Tom Ripley, Inc.: Patricia Highsmith's Corporate Fiction

Tom Ripley—the master impersonator at the center of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) and four subsequent Ripley novels—takes the stage with a deceptively dull opening act. Ripley first poses as an Internal Revenue Service official who accuses his marks of miscalculating their modest income taxes. Under his false direction, they send remittance to an "overflow" office (his apartment) where he can collect, but not cash, their checks for a few hundred dollars (20). In a sequence as plodding as any Monday morning at the office, Ripley selects his (stolen) I.R.S. form, which duly reports a "NOTICE OF ERROR IN COMPUTATION," fills out a false adjustment in duplicate ("Income: $11,250. Exemptions: 1. Deductions: $600. Credits: nil. Remittance: nil. Interest: [he hesitated a moment] $2.16. Balance due: $233.76"), types up a form letter on (stolen) stationery, and signs it with a "scrolly, illegible signature" (20). Promising a thriller, Highsmith first mires her protagonist—and reader—in tax correspondence.

Yet Ripley's I.R.S. act succeeds according to Highsmith's particular method of rendering inseparable ties between commonplace investment and criminal passion. In Ripley's case, the desire most in question is no less mundane or scandalous than the mid-twentieth-century dream of incorporation, the irresistibly self-destructive and self-aggrandizing business of being, in Tom's view, "alone, yet not at all lonely" (131). Business incorporation, like its naughtier counterparts, forgery and impersonation, entails an affront to and expansion of personal integrity. All three acts are crimes against the (social) body that are more than figuratively linked, as Highsmith makes clear, to suicide and murder. At the same time, all three can extend a life through creative production. Highsmith's reference to Oscar Wilde in an epigraph to her second Ripley novel, Ripley Under Ground (1970), outlines just these contradictions of death and life in art. Wilde writes and Highsmith quotes: "I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than for what I hold to be true. . . . Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and I am not sorry that it is so." For Ripley, "the artistic life," like the corporate life, offers the promise of deception and the chance to escape the finite self. While in The Talented Mr. Ripley Tom kills and impersonates an unpromising young painter, Dickie Greenleaf, in order to absorb his assets, in Ripley Under Ground, Tom murderously defends a full-blown corporation, Derwatt Ltd., founded on forgeries of a dead artist. Tom thus moves from clerk to C.E.O. of an enterprise that traverses the space between corporate business-as-usual and the "long and lovely suicide" of artistic creation.

Tom always triumphs in Highsmith's plots, but in the end she neither champions a corporate subject in keeping with the designs of midcentury business culture nor fashions an autonomous self capable of resisting the lure of incorporation. This ambiguity serves not only to compose Highsmith's characteristic brand of psychological and moral suspense, but also to reflect and anticipate anxieties about identity formation in twentieth-century corporate culture. Highsmith orchestrates acts of incorporation that place Tom in possession of the material and social status, as well as the self-respect, that he ardently desires. She succinctly summarizes this achievement near the end of The Talented Mr. Ripley: "He existed. Not many people in the world knew how to" (236). Yet the ever-changeable identity that Highsmith puts in motion as Tom Ripley also opposes the law of uniformity seemingly at the heart of corporate enterprise. By letting Tom have it both ways, Highsmith points at once in two directions: she presents constructions of individual identity and acts of artistic production as practices complicit with the logic of business incorporation, and she also disrupts the oppressive consistency of corporate identity and emphasizes its fictive status. Highsmith thus stops short of the dramatic revolt against "organization life" called for by her contemporaries as well as the wholesale rejection of mainstream social systems that current readers...