Freie Universität Berlin
Hauptseminar: American Culture of the Sixties
Wintersemester 2003/04, 7.Semester

Truman Capote′s In Cold Blood - New Journalism
as an Instrument of Social Criticism

by: Natalie Lewis

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

I. The Rise of New Journalism in the 1960s 4

II. Truman Capote’s Non-fiction Novel 7

III. The Non-fiction Novel as an Instrument of Social Criticism 12

1. The Clutters – Depiction of Ideal American Family Life 12
2. Dick Hickock and Perry Smith – The American Nightmare 17
3. A Critical Portrait of the American Bible Belt Society and the US Judicial system 21

Conclusion 25

Bibliography 27

Introduction

In 1965, one of America′s most controversial authors, Truman Capote, published his non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, an account of the 1959 murder of four members of a Kansas farming family. The work does not only give a broad panoramatic description of the world of the victims and their killers but also captures the image of a society standing on the verge of unknown challenges and threats.

The American post-war decade was marked by a stable economy, widespread prosperity, social mobility and conformity. As President Eisenhower pursued the Cold War abroad, American society was concerned with security at home. The young generation of the 1950s conformed to traditional family values; marriage and birth rates reached a record high. Many citizens could now afford to obtain the American dream: a house in the suburbs, at least one car and a television set. The ideal middle class family, as it was epitomized in the media, consisted of a providing father, a cheerful homemaker and mother, and disciplined children.

In the 1960s, a climate of rebellion, confrontation and upheaval altered the consensus which had dominated the nation throughout the Eisenhower era. The country suddenly found itself in an ongoing crisis. Social reform movements challenged established traditions and moral values. American culture was profoundly transformed as the 1960s created a more open society in which social structures were questioned, trust in the government dispelled, free expression expanded and counter-cultural life styles emerged. In his novel In Cold Blood, Capote questioned the essence of American society, its judicial system and the way in which crime and criminals are dealt with. He effectively used the non-fiction novel as an instrument of implicit social criticism. By applying literary techniques to non-fictional material, the author looked beyond the surface of given facts and turned the Clutter case into an allegory of American social life. In Cold Blood exposed the fragility of American family values and revealed the ambiguity of the American way of life by contrasting middle class affluence with an economic underworld of deprived Americans.

I. The Rise of New Journalism in the 1960s

Experiencing the incredibility of contemporary reality in the 1960s, many novelists no longer considered realism as an adequate literary form for serious writing. It seemed increasingly difficult to grasp American reality and make it comprehendible: “bourgeois society was breaking up, fragmenting. A novelist could no longer portray a part of that society and hope to capture the Zeitgeist; all he would be left with was one of the broken pieces.”¹ Contemporary fiction writers, e.g. John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, etc., abandoned the idea of a mimetic representation of social life. Before the background of a fragmenting world, the notion of a single universal truth was replaced by the consideration of multiple versions of the truth. Post-modern novelists perceived themselves as constructors of their own version of the world² and explored new novelistic forms, e.g. meta-fiction, surrealism, fragmentation, science-fiction, fantasy, etc.

The exhaustion of the realist novel created new possibilities for another group of writers. Instead of turning their backs on realism and a mimetic representation of their contemporary environment, the New Journalists of the 1960s and early 1970s were a fitting match for the social upheavals of the time. As Tom Wolfe wrote later about the 1960s: The Sixties was one of the most extraordinary decades in American history … when manner and morals, styles of living, attitudes toward the world changed the country more crucially than any political events …This whole side of American life that gushed forth when postwar American affluence finally blew the lid off – all this novelists turned away from … That left a huge gap in American letters, a gap big enough to drive an ungainly Reo rig like the New Journalism through³ The post-war rise of television and film production as well as the dramatic social changes of the 1960s caused a renewed interest in factual, documentary material. American readers shifted from traditional fiction to non-fictional forms. Magazine journalism was preferred because of its functional approach to contemporary history and society. Fictional novels and short stories seemed trivial, useless and simply “at odds with a pragmatic, issue-oriented new sensibility”⁴.

The 1960s were a decade of artistic innovation and improvisation, in which the style of journalistic reporting underwent major stylistic changes. Novelists and reporters began to create hybrid forms consisting of fictional and non-fictional elements. Through a thoughtful combination and juxtaposition of detailed eyewitness report, autobiography, factual history, and confessional narrative, a “New Journalism” was created to directly confront issues of social reality. It entered the journalistic scene with a remarkable self-proclaimed uniqueness and challenged long-standing journalistic reporting practices. Traditional reporting had been based on objectivity. Journalistic articles were supposed to be lean impersonal prose accounts telling both sides to a story in a “who-what-where-when”-style. The New Journalists rejected the traditional school of pragmatic journalism.

The ‘new journalists’ . . . were no longer willing to hide their personalities behind gray columns of newspaper print and the customary pose of objectivity; they converted themselves into independent investigators and participants, writing about events from the ‘inside,’ reporting on their innermost feelings and attitudes as a means of better understanding the social conflicts of their age.⁵ Instead of applying quantitative research methods to gather empirical facts, New Journalists preferred a qualitative approach. They wrote in a subjective voice and revealed their personal biases. They sought to reach a higher truth beneath the factual surface of a case. These writers were more interested in probing the consciousness of individuals and examining cultural value concepts beneath the surface facts. Their works were an attempt to morally confront specific cultural issues in order to create a greater understanding of the era. For readers, the major appeal of this genre was its treatment of actual events of the recent past through which it conveyed the chaos of contemporary American social life. In a period of extraordinary events, writers did not see a necessity to invent imaginary plots and characters:

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1 Wolfe, Tom. “Why they aren’t writing the Great American Novel anymore”. Esquire 78, 1972. 156.

2 Cf. Weber, 12.

3 Wolfe, Tom, Esquire 78, 157.

4 Weber, Ronald. The Literature of Fact. Athens: Ohio UP, 1980. 8.

5 Pells, Richard. The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age. Middletown: Wesleyan, 1989. 405