Archaeologies of Gossip

Archaeologies of Gossip AIDS in Contemporary Gay Fiction By Emily Sutton A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Literature Victoria University of Wellington 2015 ii iii Tom of Finland – Coming of Age (1981) “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is “I desire you,” and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure. “ Roland Barthes – A Lover’s Discourse (78) iv v Contents Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................ vi Abstract ............................................................................................................................................. vii Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 1 The Farewell Symphony ....................................................................................................................... 24 The Line of Beauty .............................................................................................................................. 49 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................... 86 Works Cited ..................................................................................................................................... 88 vi vii Acknowledgements I am extremely grateful for the outstanding supervision of Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill, thank you. Thank you to Reece, Mum, Dad and Sean for your love and support. Thank you, also, to Andrew and Ros for your friendship, humour and advice. I am grateful to Victoria University for the support of a Masters by Thesis Scholarship and funding that enabled me to present a portion of this thesis at The Prosaic Imaginary conference at the University of Sydney in July 2014. viii ix Abstract Queer criticism is now in its third decade and, as critical orthodoxy, running up against its own limitations. What, for example, is a discipline preoccupied with the unspoken, the marginal and the blurring of gender boundaries to do with Edmund White’s unambiguously gay, masculine “red unsheathed fury of the third penis of the afternoon”? The Western AIDS novel is, overwhelmingly, a product of a historically precise, explicitly gay, male experience. This thesis seeks unapologetically to engage with this writing on its own terms, eschewing the queer critical lens as insufficient, and, rather, reading for a specifically gay aesthetic. Grounded in a broader overview of both AIDS novels and existing criticism, this thesis consists of extended close readings of two exemplary AIDS novels: Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Firstly, I articulate the centrality of the gay sexual body to the representation of AIDS in The Farewell Symphony, tracing its representation of the disease through the epidemiological mapping of the virus itself, within the highly specific culture of gay New York in the 1970s. Secondly, I examine the way in which the re-imagination of a selective tradition of gay literary predecessors in The Line of Beauty, specifically Henry James and Oscar Wilde, provides an aesthetic solution to articulating AIDS. x 1 Introduction Le Sexy ~ Sexiness “Different from secondary sexuality, the sexiness of a body (which is not its beauty) inheres in the fact that it is possible to discern (to fantasise) in it the erotic practice to which one subjects it in thought (I conceive of this particular practice, specifically, and of no other). Similarly, distinguished within the text, one might say that there are sexy sentences: disturbing by their very isolation, as if they possessed the promise which is made to us, the readers, by a linguistic practice, as if we were to seek them out by virtue of a pleasure which knows what it wants.” Roland Barthes – Roland Barthes (164) I Will Beckwith, protagonist of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library (1988), describes an encounter with a lover as follows: I turned him over and started to nose around his bum. It was deeply beautiful, creamily smooth when slack and when he clenched his buttocks almost cubic with built muscle. There was still the dust of Trouble for Men on the hairs in his crack, which I oiled back with my tongue, and sniffed through the dry smell of the talc to his own rectal smell – a soft stench like stale flower-water. His asshole was a clean pale purple, and shone with my saliva. (107) This is delicately wrought, exquisite prose. It lingers over the male body with evident, tactile delight in skin and muscle and is unmistakably gay in its frank anal eroticism. This is the prose of somebody who notices, slyly funny in the recognition of Trouble for Men, the popular cologne that has been irritating the protagonist throughout the novel. The reference to “stale flower-water” has shades of the persistent image of gay man as connoisseur of interior decor, deftly signalling and gently parodying a lineage of gay imagery even as it situates itself in the macho aesthetics of liberated gay culture. Such writing – overtly gay and male, aesthetically refined and unblinkingly sexual – preoccupies this thesis. Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty and Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony are the exemplary contemporary, gay AIDS novels. They are, crucially, driven by this same obsessive attention to bodies and sentences. AIDS writing and its criticism need not disavow beauty or, 2 indeed, eroticism. Instead, I argue for a renewed attention to both specifically gay content and aesthetics in the realist AIDS novel. This is reading squarely: both looking directly at gay bodies and sexuality and overzealously lingering over prose. Existing criticism of AIDS fiction, on the other hand, has evaded the realities of its object of study. Just as the myth of a crisis of representation haunts the literary scholarship of World War I and the Holocaust, so too does criticism of AIDS literature reiterate the belief that the disease is somehow un-narratable. Critics have assumed that there is something inherently different about AIDS writing that demands the revision of conventional understandings of how we produce and consume literature. The origins of this critical trope can be traced to Simon Watney’s 1987 statement that “AIDS is not only a medical crisis on an unparalleled scale, it involves a crisis of representation itself, a crisis over the entire framing of knowledge about the human body and its capacities for sexual pleasure” (9, italics mine). This oft-cited claim has proliferated and mutated, like a photocopy of a photocopy. Lee Edelman claims that “AIDS, then, resists our attempts to inscribe it as a manageable subject of writing – exceeding and eluding the medical, sociological, political, or literary discourses that variously attempt to confront or engage it” (“Mirror” 10); Suzanne Poirier asserts that the contributors to her Writing AIDS “are nearly unanimous in their assertion that AIDS has irremediably changed the way that gay literature can be either written or read” (3); Michael Denneny claims that AIDS writing is “startlingly different from our normal understanding of writing and books in this society” (44); Michiko Kakutani suggests in the New York Times that “the very awfulness of AIDS poses a daunting challenge to the imagination” (C29). What is it, precisely, that engenders this recitation of AIDS-as-unrepresentable? The lucid prose of Primo Levi and the sheer quantity of trench poetry render arguments about literature’s inability to represent the Holocaust and the First World War moot. So too does the richly literary and accomplished fiction of Hollinghurst and White defy the belief that AIDS is a slippery, unspeakable rupture in the fabric of literary representation. I argue that the realist novel has specifically proven its capacity to represent AIDS: it is expansive and flexible rather than hackneyed or impotent. There is, further, a remarkable continuity of representational strategies between earlier gay fiction and AIDS writing. 3 Parallel to the critical assumption that AIDS is unrepresentable has been a narrowing of the bounds of literary scholarship into didacticism and an emphasis on content over form. The two assumptions do not necessarily exist within the same arguments, but collectively build a critical climate that deems AIDS impossible to represent while also demanding its politically appropriate representation. The conviction that “we judge literary AIDS by different standards because the emergency is so great” drives this urgent, content-focussed criticism (Pastore, “Introduction” 20). This assumption is evident in Andrew Holleran’s prediction that: “writing about AIDS will appear, and in the short term will inevitability be judged, I suspect, as writing published in wartime is: by its effects on the people

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