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A morbid longing for the picturesque
Dec. 12th, 2023 03:11 pmI decided that this spooky season I was finally going to read the OG of dark academia: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I borked the timeline a bit and ended up reading the first 100 pages or so in early November and the rest of it in early December, although frankly it also makes a very good gloomy early December book, so I’m not real broken up about it.
The Secret History is not really a whodunnit since the book kicks off by telling you that they did it. The question here is, why? How did our very ordinary, if pretentiously gloomy, narrator, end up committing murder? To this end the book’s long, detailed, almost Victorian approach to giving you all the context at great length really pays off, building up a very Gothic air of suspense and dread as the noose tightens slowly around the characters.
Our narrator here is Richard Papen, a lower-middle-class boy from a flat postwar California suburb, who is an ordinary type of misfit as far as misfits go, and therefore probably exactly the kind of narrator to be relatable to the type of people who would pick up a book like The Secret History: someone who finds the mass-produced newness of postwar suburbia to be lacking a certain depth or life or picturesqueness, bored by the plastic and fluorescent lighting and having the only discernible cultural value be making enough money. Richard is passive in a lot of ways–including some pretty terrible ones–but his “morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs” causes him to rouse himself enough to take the initiative to transfer from a midrange college in California to a pricey, older liberal arts institution in Vermont, Hampden College, the kind of place with seasons and pine trees and buildings that are old enough to be considered historical by US standards.
In a small act of rebellion against his “you should take pre-med so you can be a doctor because doctors make money” type parents, Richard had in California started taking classes in Ancient Greek. When he comes to Hampden as an English major (an eminently practical major that has nonetheless become a byline for impractical majors, at least by idiot parents who believe everything they read in the news), he runs into a dilemma: He basically isn’t allowed to take Ancient Greek as an elective and remain an English major. In order to take Ancient Greek at all, he has to jettison everything except his gen ed requirements and only take Classics with the school’s only Classics teacher, a worldly, affable old eccentric named Julian. There are five other students who have done this, who all seem admirably picturesque to Richard: They are all rich trust fund babies who wear, like, tweed and stuff, and don’t mingle much with the hoi polloi of the school because they are busy being erudite and smoking cigarettes and otherwise being a college kid’s idea of deep and poetic. I have an enormous amount of sympathy for this, as I was also that exact type of person as a college kid and am basically just the less-idealistic and hopefully slightly less superficial version of that type of person now (look, there’s a reason I’m holed up in a 200-year-old house in a 400-year-old town, even if I did have to succumb to economic reality and learn how to behave professionally in order to land a job doing boring things for a big corporation to do it).
If “half-a-dozen students who are only allowed to take classes with one teacher and barely interact with anyone else in the school” is ringing the This Is A Cult bells in your head, you are on the right track! This clique is deeply emotionally unhealthy and its isolation leads them to into increasingly bizarre shenanigans about trying to tap into the ancient glory and power and wisdom or whatever of the ancients. Richard, as the new guy, is left out of this for a while until he is sufficiently sucked in.
The ringleader of the bad ideas band here is Henry, a reserved, dour rich kid who everyone thinks is very smart because he studies weird old stuff for fun and has a head full of esoteric knowledge that nobody else bothers acquiring in this day and age (the day and age in question being the early ‘90s; this book is about 30 years old). At some point partway through the book it is revealed that Henry’s grasp of ancient wisdom comes at the expense of having an even rudimentary understanding of modern knowledge: he doesn’t know that people landed on the moon, and he doesn’t seem to believe it’s possible that modern science could have achieved something that the vaunted ancients didn’t. Further revelations of utter cluelessness will be forthcoming at the plot-appropriate times.
Anyway, the stifling closeness of this band of fucked-up idiots and weirdos really gets dark when some of the deep dark ancient secrets shit they’re up to goes wrong, and they engage in increasingly desperate acts of covering it up. Richard learns more and more about all their seedy backstories as their facades of cool erudition start to crack. One of their number, Bunny Corcoran, a perpetually broke, gregarious, casually bigoted, borderline illiterate jock, becomes increasingly insufferable and demanding to the point where you can see the decision to murder him building up well before Henry actually gives voice to the idea. It comes as almost a relief to the reader that we don’t have to vicariously put up with Bunny’s behavior anymore, either, and can finally get to the aftermath instead. The aftermath, of course, is terrible for the classics clique, as they all become increasingly unhinged and even darker secrets start spilling out and all that Gothic stuff, as the book barrels toward its self-consciously (at least on Henry’s part) dramatic finale.
Anyway, I think this book does an excellent job of showcasing the seductive appeal of the “dark academia” thing–the desire for the weight and patina of history in one’s surroundings; the power of picturesqueness on a certain type of person; the now out-of-date promise of university as a place for a life of the mind, where you can study stuff because it’s cool and interesting and not just to develop Marketable Skills for future you to compete for jobs with. The way the desire to be cool can mislead people who think they’re above the desire to be cool because they can’t fit the mainstream definition of cool, so they create little countercultures where they can decide what’s cool, and end up recreating all the same problems with “cool” as already exist (nobody did this as full-throatedly as “geek culture” in the 2010s or so, but the dynamics on display here with the classics kids are familiar). The rot at the heart of all these prestigious elite institutions and the stories that they tell themselves about themselves.
Also, this book is insanely funny. Richard’s descriptions of everyone and everything are mean and bitchy and I enjoyed them a lot. Everyone is absurd. Everyone is very ‘90s, especially the people who are extremely determined to not be ‘90s, and the people who are stuck in the ‘60s.
Overall, A+ character work and an excellent book for people who like drama and don’t mind stories where the characters are both sympathetic and completely terrible people.
The Secret History is not really a whodunnit since the book kicks off by telling you that they did it. The question here is, why? How did our very ordinary, if pretentiously gloomy, narrator, end up committing murder? To this end the book’s long, detailed, almost Victorian approach to giving you all the context at great length really pays off, building up a very Gothic air of suspense and dread as the noose tightens slowly around the characters.
Our narrator here is Richard Papen, a lower-middle-class boy from a flat postwar California suburb, who is an ordinary type of misfit as far as misfits go, and therefore probably exactly the kind of narrator to be relatable to the type of people who would pick up a book like The Secret History: someone who finds the mass-produced newness of postwar suburbia to be lacking a certain depth or life or picturesqueness, bored by the plastic and fluorescent lighting and having the only discernible cultural value be making enough money. Richard is passive in a lot of ways–including some pretty terrible ones–but his “morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs” causes him to rouse himself enough to take the initiative to transfer from a midrange college in California to a pricey, older liberal arts institution in Vermont, Hampden College, the kind of place with seasons and pine trees and buildings that are old enough to be considered historical by US standards.
In a small act of rebellion against his “you should take pre-med so you can be a doctor because doctors make money” type parents, Richard had in California started taking classes in Ancient Greek. When he comes to Hampden as an English major (an eminently practical major that has nonetheless become a byline for impractical majors, at least by idiot parents who believe everything they read in the news), he runs into a dilemma: He basically isn’t allowed to take Ancient Greek as an elective and remain an English major. In order to take Ancient Greek at all, he has to jettison everything except his gen ed requirements and only take Classics with the school’s only Classics teacher, a worldly, affable old eccentric named Julian. There are five other students who have done this, who all seem admirably picturesque to Richard: They are all rich trust fund babies who wear, like, tweed and stuff, and don’t mingle much with the hoi polloi of the school because they are busy being erudite and smoking cigarettes and otherwise being a college kid’s idea of deep and poetic. I have an enormous amount of sympathy for this, as I was also that exact type of person as a college kid and am basically just the less-idealistic and hopefully slightly less superficial version of that type of person now (look, there’s a reason I’m holed up in a 200-year-old house in a 400-year-old town, even if I did have to succumb to economic reality and learn how to behave professionally in order to land a job doing boring things for a big corporation to do it).
If “half-a-dozen students who are only allowed to take classes with one teacher and barely interact with anyone else in the school” is ringing the This Is A Cult bells in your head, you are on the right track! This clique is deeply emotionally unhealthy and its isolation leads them to into increasingly bizarre shenanigans about trying to tap into the ancient glory and power and wisdom or whatever of the ancients. Richard, as the new guy, is left out of this for a while until he is sufficiently sucked in.
The ringleader of the bad ideas band here is Henry, a reserved, dour rich kid who everyone thinks is very smart because he studies weird old stuff for fun and has a head full of esoteric knowledge that nobody else bothers acquiring in this day and age (the day and age in question being the early ‘90s; this book is about 30 years old). At some point partway through the book it is revealed that Henry’s grasp of ancient wisdom comes at the expense of having an even rudimentary understanding of modern knowledge: he doesn’t know that people landed on the moon, and he doesn’t seem to believe it’s possible that modern science could have achieved something that the vaunted ancients didn’t. Further revelations of utter cluelessness will be forthcoming at the plot-appropriate times.
Anyway, the stifling closeness of this band of fucked-up idiots and weirdos really gets dark when some of the deep dark ancient secrets shit they’re up to goes wrong, and they engage in increasingly desperate acts of covering it up. Richard learns more and more about all their seedy backstories as their facades of cool erudition start to crack. One of their number, Bunny Corcoran, a perpetually broke, gregarious, casually bigoted, borderline illiterate jock, becomes increasingly insufferable and demanding to the point where you can see the decision to murder him building up well before Henry actually gives voice to the idea. It comes as almost a relief to the reader that we don’t have to vicariously put up with Bunny’s behavior anymore, either, and can finally get to the aftermath instead. The aftermath, of course, is terrible for the classics clique, as they all become increasingly unhinged and even darker secrets start spilling out and all that Gothic stuff, as the book barrels toward its self-consciously (at least on Henry’s part) dramatic finale.
Anyway, I think this book does an excellent job of showcasing the seductive appeal of the “dark academia” thing–the desire for the weight and patina of history in one’s surroundings; the power of picturesqueness on a certain type of person; the now out-of-date promise of university as a place for a life of the mind, where you can study stuff because it’s cool and interesting and not just to develop Marketable Skills for future you to compete for jobs with. The way the desire to be cool can mislead people who think they’re above the desire to be cool because they can’t fit the mainstream definition of cool, so they create little countercultures where they can decide what’s cool, and end up recreating all the same problems with “cool” as already exist (nobody did this as full-throatedly as “geek culture” in the 2010s or so, but the dynamics on display here with the classics kids are familiar). The rot at the heart of all these prestigious elite institutions and the stories that they tell themselves about themselves.
Also, this book is insanely funny. Richard’s descriptions of everyone and everything are mean and bitchy and I enjoyed them a lot. Everyone is absurd. Everyone is very ‘90s, especially the people who are extremely determined to not be ‘90s, and the people who are stuck in the ‘60s.
Overall, A+ character work and an excellent book for people who like drama and don’t mind stories where the characters are both sympathetic and completely terrible people.
