contrast, Sartre, immersed in his celebrated "nausea," found life meaningless and made meaninglessness his standard. Were Dante writing today, Gardner suggests, he would be considered "freakish." Modern culture lionizes the artist for his angst, not his wisdom.
Contemporary novelists do little more than toy with moral stand- ards, and when a Norman Mailer calls a Charles Manson "intellectually courageous," the line between morality and escapist fiction begins to blur....