[In the following essay, Aldridge provides a stylistic analysis of Capote's short fiction, contending that the characters in Other Voices, Other Rooms function as metaphors of one another.]

On the face of it, Truman Capote would seem to be just about the most promising new writer we have in America today. Not only is he the most precocious of the group of younger novelists whose first books began attracting attention right after the war, but he has already displayed an idiosyncrasy of vision and temperament which has ended, literarily, in the creation of a world unmistakably his own and, publicly, in the creation of a mythical personality of considerable charm and color. When compared with his contemporaries, Capote at once seems remarkable for his rigid adherence to his personal bias, his refusal merely to be in style. In fact, if one can set aside Jean Stafford, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and Mary McCarthy as belonging to an older literary group and Shirley Jackson and Howard Nemerov as existing somewhat apart from the group that came out of the war, it is possible to say that Capote is the only writer of the new war generation who has remained clear of the journalistic tradition and explored a genre that does not depend simply on the reportage of social manners or of events of strictly topical interest.

Having said this much, I hope I shall not seem to be taking it back if I direct attention to certain elements in Capote's work which, while they may well be attributable to the accident of his precocity, do not seem to promise for him the kind of growth beyond precocity which up to now we may have had reason to expect of him. I think first of what seems to me most distinctive of all that he has written—its quality of isolation. I do not mean the sort we ordinarily associate with Joyce, laboring in Paris to reconstruct his youth in Dublin, or even with Proust, laboring in his cork-lined chambers to reconstruct a past for himself that would justify the death with which he was about to climax it. For both these men isolation was a necessary phase of the creative act. It enabled them to retreat momentarily from the literal business of life so that they could get down to the imaginative business of reentering life through art. The important thing was that they were performing a task of synthesis and interpretation. They had always before them the image of life as they had lived it; in isolation and through a kind of suffering we cannot hope to understand they elevated that image to the highest level of artistic creation.

In Capote one feels not that life has been lived and then laboriously achieved but that life has somehow been missed. Capote's world seems to be a concoction rather than a synthesis. It has a curious easiness about it, as if it had cost nothing to make, as if, really, the parts had all been made separately at some anonymous factory and might have been put together by just anyone. Its purity is not the purity of experience forced under pressure into shape, of painstaking selection and rejection amid a thousand possibilities. Rather, it is the sort that seemingly can be attained only in the isolation of a mind which life has never really violated, in which the image of art has developed to a flowerlike perfection because it has developed alone.

II

This quality is revealed in the failure of Capote's work to achieve true symbolic realization, a failure which is evident throughout his novel Other Voices, Other Rooms and the stories in his collection A Tree of Night, but which in the latter, because they are stories, takes a somewhat different form than it does in the novel. One can say of the figures in the novel that, if they are not, in the true sense, symbols, they are at least metaphorically related to one another and that, within the limits of this relationship, they illuminate one another. But one can also say that, for such illumination to occur, figures of this sort must share a common context in which they may actively carry out their relations and, through a process of mutual enhancement, become part of a single structure of meaning. When they are transplanted to a series of short stories, each of which represents a distinct and separate context, they, therefore, must necessarily lose their metaphorical function and become, at best, merely images and, at worst, merely ghostly abstractions.

In such a story as “Master Misery,” for example, we encounter in the figure of the sadistic buyer-of-dreams the familiar devil-god of Capote's world. Like Randolph, in the novel, he is intended to represent a sort of power of universal evil to which the will-less individual is hypnotically compelled to give his soul, as Joel is compelled to give up his manhood. We cannot say that either he or Randolph properly symbolizes such a power. But Randolph's plausibility as at least a manifestation of this power is enhanced by the metaphorical support which Idabel, Miss Amy, and Mr. Sansom, as well as the whole haunted world of the Landing itself, are able to give him. At every stage in the development of the narrative, their accumulated meaning serves to fortify his and, finally, to give it a context from which it can never be disengaged for analysis. Master Misery, on the other hand, is eternally isolated by the form in which he is presented. Outside the novel context, with its multiplicity of characters and its thick fabric of interacting themes, he is deprived of metaphorical support and revealed as merely the inert projection of a horror whose namelessness is all too analysable.

The same is true of the terrible little girl named Miriam. She is another stock Capote type—the witch-child whose behavior is horrifying because it has behind it both the innocence of the very young and the awful cunning of a brilliant demented adult. Thousands of readers have been enchanted by Miriam as well as by her prototypes Miss Bobbit in “Children on Their Birthdays,” Appleseed in “Jug of Silver,” and D.J. in “The Headless Hawk.” They have derived such a delicious sensation of evil from her that they have willingly mistaken it for the precise schematization of evil which she is intended, but clearly fails, to become. A soberer reading discloses no evidence to indicate that she is anything more than the momentary aberration of a lonely old woman.

It is interesting to see to what a large extent the power of Capote's stories depends upon the clever use of supernatural and aberrational devices and how quickly that power is dissipated as soon as one becomes conscious of them as devices. In the title story of the collection, for example, a college girl, returning to school by train, finds herself sharing a coach seat with a pair of carnival performers. The woman is a hard-drinking, crazy-eyed witch; and the man is a professional zombie and hypnotist who lives in a perpetual trance. As the story progresses, the woman plies the girl with cheap gin and fantastic stories of carnival life; while the man, with appropriately obscene gestures, keeps holding out to her a love charm in the form of a shellacked peach seed. Finally, although she struggles frantically to escape, the girl succumbs to the evil spell which the couple have cast upon her and, as the story ends, looks helplessly on while they take away her purse and pull her raincoat “like a shroud above her head.”

Here the devices are used to give shock value to material which is without inherent dramatic or symbolic value. We know nothing about the girl beyond the fact that she becomes the victim of some hallucinatory intrigue; and we know nothing about the perpetrators of the intrigue beyond the fact that they are grotesque. But to have the sort of visceral reaction to the story which we are compelled to have if we are to have any reaction at all, these two facts are all we need to know. The girl's plight becomes a substitute for a fully motivated, truly meaningful experience; and the grotesqueness of the couple becomes a substitute for an incisive portrayal of a truly meaningful criminality.

III

The theme of Other Voices, Other Rooms is a boy's search for a father; but it is not Telemachus's search for Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus's for Bloom, or even Eugene Gant's for W.O. It is literally and permanently Joel Knox' search for one Edward R. Sansom or, as it turns out, for some suitable substitute. If we are prepared to accept this fact at all, then we shall be prepared to accept the novel for what it is and for all that it is and not for what we should like it on every page to become. For there can be no doubt that, viewed within these limits, the novel comes alive with metaphorical suggestiveness; and it is possible to appreciate the skill with which Capote has expanded his theme through metaphor rather than through symbol into a complex pattern of psychological and moral action.

Joel's search for Edward Sansom, the blood-father whom he has never seen, is a parallelism of his struggle to grow out of the dream-world of childhood and to enter the real world of manhood. His discovery of Sansom, lying paralysed in the center of the paralysis of Scully's Landing, and his subsequent rejection of Sansom as unreal, as literally not existing, is a parallelism of his rejection of the real state of manhood and prepares the way for his acceptance of Cousin Randolph as a homosexual father-substitute. Randolph, with his nightmare history, his obsession with dolls and dead bluejays, and his female impersonations, is as unreal as the fantastic creations of Joel's dream-world—Mr. Mystery and Annie Rose Kuppermann. But once he has rejected his true father as unreal, Joel is left with no alternative but to accept Randolph, and through him homosexuality, as real.

The novel is divided into three parts, each part corresponding to a crucial phase in Joel's development toward the moment of this acceptance. Part I has to do with his arrival at the Landing and his efforts to escape its influence; Part II with the gradual reduction of his power to escape; and Part III with his surrender to Randolph. In each part the change being effected in Joel is demonstrated in terms of concrete events; and all the parts are tied together with key metaphors that define the various shifts in theme and setting. Thus, when in Part I Joel takes leave of the real world, represented by the garishness of Noon City, and enters the unreal world of the Landing, the transition is shown to be from daylight to darkness, with Joel falling asleep in the back of Jesus Fever's wagon and entering the house as if in a dream. Then in Part III, after Joel has tried and failed to escape, the process is reversed; he loses his sense of the unreality of the Landing while lying in a coma; and when he awakens he discovers that the unreal has become the real. The transition this time is from darkness (the night of the Carnival episode) to daylight (morning in the sick room several weeks later).

The bluejay which Miss Amy kills in Joel's room on the morning after his arrival functions in much the same way. As it flutters against the window in an effort to escape, it becomes a metaphor of Joel struggling to shake off the influence of the Landing. And by the time it reappears, at the end of Part II, as merely a lifelike arrangement of feathers on Randolph's worksheet, Joel has arrived at a point where he is no longer capable of escape. Like the bird he has been changed from a living thing with a free existence in a real world into a dead prisoner in an unreal world.

A similar device is the old bell that lies in the garden outside the house. At the end of Chapter II Joel catches his first glimpse of Randolph standing at an upstairs window in his disguise of the beautiful lady. In his astonishment Joel staggers back against the bell; and it emits “one raucous cracked note” as if in derision at what is taking place. Then at the end of the book while Joel is waiting in the same spot in the garden, he sees the figure of the lady once again, knows it for what it is, and responds to its beckoning. This time there is “a sound as if a bell had suddenly tolled, and the shape of loneliness, greenly iridescent, whitely indefinite, seemed to rise from the garden. …” Now the sound of the bell is imagined; but it seems loud and serious, as if it were tolling the news of a victory; for Joel has finally put the real world and his hope of manhood behind him and accepted the comfort and love of Randolph.

The events of the narrative naturally form a literal record of all that happens to Joel. Yet most of them function at the same time as figuratively as these other devices. In fact, so thoroughly is the material of the novel suffused with thematic meaning that it becomes impossible, and probably pointless, to separate figure from event. In Part I, Joel's struggle to escape the Landing is centered in three events, each of which has a figurative significance.

The first occurs during Jesus Fever's Sunday service shortly after Joel's arrival at the Landing. As the excitement of the ceremony reaches a climax, Zoo, who has been dancing, discards the red ribbon she wears around her throat and reveals the scar left by Keg Brown's razor.

It was as though a brutal hawk had soared down and clawed away Joel's eyelids, forcing him to gape at her throat. Zoo. Maybe she was like him, and the world had a grudge against her too. But christamighty he didn't want to end up with a scar like that. … He leaped off the stump, and made for the house, his loosened shirttail flying behind; run, run, run, his heart told him, and wham! he'd pitched headlong into a briar patch. …

Joel's identification of himself with Zoo is important for two reasons: he sees in her an intimation of what is to happen to him if he remains at the Landing (they are both destined to be its victims), and because of his fright at seeing the physical evidence of her suffering he is rendered less capable than he might have been of taking action to free himself.

The second incident occurs on the evening of the same day as Joel is questioning Randolph and Miss Amy about the ghostly lady he has seen at the window. Miss Amy, knowing of Randolph's penchant for this particular disguise, is on the verge of giving away the secret when Randolph kicks her under the table. The effect on the neurotic woman is instantaneous and, to Joel, terrifying:

… she jerked back as though lightning had rocked the chair and, shielding her eyes with the gloved hand, let out a pitiful wail: ‘Snake a snake I thought it was a snake bit me crawled under the table bit me foot you fool never forgive bit me my heart a snake!’ repeated over and over the words began to rhyme, to hum from wall to wall where giant moth shadows jittered. …

Joel went all hollow inside, he thought he was going to wee wee right there in his breeches, and he wanted to hop up and run, just as he had at Jesus Fever's. Only he couldn't run, not this time. …

After the nightmare events of the day Joel is too paralysed to move. Already he has begun to slip into that state of passive receptivity which is later to send him to Randolph; although at this point he is still able to distinguish between the real and the outlandish.

The third incident is a logical development of the first two: as they have paralysed Joel emotionally, so this one makes it clear that he is paralysed physically. He has written letters to his Aunt Ellen expressing his hatred of the Landing and asking her to help him get away. He has put the letters in the mailbox and then gone to visit Idabel and her sister. Upon his return he stops at the box and discovers that the letters are gone. The postman has not taken them because the postage money is lying in the dust under the box. Joel realizes for the first time that he is being kept a prisoner at the Landing and has been cut off from all contact with the real world outside. As he starts back to the house, he hears the sound of gunfire as someone shoots at the chicken hawks circling overhead. Like the bluejay and himself, they are free beings who must be drawn down into the paralysis of the Landing and destroyed. They are also, like his letters, potential agents of interference which constitute a threat to the security of those who depend on the imprisonment of others.

In Part II the emphasis shifts from Joel's struggle to preserve himself from the Landing to his struggle to preserve his masculinity. Interestingly enough, although it is in this section that his masculinity becomes identified with the idea of his father and its loss with his rejection of his father, Joel's conflict is really with the tomboy Idabel. With an evil innocence comparable to that of Henry James's terrible children, she begins to undermine the confidence on which Joel's manhood rests some time before he brings himself to commit the act of paternal denial that is to release him to Randolph.

The process begins shortly after Joel has seen his father for the first time and realized that the hopelessly paralysed invalid can be of no help to him. As if to erase the shock of the encounter from his mind, he goes with Idabel to fish and swim in the creek. There, as they lie in self-conscious nakedness on the bank, Idabel confesses her loneliness; and Joel suddenly sees that her tough exterior is merely a defense and that beneath it she is really very much like himself. Overcome with tenderness for her, he kisses her on the cheek. Instead of responding to his mood, Idabel reverts at once to her old self, grabs him by the hair, and throws him on the ground. As they struggle together, he falls back on her dark glasses and crushes them. At this Idabel's anger quickly subsides; and when she speaks again, it is as if nothing had happened. “And, indefinably, it was as if nothing had; neither of course would ever be able to explain why they had fought.”

The reason is obvious, however, if we relate the incident to all that has led up to it. Idabel has fought to regain the defenses which she let down in her moment of confession and which she must have if she is to dominate her environment and survive within it. Joel has fought to regain his masculine position which was threatened, first, by Randolph, second, by the paralysis of his father, and now by Idabel. The breaking of the glasses ends the struggle for Idabel because the glasses have been an essential part of her defenses—“everything looks a lot prettier” through them—and she is temporarily lost without them. It ends the struggle for Joel not only because the broken bits of glass have cut him but because he realizes that, by having caused the breakage, he has somehow seriously wronged Idabel and, by having fought with her, has somehow defeated himself.

A similar incident occurs a short time later. Joel is reading to his father when he hears Idabel whistle for him to come outside. Although he is supposed to go on reading, he has become so convinced of his father's unreality—“Certainly this Mr. Sansom was not his father. This Mr. Sansom was nobody but a pair of crazy eyes.”—that he leaves him and, stopping just long enough to buckle on the sword Zoo has given him, hurries down to Idabel. Perhaps because she has lost her glasses, Idabel seems oddly feminine—“all the rough spirit seemed to have drained from her voice. Joel felt stronger than she, and sure of himself as he'd never been with the other Idabel, the tomboy.” With her defenses gone, she has lost her dominion over her environment: at home she has had trouble with her sister Florabel; and her father has threatened to shoot her dog Henry because “Florabel … says Henry's got a mortal disease. …” As they walk toward the creek, she proposes that they run away; and Joel is struck once again by the change in her—“if it had been anyone but Idabel, Joel would've thought she was making up to him.” For the first time their relationship seems almost normal; and Joel has a sense of masculine power he has not had since just before their fight on the creek bank. But it is to last only for a moment. As they start across the creek on an old board with Joel leading the way, they suddenly see directly in front of them a huge snake lying coiled and ready to strike. Once again Joel is too paralysed to move. He stands there wavering, holding his sword helplessly in his hand, the imagined sting of the snake's bite already hot on his body. But Idabel acts. She pulls the sword out of his hand, swings it, and “the cottonmouth slapped into the air, turned, plunged, flattened on the water: belly up, white and twisted, it was carried by the current like a torn lily root.”

The scene is important for several reasons. It is, first of all, another instance of humiliation for Joel. Secondly, it makes explicit the identification of his manhood with his father: the snake's eyes are like Mr. Sansom's; and it is because of this that Joe is so frightened, for the eyes remind him of his sin. He has deserted his father to come with Idabel; and he has gradually come to deny the existence of his father as his attraction toward Randolph has grown stronger. Thirdly, there is the metaphorical use of the sword and snake images. Because of his failure to use the sword, Joel has disgraced not only his own manhood but that of his ancestor, the original owner of the sword. And because Idabel has killed the snake in the midst of his fear, she has figuratively killed his manhood, his father, and, as is later evident, all maleness in her world.

Viewed in these terms the climaxing scene of the novel—the Carnival episode and the encounter with Miss Wisteria—can be taken as a dramatic presentation of the sexual paralysis Idabel has induced in Joel. The Carnival itself, with its whirling ferris-wheel lights and bursting rockets, is a nightmare catalyst that destroys Joel's sense of reality and prepares him to accept as real the world of the Landing and Randolph; while the midget Miss Wisteria is the embodiment of female temptation, Joel's last chance to find reality in a normal sex relationship. Significantly, it is his vision of Randolph standing beneath the ferris-wheel that prevents Joel from responding to Miss Wisteria's advances; just as it is the violent rainstorm coming a moment later that separates him from Idabel and prevents their escape.

In the deserted house in which he has sought shelter from the storm, Joel has a brief insight into his predicament. It is not Randolph alone that he fears, he tells himself, but Randolph in the person of “a messenger for a pair of telescopic eyes.” Once again it seems to Joel that the eyes of his father are everywhere, accusing him of shameful desertion and even, perhaps, of patricide. But what he does not realize is that his fear of Randolph as a “messenger” and his sense of having, at least mentally, destroyed his father are one and the same thing. The very fact that it was the image of Randolph and not the image of his father who came to him is evidence that Randolph has won out over his father in the struggle for Joel's love. And because Randolph has won, because Joel has chosen him to win, he must appear as a messenger of his father's anger; for his appearance is made possible only after the father has been forsaken.

And now that he has finally accepted Randolph, Joel finds it impossible to respond to the pathetic entreaties of Miss Wisteria as she searches for him through the rooms of the empty house.

… he dared not show himself, for what she wanted he could not give: his love was in the earth, shattered and still, dried flowers where eyes should be, and moss upon the lips, his love was faraway feeding on the rain, lilies frothing from its ruin.

To Joel the door leading to the real world, to manhood and the love of woman, is closed forever. He has been arrested in childhood, led back into the secret “other rooms” of the Landing, where the unreality of dream-life and the reality of life lived in a dream merge and become indistinguishable.

The awakening of Joel from a coma induced by the Carnival experience opens Part III and prepares us for two discoveries that have ironic bearing on his development through the preceding episodes. The first is that Zoo, the daughter of the ancient Negro Jesus Fever, who had left the Landing right after her father's death to find a new life in Washington, D.C., has returned during Joel's illness. When he sees her again, he hardly recognizes her for the gay and optimistic person who was kind to him when he first came to the Landing.

How small she seemed, cramped, as if some reduction of the spirit had taken double toll and made demands upon the flesh; with that illusion of height was gone the animal grace, arrow-like dignity, defiant emblem of her separate heart.

Zoo, during her brief excursion into the outside world, has had an experience as destructive and humiliating as Joel's with Idabel and Randolph. On her way to Washington she was stopped on the road by several men and brutally raped. Like Joel, she has been crucified at the very moment of salvation; and all the hope and illusion that sustained her while she waited for her father to die has been crushed out of her. Now she too has come back to the Landing and accepted its paralysis as the only possibility left to her.

The second discovery is that Idabel has succeeded in escaping to freedom. In a postcard to Joel she says:

Mrs. Collie [frac12] sister and hes the baptis prechur Last Sunday I past the plate at church! papa and F shot henry They put me to life here. why did you Hide? write to IDABEL THOMPKINS.

But Joel doesn't believe her: “she'd put herself to life, and it was with Miss Wisteria, not a baptis prechur.” This, then, is the supreme irony. Like Joel and Zoo, Idabel has fought for freedom; but even though she, alone of them all, has actually found it, she has allowed herself to become imprisoned in a relationship with Miss Wisteria that is as unnatural as that between Joel and Randolph. Joel in his search for manhood has become pervertedly feminine; Idabel in her search for a dominant womanhood has become pervertedly masculine; and Zoo in her search for the normal love of men has been pervertedly violated by them.

The really important event in Part III, however, is Joel's and Randolph's trip to Cloud Hotel, the home of the hermit Little Sunshine. The hotel, with its fantastic, haunted history and picturesque decay, is a microcosm of the entire world of the Landing. Like Randolph's house, which is slowly sinking into the earth, it represents the way of life to which all the characters, either willingly or unwillingly, are committed. Randolph, Miss Amy, Mr. Sansom, Jesus Fever, and Little Sunshine have nearly always belonged. Years before they turned away from the real world of the present and found refuge in the phantasmal world of the past—Randolph in his lost love for Pepe Alvarez, Miss Amy in the baroque manners of a dead culture, Mr. Sansom in the literal cessation of time that accompanies paralysis, Jesus Fever and Little Sunshine in misty memories of their years of aristocratic service. Joel, Idabel, and Zoo have all learned or been forced to belong. The Landing has conquered them as decay has conquered the hotel. It has even turned their struggles for freedom to its own advantage, so that they have not only been imprisoned but maimed in the process.

And as Joel follows Randolph and Little Sunshine through the hotel, seeing the crumbling furniture—“Swan stairs soft with mildewed carpet curved upward from the hotel's lobby; the diabolic tongue of a cuckoo bird, protruding out of a wall-clock, mutely proclaiming an hour forty years before, and on the room clerk's splintery desk stood dehydrated specimens of potted palm.”—imagining the scenes of long ago when the huge old rooms were alive with “the humming heel-clatter of girls, the bored snores of fat fathers … the lilt of fans tapped in tune, and the murmur of gloved hands as the musicians, like bridegrooms in their angel-cake costumes, rise to take a bow,” it seems to him that the moment which all his experience at the Landing has prepared him for has finally arrived.

… all day, after the weeks in bed, it had been as if he were bucking a whirlpool, and now lullabyed to the bone with drowsy warmth, he let go, let the rivering fire sweep him over its fall. …

The last of his resistance has now slipped away; the struggle for freedom has ended; and the Landing and the hotel have become the world, all the world there will ever be. And when, after they return to the Landing, Randolph appears once again at his window in the disguise of the beautiful lady, Joel is waiting to respond to his beckoning:

She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go; unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden's edge where, as though he'd forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind.

IV

I suggested earlier that Capote's achievement, for all its brilliance, is an achievement in the skilled use of metaphor rather than symbol; and I implied that such an achievement is necessarily of smaller scope than, for instance, Conrad's in Victory. It seems to me that we have a right to ask of a novel that it stand in some meaningful relation to recognizable life; we have a right, that is, to ask that the characters resemble or in some way illuminate human beings and that their situation in some way connote or enlarge upon the human situation. It is, of course, true that Capote's novel is, by its very nature, the product of the disappearance of those common assumptions of value by which writers have traditionally been able to get such illumination into their books. It is no longer possible for a writer to take it for granted that his audience will share his view of life or even that his audience will comprehend his view of life. But it was beginning to be no longer possible when Conrad wrote Victory, Joyce wrote Ulysses, and Forster wrote A Passage to India. Yet these men were able to infuse their novels with a significance that persistently transcended the specific characters and situations about which they wrote. We read Victory and we read a chapter from the moral history of modern man; we read Ulysses and we read an ironic satire on the petty heroism of modern man; we read A Passage to India and we read a tragedy on the evil that is in all men; and we are reading, at the same time, the stories of Axel Heyst, Leopold Bloom, and Dr. Aziz. It was not black magic that enabled these writers to get such meaning into their books. It was the highly organized use of symbolism upon material specifically created to be symbolically suggestive. And it is the absence of such material in Other Voices, Other Rooms that renders it simply the metaphorically reinforced story of Joel Knox.

We cannot say that Conrad, Joyce, and Forster were appreciably nearer to value than Capote is; but we can say that they were infinitely nearer to life, and that, being nearer, they were able to make full use of all the equipment they could muster to give it meaning. All of them had to create a private world just as Capote has had to do; but they took great pains to see that it did not remain private, even if, to make sure, they had to go back in time to ancient Greece or as far from contemporary London and Paris as Chandrapore and Samburan. Their achievement, founded on the deepest insight into life and thus fortified by myth and distance, communicated insight into life and took on the universality of myth; while Capote's achievement, founded on a technical skill largely divorced from insight, communicates no insight beyond that which it affords into its own parts.

The difference between the two is essentially the difference between symbol and metaphor. A symbol ordinarily refers to a thing, a person, or, most often, an idea that exists in a context other than its own, as do the symbols in Victory. A character in a novel may symbolize mankind, evil, sin, or death; but he may not symbolize another character in the same novel. He may, however, serve as a metaphor of another character, and through ironic juxtaposition or contrast, enrich or enliven that character as he in turn is enriched and enlivened. A metaphor, this is to say, functions only within a given context; its meaning spreads horizontally through the area in which it is created, not vertically above or beneath it; and it remains in action as a live agent of meaning only so long as the material of which it is a part is in the process of carrying out and completing the idea or theme which originally set it in motion. Once the immediate requirements of the narrative have been satisfied, it ceases to function. A symbol, on the other hand, only begins to fulfill its true function after the action has ceased. It begins, then, to build outward and downward toward all those varieties of meaning which the action in its passage has suggested.

As I have attempted to make clear in my analysis, the characters in Other Voices, Other Rooms repeatedly function as metaphors of one another. Idabel, Zoo, and Miss Wisteria are metaphors of Joel; Jesus Fever and Little Sunshine of Randolph and Miss Amy; Jesus Fever and Idabel's father of Mr. Sansom; and, of course, in each case the relationship is reciprocal, so that the metaphor and the person metaphorized are mutually enhanced. The various other devices such as the bluejay, the hawks, the snake, the hanged mule, and Cloud Hotel are also metaphors. The first four are like Joel: they demonstrate his predicament. Cloud Hotel is like the Landing and the people of the Landing: it is a physical representation of the decayed past to which Randolph, Miss Amy, and the others are dedicated.

But even though, taken together, the characters and the devices produce a world, they do not produce a world of external significance. They belong to the special illusion Capote has created; outside it, they do nothing and are nothing. If we refuse to accept them on these terms, if for a moment we shake off the dream and open our eyes, then the spell is broken and the real world rushes in upon us. The real world should, by rights, be part of the illusion; but it is not and cannot be. The tennis balls, the beautiful lady, the hanged mule, the bluejay, the dwarfed Miss Wisteria, the neurotic Idabel are the phantasmal contents of the nightmare in which, for a little while, we allow ourselves to be lost. But having once awakened and looked about us, we see that, really, for all its intensity and horror, the thing was never there at all.

Capote is, of course, by no means alone in his use of this kind of deception. Shirley Jackson in a great many of the stories in The Lottery and Paul Bowles in his novel The Sheltering Sky repeatedly resort to it. It is simply one method of making fiction possible in a time when writers are finding it increasingly hard to give dramatic and symbolic importance to human behavior in social and moral terms. Miss Jackson's daemon lover James Harris is undoubtedly a compensation for the lack of a suitable means of making mere earthly love presentable; and certainly the bizarre violence of Mr. Bowles's Africa serves in the novel to replace the motivation which Bowles could not find in Kit and Port Moresby. By presenting characters in the grip of some supernatural spell, one is able to suggest that the motives behind their behavior are unknowable, irrational, and, hence, irrelevant; and by presenting them in the grip of violence, one is able to divert the reader's attention from the inadequacy of their motives to the shocking circumstances which surround them.

But Capote cannot be absolved of blame simply because he shares it with his time and some of his contemporaries. The truth is that his great dependency on these devices is indicative of one of his gravest limitations as an artist. He is capable of evoking a world of mystery and fantasy and of endowing it with grotesque creations of true imaginative splendor. But he has so far shown himself incapable of endowing it with the kind of significance which one expects to find in literature of the first order.