Early in The Secret History, Julian gives a lecture on the relationship between beauty and terror. It is an idea that harkens back to Aristotle who, in Poetics, argues that objects that are terrifying in real life—such as a corpse—can be beautiful when elevated to the realm of art. Although this lecture occurs within the context of Richard’s Greek class, it is also a commentary on the novel itself. With The Secret History, Tartt is interested in creating a work of beauty that it is also terrifying. In many ways, the novel is grotesque; the first murder the students commit is especially brutal, as are the ceremonies they engage in, particularly the one in which they slaughter a piglet and cover themselves in its blood. Though Tartt doesn’t usually withhold descriptions from the reader, she often describes violent events briefly or impressionistically. Violence is a central part of The Secret History, but it is never overwhelming. What is overwhelming, however, at least for the novel’s characters, are the consequences of violence.
To that end, it is in the aftermath of violence that Richard and the other Greek students are confronted with genuine terror. This terror comes in the form of guilt, law enforcement, and unintended consequences. It also comes about because the Greek students have strayed from Aristotle’s ideas about beauty and terror. After all, Aristotle only connects beauty and terror as a way to prove a broader argument about how humans naturally take pleasure in artistic representation. It’s not that humans find corpses beautiful, then, but that they find artistic representations of corpses beautiful. Henry, however, gets hung up on the idea that beauty is terror. Therefore, the problem that arises for the Greek students in The Secret History is that they actually kill the farmer (and, later, Bunny). And though someone like Henry might hope to find beauty in this otherwise horrifying experience, such a viewpoint doesn’t quite align with Aristotle’s philosophy because it has nothing to do with art or representation—it’s real, and thus full of nothing but terror.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Beauty and Terror ThemeTracker
Beauty and Terror Quotes in The Secret History
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?
It was like a painting too vivid to be real—every pebble, every blade of grass sharply defined, the sky so blue it hurt me to look at it. Camilla was limp in Henry’s arms, her head thrown back like a dead girl’s, and the curve of her throat beautiful and lifeless.
You see, then, how quick it was. And it is impossible to slow down this film, to examine individual frames. I see now what I saw then, flashing by with the swift, deceptive ease of an accident: shower of gravel, wind-milling arms, a hand that claws at a branch and misses. A barrage of frightened crows explodes from the underbrush, cawing and dark against the sky. Cut to Henry stepping back from the edge. Then the film flaps up in the projector and the screen goes black. Consummatum est.
He was looking over the hills, at all that grand cinematic expanse of men and wilderness and snow that lay beneath us; and though his voice was anxious there was a strange dreamy look on his face. The business had upset him, that I knew, but I also knew that there was something about the operatic sweep of the search which could not fail to appeal to him and that he was pleased, however obscurely, with the aesthetics of the thing.
