Ripley's Transgression, Highsmith's Art

Patricia Highsmith’s writing invites and yet defies taxonomies. In addition to suspense thriller and psychological thriller, her works are frequently categorized as crime fiction. Even this encompassing label “crime fiction” does not fully describe the aesthetic intricacy her stories explore. Slajov Žižek pinpoints the reason why she defies classification. He considers the novelist “elevating crime fiction to the level of art” because she understands that “true art lies not simply in the telling of stories, but in the telling of how stories go wrong”. Nonconformity indeed distinguishes Highsmith from other authors of crime fiction. Her writing does not focus on crime per se but how crime illuminates the treacherous nature of art. This essay argues that Highsmith employs crime as a metaphor and fiction as a medium to explore the dangerous liaison between art and transgression. The Ripliad quintet is a systematic rendition of her aesthetics, and Tom Ripley, the eponymous protagonist, anthropomorphizes art in its alluring multifariousness. The world Ripley forges is a murky juncture of actual and virtual realities where art and artfulness coalesce, presentation and pretense overlay, innovation and subversion intersect. His escapades defy laws, pushing limits as art rebels and manipulating ambiguity as artfulness equivocates