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TONY
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between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth
century." The ultimate fear is not that Johnson may trigger off the
war that ends us all-though that is there-but the fear that God "may
have lost His way" and may now lose to the Devil. "It is the heart of
existential logic that God's ultimate victory over the Devil is no more
certain than the Devil's victory over God---either may conquer man and
so give Being a characteristic Good or Evil, or indeed each may exhaust
the other, until Being ceases to exist or sinks through seas of entropy
into a Being less various, less articulated, less organic, more like plastic
than the Nature we know." Again, that could come from Burroughs
(note, in passing, the increasing popularity of the metaphor of "en–
tropy"). Mailer thinks it is disastrous that modern man lives
in
an
"antisupernatural" society, and he finds a greater psychic health in
"medieval man ... [who was] able to live with gods, devils, angels, and
demons, with witches, warlocks, and spirits." It is one of Mailer's avowed
intents to attempt to restore to modern man some of the more primitive
dreads in the
~interest
of renewed psychic vitality. This was clear in
An American Dream
where Rojack asserts: "Yes, I had come to believe
in grace and the lack of it,
in
the long finger of God and the swish of
the Devil. .. . I had come to believe in spirits and demons, in devils,
warlocks, omens, wizards and fiends, in incubi and succubi. . . ." Inter–
estingly, Rojack maintains that civilization is an "invasion of the super–
natural . . . and the price we have paid is to accelerate our sense of
some enormous if not quite definable disaster which awaits us." Mailer's
demonism, then, is perhaps an attempt to provide identities for uniden–
tified threats and forces, a way of transforming an enfeebling paranoia
into a vitalizing dread. "Today the enemy is vague," he revealingly said
in an earlier essay, and one can see how throughout his more recent
work he has tried to dissipate that vagueness by postulating pairs of
opposed extremes. Mailer once said he was excited by the "tendency to
reduce all of life to its ultimate alternatives" and we can see various
moves in that direction in some of his own pairings: "assassins and
victims"; conformists and outlaws; the cancerous forces of control re–
sisted by the brave healthy energy of the hero or the hipster; magician
and artist (as in the classic account of the Liston-Patterson fight, which
Mailer transformed into a cosmic victory of black magic over the weak–
ened forces of light) ; "being and nothingness";
Cannibals and Christians;
finally, "God and the Devil." As I said in relation to Burroughs, I
think this simplifying schematization runs the risk of melodramatizing
reality. That is not necessarily a totally bad thing, of course. A certain
amount of timely melodrama may serve to awaken us to nightmare as-
