Exhaustive Study Notes on Narrative, Realism, and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood
Intersections of Graphic Narrative and the Nonfiction Novel
The study of the graphic novel (e.g., Watchmen) and the nonfiction novel (e.g., In Cold Blood) extends and returns to key issues animating the study of the novel as a whole.
Cultural Capital: Watchmen explores its own cultural status and emergence from a long tradition of comics history. Similarly, In Cold Blood argues for the particular qualities and insights that the nonfiction novel provides to a reader.
Metafiction: This is defined as fiction reflecting on its own status as fiction and its relationship to other forms of writing. Watchmen incorporates and distinguishes itself from other genres, while In Cold Blood reflects on its own status to justify its particular insights.
Temporal Reflection: Both texts are self-conscious about the relationship between chronological time (ticking minutes, hours) and narrative time (movement toward an imaginative ending). These are linked to broader twentieth-century understandings of time structured by new forms of threat and cultural endings.
Time, Temporality, and the Sense of an Ending
Narrative Closure: Refers to the expectations and pleasures associated with the conclusion of a literary text.
Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (1967): Kermode argues that broad-scale cultural understandings of time, history, and ending are expressed through the way narratives end. Our narratives are shaped by what we expect the shape of time to have.
Suspicion of Master Plots: There is an increasing suspicion of nineteenth-century "master plots" like the marriage plot. This reflects larger anxieties around time.
Dual Countdowns in Watchmen: - The book is a "compulsive page-turner," inviting readerly absorption. - It is simultaneously structured by a thematic and formal countdown to midnight, reflecting on apocalyptic world endings.
Ethical Implications: Narrative endings raise questions about our ethical relationship to history and cultural endings.
The Historical Evolution of Fiction, Realism, and History
Emergence of the Novel: Consistently linked to the eighteenth-century rise of mass literacy, a mass reading public, cheaper paper, and mass printing.
Literary Realism: The novel emerged by disentangling itself from romance and epic, seeking to represent imaginary people who seem real or relatable—the "person next door" rather than "Achilles."
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey: Austen famously uses comic framing to argue for the value of everyday protagonists, setting the novel apart from the Gothic genre by emphasizing the non-extraordinary nature of the main character.
The Historical Novel: Since Walter Scott, this genre has applied realism to the past, aiming for a form that conveys the "historical uniqueness" of a period even within a fictional portrayal.
Post-WWII Convergence: After the Second World War, the line between fiction and history became "messy" and blurred, a topic explored further in higher-level literary theory.
The Genesis of In Cold Blood
The Murder Case: The Clutter family was murdered in 1959.
Truman Capote’s Process: Capote traveled to Kansas with his friend Harper Lee (author of To Kill a Mockingbird).
Publication Timeline: - First appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1965. - Published by Random House in 1966.
The Archive: Capote compiled over pages of notes. Crucially, he never took notes during interviews, instead reconstructing them later from memory.
Claiming a New Form: Capote sought to elevate the nonfiction novel to an art form equal to, or surpassing, the traditional novel.
Intellectual Revolutions and the Crisis of Objectivity
Epistemological Shift: Since the 1960s, humanist disciplines (philosophy, history, sociology) have been rocked by theoretical claims questioning foundational assumptions.
The Cartesian Legacy: Based on René Descartes’ statement "I think, therefore I am," which prioritized the centered, thinking human subject. This was challenged by several movements: - Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan called into question the unity of the thinking subject by introducing the tripartite structure of the human mind. - Structuralism and Post-structuralism: These movements (primarily French) challenged the instrumental value of language, focusing on the "signifier" and the "signified." Language is seen as a limit on thought rather than a transparent tool. - Marxism, Feminism, and Race/Sexuality Studies: Aware that realism and objectivity often relied on the systematic exclusion of marginalized voices.
Feminist Critique of History: Characterized by the term "his story," highlighting the exclusion of female perspectives.
The Ghost of WWII: Historical progress (the "Whiggish model") was challenged by the scientific advancement used for mass death (the atomic bomb, death camps) rather than human flourishing.
Historiography and Hayden White
Historiography: Defined as the metacritical reflection on historical writing practices.
Peter Novick: Referred to the "noble dream of historical objectivity," which was increasingly questioned.
Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973): White argued that differences between historians are essentially literary problems.
Tropes and Narratives: Historical events are encoded via tropes (e.g., tragic vs. progressive views). There is a "content to the form" of historical writing; how we narrate events is guided by narrative presuppositions.
Antecedents of the Nonfiction Novel
John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946): Created to capture the atomic bombing of 1945. Hersey felt reportage and fiction were both inadequate to convey the obliteration of lives. It focused on the paradox of the survivor serving as a witness to the dead.
Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night (1968): Subtitled "History as a Novel; The Novel as History." It concerns the 1967 anti-Vietnam War march on the Pentagon.
New Journalism: Represented by Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson.
The Subjectivity Gap: Unlike Mailer, Wolfe, or Thompson, who foregrounded their own subjectivity, Capote practiced nearly "absolute silence," writing himself out of his narrative.
Aesthetic Distinctions and Cultural Status in In Cold Blood
Characterizing the Clutters (Taste and Respectability): - Nancy Clutter: Represented through grace, proportion, and "proper" aesthetic taste (student production of Tom Sawyer, baking cherry pies, music lessons). - Kenyon Clutter: A skilled craftsman making a wooden hope chest. - Mr. Clutter: Office is perfectly ordered; he lacks "clutter."
Characterizing the Killers (Lack of Taste): - Perry Smith: Inability to separate internal importance from junk; he carries pounds of detritus. He confuses monetary cost with aesthetic value (e.g., buying a book for dollars).
Aesthetics of the Miniature: Bonnie Clutter’s interest in small things that "don't have to be left behind" contrasts with Perry's heavy, indiscriminate collection of "junk."
Escapism vs. Reality: - Clutter family escapism: Running away to Manhattan, Kansas (grounded in local reality). - Perry's escapism: Addicted to Las Vegas reveries and advertisements for diving for Spanish galleons and gold—visions he is unable to experience.
Subgenres and Fantasy: Dick is depicted as literal-minded and masculine, calling out Perry’s fantasies (e.g., the Humphrey Bogart film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre). He notes that in those stories, everyone goes "nuts."
The Author as Alchemist: Capote vs. Larry Hendrix
Larry Hendrix: An English teacher and aspiring novelist in the text who heads the house the day of the murders. - Described as a "failed author" figure who is "provincial" compared to Capote's urban sophistication. - Lives in a cramped home with three children and a "perpetually functioning television." - Mistakenly believes looking like an author (mustache, pipe, looking like Hemingway) makes one a writer.
The Conversion of Fact into Art: While Hendrix scans newspapers for stories, Capote is the "alchemist" who converts the raw material of newspaper accounts into high art.
Authorial Authority: Capote maintains a superior position over the subjects he seeks to represent, acting as the necessary interpreter for subjects who cannot represent themselves.
Holcomb: A Town Unable to Signify
Linguistic Breakdown: The town of Holcomb is described as no longer able to represent itself. - A sign says "DANCE," but the dancing has ceased and the roof is dark. - A window says "BANK," but it has been closed since 1933.
Doc Savage Fantasy: The Reverend Post suggests dealing with criminals by brain surgery to remove "evil" thoughts, reflecting a retreat into adolescent superhero fantasies (Doc Savage).
The Crime Novel as Allegory of Reading
Curation and Choice: In the "Persons Unknown" section, Perry's sorting through memorabilia acts as an allegory for the novel's construction. Perry is an indiscriminate curator, while Capote is an absolutely discriminating curator.
The Detective and the Critic: The detective’s reconstruction of a crime models the reader’s role as a provider of meaning. - Symptomatic Reading: The literary critic acts as a diagnostician (like the TV character Dr. House), spotting patterns and symptoms of underlying meaning.
Peter Brooks’ Reading for the Plot (1984): - Anticipation of Retrospection: Reading is bidirectional. As we move forward, we restructure our understanding of what we have already read based on the expected end. - The narrative payoff (closure) retrospectively gives meaning to the beginning and middle.