The Secret History by Donna Tartt

*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 respects I’ve done Bunny an injustice. People really did like him.’

In this way, even as part of the conceit of a story being told within a narrative (Richard relating his truth as part of Tartt’s construction of fiction), the truth of the matter manages to find a way of being misrepresented in the act of diegesis. History inevitably becomes a fiction, of sorts. But then the question arises: what is our true ‘self’?

Nonetheless, even as Richard attempts to put right his portrayal of Bunny, whose presence throughout the novel in his various forms (I’ll say no more) is ghostlike and elusive (not least in his intractableness), our narrator realises that:

‘A character like his disintegrates under analysis. It can only be defined by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence overheard.’

And so, even if our narrator were to attempt to construct a more accurate impression of his friend for his prospective reader, the more the endeavour would exceed his grasp. Not because of his own inadequacy, but simply because such a portrayal is invariably doomed to misrepresentation – the various reasons being that either words altogether are not enough to contain such a character, or because one’s character is inherently not a single, definable thing at any one time. Added to Bunny’s elusive characterisation is Hampden College’s absent-and-yet-ever-present tutor of Greek studies, Julian, whose mysterious and apocryphal heritage holds an immense power over his chosen six students, as much as the absent-and-yet-ever-present mythical gods held sway over their chosen community, the polis of Ancient Greece. Richard, in order to define him, must use oxymorons:

‘Julian’s eyes widened with childish, theatrical surprise; not for the first time, I thought how much he was like Henry, that same strange mixture of chill and warmth.’

Henry, another impossible-to-define figure, who surprises our narrator (and almost all else) at every turn with the lengths he’ll go to in order to indulge in a modern context the lost elements of classical civilisation, is reticent to divulge his true objectives, let alone to indicate towards the locus-point of his character. He feels compassion for the figures of classical mythology, and yet he cannot muster empathy or sympathy for the concerns or well-being of his friends, let alone other human beings outside that circle (or, indeed, animals). He also spends precious time thinking before uttering a word. What he presents to the world is as meticulously planned as what Tartt puts on the page.

This leaves both the reader (outside the narrative) and the rest of his fellow students (within the narrative) hanging on for Henry’s next decision in a novel that is in a continual state of crisis from its opening sentence. The word ‘crisis’ of course derives from the Greek ‘krisis’ (or κρίσις) meaning (in most Hellenistic contexts) ‘judgement’ – and if we’re to go by our own narrator’s criteria, such an act of judgement, especially based on another’s recollection, is from the very first instance founded on shaky ground. But then what else are we to do? In courts of law, all the way back to Ancient Greece and Rome, judgements rely upon the testimony of others. Casting our eyes back through history, we believe we acquire a greater sense of perspective on the nature and course of (and reason for) events through time by the testimony of others.

In the same way that we all simply must cope with ‘being’ because we ‘are’, so we must come to terms with the limitations of our codification of experience via literary artefact because of the nature of its mode of expression, which, just like the act of speech, is a miniscule reduction of the complex modes of thought from which expression derives. Writing is, by definition, an act of distancing from what it is to experience something in the moment.

Indeed, given the trauma suffered by the narrator from the book’s very beginning (‘Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation’), be that of his own poor decision making or not, there is a willing emotional distancing written into the work throughout. In order for the recollection and diegesis to be made possible, Richard must scribe the extent of his experiences in a way that is set apart from the true horror of the events. Writing, as it trims away the unwieldy and the inexpressible, becomes a means for the reader to judge of their own volition the pain that his memories must surely engender between the lines. For, even nostalgia (the yearning for that which we call home), which we undoubtedly have all felt, is a feeling that can be out of reach of communicative articulation – to others, and especially to ourselves. It simply sits somewhere in the chest, lingering vaguely near the heart.

Immediately following the Prologue, which relates the trauma that is to impact all those that exist within the confines of the narrative, Richard does however manage to tie down that tugging yearning he feels before venturing into the exercise of unfolding his time at Hampden College: ‘a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.’ Tartt has, between the covers of this book, given us so much more than that.