Comparative Literature

One of my favorite things my brain can do is hear a series of notes in a song and recognize that it’s the same as (or similar to) a series of notes in one of the thousands of other songs I’ve heard. It always feels like an extraordinary discovery, though I think many, if not most, human beings can do this. (That’s what landed Vanilla Ice in hot water.) Certainly, music echoes other music even more often than those of us who recognize it, recognize it. After all, there are only 12 notes in Western music, including flats and sharps. Musicians are bound, probabilistically, to sometimes place them in the same order as other musicians (though of course other factors like pitch and rhythm can differentiate these sequences).

In literature, there are many more basic units—i.e., words—than in music, so less literal repetition. And yet, writers frequently repeat the same plot points, character traits, themes, and even specific metaphors. I appreciate these recurrences even more in writing than in music, because in the latter, they can just be attributed to chance, but in the former, they offer invaluable evidence of common experience in an increasingly atomized reality. When two (or more) writers write about precisely the same idea, or kind of person, or course of events, it’s likely not just a coincidence; it’s a sign that despite our many differences, we’re all occupying approximately the same plane of existence.

I saw one such sign not long ago, while reading Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Partway through the novel, Mr. Ripley (Tom) has developed complicated feelings about Dickie, a young man he’s supposed to be persuading to return from Italy to the States to take a job in his father’s company. (The father is paying Tom—long story.) The ambiguously queer Tom is sexually attracted to Dickie—but as importantly, he’s deeply envious of all Dickie has that he does not: wealth, a father who loves him enough to be worried about him, an apparently simple self. When a peeping Tom sees Dickie hooking up with his sort-of girlfriend, Marge, he retreats to Dickie’s place, where he’s staying.

“He went up to Dickie’s room and paced around for a few moments, his hands in his pockets. He wondered when Dickie was coming back? Or was he going to stay and make an afternoon of it, really take her to bed with him? He jerked Dickie’s closet door open and looked in. There was a freshly pressed, new-looking grey flannel suit that he had never seen Dickie wearing. Tom took it out. He took off his knee-length shorts and put on the grey flannel trousers. He put on a pair of Dickie’s shoes. Then he opened the bottom drawer of the chest and took out a clean blue-and-white striped shirt. He chose a dark-blue silk tie and knotted it carefully. The suit fitted him. He re-parted his hair and put the part a little more to one side, the way Dickie wore his.”

Tom-as-Dickie imagines rejecting Marge—and then, when she violently resists, murdering her. (There’s no small amount of misogyny in this novel, though it was written by a lesbian. I’ll let a lesbian figure that one out.) “You know why I had to do that,” he tells her. “You were interfering between Tom and me—No, not that! But there is a bond between us!” Tom adds a handkerchief to his ensemble, then a hat. “It surprised him how much he looked like Dickie with the top of his head covered.”

Reading this description of, essentially, a game of dress-up, I was reminded right away of a similar scene in a thoroughly dissimilar book, John Knowles’ A Separate Peace. It takes place right after the inciting incident of the novel, when—spoiler alert—the protagonist, Gene, causes his boarding-school roommate Phinneas, called Finny, to fall out of a tree and badly break his leg. Although Knowles denied it, it is clear to anyone with gay eyes that the bookish, insecure Gene is in love with the confident, athletic Finny. (Knowles, never married but buddy-buddy with Thornton Wilder and Gore Vidal, was probably gay.) Gene’s love, however, is adulterated with a covetous and even destructive quality—a desire not just to possess Finny, but to subsume him.

Alone in their room while Finny is in the infirmary, Gene decides to put on his roommate’s clothes. “We were the same size, and although he always criticized mine he used to wear them frequently, quickly forgetting what belonged to him and what to me. I never forgot, and that evening, I put on his cordoran shoes, his pants, and looked for and finally found his pink shirt, neatly laundered in a drawer. Its high, somewhat stiff collar against my neck, the wide cuffs touching my wrists, the rich materials against my skin excited a sense of strangeness and distinction; I felt like some nobleman, some Spanish grandee.”

“But when I looked in the mirror it was no remote aristocrat I had become, no character out of daydreams. It was Phineas, Phineas to the life. I even had his humorous expression in my face, his sharp optimistic awareness. I had no idea why this gave me such intense relief, but it seemed, standing there in Finny’s triumphant shirt, that I would never stumble through the confusions of my own character again.”

Here, in a work published years apart from The Talented Mr. Ripley, Knowles strikes almost the exact same notes as Highsmith: a queer character costumes himself in the clothing of the straight man he’s in love with, not only to feel physically closer to him—“the rich materials against my skin”—but to feel psychically closer to his seemingly uncomplicated nature—most importantly, his normativity; his heterosexuality. And since neither this psychic nor this physical closeness can actually be achieved, there’s also in these passages tones of anger and violence, like a refrain of the actual violence elsewhere in the novels. Tom takes it out on an imaginary Marge. For Gene, it bubbles up subtly when he recalls how unselfconsciously Finny would wear Gene’s clothing, forgetting whose clothes were whose. “I never forgot,” Gene says.

Other than the fact that they were both writers, the only connection between Knowles and Highsmith was their queerness (and even that connection is tenuous, given that Knowles never publicly came out). Still, the experience they shared was enough to produce these echoing descriptions of yearning and rage, which resonate not only with each other, but also with any reader who knows a little about the constraints of one’s own wardrobe. Thanks to such reverberations across books and time, we don’t have to “stumble through the confusions of [our] own character.” As though through echolocation, fiction guides the way.

JF