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We Other Dionysians:

Underneath the best-seller gloss of Donna Tartt's 1992 thriller, The Secret History, lurks a treatise on the politics of marginal identity virtually unmentionable in a Vogue, People Magazine or Glamour book review. The work, which details the intellectual project of six Classics students at a small, wealthy Northeastern college, situates itself among the likes of Euripides, Plato, and Nietzsche when it turns from the student's actual escapades--those pungent bits of decadence and evil that prick the ears of most mainstream literary critics--and begins instead to outline the drives behind them. For, while the students do indeed orchestrate an elaborate, risky, theatrical orgy suited for the palates of Greek tragedy, their drive is not merely to intoxicate themselves in the name of a kind of narcissistic adolescent rebellion; rather they are attempting to escape themselves entirely, and shed the burden of the self, in an effort to act without the constraints that their layers of marginal identity apply.

The identity-layering project that each student undertakes is terrifically complicated and well documented in the text. We are told by our narrator, Richard, a dirt poor Californian entering the college on student aid, that he found it necessary to create what he considered to be a "fictive childhood--full of swimming pools and orange groves and dissolute, charming show-biz parents [that] all but eclipsed the drab original" (7). Francis, another student who appeared to Richard as "the picture of respectability. cool, well-mannered, rich, absolutely beyond reproach" (274) is revealed to be one of the more panicky members of the group, the sensitive hypochondriac whose closeted homosexuality predicates his intense need for masking. When Francis would lapse into his façade in any public, threatening situation, Richard notes, "It was such a convincing illusion that even I, who knew the essential falseness of it, felt oddly comforted" (274). Henry is described as the author of the group's actions--its wealthy, bisexual, Ubermensch and wayward apologist. Modelled after Tartt's affinity for T.S. Eliot, Henry is the most withdrawn and hyperintellectual of the students. The mastermind behind their activities and the controlling researcher who makes it all possible, his driven responsibility for the group makes his cheery transformation particularly abrupt. Many times in the novel, Richard notes that Henry would, among those outside the group, "assume the role he'd written for himself: cool but friendly; hesitant; reticent with details; bright, though not to the degree he really was" (331). Camilla, the only woman in the group, and as Richard would put it, "a vulnerable targetsimply because in Greekdom, generally speaking, women are lesser creatures," (211) has guarded herself in a similar fashion. Even while Richard muses that she "was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose white scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze," he grounds his feminine stereotype with the admission that she "was not at all the fragile creature one would have her seem. In many ways she was as cool and competent as Henry; tough-minded and solitary in her habits, and in many ways as aloof" (212). Charles, Camilla's violent, possessive, alcoholic twin brother and bisexual lover, has issues of his own to mask. Often the member of the group Henry delegates as ambassador to the world at large, Charles is put in several positions where he must act a role, as he terms it, "trying to convince them we were all just a bunch of regular kids. Being the front for everybody, you know, always on guard, having to say exactly the right thing and doing my best to size up things from their point of view and at the same time not at all nervous" (423-24). Acting as a counterpoint to the group's singularities, the sixth member, Bunny, is a socially assimilated, racist, homophobic, misogynistic ex-football player whose affinity for Greek, though perhaps more initially grounded in a fraternity sense, coincidentally situates him among the other Classics students. His parents, notes Henry, "make a big show of yacht clubs and country clubs and sending their sons to expensive schools, but that's got them in debt to the eyebrows. They may look wealthy, but they haven't a dime. [Bunny] told me they didn't even give him money for his schoolbooks" (121; 184). Due to his familial drive to keep up appearances, Bunny has difficulty separating the real and the unreal, especially as it regards his own personality. As Richard notes, "Up close, he was all motes and light, you could pass your hand right through him. If you stepped back far enough, however, the illusion would click in again and there he would be, bigger than life, squinting at you from behind his little glasses and raking back a dank lock of hair with one hand" (357).

As a group, the six students form a coalition of outcasts, a minority clique of intellectuals who through an exquisitely refined sense of taste delegating expensive suits, shirts with detachable collars and cuff links, cups of espresso, bottles of Tattinger, antique furniture, grand Gothic houses, lanterns, pianofortes, translations of Greek into Latin and then into English, through these and other idiosyncratic attempts at suspended anachronism, convince themselves not of their strangeness, but of their ivory tower elitism; covering their insecurities with the veneer of cosmopolitan sophistication, they fancy themselves the walking result of evolution's occasional overachievements.

But when Julian, their Classics professor, offers a stirring discussion on the Greek desire to lose the self in Bacchant frenzy--the traditional religious worshipping of the god Dionysus, said to cause, as Richard notes, "a triumph of barbarism over reason: dark, chaotic, inexplicable" (38)--the students are mesmerized and, recalling their own minority status--those shadowy selves they strive so diligently to mask--they have encountered an impetus too seductive to neglect. As Richard recounts it,

"We don't like to admit it," said Julian, "but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal!. let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn." (38; 39; 40)

And with that, spurred on by Henry, who claims he was "obsessed with the idea," (155) all of the students except Richard, who at the time was new and thus not familiar enough to be trustworthy, attempt a Bacchanal of their own. That this act, the catalyst that propels the rest of the novel--the one thing that, in an objective correlative sense, separates this particular novel from any other--happens off stage, and is later recounted by Henry, is appropriate not only in a Greek sense, but also allows the focus to shift from the Bacchanal to its implications, its results, and the minority-identity agenda Tartt sets herself out to articulate.

The first notable aspect of the act itself is in fact the one condition that made the synthesis possible. As articulated by Henry, it is no more than another fictive identity layer: "If one is to read Dante, and understand him, one must become a Christian if only for a few hours? It was the same with [the Bacchanal]. belief was the one condition which was absolutely necessary. Belief, and absolute surrender" (157). And this, followed by a sparse, rather teasing description of the act, is all that we get in terms of the experience itself. The action that follows, which I'll try to scan as superficially as possible, since it's not of primary import in this particular paper, and rather speaks to the enthusiasms of the Vogue, Glamour, and People book reviews, is that when the celebration commences (ultimately without Bunny, as he refused to take the project seriously) a farmer is sacrificed in a most unpleasant way, and when the students "awake," from their madness, and arrive at Francis's country house, their chitons dilapidated and their manners disequilibrious and panicky, Bunny walks in on them. Offended for not being included, and yet realizing his newly-acquired power position, Bunny blackmails and torments the group, accentuating the "weirdness" of their actions and their own personal attempts to transcend their various insecurities and minority identifications. He reacquaints himself with his "mainstream" friends, while the Classics students bend over themselves to be conciliatory. Meanwhile, he hails epithets at them like rocks, teasing Camilla and Charles about incest, picking on Richard's poverty, Francis's homosexuality, and yells at Henry in a particularly impassioned moment, "You make me sick, you fag, you Nazi, you dirty lousy cheapskate Jew--" (201). And thus, when the five students shove Bunny over a steep cliff and into a ravine, double-checking to make sure he's dead, it comes as little surprise.

But what comes next does surprise us, as the identity layers the characters fought so studiously to repress, reëmerge with a vengeance. We see Charles arrested for drunk driving, Francis in a hospital with anxiety attacks, Camilla sleeping both with her brother and Henry, and Henry withdrawing from everyone but Camilla, while they negotiate with the police and the FBI and Richard wonders how he became an accomplice. There is an upheaval of sorts, and it becomes perfectly obvious to us that things, to put it in that best-seller way, will never be the same again.

But Tartt is exceedingly clever throughout all of this excitement; in fact, if you are reading from a very different, classically informed position, none of the events that occur in her novel come as a surprise. When Julian gives his lecture on the delights of the Bacchanal, he quotes passages from Euripedes's Bacchae and through translation, hails the experience as a mysterious, glorifying thing, removing the obstructive self in the name of fertility, creativity, and passionate emotional release, he is reading the text as it is Romantically filtered through Frederick Nietzsche's 1872 work, The Birth of Tragedy.

Nietzsche is not the first to Romanticize madness; writers such as Winckelmann, Hamann, and Herder had all translated the act of the Bacchanal as the release of an ecstatic creativity--the source of poetic genius. What Nietzsche does is popularize it, including a sense of Bacchant creativity, emotional and sexual release, and political revolution in his characterizations of both Zarathustra and the Ubermensch. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes the rite in a celebratory vein reminiscent of Julian's, noting

Under the influence of the narcotic potion hymned by all primitive men and peoplesthose Dionysiac urges are awakened, and as they grow more intense, subjectivity becomes a complete forgetting of the self. Some peopleturn away with pity or contempt from phenomena such as these as from "folk diseases", bolstered by a sense of their own sanity; these poor creatures have no idea how blighted and ghostly this "sanity" of theirs sounds when the glowing life of Dionysiac revelers thunders past them.Now the slave is a free man, now all the rigid and hostile boundaries that distress, despotism or "impudent fashion" have erected between man and man break down. Now, with the gospel of world harmony, each man feels himself not only united, reconciled, and at one with his neighbor, but one with him, as if the veil of Maya had been rent and now hung in rags before the mysterious primal Oneness. (17)

There is very little room in Nietzsche's celebration for the rational. In fact, that which Nietzsche associates with the rational he embodies in Socrates, whose appearance in the fifth century BC, according to Nietzsche, took all the pleasure from paganism. He describes the philosopher as a "new-born daemon" (60) whose syllogisms and dialectic "[destroy] the manifestation and illustration of Dionysiac statesthe dream world of a Dionysiac rapture" (70). The effort to catalogue what Socrates terms four kinds of divine madnesses in his Phaedrus--the Prophet madness derived from Apollo, the Mystic madness derived from Dionysus, the Poet madness of the Muses and the Love madness of Aphrodite (542)--is, for Nietzsche, just one more swipe at creative inspiration and the romantic creation that accompanies the Bacchanal.

But for Plato, the creation of a Republic was predicated on rationality and propriety--indeed, of the madnesses above, Love is Socrates's most valued because, he notes, it has "a measure of truth in it" (542). If we are to believe, as historian Michael Grant argues, that "Dionysus, seen in The Bacchae as the Master of Illusions who could make the world seem what it is not, was indeed the spirit of the theatre" (245), then truth, at least in the Socratic sense of the word, plays no role in Dionysian ritual. It is fitting, then, that the only reference made to rationalist thought in Julian's lecture is a line from Aristotle's Poetics, in which the philosopher notes that "Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it" (40). Presenting Dionysian ritual as the embodiment of beauty, Julian practically dares the students to transgress. Thus, the power of a Romantic, Nietzschian call for primal devolution, accompanied by the very daring nature of the verboten in rationalist thought propels the students toward the Bacchanal, in a spirit of inflated excitement, flimsily masked as a rational, academic inquiry.

But no matter the rationale for the students' intellectual project, it is crucial that we, like Tartt, are reminded of the original purpose of Euripides's play, The Bacchae, from which most subsequent interpretations of Dionysian ritual are drawn. As Lillian Feder reminds us in her work, Madness in Literature (1980),

The contents of the various myths of madness centered around Dionysus, along with what is known or can be reconstructed regarding early Dionysiac rites, indicate that both spring originally not from human efforts to release their unconscious drives but rather from their need to control and direct them. Only in historic times did human beings return to such rites out of a desire to release emotions inexpressible through socially accepted patterns. (49)

Thus, for Euripides, joining a Bacchant ritual did not mean that one wanted to lose oneself; rather it implied that one was looking for ways to know oneself--looking for ways to develop regulating mechanisms that prevented one from losing complete control; as Feder puts it, "the followers of the god worship him with restraint and joy" (59); it is only those who refuse to worship, or who are worshipping for the wrong reasons, who experience anarchy and irrevocable madness.

Both Julian and his students interpret the Bacchanal through the popular German Romanticism tradition; their view of the play presents only the possibilities for freedom, and neglect the severe laws of misbehavior and punishment that play great roles both in Euripides's original text, and in even earlier representations of Dionysian ritual, presented in Homer's Iliad and Aeschylus's Edoni, and the Bassarides (Feder 44-45). That Tartt is in fact modeling her novel on these earlier texts is evidenced by the ultimate destruction of her characters' identity layering projects--the intensely choreographed politics of representation that collapse following the Bacchanal and its resonances. If the original, prehistory intent of Bacchant worship is to reacquaint one's self with itself, then the only possible conclusion when that self is a conscious construct is a reëmergence of the primal identity once "sanity" is achieved. Thus, as I stated earlier, a classically informed mind would find very little of surprise and terror in Tartt's novel. This ideal reader might rather find a modern reworking of an ancient parable--an identity agenda for marginal groups found within the dead white male tradition whose message regarding the danger in an identity construct is even older and more familiar than "to thine own self be true." Thus, while it is a "marginal" achievement to produce a best-selling work that, however ironically, carries so many identifiable layers, I might choose to label that an "elite" feat, reminding Classics scholar Louis A. Ruprecht, whose painful admission that "The Greeks do not sell" (247) graced the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, that the Greeks weren't reviewed by Vogue, People, or Glamour, and that that which is marginal is occasionally very little else than a question of marketing, in every sense of the word.

Feder, L. Madness in Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

Grant, M. Myths of the Greeks and Romans. New York: Meridian, 1995.

Nietzsche, F. The Birth of Tragedy. New York: Penguin, 1993.

Plato. Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.

Ruprecht, L. A. "Hellenism on Display." Journal of Modern Greek Studies 15.2 (1997): 247-

260.

Tartt, D. The Secret History. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1992.