“Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw’, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside of literature? I used to think it didn’t.”
The Secret History, a modern Greek tragedy at heart, is a 600 page exploration of the existence of man’s inborn hamartia, and the disastrous consequences that ensue when we try to rise above ourselves and push the boundaries of what is possible. Within its pages, Donna Tartt has mastered the art of the slow-burning plot. Shadowy and obscure every step of the way, it is only in the moment, when it is too late, that the veil lifts, the air clears, and suddenly everything is laid out, plain and transparent – the details that were always there, in true tragic fashion, if only we’d seen them sooner.
“…I realise that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very much different from what I actually did. But of course, I didn’t see this crucial moment for what it actually was; I suppose we never do.”
Tartt tells the story of six elite students studying Classics at a New England college. Their intellectual forays into ancient philosophies, guided by their peculiar, slightly untrustworthy professor, light the fires of their obsession with control, specifically the loss of those intangible restraints which bind us to ourselves. Their desire to ‘throw off the chains of being’ and ‘shatter the accident of [their] mortal selves’ drives them to recreate a centuries-old Dionysian ritual. However, instead of the godly transcendence renowned by the Greeks, where one rises above the boundaries of their own humanity and the edges of the universe fall away into nothing, it spins for them instead a world of lies, murder and madness, into which they quickly, and irrevocably, descend.
“It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?…To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of morality than an animal!”
Despite Tartt’s gifted literary voice, it is the carefully crafted nature of each and every one of her characters that grants them the sheer solidity and palphability that makes this book so remarkable. Never wholly good and never entirely bad, they are so fluid on the spectrum of morality, there could never be any other word to describe them besides ‘human’.
“If we are strong enough in our souls, we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
One could argue that all fatal flaws are simply niches of a human identity; Oedipus’ ignorance, King Lear’s pride, Don Quixote’s wilful blindness to reality are traits that all individuals, both ancient and modern, are and have been guilty of, to some degree. In The Secret History, Tartt explores a greater, more encompassing notion of hamartia – that our humanity itself is an inescapable flaw, arguably one of the greatest we will ever have. The group’s efforts to transcend the boundaries of reality, to rise above their human selves and touch the fringes of something bigger, something greater, does nothing but instill in them a maddening awareness of their own existence, subdued and inferior as it is. The murder of one of their own, in an attempt to conceal their crimes, throws this into glaring light, and drives them insane with rage and fear, at first clinging to and then turning on one another.
“Could it be that it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls – which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than anything?”
There is no such thing as perfect humanity; it is the nature of all people to be flawed. Perhaps in the end, the most fundamental type of hamartia, and the inborn flaw that proves fatal for Hampden’s finest, is the shared inability to be anything other than human.
“Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them, don’t you think?”
Abbie Roberts 