"The last to see them alive": panopticism, The supervisory gaze, and catharsis in Capote's In Cold Blood.

George Plimpton's Truman Capote (1997), a self-proclaimed "oral biography," revisits Capote's In Cold Blood and the author's often flamboyant interaction with the individuals from whom he gleaned the details necessary for his famous "nonfiction novel." One of the more vivid anecdotes in Plimpton's book comes from Harold Nye, a Kansas Bureau of Investigation officer whom Capote interviewed, who recounts a night on the town with the author:

    My wife is a very strict individual,  straight as an arrow. One time    in Kansas City, Truman asked us if we  wanted to go out for the    evening. Sure, you don't turn him down.  First, we get a cab, and    just off the main street ... he pays a  hundred bucks to get us into    a place above a gallery to watch  what's going on in a lesbian bar.    Now, here is what it was: they  were eating, tables, dancing,    probably a hundred people in there,  female couples doing their    thing. This was horrible to my wife. She  tried to turn away from    it, but she didn't say anything to  Truman. We leave and he takes us    over to a male gay bar. We sit down  and order a drink, and it    isn't three minutes until some of  these young bucks nail him,    talking to him, playing with his ears,  just right in front of my    wife. But how the hell do you say anything  to a man as famous as    Truman Capote that you don't like what  he's doing. We finally  

      
   tried to excuse ourselves and leave. But Truman gets us to go on  to    the Jewel Box, a little theatre, and, you know, I expect there  must    have been thirty female impersonators in there ... and  they're damn    good. I mean, they looked as good as any beautiful  babes in New    York. But at the end of these little skits they revealed  that  

      
   they were males. Now, to take this lady-and Truman knew what kind  

      
   of lady she was, because he had been to my house-and subject her  to    this ... Well, his stock went down from sixty per cent down to  about    ten. (170-71) (1) 

Most striking in this passage is the way in which Nye's account reveals the degree to which Capote values watching others witness a series of spectacles that he has specifically orchestrated for their shock. The jaw-dropping of the Kansans (who, despite averted eyes, gather a large amount of detail from the experience) provides a certain pleasure for Capote, and I contend that his choreography of this incident reflects a similar strategy in In Cold Blood. In the novel, Capote stages his story as he staged an evening for his Kansas guests, containing his characters within specific boundaries not only determined by the "history" of the actual Holcomb murders but by Capote's own desires for drama and scandal. Once contained in a novelistic structure reminiscent of Foucault's reiteration of Bentham's panopticon, Capote's characters are forced into a spectacle that offers readers of the book vicarious participation in the slaughter of an entire family from Kansas. In Capote's view, this strategy offers not only an angle into the criminal mind but a catharsis for an audience that can vent its own destructive energies through interaction with his novel rather than through violent action in the community. Understanding Capote's narrative strategy also identifies what may well be Capote's real contribution to the "nonfiction novel": the panopticon as template for fictionalizing nonfiction events in a novel.

Panopticism in Capote's In Cold Blood

When critical assessments of In Cold Blood appeared in 1966, reviews of the work varied widely. Whether these reviews were positive or negative, however, most failed to perceive Capote's spectacle as anything but what New York Times writer Conrad Knickerbocker called "a total evocation of reality" (37), debating instead the text's proper genre. Nor were initial reviewers unduly troubled by Capote's lingering, supervisory presence; indeed, Knickerbocker asserted, "[n]ot the least of the book's merits is that it manages a major moral judgment without the author's appearance once on stage" (37). Eliot Fremont-Smith felt that Capote's transmission of the story was equally "real" and transparent in its structure and motives:

    Part of  Capote's equipment is his carefully trained memory: he    took no  notes while interviewing, and nothing was taped; instead,    he  listened, and thereby won extraordinarily candid accounts. When  "In Cold Blood" was published last fall in four installments  in The    New Yorker, it was preceded by an "Editor's Note:  All quotations in    this article are taken either from official records  or from    conversations, transcribed verbatim, between the author and  the    principals." (Transcribed verbatim in his head, that is.)  (23) 

Part of the reason critics accepted that Capote had merely recorded and represented "the facts" was Capote's own tireless promotion of the novel's merits in this regard. One reviewer suspected that Capote himself might have choreographed the outpouring of positive assessments:

    The Svengali primarily responsible for this publishing  phenomenon    is a short, blond, rather flamboyant former employee of  The New    Yorker magazine. His name is Truman Capote.... This is not to  say    that Mr. Capote went around saying: "Be on the lookout, I am  writing a great book." He didn't. But his discussions of the  material that was to become the book had the effect of pebbles  

      
   falling in a pool. ...