Engaging the Irrational
A look at its function in The Secret History
In search of a quick read to finish during the week between finals and graduation, I turned to a recommendation: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. After spending a semester closely reading Dostoevsky who posits the fundamental value of sacralizing memory: “There is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful, than such a beautiful, sacred memory,” the book is intriguing in how it (in a familiar Dostoevskian vein) traps its protagonists between two powers: the burden of taking ownership of actions and the lightness of forgetting. The book, published in 1992, works closely to explore what happens when the Dionysian life force is enthroned. Nietzsche articulates his conception of the Dionysian in The Gay Science:
Contradiction, the last and final reality?
“Yes," says Dionysus, “that I might make man stronger, more evil and deeper than he is.”
“Stronger, more evil and deeper?” I asked, shocked.
“Yes,” he said once more, “stronger, more evil, deeper, and also more beautiful”… and saying this, he smiled his Halcyon smile, this Tempter-God.
And, later, in Twilight of the Idols:
The saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems; the will to life, rejoicing over its inexhaustibility even in the very sacrifice of its highest types – that is what I call Dionysian.
Tartt sets up the significance of this force early on in the text, as the students’ professor Julian argues why it is a mistake to do away with the primitive, emotive, appetitive self in favor of order. Citing the notoriously pragmatic Romans as a means of example, he holds as follows:
It is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channelling the primitive impulses he’s worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.
The subsequent plot becomes concerned with two murders: one, the outcome of a bacchanal, and the second a means of ensuring the first murder remains a secret. Yet, it is not when Dionysus is called upon during the bacchanal that the life force comes into play in this text. That force comes as the consequences of the murders begin to unfold. Deaths are generative in The Secret History. Their aftermaths are precisely what turn the group onto life’s depth and evils. Saddled with the onus of responsibility for their horrific crimes, efforts to rationalize their egoistic behavior are never truly made. Chaos is accepted by the friend group, and the turbulence this causes is brought into relief particularly by the legal proceedings of the murder investigation. The haunting shadow of one character continues to cast itself over our protagonist when he’s encountered in the story’s epilogue years later. This irrationality, and how impossible it is to repress, persists throughout the text, as the characters continue to say “yes” to life, despite its inescapable strangeness.
My Thoughts on The Secret History
It is very evident reading this book that Donna Tartt works at the bustling intersection of dogma and iconoclasm, with a Nietzschean/Catholic/Paglian tradition in mind. The book is gently trashy in the way she engages devices that are sure to keep her readers flipping pages (murder mystery, the veiled world of academia, rich strokes of exposition), but these are mostly a vehicle to deliver her greater philosophical outlooks. The text's main characters are largely unlikable, but the story they are a part of renders this issue insignificant. Where Tartt loses me in The Secret History is with her constant references to every single author in the canon. I understand that it’s to establish the friend group of our protagonist as pretentious, superior, and well-read, but it at times reads as attempts to prove how well-read Tartt herself is. This is superfluous: Her intelligence and that she is steeped in literary tradition percolates through her writing.
Overall, an enjoyable and engaging read. I look forward to reading The Goldfinch.