Donna Tartt is a genius and I feel like tsh fandom has it kinda wrong
while reading The Secret History there’s a specific passage that has stuck out to me every time and it’s pages 510-512. Richard essentially stops the story to reflect on Julian as a person, as a real person.
the writing here is beautiful but something about it seems important.
to sum it up, Richard comes to the conclusion that Julian’s problem (fatal flaw if you will) is that he ignores bad things to focus on good things (paraphrasing obviously). Specifically Richard keeps talking about Julian’s fascination with beauty.
Now if you just decide to trust Richard you could be like “yeah ok makes sense.”
but why the fuck would you trust richard
The most famous quote of the book comes from (as far as I can remember) the only scene in which we get an in depth look into what the hell actually goes on in the classics class.
“Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry.
“And what is beauty?”
“Terror.”
“Well said,” said Julian. “Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.
so he’s literally doing the exact opposite of what richard said lol
he’s not ignoring horrific parts of things he’s embracing them as the fundamentally driving force of their beauty.
So richard is wrong (and no one is surprised)
there’s more passages of julian basically being like “violence and death is hot!” but we don’t need to go over that it’s pages 38-39.
I think this is particularly interesting because it shows that even in reflecting over julian in hindsight richard is still, in a way, under his spell.
When you read the book under the premise that julian is an extremely privileged man who spreads his beliefs of tragedy being beautiful, to privileged youth who have never experienced such tragedy and are people longing for a sense of beauty, this all makes a lot more sense.
