‘Out There’: Monstrous Doubles and the Folie a Deux in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood

This chapter takes up with arguably the greatest non-fiction novel ever written, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966). Not the least notorious of the many contentious aspects of Capote’s master work is his fabrication of a totally false ending: in order to provide his ‘true’ tale with closure, Capote invented a fictional encounter within a Kansas cemetery, one that carries remarkably sacrificial implications. In Cold Blood will be subjected to a close Girardian reading, focusing on two key themes. The first is the reversibility, or exchangeability, at work in the scapegoating mechanism: just as the entire Clutter family is the sacrificial victim of the victimizing monstrous doubles of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, so are the two murderers the scapegoats of the community striving to expel its internal mimetic violence through the public ritual of law and capital punishment. The second is that the personalized violence of the deviant criminals (folie a deux) and the impersonal violence of the ‘law-abiding community’ are both governed by the exact same psychological processes: mimetic desire and mimetic rivalry—the same curse of the boys from another great novel of mis-recognized violence, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The fictitious ending unifies both of these themes beautifully well, suggesting, in an artfully disguised manner, that the youngest murder victim, Nancy Clutter, is herself nothing less than a sacrificial victim, whose violent death and forcible descent into the Underworld bestows a regenerative power upon those around her.