Casting criminals: The execution novels of Robert Coover and Norman Mailer.

摘要

Robert Coover's The Public Burning and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song both depict the circumstances surrounding the executions of historically prominent criminal figures, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and Gary Gilmore, respectively. Though their novels are radically different in terms of technique and tone, Coover and Mailer use these cases to portray and scrutinize public responses to criminals and their punishments. In doing so, they critique widespread processes of interpreting criminals and explore the ideological foundations of people's views. Both writers highlight the impact of official discourses and media narratives on people's responses to the Rosenbergs and Gilmore. They pay closest attention to the specific roles in which people cast the Rosenbergs and Gilmore, the processes of defining those roles, and the comforts they offer to the state and to the execution audiences. By depicting these executions as explicitly public events, Coover and Mailer also echo the formulaic rituals and narratives from the era of public execution. These correspondences reveal the survival of the designs, structures, motifs, and stereotypes that these rituals and narratives contain. Coover and Mailer show that like public execution spectacles and popular literature about crime, contemporary discourses transform criminals into momentary celebrities while also attempting to mitigate the threat that they pose. Coover's and Mailer's own portraits work to challenge the process of reducing criminals to types that allow people to disassociate themselves from criminals, assert their own rectitude in contrast to these offenders, and justify the brutality of the penalties the state imposes upon them. These writers thereby undermine complacency by revealing how far we have not come from a time when people's spectacle deaths and the narratives they spawned were the fodder for others' edification, diversion, or self-justification.