LAURA ADAMS
203
universe they have been sitting on all the time. It 's slower , more sensuous ,
more meaningful , more natural, but filled with awe . The light tends to
have a little of the hour of the wolf, a light close to lavender or purple, that
light you get on certain kinds of evenings, or very early on certain kinds of
dawns full of foreboding. But it's-there are all kinds of situations . A
woman losing her virginity is in an existential situation. Of course , part of
the comedy of twentieth-century technology is that it's gotten to the point
where a woman can lose her virginity without being in an existential
situation for a moment . It 's all exactly the way she thought it was going to
be , she 's been so well oriented.
Int :
I think that assumes that her partner is not also a virgin .... All right.
Your basic existential situation is a situation anyone enters at any moment
in time when the end result of his actions is unknown . But isn't to a larger
extent your aim in all the work that you've been doing to uncover what is
essentially good or evil in our natures and God's nature when that kind of
thing is actually unknowable? What I was going to suggest earlier in talking
about the demarcations of good and evil in
An American Dream
is that you
seem to have become increasingly obsessed since that time with your
inability to know what is good and what is evil.
Maller:
You say I'm obsessed , but where would be the literary proof of that?
What books would show that?
Int :
Start with the case of Richard Nixon in
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
and
St. George and the Godfather :
your inability to know or to intuit
whether Nixon is basically good or basically evil ; to know, in
Of
a
Fire on
the Moon ,
whether our space program will carry God's vision to the stars or
the Devil's; to know in
Why Are We in Vietnam?
whether America has
made a Faustian compact with the Devil or whether God is using us for evil
ends ; whether or not our national leaders and events win or lose us ground
in this divine battle . It seems to me that you lead us to this question, with
increasing desire to know the answer , in every work.
Mazier:
Well , it could be said that all I'm doing is leading people back to
Kierkegaard. I'd remind you I've written this several times: Kierkegaard
taught us, or tried to teach us, that at that moment we're feeling most
saintly , we may in fact be evil. And that moment when we think we ' re most
evil and finally corrupt , we may, in fact , in the eyes of God, be saintly at
that moment . It's a Dostoevskian, Kierkegaardian notion . Its first value is
that it strips us of that fundamental arrogance of assuming that at any given
moment any of us have enough centrality, have a
seat
from which we can
expound our dogma , or measure our moral value. So we don't have the
right to say Richard Nixon is : A. good ; B. evil. I might have my opinion of
Richard Nixon , but I don ' t have the right to say that man is evil, any more
