billybookblog

*contains spoilers* ‘NATURAL things affect us, by the laws of that connexion, which providence has established between certain motions and configurations of bodies, and certain consequent feelings in our minds. Painting affects in the same manner, but with the superadded pleasure of imitation; […] as to words; they seem to me to affect us in a manner very different from that in which we are affected by natural things, or by painting or architecture; yet words have as considerable a share in exciting ideas of beauty and of the sublime as any of these, and sometimes a much greater than any of them’. Edmund Burke from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). The disparity between one’s experience and the words one uses in attempting to apprehend it in writing is a gulf that has proven a perennially yawning one. What number of words, if one had the time or the inclination, could so fully and accurately express an experience as it was? Or eve...

*contains spoilers* History and fiction; story and narrative. In the telling of any tale, as events are given shape in the mind’s recollection, as they’re articulated in the utterances of one’s speech and writing – and even related in silences between – the lines separating history and fiction, story and narrative, become distorted. This is especially so with Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel, The Secret History , which, amongst a plethora of thematic focuses (such as: social morality in context and in isolation; the value and distinctions of [and between] the academic disciplines; how place and time have the capacity to shape us into something we believe to be unlike our ‘self’), confronts the ineffability of experience. Indeed, even under the highly-disciplined hand of the author, our narrator, Richard Papen, who communicates as if he were writing a book, sometimes questions the manner in which he’s portraying the key characters of his tale: ‘Reading back over this, I feel that in some respec...