(Tartt)

On the back cover of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is a description which presents this, the original American campus novel, as a work which “recounts the terrible price we pay for mistakes made on the dark journey to adulthood”.  Reading the book itself however, I found this not even remotely salient in the novel’s web of argument and exploration. Instead, from the very first page, I encountered The Secret History as a questioning and cautionary work concerned with the perils of a particular kind of reading practice.  

Tartt’s circle of protagonists read Classics rather than English literature (and thus deal more with history than the subjective sphere of fiction). Yet their approach to the discipline – as a portal into a realm of symbolism and fascinating ambiguity, to derive meaning from, speculate about and escape into– renders their experience of scholarship similar to that of literary study. What distinguishes this particular practice, and characterises the kind of reading that Tartt warns against, is a tendency to behold the boundary between text and reality as a fluid one enabling the former to pervade and infuse the latter. The result is an individual who beholds the entire world as a text, a perpetual reader who is forever engaged in the act of decipherment, analyses, of the recognition and construction of the aesthetic.

In the novel itself, this manifests in characters who seize upon classical details in the every-day: an obsession with the weather, repeated references to omens (Charles interprets ravens as: “Three of them for three of us. That’s an augury, I bet”), constant allusions to the classical world (i.e.  Henry glances “up at the hole in the ceiling. ‘Yes,’ he said brusquely. ‘Like the Pantheon.’) and the incorporation of the past into the mythology of identity (“…imagine what heroes you’d be… ‘Demigods,’ said Francis, laughing. ‘We could sit on the thrones in the town square.”). Ultimately, however, this transformation of reality into construct is none too apparent than in the occurrence of murder.

Tartt prefigures the cumulative expression of what Richard describes as the “morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs” (a concern for the idea or look of a thing rather than its actual implications and empirical reality) in theoretical statements offered in the scholarly environment (i.e. “Aristotle says in the Poetics,’ said Henry, ‘that objects such as corpses, painful to view in themselves, can become delightful to contemplate in a work of art’.”) and ones which indicate an obsession with the aesthetic of murder at the cost of grasping its moral weight (“…too easy to beguile myself with the Medicis, the Borgias, all those poisoned rings and roses…”). Death itself, by extension, becomes unreal, like something written into being:  “the corpse itself seemed little more than a prop, something brought out in the dark by stagehands and laid at Henry’s feet”.  There is therefore, Tartt seems to be saying, a kind of scholarship, a kind of reading, which knows no limits – which in training the individual to fix their eyes upon the text, render it impossible to behold the world through any other gaze; one which is so fixated upon aesthetics and quotation and meaning, that it is tragically (and dangerously) detached from reality itself.