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Volume 6, Number 2 (1982) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum LITERARY PERSPECTIVES ON MURDER RONALD BAUGHMAN College of Applied Professional Sciences, University of South Carolina in literature. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote's account of the destruction of the Clutter family by Perry Smith, contains this confession by the murderer: ... we never used the lights again. Except the flashlight.Within this scene, we see Smith's surprising tenderness for his victims, his concern that Mr. Clutter not be worried about his wife, Smith's confusion of reality with a dream. This poignant yet brutal passage reveals as well Capote's skill in influencing his audience. Writers throughout history have dramatized murders in an effort to explore the nature of human guilt and innocence. In the process of devising a literature course on this subject for Criminal Justice students in the University of South Carolina's College of General Studies, I realized that a central concern would be the author's point of view on the material-how the, author's perspective influenced our judgments about the criminals and their actions. To pursue this question, I divided the course into two major parts. The first concentrated on acts of murder by individuals. The class and I attempted to discover the psychological basis for one's committing murders, and considered the role of the victims, the process of police investigation, and the court proceedings. The second stage of the course expanded the concept and act of murder to its logical limit: that is, to murder on a national scale as typified by Nazi Germany and its death camps. The one requirement I used for selecting books was that each work be based on an actual event and be presented either as a factual documentation or as an artistic recreation of that event. Once the subject matter was decided on, the primary task in treating a literary dramatization of murder remained: to determine how the author's selection and arrangement of materials influenced readers' judgments about the criminals and their actions. Some of the authors we read, like many other writers throughout literary history, became obsessed by characters they found philosophically repugnant. Why? The answer lies in part in the process of character creation. One of the great powers of a writer's mind is its capacity to move directly into the skin and bones of a character, though the character may be completely alien to the author; in this case, the writer enlists imaginative powers to recreate the probable thoughts and feelings of a figure primed for or in the act of murder. In order to render the criminal mind believable, the author may directly identify with the character, giving emotional and logical validity to the murderer's action. And with this complex representation of the character may come a blurring of the seemingly clear line dividing guilt and innocence. Herein lie both the power and the difficulty of authorial point of view. Truman Capote originally intended to focus upon the tragedy inflicted upon a nearly "perfect" American family living an idyllic Midwestern life, to consider how such a family could be suddenly and violently murdered for no apparent reason. But once he began exploring the minds of the men involved in the crime, particularly Perry Smith, Capote's concerns shifted from the Clutter family to Smith. The structure of In Cold Blood contrasts two contradictory worlds: one populated by decent, God-fearing people, models of small-town friendliness and goodness, and one haunted by the nightmarish embodiment of the murderous psychopath. It is in the latter world that Capote finds his true subject. The murderer Perry Smith grew up as a physically and psychologically abused child. His parents traveled the rodeo circuit, and his mother became an alcoholic prostitute who died by strangling on her own vomit. His father-the self-styled Lone Wolf-was a fabricator of grandiose dreams and a man of incredible violence. In a quarrel over a biscuit, for example, the father pointed a .22 rifle at his son and said, "Look at me, Perry. I'm the last thing living you're ever gonna see." By mere chance the gun was not loaded. Violent like his father, Perry also inherited from Smith, Sr., the tendency to wish for impossibilities. He dreamed of riches acquired by finding buried treasure in sunken ships, though he could not swim and would not even wear swimming trunks, since his legs and been terribily scarred in a motorcycle accident. Smith also longed to be a nightclub singer, though he had no musical talent or training. Much of his youth had been spent in orphanages and reform schools where he had had to fight his way from childhood to adolescence to manhood. His only reliable companion was a bizarre imaginary friend: a gigantic yellow parrot, in Perry's own words, "taller than Jesus, yellow like a sunflower" that swooped down as a "warrior-angel" and attacked his offenders- as he said, "slaughtered them as they pleaded for mercy" and then gently lifted Perry to Paradise. Smith is, of course, factually guilty of murdering the Clutter family. Yet we as readers feel a stronger sympathetic impulse towards Perry than we do towards Dick Hickcock even-shockingly-towards the Clutter victims. Why? Because Capote carefully provides the horrifying background of Smith's life before the grisly details of the murder scene. Consequently by the time Perry and Dick are captured and jailed, readers already understand why Smith would fly into a psychotic rage 'and kill this family. In short, before Smith and Hickcock are brought.to trial, the reader has already reached a verdict: that Perry Smith is not responsible for his actions, that the blame for his actions lies with the forces that created him, not with the individual himself. At least that seems to be the point Capote would have us reach. Therefore, according to the author, a second instance of murder in cold blood comes with the trial and execution of Smith and Hickcock. The judge, lawyers, and jury members go through only the motions of a real trial. And, indeed if his representation is even slightly accurate, Capote is correct in calling the trial a travesty on justice. The reader now becomes a judge of the legal system itself. But unlike actual judges or jury members, we have been given information about the murderers that in a real trial would probably be inadmissible would probably be considered totally irrelevant. And herein lies our problem. Where does justice reside? Because Capote has made us understand and even care for Perry Smith, we feel that he should somehow escape the ultimate punishment. (Ironically, very few readers feel much sympathy for Dick Hickcock; in class after class, my students have proclaimed that he certainly deserved to be hanged-although he was, in fact, little more than a flashlight carrier for Smith). In his effort to probe and to convey honestly his portrait of the murderer, Capote makes us accept the proposition that there can be no absolute, certain justice. This is probably an accurate assessment of the situation; yet, in addition, he causes us to some extent-and contrary to his initial purposes-also to forget the victims. In contrast to Capote's In Cold Blood, Judith Rossner's Looking for Mr. Goodbar adopts the perspective of a rape- murder victim. Although the rapist/murderer, Gary Cooper White, shares many personal characteristics with Perry Smith, Rossner scarcely concerns herself with his ruined life and descent into crime. Instead, this writer illustrates how one woman virtually guarantees herself a meeting with White, almost as if Theresa Dunn is committing suicide and simply employs White to carry out her execution for her. Like Capote, Rossner in the act of creating her book changed her purpose. Originally she set out to report on and to expose the murky subculture of New York City's singles bars, using an actual murder of a young woman as her point of departure. The author's initial attitude towards the victim was not at all sympathetic. But in the process of writing about Theresa Dunn, Rossner's fictionalized version of the actual murder victim, the writer became both haunted and terrified by this woman's life. The author quickly realized that Theresa was emblematic of a whole society of women who desperately seek human connection. The emblem expanded into a statement about the conditions under which some women live, painfully depending upon their sexuality to gain even the smallest measure of favor and concern. As Rossner portrays it, Theresa Dunn's life is a string of broken relationships with men who mistreat her. Her father is cold and distant; a professor with whom she has an affair is cruel and insensitive; and the men with whom she later shares casual, chance sexual encounters profess love but in reality use her only for their sexual gain. Because she has been repeatedly rejected by "normal" men, she begins to think of herself as repulsive and worthless. Almost to reinforce her self-loathing, Theresa transforms herself from a respectable school-teacher during the day into a degraded figure haunting bars at night and seeking sexual debasement for herself. With each male she encounters, she demands more and more violence in love-making to satisfy her self-concept. Her most constant lover, Tony Lopanto, is a brutal punk who beats and virtually rapes her. And when Tony rejects her, Theresa almost wills herself to meet-once and fatally-her final, most violent, and thus most fulfilling lover, her murderer, Gary Cooper White. These first two books demonstrate clearly that the author's point of view greatly influences the readers' judgment about the protagonists. Consumed by Theresa Dunn's story, Rossner's audience has no real interest in and no compassion for a male figure who is virtually a duplicate of Perry Smith, the man for whom Capote causes us to feel great sympathy. The class now begins to see how an effective case can be made by a skillful author either for or against a character. Students thus learn that they must question a writer's approach in order to determine in what ways and with what legitimacy the author is manipulating their feelings and judgments. And once the students realize that questions of guilt and innocence are much more complex than a single either/or equation would imply, they begin to see as well the difficulties involved in the criminal justice profession. Curiously, very few serious works involving murder are written from the point of view of the prosecutors. One excellent work that does offer such a vantage point is Helter-Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry. From Bugliosi's perspective, the criminals and victims are seen in relatively impersonal ways. He offers little sympathy for the victims-the Hollywood Beautiful People butchered beyond recognition in the Tate/Polanski household and the LaBiancas, a Clutter-like family in the suburbs. He is deeply interested in Charles Manson, the mastermind behind the murders, but his interests are guided primarily by the challenge of matching his wits with a formidable adversary. Bugliosi does not intend to arouse sympathies for Manson, although, again, Manson's life is amazingly similar to Perry Smith's; he was the product of a broken home, had a sexually indiscriminate mother and an unknown father, experienced reform schools and prisons as substitutes for home, and was preoccupied with bizarre personal dreams that ranged from his becoming a successful musician to his becoming a world dictator. Manson's life, like Smith's, can be seen as a search for the family and home he had never really had. Unlike Capote, however, Bugliosi does not intend Manson to be seen as society's victim; rather, normal society becomes Manson's victim as he gathers about him a collection of young men and women whom he labels-in a perverse twisting of our normal associations with the word-the Family. Manson teaches his Family to have no moral restrictions, but instead to indulge in all of society's taboos. By striking a direct counterpoint to usual social norms, Manson educates his Family to be freed from society's bonds; he teaches them to feel no guilt about any of their thoughts and actions. Ironically, of course, without a sense of guilt they become the most heinous creatures of all, losing any humanity and compassion either for themselves or for their victims If neither the murderers nor the victims are Bugliosi's major concerns, then who or what is? First, the writer dramatizes the difficulties involved in the process of bringing a criminal to justice. In fact, Bugliosi castigates all the members of the state's and the defense's teams-the LAPD, the Sheriff's Patrol, the detectives, the prosecuting and defense lawyers, and the judges -as incompetent and blundering. Because of inter- departmental rivalries, for instance, the state's team mishandles and even loses valuable evidence that could have convicted Manson almost immediately. The only person in the entire book who is without blame or error is, perhaps not surprisingly, Bugliosi himself. He adopts an almost omniscient role: he is the one official who is capable of doing right as well as of determining who is guilty and who is not. His point of view seems to be that, had it not been for him, Manson and his followers would probably not have been captured or brought to trial and convicted. The central concern of the book is Bugliosi's triumph of wits over his adversary Charles Manson. Bugliosi's prosecution is based on the concept that the actual murderers-the individual Family members who so brutally stabbed and shot the Tate/La Bianca victims-were not really as guilty as Manson, since they were created and controlled by him and were consequently merely following orders. Manson's orders were to create a murder scene so horrible it would create social panic. Certain black power slogans written in the victims' blood were intended to convince white America that the murderers were black and thus to initiate a race war. The race war in full swing, Manson would lead his Family to safety underground. The blacks' triumph certain, they would by necessity seek a leader, since blacks clearly could not lead themselves. Naturally, they would turn to Charles Manson, who would then kick them into submission. Manson would thus become the dictator of an entire society of murderers, where anything and everything was sanctioned. In Helter-Skelter, the author does not present a loner who incidentally murders, nor a victim looking for a murderer, as in the previous two works. Rather, we see murder carried out as device of a twisted political policy. According to Bugliosi, Manson is, of course, guilty; those who carried out the murders are less culpable; those who were Family members but did not actually participate in the slaughters are relatively blameless. This assessment of degrees of guilt seems quite sound, yet Bugliosi does not evaluate members of the Family solely on rational principles. Rather, he also responds, like the other authors examined, in quite subjective ways, detesting some Family members and liking others for their personal qualities. For example, he chooses Linda Kasabian as star prosecution witness because as a Family member in good standing she can provide valuable information about Manson's control of the group. Kasabian also has not participated directly in the murders so that she is, at worst, an accessory to the plan's conception. Yet quite clearly Bugliosi is also personally drawn to the young woman; of her he writes, "She was a quiet girl, docile, easily led, yet she communicated an inner sureness, almost a fatalism, that made her seem much older than her twenty years...Linda bore a distinct resemblance to the actress Mia Farrow." The prosecuting attorney thus bases his judgment of Kasabian, as witness and as person, both on professional criteria and emotional response. This is the same kind of attraction that causes Capote to plead for Perry Smith, or Rossner to exonerate Theresa Dunn, though some of their readers find these authors' stances to be indefensible. Nonetheless, Bugliosi does, as we know, win his case, and many of the guilty are convicted and imprisoned. But one cannot help wondering whether all of the guilty have been tried. Manson's psychotic vision of himself as Dictator to a society of murderers seems ludicrous to us; yet such an insane world is exactly what was created when Adolf Hitler, Manson's idol, came to power in Nazi Germany. When we read about the brutal slaying of an innocent family in Kansas and, later, about the hangings of the two men who killed the family; when we read about the brutal rape and murder of a lonely woman in New York; when we read about the savage stabbing and shooting of a group of Hollywood Jet Setters and of a suburban grocery store owner and his wife-when we read about these heinous crimes, we are filled with outrage or pity. But had all these victims died in the Third Reich concentration camps, they would have occupied only a few moments of the Nazis' busy daily schedule In fact, in one death camp alone, 2,000 Clutters, Theresa Dunns, Tate-LaBiancas went to the showers and ovens every day, until approximately 12 million people had been murdered. In the literature concerning the Nazi death camps, common standards of moral behavior and justice, implicit in the books previously discussed, no longer apply; instead, brutality and murder become the norm, become the official policy and the daily reality. But importantly, not only did the Nazi officials prove murderous and brutal, the victims themselves became active participants in the horrors; to engage in the violent rituals was the only mode of survival left to them. The Germans forced each prisoner to play a dual role, as victim and as executioner. The lowest functionaries in the camps were prisoners who soved other prisoners into the ovens. If they failed to perform their duties, they too joined the throngs on the way to the gas chambers and crematoria. Because of the complete reversal of normal moral codes in that world, the authors writing about the camps often adopt an omniscient, seemingly nonjudgmental point of view. They want their readers to see and to feel, without direct authorial tinterpretations what the camps were actually like; also through their own flat, sometimes cold voices, they attempt to show us the final debasing effects of the camps: that even writers, people who are supposedly endowed with great powers of sensitivity, intelligence, and wisdom, are rendered unable to feel, to judge, to express moral outrage. The dehumanization process felt by the writers is an essential result of the death camps. In the utterly depraved world of these camps, judgments seem quite impossible. Out of the literally hundreds of excellent fiction and non- fiction works about the death camps, two particularly illuminate our central theme. One of the most wrenching works is the too little read This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski. Born in the Ukraine in 1922, Borowski at the age fo four saw the Russians incarcerate his father in a Siberian labor camp, and at eight witnessed the imprisonment of his mother in another Siberian camp. At the age of seventeen, he himself was sent by the Germans to Auschwitz. He spent the next six years there and in other camps. Following his liberation in 1945, Borowski lived in Paris until, in 1951, he succeeded, on his third attempt, to kill himself. He was not quite thirty. His friend, the literary critic Jan Kott, says of this young poet and fiction writer, "For Borowski, the son of Soviet prisoners and the posthumous child of Auschwitz, the whole world is a concentration camp-was and will be." Borowski's icy detachment becomes one of the most terrifying elements of his work; yet this detachment is not a pose but en emotional necessity. His work records the depths to which human beings degenerated in the camps. He frequently witnessed one of the favorite sports of the guards-placing a shovel across the neck of a prone prisoner and jumping on the handle until the prisoner died. He saw the Nazis' perverse medical experiments and the mad Kapos' collections of human skin, hair, and bones, and soap made from human fat. He reports the boast of a prisoner named Becker that he had personally hanged his own son because the boy had stolen bread. In fact, many learned that in order to survive they had to betray friends and even members of their own families. Borowski himself worked at various jobs in the camps, from stacking bodies of infants to stripping other prisoners of their belongings as they disembarked from the trains. He learned to plunder whenever he could in order to purchase extra supplies. Throughout his work, Borowski uses the image of people as ants, ants that merely function but do not think or feel. And like a dispassionate entomologist, he reports the ants' actions but offers no judgments. The only moral stance that mattered in the camps, he writes, was that "The living are always right, the dead are always wrong." Borowski's suicide, an act duplicated by thousands of other former inmates, testifies to the pervasive-and continued-destruction produced by these camps. Edward Lewis Wallant's powerful novel, The Pawnbroker, extends Borowski's view that the world of the concentration camps becomes internalized and thereby molds one's perspective towards life beyond the camps. Sol Nazerman, Wallant's protagonist, has survived the death camps where he witnessed the murders of his son, daughter, and wife. Though he moves to the presumed safety and freedom of the U.S., he has been so brutalized by the Nazis that he can no longer feel anything for others or himself. He operates his prison-like pawnshop in the crime-infested streets of a New York City slum and treats his desperate, begging customers almost as cruelly as the Nazis have treated him. As he stands behind the iron bars of his pawnbroker's cell, Nazerman engages, unmoved, in the bartering these unfortunate people offer: They want something of value from him, but he has nothing to give. He feels no culpability for his own illegal and immoral actions, no grief for his customers' predicaments, no interest in their dreams and aspirations, He almost succeeds in becoming a complete automaton as he attempts to block his memories. Yet, surprisingly, the death of his apprentice, Jesus Ortiz, who sacrifices himself to save the pawn-broker's life, awakens in Nazerman what he has worked so hard to suppress. He is shocked to discover that he can feel grief. Once he allows himself to grieve for Jesus, he also learns how to mourn all those others he has lost. Wallant's final view of Nazerman offers the qualified affirmation remaining to these survivors Out of one's learning to grieve-to recognize and to cry out against injustices-comes the chance for a renewed life. What can be said, finally, about literary treatments of murder? These works raise important questions about our definition and implementation of justice. Because writers are not restricted to mere factual data but instead transform fact into comprehensible human truths, they may offer the most profound explorations possible of criminal minds. According to one literary masterpiece, the very first murderer, Cain, posed a seemingly simple question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" The writers we have examined demonstrate through their diverse points of view the difficulties in providing a definite answer. |
