The Third Dimension of Georg Lukacs

I remember Lukacs from the thirties as a Marxist literary critic who all agreed was a great, original thinker, though no one I knew had read more than one or two of his pieces. My own assent to his reputation was based on Lukacs’s theory of “intellectual physiognomy,” which explained what made characters in novels and plays profound or trivial. “Intellectual physiognomy” seemed to me the answer to a deep riddle of fiction: how an Othello or Lear could deliver wonderful utterances yet be convincingly stupid or raving; while a personage in an “intellectual” novel, e.g., one by Aldous Huxley, might philosophize brilliantly about abstruse issues yet produce an effect of shallowness.

“Int...