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

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.