Romantic Self-Creations

Mailer and Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song

Abstract

A reprint of Mark Edmundson’s essay, first published in Contemporary Literature 31.4 (Winter 1990). Edmundson places Mailer in the Emersonian tradition of self-destroying self-invention and challenges early reviewers who saw The Executioner’s Song as Mailer’s retreat from romantic egotism into documentary. He argues that the book’s shaping of passage endings grants tragic dignity to Gary Gilmore and Nicole Baker while diminishing the victims, so that Mailer’s spare, prison-like style becomes a polemic for an existential acceptance of death. He then considers whether Gilmore may instead embody a disruptive, parodic play that resists any such form, compelling Mailer to defend culture’s conserving values.