Pondering Character

 I managed to read Highsmith's Tom Ripley novels only in my fifties. Everyone says there is a strangeness, a dangerous quality, in her work. They are right.

But David Bergen on Patricia Highsmith, Backstories, and Why Tom Ripley's Character Works catches the ineffable quality of Highsmith, or so my memory tells me.

 Critics and readers have focussed on Ripley’s latent homosexuality, and how the repression created an angry young man capable of killing Dickie Greenleaf, a blond blue-eyed young American whom Ripley might desire; a few seconds before swinging the oar, Tom thinks “he could have hit Dickie, sprung on him, or kissed him, or thrown him overboard….” However, Highsmith is more interested in the impulses at the edge of desire, in alienation, in the act of survival, and the subconscious urge to run towards an ideal.

*** 

Highsmith gives us little history of Tom Ripley, and so we have no sense of what “made” Tom. Another writer might introduce a traumatic childhood, or some abuse newly recalled, or the horrible evil stepmother, to justify a character who kills with robotic coldness and efficiency and then cleans up his own messes with very little emotion; a dead body is a mere object to get rid of.

Ripley knows what he has done, but he justifies each violent action as an unfortunate necessity. To create a character who has no background, no formative traits, no history, no emotional purchase, and then to make that character believable and sympathetic, is a feat. 

Origin stories seem a rage now, following the rise of comic books. Yes, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist have origin stories; Morte d'Arthur has an origin story. The Bible has its origin stories. But what are the origin stories of Hamlet, Lear, Ivanhoe, Elizabeth Bennett, Sam Spade, or Jake Barnes? 

It seems to me that some stories require the character's origin. Those seem to be the stories that follow a biographical method. We need to see the beginning to understand the end. Again, see David Copperfield. The character directs action?

Others tell the story of what I am calling a functional character. We do not need to know the complete biography of Sam Spade or Hamlet. Of the latter, all we need to know is he is the Prince of Denmark and his father was murdered; what he was studying at Wittenberg is irrelevant. The action shows the character? 

But The Great Gatsby presents a problem for me. Jay Gatz alters his origin because he aspires to Daisy, but the alteration does not become known until after Gatsby's death. Dreiser works a similar story in the biographical form with An American Tragedy.  So does James T. Farrell in the Studs Lonigan trilogy. We have seen Gatsby chasing after Daisy. When we find out about Jay Gatz, the novel approaches tragedy.

Is the origin story related to the trauma plot? Are we delving into the trauma to understand the character? For Melville, it was enough to tell us that Moby Dick took Ahab's leg to start off Moby Dick. 

Well, enough meandering thoughts before dawn.

sch 5/27