Father Goriot by H. Daumier (1842). Wood engraving.
© commons.wikimedia.org
Currently, the novel is the most prominent serious narrative literary genre. This was not always the case: in the 19th century, it challenged tragedy as the “high” genre, reflecting and participating in broader changes from feudal to modern democratic societies. How should we account for and evaluate this shift?
As European societies became broader, more fragmented, and less integrated, so changed the dominant way artistic forms represent human lives and actions. Ordinary individuals replaced aristocratic heroes and heroines, amorphous prosaicness replaced the rigid structure of tragedy, and the solitary experience of reading and writing superseded communal performances. Drama, exemplified in the “classical tragedy” of William Shakespeare or Sophocles, provided a problematic norm for the modern realist novel: the question of how and to what extent the novel should take up this model is a vital issue for novelists such as Honoré de Balzac and novel theorists such as György Lukács and Erich Auerbach. For all of them, the novel’s relationship to tragedy exceeds a narrowly formal problem: the shift has implications for its status as art and for its ability to represent modern democratic values.
In the influential Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), Erich Auerbach characterizes the realist novel as a successful synthesis of the serious style of tragedy and ordinary subject matter. Ordinary characters from the lower classes, previously used for the “lowly” style of comedy—where they were depicted either in a grotesque or a light, pleasant way—became the subjects of “serious, problematic or even tragic representation” in realist fiction. Auerbach’s account of the history of representation covers the development from Greek epos and biblical narrative up to contemporary modernist novels, with realism depicted as a culmination.
Auerbach registers some difficulties in the realist novel’s succession to tragedy. In Stendhal’s writing, the giving of serious attention is still conditioned by the protagonist demonstrating aristocratic values. Balzac, on the other hand, distributes his sympathy without any limits, “bombastically exaggerating” the passions and misfortunes of minor characters, which leads to his work bordering on melodrama. Auerbach portrays Gustave Flaubert’s work, overcoming the shortcomings of his predecessors, as the completion of this development. Flaubert’s method of impartial observation resulted in the banishment of his subjectivity from the narrative, with his subjects finally portrayed as they were.
Auerbach’s account, written in exile after the Second World War, bears a message of hope. Modern literature came to terms with reality, overcame ideological prejudices, and fulfilled its role in objectively depicting human lives. His account relies on a liberal humanist narrative in which modern rationality is linked to democratization, as if cognitive shortcomings were the primary motivator of injustices. When we see the world as it really is, the privileges previously reserved to aristocrats will surely be extended to everyone.
Lukács approaches the relationship between the novel and tragedy from a different perspective. His main concern is the contrast between the intense communication and emotional effects of the latter and the subdued resonance of the former. Tragedy’s unified and condensed structure, organized around a central collision, the generality of its themes, and the strong personality of its heroes ensured its immediate and powerful effect on the viewing public. The novel’s unstructured narration and ordinary and strange characters enmeshed in their respective social milieu make it challenging for the reader to relate to them seriously.
In the opening pages of Father Goriot, Balzac addresses the reader and paints a gloomy vision of the novel’s reception. He predicts that instead of seriously relating to Goriot’s suffering, his reader will devour the story along with other distractions and consumables. Balzac hopes to overcome his readers’ insensitivity: he refers to his work as a drame, hoping that readers can relate to Goriot’s experience “in their own heart.”
Lukács is skeptical that the novel could achieve a genuine synthesis with tragedy. In The History of the Development of Modern Drama (1911), he argues that the form of drama became problematic justly, along with the social institutions that made it possible. The force of classical tragedy relied on unjust social structures: its general content was based on a shared value framework enforced by religion and state; its unified character system was contingent on a hierarchically organized society; and the strong personality of tragic heroes depended on a social structure that posed no substantial barriers to the will.
Lukács firmly rejects the possibility of democratizing the individuality and will of dramatic characters: “In vain has our democratic age claimed an equal right for all to be tragic; all attempts to open this kingdom of heaven to the poor in spirit have proved fruitless.” Such attempts, he argues, forget that the full realization of personality requires suppressing the personality of others: for every aristocratic hero expressing their will, servants are resigning their own. Lukács does not believe that the modern world is without hierarchies. Still, he claims that modern individuals gained a sense of autonomy that would make such a complete identification artistically implausible.
In The Theory of the Novel (1916), Lukács identifies a solution to the precariousness of novelistic form. The novel’s structure, capable of unifying the dispersed nature of the modern world, is a biographical narrative of a problematic individual following their development, leading to a recognition of their place in the world, which irradiates their life as its immanent meaning. This meaning needs to be accompanied by irony, the reflexive moment of the novel introduced by the narrator’s perspective and directed toward not only the protagonist but also toward themselves. The novel’s meaning thus emerges as an interplay between the narrator’s ironic response to the protagonist’s life story and their own uncertainty in this response. Unlike in tragedy, in which the hero’s recognition of their life’s meaning affects everyone in their surroundings fatally, sometimes prompting mass death, the realist novel carefully restricts the resonance an individual life can and should evoke.
In the final parts of Father Goriot, Eugène de Rastignac, the novel’s protagonist, complains about the cold response his cohabitants show to the “tragic” event of Goriot’s death. Similarly to the reader envisioned by Balzac earlier, a tutor living in the boarding house cannot wait to have his meal: “There were sixty other deaths today: why don’t you go and weep over the hecatomb of all Paris? […] If you’re that fond of him, go and take care of him and leave the rest of us to eat our dinner in peace.” The rational perspective, which in Auerbach’s account leads to an objective and unbiased distribution of serious attention, is taken to different conclusions in this passage. The abstract broadening of claims for a meaningful existence to all citizens would lead us to weep incessantly, so we had better not weep at all. An intense, empathetic response to one individual’s suffering does not make rational sense.
Rastignac’s challenges his cohabitants’ cynical approach through his own actions. He sacrifices the last of his money to supply the dying man with medicine and, later, a dignified burial, chastising Goriot’s rich daughters for failing to live up to their duty. But, however intense his identification with Goriot is, it is short-lived: in the end, he realizes that he needs one of Goriot’s daughters for his social and leaves to have dinner at her place. While we could see the novel’s end as inconsistent with the standpoint Balzac expressed initially, the author is hardly to blame. Following Lukács, we can read the novel as an expression of a paradox haunting modern liberal society: the tension existing between the universal promise of abstract equality and its very imperfect, emotionally taxing, and paradoxical realization. Rastignac’s limited, irrational, and perhaps hypocritical empathy is not the ideal response to this dilemma, but perhaps it is better than nothing.
Balzac, Father Goriot, p. 392.
Anna Schubertová is a PhD candidate in comparative and general literature at Charles University, Prague. She was a Jan Patočka Junior Visiting Fellow at the IWM in 2023–2024.
