“[…] Julian answered the door exactly as he had the first time, by opening it only a crack and looking through it warily, as if there were something wonderful in his office that needed guarding, something that he was careful not everyone should see.” (Tartt, The Secret History, p27)
The precious something Julian guards is what draws Richard Papen into the dark story which unfolds; the allure of the Classics is not, for Richard, a matter of intellectual or scholarly pursuit, but a personal fascination with the members of the Greek class; “I envied them, and found them attractive […] Studied or not, I wanted to be like them.” (pp32-3)
For my final post, I would like to read the personal immersion in the Classics of the characters in The Secret History against the ideas about experience hindering our assessment of literature presented by Herrstein Smith in “Contingencies of Value”.
The most interesting character of the novel for me was Julian. There was so much mystery and fascination surrounding him, building throughout the novel – then what? A thoroughly anti-climactic response; he simply disappears, leaving his students terribly alone and disillusioned. I think Julian represents something important when it comes to critical and uncritical reading. Julian in many ways is constituted by his students’ thoughts of him; his aura of wonder and otherworldliness is a romanticisation by those he affected, which Richard finally acknowledges at the end; that he has a tendency to ‘reinvent’ Julian because Julian himself was “constantly in the process of reinventing the people and events around him, conferring kindness, or wisdom, or bravery, or charm, on actions which contained nothing of the sort.” (p576) I believe that the character of Julian can be read, at least in this case, as representing the nature of a personal connection with literary subjects. Like a beloved novel allows room for our own personal fantasies and imaginations, the Greek class projects their own ideas of their divine teacher onto Julian, and he becomes to each of them something personal and individual.
Julian and his Classical teachings represent to Henry and the others what Shakespeare’s sonnets mean to Herrnstein-Smith; she claims she will fail to “evaluate” them because she is too close to them, her personal life is too imbued with their presence and content.
I cannot evaluate Shakespeare’s sonnets partly because I know them too well. […] Experience not only deepens us but also batters, scars, individualises, and specialises us: experience is a provincialism of its own, separating us from our fellow creatures […]. (Herrnstein-Smith, p5)
Julian’s Greek students also have the trouble of being far too close to their academic pursuits to view him in a critical light. Their study of Greek goes beyond the classroom and into the very essence of their beings; Richard notes, before he joins them, that “they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world” (p32). The Dionysian madness Henry, Francis, Camilla and Charles achieve is the ultimate, pure literary experience, completely detached from oneself, with all the prejudices, scepticisms and critical faculties gone, and only a complete and utter immersion in the text. An impossible fantasy for any real reader, but a hyperbolic picture of the impersonality Smith claims she lacks, and hence is unable to give her experiences of the sonnets as an authoritative one. While Smith writes that in reading certain sonnets, “I have lived the poem”, her “living” the literary is dependent on her personal, external experiences, while in Henry’s Bacchic freedom personal being and all the world are one, as “the universe expands to fill the boundaries of the self” (p187). But Smith is immersed enough in the sonnets for all the poetic technicalities that fill high-school poetry classes – “form, style, logic, figurative language” – disappear. She “can’t see them anymore”, as they have “been absorbed and reabsorbed into the art of the whole and my experience of it”. So perhaps this personal, emotional connection to the texts, which allow the essence of the poetry take over, is the closest we can really get to the Dionysian ecstasy Tartt’s characters experience.
At the end of the novel, Richard says of Julian that “I loved him […] for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be” (p576). Like the sentiments of Shakespeare’s sonnets allow Smith to live them in light of her own life, the personal connections to works of literature allow us to experience them in relation to life outside academic pursuit; whether this is a hindrance to critical objective or not, we are probably richer for it.
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