Episode 156: The Only Possible End: On Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History'

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2023

⏱️ 93 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There are works of weird fiction that dispense their strangeness so subtly that many readers never pick up on it, books that allow themselves to be pass for mundane, the better to haunt us after we put them down. Donna Tartt's debut novel The Secret History, published in 1992, is such a work. On the surface, it is a brilliant, yet completely naturalistic, telling of the lead-up and aftermath of a murder. But The Secret History is also a work of the depths, and readers who go in seeking the Weird will find it lurking on every page. More than a masterpiece of psychological exploration, it is a story about the resurgence of the old god Dionysus, and a chronicle of fate; fate conceived, in the manner of the Ancient Greeks, as a cosmic force. Support us on Patreon. Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia. Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Find us on Discord Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! REFERENCES Donna Tartt, The Secret History Robertson Davies, Canadian novelist Weird Studies, Episode 98 on Exotica M. R. James, English author Weird Studies, Episode 3 on “The White People” E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational Jean Cocteau, La Machine Infernale John Crowley, Little, Big Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Outrageous Okana” Weird Studies, Episode 110 on “The Glass Bead Game” Gabriel Faure, Nocturne No. 11 Pierre-André Boutang, L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:02.0	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:20.0	For more episodes, or to support the podcast,
0:23.3	go to weirdstud J.F. And this is Phil.
0:53.8	Phil and I are sitting in the same room, a rare occasion indeed.
0:57.5	So we decided to take advantage of the situation to record a live intro.
1:03.1	For Donna Tart's The Secret History.
1:06.6	You know what, Phil?
1:08.3	What, J.F.
1:10.2	There are books that are so weird that no one notices they're weird.
1:16.7	That's very true. Would you like to say more on that subject?
1:20.3	Well, the thing about Donna Tart...
1:24.1	Keep going, keep going. The thing about Donna Tart's... Keep going. Keep going.
1:29.5	The thing about Donna Tart's secret history is that it is a genuinely strange novel,
1:34.3	which I didn't realize was strange until this latest read.
1:39.9	Yeah. I only recently discovered it myself, and, yeah, realizing that this work of fiction that has become a kind of a...
1:50.1	What's the analogy that I'm groping for here?
1:53.0	Like, a Catcher in the Rye.
1:54.9	Yeah, right.
1:55.5	Or Great Gatsby.
1:56.9	Like one of those sort of...
1:57.8	Yeah, a novel.
	...

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