492
PARTISAN REVIEW
A time that can produce a Mailer, Bellow, Malamud, Ozick,
Kundera, Solzhenitsyn, Lessing, Naipal, to name only a few out–
standing novelists, is surely a creative epoch. And there are too
many accomplished figures to list in the academic disciplines. Yet
the prevailing atmosphere is one of specialization, academicism, and
uncertainty. In literary criticism, for example, there are still a few
critics who are neither journalists nor academics, such as Irving
Howe, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Stephen Spender, Robert
Penn Warren. But academic criticism is dominated by a highly
abstract, self-perpetuating literary theorizing, most of it under the
influence of an Americanized version of French deconstructionism,
some of it under the spell of a jargonized and outdated Marxism.
And the popular media, with their zest for novelty, create the feeling
that we are living in a permanent intellectual carnival.
Beyond the intellectual questions are the larger ones of war and
peace and the survival of Western democracy. We are living in a state
of apocalyptic fear and fatality about the possibility of a nuclear holo–
caust- partly real, partly induced by a new wave ofradical pacifism
that has the effect of paralyzing the will of the West to defend itself
against the growing power of the Soviet Union and its terrorist
allies. And none of the solutions- or even the old categories- appear
to furnish the answers to our problems.
It is often said that the terms "left" and "right" no longer have
meaning. This is not true. They do have a meaning, but the meaning
is not what it used to be. For much of the Left is not the old Marxist,
revolutionary Left. Nor is it simply pro-Russian or pro-communist.
The new Left is a complex of outworn Marxist notions, vaguely pro–
gressive ideas, trendy causes like environmentalism and various lib–
eration movements, sympathy for something called the Third World,
pacifism, anti-Americanism, an obsessive fear of nuclear power. All
this is combined with a sometimes genuine, sometimes spurious con–
cern for justice and human welfare. Unfortunately, the concern is
often expressed in terms of blind government spending and in politi–
cal pieties. This is not to say there is not a serious socialist Left, mostly
in France and to a lesser extent in this country, but it is often over–
whelmed by the more popular radical tide. On the other hand, in an
inversion of their usual roles, conservatives are often more concerned
over the preservation of liberal and democratic values than are the
liberals on the Left, though a good deal of this concern is more rhetor–
ical than real. Nevertheless, in matters of foreign policy, for exampie,
conservatives tend to be more realistic and more reliable than the
liberals and the Left. Liberals, as a rule, are caught in the crossfire
between conservatives and radicals; many of them have been swept
