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Narrative 11.3 (2003) 245-269



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Exploring the Great Divide:
High and Low, Left and Right

Robert Scholes


In a recent article, Andreas Huyssen finds it necessary to clarify the interpretation of the "Great Divide" between high and low modernism that he advanced to such great effect in After the Great Divide: "Much valuable recent work on the editing, marketing, and dissemination of modernism has misconstrued my earlier definition of the Great Divide as a static binary of high modernism vs. the market. My argument was rather that there had been, since the mid-nineteenth century in Europe, a powerful imaginary insisting on the divide while time and again violating that categorical separation in practice. After all, the insight that all cultural products are subject to the market was already advanced by Theodor Adorno, key theorist of the divide, in the late 1930s" (366-67). Huyssen goes on to say that he was mainly interested in how the divide played out in the context of postmodernist attempts to break down the wall between high and low, and that he now wishes to reconfigure or reconsider the divide in terms of a global approach to comparative literary studies. This is all well and good, but it seems to me that certain aspects of the divide have never been properly understood, and that, in order to understand them we need to reexamine some of the internal contradictions and other problems in the work of those who theorized the divide during the modernist period—not just Adorno but others, ranging from Georg Lukács and Clement Greenberg to the literary New Critics. In attempting this reexamination, I will no doubt oversimplify some of the positions I discuss and, in some cases, challenge received opinion about these texts. In defense, I can say only that I have been considering these positions for many years and believe that my readings are responsible and as accurate as such compression will allow.

We can start with Lukács, who was insisting on the distinction as early as 1914-15, when he wrote Theory of the Novel. In the preface he wrote for the 1963 [End Page 245] edition of this book, Lukács points out that he had composed the work during World War I, in a mood of profound depression as he contemplated the future of Europe. First published in a journal, it appeared as a book in 1920. In this work, Lukács wishes to make an argument for the novel as a major form of literary art—a motivation that he shares with such illustrious predecessors as Gustave Flaubert and Henry James, though his reasoning is very different from theirs. For Lukács the novel succeeds the epic as the proper narrative mode for an age after the death of God, a narrative grounded in what he calls a "transcendental homelessness" (61). Lukács feels that the dignity of the novel was threatened by the presence of a number of similar but trivial narrative modes, the most prominent among them being "mere entertainment literature" (71). The novel, he asserts, unlike other literary genres, was cursed by having an evil twin: "a caricatural twin almost indistinguishable from itself in all inessential formal characteristics: the entertainment novel, which has all the outward features of the novel but which, in essence, is bound to nothing and based on nothing, i.e. is entirely meaningless" (73).

Lukács wanted the novel to do serious cultural work, which meant, for him, a Hegelian project in which characters would embody the workings of a progressive historical dialectic. This led him, as similar concerns led Erich Auerbach, to privilege novels that offered a coherent and historicized narrative position (omniscience) and dealt with social and economic forces from a progressive perspective, exposing the evils of capitalistic society in the manner of Balzac or pointing the way toward a better social system. The pessimistic naturalism of Zola he did not approve, and, indeed, Lukács linked naturalism to aestheticism as excessively concerned with sensual details. Granting these concerns their seriousness, his attack on...

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