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

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 10:00:00 -0400

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.

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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

Episode 25: David Cronenberg's 'Naked Lunch'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 12 Sep 2018 10:00:00 -0400

JF and Phil head for Interzone in an attempt to solve the enigma of Naked Lunch, David Cronenberg's 1991 screen adaptation of William S. Burroughs' infamous 1959 novel. A treatise on addiction, a diagnosis of modern ills, a lucid portrait of the artist as cosmic transgressor, and like the book, "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork," Naked Lunch is here framed in the light Cronenberg's recent speech making the case for the crime of art.

Image by Melancholie, Wikimedia Commons.

REFERENCES

David Foster Wallace, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," from Girl With Curious Hair
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, and "How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?" in A Thousand Plateaus
David Cronenberg (writer-director), Naked Lunch (the film)
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (the novel)
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an Opium-Eater
Dale Pendell, Pharmako/Poeia: Power Plants, Poisons and Herbcraft
"David Cronenberg: I would like to make the case for the crime of art," Globe and Mail June 22 2018
JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
Derek Bailey (director), On the Edge: Improvisation in Music
Phil Ford, "Good Prose is Written By People Who Are Not Frightened"
Geroge Orwell, "Inside the Whale"

Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Crime”

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

Episode 25: David Cronenberg's 'Naked Lunch'