Koerner 1 and WHAT WE SAW THERE

Koerner 1 DEFINING A MICRO-GENRE: INSULAR FRIEND GROUPS IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE and WHAT WE SAW THERE: A NOVEL ________________________________________________ A Thesis Presented to the Honors Tutorial College Ohio University ________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the Degree of Bachelors of Arts in English ________________________________________________ Hannah Koerner April 2017 Koerner 2 Critical Introduction Defining a Micro-Genre: Insular Friend Groups in Contemporary Literature Three tall, gray bookshelves line the back wall of my parents’ office at home. They are filled with historical fiction, Joan Didion collections, and tall, wide books of nature photography. They have been there as long as I can remember, but I only started reading books from them when I was in high school. It was in my sophomore year, after finishing off the Alice Hoffman novels and Erik Larson’s nonfiction that I stumbled upon Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. It is an immediately arresting cover: a close-up of a Greek statue’s face and neck, turned to the side, mouth slightly opened and downturned as if looking away from something terrible and regretful—something tragic. The photograph is faded and warm, almost sepia-toned, like something you might find while perusing bins in an antique store. It’s a fitting cover; The Secret History is a tragedy, and like all tragedies, it owes a deep debt to the past. When I finally read and finished the book, it was the tragedy that held me—not because it was classical and well-crafted (it was both), but because of the unfairness. After becoming close, the main characters’ bonds lead them to commit a grievous crime against one of their own. After that crime, they turn on each other and the group implodes. Why, I wondered, did the their close bonds have to prove so ruinous and ultimately dissolvable? When the narrator, Richard, moves to a small Midwestern liberal arts college from California, his immediate attraction to the group of elite, aloof Greek students quickly forms the central drive of the novel: his scheming to speak with them, infiltrate them, and ultimately, appease their leader figure Henry Winters. After a brief, idyllic period of content friendship with the group, however, a dark side of those figures Koerner 3 emerges. Richard learns that in the past, the group, led by Henry in pursuit of his Greek education, attempted to recreate a bacchanal. The ritual left the group out of their minds, seemingly possessed, until they woke with only hazy memories to find the body of a farmer they appeared to have murdered. Afterwards, Bunny, the only member of the group not to participate in the bacchanal, slowly pieces together what happened. To protect themselves from jail, the rest of the characters—including Richard—plot Bunny’s murder. Their plot succeeds when Henry pushes Bunny off an icy cliff. In the ensuing rush to cover up that second crime, tension and guilt set the remaining friends at odds and lead to the implosion of the group, with each of the survivors destroyed in some fundamental way. Although each gets a brief sort-of epilogue, none remain in touch. That is their punishment for their crimes: lonely, unfulfilled, and unremarkable lives—the very thing their group and friendships were designed to avoid. As a person in the midst of figuring out the ethics of my own insular, potentially destructive friend group, that morality disturbed me. By that year my elementary school group of friends had so far avoided the doomsday advice of high school orientation (“Don’t share your locker combination with anyone; you’ll have a new set of friends by the end of the year.”) and were well set on staying that closely and exclusively together until well after we graduated. That was something we talked about a lot—how we would manage to stay together. Those conversations were more urgent and more emotional than any I ever had with the first few romantic interests that infringed on our group around that time; they seemed urgent in a way I’m not sure any conversations have seemed since. That is partially because, when you are that young and have always lived only in one place and with one group of friends, the loss of both that place and those people at once Koerner 4 looks earth-shattering from a distance of several years. Even now that I have graduated and moved to a different town and made a new group of friends, I don’t think my high school self was wrong to feel that way; for her, that move was quite simply the obliteration of everything she defined herself by and depended on. In her world, there was literally no precedent for such an apocalyptic change. The urgency was also because my best friend, Elise (name changed to protect privacy), was suffering from several debilitating mental illnesses. At the time, maintaining our group of friends seemed very much like a matter of life and death. It would not be for several more years that either my friends or I voiced the phrase “mental illness” to each other, although our awareness of what was happening surely shifted to include that more medical dimension during that period. I remember thinking whatever Elise was going through was, surely, too unique and terrifying to be classified. She would speak of her rapidly shifting moods in elaborate metaphor. At one point I remember believing she literally woke up as a different person every other day. I don’t think she was exaggerating; I understand she was using what was at that age the most precise description she could. What she was going through was also, we believed at the time, too risky to be shared. Her parents’ understanding of diseases like depression or anxiety amounted to, “Everyone gets sad sometimes,” and “People who kill themselves are selfish”—whatever the commonplace lines were, they had said them, and said them to Elise. What little we knew of school counselors told us they were controlling and invasive, people who would take all power in the situation away from us. Moreover, they were people who would be obligated to tell Elise’s parents, a possibility that we imagined was even more apocalyptic Koerner 5 than our eventual graduation and matriculation to different colleges. For us, every adult represented that potential threat. Every adult was the enemy, and every well-meaning friend who wasn’t us but might blab to an adult was the enemy. Even now that I have two abnormal psych classes, a year’s worth of therapy sessions, and two bottles of anxiety medications under my belt, I don’t know that we were wrong to think those things; my confidence in those nosy school counselors is still just as low, and any misstep in the past could have been the one that sent Elise over the edge at just the wrong time. In that sense, my high school conception of Elise’s problems as the most important problems in the world was a helpful nearsightedness; I spent every ounce of energy I had ensuring I never made that misstep, even if I didn’t have the education or resources to truly understand what helping Elise should look like. Maybe my reticence towards outside, adult aide is a sign I still haven’t fully escaped the tense, stifling mindset my high school friends and I occupied. Maybe it’s also fair. At any rate, the edict laid out by The Secret History was clear: my friends’ and my collective decision to handle the situation ourselves should end in disaster—we were a group too insular and contained not to implode. Moreover, it placed the blame mostly on the leader figure of Henry Winters, the most removed of all the characters from a normal life. He was intriguingly different, and so held them all together like a magnet for people wanting more than normal. He was also the cruelest character, the one to unhesitatingly push a friend to his death when expedient. Elise functioned in much the same way for us: we were intrigued by her difference, and felt unique and important for being so close to it. Like Richard with Henry, my other friends and I felt bound to Elise and competed for her favor. It was a tremendously uneven power dynamic. But even then Koerner 6 I knew that if anything went wrong in our friend group, it would not be Elise’s fault for struggling with impossible circumstances she could not control. That would remain true even if she acted recklessly, or desperately, or cruelly; she was doing the best she could with the incomprehensible whirlpool her mind had suddenly become. For obvious reasons, the implicit moral structure of The Secret History troubled me. I was troubled because it suggests there is something inherently wrong with a group of friends that insular and all consuming. The novels make a compelling case for that distrust, as the strength of such groups’ internal logic circumvents any of the individuals’ moralities. At the same time, separate from moral considerations, seems to be a practical assertion from the plot structure outlined above: such groups not only should not last, but cannot last. The tensions and wills of too many disparate individuals will always, within the groups of the novels above, stumble upon an irresolvable conflict. The groups are formed as a result of alternative desires: desire for power, for an escape from family life, or for remarkable artistic achievement. In many cases the members of the groups written about are conscious to varying degrees that their relationships with their friends preclude a monogamous coupling.

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