[In the following essay, Mengeling discusses the Oedipal theme in Other Voices, Other Rooms.]

Truman Capote's first and most widely acclaimed novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) germinated in a mind deeply concerned with the power of darkness. Heaped with dreadful psychologies and nightmare terrors, it comes near to resembling a Gothic romance, stylistically nocturnal in the best tradition. It is a complicated work of many motifs, themes and sub-themes, a work which in the fourteen years since its publication has fallen victim to a variety of critical interpretations best described as tenuous.

John Aldridge was the first critic of Other Voices to exploit the theme of a boy's search for a father. Aldridge also utilizes, and within limits he is correct, the parallel sub-theme of a boy's “struggle to grow out of the dreamworld of childhood and to enter the real world of manhood.”¹ More recently, Ihab Hassan has exhumed and labeled the Narcissus theme as being the “central” and “unifying impulse,” not only of Other Voices, Other Rooms, but of the whole of Capote, literary and personal. Undoubtedly Hassan has dug closest to the primal root of meaning in his detailed elaboration of Joel Harrison Knox's search for “an image which reflects darkly his own identity, his reality.”² But even Hassan's interpretation is not complete focus. For Hassan, like Aldridge before him, has (with typical critical impatience) clutched a handy sub-theme,³ has sincerely though mistakenly labeled it the primary theme, and been consequently led into formulating an off-center value judgment concerning the work as a whole.

It is not the intention of this writer to exercise a literary judgment in connection with Other Voices, Other Rooms. For the present he will gladly leave this labor to those critics with preconceived literary systems. He does wish, however, to exactly establish the propelling and predominant theme of this novel. For a correct understanding of theme must always precede a correct value judgment, and it is just this understanding that has eluded such Capote critics as John Aldridge and Ihab Hassan.

The primary theme of Other Voices, Other Rooms is oedipal in nature. Because this is so it would be unduly difficult, if not impossible, to establish the validity of its presence without briefly touching at times upon certain Freudian theories and terms. However, it must be emphasized that the esthetic use of such a theme need not necessitate any knowledge of Freud or Freudian theory on the part of Capote, who has said in the Paris Review: “All I want to do is to tell a story and sometimes it is best to choose a symbol. I would not know a Freudian symbol as such if you put it to me.”⁴ Instead, let it be sufficient to say that Truman Capote, in writing Other Voices, Other Rooms, has been consciously or unconsciously interested in the aesthetic possibilities of an archetypal process,⁵ and that he has exploited them in one defective way or another depending upon his dramatic purpose.

When the narrative opens Joel Harrison Knox is at the age of puberty, a time, as Freud explains, when the importance of the Oedipus complex has by no means vanished. It is at this time that the sexual instinct asserts its demands with all the strength and intensity of adolescent lust, and the parents, original objects of sexual desire, once more become the love objects of the libido. But to become a loved and loving member of a normal adult society the child must now free himself from his parents (which they help him to do) and discover a foreign object to love, one more sexually acceptable to the developing super-ego. The child must, of course, release his sexual desires from the mother. Seemingly, this break was forced upon Joel at the age of twelve when his mother died of pneumonia. Joel consequently seeks reconciliation and identification with a father he has never seen chiefly in hopes of satisfying the demands of his growing super-ego for guidance. His father, whom in absence Joel has imaginatively deified,⁶ he optimistically anticipates will give him the love, guidance, and understanding that had been taken from him with his mother's death. Now it must be the father, Edward Sansom, that guides Joel from the dreamworld of childhood to the adult world of reality.⁷

But Joel's conscious efforts to grow will prove abortive, for he has, in fact, not alienated his ego from the dominance of the dead mother. Instead, he has unconsciously compensated for her loss by establishing a somewhat spurious identification with her.

Because his mother died of pneumonia in a cold, wet, New Orleans January, Joel gradually comes to project her image into the figure of a fairy tale personality, the Snow Queen.⁸ Joel first hears the fairy tale “The Snow Queen” shortly after his mother's death but preceding his journey to Skully's Landing, the place where he is to meet his father:

Listening to it, it came to Joel that he had a lot in common with Little Kay, whose outlook was twisted when a splinter from the Sprite's evil mirror infected his eye, changing his heart into a lump of bitter ice: suppose, he thought, hearing Ellen's gentle voice and watching the firelight warm his cousin's faces, suppose, like Little Kay, he also were spirited off to the Snow Queen's frozen palace? What living soul would then brave robber barons for his rescue? And there was no one, really no one.⁹

Here, in effect, is what later proves to be a justifiable foreboding. For Joel is about to embark upon his own personal journey to the palace of a Snow Queen, there to be entombed in a frozen state of oedipal fixation, and no one, not even his father,¹⁰ will “brave robber barons” to effect his rescue. When, for instance, towards the end of the novel Joel dreams of the Cloud Hotel, a decaying manse equivalent in concept to the ice-palace of the Snow Queen, he decides that this “was the place folks came when they went off the face of the earth, when they died but were not dead.” And as he dreams of walking through its deserted and dust-filled rooms he realizes that “even here” there is “no father” to claim him.

In journeying to meet his father Joel moves away from society (Paradise Chapel) towards isolation and fixation (Skully's Landing, or as the Noon City folk call it, The “Skulls”).¹¹ As he rides through the desolate and lonesome countryside, where “there are luminous green logs that shine under the dark marsh water like drowned corpses,” certain “sickening memories” slide through his mind:

Of these, one in particular stood out: he was at a grocery counter, his mother waiting next him, and outside in the street January rain was making icicles on the naked tree limbs. Together they left the store and walked silently along the wet pavement, he holding a calico umbrella above his mother, who carried a sack of tangerines. They passed a house where a piano was playing, and the music sounded sad in the gray afternoon, but his mother remarked what a pretty song. And when they reached home she was humming it, but she felt cold and went to bed, and the doctor came, and for over a month he came every day, but she was always cold, and Aunt Ellen was there, always smiling, and the doctor, always smiling, and the uneaten tangerines shriveled up in the icebox; and when it was over he went with Ellen to live in a dingy two-family house near Pontchartrain.

And even though he considers being sent for by Edward Sansom a “Godlike action” and a “wonderful piece of luck,” he feels “dizzy with heat and loss and despair,” not being able to keep back his tears when letting his “attention turn inward,” as he does in thinking of the dead mother. Joel is approaching the point where it will be beyond his control to direct his attention outward and as the narrative progresses he increasingly seeks to discover the reality of himself in thoughts of the mother. When asked by Zoo Fever, Negro servant at the Landing, whether he had ever seen snow, Joel composes a rather intricate and significant lie concerning himself, his mother, and her death by snow:

“It was one stormy night in Canada that I saw the snow,” he said, though the farthest north he'd ever set foot was Richmond, Virginia. “We were lost in the mountains, Mother and me, and snow, tons and tons of it, was piling up all around us. And we lived in an ice-cold cave for a solid week, and we kept slapping each other to stay awake: if you fall asleep in snow, chances are you'll never see the light of day again.”

“Then what happened?” said Missouri, disbelief subtly narrowing her eyes.

“Well, things got worse and worse. Mama cried, and the tears froze on her face like little BB bullets, and she was always cold …” Nothing had warmed her, not the fine wool blankets, not the mugs of hot toddy Ellen fixed. “Each night hungry wolves howled in the mountains, and I prayed …” In the darkness of the garage he'd prayed, and in the lavatory at school, and in the first row of the Nemo Theatre while duelling gangsters went unnoticed on the magic screen. “The snow kept falling and heavy drifts blocked the entrance to the cave, but uh …” Stuck. It was the end of a Saturday serial that leaves the hero locked in a slowly filling gas chamber. “And?”

“And a man in a red coat, a Canadian mountie, rescued us … only me, really: Mama had already frozen to death.”¹²

Further significance is given to this passage when Capote goes on to write: “… somehow, spinning the tale, Joel had believed every word; the cave, the howling wolves, these had seemed more real than Missouri and her long neck, or Miss Amy, or the shadowy kitchen.” In such wise, though at this point only momentarily, does a prophetic, snow-filled dreamworld connected with the dead mother seem more real and acceptable to Joel than the concrete environment of the Landing.

It is late one afternoon that Joel, while standing in the garden, observes a queer looking lady in one of the windows of the house. He is certain that she is no one he has ever known, though she “brought to mind his own vaporish reflection in the wavy chamber mirror.” She has “marshmallow features,” wears a powdered wig, and is attired in a flowing white gown. Though Joel is at this point unaware of the fact, this pale apparition is Cousin Randolph. Randolph, in one sense, is the Evil Sprite of the fairy tale, for it is through his perverted teachings that Joel by degrees comes to accept him as the concrete prototype of the Snow Queen, and therefore the image of his mother and the ego of himself. Even now he sees in this strange lady the “vaporish reflection” of his own ego.¹³ When the curtain is abruptly drawn and the window is once more empty, Joel, somewhat taken aback, stumbles against a dinner bell used long before to summon slaves from the fields. “One raucous, cracked note” shatters the “hot stillness” in another prophecy of enslavement.

That evening Joel is quick to establish a definite relationship between the Snow Queen and the lady in the window:

She had the eyes of a fiend, the lady did, wild witch-eyes, cold and green as the bottom of the North Pole sea: twin to the Snow Queen, her face was pale, wintry, carved from ice, and her white hair towered on her head like a wedding cake. She had beckoned to him with a crooked finger, beckoned …¹⁴

And it is only a few minutes later that Randolph whispers into Joel's ear with a cooing, childlike innocence, “try to be happy here, try a little to like me.” Joel, seeing his own round eyes in those of Randolph, somewhat pathetically replies, “I like you already.”

Randolph, in partially winning the endorsement of Joel, begins to prepare his ego for the reacceptance of a mother-image as love object of the libido. Joel can have little inkling of the hidden meaning when Randolph says: “Have you never heard what the wise men say; all of the future exists in the past.” Neither does Joel fully understand when Randolph cryptically speculates on the regressive path of love along which Joel is being led:

“… and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.”¹⁵

Such an observation shows a love of things past, a dedication to the dead and the gone. Additional pertinence can be found in the fact that this observation is made in Randolph's curio-cluttered room, a chamber he refers to in “the warm blood of darkness” as being his “mother's womb.”

The second of the novel's three parts opens with what is in effect a climax. Joel, in finding his father little more than a paralytic zombie,¹⁶ a grotesque figure not possibly acceptable as a father, somewhat curbs his last feeble resistances to Randolph and all that Randolph stands for:¹⁷

If only he'd never seen Mr Sansom! Then he could have gone on picturing him as looking this and that wonderful way, as talking in a kind strong voice, as being really his father. Certainly this Mr Sansom was not his father. This Mr Sansom was nobody but a pair of crazy eyes.

A further curb to his resistances to Randolph ensues when Joel, now without the hope of father guidance, personally experiences the inability to confirm his manhood in relation to the tomboy, Idabel Tompkins. When, for instance, on a fishing expedition he attempts to kiss Idabel, Joel finds himself not only being fought off, but actually overpowered. Another instance in which Joel fails to assert his manhood occurs as he and Idabel are treading through swamplike underbrush on way to the Cloud Hotel, a place where Joel hopes to obtain a magic and protective charm from the hermit conjureman, Little Sunshine. When in attempting to cross a millstream they are suddenly confronted by a dangerous and outsized water moccasin, it is Idabel who must slay the snake, for Joel is frozen with fear. In the eyes of the snake Joel imagines he sees the accusing eyes of his father, the father he finds it impossible to accept. It is in failing such initiation ordeals that Joel is made more eligible to the advances of Randolph.

For a time Joel's primary thought is to escape from the accusing eyes of the father, for he is sure that they know “exactly what went on inside his head.” He and Idabel decide to run off, but do not do so before Joel, in a somewhat disgusting scene of childish naivete, attempts to placate his feelings of guilt:

Tenderly he took Mr Sansom's hand and put it against his cheek and held it there until there was warmth between them; he kissed the dry fingers, and the wedding ring whose gold had been meant to encircle them both. “I'm leaving Father,” he said, and it was, in a sense, the first time he'd acknowledged their blood; slowly he rose up and pressed his palms on either side of Mr Sansom's face and brought their lips together: “My only father,” he whispered, turning, and, descending the stairs, he said it again, but this time all to himself.

Necessarily, this attempt to mollify the wrath of the father proves abortive and false, being, as it is, a farewell acceptance only possible at a time of desertion.

When the two runaways stop for a time at the Noon City fair Joel meets the wistful midget, Miss Wisteria. Sitting with her on top of the ferris wheel he thinks that perhaps escape is not impossible. But as an angry thunderstorm brews overhead and the crowd disappears into shelter, Joel sees in the sudden emptiness below an apparition of Randolph. Consciously unaware of Randolph's true function Joel believes him to be the “messenger for a pair of telescopic eyes,” an envoy sent by the father to drag him back to the Landing:

Vine from the Landing's garden had stretched these miles to entwine his wrists, and he saw their plans, his and Idabel's, break apart like the thundersplit sky: not yet, not if he could find her, and he ran into the house: “Idabel, you are here, you are!”

But Idabel has disappeared, and Joel, to escape those “telescopic eyes,” seeks refuge in thoughts of the dead mother, the parent for whom Randolph is truly the envoy:

… stay awake, Joel, in eskimoland sleep is death, is all, remember? She was cold, his mother, she passed to sleep with dew of snowflakes scenting her hair; if he could have but thawed open her eyes here now she would be to hold him and say, as he'd said to Randolph, “Everything is going to be all right.”

It is at this point that the perceptive reader becomes definitely aware of Joel's fixation, for Joel, as he acknowledges, is unable to place his love in anything other than the image of the dead mother:

Miss Wisteria stood so near he could smell the rancid wetness of her shriveled silk; her curls had uncoiled, the little crown had slipped awry, her yellow sash was fading its color on the floor. “Little boy,” she said, swerving her flashlight over the bent, broken walls where her midget image mingled with the shadows of things in flight. “Little boy,” she said, the resignation of her voice intensifying its pathos. But 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.

Joel is now ready to complete the transference of his affective mother fixation to the person of Cousin Randolph.

Part three of the narrative opens with Joel once more at the Landing. Ironically, he is desperately ill with a case of pneumonia. In a state of coma he experiences a prophetic dream of wish-fulfillment, a phantasy of the mother who will return from the grave to find her son and claim him in death. Joel, with a wizard-type magician named Mr Mystery, is riding over “snowdeep fields” on his way to the palace of the Snow Queen. Suddenly, “an ice-wall rose before them … r-r-rip, the ice tore like cellophane, the sleigh slid through into the Landing's parlor.” Gathered there, with the exception of the Snow Queen and his mother, is every figure Joel has known or thought about since coming to the Landing. As he watches transfixed, each of the black-clad figures drops an “offering” into a “gladiola-garlanded cedar chest.” Joel lies inside the chest clothed in the peculiar fashion of the Snow Queen and the lady of the window:

… all dressed in white, his face powdered and rouged, his goldbrown hair arranged in damp ringlets: Like an angel, they said, more beautiful than Alcibiades, more beautiful, said Randolph, and Idabel wailed: Believe me, I tried to save him, but he wouldn't move, and snakes are so very quick.

In psychically identifying with the strange lady and the Snow Queen Joel has accepted Randolph as mother substitute:

He did not want any more to be responsible, he wanted to put himself in the hands of his friend, be, as here in the sickbed, dependent upon him for his very life. Looking in the handglass became, consequently, an ordeal: it was as if now only one eye examined for signs of maturity, while the other, gradually of the two the more attentive, gazed inward wishing him always to remain as he was.

Capote, however, seems determined to carry Joel beyond mere fixation to the farther point of sexual consummation. Joel, therefore, must somehow be infused with the psychological strength necessary for him to assume the position of husband, not child, in relation to Randolph, the mother image.

Having sufficiently recovered from the pneumonia Joel agrees to accompany Randolph to the Cloud Hotel, the name of which evokes the vision of “a kind of mist-white palace floating foglike through the woods.” Indeed this is a journey that parallels the one of the coma-dream. The Cloud Hotel, a structure where time is frozen in the past, acts somewhat obliquely for Joel as a uniting and invigorating force. Seemingly faithful to the archetype of the descent into Hades, Joel returns to the Landing possessed of a new type of knowledge and strength.¹⁸ He knows now “that he (is) strong,” and with a “crazy elation … he ran, he zigzagged, he sang, he was in love.” Also, for the first time he “saw how helpless Randolph was,” and significantly the scene ends with Joel leading Randolph back to the Landing. Thus, during his stay at the Hotel Joel has somehow obtained the strength needed to assume the role of protector and sexual lover to Randolph.

It is in the final scene of Other Voices, Other Rooms that the father image, only remaining check to sexual consummation, is recognized by Joel as symbolically and psychologically slain. Joel, standing in the twilight garden, watches the dark clouds “coming over the sun,” and finally, the “meticulous setting of the sun.” It is then that he realizes that “Mr Sansom was the sun.” This act of patricide opens the way for Joel's sexual consummation with the mother image, Cousin Randolph, who now appears in the window wearing a flowing white gown suggestive of the Snow Queen:

… it was as if snow were falling there, flakes shaping snow-eyes, hair; a face trembled like a white beautiful moth, smiled. 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.

Concerning this final scene Hassan has written: “We are not sure whether it is in triumph or defeat that Joel responds to this mute appeal. We can only sense that the traditional modes of behavior are no longer in command of life.”¹⁹ In clarification I suggest that both triumph and defeat are inherent in this paradoxical finale. Joel's triumph lies within the framework of the oedipal process and exists in his successful destruction of the father image which had acted as a stigma to the fulfillment of his ego desires. By denying the existence of his father Joel in effect has not only psychically slain him but has also left himself in a position to extend the oedipal process to the point of sexual consummation. But naturally defeat is inherent in, and overweighs, such as “bloomless,” twisted triumph. For in the process Joel's super-ego (in ironic counterpoint to Sansom's physical paralysis) has been crippled, and must now remain forever retarded and incomplete.

Notes

1. John W. Aldridge, After the Lost Generation (New York: 1958), p. 203.

2. Ihab Hassan, “The Daydream and Nightmare of Narcissus,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, I, (Spring-Summer: 1960), p. 5.

3. The sub-theme chosen is usually the one that will most readily force the novel either into or out of the critic's preconceived system of literary and cultural values.

4. Quoted in Hassan, p. 7.

5. Freud believed that each individual is born with fragments of a phylogenetic origin, or, in other words, an archaic heritage, not individual and personal, but applying to all mankind collectively. This archaic heritage includes certain dispositions, ideational contents, and memory traces of the experiences of former, primordial generations. In an abbreviated form, each individual undergoes in his psychological development a reiteration of the more meaningful events of a process so ancient that it occurred in the dawn of history. This process is Freud's scientific myth of the father-dominated, primal horde, original root of the oedipal archetype.

   Further details of this theory may be found in Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, authorized translation with an introduction by A. A. Brill, (New York: 1918).

6. By deifying his father Joel has equated Edward Sansom with God-the-Father and all the masculine, authoritarian symbols (lightening, thunder, the sun, etc.) usually associated with such an image. In a manner of speaking, Joel is asking divine providence to guide him through the initiation rites connected with manhood, individualization, and discovery of the Self.

7. In this mode the literal theme of a boy's search for a father parallels the underlying, though primary, theme of a boy falling prey to an oedipal fixation.

8. It is for this reason that Joel, when subsequently thinking of the mother-image, invariably connects it with snow, ice, and the color white.

9. Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (New York: 1948).

10. Already Joel feels that he is falling prey to some nebulous, demon-type spell because he is unable to dispel the anxiety brought to bear by the oedipal conflict. Because he is incapable of understanding the true origin and nature of this anxiety he ascribes its most painful aspects to external, non-human types (e.g., demons, wizards, his deified father, a malevolent God) that for some inexplicable reason have the will to do him harm. The fact that he includes Edward Sansom and God-the-Father within this group of external types is evidence of the fact that his attitude toward the father is ambivalent, and can be seen in such statements as the following: “Joel didn't much like God, for He had betrayed him too many times.” Or: “He believed there was conspiracy abroad, even his father had a grudge against him, even God. Somewhere along the line he'd been played a mean trick. Only he didn't know who or what to blame.”

11. To show this shift Capote also utilizes the transitional metaphor of daylight into darkness. This same metaphor, to give another example, is used in the final scene of the narrative.

12. In passing, it is interesting to note that the female genitals are often symbolically represented in dreams (though Joel is not in this instance dreaming) as being a cave. The male genitals, on the other hand, are often represented by mountains. On a less unconscious level, the “ice-cold cave” in which Joel is for a time imaginatively imprisoned acts as a poorly disguised version of the Snow Queen's ice palace. The tacked on reference to the “Canadian mountie” obviously acts as the idealized father-image whom Joel desires to effect his rescue and give him guidance.

13. It is in this way that the Narcissus sub-theme, as outlined by Ihab Hassan, parallels the primary theme.

14. This passage is interesting not only because of the Randolph-Snow Queen relationship, but because of the “wedding cake” image which foreshadows the symbolic marriage of Joel and Randolph at the end of the novel.

15. Once again it is interesting to note that such things as lilacs, ships, bells, and landscapes are primary dream symbols that represent the female genitals.

16. By a simple inversion of the letters n and m in the name Sansom we arrive at the name Samson, a biblical hero shorn of his strength by the hands of a woman. The ineffective Edward Sansom was shorn of his strength to act as a true father by the hands of the effeminate, homoerotic, Randolph.

17. Among other things, Randolph stands for homosexuality, though this is on the most literal level of the book's meaning. It is because Randolph must assume the role of mother-wife to Joel that Capote finds it of dramatic necessity for Randolph to be of the effeminate variety.

18. It is during this stay at the Cloud Hotel that the mule John Brown (acting here as a symbolic and sterile counterpart to the father, Edward Sansom) accidentally hangs itself.

    The John Brown of historical fame had tried unsuccessfully to free the slaves and was hung for his efforts.

19. Hassan, p. 12.