Narration, totality and mediation: Realism and the problem of aesthetic knowledge in György Lukács

Abstract

This article examines realism in György Lukács as a theoretical problem grounded in the possibility of aesthetic knowledge of social reality. It aims to demonstrate that the opposition between narration and description constitutes a methodological divergence concerning the capacity of aesthetic form to reconstruct mediations and apprehend historical totality. Through critical-conceptual analysis of Lukacsian texts, comparative textual analysis of works by Balzac and Zola, and dialogue with Adorno, Benjamin, and Williams, the critique of naturalism and formalism is situated within the diagnosis of bourgeois ideological decadence after 1848, understood as an epistemological barrier to totalization. It concludes that these categories maintain heuristic relevance in late capitalism when detached from transhistorical normativity and critically applied to determinate contexts, differentiating forms that reconstruct social mediations from those that naturalize reified fragmentation.