Panel: Agency, Imprisonment, and Practices of Memory
Copanelists: Gail Okawa and Deanna Rymhs
This paper explores Norman Mailer’s editorial “translation” of Jack Henry Abbott’s letters into the epistolary autobiography In the Belly of the Beast (1981), focusing in particular on how Abbott’s self is produced in the text. Often the emphasis of such a discussion is on how the self is modified through editorial decisions. Concentrating on editorial decisions would certainly be an important project here, particularly since the writer is imprisoned and the editor is not only free but also in a position of cultural and political power. Moreover, the Jack Henry Abbott produced in In the Belly of the Beast fits neatly with the violently antisocial, heroic figure Mailer found appealing at the time— too neatly, perhaps, not to be the product of Mailer’s editorializing. The theories of criminality and psychopathy propounded by the “hypnoanalyst” and psychologist Robert Lindner (Rebel Without a Cause) that had a major impact on Mailer’s work permeate Abbott’s letters, for example. Abbott as self-ascribed “fanatically defiant and alienated individual” bears an uncanny resemblance to Lindner’s rebellious inmate or psychopath, a resemblance also found in Mailer’s Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song. But what if this resemblance is the product of Abbott’s own self-production and not Mailer’s editing? What if Abbott produced a self according to conventions outlined in Mailer’s earlier work and interests, ensuring that Mailer would find him appealing and champion his cause? In other words, does Abbott “translate” Mailer’s desires into the self he produces in his letters? Rather than a case of a powerful editor shaping the narrative of an inagential writer, is the imprisoned writer increasing his agency by interpolating the desires of the well-connected editor?
If this was Abbott’s project, it certainly worked: through Mailer, Abbott received significant support from New York literati, Hollywood, and the arts community—support that likely influenced his eventual release from prison. Abbott’s freedom was cut short, however, when he murdered a waiter named Richard Adan six weeks after his parole.
Simon Rolston is a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia specializing in twentieth-century and contemporary American autobiography. He is interested in how autobiography can function both as social control and also as resistance. His dissertation, The Politics and Poetics of Self-Invention in Twentieth- Century and Contemporary American Prison Writing, explores the conversion narrative as it is produced in the American prison system and as it is performed or manipulated in American prisoner autobiographies. He is the recipient of the Theodore E. Arnold Fellowship and currently holds a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship.