Textures of Uncertainty Patricia Highsmith’S Minimalism

Ingrid Hotz-Davies Textures of Uncertainty Patricia Highsmith’s Minimalism Many critics have commented on the intractable nature of Patricia Highsmith’s fiction, so much so that Neil Gordon, for example, is amazed at “how radically Patricia Highsmith does not fit in,” how even her best-known cycle of novels, the Ripley Series,1 “has resolutely declined classification. More disturbing is it that even for its critics it has stubbornly refused, like a patient on a psycho- analyst’s couch, to lie down and tell its story” (Gordon 16). At the same time, if there is one thing critics and readers alike seem to agree on, it is that Highsmith stands as one of the great literary artists of unease, even dread.2 Whether we think of the decidedly queer story of murderous temptation in her first novel Strangers on a Train (1950), immediately turned into a film by Alfred Hitchcock (1951), her lesbian novel The Price of Salt, first published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan in 1952, The Cry of the Owl (1962), a relentless tale of stalkers and stalkers stalked,3 or indeed of her last novel Small g: A Summer Idyll published in the year of her death (1995), a “summer idyll” involving the patrons of a small cross-over gay bar in Zurich, which appears not so much idyllic as hang- ing in uneasy balance over a continually felt abyss of potential disaster and violence: hers is not a fictional universe one would, in Terry Castle’s words, be easily tempted to “cozy up to” (28). In all of this, Highsmith’s recognition as a literary writer has been precari- ous—though more secure in Europe, where she lived in self-chosen exile from 1963 onwards, than in the USA (Highsmith, Plotting 119-120)—and slow in the coming. It is only very recently that we have seen the first monographs on her works (Harrison 1997; Mawer 2004; Peters 2011) as well as, above all, a series of 1 The series consists of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Ripley under Ground (1970), Ripley’s Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), and Ripley under Water (1991). It focuses in ever new constellations on the exploits of the chillingly protean and murderous Tom Ripley, whom she consistently invites us to sympathize with. 2 See for example the collection of essays and interviews by fellow writers, filmmakers and artists from Graham Greene to Peter Handke collected by Franz Cavigelli and Fritz Senn for Diogenes in 1980. Peters makes “anxiety” the central concern of her study of Highsmith’s writings (2011). 3 Terry Castle, in a fine review essay, calls her the “balladeer of stalking” (Susannah Clapp qtd. in Castle 31). © Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019 | doi:10.30965/9783657701728_004 32 Ingrid Hotz-Davies very detailed and voluminous biographies and memoirs (Meaker 2003; Wilson 2003; Schenkar 2009). With these, the “canonization of Patricia Highsmith— doyenne of the psychological suspense novel, depressive homosexual, mean drunk, and one of the greatest, darkest American story tellers since Poe—has officially begun” (Castle 28). Most of the critical work on her that tackles the question of Highsmith’s signature style of unease and anxiety has been con- text- and contents-based. A major strand, maybe not surprisingly, pursues psychological or psychoanalytic readings of her novels (e.g. very general Gordon; or Peters, who deploys Lacanian theories), and this despite the fact that she tends to subvert psychological models rather than confirm them (Hotz-Davies 2004). Michael Trask, by contrast, identifies Highsmith’s “method” as a fictional exploration of the anti-essentialist, performative models of the human psyche found in the sociology of Erving Goffman as well as in Method Acting and sees Highsmith as embracing the paranoid structures of a hermeneutics of suspicion without, however, calling any faith in confession and the “true self” to the rescue. Others discuss her as a queer writer avant la lettre, a “deconstructionist” of gender and sexuality certainties (Tuss, Straayer), or as an example of the radi- cal potential of “queer negativity” (Halberstam, qtd. in Caserio). Her emergence from the paranoia of 1950s McCarthyism provides another basis for an understanding of Highsmith’s distinctly uncomfortable vision. Her works have been seen, and this is an interesting convergence of opposites, as both a radically subversive engagement with the languages of American imperialism from Mc- Carthy to today (Hesford 2005) and as an accommodation, albeit an uneasy one, to ideals of American consumerism and capitalism (Lukin, Trask). Certainly the contents of her works—after all, if they can be classified at all, then certainly under the heading of “suspense,” a description she herself also accepted (High- smith, Plotting)—are an important component of Highsmithian anxiety. However, and this is the track I will be pursuing here, the sense of dread evoked in the reader is also a result of a particularly disturbing variety of nar- rative minimalism, of the calculated withholding of information. This minimalism is in no way in the service of “suspense” as a component of the thriller genre, but rather lies at the heart of her understanding of human psychology as a profoundly asocial, amoral, and ultimately unfathomable territory. That is, there is a continual and uncanny suspicion that beneath the façade of every- day human behavior lie unfathomable depths of psychological disturbance, so unfathomable in fact that even the twentieth-century’s master discourse of uncoding it, Freudian psychoanalysis, can only be drawn on with ironic skepticism (on her “suspicion of psychoanalysis and its etiological paradigm”, Trask 594): “The atmosphere of sickly apprehension so palpable in Highsmith’s suspense fiction—her ability to induce in the reader states of extraordinary .

Load more