The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukács, Marxism and the Dialectics of Form (review)

178 the minnesota review social interaction, are transformed into erotic play. The world will be rescued from its global crisis when the working class finds the "strength and joy" to demand that their jobs become inherently pleasurable. Mankind faces a brilliant future, if it is willing to regress to the "polymorphous perversity" of its primordial past. Since he dwells in a privileged present, the philosopher can identify the beginning and end of historical time; by keeping these temporal boundaries firmly in view, he can serenely contemplate history's "total configuration." RICHARD JOHNSON The Philosophy ofthe Novel: Lukács, Marxism and the Dialectics ofForm by J.M. Bernstein . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 296 pp. $14.95 (paper); $35 (cloth). Bernstein's purpose is to reclaim the problematic of Luka'cs' The Theory of the Novel (1915) for a marxist theory of the novel. To do so he must show that what is sound in it makes sense only in terms of Lukacs' later marxism, while its limitations derive from a Kantianism Luka'cs had not yet shed when he wrote it. Situating TN in such a perspective accounts for why Bernstein begins with a discussion of History and Class Consciousness (1923), for it is in the later work that Lukacs developed his great critique of Kantian philosophy as the ideology corresponding to the reifications of capitalism. It is thus possible to see Lukacs' dissection of the antinomies of bourgeois thought as an effort to complete his own intellectual development by putting an end to his own early neo-Kantianism. TN might then be situated between the early pessimistic neo-Kantianism of Soul and Form (1910) and the Hegelian marxism of HCC. The project of recovering all that is vital in TN thus becomes one of purging the former while nudging the latter further along the road to marxism. All the early errors become signs of how weU Lukács was able to imitate and embody the bourgeois mind which his marxism then diagnoses and transcends. What is required for this interpretation is one magical concept—history. The early Luka'cs illustrates its effects without knowing it; the later Lukacs provides this critical self-consciousness. Thus the pessimism and individualism ofSFbecomes a sign not of a metaphysical truth but of a historical one. Lukacs becomes both the definitive representative of "existentialism" and the one who saw through it. If Bernstein is adept at this strategy it is because he had a good teacher—Lukacs, who never ceases to use it. But there is another side to this story which Bernstein brings out in spite of himself. In fact, the most important achievement of the book, though an unintended one, may be the demonstration of how deeply imbued Lukacs' categories and conceptual strategies are with a neo-Kantian dependence on abstract antinomies from which Lukács never extricates himself. Luka'cs' problem is that he is insufficiently dialectical, while Bernstein's is that his own neo-Kantianism makes it impossible for him to see this. Bernstein's summary of HCC in his opening chapter outlines Lukacs' major contribution to the concept of ideology—the discovery that the antinomies of bourgeois thought have an uncanny correspondence to the reifications of capitalist society. Unfortunately, Bernstein can't pursue this question concretely because his account of HCC is marred by an uncritical acceptance of what has come to be seen as its major defect, Luka'cs' invocation of the standpoint of the proletariat, the "identical subject-object of history," as the deus ex machina that necessarily has both a correct (non-ideological) consciousness and a destiny that coincides with the word History in capital letters. This theoretical move partakes of the worst forms of speculative idealism, expressive causality, and class-reductionism. (Adorno, Althusser, and Gramsci, among others, might be called in as marxist testimony against it.) The trouble with Lukacs' production is not simply that it didn't materialize historically, but that it is seriously marred conceptually. But Bernstein endorses Luka'cs' faith uncritically . Throughout the book he will use history as the blank check to explain everything. Bernstein attempts an overview of TNin chapter 2 that will save Lukacs from himself—or from...