Interpreting "true stories?"

I'm reading In Cold Blood by Truman Capote right now, which, as I'm sure you know, is the original true crime book, so technically everything is supposed to be factual (no spoilers please). Because of this, I feel kind of like I'm not allowed to interpret or analyze it. Do you ever have this problem when reading something that is (auto)biographical or supposedly based on a true story?

For example, when Nancy Clutter is killed, she is wearing a dress embroidered with cherries. She is a Purity Sue, loved by everyone, beautiful, naive, et cetera. I'm very tempted to believe that Capote wrote the dress into the story in order to symbolize her virginity, but the whole true crime thing makes me hesitate to assign any meaning to it.

There are tons of examples from this book similar to that one. Not really starting this topic to discuss what liberties Capote took (I don't really want to know until I'm done with the book), but rather just to pose the question: what has been your experience with "true" narrative literature? Do you feel unable to really attach meaning to it?

Well, if she actually was wearing a dress with cherries on it, then I'd say that'd be misuse of analysis. But if that was put in by the writer, then of course one can analyze it.

When someone says a story is exactly what happened, I tend to take it at face value. When someone says it's true, but that not everything in it happened, I become a lot more skeptical. (For instance, Eli Wiesel's "not everything that is true happened, and not everything that happened is true" spiel makes me take Night a bit less seriously than comparatively to-the-point accounts like Primo Levi's Survival In Auschwitz.)

Then again, Levi himself does occasionally play up a specific aspect of a scene to make a point through metaphor . . .

Edit: Almost forgot! I had an English teacher who talked endlessly about the symbolism in What is the What, and the things that the author inserted to make philosophical points. I later found out that a lot of those things, even the improbable ones, appeared in the story because they happened in real life, with no intention of symbolism.

edited 22nd Nov '11 7:37:41 PM by feotakahari

I had a professor who wanted us to look for literary symbolism in things that are supposedly accounts of real life. Yeah, I dropped that class shortly thereafter, and am currently retaking it with a less insane professor.

edited 18th Dec '11 1:08:19 PM by BetsyandtheFiveAvengers

That's what's always bothered me about interpreting symbolism. How do you know that's really what the author meant?

At that point, I don't think it really matters anymore. I think it becomes more about what you see.

Honestly, a lot of analysis of nonfiction depends heavily on your level of skepticism.

Trying to see symbolism in real life is odd, but if Patricia Cornwell went crazy with it in her book on Jack the Ripper - all the while being careful to tell us that's what she's doing - I don't see why the audience can't.

You can probably interpret what the author chooses to report. For example, the murder victim may really have been wearing that dress with cherries on it, but if they'd been a snide, hateful person perhaps the fact that the dress was mostly red would have been emphasized. Or it wouldn't have been mentioned at all. If a work is telling a story, then even if that story is true, the author is going to be putting some intepretation into it.

That doesn't make any sense to me at all. The author's the one who wrote the darn thing, if they intended it to mean something than that's what it means. Just because it's possible to interpret something more than one way doesn't mean every interpretation is true. That doesn't mean you always have to agree with the message the author is presenting, though.

Hang on...I suppose a better way to look at it would be examining what it could mean, outlining possible interpretations, not necessarily looking for the right answer because there wouldn't necessarily be one. But in that case, there could be no wrong answer either, could there? I guess what bothered me about it is the fact that English teachers often make it seem like they know the correct interpretation then tell you you're interpreting it wrong. How would they know? Did they talk to the author? I doubt it.

That is an excellent point.

edited 24th Nov '11 12:48:44 PM by loganlocksley

Oh, no, see, those English teachers think talking to the author is the absolute basest thing one can do. In the rare instance an author actually had any idea what he was doing, he's probably lying about it afterward. What they do is consult their Big Book of Sex and Bigotry and flick through it until they find points that match. If it's not sexual and it's not about social conflict - all right, it could be about identity or the universe in a pinch - then it's not valid, because their grad school said so.

And yet, it's still more sane than The Great Game.

edited 24th Nov '11 2:25:17 PM by DomaDoma

That's unduly harsh. I hate hearing people analyze stuff that isn't there, but there are some people who really love a work and put tons of effort into analyzing and making sense of it, and it's unfair to say that they're just doing it to be pretentious.

If they purportedly believe in Death of the Author but still seem to believe in an orthodoxy of interpretation, it's a fair bet that they're pretentious.

If even the author isn't allowed to have the final say, then nobody is allowed to.

For the record, I disagree with Death of the Author.

funny, Roland Barthes explicitly stated that this was the point.

That makes sense. I was referring to Doma Doma's pretentious English teachers with that last comment.

You know, thinking about it, I guess Death of the Author is valid to a point. I don't think the creator should mercilessly shoot down everyone's interpretations and ruin their fun, but that doesn't mean Word of God should always be ignored. It largely depends on the situation.

It's theoretically possible to talk about the implied narrative independent of the actual narrative—which could be interesting, if you deliberately contrast what happened, as best as it can be pieced together from multiple sources, with what a single source claims (or even implies without outright stating) happened. (Case in point . . .)

edited 24th Nov '11 5:43:15 PM by feotakahari

Oh, yes. That's pretty much a civic duty, and an easy one, thanks to the Internet.

Oddly enough, I always considered In Cold Blood to be a novel rather than a true crime book, so I would be totally fine with analyzing details like that. (I read it in a course on the American novel; that's why.) It is, in fact, one of the examples I sometimes use to describe how the lines between non-fiction prose and fiction can be blurred.

Even when a work is purely factual, the way that facts are described can make an enormous difference in how they are "taken" by the reader, so an author can still employ symbolism. Assuming that the dress really had cherries on it, Capote might have included that detail precisely because of the way they would symbolize her virgnity. No, it wouldn't have been his decision to dress her that way, but it would have been his decision to describe her as dressed that way.

In any case, the cherries would still be significant, as an example of real-life irony. They do not lose their ironic meaning just because they were real.

It is not a matter of what the author wants to say, but a matter of what the author writes and the implications and consequences of said writing.

If an author conveys something they don't want to convey explicitly ("Don't want" as in a message of implied misogynism, racism or whatever) then it's either the author failing as an author (IE: A communicator of stories) or the author communicating said views or messages implicitly.

And then I get to read your implicit misogyny analysis and, more likely than not, write a rebuttal that shows how badly you're reaching. (To give one all-too-common example, JKR doesn't fail as an author or as a feminist because Molly Weasley is a homemaker.)

This is one of the perks of not being a college student, and thus not beholden to the opinions of liberal arts professors.

"If an author conveys something they don't want to convey explicitly ("Don't want" as in a message of implied misogynism, racism or whatever) then it's either the author failing as an author (IE: A communicator of stories) or the author communicating said views or messages implicitly."

Disagree completely. It could be a case of a reader projecting their own ideas/prejudices onto the work in question, which can happen completely independently of anything the author does. One of the most important things you have to remember, for instance, in interpreting any work of fiction is context; if you read a story written in, say, 1750, and a character strikes you as homosexual, the question you have to ask yourself is how would the character have been viewed at the time the story was originally written. As something of an example, Lord Byron, upon reading Paradise Lost, claimed that, given how God and the Angels are depicted, Milton must have been privately on the side of the Devil. This does not take into account that Milton was an ardent Calvinist, and would have considered the God of Paradise Lost to be completely just and righteous.

Oh, yes, and that whole bit in Phantom Of The Opera where Leroux takes great pains to stress how feminine Raoul is. He's not calling him a pansy; this was just a sexually attractive trait in France at the time.

edited 12th Dec '11 2:24:19 PM by DomaDoma

Interesting point. That's the same process that can create a Broken Aesop - the author is trying to make a certain point, but it doesn't come out right. The same thing happens with ordinary communication, like when Alice says something that Bob takes the wrong way.

However "the author must have failed" isn't the only option. Going back to the example of Alice and Bob's poor communication, it isn't necessarily Alice's fault. Basically, the communication could fail in two ways: Alice could screw it up with the method she uses to communicate her point, or Bob could screw it up by the way he interprets her.

When a story is interpreted in a way other than how the author intended, it isn't as simple as "Well, it must have been the author's fault." The person interpreting the work can just as easily be wrong.

edited 12th Dec '11 3:13:31 PM by loganlocksley