Patricia Highsmith and Detective Fiction
In “The Typology of Detective Fiction”,
the author carefully explains the principles behind the formation of detective
fiction genre by comparing the nature of whodunit stories and thrillers. What I
find intriguing is his interpretations on the relationship between a
masterpiece that does not fit the common classification and a genre. He gives
the example of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. RIpley which is
exactly an outlier that is not strictly characterized by the thriller genre yet
not included in a separate genre of its own. Since I am personally a fan of
Patricia Highsmith’s mystery stories, I would like to explain why this book
does not fit the usual rules of classification summarized by the author.
The
Talented Mr. Ripley does appear to be a thriller because it is about a
crime with a focus on the “second story” - the story of the present as opposed
to that of the past, trying to display and understand the behaviors and
psychology of the criminal who is Mr. RIpley in this case. However, the novel
is special in the sense that Patricia Highsmith puts more effort on the
depiction of the criminal than on the crime itself while thrillers tend to
provide tons of details about the crime itself- the “brutality” of the crime
and “the lack of suspense” in the narration (Todorov 1977, 50). This aspect is
supported by the fact that no crime actually takes place during the first third
of the story. There is no clues leading to the criminal. Rather, it is the
buildup of Mr. Ripley’s reactions to material temptations that lead to the
eventual crime. Patricia Highsmith did not necessarily follow the rules of
detective fiction, but she presented the story equally well and even better in
her own ways.
I have never read a novel by Patricia Highsmith but your description of the author giving information only through the reactions of another character spike my interests! Our discussion of what makes a story a 'great literary work' and your description makes me wonder if Highsmith's brave and successful attempt at telling a mystery qualifies her work as a great literary work.
ReplyDeleteLooking at other texts that we have read so far, I was curious to see what 'rules' of the genre affected these mysteries. For example, when reading in "The Staging of the First Murder in the Mystery Plays in England", I discovered that Cain and Abel followed the trends of previously popular literary works. For example, the N- town plays Cain murders Abel with a jaw bone. This weapon was used in many previous works such as the York plays. Similarly, this trend of using a jaw bone was adopted by Shakespeare in Hamlet and maintained throughout literature in England. The article even explored Medieval art to compare it to the enactment of the murder in contemporary stages. According to the article, "it was usual in medieval art for a single attacker to be shown with his right hand holding his weapon and the right arm and weapon held clear above and the Demon in wielding his weapon as a club."
Although these comparisons seem small and insignificant the similarities in literature over time prove Todorov's point that rules of genres have been strictly followed in the past.