Pornoviolence.

There’s no getting around the fact that In Cold Blood has had vast amounts of praise heaped upon it since its release in ’66, but as with any work that stirs as much controversy as Capote’s seminal piece of literary journalism, it has also attracted its share of criticism and controversy.

Among those who leveled criticism at the novel was a fellow pioneer of the New Journalism movement (which subsequently led to literary journalism), Tom Wolfe. While Wolfe has certainly acknowledged the merits of what Capote achieved with In Cold Blood, he also raised some interesting points about its subject matter in one of his essays, entitled, Pornoviolence.

With Pornoviolence, Wolfe made a point of criticising the media for its habit of glorifying violence as a means of gratifying its audience, similarly to how pornography does with sex. In Cold Blood was among the texts to be criticised in the essay, with Wolfe writing: "The book is neither a who-done-it nor a will-they-be-caught, since the answers to both questions are known from the outset ... Instead, the book's suspense is based largely on a totally new idea in detective stories: the promise of gory details, and the withholding of them until the end."

Throughout my research into literary journalism I've read plenty about it being a style of writing that allows for a lot more description and detail than traditional news journalism does, but until now I haven't given much thought to when those details become gratuitous.

I'll admit that while I was reading In Cold Blood, even though I had a vague idea of what had happened to the Clutter family, I was eagerly waiting for Capote to lay out all the details. Has my predilection for slightly "edgier" entertainment conditioned me to react like that? I dunno. Wolfe's words have had me thinking about the issue though. At what point do the details of a violent crime become excessive in any form of journalism, literary or otherwise? The classic saying is, "if it bleeds, it leads," but where is the line drawn between respectable reporting and tasteless exploitation? I don't doubt that if you compared the coverage of a violent crime between a broadsheet and a tabloid you'd notice some stylistic differences.

Having given it some thought in the case of In Cold Blood, I don't think that the explicit details of how the Clutter family was slaughtered were in any way gratuitous, as they were a vital element of understanding Perry Smith and what he was capable of. Having said that, I do wonder if it was absolutely necessary, from a journalism perspective, to withhold the details of the crime for so long and continue to tease the audience as the story unfolded. Granted, it was an excellent narrative technique but when you consider it from the standpoint of journalistic necessity, Wolfe's argument is certainly not without credibility.

Given that my literary piece will focus on the lives of those are frequently confronted with horrific human injury, this does have me giving more consideration to how much detail I'll be using in describing the darker details.