rial ambitions to blossom in Germany,n”because a committed value pluralistnnegates the idea of citizenship as a moralncommunity.” A deep historical defectnwas thus made into a modern virtue. Asnsocial-science professor and SS leadernReinhard Hflhn put it, “shared valuencommitments are destructive of a Volksgemeinschaft.n” When the German armiesnset out to create a “new order” innthe East, only commitment to the worknethic remained to guide the elites; thisnmoral trait was twisted into the valueneutral,ncareerist, bureaucratic nightmarenof The Holocaust Kingdom.nBaum’s work has weaknesses, particularlyna tendency to let his generalizationsnoutrun his evidence, but his focus onnvalues and his overall thesis remain compelling.nHe notes that smaller nationsnwith deep value cleavages, such asnSwitzerland or Holland, have managednto escape the disaster that befell modernnGermany by the device of “consociational”ndemocracy. This method ofngovernment demands elite solidarity,ndegrees of duplication and inefficiency,nand the eschewing of great-power status.nThe United States, he emphasizes severalntimes, has also managed to articulate anshared “mainstream” core of values givingnit a coherent national identity.nOr has it? While it is indeed true thatnthe United States was conceived in andnexhibited through the middle of thisncentury a fairly consistent value schema,nevidence suggests that that consensus hasnalmost completely unraveled over thenlast 20 years. Pollster Daniel Yankelovich’snrecent book New Rules chroniclesnthis vast transformation in the sharednmeanings found among Americans,nwhere the old values—sacrifice fornchildren, hard work, religious belief,ndelayed gratification, lawfulness, civicnduty, maintenance of an intact family, annice neighborhood, and so on—are challengednby new ones focused on cultivationnof the self. The result by the earlyn1980’s, Yankelovich shows, is astandoff,nwherein 20% of the population adherenfirmly to the “old values” and 17% tonthe “new.” The other 63 % are scatterednin between. These numbers reflect freshnand deep cleavages in America, fundamentalndifferences on the nature of thengood society, and deep disagreementnover what it means to be an American.nNorman Lear and Jerry Falwell, to choosenthe most obvious examples, stare at eachn’ other as ethical strangers, unable to communicatenin moral terms. They and theirncamps are engaged in what Yankelovichncalls “a national battle of moral normsn… a cockpit of [cultural] conflict”nwhich the pollster expects to continue fornthe remainder of this century. Reflectingnthis growing dissensus, “value neutrality”nand an accentuated “pluralism”nhave indeed become the reigning orthodoxiesnof our professions, our bureaucraciesnand, increasingly, our public arena.nIf Baum’s thesis is even partially correct,nthese trends portend a dangerous timenahead. Unconsciously echoing manynGerman academicians of the late 19thncentury, Yankelovich celebratesnAmerica’s new cultural and value pluralism,nyet also yearns for a “synthesis” thatnmight still heal the breach. This time,none is tempted to say, may it be so. DnSleaze Experimental and ConventionalnJohn Hawkes: Virginie: Her Two Lives;nHarper & Row; New York.nAlice Adams: To See You Again;nAlfred A. Knopf; New York.nby Stephen L. TannernIhese two works of fiction, one annovel and the other a collection of stories,nexemplify two contrasting approaches inncontemporary literature.nJohn Hawkes, a representative writernof experimental, nonmimetic fiction, attemptsnto create a world rather than tonimitate the one immediately at hand. Inncreating the worlds of his novels, henacknowledges a strong feeling for dreamsnand an interest in “exploiting thenrichness and energy of the unconscious.”nFrederick Busch, in Hawkes: A Guide tonHis Fiction, characterizes him as an”voyager of the inner eye ” as he describesnHawkes’s distortion of our usual conceptnof the novel, his unsettling manipulationnof narration, his fascination with the patternsnand music of language, and hisnstartling verbal equivalents of ordinarilyninaccessible psychic history. According tonBusch, “Hawkes’s worlds are metaphoricnones with enough of our own world ad-nDr. Tanner is professor of English atnBrigham Young University.nnnduced—a wicked verisimilitude—tonkeep us suspended between what wenhave thought to be real and what Hawkesncauses us to really care about in his monstrousnworlds.”nHawkes shares with William Gass,nRichard Gilman, Susan Sontag, andnothers the belief that fiction is how anwriter’s language behaves and should bendescribed in terms of its language alone.nThis view is insisted upon in RichardnGilman’s The Confusion of Realms,nwhich attacks all artistic theory and practicenthat take literature to be “an employmentnof language for ends beyondnitself.” Invoking recent self-reflexive experimentalnfiction and the criticism ofnSusan Sontag, Gilman argues thatnliterary works are self-sufficient, selfjustifyingnuniverses, not second-ordernrepresentations of some already-existingnreality. Literature is properly an “increment,”nnot a “complement,” a newnreality rather than a reflection of the oldnone. Art, says Gilman, need not communicaten”experience of any kind exceptnan esthetic one,” and it has “no reasonnfor being other than to test and exemplifynnew forms of consciousness, which,nmoreover, have had to be inventednprecisely because actuality is incapable ofngenerating them.” In zParisReview article,nGilman applauds the “secularizationnof art, its chastening and the removalnW H l S lnJanuary 1983n