The distinction between progressive ‘narration’ and reactionary ‘description’, that is, between realism and naturalism, is one that Georg Lukács often made in his critical writings on literature, and is encapsulated in his 1936 essay ‘Narrate or Describe?’. This distinction, appearing in such an uncompromising essay, has also provided critics with reason to dismiss Lukács’ position on naturalism, and also on modernism, given that Lukács argued elsewhere that twentieth-century modernism was a regressive outcome of the alienating tendencies found within nineteenth-century naturalism. However, this chapter argues that the ‘Narrate or Describe?’ essay was related to the context of the 1930s, and that Lukács’ position on naturalism and modernism began to change from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. A key work here was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). Lukács then revised his understanding of naturalism, and this found expression in his The Specificity of the Aesthetic (the Aesthetic) (1963). This chapter explores the account of filmic naturalism in the Aesthetic, and then compare that with Lukács’ response to Solzhenitsyn’s work, before applying both to an analysis of the 1970 film One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
The Specificity of the Aesthetic Phenomenon in the Philosophical and Anthropological Search of Georg Lukács