In Harper Lee s Novels a Loss of Innocence as Children and Again as Adults
Literary Theory and Criticism
Analysis of Truman Capote's Novels
The pattern of Truman Capote's 1(924 – 1984) career suggests a divided allegiance to 2 different, even opposing literary forms—objective realism and romance. Capote's earliest fiction belongs primarily to the imagination of romance. It is intense, wondrously evocative, subjective; in identify of a closely detailed outlining of a real social world, it concentrates on the inner states of its characters, usually with the full resources of romance, including archetypal journeys or a descent into the hidden. His characters' inner life is fixed through the use of telling imagery and decision-making symbols. In "The Headless Hawk," for example, the existent earth exists hardly at all; what little there is of it seems subaqueous, has the liquid flow of things seen underwater. In "A Tree of Night," the heroine is subjected to real terror, complete with gothic phantoms in the form of two strangers on a train. The journey of the train itself is complementary to Kay'southward journey into the night places of her soul, where the "wizard man" and irrational fearfulness prevail. In "Miriam," an elderly woman's sense of reality and personal identity requite way before the presence of an implike kid.
It is not surprising that these early stories have been compared to those of Edgar Allan Poe, for, like Poe, Capote was fascinated past the psyche at the point of disintegration. Similarly, in Other Voices, Other Rooms, the male child Joel Knox inhabits a vaguely outlined social earth; what is ultimately well-nigh existent is the terror that surrounds and threatens him. The scenes that pinpoint his experience are all charged with moral, symbolic implication; rather than unfolding through a written report of social relationships, the narrative moves episodically through assaults on Joel's mind, imagistic storm points keeping him in agitation and crisis; the identities of the characters surrounding Joel are fixed from the start and have merely to exist revealed through psychic drama. The shape of the work is, finally, that of a romantic moral parable.
How strange information technology is, so, that every bit Capote'due south career progressed he revealed a pronounced interest in the literature of realism, even a kind of superrealism, unsaid by "nonfiction fiction." He began working in this genre with Local Color, a poetic literature of pure "surface." The texture of surface is the existent subject area of The Muses Are Heard. With a sleepless vigilance, Capote observes his fellow travelers and in the finest, most precise item captures their idiosyncrasies, the gestures and unguarded remarks that reveal them, as it were, to the quick. Tart, witty, discrete, The Muses Are Heard assumes no depths of meaning in the Cold War world information technology portrays; eye, ear, and social intelligence are what are important. Capote'southward career besides shows a desire to join the opposing parts of his nature and his equipment equally a writer, however, and in In Cold Claret he actually accomplished such a fusion. Capote himself never intrudes on the narration, makes no commentary, stands dorsum reporting "impartially" on what occurs. This effacement of self is so complete that the reader believes he is witnessing the events as they occur. Notwithstanding, at the same time the work contains many, not always obvious, romantic urgings, forcing the reader to put himself in the place of Perry Smith on death row. Strict categories of good and evil break down before the sense of the inextricable mixture of both in life, and the helplessness of humankind before an obscure and ominously felt cosmic drama. The lyric notation of baffled yearning at the finish is romantic, in spite of the work's judicious, almost judicial, realism.
Other Voices, Other Rooms
The plot of Other Voices, Other Rooms, Capote's first novel, is not extremely complicated. Joel Knox, a thirteen-yr-old, motherless boy, is sent from the home of his Aunt Ellen in New Orleans to Skully's Landing to be united with his father, Mr. Edward Sansom. Arriving eventually at the Landing, a plantation house partly in ruins, Joel is cared for by a woman named Amy, her languid, creative cousin Randolph, and two family unit retainers, Jesus Fever, an aboriginal black homo, and his granddaughter Missouri Fever, known as Zoo. The male child's inquiries about his father are mysteriously unanswered by the adults, and information technology is but later in the novel that the male child confronts his father—a paralytic invalid who neither speaks nor understands, his eyes stock-still in a wide, crazed stare. The crisis experienced by the boy in the decaying house is largely inward; he attempts to free himself of his situation, merely in a serial of foreign episodes his failure to do and so becomes axiomatic, and at the stop he embraces his fate, which is complementary to that of Randolph, the dream-bound homosexual. He accepts whatever beloved and solace Randolph (evoked equally mother-begetter, male-female person, and "ideal lover" in 1) can requite him.
In its atmosphere of sinister enchantment, of the bizarre and weird, Other Voices, Other Rooms exploits many of the resources of the gothic mode. William Faulkner stands distantly in the background; Carson McCullers is more immediately axiomatic. Capote'southward theme of a quest for love and understanding in a globe apparently incapable of providing either, and his use of freakish characters, suggest the generic influence of McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940). Even the "normal" world of Noon City is filled with oddity—a one-armed barber, a female eatery proprietor who has an apelike advent. Such oddity is minor, however, compared to the characters who inhabit the Landing—Jesus Fever, a brokeback dwarf; Zoo, whose long, giraffelike neck reveals the scars from Keg Brown's razor assail upon her; Randolph, who, in an upper-floor room, dressed in a gown and wig, becomes a "cute lady." At the same time, and often with the most powerful effect, the novel draws on the imagery of surrealism. The late scene at the carnival, for example, is spectacular in its evocation of an irrational world struck by lightning, a sequence followed past the nocturnal pursuit of Joel through an abased house by the midget MissWisteria, and the coma Joel experiences in which his life is relived while a pianola composes its own jazz and the plantation lurches into the earth.
Essentially, Other Voices, Other Rooms is a romance. It has been compared with Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1831 story "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," which also deals with a youth who, in a dark and dreamlike world, searches for his identity and is initiated into life. Joel'southward journeying, in its diverse stages, has a symbolic shading. At the opening, he leaves the morning earth of Paradise to travel to Noon City, where he continues his journey through the backcountry in a mule-fatigued wagon, with Jesus Fever asleep at the reins; arriving at the Landing in darkness, Joel is himself comatose and cannot remember inbound the business firm when he awakens the next morning in an upstairs bedroom. With the effect of a wizard's spell, the house comes to merits him. Complicated patterns of imagery—of fire and fever, knifing and mutilation, decease and drowning—evoke the extremity of the boy's fear and loneliness as avenues of escape from the Landing are airtight to him, one by one. Mythic patterns also sally—the search for the "male parent," the Grail quest, Christian crucifixion, Jungian descent into the unconscious—to reinforce the romantic contour of his experience. Although in some ways Joel'southward guide ("I daresay I know some things I daresay yous don't"), Randolph is himself held under an enchantment, dating back to the inception of his homosexual life. At the end, Joel and Randolph get ane. Every bit the ancient "slave bell" in the ruined garden seems to ring in Joel'southward head, he goes forwards to join Randolph, leaving his childhood backside him.
Other Voices, Other Rooms is less perfectly achieved than The Centre Is a Lonely Hunter. Randolph, for instance, a major character, is more a pastiche of English decadence than a existent person. Moreover, the catastrophe becomes snarled in obscurity. In accepting Randolph, Joel accepts his own nature, an deed that brings liberation and even some limited promise of beloved. All the same, Randolph is so sterile, so negative, and then enclosed within his own narcissism that the reader cannot share the upsurge of joy that Joel is supposed to feel. Capote's strength in the novel lies elsewhere—in his ability to create a sustained poetry of mood, to capture psychic states of rare intensity and beauty. His experimentalism in this respect is far more adventurous than that of McCullers. The image-making power of Capote's language is so impressive in this precocious novel as to leave i fearful that he may take exhausted the resources of the southern gothic mode in a single flight.
T he Grass Harp
Capote'southward adjacent novel, The Grass Harp, derives from the rural southern legend of "Children on Their Birthdays." Like that tale, The Grass Harp has a narrative frame that begins and ends in the nowadays, with the story placed in between. Collin Fenwick looks back upon his rearing every bit an orphan in the home of two maiden women, Dolly Talbo, a gentle, childlike woman, and her sister Verena, who has holding and investments in boondocks. He is spared the intense ordeal of Joel Knox merely is like him in his sense of personal isolation and in his search for love and identity. When Verena takes it upon herself to exploit a home remedy that Dolly makes from herbs (her niggling scrap of identity), Dolly rebels, and with Collin and Catherine Creek, an eccentric half-breed factotum, she withdraws to a treehouse set among a field of tall Indian grass. Somewhen, they are joined past Riley Henderson, a rebellious youth, and Charlie Absurd, a retired circuit courtroom guess whose refinement makes him an anachronism to his married sons, at whose houses he stays in rotation. The hazard in the tree firm does non have a long elapsing, but by the time it is over the characters all come to have an enlarged sense of who they are.
The narrative is flawed in various respects. It involves a number of plot contrivances (Morris Ritz's abrogation with the money in Verena's safe); the "battle" scenes between the tree business firm occupants and the law-and-order characters from town rely also much on slapstick; and Riley Henderson'due south reformation and spousal relationship to Maude Riordan is a trite formulation. However, there are many fine touches in this delicate, not wholly successful tale—the portrait of Judge Cool and his late-in-life courtship of Dolly; Verena'due south recognition that it is she who is more solitary than Dolly, whose "heart" has been the pillar of the house; the controlling symbols of freedom and imagination versus rigidity and dry rationality (the Indian grass "harp" and the cemetery) that enclose the work and give information technology life beyond its conclusion. A meditation on freedom and restriction, The Grass Harp reveals Capote moving away from his earlier studies in isolation toward a concern with a discovery of identity through relation to others.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
The novella Breakfast at Tiffany's marks a new stage of Capote's career, since it brings him fully into the globe outside his native South. In this short novel, Capote captures New York and its denizens—Joe Bong, the sentimental bartender with a sour stomach; Madame Sapphia Spanella, a husky coloratura who rollerskates in Key Park; O. J. Berman, the Hollywood agent; and Sally Tomato, the surprisingly unsinister mobster with a Sing Sing address. José Ybarra-Jaegar, the Argentine diplomat, is perceived acutely and never more than so than when he writes a deceitful letter of the alphabet to the novella'southward protagonist, Holly Golightly, breaking off a relationship with her when her dreamlife becomes "unsafe."
Capote's novel employs a retrospective narrative frame like the one in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Dandy Gatsby (1925), in which the pale, conventional Nick Carraway observes the strange career of his larger-than-life neighbor. In both cases, the narration is dominated past nostalgia and the sense of loss, accentuated past the utilise of a reiterated autumnal motif. Holly's origins arrive dorsum in Capote's writing. In Other Voices, Other Rooms, Randolph'south dream initiator Dolores dries her washed hair in the sun and strums a guitar, as does Holly. Miss Bobbit models her also, her "precious papa" having told her to "live in the sky." Holly is a Miss Bobbit in her late teens, a childadult whose ideal of happiness lies "beyond." An "innocent" immoralist, Holly is, however, a somewhat sentimental formulation (a "adept" sensitive graphic symbol misprized by a nasty and unfeeling world), and a rather underdeveloped character. Equally Alfred Kazin has observed, she is partly New York chic and partly Tulip, Texas, naïve, only in neither example does she get a real person. The fusion of realism and romantic fable attempted in Breakfast at Tiffany's is not achieved fully until Capote'southward side by side work, In Cold Claret.
In Cold Blood
In Cold Blood, which remained on the all-time-seller lists for more than 1 twelvemonth and has since been translated into 20-5 languages, is Capote'due south near popular and widely read book. It is likewise one of his most notable works artistically. F. W. Dupee has called it "the best documentary account of an American crime always written," and Capote himself claimed that information technology creates a new literary genre, the "nonfiction novel." Although nothing exactly like In Cold Blood had appeared previously, in that location are clearly precedents for it—Theodore Dreiser'south An American Tragedy (1925), for instance, a documentary novel of crime and penalty, and Ernest Hemingway'southward Green Hills of Africa (1935), as well as the reportage of Rebecca West and Lillian Ross. Moreover, In Cold Blood's objectivity is more apparent than real, since the cloth Capote draws from has been heightened, muted, and selected in many means, subjected to his artful intelligence. The New Yorker way of objective reportage clearly was an influence on the book; another may take been Capote's experience as a scenarist. His use of "intense shut-ups, flashbacks, traveling shots, [and] background detail," as Stanley Kauffmann has observed, all belong to the "structural" method of the cinema.
A cinematic method is specially noticeable in the earlier part of the piece of work, where Capote cuts back and forth between the murderers and the victims as the knot tightens and their paths converge. It is the convergence of a mythic equally well as a literal kind of two Americas—i firmly placed in the wheat chugalug of the Midwest, decent in its habits, secure in its compensation, if a little strong in its consciousness of beingness near to God; the other bumming and adrift, powered by garish and fantastic dreams, dangerous in its potential for violence. The horrible irony of Capote's description of "Bonnie" Clutter suggests the ominousness of this section. "Trust in God sustained her," he writes, "and from time to time secular sources supplemented her faith in His forthcoming mercy." The business relationship of the actual murders, suspensefully postponed until later in the work, is chilling in its costless nature while at the same fourth dimension, through a steady building of telling details, information technology has the forcefulness of a vast inevitability.
The slaughter of the Clutters is "gratuitous" insofar as information technology might well not have occurred, has nothing to do with them personally, and gains for the young men responsible nothing except a few dollars, a fugitive life, arrest, and execution. As "haves" and "have-nots" come together, as Smith's long pent-up rage against his begetter becomes projected onto Mr. Clutter, a lighted lucifer explodes a pulverisation keg. Contributing to this act of unreason is the stand-off between Hickok and Smith, each having told lies about himself to the other; rather than surrender this "fiction" of himself, which would involve confronting the truth of his maimed and powerless life, Smith is driven to a senseless murder. The irrationality of the criminal offense is complemented afterwards by the irrationality implicit in the trial and execution, so that ultimately In Common cold Blood deals with the pervasive power of irrationality.
The psychological interest of the volume is heightened past Capote's drifting narrative and use of multiple "perceptors"—the Clutters themselves, Alvin Dewey, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent, and many of Holcomb'south townspeople. Of overshadowing involvement, however, is Perry Smith, who could, as Capote said, "footstep right out of i of my stories." A young dreamer and "ceaseless conceiver of voyages," he is at the same time a dwarfish child-man with short, crippled legs. A series of Capote's before characters stand backside him. Holly Golightly, dreamer-misfit and childwoman, is a not-then-distant cousin. However, in this work, Capote's sentimental temptation has been chastened by a rigorous authenticity, and what results is an extraordinary portrait. Sensitive and sympathetic, Smith is notwithstanding guilty of heinous murders. His romantic escapism (he dreams of diving for treasure but cannot swim, imagines himself a famous tap dancer but has hopelessly maimed legs) becomes comprehensible in the light of his homeless, brutalized background, more than bizarre than any fiction; his undoing is elaborately plausible.
In the book'south terminal scene, reminiscent of the ending of The Grass Harp, Capote brings the memory of Nancy Clutter together with the memory of Smith—entangled in an innocence blighted past life; in this way, In Cold Blood becomes a somber meditation on the mysterious nature of the world and the means of Providence. This questioning quality and lyric resonance were undoubtedly what Rebecca West had in mind in referring to In Cold Blood as "a grave and reverend book." It is a work in which realism and romance become 1.
Answered Prayers
After the publication of In Common cold Blood, Capote produced no new major work. During this catamenia, which included bouts of suicidal depression as well as serious physical illnesses, he continued to write for films and to write shorter pieces, while likewise supposedly at piece of work on Answered Prayers. Of the four chapters originally published, Capote later decided that "Mojave" did not belong in the novel, beingness a self-contained brusque story written by the character P. B. Jones. With its globe-trotting narrative, including flashbacks and a story within the story, it is extremely suggestive. Its theme is never straight stated, but its cumulative outcome makes information technology articulate that its business organisation is with illusion, particularly of those who honey others and find their love betrayed. "La Côte Basque: 1965" is gear up at a fashionable eatery on New York'southward East Side, where all the diners indulge in or are the discipline of gossip. P. B. Jones lunches with Lady Ina Coolbirth, who, herself on the eve of divorce, tells stories of broken marriages, while at the next table Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper and Mrs.Walter Matthau tell similar tales. This mood piece closes at the terminate of the afternoon in an "atmosphere of luxurious exhaustion."
Jones himself is the focal effigy in "Unspoiled Monsters," which details his career as an opportunistic writer and exploiter of others, exploitation and disillusion existence the observed norm amidst the members of the international gear up. Nevertheless, even these few chapters reveal the depth to which Capote'southward writing had sunk. His "gossip column" approach just reveals that Capote had lost the capability of producing anything original—he was simply telling thinly disguised tales out of schoolhouse. Indeed, the publication of "La Côte Basque" alienated many of Capote's social club friends. Its topicality also ensured that Answered Prayers would non take stood the examination of time—or of the critics, for that matter—and probably that, more than than any other reason, is why Capote never finished information technology.
Capote excelled in a number of literary forms—as a memoirist, announcer, travel writer, dramatist, brusque-story writer, and novelist. The trunk of his piece of work is comparatively small, and it has neither the social range nor the concern with ideas of the piece of work of certain of his contemporaries, simply it is inimitable writing of great distinction. He is a bright and iridescent stylist, and his concern with craft belongs to that line of American writers that includes Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Fitzgerald. Like Fitzgerald especially, whose romantic themes and classical grade he shares, Capote has the constant involvement of sensibility.
Major works
Long fiction:Other Voices, Other Rooms, 1948; The Grass Harp, 1951; A Christmas Memory, 1956 (serial); In Cold Claret, 1966; The Thanksgiving Visitor, 1967 (serial);Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel, 1986; Summer Crossing, 2005 (plant manuscript).Short fiction: A Tree of Night, and Other Stories, 1949; Breakfast at Tiffany'southward: A Curt Novel and Three Stories, 1958; I Christmas, 1983; I Remember Grandpa: A Story, 1986; The Complete Collected Stories of Truman Capote, 2004.
Plays: The Grass Harp: A Play, pr., lead. 1952 (adaptation of his novel); Business firm of Flowers, pr. 1954 (with Harold Arlen).
Screenplays: Vanquish the Devil, 1954 (with John Huston); The Innocents, 1961.
Nonfiction: Local Color, 1950; The Muses Are Heard, 1956; Observations, 1959 (with Richard Avedon); The Dogs Bark: Public People and Individual Places, 1973.
Miscellaneous: Selected Writings, 1963; Trilogy: An Experiment in Multimedia, 1969 (with Eleanor Perry and Frank Perry); Music for Chameleons, 1980; A Capote Reader, 1987; As well Brief a Treat: The Messages of Truman Capote, 2004 (edited by Gerald Clarke).
Source: Notable American Novelists Revised Edition Volume 1 James Agee — Ernest J. Gaines Edited by Carl Rollyson Salem Press, Inc 2008.
Categories: American Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Literature, Postmodernism
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