In Lukács’ essay (“Realism in the Balance”) and Brecht’s direct response, (“Against Georg Lukács”) emerge a debate about the nature of popularity in art that is itself a vehicle for revolutionary change. This paper examines Lukács’ notion of the “great social mission of literature” in relation to Brecht’s “aggressive concept of what is popular.” This debate amounts to more than a quarrel about tactics. Indeed, framed within the context of Lukács’ theory of literature and Brecht’s less systematic theories as a playwright and dramaturge, this popularity debate has implications about the nature and limits of art itself. We shall determine the issues on which these two thinkers most greatly diverge, on which they most closely agree and where they ultimately rest.
The ways in which both Lukács and Brecht define the limits of accessibility points to their
broader agendas. It isn’t merely that Brecht is willing to give the masses more credit while Lukács uses their simplemindedness to buffer his reactionary argument against Expressionism. Indeed, Lukács’ definition of the popular in entrenched is his theory of the supremacy of the realist novel. Brecht’s own views are part and parcel a reflection of his own agenda as a man of the theater first, and a Marxist second.
Writing in a broader context of revealing proto-fascism latent in Expressionism, Lukács distinguished between popular art and “genuinely popular culture” The art he sees as “genuine popular culture,” has an explicit link to the program of the Popular Front (p. 57). Genuine is used to distinguish revolutionary works from the merely popular consumables represented by the Krimi. The reason Lukács provides for drawing this distinction has to do with the current difficulty of defining the popular. According to Lukács, capitalism has introduced a feeling of political and economic uncertainty into the world and confused people’s moral and artistic judgments. The exact transformation is not really spelled out. In addition to the Krimi, he excludes contemporary fads in art from being genuinely popular. Rather, the only art that can become genuinely popular are works that live up to what he calls the “great social mission of literature.”
This mission forms the crux of his argument and follows from his general views on literature and ties into the simplistic binary he draws between Realism and Modernism. Only works that participate in Realism and Cultural Heritage can realize this mission. Thomas Mann is cited as an example of a genuinely popular author, an author whose tone and content…grow out of the life and history of [his] people.” Mann and authors like him “are an organic product of the development of their nation. That is why it is possible for them to create art of the highest quality while at the same time striking a chord which can and does provoke a response in the broad masses of the people” (p. 54).
Realism is seen first as a tool at keeping German literature alive. “Popular, realistic” literature of the past will need to come back into fashion in order for German literature to once again be relevant. He contrasts the broad sweep of the realist masters with the “one dimensionality” of the avant-gardists, and offers a none-too-concrete analysis of how realist literature points the way for the Popular Front.
A living form of humanism prepares [the masses] to endorse the political slogans of the Popular Front and to comprehend its political humanism. Through the mediation of realist literature the soul of the masses is made receptive for an understanding of the great, progressive and democratic epochs of human history. This will prepare it for the new type of revolutionary democracy that is represented by the Popular Front. (p. 56 -7)
In contrast to the “infinite multitude of doors through which entry in possible,” Lukács calls the avant-garde a “narrow doorway” though which only a privileged few can pass. “The broad mass of the people can learn nothing from avant-garde literature (p. 57).” As such, no matter how much it revolutionizes artistic form, it remains “devoid of reality and life” can never be truly revolutionary and hence, never genuinely popular. The “ordinary people who try to translate these atmospheric echoes of reality back into the language of their own experience” are left wanting.
Much of Lukács’ hostility to the avant-garde seems directed at what he interprets as elitism, since their work requires significant glossing. The genuinely popular, genuinely realistic novel that takes part in this “great social mission” requires no glossing. Art should reflect and make manifest the “correct dialectical unity of appearance and essence” (p. 33). “What matters is that the slice of life shaped and depicted by the artist and re-experienced by the reader should reveal the relations between appearance and essence without the need for any external commentary” (p. 33 – 34). The external commentary he refers to is the alienating or formalistic techniques of the avant-garde that will mask the manifest content. He is arguing for a popular literature with no latent content whatsoever, a completely transparent literature that can play a didactic and inspiring role in the development of world history. As such, “a trenchant analysis of the decadent manifestations of this period – political, cultural and artistic – is an essential prerequisite for any breakthrough to a genuinely popular culture” (p. 58). The word “breakthrough” as used in this context is crucial since it reminds us of Lukács’ overarching mission of creating a popular culture commensurate with party politics.
“Popularity is unpopular,” writes Brecht, thereby showing his ambivalence to the notion of popular art. Yet, after this initial and not-humorless caveat, he commits himself to a rather strict definition. We have seen a similarly ambivalent attitude in Lukács, when he speaks of the difficulties defining popular culture in late capitalist society. Yet Brecht is subtler in his assessment, since he acknowledges that the definition he uses is itself conditioned by the historical reality of his time. “Our concept of the popular refers to a people who not only play a full part in historical development but actively usurp it, force its pace, determine its direction…we have in mind a fighting people and therefore an aggressive concept of what is popular” (p. 80). Brecht furnishes us with a systematic definition: yet it is difficult to conceive of any work of art ever living up to the attributes he enumerates (see p.81).
Like Lukács, Brecht sees the need to meet the masses, to “speak their language.” “There is only one ally against growing barbarism – the people, who suffer so greatly from it. It is only from them that one can expect anything. Therefore it is obvious that one must turn to the people, and now more necessary than ever to speak their language” (p. 80). This formulation of a popular aesthetic actually implies a more participatory model (than does the Lukáscian formulation) while sharing Lukács concern for accessibility. (This comment seems both appropriate and reasonable in a way that an earlier admission about “stepping back into the masses” does not.)
Several important implications follow as well as a defense of experimental artistic techniques. “With the people struggling and changing reality before our eyes, we must not cling to ‘tried’ rules of narrative, venerable literary models, eternal aesthetic laws” (p. 81). Here, Brecht opposes the rigidity present in much of Lukács’ discussion; in doing so, he also shows his belief in new manifestations of the popular. For if representing reality in the Weimar Era means something very different from what it meant in the time of Balzac, the standards by which a work will be judged popular likewise change. He continues: “Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change” (p. 82). Thus, we see Brecht espousing and advocating a progressive view of the popular, one that is connected (still rather abstractly, it must be admitted) to the changing nature of reality and its modes of representation. The simple mimesis that might have proved adequate for previous generations is found to be lacking. Brecht asserts that recycling old styles and strategies would result not only in failure, but incoherence; “Were we to copy the style of these realists, we would no longer be realists” (p. 82).
Brecht gives the masses more credit than does Lukács. After citing successful usages of heightened stage techniques, Brecht boldly pronounces: “The people understand this” (p. 83).
Whereas Lukács asserts that the masses need the mirror held up to nature, Brecht writes:
“One can arouse a sense of outrage at inhuman conditions by many methods – by direct description (emotional or objective), by narrative and parable, by jokes, by over-and under-emphasis.” The modernist aesthetic does have something to offer the masses. It can speak their language. At the same time, Brecht admits that objective criteria for both popular art and for realism ought not to be considered as fixed variables; the distinction he draws at the very end between “being popular” and “becoming popular” is a direct response to Lukács’ reified notions of “genuine” popularity.
The revolutionary project of Brecht’s theater, which tries to make an audience think critically about what’s happening onstage, aims at similar goals as Lukács’ theory of popularity. The abyss that opens between their two views can be seen vividly in the ways they label their projects. The term “great social mission of literature” allies Lukács with an established realist cannon. Contrast this to Brecht’s “aggressive” notion of the popular. Where Lukács calls for order, classicism and a gradual coming to consciousness of historical determinism and the mechanisms of the capitalist apparatus, Brecht advocates revolutionizing the means of representation to match a changed reality.
Bibliography:
Jameson, Fredric, ed Aesthetics & Politics. London: Verso, 1977.
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