Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has newly acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, literature, and related fields.

They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These newly available items will be on the TU Library shelves for the benefit of our students and ajarns. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.

Among them is a newly acquired book that should be useful to TU students who are interested in literature, cultural politics, history, sociology, and related subjects.

The Historical Novel is by György Lukács. The TU library collection has several other books by and about György Lukács.

György Lukács was a Hungarian philosopher, literary historian, critic, and aesthetician. As a literary critic Lukács was influential for his theoretical developments of realism and of the novel as a literary genre.

The American literary historian Irving Howe noted that Lukács was praised by Thomas Mann as “the most important literary critic of today” and by Jean Paul Sartre as a significant modern philosopher.

Howe observes:

The Historical Novel was written during the worst years of the Russian terror, yet it shows few signs of conscious adaptation to Stalinist apologetics. There is the standard praise for Maxim Gorky as “the greatest writer of our time,” and an apparent readiness to take seriously such third-rate “progressive” writers as Lion Feuchtwanger; indeed, the book clearly declines in its last chapter, as Lukács, turning to contemporary novelists, finds the pressures of political obligation to be increasing. But in its bulk The Historical Novel is a work of thoughtful historical scholarship that should prove valuable even to those who oppose Marxism on principle-for the mind unable to learn from its opponents is a mind gone dead. The book is rich with those insights and nuances of perception we have come to expect from the disinterested literary critic (the analysis of Scott’s mediocre heroes, the passage on Stendhal’s relation to the Enlightenment, the sustained comparison of Scott, Manzoni and Pushkin, the polemic against psychological “modernizing” in historical fiction, the comparison between history in the novel and history in drama). Nothing, I would judge, in The Historical Novel quite matches the sheer critical brilliance of Lukács’ essays on Stendhal and Balzac in his Studies in European Realism; the price for choosing to compose a survey of the development of a genre is an inability to focus at length upon particular texts, while the reward is an admirable comprehensiveness and sweep of judgment, an exercise in theoretical inquiry such as we Americans too seldom risk. Lukács’ criticism is radically different in method and assumption from the nominalist drudgery which has been so fashionable – and often so useful – in America these past few decades; it ought to provoke us to some fruitful questions, comparisons and revisions. In reading The Historical Novel one repeatedly experiences that special thrill of pleasure which comes from encountering a first-rate literary mind. Even when it is hard to accept Lukács’ particular judgment (such as the high praise for [Sir Walter] Scottt), or ·when one is disturbed by a sudden drop into dogmatics (such as the section on French classical drama), or is annoyed by an almost willful miscomprehension of an intellectual opponent (such as the remarks about Nietzsche), one cannot forget that this man commands the resources of classical European culture, that he employs a mind of great dialectical skill, and that he has a deep love for literature in its own right. Unlike so many would-be Marxist critics, Lukács turns to literature not because it provides him with political opportunities but because he has been involved with it for a lifetime and has experienced the passion of the true scholar. His theoretical constructions are finally at the service of – they do not merely dictate-his task as a literary critic. And The Historical Novel provides evidence, if any be needed, that in the hands of a serious and gifted writer Marxism can be a powerful tool for the· investigation of what might be called the problems of pre-criticism. It can, that is, illuminate particulars of literary setting and compositional bias; it can explain the historic coloration of a writer’s outlook; it can provide us with a sense of the hidden social coordinates of a work of literature, those references and implications that help bind it together and must be grasped if the work is not to be obscure. Though Lukács is concerned with the external relations between the historical process and the development of literature, and though he stops to examine the illumination a literary work can provide upon the epoch in which it appears, these are not finally the questions that interest him most. The essential theme of his book is a problem in literary criticism: How does a historical consciousness become embodied in a work of art? Repeatedly Lukács turns to “the increasing concreteness of the novel in its grasp of the historical peculiarity of characters and events”; repeatedly to that self-reflexiveness in the dominant characters of the modern novel, which he sees as the sense of history become part of experience and. thereby transformed into a dynamic agent reflecting and acting upon the dialectical contradictions of the outer world. It is this union of consciousness and historic process which most concerns Lukács, and it concerns him primarily as a sympathetic critic trying to discover the “class timbre” of those novelists who choose moments of historical conflict as their setting and theme. The problems Lukács encounters it would be absurd to discuss in so brief an introduction. But let me at least mention two of them. Lukács begins with large historical concepts but soon turns to critical details and particulars, so that unexpectedly ‘his work can be read with profit as a contribution to the study of literary genres. And throughout the book he grapples, at times a bit surreptitously, with the problem of the relation in literature between the historically conditioned and the supra-historical, the theme that is socially and temporally defined and the theme that seems, in addition, to evoke a universal element of the human condition. Though not as free or bold as he might be on this matter- a comparison with the critical writings of Sartre and Camus is not entirely to his advantage- Lukács is genuinely troubled by the problem, for he understands that the principle of historicity should not be made into an absolute but must be set against some principle of opposition. I write these few remarks in the hope of encouraging a wide reading of The Historical Novel and a program for translating more of Lukács’ books.

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