Capote and Nabokov

In reading Capote’s In Cold Blood, I could not help but be reminded of Nabokov’s Lolita, despite their typical categorization under relatively different genres. Capote’s book falls within the complicated genre of nonfiction, and yet pushes those boundaries in its qualification as the first “nonfiction novel”; Nabokov’s book, on the contrary, is a distinct work of fiction. However, both novels seem to play with the fluidity of genre, each attempting to crossover and utilize elements of both fields in order to contribute to a more nuanced and sympathetic reading of their works. For example, Capote writes In Cold Blood with a novelistic agenda, using narrative technique to create “stories” for the victims and killers and engaging a novelist’s eye for details, as is especially evident in his introduction of Holcomb, Kansas. Nabokov, however, uses the nonfiction mode of a memoir to create a defense account of the solipsistic Humbert; in the self-reflexivity of the novel, he even situates the memoir within “reality” by posing a forward from John Ray, Jr. who speaks of the “author’s” (Humbert’s) manuscripts and guides curious readers to where they may find a newspaper reference to H.H.’s crime. In this way, both Capote and Nabokov complicate the definitions and limitations of nonfiction and fiction and challenge their uses in rather unconventional or experimental forms.

Beyond the interplay of the genres, the parallels and echoes between these books remained striking. The following is a list of other similarities between these works that rely on the nonfiction/fiction framework:

·      Capote and Nabokov create a brand of crime novels that do not follow the conventional “whodunit.” The suspense in these novels comes not so much from wondering who committed the crime—for readers know this at the outset—or even how the murders were enacted; rather, the suspense stems from a reconstructing of events that lead the reader through the details of before, during, and after the foretold crimes.

·      As mentioned in the above bullet, both novels reconstruct a past in a way that relies heavily on intertextuality, the past itself serving as a text from which to borrow. Capote reimagines the murders of the Clutter family while Nabokov’s Humbert reconceives his own history to rationalize his nymphetic obsession.

·      And, most importantly, both Capote and Nabokov write their novels in a way that creates sympathy for a detestable character. Capote’s murderers, Hickcock and Smith (particularly Smith), and Nabokov’s pedophile, Humbert, are humanized through the presentation of their personal histories to such a degree that it comes to act as a type of defense and qualification for their horrific actions. Readers of these novels are shocked by the sympathy they feel for people who are considered monsters by the crimes they commit.

  

I found the parallels between these books so remarkable given that they were published within a few years of one another (Lolita in 1958 [U.S] and In Cold Blood in 1966)—perhaps Capote was a fan of Lolita? The huge success that follows these masterpieces is indicative of cultural attitudes that have lasted into today and have created a market for these fictionalized nonfiction criminal accounts.