PARTE da entrevista de Norman Mailer à Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

Do you think America is a good place in which to practice the arts?

MAILER

When I was young it was marvelous for a writer. It’s the reason we have so many good writers in America—most of our literature had not yet been written. English novelists had all the major eighteenth- and nineteenth-century geniuses to deal with and go beyond. What did we have to go beyond? A few great writers, Melville and Hawthorne. The list is very short. For us, the field was wide open. Now we’re beleaguered. The movies were bad enough, though American novelists always felt a certain superiority to what was happening in Hollywood. You weren’t learning more about human nature from films, you were just being entertained—at some cost to your ability to learn a little more about why we’re here, which I think is one of the remaining huge questions.

Now people grow up with television, which has an element within it that is absolutely inimical to serious reading, and that is the commercial. Any time you’re interested in a narrative, you know it’s going to be interrupted every seven to ten minutes, which will shatter any concentration. Kids watch television and lose all interest in sustained narrative. As a novelist, I really feel I’m one of the elders of a dying craft. It once was an art, and now it’s down to being a craft and that craft is going to go. The answer to your question is this: America is no longer a good place to be a novelist, and once it was a wonderful place.

INTERVIEWER

Was there a time when the country looked to novelists for the truth?

MAILER

The important writers in my day, back in the early forties, were much more important to me than movie stars. Movie stars were oddities, curiosities. Actors could be dynamic, they could be attractive, but that wasn’t important, not in the scheme of things. Novelists were. I can’t speak for how people feel when they enter the priesthood, but that was the way I felt as a novelist—vocational. Nothing was more important to me.

(...)

INTERVIEWER

Flannery O’Connor once asked the question, “Who speaks for America today?” The answer she gave was the advertising agencies. Can you imagine a time again when the answer to that question will be the American novelist?

MAILER

No, not now. I’m gloomy. I wish I could be more positive about it. But the marketeers have taken over the country. There’s been a profound shift in the American ethic. We used to be a country that prided itself on the fine products we made. Not necessarily the greatest or most beautiful or most finely machined products, but we made a very good level of product that made economic sense. Now the country’s pride is marketing.

INTERVIEWER

F. Scott Fitzgerald knew that America was addicted to illusion. But is it now more true to say that America fully believes its own lies?

MAILER

When it comes to foreign affairs, we’ve been living lies ever since World War II. Now, maybe for the first five or ten years after World War II, Russia was an ideological threat because it did have great appeal to certain poor countries, no question. And then after that they hit their bad years. They’ve never been a huge threat to us. Yet for forty-plus years while the cold war was on, we kept Americans believing we were engaged in a struggle of ideology that had to be won. So there was an awful lot of bullshit slowly rolling down, like lava, over the American mind.

Most of the country believes in Jesus Christ. And they believe that compassion is the greatest virtue. But we only believe this on Sundays. And the other six days of the week, we’re an immensely competitive nation. We scramble like hell to make more money than our neighbor. Culture’s a word that most Americans don’t react to quickly. A European knows exactly what you mean by culture. They’ve got it there in their architecture. They’ve got it there in the curve of a street, and we have thoroughfares that go in a straight line because that’s the fastest way to get to market. So there’s a great guilt in American life, and this guilt is that we’re not good Christians. The Karl Rove concoction—stupidity plus patriotism—comes into play here. The basic propaganda machine of the parties, particularly the Republicans, is to enforce the notion that we are a noble, good country that wants only good for the rest of the world, and that we’re God’s blessing and that God wants us to succeed, that we’re God’s project. And under this exists, always, an ongoing sense of shame, an ongoing sense of guilt, the feeling that we’re not as good as we pretend to be.