I did not regret for the first time that I was not better
versed in literature; that I have not read all the important works of world
literature, nor have I been educated in literary science. I'm a fan. This means
that reading a literary work triggers in me feelings and thoughts, acceptance
and rejection, questions that I do not know how to express, justify and answer
professionally enough. And yet I try, more to myself in challenge and joy than
to readers in fun and instruction.
I read the novel, which in Slovenian translation consists of
561 pages (without an afterword of a reviewer), in a draught, that is, in three
days with breaks. I surprised myself. That says something about this debut-work,
then, at the time of the book’s release, of the 28-year-old, undoubtedly
talented writer. But it doesn't say everything.
To let you know what I’m talking about, let me summarize the
content. A group of six classical Greek students at an elite college in the
state of Vermont - including a first-person storyteller and a girl - under the
influence of their charismatic professor set up bacchanalia in the environment
of the college, and in the trans killed
a local farmer in a horrible way. Police detect the crime, but not the
perpetrators. In order to disguise themselves, the students then deliberately
and thoughtfully plunge off the cliffs into death their colleague, whom they
suspected would report them. Police again discover the crime, but not the
perpetrators. In the second part of the story, we follow the events after this
murder, the experience of individual members of the group, the relations
between them and the disintegration of the group to the final conflict due to
the love triangle and the consequent suicide of the leader. The surviving
perpetrators of both crimes remain undetected and become included in everyday
life.
When I put the book down, I asked myself: genuine fiction or
contrived, fake-fiction?
At this point, I would benefit from better knowledge of literary
theory to be able to convincingly express what I mean by this question. I am
not sure, maybe I'm completely wrong, but it seems to me that a similar
criterion for evaluating literary works was used by Josip Vidmar, one of the influential
slovenian post-war literary critics. Referring to above mentioned criterion of
distinction between genuine and fake literature, he rejected contemporary
modernist literature as fake-fiction in comparison with the works of
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and other classics, which he regarded as genuine art works
that seem to spring from the depths of artistic souls - and thus he earned the
ridicule of young writers and the reputation of a hard conservative. A real
work of art is in the details of space and time, technically speaking, of
course also fictional, but through fictional stories that are plausible and
touch us, it reveals a reality, a reality that has been remained hidden from us
in ordinary life. It reveals itself to us through the artist’s empathy,
intuition and imagination and presents itself with fictional characters and
scenes. Real art shows a mirror to man and society. I just can't give up on
that old maxim. In contrast, literary fake-fiction works are not genuine, not
close-to-life, are mental constructions, they are more brain products than
artistically processed real-life experiences. They tell us stories that may be
interesting and entertaining, but they are not “alive” and convincing, they do
not feature people “with flesh and blood”,
as it is called savagely. They do not reveal important covered realities to us,
they do not shake our common sense, but they act as a pretentious pose, as
boasting, as snobbery, as a facade behind which there is nothing, or at least
nothing but superficiality. They don’t bring new insights, they’re just entertainig
reading for killing time.
So what has Donna Tartt written? Has she mirrored social and human reality or just her hairdressing? Is her novel a contribution to the knowledge of human condition or a “literary trip” as experienced by Schnabl (p. 566)?
This question resonates with the feeling of Ilana Masad (https://www.readitforward.com/essay/why-i-hated-the-secret-history /), who titled her assessment of the novel as follows: "Why I didn't like the novel Secret History and why I became fond of it when I talked about it." Why didn't she like it? Because of the elitism, snobbery, and pretentiousness of the heroes, who, though Americans, are so very English, so forged, therefore, that she found the story "utterly unbelievable and difficult to digest" and protracted. But the fact that she became fond of the novel when others explained this and that to her means that it can be perceived more superficially or in more depth, in many layers; that you can read it as a crime-novel with literary embellishments or as a psychological and social analysis.
Let me now explain my methodological guideline. The novel is a "corpus delicti." I don’t care what the author wanted and intended to write, a crime novel or a social novel. I care what the novel tells to me; what I can extract from it within the limits of my abilities and empirical experience of life, and what it might mean to anyone else. Therefore, all the claims, even if I mistakenly claim that the author wanted this and that, did this and that, merely express my opinion, my experience of the novel, and my thinking alongside it.
Let me start with my feelings while reading. Like I said, I read the book in draught. That is a fact. The novel is a page-turner; you can’t wait to turn the page to see what’s hiding on the next page. It keeps you in suspense for three days. In doing so, paradoxically, the writer reveals the crime and the perpetrators on the first page. What is left for the writer of a crime novel for the next five hundred pages? She then leads us extremely skilfully in exploring, step by step, “what happened next”. From this point of view, the novel is thrilling and compelling and probably among the few who have taken this way of plot-unfolding.
The second feeling refering to the content, is the feeling that it is not possible easily to "extract" the »lesson«, the "morality" of the story; that this history is really very secret. In the end, I was confused. What did Donna Tartt want? This reproach sounds very old-fashioned, but I dare say that in good artistic reflection it is possible to summarize and express a basic lesson in a sentence or two. I don’t think that’s the only purpose of the work, that it has to have a thesis, but such a summary is normally possible. In a Dionysian trance, the students horribly butchered a nearby farmer; then they recalcitrantly plunged into the death their colleague. Killers, murderers, to be exact, escaped, except for one who commits suicide, without punishment, even, it seems, without other consequences. They don’t feel any severe remorse, they seem to be pragmatically rescuing their skin and breaking through day in and day out. Finally, they engage in a "normal" life, unrecognized, undisclosed, as the author reports in the epilogue. The impression is that "the crime pays off." This is also noted by one of the evaluators: “... the epilogue, at least in my reading, shows how the decadence of their non-confrontation with what they did was a real virtue, with the help of which they somehow got out of the abyss. Not without scars, of course not, but they still came out ” (Gregor Lozar, Arslitera). If this is the lesson of the novel, this quote is proof that this lesson is contagious. Basically, a crime pays off if you’re smart and cool enough. If they hadn’t “removed” Bunny, they would have sat in jail. If it was revealed what they had done to Bunny, they would be put in that American chair. So - well, they suffer of insomnia, psychasthenic disorders, addiction - but this is also faced by people who have not committed any sin in their lives, at least not as fatal as a murder. What does the writer want to tell us?
At times, the third feeling, her writing seems to me to show too obviously that the philologist was attending a creative writing course. This is noticed in young writers, sometimes in unnecessary puffy language (add descriptive adjectives!), in superfluous details (as many details as possible!), in the plot (ingenious plot!), excessively slow, gradual development (suspension!) and the like. When I put down the book, I had a certain feeling that it was all nothing more than a good crime novel, for a few hours of escape, without deeper reflection. The novel disguises its »flat« nature with seeming sophistication - the study of Greek, imitation of Greek culture, quotations (postmodernist canon), quasi-philosophy ("erudition" according to Schnabl, ibid.), elitism. "Fake" great literature. A new genre. A dazzling look that conceals an idea void.
Let me list a few things that have bothered me and solidified my initially negative assessment.
Why locate the story in an elite college, in a fictional group of students of classical philology, specifically Greek? For a coincidental or pragmatic reason, because the author herself was a student of classical philology and knows these environments? Why emphasize their extreme remoteness from real life, their extreme cultural or spiritual elitism and snobbery? A literary work should describe the real life, the typical life, Vidmar would say, and not some extraordinary and distant situations elsewhere.
What is the significance of justifying the plot on such a temporally and culturally remote custom as the Greek Dionysian orgies or the Roman bacchanalia? Be careful, dear readers, that you do not try to stage bacchanalia in your life, because in them a person completely loses control of himself, which can lead to fatal complications. Is that the point?
What are all these Greek and Latin sayings and quotations from English and world literature for? Do they serve to prove that the witer likes the postmodernist style, even though she herself does not write in exactly that style, as the reviewers note? Proves it's read? Are these the necessary embellishments of a "great novel", a "cult book"?
What should I do with the flat philosophy served by the admired mentor Julian when he repeats “Beauty is awful”? Enthusiasts of the novel see in this interesting, astonishing intellectual deliberations, "erudition". "Beauty is awful" is the excess of "sublimity"! I beg you! Horror is not beautiful, it is just awful. What’s so beautiful about the fact that the farmer’s belly was ripped open?
What is the point of describing all this gluttony, drunkenness, buzzing and incest, and all sorts of bullshit of the youth of the American rich? We know a lot about this. They had already been analyzed ever and again. Everything is clear. With this plutocracy, it will have to be swept away once. It no longer needs to be described.
So is this universally celebrated novel really a flat work,
and all its fame a marketing product, or, as Blatnik aptly says (ibidem - does
not refer to this work) a product of the book's "celebratory
apparatus"?
After all, my assessment is a matter of my decision. It
seems to me that I could defend the view that this novel is a “fake-great«
novel, not a “novel of my life,” as one reviewer wrote, but a “fake-novel of my
life”. Or perhaps a more appropriate paraphrase for the reader: ‘‘a fake-novel
of my fake-life, as such a novel can only be admired by one who lives a fake-life.
At the same time, however, I run into some inconsistency. If
it’s fake, how come it attracted and kept me? Can (flat) content be in such a
mismatch with the (suggestive) form? Is it possible to weave a tension
(suspension) on completely imaginary content that makes any identification and
any ethical involvement impossible?
It may be worth following the rule that it is good to change
one's point of view in order to gain new insights. Instead of rejecting the
novel, I take the position that the novel is genuine in the Vidmarian sense of
the word; that it holdds a mirror to society. I was first drawn to this view by a
fourth feeling - after reading the novel. Disintegration, complete disintegration,
I told myself. Tartt describes a society that is falling apart; it describes
ethical disintegration to the point where - as already mentioned - we cross out
any ethics and agree to the maxim “everything is allowed”. The author does this
convincingly, so her work is not a “decorated” crime novel; it is a genuine
social novel.
What do the individual elements of this novel mean? Let’s
start with the trivia and atmosphere that first led me to think that the novel
is a social critique, a novel about social disintegration. In addition to the
main elements, I was convinced of this by a faithful description of banal
everyday details, then by thinking about
symbols and meanings. Tartt passionately and skillfully describes everyday
habits: “fast-food” student eating, and “slow-food” meals, funded by a boy
sitting on a bottomless bag; booze and “tripe”; obsessive transport here and
there, overseas jumps to Yuroup. An elite private college that prospers from a
hefty student tuition, among other things, is no better than our »free« state
university; also there the ascending arbitrariness of some professors to whom
no one can do anything; parasite breeding, quasi-research. The description of
Bunny's funeral is a description of an emotionally alienated, seeming, nominal
"family." The inefficiency of law enforcement and the judiciary,
which do everything according to the rules, is obvious. The gathering of the
media at the scene of a crime and their reporting is a farce of journalism.
Let’s move on to the elements relevant to the story.
Isolation. - What is the significance of the fact that the
events are limited to a group of six students from a very isolated department
of classical philology of a remote college? Why insulation? Why "away from
the mad world"? To draw attention to what is happening in the persons and
between the persons in the group. The
material and institutional moment is almost completely excluded. The focus is
therefore on psychological and ethical issues. Did this escape succede? Does
not the madness of the world spring from the madness of the spirit?
Greek. - What is the significance of the fact that the novel
takes place in the department of classical philology; that the personalities
are students of Greek? What does the decision to study Greek mean? What are the
motives for this decision? I roughly see two motives. 1. A less important but
possible motives are prestige, status, style, family tradition, etc. something
that complements the snobbery and elitism of the group. To this we can add other
motives: predicted performance, after all, a coincidence - by chance, Richard
found that college prospectus in his hands. 2. The second motive is essential:
To conquer another way of thinking, to become acquainted with or even to assume
another, as far as possible, identity. "Learning to think in Greek."
The biggest advantage of immersing oneself in this language is supposed to be
the enstrangement of current self-evidences and the generation of new, creative
ideas. However, here “thinking in Greek” obviously does not mean thinking like
Tales, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, or like Greek playwrights and other writers,
but going backwards in thinking to the level of Greek myths (“... aheronta
movebo ...”). From all the Greek tradition, professor Julian chooses the
Dionysian view: observing the dark forces, releasing self-control (Dionysian
trance), freedom from all compulsions (absolute freedom) in the name of
balancing the rational and the irrational. This is supposed to be »erudition«
(Schnabl) as a feature of the novel.
There is another point. The decision to study Greek is a decision
for an exemplary useless thing in material sense; it is an anti-utilitarian
move, a decision for the spirit in a distinctly utilitarian culture. For a
spirit that fails when it should decisively intervene in what is happening? Can
spirit be “sick” too?
People with a noble longing for spirituality commit a crime.
How come? In addition to the mentioned desire, there is another desire in them,
the desire for new experiences, for overcoming the limitations of body and
mind, the desire for unlimited freedom. This is fundamental, because the desire
to accept a foreign identity is only a subtype of overcoming limitations, that
is, overcoming the limitations of one's own language and culture (=
historical-geographical limitations). Bacchanalia are a way of overcoming
control, that is, limiting, over one’s own body and spirit in a trance. The
result is an uncontrolled rage that leads to crime in the novel. As a
psychology student in the early 1960s, I attended a lecture in which, at a time
when drugs were not even talked about, a well-known slovenian psychiatrist,
Professor Lev Milčinski, asked us if we would be willing to take part in an
experiment in which we would ingest some drug to study its effects. Almost all
of us raised our hands. The professor did not mean it seriously he only tested our
willingness to use drugs as a source of new experiences. The desire to
transcend givens and limitations is therefore a deep human desire.
Of course, we can raise the pedagogical for-finger and say
that the teacher should have prevented this. Let’s think about it: what is the
success of pedagogy and all other disciplines in preventing drug addiction. For
decades, new and new young people have fallen into addiction, despite all the
prevention. There may be fewer drugs addicts than there would be without
prevention, but that doesn’t blur the essence of the argument. Let’s not blame
the writer for the bacchanalia in her novel to be a literary construct. No, it
stems from the deep desire of young people. All the more so for such young
people who consider themselves to be of a better sort, thinking that nothing
bad can happen to them, but if it does, they will master it.
A charismatic professor. - Since I was a professor myself, I
dedicate myself to the analysis of this type with great malicious joy and
indulgence. Interestingly, other reviewers treat him almost as respectfully as
his students and do not generally problematize his character. But he’s a guy
who smells far away. A professor of Greek (this is not yet a sin), a friend of
some celebrities of literature and politics, who choses a remote Vermont college
as the focus of his activity; in this college a remote cabinet. An unannounced visitor is spoken to through the slot of a closed cabinet door. He hardly
communicates with his college colleagues. He is therefore as far removed as
possible from "earthly life", as if he were coming from somewhere
else. Why? A psychologist would recognize a defensive posture. What is he
afraid of, what is he hiding? He hides his emptiness and his doing. He set
himself the task of introducing a handful of young beings into Greek and that
part of Greek culture that corresponded to his ideology. He is wealthy, teaches
for free, pro bono, due to formalities for $ 1 a year. This means that he works
“for his soul”, out of an inner, spiritual need to educate the youth. Every
student whom he acquires for himself, whose soul he acquires, fills his inner
emptiness; is a big »like« for his efforts. He has “closed type hours,”
whatever that means. He only accepts five students, perhaps in order to be able
to influence them as fully as possible, to indoctrinate them. With a larger
number, someone would elude him, escape his hypnotic impact. He chooses
students on the basis of personal impression, not on the basis of prior
knowledge. I suppose the most important property of the chosen ones is
docility. He reads in his eyes who admires him. It does not accept those who
have previously studied the classics. Probably so as not to come up with formed
opinions that would not be to his liking. "You have to read the right
pages and share his views." The style of his teaching is therefore
autocratic, he asserts unanimity, he indoctrinates with his ideology. "Although
some of his features indicated youth… his face was by no means young and his
hair was snow white." This is a description of a baby-face, an old man
with a youthful face, an image of an infantile, immature man. He was smart,
polite, attentive, you could say charming - signs of a manipulator. When he
rejected Richard, he said he was sorry he couldn’t accept him. "The tone
of his voice, no matter how unbelievable, seemed to indicate that he was really
sorry, even more so than I was." A gorgeous description of hypocritical,
fake speaking. Fake. Hypocrites.
When he realized the consequences of his teachings and his
excellence, the magician disappeared without a trace - he followed the call of
his high friends and protectors. A real ascension into heaven, sorry, into hell.
Professor's teachings. - I highlight three of the
professor’s teachings: a return to myths, the loss of the self with the release
of drives, and the beauty of the awful. We celebrate the Greeks because they gave
up mythical thinking, witchcraft, and began to think rationally. We celebrate
them for inventing an orderly democracy. The noble motif of studying Greek is
to immerse oneself in Greek thinking, to assume Greek identity in a way of
experimenting, supplementing, expanding one’s native one; to assume the
identity of the ancient Other, who began to dig in the mine of thought. In
Julian's lectures this motif turns and focuses on the mythical past. The
Greeks are different from us because they lived their myths. Myths express the
true nature of man. Our God is not Apollo but Dionysus. Thinking suppresses
experience-life, but the aim of life is to live to the fullest, like the
Greeks. Back to the myths, is Julian's call, away from the gray theory to the
source of life, to primacy. The first regression.
For a child, it is a terrible realization that man is
separate from the rest of the world… Our own selves make us terribly unhappy
and that is why we are so anxious to lose them… “I can lose it in love, which
is a “fly-goddess ”. We can lose it "in the heat of a battle" in the
whirlwind of war or the pursuit of the "sublime thing," but
"where are the sublime things today." Julian does not think that the
young man's developmental task is Jungian individuation, to "find himself".
The experience of happiness he sees in the regression to the instinctive
connectedness with the world, in the release of absolute, unbridled freedom, and
immersion in the drives. The second regression.
Julian's third maxim is "Beauty is horror." In
support of this thesis, he lets Camilla to recite a passage from Euripides, the
scene when Clytaimnestra stabs Agamemnon:
He falls, squeezing the breath of life out of himself
and blood erupts in a violent jet.
Etc.
A debate develops as to why these verses are beautiful. They
mention form, rhythm, rhyme. Henry adds: "Aristotle says in Poetics that
things like corpses, which are in themselves disgusting to look at, become
objects of enjoyment in the work of art." Julian agrees, adding that
horrific scenes are most deeply etched in our memory. What is beauty? Horror.
And an unspoken but obvious twist from the sequel: awful is beautiful. The
awful reality is beautiful. An imperceptible but fatal slip of meanings,
replacing the description with a real scene. Aristotle says that corpses are
disgusting, that the outbreak of blood is terrible. He doesn't say they are
beautiful. Only an artistic description of these horrors is (can be) beautiful.
Description, not reality. Only the sublimation of the real or the instinctive
is (can be) beautiful.
And another exchange of feelings. "Infront of
everything we call beauty, we tremble." Maybe it's true. We may even wish
to die. Sometimes, when we look at the evening landscape, we are overwhelmed by
beauty. We think about eternity, about eternal peace, about the possibility to
fall asleep there forever. But this trembling is not the trembling at the
horror that overwhelms us when we see the real scene as described in the verses
above. From the sublime to the real: the third regression.
Not the orderly agon of the Olympics, not the Socratic
discussion and reasoning that ends in aporia, the bacchanalia are a real
outburst of life, vitality, horrible beauty. Professor Julian is thrilled when
his students stage bacchanalia that fatally cut through their lives. An
advocate of the liberation of the drives, of absolute freedom, he drastically
restricts the free choice of his students. The advocate of relief from the self
elevates his self to the sole authoritative one. The professor shudders as he gets
afraid for his ass.
Reviewers summarize the professor's doctrine with approval
as »erudition«. It is liked by young people (and young reviewers). A professor
who offers the teachings that young people like is a good professor. Imagine a
fool preaching something that would provoke the disapproval and trampling of
students. Not suited for a professor. The university doesn't like him either,
because he doesn't bring her anything (no coins).
The well-known and perhaps forgotten melody from Faust is
approaching us louder and louder from the backstage:
Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie
und grün des Lebens goldner Baum
Gray, dear friend, is all the theory
Green only is the
golden tree of life.
Julian seduces everyone with the promise of "pure
being". Henry, an intelligent bankrupt high school student, group leader,
loves him. He is charming the others. Where is Gretchen? Camilla obviously.
Chamomilla, who drives away bad thoughts. She loves Henry, sometimes she sleeps
with his brother as well. Richard is in love with her (the reason for
abandoning the ethical act? - cherchez la femme). Bunny is more to the side,
outside the enchanted circle.
It would take us too far to answer the question of where the
ideology of the liberation of the drives comes from be it here or in America,
anyway; do we seek escape from rationalism. This is probably related to the deadlock
in which the world, in which technology and the objectification of man rule as
the fruits of rationalism, found itself.
Ethics. - Where did it get stuck that none of those involved
reported either the first or the second crime? The first victim is a local
farmer. He may have come across them by chance; perhaps the bacchanalists
unknowingly invaded his estate, and he wanted to drive them away. They did not
intend to do that. The man is an unintentional, collateral victim of sublime
endeavor. Newspapers quoted his name. He was nothing special, just an ordinary
farmer. He couldn’t have been too smart if he tried to chase them away, as he had had to
see that they were in a trance, out of mind. Ugh, just an accident. No one saw
it. No one can think they were there. Would you, dear reader, fuck off your
whole life, your whole future, because some fool threw himself at your knife?
You regret it, but you can't fix it. Well, here we are. Maybe if you were
counting on payment in heaven, if you were afraid of the last judgment, you
would confess to your priest. What if you don't believe in these things? And no
one did see and coudn't know? In order to denounce yourself (and with you all
the others), you have to believe in ethics, in the good, in the right. Listen
to the voice of the conscience. Expose yourself. You have to be willing to die
for what is right. Like Antigone. Like Sophie Scholl. To take a man's life is
not good, it is bad. It is a sin – maybe not a sin before God, surely a sin
before man, a sin before your conscience, your Other that exists in you. The court
will take into account attenuating circumstances.
The conscience did not disappear. But it is a delicate
plant. It needs to be nurtured to grow and guide us. Or is this an overly
optimistic thought? Richard: "Funny, but if I think about it now, it's
clear to me that that was the very moment ... the turning point at which I
could decide to do something completely different from what I actually did. But
then this I did not recognize the decisive moment as such and we probably never
recognize it. "
One thing is certain: crime is not without consequences: it
cuts a dividing line into life. After him, life is no longer the same as
before. Richard will not tell any more stories in his life.
Conclusion
Which gods took the life of a simple Vermont farmer and a
naive, slightly dumb, unbridled, horny student of classical philology, who,
however, was the only one in the six willing to act ethically? It was God of
Life. As always. In the name of Life, the great, full Life, Dionysian Life, Life
as an Idea, millions of simple, real, boring lives and “lives of unworthy” of fools
and cripples have been destroyed in history.
“Life is nothing special. But it is the only thing we have”,
Freud wrote.
Kein goldner Baum.
Epilogue
The crime has been clarified. What about punishment? They
got out of it, except for one who (unnecessarily?) punished himself. They live
a normal life that is “nothing special, but the only one”; with the unhappiness that also those who have done nothing suffer. Is there a difference though? What's
the difference? What did Antigone experience? What was Sophie going through?
What will the students not experience? Do we know that (yet)? Have the two
women experienced a “pure being”?
Thank you, Donna Tartt.
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