István Csicsery-Rónay, Jr. — The Classical Historical Novel and the Mythology of liberal Nationalism: Scott, Manzoni, Eötvös, Kemény, Tolstoy.

The Problem of the Historical Novel

The historical novel has been singularly out of favor with critical readers in Western Europe and the U.S. for most of this century. Yet, in the Nineteenth Century, few literary forms could vie with it for popularity. Among writers, it was universally influential. More than any other form of the novel, it influenced the political and cultural life of European society and carried the characteristically modern sense of history into the salons of the European bourgeoisie. What is the explanation for this dramatic change in literary taste?

In one respect, the realistic historical novel has suffered the same fate as historiography itself. In their heyday, history and historical fiction together extended the concerns of the European imagination by establishing paradigms for exploring the relationship between indi- viduals and the course of world events. But the promise of history to make the rapid and profound changes of the Industrial Revolution intelligible to the bourgeois public could not be kept. The rapidity of social change produced a corresponding rapidity of change in historical thinking itself, and the unintelligibility of events was compounded by the mass of conflicting historical interpretations. Already in the 1860s, Nietzsche complained of the “sleeplessness” of a European society debilitated by its obsession with its own past (Nietzsche 7).

Coming after a century of confident historicism, the shock of the First World War and its consequences seemed to contemporaries to have come out of the blue, flatly contradicting the lessons that established humanist historians had been teaching. Valéry expressed the age: “History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect … History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything … Nothing was more completely ruined by the last war than the pretension to foresight. But it was not from any lack of knowledge of history, surely?” (Paul Valéry, qtd. in Hayden White, “The Burden of History” 120).

In recent decades, faith in the self-evident order and value of history has given way to critical analysis of historiography, and antidramatic, structural approaches to social life in anthropology and sociology. In literary studies, especially in Western Europe and the U.S., where the mainstream of criticism in this century has been formalistic and epistemological, the historical novel has been treated as an anachronism even its own time. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more thankless task for formalistic criticism than to study a genre, the most distinctive trait of which is thought to be the almost empiricistic recreation of a particular historical milieu.

A similar reticence can also be found among historically-minded critics. Fredric Jameson, a distinguished Marxist critic who has con- strained his important observations on the genre to occasional comments, has written several epitaphs on the historical novel. Basing his arguments on Lukács’s early Theory of the Novel, Jameson claims that, while true novels have no formal laws, “those subvarieties of the novel which do have laws — for instance … the detective story or the historical novel — are evolutionary oddities and dead-end streets rather than illustrations of any general tendency” (Prison House 73). Leaving aside other problems with this formulation, Jameson’s view reflects a widespread opinion that the historical novel was too programmatic and conventional to develop into a major form of the novel. Elsewhere, however, Jameson writes that in the historical novel, “if anywhere, the primacy of the logic of the raw material over the form is absolute, and the process through which the contradictions of the historical object are transformed into the contradictions of form can be observed openly, as in a laboratory experiment” (Marxism and Form 348). The fatal regularity of the historical novel is the product of its adherence to external, causal reality, an adherence that can only rest in the repression of the form-giving imagination of art: “if everything in the historical moment coheres, then ultimately the historical novel itself must dissolve as a form, for in the gradual straining for the concrete totality it bursts the existential limits of art itself …. In our time, it is generally agreed that all novels are historical, in that, in keeping faith with the present their object is just as profoundly historical as any moment in the distant past. The implication is that the the novel of the present has become as contradictory as the historical novel, and as impossible to realize” (350).

Jameson’s two observations cited above, that the historical novel’s “lawfulness” is an evolutionary oddity and that the genre dissolved be- cause of its straining for iconic representation of historical reality, are surely contradictory. For an art-form cannot be both too “lawful” and too empirical. Since the occasions for Jameson’s remarks are in both instances discussions of modernism and the novel, evidently it is not the precise aesthetic-epistemological limits of the historical novel that matter for his critique, but its fundamental irrelevance to modern art. It is telling that even a critic sympathetically inclined to the historical novel should repeat the modernist critic’s argumentum ad gustam without performing the work of regrounding the genre in its social context, the neglect for which he elsewhere chastises bourgeois his-torians (Jameson, “Figural Relativism” 2-9).

The unpopularity of the genre is thus, at least in part, an aspect of a general distaste for criticism concerned with exploring the relationships between literary structures and the social structures in which they were created. No analysis of the historical novel can ignore this sociological dimension. More than even the sociological novels of the French critical realists, realistic historical novels were written for specific ideological purposes, directed to politically conscious audiences. The study of the realistic historical novel might be recovered by way of several promising, but as yet scarcely explored, approaches, such as examining the relationship between the realistic historical novel and the narrative techniques of historiography in the nineteenth century; studying in depth the influence of contemporary public debates on the authors’ historical conceptions, and the reception of their novels by their publics; mapping — after Lucien Goldmann — the “homological” relations among the ideological and social-economic structures of the authors’ societies and the structures of their individual novels; or analyzing the specific technical aspects of the novels — narrative language, plot construction, characterization, beginnings and endings — as embodiments of the authors’ ideologies and those of their societies. I propose to adopt all four of these approaches to some degree, in order to illustrate some of the possibilities for future study of the realistic historical novel. Although my mixed approach lacks some of the precision that a more exclusive, specialized focus might offer, a specialized approach first requires a definition of its relationship to the whole object. I hope in these essays to explore some of the areas of the “whole object,” in the relationship between the historical novel and the Liberal ideology of history,

Lukács’s The Historical Novel

Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel is the only major work on realis- tic historical fiction. In the forty years since its publication, it has not yet received a large-scale reply. For the most part, this neglect indi- cates an attempt to dismiss it ex silentio. For the lack of a comparable substitute, therefore, The Historical Novel must be the starting point for any new analysis of the genre.

Lukács sets out to show “how the historical novel in its origin, de- velopment, rise and decline follows inevitably upon the great social transformations of modern times; to demonstrate that its different problems of form are but historical reflections of these historical transformations” (Lukács 17). The significant elements of the genre are those which can be shown to accurately reflect “the essential traits of reality” of the everyday life of society in the author’s chosen historical setting. These essential traits, the “raw materials of life,” are themselves conditioned by the social- economic conditions of the age, which, to a great extent, remain concealed from all societies based on the division of labor. All “facts of life” in an individual’s everyday existence are consequently by their very nature the contradictions of society manifested in concrete, particularized form. The application of Marx’s fundamental principle that the social-economic structure of a society determines the cultural, ideological superstructure leads Lukács to study the historical novel by grounding each novelist or school of novelists in the social and economic conditions of his time.¹

Because, in Lukács’s view, the cultural realm is determined by the historical development of the economic and social realms, the appearance of cultural phenomena such as the historical novel is motivated only by the social conditions favorable to them, from which they emerge. Consequently, according to Lukács, the precondition necessary for the emergence of the historical novel was a popular consciousness, an awareness of the direct influence that historical events had on individual lives among the European masses. Not until the French Revolution, the use of propaganda and mass levies for the Napoleonic Wars, and the spread of revolutionary ideals, was such an awareness possible. “Hence the concrete possibilities for men to comprehend their own existence as something historically con- ditioned, for them to see in history something that deeply affects their lives and immediately concerns them” (Lukács, 24). The continental upheaval transformed into mass experience the problems of democratizing Tory-controlled, but Whig-dominated England, and the agitation for reform in Germany, problems that had earlier been merely leisure-class concerns. In Europe, reactions to the Napoleonic advances were sometimes friendly, as in Poland, sometimes hostile and reactionary, as in Germany, but in each case they brought about an awakening of national consciousness. This, in turn, inspired interest in the national past.

After the defeat of Napoleon, the first historical novelists wrote romantic idylls of the Middle Ages, extolling the imagined social concord of feudal pre-capitalism in the face of mercenary and schismatic bourgeois times. The spurious history of these novels and “romans” served to legitimize the historical right of Europe’s newly restored thrones. At the same time, the “classical” form of the historical novel was being invented under the pen of an Anglo-Scots Tory gentleman-bourgeois, Walter Scott.

England, of all European countries, was most ripe for the realistic depiction of history. While Europe struggled to absorb the sudden new consciousness of history, England had long ago undergone its bourgeois revolution, in 1642, its restoration, in 1660, and the political compromise of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It was in England that the first dire effects of the Industrial Revolution had been felt, in the mass uprooting and de-classing of large segments of the agrarian population. In this privileged historical setting, Scott conceived of a series of novels illustrating the course of English history as a succession of political and social compromises, culminating in the social harmony of Scott’s own age.

A realistic reflection of concrete historical conditions (conditions that manifested themselves directly in the everyday lives of individuals) required the writer to present the reader with a relevant picture of his- tory, a “prehistory of the present.” Lukács derives this point from Hegel’s admonitions to historical writers that history must make the past recognizable to the reader as his own past:

The historical is only ours … when we can regard the present in general as a consequence of those events in whose chain the charac- ters or deeds represented constitute an essential link… For art does not exist for a small, closed circle of the privilegedly cultured few, but for the nation as a whole. What holds good for the work of art in general, however, also has its application for the outer side of the historical reality represented. It, too, must be made clear and accessible to us without extensive learning so that we, who belong to our own time and nation, may find ourselves at home therein, and not be obliged to halt before it, as before some alien and unintelligible world. (53)

In realistic historical fiction, according to Lukács, the historical transformations of society are shown among the masses, where the historical consciousness is dim, and change is perceived as a disruption of the routine course of everyday life. For “real,” lived history works its way through the lives that make up a whole society, not merely the few political and revolutionary leaders. Consequently, the historical novel’s hero is generally not a great historical figure, one of Hegel’s “world-historical individuals.” Since these historical leaders are only the final completed expressions of a certain historical development among the masses, their character is a completely fixed product, and they cannot express the historical process itself. The hero in the historical novel, writes Lukács, is rather a typical national hero, as in classical epic, transformed into the unexciting hero of the “prosaic world.” Because he must be a field on which the antagonistic historical forces of his age can meet, he is undramatic and ideologically passive. He simply allows history to pass through him.

The motivation for the plot is similarly closely linked to the trans-formations of social-historical conditions, for the plot’s transformations embody the dialectical process of transition from one set of historical conditions to another. Significantly, in Lukács’s definition, the author creates a “tragic atmosphere” of historical change, since such changes in the lives of the masses always appear as a loss of traditional values (58). As Lukács describes it, the classical form of the historical novel has only a few representatives: Scott’s novels, Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, some novellas by Pushkin, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Inasmuch as it is only an aspect of classical critical realism, Balzac, and to a lesser extent Stendhal and Mérimée, share in its development. The classical form of the historical novel could only thrive, writes Lukács, where the process of social differentiation was active and visible, and where the masses of common people were included in it. It grew up in the classical phase of capitalism, when the whole social process was animated and the facts of capitalist competition were undisguised in every sphere of life.

With the revolutions of 1848, the ruling bourgeoisie recoiled in panic from the demands of the working masses, and froze Western European society into an ideological police-state. Social processes were fetishized, made to appear to have fixed and eternal value. Writers found themselves in a double-bind. They could not withdraw from society to criticize its fetishization of coercive institutions without losing their own institutionalized livelihoods. Literature had become a commodity, and the realistic representation of social life was supplanted by a literature of compensation and withdrawal.

In the most important chapter of The Historical Novel, Lukács dis-tinguishes historical drama from the historical novel along the lines of the genre distinctions established by Hegel and the German classical aesthetic philosophers. Lukács is emphatic in his assertions that the historical novel is not a genre independent of other novels, for it does not reflect different facts of life than do other novels (170). All novels re- flect the social contradictions manifested in everyday life. For Lukács, the only proper genre distinctions are particular reflections of “peculiar facts of life” (Ibid.). “Naturally,” he writes, “a precoccupation with history will always produce individual and special tasks. But none of the specific problems is or can be of sufficient weight to justify a really independent genre of historical literature” (Ibid.). Only when the decadent writers of the post-1848 period begin to establish mechanical rules for historical fiction does it become a genre, or rather a travesty of a genre.

The chapter on the genres of historical literature provides the groundwork for a broad historical correlation of social conditions and literary modes. For if the historical novel was able to emerge only from specific concrete preconditions in social life, and necessarily declined when these conditions disappeared, the same genetic dynamics must be applicable to other, more “formal” and abstract genres as well. To put it another way, the fact that the historical novel comes about at a certain time, generating critical realism in the novel, is only a statement about content within a specific mode, epic. The novel clearly thrived with different concerns before Scott and Balzac. Conceivably, one could argue that the novel-form developed with only slight alteration from Defoe to Flaubert, taking up particular contents and casting them off as they gained and lost some indefinable relevance to the form. That content generates form can only be demonstrated by the movement of content from one generic form to another, according to its own concrete logic, transforming the genres as it recreates them.

This is precisely the tack Lukács takes in distinguishing historical tragedy from the historical novel in terms of the historical situations from which each emerged, and which each reflects. Historical tragedy, like all drama, has its center in one principal, all-determining conflict that represents a collision of social forces in history.

By concentrating the reflection of life upon a great collision, by grouping all manifestations of life around this collision and permitting them to live themselves out only in relation to this collision, drama simplifies and generalizes the possible attitudes of men to the problems of their lives, The portrayal is reduced to the typical representation of the most important and most characteristic attitudes of men, to what is indispensable to the dynamic working-out of the collision, to those social, human and moral movements in men, therefore, out of which the collision arises and which the collision dissolves. Any figure, any psychological feature of a figure, which goes beyond the dialectical necessity of this connection, of the dynamics of the collision, must be superfluous from the point of view of the drama. Hence, Hegel is right to describe a composition which resolves itself in this way as the “totality of movement.” (94-95)

With their intense internal contradictions, dramatic heroes are incar- nate abstractions of the conflicting social forces careening toward a collision and a moment of truth. This inexorable movement abstracts and generalizes the same rush to revolutionary collision in the social life of the masses. It is social collision in “pure form.” It depicts the process of social conflict as completely present in the action, completely abstract in content, and completely embodied in the character of the world-historical individual. It follows that great periods of tragic drama are also periods of great world-historical changes, as the fifth century B.C. in Athens, and the Renaissance in England. More specifically, tragedy is a pre-revolutionary mode, depicting only the intense immediacy of social conflict (97).

The novel, on the other hand, is the epic of the “age of prose,” a tarnished variation of the heroic epic of antiquity. In opposition to the intensive “totality of movement” of drama, epic is marked, in Hegel’s terms, by an extensive “totality of objects” of the social world (133). “So- ciety is the principal subject of the novel, that is, man’s social life in its ceaseless interaction with surrounding nature, which forms the basis of social activity, and with the different social institutions or customs which mediate the relations between individuals in social life” (139). The novel reflects the horizontal relations between people in their every- day lives, absorbing and diffusing the intense pitch of dramatic conflict by placing it in the full complexity of its social setting. The collision of social forces that the drama generalizes in representative figures, the novel observes through “the complex, capillary forces of development in the society of the time” (127).

While tragic drama takes as its theme the revolutionary moment as an unmediated and naked individual conflict, the historical novel concentrates on the great number of social contradictions experienced in everyday life preceding and following the revolutionary collision.

The maturing of the revolution then shows with increasing clarity the objective connection between the isolatedly occuring contradictions and gathers them into several central and decisive issues affecting the activity of the masses. And, in the same way, certain social contradictions can continue unresolved even after a revolution, or, indeed, emerge strengthened and heightened as a result of the re- volution. (98)

Thus the conflict between the aristocracy and the alliance of the bourgeoisie and working class came to a historical moment of truth in the Revolution of 1789, while the contradictory goals and motives of the bourgeoisie and workers became increasingly sharp as a result of the victory.

The historical novel deals less with the recognition of social transformations than with the “cunning” of historical factors. In it, the abstractness of the world-historical individual is broken down into its everyday concreteness, into typical details, with the myriad mediations and human relationships that circumscribe individual actions, The specificity of these mediations and relationships lies in their constantly shifting positions vis a vis one another,

Since the novel portrays the “totality of objects,” it must penetrate into the small details of everyday life, into the concrete time of the action, it must bring out what is specific to this time through the complex interactions of all these details. Therefore the general historicity of the central collision, which constitutes the historical character of the drama, does not suffice for the novel. It must be historically authentic root and branch. (151)

In the final chapter of The Historical Novel, “The Historical Novel in the Age of Democratic Humanism,” Lukács describes several attempts by modern writers to write neo-classical historical novels as statements against imperialism and Fascism. Although he has respectful words for their efforts, he notes that these attempts are doomed to be artificial and ironic. The classical historical novelists were intimately bound up with “the life of the people,” and often, as in the case of Scott, Balzac, and Tolstoy, they attained their critical clarity unwittingly, in spite of their conscious conservative political opinions. By contrast, “the writer of the imperialist period … has had to struggle both against the isolation from popular life imposed upon the writer by the social division of labor under advanced capitalism and the growth of an ever more reactionary liberal ideology under imperialism” (334). For Lukács, writing in the ’30s, the revival of the historical novel required that it grow out of the new content provided by the victorious Socialist revolution in the Soviet Union and the proletarian liberation struggles throughout the world.

In Lukács’s last chapter his study of the historical novel is trans- formed from historical critique and analysis into a program. By tracing the development of historical consciousness and the consequent rise of a Golden Age of the realistic novel to the French Revolution and its aftermath, the turning point of the bourgeoisie in history, Lukács tried to encourage the continuation of that line of development into the Twentieth Century toward a corresponding turning point, the creation of a Socialist society by the Russian Revolution. As the Golden Age of critical realism had followed the former revolution, Lukács strove to lay the theoretical groundwork for a renaissance of the humanistic, heroic, non-ironic realism yet to follow on the latter one (347).

It is hard to resist the feeling in reading The Historical Novel that Lukács’s delineation of the classical form (distinct from his critical description of the historical development of the European novel) was a kind of sympathetic magical preparation for a form that had not yet emerged, and needed only to be told that the conditions were now right for it. That the magic did not succeed is not necessarily a refutation of Lukács’s concepts. In the attempt, however, Lukács placed himself in a difficult situation: by capping his historical survey with an overt historical telos, the earlier parts of the work are bound up with the re-emergence of a heroic realism yet to come. It is generally agreed by Western writers that no significant heroic form of the novel has developed. Judging by the lack of response to The Historical Novel, it appears that the book has been granted the status of a historical artifact, and with that, the case closed. The historical novel, the historicist analysis that seems to suit it, and the Hegelian-Marxian-Lukácsian aesthetics have all been treated as different aspects of the same anti-modernist error.

What sort of theory of literary creation lies behind The Historical Novel? From the metahistorical promontory used by Lukács to survey the growth of the historical novel, only certain works and their historical periods are visible. Why the novelists chose to write novels and not, say, pure history, is not apparent. Nor is the purpose of the historical novel questioned. Lukács seems to accept it as a necessary social fact. But what sort of fact was it? What inspired particular historical novelists to write in their chosen mode? What did the novelists and their publics see in the novels when they were written and published? — for surely there were only a few Stendhals looking forward to being understood only by 1880.

By considering only the relation of works to their periods in a world- historical schema, Lukács is justifiably criticized for historicism, for viewing society as the work of an abstract forming spirit. Where Lukács does deal with particular novelists’ roles in their societies, it is generally to state how oblivious they were of what they were actually saying (54). He explicitly rejects biography or personality-psychology as approaches to the study of the novel.

Lukács’s emphasis on latent historical context is justified only so long as he does not claim that it determines the particular aesthetic elements of particular historical novels. But by hypostasizing the “large objective connections,” he assumes a privileged knowledge of historical truth, and ignores the important question of what novelists in particular societies believed they were doing, what they were striving to do, and how their publics received their works.

A Critique of The Historical Novel: The Importance Of Nationalism

For Lukács, the progressive, dialectical development of history is not only a fact deducible from the study of history, it is a force in its own right, apparently independent of any particular kind of human choice. Lukács makes no attempt to describe in detail synchronic social relations and consequently does not provide even the rudiments of a theory of how formal or functional relations work in individual historical novels. Lukács is interested exclusively in what historical novels represent, their world-historical role, not how they work as novels. Furthermore, because his view of history is never examined in his book, the precise relation of historical content to the novel form is obscure. We learn that certain “facts of life” in historical reality appear reflected in the novel, and that characters and events are typical, but not how they differ from reality or historiography. By excluding considerations of genre other than the classical modes, The Historical Novel takes a step backwards from Theory of the Novel, in which formal characteristics of the novel are radically distinguished from the classical epic. Lukács defines the historical novel as a document of the historical process and not a form of aesthetic creation which not only derives from, but also affects, the historical process.

By not scrutinizing his own schematic view of the historical process in the book, Lukács does not provide adequate theoretical ways of distin-guishing historical novels even from historiography. The generic properties of epic, such as typicality, the “totality of objects,” diffusion of social collision, use of significant detail, dramatic concentration, the reflection of “the rich and graded interactions” of world-historical individuals and common people (Hegel’s “maintaining individuals”), and the awareness of social contradictions in everyday life, are all apt prescriptions for historians as well as historical novelists, as Ranke, Michelet, Marx, and Burckhardt, to mention only a few, were well aware. Without analysis of the specifically literary dynamics of the novel — such as, for example, the relation of romance to critical irony, or the motivation of actions — Lukács neglects the ideological world specific to the novel and its ef- fects on Nineteenth Century readers of popular fiction.

But to my mind the most important flaw in The Historical Novel is the fact that Lukács’s desire to set up a tradition of realism based on the reflection of social-historical conditions of classical capitalism and the rupture after 1848 obscures the multiple developments of realism in Europe during the nineteenth century. With the presence of having a special understanding of history endemic to much Hegelian and Marxist historiosophy, themselves products of Liberal historicism, Lukács deprives the historical novelists of the historical specificity of their societies, their social relations, and the particular social function of writing historical novels when and where they did. By holding up as a prototype the historical novels of the most developed countries of Europe, Lukács largely ignores the development of the historical novel elsewhere. He places the historical novel in the broad context of “world-literature,” whose leading movements and directions correspond to European social and economic development. The shortcomings of studying all literature as a function of leading literatures is brought into relief with the case of the historical novel. For the contribution of historical fiction to realism is interdependent with specific national ideological concerns.

Historical novels were nationalistic myths directed to audiences with different degrees of national consciousness. In the England of Scott’s day, the concept of nation was in the process of transition from the pre-Liberal political conception of the community of realms under the British crown, to the more concretely social image of the community of classes. The change was brought about by two related factors, the more or less sudden capitalization and rationalization of formerly traditional communities, like Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, and the increasing conscious polarization of classes into self-differentiating communities.² Scott himself, a traditionalist and a Tory in politics, saw the bad effects of English liberal ideology turning into imperialism within its own political boundaries. In accepting the displacement of the Highlanders by the aggregation of sheep-farms in the early Nineteenth Century, Scott made a conscious decision to accept, if not entirely to approve, a conception of the English community that required the absorption of non-English communities within the political borders of the realm, and their subjection to sudden econo- mic rationalization and exploitation. The ideal of the nation for Scott, symbolized by his works’ frequent happy-end marriages between men and women of opposing factions and regions, is ultimately assimilative, and points toward an economic homogenization of society inherent in Liberal ideology — ultimately leading to an “internal imperialism” and economic assimilation of communities outside the ancient political borders of the English nation. Thus, in Scott’s day, the great middle way that had yielded the synthetic English national character in Scott’s novelistic mythology was in the process of becoming increasingly ironic. It necessitated the conscious destruction of unassimilable societies (a theme carried to its tragic logical extreme in the U.S. by Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales), and the absorption of the assimilable ones. The new ideal of national community is thoroughly stylized in Scott: little Rose Bradwardine has little to offer the English Edward Waverley other than her estate, which is promptly renamed Waverley Honour for the hero’s own dynastic purposes.

Scott and his epigones, along with the French critical realists (who rarely dealt with nationalities or lower classes in groups), represent one of the ideological contexts of the historical novel. The great popularity of the historical genre in Italy and Central Europe, however, cannot be explained by this complacent confidence in change. Although Liberal ideology figured-forth the historical novel and its myth of national community as a reconciliation of warring interests in Europe as in capitalist England, it did so under radically different conditions and for different purposes.

In Central and Southern Europe, nascent Liberal ideology played a different role than in England. The simultaneously internationalistic and ethnocentric Liberalism of England developed because the division into traditional national and cultural communities was no longer viable in a new political economy. In Italy and Hungary, Liberalism and embourgeoisement were associated with the creation of politically and economically independent communities in opposition to the absolutist “internationalism” of the Hapsburg Empire. What the West was striving to discard, Italian and Hungarian liberals were striving to establish, and yet with apparently identical goals in mind.

Scott’s tremendous influence in Europe must be seen in this light. The “Romantic” concern for the perishing historical underdog was a rallying point in Europe, and when combined with Herder’s incomparably influential notion of the Volksgeist, the spiritual essence of each nation, it shifted the perspective of the continental historical novel away from the perspective that Scott had established. Where Scott observed the destruction of national communities from the vantage point of the mainstream of economic and world-political evolution, Manzoni, and the Hungarian historical novelists, Eötvös and Kemény, observed their national communities striving to reach the mainstream.

These different social conditions and ideals produced different at- titudes toward history. Scott’s history was one of compromise and progress. Manzoni viewed history as a testing-ground for the Italian nation’s moral freedom. Eötvös and Kemény, both leading Liberal political figures before and after the Hungarian Revolution against Austria in 1848/9, were aware that the development of bourgeois capitalism in an agrarian country that was experiencing the pauperization of a significant number of its peasants even before the revolution, would be attended by an increasingly sharp alienation of classes. Eötvös’s novel, Hungary in 1514, written in 1846, on the eve of the revolution, was a warning that peasant wars were as likely and as justified in contemporary Hungary as they were in 1514, the time of a great peasant revolt led by György Dózsa. For Eötvös, the alienation of classes and nationalities in Hungary threatened to destroy the nation altogether, unless urgent Liberal reforms were undertaken.

Kemény wrote his great novels after the revolution, in the cultural vacuum of the Austrian reaction. He was familiar to the point of obsession with the works of Engels and the utopian socialists, and saw with clarity that Liberal capitalism led to class struggle, His “solutions” mark the turning point in the European novelist’s faith in history. Kemény believed that only the economic rationalization espoused by Liberalism could counteract the centrifugal tendencies of the non-Magyar nationalities demanding independence and their own Liberalization. Further, he was aware of the paradox that the greatest threat to the stability of a Liberal Hungary came from those pauperized masses upon whose immiseration capitalist ra- tionalization depended. Without Liberalization, however, he believed Hungary as a nation had no chance to withstand the absolutistic pressures for assimilation by the Austrian despots and the fragmentation of the country by the new nationalities. With Kemény, the historical novel is transformed into a myth of survival, in which the Liberal ideal of the “synthetic” nation state does not serve progress, but the reverse: economic progress is the ironic ideal necessary for the nation state’s survival.

It is with Tolstoy’s masterwork, War and Peace, that both European Liberalism and the realistic historical novel break out of their conventional constraints altogether. With the example of the ostensibly successful emancipation of the serfs and a national history apparently free of deep class or national conflicts, Tolstoy created a nationalist myth in which Russia appeared providentially selected to vanquish European rationalism, and its political demiurge, Napoleonic despotism. The Russia of War and Peace is for Tolstoy a counter-model of what he considered the Liberal Western nation-state to be. Unified against its invaders, the essential unity of the Russian mass vanquishes and invalidates the ascendance of the European nations, which had been based on the forced yoking of disparate political fragments.

Defining the Realistic Historical Novel

Some critics denounce any linking of the historical novel to particu- lar ideologies or historical moments. Gilles Nélod, in his Panorama du roman historique, rejects Lukács’s restrictions: “Il n’existe pas un type d’ouvrages qui s’appelerait le roman historique, mais une multitude de livres a conceptions variables, la fois selon les époques, les pays, les intentions des auteurs” (Nélod 8). He proposes a much more liberal definition:

Il s’agit d’une narration ou les elements fictifs se melent a une proportion plus ou moins forte d’elements vrais (ou historiques), l’auteur ayant l’intention de ranim.er des personnages memorables, un esprit du temps, des aspirations d’hommes du passe, des evenements anciens, et un epoq_ue. Il peut aussi le presenter comme une maniere de “ramasse” destine’ a satisfaire la curiosit du lecteur q_ui y cher- cherait un enseignement ou un delassement. L’Ecrivain en fera une ouevre d’art rivalisant avec l’historire et si cette ouevre d’art profite d’abord au romancier elle pourra “au-del de l’individu, profiter au genre lui-meme, le renouveler, l’enrichir” (G. Lafourcade). (22)

Although it is attractive in some ways, Nélod’s “definition” is much too vague to distinguish between the historical novel and the historical romance, or even realistic fiction from historical fiction. While Lukács may err on the side of historical determinism, Nélod exaggerates and fetishizes the historical writer’s freedom from constraints. His definition makes of the historical novel anything a writer wishes to be considered one. Lukács’ criticism of C.F. Meyer is to the point: there is a radical difference between a historical figure or events depicted in terms of historically appropriate and particular motivation (which can range from Scott’s Highland superstitions to Fabrizio del Dongo’s “ce n’est que ça?” after Waterloo) and those depicted in the costume and physical environment of an earlier period, yet motivated by an anachronistic psychology or morality peculiar to the writer’s own age (Lukács 224ff.).

Roland Barthes, in S/Z, mentions in passing that the difference be-tween historical romance and realistic historical fiction is that the his- torical characters appear in the latter as minor characters in the right proportion to their roles in the lives of the fictional characters.

It is precisely this minor importance which gives the historical character its exact weight of reality: this minor is the measure of authenticity: Diderot, Mme de Pompadour, later Sophie Arnauld, Rousseau, d’Holbach are introduced into the fiction [La Comedie Humaine] laterally, obliquely, in passing, painted on the scenery, not represented on the stage; for if the historical character were to assume its real importance, the discourse would be forced to yield it a role which would, paradoxically, make it less real (thus the characters in Balzac’s Catherine de Medicis, Alexandre Dumas’ novels, or Sacha Guitry’s plays: absurdly improbable): they would give themselves away. Yet if they are merely mixed in with their fictional neighbors, mentioned as having simply been present at some social gathering, their modesty, like a lock between two levels of water, equalizes novel and history: they reinstate the novel as a family, and like ancestors who are contradictorily famous and absurd, they give the novel the glow of reality, not of glory: they are superlative effects of the real. (Barthes 101-102)

In a valuable essay on “Redgauntlet and Henry Esmond,” Robert A. Donovan explores this difference of proportion in terms of the narrator’s stance to his fictional world and its historical context.

To produce a seamless blend of truth and falsehood is less a matter of action than of character, but less a matter of either than of perspective. The plot presents few serious difficulties. Imaginary events can readily be made to intersect real ones, because the imaginary event is more probable by its causal relation to what we know happened. Character is more difficult. Probability here depends, in the case of the fictitious personage, on internal consistency, in the case of the historical figure, on consistency with known facts. Clearly all the characters, the imaginary and the real, must be reduced to a common plane of existence before we can accept them without uneasiness as belonging to the same fictional world, and since the imaginary characters cannot very well be expected to assume historical reality, the historical figures must be given what we might call fictional reality. (Donovan 174)

Perspective is the problematic intermingling of two kinds of cohe- rence: the fictional-aesthetic coherence of the novel’s “autonomy, its removal from the world of actuality,” in which the significance of the whole is a product of its internal consistency, and the coherence of his- tory, based on correspondence to “known facts” outside the imagination. The latter involves determining facts and putting them into coherent order without turning them into fictions. The former involves placing the autonomy of the fictional world into the world of actuality without turning it into history. The historical novelist is required to make a decision of how to motivate historical actuality in the coherence of the novel.

Donovan conceives of two possibilities: romance and chronicle. The historical romancer uses the historical setting to embellish his story and characters with the mystery of an exotic, vanished past. “To romanticize the past is to affirm tacitly that it has no real connection with the present, and the past functions in the novel, like a Gothic castle or abbey, to suffuse its own atmosphere over the events of the story (176). The romanticized past is distanced in order that it may stay distant.

The other strategy Donovan calls “chronicle,” (An unfortunate choice of words, since in historiography chronicle is the least “meaningful” form of historical narrative, consisting of the mere juxtaposition of events in chronological order, while Donovan, as I understand him, means quite the opposite.) Chronicle relates the public lives of histo- rical figures and the private world of the fictional characters through the rich “logic” of history. Donovan’s notion thus corresponds to Lukács’s concept of the “prehistory of the present.”

Chronicle treats the past not as picturesque and inert, but as vibrant and alive, influencing, even though from a distance, the attitudes and values, as well as the actions, of the imaginary figures who are involved in it. At the same time the imagined characters and events serve to color our attitude toward the historic past in which they are embedded because of the dynamic nature of their relation to it. (Ibid.)

Comparing Scott’s Redgauntlet with Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, Donovan demonstrates what we might take as a working definition of the difference between the realistic and the non-realistic historical novel. Scott takes his reader directly into the fictional world of his two protagonists, Darsie Latimer and Alan Fairfield, through their correspondence. As the story progresses, their private lives become increasingly embroiled in the public affair of Redgauntlet’s plot to reinstate the Stuart Pretender on the English throne. Their private concerns are absorbed by public ones. The rebellion is defeated not by armed combat, which might feed the rebels’ (and the reader’s) anachronistic romantic heroism, but by the prosaic dismissal of their heroism as pure anachronism, the private feeling of a small clique pretending to represent the public good, In Scott’s novels the private lives of the protagonists have no direct influence on the public events, yet those public events are meaningful only to the extent that they influence private, fictional lives.

Thackeray’s novel purports to have greater historical specificity than Scott’s. Accurate description of the object-world of Queen Anne’s England, the diction of Addison and Steele, and the array of contemporary historical figures are all intended to give the illusion of history’s richness and palpability that Scott’s division of the private from the public restricts. But paradoxically Henry Esmond is much less historical than Redgauntlet. “Henry Esmond is much more intimately involved with historical events and personages than Darsie Latimer or Alan Fairfield, yet Henry Esmond‘s personal destinies never come into focus with the historical events that surround them” (193).

Thackeray prefers to bring into the foreground historical personali- ties where Scott and the historical realists following him would have placed fictional ones. Esmond‘s characters are thus all frozen in his- tory; they are forced to play the static roles assigned to them by history in the fiction as well. They cannot motivate the public world by making it relevant to their private lives, for they are only public characters; they cannot represent the interaction of private lives with history, for they are history, and only history. They live in a temporal vacuum in which history represents only the difference between the past’s environments and the present’s. Human relations are frozen in an image of Victorian sexual and moral contrasts projected barely altered into the age of Queen Anne. “Where Scott attempts to lead us back into the past, Thakeray holds us in the present, and offers us the trappings of history to disguise the fact that Esmond is really a Victorian novel, perfectly of a piece with its predecessors, Vanity Fair and Pendennis” (196).

Thackeray’s image of history is ironical, and satirical, a point of view that Hegel noted was necessarily based on static and ahistorical moral oppositions, and consequently inappropriate for history (ctd. in White, Metahistory 93). “Thackeray’s imaginative vision does not confront life as a process, as a continuing movement of development and change; he sees it as a monstrous agglomeration of ironic incongruities which exist at any given moment, between what is and ought to be, between what seems and what is” (Donovan 199). The satirical vision explicitly debunks history.

We can distinguish realistic historical fictions from non-realistic ones on this basis: writers such as Thackeray emplot the “known facts” of history to create coherent images of the past which, on a thematic level, are stripped of relevance.³ In the case of Henry Esmond, it is the satirical mode that undermines the possibility of historical relevance. (The Hungarian historical novelist Zsigmond Kemény made a similar complaint about idealized historical romances: “Why is it that the heroes our novelists guide us to could be pitched a few centuries for-ward or backward and they would fill their places no worse than before? Why don’t they possess some element that would bind them so organically to a certain historical atmosphere, certain years, certain codes and world-views that, torn from these connections, they would disintegrate?” (Kemény, Élet és Irodalom 137-38). In the realistic historical novel, historically accurate chains of events motivate the private actions of fictional characters, who, in turn, infuse the image of actual history with human and communal significance through its effect on their lives.

This definition suffices for the moment to distinguish the realistic historical novel from the romantic or satirical. But since it might apply equally well to distinguish Balzac from Hugo or Flaubert from Huysmans, any “realist” from any “romantic” or “satirist,” it gives little help in distinguishing the historical novel from the nonhistorical novel. Eric Auerbach lists among the fundamental elements of modern realism: the serious treatment of the everyday reality of socially inferior groups, the embedding of random persons in the general course of contemporary history, and the fluidity of the historical background (Auerbach 491). Since it depends on each of these traits, our definition of the realistic historical novel is hardly distinguishable from modern realism of any sort. The phrase “contemporary history” need only be substituted with “past history.”

Jameson correctly points out that it is generally agreed that all novels are historical, and moreover, that they became increasingly historical as the form evolved. The novelists were fully aware of this process. “It is impossible,” wrote James, “to imagine what a novelist takes himself to be unless he regard himself a historian. As a narrator of fictional events he is nowhere …” To provide a “backbone of real logic he must relate events that are assumed to be real” (qtd. in Loofborouw 105). The novelist’s art lies in the illusion of historical reality, a form of verisimilitude that transposes the alleged “real logic” of history to fiction, the process James called “historical faith.” The realism of the realistic story depends then, on the reader’s tacit acceptance that the way one event follows another happens as it does in reality, i.e., in history, the realm of actual events following actual events. From this formal base, novelists can focus on the human (i.e., vraisemblable) motivations of events and provide an image of life “more cogent than reality itself” (Maupassant qtd. in John Lukacs 121).

But is this rhetorical use of history as a “backbone of real logic” in order to tell highly motivated and relevant stories the same as that used by historical novelists? Can we speak of the realistic novel taking over the historicity of the historical novel? Are there not different ways of employing historical time? Northrop Frye observes in Anatomy of Criticism that “Waverley is dated sixty years back from the time of writing and Little Dorrit about forty years, but the historical pattern is fixed in the romance and plastic in the novel, suggesting the general principle that most historical novels are romances” (Frye 306-307). It will suffice for now to indicate that Frye distinguishes between only two tenses of historical time in the novel: the fixed pattern and the plastic, What Frye’s distinctions actually signify is that the past of Little Dorrit (or Middlemarch) is a time that is a distant present, where the moral concerns of the present exist essentially in the same way as in the present. The historical past of Scott’s novels (when they are not, in fact, sheer romance), is a distance that must be reached, and then overcome. Scott’s history is a line to the past fraught with essential change, great enough to destroy whole communities, whole nations. The realistic historical novel appears romantic if only because it assumes the possibility that human creations can perish irrevocably, and that their preservation may require more heroic and communal effort than the mere maintenance of an individual’s moral goodness.

The historicity of the novel is to some extent a function of its past- ness: in order to be capable of being narrated at all, as Goethe noted, the epic forms must deal with completed actions (Goethe qtd. in Ungvári 325). But there are clearly different narrative tenses of the past, as there are linguistic ones. As Ortega y Gasset writes, the epic past, for example, is not the same as the historical.

The novel and the epic are precisely poles apart. The theme of the epic is the past as such: it speaks to us about a world which was and is no longer, a mythical age whose antiquity is not a past in the same sense as any remote historical time. It is true that local piety kept gradually linking Homeric men and gods to the citizens of the present by means of slender threads, but this net of genealogical traditions does not succeed in bridging the absolute gap between the mythical yesterday and the real today, No matter how many real yesterdays we interpolate, the sphere inhabited by the Achilleses and Agamemnons has no relationship with our existence, and we cannot reach it step by step, by retracing the path opened up by the march of time. The epic past is not our past. Our past is thinkable as having been the present once, but the epic past eludes identification with any possible present, and when we try to get back to it by means of recollection it gallops away from us like Diomedes’ horses, forever at the same distance from us. No, it is not a remembered past but an ideal past. (Ortega qtd. in John Lukacs 118-19).

The German Romantic aestheticians were obsessed with the irrecoverability of this ideal past. By presenting a world entirely coherent and filled with immanent meaning, the epic past was the Romantics’ standard against which the “world of prose” was to be measured. But from the vantage of the revolutionary period’s historical turmoil, the epic past actually functioned as the aestheticized past. From Schiller to the young Lukács, the epic’s illusion of totality created the distinctive double-vision of Romantic aesthetics, constantly focusing and refocusing, now on the ideal past, now on the real past of history. In the world of prose, the highest the epic could attain was an ironic vision of its own incompleteness. The novelist, too, has a double-vision: he watches his hero searching for a way to attach a makeshift, totally abstract and ideal value to contingent reality, while the author himself is aware that, although the search is necessary for survival, it is manifestly absurd at the same time. Modern time is ironic time. Instead of universal, eternally present paradigms of being human, Hectors and Hecubas, modern times have at best einen rückwärts gekehrter Prophet (Schlegel), a historian attaching meaning to the past, interpreting what has gone before. If the epic past always recedes from us at the same interval, the Romantic feeling of history is like Quentin Compson in Sartre’s description, a man sitting in the back of a truck, seeing only what has gone by. Wesen ist, was Gewesen ist, writes the wit Hegel.

For the Lukács of the Theory of the Novel, this is the essence of Romantic irony, and the novel is its appropriate form: the novelist al- ways gathers up substance from the past, but never finds value in it. The young Lukács divests Hegel’s world of prose of its upstanding, medi ocre triumph in the world-process, and is left with the venerable subject- object split in history. The romantic ironist speaks of the pluperfect in the imperfect tense.

Between the two high points of Romantic irony at the beginning and at the end of the nineteenth century, there develop a tense of the past that for the lack of a better term we might call the historical past. It becomes the preferred mode of historiography from Herder through Ranke, but it is in the historical novel that it is most fully articulated. We might say that, while the epic and ironic senses of the past are past-oriented — since the implied narrator’s gaze is fixed on past events as a standard of value–, the historical sense of the past is future oriented — its narrator evokes the past in order to give the reader a standard by which to measure his/her own present as a middle developing toward the future. Great differences of emphasis determine the great variety of ideologies and emplotments in this mode.⁴

The historical novel differs from the realistic “sociological” novel in that it takes as its object the origin of the present, and assumes that the origin of the present was not essentially the same as the present. The present evoked by the historical novel is generally a society in which the oppositions of historical interest groups, such as classes, nationalities, social systems, etc., are resolved (or, in the imperative mood, must be resolved) in the form of an ideal community, a “synthesized” nation, symbolized by the marriage of ideologically conflicting factions. Thus, almost all realistic historical novels end with a ritual marriage, or inversely, with a failed, or parody, marriage.

As for Frye’s “general principle that most historical novels are romances,” it is important to note that almost without exception realistic historical novelists include romance elements in their work as special nonhistorical zones of value, areas of action in which the meaning of actions is purely ethical and independent of the complicated causal interactions of known historical events. The Highlands have this role in the Waverley Novels. There, archaic conditions reinforce the protagonists’ penchant for escape from responsibility. The story of L’Innominato and his hidden valley serve the same purpose in 1 Promessi Sposi. In Eötvös’ novel, a sentimental subplot with little connection to the historical main plot frees Eötvös to speak of ideal social values without having to treat complex historical contingencies. In Kemény, as in his master, Dickens, the romance element almost spills out of bounds into romantic fantasy. Meaning in The Fanatics is so oppressively present on all planes of being that human history seems to be only one of its many manifesta- tions, alongside astrology, tragedy, religion, and depth-psychology.

While the Liberal bourgeois ideology of history informed realistic historical fiction, this romance element was essential to historical novelists. Without it, history might easily have been conceived as de- terministic, or inversely, chaotic. Moral awakenings by individual pro- tagonists depend  on these romance elements. It does not matter whether they are ironic, as in much of Scott, or in dead earnest, as in Manzoni, Eötvös, and Kemény. Human protagonists seem to require some outside help to make sense of their freedom. While the problems of national survival or progress remained for the authors’ national societies to solve, in the novels they had to be formulated in abstract representations of the freedom to choose between determinism and free choice by individual characters. The Liberal ideology of history required a myth in Lévi-Strauss’ sense: an ideal resolution of real social conflicts. The historical novel further required analogies of these mythic resolutions within the text itself to indicate how the meaning of the historical action’s resolutions were to be interpreted.

This dynamic relation between the realism of the main action and the romance element is not, however, exclusive to the realistic historical novel, and it is doubtful whether any form of realistic fiction is intel- ligible without either romance or satirical elements that represent the moral dimension of the action.

Ideology and Liberalism

The five novels discussed in the following essays each embody a dif-ferent form of the ideology of Liberal nationalism, corresponding to the social-historical conditions in which their authors conceived them, and speaking to the problems shared by the artist and his national public.

An ideology of history, both for the individual historical writer and a culture, is part of a society’s broader ideology, the parameters within in which a social group can formulate thought about itself. In the vocabulary of structural studies, ideology might be defined as the “conditions of possibility” for thought — the limits outside of which cultural production, such as thought or art, is not considered coherent and intelligible. Marx perceived that the quality and limits of a soci- ety’s consciousness are produced primarily by the structure of its eco- nomic relations: its division of labor, distribution of wealth, modes of production. These economic factors condition the broader social-institutional relations in the society. For example, the bourgeois family’s patriarchal structure, and the withdrawal of the family from active economic production into the private sphere of consumption and reproduction, are responses to the centralization of industrial economies, with their need for increased consumption of goods and fewer workers.⁵ The realm of culture, a society’s art, institutions, and self-conscious thought, is in turn derived, according to Marx, from those prior economic and social relations, though it is the characteristic of the realm of culture to change very slowly and to allow great overlapping of values. The objects of consciousness and the materials with which it is expressed — in Raymond Williams’ words, its “social semantic formations” ranging from institutional structures to “structures of feeling” (Williams 138-45) — are responses to these conditions, Thus, for example, Jürgen Habermas traces the development of sentimentalism and the epistolary novel to the exaltation of individuality that arises with the alienation of work from the intimate sphere (Habermas 77-78). These responses are limited by what a people in a society believe can be produced or attained, which is always analogous to the limits of productive and social relations in their economic and social life.

There is a sense of the word “ideology” inevitably associated with Marx’s related concept of false-consciousness. When one group or class dominates others through economic and political power, the rulers inevitably strive to legitimize their domination by rationalizing, or “naturalizing,” it in institutions and arguments that make the given social relations seem fixed, natural, and if not necessarily beneficial to everyone, at least the best of all possible arrangements. Ideology as false-consciousness thus always claims a higher justification for a group’s domination than mere economic domination.

But beyond this association of ideology with domination is the more encompassing definition derived from the originators of the concept, the Ideologues, and the young Marx’s ascription of ideology to all class-bound thought, that is, that every idea is a function of the person, age, or group that holds it. No idea is fully meaningful when seen merely as a pure ideal content devoid of motive. Rather, it must be seen as an expression of a specific social-historical situation in and by which it was generated. It is the nature of thought to strive to transcend its concrete situation — whether in the form of gloss, criticism, or aesthetic concentration. It claims a privileged freedom from the very conditions it purports to change. This putative freedom may be expressed as transcendental values that justify the established social structure, or as criticism, the conception of an alternative to the established social structure.

Karl Mannheim defines ideology as “the character and composition of the total structure of the mind” of an epoch or a group (Mannheim 56). Elsewhere in Ideology and Utopia, Mannheim distinguishes ideologies from utopias, identifying the former with false-consciousness, while perceiving in the latter those critical ideas that generate changes in the social structure.

According to Mannheim, both ideologies and utopias are forms of “situationally transcendent” thinking, and critical of social reality (193). Utopias succeed in actually changing the situations from which they emerge, while ideologies are by nature incapable of doing so. For example, the religious-ethical basis of Christian kingship could not change the exploitative feudal or absolutistic structure, and was consequently ideological. By contrast, the chiliastic millenialism of the Reformation inspired a critical, revolutionary praxis that overthrew ecclesiastical hegemony in Sixteenth Century Germany, and was therefore utopian. Mannheim’s distinction between the two forms of thought is functional, based on the concrete historical success they each had in changing the conditions they criticized, He identifies chiliastic anarchism, liberal rationalism, conservative organicism, and socialist-communist revolutionarianism as the leading examples of supraideological utopias.

I am unable in this space to elaborate my differences with Mannheim’s use of his vocabulary. But since both ideology and utopia are important terms for my thesis, I must mention the main points of divergence, if only to clarify my own use of them. Mannheim’s functionalist distinction between ideology and utopia, based on their role in historical transformations, contradicts in some respects his structural definition of ideology as the whole thought of an age or group. This functionalism is simultaneously too abstract and too concrete. On the one hand it does not account for the structural aspect of utopian thought, i.e., that it is also bound up with the conditions it criticizes and under which it emerges. To be sure, this is partly caused by the anomalous application of the term “utopian” not to the quality of a kind of social thought, its high degree of organized ideality among social concepts, but to the relative ability of such thoughts to become realized in history — which is, considering the gap between the realized concept and the ideal in utopian thinking, a fairly ironic use of the term. On the other hand, Mannheim’s definition stops short of explaining the process by which putatively utopian thought like Liberal rationalism and conservative organicism became the ruling ideologies, replete with false-consciousness, of European bourgeois society in the Nineteenth Century. A comparison of Mannheim’s concept with modern Western intellectual history and the rise of Liberalism, conservatism, and socialism, shows rather that “ideological” thought, insofar as it tends to entertain transcendent social values, tends also to contain “utopian” thought, which can be generated into utopian praxis, and conversely, that all utopian praxis tends to become integrated into ideologies to some degree. Moreover, in few social-historical situations can utopias and ideologies be definitely distinguished, nor indeed utopias from one another, by Mannheim’s standards, as the commingling of Liberalism and conservatism, and both with socialism, in the ideological utopia of nationalism illustrates.

With regard to the realistic historical novel, I will use the terms in a less precise, but I believe more appropriate form: as two aspects of a society’s structure of values, in which the utopian impulse toward a social ideal exists interdependent with ideological false-consciousness. To use Lévi-Strauss’ terms, all ideology is marked by a form of mythical thinking, in which contradictions perceived in the social structure in reality are reconciled in an ideal solution that is false with regard to its claims to resolve the actual conflicts, but true (thus “utopian” in Mannheim’s sense) to the extent that it changes the valuation or organization of the conflicts.

We can distinguish in the realistic historical novel, which was the major cultural expression of the ideology of Liberal nationalism, such an interdependence of ideology and utopia. For the most part, realist historical novelists were Liberals with affinities for both organicism and rationalism. The national past, the organic social history of the nation, became specifically historical, and hence relevant, for the Liberal bourgeois author and public only through its alignment with the utopian goal of a nation-state representing all the class and ethnic interests in the national society.

Liberal nationalism, as represented by the realistic historical novel and its authors, was a complex, and far from doctrinaire, phenomenon, but it shared the rationalistic premises common to all forms of Liberalism. The lineaments of this Liberal ideology demonstrate better than any other of the utopias discussed by Mannheim the dynamics of ideology as a mythic reconciliation of actual contradictions on the level of ideas (and perhaps suggesting that either, or both, the notions of ideology itself and the dialectical theory of myth are its products). Rational mediation was for Liberals both the goal of political action and a mode of perceiving the world. Liberalism’s utopia was an image of absolutely harmonious competition of morally enlightened men, in whom self-interest and commonwealth were congruent, governed by the “idea:” “a formal goal projected into the infinite future, whose function it is to act as a mere regulative device in mundane affairs” (129). Since the idea permits a unification of free competition with ethical responsibility, Liberalism had an overriding tendency toward abstraction, and a quasi-religious faith in the historicist tenet that “reality moves continually towards an ever closer approximation of the rational” (223).

This rationalistic faith resided, in the Liberal historian Guido Ruggiero’s words, in a “subjective kernel of freedom” (Ruggiero 13). Inherited from the Reformation’s revolutionary assertion of the freedom of individual conscience in matters of secular government, Liberalism extended the jurisdiction of conscience into the social sphere, to be embodied in social authority, and especially law (Manning 78). For the Liberal, “the individual is more than a mere individual, because his conscience represents for him a law, an authority, in which are already expressed the universal elements of his nature, and from which arises the demand for an organization of human life transcending the demands of mere selfishness” (Ruggiero 352). The guiding force of the Liberal utopia was the free expression of an essentially psychological and abstract conception of order — the generation of law to organize and harmonize the individual’s creative mental energy from within.⁶

Developed in the polemic against the Rousseauians, law for the Libe- rals was the respect for others’ individuality, particularly in the sphere of economic competition and relations of private property.

Social and political relationships for the Liberal are artificial. They are rational constructs designed to counter … imperfections otherwise inevitably experienced by men competing for wealth and position while valuing privacy and leisure. A system of law is the liberal solution to the predicament of the civilian entrepreneur whose search to improve his own economic and social position encourages others to covet his achievements. (Manning 14)

For the Liberal, freedom and justice (the secular equivalents of grace and sacred wisdom) presupposed a public respect for the system of laws, a universal acceptance that the laws objectify the universally per-perceived dictates of individual conscience. At the same time, Liberal law could not be imposed before these dictates were fully and rationally articulated. Thus, the forms and principles that served as the bedrock of Liberal ideology were based on a dynamic notion of dialectics. In a given society, law was to be agreed upon after the airing of opposing interests’ opinions, which were then synthesized in a manner most beneficial to the common good. This process, too, was based on a rational faith that interests can balance one another without usurpation by or abdication to any single interest group. Rational discussion was the lifeblood of the Liberal political process, substituting for the irrational force applied under absolutism and feudalism to protect selfish individual and class interests. The dialectical clash of interests was formalized in the parliament and the party-system of the legislature, with its emphasis on debate.⁷

Dialectics was not merely an operative device, a strategy for par- ticular political situations, but also Liberalism’s· guiding conception of the historical process. As opposed to the conservatives’ notion of humanity as irreperably fallen, or the Rousseauian conception of ori- ginal freedom, Liberalism was based on the idea that freedom is acquired through education and a dialectic of experience.⁸

The history of Liberalism was itself conceived in terms of dialectical progress; since Liberal theorists considered their ideology the first understanding of the conception of political freedom in history, every change in social and scientific relations — so long as it arrived without harming the Liberal state — was conceived as a moment in the process of emancipation. Liberals read the history of their own ideas in this way. Ruggiero speaks of an “antithesis” between English Liberalism’s theory of liberties as a complex of particular rights and immunities independent of conceptual formulations, and the “continental” Liberals’ theory of liberty as an abstract, ahistorical principle, the attempt at synthesizing of which dominated the whole political consciousness of the nineteenth century (Ruggiero 347-48).  Manning writes of the dialectical antithesis between Liberalism’s two guiding models: the Newtonian social equilibriurn and the Darwinian evolutionist model of progressive specialization in the practice of liberties (Manning 25). Underlying the formal world-view that generated parliamentary and historicist theory was the economic nec plus ultra that “all the energies of Society must be able to compete effectively among themselves,” i. e., all law and government had to foster economic competition (Ruggiero 369).

If dialectical competition underlay the operation of economics and pariiament, its synthesis was to be formalized in the State: a static balancing mechanism that ensured the equilibrium of society through its system of checks and balances, and its own freedom from economic and partisan shifts in power, insured by its particular power as a synthesizer (364).

Basing its theory on universalizing principles such as dialectical reason, conscience, law, progress, and the balancing of interests, Liberalism established the framework for making abstract equations among dif- ferent social groupings. As individual freedom was the model for society at large, the conception of individuality could be extended to nations; these nations conceived as individuals were then bound by the same ethical imperatives and systems of law, not to mention economic prerogatives, to which individuals were subject.

Liberalism’s highly intellectualistic, formalizing tenor left irrational elements of social life outside its framework, and even created new irrational areas, such as class-struggle and free competition. It is the model structure of ideology as myth — and significantly, the concept of ideology was one of the first instruments of Liberal intellectual organization. Its highly ideal conception of social relations included in its premises the need to believe in the harmonious, enlightened relations among individuals as the telos of human history. But, as Mannheim, writes, “just as parliament is a formal organization, a formal rationalization of the political conflict but not a solution of it, so bourgeois theory attains merely an apparent, formal intellectualization of the inherently irrational elements” (Mannheim 122). The ideal character of Liberal thought was thus masked by its ideal universe of discourse. That Liberalism was the legi- timating ideology of the bourgeoisie was clear to Liberal theorists, but this did not seem to contradict their claims to universality. As late as 1927 Ruggiero could write:

Sieyès said that the Third Estate was the nation; and this was true, not in the sense that no other classes except the bourgeoisie existed, but in the sense that the bourgeois forms of economic activity, legal feeling, and political organization were valid for all classes, offering to each class opportunities of action commensurate with its strength, freedom of competition and opposition, and a guarantee of legality and justice. The Liberalism of the middle classes, at the period of its greatest expansion, expresses precisely this universality, which converts their particularistic quality, as an economic class, into the quality of a political governing class. (Ruggiero 425)

The political forms that Liberalism had established reflected its faith in organization, and distracted it from the concrete economic rela- tions upon which they were founded. As these forms fostered and then protected the bourgeois producers of wealth, there were no corresponding forms to insure the distribution of this wealth to others, or the extension of the ideal of freedom beyond the essentially negative ideal of non-interference in the marketplace and private property, As the bourgeoisie exercised its rights to gain ever-greater profits, Liberalism, which had originally been conceived as a blueprint for a self-regulating social mechanism, lost its capacity for self-regulation (Laski 244). Intended as an image of harmonious, rationally consistent social operations, the underlying contradictions of Liberal theory gradually appeared as deep fissures in the foundation, resistant to attempts to incorporate them into mythical- ideological mediations.

It sought to establish a world-market; but the logic of that effort was frustrated by the political implications of the nationalism which surrounded its birth and flourished with its growth. It sought to vindicate the right of any individual to shape his own destiny, re- gardless of any authority which might seek to limit his possibilities; yet it found that, inherent in that claim, there was an inevitable challenge from the community to the sovereignty of the individual.

It sought relief from all the trammels law might impose upon the right to accumulate property; and it found that the vindication of this right involved the emergence of a proletariat prepared to attack its implications. No sooner, in a word, had it achieved its end than it was compelled to meet a defiance of its postulates which seems certain to change the order it had brought into being. (14)

Similar contradictions appeared in the Liberal conception of natio- nalism. The Revolutionary line was expressed in Sieyès’ words: “the na-tion is prior to everything. It is the source of everything. Its will is always legal; indeed, it is the law itself” (Manning 89). This radical formulation was contested in both France and England, but generally only to the ex- tent that a particular segment of the nation, the bourgeoisie, was exal- ted as the nation’s representative of law and order, and thus endowed with the abatract right to represent the whole nation. National liberation movements in the early Nineteenth Century were greeted by the Romantic Liberals, as Wordsworth wrote of the Spanish resistance in 1809, as struggles “not for individual privilege, but for the rights of human nature; not for temporal blessing, but for eternal happiness; not for the benefits of one nation, but for all mankind and even for France herself” (qtd. in Manning 92). National solidarity was felt to be inherent in human consciousness and thus a part of the form of rational liberation. Since, moreover, the Nineteenth Century conception of nationality required also the conception of the nation-state, Liberal theory argued that the nation, “conceived as an autonomous organism capable of self-government, contained in itself, at least in embryo, the new national state toward which Liberalism, its merely negative and critical state left behind, was advancing” (Ruggiero 410).

With the rise of many European nation-states competing with one another for resources and territory, the bourgeoisie later came to consider nationalism, in Acton’s phrase, as “a retrograde step in history,” a development that, for the bourgeois entrepreneurs, set up obstacles to expansion, and for the bourgeois humanists, obstructed the dawning of an “international” consciousness, except among the revolutionary opposition (Ruggiero 412-13; Manning 94).

Historical novelists generally shared the Liberals’ faith in a pro- gressive, intelligible, rational development of an ethically ideal society out of and opposed to a society perceived to be irrational and evil. The realistic historical novelists generally wrote their works before great revolutions, and their positions were consistently anti-revolutionary, warning of the chaos that would inevitably follow great social up- heavals, and, sometimes overtly, sometimes in disguise, urging material and economic progress by evolutionary means as the only way to bridge the gap between the ideal of reason and the evil existing state of affairs.

The particularity of realistic historical novelists’ Liberal ideology of history is a result of the fact that they identified the unified nation-state as the ethical ideal to which progress would lead. They were highly critical of contemporary conservative ideology, identifying it with the domination of a single despotic class pretending to re- present the whole spectrum of class and ethnic interests. (The lack of such criticism in Scott and Tolstoy does not invalidate my thesis; rather, as I hope to prove, it brings out in relief their attempts to overcome their own Liberal ideas by absorbing them into a “metaconservatism,” of which class and ethnic conflict is a necessary part.)

Historically, realistic historical novelists were aligned with the conservative aristocracies or the gentry class of their national societies. (Scott was the spawn of a long line of Scots Border chiefs; Manzoni, Eötvös, Kemény, and Tolstoy were of aristocratic lineage.) Most were convinced Liberal progressives. The ideological streams that led them to the estuary of Liberalism differed: Manzoni and Tolstoy approached it from religious populism, and even avowedly anti-Liberal libertarianism; Eötvös and Kemény from “doctrinaire” social and economic theory and nationalism; Scott, the Tory gentleman, from personal affinity for the Edinburgh bourgeoisie. With the exception of Tolstoy, each of them embodied in his novels the ideal of an integrated nation-state created by the re-conciliation of warring class and/or ethnic interests, a state in which the nation would embody the attainment of the rational and harmonious community of interests. With Tolstoy, who wished to discredit a hollow abstraction of Liberalism with a tonie “realism,” the historical novel broke out of the aesthetic frame set by the Liberal faith is dialectical mediations and rational discussion, and, paradoxically, repudiated the “realism” of the realistic historical novel.

On Ideological Myth in the Novel

Before discussing concrete historical novels as examples of the my- thology of Liberal nationalism, I must clarify the sense in which I use the term “myth.” My starting point is the correlation of the transformation of values surrounding the reversal and recognition inherent in all fiction with the notion of myth as an ideal resolution of real contradictions, as proposed by Lévi-Strauss.

Readers of narrative are called upon to make sense of a series of events by translating them into values.

The reader must organize the plot as a passage from one state to another and this passage must be such that it serves as a represen- tation of theme. The end must be made a transformation of the be- ginning so that meaning can be drawn from a perception of resemblance and difference. And this imposes constraints on the way in which one names beginning and end. One can attempt to establish a coherent causal series, in which disparate elements can be read as stages toward a goal, or as a dialectical movement in which incidents are related to contraries whose opposition carries the problem that must be resolved. And these same constraints apply at lower levels of structure. In composing an initial and final state the reader will draw on a series of actions which he can organize into a causal sequence, so that what is named as a state which the larger thematic structure requires is itself a logical development, or he may read a series of incidents as illustrations of a common condition which serves as initial or final state in the overall structure. (Culler 222)

Lévi-Strauss writes that all mythic thinking operates according to a similar dynamic: faced with irreconcilable contradictions in experi- ence (between sexuality and autochthony, change and permanence, contingency and identity, animal and human, man and woman, etc.), a culture creates an ideal resolution through a transformational structure in which the contradictions are transformed into mutually signifying oppositions.

In “The Structural Study of Myth,” Lévi-Strauss proposes a formula for describing myth’s characteristic generation of a synchronic, static set of options, in which the contradictory relations are resolved by displacement. A second set of oppositions is generated, and a reversible, symmetrical structure resolves the initial imbalance. “The inability to connect two kinds of relationships is overcome (or rather replaced) by the assertion that the contradictory relationships are identical inasmuch as they are self-contradictory in a similar way” Such a structure is built on an analogy of mythical structuring to the principle of binary oppositions in structural linguistics (Lévi-Strauss 216).⁹

Lévi-Strauss’ delimitation of static/synchronic resolutions also leaves room for the possible generation of resolutions not purely static, in which the contradictions are resolved through a progressive transfor- mation, since “mythical thought always progresses from an awareness of oppositions to their resolutions” (224). And indeed, the formula Lévi-Strauss offers provides for the possibility of internal progressive transformation within a myth-text. Pierre and Elli Köngäs Maranda have elaborated Lévi-Strauss’ fomula and emphasized its implied diachronic movement.

Every myth, write the Marandas, performs the task of mediating op- positions through a process capable of including both of the opposing sets of terms or of deriving power from both. In myths, unlike linear transformations like metaphor, there is an ontological twist whereby the result of the mediating process is an entirely new set of significances, corresponding to the dynamics of plot-reading quoted above from Culler (P. and E.K. Maranda 16).

Diachronic mythical resolution might be seen as a narrative reducible to four stages: the identification of an initial state of general dis- harmony or particular lack; in the middle, a complex mediation consisting of the evocation or education of the mediating qualities:  the inversion of the initial state (thereby completing the “ontological twist”); and a final state of augmented recuperation, in which the initial state is reconstructed through the annihilation of the cause of the disharmony. In this form, it is the overt plot-schema of romance and comedy. (For tragedy and satire, inversions and ironies must be included.)

A few illustrations may be helpful. The Marandas provide one from a Finnish Schwank, their example of the simplest form of such a construction.

Once a farmer and his servant were starting their meal, as the neigh- bors were eating, too. So the farmer said “Let’s pretend eating, but not eat.”

The servant contented himself with it, and when they went to the field to mow, the servant took the blade off the scythe, and said “Now let’s pretend mowing, but not mow.” (26-27)

Read for the “twist:” If pretending authority results in the servant’s acceptance of pretence, then the servant’s pretence results in the negation of the authority function of accepting pretence.

An extremely elegant example comes from Hegel:

The building of a house is, in the first instance, a subjective aim and design. On the other hand we have, as means, the several substances required for the work — Iron, Wood, Stones. The elements are made use of in working up this material: fire to melt the iron, wind to blow the fire, water to set wheels in motion, in order to cut the wood, etc. The result is that the wind, which helped to build the house, is shut out of the house; so also are the violence of rains and floods, and the destructive power of fire, so far as the house is made fireproof. The stones and beams obey the law of gravity — press downward — and so high walls are carried up. Thus the elements are made use of in accordance with their nature, and yet co-operate for a product, by which their operation is limited. Thus the passions of men are gratified; they develop themselves and their aims in accordance with their natural tendencies, and build up the edifice of human society; thus fortifying a position for Right and Order against themselves. (Hegel 27)

Thus, the destructiveness of Nature (which is both the violence of natural elements and human passion, human nature) is to the builder’s designing (of a house or a human community), as is the designer’s des- truction (of the violent nature of the elements) to the negation of na- ture and the hypostasis of the designing-function, i.e., the thing de- signed (the house or the human community). Thus the World-Spirit is explained by analogy to the human process of making culture out of nature, at the same time that this human capacity to transform is seen as an aspect of the World-Spirit’s transfroming capacity. The utopian ideology of Liberalism easily lends itself to this form of analysis. Inasmuch as the present’s social relations are disordered by irrationality, the mediation of reason through the ethics of right action will disorder the rule of unreason and establish the rule of Reason in the Liberal State by extinguishing irrationality.

Because of the situation of gain at the end, an increase of value resulting from the transvaluing twist, the diachronic myth structure is not reversible. It thus corresponds to what we have called literary plot structure, or dramatic action. The irreversibility of the trans- formation is relative, however, since, as Lévi-Strauss insists, it is illusory, merely an ideal resolution of real contradictions (Lévi-Strauss 229).¹⁰ Within the ideology represented in the plot there is an irreversible logic of diachronic transformation, a gain in time through change. But since it can always be returned to and retold, it is reversible in a context into which it fits of a piece. Hence the double time references Lévi-Strauss ascribes to all myths.

On the one hand, a myth always refers to events alleged to have taken place long ago. But what gives the myth its operational value is that the specific pattern described is timeless; it explains the present and the past as well as the future. This can be made clear through a comparison between myth and what appears to have largely replaced it in modern societies, namely politics. When the historian refers to the French Revolution, it is always a sequence of past happenings, a non-reversible series of events the remote consequences of which may still be felt at present. But to the French politician, as well as to his followers, the French Revolution is both a sequence belonging to the past — as to the historian — and a timeless pattern which can be detected in the contemporary French social structure and which provides a clue for its interpretation, a lead from which to infer future developments. Michelet, for example, was a politically minded historian. He describes the French Revolution thus: “that day … everything was possible …. Future became present … that is, no more time, a glimpse of eternity.” It is that double-structure, altogether historical and ahistorical, which explains how myth, while pertaining to the realm of parole and calling for an explanation as such, as well as to that langue in which it is expressed, can also be an absolute entity on a third level which, though it remains linguistic in nature, is nevertheless distinct from the other two. (209-10)¹¹

The application of this myth-plot structure to novels is a complicated matter and fraught with problems. Lévi-Strauss considers narrative a specific form of degenerated myth, and has not concerned himself with the diachronic application of his model. The Marandas’ contribution of a diachronic transformational model for narrative opens the question of how novels as a particular form embody or illustrate it. The central focus in the novel is on the complex process of mediation; ends and beginnings are often the most cumbersome formal elements of novelistic invention.¹² The novelist, like the epic poet before him, meditates on the mediations and transformations of states in their social and ideological multiplicity from the position of a hypostasized resolution — the feeling of closed pastness that for Goethe distinguishes epic from the other genres. Rather than a totality of objects, it might be more apt to call the novel the totality of mediations, including objects, institutions, histories, records, and ideologies, in the process of transforming from one set of values to another, from a state of disequilibrium in the social world to a state of social gain as a result of the transformation. The variety of mediational structures — the social dialects, codes, and ideologies — characteristic of the novel corresponds to the variants of a myth, condensed, as it were, into an iconic representation of a society’s ruling ideologies. In political novels, such as the realistic historical novel, ideological mythmaking comes into the foreground as one of the objects of the novelist’s totality of objects. Through the conflict of contradictory and fractious interests, a “metaideological” mediation is attempted by the historical novelist to present to his society an alternative to partisan strife in the synthesis of political interests. This allegedly rational mediation embodies the ideological myth of Liberal nationalism.

Conclusion: Statement of Aims

I propose in the following essays to examine five major examples of the realistic historical novel, Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), Alessandro Manzoni’s 1 Promessi Sposi (1827; 1840-2), József Eötvös’ Hungary in 1514 (1846), Zsigmond Kemény’s The Fanatics (1859), and Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1863-9). The essays differ from one another in their foci, for each historical novelist’s approach to the genre differed according to the traditions of narrative in which he was versed, and the specific social-political problems to which he addressed his work. Roughly, they fall into three categories, corresponding to Lukács’s periodization of the classical historical novel. The first two essays, dealing with Waverley and I Promessi Sposi, are concerned with the two provenances of Liberal historical thinking in the Nineteenth Century: post-Enlightenment rationalism and “progressive” economic nationalism, as embodied in the realistic historical novel. I am concerned less with their influence on later writers than with the articulation of the fundamental contradictions and concerns of the realistic historical novel.

The second group of two essays treats two classic Hungarian histo- rical novels, written in the period surrounding the Hungarian revolution of 1848/9, thus corresponding to Lukács’s revolutionary stage of the classical mode. Although they are considered masterworks of the nineteenth-century Hungarian novel, they are not available to English-speaking readers — and with the exception of a German translation of Eötvös’s work made in the 1850s, they have not yet been translated into major Western languages. Barring a radical shift in literary tastes in the West or literary politics in Hungary, it is unlikely that they will be read outside Hungary for some time. Consequently, I cannot assume the familiarity with the text that I do with respect to the other three works, and must acquaint my readers with the works at the same time that I analyze them. This has meant that my essays on the Hungarian historical novelists had to be made longer and to cover more ground than those concerned with writers already considered classical by Western readers. These essays are important in two respects: they introduce major Hungarian works that have until now remained out of the ken of American literary scholars, and they illustrate Lukács’s hypothesis about the degeneration of historical consciousness and the historical novel in response to the reactions following the revolutions of 1848 more clearly than any examples taken from the mainstream of Western literature.

The last essay concerns the collapse of the realistic historical novel, as evidenced by Tolstoy’s War and Peace, under the weight of growing imperialistic national rivalries, the proliferation of historical theorizing, and the bankruptcy of Liberal nationalism. In Tolstoy, the dialectical-dramatic form of the novel that is itself an embodiment of “progressive” ideology is absorbed into a grand form that extols formlessness; the dramatic transformations of personalities and ideologies that serve as an analogue to Liberal transformations of social values are subsumed in War and Peace under the irrational, over-flowing, non-progressive celebration of Russian nationality as the nation that “saved” Europe from the destructiveness of its own rationalism.

I propose in these essays that the realistic historical novel was concerned less with producing a replica of a historical moment than with providing a concrete image of the process through which an ideal of Liberal capitalism was to be achieved; that this image was depicted in a process of mythic transformation of historical contradictions between sub-national factions (classes, ethnic groups, parties, etc.); and that the preconditions for this mythic transformation lay in the European Liberal ideology that conceived freedom and community in purely ideal terms, while it conceived restrictions on freedom in terms of concrete social oppositions. Further, I propose that the realistic historical novel, bound as it was to the development of realism in the nineteenth century social novel, displays certain inherent dynamic traits which are universal in fiction, and that its combination of empirical representation and ideal mythic structure corresponds to the ideological concerns of Liberal nationalism; and that the historical novel ceases to be produced when European Liberal ideology is no longer adequate for concrete social conditions, i.e., when the contradictions are no longer conceived to be soluble on a national scale, and when the nation-state becomes synonymous with the exis- ting established social relations, rather than a quasi-utopian ethical goal.

Notes to Chapter I

1 A similar grounding is in order for Lukács’ own position, particularly in response to critiques of The Historical Novel by critics like George Lichtheim, who disparages it as “fundamentally trivial.” (Lichtheim, Georg Lukács. 102;106-7)

2 cf. Karl Polanyi, The Great Tranformation, 77 ff.; E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 418 ff.

3 See John Loofbourow, Thackerav and the Form of Fiction, 112; and Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel, 142, for the dissenting view.

4 See “Introduction” to Hayden White, Metahistory.

5 Jürgen Habermas,  A társadalmi nyilvánosság szerkezetváltozása [Hungarian translation of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit]. 73 ff.

6 “Freedom … coincides with the reality of the mind. It is not a faculty, an adventitious mode of being which might be withdrawn, leaving the substantial structure of the mind unmodified and unimpaired. It is the spiritual energy which presides over, nourishes and regulates all the activities of man. To act and to act freely are the same; without freedom there is no action, but passion, mechanism, habit…. Freedom is nothing but the creative spontaneity of the mind and at the same time the law which controls its development.” (Ruggiero, 352)

7 “Parliaments are accused of talking too much and doing too little, as if their proper work were not precisely to talk; and of having insuf- ficient technical knowledge of the questions which they discuss, as if their knowledge was not required to be simply political knowledge.” (Ruggiero, 365)

8 “We are profoundly convinced that men are not born free but become free. This applies both to the life of the individual and to the historical life of humanity. The child is not free, dominated as he is by impulses, by transitory and changing passions; we place him on the contrary under watchful control. Childish peoples, like those which are not controlled by stable laws and organic government are not free, though they may seem to be; among them we find only caprice above, among the dominant strong, and servitude beneath, in the domi- nated weak. Liberalism does not exist at the origin of human development, but comes into being as it proceeds. As the action of man widens its field it be comes more free, because focused in a more complex personality.” (Ruggiero, 54-5)

9 Lévi-Strauss proposes an algebraic formula to which “every myth (considered as an aggregate of all its variants) corresponds”:

“fx(a) : fy(b) :: fx(b) : fa-1 (y)

Here with two terms, a and b, being given as well as two functions, and y, of these terms, it is assumed that a relation of equivalence exists between two situations defined respectively by an inversion of terms and relations, under two conditions: (1) that one term be replaced by its opposite (in the above formula, and a-1; (2) that an inversion be made between the function value and the term value of two elements (above, y and a).” (Structural Anthropology 228)

10 Lévi-Strauss, 229; See also James A. Boon, From Symbolism to Structuralism, 102: “The most critical point to remember is that throughout these transformations of contradicting terms, nothing is ever really solved The contradiction is merely displaced but by becoming so, it expands a culture’s store of signification.” (See also p. 97.)

11 Lévi-Strauss, 209-10; also in Boon, 97-8, citing Lévi-Strauss,: “It was necessary to await anthropologists in order to discover that social phenomena obey structural arrangements. The reason is simple: it is that structures appear only through observation practised from outside. Inversely, this observation can never grasp processes, which are not analytic objects, but the particular fashion in which temporality is lived by a subject. This is to say, on the one hand, that processes exist only for the subject engaged in his own historical becoming, or more exactly that of the group to which he belongs; and, on the other hand, that in a given group processes are numerous enough — and sufficiently different from each other — for there to exist subgroups of identification: for an aristocrat and for a sans culotte the Revolution of 1789 is not the same process. And there exists a “meta-process” integrating these irreducible experiences, only for historically posterior thinking….”

The rich and exciting debate between contemporary Marxist and Structuralist thinkers on the subject of history and ideology is not immediately relevant in this context, but should be consulted in any future work on the relationship of historiography to ideology. See especially Levi-Strauss’ “History and Dialectic” in The Savage Mind; A.J. Greimas, “Structure et histoire” in Du Sens; Roland Barthes, “Historical Discourse” in Michael Lane, ed. Introduction to Structuralism; Henri Lefebvre, “Reflexions sur le Structuralism et l’Histoire” in Le Structuralisme et L’Ideologie; Robert D’Amico, “The Contours and Coupures of Structuralist Theory,” Telos No. 17; Marc Zimmerman, “Polarities and Contradictions: Bases of the Marxist-Structuralist Encounter,” New German Critique No. 7.

12 See Frank Kermode’s debate with George Eliot in The Sense of an Ending, 174.