Executioner's Song Research Articles

Viper on the Hearth's Unfinished Business: Anti-Mormonism and Mormon Studies

<i>Viper on the Hearth</i>'s Unfinished Business: Anti-Mormonism and Mormon Studies

Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer's “The Executioner's Song”

Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer's “The Executioner's Song”

Deconstructing Death: Derrida and the Scene of Execution

I would like to begin with a rather spectacular vision of the death penalty, one that brings together, with great irony, the death penalty, the possibility but also the impossibility of its abolition, and the 'American spirit'. Here is that vision:I would like to see a law passed which would abolish capital punishment, except for those states which insisted on keeping it. Such states would then be allowed to kill criminals provided that the killing is not impersonal but personal and a public spectacle: to wit that the executioner be more or less the same size and weight as the criminal (the law could here specify the limits) and that they fight to death using no weapons, or weapons not capable of killing at a distance. Thus, knives or broken bottles would be acceptable. Guns would not.The benefit of this law is that it might return us to moral responsibility. The killer would carry the other man's death in his psyche. The audience, in turn, would experience a sense of tragedy, since the executioners, highly trained for this, would almost always win. In the flabby American spirit there is a buried sadist who finds the bullfight contemptible - what he really desires are gladiators. Since nothing is worse for a country than repressed sadism, this method of execution would offer ventilation for the more cancerous emotions of the American public.1The author of this fight-club-phantasy - this unadulterated AmericanGladiators-meets-Thunderdome scenario - is Norman Mailer. The same Norman Mailer who would, some twenty years later, go on to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning 'true life story' The Executioner's Song (1979), which depicts in 1109 pages the events surrounding the execution of Gary Gilmore by the state of Utah in 1977 (Gary Gilmore was the first person executed in the United States after the re-instatement of the death penalty in 1976). 'The Executioner's Song' is, of course, also the title of a 1982 NBC film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Rosanna Arquette.2But before the book, and before the movie, Mailer wrote a short article, titled 'A Program for the Nation', from which I have just quoted an excerpt. This article was written in response to a survey from Esquire magazine in 1959,3 in which 150 famous people were queried about the 1960 U.S. Presidential election: 'What, to your mind, should be the most important issues in the election' (Presidential Papers, p10)?Now if I turn to Mailer's program for the nation here, it is not only because he addresses capital punishment as an important, presidential issue. It is also because he insists on the scene of execution in America. There is a scene, says Mailer, that is not being seen: a hidden and invisible and perhaps even disavowed scene. This scene, says Mailer, must be made visible; it must be literally seen (this is his irony). America must see what it refuses to see: the scene of execution. What Mailer goes on to describe, however, is a rather unAmerican scene: no lethal injection here (or to put it less anachronistically: no hanging, no electric chair, no gas chamber here). Instead Mailer stages his American scene of execution as an epic historical drama, as an archaic and sadistic scene.Indeed, what Mailer's phantasy makes visible is not only a Roman scene. It is also a second (or even third) scene, which is really a kind of primal scene: 'In the flabby American spirit there is a buried sadist who finds the bullfight contemptible - what he really desires are gladiators'. In the deep, dark, fleshy recesses of the American soul lies a desire that is older, younger, more primitive, more archaic than a desire for (European) bullfights. It's a desire for cutting weapons and a desire for human, rather than animal, sacrifice. Thus, Mailer's insistence on the scene of capital punishment leads him, as it were, behind the scene(s), to the scene's latent structure: 'Since nothing is worse for a country than repressed sadism, this method of execution would offer ventilation for the more cancerous emotions of the American public'. …

Da Norman Mailer a Matthew Barney. Il mito post-umano di Gary Gilmore

Gary Gilmore, a murderer who was condamned to death in the USA in 1976, gained international notoriety thanks to his decision to accept and encourage his death sentence, refusing every kind of juridical appeal, surprisingly turning his own execution into a public and intentional suicide. For its power to make American institutions wonder about ethical and political problems, like the legitimacy of death penalty or the relationship between individual freedom and public law, this case inspired in 1979 The Executioner's Song, a non-fiction novel by Norman Mailer. about twenty years later Gilmore became a character of The Cremaster Cycle, one of the most important works by the american video-artist Matthew Barney, who based the plot of his Cremaster 2 (the second episode of this five-movie saga) on Mailer's novel. The comparison between Cremaster 2 and its literary model will provide an example of the transformation of a story between different artistic languages, but also between different historical and cultural backgrounds: in the post human era the story of Gary Gilmore has lost most of its political and ethical meanings becoming a symbol of the struggle between human willingness and biological destiny.

The blending of fact and fiction in three American documentary (crime) narratives

The article focuses on narratives that can best be classified as documentary novels. Such narratives can frequently depict deviant crimes. The selected texts are taken from three different decades, as the study intends to determine if/how the perception of crime and, consequently, its depiction in verbal narratives change through time, and moreover, to examine the attitudes of different writers towards facts (empirical reality) that they depict. Truman Capotećs In Cold Blood (1965), Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song (1979), and John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story (1994) are all instances of crime narratives that blur and thus problematize the (often thin) line between fact and fiction, and, as a result, raise issues that concern genre theory. These texts embody characteristics of journalistic, historical, (auto)biographical, and fictional accounts, and continually oscillate on the scale of factuality or fictionality.

Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film

Reviewed by: Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film D. Quentin Miller (bio) Caster, Peter . Prisons, Race, and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Film. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2008. The ever-growing field of prison literature studies focuses attention on a number of social issues that affect the way we read American literature. Class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion are just some of the lenses that provide insight into American literature, and they fuse together into a magnifying glass when we read prison literature. When we look through this glass, we see aspects of our world invisible to the naked eye, and we also realize quickly that, when we shine a light through a magnifying glass long enough, things tend to smolder, or to burst into flames. Prison literature is both something we need to scrutinize and something that is potentially incendiary. Peter Caster's new study, Prisons, Race, and Masculinity, is aware of both of these aspects of prison literature, and is cautious to separate literary and cinematic representations of prison from actual prison experiences. Part of the reason this literature can be incendiary is related to the mysteriousness of its subject: if prisons represent sites of fear and depravity for non-incarcerated citizens, then fictional renditions of prisons can easily become sensational and, gradually, damaging to those who inhabit them, or who once inhabited them. The fact that a wildly disproportionate number of United States prisoners are black males presents a real-world problem that is reinforced by distorted representations of prisons in literature and film: as Caster says, "Those not themselves incarcerated look to [End Page 564] popular and provocative projections" of the prison experience, and "the sheer number of imprisoned black men is both a cause and a consequence of an expectation of criminality" (xii, xiii). This expectation is reinforced, in his argument, throughout the twentieth century in fiction and in film. Caster's method is clear and consistent; he incorporates "tactics of psychoanalysis with the larger strategy of historically accounting for the production and reception of these books, films, and performances" (2). This is cultural criticism done very well, drawing from psychology, history, statistical analysis, the proceedings of the American Correctional Association for over thirty years, legal studies, and foundational studies in prison literature. This pluralistic approach does not distract from Caster's careful, original readings of texts: he impressively and deftly moves between his readings and his critical methodology, producing a clear study that will prove invaluable to scholars in the field of prison literature as well as those interested in the individual texts and authors he studies. After thoroughly critiquing the relationship between imprisonment in history and in the popular imagination in his opening chapter, Caster's study contains seven chapters that progress roughly chronologically. The first three involve literary analysis; the subjects are three Faulkner novels, Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. The next three chapters scrutinize wide-release films of the 1990s: American History X, The Hurricane, and The Farm. A final chapter considers two live performances. This arrangement acknowledges the uniqueness of prison texts which may be rooted in a literary tradition, but which have adapted to other dramatic representations as the century has progressed. The three chapters on film are quite thorough and, taken together, impressively coherent in both their approach to black male subjects and their critique of films that blur the boundary between imagined and real imprisonment. Caster is remarkably adept at critiquing film effectively in written analysis, and while he continues to develop his context in these chapters through statistics and other source materials, he focuses in depth on the films themselves. He boldly points to a "fallacy" in these three films: "The fallacy of these prison films' redemption narratives lies in their implicit endorsement of the legal system that they suggest unjustly imprisons, but nevertheless improves, black men" (108). The relationship between history and the imagination in these films is "vexed" in his view, and his analysis of them is convincing. Although the three films were produced for different audiences, under different circumstances, with vastly different budgets, and with...

The Karma of Words: Mailer since Executioner's Song

The Karma of Words: Mailer since Executioner's Song

The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism

There may be no better example of the way the world has changed around Norman Mailer than the recent critical esteem showered on Mikal Gilmore's memoir, Shot in the Heart. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and much praised in the popular press, Gilmore's book returns to the territory covered by Mailer's most impressive work, The Executioner's Song. Like Mailer's "true life" novel, Gilmore's memoir recounts the events that led up to two brutal murders committed by his brother Gary, the eventual execution of his brother, and the effects of those killings on the people touched by their wake. 1 But Shot in the Heart treats those matters so differently from The Executioner's Song that it throws Mailer's work into stark relief by comparison.

Sentenced to Death: The American Novel and Capital Punishment

The criminal justice system in America is as powerful a shaper of history and society as its better-known counterparts--the military, politics, government, and technology. In a country that lacks a mandatory death sentence for specific crimes, the American strategy for execution proves to be based more upon distinctions between offenders than upon distinctions between offenses. Five important novels--McTeague, An American Tragedy, Native Son, In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song--bring readers a vivid awareness of America's punitive codes. Each details the story of a life that leads to the gallows. Sentenced to Death places these works against the historical background of crime and capital punishment in America, a nation where public discourse on crime is dominated by images of the electric chair and the gas chamber, by maximum security prisons, by hardened convicts out on parole. Such images, in turn mirror and shape the exercise of punitive power. This probing look at capital punishment in execution novels and in real-life media accents the poles of punitive power. Such a comparison of literary works with confrontational journalism and court records also brings revealing insight into the long-term debate on capital punishment in American culture.

Errol Morris' Construction of Innocence in The Thin Blue Line

Errol Morris' Construction of Innocence in The Thin Blue Line Renée R. Curry California State University, San Marcos The Home Box Office video promotional campaign for Errol Morris' documentary The Thin Blue Line (1988) calls the film a "new movie mystery" and aligns it in the tradition of The Executioner's Song and In Cold Blood [in that it depicts] a chilling investigation and reconstruction of a brutal, cold-blooded murder. This reallife drama impartially sifts fact and fiction, bluntly controlling the evidence. The result will take you to the boundaries ofjustice and beyond. This promotion fails to point out, however, that unlike either of the two feature films in the comparison, The Thin Blue Line is a documentary and as a documentary, it explodes the concept of real-life drama by employing the actual convicted criminals, David Harris and Randall Adams, as the two key actors. Some scholarly attention has already been devoted to the phenomenological attributes of The Thin Blue Line (Mcllroy), its particular documentary style (Michaels), and the post-structuralist relationship between history and memory (Williams). My argument differs from these in that, while I explore some of the phenomena of the film and while I also discuss Morris' unique participation in post-structuralist film-making, I house these explorations within an interrogation of the technical and verbal paradigms of innocence constructed throughout the film. The "true" story upon which director Errol Morris bases this film tells a tale of Randall Dale Adams who spent an evening with a young man named David Harris. Late in the evening, one of these two men killed a Dallas police officer. Randall Adams claims that he was asleep in a hotel room with his brother at the time of the killing. David Harris asserts that Adams killed the police officer while he, Harris, sat as a passenger in the car. The Dallas police weigh the evidence and decide that Randall Adams pulled the trigger . They try him, convict him, and sentence him to Death Row. Randall Adams still maintains his innocence. This paper argues that Errol Morris' film reopens consideration of the facts of the case regarding the murder of Dallas policeman Robert Wood by aurally and visually constructing innocence, 153 154Rocky Mountain Review Randall Adams' innocence, on the screen. To construct this innocence , Morris relies on ordinary "telling" techniques such as verbal monologues and newspaper graphics. However, he also employs cinematic techniques to construct Adams' innocence. He replays key reenactment scenes (such "settings" do not occur in documentaries). He surrealistically displays key psychological images and sound effects such as the twirling crisis light of the police car, the clicking "sound" of the ever-blinking red and blue light, and the slow-motion flying milk shake released by the partner of the cop being shot (such fantasy elements of filmmaking are not in the domain of the documentary). Upon release of The Thin Blue Line, the "real-life" investigation reopened. Neither The Executioner's Song nor In Cold Blood had such impact; they both remained in the domain of attempting to explore criminal psychology with a film audience after the fact of the crime. The Thin Blue Line changes perceptions about the facts of the murder case just as traditional documentaries frequently do. However, this documentary privileges the fantastical elements of cinema to make its case and thereby drags elements of the feature film into the domain of art as political praxis. Errol Morris claims, "There's no reason why documentaries can't be as personal as fiction filmmaking and bear the imprint of those who made them. Truth isn't guaranteed by style or expression. It isn't guaranteed by anything " (Bates 17). Previous to this film, Errol Morris directed two other documentaries : Gates of Heaven (1978) and Vernon, Florida (1981). These films remain distinctive for their "non-linear, anecdotal style and their dead-on shots of ordinary people talking plainly to the camera, with no intervening interlocutor to be seen or heard" (Dieckmann 33). The Thin Blue Line takes detours with a deliberate linearity by interjecting anecdotes, fantastical images, and dead-on shots. Morris also forays into obtrusive interviewing in the ultimate scene of the film when...

The Voice of Paranoia: Norman Mailer'sThe Executioner's Song

The facts are these: some time on the early morning of July 20, 1976, Gary Gilmore, barely three months after his release from a twelveyear sentence for armed robbery served in the federal penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, drove into a gas station in Provo, Utah, robbed Max Jensen, the station attendant, and demanded that he lie facedown on the ground. Gilmore then fired twice into Jensen's head at point-blank range with an automatic pistol; Jensen died immediately. In the evening, fourteen or fifteen hours after the first murder, Gilmore drove into a motel situated next door to the house of his relatives, Vern and Ida Damico, who had given Gilmore refuge and found him a job upon his release from prison. Gilmore demanded money from Benny Bushnell, the owner of the motel, asked him to lie face-down on the floor, and then pumped one bullet into his head; Gilmore had intended to shoot him twice, but his gun jammed, and it was several hours before Bushnell would die of his wounds. One day later, Gilmore was arrested for the murder of Benny Bushnell. He was tried and found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to death: his choice of death was by firing squad. Though his mother and the American Civil Liberties Union attempted to block the execution, Gilmore demanded that the state of Utah carry out the sentence. On January 17, 1977, he was shot to death by a team of four handpicked riflemen, in the first public execution to have taken place in the United States in over a decade.

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

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.

Dictionary of Narratology , and: Who Says This? The Authority of the Author, the Discourse, and the Reader (review)

Reviewed by: Dictionary of Narratology, and: Who Says This? The Authority of the Author, the Discourse, and the Reader Wallace Martin Gerald Prince . Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987. 118 pp. $17.95. Welch D. Everman . Who Says This? The Authority of the Author, the Discourse, and the Reader. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1988. 142 pp. $17.95. In a world overrun with theories and vocabularies, there are two reasons for coining new words or redefining those that exist: to designate something not hitherto named or to reveal a new system of relations. From Henry James and Percy [End Page 374] Lubbock we inherited a set of terms that enhanced our understanding of point of view in fiction. Finding that vocabulary inadequate, Dorrit Cohn, Franz Stanzel, and Gérard Genette developed different systems to name the phenomena involved, and each one calls attention to important aspects of narrative technique. The efforts of French structuralists to describe other aspects of narrative left us a more dubious welter of words. When not renaming phenomena that had already been named, they often used traditional terms in new senses. And when translated, a single French word might spawn several in English (thus Barthes's catalyses became "catalyzers," "catalysts," and "satellites"). In these circumstances, Prince's Dictionary of Narratology is an immensely useful reference work. It includes nearly all the terms that fall within the field; the only omissions I noted were words that have not gained currency. He is particularly generous in presenting the terminology of the French structuralists but does not slight the Anglo-American, German, and Russian traditions. The multiple meanings of words such as "mode" are lucidly distinguished, and the foreign terms used by some who write in English ("Er-form," "histoire") are appropriately cross-referenced. Relevant terms from communication theory, psychology, and folklore also appear. To gain an understanding of some words, it is necessary to know the meaning of others, and by following the cross-references Prince supplies, it is possible, and sometimes necessary, to piece together the theories from which they are taken. A few entries, such as "focalization" and "function," draw together large areas of theory in useful ways. Narratologists will want to have a copy of Prince's Dictionary at hand; if available in paperback, it would be useful for courses in narrative. The proliferation of overlapping terminology in the past thirty years has produced what looks more like a scholasticism than a science of narrative, and this situation obscures important achievements in the field. Although we do not need an Academy of Narratology to license neologisms, we might profit from the efforts of a reductionist who proposed to cut the working vocabulary of the discipline down to an unredundant size. Whereas critics classify the techniques of fiction, writers play with them, disrupting the conventions that separate characters, narrators, and authors, and thereby calling into question the ontology that segregates texts, facts, and dioughts. Everman's Who Says This? is a collection of essays that could serve as a primer of postmodernism. The first chapter concerns the mixing of fact and fiction in The Executioner's Song, Kerouac's Visions of Cody, and Cantor's The Death of Ché Guevara. In his almost desperate attempt to show what really happened, Mailer is driven to the fictional rendering of consciousness as well as to a ponderous authentication through inclusion of court transcripts and newspaper articles. Kerouac's quest for the truth of Neal Cassady leads him to a quest for himself in "spontaneous prose" and tape recording. (Both approaches are in the American grain; Mark Twain had used news clippings and imagined an internal tape recorder in writing his autobiography.) But of course neither of these approaches will yield a truth beyond textuality—as Cantor realizes. The next four chapters treat Raymond Federman, Harry Mathews (of OuLiPo), and Italo Calvino respectively. Everman is a perceptive reader and a good writer, but the subtitle of his book—The Authority of the Author, the Discourse, and the Reader —provides only an occasion for collecting these essays, not a conceptual [End Page 375] structure that draws them together. Assaults on literary authority have taken two forms. One...

The Executioner's Song

The Executioner's Song

A Right to Die: Termination of Appeal for Condemned Prisoners

There currently are nearly thirteen hundred persons in American prisons under sentence of death. For the vast majority of them, the elaborate state and federal appeals process can and will delay execution months, years, perhaps indefinitely. They wish to live, and their lawyers will explore every legal avenue in order to keep their clients alive. For some on death row, however, the darkest fear is not execution, but the prospect of living out their natural years incarcerated in a six-by-nine cell, under constant surveillance, with little or no hope of ever regaining their freedom. For these men and women, termination of their appeals and execution of sentence may well appear as a preferable option to an inexorable mental and physical deterioration. They want to hear the executioner's song. Of those executions carried out in the United States since the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment does not violate the eighth amendment,' several have been termed voluntary, in that the condemned prisoners cut off their appeals in order to hasten their punishment.2 So long as the current system continues, with its opportunities for numerous appeals and delays but with the death sentence an ever more frequently imposed penalty, we may expect some of the present and future occupants of death row to terminate their appeals. Such a decision raises not only legal but moral questions as well; indeed, some opponents of capital punishment argue that there is no right to terminate appeals because this leads to

Gary Gilmore's Pilgrimage: A Study of norman Mailer's 'The Executioner's Song'

Gary Gilmore's Pilgrimage: A Study of norman Mailer's 'The Executioner's Song'

Book Review: The Executioner's Song

Book Review: The Executioner's Song