“The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he’s worked so hard to subdue.
It took a while for me to gather my final thoughts about The Secret History; there’s so much to discuss and it seemed a bit daunting to put them all down on paper. I had to let this novel marinate for 4-5 days before some things began to “click” and more knowledge from my Ancient Greek Civilization class came back to me.
The Secret History begins by telling the reader that one of the main characters was murdered and sets the reader on the path to discover the motive. This novel also explores how committing such a violent crime impacts those involved. The concept of “Divine Madness” plays a significant role in this novel. Divine madness (theia mania/θεία μανία), according to the Ancient Greeks, was brought on by the gods. After the murder, these characters spiral into chaos. Tartt does an excellent job creating a sense of claustrophobic panic and frenzy.
“It was like walking into the cockpit of an airplane and finding the pilot and co-pilot passed out drunk in their seats. … I was struck with a black, horrendous horror … Who is in control here? I thought, dismayed. Who is flying this plane?”
Tartt also toys with the Ancient Greeks’ belief that the dead will come back to haunt, if they were treated wrongly; a warning that is heavily emphasized in Homer’s The Iliad. The Ancient Greeks had three categories for the deceased: ataphoi (those not properly buried), aoroi (those who died prematurely), and biaothanatoi (war victims). In The Secret History, because the characters are so engrossed in ancient civilizations, they believe that the restless dead may haunt them.
“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”
Another concept The Secret History made me think about is how we tend to romanticize the past, regardless of how problematic certain aspects of those ancient civilizations maybe; we tend to hone in on their brilliance instead of viewing them as a complex whole. The Ancient Greeks and Romans were a bit insane; one only needs to briefly study their wars to see their violence. As I like to say, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water!” The characters in The Secret History do this; they fall in love with ideals at the expense of their sanity.
“He refused to see anything about any of us expect our most engaging qualities, which he cultivated and magnified to the exclusion of all our tedious and less desirable ones.”
I could go on and on about all the elements that Tartt wove into this narrative. I’ll just conclude by saying that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this novel since I finished it. The Secret History reminded me how much I loved studying Ancient Greece and Rome and thanks to this novel, I’ll be doing so again. I’m actually quite thankful for that; in the chaos of life, one can tend to forget things that one previously enjoyed. The Secret History is dark, unique and often problematic. I like that it’s not politically correct, a bit coarse, vulgar at times and even offensive; we live in a society now that is so afraid to say the wrong thing - it’s evident that this book was published in the 90s. I was so enraptured with this story up to the very last page and as soon as I finished the book, I wanted to go back and start it over again. One day, I’ll got back through this novel and heavily annotate it; there’s so much to explore.
Dare I say I have another novel added to my favorite novels list? I think so!
Rating: 5/5.
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