Anxiety and Evil in the Writings of Patricia Highsmith

Fiona Peters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409423348
• eBook ISBN: 9781317180272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Drawing on an impressive range of secondary material, including many elusive reviews, interviews and articles from the under-explored Highsmith Archive, Fiona Peters suggests that the usual generic distinctions -crime fiction, mystery, suspense - have been largely unhelpful in elucidating Patricia Highsmith's novels. Peters analyzes a significant selection of Highsmith's works, chosen with a view towards demonstrating the range of her oeuvre while also identifying the main themes and preoccupations running throughout her career. Adopting a psychoanalytic approach, Peters proposes a reading of Highsmith that subordinates murder as the primary focus of the novels in favor of the gaps between periods of activity represented through anxiety, waiting, lack of desire and evil. Her close readings of the Ripley series, This Sweet Sickness, Deep Water, The Tremor of Forgery, and The Cry of the Owl, among others, reveal and illuminate Highsmith's concern with minutiae and the particular. Peters makes a strong case that the specific disturbances within her texts have resulted in Highsmith's writing remaining resistant to explication and to the more sophisticated interpretative strategies that would seek to position her within a specific genre.

1 In the Waiting Room

DOI: 10.4324/9781315567358-2

Introduction

Put another way, it means that there are lives not sustained by desire, as desire is always for objects. Such lives are based on exclusion.¹

1 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 6.

Patricia Highsmith's work can be viewed as a series of reflections originating from and developing her particular viewpoint on the human condition. This viewpoint, except for one or two exceptions within her work when she approaches the subject matter of her own specific human experience (most notably Carol [1952] but also Small g: A Summer Idyll [1995]), can be read as a lament, albeit one heard within the unexpected (and arguably restrictive) narrative structure of crime fiction. Highsmith's chosen genre and her interest in the psychological make-up of the thwarted individual caught within restrictive frameworks created an antithetical tension throughout her life; this is what provides her texts with their originality and unpredictability. While from some angles they appear to be full of action – convoluted plots and so on – this never quite masks a radical and disturbing underlying vacuity. I have chosen to label this vacuum beneath the surface conventions as a ‘waiting room’ in which her characters find themselves suspended from life and thus unable to engage in meaningful actions or projects. The concept of a waiting room implies that at some point the characters must vacate their chosen place (of safety, torment, or whatever it might be). Moreover, it indicates that their particular waiting mode is not one of anticipation, but resignation.

I have chosen to focus on an examination of the ‘waiting rooms’ constructed in some of Highsmith's novels because this approach (concentrating on what does not happen as much as what does) reveals the extent to which she addresses and problematises issues of ethics, sexuality and anxiety. I will be discussing Deep Water (1957), The Cry of the Owl (1962) and This Sweet Sickness (1960) here because, as outlined in the Introduction, these three early texts work together to expose and foreground the anxious vacuity that remains a feature of the rest of her oeuvre.

The level of anxiety and discomfort that marks Highsmith's characters, while protecting them to some extent within the waiting room, also closes off any experience of the world as a stable or secure zone. Their suffering is manifested in multiple guises; the examples of her heroes’ problems read like a textbook of obsessional and neurotic behaviours. However, if Highsmith's raison d’être was merely to articulate the difficulties that her unfortunates have in negotiating their way through life, the world she constructs would not present the level of tension, or indeed exert the fascination for the reader, that it does. Instead, Highsmith uses her characterisations to highlight and exaggerate modes of behaviour that move her work firmly towards a dissection of, not the pathological, but ‘normal’ human behaviour.

This chapter examines the dilemmas faced by her anxiety-ridden ‘heroes-in-waiting’, and considers the effects of this, expressed both thematically and structurally, on her readers. The act of reading involves making choices; Highsmith problematises these choices for her readers when she blurs the boundaries between accepted and pathological patterns of behaviour. This occurs even within a novel such as Deep Water. It might appear in Deep Water that Victor Van Allen descends into madness towards the end of the book, indeed that the book is written as an exposition of a gradual erosion of sanity. However, Highsmith does not allow the text to split into two sections that clearly mark the separation between sanity and madness. Instead, she uses the processes that Vic goes through to reflect on the behaviour of those around him, consistently casting doubt on their perspectives and motivations. In fact, by the end of the book, one could argue that Vic ‘sees’ clearly, according to his frame of reference, in ways that subvert the structure (or the waiting room) which he finally, through psychosis, is able to escape. The novel ends with a marked degree of ambivalence concerning the cohesion of the Symbolic order and reflects on the structural depths of its uncertainty. Lacanian psychoanalytic theory emphasises the instability of the Symbolic order, while arguing concurrently that the psychotic cannot be duped. Vic, by the concluding pages of Deep Water, becomes an exemplar of this radical claim.

Deep Water is one of Highsmith's most important novels insofar as it demonstrates many of her abiding concerns. These issues are applicable to the structure, not only of the subject but also of the reading process. A question that may legitimately be asked in respect of Highsmith's work (even if it is not fully answerable) is that of her own relationship to her texts and, simultaneously, her relationship with her readers. If in some ways her characters are eliding the Symbolic, where does she place herself in respect of the ‘truth’ of her communication through the writing process? In other words, where can we place the authorial voice and her desire? Is Patricia Highsmith, through her withholding of desire in her protagonists, flirting with her readers, leading them on towards a full stop that thrusts them back on their own desire? ‘What can be dismaying about flirting – or exhilarating depending on one's point of view – is what it might then reveal about the nature of people's interest in each other.’² As Highsmith wrote about the process of writing suspense fiction, the trick is to allow the reader some slack, but to never let them go until the moment of the author's choosing: ‘Stretch the reader's credulity, his sense of logic, to the utmost – it is quite elastic – but don’t break it.’³ Of all her non-Ripley texts, it is Deep Water that demands the most of her reader's credulity.

2 Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. xviii. 3 Patricia Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (New York: St Martin's Press, 1983), p. 60.

Highsmith aligns her flirtation with a forced inactivity that the reader, along with the protagonists, must endure. This ‘empty time’ that is imbued with the ‘inertia of the real’ is written differently within each novel. The three texts chosen here to exemplify Highsmith's ‘waiting room’ writing each occupy a different perspective in respect of emptiness and lack of resolution. Robert in The Cry of the Owl is both aware and fearful of his inertia, while at the same time utilising it as a shield against emotional involvement. David in This Sweet Sickness ‘plasters over’ the real with fantasy, and thus becomes the archetypal obsessive, finally precipitated into his ultimately ‘feminine’ act of suicide when confronted by the immutable presence of the Law. Highsmith in both these novels utilises objects within the domestic sphere as both sinthome and the glue that falteringly halts the unravelling of the Symbolic. Of the three novels I am considering it is in Deep Water that objects are used to reflect most clearly on the vacuity and profligacy of the protagonist's environment. It can be argued that the inert is, in its passivity, resistant to mindless proliferation. The waiting room thus draws into it a passive critique of the drive towards excessive consumption: ‘This feeling for the inert has a special significance in our age, in which the obverse of the capitalist drive to produce ever more new objects is a growing mountain of “useless waste”.’⁴ Highsmith's waiting room, perhaps surprisingly, might then be able to be read also as a form of cultural critique, one that transposes the seeming negativity of passivity and inertia into a radical disavowal of the rigid structuring of the Symbolic.

4 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Not a desire to have him but to be like him’, in London Review of Books, 21st August 2003, p. 2. (All further references to this review will be to l.r.b.)

Deep Water

In Deep Water, before turning, almost accidentally, to a real murder, Victor Van Allen allows his local community to suspect that he has killed a lover of his wife's in the belief that this would raise him in the estimation of those around him. He realises that people find it more acceptable to imagine that a man could kill out of jealousy than that he would fail to act or respond to a situation that makes him look foolish and weak. A friend of Vic's sums up how she perceives his attitude: ‘You’re like somebody waiting very patiently and one day – you’ll do something.’⁵ The unsolved murder of Malcolm McRae validates Vic's apparent lack of jealousy and ‘humanises’ him in the eyes of the community: ‘He had seen it in their faces, even in Horace's. He didn’t react with normal jealousy and something was going to give. To have burst out, finally, was merely human. People understood that’ (DW 52). Immediately after this point, the real murderer is caught, plunging Vic into a crisis of identity; he knows he will once again be viewed as a sad cuckold, stagnating while his wife humiliates him in front of his peers.

5 Patricia Highsmith, Deep Water (London: Penguin, 1974), p. 53. (All further references are to this edition and appear bracketed as DW and page numbers in the text.)

This non-action, the not-killing of McRae, acts as the pivotal moment in this novel. Once the affect⁶ brought about by Vic's recognition of the possibility of murderous action is thwarted by the real murderer's arrest, it is only a matter of time before the fantasy thus produced precipitates the necessary action. Becoming ‘merely human’ is approached by Vic not as an intellectual possibility, but as a psychic dilemma; as with many of Highsmith's suffering heroes, his difference from other people is presented as both superiority and as a lack: of desire, or ability to function within socially acceptable boundaries. Psychoanalytically, the lack of opportunity to discharge affect, once activated, leads to the hysterical symptom.⁷ Slavoj Žižek argues from Lacanian theory that fantasy cannot be read as a confirmation of a pre-existing desire, but instead works to produce that desire:

6 ‘Term borrowed by psycho-analysis from German psychological usage. It connotes any affective state, whether painful or pleasant, whether vague or well defined, and whether it is manifested in the form of a massive discharge or in the form of a general mood. According to Freud, each instinct expresses itself in terms of affect and in terms of ideas. The affect is the qualitative expression of the quantity of instinctual energy and its fluctuations.’ J. Laplanche and J-B Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: The Hogarth Press, 1985), p. 13. 7 ‘The origin of the hysterical symptom, they [Freud and Breuer] asserted, was to be found in a traumatic event which has been met with no corresponding and proportionate discharge of effect (the effect, in other words, remains strangulated).’ Ibid., p. 13.

The fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in advance, but something that has to be constructed – and it is precisely the role of fantasy to give the coordinates of the subject's desire, to specify its object, to locate the position the subject assumes in it. It is only through fantasy that the subject is constituted as desiring: through fantasy, we learn how to desire.⁸

8 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), p. 6.

Vic exemplifies this point; it seems he has never learned how to properly desire. Presented as obsessive by Highsmith from the outset of the novel, he attempts to manifest (in some respects forces) a faint version of a desiring symptom_ jealousy. This demands a response, an action, resulting in the lethargic, but effective, murder of Charley De Lisle, another of his wife's lovers. The nature of Vic's jealousy is, even at this point, ambivalent, predicated less on an underlying possessiveness or desire towards his wife than on shame and embarrassment concerning her choice of lover. Immediately prior to the murder scene, Vic's repulsion at the thought of his proximity to De Lisle is so intense that he views the water in the pool as contaminated because De Lisle has been there: ‘he felt a revulsion about getting into the water while Melinda and De Lisle were there, about even getting near the pool, because de Lisle had been in its water’ (DW 89). He tries to shift out of his constitutive anxiety mode by attempting to introduce desire. This fails, and he kills De Lisle not out of jealousy or anger but embarrassment. Melinda pulls De Lisle too close to Vic, thus he must preserve his ‘lack’ by the destruction of this obscene, embarrassing object. Anxiety clings onto its function of keeping the subject at a distance from the object:

We can in this way also grasp the specificity of the Lacanian notion of anxiety: anxiety occurs not when the object-cause of desire is lacking; it is not the lack of the object that gives rise to anxiety but, on the contrary, the danger of our getting too close to the object and thus losing the lack itself. Anxiety is brought about by the disappearance of desire.⁹

9 Žižek, Looking Awry, p. 8.

Highsmith stages this murder scene without desire, totally lacking in dramatic effect. It happens almost accidentally, virtually as if it were a joke that went too far:

It's a joke, Vic thought to himself. If he were to let him up now, it would be merely a joke, though perhaps a rough one, but just then De Lisle's efforts grew violent, and Vic concentrated his own effort, one hand at the back of De Lisle's neck now, his other hand holding De Lisle's wrist away from him under the water. (DW 91)

Vic kills De Lisle, but this is revealed as utterly insufficient; while he succeeds in annihilating that particular object, this fails to provide any cathartic effect. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 In the Waiting Room
• 2 In Exile
• 3 Tom Ripley: The Sinthome Writes Back
• Bibliography
• Index