truman capote's contribution to the documentary novel: the game-theoretic dilemmas of in cold...

Truman Capote's Contributionto the Documentary Novel:

The Game-Theoretic Dilemmas ofIn Cold Blood

MICHAEL WAINWRIGHT

In the days when the nuclear ghosts of Khrushchev and Kennedyare poised to rise again, the contrast between these two visionsmakes, to my mind, the strongest case for literary scholarship inwhich realism, objectivity, and rationality are refugees no longer.

Peter Swirski, Of Literature and Knowledge

Prisoner's Dilemma is about avoiding exploitation, but in a Chickengame one person or the other must compromise to avoid a mu-tual disaster. Each player wants to convince the other that he orshe will not back down, and the person who does is "chicken."

Barry O'Neill, Honor, Symbols, and War

But the confessions, though they answered questions of howand why, failed to satisfy his sense of meaningful design.

Truman Capote, In Cold Btood

T o which genre of literature does Truman Capote's (1924-84) InCold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences(1966) belong?^ According to Capote, his volume exemplifiesa new literary class, the nonfiction novel. "What I wanted to do,"he explains, "was bring to journalism the technique of fiction"{Conversations 120). The apparently motiveless murder of theClutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, on the night of November15-16, 1959, provided Capote with an opportunity to put his

' TTie New K)rfer serialization of In Cold Blood came out on September 25, October 2,and October 9, 1965. Random House released the book version of In Cold Blood thefollowing year.

"Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of In Cold Blood " PLL 25

theory into practice. Capote's subject matter was "controversial,"notes Jim Willis, "but there is no denying the story's popularitywith the reading public, and In Cold Blood became an instantsuccess and long-lasting best-seller" (94). This vindication as-sured Capote that "the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film,the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry"displayed by In Cold Blood gave the affirmative answer to his"greatest creative quandary" {Music xiv): whether a full-scalejournalistic novel could be accurate, aesthetic, and accessible."The novelistic techniques generate an excitement, intensityand emotive power that orthodox reporting or historiographydo not aspire to," David Lodge elucidates, "while for the readerthe guarantee that the story is 'true' gives it a compulsion thatno fiction can quite equal" (203).

The "nonfiction novel" is certainly Capote's neologism,continues Lodge, but "it has in fact been around for quite along time in various guises" (203). J. A. Cuddon identifies thegeneric archetype as the "documentary novel." "This form offiction," he writes, "was invented by the Goncourt brothers,Edmond and Jules, in the 1860s" under the appellation of the"roman documentaire. "During the twentieth century, adds Cud-don, "such a novel has become a form of fiction which, likedocumentary drama, is based on documentary evidence in theshape of newspaper articles, legal reports, archives, and recentofficial papers." Notable examples "have been Theodore Drei-ser's An American Tragedy (1925) and Truman Capote's In ColdBlood' (255). Barbara Foley, who remains the leading authorityon documentary fiction, not only repeats the assertion that thisgenre "is a species of fiction" (41), but also agrees with Lodge'ssense that the documentary novel adheres to referential strategiesassociated with nonfictional modes of discourse. Documentaryfiction, she believes,locates itself near the border between factual discourse and fictive discourse,but it does not propose an eradication of that border. Rather, it purports torepresent reality by means of agreed-upon conventions of fictionality, while

26 PLL Michael Wainwright

grafting onto its fictive pact some ldnd of additional claim to empiricalvalidation. (25)Lodge and Foley, however, attribute documentary fiction with alonger provenance than Cuddon does. Lodge cites Daniel Defoe'sA Journal of the Plague l^ar (1722) as the generic archetype, whileFoley places Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) atthe forefront of the genre. Lodge's cursory article must then cedethe academic field to Foley's detailed monograph, which ascribesthree distinct phases to the evolution of documentary fiction,with each new stage emerging gradually from its antecedent.

Spanning approximately two hundred years from the endof the sixteenth century to the close of the eighteenth century,Foley's first phase concerns the "pseudofactual novel." Thisform of documentary fiction "simulates or imitates the authentictestimony of a 'real life' person; its documentary effect derivesfrom the assertion of veracity" (25). Nashe's The UnfortunateTraveller claims to be "a reasonable conveyance of history" (32),and the spirit of this declaration equally applies to AphraBehn'sOroonoko (1688) and Defoe's Ajournai of the Plague Year Foley'ssecond stage of documentary fiction involves the "historicalnovel" (25) ofthe nineteenth century. This type of work, as SirWalter Scott's Waverley (1814) ,JamesFenimore Cooper's The Spy(1821), and Charles Reade's The Autobiography of a Thief (1858)illustrate, "takes as its referent a phase ofthe historical process;its documentary effect derives from the assertion of extratex-tual verification." The third of Foley's phases emerges at thebeginning of the twentieth century and comprises two genericsubcategories. On the one hand, "the fictional autobiographyrepresents an artist-hero who assumes the status of a real personinhabiting an invented situation; its documentary effect derivesfrom the assertion of the artist's claim to privileged cognition"(25). Examples of this generic subdivision are James Joyce's APortrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-15), Gertrude Stein'sThe Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), and Henry Miller'sTropic of Cancer (1934). On the other hand, "the metahistorical


novel takes as its referent a historical process that evades rationalformulation; its documentary effect derives from the assertionof the very indeterminacy of factual verification" (25). Instancesof this generic subdivision are Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928),William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Robert PennWarren's All the King's Men (1946). Significandy, and notwith-standing Lodge's supposition concerning the provenance towhich In Cold Blood belongs, Foley understands Capote's textas neither a fictional autobiography nor a metahistorical novel.Nor does she identify the nonfiction novel with a new phase ofdocumentary fiction. Rather, the third phase, which closed inthe late 1960s, was the final chapter of the documentary novel.

Foley offers three reasons for this stark conclusion. First, thesolipsistic behavior of self-stylized nonfiction authors, which shefinds "generally irritating and barren" (15), undermines theirjournalistic objectivity. Although Foley does not specificallycite Capote, his reputation did suffer on this account, with op-probrium elicited from literary critics, politicians, and moralcrusaders alike. Capote was dedicated to himself, not his art,according to these arbiters; as a result, scoffs Norman Mailer, "Idon't know if there was ever a large idea that bothered him forone minute" (qtd. in Plimpton 38). Capote, supposedly a jour-nalistic novelist, appeared to be out of touch with the majorityof Americans. His Black-and-White Ball, held at the Plaza Hotel,New York City, on November 28, 1966^which was insensitivelyand decadendy at odds with the public mood concerning the warin Vietnamconfirmed thisjudgment. Moreover, this solipsisticand self-destructive streak would continue until his death, as thepublication of scandalous extracts from Answered Prayers-and hisgratuitous behavior at Studio 54, one of his favored New York Cityhaunts, would unhesitatingly attest.^ To this testimony, Eleanor

"^In 1975," chronicles James Campbell, "Esquire began to publish sections fromAnswered Prayers, an 'ambitious novel' which Capote claimed to have started in the1950s, making comparisons to A la Recherche du temps perdu" (40). What there was ofthe novel appeared in book form two years after Capote's death.


Pernyi, former editor o Harper's Bazaar dLud Mademoiselle, addsanother criticism. Capote "was exactly like Warhol," she avers,"in that he knew nothing. Absolutely nothing. He had no formof culture" (qtd. in Plimpton 283, emphasis original). A manso indiscreet, self-absorbed, and uncultured, felt his detractors,could not produce art of moral fiber and philosophical depth.

The second of Foley's reasons for excluding the nonfictionnovel from the genre of documentary fiction is its practitioners'apparent willingness to sanction the secret cancellation of thewriter-reader contract to which they appeal. Phillip K Tompkinsfirst submitted this indictment against Capote in 1968. Tompkinssets his own interview of Mrs. Meier, the jailhouse keeper's wife,against Capote's delineation of murderer Perry Edward Smith'srepentance while in custody to ratify this charge. "During ourtelephone conversation," reports Tompkins,Mrs. Meier repeatedly told me that she never heard Perry cry; that on theday in question she was in her bedroom, not the kitchen; that she did notturn on the radio to drown out the sound of crying; that she did not holdPerry's hand; that she did not hear Perry say, "I'm embraced by shame." Andfinallythat she had never told such things to Capote.

Mrs. Meier, avows Tompkins, "told me repeatedly and firmly, inher gentle way, that these things were not true" (53, emphasisoriginal). In ColdBloodrestores a sense of humanity to Smith thathis behavior never supported. "Art triumphs over reality, fictionover nonfiction," argues Tompkins. "By imparting conscienceand compassion to Perry, Capote was able to convey qualities ofinner sensitivity, poetry, and a final posture of contrition in hishero" (57, emphasis added). Eric Heyne, who draws on Tomp-kins's findings, believes that these particular "inventions" areunforgivably damning because Smith's "precise motivations areat the thematic and aesthetic heart of the book" (486). Ovngto disingenuous design rather than perfunctory journalism,concludes Foley, "many readers of works such as In Gold Blood,The Executioner's Song, and Roots have stated that the credibilityof the narrative collapsed for them when they discovered that


certain details had been invented or significantly changed toenhance the thematic patterning of the text" (15).^ For Foley,readers of documentary fiction expect empiric validity, the textmust be "true," but Capote breaks this contractual obligation.

Foley's third reason for debarring the nonfiction novel fromthe genre of documentary fiction is the advent of posts tructural-ism. This hermeneutical advance, as Foley explains, posits "thenotion that the borderline between nonfictional and fictivediscourse is an arbitrary boundary" (10). "The world in whichwe live," according to E. L. Doctorow, "is still to be formed andthat reality is amenable to any construction that is placed uponit" (26). Indeed, in a concurrence that Foley does not acknowl-edge, Jacques Derrida delivered his poststructuralist evaluationof Western logic in "Structure, Sign, and Play" at Johns HopkinsUniversity in the same year that Random House first publishedIn Cold Blood. Since the advent of poststructuralism, believesFoley, even self-proclaimed nonfiction novelists dispel the auraof factuality that ought to envelop historical events. "Mailer, inThe Armies of the Night," she observes, "writes that history inhabitsa 'crazy-house' and that the 'mystery of the events at the Penta-gon,' even when reconstructed by means of newspaper reportsand eyewitness accounts can be only a 'collective novel'" (11).^Events are not amenable to rational formulation, authors abideby this poststructuralist assumption, and documentary fictionhas passed into the past.

In summary, solipsistic dissipation of journalistic objectivity,secret contractual rescindment, and poststructural acquiescenceexclude the nonfiction novel from the genre of documentaryfiction and place works such as In ColdBloodin the all-embracingand all-submerging realm of ambiguous textual practice.^ Ironi-

'Mailer published The Executioner's Songin 1979; Alex Haley's Roots appeared in 1976.

The New American Library first published Mailer's The Armies of the Night in 1968."Theories about "New Journalism" in the early 1970s certainly helped to maintainresistance against poststructural acquiescence, but to use this neologism to describe


cally, however, widening the debate from Tompkins's researchhelps to deny the second of Foley's charges by positing a subtlerindictment against Capote. "Complex truths," concedes Heyne,"may be well served by inventions, exaggerations, slanting, andother transformations of fact." Critical judgment of nonfictionnovels therefore requires a double perspective. One viewpointconsiders accuracy, which amounts to "a kind of groundwork, adetailed and sufficiently neutral verbal representation of events,for which the goal is universal agreement or correspondence,"while the other viewpoint concerns meaning, which "is muchmore nebulous, covering virtually everything one does with 'thefacts' once they have been given accurate shape" (486). Themeaning derived from a prescient disinterest in detail speaksto factual adequacy rather thdni factual accuracy. Hence, the seri-ous failings of In Cold Blood stem from factual inadequacy, andwith this argument in mind, maintains John Russell, Capote'sduplicitous practice becomes immediately apparent. In the"acknowledgments section in In ColdBlood," asserts Russell, "notonly does the word 'official' occur at the outset, but it is linkedto two other qualifiers that could have been left out: 'All thematerial in this book not derived from my own observations iseither taken from official records or is the result of interviewswith the persons directly concerned'" (14, emphasis original).Interpreting this preface as "tantamount to a definite claim,ruling out any speculation at all" (14), Russell censures Capote'sartful deceit, the author's knowing but secret management ofmeaning, which "is wholly remote from an aesthetic decision to

In Cold Blood, as Lodge and Brian McHale do, is an anachronism that confuses theissue. "Wolfe," notes Lodge,

saw himself as leading a new literary movement which he called "The NewJournalism," the title of an anthology he edited in 1973. In the Introduc-tion to this volume he claimed that the Newjournalism had taken over thenovel's traditional task of describing contemporary social reality, whichhad been neglected by literary novelists too obsessed with myth, fabulationand metafictional tricks to notice what was going on around them. (203)

"Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of In Gold Blood" PLL 31

modify facts, a choice that can lead an artist to the truth of hisown vision" (4, emphasis original).

To rescue In Gold Blood from the accusation of disingenu-ousness is difficult. This task relies on recognizing Capote'srealization of the fundamental framework that has securelygrounded documentary fiction throughout its history; in turn,and rather surprisingly, this critical operation defends Capoteagainst Foley's charges of dissolute self-indulgence and post-structural acquiescence. That Capote finds the nonfiction novela satisfactorily paradoxical genre appeals to Foley's structuralistargument concerning documentary fiction and helps towardrecognition ofthe principal structure in question. Foley arguesthat fictional and nonfictional discourses are distinguishable inkind rather than degree. "That most twentieth-century theoriesof cognitionin fields from psychology to the philosophy of sci-ence to linguisticshave found it necessary to postulate that thehuman mind characteristically uses polarity as an essential devicein gaining understanding" (35) points to a cognitive landscapedominated by binary constructs. "As Roman Jakobson and Mor-ris Halle point out," adds Terence Hawkes, "the discernment ofbinary opposition is a child's 'first logical operation'" (24). Thismental act makes use of that singular "set of schematic logicalstructures" (44) that Robert Hanna calls "protologic" (43). ForJakobson, Halle, and Hawkes, as the latter emphasizes, the firstlogical operation of childhood amounts to "the primary anddistinctive intervention of culture into nature" (24). In contrast,Hanna's conception of protologic as "unrevisable and a priori"(44) suggests the natural rather than cultural aspect of this act.From Hawkes's perspective, opposition creates structure, butfrom Hanna's perspective, structure creates opposition.

Although human cognition matures beyond the discernmentof binary opposition, that recognition provides the grounds forcognitive perception and creation. Capote's nonfiction novel,however, interpreted contemporary American politics as a re-awakening to protological principles, the very standards that


appeal so much to Foley. At the sociopolitical level, this returnpromoted a perverse sort of immaturity, a reversal to whichpostmodernity undoubtedly contributed. Dating the first ap-pearance of the postmodern remains what philosophers call an"empty question," and although the continual contestation ofsuch queries makes them both intriguing and annoying, they areusefully addressable.'' In broad terms, postmodernity emergedas modernity declined, a process that Marianne DeKoven'sUtopia Limited (2004) traces over a twenty-year period startingin the mid-1950s but that Brian McHale dates to "one year inparticular: 1966" (400). McHale also notes, however, CharlesAlexander Jencks's claim "to know exactly when postmodern-ism began. It began, Jencks says, on July 15, 1972, at 3:32 p.m.,when part of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louiswas demolished" (391-92, emphasis original). Built accordingto modernist precepts, but unlivable in practice, Pruitt-Igoe"marked the failure of high modernism in architecture." ForJencks, states McHale, "postmodernism began with a bangZYCT"-a//)) explosively" (392, emphasis original).

Notwithstanding these suggestions, and McHale's unfor-tunate confusion of social phases with artistic movements, anunprecedented technological saltation precipitated the evolu-tion from modernity to postmodernity. This double-facetedleap dates to August 6, 1945, and August 29, 1949. The use ofthe atomic bomb on Hiroshima granted a unique status to theUSA, but the successful test of a similar device by the USSR atSemipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, denied American nuclear preemi-nence. President Harry S. Truman initially refused to believethat Russian technology had advanced so far, but eventually heconceded the point. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, theSemipalatinsk success emboldened Georgy Malenkov, Chief ofthe Soviet Missile Program. "In a speech on 7 November 1949,"

A^n empty question is a query for which any delimited answer remains equivocaldespite a thorough knowledge of the relevant data.

"Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of In Gold Blood " PLL 33

reports Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, Malenkov stated "that if theimperialists decided to unleash a third world war, the war wouldbe the graveyard not only of the imperialists but the whole sys-tem" (190 n.59). The Cold War was firmly set: nuclear equalityposited the binary formulation of West-East relations, with theIron Curtain as a manifestation of the structural and dialecticdivide between the two sides. The overriding concern for eachparticipant in this standoff was not so much domination of theother party as preventing domination by that party.

For a response to this new dynamic, the US Air Force ap-proached the private RAND, or Research and Design, Corpora-tion. Its team of defense analysts included the Hungarian-bornmathematician John von Neumann (1903-57) .^ "During the firstthree postwar years," as Norman MacRae relates, "Johnny hadno real influence in Washington" (333). His contributions to theManhattan Project and his role in proposing specific targets forthe atomic bomb had been considerable, but when the secondfront opened in Europe, the allied leaders began to considerthe aftermath of the war and how to predict the dynamics ofthe resultant economic climate. Although von Neumann hadrecently applied game theory, a mathematical subdiscipline thathe had inaugurated in "Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele"(1928), to strategic economics, with the help of his colleague,the German-born Austrian economist Oskar Morgenstern (1902-77), their Theory of Games and Economic Behavior {1944) provokedlittle governmental interest.

The RAND Corporation, however, reestablished von Neu-mann's influence, because the two participants in the Cold Worldwere, in effect, game-theoretic p/a);^5. "The guiding philosophy"for "the analysis of systems for strategic bombardment, air de-fense, air supply, or psychological warfare," reads the "Fourth

'"Von Neumann," relate Giorgio Israel and Ana Millan Gasea, "was contacted bythe director of mathematical research at RAND, John Williams, in late 1947 and,from 1948 until 1955, he enjoyed a consultancy contract with this institution" (107).


Annual Report" (1950) from the corporation, "is supplied by thevon Neumann-Morgenstern theory of games," and "pertinentinformation developed or adapted through survey, study, orresearch by RAND is integrated into models, largely by meansof mathematical methods" (27).

Game-theoretic simulations meant that coordination problems,situations in which an individual must choose between behavioraloptions knowing that other individuals are faced with the samechoices and that the outcome will be determined by everyone'sactions, could now be studied mathematically. Until this time,the academic interrogation of coordination problems had ap-pealed to a combination of philosophy, psychoanalysis, andliterary insight, but the theory of games complemented theseinterpretative strategies toward human behavior with a denota-tive supplement. Initially, von Neumann advocated a first-strikepolicy. If America attacked first, explains AlexanderJ. Eield, thenthe Russians would be "either too devastated, too demoralized,or too rational to strike back." If attack did provoke retaliation,then a nuclear exchange would still be "preferable to the prospectof being on the receiving end of an unprovoked attack" (170).In the absence of the will to strike first, however, the West andthe East could maintain the political equilibrium by the logicof mutually assured destruction: nuclear parity, which threatenedeach side with annihilation should one party attack the otherwith atomic weapons, was the rational policy of defense.

Skeptics took the acronym for mutually assured destructionto imply a form of MADness and questioned whether the Polit-buro shared this logic. Nathan Leites of the RAND Corporationaddressed this issue in The Operational Code of the Politburo (1951),and the tide of chapter 1, "Predictability and Unpredictability,"neatly sums up his remit. "One point of Bolshevik doctrine affirmsthat future developments are either inevitable or impossible.Intermediate probabilities are excluded. This," states Leites, "isa characteristic 'all-or-none' pattern of Bolshevik thought" (1).Joseph Stalin, whatever his aberrations, and the Russian Polit-

"Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of In Cold Blood" PLL 35

buro, however submissive to their premier, share the Americanadministration's acceptance of the antagonistic but peacefulequilibrium that mutually assured destruction elicits.

Did the "uncultured" Capote's "self-regard" blind him tothe psychological straits imposed on ordinary citizens by theinternational politics of fear? Capote's screenplay adaptationwith John Huston of James Helvick's Beat the Devil (1953), a taleof international crooks attempting to buy Kenyan land rich inuranium, which engages with the nuclear issue tangentially andcomically, supplies an affirmative answer to this question. Sub-sequent evidence, however, suggests otherwise. "In December1955," records John Fass Morton, "Robert Breen's EverymanOpera began its historic tour of George Gershwin's Porgy andBess" (249), and Capote, as a member of the first American operacompany in Russia since the October Revolution, chronicled itsLeningrad premiere in The Muses Are Heard (1956).

After his return to America, Capote was among the authorsapproached by William Faulkner's committee for PresidentDwightD. Eisenhower's People-to-People Partnership. Althoughthe State Department had refused to fund the Everyman Operatour of Russia, Eisenhower's ideological war against the Sovietssoon changed tack. This reorientation culminated in the Partner-ship program, which Eisenhower inaugurated on September 11,1956, to spread the concept of liberal democracy to the peoples ofthe USSR. Authors who supported the scheme included Capote,Paul Green, Louis Kronenberger, Mark Schorer, and Gore Vi-dal.^ Capote, as his knowledge of John Hersey's work in postwarJapan attests, was also aware of at least one journalistic responseto the nuclear dilemma. "Hiroshima [1946] is creativein thesense that Hersey isn't taking something off a tape-recorder andediting itbut it still hasn't got anything to do with what I'm

''The literary side to the People-to-People Partnership eventually petered out underFaulkner's unsteady leadership; see Joseph Blotner's "William Faulkner: CommitteeChairman" {Themes andDirections in American Literature. Essays in Honor of Leon Howard.Ed. Ray B. Browne and Donald Pizer. Lafayette, IN: Purdue U Studies, 1969. 200-19).


talking about," expiates Capote. ''Hiroshima is a strict classicaljournalistic piece" {Gonversations49).

These biographical details, a concomitant relegation of Foley,Mailer, and Pernyi 's assertions about Capote, and a hermeneuticattuned to game theory help to focus criticaljudgment onto thecoordination problems o In Gold Blood; as a result, the paradoxi-cally febrile Cold War atmosphere of coldblooded rationality ingovernmental circles emerges from Capote's nonfiction novelas a conditioning effect on the behavior of American citizensin general.

The journalistic reaction to the murder of Herbert (father),Bonnie (mother),Nancy (daughter),andKenyon (son) Clutter,a long-established, self-contained, and well-liked farming fam-ily, signaled the empirical worth that Capote desired from hischosen subject: "the case, then commanding headlines as fareast as Chicago, as far west as Denver," he reports, "had indeedlured to Garden City a considerable press corps" {IGB95). Whatseparates In Gold Blood from newspaper investigations of thecase, what emerges from In Gold Blood in defiance of Capote'sfactual inadequacy, and what makes In Gold Blood so prescientboth in the specific terms of the Clutters' murderers in late-1950s America and in the transhistorical and asocial terms ofthe documentary novel, therefore, is Capote's implicit realiza-tion of the fundamental framework that places two rationaldilemmas at the thematic and aesthetic heart of his work. Theseconundrums, the Prisoner's Dilemma and Chicken, are thoseposited by game theorists as characteristic of the Cold War. Ingeneral terms, then, the archetypal nonfiction novelist underpinsthe indeterminacy of social practice with the sociobiologicallyfostered conventions of rationality, with the resulting class offiction being a third branch to the third phase of Foley's tax-onomy. Definition by period, which usually treats specific years,decades, or centuries as thresholds, switch points, or transitions,still acknowledges its cultural construction in this instance byrecognizing the transhistorical aspect of rationality.


One can adduce that certain coordination problems impingedon postwar American society to an unprecedented extent fromthe words, metaphors, and analogies with which mathematiciansstarted to describe game-theoretic situations. These narrativevisualizations translated numerical models into everyday par-lance. Canadian-born mathematician Albert W. Tucker (1905-95) named the Prisoner's Dilemma in 1950 while working atthe RAND Corporation. Paul Watzlawick's recent rendition ofTucker's analogy is reputedly true to the original. "A districtattorney," writes Watzlawick, "is holding two men suspected ofarmed robbery. There is not enough evidence to take the caseto court, so he has the two men brought to his office." The at-torney, continues Watzlawick,tells them that in order to have them convicted he needs a confession: with-out one he can charge them only with illegal possession of firearms, whichcarries a penalty of six months injail. If they both confess, he promises themthe minimum sentence for armed robbery, which is two years. If, however,only one confesses, he will be considered a state witness and go free, whilethe other will get twenty years, the maximum sentence. Then, without giv-ing them a chance to arrive at a joint decision, he has them locked up inseparate cells from which they cannot communicate \\h each other. (98)

The letters X and Y designate the players (or suspects);confession equates to defection and silence equates to coop-eration; the silence that pertains between the suspects is thecoordination condition that forces each man to enter a guilty orinnocent plea before learning of his counterpart's response;and the state penal system that sets the tariffs for each of thefour possible outcomes is the game-theoretic banker. Thesepossible results are set out in matrix 1 :

S8PLL Michael Wainwright

X Confesses(Defects)

X Keeps Silent(Cooperates)

Y Confesses(Defects)

Outcome 1:Both get 2 years.

Outcome 3:X gets 20 years.

Y goes free.

Y Keeps Silent(Cooperates)Outcome 2:X goes free.

Y gets 20 years.Outcome 4:

Both get 6 months.

MATRIX 1 : POSSIBLE OUTCOMES FROM A STANDARD PRISONER'S DILEMMA

Whatever the other suspect does, each individual achieves a bet-ter outcome by confessing. In this way, each suspect is certain tosave himself eighteen years' imprisonment. The best and worstindividual payoffs occur when one participant confesses buthis counterpart keeps silent; the talkative suspect goes free, buthis taciturn coeval receives the longest possible sentence; "SoLong, Sucker," in the words of RAND Corporation employeesJohn Nash and Lloyd Shapley, expresses the defector's cynicalrelief in this instance. If both suspects confess, however, thatwillbe worse for each suspect than if both keep silent. Simply put,the outcome will be worse for both suspects if each man, ratherthan neither, does what will be better in his individual estima-tion. The three essential inequalities for a Prisoner's Dilemmamean that the payoff for unilateral defection (Outcome 2/3)betters the result for mutual restraint (Outcome 4), the resultfor mutual restraint overrides the payoff for mutual defection(Outcome 1), and the payoff for mutual defection betters theresult for unilateral restraint (Outcome 3/2).

There are three reasons to defect in a Prisoner's Dilemma:first, the hope of getting the temptation score, which is the beston offer; second, the fear of getting Nash and Shapley's suckerpayoff, which is the worst available; third, the desire for differ-ential advantage. Although confession as a dominant strategyensures that neither player is at a disadvantage with respect tohis counterpart, mutual cooperation provides the optimum out-come for the players as a pair (neither player can improve his


result without reducing the other player's payoff). Hence, eachparticipant in a Prisoner's Dilemma is tempted by the maximumscore but simultaneously worried about the penultimate payoffguaranteed by mutual defection. For many game theorists, thePrisoner's Dilemma simulates the international politics of theCold War, with each side critically aware that mutual restraint isthe wisest course of action. The circular logic that drives playerchoice around this conundrum, however, guarantees neither par-ticipant the maximum outcome. What is worse, and in additionto the authoritarian associations that stem from Tucker's choiceof visualization, "situations of the Prisoner's Dilemma type," asWatzlawick asserts, "are more frequent than one might expect"(100). "The main ingredient," agrees William Poundstone, "isa temptation to better one's own interests in a way that wouldbe ruinous if everyone did it" (125-26). If two individuals mustreach a joint decision about which they cannot communicate,then a Prisoner's Dilemma is likely to arise. This preponderancemakes the Prisoner's Dilemma the most studied of two-persontwo-choice scenarios, with its occurrence in nonfictional fictionappreciable to an informative degree, as the interrogation ofthe two suspects in In Cold Blood, Richard Eugene Hickock andPerry Edward Smith, affirms.

The suspects are initially questioned in "the Detective Divi-sion of the Las Vegas City Jail," which "contains two interroga-tion rooms," both of which had been "booked for 2:00 P.M." onJanuary 2, 1960 (Capote, ICB 256). The authorities split theirfour-man team evenly and the interviews begin simultaneously.Roy Church and Harold Nye talk to Hickock about minor of-fenseshis parole violation and "passing bad checks" ( 253 ) tolull him into a sense of false security. Only after considerablequestioning about these matters do they challenge him about

A^ police patrol had arrested Hickock and Smith in Las Vegas for possession of astolen car. The investigators interviewed the two men there before returning withthem to Kansas.


the Clutter murders. Hickock denies involvement. "Think itover," they tell him. "That's all for now" (265). Alvin Deweyand Clarence Duntz follow the same procedure with Smith; healso denies involvement. The detectives now leave the two mento contemplate their predicament overnight. "He and Dick,"notes Smith, "were being kept apart; Dick was locked in a cellon another floor" (269).

Capote delineates this coordination problem as a quantifiablereal-life situation in which separation over an extended periodensures that the suspects' conundrum becomes a matter ofreflective and reflexive rationality'. If both men defect by con-fessing to the Kansas authorities, then their assistance might beenough, along with other mitigating factors such as childhoodtrauma, to commute death penalties to life imprisonment. If thetwo suspects cooperate and deny responsibility, then they willreceive moderately long prison sentences for their misdemean-ors but are not likely to be convicted of the killings. If one mandefects (confesses to the authorities) and successfully accuseshis coeval of all four murders, then his counterpart receives thedeath penalty while he benefits from a reduction of his prisonsentence from a moderate to a light tariff. Matrix 2 tabulatesthe outcomes for this Prisoner's Dilemma:

Hickock Confesses(Defects)

Hickock Keeps Silent(Cooperates)

Smith Confesses(Defects)

Outcome 1:Both men get life.

Outcome 3:Hickock gets capital

punishment.Smith gets lenient

sentence.

Smith Keeps Silent(Cooperates)Outcome 2:

Hickock gets lenientsentence.

Smith gets capitalpunishment.Outcome 4:

Both men get mod-erately long prison

sentences.

MATRIX 2 : POSSIBLE OLTTCOMES FROM THE INTCRROGATORY PRISONER'S DILEMMA IN IN COLD BLOOD


Despite their confidence in a lack of evidence linking them to themurders, Hickock and Smith feel the pressure of this dilemma asa coordination problem that reasoning cannot solve. That theyhad anticipated this police tactic long before the crime"Dickhad said, 'If we get caught, let's get caught together. Then wecan back each other up. When they start pulling the confessioncrap, saying you said and I said'" (108)and had concoctedan alibi in case they were arrested, offers neither man muchsolace. Their desperation mounts during their night apart. "Ifonly he could talk to Dick!" thinks Smith; Hickock, also unableto sleep, "was equally eager to converse with Perry" (268-69).Denied this mutual desire, the two suspects have time to reflect,and these deliberations, in large measure, concern the otherman's thoughts.

Church and Nye maintain the pressure of this Prisoner'sDilemma during their questioning of Hickock the next day."Methodically applying" their "roundabout strategy""not onceduring this interview, now almost three hours old, had either ofthem mentioned murder" (271)they frustrate Hickock's ex-pectations, and this frustration finally pays the desired dividend:Hickock cracks. "Perry Smith killed the Clutters," he pleads."It was Perry. I couldn't stop him. He killed them all" (272).Dewey and Duntz tell Smith of his partner's confession, but heremains true to their bond of murderous brotherhood. Smith'scontinued loyalty plays strongly in Hickock's favor, but Smithdoes have a failsafe mechanism. A lie he told Hickock aboutmurdering an African-American beggar, a falsehood to boosthis self-image in front of his counterpart, is Smith's indicator ofHickock's reliability. In attempting to absolve himself of blame,and unaware of Smith's trap, Hickock tells the detectives thatSmith has murdered before. "Hickock tells us you're a natural-born killer," Dewey informs Smith. "Says it doesn't bother youa bit. Says one time out there in Las Vegas you went after a col-ored man with a bicycle chain. Whipped him to death" (275).Smith, whose countercheck is in keeping with the theme of


non-communication as a coordination condition, is now certainof Hickock's defection. "I always knew if we ever got caught, ifDick ever really let fly, dropped his guts all over the goddamfloor," rages Smith, "I knew he'd tell about the nigger" (276). Inreturn. Smith implicates his partner in the Clutter homicides,admitting to the murders of Herbert and Kenyon but assertingthat Hickock killed Bonnie and Nancy. The echo between themirror symmetry provided by this confession and the police'ssuccessful Prisoner's Dilemma persuades the authorities to chargeboth men with the murders. Smith "wanted to fix Dick for beingsuch a coward" (304), and his statement succeeds in this intent.

Whether the eventual outcome for mutual defection byHickock and Smith transpires in accordance with a standardPrisoner's Dilemma is debatable, because the death penaltyrather than life imprisonment is handed down to each man, buteach convict does earn the perrerse satisfaction of contemplat-ing his counterpart's execution. In fact. Smith's disloyalty inthe Prisoner's Dilemma comes after the revelation of Hickock'sdefection rather than simultaneously with that confession, whichmeans Smith can break the conundrum that faces him. A worseoutcome than that available from a classic Prisoner's Dilemmanow awaits Hickock and Smith. Their diachronic disloyalty re-sults in a combination of payoffs: defection-cooperation meetscooperation-defection to eschew any form of leniency, ensuringthat each man's sentence is capital punishment.

The Prisoner's Dilemma related by In Cold Blood illustrateshow the hermeneutic provided by the interaction betweendocumentary fiction and game theory reveals one of the envi-roning codes that inflect individual behavior. Moreover, just astheir well-practiced alibi and prison-cell thoughts testify to thelogic with which they meet coordination problems, so Hickock'scapitulation in the Prisoner's Dilemma and Smith's subsequentdesire to frame his erstwhile partner express their predilectionfor courting logical dilemmas. That a similar scenario, a disturb-ing problem of preemption in which neither participant had a


dominant strategic option, underpinned Hickock and Smith'smurderous deeds in Holcomb therefore seems a reasonablesupposition. Game theorists commonly assign the coordinationproblem known as Chicken, first named by British mathemati-cian and philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) during hismeditation on Gommon Sense and Nuclear Warfare (1959), to suchsituations.

Although not a game theorist, Russell associates the ColdWar with logical paradigms, as his contemplation of superpowerpresidents calling each other's bluff testifies. "Since the nuclearstalemate became apparent," states Russell, "the Governmentsof East and West have adopted the policy which Mr. Dullescalls 'brinkmanship'" (18-19). This attitude, relates Russell, is"adapted from a sport which, I am told, is . . . called 'Chicken!'"This scenario "is played by choosing a long straight road with awhite line down the middle and starting two very fast cars towardseach other from opposite ends. Each car is expected to keepthe wheels of one side on the white line. As they approach eachother," observes Russell, "mutual destruction becomes moreand more imminent. If one of them swerves from the white linebefore the other, the other, as he passes, shouts 'Chicken!,' andthe one who has swerved becomes an objectof contempt." Whenplayed by discontented youths, continues Russell, "this game isconsidered decadent and immoral, though only the lives of theplayers are risked" ( 19). These youths use the middle of the roadto rebel against orthodoxythey are simply not prepared to stayon the proper side of delimiting lines, rules, or demarcations."But when the game is played by eminent statesmen, who risknot only their own lives but those of many hundreds of millionsof human beings," continues Russell, "it is thought on both sidesthat the statesmen on one side are displaying a high degreeof wisdom and courage, and only the statesmen on the otherside are reprehensible. Both are to blame for playing such anincredibly dangerous game." In this instance, believes Russell,


the game may be played without misfortune a few times, but sooner or laterit will come to be felt that loss of face is more dreadful than nuclear annihila-tion. The moment will come when neither side can face the derisive cry of"Chicken!" from the other side. When that moment is come, the statesmenof both sides will plunge the world into destruction. (19)

Although "Russell's highway metaphor," as Barry O'Neillchronicles in "Game Theory Models of Peace and War" (1994),"was prominent in the early discussion of strategists" (1011),Russell somewhat lagged behind the cultural game. Philosophyand mathematics were playing catch up. In effect, Russell wasformally designating the importance of Chicken as a culturalphenomenon, a phenomenon that film director Nicholas Rayhad already portrayed in Rebel without a Cause {\9bb). The script,which Irving Shulman and Stewart Stern adapted for the screenfrom Ray's original story, portrays the stark reality of Chicken.James Dean plays Jim Stark, a teenager from a respectable butcomplacently bourgeois family who is rapidly descending intodelinquency. Having moved to the suburbs of Los Angeleshisparents' response to Jim's assault on another youth in theirhometownJim finds himself at loggerheads with local gangleader Buzz Gunderson (played by Corey Allen). Jim is chal-lenged to the "Chickie Run": he and Buzz must drive (stolen)trucks alongside one another toward a precipitous bluff; thefirst driver to bail out of his cab is the chicken. In terms of pos-sible outcomes: jumping last is best, jumping simultaneouslyis second best, jumping first is second worst, and not jumping,which leads to two deaths, is worst.

Jim jumps after Buzz's attempt to bail out, but Buzz goesover the precipice. The gang deems Jim a chicken. That Buzz'ssnagged coat sleeve traps him inside the cab goes unnoticed bythe spectators, and his death makes him a countercultural hero.The film implies that Jim and Buzz's type of brinkmanship, thesort that in extremis leads to death, was symptomatic of postwarAmerican life, and that adolescents were especially susceptiblein this regard: they had to endure the shadow of the atomic and


hydrogen bombs for the whole of their adult lives. Nor was thisyouthful susceptibility confined to men, suggests Ray's film, withthe active, game-playing members of Gunderson's gang beingfemale as well as maleindeed, Natalie Wood earned an Oscarnomination for Best Supporting Actress for the role of Judy, theteenager who initially dotes on Gunderson but who ends up asJim's new friend. "The number of subsequent films featuringvariations on Chicken is staggering," reports Jim Morton.Usually it was used as a device to get rid of the 'bad' kidteens lost theirlives driving over cliffs, running into trains, smacking into walls and collid-ing with each other. The creative abilities of Hollywood scriptwriters weresorely taxed as they struggled to think of new ways to destroy the youth ofthe nation. (144)

Bertrand Russell's terminology might imply something child-ish, but this is a deceptive assumption, as a number of gametheorists and historians of science are keen to emphasize.^""Chicken games," believes Richard Jankowski, "are more per-vasive than the scant attention paid them in the literature" ofgame theory suggests (450). "This game," concurs Saul Stahl,"describes a very common situation" (125). The most obvious"instance of a political Chicken Dilemma," adds Poundstone,is "the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962" (205). Chickenshares with the Prisoner's Dilemma both the hope of gettingthe temptation payoff and the desire for differential advan-tage, but it does not promise the sucker score for cooperationif one's counterpart defects. Hence, the possible outcomes inthis coordination problem swap the penultimate and lowestoutcomes from a Prisoner's Dilemma so that the outcome forunilateral defection betters the result for mutual restraint, theresult for mutual restraint overrides the score for unilateral re-straint, and the payoff for unilateral restraint betters the resultfor mutual defection.

'"This supposed childishness mightaccountfor the lackof scholarly papers on Chicken.


If the death of Stalin (March 5,1953) had implied the begin-ning of a new era in international relations, then this hope waseffectively dashed when Niki ta Khrushchev took over the reins ofSoviet power, with the Prisoner's Dilemma of international MAD-ness mutating into Chicken as each administration identifiedsymptoms of irrationality in the political leader opposing them.Khrushchev's behavior at the United Nations General Assemblyin 1960^where he brandished his shoe at a Filipino delegate whoaccused the Soviet Union of imperialism in Eastern Europedidnothing to reassure Eisenhower's administration that the Sovietpremier would abide by the implicit sense of MADness. Thisfear had not diminished by the time John F. Kennedy claimedthe American presidency. Conversely, the Soviets worried overintelligence reports that enumerated Kennedy's physiologicalproblems and the pharmaceutical cocktailincluding cortisone,Lomotil, paregoric, and testosteronethat maintained hishealth." In the light of these complementary but disparagingappraisals, that the MAD tension between Khrushchev and Ken-nedy should spawn the Cuban missile crisis, a mooted solutionof their Cold War dilemma that involved risking extensive lossesin the hope of inflecting dedsivelosses, becomes somewhat moreexplicable. Fortunately, the advisers to both leaders did adhereto game-theoretic logic, and the Chicken of the missile crisisended without recourse to thermonuclear war.

Hickock and Smith's interpersonal game, however, endsin six deaths, and Capote puts Chicken in the frame for thisoutcome.^^ In Gold Blood repeatedly shows the two men's predi-

"For more information on Kennedy's use of medication see Christopher Andersen'sThese Few Precious Days: TheFinal Year of Jack withjackie (New York: Simon and Schuster,2013) 141 andjeff Smith's The Presidents We Imagine: Two Centuries of White House Fictionson the Page, on the Stage, Onscreen, and Online (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2009) 162.'^ In an indiscriminate yet enticing manner, Capote's body count"four shotgunblasts that, all told, ended six human lives" (5)includes Hickock and Smith along-side the Clutters.


lection for Chicken. As with Jim Stark and Buzz Gunderson inRebel without a Cause, automotive transport provides each manwith a means of satisfying this behavioral trait. Hickock's cardriving, which has left him with permanent injuries from a trafficaccident, expresses his desire to take risks. "It was as though hishead had been halved like an apple, then put together a frac-tion off center," reports Capote. "Something of the kind hadhappened; the imperfectly aligned features were the outcomeof a car collision in 1950" (36). Memories of this trauma keepcoming to the surface"Not long ago," writes Hickock whileon Death Row, "I had a piece of glass work out of my head. Itcame out the corner of my eye. My dad helped me to get it out"(333). Similarly, "a motorcycle wreck" cost Smith "half a yearin a State of Washington hospital and another six months oncrutches." Although "the accident had occurred in 1952, hischunky, dwarfish legs, broken in five places and pitifully scarred,still pained him so severely that he had become an aspirin addict"(37). The constant reminder of this game-theoretic payoffthefeeling that he had not won the automotive version of Chickenoutrightrepeatedly propels Smith into games of Chicken. Un-surprisingly, then, one of his daring schemes for "quick money"after murdering the Clutters involves "chauffeuring stolen carsacross South American borders" (118).

Like the radioactive fallout in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, andlike the background rationale of mutually assured destruction inAmerica, the effects of Hickock and Smith's dangerous gamesdrag on. Both men continue to drive recklessly, as their sharedpredilection for Chicken might suggest, but the truly intriguingaspect of this shared expression is its asymmetric tendency. WhenHickock drives, he redirects (or displaces) his interpersonal ten-sion with Smith into simulating Chicken, a behavior that Smithdoes not reciprocate. Hickock's simulations involve non-rationalplayers whose defection cannot harm him. Capote recounts onesuch incident in detail. "The car was moving," with Hickock atthe wheel. "A hundred feet ahead, a dog trotted along the side


of the road. Dick swerved toward it." This change of course isthe manifest expression of Hickock's redirected play. Uncon-sciously, Hickock wants to play Chicken with Smith, but his fearof Smith's resolve in such situations causes this swerve toward"an old half-dead mongrel, brittle-boned and mangy." Littledanger attends this game because "the impact," as the dog "metthe car, was a little more than a bird might make." Nonetheless,this displaced activity against a helpless opponent temporarilysatisfies Hickock's predilection. "'Boy!' he saidand it was whathe always said after running down a dog, which was somethinghe did whenever the opportunity arose. 'Boy! We sure splatteredhim!'" (133). Although Hickock seemingly resolves his tensionwith Smith by co-opting his passenger to the winning side in thisgame, as his use of the first-person plural pronoun announces,Hickock's constant repetition of this game indicates the short-term nature of his satisfaction.

Chicken, as a scenario of circular logic in which disloyalty toone's counterpart offers both the best and worst outcomes foran individual, generates a greater incentive toward cooperationthan does the Prisoner's Dilemma; as a corollary, if a personcooperates (or chickens out) during Chicken, then he is likelyto defect in a Prisoner's Dilemma. Accusations of cowardice be-tween Hickock and Smith, as a manifestation of each man's fearof the other man's trustworthiness, are particularly telling in thisregard, with Capote's factual adequacy as a documentary novel-ist indicating that Chicken impelled the first Holcomb murder.

This game-theoretic contention does not doubt the psycho-logical reports about Hickock and Smith submitted at their trial,some of which Capote reports verbatim, but traces the logicalframework that dangerously underpinned the young men's re-lationship. Having walked into the Clutters' farmhouse, whichaccording to Hickock's (erroneous) information contained asafe, the two intruders discover there is hardly any ready cashor jewelry on the premises. A dilemma ostensibly concerningwitnesses, but actually about their interrelationship, now con-


fronts the intruders. "After we'd taped them," recalls Smith,"Dick and I went off in a corner. To talk it over I said, 'Well,Dick. Any qualms? He didn't answer me." Hickock's reticenceduring this exchange enforces the condition of silence thatmaintains the situation as a coordination problem. "Leave themalive, and this won't be any small rap," continues Smith. "Tenyears the very least." With this statement. Smith expresses thepayoff for mutual cooperation, but Hickock still "didn't sayanything. He was holding the knife. I asked him for it, and hegave it to me" (290). The transfer of the weapon from Hickockto Smith is the former's tacit acceptance of the latter's assump-tion of command. With this act of displacement, Hickock notonly anticipates the proof that "Perry was that rarity, 'a naturalkiller'absolutely sane, but conscienceless, and capable of deal-ing, with or without motive, the coldest-blooded deathblows"(64-65, emphasis added), but also expresses his own inability^ toact in Herbert Clutter's defense. "All right, Dick," says Smith."Here goes.' But I didn't mean it," maintains Smith. "I meantto call his bluff, make him argue me out of it, make him admithe was a phony and a coward. See, it was something between meand Dick" (290, emphasis added).

Smith had called Hickock's bluff, but Hickock remained silent;Smith defected actively while Hickock cooperated passively; as aresult, Herbert Clutter suffered a gruesome death. "I didn't real-ize what I'd done till I heard the sound," states Smith of cuttingHerbert's throat. "Like somebody drowning. Screaming underwater. I handed the knife to Dick. I said, 'Finish him. You'll feelbetter.' Dick triedor pretended to" (290). That neither manhas more than a few seconds to weigh the possible outcomesof their behaviorpayoffs in terms of interpersonal status thatmatrix 3 enumeratesand that Smith was (reportedly) unawareof his homicidal act indicate that Herbert's murder was theintruders' way out of their reflexive dilemma:


Hickock Active(Defects)

Hickock Passive(Cooperates)

Smith Active(Defects)

Outcome 1:Neither man chickens

out.Herbert Clutter dies.

Outcome 3:Smith gloats as

Hickock chickens out.Herbert Clutter dies.

Smith Passive(Cooperates)Outcome 2:

Hickock gloats asSmith chickens out.Herbert Clutter dies.

Outcome 4:Both men chicken

out.Herbert Clutter

survives.

MATRIX 3: POSSIBLE OUTCOMES FROM CHICKEN IN IN COLD BLOOD

Although the killing of the other three witnesses was a logicalstep after the first murder, each death resulted from the coordi-nation problem over personal status that had become the stateof Hickock and Smith's relationship. "Be funny," Hickock laterremarks while driving, "if we had a smash-up" (250), but nothinghumorous accompanies the unresolved tension that attends theirpartnership, and other innocent parties soon unknowingly audi-tion for Herbert Clutter's former role of interrelational catalyst.

Soon after the murders, Hickock and Smith are "sharing abooth in the Eagle Buffet, a Kansas City Diner" (105), when theystart arguing. "Well, if it came to a fight," remarks Capote, "Perrycould defend himself' ( 108). He was shorter than Hickock, but "heoutweighed his friend, was thicker, had arms that could squeezethe breath out of a bear. To prove it, however," meant a fight, aphysical game of Chicken, and that "was far from desirable" (108),even for Smith. Fortunately, there is no catalyst, no third party tosuffer the consequences of this incident. "A middle-aged travelingsalesman who shall here be known as Mr. Bell," however, soon fillsthis absence. Unlike Hickock, who is a car-driving killer of straydogs. Bell is a car-driving Samaritan who picks up "hitchhikers"(204). In this respect. Bell and Smith are alike, with "Perry . . .always pestering Dick to pick up the damnedest, sorriest-lookingpeople" (246). Capote's sobriquet for the traveling salesman sug-gests that the situation he catalyzes rings (or tolls) a bell: Hickock


and Smith repeatedly engineer such situations. Indeed, they hadbeen waiting for a "prosperous-seeming solitary traveler to offerthem a lift," but "until now... a suitable victim had eluded them"(205). Once on the road, Hickock will "pronounce the agreed-upon signal" and Smith will wield "his handkerchief-wrappedrock" onto Bell's head. Hickock's signal to Smith for the attackis "Hey, Perry, pass me a match" (206, 207). As in the basementwith Herbert Clutter, however, the actual communication act ismore expressive than initially supposed. Smith knows "now wasthe time, now" (206, emphasis original), but Hickock hesitates. Afew seconds later, Hickock does issue the signal, but "what Perrylater called 'a goddam miracle,'" the "appearance of a thirdhitchhiker" for whom Bell stops, was probably Hickock's get-outclause. Hickock saw this miraculous fourth man and issued theattack phrase knowing that Smith had no time to bludgeon Bell.'^

Hickock and Smith's relationship was a self-perpetuatingenvironment for the game of Chicken. This coordination prob-lem is the "meaningful design" (292) behind the young men'smurderous actions that forever eludes Alvin Dewey. As theirrespective roles at the Clutters and with Bell suggest, however.Smith almost took that game further: in game-theoretic terms,he nearly became a bully. Glenn H. Snyder and Paul Diesing ex-plain that Bully "represents Chicken dynamics in their extremeform" (123). Such games "are characterized by very unequalpower between the two players, so unequal that the strongerplayer could easily win a... confrontation" (122). A bully prefersto avoid an altercation, uses the threat of bullying to gain hisobjective, but achieves his aim by force if necessary. In In GoldBlood, Smith becomes annoyed with Hickock over the issue of

"Smith's eventual attempt to retract the parts of his statement thatincriminate Hickockfor the Clutter murders also reveals Hickock's penchant for playing Chicken againstan obviously weaker opponent. Hickock "helped me," states Smith, "he held theflashlight and picked up the shells. And it was his idea, too. But Dick," admits Smith,"didn't shoot them, he never could'vethough he's damn quick when it comes torunning down an old dog" (346-47).


witnesses, and his annoyance builds to the point of exaspera-tion. Hickock had "reminded Perry, for what seemed to Perrythe millionth time," that his scheme was a cinch because theywould leave "nowitnesses" (43, emphasis original). Immediatelyafter leaving the Clutters' farmhouse. Perry toys with idea ofmurdering Hickock. "I'd better shoot Dick," he reasons. ''He'sa witness" (291, emphasis original). Smith did not kill Hickock,but "I don't know what stopped me. God knows I should've doneit" (291 ). Conscienceless logic demanded Hickock's immediatedeath, but that act would have made Smith a bully, and "littleold big-hearted Perry" (246), as Smith describes him, couldnot assume that role. In short, Hickock simulates Chicken andSmith cannot play Bullyand these complementary inabilitieslock them into a relationship dominated by Chicken.

That Hickock and Smith have been connected with an un-solved casetheir remains have recently been genetically exam-ined in connection with the Walker family murders (December19, 1959)therefore comes as little surprise. "The bodies ofthe two men executed for the 1959 murders of a Kansas familythat became infamous in Truman Capote's true-crime book InCold Blood," reports John Hanna, "were exhumed Tuesday inan effort to solve [the] slayings of a Florida family killed weekslater" (1). Capote references these murders in his nonfictionnovel, with Hickock and Smith's discussion of the case whilethey are staying at the beachfront Somerset Hotel in Florida.Reading the Miami Herald, Smith comes across "an inner-pagestory" that wins "his entire attention," which concerns "theslaying of a Florida family, a Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Walker, theirfour-year-old son, and their two-year-old daughter." The reportof this "clueless and apparently motiveless" crime prompts Smithto ask Hickock, "Where were we last Saturday night?" Hickockreplies with a question of his own: "Tallahassee?" (237). Theyeventually agree on "Tallahassee," and Smith conjectures thata copycat "lunatic" (238) murdered the Walkersbut Smith'sinitial question and the ruminations that follow also carry the


ominous ring of a concocted alibi. That Capote, whose prescienceresponded to the strategic tensions between Hickock and Smith,intended this reverberation is more than likely.

Under Capote's handling, the specific case of Hickock andSmith reveals two of the limited number of structuring principles,rules of transformation, and unif)dng codesthe Prisoner'sDilemma and Chickenthat sociobiological structuralists in-cluding Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, andjohn MaynardSmith believe to underlie interpersonal relations in general.Rather than grafting "some kind of additional claim to empiri-cal validation" (25) onto fiction, as Foley believes, game theoryreveals the infrastructure of the documentary novel, therebyconforming to Joseph Carroll's exhortation that sociobiologybecome consilient with "the interaction of instinctive biases andgeneral intelligence" (84).

Capote's prescience, or "privileged cognition" (25) to useFoley's phrase, allows him to unearth certain aspects of behaviorthat rest on this fundamental framework, but within a literaryrather than a mathematical discourse. Poststructuralists mightobject that game-theoretic visualizations offer just anotherset of texts construed in relation to historical contingencies,but structuralists can turn to Foley to address this contention."While I would grant Derrida's point that Western philosophyis pervaded by abstract and ahistorical oppositions that, in theguise of reflecting transcendent essences, naturalize dominantideology," she states, "I would not therefore conclude that allinherited cognitive oppositions are equally ideological andequally fallacious" (35). In line with this perspective, Peter Swir-ski posits "two visions of the world and inquiry": the first "is amoderately realistic belief in understanding mind-independentreality, one empirical step at a time," while "the other is a form ofconstructivism that argues for a plurality of community-relativeinterpretative programs" (151). Swirski encourages the formerview, which confirms the importance of game theory as a literaryhermeneutic, and discourages the latter perspective.


Although not an example of documentary fiction accord-ing to Foley, In Cold Blood upholds her denial of poststruc-tural preeminence, with the gravitation of game theory as ahermeneutic toward this nonfiction novel being a measure ofCapote's discursive maturity. At one level. In Cold Blood reflectsthe contingencies of its historical situation. At another level. InCold Blood acknowledges that, whether owing to biological orbiosocial evolution, binary constructs have always structuredhuman thought; and game theory, as Carroll acknowledges, isone of the "major advances in providing a map of elementalhuman motives rooted in our evolutionary history" (84). Thenonfiction novel, the third branch of the third phase of docu-mentary fiction as initiated by In Cold Blood, at once recognizesthe possibilities of specific eventsthe historical governanceof international and interpersonal eventsand transcendenceover contingencythe binary constructs that have always shapedcognition. That 1966 was a landmark year for game theory, withthe publication of Anatol Rapoport and Melvin Guyer's "A Tax-onomy of 2 X 2 Games," supports the thesis that nascent postmo-dernity pushed such structures to the forefront of sociopoliticaldecision-making.'* "Most of the efforts to apply Chicken to IR[International Relations]," as Joshua S. Goldstein chronicles,"took place in the 1960s and 1970s" (136).

Documentary fiction did not die in the late 1960s as Foley'sthesis suggests; indeed, all three branches of her third phasehave survived. The fictional autobiography has spawned, forexample, two works byj. G. Ballard. Empire of the Sun (1984) andThe Kindness of Women (1991) chart the development of young

Jim Ballard from a childhood defined by internment in Shanghaiduring World War II to the mature artist who must negotiatethe impersonal lifestyle of postwar suburban London. The me-tahistorical novel has produced, for instance, the Border Trilogyby Cormac McCarthy. All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing

'"There are seventy-eight two-person two-choice scenarios in all.


(1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998) take as their major referentthe historical process that consigned the cowboy from a livingand working role in the American landscape to a simulacrumof that figure as witnessed in film and television productions.Concomitant with continued MADness, the nonfiction novelsurvived the 1960s, with Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic fMau-MauingtheElak Catchers (1970), Mailer's The Executioner's Song (1979),and Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark (1982) emerging as right-ful successors to In Cold Blood.

Thanks to the unremitting defense policy of PresidentRonald Reagan, however, the dilemma of matching Americannuclear capabilities almost bankrupted the USSR; as a result,the misfortune predicted by Bertrand Russell did not happen.America won the game of Chicken against Russia, and the worldescaped nuclear annihilation. Whether documentary fictionfrom the period approaching, including, and following the fallof the Berlin Wall in November 1989 responded to this seismicshift in international relations, whether the preeminent status ofbinary rationality that dominated East-West politics during theCold War fell with the Iron Curtain, are intriguing questions.

A certain appellation, "narrative journalism," implies thatthe crash of the Berlin Wall stilled the anxieties ushered in bythe atomic explosion of August 29,1949. The 1997 online serial"Black Hawk Down" from Mark Bowden (journalist) and PeterTobia (photographer) of the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as theassociated book from 1999, were publicized under this neolo-gism. Two years later. Harvard University launched the NiemanProgram on Narrative Journalism to provide a central resourcefor the tuition and practice of the genre. Within another twoyears, Kelly McEvers and Nathan Deuel founded Six Billion: AnOnline Magazine of Narrative fournalism according to the agendathat everybody in the world (roughly six billion people in all)has a story to tell. Whether the product of narrative journalismis synonymous with the nonfiction novel is a matter for furtherspeculation, but it is undoubtedly a form of documentaryfiction,


and that form owes a debt to Capote's subdivisional archetype.Indeed, with the steady realization of Iranian nuclear ambitionsand Israeli determination to counter aggression from that quarter,the coordination problems of refractory states are firmly backon the agenda of international relations; as a corollary. Capote'slegacy in documentary fiction appears all the more significant.

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