Romantic Self-Creations: Mailer and Gilmore in "The Executioner's Song"

Abstract

Romantic writers are, for better and worse, obsessed with originality. In practice this means that each one who aspires to matter has to initiate his life as an artist with a story about what originality is, and that story must itself strike readers as being a new one. To compound the difficulty, the romantic writer is compelled, even as he recounts his version of originality, to be exemplifying it. Emerson sets out to do this much in his most celebrated essay, Self-Reliance. The formula for originality he puts forward there is a simple one: you become original by listening to yourself. Genius derives from trusting the inner voice, abiding by one's spontaneous impression ... then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side (259). Originality is not, as Wordsworth believed it to be, the product of a favored childhood, where one is Fostered alike by beauty and by fear (1850 Prelude, bk. 1, line 302). Nor is it mysteriously inborn, a celestial gift, as the German romantics tended to think. Moses and Plato and Milton became what they did in Emerson's view by observing the gleam of light which flashes across [the] mind from within and speaking not what men but what they thought (259). Yet the Emersonian philosophy of is also a philosophy of self-ruin. In time, every rhetorical pearl evolves back to sand; every hard-won identity tends to solidify and hem in the life. Romantic self-invention frequently begins in a sort of potlatch, a ritual in which the subject is compelled to destroy his full accumulation and return to poverty, and to ignorance, that state on which, according to Thoreau, all growth depends. The American romantic faith is a faith in crisis: without ruin, no renovation. And no renovation, it's assumed, is final: always, as Emerson says, there must be abandonment.