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This essay is not one I had originally intended to write. I ended up skipping way forward in my chronology, all the way from 360 BCE to 1992, and read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. It was the perfect time of year, and I had just found a superb tweed jacket at a thrift store. The moment couldn’t have been better. And as the pages flew by like the leaves of the trees that were falling all around me, I began to detect in Tartt’s novel a way in which she contorted her characters and devices so that they would outlast the pages they lived on. Even more than the way a good story will stay with you by sheer beauty and meaning, I could tell she had found a way to actively implant this effect in her composition. Tartt’s book, even in all its grimness, is there to remind us that our lives are never meaningless. In it, she uses human life and especially the use of a dead language to show that life after death is always possible in some form.
As always, please read this book before reading this to avoid major spoilers. Especially this one, I promise it is worth the time. Now, let’s get that all out of the way. The character Bunny, jovial menace and all-round leech is murdered by his awful friends before half of the book is over. In fact, his death is revealed in the first sentence of the book: “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation” (3). And, as Donna Tartt would have it, this just about sums up the entire idea I’m trying to show. He had been dead for weeks, and it is only after this time has passed that the rest of the crew begins to understand the weight of his death. Their realizations are not merely the result of happenstance or typical progression of regret, but more so the result of his personality and spirit continuing to crop up in their daily lives. Think of all the Bunny look-a-likes that appear at the funeral. These are his family, but it is intentional that the family is one that looks so like Bunny, from his father down to his nephews.
Consider also the bad spelling within the letter he’d written to Julian, pleading fearfully about his mistrust of Henry. He wrote the letter before he died, and it is discovered, in the wrong mailbox, weeks and months after he sent it. In this way, Bunny himself reveals the truth to Julian, albeit far too late, but still somehow acting beyond the veil of death. There’s even the curious moment when Charles claims, with an absolute seriousness, “I saw him. He was here. He was sitting on the foot of the bed” (472). Parts of him continue to show up, as the fallout of a life. His never ended until some form of justice had been done, which is just how he’d want it.
These and other moments of longevity are important, but as I said earlier, Tartt uses another tool in a brilliant way to illustrate this same notion: languages. Throughout the book, the five main characters, all Classics majors, use Ancient Greek as a companion to their everyday English. It is a dead language, in its current form, but to them it has its uses. They speak this tongue to communicate out loud with each other in secrecy. For the typical situation, nobody would be able to understand what they say to each other, and so they can discuss incredibly sensitive topics—like the fact that they are murderers—without any fear of being overheard. About this there are two things I wish to elucidate.
The first is that there is one situation in which they are not at all able to use Greek. Toward the end of the novel, at lunch with Julian, Francis and Richard are nearing a breakdown together because they know the incriminating letter from Bunny is on his desk. Julian, their Classics professor, is as fluent in Greek as he is able to breathe, and Richard has this to say: “I realized that something we had always relied on was the ability to communicate whenever we wanted. Always, previously, in an emergency we could throw out something in Greek, under the guise of an aphorism or quotation. But now that was impossible” (501). Suddenly, they are caught in a situation where the dead language they relied on so much is no longer as dead as they’d like it to be. It has resuscitated ever so slightly, and it has encroached upon their safety. And yet, for us on the outside, we are able to see how this language may live even after it is considered “dead”; more on that later.
In another episode, Ancient Greek shows greater signs of not being so dead as well. Richard and Henry are speaking in secrecy at a bar, and this is said:
“’Do not fear,’ he said to me. ‘It is the mother. She is concerned with the dishonor of the son having to do with wine.’
I did not understand what he meant. The form of ‘dishonor’ that he used also meant ‘loss of civil rights.’
‘Atimia?’ I repeated.
‘Yes.’
‘But rights are for living men, not for the dead.’
‘Οιμοι,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Oh, dear. No. No.’ He cast about, snapping his fingers …
It is harder to carry on a conversation in a dead language than you might think” (383).
Here, Richard and Henry have to use phrases that they typically wouldn’t otherwise, in order to create the message that they needed. They end up using words in different ways than the Greeks may have used them in the past, but the words fit in this contemporary setting. It’s very interesting to see this happen, because it shows snippets of an answer to a question: can a dead language be revived? I was heading down this road just a moment before, and now we will explore it more fully.
In short, yes, a functionally dead language can be revived, and it has happened before. In fact, Hebrew, as we know it today, is exactly the result of a language revival effort. In 1881, a man named Ben-Yehuda began a Hebrew language revival effort in Palestine. From jewishvirtuallibrary.org, “[he] adopted several plans of action. The main ones were three-fold, and they can be summarized as ‘Hebrew in the Home,’ ‘Hebrew in the School,’ and ‘Words, Words, Words.’” Ben-Yehuda began with simply making conversation in Hebrew with as many Jews as he could meet in everyday situations, and he had planned to do this as much as possible. On the first day he spent in Palestine with this intent, “he talked with a Jewish money-changer, a Jewish innkeeper, and a Jewish wagoneer, all in Hebrew. For here he had encountered simple people who could speak Hebrew, perhaps with mistakes, but still more or less naturally and freely.”
On that note, it is important to point out a difference between Ben-Yehuda and our five protagonists from Hampden College. Ben-Yehuda was confronted with a language that was still very much spoken, while Tartt’s characters speak one that almost does not exist in verbal form. Hebrew was not so dead that it had been entirely lost to only written documents. But, it is true that there was nobody who had learned it as a first language, only learning it in school. This is what made it functionally dead. Ancient Greek, very different from the modern, has been entirely lost in its spoken form other than within scholarly circles, thus confining it mainly to written records.
Ben-Yehuda’s success, to continue here, is attributed to “when his first son, Ben-Zion Ben-Yehuda (or, as he is more commonly known, Ittamar Ben-Avi), was born in 1882, Ben-Yehuda made his first wife Deborah promise to raise the boy as the first all-Hebrew speaking child in modern history.” This effort was copied by others, and slowly, Hebrew began to reestablish itself as a natural language.
So, Languages clearly can be revived. Or, more importantly, they can be useful—in terms of cultural perspective, narrative, hermeneutics—far after they are considered “dead.” Tartt uses this fact and a well-known dead language to remind us that life continues after death, even for more than just us people.
And this is what she does, even unto the last page of the book. To entirely spoil the end, Henry ends up dead, a victim of his own overbearing decision-making. And yet, both Francis and Richard see Henry after that, at separate times in different hospitals. Later, on the very final pages, Richard dreams of Henry. He dreams of him so vividly that he is able to take down dialogue with him. And what is it that Henry says? “’I’m not dead … I’m only having a bit of trouble with my passport” (559). And us readers come full-circle, the story beginning and ending with the very same idea. Death doesn’t come for us, so much as our willingness to give up does. So live life, make connections, and work on what you want to work on. From where I stand, it’s pretty clear that our impact has a longer reach than you might think.