‘I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.’

Richard Papen’s 500 odd page confession, which constitutes Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, is granted complete immunity by the novel’s title; yeah, we all know, now – but, hey, nobody knows. Or, as Saul Goodman might quip, nervously re-parting his rug as the defense case totters on the brink of self destruction: “ ‘s all good, man”. There are, of course, all manner of secret histories – some intentionally so, others not so much – and in this current era of virtual self-validation and key- stroke fame one might well brand these covert operations as abject failures, one might pose the question: why bother? Yo, the word on the street is that you don’t even exist bro. Humbert Humbert’s secret history had every chance of remaining so – scrawled in his cell before his heart stopped – and yet, he (and Nabokov, and Lolita) made it through into the city of angels, the refuge of aurochs. The retrospective sonnets of that novel were indeed prophetic, as they tilted towards a future that would eclipse not only Humbert’s but Nabokov’s fleeting footfall in this literary, and literal, waiting room.

Staying with the immortal closing paragraph of Lolita, Brett Easton Ellis’s vagabond playboy Victor Ward is left contemplating ‘the secret of durable pigments’ at the end of his 1998 novel Glamorama in the form of a mural behind the bar of the Principe di Savoia. When Victor (or Ellis: for clearly the line between author and character is increasingly just something he flosses with these days) concludes that ‘The stars are real. The future is that mountain’, we are left hanging at the intersection of art and interpretation. And we may beg to differ. The stars may or may not be real – those in the mural certainly are not; the mountain, or its representation in the mural, is just a mountain. The future for Victor in the Ellis canon in fact ends with the word ‘mountain’, although he does of course have past lives. Ellis invites us to consider that ‘behind the mountain is a highway and along that highway are billboards with answers on them – who, what, where, when, why’. But we only have his word for that. Smash cut to a horde of angry Facebook users who point out, quite rightly, that Victor couldn’t have seen the highway from where he was spacing with his glass of water looking at the mural in the Principe di Savoia and that there is a realism problem, certainly a pictorial space issue, and quite possibly a moral failing on the author’s part to boot.

Things can get a little fucked up when you read too much into a story someone told you. Othello found this out the very hard way. And whereas Victor’s future (assassins lurking) seems about as promising as Iago’s, with Lodovico’s ice cold pronouncement of ‘the time, the place, the torture’, the Othello franchise's future seems brighter, benefitting from a reboot with Lodovico recast as Shakespeare: “I myself will straight abroad/ and to the state this heavy act, with heavy heart relate’. The story will be retold. And at its conclusion, if Lodovico is faithful to his creator, it will be related again, and again, infinitely. But will he capture the poetry of the tragedy? He is, after all, just a government man – no poet. The best summation of what went down is clearly Othello’s parting words, choked out through tears, before he took the blade. But, sorry, he has been cancelled. We will have to go with Lodovico’s factual and ethical account, God help us.

In any series of events, there is what actually happened (Bunny’s gentle, brutal shove, Desdemona’s suffocating horror), the recounting of what occurred (by Richard, Xanaxed, typing his broken heart out in LA, Lodovico, pumped on his own importance before the senate) and the fourth wall that we all lean against, scrolling, built by Tartt, by Shakespeare, by Ellis. Some, Iago for instance, are trying to shut the chatter down: “Demand me nothing. What you know you know. From this time forth I never will speak word.” Others are trying to fess up and no one is listening, Patrick Bateman being the obvious example. Meanwhile, Orwell reigns supreme over all: whatever happened, or was alleged to have happened by a ‘writer’ will be subjected to appropriate scrutiny by the appropriate Ministry. Fictional murders will be replaced by real life ‘suicides’; the rules of attraction will be updated and strictly enforced. Janet Frame will be lobotomised after all because she ‘didn’t fit the narrative’ and her subsequent literary fame was a ‘mistake’. And how many people living in the Maniototo have read Living in the Maniototo? I broke down in my 1972 VW Beetle in Ranfurly recently and the nice Mister Man (I call all masculine saviours with these skills I don’t have Mister Men) didn’t look like a Frame man to me.

In Borges’ fiction The Secret Miracle, time is slowed so that the character before the firing squad is permitted to complete his work, solely in his head, between the issue of the bullet from the gun and its impact. What seems to him a year is a mere split second; this is the miracle granted by God. A year might seem a long time to be standing in front of a wall in a shitty courtyard with a bullet following an obscenely slow trajectory to your skull, just so you can finish your shit that nobody is going to know about anyway. But maybe that is just how it is.