LAURA ADAMS
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think about it all the time. Coming back to the novel after all these years,
the difficulty is as fresh on me now as it was when I started writing. I mean
when you get down to it, it is an extraordinary business to say you're going
to write a novel. You are creating a world. When you've been writing for as
many years as I have , and know the responsibiliry of being a writer, the
Godlike assumption of writing a novel is almost impossible to surmount.
How do you open the
door~
To become the prime cause of your own little
world!
Int :
I don't think that for you it's just writing a novel. It 's writing
the big
novel. Until recently, when I knew that you actually had the novel in
progress, I was thinking of the novel that you promised us as a metaphor ,
and saw what you have been laying before us for the last twenty-five years as
a novel. It 's art as process rather than a series of products .
Marler:
I think you could take all my work up to now and say, if you want to
extend the meaning of a novel , that all this makes up one book or is equal in
its impact to one huge novel. I wouldn't run away from that. I would hope
it 's true . I mean , suppose I get hit by a car tomorrow. Will people come
along and say, "Well , he's never written his novel, but he sure did write a
novel of sorts." No, I don 't argue with that .
Int :
I think that you have been staking your reputation on this big book and
that you've considered that the work you've been doing since
Armies
is less
significant, is easier. ''Journalism is chores," you've said, but isn't it really
in terms ofaltering the consciousness ofour time more significant than even
maybe the big novel might be?
Marler:
It
could be, but you can't measure that . You can't also say that the
sum of my ambitions is that one sentence, effecting a revolution in the
consciousness of our time. You can't measure these things .
Finnegans
Wake
has apparently had little influence on the consciousness of our time ,
but we don't know. Its influences are subterranean. Besides, we don't know
what its influence is going to be a hundred years from now .
Int :
But it hasn't been widely read .
Mailer:
Suppose a hundred years from now people are talking in three or four
or five languages at once. The fact that this book
Finnegans Wake
exists is
going to be incredible then because it is going to accelerate the
consciousness of that time, and yet one man will have done the work a
century earlier. Then the book will come into its own. Maybe he forged the
first link in something that is going to be tremendously important. The fact
that the link is there will serve as acrystallizing forceforspeaking in tongues.
This is an extreme exampie of what I am trying to say, but we can never be
certain of how well we are succeeding in a mission once we 've assigned
ourselves that mission . All we can ever know is whether we have worked as
