Criminal "Inner Voice" in Patricia Highsmith's Fiction: A New Voice for a New Genre?

Résumé En

In the vast and varied landscape of criminal literature, Patricia Highsmith stands out as a most singular figure, popularly known and acknowledged as a “serious” writer, but failing to generate academic interest before her death. Recent critics have explained this lack of scholarship by the difficulty in assigning her a satisfying label that would classify her within the many subgenres of crime fiction. Through minute analyses of chosen extracts from The Talented Mr Ripley (1955), one of her most famous novels, this paper argues that what singularizes Highsmith in the crime fiction landscape is in fact her specific use of criminal voice, which goes against the conventions of each subgenre.I will discuss how the omnipresent criminal’s inner voice dismantles the detective novel’s traditional themes of the triumph of the law and the restoration of order. The exploration of a deviant and criminal mind resonates beyond the page, as the reader is turned into an “accessory after the fact” (Coburn, 1984) wanting the protagonist to evade detection. I will also analyse Highsmith’s choice of a “consonant narrator” (Cohn, 1985) who remains effaced and fuses with the consciousness he narrates. Unlike his noir fiction counterparts, trapped in a downward spiral, Ripley exhibits a control and a manipulation that are even linguistically shown, as the third-person omniscient narration becomes contaminated by his pervasive voice, leaving traces of orality and subjective judgment. Finally, I posit that instead of the spectacular plot twists of the thrillers Highsmith supposedly inspired, suspense and apprehension are created through those moments of reflection and contemplation, when the free indirect discourse technique allows the reader to share in the “here and now” of her protagonist, in the “dragging-on of ‘empty time’ characteristic of life itself” (Žižek, 2003).