Inspiration: The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Last night, I finally finished Donna Tartt’s first novel The Secret History.  With about two hundred pages left, I could not put it down, so I just busted through those pages ‘til five in the morning with a kind of intensity I haven’t felt in a while.  I don’t read very often, but the one thing about not needing a car in NYC is that when I take the subway, all I do is read read read. 

I am no book critic nor great summarizer, so for that, just google the book.  But in short short short, it’s one of those books about rich white college kids with problems.  In fact, Donna dedicates the book to Bret Easton Ellis, one of my favorite authors who wrote another rich white college kids with problems favorite Less Than Zero, which I read last year.  (He also wrote Rules of Attraction and American Psycho, which I have not read but absolutely love the movies.  I tried to read Glamorama two years ago, but surprisingly, I stopped in the middle because the pop culture lists got a bit boring to me!  I will get back into it though.)

Obviously, while the book is fiction, there’s an air of reality to it.  The entire time I just knew it was real.  I was sucked into the world Donna had created and completely invested myself in the lives and relationships of the characters.  After reading it, I realized that, to me, the most captivating part about the book was how ‘day in the life’ it was.  While I didn’t enjoy the heavy descriptions about everything and anything in the settings of Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, something about Donna’s characters’ everyday activities made me thirsty for more.

The thing I found fascinating was how normal it was for her characters to live the way they lived.  Sure, each was one in a million, and occasionally a minor and more societally-accepted-version-of-the-word-normal character would pop in and out to reveal how awkward the main characters actually were.  But the great thing about a book is that the author chooses what you know, and ultimately, do not know, which for the love of god, she did so well.

There are plenty of times the characters sleep for fifteen hours, ingest random pills, and spend tons of money.  Of course, they’re in college with no worries in the world but what to do on Friday night.  Here’s a short passage that describes this ‘day in the life’ thing I’m writing about, which by no means, is any kind of spoiler:

I woke around ten.  It was Saturday, which surprised me a little; I’d lost track of the days.  I went to the dining hall and had a late breakfast of tea and soft-boiled eggs, the first thing I’d eaten since Thursday.  When I went to my room to change, around noon, Charles was still asleep in my bed.  I shaved, put on a clean shirt, got my Greek books and went back to Dr. Roland’s.

I was ridiculously behind in my studies but not (as is often the case) so far behind as I’d thought.  The hours went by without my noticing them.  When I got hungry, around six, I went to the refrigerator in the Social Sciences office and found some leftover hors d’oeuvres and a piece of birthday cake, which I ate from my fingers off a paper plate at Dr. Roland’s desk.

Since I wanted a bath, I came home around eleven, but when I unlocked the door and turned on the light, I was startled to find Charles still in my bed.  He was sleeping, but the bottle of Kosher wine on the desk was half-empty…

Now one might think, “what’s the point of all this?  Why do I care about some college kids drinking and sleeping”?  What Donna has done so well was to insert a fantastic event at the beginning of the novel that sticks with the reader on top of all this everyday existence nonsense.  From the get-go, the main character reveals that he and his friends murdered someone.  Bret adds this ‘other layer’ as well, but rather than a fantastic event like a murder, his characters are plain psychotic—a main character that looks perfectly normal from the outside that has a routine life while having these surreal thoughts that dive into hallucinations and alter the character’s perception of real reality.  So while it might seem ordinary from the outside (or just plain f***ed up, depending how you look at it), only the reader can understand that something is occurring beyond the surface.

So, inspiration.  How does The Secret History inspire my work?  I believe I need to add that ‘other layer’ to my work.  My artwork is completely about a day in the life of Jeff Songco.  My photographs are littered with the shit I manage to collect in my life.  From clothes to food, from credit card receipts to used condoms (I wish), from images of myself grilling cheese to doing yoga—I make artwork about my everyday.  But I need something more and I believe that it must be something fantastic and totally ridiculous.  I need something that the viewer understands to be my tragic flaw (in a way) and that ultimately I try to hide.  I guess I want the viewer to realize that my life (which is documented) is what is crafted, and my tragic flaw is essentially, the only thing that is real.

One thing I know I add into my work is the idea of levitation.  We all know there’s no such thing as levitation.  But I’ve been able to master my digital manipulation and really, I do levitate in my photos.  That’s one kind of ‘other layer’.  Oh yeah—and what about cloning?  That’s another one!  When you look at one of my photographs where I am alone, a question could pop up: is that really him or is that one of his clones? 

I often get a jolt of self-realization when I find myself acting completely different than I had a few months ago.  Psychology tells me that it could be manic-depression.  I try to rationalize it as me just being me.  Within my artwork, I’ve been able to justify it with cloning.  Something tells me it could be the tragic flaw I’ve been looking for.