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The Executioner's Song

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The Executioner's Song American Studies in Scandinavian, Vol. 14, 1982 :35-48 Gary Gil y of Norman The Executioner's Song BY Raoul Granqvist Ume%University Norman Mailer has waged a lifelong war against the social pres- sures that level human actions and dull senses and impulses. His quest for conceptual metaphors to diagnose the resulting "cancer" (as he calls it), has been equally persistent. Mailer is not content with describing or reporting. Ever since the mid-sixties he has in- sisted on re-creating contemporaneity by presenting his readers with fictional dramas in whose realization they (and the writer himself) have participated. To expose the collective guilt, to clarify am- biguities, and thereby cure the society of its diseases has been Mailer's grand, didactic scheme. Gary Gilmore's refusal to waive his right to appeal for his life and his subsequent execution by the State of Utah in 1977 pre- sented Mailer with a long-sought after theme. The title, The Exe- cutioner's Song, could have been different: Many years ago I wished to write a book called The Saint and the Psychoflath and in time that book swelled to such proportions in my mind that I thought of a magnum opus to bear the monumental name: A Psychology ofthe Orgy. Ah, my Psychology of the Orgy reduced itself to the dimensions of an essay ["The White Negro", 19571. Now [1968], the title comes back. It is a good fit - The Saint and the Psychobath. Because these are writings on two themes, violence and the mystical, writings about what is criminal and what is religious, and the root of my perception all those years ago . was that the saint and the psycho- path were united to one another, and different from the mass of men. They were closer to existence. They shared a sense of the present so powerful that memory, caution, precedent, tradition, commonplace, project, and future enterprise were nerveless before the sense of the present in their mind and body. In their most incandescent states, they existed for the next breath, and so were indistinguishable. from one another: saint and psychopath - a murderer in the moment of his murder could feel a sense of beauty and perfection as complete as the transport of the saint.l Even if the title differs, the program as outlined above bears distinctly on the content of The Executioner's Song. Its protagonist develops, through a murder, into a mystic and a public saint. The following essay will attempt to analyse this process and position the varied stations along his allegorical route. It will rehearse Mailer's obsession with the oppositions and paradoxes in the American psyche, recall his hatred of unauthentic and anonymous violence, and place the novel in the continuum of his work in progrem2 Gary Gilmore is paroled after having spent eighteen of the last twenty-one years behind bars (he is now 35 years old). We settles down in Provo, in the "Mormon Kingdom of Deseret," among relatives, who find him odd jobs, and friends. Subjected to their missionary care and love, he rebels. His rebellion is initially socially acceptable: stealing, fighting, excessive drinking. Con- stantly needing to prove himself physically, he wrestles, brags about stabbing a black man (an episode Mailer has him retell four times), and picks fights that become increasingly brutal. He nearly kills Pete Galovan, who accuses him of fostering unacceptable sexual impulses when he befriends a teenage girl. The fight with Pete, the disenfranchised Mormon freak, is a symbolic precursor to Gary's murder of Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell, they too being Mormons. Gary's two-and-a-half-month freedom trip proceeds, then, from social integration to disintegration. There is a parallel pattern in his relationship with Nicole Barrett. In her he encounters another outcast and rebel, in fact, his superior as a taboo-breaker and sexual virtuoso. He cannot satisfy her sexually and fears his impotence both as a lover and a man. Mailer's portrayal of Nicole as the Bitch places her in the company of other stock female char- acters, such as Cherry (The American Bream) and Marilyn Monroe (Marihn). Gary's frantic, unfulfilled sexual performances are jux- taposed with the magic of her sex. She deserts him. This is central to the allegorical structure of the novel. Gary has to regain his manliness, a quality which for Mailer is synonymous with ideas such as courage and ~reativity.~It is July and the days are long and hot. Gilmore shoots and kills the gas-station attendant and the motel clerk, two men who through their social and religious func- tions symbolically represent the very core of American middle-class consciousness. " 'This one is for me', he said and fired! 'This one is for Nicole', he said and fired again. The body reacted each time." (224) As Mailer has let us understand it is the psychopath in Gilmore that commits the crime, a crime that has a justification of its own. Mailer's manifestoes in the "White Negro" essay are intrinsically relevant for an understanding of the "poetic justice" of death: The only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on an uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. In short, whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psycho- path in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness, and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention . Gilmore in his attempts to find a rationale for his killing reverts time and again to the same "existential9' notion: '5t just seemed like it was the next move in a motion that was happening" (381), "'if I feel like murder it doesn't necessarily matter who gets mur- dered" (351), and "murder is just a thing of itself, a rage and rage is not reason" (406). It is the situation in all its complexities that conditions Gilmore to act, spontaneously, instinctively, primitively. It is a movement necessitated by the previous move, as logical as a child's natural and unhampered behavior. Subconsciously9 the psychopath seeks to give "expression to the buried infant in him- self" and lessen the tension of his "infantile desire^."^ Gilmore's attraction to Nicole, and indeed to many other teenage girls in the novel, reads then symbolically as a search for the "source of creation" or, on his personal level, a longing to re-establish his own childhood that society, by locking him in a reformatory school at the age of 14, never recognized. But his pre-murder love for Nicole, socially stigmatized and sexually warped, needs to be replaced by an outward action for his love to survive and expand. "1 killed Jenkins and Bushnell because I did not want to kill Nicole" (691), says Gilmore in another attempt to rationalize his crime. Killing then is Gilmore9s ultimate way of securing Nicole's love. At bottom, the drama of the psychopath is that he seeks love. Not love as the search for a mate, but love as the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it.6 Any action originating in an inner impulse, even the taking of life, can generate new life, love, and spiritual rebirth. This is one of the metaphors that this novel begs us to consider. Gilmore killed, Mailer suggests, to purge himself of the violence, to provide room for a love that transcends its normal implications. Is the nation reciprocally freed from its "guilt'' in killing Gilmore, Mailer asks ? Gilmore's journey symbolizes the metaphorical dialectics in society between the human urge and the communal program to modify it. The preliminary hearings that are held in Provo state the ob- vious: Gilmore is guilty of First Degree Murder. So the question is: will he be sentenced to death or a lifetime in prison? But Gary cannot accept "life" in prison. The deadening routine of the system is oppressive and destructive: Oh, Nicole, there comes a time where a person must have the courage of their convictions. You know I've spent about 18 years of my 35 locked up. I've hated every moment of it but I've never cried about it. I never will. But I am tired of it, Nicole. I hate the routine, I hate the noise, I hate the guards, I hate the hopelessness it makes me feel, that anything and everything I do is just to pass the time. Prison maybe affects me more than most people. It drains me. (4734) Gilmore will challenge the system by, paradoxically, letting punitive society have its elementary and ultimate victory. "I am going to make them do it. Then we'll see if they have as many guts as I do" (358). The position that Gilmore adopts is typical of all of Mailer's heroes. The coupling of "creativity" with c6rebellious- ness" and the life-and-death metaphors interspersed throughout the novel define the course that Gilmore will take. Through a series of confrontations and conquests he will regain his ability to love and create. His position will be heightened by each single combat. And each adversary will, by contrast, define some of the oppositions that haunt American society. He first deals with h'icole. The sacrificial murder must restore male supremacy, which, in Mailer's sexual politics, yields equality of an order that is both permanent and mystical.
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