In an attempt to challenge my suspicion towards American style narrative journalism I've been reading Truman Capote's 1965 classic In Cold Blood. Surely a memorable book. Surely a "remarkable synthesis of journalistic skill and powerfully evocative narrative" (thus the back cover of my Penguin), but the synthesis remains dubious too. No matter how many farmhands, friends and relatives Capote has been interviewing I can't help feeling offended by his way of reconstructing another man's unaccompanied morning walk on a particular morning.
Capote builds such a narrative which suggests an interior monologue, a train of thought, that the thinking man in question, Mr Clutter, has not been alive to confirm:
After drinking the glass of milk and putting on a fleece-lined cap, Mr Clutter carried his apple with him when he went outdoors to examine the morning. It was ideal apple-eating weather; the whitest sunlight descended from the purest sky, and an easterly wind rustled, without ripping loose, the last of the leaves on the Chinese elms."It was ideal apple-eating weather" - says who? Said perhaps Mr. Clutter on a previous occasion? And then probably thought so on this morning too? Personally I wouldn't ever want a reporter to ascribe an observation like that to me without asking.
More about Capote's writing style later. For now, here's a sample.
4 comments:
Can he be excused on account of his motive? Isn't the backbone of Capote's story the empathy he develops for one of the two villains, in spite of himself and his expectations. Emotions that lead him to tell a story of how poverty, abuse and neglect leads to crime; an argument which I would guess was less palatable at the time (early Sixties?) than it is now.
In other words: The rhetorical situation requires strong persuasive appeals. Hence the fictional thoughts of someone who was indeed, at the time of writing and before Capote ever knew of him, dead (Mr. Clutter being one of the victims of the heinous crime in mention).
Unethical? Means to an end? No-go?
Well, I would say... no-go.
Mr Clutter is a decent man who is brutally murdered. He gets our sympathy easily - so why not simply accept that none of Mr Clutter's character witnesses were present to discuss the weather or other matters with him on that morning? To me that seems an obvious reason to skip the scene, to leave it out or simply build the narrative differently, give a weather report and say that the man "was known to...", "was probably on his usual..."
Accountability ought to be all the more important when, as you say, the angle and the basic argument of the story is controversial and somewhat speculative.
But I get the sense that I'm missing your point...
Not sure that I had a full-developed point in mind, just pondering on why I didn't myself worry so much about all the clearly fictional elements of In Cold Blood when I read it myself.
I remember reading it as a novel. Not as journalism. Obviously I read the blurb on the back of the cover and the appeal of "a true story" was very strong. But I was never unaware that the book should be read as fiction. That is obviously a contradiction in terms.
I think I felt it was a kind of 'rhetorical fiction'. Capote had something to say, and he chose the novel as his medium. Not a journalist with a cause, but a writer with a cause. Not a journalist using literary style, but a novelist using real life as content.
So. Genre?
Nah, considering the craft and effort that went into researching the story, I don't think it deserves the label fiction. Most of the reconstructed narrative is based on statements from actual witnesses, and to me the genre label 'literary journalism' doesn't seem far off the mark. But you suggest 'rhetorical', and I can definitely see why. One gets a strong sense of the text being shaped and driven by the writer's intentions - and usually that's a quality I appreciate, but when towards the end of the book Capote introduces an article from a scientific journal (of psychology?), I felt almost cheated--- so this was the frame that all the pieces of the puzzle had been arranged to fit into? Suddenly the narrative seemed a little too elaborately designed to prove a specific point, Capote wanting (of course?) to explain rather than just describe the events.
Post a Comment