Lecture notes: Breakfast at Tiffany\'s PDF

Preview

Summary

Notes for lecture on Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's by A/P Barnard Turner....

Description

EN1101E/GEK1000 Semester 1, 2013-2014 Literature and context o Historical contexts o Literary traditions  General cultural and ideological traditions  Literary theory contexts, “interpretive communities” (Stanley Fish) o Our own contexts of reading, inc.  Projections and speculations about the future Literary theory Any survey module like this would be incomplete without some mention of theories about literature, but the matter is too complex to take up in much detail here. Literary theory generally approaches literature as an activity/storehouse of objects (books, notebooks both written and virtual etc.) and, often but not always, can be definite enough to give us insights into the ways in which we see an individual work. Some main types of literary theory: • Genre criticism: the effects of genre (e.g. short story, novel, tragedy, ode) on the individual work; • Myth approaches • Structuralist theories (informed largely by linguistics) • Post-structuralist approaches or deconstruction: reading the text against itself, opening out meanings by comparing points which can be made to contradict each other in the text: o e.g. the narrator claims he is conventional (p. 45) but assumes authority to tell others about her; o he says he hadn’t thought of writing about Holly, but it doesn’t take much (a blurry photograph of an African sculpture) to get him to do so; o he says he is “always drawn back to places” he has lived (p. 3) but also that he hadn’t thought of writing about the 72nd St brownstone; o Critics look outside the text for the people Capote modeled the characters on, but really they are all aspects of Capote; • Sociological or sometimes Marxist views • Reader-response approaches • Psychoanalytical or psychological approaches: • Reading with your whole body, eyes of course, ears, moving slightly with the rhythm • Gender approaches, inc. feminism, LGBT, etc. Of course, actual criticism might combine these approaches (and some I’ve not mentioned) in varying degrees. Reading novels We should attempt to interrelate character (agency doing something), incident (that which is done) and plot (the structure or concatenation of such incidents) • "What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?" (Henry James)

1

German professor Günter Müller (1946) makes a distinction between Erzählzeit (“time of the narration”) and erzählte Zeit (“time narrated”). This distinction of quite commonly used in literary analysis, especially through the work of Müller’s student, Eberhard Lämmert and French critic Gérard Genette. • The Erzählzeit is the time taken to describe something (usually a matter of printed pages, as readers read at different speeds) or to perform something on stage; erzählte Zeit is the time which elapses as depicted in the novel, play, etc. Examples which show the difference are the first chapter of Genesis and James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (which describes one day in some 700 pages). A “fast flowing” book packs a lot of erzählte Zeit in the Erzählzeit; an author can also “slow” times, particularly in a novel which delves into characters’ thoughts (e.g. the so-called psychological realism of Henry James). Chronotopes (1937 essay by Mikhail Bakhtin): • Bakhtin applies Einstein’s relativity to the novel, showing the interrelation of space (tope- ) and time (chrono- ) in various types (genres) of fiction: e.g. many war novels concentrate on one or two conflicts/battles or can range over whole theatres of war; • Capote’s Breakfast takes us through two years, makes us conscious of the international, even transatlantic/transpacific situation, in 100 pages: o these external influences however are brought into New York; Holly does leave at the end but we hear very little about her new abode  Mr Yunioshi is a Japanese Californian (p. 5) living in New York and with connections to high fashion (e.g. Harper’s Bazaar [p. 39]) and is presumably on the East Coast because most of the Japanese on the West are in internment camps;  Rusty Trawler might marry the (real-life Fascist sympathizer) Unity Mitford “if Hitler didn’t” (p. 33);  José Ybarra-Jaeger is a German Brazilian (p. 50), also therefore slightly suspicious, especially as he wants to be the President of his country (p. 44);  In terms of the chronotope here, what role would Thursday play in the novella? In terms of its genre, Breakfast is a long short story or a short novel: the most accurate description would be a novella. • In this sub-genre, the narrator’s voice is essential, and style is crucial: • Truman Capote, Paris Review interview 1957: “When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant” “I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence— especially if it occurs toward the end—or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation. Henry James is the maestro of the semicolon. Hemingway is a first-rate paragrapher. From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence. I don't mean to imply that I successfully practice what I preach. I try, that's all.” http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4867/the-art-of-fiction-no-17-truman-capote. You can listen to Capote reading from the novella (from p. 15) in 1963: • Listen for the laughs (especially at “quel beast” and “men who bite”): http://capoteweb.com/breakfast-at-tiffanys/

2

Truman Capote (1924-1984), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958)

Capote in 1948 (photo by Carl Van Vechten)

Capote in 1958 (photo by Richard Avedon)

Marilyn Monroe and Capote

First published November 1958 Esquire: • up-market, New York based but widely circulated magazine First person limited anonymous narrator • An incipient writer, who seems to be writing the kinds of stories (generally) Holly is living (cp. her reaction to the story he reads her p. 19 • The narrator is obviously intrigued by Holly, yet feels that he is her intellectual and perhaps moral superior: o he needs to, because a Puritan work ethic would not always define writing fiction as real work (a point Holly makes when she asks if he is a real writer, i.e. one who sells his stories [p. 18] • “Holly and libraries were not an easy association to make” (p. 51): o yet, if the narrator is indeed honest in saying that he was not thinking of Holly as material, even loosely, Capote would use the material to put “Holly” (i.e. the now-classic Breakfast at Tiffany’s) in a library, as has of course happened; o On p. 3 the narrator says that he would not have written about Holly, perhaps a sign of Capote’s ill-ease at using his own acquaintances in the novel (the so-called tactic of the roman à clef [novel with a key]) o Cp. 22: did the narrator really put everything “in a story with different names” etc.? Hence we should separate the narrator (voice in the text which tells the story) and the author (person to whom, or to whose heirs for a certain time, the royalties go and whose name appears on the cover). The narrator can be named (as almost here): this might be called a “diegetic narrator”, i.e. one who can be placed in the text; or the narrator is more a “function”, i.e. a perspective or point of view only. 3

Narratology, as this study is called, can be quite complicated: Mieke Bal, Roland Barthes are two names to start with if you’re interested. The story is set in the early 1940s (cp. Holly’s age, pp. 12 and 60): • Wartime New York (Upper East Side) • US enters WW2 after Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941): reference to the war on the first page (p. 3 in the Penguin ed.) • Holly gets “V-letters” (Victory-letters, from overseas GIs; the US had entered WW2 after Pearl Harbor in December 1941) • Mid-1944 (p. 67): could the narrator be drafted? • So a time of restraint, deprivation, rationing (e.g. peanut butter [p. 49], private telephones [p. 4) but the partying seems to go on, at least for the upper classes (of course, the US was almost unscathed by the war) o Roseland ballroom still open p. 91; o Bergdorf’s (5th Avenue) still presumably have shoes so that Holly can run up a bill with them (p. 23); o Woolworth’s has paper enough to make Hallowe’en decorations (p. 49); o Hamburg Heaven, presumably, still has meat for their signature dishes; o Reference to P.J. Clarke’s (apparently misspelled, p. 14), a famous bar immortalized in the 1945 movie Lost Weekend and the place where Johnny Mercer had, in early 1943, scribbled the lyric for the classic tune/dance number “One for my Baby”:  If you have the slightest interest in jazz /modern dance / 20TH century American popular culture you could check out the extract from the 1943 Fred Astaire movie The Sky’s the Limit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD7sqGJ3NBg;  Indeed, since the main character in the movie is called Fred (for the performer Fred Astaire?) and the last scene shows him getting into his bomber to head for the Pacific War, leaving his love behind, there may be a source here for Capote’s novella. Hence, the story is written in the shadow of death • Holly [Lulamae’s] brother Fred dies in overseas combat p. 70; • Holly apparently tries to kill herself o the “fat woman” of death (p. 86): or Holly’s fears of her own declining body image with the years? • Ref to funeral director Frank E. Campbell p. 91 People escape to the movies, even if to see war films: • e.g. The Story of Dr Wassell, a 1944 Cecil B. DeMille film with Gary Cooper about a real wartime doctor [p. 29]); o Laraine Day, who did play the nurse in the picture, recalled that “DeMille can't find anybody in all of Hollywood to play a nurse. I'd been playing nothing but nurses in Dr. Kildare pictures, and so I got the part." (http://www.tcm.com/thismonth/article/149922%7C0/The-Story-of-Dr-Wassell.html);  actually, the movie didn’t open in New York until June 6th 1944 (D-Day), so it is highly unlikely that the narrator could have seen it in the summer of 1943 (when it was still being filmed); • or Wuthering Heights (a 1939 Wiliam Wyler film [55]) 4

But the story is narrated from the viewpoint of the 1950s: • the nation did survive, the country is now prosperous again, indeed for a while the world’s leading nation; • A feeling of relief? • or does the presentiment of doom still linger? • is Holly still alive (p. 8)? Nostalgia: • events start in 1943: o Holly knows the “new” Oklahoma! songs (p. 15), a musical which was first produced in 1943; • The flow of time passing: o References to “October 1943” (p. 47); February 1944 (p. 54); May (57); autumn 1944 p. 74 (30 September 1944, p. 75; spring 1945 (p. 97) • Then the hook to the present: o Joe Bells’ African photographs are dated 1956 (p. 7) • • •

Does this length of time condition the narrative style, it mood or even tone? i.e. could the narrator write about Holly, a powerful presence in his life (and his first real literary critic) before he had mostly forgotten her, so that he has power over her? indeed, he seems to enjoy counteracting the power she and her set have over him by critiquing them: o cp. the “big falling-out” around the middle of the novella (p. 53): why?

So then the novella is a compilation of opposing forces: • a conventional narrator and an unconventional main character • The past and the present

“It has been sleeked up since my day” (p. 10) a 2013 photo of the 1961 movie location brownstone, sold in 2013 for USD5.95million http://www.corcoran.com/nyc/Listings/Display/2267310

5

•

The country and the city: o Lulamae Barnes is from “near” (NB) Tulip. Texas (p. 59): a real place in northwest Texas near the Oklahoma border  In 2002 population around 50, mostly cattle ranches  Yet Doc Golightly thinks that “Fred” might have heard of it,

Google maps street shots of

and Tiffany’s, 5th Ave, NYC

Tulip

Contradictions o O. J. Berman on Holy as a “real phony” (p. 27) o Holly is after all a rural red-neck Texan country girl after all o “Can take the girl out of the country but you can’t…” (p. 65); o she is still ’stealing turkey eggs’ but now she steals from Woolworth’s o Her short-term roommate, Mag Wildwood is from “Wildwood, Arkansas”, so the same type of small southern dot on a map as Holly (ie Lulamae): o Holly feels and affinity for her for this, but also a loathing as that is what she has left behind (the novella doesn’t of course record conservations between Holly and Mag alone, but one can imagine that they would slip into a Southern drawl). Holly seems to have absolute, unshakable standards: o ‘I may be rotten to the core . . . but: testify against a friend I will not’ (p. 91); o She claims to be “unto-thyself-type honest” (p. 74): o so IS she true to herself? o p. 91: ’my yardstick is how somebody treats me’ o In the 42nd-St. Library, the narrator watches Holly and is reminded of Mildred Grossman (p. 51): o Neither can be reshaped? Both are solid, fixed, immutable, molded too soon (p. 51)? o We cannot be too fixed in our opinions, as this leads to dogmatism and the inability to cope with change, o nor too Flighty, as this leads to rootlessness She lives in a world of relativities o A wanderer, a drifter (“travelling” on her card [p. 10]), hence the “Golightly” name? [of course, it’s her husband’s name, and this may just be a Hepburn association, but we might think of Golightly has the same rhythm as “Doolittle” (which Holly does) in My Fair Lady. o The narrator first (p. 14) thinks she could be a “model” (which, at least for Mr Yunioshi [p. 11] she may have been) or an “actress”: he dismisses this idea, but can we say that Holly is all act and little substance? o This shows our own grounding in reality, our feeling of superiority over her? 6

Description p. 11: o a girl with a “boy’s hair” o Streaked hair colour, clearly dyed but of what original colour? o Cp. p. 15: she seems to dye her hair herself: “ o Her vari-coloured hair was somewhat self-induced”; o Indeterminate age: o “beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman” (in fact, she is around 19, comparable in age to Austen’s Catherine Morland) o Thin, yet not overly “skimpy”: still appears to have an “almost breakfast cereal air of health” (p. 12)

1938 Wheaties advert (Lenore Kight Wingard [Olympic swimmer] and Joanna de Tuscan [fencer]) http://www.pophistorydig.com/?tag=elinor-smith-wheaties o

The narrator picks up on these relativities immediately: o Arbuck’s older, “plump” body is incongruous with her youthful, svelte one, and their juxtaposition seems “improper”, “not morally, aesthetically”;

Other incongruities: o Holly tells stories which I for one am disinclined to believe yet which turn out to be more or less true: o e.g. p. 20 that she had been in Hollywood [hence the first part of her assumed first name, Holiday]; o Cp. her would-be agent O.J. Berman p. 28; o Her penchant for older men (p. 18): o substitute father figures (on first meeting, the narrator thinks her husband is her father [p. 59]: o yet Holly says this view is “merde” (P. 18) o View of Sally Tomato, the Mafia leader, as a “darling old man, terribly pious” (p. 22); o At the top of this page, Holly says the Sing Sing visitors area is not like the movie, but she seems to use a movie paradigm (the villain with the heart of gold) to describe Sally; o Limited, average sexual experience in comparison with her acquaintances p. 73; o Questioning of “heteronormativity” (Michael Warner 1991 term), conventional sexuality: o Shock value in telling the narrator that she could be a little bisexual (p. 20)? 7

o

o Cp. p. 55: Holly wants to be “top banana in the shock department”; Acts from impulse then regrets it; o throwing out the cat on the mean streets at the end but then trying to find him again p. 95;  The cat is earlier described as “a grim cat with a pirate’s cut-throat face” (p. 31)  Life has, by her estimation, treated her rough and she is going to an unknown future in a foreign land whose language she doesn’t know;  sign of desperation?  Not wanting to have any ties to the past (e.g. asking the narrator to look after him); o Holly has many bookshelves but until late in the novel few books [pp. 26, 32 [books on horses and baseball: why these subjects?], 34 [interests of Sally? Rusty?], 71); o why does she start reading p. 71?

So could we label Holly (pin her down) and say she is a mixture of prevailing novelistic/popular culture types? o part gangster’s moll, part socialite, part ingénue: o can she really not know that Tomato is using her to send messages to his associates outside the Sing Sing prison? The prevailing mood: • The “mean reds” p. 36: o Angst, a feeling of trepidation, malaise, spleen, fear without a visible cause (the cause of course being human): o “You’re afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don’t know what you’re afraid of.”  does Holly seem a fearful person?  Maybe underneath the suave exterior she is too young and naïve to be scared? • The other characters seem to suffer from some kind of dire melancholy, doldrums, restrained anger: o the narrator at not getting published o Mag at being an oddity in her set, overcompensating by appearing important and wellconnected; o Sally of course in prison; o O.J. Berman trying to get Holly back to Hollywood. Acting, Hollywood, role-playing • Costumes • Mag the model • Holly rises above the allure and the glamour: • She tells the narrator that she was “awake” to Hollywood and her own limited dreams (p. 34) • Yet Holly seems to have turned down a part as an actress, as it was “too hard” (thus showing her laziness) and “too embarrassing” (thus showing her superiority), p. 34. • Holly acts/pretends to be Sally Tomato’s niece • Rusty in denial about his own homosexuality (p. 37)? Satire: 8

• • • • • • •

“gold-digging” (Holly asks the narrator for a list of “the 50 richest men in Brazil” [p. 91]); Cosmopolitanism, urban[e] sophistication Ignorance of the wider context of world affairs (Don’t they know there’s a war on?): Mag Wildwood thinks nobody speaks Portuguese (44), one of course of the world’s great early colonialist languages; Breaking with the commonplace, conventional and normative may lead to unforeseen problems, incrimination, etc. Self-satire of Capote the aspiring novelist, for whom Breakfast was his big break? Does the novella realign itself with the celebration of the fixed, conventional and average in the compelling framed image of the cat in the apartment window at the end?

Entrapment and negative freedom: • Holly is waiting for the war to end so that she can leave for foreign parts (p. 43); • Unconventional lifestyles in conventional (even if NYC) upper-class society; • The narrator admires a bird cage in an antique store (p. 14) but can’t afford it; o Holly buys it for him but tells him not to put “a living thing in it” (p. 53) o Holly sees herself as a wild thing p. 66; o Doc Golightly compares Holly to a “jaybird” [aka blue jay], calling for her to go away (61, 62); • Forward moving, no regrets? o she seems to have thought of her brother continually until his death, and then hardly ever mentions him again (71; the once time is on p. 86); o She stops calling the narrator Fred but doesn’t find another name for him o Yet this is freedom from something; are there examples in the novella of a character seeing freedom as a means to another end, besides “simply” being free?

We are of course considering the novella here, but many of you may have watched the movie. o Apparently, Capote had wanted Marilyn Monroe to play Holly, but the role has come to signify Hepburn, as much as her role in My Fair Lady perhaps.

o

o

(Monroe seems to have got further with Joyce’s demanding Ulysses than most students; http://www.cupblog.org/?m=200906 Monroe was in a 1953 movie called How to Marry a Millionaire, the title (but little else) taken from a 1951 “self-help” book by Doris Lilly who may have been the “model” for Holly: http://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/11/nyregion/doris-lilly-69-gossip-columnist-who-wrote-ofmillionaires-dies.html The ending is different: o How? o Why?

9

o