At the Grave of the Gentile Constitution: Walter Scott, Georg Lukacs and Romanticism.("From Romanticism to Bolshevism")(Critical essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-SEP-05

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2005 Boston University

IN HIS BOOK, GEORG LUKACS: FROM ROMANTICISM TO BOLSHEVISM, (1) MICHAEL Lowy charts Lukacs development from the anti-capitalist Romanticism of The Theory of the Novel, through his conversion to Bolshevism in 1917, to his Hegelian reconciliation with Stalinist reality in the course of the 1920s. This paper, however, challenges the view that Lukacs ever completely left behind his "Romanticism" and suggests that in the case of Walter Scott Lukacs may have even "out-romanticized" his subject. This is especially evident in his comments on Waverley in The Historical Novel, in which he appears to idealize the Scottish clans to an extent that Scott does not. Scott's depiction of the clans is heavily influenced by a robust materialism that follows that of the Scottish philosophical historians such as Adam Ferguson and William Robertson, and, indeed, it is this materialism that Scott's Marxist critic picks up on. What Lukacs fails to pick up on is the extent of" Scott's materialism and the fact that Scott's sense of historical determinism and his satisfaction with British historical progress--at least at the time of this early novel (2)--prevent him demonstrating as much sympathy with the clansmen as Lukacs. Lukacs draws on earlier Marxist thought, especially that of Engels, when he refers to what is lost in the collapse of the "gentile" social order. Further, I will argue that Lukacs's apparent idealization of the clans has less to do with a detailed analysis of Scott's novel than it has with his own dissatisfaction in the late 1930s with the state of democracy. The Historical Novel should be read as a political manifesto and not simply as (what Lukacs himself calls) a preliminary essay in Marxist aesthetics.

For Lukacs, Waverley is the prime example of the art of the historical novelist. Scott's achievement, in his view, is not the retelling of the political and military events of 1745 Britain, but the recreation of a political movement (the Jacobites) and, in particular, the reactionary elements of Scottish clan society that supported Charles Edward Stuart's unsuccessful rebellion. According to Lukacs, Scott uses the naive, English hero's experience with a Scottish clan to build up a picture of the people supporting the coming rebellion. When Waverley first encounters them, Lukacs observes, they are "unintelligible" but by the time they go to war "both he and the reader are already familiar with the peculiar being and consciousness of these people still living in a gentile order." (3) One of the points highlighted here is the "diversitarian" view that each people has a "being and consciousness" that is peculiar to itself, reflecting Lukacs's earlier suggestion (22) that Scott's novels were fictional expressions of a "historicism" that had already been given theoretical formulation by Herder. (4) Lukacs' point about consciousness appears to be borne out by Scott's comment about contemporary Scots being "a class of beings as different from their grandfathers as the existing English are from those of Queen Elizabeth's time." (5)

Not only are the Highlanders "unintelligible," but according to Lukacs they are representative of people living in a "gentile" order, a society that corresponds to one of the intermediate stages of development in the Scottish Enlightenment's "four stages theory." (6) Lukacs' use of the term "gentile" may be unfamiliar to some non-Marxist critics, (7) as it has its origin in Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. The term is derived from the Latin gens (nation or clan) and in Engels was "used specifically to denote the form of kinship organization which prides itself on its common descent." (8) Lukacs had Engels' work in mind, writing, for instance, that "what in Morgan, Marx and Engels was worked out and proved with theoretical and historical clarity, lives, moves and has its being poetically in the best historical novels of Scott" (56). For Engels, gentile society was a tribal, pre-capitalist and, indeed, pre-feudal stage, through which all nations pass in Hegelian fashion. Such was the gentile society convincingly depicted, in Lukacs' view, by "classical" historical novelists such as Scott in Waverley, Rob Roy and A Legend of Montrose, James Fenimore Cooper in The Leatherstocking Tales (1823-41) and Gogol in Taros Bulba (1842).

When Lukacs talks about gentile society he does not describe a quasi-feudalistic order, but a more primitive one that predates feudalism--an order more typical of the pastoral stage in the Enlightenment's four stages theory than of the agricultural stage characteristic of feudalism. In The Historical Novel, he reproduces a strand in Marxist thought that represents the gens as a democratic order that is typically superseded first by feudalism and then by capitalism. Engels outlines his view of this process in a chapter of The Origin of the Family ("Barbarism and Civilization") which charts the transformation of "primitive natural democracy ... into a malign aristocracy." (9) He identifies aspects of gentile society that could be described as democratic and even quasi-communistic, and quotes Lewis Henry Morgan's view that "Liberty, equality, and fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal principles of the gens." (10) Engels refers to the "council" of the Iroquois gens, which he sees as "the democratic assembly of all male and female adult gentiles, all with equal votes" (151). References to "primitive communism" and classlessness seem surprising, but this is part of the notion, taken from Morgan--and from Rousseau before him--that members of the gentile order would have held land in common and that there would therefore have been little or no class differentiation. (11)

Lukacs sees a recognition of the "contradictory character of progress" on the part of the representatives of the "classical historical novel" in the fact that their works, without glorifying the past, "clearly mourn the passing of many moments in the past," including "the many primitive democratic institutions, and the human qualities associated with them, which the march of progress has pitilessly destroyed" (346; my emphasis). In his Ontology, he refers to Engels' discussion of the dissolution of"primitive communism," a development that Engels saw primarily as necessary and progressive, but which also demonstrated the appearance of a degradation, a fall from the simple moral greatness...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.