The Great Pasha, Buried Alive: The Archetypes of the Characters in Truman Capote’s Story “A Tree of Night”

Abstract

“A Tree of Night” is probably Truman Capote’s most terrifying piece, which, along with “Miriam”, has become his signature story. Created in 1943 and published two years later in Harper's Bazaar, this story was called a “pure distillate of terror” by reviewers. Despite the absence of the manuscript in Capote’s archive and his silence about how and when this story was written, the paper pieces together the writer’s personal circumstances during that period. Based on these data the paper makes a suggestion on when the story might have been created and identifies the archetype of the mysterious character named the Great Pasha. This information corrects a number of inaccuracies contained in Capote’s biography published by Gerald Clarke in 1988. The paper explores in detail the history of the Great Pasha — “a fakir from Egypt”, who toured American South with a bold performance “Buried Alive”. According to the hypothesis made in the article, it was the Great Pasha who met six year old Truman at his aunts’ house in Monroeville in May 1931. Twelve years later Capote drew on his memories of the Great Pasha and his assistant Madame Flozelle to create sinister characters of his Gothic story “A Tree of Night”. Thanks to the archival materials the paper managed to bring out the traits that Capote’s characters owe to their archetypes, and to reconstruct the facts of the fakir’s life. For the first time in Russia the article reproduces a unique picture featuring the Great Pasha, his assistant, and the writer’s mother Lillie Mae Faulk.