Abstract

When I think about my lofty, teenaged dreams of attending Brown University, they’re richly crafted in dark cherry wood panels, anachronistically smoky classrooms, and at times, adorned with literal tapestries. This isn’t my experience of Brown today, and while that’s probably for the better, I can’t help but wonder if I’m missing out. I picked up this picture, this psychic glimpse inside the ivory (mahogany) halls from a large mass of popular media: The Mysterious Benedict Society, Brideshead Revisited, Heathers (re: Veronica’s aspirations), and even shows like the Sabrina Netflix reboot. I would be remiss not to mention the center of gravity of this agglomeration, the alpha of this Glen plaid-wearing pack: Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel, The Secret History. Second only to dear Brideshead, fictional Hampden College’s Classics department is the total prototype of every subsequent moody-but-still-educational environment. And ohhhh did I want it. I read The Secret History towards the end of my high school career, sitting in the one (1) single carrel plopped into the school’s otherwise airy, exclusively primary-colored, tech-infused library. On the third floor of a three-story building (how grand), it stood alone by the staircase, waiting for a bright pupil to angst within it for a bit. I loved this carrel. I’d let its narrow walls wrap me up and transport me somewhere more romantic, firelit, as I waited for the acceptance letters that would hopefully truly take me there. But now I’m here. I mean the school’s literally called BROWN University—you’d expect wood paneling and thick burgundy draperies, right? So I’m dissatisfied and, furthermore, dissatisfied with my dissatisfaction. This won’t do.

Literature Review

I embarked on this journey with the idea of breaking down The Secret History and maybe The Goldfinch, another of Tartt’s novels I read far too young to resist its oddly powerful residues. I joked around—Bennington, the real college Tartt attended, is obviously the true engine of my dissatisfaction. Maybe Tartt’s running some twisted PR campaign, a psyop, honestly, to raise the school’s status. Reader, I don’t think this is a joke at all. I’m onto something. I’m finding Pepe Silvia as we speak. I’ve done the research, and it’ll change the world. The literature review alone revealed some major pieces of evidence.

1. Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, also went to Bennington College.

This clued me into how Bennington is likely engineering products with massive popular media appeal, as they’d have no other reason to produce such seemingly different works as The Secret History and American Psycho. If it’s a coordinated campaign, it makes sense for them to cover everybody, both those from Brown and Wharton alike. 

2. Not only did he matriculate, he actually dated Donna Tartt while there.

I know. The plot immediately thickened when I learned this. I was newly unsure of if this was a Bennington conspiracy or a Tartt-Ellis project, but I’ve decided it’s Bennington and I’ll convince you of this later. Maybe this wouldn’t have been a surprise if I’d bothered to notice that The Secret History is dedicated to Ellis, but alas, in my California home I was Richard Papen chomping at the bit for some cashmere sweaters and avaricious New Englandy co-eds. It’s shocking that this twosome is so confident in the secrecy of their operation that Tartt didn’t even try to hide the dedication. I can see the smug smiles on their faces. Little did they know I’d sleuth it out on my careful reread.

3. Both Tartt and Ellis write frequently about Bennington, although they attempt to deceive us by renaming the featured schools “Hampden” and “Camden” colleges, respectively.

It’s not slick. Changing the name could never throw me off the scent.

4.

More rigorous review of the existing data via Google Ngrams reveals the extreme overlap of the rise in the prevalence of “dark academia” with Trump’s political power. This is the key piece of evidence that made everything begin to click. “Dark academia” is the most concise way to describe the setting of The Secret History. Mooding and brooding, rarely in class, contemporary fans of “dark academia” might spend more time curating Pinterest boards and shopping for tweeds than reading. Richard Papen is entirely obsessed with dark academia, much like how Patrick Bateman is entirely obsessed with Donald Trump. The clear majority of celebrity allusions in American Psycho are directly about Trump, and it’s almost implied that Bateman is making them up because he’s so enthralled with the man. As we began to approach a real world more similar to Bateman’s via Trump’s rise, dark academia rose in tandem, creating a world more similar to Papen’s. As if those two worlds are one and the same. As if there is no aesthetic difference at all. They are not two distinct worlds inspired by one series of real-world events, as they predate the reality of 2016 by almost twenty-five years. Rather, they are predictive, two volumes projecting the same future. Causal, even.

5.

The most damning piece of all: Bennington’s cachet soared when a) American Psycho and The Secret History were published in 1991 and 1992, and b) when Trump was elected. Thus, we’ve ascertained that the two novels are linked to each other, linked to real world events, and that both the novels and their subsequent events spur Bennington’s fame. Not looking so far-fetched now, right?

I was convinced that these novels were responsible for almost 100 percent of the dissatisfaction in my life. Eradicate them and I’d be cured. I sat down last week to really get going with this investigation. Laptop: charged. Water: gone. Super dehydrated. Armed with my query, “american psycho free pdf download please,” I was off to the races. Immediately after opening my hopefully virus-free prize, I was slapped in the face by a different kind of fright and had to close the laptop for a few moments, mouth agape.

Chapter One is entitled April Fools. 

Methods 

When my pulse finally dropped back down to my standard 106 bpm, I could resume reading and begin research in earnest. A brief introduction to American Psycho: Patrick Bateman, our charming first-person narrator, works in Mergers and Acquisitions at Pierce & Pierce, an investment banking firm in Manhattan. He dwells amongst a horde of near-identical men with the slicked-back hair, horn-rimmed glasses (only from Oliver Peoples), and neat suits of 1987, and blends into this crowd so well that he’s frequently mistaken for a whole other cast of peers. He’s a total robot. I read endless descriptions of menswear trends, brands, and outfits; pored over menus of ritzy restaurants with scarce reservations; encountered a new, identical, doppelgangerish colleague of Patrick Bateman every sentence; and, somehow, began to take the story seriously. The monotone inanity of the scenes is off-putting, and Bateman’s devolution into murderous rampages almost begins to feel like the lighter, more palatable element of the novel compared to the endless slog of “Armani, Missoni, Bill Blass.” Each chapter contains, get this, a full paragraph about what Bateman and his scenemates are wearing.

The point is, the novel itself is Camazotzian. Cyclical, rigid, endlessly interminable, the siege of names and brand names slowly grinds down any resistance you may have and begins to slough off your opinions and experiences in favor of just outlasting this deluge. Why fight? Experientially, the reader feels a bit of what Bateman does towards the start—the path of least resistance is to acquiesce, learn some brands, read a book on style, and accept that this is your life now. You have 350 more pages to read about menswear tailoring, tie clips, and “cold corn chowder lemon bisque with peanuts,” so you might as well enjoy the ride. The text washed over me, I became seaglass.

In seeming contrast, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History appears rich and edenic to the self-important teen feasting on academic validation. Our everyman protagonist, Richard Papen, arrives from a humdrum California town to Hampden College, a land of secret societies, classics departments with six total concentrators, and professors who engage with their students like it’s their sacred duty. Richard is swept up and tumbled into adventure after adventure, in trips to countryside manors and midnight trysts. He’s taken seriously amid a crowd of other Serious Intellectuals, and for a while, it’s everything he’s ever wanted.

Tartt wants to sweep you away too. Viewing the novel through Richard’s eyes, you learn to long as he longs, to harbor a yen for the upper echelons. Slowly, the reader acclimates to a world of preposterous claims and obscene wealth, situating themself first far away from it, then on the periphery, and then, in that oh so horrible place where they’re not quite of the nature but still deeply embedded within it. It’s rather like American Psycho, interestingly. And this is what Tartt wants, I posit. The hapless reader begins to believe that The Secret History is normal, and beyond normal, aspirational. It’s what college should be, if you sift out the murders. And, actually, it’s probably just the people at the college causing the problems, right? Henry Winter and Charles Macaulay are fundamentally sick, but your school won’t be like that. 

This is a masterstroke of misdirection. Unfortunately for you and I, the corrosive beast is the place, not the people. You’ll never escape. It doesn’t matter that your school doesn't have Henry Winter, because the environment of the institution itself is the corrupting, putrid force. It’s inhospitable to you, actively invested in the project of changing you. And you, oh you, you think you want this. Instead, you begin to experience a creeping dissatisfaction from longing for this change. And I’m sorry for that. You want passive transformation as Richard experiences it, you want ease and languor and glamour. We all do. You might even be mad because Brown hasn’t changed you enough, and Bennington would. 

Richard Papen’s education is purely an aesthetic experience. When I compare his collegiate years to my own, I am matching aesthetics to aesthetics and coming up short. I have no option to reflect on my educational experience because it’s never modeled back to me. Thus, my perhaps legitimate aesthetic dissatisfaction turns into more overwhelming experiential dissatisfaction. It’s impressive, and effective. Ask what Papen learned, and I have little to say. Somehow, when you ask me what I’ve learned, I too come up blank. 

Results

(?)

Discussion

I wholeheartedly believe that these two works are to be read in conversation with each other. Tartt’s Hampden and Ellis’s Camden both stand in for Bennington. Messily entangled as the two authors once were, the Bennington stand-ins do much of the sinister work of both novels. Hampden is the explicit, tangible setting of Richard Papen’s criminal development, and it bleeds into the plot of the novel. The architecture of the dorms, the pressure of the tiny environment, the guilt etched onto one’s face in front of a small-town TV news crew, all of it actively spurs the plot on. Camden is far more peculiar. Compared to the physicality of Hampden, Camden is a mere wisp in American Psycho, a glancing blow to Bateman’s constructed reality. His brother floats around the school, but it’s not so relevant for Sean, other than that it’s not the place for him. The Batemans stand in opposition to the liberal arts. Camden is brought into the text just six times, and really only in relation to four people. Vanden, green-haired and cigarette-smoking; Sean, as before; and Scott and Anne Smiley, a couple who Bateman attends dinner with, escorted by his coworker’s girlfriend Courtney. Bateman hates all the Camdenites, and for a moment, it appears to be because they’re different from him, disrupting the smooth smooth flow of his same-y world. Vanden is reading a magazine about a downtown doom spiral and reflecting on how it affects her, only to be shot down both by Bateman and his whataboutisms, and her own punk boyfriend, who begins to disparage her for confusing Sri Lanka with a club she’d been to downtown. She is cowed by this, and perhaps, I realize, not so different from the crew of Pierce & Pierce. Anne Smiley brings a slightly stronger cerebral touch at first—discussions of a book Bateman hasn’t read, the merits of different writing approaches (albeit in gossip columns)—but it quickly devolves into posturing, then fawning.

“‘It's called California classic cuisine,’ Anne tells me, leaning in close, after we ordered.

‘You mean compared to, say, California cuisine?’ I ask carefully, measuring each word, then lamely add, ‘Or post-California cuisine?’

‘I mean I know it sounds so trendy, but there is a world of difference. It’s subtle,’ she says, ‘but it’s there. Oh Courtney, where did you find Patrick? He’s so knowledgeable about things. I mean Luis’s idea of California cuisine is half an orange and some gelati,’ she gushes.”

This exchange is utter nonsense. I do find myself enamored by Bateman’s usage of “post-,” but it’s total drivel. It’s even more embarrassing for the Camden crowd that Anne would fawn over Bateman, clearly an unsophisticated, mass-market clone. I came to school wanting to find The Secret History, murders and evildoing laid aside in sake of the blissful aesthetics and idea that someone might see me in the way I want to be seen, and instead I found American Psycho, save for the murders, and evildoing, but full of an unlovable aesthetic and people who see each other perhaps in the way they want to be seen. By now, reader, I hope you realize these two things are not so different, and both somewhat horrible. Anne could theoretically have inhabited The Secret History just as Henry Winter may have moved onwards and upwards to Pierce & Pierce, each crossing out of their realm. And this bursts the illusions of grandeur, revealing them as nothing more than marketing gimmicks. 

There’s one unresolved question: Why would the Bennington shills paint their fictional alums as silly, vapid, and endowed with poor decision-making capacity? If this is a plot to get the reader to both hunger for Bennington and become dissatisfied with their own lives, shouldn’t the Camden and Hampden grads be otherworldly superior? Coldly, unfortunately, the answer is simply that it’s because the system can work like this. In The Secret History, Hampden is never held responsible—the problems are cast aside as personal failures of insufficiently competent students. The fundamental, strongest tool of elite institutions is that they hold the mirror you are reflected in. You are part of a strong community only when it suits them, coerced into perceiving yourself as a lone sheep when you fail. And you can’t do anything about it. This may even cause dissatisfaction about one’s dissatisfaction, a truly unresolvable problem. Our perceptions are malleable to the point that I’d considered abandoning Brown, my dream school since Heathers, for a potential transfer. Just based on a book, a mere facsimile of the institution. When confronted with the full institution, what are we to do?

References 

In the spring of my senior year of high school, as decisions flew through the air into the inboxes of my friends and foes alike, a new phrase entered all of our lexicons. Yield protection. It’s the idea that some colleges reject students that are “too qualified” compared to their average admit because they assume the student won’t take the offer, thus reducing the school’s yield ratio of offers to enrollees. A low yield makes the school seem undesirable, so the theory goes. It wasn’t uncommon for me to hear the phrase “I got yield protected out of UCSB,” and it was a way of thinking that I hadn’t really encountered before. It was news to me when writing this article, however, that it’s also called “Tufts Syndrome.” I found it kind of silly, but as I received my own share of rejections, I started to rationalize them, using the phrase first as a joke, and then a little more seriously. The process of college, from start to finish, is littered with unrealistic expectations. Believing every die will roll in your favor, as so many do, isn’t feasible, but instead of confronting that we frequently sow blame across vast landscapes. You don’t need to blame yourself, you need to blame no one. The idea that there is a fault here is rotten from the start. You can’t “have it all” unless the “all” is massively narrow, and so, you must abandon it. Check and mate, Bennington.

Further Reading

1. https://www.armani.com/en-us/giorgio-armani/man/clothing/jackets/ 
2. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26 
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_(New_York_nightclub) 
   1. Interestingly, this is described as a gay club by Wikipedia. Don’t tell Patrick Bateman. 
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-California_cuisine 
   1. Shockingly real 
5. https://joandidion.org