The Setting of 'The Secret History'
The scene of Donna Tartt's fictitious murder unfolds in a setting that - despite numerous references in the book to the themes of Greek drama and literature - is far removed from the violent landscape of Ancient fantasy.
The opening chapters of 'The Secret History' move slowly, drawing the reader into the sheltered and serene world of Pembroke, a New England College attended by the daughters and sons of the privileged classes. Whilst this gradual picture-painting can at first seem tedious to the reader, Tartt's language serves a purpose; to evoke a sense of time and place that - as in Doestoevski's 'Crime and Punishment' - takes on nightmarish proportions once the crime is committed.
Narrative in 'The Secret History'
Richard Papen arrives at the college as something of a fish out of water. Ashamed of his humble origins, he masks his financial troubles and reinvents himself in order to fit in with his peers.
Richard is the narrator of the novel, offering a past first-person singular point of view of the action: "Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does."
It is this ambiguity between the past and the present that strikes tension before the main action has even unfolded, urging the reader to continue turning the pages. Richard's narratorship is well constructed in as much as he enters Pembroke College as an outsider - always at odds with his environment. His precociously concealed background means that he does not acclimatize to Julian's group of students as quickly as he might otherwise. He initially remains slightly outside the action (indeed he does not participate in the first muder, nor directly in the second), recording and observing, rather than participating. It is only much later in the novel that the readers have a chance to observe the burden of the group's crime on the narrator.
'The Secret History' and the Greek Tragic Genre.
What could drive a group of well-to-heel New England students to murder? The original germ of the story is likely to come from an unsolved mystery occuring during Tartt's own studies at Bennington College in Vermont (which is arguably similar to Pembroke) where a student went missing whilst hiking and was never found.
Superficially the novel mirrors the structure of a Tragedy by imposing the suggestion of a fatal flaw at the outset. However, this concept is never properly explored or expanded (as an aside, the traditional reading of a 'fatal flaw' as being a feature of Greek Tragedy is due to a misreading of Aristotle's Poetics).
More viable is the claim that elements of chance and opportunity had a part to play in the escalation of events leading to the murders. Close comparisons with the genre is insubstantial when considering the reflective narrative frame of the novel and the pace at which the action unfolds. 'The Secret History' toys with Greek and Tragic genres, without strictly adhering to its rules and restraints, rendering it decisively 'modern'.
Text Source: The Secret History, Donna Tartt. London: Penguin Group, 2002. ISBN: 0-140-16777-3
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