Love the way Henry always mechanically goes:
Yes, but compare with his Greek:
(chpt. 5)
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@hellframe
Love the way Henry always mechanically goes:
Yes, but compare with his Greek:
(chpt. 5)
Francis the Carrot Top
In chpt. 7 Francis and Richard arrive to Shady Brook for funeral and meet Mr Corcoran:
This scene shows that, unlike his friends, Francis was quite fond of Mr Corcoran, and vice versa. But why exactly Carrot Top? Not that it was an uncommon tease, it still sounds peculiar.
There's a wordplay, of course: Bunny was gnawing on Carrot, so Carrot killed Bunny — prey becomes the hunter, if we can think of rabbits and vegetables in that fashion.
And another possible wordplay. There's an idiom 'carrot and stick', in which carrot means a reward, something that is used to tempt/seduce — Francis is a seducer.
That's it, unless "Carrot Top" stands for something more particular.
Very interesting of Donna Tartt not to given Bunny a single redeeming quality. Even the Corcoran family is specifically designed so that you can offer them almost no sympathy. It would’ve been interesting if Bunny was a ball of sweet sunshine and was torn between a moral obligation to tell the truth about the dead farmer and is love for his friends especially Henry. Instead of just being like 100% terrible.
Ah, but that’s what’s brilliant. By making Bunny so objectionable, Donna turns all of us into willing accomplices before we even know it.
So I just discovered this today but I feel the need to say something in regard to bunny's family being unpleasant I'm afraid Todd O'Neal had a point when he said the book is some form of a roman e clef cause after I listened to one episode of the podcast I looked up Matt Jacobsen BUT INSTEAD FOUND HIS OLDER BROTHER JOHN JACOBSEN WHO HAS A WEBSITE AND USED TO SHARE STORIES ABOUT HIS LIFE AND FAMILY INCLUDING THE PARENTS and there were detailes mentioned in regard to their marriage issues and their mother being the way she was that although you can go read it online I find too private to repeat but other things MENTIONED IN THE SECRET HISTORY ABOUT BUNNY'S FAMILY CONNECTIONS TO JAMAICA OR THE KENNEDY HIS BROTHER USED TO RESERVE TABLE IN THE KENNEDY NAME TILL MID TWENTIES! not mentioned in the book but according to John their mother was a racist (there is a story of it on his website John Jacobsen.com in the menu look for my stories there is many of them ) overall quite similar to what we see in the book or even their house being described that way! Their father Hugh Jacobsen was a modern architect who designed one of JACKIE KENNEDY HOUSES
As a whole after what I found on John's website I got quite curious about how much time had donna spent with his family cause certain details that I only mentioned fragments of it here are accurate and that BUNNY FUNERAL SECTION OF THE BOOK IS FOREVER CHANGED FOR ME
I HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU CHECK IT For Yourself
Sorry for the lengthy reblog!
search for John Jacobsen my stories and that part of website would show up directly. It dates back to 2013/2014 Facebook stories he republished on his blog and there are plenty but be patient and you would find details
@hellframe I would love to know other than literary allusions of the book what is your perception on the parts that are said to be based on real life according to Tartt's classmates
@massivetimemachinemagazine Excuse me, with all due respect, I am mostly indifferent to biographical criticism of that sort.
Ok, Todd O'Neal must've been a sweet guy if he so generously gave Henry his cigarettes, chip in his tooth, and eye problems. But it makes no difference, since the novel is about metaphysics. It's not roman-à-clef, it doesn't make sense. In my humble opinion, Tartt's conversion to Catholicism and particular elements of cultural background are more important than her classmates when it comes to understanding the novel.
The Secret History & Greek letter Ψ
I’m sure, many readers noticed that Julian, despite his outspoken prejudice against psychology, described the seduction of Dionysiac ritual in terms of psychoanalysis, like this:
Even more funny is that Julian’s method of teaching is probably based on psychological theory from the late 60s. I mean, the Pygmalion effect.
Source of image: steemit.com
I was reading this article in The New Yorker about the 100th anniversary of the publication of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land,” and there’s so much Secret History in here. Of course, Donna Tartt quotes the poem directly in the “Elizabeth and Leicester” scene on the lake at Francis’s country house. But this article made me see Eliot’s influence in less conspicuous ways.
Eliot:
“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood,” he wrote, in an essay on Dante. “It is better to be spurred to acquire scholarship because you enjoy the poetry, than to suppose that you enjoy the poetry because you have acquired the scholarship.”
The Secret History:
“In very great poetry, the music often comes through even when one doesn’t know the language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.”
Eliot:
I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only
The Secret History:
Gloomily, I thought of Monmouth House: empty corridors, old gas-jets, the key turning in the lock of my room.
Eliot:
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; They called me the hyacinth girl.”
The Secret History:
She was still a girl…a slight lovely girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth…
Especially significant when it comes to the death of one slow-witted college boy who couldn’t keep his mouth shut, the famous opening line from “The Waste Land”:
April is the cruellest month
And the poem’s very last words:
Shantih shantih shantih
Eliot says in his own “Notes on The Waste Land” that these are “a formal ending to an Upanishad.” Which of course reminds me of Henry’s choice of reading matter at Bunny’s funeral:
“I was reading,” he said. “What is it? Something good?” “The Upanishads.”
I’m sure there are hundreds of references and influences in The Secret History that I will never catch, but of one thing I’m certain: nothing in this book, not even the most random-seeming detail, is here by chance. That’s how you know you’re in the presence of genius.
@hellframe
Thought you might like this
Tartt also probably used Eliot's essay on Dante for Henry's explanation of bacchanal to Richard in chpt. 4, but inverted the meaning.
According to Henry, Julian said that the Divine Comedy is 'incomprehensible to someone who isn't a Christian. That if one is to read Dante, and understand it, one must become a Christian if only for a few hours. It was the same with this. It had to be approached on its own terms, not in a voyeuristic light or even a scholarly one.'
Eliot actually argued for the opposite. He acknowledged that 'In reading Dante you must enter the world of thirteenth-century Catholicism'.
However,
'You are not called upon to believe what Dante believed, for your belief will not give you a groat’s worth more of understanding and appreciation'
and
'I will not deny that it may be in practice easier for a Catholic to grasp the meaning, in many places, than for the ordinary agnostic; but that is not because the Catholic believes, but because he has been instructed. It is a matter of knowledge and ignorance, not of belief or scepticism.'
Maybe, Tartt wrote that in act of polemic with Eliot. Or the inversion is her typical method of making allusions)
Honestly Henry did commit horrible and inexcusable and unforgivable acts but it doesn't mean that every single thing he ever did for the entire book had to be out of ill intent.
He didn't save Richard during Winter to get him to trust him, he saved him because Richard was his friend he found freezing to death in an attic. He wasn't manipulating Camilla, he loved her and was trying to protect her and prevent her abusive brother from hurting her any more. He killed himself for a lot of different reasons but one of them was that it really was the only remaining way he could find to get everyone out of trouble and make things somewhat right again.
He surely was detached, and while he generally didn't feel as strongly as other people and even suppressed his own emotions to try and always be as rational as possible, it's not like he was completely incapable of feeling anything at all. In his own aloof way, he did care for them. I think that it's really the fact that despite everything there was some good in all of them that makes them so compelling, Henry included.
You're so right. If you allow me to say so, Henry actually was a very empathetic guy. It's just his empathy was not emotional, rather of an intellectual kind.
I presume that the most important thing for him was to keep his friends happy.
In the end, when Henry tried to explain why they killed Bunny to Julian, he told that Bunny 'wasn't a happy person in those last months.' In that moment Henry was astonished, shocked with situation, he didn't expect that Julian would discover the truth. So, I think, he spoke sincerely, absolutely honest. He really believed in this, and he thought that Julian must've understood his motivation.
Francis Abernathy: fake pince-nez
I was wondering where Francis ‘borrowed’ this accessory, so let there be some observations.
First of all, there’s a sassy definition of a typical dandy by Paul de Saint-Victor (La Presse, 21 August 1859):
'Black Prince of Elegance, the demigod of boredom who looked at the world with an eye as glassy as his pince-nez, suffering because his disarranged cravat had a crease, like ancient Sybarite who suffered because his rose was crushed.'
Well I can't leave comment on this website why i don't know .but to continue what I said previously to be specific what I wish to know is how do you come about these recourses did you already have an advanced knowledge of Baudelaire or particular searches on the internet led you to him cause I just find some of the references you mention rather too specific.Overall these takes and connections are quite brilliant thank you so much for the work!
To be serious, there's nothing too specific. Tartt portrayed Francis as a dandy, and it's just a coincidence that I had erratic interest in dandyism some time ago — for fun, it was nothing special, tbh.
And I've got curious about things in TSH that I couldn't understand, so I did some research.
There's an article in which Tartt was named 'a privately idiosyncratic T. S. Eliot freak' (J. Kaplan, 'Smart Tartt'). I wanted to know why, and how this Eliot's frame could help to interpret the novel. I found a lot of things in TSH that somehow recall Eliot's biography, studies, works, poems. A plenty of things, if you know what to look at.
It's hard to decide what information is relevant for TSH and what is not, but if Tartt wrote the novel for about 8-9 years, she did a lot of reading, I guess.
The 'Eliot frame' sometimes helps: if Eliot wrote about something, Tartt as his 'freak' definitely knew about it. Eliot liked Sherlock Holmes stories, and he wrote criticism on Baudelaire. Mark Twain is here because he is from Missouri, like Eliot and Henry Winter, and Eliot wrote an introduction to Huckleberry Finn.
These 'connections' must be something called intertextual analysis, or whatever. But I am just a little cat, and my little paws can't do serious studies.
Btw, there was a fine study by F. Pauw — "If on a winter's night a reveller": the classical intertext in Donna Tartt's The Secret History.
He gave a short account of references to Eliot in the novel:
But there's much more, and I haven't found anything about Eliot's intertext in TSH on web. So I make some trivial observations, keeping in mind that TSH needs a commentary, like Joyce's Ulysses.
I should say, there's an amazing cycle of lectures on YouTube 'The works of T. S. Eliot' by Victor Strandberg. It made me reconsider the way of reading TSH.
(Idk what's the problem with comments, it's not me it's tumblr.)
Francis Abernathy: fake pince-nez
I was wondering where Francis ‘borrowed’ this accessory, so let there be some observations.
First of all, there’s a sassy definition of a typical dandy by Paul de Saint-Victor (La Presse, 21 August 1859):
'Black Prince of Elegance, the demigod of boredom who looked at the world with an eye as glassy as his pince-nez, suffering because his disarranged cravat had a crease, like ancient Sybarite who suffered because his rose was crushed.'
T. S. Eliot & The Secret History. Part II.
In the juvescence of the year Came Christ the tiger In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas, To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk Among whispers
I found it quite curious to read these lines from 'Gerontion' in relation to Henry's suicide.
We see here the same inverted Christian imagery as in TSH, although in the novel it is entwined and overlaid with the Greek mythology.
It's possible that Tartt reconceptualized some of Eliot's ideas.
T. S. Eliot & The Secret History. Part I.
beauty and terror
These words occur together in the poem Gerontion, which Elliot originally included into The Waste Land:
Some critics suppose these lines to be extremely personal for T. S. Eliot. But is it even possible to lose beauty in terror?
I think, TSH can provide a response to this matter.
Henry Winter, flirting
The first day of his visit to Francis’s country house Richard had a little voyage with Henry and Camilla in a boat. And here we have this introduction to Henry’s habits:
“He had a habit, as I was later to discover, of trailing off into absorbed, didactic, entirely self-contained monologues, about whatever he happened to be interested in at the time"
Richard was wrong, of course. Henry’s monologues were not ‘entirely self-contained’, they had particular purpose — at least, two of them were an instrument of mild pressure on Camilla, including this one which Richard heard during their voyage:
Macaulay twins & Thackeray
A nod to Vanity Fair in chpt. 2 makes not much sense at first, though for Richard it must’ve been rather alarming — Rawdon Crawley played cards to fleece his comrades.
However, this association may be a clue to understanding what is happening around the Macaulay twins in Book 2.
This is actually such an amazing analysis. I never thought of that reference as being anything more than a simple literary reference, just as Madame Bovary's dog appears later on in the story.
Both Becky and Camilla appear to others as nothing more than pretty and vulnerable, as that is the side they can show most to their benefit. The first time I read the Secret History, I always felt sorry for Camilla (and that is certainly not to say that I still don't), but as I started looking at her character and realising that Richard's narration would be unreliable and skewed, it started to dawn on me how possible it was that she was a deeply flawed, three-dimensional character. She has plenty of good in her, but she has just as many concerning character traits and opportunities to do ill. Richard's blind infatuation with her and Charles (and the beauty of their outwardly perfect, symbiotic relationship) led to a sort of initial blindness for the reader.
And this certainly doesn't do anything to ruin the character of Camilla. My favorite characters in both books were precisely these female characters that have so many unwritten, unmentioned characteristics and hidden plans and desires--those are the characters considered to be evil and manipulative. And while Becky certainly is that, she is also trapped in many situations that she gets out of only using her intelligence and manipulative talent. Camilla, similarly, is trapped in a situation apparently without much financial freedom (although this certainly varies throughout the book) and--the larger issue--and incestuous relationship. I don't doubt that Charles has in him a great capacity for violence, but, like Rawdon around Becky, it never seemed all that plausible to me that he would become violent in his precarious relationship with Camilla (although, of course, he has so many psychopathic traits that I wouldn't put it past him). But Camilla could easily have used this outward appearance of violence in Charles (just as Becky uses it against Rawdon when talking to Lord Stein) to escape her situation and gain from it a safer living place and a healthier environment. This manipulation of Henry could then, of course, extend to other elements of the book--which ones, we can only speculate.
Richard's anger upon seeing Camilla's wounds always confused me. It just seemed like such a feral, animalistic, raw reaction (which would be justified), but the outlet that he found (thinking about wanting to suffocate her, rape her, etc) seems far too extreme and violent. It might have been a result of Richard spending too much time in a mental space where such actions and reactions were normalized as part of the study of classics, but I think it also stems from some suspicion that he held in regards to Camilla--although, of course, another potential source would be his sexual desire for both Henry and Camilla and the jealousy that would have arisen from them being in a relationship. This little sprout of suspicion, added to the other feelings he was experiencing, would quite understandably build up into an angry, wounding boil.
Anyway, this analysis just sparked something in me. Lots to think about and mull over in the near future :). And now I feel like I should reread both books.
Thank you, OP :)
The pleasure is all mine, I'm glad you found my thoughts encouraging.
Actually, there’re a lot of little details in TSH that seem to be inspired by Vanity Fair:
Bunny’s nickname on campus — the Colonel, which also belongs to Rawdon Crawley. A piece of art that shows a man riding an elephant (TSH chpt. 6; VF chpt. 17). Maraschino liqueur, consumed in a moment of distress (TSH chpt. 6; VF chpt. 55). Even the name Camilla appears in regard to Rawdon’s sister as a reference to Aeneid (VF chpt. 10) — Tartt said that she picked it directly from Virgil, but who knows what influenced her choice.
And that amazing manner of depicting main female characters, when the language itself works as a disguise for their true intentions: a stream of sweet talk to create an alluring, glistening image, which is extremely hard to resist. If you liked Camilla, you must have an exquisite taste for good narration.
And that association with light — both Becky and Camilla are often shown illuminated in some specific way, or having bright, luminous details in their exterior. There’re a couple of instances when it looks like Tartt goes immediately after Thackeray. Like this one:
“Her complexion could bear any sunshine as yet” — the narrator flatters Becky after recounting how important is the quality of light for other ladies (VF chpt. 48).
“The light from the window was streaming directly into her face; in such strong light most people look somewhat washed out, but her clear, fine features were only illuminated” — Richard on Camilla (TSH chpt. 1).
What a rare compliment to admit that one's face can bear intense light, isn’t it?
The way Tartt ends her novel is very Thackerayan too, with no comforting closure or moral resolution. Just as Thackeray claimed: “I want to leave everybody dissatisfied and unhappy at the end of the story — we ought all to be with our own and all other stories.”
And it's so true that we can only speculate about some ambiguous moments. At times TSH makes me mad, because it feels like Tartt is just teasing with all that allusions and references. Although they can add something to her characters, the sum of possible perspectives appears to be self-contradictory. In the end I can only repeat that question of Richard: “How am I supposed to know what to think?”
I hope you'll enjoy your rereadings.
Macaulay twins & Thackeray
A nod to Vanity Fair in chpt. 2 makes not much sense at first, though for Richard it must’ve been rather alarming — Rawdon Crawley played cards to fleece his comrades.
However, this association may be a clue to understanding what is happening around the Macaulay twins in Book 2.
When Julian invited Richard for lunch to talk about Bunny (chpt. 5), he served four-course meal with a bottle of ”maddeningly delicious“ wine:
At first I thought that Donna Tartt picked Château Latour for this scene to support the leitmotif of chess, since 'la tour' is not only a tower, but also a rook in French. And then I've seen this logo:
Richard & brooks
The word ‘brook’ appears quite frequently around Richard in TSH. It might be one of many allusions to Lewis Caroll.
In ‘Through the Looking-Glass’ Alice observed the Looking-glass land from above, and that’s what she saw:
A chessboard. Every rank ended with a brook, which Alice had to jump over for every move. Pawn-Alice passed six brooks to become a queen. As for Richard, there’re only five:
1. an old Brooks Brothers jacket, presented by Judy;
2. a book of the poems by Rupert Brooke, an excuse gift from Bunny;
3. Shady Brook, Bunny’s hometown;
4. “By brooks too broad for leaping the lightfoot boys are laid…” – line in the poem, which Henry read at the funeral;
5. Brooklyn, where Richard spent his summer.
That’s it for brooks, unless the last brook was hidden.
Consummatum est.
These words appear twice in TSH: when Henry took a shard of glass out of Camilla’s foot (chpt. 2), and when Richard recalled Bunny’s murder (chpt.6).
Someone on web already mentioned that this line belongs to the sayings of Jesus on the Cross. Here’s an excerpt from wiki about it:
In both cases in TSH 'consummatum est' was an expression of triumph, but there’s more meaning to that.
Julian & Thackeray
Richard mentioned that George Orwell compared Julian to a mirror:
This reminds of a famous passage from Vanity fair:
The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.