioning, tables of contents, indexing, and hypertextual referencing of external sources. They also have image–text relations in captioned pictures, diagrams, tables, mathematical notation, or maps.^§AS1.4.7c But novels are minimally multimodal, if at all. To the extent that they are, it is in their restricted capacity to reproduce the sounds and idioms of speech in direct quotation, and their attempts to describe settings in ways that are picture-like in their gratuitous detail.

Nevertheless, from their form as text, novels as a genre inherit some fundamental meaning functions. Their design is premeditated and stylized in a way that is impossible in speech, by meticulous phrasing and repeated working-over. Before word processing this was achieved by slow and repeated drafting. With the digitization of scribing, the recursive multilinearity in fabrication is intensified, if and when the author takes the care.^§AS1.4.7d

In the genre of the novel, these intrinsic affordances of text are hidden by a series of figurative tricks. The narrator is a pseudo-speaker. This is the paradox of linear reading, where the text of the novel flows smoothly past as if it were monologue, the narrator it seems merely speaking, streaming word after word, paragraph after paragraph after paragraph, chapter after unyielding chapter. Direct quotes attributed to the characters re-enact speech. But of course, these wordings on the printed page have been carefully premeditated, without necessary redundancy, without irrelevance, without miscues, without slips except the ones that have to be feigned, and without the inaudible overlapping of speakers or time-wasting pauses.

There is also vivid picturing of scenes, as if the reader might be able to see the same thing in their mind’s eye, but of course they can’t, no matter how graphic the attempt. And unlike a picture, the viewing path through the text is relentlessly linear, descriptive word by descriptive word. Readers are made to see in a way never required in an image. These are just tricks, transpositions from speech and image that either fail to retain their characteristic forms, or do so only by pretense. Such are the affordances of text-as-form, inherited by the novel.

Now, the novel as genre. Texts play through canonically as macro-genres: narrative, argument, or information. Orientation > complication > resolution, we might instruct children writing stories. The novel runs according to a macro-patterning of genre that we call narrative, whose function is to reconstruct a time- and place-delimited event.⁴⁹⁶ The novel is a sub-genre. In a further generic subdivision, there are the historical novel, romance, science fiction, the detective story, and a myriad of others. Genre is how we analyze and classify these finer variations in text-form and function.

In terms of their associations, by seriality novels might be collocated alphabetically by author in a bookstore or library. Or, less trivially, subgenres are scaled from specialized to more general: historical novel > novel. However, the most insightful of analyses address the genre of the novel in terms of its expressive causality. In its most general terms, what is the social function of the novel as a genre?

Asks Lukács at the beginning of The Theory of the Novel, “what is the task of true philosophy if it is not to draw [an] archetypical map?” That map, in the case of the novel, is a peculiarly modern one. “[T]he novel seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life” through “the problematic individual’s journeying … towards clear self-recognition.” It “irradiates the individual’s life as immanent meaning; but the conflict between what is and what should be has not been abolished.” The novel “raises an individual to the infinite heights of one who must create an entire world through his experience.”⁴⁹⁷

So, to Tolstoy in War and Peace. The personal thoughts of Andrey Bolkonsky overlay the horrors of war. The specificities of domestic life and war are generalizable as meanings of love and war – its insubstantiality, its disappointments, its rhythms, its necessities, its solidarities, its lines of visceral conflict. Subjective feelings are writ large as war impacts private lives. “Epochal characteristics” are expressed in the minutiae of speech and location.⁴⁹⁸

In the genre of the novel, the individual is expressive of the social whole, in the talismanic characters, the patterns of their actions, the things they think in their speaking, and the symptomatic micro-events (this particular conversation, this person being wounded in battle at this moment). The modernity of the novel is its transpositions between the introspective self (the narrator, the direct speech of the character) and the generalizable social, the personal standing for the existential.

Then another transposition, as the lone reader puts themselves virtually in the place of the novel’s setting. The reader commits to take on, by sympathy or resistant repugnance, the narrator’s and the characters’ mindsets. And they make a mental shift across time frames, reading in a shorter time a reported sequence of events that, if they were real, would take much longer to unfold – except for wanton genre-transgression, where to read though Leopold Bloom’s perambulating thoughts for a day in James Joyce’s Ulysses will take the reader longer than the single day the novel purports to portray.

For all its quintessentially modern, angsty, personalized emotion, for the narcissism of both narrators and characters – as if they could ever be expressive of society or history in its totality – the novel nevertheless inherits some of its most general features from earlier narrative genres. In Biblical narratives, medieval exegesis identified a four-level system of transposition, a “fourfold differentiation of senses” in the words of mid-thirteenth-century theologian Dom Jean Leclercq: “history, allegory, tropology, and anagogy.”⁴⁹⁹ These, in more contemporary terms, are four kinds of expressive causality, four transpositions of writing to reading: the literal historical narrative, of Christ’s life for instance; allegory, where parts of the Old Testament prefigure the New and these in turn prefigure a prophetic future; moral lessons, repeatable in life; and reasoning towards revelation of essential meanings.⁵⁰⁰ The novel does its own version of these old narrative maneuvers, albeit in a modern, quasi-spoken, psyche-centered, voice.

Back to War and Peace. The novel later transposes its form to film, with the gains as well as losses that accompany any such movement. Hollywood made a version with Audrey Hepburn in the 1950s, seen by large audiences in the Soviet Union. It became a point of communist pride to best it with Sergei Bondarchuk’s version of 1965–67, allegedly the most expensive film ever made. Antiques were taken from museums; costumes and weapons were meticulously reconstructed – such are the cinematic devices for transposition, faithful by trope to the historical record.⁵⁰¹

If the American version is cinematic literature of romance, the Soviet version transposes the experience of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, outside of the living memory of audiences, with Hitler’s, then still within the living memory. The extras on the cinematic battlefield really were soldiers from the Red Army, and this really was the Cold War.

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⁴⁹⁰ György Lukács, 1910 [1974], Soul and Form, translated by A. Bostock, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

⁴⁹¹ György Lukács, 1920 [1978], The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, translated by A. Bostock, London: Merlin.

⁴⁹² György Lukács, 1923 [1971], History and Class Consciousness, translated by R. Livingstone, London: Merlin Press.

⁴⁹³ György Lukács, 1937 [1983], The Historical Novel, translated by H. Mitchell and S. Mitchell, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

⁴⁹⁴ György Lukács, 1947 [2013], The Culture of People’s Democracy, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

⁴⁹⁵ György Márkus, 1977, “The Soul and Life: The Young Lukacs and the Problem of Culture,” Telos (32):95–115, p. 105.

⁴⁹⁶ Mary Macken, Mary Kalantzis, Gunther Kress, Jim Martin, Bill Cope, and Joan Rothery, 1990, A Genre-Based Approach to Teaching Writing, Years 3–6, Book 3: Writing Stories: A Teaching Unit Based on Narratives About Fairy Tales, Sydney: Directorate of Studies, N.S.W. Department of Education; Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, eds. 1993, The Powers of Literacy: Genre Approaches to Teaching Writing, London, UK: Falmer Press and Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

⁴⁹⁷ György Lukács, 1920 [1978], The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, translated by A. Bostock, London: Merlin, pp. 29, 60, 80, 83.

⁴⁹⁸ Ibid., pp. 149–50; György Lukács, 1937 [1983], The Historical Novel, translated by H. Mitchell and S. Mitchell, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 43, 285–87; György Lukács, 1947 [2013], The Culture of People’s Democracy, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, p. 118.

⁴⁹⁹ Henri de Lubac, 1959 [1998], Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, Volume 1, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, p. 73.

⁵⁰⁰ Fredric Jameson, 1971, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 29–31.

⁵⁰¹ Denise J. Youngblood, 2014, Bondarchuk’s War and Peace: Literary Classic to Soviet Cinematic Epic, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 183–187. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

György Lukács’ “Theory of the Novel” §AS1.6a