Truman Capote's Contribution

to the Documentary Novel:

The Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of
In Cold Blood
MICHAEL WAINWRIGHT
In the days when the nuclear ghosts of Khrushchev and Kennedy
are poised to rise again, the contrast between these two visions
makes, to my mind, the strongest case for literary scholarship in
which realism, objectivity, and rationality are refugees no longer.
Peter Swirski, Of Literature and Knowledge
Prisoner's Dilemma is about avoiding exploitation, but in a Chicken
game one person or the other must compromise to avoid a mu-
tual disaster. Each player wants to convince the other that he or
she 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 how
and why, failed to satisfy his sense of meaningful design.
Truman Capote, In Cold Btood
To which genre of literature does Truman Capote's (1924-84) In
Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
(1966) belong?^ According to Capote, his volume exemplifies
a 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 the
Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, on the night of November
15-16, 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 the
following 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 popularity
with the reading public, and In Cold Blood became an instant
success 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-scale
journalistic novel could be accurate, aesthetic, and accessible.
"The novelistic techniques generate an excitement, intensity
and emotive power that orthodox reporting or historiography
do not aspire to," David Lodge elucidates, "while for the reader
the guarantee that the story is 'true' gives it a compulsion that
no fiction can quite equal" (203).
The "nonfiction novel" is certainly Capote's neologism,
continues Lodge, but "it has in fact been around for quite a
long time in various guises" (203). J. A. Cuddon identifies the
generic archetype as the "documentary novel." "This form of
fiction," 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, like
documentary drama, is based on documentary evidence in the
shape of newspaper articles, legal reports, archives, and recent
official papers." Notable examples "have been Theodore Drei-
ser's An American Tragedy (1925) and Truman Capote's In Cold
Blood' (255). Barbara Foley, who remains the leading authority
on documentary fiction, not only repeats the assertion that this
genre "is a species of fiction" (41), but also agrees with Lodge's
sense that the documentary novel adheres to referential strategies
associated with nonfictional modes of discourse. Documentary
fiction, 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 to
represent 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 empirical
validation. (25)
Lodge and Foley, however, attribute documentary fiction with a
longer provenance than Cuddon does. Lodge cites Daniel Defoe's
A Journal of the Plague l^ar (1722) as the generic archetype, while
Foley places Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) at
the forefront of the genre. Lodge's cursory article must then cede
the academic field to Foley's detailed monograph, which ascribes
three distinct phases to the evolution of documentary fiction,
with each new stage emerging gradually from its antecedent.
Spanning approximately two hundred years from the end
of the sixteenth century to the close of the eighteenth century,
Foley's first phase concerns the "pseudofactual novel." This
form of documentary fiction "simulates or imitates the authentic
testimony of a 'real life' person; its documentary effect derives
from the assertion of veracity" (25). Nashe's The Unfortunate
Traveller claims to be "a reasonable conveyance of history" (32),
and the spirit of this declaration equally applies to AphraBehn's
Oroonoko (1688) and Defoe's Ajournai of the Plague Year Foley's
second stage of documentary fiction involves the "historical
novel" (25) ofthe nineteenth century. This type of work, as Sir
Walter 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 the
beginning of the twentieth century and comprises two generic
subcategories. On the one hand, "the fictional autobiography
represents an artist-hero who assumes the status of a real person
inhabiting an invented situation; its documentary effect derives
from the assertion of the artist's claim to privileged cognition"
(25). Examples of this generic subdivision are James Joyce's A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-15), Gertrude Stein's
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), and Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer (1934). On the other hand, "the metahistorical
"Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of In Cold Blood " PLL 27
novel takes as its referent a historical process that evades rational
formulation; its documentary effect derives from the assertion
of the very indeterminacy of factual verification" (25). Instances
of this generic subdivision are Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928),
William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Robert Penn
Warren's All the King's Men (1946). Significandy, and notwith-
standing Lodge's supposition concerning the provenance to
which In Cold Blood belongs, Foley understands Capote's text
as neither a fictional autobiography nor a metahistorical novel.
Nor does she identify the nonfiction novel with a new phase of
documentary fiction. Rather, the third phase, which closed in
the late 1960s, was the final chapter of the documentary novel.
Foley offers three reasons for this stark conclusion. First, the
solipsistic behavior of self-stylized nonfiction authors, which she
finds "generally irritating and barren" (15), undermines their
journalistic objectivity. Although Foley does not specifically
cite Capote, his reputation did suffer on this account, with op-
probrium elicited from literary critics, politicians, and moral
crusaders alike. Capote was dedicated to himself, not his art,
according to these arbiters; as a result, scoffs Norman Mailer, "I
don't know if there was ever a large idea that bothered him for
one minute" (qtd. in Plimpton 38). Capote, supposedly a jour-
nalistic novelist, appeared to be out of touch with the majority
of Americans. His Black-and-White Ball, held at the Plaza Hotel,
New York City, on November 28, 1966^which was insensitively
and decadendy at odds with the public mood concerning the war
in Vietnamconfirmed thisjudgment. Moreover, this solipsistic
and self-destructive streak would continue until his death, as the
publication of scandalous extracts from Answered Prayers-and his
gratuitous behavior at Studio 54, one of his favored New York City
haunts, would unhesitatingly attest.^ To this testimony, Eleanor
^"In 1975," chronicles James Campbell, "Esquire began to publish sections from
Answered Prayers, an 'ambitious novel' which Capote claimed to have started in the
1950s, making comparisons to A la Recherche du temps perdu" (40). What there was of
the novel appeared in book form two years after Capote's death.
28 PLL Michael Wainwright
Pernyi, former editor o Harper's Bazaar dLud Mademoiselle, adds
another criticism. Capote "was exactly like Warhol," she avers,
"in that he knew nothing. Absolutely nothing. He had no form
of culture" (qtd. in Plimpton 283, emphasis original). A man
so 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 nonfiction
novel from the genre of documentary fiction is its practitioners'
apparent willingness to sanction the secret cancellation of the
writer-reader contract to which they appeal. Phillip K Tompkins
first submitted this indictment against Capote in 1968. Tompkins
sets his own interview of Mrs. Meier, the jailhouse keeper's wife,
against Capote's delineation of murderer Perry Edward Smith's
repentance while in custody to ratify this charge. "During our
telephone conversation," reports Tompkins,
Mrs. Meier repeatedly told me that she never heard Perry cry; that on the
day in question she was in her bedroom, not the kitchen; that she did not
turn on the radio to drown out the sound of crying; that she did not hold
Perry's hand; that she did not hear Perry say, "I'm embraced by shame." And
finallythat she had never told such things to Capote.
Mrs. Meier, avows Tompkins, "told me repeatedly and firmly, in
her gentle way, that these things were not true" (53, emphasis
original). In ColdBloodrestores a sense of humanity to Smith that
his behavior never supported. "Art triumphs over reality, fiction
over nonfiction," argues Tompkins. "By imparting conscience
and compassion to Perry, Capote was able to convey qualities of
inner sensitivity, poetry, and a final posture of contrition in his
hero" (57, emphasis added). Eric Heyne, who draws on Tomp-
kins's findings, believes that these particular "inventions" are
unforgivably damning because Smith's "precise motivations are
at the thematic and aesthetic heart of the book" (486). Ovng
to 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 credibility
of the narrative collapsed for them when they discovered that
"Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of In Cold Blood " PLL 29
certain details had been invented or significantly changed to
enhance the thematic patterning of the text" (15).^ For Foley,
readers of documentary fiction expect empiric validity, the text
must be "true," but Capote breaks this contractual obligation.
Foley's third reason for debarring the nonfiction novel from
the genre of documentary fiction is the advent of posts tructural-
ism. This hermeneutical advance, as Foley explains, posits "the
notion that the borderline between nonfictional and fictive
discourse is an arbitrary boundary" (10). "The world in which
we live," according to E. L. Doctorow, "is still to be formed and
that reality is amenable to any construction that is placed upon
it" (26). Indeed, in a concurrence that Foley does not acknowl-
edge, Jacques Derrida delivered his poststructuralist evaluation
of Western logic in "Structure, Sign, and Play" at Johns Hopkins
University in the same year that Random House first published
In Cold Blood. Since the advent of poststructuralism, believes
Foley, even self-proclaimed nonfiction novelists dispel the aura
of factuality that ought to envelop historical events. "Mailer, in
The Armies of the Night," she observes, "writes that history inhabits
a 'crazy-house' and that the 'mystery of the events at the Penta-
gon,' even when reconstructed by means of newspaper reports
and eyewitness accounts can be only a 'collective novel'" (11).^
Events are not amenable to rational formulation, authors abide
by this poststructuralist assumption, and documentary fiction
has passed into the past.
In summary, solipsistic dissipation of journalistic objectivity,
secret contractual rescindment, and poststructural acquiescence
exclude the nonfiction novel from the genre of documentary
fiction and place works such as In ColdBloodin the all-embracing
and 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 maintain
resistance against poststructural acquiescence, but to use this neologism to describe
30 PLL Michael Wainwright
cally, however, widening the debate from Tompkins's research
helps to deny the second of Foley's charges by positing a subtler
indictment against Capote. "Complex truths," concedes Heyne,
"may be well served by inventions, exaggerations, slanting, and
other transformations of fact." Critical judgment of nonfiction
novels therefore requires a double perspective. One viewpoint
considers accuracy, which amounts to "a kind of groundwork, a
detailed and sufficiently neutral verbal representation of events,
for which the goal is universal agreement or correspondence,"
while the other viewpoint concerns meaning, which "is much
more nebulous, covering virtually everything one does with 'the
facts' once they have been given accurate shape" (486). The
meaning derived from a prescient disinterest in detail speaks
to factual adequacy rather thdni factual accuracy. Hence, the seri-
ous failings of In Cold Blood stem from factual inadequacy, and
with this argument in mind, maintains John Russell, Capote's
duplicitous practice becomes immediately apparent. In the
"acknowledgments section in In ColdBlood," asserts Russell, "not
only does the word 'official' occur at the outset, but it is linked
to two other qualifiers that could have been left out: 'All the
material in this book not derived from my own observations is
either taken from official records or is the result of interviews
with 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's
artful deceit, the author's knowing but secret management of
meaning, which "is wholly remote from an aesthetic decision to
In Cold Blood, as Lodge and Brian McHale do, is an anachronism that confuses the
issue. "Wolfe," notes Lodge,
saw himself as leading a new literary movement which he called "The New
Journalism," the title of an anthology he edited in 1973. In the Introduc-
tion to this volume he claimed that the Newjournalism had taken over the
novel's traditional task of describing contemporary social reality, which
had been neglected by literary novelists too obsessed with myth, fabulation
and 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 his
own vision" (4, emphasis original).
To rescue In Gold Blood from the accusation of disingenu-
ousness is difficult. This task relies on recognizing Capote's
realization of the fundamental framework that has securely
grounded documentary fiction throughout its history; in turn,
and rather surprisingly, this critical operation defends Capote
against Foley's charges of dissolute self-indulgence and post-
structural acquiescence. That Capote finds the nonfiction novel
a satisfactorily paradoxical genre appeals to Foley's structuralist
argument concerning documentary fiction and helps toward
recognition ofthe principal structure in question. Foley argues
that fictional and nonfictional discourses are distinguishable in
kind rather than degree. "That most twentieth-century theories
of cognitionin fields from psychology to the philosophy of sci-
ence to linguisticshave found it necessary to postulate that the
human mind characteristically uses polarity as an essential device
in gaining understanding" (35) points to a cognitive landscape
dominated by binary constructs. "As Roman Jakobson and Mor-
ris Halle point out," adds Terence Hawkes, "the discernment of
binary opposition is a child's 'first logical operation'" (24). This
mental act makes use of that singular "set of schematic logical
structures" (44) that Robert Hanna calls "protologic" (43). For
Jakobson, Halle, and Hawkes, as the latter emphasizes, the first
logical operation of childhood amounts to "the primary and
distinctive 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, but
from Hanna's perspective, structure creates opposition.
Although human cognition matures beyond the discernment
of binary opposition, that recognition provides the grounds for
cognitive perception and creation. Capote's nonfiction novel,
however, interpreted contemporary American politics as a re-
awakening to protological principles, the very standards that
32 PLL Michael Wainwright
appeal so much to Foley. At the sociopolitical level, this return
promoted a perverse sort of immaturity, a reversal to which
postmodernity undoubtedly contributed. Dating the first ap-
pearance of the postmodern remains what philosophers call an
"empty question," and although the continual contestation of
such queries makes them both intriguing and annoying, they are
usefully addressable.'' In broad terms, postmodernity emerged
as modernity declined, a process that Marianne DeKoven's
Utopia Limited (2004) traces over a twenty-year period starting
in the mid-1950s but that Brian McHale dates to "one year in
particular: 1966" (400). McHale also notes, however, Charles
Alexander 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. Louis
was demolished" (391-92, emphasis original). Built according
to modernist precepts, but unlivable in practice, Pruitt-Igoe
"marked the failure of high modernism in architecture." For
Jencks, 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, an
unprecedented technological saltation precipitated the evolu-
tion from modernity to postmodernity. This double-faceted
leap dates to August 6, 1945, and August 29, 1949. The use of
the atomic bomb on Hiroshima granted a unique status to the
USA, but the successful test of a similar device by the USSR at
Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, denied American nuclear preemi-
nence. President Harry S. Truman initially refused to believe
that Russian technology had advanced so far, but eventually he
conceded the point. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the
Semipalatinsk success emboldened Georgy Malenkov, Chief of
the Soviet Missile Program. "In a speech on 7 November 1949,"
^An empty question is a query for which any delimited answer remains equivocal
despite a thorough knowledge of the relevant data.
"Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of In Gold Blood " PLL 33
reports Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, Malenkov stated "that if the
imperialists decided to unleash a third world war, the war would
be the graveyard not only of the imperialists but the whole sys-
tem" (190 n.59). The Cold War was firmly set: nuclear equality
posited the binary formulation of West-East relations, with the
Iron Curtain as a manifestation of the structural and dialectic
divide between the two sides. The overriding concern for each
participant in this standoff was not so much domination of the
other 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-born
mathematician John von Neumann (1903-57) .^ "During the first
three postwar years," as Norman MacRae relates, "Johnny had
no real influence in Washington" (333). His contributions to the
Manhattan Project and his role in proposing specific targets for
the atomic bomb had been considerable, but when the second
front opened in Europe, the allied leaders began to consider
the aftermath of the war and how to predict the dynamics of
the resultant economic climate. Although von Neumann had
recently applied game theory, a mathematical subdiscipline that
he 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) provoked
little governmental interest.
The RAND Corporation, however, reestablished von Neu-
mann's influence, because the two participants in the Cold World
were, 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 by
the 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).
34 PLL Michael Wainwright
Annual Report" (1950) from the corporation, "is supplied by the
von Neumann-Morgenstern theory of games," and "pertinent
information developed or adapted through survey, study, or
research by RAND is integrated into models, largely by means
of mathematical methods" (27).
Game-theoretic simulations meant that coordination problems,
situations in which an individual must choose between behavioral
options knowing that other individuals are faced with the same
choices and that the outcome will be determined by everyone's
actions, could now be studied mathematically. Until this time,
the academic interrogation of coordination problems had ap-
pealed to a combination of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and
literary insight, but the theory of games complemented these
interpretative strategies toward human behavior with a denota-
tive supplement. Initially, von Neumann advocated a first-strike
policy. If America attacked first, explains AlexanderJ. Eield, then
the 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 prospect
of being on the receiving end of an unprovoked attack" (170).
In the absence of the will to strike first, however, the West and
the East could maintain the political equilibrium by the logic
of mutually assured destruction: nuclear parity, which threatened
each side with annihilation should one party attack the other
with atomic weapons, was the rational policy of defense.
Skeptics took the acronym for mutually assured destruction
to imply a form of MADness and questioned whether the Polit-
buro shared this logic. Nathan Leites of the RAND Corporation
addressed 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 affirms
that future developments are either inevitable or impossible.
Intermediate probabilities are excluded. This," states Leites, "is
a 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 American
administration's acceptance of the antagonistic but peaceful
equilibrium that mutually assured destruction elicits.
Did the "uncultured" Capote's "self-regard" blind him to
the psychological straits imposed on ordinary citizens by the
international politics of fear? Capote's screenplay adaptation
with John Huston of James Helvick's Beat the Devil (1953), a tale
of international crooks attempting to buy Kenyan land rich in
uranium, which engages with the nuclear issue tangentially and
comically, supplies an affirmative answer to this question. Sub-
sequent evidence, however, suggests otherwise. "In December
1955," records John Fass Morton, "Robert Breen's Everyman
Opera began its historic tour of George Gershwin's Porgy and
Bess" (249), and Capote, as a member of the first American opera
company in Russia since the October Revolution, chronicled its
Leningrad premiere in The Muses Are Heard (1956).
After his return to America, Capote was among the authors
approached by William Faulkner's committee for President
DwightD. Eisenhower's People-to-People Partnership. Although
the State Department had refused to fund the Everyman Opera
tour of Russia, Eisenhower's ideological war against the Soviets
soon 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 of
the 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 postwar
Japan attests, was also aware of at least one journalistic response
to the nuclear dilemma. "Hiroshima [1946] is creativein the
sense that Hersey isn't taking something off a tape-recorder and
editing 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 under
Faulkner's unsteady leadership; see Joseph Blotner's "William Faulkner: Committee
Chairman" {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).
36 PLL Michael Wainwright
talking about," expiates Capote. ''Hiroshima is a strict classical
journalistic piece" {Gonversations49).
These biographical details, a concomitant relegation of Foley,
Mailer, and Pernyi 's assertions about Capote, and a hermeneutic
attuned to game theory help to focus criticaljudgment onto the
coordination problems o In Gold Blood; as a result, the paradoxi-
cally febrile Cold War atmosphere of coldblooded rationality in
governmental circles emerges from Capote's nonfiction novel
as a conditioning effect on the behavior of American citizens
in 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 his
chosen subject: "the case, then commanding headlines as far
east as Chicago, as far west as Denver," he reports, "had indeed
lured to Garden City a considerable press corps" {IGB95). What
separates In Gold Blood from newspaper investigations of the
case, what emerges from In Gold Blood in defiance of Capote's
factual inadequacy, and what makes In Gold Blood so prescient
both in the specific terms of the Clutters' murderers in late-
1950s America and in the transhistorical and asocial terms of
the documentary novel, therefore, is Capote's implicit realiza-
tion of the fundamental framework that places two rational
dilemmas at the thematic and aesthetic heart of his work. These
conundrums, the Prisoner's Dilemma and Chicken, are those
posited by game theorists as characteristic of the Cold War. In
general terms, then, the archetypal nonfiction novelist underpins
the indeterminacy of social practice with the sociobiologically
fostered conventions of rationality, with the resulting class of
fiction 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 by
recognizing the transhistorical aspect of rationality.
"Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of In Cold Blood" PLL 37
One can adduce that certain coordination problems impinged
on postwar American society to an unprecedented extent from
the words, metaphors, and analogies with which mathematicians
started to describe game-theoretic situations. These narrative
visualizations translated numerical models into everyday par-
lance. Canadian-born mathematician Albert W. Tucker (1905-
95) named the Prisoner's Dilemma in 1950 while working at
the RAND Corporation. Paul Watzlawick's recent rendition of
Tucker's analogy is reputedly true to the original. "A district
attorney," writes Watzlawick, "is holding two men suspected of
armed robbery. There is not enough evidence to take the case
to 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, which
carries a penalty of six months injail. If they both confess, he promises them
the minimum sentence for armed robbery, which is two years. If, however,
only one confesses, he will be considered a state witness and go free, while
the 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 in
separate 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 the
coordination condition that forces each man to enter a guilty or
innocent plea before learning of his counterpart's response;
and the state penal system that sets the tariffs for each of the
four possible outcomes is the game-theoretic banker. These
possible 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 to
save himself eighteen years' imprisonment. The best and worst
individual payoffs occur when one participant confesses but
his counterpart keeps silent; the talkative suspect goes free, but
his taciturn coeval receives the longest possible sentence; "So
Long, Sucker," in the words of RAND Corporation employees
John Nash and Lloyd Shapley, expresses the defector's cynical
relief in this instance. If both suspects confess, however, thatwill
be worse for each suspect than if both keep silent. Simply put,
the outcome will be worse for both suspects if each man, rather
than neither, does what will be better in his individual estima-
tion. The three essential inequalities for a Prisoner's Dilemma
mean that the payoff for unilateral defection (Outcome 2/3)
betters the result for mutual restraint (Outcome 4), the result
for mutual restraint overrides the payoff for mutual defection
(Outcome 1), and the payoff for mutual defection betters the
result 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 best
on offer; second, the fear of getting Nash and Shapley's sucker
payoff, which is the worst available; third, the desire for differ-
ential advantage. Although confession as a dominant strategy
ensures that neither player is at a disadvantage with respect to
his counterpart, mutual cooperation provides the optimum out-
come for the players as a pair (neither player can improve his
"Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of In Cold Blood" PLL 39
result without reducing the other player's payoff). Hence, each
participant in a Prisoner's Dilemma is tempted by the maximum
score but simultaneously worried about the penultimate payoff
guaranteed by mutual defection. For many game theorists, the
Prisoner's Dilemma simulates the international politics of the
Cold War, with each side critically aware that mutual restraint is
the wisest course of action. The circular logic that drives player
choice around this conundrum, however, guarantees neither par-
ticipant the maximum outcome. What is worse, and in addition
to the authoritarian associations that stem from Tucker's choice
of visualization, "situations of the Prisoner's Dilemma type," as
Watzlawick asserts, "are more frequent than one might expect"
(100). "The main ingredient," agrees William Poundstone, "is
a temptation to better one's own interests in a way that would
be ruinous if everyone did it" (125-26). If two individuals must
reach a joint decision about which they cannot communicate,
then a Prisoner's Dilemma is likely to arise. This preponderance
makes the Prisoner's Dilemma the most studied of two-person
two-choice scenarios, with its occurrence in nonfictional fiction
appreciable to an informative degree, as the interrogation of
the two suspects in In Cold Blood, Richard Eugene Hickock and
Perry 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." on
January 2, 1960 (Capote, ICB 256). The authorities split their
four-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 ) to
lull him into a sense of false security. Only after considerable
questioning about these matters do they challenge him about
^A police patrol had arrested Hickock and Smith in Las Vegas for possession of a
stolen car. The investigators interviewed the two men there before returning with
them to Kansas.
40 PLL
Michael Wainwright
the Clutter murders. Hickock denies involvement. "Think it
over," they tell him. "That's all for now" (265). Alvin Dewey
and Clarence Duntz follow the same procedure with Smith; he
also denies involvement. The detectives now leave the two men
to contemplate their predicament overnight. "He and Dick,"
notes Smith, "were being kept apart; Dick was locked in a cell
on another floor" (269).
Capote delineates this coordination problem as a quantifiable
real-life situation in which separation over an extended period
ensures that the suspects' conundrum becomes a matter of
reflective and reflexive rationality'. If both men defect by con-
fessing to the Kansas authorities, then their assistance might be
enough, along with other mitigating factors such as childhood
trauma, to commute death penalties to life imprisonment. If the
two suspects cooperate and deny responsibility, then they will
receive moderately long prison sentences for their misdemean-
ors but are not likely to be convicted of the killings. If one man
defects (confesses to the authorities) and successfully accuses
his coeval of all four murders, then his counterpart receives the
death penalty while he benefits from a reduction of his prison
sentence from a moderate to a light tariff. Matrix 2 tabulates
the 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 lenient
sentence.
Smith gets capital
punishment.
Outcome 4:
Both men get mod-
erately long prison
sentences.
MATRIX 2 : POSSIBLE OLTTCOMES FROM THE INTCRROGATORY PRISONER'S DILEMMA IN IN COLD BLOOD
"Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of In Gold Blood" PLL 41
Despite their confidence in a lack of evidence linking them to the
murders, Hickock and Smith feel the pressure of this dilemma as
a coordination problem that reasoning cannot solve. That they
had anticipated this police tactic long before the crime"Dick
had said, 'If we get caught, let's get caught together. Then we
can back each other up. When they start pulling the confession
crap, saying you said and I said'" (108)and had concocted
an alibi in case they were arrested, offers neither man much
solace. Their desperation mounts during their night apart. "If
only he could talk to Dick!" thinks Smith; Hickock, also unable
to 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 other
man's thoughts.
Church and Nye maintain the pressure of this Prisoner's
Dilemma during their questioning of Hickock the next day.
"Methodically applying" their "roundabout strategy""not once
during this interview, now almost three hours old, had either of
them 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 he
remains true to their bond of murderous brotherhood. Smith's
continued loyalty plays strongly in Hickock's favor, but Smith
does have a failsafe mechanism. A lie he told Hickock about
murdering an African-American beggar, a falsehood to boost
his self-image in front of his counterpart, is Smith's indicator of
Hickock's reliability. In attempting to absolve himself of blame,
and unaware of Smith's trap, Hickock tells the detectives that
Smith has murdered before. "Hickock tells us you're a natural-
born killer," Dewey informs Smith. "Says it doesn't bother you
a 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
42 PLL Michael Wainwright
non-communication as a coordination condition, is now certain
of Hickock's defection. "I always knew if we ever got caught, if
Dick ever really let fly, dropped his guts all over the goddam
floor," rages Smith, "I knew he'd tell about the nigger" (276). In
return. Smith implicates his partner in the Clutter homicides,
admitting to the murders of Herbert and Kenyon but asserting
that Hickock killed Bonnie and Nancy. The echo between the
mirror symmetry provided by this confession and the police's
successful Prisoner's Dilemma persuades the authorities to charge
both men with the murders. Smith "wanted to fix Dick for being
such a coward" (304), and his statement succeeds in this intent.
Whether the eventual outcome for mutual defection by
Hickock and Smith transpires in accordance with a standard
Prisoner's Dilemma is debatable, because the death penalty
rather than life imprisonment is handed down to each man, but
each convict does earn the perrerse satisfaction of contemplat-
ing his counterpart's execution. In fact. Smith's disloyalty in
the Prisoner's Dilemma comes after the revelation of Hickock's
defection rather than simultaneously with that confession, which
means Smith can break the conundrum that faces him. A worse
outcome than that available from a classic Prisoner's Dilemma
now awaits Hickock and Smith. Their diachronic disloyalty re-
sults in a combination of payoffs: defection-cooperation meets
cooperation-defection to eschew any form of leniency, ensuring
that each man's sentence is capital punishment.
The Prisoner's Dilemma related by In Cold Blood illustrates
how the hermeneutic provided by the interaction between
documentary fiction and game theory reveals one of the envi-
roning codes that inflect individual behavior. Moreover, just as
their well-practiced alibi and prison-cell thoughts testify to the
logic with which they meet coordination problems, so Hickock's
capitulation in the Prisoner's Dilemma and Smith's subsequent
desire to frame his erstwhile partner express their predilection
for courting logical dilemmas. That a similar scenario, a disturb-
ing problem of preemption in which neither participant had a
"Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of In Gold Blood " PLL 43
dominant strategic option, underpinned Hickock and Smith's
murderous deeds in Holcomb therefore seems a reasonable
supposition. Game theorists commonly assign the coordination
problem known as Chicken, first named by British mathemati-
cian and philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) during his
meditation on Gommon Sense and Nuclear Warfare (1959), to such
situations.
Although not a game theorist, Russell associates the Cold
War with logical paradigms, as his contemplation of superpower
presidents calling each other's bluff testifies. "Since the nuclear
stalemate became apparent," states Russell, "the Governments
of East and West have adopted the policy which Mr. Dulles
calls '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 a
white line down the middle and starting two very fast cars towards
each other from opposite ends. Each car is expected to keep
the wheels of one side on the white line. As they approach each
other," observes Russell, "mutual destruction becomes more
and more imminent. If one of them swerves from the white line
before the other, the other, as he passes, shouts 'Chicken!,' and
the one who has swerved becomes an objectof contempt." When
played by discontented youths, continues Russell, "this game is
considered decadent and immoral, though only the lives of the
players are risked" ( 19). These youths use the middle of the road
to rebel against orthodoxythey are simply not prepared to stay
on the proper side of delimiting lines, rules, or demarcations.
"But when the game is played by eminent statesmen, who risk
not only their own lives but those of many hundreds of millions
of human beings," continues Russell, "it is thought on both sides
that the statesmen on one side are displaying a high degree
of wisdom and courage, and only the statesmen on the other
side are reprehensible. Both are to blame for playing such an
incredibly dangerous game." In this instance, believes Russell,
44 PLL Michael Wainwright
the game may be played without misfortune a few times, but sooner or later
it 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 statesmen
of both sides will plunge the world into destruction. (19)
Although "Russell's highway metaphor," as Barry O'Neill
chronicles 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. Philosophy
and mathematics were playing catch up. In effect, Russell was
formally designating the importance of Chicken as a cultural
phenomenon, a phenomenon that film director Nicholas Ray
had already portrayed in Rebel without a Cause {\9bb). The script,
which Irving Shulman and Stewart Stern adapted for the screen
from Ray's original story, portrays the stark reality of Chicken.
James Dean plays Jim Stark, a teenager from a respectable but
complacently bourgeois family who is rapidly descending into
delinquency. Having moved to the suburbs of Los Angeleshis
parents' response to Jim's assault on another youth in their
hometownJim finds himself at loggerheads with local gang
leader 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; the
first driver to bail out of his cab is the chicken. In terms of pos-
sible outcomes: jumping last is best, jumping simultaneously
is 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 goes
over the precipice. The gang deems Jim a chicken. That Buzz's
snagged coat sleeve traps him inside the cab goes unnoticed by
the spectators, and his death makes him a countercultural hero.
The film implies that Jim and Buzz's type of brinkmanship, the
sort that in extremis leads to death, was symptomatic of postwar
American life, and that adolescents were especially susceptible
in this regard: they had to endure the shadow of the atomic and
"Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of In Cold Blood" PLL 45
hydrogen bombs for the whole of their adult lives. Nor was this
youthful susceptibility confined to men, suggests Ray's film, with
the active, game-playing members of Gunderson's gang being
female as well as maleindeed, Natalie Wood earned an Oscar
nomination for Best Supporting Actress for the role of Judy, the
teenager who initially dotes on Gunderson but who ends up as
Jim's new friend. "The number of subsequent films featuring
variations on Chicken is staggering," reports Jim Morton.
Usually it was used as a device to get rid of the 'bad' kidteens lost their
lives driving over cliffs, running into trains, smacking into walls and collid-
ing with each other. The creative abilities of Hollywood scriptwriters were
sorely taxed as they struggled to think of new ways to destroy the youth of
the nation. (144)
Bertrand Russell's terminology might imply something child-
ish, but this is a deceptive assumption, as a number of game
theorists 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" of
game 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). Chicken
shares with the Prisoner's Dilemma both the hope of getting
the temptation payoff and the desire for differential advan-
tage, but it does not promise the sucker score for cooperation
if one's counterpart defects. Hence, the possible outcomes in
this coordination problem swap the penultimate and lowest
outcomes from a Prisoner's Dilemma so that the outcome for
unilateral defection betters the result for mutual restraint, the
result for mutual restraint overrides the score for unilateral re-
straint, and the payoff for unilateral restraint betters the result
for mutual defection.
'"This supposed childishness mightaccountfor the lackof scholarly papers on Chicken.
46 PLL Michael Wainwright
If the death of Stalin (March 5,1953) had implied the begin-
ning of a new era in international relations, then this hope was
effectively dashed when Niki ta Khrushchev took over the reins of
Soviet power, with the Prisoner's Dilemma of international MAD-
ness mutating into Chicken as each administration identified
symptoms of irrationality in the political leader opposing them.
Khrushchev's behavior at the United Nations General Assembly
in 1960^where he brandished his shoe at a Filipino delegate who
accused the Soviet Union of imperialism in Eastern Europedid
nothing to reassure Eisenhower's administration that the Soviet
premier would abide by the implicit sense of MADness. This
fear had not diminished by the time John F. Kennedy claimed
the American presidency. Conversely, the Soviets worried over
intelligence reports that enumerated Kennedy's physiological
problems and the pharmaceutical cocktailincluding cortisone,
Lomotil, paregoric, and testosteronethat maintained his
health." In the light of these complementary but disparaging
appraisals, that the MAD tension between Khrushchev and Ken-
nedy should spawn the Cuban missile crisis, a mooted solution
of their Cold War dilemma that involved risking extensive losses
in the hope of inflecting dedsivelosses, becomes somewhat more
explicable. Fortunately, the advisers to both leaders did adhere
to game-theoretic logic, and the Chicken of the missile crisis
ended without recourse to thermonuclear war.
Hickock and Smith's interpersonal game, however, ends
in six deaths, and Capote puts Chicken in the frame for this
outcome.^^ In Gold Blood repeatedly shows the two men's predi-
"For more information on Kennedy's use of medication see Christopher Andersen's
These 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 Fictions
on 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 shotgun
blasts that, all told, ended six human lives" (5)includes Hickock and Smith along-
side the Clutters.
"Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of In Cold Blood" PLL 47
lection for Chicken. As with Jim Stark and Buzz Gunderson in
Rebel without a Cause, automotive transport provides each man
with a means of satisfying this behavioral trait. Hickock's car
driving, which has left him with permanent injuries from a traffic
accident, expresses his desire to take risks. "It was as though his
head had been halved like an apple, then put together a frac-
tion off center," reports Capote. "Something of the kind had
happened; the imperfectly aligned features were the outcome
of a car collision in 1950" (36). Memories of this trauma keep
coming to the surface"Not long ago," writes Hickock while
on Death Row, "I had a piece of glass work out of my head. It
came out the corner of my eye. My dad helped me to get it out"
(333). Similarly, "a motorcycle wreck" cost Smith "half a year
in a State of Washington hospital and another six months on
crutches." Although "the accident had occurred in 1952, his
chunky, 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 payoffthe
feeling that he had not won the automotive version of Chicken
outrightrepeatedly propels Smith into games of Chicken. Un-
surprisingly, then, one of his daring schemes for "quick money"
after murdering the Clutters involves "chauffeuring stolen cars
across South American borders" (118).
Like the radioactive fallout in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and
like the background rationale of mutually assured destruction in
America, the effects of Hickock and Smith's dangerous games
drag on. Both men continue to drive recklessly, as their shared
predilection for Chicken might suggest, but the truly intriguing
aspect of this shared expression is its asymmetric tendency. When
Hickock drives, he redirects (or displaces) his interpersonal ten-
sion with Smith into simulating Chicken, a behavior that Smith
does not reciprocate. Hickock's simulations involve non-rational
players whose defection cannot harm him. Capote recounts one
such incident in detail. "The car was moving," with Hickock at
the wheel. "A hundred feet ahead, a dog trotted along the side
48 PLL Michael Wainwright
of the road. Dick swerved toward it." This change of course is
the manifest expression of Hickock's redirected play. Uncon-
sciously, Hickock wants to play Chicken with Smith, but his fear
of Smith's resolve in such situations causes this swerve toward
"an old half-dead mongrel, brittle-boned and mangy." Little
danger attends this game because "the impact," as the dog "met
the car, was a little more than a bird might make." Nonetheless,
this displaced activity against a helpless opponent temporarily
satisfies Hickock's predilection. "'Boy!' he saidand it was what
he always said after running down a dog, which was something
he did whenever the opportunity arose. 'Boy! We sure splattered
him!'" (133). Although Hickock seemingly resolves his tension
with Smith by co-opting his passenger to the winning side in this
game, 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 to
one's counterpart offers both the best and worst outcomes for
an individual, generates a greater incentive toward cooperation
than does the Prisoner's Dilemma; as a corollary, if a person
cooperates (or chickens out) during Chicken, then he is likely
to defect in a Prisoner's Dilemma. Accusations of cowardice be-
tween Hickock and Smith, as a manifestation of each man's fear
of the other man's trustworthiness, are particularly telling in this
regard, 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 logical
framework that dangerously underpinned the young men's re-
lationship. Having walked into the Clutters' farmhouse, which
according to Hickock's (erroneous) information contained a
safe, the two intruders discover there is hardly any ready cash
or jewelry on the premises. A dilemma ostensibly concerning
witnesses, but actually about their interrelationship, now con-
"Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of In Cold Blood " PLL 49
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 reticence
during this exchange enforces the condition of silence that
maintains the situation as a coordination problem. "Leave them
alive, and this won't be any small rap," continues Smith. "Ten
years the very least." With this statement. Smith expresses the
payoff for mutual cooperation, but Hickock still "didn't say
anything. He was holding the knife. I asked him for it, and he
gave it to me" (290). The transfer of the weapon from Hickock
to Smith is the former's tacit acceptance of the latter's assump-
tion of command. With this act of displacement, Hickock not
only anticipates the proof that "Perry was that rarity, 'a natural
killer'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^ to
act in Herbert Clutter's defense. "All right, Dick," says Smith.
"Here goes.' But I didn't mean it," maintains Smith. "I meant
to call his bluff, make him argue me out of it, make him admit
he was a phony and a coward. See, it was something between me
and Dick" (290, emphasis added).
Smith had called Hickock's bluff, but Hickock remained silent;
Smith defected actively while Hickock cooperated passively; as a
result, Herbert Clutter suffered a gruesome death. "I didn't real-
ize what I'd done till I heard the sound," states Smith of cutting
Herbert's throat. "Like somebody drowning. Screaming under
water. I handed the knife to Dick. I said, 'Finish him. You'll feel
better.' Dick triedor pretended to" (290). That neither man
has more than a few seconds to weigh the possible outcomes
of their behaviorpayoffs in terms of interpersonal status that
matrix 3 enumeratesand that Smith was (reportedly) unaware
of his homicidal act indicate that Herbert's murder was the
intruders' way out of their reflexive dilemma:
50 PLL
Michael Wainwright
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 as
Smith 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 logical
step after the first murder, each death resulted from the coordi-
nation problem over personal status that had become the state
of Hickock and Smith's relationship. "Be funny," Hickock later
remarks while driving, "if we had a smash-up" (250), but nothing
humorous accompanies the unresolved tension that attends their
partnership, 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 a
booth in the Eagle Buffet, a Kansas City Diner" (105), when they
start arguing. "Well, if it came to a fight," remarks Capote, "Perry
could defend himself' ( 108). He was shorter than Hickock, but "he
outweighed his friend, was thicker, had arms that could squeeze
the breath out of a bear. To prove it, however," meant a fight, a
physical game of Chicken, and that "was far from desirable" (108),
even for Smith. Fortunately, there is no catalyst, no third party to
suffer the consequences of this incident. "A middle-aged traveling
salesman who shall here be known as Mr. Bell," however, soon fills
this absence. Unlike Hickock, who is a car-driving killer of stray
dogs. 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-looking
people" (246). Capote's sobriquet for the traveling salesman sug-
gests that the situation he catalyzes rings (or tolls) a bell: Hickock
"Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of In Gold Blood" PLL 51
and Smith repeatedly engineer such situations. Indeed, they had
been waiting for a "prosperous-seeming solitary traveler to offer
them 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-wrapped
rock" onto Bell's head. Hickock's signal to Smith for the attack
is "Hey, Perry, pass me a match" (206, 207). As in the basement
with Herbert Clutter, however, the actual communication act is
more expressive than initially supposed. Smith knows "now was
the time, now" (206, emphasis original), but Hickock hesitates. A
few seconds later, Hickock does issue the signal, but "what Perry
later called 'a goddam miracle,'" the "appearance of a third
hitchhiker" for whom Bell stops, was probably Hickock's get-out
clause. Hickock saw this miraculous fourth man and issued the
attack phrase knowing that Smith had no time to bludgeon Bell.'^
Hickock and Smith's relationship was a self-perpetuating
environment for the game of Chicken. This coordination prob-
lem is the "meaningful design" (292) behind the young men's
murderous actions that forever eludes Alvin Dewey. As their
respective 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 extreme
form" (123). Such games "are characterized by very unequal
power between the two players, so unequal that the stronger
player could easily win a... confrontation" (122). A bully prefers
to avoid an altercation, uses the threat of bullying to gain his
objective, but achieves his aim by force if necessary. In In Gold
Blood, Smith becomes annoyed with Hickock over the issue of
"Smith's eventual attempt to retract the parts of his statement thatincriminate Hickock
for the Clutter murders also reveals Hickock's penchant for playing Chicken against
an obviously weaker opponent. Hickock "helped me," states Smith, "he held the
flashlight 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 to
running down an old dog" (346-47).
52 PLL Michael Wainwright
witnesses, and his annoyance builds to the point of exaspera-
tion. Hickock had "reminded Perry, for what seemed to Perry
the millionth time," that his scheme was a cinch because they
would leave "nowitnesses" (43, emphasis original). Immediately
after leaving the Clutters' farmhouse. Perry toys with idea of
murdering Hickock. "I'd better shoot Dick," he reasons. ''He's
a witness" (291, emphasis original). Smith did not kill Hickock,
but "I don't know what stopped me. God knows I should've done
it" (291 ). Conscienceless logic demanded Hickock's immediate
death, but that act would have made Smith a bully, and "little
old big-hearted Perry" (246), as Smith describes him, could
not assume that role. In short, Hickock simulates Chicken and
Smith cannot play Bullyand these complementary inabilities
lock 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 (December
19, 1959)therefore comes as little surprise. "The bodies of
the two men executed for the 1959 murders of a Kansas family
that became infamous in Truman Capote's true-crime book In
Cold Blood," reports John Hanna, "were exhumed Tuesday in
an effort to solve [the] slayings of a Florida family killed weeks
later" (1). Capote references these murders in his nonfiction
novel, with Hickock and Smith's discussion of the case while
they are staying at the beachfront Somerset Hotel in Florida.
Reading the Miami Herald, Smith comes across "an inner-page
story" that wins "his entire attention," which concerns "the
slaying of a Florida family, a Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Walker, their
four-year-old son, and their two-year-old daughter." The report
of this "clueless and apparently motiveless" crime prompts Smith
to ask Hickock, "Where were we last Saturday night?" Hickock
replies with a question of his own: "Tallahassee?" (237). They
eventually agree on "Tallahassee," and Smith conjectures that
a copycat "lunatic" (238) murdered the Walkersbut Smith's
initial question and the ruminations that follow also carry the
"Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of In Gold Blood " PLL 53
ominous ring of a concocted alibi. That Capote, whose prescience
responded to the strategic tensions between Hickock and Smith,
intended this reverberation is more than likely.
Under Capote's handling, the specific case of Hickock and
Smith reveals two of the limited number of structuring principles,
rules of transformation, and unif)dng codesthe Prisoner's
Dilemma and Chickenthat sociobiological structuralists in-
cluding Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, andjohn Maynard
Smith 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 theory
reveals the infrastructure of the documentary novel, thereby
conforming to Joseph Carroll's exhortation that sociobiology
become consilient with "the interaction of instinctive biases and
general intelligence" (84).
Capote's prescience, or "privileged cognition" (25) to use
Foley's phrase, allows him to unearth certain aspects of behavior
that rest on this fundamental framework, but within a literary
rather than a mathematical discourse. Poststructuralists might
object that game-theoretic visualizations offer just another
set 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 philosophy
is pervaded by abstract and ahistorical oppositions that, in the
guise of reflecting transcendent essences, naturalize dominant
ideology," she states, "I would not therefore conclude that all
inherited cognitive oppositions are equally ideological and
equally fallacious" (35). In line with this perspective, Peter Swir-
ski posits "two visions of the world and inquiry": the first "is a
moderately realistic belief in understanding mind-independent
reality, one empirical step at a time," while "the other is a form of
constructivism that argues for a plurality of community-relative
interpretative programs" (151). Swirski encourages the former
view, which confirms the importance of game theory as a literary
hermeneutic, and discourages the latter perspective.
54 PLL Michael Wainwright
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 a
hermeneutic toward this nonfiction novel being a measure of
Capote's discursive maturity. At one level. In Cold Blood reflects
the contingencies of its historical situation. At another level. In
Cold Blood acknowledges that, whether owing to biological or
biosocial evolution, binary constructs have always structured
human thought; and game theory, as Carroll acknowledges, is
one of the "major advances in providing a map of elemental
human motives rooted in our evolutionary history" (84). The
nonfiction novel, the third branch of the third phase of docu-
mentary fiction as initiated by In Cold Blood, at once recognizes
the possibilities of specific eventsthe historical governance
of international and interpersonal eventsand transcendence
over contingencythe binary constructs that have always shaped
cognition. That 1966 was a landmark year for game theory, with
the 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 sociopolitical
decision-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's
thesis suggests; indeed, all three branches of her third phase
have survived. The fictional autobiography has spawned, for
example, two works byj. G. Ballard. Empire of the Sun (1984) and
The Kindness of Women (1991) chart the development of young
Jim Ballard from a childhood defined by internment in Shanghai
during World War II to the mature artist who must negotiate
the impersonal lifestyle of postwar suburban London. The me-
tahistorical novel has produced, for instance, the Border Trilogy
by Cormac McCarthy. All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing
'"There are seventy-eight two-person two-choice scenarios in all.
"Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of In Cold Blood " PLL 55
(1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998) take as their major referent
the historical process that consigned the cowboy from a living
and working role in the American landscape to a simulacrum
of that figure as witnessed in film and television productions.
Concomitant with continued MADness, the nonfiction novel
survived the 1960s, with Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic fMau-Mauing
theElak 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 President
Ronald Reagan, however, the dilemma of matching American
nuclear 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 world
escaped nuclear annihilation. Whether documentary fiction
from the period approaching, including, and following the fall
of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 responded to this seismic
shift in international relations, whether the preeminent status of
binary rationality that dominated East-West politics during the
Cold War fell with the Iron Curtain, are intriguing questions.
A certain appellation, "narrative journalism," implies that
the crash of the Berlin Wall stilled the anxieties ushered in by
the atomic explosion of August 29,1949. The 1997 online serial
"Black Hawk Down" from Mark Bowden (journalist) and Peter
Tobia (photographer) of the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as the
associated book from 1999, were publicized under this neolo-
gism. Two years later. Harvard University launched the Nieman
Program on Narrative Journalism to provide a central resource
for the tuition and practice of the genre. Within another two
years, Kelly McEvers and Nathan Deuel founded Six Billion: An
Online Magazine of Narrative fournalism according to the agenda
that everybody in the world (roughly six billion people in all)
has a story to tell. Whether the product of narrative journalism
is synonymous with the nonfiction novel is a matter for further
speculation, but it is undoubtedly a form of documentaryfiction,
56 PLL Michael Wainwright
and that form owes a debt to Capote's subdivisional archetype.
Indeed, with the steady realization of Iranian nuclear ambitions
and Israeli determination to counter aggression from that quarter,
the coordination problems of refractory states are firmly back
on the agenda of international relations; as a corollary. Capote's
legacy in documentary fiction appears all the more significant.
WORKS CITED
Campbell, James. Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and Writers in the Dark.
Berkeley: U of California P, 2008. Print.
Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its
Consequences. 1966. New York: Modern Library, 1992. Print.
. Music for Chameleons. New York: Signet, 1980. Print.
. Truman Capote: Conversations. Ed. M. Thomas Inge. Jackson: UP of
Mississippi, 1987. Print.
Carroll, Joseph. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature.
New York: Roudedge, 2004. Print.
Cuddon, J. A. Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: An-
dr Deutsch, 1977. Print.
DeKoven, Marianne. Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Post-
modem. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004. Print.
Doctorow, E. L. Essays and Conversations. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review,
1983. Print.
Eield, Alexander J. Altruistically Inclined?: The Behavioral Sciences, Evolution-
ary Theory, and the Origins of Reciprocity. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P,
2004. Print.
Eoley, Barbara. Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Eic-
tion. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1986. Print.
Goldstein, Joshua S. "Chicken Dilemmas: Crossing the Road to Coopera-
tion." International Cooperation: The Extents and Limits of Multilateralism.
Ed. I. William Zartman and Saadia Touval. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2010. 135-60. Print.
Hanna, John. "Richard Hickock, Perry Smith, In Cold Blood Killers, Ex-
humed Erom Mount Muncie Cemetery." The Hufington Post 17 Eeb.
2013, I. Print.
Hanna, Robert. Rationality and Logic. Cambridge: MIT P, 2006.
Hawkes, Terence. Structuralism and Semiotics. Berkeley: U of California P,
1977. Print.
"Game-Theoretic Dilemmas of In Cold Blood" PLL 57
Heyne, Eric. "Toward a Theory of Literary Nonfiction." Modem Eiction
Studies?,?,.?, (1987): 479-90. Print.
Israel, Giorgio, and Ana Millan Gasea. The World as a Mathematical Game:
John von Neumann and Twentieth Century Science. Trans. Ian McGilvray.
Boston: Springer, 2009. Print.
Jankowski, Richard. "Punishment in Iterated Chicken and Prisoner's Di-
lemma Games." Rationality and Society 2.4 (1990): 449-70. Print.
Kennedy-Pipe, Caroline. Stalin's Cold War: Soviet Strategies in Europe, 1943 to
1956. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995. Print.
Leites, Nathan. The Operational Code of the Politburo. (Based on the Writings of
Lenin and Stalin). New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951. Print.
Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction. London: Penguin Books, 1992. Print.
MacRae, Norman. John von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the
Modem Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much Mare. Provi-
dence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 1999. Print.
McHale, Brian. "1966 Nervous Breakdown; or. When Did Postmodernism
Begin?" Modem Language Quarterly 69.3 (2008): 391-413. Print.
Morton, Jim. 'Juvenile Delinquency Films." Re/Search 10 (1986): 143-45.
Print.
Morton, John Fass. Backstory in Blue: Ellington at Newport '56. Piscataway, NJ:
Rutgers UP, 2008. Print.
Nashe, Thomas. The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works. 1594. Ed.J. B.
Steane. London: Penguin, 1985. Print.
O'Neill, Barry. "Game Theory Models of Peace and War." Handbook of
Game Theory with Economic Applications. Vol. 2. Ed. Robert J. Aumann.
Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1994. 995-1053. Print.
: Honor, Symbols, and War. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 2001. Print.
Plimpton, George. Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Ac-
quaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. London: Picador,
1998. Print.
Poundstone, William. Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory,
and the Puzzle of the Bomb. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print.
RAND Corporation. "Fourth Annual Report." Santa Monica, CA: RAND
Corporation, 1950. Print.
Rapoport, Anatol, and Melvin Guyer. "A Taxonomy of 2 x 2 Games." Gen-
eral Systems 11 (1966): 203-14. Print.
Russell, Bertrand. Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare. 1959. London: Rout-
ledge, 2001. Print.
Russell, John. Reciprocities in the Norfiction Novel. Athens: U of Georgia P,
2000. Print.
58 PLL Michael Wainwright
Snyder, Glenn H., and Paul Diesing. Corfiict Among Nations: Bargaining,
Decision Making and System Structure in International Crises. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1977. Print.
Stahl, Saul. A Gentle Introduction to Game Theory. Providence, RI: American
Mathematical Society, 1999. Print.
Swirski, Peter. Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought
Experiments, Evolution and Gaw Theory. London: Routledge, 2007.
Print.
Tompkins, Phillip K "In Cold Fact." Truman Capote's In Cold Blood: A
Critical Handbook. Ed. Irving Malin. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1968.
44-58. Print.
Watzlawick, Paul. How Real is Real?: Confusion, Disinformation, Communica-
tion. London: Souvenir, 1983. Print.
Willis, Jim. 100 Media Moments that Changed America. Santa Barbara, CA:
Greenwood, 2010. Print.