Realism, Modernism and the General: Beckett, Lukács, Adorno

Matthew Taunton

Origin: Static Issue 08
Content: Text

This paper starts from the proposition that theories of realism have tended to hinge in some sense on the generalizability of the text. In the work of the Marxist critic Georg Lukács, realist texts were valued for the facility that they offered to move from an identification with the specific experiences of their characters to a more general understanding of the social and economic conditions which produce those experiences. This paper makes a contrast between this position and the purportedly anti-realist theories of Theodor Adorno, using the two theorists' polarised reactions to Beckett's Trilogy (and modernism itself) to interrogate the role of generalizability in their aesthetics. In this regard, they are both heritors of a problematic concept of the 'general will' that can be traced back through Marx to Hegel and Rousseau. By focussing on the Trilogy itself, this paper makes the argument that its relation to the general should not be sought in the way that it reflects (Lukács) or mediates (Adorno) general social and political realities. The Trilogy's foregrounding of the materiality of thought and experience and its exploration of immanence suggest that the general is to be found in humankind's shared experience of the material universe.

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Contributor:

Matthew Taunton is a writer and academic working in London who completed his PhD at the London Consortium in 2008. His principal areas of research have been in British and French Literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and he also has interests in urban studies, media history and film. After completing his thesis he worked as a research assistant for the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism, which was published in 2008 by the British Library and Academia Press, and to which he is a major contributor. He has taught English Literature at University College London, Birkbeck College and now Goldsmiths College. He also recently designed and taught a course in media history at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, and is currently teaching an undergraduate humanities course at the Open University. His book, Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris, is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan in 2009. His journalism appears frequently in the New Statesman and the Times Literary Supplement among other publications.