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Therapy of Writing

How do you think it must have helped Richard to write down his story in a book? Does sharing a traumatic experience in a concrete way like this help human beings to heal faster?

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The Aftermath of Richard’s Feelings for Camilla

Do you think it is possible for Richard to ever find true love?

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Literature Circle Reflection #3

In our last literature circle, we talked a lot about how intense the last pages really were. For quite some time, the book took on a kind of slow narrative, but this last part, with Charles’ alcoholism, and Henry and Camilla’s relationship, and Francis’ anxiety, and Julian’s departure, and Henry’s suicide, and Francis’ marriage, and Richard’s returning to his old life, was very fast-paced and exciting. We thought this change in rhythm was very interesting and signified the turning point that would bring Richard right to where he started. After this fast portion, things would go back to being very boring and slow for him, probably even for the rest of his life. 

We also talked about the internal punishments, much like in Crime and Punishment, that each character puts themselves through. Charles resorts to alcohol and poverty, forgetting about his sister and the life he once had. Camilla ends up taking endless care of her ill grandmother and never gets to do anything that would be pleasing to her. Francis is forced into a marriage with a woman, when he is gay. He does not try to fight it, but accepts his fate (he needs this punishment in order to live with himself). Henry ends up committing suicide -- the guilt and the pain was simply too much for him to bear. Richard’s punishment is his “exile” back home, the place where we know since the beginning is where he least wants to be. 

Overall, each person in our literature circle absolutely loved this novel. After every time we met up, we could not wait to read further into the story and come back to discuss the new things we had read. Donna Tartt did a tremendous job of giving us suspense and mystery even though she revealed to us the biggest event in the whole story right at the beginning. This book is more of a question of “why?” than a question of “what?”, and Tartt wrote this super beautifully. I would one hundred percent recommend this book -- it is a true masterpiece that needs to be acknowledged and experienced by everyone. 

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Richard and the others would be haunted forever by the memories, the ghosts (whether they are real or not) of Bunny and Henry. 

francis: 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. camilla: do you mind if we change the subject? please?

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A Random Love Story

I was very shocked to find out that Henry and Camilla were actually in love at the end of the book. I felt like there was never any evidence, throughout the whole thing, that led us to ever believe this, and that it was just thrown in there near the end. To me, I felt almost cheated by the author because it is such a random thing that came up in the middle of nowhere. I guess Tartt’s point was that, throughout the book, we saw Henry and we thought that he was above falling in love with Camilla, simply because he seemed so much higher up in the hierarchy of the group. As time went on, we realized that he was becoming more and more like the rest of them, just an ordinary person figuring things out like the rest of them. I think that Tartt wanted to establish once and for all that Henry was human and that he too had weaknesses. It just seemed to me like the author decided to throw this in there at the last minute without ever leaving any clues behind, or any reasons as to why this might be. I did not appreciate the author’s use of making Camilla and Henry in love because it seemed pointless and rushed to me. I would have maybe liked to see this relationship more if it would have been introduced, or at least hinted at earlier on in the book. 

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The Dark Forest

I can connect this novel to Dante’s Inferno by Dante Alighieri. As mentioned in one of my previous posts, Richard ends up meeting Henry in the seventh circle of hell, meant for people who committed suicide. This was in one of his dreams, but he still “met” him nonetheless. Henry describes not being able to move around freely, which would make sense with the traditional notion that the sinners exiled to this part of hell were turned into trees or bushes. Henry could not leave, being forced to observe a moving exhibit with pictures of history. This was probably torture to him, the fact that he had to look at this knowing that he was no longer part of that world with that rich history that he once cherished so much. Dante’s Inferno is also relevant to this book because Dante’s venturing in the dark forest relates to Richard’s own life. Dante is very disoriented in this forest, and does not see very far ahead of him,as it is dark. In the same way, Richard has never been ever sure about himself and where he was going in life. He never even had a plan for things like where he would be staying for summer holiday until the day approached for him to leave. Even his whole decision to attend Hampden College was based off of an impulse he had one day. His future is something that is never clear to Richard. Dante’s encounter with the lion, the leopard and the she-wolf can be connected to Richard’s encounter with Camilla, Henry, Charles, Francis and Bunny at the college. These people completely change his life path, as did these animals in Dante’s Inferno. They made him reconsider the path that Richard had made for himself and go on a completely different route. Where Henry ends up in hell, and Richard ends up right back where he started in this dark forest, Donna Tartt wants us to reflect: is the forest really any better?

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Repeating History

What do you think will happen to Richard in the future? Do you think he will remain in California for the rest of his life? Will he “repeat history” by venturing on another “adventure” to another random part of the world?

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'Are you happy here?' I said at last.  He considered this for a moment. 'Not particularly,' he said. 'But you're not very happy where you are, either.'

Donna Tartt, The Secret History, pg. 559

In this passage, Richard is describing a dream that he had, where he had walked inside a new, modern building. Inside was an exhibit displaying many many historical monuments (the Pyramids, the Parthenon, etc.). “History passing beneath my eyes, changing every moment.” (pg. 558). Richard ends up meeting Henry in the building, where he tells Richard that he is not dead, only “having a bit of trouble with [his] passport.” He tells him his movements are restricted, that he “no longer [has] the ability to travel as freely as [he] would like.” Finally, Richard asks him the burning question that is mentioned above. Henry’s answer was nothing short of haunting: “Not particularly, but you’re not very happy where you are, either.” We get the sense that Richard is meeting Henry in the afterlife, where Henry is trying to explain to Richard that his soul is not dead, but the absence of his body makes it hard for him to move around (back to earth, possibly). It seems like it is a form of heaven, as Henry gets to witness history happen before his eyes in this building. But it can also be a form of hell, as Henry gets to witness history happen before his eyes. Maybe Henry is in the seventh level of hell, meant for people who commit suicide according to Dante Alighieri’s Dante’s Inferno. Technically, in this level, the people in it are turned into trees or bushes, which is not really the case with Henry. But maybe it is. Henry says that his movements are restricted, and that it is very hard for him to get around. Trees are the same way; they stay put, unable to move. Maybe Henry is in this seventh level, and he was turned into a tree only figuratively. This quote is near the end of the book, when Richard is back home in California at twenty-eight years old. This dream is of huge importance because it shows the meaninglessness of it all. Like Dostoyevsky, Tartt displayed nihilism in that Richard describes the world with this disinterest all of the time, as if he knows, and he wants everyone else to know that life always comes around to the same old, meaningless thing. When Henry tells Richard that he is not happy where he is in his life either, he is implying that Richard was not really living, was never really living, in fact. He is just like Henry, sitting in a level of hell, wasting away, looking at time pass through history. All Richard is really good at is observing as different things pass before his eyes, not unlike this slideshow of historical monuments. Throughout the whole book, he was not the doer, as if this story that he was recounting was not even his own story at all. Richard will never be happy at all because he does not know how to actually take action in life. His secret history is barely even his. His life is barely even a collection of his actions -- it is mostly a collection of other people’s actions: his parents’ crazy attitudes, his friends’ path to destruction, his mundane existence back in California. Throughout this whole adventure, it seems that he is the least affected of the group in terms of what happened, and it is true. He does not get hit with this regret that leads him down a destructive path. He just ends up exactly where he started. He, throughout it all, gained absolutely nothing (save his diploma that he was not even interested in). He lost absolutely nothing. Richard represents the option of disengaging from life in order to not get hurt or afflicted by the things that can go wrong. Henry shows us in what he says that this way of life is just as destructive as Charles’ alcoholism, or Francis’ anxiety problems. Henry is not happy, but he is dead. Richard will never learn how to be happy because he will never learn how to truly live. He is also dead, he has been dead from the start. This is why he actually related to what Henry was talking about when he was describing that he had a good feeling when he murdered the farmer and Bunny. He could actually feel something -- there was a rush that assured both Henry and Richard that they were alive within  the action of making sure that Bunny was not alive. This quote shows us that Richard is kind of a sociopath as well. He just does not know how to engage with the world, no matter where he is, or how mature he gets. 

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Narrator

Was Richard a good narrator? Was his passive attitude a good fit for the action-filled story?

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My Very Wrong Perception

Was Julian’s abandoning his students a sign of moral responsibility, or a sign of cowardice? How did this change your opinion of him since the start of the book?

It was so strange to finally find out more about Julian, after hundreds of pages of waiting in anticipation for some sort of grand reveal of who he truly was. Since the beginning, he came off to me as somebody very strange and suspicious --someone who seemed to be involved in something darker and more secretive than what we could tell. I thought, at first, that Julian was the leader of some strange Ancient Greek cult that the whole class was a part of. This would explain his letting only a set number of students into his class every year. Tartt really left Julian’s character open to interpretation seeing as he was very rarely present most of the time.This made me think that, near the end of the book, there would be a big section where we would finally get to know Julian and where exactly he stood. I was so excited to see if he was, in reality, pulling all of the strings in the whole mess. I genuinely believed, because of his strange beliefs and mannerisms, that he was the puppet master and that he was trying to serve some greater purpose by killing Bunny off. I was terribly wrong. It turns out that Julian was probably the most rational and sane person in the class. Sure, he was a little weird and very passionate about his work, but in the end, he was just an old man who enjoyed teaching others what he knew. To me, his running away was a sign of moral responsibility more than anything. Julian loved Bunny and was probably still mourning when he found out that his own students were the ones that killed him. He would have been a sociopath if he would have stayed with Henry and the rest of them after finding out what had happened. I do not think his abandonment was a sign of cowardice at all: I think it actually took a lot of courage to leave the few students he came to know and love very dearly. I am sure it was very hard for him, but his humanity told him that these people were not normal. Julian turned out to be the most normal of the bunch, to my disappointment. I was kind of looking forward to seeing where the mysterious professor fit into this crazy story. It turns out that he didn’t fit in. I did not suspect that he was actually on the outside the whole time. This just goes to show that our original perceptions of characters really are not what accurate in the slightest. Out of them all, at the beginning, I suspected Julian to be the craziest. It turns out that he was just a man with a few strange behaviours, if you want to put it that way.

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Richard ends up, at the end of the book, many years later, right where he started in California. His wanting to leave Plano was the one reason why he enrolled himself at Hampden College in the first place. He has come full circle after his whole experience -- not gaining anything, and not losing anything. His life will always be dull and colourless, a cycle of events that always cancel each other out.

TSH Series:

Plano. The word conjures up drive-ins, tract homes, waves of heat rising from the blacktop. My years there created for me an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup. Which I suppose was a very great gift, in a way. On leaving home I was able to fabricate a new and far more satisfying history, full of striking, simplistic environmental influences; a colorful past, easily accessible to strangers. The dazzle of this fictive childhood—full of swimming pools and orange groves and dissolute, charming show-biz parents—has all but eclipsed the drab original. In fact, when I think about my real childhood I am unable to recall much about it at all except a sad jumble of objects: the sneakers I wore year-round; coloring books and comics from the supermarket and the squashed old football I contributed to neighborhood games; little of interest, less of beauty. I was quiet, tall for my age, prone to freckles. I didn’t have many friends but whether this was due to choice or circumstance I do not now know. I did well in school, it seems, but not exceptionally well. My clothes were cheap and my haircut too short and no one at school seemed to like me that much; and since all this had been true for as long as I could remember, I felt things would doubtless continue in this depressing vein as far as I could foresee. In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.

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I can connect Henry’s character to that of Amy Dunne’s in Gone Girl written by Gillian Flynn.In both these novels, these characters are people that we start off really liking. We liked Henry because he was so wise and understanding, and he seems so ready to help his friends (he stayed with Richard in the hospital during winter break when he was ill). We liked Amy because we were meant to like her at first; she wrote a whole fake diary that made her seem like an amazing person. Later on in both stories though, we find out that both these characters are not exactly who they seemed; they are kind of sociopaths. Amy, just like Henry, gets away with cold-blooded murder, as she stabbed her ex-boyfriend, Desi to death. Both characters kill somebody they were close to in order to better benefit themselves. Henry kills Bunny so that the secret that he murdered that farmer would never get out. Amy kills Desi because she knew he would fall back into obsession with her, and she could not have that if Nick, her husband was going to fall back in love with her. Neither of these characters are very emotionally engaged, meaning that they do not consider at all the feelings of others. Henry even admits this to Richard near the end of the book: “’I felt dead in everything I did.’ He brushed the dirt from his hands. ‘But then it changed,’ he said. ‘The night I killed that man.’” (pg. 493). He admitted that he enjoyed it -- that he felt a “surge of power and delight” from it. A “sudden sense of richness of the world.” We realize here how not in his right mind Henry really was. In the same way, Amy was incredibly troubled. We obviously saw in every wrong action that she had done that she was enjoying the thrill of it. A sociopath is somebody who has very antisocial behaviour (we see that in the way that Henry talked to no one but his very close circle of friends and his professor), who oftentimes breaks the law (enough said), and who lacks moral responsibility or a social conscience (Henry talks about loving the feeling of killing someone -- it made him feel more alive than ever). Amy loved the thrill of ruining other people’s lives, especially Nick’s, and had no trouble creating big schemes in order to get his way. Notice that both characters of both books are geniuses. Amy’s plan to bring Nick down was so well though-out and had to have been carefully constructed for it all to fall into place. We know that Henry is a genius -- his knowledge on classic literature and the Greek language is comparable to no other, according to Richard. Amy and Henry are incredibly similar as they both display many sociopathic tendencies.

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Very “Close” Twins

What is the significance of Charles and Camilla’s incestuous relationship? Why did the author decide to include this in the story?

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With rue my heart is laden For golden friends I had, For many rose-lipt maiden And many a lightfoot lad.  By brooks too broad for leaping The lightfoot boys are laid; The rose-lipt girls are sleeping In fields where roses fade.

A.E. Housman, “With Rue my Heart is Laden”, Donna Tartt, The Secret History, pg. 414

Richard is very surprised when he hears Henry recite this poem at Bunny’s funeral, out of all of the things he could have said. Richard often recalled Bunny saying this poem (he was into corny ones like these) that when Henry said it up at the podium, Richard actually heard it in Bunny’s voice. This is not the type of poem that Henry, who was so much into the extremely advanced classics, would ever have even glanced at. This is what made it so strange to Richard’s ears, and to, I’m assuming, everyone else’s. Henry was obviously a wreck at this point in the book. His dignity was starting to wear away bit by bit, and this showed in that he would have never even considered this poem among all of the other more intellectual ones he knew and understood so well. To me, this saying a poem that was unlike him speaks to the fact that Henry’s god-like air was fading. He was becoming more and more human as time progressed, as Bunny’s death started sinking in more and more. Where this poem would have been considered childlike to the old Henry, it is now the only thing he can manage to say. It speaks to me of someone too tired and too worn out to meet the standards of those who, you could say, basically looked up to him. In the end, Henry was only a kid himself, in his early adult years, trying to figure his life out as well as anyone else. This poem marked a turning point in the novel, where Henry’s usually unfazed personality was imploding, until all anyone had left of him at the end was the memory of him completely defenseless in that inn, ready to take his own life. This moment right here, where he shared this A.E. Housman poem, was the beginning of the end for Henry, and where Richard was starting to realize it as well.

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The God of Illusions

Donna Tartt was originally going to name the book The God of Illusions. Would this have been a more suitable title? What would this title have said about the novel?

I think that this alternate title speaks of Henry in particular. Throughout the whole book, Henry’s majesty and greatness that is so much described in the beginning of the book turns out to be just an illusion by the end. When Richard first meets him, Henry comes off as a highly intelligent man that is at the top of the group’s hierarchy. He is seen as the leader and the commander in chief. Even as time progressed and Richard is now let into their circle, Henry is the one that everyone follows because they trust that his decisions will be the most beneficial to them all. It was his idea to try to attain that bacchanal state, it was his idea to kill Bunny. Through it all, it is Henry that the others would always turn to when they needed to get out of a sticky situation. There was always this perception that we and the characters had that Henry simply knew it all, that he was a god, almost. By the end of the book though, we find out that he is no supreme being at all. This incredibly smart man turns out to simply be another vulnerable kid in his early twenties who does not have all the answers.His grandeur and wisdom are nothing but an illusion; the others were so convinced that what they saw in Henry was real that they followed his every word, committing to his decision with childlike trust. This illusion began to fade away, I think, when Henry was at Bunny’s burial: “Slowly, slowly, with a drugged, fathomless calm, Henry bent and picked up a handful of dirt. He held it over the grave and let it trickle from his fingers. Then, with terrible composure, he stepped back and absently dragged the hand across his chest, smearing mud upon his lapel, his tie, the starched immaculate white of his shirt.” (pg. 420). Richard explains that everyone was shocked to see Henry this out of sorts because he was the one who was supposed to have everything figured out. This illusion started disappearing more and more as Charles, and then even as Julian realized Henry was not the person they thought he was. By the end of his life, this illusion was completely gone as everyone witnessed his suicide. The author makes it seem that he is the only character with any rationality for the longest time throughout this novel, and she ended up surprising us all: he was arguably the craziest of them all. This was Tartt’s point: our perceptions of people are, more often than not, very off. Even when it comes to those who are very close to us. She even puts in this quote by E.R. Dodds to start off Part II of the book to emphasize this point: “Dionysus [is] the Master of Illusions, who could make a vine grow out of a ship’s plank, and in general enable his votaries to see the world as the world’s not.” (pg. 273). In this case, Richard and his friends were Henry’s votaries, and this illusion of him being all-knowing made everyone else see the world from a totally different perspective. Their views of the world changed drastically when it dawned on them that Henry was more like them than they thought. I think I like this title better than “The Secret History” because it is not as broad and its meaning is a lot less obvious. You really have to analyze the story to get the hidden meaning behind The God of Illusions, and even though I probably did not interpret it right, it is always interesting to speculate and to appreciate what we think the author meant to say. 

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What Secret History?

Even after finishing this book, I’m still unsure as to what the secret history mentioned in the title is. It is quite obvious that Tartt was probably talking about Richard and his friends’ secret history; how their story of killing their friend was kept hidden until Richard decided to tell it to us. Maybe it just refers to his past that he lived back when he was in his early adulthood in Vermont. He tells us multiple times as his twenty-eight-year-old self that this story has been kept hidden for many years, but that he is still afraid that one day the police will finally come to arrest him for the murder. This secret history could be his own personal history that he now has to carry around for the rest of his life, if we want to think about it like that. Another possible theory is that this secret history is actually relating to the secret history of Hampden College itself. That there was a lot more going on than what met the eye at this university while he was a student there. Maybe it is a combination of the two: Richard is recounting the history of the school that kind of fell through the cracks, as well as his own little history, magnified onto the pages before us. It is also worth noting that, at the beginning of the book, we saw how obsessed everyone in this Classics class was about history and ancient writings. This distant history was really what engulfed everyone’s lives. Even out of the classroom, we often read about how these students would discuss the Greek language, or some sort of old literature in their own spare time. They lived for this history. As the story progressed though, and they got more and more caught up in killing Bunny and, later, in the guilt that they felt, their lives became less about a history that was not theirs, and more about their own history. By the end of the book, these characters did not care at all for what they were studying, even though they were completely immersed in it beforehand. Most of them did not even end up graduating in their major that they were so passionate about. This novel really shows the transition of a group of kids living scholarly, strictly academic lifestyles, to living thrilling and heartbreaking lives that are more real than anything they had ever experienced. They had all originally made lives for themselves out of old books, but as time went on in the novel, they all came to realize that the old books they knew inside and out would render themselves completely useless in the face of real-life situations, such as death and depression. This title is supposed to be ironic. In the end, Donna Tartt wanted to show that their own histories had nothing to do with what they were so obsessed with from the start: history.

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Another Possible Motive

Henry being the mastermind of the murder, do you think he had some other additional reason for killing Bunny? If so, what do you think it was?