Norman Podhoretz
THE NEW NIHILISM AND THE NOVEL
If
you take a random sampling of novels published over the
past few months, what strikes you most forcibly is the remarkable degree
to which writers, both here and in various European countries, have
again become preoccupied-though in a different key and a new per–
spective-with the theme of the loss of values. In America, at least,
the deep concern with this theme that informed almost every poem
and novel of the modernist movement became for a time either incom–
prehensible or boring (which, when we are talking about attitudes as
expressed in works of art, amounts to much the same thing)-and with
good cause. First of all, the modernist movement had exhausted itself
by the mid 1940's: the avant-garde in literature was dead, and the few
experimental writers who remained were able to bring no fresh life to
the attitudes of the movement. It is this, and not a mere deficiency of
technical ingenuity, that explains why such writers daringly continued
to repeat experiments so revolutionary that they were already on the
reading lists of freshman survey courses in English literature. Concern
over the loss of values became a received idea, a cliche, and the best
anyone could do with it was to trot out mechanical symbolic allusions;
only a scholar with the statistical thoroughness of Miss Caroline Spur–
geon would have the stamina to tabulate the number of deserts, rats,
ruined mansions and the like that have cropped up
in
the last ten or
fifteen years of American writing. Beyond this, however, the whole
question of the loss of values was soon removed from the hands of the
literary men who had raised it
in
the first place and given over to the
tender embraces of the theologians, thus turning what had been a
"nonsectarian" diagnosis of the spiritual condition of modem man
into a point of doctrinal contention between "humanists" and "religion–
ists." Not that the literary men offered any great resistance to this
usurpation, for the terms in which some of them had posed the prob-
