A Pampered Poodle

Capote's Lexicon

Since I started reading In Cold Blood I haven't been able to ignore that my vocabulary skills are way beneath an author's such a Truman Capote's. There are many books, especially the type I've read as a kid, in which few words that I don't know appear and when they do, they play an unimportant role in the sentence so you can just read over them or get their meaning from the context. It's worked so far for me to look up occasionally a word in my laptop's or kindle's dictionary for the sake of curiosity, but for this book I've had to actually learn the meaning of words I didn't know for me to get some sort of understanding of Capote's work. As I'm still reading the beginning of the book, a lot of what Capote writes is characterization or description of the characters and the setting, building up the scene for the awaited homicide to happen. Unlike a news report or journalistic writing, the book, composed by feature articles, shows the events in a juicer way. Nancy isn't just a straight-A student or a cat-loving loser, she's a girl who values her gold watch under her cat and her going-steady ring. She helps her acquaintances learn baking or organize school activities. Then there's Kenyon, who more than just a woodworker liked to go spend time alone in the basement. Capote's way of writing (his syntax, tone and register) makes the scenes he shows deeper in meaning and simply more vivid. So far in the book as much has happened to write a paragraph for a typical journalistic report on the crime, but the author goes beyond the simple facts that would make the subjects stereotypes and depicts them as real people the reader wants to understand. A diverse diction and specific words that portray the situation make In Cold Blood a more critical way of showing what happened in Holocomb, Kansas.

By reading random sentences throughout the book, I realized that the writing style and understanding it is essential for apprehension of the book. For example, this sentence would have no meaning for me had I not looked up the definition of many words: "An itinerant buffalo hunter, Mr. C. J. (Buffalo) Jones, had much to do with its subsequent expansion from a collection of huts and hitching posts into an opulent ranching center with razzle-dazzle saloons, an opera house, and the plushiest hotel anywhere between Kansas City and Denver" (pg. 32). If reading it quickly, I would have gotten that the town grew and became sort of a sophisticated place with an opera. While I wouldn't have been wrong, I would've missed out on a lot of the essence of the sentence. The town grew from a Midwest settlement that started out from travelers who lived in huts and traded what they hunted. It became an extravagant southern village, I assume that with a New Orleans style, and now, it's a place where two criminals pass by and barely notice it. Olathe is not the subject of the book but Capote's description of it shows how communicative writing gets to the reader. Other "simpler" sentences are as well expressive because of Capote's techniques. Capote writes, "Herb was hard-headed, a slow man to make a deal; Johnson had worked over a year to clinch this sale" (pg. 47). As he juxtaposes the characters, Capote describes the situation, rather than just saying, "Johnson had worked hard to make this deal with Mr. Clutter." As most books do, In Cold Blood begins with describing the setting and the characters that will matter in the rest of the book, and the way Capote does it gives a deeper understanding of what is happening. Aspects like word choice or syntax give what would seem like simple sentences an implied meaning.


These are the words I had to look up in the last fifteen pages I read (between pages 30 to 45 approximately):

Opulent: luxurious, lavish.


Hitching: traveling by hitchhiking or moving from one place to another.


Plushiest: like a plush, soft to the touch.


Razzle-dazzle: dazzling excitement, extravagant or showy display.



Haranguing: agressive and lengthy speech.


Spittoons: metal pot.


Conscientious: wishing to do what is right, diligent.


Tenant: someone who rented from a landlord.


Bashful: shy, reserved.


Jolt: push or shake abruptly.


Rankle: to annoy or cause resentment.


Hosiery: stockings, socks.


Quandary: a state of perplexity, of being confused in a difficult situation.


Chintz: multicolored fabric.


Decrepit: an elderly and weak or worn out.


Dourness: relentless, gloomy in appearance.


Hefty: large, heavy and powerful.


Lanky: thin and tall.


Reticent: revealing one's thoughts and feelings.


Keen: enthusiastic or eager to do something.


Disheveled: appearing dirty and disordered.


Foal: a young animal.


Astride: with a leg on each side of.


Prim: formal and respectable, proper.


Loiter: to wait around, linger.


Clinch: to settle or confirm something, like a contract.

Alternating Stories

As I read In Cold Blood I could relate Truman Capote's way of telling the story to Vargas Llosa's way of writing La Fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat). Capote begins his book with a description of the town and characterizing a couple of characters whose lives, I assume, will become related to each other. After introducing Mr Clutter, the author shifts to an in medias res, a I learned in Spanish class, scene in a restaurant, where Perry is waiting for Dick, two characters that as the chapter continues you learn that they are some type of adventurers, even though Dick is cautious. In Mr Clutter's chapter, he finds a group of pheasant hunters, so once I read that Dick and Perry had a hunting shotgun in their car, I predicted that the stories will interweave into the story of the murder in Holocomb. As Perry sits in the café waiting for Dick, the narrator begins describing the situation as he or she deepens into Perry's life in a subtle way to characterize him. Then the author switches back to the Clutter family but describes Nancy instead of her father. Then back to Perry, now with Dick, and then back to Nancy. It seems like Capote will alternate stories between several characters as he builds up the scene of the empty and isolated town that will be hit with the death of six people, perhaps Mr and Mrs Clutter and their four children).

The Feast of the Goat begins with Urania's return to Dominican Republic after having left for several decades. The narrator hints that some sort of traumatic experience shocked her and made her hate her family and her country, and just like Capote, introduces a mystery that the reader will discover throughout the book. Vargas Llosa has three alternating narrations, one from Urania's point of view, one that shifts between the killers of Trujillo and another one for the dictator himself. As he characterizes each of the supposedly real characters, the reader begins to discover what had happened to Urania and the specific events that led to the assassination and her rape. Although The Feast of the Goat and In Cold Blood have very different tones and environments, the structure the authors use is similar. The first has an intrigued tone while the second has a detached one. Both authors are trying to explain a series of events and what they meant in a larger scale. Vargas Llosa explains the nature of dictatorship, machismo and corruption as he shows why Latin America works that way politically. Capote, as we've talked about in class, will show how small places like Holocomb are being affected by  the growth of towns and the difficulty of being isolated nowadays. From what I've read so far, using alternating narrations helps give a better insight into what is happening and deal with different themes. Authors use it to get to what they're trying to say in an implicit way.

Vocabulary:

• Honed: made sharper, more efficient.
• Ludicrous: very foolish, ridiculous.
• Reticent: not revealing one's feelings, reserved. 
• Brooding: very unhappy.
• Gewgaw: a showing things that is useless.
• Uppity: arrogant.
• Ominous: threatening, giving the impression that something bad is happening. 
• Impish: inclined to do something bad, mischievous. 
• Pragmatic: dealing with things practically.
• Ineffable: too great or too extreme to be expressed in words.
• Cinch: easy task or part of a saddle. 
• Elocution: pronunciation, articulation. 
• Lattice: grid of fibers. 
• Despondency: low spirits, hopelessness. 
• Sprucing: neat in appearance. 

Cold and Detached

Truman Capote's In Cold Blood begins with a detached and gloomy description of the isolated town of Holocomb, Kansas. He describes it as a town "out there" and "simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center" (pg. 3.), as he makes the reader suspicious of what could happen in the cold novel. While you read the first few pages, describing the town, the town appears as lonely or unsociable but calm and unperturbed. Capote briefly juxtaposes the remote and peaceful town he shows with the sudden announcement of the murder of six people. As I read the first fifteen pages or so, I could see that the author is building up suspense for what is going to happen, a homicide, as the reader familiarizes with the town and the characters.

Once the calm and empty illustration of the town is disrupted, Capote shifts right away to the characterization of Herbert Clutter, a respected member of the community of Holocomb. The author continues to use a detached tone but with a foreboding aspect. As a reader, you expect that the murder will happen any moment. I got suspicious about him when Capote describes his anger and thought that the armed hunters would lead somehow to the killing, because the cold and suspensive tone. While the tone is like that for the most part, the author occasionally uses quotations where he shows Holocomb's "prairie twang" or their colloquial language. The Clutter parents see one of their daughters as a "real Southern belle" (pg. 8) and Nancy, that daughter, wanted to go to a special event that all her friends were going to. The author's specific description with a personal touch contrasts from the distant introduction of the town. Capote makes it seem first like just a typical environment where life is dull, but as he starts to get into the Clutter family, the reader gets the feeling that they're good, normal people, perhaps, like you (the reader) are. The way the author gets increasingly into detail with the characters can suggest it will follow the structure of many crime novels or TV episodes, or that these follow Capote's structure, as he gets into the homicide. I remember that Agatha Christie's And The There Were None started with a detached mood, a kept a cold tone all through the book, and used a similar structure as Capote. She began with a character, describing him or her in general, and then she got into specifics of their life, culminating in their disappearance. Looking at the next couple of pages of In Cold Blood, I can see that Capote will alternate stories between characters, just like Christie.
So far, reading this book feels like reading a murder novel but with a deeper literary aspect to it. I've just read the first fifteen pages so honestly I haven't been able to analyze it very deeply, so that's a question I want to keep in mind in my future reading: Where is Capote going with the crime stories?

Vocabulary

·      Haphazard: lacking organization

·      Dire: extremely serious or urgent, dangerous

·      Gaunt: skinny, looking exhausted

·      Rawhide: leather

·      Postmistress: woman in charge of a post office

·      Meager: lacking quantity or quality, thin

·      Chancy: subject to unpredictable changes

·      Scuttling: hurrying

·      Impinge: have a negative effect, intrude

·      Keening: making a wailing sound in grief

·      Seldom: rarely

·      Hued: colored (hue: shade of a color)

"I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys" -George Orwell

In George Orwell's essay, "Shooting an Elephant," he uses a metaphor to show his views on British imperialism. The autobiographical account literally shows how he killed an elephant because he felt that he had to, but beyond the facts he is explaining the nature of imperialism and being persuasive about it. If you read his essay at first you might think that it's just a story about his visit to Burma, but if you look deeper, you'll see that he uses rhetoric and fallacies to construct a point about the political and social situation of that time.

Orwell begins his essay with a bad example fallacy. He uses hyperbole and makes observations on Asia based on the few descriptions he gives or his personal thoughts. While there could be a lot of people in where he was, they surely didn't represent Burma as a whole or the nature of the British Empire. The author uses hasty generalizations when describing some of them, both literally and in the rhetorical sense. He doesn't do it because he hates a specific group of people based on a few he met, but because he's trying to show the reader his environment. Some yellow-faced Asian most likely did insult him, but he felt like the whole race was against him, a British police officer. Same with the Buddhist priests--the way he describes them, in a hasty generalization or based on merely his personal observation, shows that the British viewed an overly simplified situation. Because of his mental fallacy, or perceiving things in a way that lacked a connection between the evidence and conclusion, Orwell felt that he was a puppet of the empire and like "every Englishman in the East," he had to suffer in silence. He says, "Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty." His fallacies are certainly not to amaze the reader with the huge number of Asians or overly simplified descriptions, but rather to show how imperialism affected people's mind and perception. Through his essay, George Orwell describes the way imperialism affects the logical way of thinking.

After having described the way he lived in Burma, Orwell continues to tell about the event, killing an elephant, that allowed him to understand the essence of imperialism. He continues to make generalization about his surroundings as he describes how he felt pressured by the natives to shoot an elephant that had gone crazy. While he uses a few literal fallacies, Orwell's essay has a disconnect between the proof and the conclusion in the situation. He walked by a field with a gun, because he felt it was appropriate and he perceived that the Burmese wanted him to kill the animal, so he did. He was the authority, and was armed, so he could've done anything he wanted, but the effects of "tyranny" made unable to oppose to pressure. The proof in the situation would be that there was a crazy elephant and a lot of natives around, and the conclusion that you had to kill it, but the connection between them is flawed, he didn't have to kill it because of the pressure. Orwell writes, "I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle." It's a fallacy beyond just the writing. He shows that imperialism and despotism got into people's minds and made them act illogically. The division between the colonizers and the colonized made people act in the way the stereotype said they should, sort of like a false dilemma.

The Disastrous Effects

We often think of Winston Churchill as the British hero that saved Europe from the Nazis and was a great ally to America, but most people don't know about his imperialist side. In Churchill's speech "Our Duty in India," he uses fallacies to build up the belief that Britain couldn't allow India to become independent and that the Conservative Party should unite for that cause.
Churchill begins his speech by building an idea with a wrong ending fallacy. He wants to make his audience feel attacked by the Socialist Party and blame someone for the situation, so he states that as the plans of the Conservative Party are being stopped, the Socialists will take advantage of them to keep them out of the issue of India. Churchill is using the slippery slope fallacy as he shows one possible solution as if it was what was actually happening. As he antagonizes the Socialists, Churchill proceeds to explain his ideas about India.
According to Churchill, everyone would agree that allowing India to become independent would be self-destructive and absurd for everyone, so they shouldn't do it. Apart from being a hasty generalization, his proof doesn't lead to the conclusion, so it's also a wrong ending fallacy. Churchill then continues to explain how everything would go wrong if British imperialism ended.
Churchill says, "The princes, the Europenas, the Moslems, the Depressed classes, the Anglo-Indians--none of them know what to do nor where to turn in the face of their apparent desertion by Great Britain. Can you wander that they try in desperation to make what terms are possible with the triumphant Brahmin oligarchy?" He uses the straw man fallacy to make people believe that one of the many paths India could follow once independent would be destructive and horrible for everyone. He also wrongly assumes that no one in India would know how govern the colonies. Not even Gandhi, who, if you read his latest declarations, cannot stop fighting, would be able to govern India. That statement tries to make people skeptical about what would happen if India became independent using a hasty generalization, as Churchill only uses a very general example to condemn the Indian leader. Churchill goes back to victimizing the Conservative Party, suffering under the attack of the Socialists. He uses post hoc ergo propter hoc by assuming that as the Party is suffering because of the Socialists, it must be the fault of something that preceded it.

The beginning of Winston Churchill's speech used different types of fallacies but as he further explains his ideas, he bases most of what he says in a slippery slope fallacy. Churchill wants to keep the British Empire ruling the world and according to him, if it wasn't like that, places like India would have chaos. He attacks the idea of a federal system saying that it would collapse in India because every region or religion would try to seize power. He also says that the untouchables would suffer because of the authoritarian and evil-minded (in a reductio ad absurdum way) Brahmin rule. The problem is that those things would not happen but could happen. In his slippery slope fallacy that puts together all elements of his speech, Churchill choses the worst case scenario for India's independence, that could happen, and makes it seem like the only possible outcome. He literally says that all services in India would collapse in the case of British withdrawal. Although it's true that defense could collapse, hygiene deteriorate and many things get messy, it is not as simple as "independence equals disaster."

Set to make Indian independence look like a huge disaster and wrong decision, Winton Churchill uses rhetorics and a lot of fallacies to convince his audience that they needed to support British imperialism. Churchill oversimplifies the situation and makes assumptions that disconnect his proofs from his conclusions. Although his speech could sound like strong and convincing for some people, if you look closely to what he says you will notice that his imperialist argument is not logical.

Oh God

In 1931, BBC invited Gandhi to Kingsley Hall for the sole purpose of recording his point of view. Although the recorders wanted him to speak about politics, Gandhi refused and decided to give a speech on God and what he believed about him. He chose to donate all royalties to an association in India. It can certainly be a touching speech, where Gandhi explains that a universal force rules us benevolently, but if you look closely at what he says, he's building up an idea without real proof to support it. Gandhi admits both that there is no reason in his argument and that he doesn't fully believe in God. He constructed his speech all on fallacies to build a spiritual argument that has no proof. I'm not sure whether he wanted to earn royalties, popularity or recognition, but his ideas are fallacious and his conclusion artificial.

Gandhi begins his speech with a contradictory statement. It's not part of Heinrichs' fallacies, but there's a conflict between what he says, and he uses a proof that doesn't support the conclusion. He says, "There is an indefinable mysterious power that pervades everything, I feel it though I do not see it." The conclusion is that there is a power, but what he puts as a proof disproves it. If he can't see it, it's surely not pervading everything, not his eyes at least. After talking about the mysterious power, and saying that it can be reasoned to an extent, which he contradicts later, Gandhi switches his topic to God. In a false comparison, Gandhi assumes that the force and God are the same. Once he has stated that God's rules are everywhere, he goes on to observe why we don't see them.

He mentions that some poor villagers in India didn't know who ruled their town but said that God ruled it. If God's rules are everywhere, and they know God rules them, then they did know who "rules" their town. That pathos-oriented anecdote about the villagers has a disconnect between the proof and conclusion. Gandhi says that, just as supposedly they didn't know who ruled them, he didn't know who rules him, although he said it is God. He admits to feel the orderliness of the universe and the existence of a universal law, falsely comparing himself to the ignorant villagers. Then, in a hasty generalization, he affirms that "it" cannot be a blind law because blind laws never work. A typical hasty generalization offers too few examples that prove the conclusion, he offers none. Gandhi mentions that Sir J. C. Bose proved that even matter is life, distracting the audience from anything that's relevant to what he just said. He uses a red herring also to be pathetic, as he's mentioning an important Bengali. Gandhi ends that paragraph saying that since he doesn't know much about the law-giver, he cannot deny his law, which is clearly an ignorance as proof fallacy.

Apparently no king ruled Mysore (where he talked to the poor villagers) from this palace

Gandhi continues to talk about his denial of the certainly existent power, as he jumps into a series of consecutive fallacies. "Since nothing else that I see merely through the senses can or will persist, He alone is," says Gandhi in a fallacy of ignorance. Then he assures that He can be either malevolent or benevolent, and that he's certainly the last. It is a false dilemma because, as far as we know, God could be kind of good or both good and bad. He says that God is benevolent because he persists in the middle of life and death, truth and untruth and light and darkness. Therefore, says Gandhi, God is life, truth, light, live and the supreme Good. He achieves that conclusion by a wrong ending fallacy. Gandhi states a lot things as if they were facts or truths about life. He says that, "God to be God must rule the heart and transform it," and that he must express himself in definite realizations beyond our five senses. These facts he states use the wrong ending fallacy, again, because there is no connection between the proof and the conclusion. It is partly a tautology as well because for God to be God he must do what people often think of as God. 

Gandhi ends his speech by saying that since prophets have felt God in realizations beyond their senses, God exists. He bases his argument in saying that what we feel beyond our senses is infallible, which uses no proof for his conclusion. Then he uses a bad example, as he says that as prophets have felt God, he is real. What a few prophets think is not the truth about the world or representative about what everyone thinks. It is also a tautology as prophets, by definition people who proclaim the will of God, obviously "feel" God. Gandhi concludes his speech saying that, "Faith transcends reason." Just like reason can't explain God, his logic couldn't either. The whole speech is based on contradictions and presumed facts. There is clearly a disconnection between the evidence and conclusions of his arguments, making his explanation of God completely fallacious.