Cultural Relativism and “Our Way of Life”:
Patricia Highsmith’s The Tremor of Forgery
DOI :
https://doi.org/10.35219/cultural-intertexts.2022.12.12Mots-clés :
cultural relativism, American ethnocentrism, nationalistic chauvinism, Arab culture, moral fraudulenceRésumé
Like Meursault in The Stranger (1942) by Albert Camus, the 34-year-old protagonist of
Patricia Highsmith’s The Tremor of Forgery (1969) is almost certain of having killed an
Arab in self-defence but feels no remorse for the deed except as it is judged by other Americans
within his orbit of Western influence. While visiting Tunisia on what is apparently his first
trip overseas, novelist Howard Ingham wrestles with the alterity of an Arab culture during
the Six-Day War in the Middle East while at the same time criticizing the parochialism of a
countryman who broadcasts propaganda about “Our Way of Life.” Ingham soon embraces,
albeit equivocally, a perspective of cultural relativism, but his doing so is largely the dodge
of a doubly dispossessed stranger in a strange land. Tremor thus figures as one of
Highsmith’s “texts of exile,” as Fiona Peters has called it, that ends with Ingham’s anticlimactic return home to renew a relationship with his former wife.
