Lukács and Auerbach: Apocalypse, Rebirth and Universality of Everyday Life

Abstract

The novel is “the epic of an age [...] in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality”. Thus, according to Lukács in his early work Theory of the Novel (1916). In the novel, the perfectly closed universe of the ancient epos has given way to a fragmented and chaotic reality, a symptom of the split that has occurred between the individual and the world.
The same multiform and stratified universe is also the modernist novel’s background as well as Auerbach outlined it in the last chapter of Mimesis (1946). Here he observes that early XIX century’s writers, in the absence of standards to get the reality in order, started to pay attention to everyday life’s small events, true bearers of meaning, which now occupy in the fiction the place early reserved to the great doom’s changings.
However, on the background of a setting designed like that, in which the dissolution of the fictional form coincides with the “sunset of our world”, in Lukács as in Auerbach, emerges a dim glow of hope, of a humanity’s palingenesis, which will restore the lost ‘totality’ of the ancient ages.
Lukács notices the signs in Dostoevsky’s work, who continues and completes the line traced by Tolstoj, which had represented in his work “a community of feeling among simple human beings closely bound to nature”. Auerbach identifies a new universality into the almost sacral attention that writers have payed to the small acts of everyday life, minimum details of ordinary lives that become expression of a primal equality among men.
The return to a poetry of things, which tells about an immediate and spontaneous relationship with nature and gives the idea of an intimate fellowship among all human beings, is for the two intellectuals an ethical instance, even before being literary.