T.C. İstanbul Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bilim Dalı
Doktora Tezi
Fatherless Men and Homeless Love: Search For Community in Alan Hollinghurst’s Novels
Gökçen Ezber 2502050014
Tez Danışmanı Doç.Dr. Murat Seçkin
İstanbul 2012
Fatherless Men and Homeless Love: Search for Community in Alan Hollinghurst’s Novels
Gökçen Ezber
ÖZ
Bu çalışmanın amacı, çağdaş İngiliz romancı Alan Hollinghurst’ün The Swimming- Pool Library (1988), The Folding Star (1993), The Spell (1998) ve The Line of Beauty (2004) adlı romanlarındaki eşcinsel erkek karakterlerinin kimlik arayışlarını psikanalizin nesne-ilişkileri kuramı ve queer kuram ışığında çözümlemektir. Hollinghurst’ün romanları incelendiğinde, eşcinsel erkek karakterlerin benliklerini ve kimliklerini oluşturmada zorluklar yaşadıkları, bu nedenle toplumun tanımlanmış sınırları içinde kendilerine bir yer bulup, bir aidiyet duygusu içinde, toplum tarafından meşru olarak kabul edilen herhangi bir topluluğun parçası olamadıkları görülmektedir. Çalışmada ortaya çıkan sonuç, Hollinghurst’ün eşcinsel erkek karakterlerinin başarısızlıkla sonuçlanan kimlik ve topluluk arayışlarının onları, kendilerini gerçekleştirme anlamında alternatif yollara yönlendirdiğini ortaya koymaktadır. Çalışma kapsamında incelenen edebi karakterler, hetero-normatif toplumda bir yer edinip kendilerine ‘meşru’ bir kimlik kuramadıkları için, varoluşlarını edebiyat, cinsellik ve estetik kaygılar çerçevesinde oluşturma yoluna gitmektedir. Söz konusu karakterler, edebiyat ve kurmaca aracılığıyla kendilerini bir geleneğin ve tarihin parçası olarak konumlandırmaya; cinsel tatmin yoluyla toplum tarafından sürekli ve bilinçli bir biçimde yok sayılmalarını telafi etmeye; estetik tutkuları aracılığıyla da benliklerini güçlendirmeye çabalamaktadırlar. Çalışmanın sonucunda, alternatif yollarla ve toplumun desteğini almadan kendi varoluşunu kurmaya çalışan Hollinghurst’ün eşcinsel erkek karakterlerinin, kendilerine rol model olarak bir baba figüründen yararlan(a)madıkları, eşcinsel arzularının da toplum tarafından kabul edilmediği ortaya çıkmaktadır. Toplumun eşcinsel erkeğe biçtiği bu babasızlık ve yersizlik, Hollinghurst’ün romanlarında betimlendiği gibi, onu ‘meşru’ bir varoluş alanından ve kendine bir kimlik oluşturacağı, topluluk içinde bir aidiyet duygusundan yoksun bırakmaktadır.
iii
ABSTRACT
The aim of the present study, in dialogue with the objects-relations theory of psychoanalysis and queer theory, is to analyse the homosexual man’s search for community in Alan Hollinghurst’s novels The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), The Folding Star (1993), The Spell (1998) and The Line of Beauty (2004). An analysis of Hollinghurts’s novels reveal the fact that the homosexual male characters have difficulties in building their selves and identities and hence they cannot find legitimate places in society and be part of a community. The present study reveals that the failed search of Hollinghurst’s homosexual characters for an identity and community leads them to alternative ways of self-realisation. Because they cannot build themselves ‘legitimate’ identities, the literary characters analysed within the scope of this study try to reach self-fulfillment through literature, sexuality and aesthetics. Through literature and fiction, the homosexual man tries to position himself in a tradition and history; through sexual gratification he attempts to compensate for his continuous alienation and ignorance by society and through aesthetic concerns he tries to strengthen his self. The study pursues its final claim that the homosexual man in Hollinghurst’s novels, who tries to realise his self- fulfillment without the support of society and through alternative ways, is (left) without a fatherly role-model and his homosexual desire is not legitimised by society. The fatherlessness and homelessness ascribed to the homosexual man by society prevent his self-realisation and denies him a sense of belonging in a community through which he could build himself an identity.
iv FOREWORD
This study aims at understanding the homosexual man’s search for community as depicted in the contemporary British novelist Alan Hollinghurst’s novels The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell and The Line of Beauty. The analyses of the four novels and the arguments around them unfold in dialogue with psychoanalysis and queer theory. It is within the conceptual boundaries of these seemingly contradictory, but inherently convergent schools of thought that the dynamics of selfhood and identity of the homosexual man in Hollinghurst’s novels will be anlaysed. The final argument of the present study pursues the claim that in order to resolve the inner conflict of the homosexual man, caused by the problematic relationship between himself and the family and society, he has to invest in the aesthetics, sexual gratification and the world of fiction. These alternative modes of existence offer him a home and surrogate fathers around which he can build himself a coherent self. The essential homelessness and fatherlessness of the homosexual man compels him to seek meaning and gratification in erotic, fictional and aesthetic pursuits which in turn create a sense of community. It is a great pleasure to express my deepest and sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Associate Professor Murat Seçkin, for his support and encouragement throughout my postgraduate studies. His academic and inspirational contribution was invaluable to the completion of this dissertation. I am also deeply grateful to Associate Prof. Oğuz Cebeci for widening the scope of this dissertation by urging me to integrate psychoanalysis into my analysis. My thanks also go to other members of my committee; namely Prof. Esra Melikoğlu, Prof. Nazan Aksoy and Associate Proffessor Özden Sözalan. I would also like to thank to Prof. Zeynep Ergun, Dr. Ekin Öyken, Dr. Bahar Eriş, Dr. Şebnem Sunar, Dr. Buket Akgün and Hüseyin Beköz, MD for having always been there for me to share their invaluable ideas and suggestions about my dissertation. Their friendship has been the greatest encouragement I have had during the writing of this dissertation.
v Most importantly, none of this would have been possible without the love and patience of Adem Ünlü, who has stood beside me in these last six years of my life which coincided with my PhD studies. Not only did he endevour to keep me reasonably sane and cheerful throughout this process, he also spent long hours providing me with constant support, patience and most importantly a warm home filled with love.
vi CONTENTS
Öz …………………………………………………………………………………. iii Abstract …………………………………….………………….……………………iv Foreword ……………………………………...….…………….……………………v Contents ……………………………………...….…………………………………vii Introduction …………………….……………………...….…………………………1 Chapter 1: The Theoretical Framework ……………...….….…..………………12 1.1. Selves ……………...….….………..………………………………..18 1.1.1. The Creative Self .………..…………………………………18 1.1.2. The Social Self .………..……………………………………21 1.1.3. The Seeds of Self .…………..………………………………26 1.1.4. The Crumbling Self .……………..…………………………29 1.2 Identities ……………..…...….….………..…………………………34 1.2.1. The Queer Identity .………………..…………………………34 1.2.2. The Sexual Identity .………………..……………...…………41 1.2.3. The Performative Identity .………………..…………….……45 1.2.4. The Hierarchic Identity .…………………..…………….……48 1.3 Communities .…………………..…………….……………………..51 1.3.1. Fictional Communities .…………...………..…………….…56 1.3.2. Erotic Communities .…………..…...………..…………….…57 1.3.3. Aesthetic Communities .……….…...………..…………….…59 Chapter 2: Canonizing the Queer ……………...…………………………….…..61 2.1. The British Gay Novel Tradition .………….…...………..…………61 2.2. Alan Hollinghurst .……………………...….…...………..…………70 Chapter 3: Fatherless Men .…………...……….……...….…...………..…………81 3.1. Men of the Underworld .……………...…….…...………..…………84 3.2. Men Roaming .……………...... …….…...………..…………92 3.3. The Primal Father .…………..……...…….…...………..…………102 3.4. Men Reading .……………...…….…...……………..…..…………107 3.5. Men Writing .……………...……………….…...………..…………118
vii Chapter 4: Merchants of Fetish .……………..……...…….…...………..………126 4.1. The Man and the Boy .……………....…….…...………..…………130 4.2. Erotic Triangles .………………….....…….…...………..…………147 4.3. The Artist as Father .……………...…...….…...………..………… 152 4.4. The Fetish as Father .……………...…...….…...………..…………160 4.5. The Homosexual Psyche .………………...…….…...………..……162 Chapter 5: A Dream in Vain .……………………….…….…...….…..…………167 5.1. Traffic of Men .……………...…….…...………..…………………168 5.2. Architecture and Men .……………...…….…...………..…………180 5.3. Sons and Men .……………...... …….…...………..…………189 5.4. Men in Dichotomies .…...…………...…….…...………..…………197 5.5. The Homosexual Father .……………...…….…...…………...……204 Chapter 6: Homeless Love .……………………….…….…...………..…………208 6.1. Men in the City .……………..……...…….…...………..…………209 6.2. Men in the House .………………...... …….…...………..…………214 6.3. Masters of Men .………………..…...…….…...………..…………219 6.4. Men in the Community .………..………...…….…...………..……227 6.5. The Man and the Illness .………….………...…….…...………..…230 Conclusion .……………...……………...….…...………..………………………..242 Bibliography .………………...…….…...………..………………………………..246 Illustrations .……………...…….…...………..……………...…………………….259 Curriculum Vitae (Özgeçmiş) .……………....…….…...………..……………...…261
viii
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1. Title cover of William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty …………………...259
Figure 2. Drawing of the shape of ogee, the line of beauty, from William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty, 1753…………………………….260
ix INTRODUCTION
‟But why, O foolish boy, so vainly catching at this flitting form? The cheat that you are seeking has no place.” Ovid, Metamorphoses
Heterosexuality as a normative system gives shape to modern human societies and communities. It functions effectively by constructing notions of ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’. It is through a mechanism of taxonomic differentiation and binary structuring that the heterosexual order instates its legitimacy and continuity. Hence, when an individual born into this hetero-normative order fails to be designated as ‘normal’, she or he is ruthlessly alienated. Individuals labeled as an ‘other’ are not granted a space in society. One figure who cannot have a claim of normalcy in this order is the homosexual man. As someone who is deliberately cast out of heterosexual society, his survival is not supported by the self- replicating order. The dynamics of society work against him so that he is at once be cast out and the hetero-normative order is secured for future generations. The lot of the homosexual man in this structure is a seemingly inherent sense of otherness and loneliness, an ever-growing need for being related to people or things, attempts of self-affirmation in different ways, which all culminate in a lifelong struggle for survival in a hostile environment. My central aim in this study -which unfolds in dialogue with the discourses of psychoanalysis and queer theory- is twofold. The present study, within the scope of the contemporary British novelist Alan Hollinghurst’s novels, will first set out to demonstrate that the homosexual man, because his homosexuality and his homosexual tendencies make him a misfit in the hetero-normative order of the family from the very beginning, develops conflicts in his selfhood and enters into a gender- discriminative society where he struggles to build himself an identity. This struggle of the homosexual man manifests itself in an ongoing search for community in Hollinghurst’s characters. The study will then aim at a conceptualization of the term community in relation to Hollinghurst’s fictional characters. It will be argued that the homosexual man in Hollinghurst’s novels cannot be part of physical communities
1 defined by locality and temporality. Hence he is bound to look for alternative kinds of communities in which he can strengthen his self and build himself an identity. The study will be offering three different kinds of community as searched for by the homosexual man. In line with the homosexual man’s ways of strengthening his weak selfhood and the kinds of relationships he develops within the society he lives in, these communities might be designated as fictional, erotic and aesthetic communities. The present study, as its title signals, will be extending its arguments on both psychological and social levels. The homosexual man’s being fatherless refers to his weak ties with the hetero-normative order, the father’s symbolic world. The inherent sense of being an ‘other’, the selfhood he has developed within the family compels him to look for other anchors in life where he can have strong self. The homosexual man, in other words, cannot make use of his father’s world as a sustaining and inclusive framework. In parallel to his fatherlessness, the homosexual man’s desire is homeless in the sense that his homosexual desire finds no legitimacy in the eyes of the social tenets that be. Thus, left without a patriarchal acknowledgement and with a ‘deviant’ desire that finds itself no place, the homosexual man finds himself labeled as a misfit, even a pervert, deliberately expelled from society. Alan Hollinghurst’s novels depict the figure of a homosexual man who has to live with this difficulty of being part of a sustaining community and who looks for other compensatory ways to feel himself existing at all. The discussion of the concepts of ‘selfhood’ and ‘identity’ is crucial for the main argument of the present study. Hence, an eclectic theoretical framework will be employed to explicate the significance of these two concepts with reference to Alan Hollinghurst’s fictional characters. The concurrent use of psychoanalysis and queer theory will enable us to cover both the psychological and the social dimensions of the homosexual man’s experience. The justification of such a convergence between psychoanalysis and queer theory is of paramount importance. The object-relations theory of psychoanalysis deals with the psychological and interpersonal dimensions of the experience of the self. Queer theory’s main aim is understanding the nature and the cultural influences on subjectivity and identity. The present study will attempt at an elaboration of the affinity between these two
2 schools of thought. As it will be argued, the idea and conceptualization of selfhood in both theories share many parallels. Queer theory’s idea of truth and selfhood as constructed and relational significantly converges with the object-relations theory’s conception of selfhood as shifting, contingent and in continuous development. Thus, beyond the seeming-contradiction of these two schools of thought, a conceptual convergence of both theories will enable us to employ a wider perspective for a richer analysis of Hollinghurst’s fictional characters. An in-depth analysis of Alan Hollinghurst’s fictional characters necessitates an understanding of how the selfhood of homosexual men come into being within the family perceived as the smallest unit of society. The study will hence benefit from the analytic methodologies of the object-relations theory of psychoanalysis. The object-relations theory attempts at an understanding of selfhood which is not controlled by drives. Object-relations theory unfolds from a developmental perspective and takes into account the social relationships of the individual. The proponents of the object-relations theory argue that the individual develops her or his selfhood in relation to others in the environment. The individual looks for functioning self-objects to be related to during the interactions with primary caregivers. If the individual’s interactions with others fail in offering healthy self- objects to the individual, some compensatory strategies are employed so as to construct a selfhood in unity. The present study will be analyzing the social, emotional and creative aspects of the individual’s self. The discussion of developmental theories of psychoanalysis and their relevance to the selfhood of the homosexual man will be followed by the discussion of the concept of identity from the perspective of queer theory. The discourses of queer theory offer us a sound framework in which we can elaborate on the position of the homosexual man in society. Queer theory as a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s examines the socially constructed nature of sexual acts and identities. Queer theory’s investigations into the social dynamics giving shape to people’s identities based on their genders allow us to deconstruct the mechanisms of alienation and the individual’s response to it. This explicatory outlook will enable us to contextualize the strategies of social survival and identity construction of the homosexual man. The way Hollinghurst’s fictional characters subvert hetero-
3 normative notions of sexuality, the nonconformist mode of their relationships their modes of positioning in the heterosexual society will be analyzed in reference to queer theory. Based on the insights of the object-relations theory of psychoanalysis and queer theory, it will be argued that the homosexual man enters into society with an inner conflict in his self. This inner conflict that emerge in relation to the dynamics of the family and the individual’s relation to others around make it rather difficult for him to relate himself to a certain community in which he could build himself a solid identity. In parallel to object-relations theory’s explanation of compensatory self- objects and queer theory’s arguments on the homosexual man’s subverting strategies, the present study will be suggesting that the homosexual man looks for different kinds of communities which are not, and most of the time could not, be related to a physical locality and temporality. It will be argued that the homosexual man attempts at relating himself to fictional, erotic and aesthetic communities. The focus on literature and literary figures, the promiscuity and fluidity of desire and the interest in aesthetics and the arts in Hollinghurst’s novels suggest a reading and interpretation of his novels as a search for community. The British novelist Alan Hollinghurst could be defined as an author whose works reflect an obvious attempt to find a distinctive authorial voice and style within the existing homosexual novel tradition. The analysis of his four novels will be preceded by a discussion of the canon of British homosexual novel and Alan Hollinghurst’s place in it. Alan Hollinghurst differentiates himself from his predecessors in his presentation of homosexual characters. Unlike his predecessors, Hollinghurst in his novels does not resort to an apologetic style which has been used to justify of hide the homosexual existence. He does not use innuendos, allusions and coded reference to homosexuality. It will be argued that Hollinghurst’s novels reflect the great variety of stylistic modes developed by earlier writers. We can trace the oblique style used by writers like E.M. Forster and Henry James who dealt with homosexuality only between the lines and through innuendos and the explicit presentation of homosexual identity in Hollinghurst’s novels. Hence, Alan Hollinghurst’s novels are working towards a rethinking and development of the literary tradition in which they have emerged. This attempt of Hollinghurst might be
4 perceived as an authorial attempt to build a fictional community, in other words an established canon in literature which deals with the homosexual existence. Because he chooses to ‘canonize’ the queer, Hollinghurst as a novelist deliberately distinguishes himself from earlier novelists who could only write by ‘queering’ the canon. Alan Hollinghurst’s 1983 novel The Swimming-Pool Library creates its own literary milieu in which it is to be read. The novel is closely related to acts of reading and writing and it is through a confrontation between fiction and reality that the homosexual man looks for an identity and community in this novel. Desire, the novel’s main theme, will be analyzed in two different frameworks: the interpretation of the shiftless and promiscuous eroticism of the novel will be followed by an analysis of the inherent need to know and to find out by the characters. The novel’s main character, William Beckwith, is a young homosexual man whose main concern in life is sexual pleasure only. William’s unexpected confrontation with the recent history of homosexuality in Britain through an eighty-year-old homosexual man, Lord Nantwich, creates the main turning point of the novel. William’s historical education, which reveals him the eight decades of homosexual life in Britain, offers him a recognition of the still alive prejudice and violence towards homosexuality. William’s final decision of whether to write down what he has learnt through Lord Nantwich’s diaries or not functions as the main crux of the novel. Although readers are not informed about his final decision, the novel’s ending leaves us with a strong sense of evasion on the part of William Beckwith. This unwillingness or lack of fortitude to acknowledge and give voice to a homosexual experience reflects William Beckwith’s personal choice of looking for a sense of identity in desire and fiction. He is content with his life which is embedded in sexual gratification and literary catharsis. Writing Lord Nantwich’s biography would mean a confrontation with his father’s order. It would mean an attempt to question and grapple with the hetero- normative order. Although his ignorance in itself could be read as a political act, too, his evasion from such acknowledgement of the oppression of the hetero-normative order reflects the predominance of his own mode of existence as a homosexual man, which is purely sexual and literary.
5 The analysis of The Swimming-Pool Library will also suggest the argument that William Beckwith’s reckless and obsessive devotion to sex and his escape into fiction reflect his attempt to fill in the gap in his selfhood left by his mother and father. The novel’s exclusion of any references to William’s mother and its depiction of his father as a remote and discriminating paternal figure present us a family structure in which William Beckwith’s selfhood could not be strengthened with healthy and positive affirmation. William’s sexual interest in young men of colour, his promiscuity, his great liking of Ronald Firbank as a homosexual writer and his obsessive concern with his body image all conjure up a weak selfhood as described by the object-relations theory of psychoanalysis. William’s lifestyle, his interests and preoccupations might be read as compensatory ways of keeping his selfhood intact and coming up with an identity that relates itself to sexuality and literature. The present study will go into an analysis of Alan Hollinghurst’s second novel The Folding Star around the novel’s main theme of obsession and how it is related to the existence of the homosexual man. The Folding Star is laden with melancholy feelings and a deep sense of loneliness. Its main character Edward Manners is presented to the readers as a lonely character in a foreign city and the plot unfolds as he develops an obsessive love for Luc Altidore, a young boy of sixteen. Elements of romanticism, voyeurism, fetishism and melancholic despair in the novel could be analyzed as the reflection of the basic constituents of the main character’s selfhood. Edward’s leaving England for a foreign city in Belgium, his obsessive and fetishistic love for a young boy, the juxtaposition of his personal story with that of a dead artist who turns out to be as obsessive as himself and his unsettled relationship to his past all present us a depiction of a character whose selfhood is in search of completion and unity. Edward’s quest in life could be read as an attempt to compensate for the gaps in his selfhood and find self-affirmation in society with a distinct identity. Similar to The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star abounds with allusions to literary works and pursuits. The novel, in its treatment of desire towards a younger lover, clearly parallels itself with Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Edward Manner’s musings in his own past reveal a deep but unsatisfied concern for literary activity in his younger days. It is significant to
6 designate Edward Manners as a failed writer who seeks himself an alternative mode of existence and community because he had failed in building himself a fictional community. The sense of failing in the novel is strengthened through a parallel story of a dead artist. Paul Echevin the artist in The Folding Star had pursued a similarly obsessive and fetishistic love towards his model Jane. Apart from the significance of an artist’s and a homosexual man’s loves being juxtaposed, the two obsessive loves end in a sense of loss and mourning. Echevin loses his beloved model Jane and replaces her with Martha and continues his obsession in a surrogate. Edward Manners, too, loses Luc to others and is left all alone presumably looking for other obsessive loves. These two parallel failings will be read as a reflection of homosexual time as not progressive, but repetitive: not resolving anything, but furthering the inner conflicts. Edward Manner’s struggle in Belgium, in his new home, could be designated as an attempt to annex himself to an obsessive love and a mysterious artistic pursuit so that he would be feeling himself part of a sustaining community that is based on sexual gratification. Such an erotic community could be read as an unsettling strategy of the homosexual man aiming at challenging and subverting the hetero- normative notion of ‘legitimate’ sexual mores. However, this search for sexual gratification should also be read on a psychological level, because the homosexual man’s sexuality and the way he makes it part of his life are closely related with his inner quest for a healthy and strong selfhood. Hence, the present study will be offering a reading of Edward Manner’s eroticism and sexuality both as a compensatory strategy to strengthen his selfhood and a tool of ‘queering’ the hetero- normative order. Hollinghurst’s depiction of the homosexual man’s search for fictional communities gives its place to a search for erotic communities in his third novel The Spell. The word ‘spell’ refers to the lure triggered by drugs. It accentuates the homosexual man’s sexual tendency that makes itself felt during a search for the affirmation of selfhood. On another level, it connotes a sense of delusion, because sexuality lures these characters into an illusion only; it does not offer them a sustaining and affirmative framework as was intended. The analysis presented in the present study will function as a reading of The Spell as a novel which lays bare the
7 near-impossibility of the homosexual man’s attaining a sustaining mode of existence and community. It will be argued that the novel’s ever-changing permutations of relationships among homosexual men reflect the fluidity of queer desire that cannot be contained in a single, taxonomic framework. The fluidity of queer desire will be analyzed as the result of the unresolved issues in the homosexual man’s selfhood. This never-ending search of the homosexual man brings up the issue of queer time, which is not progressive, but elliptical. The conception of time for the homosexual man is a compromised and flawed one; they cannot envisage themselves in long-term and stable positions in society. The image of the house as depicted in Hollinghurst’s novels, most notably in The Spell, evinces the homosexual man’s search for a shelter, a definitive framework in life. The significance of human feeling and the sense of community in The Spell will be analysed with reference to dynamics of human relationships as acted out in different permutations. Characters in The Spell are moving and changing positions not only in society, but also in their relationships. The mutability of homosexual men in their relationships ascribe them ever-changing roles which are continuously redefined in new permutations of relationships. It will be argued that the novel in this manner reflects the ever shifting nature of the homosexual man’s identity which is not predefined. Hollinghurst’s novel The Spell brings together the conventions of a Shakespearean romantic comedy and a Wildean social comedy. The very title of the novel reflects the kind of magic that works through drugs and lays bare the ever- shifting and boundless nature of desire as exercised by homosexual men. It will be argued that this very ‘spell’ the novel’s plot evolves around could be read as the very illusion the homosexual man finds himself obliged to build around himself and in his life so that he could both evade the harsh realities of a discriminating society and also entertain hopes of a definitive and sustaining framework of existence in different cities and with different partners. The analysis of Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 novel The Line of Beauty will be unfolding around themes of art, beauty, aesthetics and the homosexual man’s strategies of relating himself to society. The main aim of the analysis will be to show that the homosexual man is surrounded by an ambiguous permissiveness in society.
8 The homosexual man, as depicted by Hollinghurst in his fourth novel, is poised between toleration and alienation. The concealed and subdued homophobia at the beginning of the novel turns into an open condemnation of the main character’s homosexuality once it is public. This shift from a half-hearted tolerance of homosexuality to open condemnation of it represents the dynamics of society which work against ‘deviant’ sexualities. The novel starts with the main character Nick Guest’s illusion that he, as a homosexual man, could be integrated into the hetero- normative society. The closure of the iron gate of the Feddens’ house at the end of the novel reflects the failure of Nick Guest in being part of society. Another claim to be pursued in the analysis of The Line of Beauty is that the novel is heavily loaded with the issue of aestheticism. It will be argued that aesthetic pursuits and the interest in the arts and beauty in the novel reflect the homosexual man’s attempt to construct himself a meaningful and sustaining framework of existence. Aestheticism is the very strategy the homosexual man deploys to legitimize himself in society and to find some meaning which is denied him by a gender discriminative society. Nick Guest and Wani Quaradi’s venture to publish a magazine of aesthetics is a clear reflection of how the homosexual man seeks shelter in the illusive and momentary nature of aesthetic gratification, because the colossal pillars of society do not support his existence. The pursuit of beauty and the aesthetic, beyond the attempt to relate oneself to society, is the result of the homosexual man’s search for a father. The analysis of the novel, thus, will trace the sense of fatherlessness in the characters’ interest in literature. Nick Guest’s writing a doctoral dissertation about Henry James’s literary style could be read as an attempt to emulate Henry James’s literary existence. Literature, it will be argued, functions as an alternative plane of life where the homosexual man can find himself surrogate fathers. The homosexual man cannot use the straightforward word of his biological father; he finds himself obliged to employ an ambiguous style both in his words and deeds. Hence, Henry James’s ambiguous style very aptly represents the ambivalent position of the homosexual man in society. This stylistic ambiguity could be juxtaposed with the linearity of the masculine order in the hetero-normative society which cannot father the homosexual man. Literature
9 and fiction, from this perspective, emerge as alternative modes of existence for the homosexual man. The juxtaposition of the social and the personal is another significant dynamic of The Line of Beauty. At first glance, the homosexual characters in the novel seem to be isolated from and disinterested in the heavily social and historical context of the novel, however a closer reading of this juxtaposition reveals how these social and historical forces affect the homosexual man in society. It will be argued that the camp element in the novel, the irony employed by many of its characters towards the hetero-normative order highlight issues of eccentricity and marginality. Working on the dichotomy of intimacy and formality, the novel not only expounds on the society’s hypocrisy when it comes to ‘otherness’ in any form, but it also elucidates the strategies employed by the homosexual man to survive in this ambivalent space of existence. The analysis of The Line of Beauty will be elaborating on the function of aestheticism and literary pursuits in the homosexual man’s life as compensatory ways of integrating with communities and society in general. It will be argued that these pursuits offer only illusive and transitory gratification, because they are not compatible with the hetero-normative order and its taxonomic linearity. The fluidity of the homosexual man’s desire and his unframed existence compel him to stay outside the defined boundaries of his father’s order. He is forced to look for alternative ways of being accepted by parental figures and society. Nick Guest’s story in The Line of Beauty will be examined both from a personal and social perspective. It will be argued that Nick’s quest in the novel is for an aesthetic and erotic community where the tenets of the hetero-normative order are replaced by aestheticism and sexual desire. The troubling issue of designation regarding the terms ‘homosexual’, ‘gay’ and ‘queer’ in the present study is in need of some explanation. Since the present study will be employing an eclectic theoretical framework, there will not be a single designation for the characters in Hollinghurst’s novels. The arguments of the present study will be unfolding in dialogue with psychoanalysis and queer theory, hence the terms ‘homosexual’, ‘gay’ and ‘queer’ will have to be used simultaneously. The term ‘homosexual’ will be used when elaborating on and referring to theories of
10 psychoanalysis and during the general analysis of the novels. The reason for this choice is the fact that the term ‘homosexual’ seems less loaded with political implications then the term ‘gay’. The term ‘queer’ will mostly be used as a verb to employ its meaning of challenging and disrupting the tenets of the hetero-normative order. Thus, Alan Hollinghurst’s attempt to build a homosexual canon will be discussed as a ‘queer’ act.
11 CHAPTER ONE: The Theoretical Framework
Queer theory deals with the nature of and the cultural influences on subjectivity and identity. However, the psychological and interpersonal dimensions of the experience of self need some more introspective and theoretical frameworks. The eclectic theoretical framework of the present study will make use of queer theory and relational schools of psychoanalysis (namely the object-relations theory and self-psychology1) simultaneously so that both the social and the personal aspects of Alan Hollinghurst's characters will be analyzed. The object-relations theory of psychoanalysis is very much in parallel with queer theory's idea of truth as constructed and relational. The object-relations theory of psychoanalysis also presupposes the idea that selfhood is shifting, contingent and always-in-progress. It will be in such an interdisciplinary space between queer theory and the object- relations theory of psychoanalysis that arguments of this dissertation will unfold. As the very title of the present study suggests, by help of these two theories, we will be trying to conceptualize the relationship of homosexual men with their ‘fathers’ and their ‘homes’. The methodologies of these two theoretical schools of thought, queer theory and the object-relations theory, when used simultaneously, enable us to understand the paradoxical existence of the homosexual man as depicted in Alan Hollinghurst's novels. Such an eclectic framework will also make it possible to analyse both the inner dynamics of the individual and the individual's relation to society. Queer theory tries to explain how society gives shape to people's gender and how gender roles are
1 Object relations theory is a psychodynamic theory within psychoanalytic psychology. The theory pursues the claim that the mind of the individual develops in relation to others in the environment. The word ‘object’ refers both to real others in the individual’s world and to the images of others internalized by the individual. The proponents of the object relations theory argue that the object relations are formed during early interactions with the primary caregivers of the individual and the patterns of these relationships continue to exert a strong influence on the individual throughout life. Object relations theory could be utilized as a less medicalised form of psychoanalysis. It combines the psychological with the social and opens up a promising analytical framework. 12
‘performed’ into an unchanging normativity2. Queer theory, thus, offers us a very sound framework for analyzing the individual's interaction with society. However, when it comes to questions of identity and human suffering, the wider and interpretative framework of relational psychoanalysis offers a more complex and rigorously organized set of concepts. Thus, if queer theory will make use of a less medicalized psychoanalysis that focuses more on intersubjective relations and take into consideration the social as well, we might benefit from a more systematized theory of selfhood. In such a parallel reading of Hollinghurst’s homosexual characters, we will be able to see not only the conscious forces (the area queer theory focuses on) that 'construct the individual, but also the unconscious processes of selfhood (the area of psychoanalysis) that explain the complexities of the individual subject and the interpersonal. In a less medicalised psychoanalytical framework, not only ‘causes’ of certain human conditions, but the ‘affects’ are also taken into consideration. The object-relations theory, similar to queer theory, regards language as a space where the subject is formed. The self and object world are regarded as inter-related. The issues queer theory concentrates on are not radically different from the interests of relational and object-relations psychoanalysis: they both argue that a subject is created in interaction with significant people and his cultural and linguistic milieu.3 A marriage of queer theory and psychoanalysis has been proposed by a number of thinkers working in social, cultural and literary studies and also by psychoanalysts themselves.
2 As it will be detailed further on, the main proponent of the idea of performativity of gender is the leading queer theorist Judith Butler. Butler’s main argument, first introduced in her book Gender Trouble in 1989 is that gender is a social artifice. Butler argues that our ideas of what women and men are derive from customs that embed social relations of power. The denaturalizing of gender as such could be traced back to Plato and John Stuart Mill. John Stuart Mill in his The Subjection of Women stated that ‘what is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing’. 3 Judith Butler, towards the beginning of Gender Trouble, states that ‘within the inherited discourse of the metaphysics of substance, gender proves to be performative, that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be’ (Ibid., p. 24-25). Thus, gender emerges as an act that brings into being what it names: a ‘masculine’ man or a ‘feminine’ woman. Gender identities, for Butler, are constructed and constituted by language, which means that there is no gender identity that precedes language. David F. Greenberg’s The Construction of Homosexuality is a perfect example of a book to the discursive and linguistic construction of gender identities in different cultures and languages.
13
Judith Butler, the leading queer theorist who has developed a detailed conceptual framework about the ‘performative’ aspects of subject formation from a gender perspective has voiced the need for queer theorists to take psychoanalysis into consideration. Butler claims that:
“One cannot account for subjectivation and in particular, becoming the principle of one’s own subjection, without recourse to a psychoanalytic account of the formative or generative effects of restriction or prohibition.”4
Butler, in her The Psychic Life of Power contends that before understanding the control mechanism of society over subject, we should have a firm grasp of the process of the formation of the subject. She criticizes Foucault for his theory’s lack of elaboration in the psychic dimensions and elements of subject formation.5 In Butler’s theory, the formation of the subject is conceptualized in three parts. She first dwells on the theory of the infantile passionate attachments; secondly she works on the theory of the normative regulation of these attachments and thirdly the concomitant formation of the melancholic subject.6 Another theorist who proposes a marriage of queer theory and theories of psychoanalysis is Eve Watson. In her article titled ‟Queering Psychoanalysis / Psychoanalysing Queer”7, Watson focuses on Lacanian psychoanalysis and tries to find out what a possible encounter between queer theory and Lacanian
4 Judith Butler. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjections. Stanford: Stanford University Press. p. 87. 5 Michel Foucault, in his The History of Sexuality, elaborates on the discursive construction of gender identities by social institutions. Identities of gender and clear cut borders between them, according to Foucault are mostly constructed in the nineteenth century and the social discourse has been functioning as a repressive force since then. 6 Butler argues that the infant has passionate attachments to its ‘earliest objects of love – parents, guardians, siblings, who are objects of the infant’s libidinal investments (Butler 1997, p.8). Because of its prematurity, however, the infant is also dependent upon those who care for its physical and emotional survival. Butler clearly draws upon the psychoanalytic idea that the child is born unable to care for itself, and, therefore, has a dependent attachment to others. Butler argues that because of this dependency, power always structures the relationship between infant and parent. In Butler’s model, the child’s primary passionate attachments are to those upon whom it is dependent, and are thus structured as a relation of domination and submission. As very clear in this exposition of her theory, Butler contextualises the psychoanalytic elements of the subject in relations of power. 7 Eve Watson. “Queering Psychoanalysis / Psychoanalysing Queer”, Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 2009, p. 114-139. 14 psychoanalysis can offer. 8 Watson defines a common ground where Lacanian psychoanalysis and queer theory can work together, because she claims that the two fundamentals of Lacanian psychoanalysis, desire and subjectivity, are also key issues in queer theory. Watson draws our attention to the argument that the Lacanian discussion of desire is independent of gender, hence it offers a non-normative and non-heterosexist account of sexuality and desire. Watson argues that:
“Queer’s aim of positionality rather than identity in order to de-homogenize and decentre the discourses of liberal humanism as well as scientific and intellectual positivism, fits with the aim of psychoanalysis of a change in the subject’s position in order to interrogate truth of one subject.”9
Similar to Watson’s argument , C. Smith in his article “What is This Thing Called Queer?” claims that psychoanalysis and queer theory share a similar goal: “… a radical questioning of social and cultural norms, notions of gender, reproductive sexuality and the family.”10 As argued by a great number of thinkers, queer theory shares the aim of psychoanalysis to investigate the multifarious and contextually specific practices that normalize ways of being and knowing. Both disciplines focus on the discursive aspects of subjectivity and on the contingent and unstable nature of complex social relations. The methodologies of queer theory as a postmodernist school of criticism and psychoanalysis bear a certain degree of resemblance to one another as well. In psychoanalysis, the detached position of the analyst and his/her attempt to find meaning in the ‘patient’s mind is very similar to an interpretation of modernism’s usage of ‘stream of consciousness’.11 Again, in postmodernism, the literary text is
8 Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) holds an eminent place in the history of post-Freudian psychoanalysis. Lacan based his conceptual and psychoanalytic framework on existentialism (Heidegger), linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure) and anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss). Lacan aimed at replacing the biological base of Freudian thought with a theory of the subject and the unconscious that was structured according to a linguistic model. 9 Ibid., p. 118. 10 C. Smith. “What is This Thing Called Queer?” in Morton (ed.), The Material Queer: A LesBiGay Cultural Studies Reader, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1996. p. 280. 11 Psychoanalysis, from the very beginning, has been interested in arts and literature. Freud himself has thought about the nature of art and literature in the development of the self. Similarly, many object relations theorists are aware of the affinity between psychoanalysis and art. Heinz Kohut, in his 15 defined as having multiple points of view, a discontinuous narrative, a fragmentary structure and an absence of a moral structure.12 Queer theory, as a theoretical discipline nurturing on postmodernism’s attempt at tracing similar instances of discontinuity focuses on fragmentation and multifaceted characteristics of the individual. Both queer theory and psychoanalysis try to understand what makes the individual; one looks at society, the other delves into the subject. The parallels between queer theory and psychoanalysis are further explained by N. Sullivan in his A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. Sullivan argues that both disciplines have a similar way of looking at the” unconscious”. Queer theory, for Sullivan, aims
“to make strange, to frustrate, to counteract, to delegitimize, to camp up – heteronormative practices and institutions, and the subjectivities and socialities that are (in)formed by them and (in)form them.”13
Eve Watson in her article also likens queer theory’s methodology to “the psychoanalytic revelation of the unconscious as uncanny:
“Freud reveals the uncanny as the sudden appearance of something that ought to have remained hidden, causing anxiety or panic.”14
The practioners of queer theory try to understand how power structures, cultural forms and bodily practices are inscribed on the subject. Queer theory presupposes the idea that the individual might transgress these social structures, but cannot escape them. The power relations and the social dimension which has a great impact on the subject is the main field of study of queer theory, but as put forward by many
epilogue to The Restoration of the Self, argues that the modern day’s problems in the self, the ever- increasing sense of disintegration and fragmentation felt by people reflect the modern society’s dynamics affecting the individual. Kohut refers to writers like Kafka, Pound and O’Neill who reflect the modern man’s psychic problems in their works. Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of The Self, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, p. 286-287. 12 Niall Lucy. Postmodern Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. p.18. 13 N. Sullivan. A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. New York University Press, New York. 2003. Preface. 14 Eve Watson. 2009. “Queering Psychoanalysis / Psychoanalysing Queer”. Annual Review of Critical Psychology. p. 131. 16 thinkers, queer theorists and psychoanalysts alike 15 , the integration of the interpersonal dimension of the nature of self with the social dimension will offer us a wider spectrum in which homosexual subjectivity can be analyzed. Relational streams of psychoanalysis, object relations theory in particular, widen the scope of queer theory with their version of selfhood and intersubjectivity. Queer theory focuses on an analysis and deconstruction of discourses which construct selves. As many thinkers and theorists argue, the social discursive analysis does not tell the whole story. Selves are not constructed only through language and discourse. The object relations theory presupposes that the self is constructed through relationships we form in life. These relationships, according to object relations, might come both before and after language. The object relations theory’s focus on primitive and violent fantasy and relationships open up an intersubjective domain where both the personal and the social can be analyzed in interaction with one another. The development of psychoanalysis cannot be considered as separate from other social sciences, because it has developed in dialogue with many other cultural and social schools of thought. Psychoanalysis as a conceptual framework and a theory was never contained in a therapeutic procedure. It has evolved into one of the most powerful methods of cultural analysis and critique of the twentieth century. Hence, psychoanalysis has played a decisive role in the emergence of women’s gender and queer studies. These social theories, in turn, offered psychoanalysis a continuing relevancy within the discourse of postmodernism. In this framework, psychoanalysis today cannot only be regarded as a re-examination of its Freudian bases. Through the insights of psychoanalysis we can better understand the human beyond gender dichotomies and the inexhaustible sexual diversity in human societies. It is at this very crucial point that psychoanalysis and queer theories should
15 A number of practioners of queer theory and psychoanalysts have proposed a dialogue between the two disciplines: Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1977); Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (eds). Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (University of Chicago Press, 2001); Stephen Fresh’s brief discussion of queer theory in his For and Against Psychoanalysis, 2nd ed. (London and New York 2006) and Jessica Benjamin’s discussion of the work of Judith Butler in Shadow of Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (New York and London: Routledge 1998). 17 be working hand in hand, because the psychological and social forces function and influence the individual simultaneously. The object-relations theory of psychoanalysis offers a framework in which the selfhood of individuals could be analysed in relation to the social interactions in society. The proponents of the object-relations theory pursue the claim that the selfhood of individuals are constructed in relationships.
1.1. Selves
1.1.1. The Creative Self
The homosexual man is often associated with a keen interest in arts and beauty. This interest manifests itself in a strong sense of aestheticism, to the extent that the homosexual man is most often defined as an aesthete. Queer theory, from a societal perspective, argues that the homosexual man’s interest in art and beauty in their most extreme and effective forms functions as a kind of defense mechanism. Aestheticism and camping16 are strategies used by the homosexual individual to ridicule them. Queer theory argues that they function as a cover to make the feeling of lack and inferiority invisible to the outer world. In her 1964 article titled as “Notes on Camp”, Susan Sontag claims that camp “is not a natural mode of sensibility.”17 The essence of camp for Sontag is “its love of the unnatural; of artifice and exaggeration.”18 While presenting different aspects of camp in her article, Sontag also draws our attention to camp’s relation to aestheticism: “Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.”19 Among many other aspects of camp, Sontag also refers to the relationship between
16 Very generally defined, camping is combining elements of incongruity, theatricality and exaggeration to bring about a form of humour through which the individuals, mostly homosexuals, can cope with a hostile environment. 17 Susan Sontag, in Fabio Cleto, Ed., Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, Edinburgh University Press, 1999, p. 53-108. 18 Ibid., p. 82. 19 Ibid., p. 82. 18 camp and homosexuality. She makes an analogy between two groups of people, namely homosexuals and Jews, who both show and affinity with camp taste. Interestingly enough, Sontag defines Jews and homosexuals as creative:
“The analogy is not frivolously chosen. Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.”20
Although not a queer theorist herself, Susan Sontag employs a very queer attitude in analyzing the homosexual individual’s camp sensibility and creative urge. She argues that “every sensibility is self-serving to the group that promotes it.”21 Sontag argues that this camp sensibility and aestheticism associated with homosexual individuals form a “gesture of self-legitimization.”22. Sontag claims that:
“Homosexuals have pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense. Camp is a solvent or morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.”23
Queer theory’s relating the aesthetic impulse of the homosexual individual to an attempt of social integration is justifiable in the sense that the aesthete is usually associated with artifice, with camp. The meaning of the word ‘artifice’ connotes a sense of a ‘cunning device’, an attempt to trick or deceive others. However, we should also be looking at the issue of aestheticism and creativity of the homosexual individual on a subjective level. The French psychoanalyst Chasseguet-Smirgel in her book Creativity and Perversion, offers us a very detailed framework to understand the relation between creativity and the homosexual individual. Smirgel associates perversion with a regression to the anal-sadistic period. This period refers to a unity of forms in a kind of chaos. The child’s relation to the
20 Ibid., p. 83. 21 Ibid., p. 83. 22 Ibid., p. 83. 23 Ibid., p. 83. 19 anal universe of the mother is in contradiction with the father’s world where forms are separated and anality is banished. Sexual perversion, for Smirgel, is a kind of rebuilding the chaos of the anal world and insists on staying in the mother’s anality. This attempt results in imitating and parodying the patriarchal order. This is very much in affinity with queer theory’s idea of camp as parody and artifice24. The sexually perverse individual, for Smirgel, attempts at staying in the mother’s anal world by exchanging it with the father’s genitality. This presupposes an exchange between the real and the fake. The lack of genuity and the fake creativity ascribed to the pervert in Smirgel’s theory stems from her argument that the sexual pervert negates himself “as being a link in the chain of generations.”25 Smirgel’s theory of creativity and perversion, in general, argues that those who cannot project their ego-ideals onto their fathers and his penis are confronted with gaps in their personality. Their creative urge stems from their attempt to compensate for these gaps and construct themselves an identity. However, this creative urge does not result in an “original creation” because the pervert lacks an
24 Judith Butler, in her Gender Trouble, elaborates on the main elements of camp, which are parody and drag. Butler’s argument can be read as an extension on the use of camp as the homosexual man’s attempt of integration. Butler argues that: ‘If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity’. (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, p. 136). From Butler’s perspective, the ‘acting’ of gender in different, alternative ways, might reveal the artificiality and constructedness of heterosexual identities. In Butler’s argument, it would not be wrong to say that all gender is a form of parody, but that some gender performances are more parodic than others. Parodic performances like drag, for example, highlight the disjunction between the body of the performer and the gender that is being performed and thus reveal the imitative nature of all gender identities. As Butler argues: ‘In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency. Part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender’ (Ibid., p. 137-8). The relation between parody and gender roles is also discussed by Judith Butler in her 1991 article ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’. Judith Butler in this article pursues her claims about the performative aspect of gendered identity. She elaborates on ‘drag’ and other kinds of gender performances disrupting the normative modes of gender and sexual identity. Butler argues that ‘drag’ represents the mundane way in which genders are appropriated and theatricalized. She claims that all gendering is an instance of impersonation and approximation. Based on Butler’s claims, we can argue that she perceives gender as a kind of imitation without any original. Butler in her article argues that the ‘parodic replication and resignification of heterosexual constructs within non-heterosexual frames bring into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called original.’ Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, Ed., Diana Fuss. London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 307–20.
25 Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. Creativity and Perversion. Free Association Books. London. 1985. p. 69. 20 idealized sexual energy. That positions the pervert not as an original creator, but an aesthete. A great number of Hollinghurst’s characters are closely related to aestheticism. Nick Guest’s interest in the arts and the antiques in The Line of Beauty is one of his characteristics which define him as an aesthete. Edward Manners, in The Folding Star, seeks refuge in fetishism in his obsessive love for a young boy. Smirgel’s conception of perversion, creativity and fetishism will enable us to understand the subjective dimensions of Hollinghurst’s characters’ sense of aestheticism and its relation to people around them.
1.1.2. The Social Self
While the Freudian psychoanalysis focused on impulses and drives, psychoanalysts after Freud have widened this limiting perspective to include emotions of the individual in their analyses. Focusing on emotions made it possible to analyse individuals as autonomous subjects in the context of their social relationships. Otto Rank has worked with Sigmund Freud as a colleague of his for 20 years. During the early periods of his career when he worked with Freud, he focused on the figure of the artist. He later extended his interest into fields like legend, myth, art and other aspects of creativity. His studies influenced Freud to the extent that he contributed two chapters on myth and legend to later editions of The Interpretation of Dreams. Otto Rank distinguished himself from Freud by elaborating on the pre- Oedipal period. In his Das Trauma der Geburt (translated into English as The Trauma of Birth in 1929) 26 , Otto Rank focused on how art, myth, religion, philosophy and therapy could be explained by ‘separation anxiety’ before the development of the Oedipus complex. According to Freud, the Oedipus complex was
26 Otto Rank, The Trauma of Birth, 1929, Dover, 1994, p. 216. 21 the origin of neurosis and it was also the source of all artistic activities, myth, religion and philosophy. Freud argued that all human culture and civilization were related to the Oedipus complex. Hence, it was a very big move away from Freud that Otto Rank defined some other essential factors embedded in the pre-Oedipal period. Rank was the first to use the term “pre-Oedipal” in a public psychoanalytic forum in 1925.27 One of them most relevant aspect of Otto Rank’s model of psychoanalysis is that it focuses on the emotional life of the individual. In his 1927 lecture, Rank observes that “surgical therapy is uprooting and isolates the individual emotionally, as it tries to deny the emotional life”.28 This denial of emotions that Otto Rank criticized stems from the fact that Freud had reduced all emotional experience to sexual drives. Most importantly, Otto Rank equaled emotions with relationships, thus, in a way, he paved the way for a focus on what is social in psychoanalysis. Denial of the emotional life of the individual, for Otto Rank, leads to denial of the will, the creative life, as well as denial of the interpersonal relationships in the analytic situation.29 Unlike Freud’s retrospective theory, Rank argues that all emotional life is grounded in the present time. In Will Therapy, published in German in 1929-31, Rank uses the term “here and now” for the first time in the psychotherapeutic literature:
“Freud made the repression historical, that is, misplaced it into the childhood of the individual and then wanted to release it from there, while as a matter of fact the same tendency is working here and now.”30
This way of thinking has a significant implication in understanding the homosexual man’s emotional and social position. Whereas Freud’s theory portrays the individual as subject to his or her drives and having no will of his or her own, Otto Rank moves
27 A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures [talks given 1924–1938; edited and with an introductory essay by Robert Kramer, Princeton, 1996, p. 43. 28 Ibid., p. 169. 29 Ibid., p. 31. 30 Ibid., p. 32 22 away from this unconscious repression of the past as defined by Freud. Instead of the word repression, Rank uses the word denial, which presupposes an emotional and conscious will to remain in the present:
“The neurotic lives too much in the past [and] to that extent he actually does not live. He suffers … because he clings to [the past], wants to cling to it, in order to protect himself from experience [Erlebnis], the emotional surrender to the present.”31
Thus, Otto Rank’s theory enables us to perceive the homosexual man not in an isolation of emotions and drives that he cannot consciously control, but as very much in relation with the people around him. Rank makes use of a key concept of his which is separation from outworn thoughts, emotions and behaviours. These instances of separation bring forth the psychological growth and development of the individual. Otto Rank’s theory also presupposes that individuation is realised in a relationship and a maximum degree of connectedness is required for the human being to assert their will within relationships. Otto Rank perceives human development as a lifelong construction. All human beings yearn for individuation and connection and they constantly negotiate and renegotiate their yearnings to these ends. The will to separate and the will to unite give shape to these negotiations. This process is likened to a life-long creativity. Otto Rank attributes the individual a continual capacity to separate from “internal mental objects” – from internalized institutions, beliefs and neuroses; from the restrictions of culture, social conformity and received wisdom. In a 1938 lecture, Rank argues that:
"Life in itself is a mere succession of separations. Beginning with birth, going through several weaning periods and the development of the individual personality, and finally culminating in death – which represents the final separation. At birth, the individual experiences the first shock of separation, which throughout his life he strives to overcome. In the process of adaptation, man persistently separates from his old self, or at least from those segments off his old self that are now outlived. Like a child who has outgrown a toy, he discards the old parts of himself for which he has no
31 Ibid., p. 27. 23
further use ….The ego continually breaks away from its worn-out parts, which were of value in the past but have no value in the present. The neurotic [who cannot unlearn, and, therefore, lacks creativity] is unable to accomplish this normal detachment process … Owing to fear and guilt generated in the assertion of his own autonomy, he is unable to free himself, and instead remains suspended upon some primitive level of his evolution."32
What is aimed here is a process of learning how to give and take, surrender and assert, merge and individuate, unite and separate - without being trapped in a network of opposites. There has to be a balance between separation and union. The feeling of love in Otto Rank’s theory holds a significant place in that it is defined as the force which
"unites our I with the other, with the Thou [dem Du], with men, with the world, and so does away with fear. What is unique in love is that—beyond the fact of uniting—it rebounds on the I. Not only, I love the other as my I, as part of my I, but the other also makes my I worthy of love. The love of the Thou [des Liebe des Du] thus places a value on one's own I. Love abolishes egoism, it merges the self in the other to find it again enriched in one's own I. This unique projection and introjection of feeling rests on the fact that one can really only love the one who accepts our own self [unser eigene Selbst] as it is, indeed will not have it otherwise than it is, and whose self we accept as it is."33
If love functions as a triggering force for human connectedness and individuation, the way the individual defines his or her position in this world in relation to his or her parents can be perceived as the first attempt as such. The concept of ‘family romance’ developed by Otto Rank is again not an unconscious, but a conscious fantasy which is repressed later on. In this fantasy the child imagines that his or her birth parents are not real but adoptive ones. The child might also imagine that his or her birth is an outcome of maternal infidelity. The fantasy parents in such a ‘romance’ are typically of noble lineage or from another higher social class than the real parents.
32 Ibid., p. 270. 33 Ibid., p. 157. 24
The family romance might be used as a significant concept to understand the homosexual man’s search for a father.34 Since the homosexual man is essentially not healthily connected to his father, he has to imagine himself another parent. The homosexual individual has to ask himself questions like ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Where am I?’ more urgently than other individuals. The family romance fantasy has several possible aims and sources: revenge against frustrating parents; rivalry with the parent of the same sex; separation from idealized parents by means of their transformation into fantasy parents; and the elimination of brothers and sisters for competitive or incestuous purposes.
What triggers the family romance in the individual is the feeling of doubt. The individual has to develop the ability to doubt the absolute aspect of parental figures. It could be argued that the family romance is actually linked to the unconscious of the parents. As Alain de Mijolla, in her article titled as ‘Unconscious identification, fantasies and family prehistory’ argues: ‘For the father, there can be only one true father, his own, that of the "primal horde"; while the mother associates her child psychologically, particularly her first-born, with her own oedipal attachments.’ 35
Otto Rank’s psychoanalytic framework and his concepts will enable us to analyze some of Hollinghurst’s characters on a more subjective level. As all his novels reflect, the homosexual men face separation of different sorts all throughout their lives. In all the four novels of Alan Hollinghurst, the main characters are separated from their parents. Their search for surrogate parents give shape to most of the story in the novels. The nature of relationships and modes of connectedness, most readily seen in The Spell and The Folding Star, are important issues which could be analyzed in Otto Rank’s conceptual framework. In The Spell, for example, we have
34 The family romance can be generally defined as a conscious fantasy, repressed later in life, in which a child imagines that her or his real birth parents are not actual, but adoptive ones. The family romance addresses the basic question ‘Who am I?’, hence, it could be read as the conscious attempt of the child to place herself or himself in a history.
35 Mijolla, Alain de., ‘Unconscious identification, fantasies and family prehistory’, 1987, International Journal of Psychoanalysis , 68, p. 397-403.
25 some parallel instances of Rank’s concept of family romance as depicted in the character of Dan. Thus, the relationships formed and lost by the homosexual men, their emotions, their (dis)connectedness to one another and their perceptions of their parents can all be read on a subjective level in Rank’s framework.
1.1.3. The Seeds of Self
Another significant psychoanalyst from the school of object-relations theory is Otto Kernberg. He focuses on the interrelation between past and present relationships of the individual. Kernberg inquired into the components of the psyche and identified the fundamental building blocks in the construction of self-identity. In Kernberg’s theory the separate sense of self gradually takes shape from the moment of birth and the undifferentiated fragments of raw experience eventually cohere into emotionally charged images of self and others. In other words, Kernberg pursues the claim that selfhood is not inherent in human experience from the moment of birth, but is in fact entirely a mechanically constructed phenomenon.36 Kernberg defines object-relations theory as ‘the psychoanalytic study of the nature and origin of intra-psychic structures deriving from past internalized relations with others in the context of present interpersonal relations. Psychoanalytic object relations theory focuses upon the internalization of interpersonal relations.’ 37 ‘Interpersonal relations’ are the personal interactions that actually take place between individuals. ‘Object relations’ are the internalized ‘derivatives’ (memories or traces) of these interactions.’ Interpersonal relations’ are the personal interactions that
36 As a materialist scientist, Kernberg argues that neurobiology should be working in collaboration with modern research in psychoanalysis and discover an integrated theory of consciousness. Kernberg’s plea for such collaboration could be read as a proposed marriage of psychoanalysis and social theories as well. 37 Otto Kernberg, Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis, New York, Aronson, 1976. 26 actually take place between individuals. ‘Object relations’ are the internalized ‘derivatives’ (memories or traces) of these interactions38. Kernberg, like Freud and Mahler, attributes various forms of adult psychopathology to developmental failures at specific chronological stages.39 These developmental failures defined by psychoanalysis explain the depiction of homosexual men as children in fiction. Kernberg believes that there are three levels of pathological psychic functioning, each of which corresponds to distinct personality structures and originates in a specific developmental period. The personality structure in psychosis, the most severe pathology, is characterized by failure in reality testing, poor sense of boundary between self and other, and ‘intra- psychic fusion’ with the mother. In normal infants, ‘normal autism’ in the first month and ‘normal symbiosis’ in the second to fifth months are followed by differentiation of self-images from object-images in the second half of the first year. Psychosis
38 William N. Goldstein, (eds.) Rossand Myers, ‘Kernberg on the Borderline: A Simplified Version’, p.173. 39 Kernber’s stages of normal and abnormal development of the self as summarised by Palombo, Bendicsen and Koch offers us the main outline of Kernberg’s structure: ‘Kernberg proposed five stages of normal development. During Stage 1 (birth to 1 month), Normal Autism or the Primary Undifferentiated Stage, pleasurable interaction with the primary caregiver initiates the beginning of normal undifferentiated self–object representation that gradually builds up from these interactions. During Stage 2 (1 to 6/8 months), Normal Symbiosis or Primary Undifferentiated Self–Object Representation, the self- and object-images undergo differentiation within the child’s ego. Pleasurable interactions with the primary caregiver are organized as “good” self–object representations while negative experiences get organized as “bad” self–object representations. During end of Stage 3 (6/8 months to 18/36 months), Differentiation of Self- from Object-Representations, the child arrives at an integration of both good and bad self-images and good and bad object images resulting in a state of object constancy. During Stage 4 (18/36 months throughout the Oedipus), Integration of Self- Representations and Object-Representations and Development of Higher Level Intrapsychic Object Relations-Derived Structures, repression replaces splitting as the primary defensive organization. With the differentiation of the id–ego–superego elements into a mature intrapsychic system the child experiences a totality of self- and object-representations resulting in a “definite self-system” that combine to form a unitary psychological suprasystem. Finally, during Stage 5 (The end of the Oedipus and beyond) Consolidation of Superego and Ego Integration, the end product of this stage is a stable, resilient ego identity. The second part of Kernberg’s framework is the three levels of abnormal development. In the higher level of character pathology, we find the neurotic individual with a severe and punitive superego. These patients can benefit from psychoanalysis and enjoy a very good prognosis. In the intermediate level of organization of character pathology, we find the preoedipal borderline patient. These patients can benefit from a modified psychoanalysis with a less favourable outcome. In the lower level of organization of character pathology, we find the early preoedipal disturbances involving severe personality-disordered individuals with archaic defences and pessimistic, guarded outcomes.’ Joseph Palombo, Harold K. Bendicsen, Barry J. Koch, Guide to Psychoanalytic Developmental Theories, Springer. New York, 2009, p. 193.
27 arises when the child fails to differentiate self-images from object-images during the latter part of the first year of life. Borderline personality organization is slightly less pathological than psychosis.40 In a borderline personality, reality testing, thought process, interpersonal relations, and adaptation to reality are vulnerable but intact. In ‘normal’ children, good and bad self-representations are integrated into a single self-concept, and good and bad object rep-representations are integrated into single object representations. Such integration should have taken place by the end of the third year. When the child fails to integrate ‘good’ and ‘bad’ self and object images, the borderline personality organization develops. Borderline personality organization shows itself in poor impulse control, low frustration tolerance, ‘identity diffusion’ (manifested by chronic feelings of emptiness, contradictory self-perceptions and behavior, and shallow, flat perceptions of others), and proclivity toward ‘primitive’ ego defenses. These primitive defenses include splitting, denial, unrealistic idealization of others, unrealistic devaluation of others or the self, a sense of omnipotence, and ‘projective identification,’ a defense mechanism whose definition has been widely disputed by psychoanalytic theorists. Kernberg presumes the basic cause of these defects is an excessive aggressive drive in the earliest (pre-genital) years. This aggressive drive interferes with separation-individuation in such a way that splitting is reinforced and object constancy is never achieved. Borderline personalities, for Kernberg, could be characterized by their defense of splitting. According to Kernberg, splitting is a mechanism characteristic of the first stages of ego development. It consists of dissociating or separating identification systems with opposite valences (i.e., positive or negative emotional charges). Persons who use the defense of splitting show inability to simultaneously experience positive and negative feelings toward an ‘object.’ Many of Alan Hollinghurst’s characters could be analysed within the conceptual framework of borderline personalities. The character of Justin in The Spell, for example, manifests
40 Borderline personality disorder is a personality disorder which is described as aprolonged disturbance of personality function in a person, characterized by depth and variability of moods. In a borderline personality disorder we have instability in mood, splitting, idealization and devaluation episodes, chaotic and unstable interpersonal relationships and disturbances in the individual’s sense of self. 28 a rather weak impulse control and a chronic feeling of emptiness. His devaluation of his self leads him to a pursuit of sexual gratification as a remedy. Edward Manners in The Folding Star, similarly, could be seen as a borderline personality. His idealization of a young boy in the person of Luc Altidore and his poor impulse control reflect the inner conflicts in his selfhood.
1.1.4. The Crumbling Self
The eminent American psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut focused on relationships rather than drives. His analysis includes issues like identity, meaning, ideals and self- expression. Kohut developed an alternative theory to Freud’s structural theory of id, ego and superego. His theory rests upon a tripartite structure of self. Relationships with other people have a significant function in Kohut’s theory, because it is through interacting with others and forming relationships that our selves are developed. Such a viewpoint adds a social dimension to Kohut’s theory.
Kohut expanded the scope of ego psychology and developed an alternative theory that came to be known as self-psychology. He rejected the Freudian idea that the drives are the central motivators of individual development; instead of the drives, Kohut focused on the need for self-cohesion as the determining factor in feelings of self-being. Kohut reformulated the theory of narcissism in his newly developed framework of self-psychology. According to Freud, narcissism was a pathological investment of the ego by the libidinal drive. Kohut, rejecting the drive theory, pursued the claim that narcissism has both healthy and unhealthy forms. In contrast with Freud’s claims, Kohut argued that the central concern of the modern man is self-cohesion.41 The Tragic Man, in Kohut’s conceptual framework, represents the human failure to attain self-cohesion due to a serious personality flaw. The Guilty
41 ‘I shall go directly to the heart of the matter by making the claim that the psychological danger that puts the psychological survival of modern Western man into the greatest jeopoardy is changing … The under-stimulation due to parental remoteness that is pathogenic factor in disorders of the self is a manifestation of a disorder of the self in the parent.’ Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of The Self, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, p. 269-274. 29
Man represents the embodiment of the oedipal conflict related to incestuous wishes.42
Kohut used narcissism as a model to explain the process of the development of the ‘sense of self’. A narcissistic person, according to Kohut, is able to suppress his feelings of low self-esteem. Kohut claims that narcissism emerges because the person goes through some problems with his mother during the mirroring phase and with his father in terms of idealization. Self-object43 transferences of mirroring and idealization do not function properly in the narcissistic person. In other words, children somehow fail in idealizing and emotionally ‘sinking into’ and identify with the idealized competence of admired figures. Children are also in need of their self- esteem and worth reflected back (mirrored) by caregiving and emphatic others. Heinz Kohut, in his The Restoration of the Self, explains the function of the mirroring mother in following words:
‘If a mother accept the fecal gift proudly, -or if she rejects it or is uninterested in it- she is not only responding to a drive. She is also responding to the child’s forming self. Her attitude, in other words, influences a set of inner experiences that play a crucial role in the child’s further development. She responds -accepting, rejecting, disregarding- to a self that, in giving and offering, seeks confirmation by the mirroring self- object. The child therefore experiences the joyful, prideful parental attitude or the parent’s lack of interest, not only as the acceptance or rejection of a drive, but also –this aspect of the interaction of parent and child is often the
42 ‘It seems to me that, viewed in broad perspective, man’s functioning should be seen as aiming in two directions. I identify these by speaking of Guilty Man if the aims are directed toward the activity of his drives and of Tragic Man if the aims are toward the fulfillment of the self. To amplify briefly: Guilty Man lives within the pleasure principle: he attempts to satisfy his pleasure seeking drives to lessen the tensions that arise in his erogenous zones. The fact that man, not only because of environmental pressure, but especially as the result of inner conflict, is often unable to achieve his goals in this area, prompted me to designate him Guilty Man where he is seen in this context. […] Tragic Man, on the other hand, seeks to express the pattern of his nuclear self; his endeavors lie beyond the pleasure principle. Here, too, the undeniable fact that man’s failures overshadow his successes prompted me to designate this aspect of man negatively as Tragic Man rather than ‘self- experience’ or ‘creative man’. Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of The Self, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, p. 132-133. 43 Self-objects are external objects that function as part of the self machinery – objects which are not experienced as separate and independent from the self. They are persons, objects or activities that complete the self and which are necessary for normal functioning. 30
decisive one- as the acceptance or rejection of his tentatively established, yet still vulnerable creative-productive-active self.’44
Kohut perceives these processes essential for the individual so that a cohesive and healthy self could be developed. Thus, narcissism originates in poor attachment at an early age. In this framework, narcissism, very much like aestheticism and creativity, functions as a disguise of low self-esteem. In Kohut’s theory, the mother figure emerges as incompetent in reflecting back the image of self-esteem of the child. It is a significant point of analysis that we do not have detailed depictions of mothers in Alan Hollinghurst’s novels. The failure of the mother in making her child feel worthy leads the child to ‘perverse’ sexual activities and/or artistic and creative urges. As Oğuz Cebeci, in his book Psychoanalytic Literary Theory (Psikanalitik Edebiyat Kuramı), states, in such a situation, the child finds himself under a threat of fragmentation and:
“...the child who tries to escape from a depression triggered by the failure in developing a self, tries to compensate with oral, anal and phallic senses instead of building a relation with the self-object.”45
However, the sense of relaxation is an illusionary and transitory one. Such an illusionary and transitory mode of existence defines a great number of Hollinghurst’s characters who seek solace in promiscuous sexual gratification and illusionary, fake artistic attempts. According to Kohut’s model, when the child cannot relate himself to the self- object, the father, the imago of the idealized parent is fragmented. Then, the child’s wish to merge with this imago is sexualized. The child relates himself to these fragmented pieces. The function of several sexual orientations like homosexuality and sadomasochism is explained in this manner. What this means is that the
44 Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of The Self, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, p. 75-76. 45 Oğuz Cebeci, Psikanalitik Edebiyat Kuramı, Ithaki Yayınları. Istanbul. 2004. p.270. 31 seemingly sexual acts of the individual with ‘deviant’ sexual activities actually aim at relating himself to the self-object through this fragmented imago. In Kohut’s model, which is called self-psychology, the loss of the other and the other’s self-object function leaves the individual apathetic, lethargic, empty of the feeling of life, without vitality and depressed. When the individual has no access to a self-object a traumatic frustration occurs. Kohut argues that when the parental self-object fails in being a joyful mirror to a child’s healthy assertiveness, the child might be faced with a ‘lifetime of abrasiveness, bitterness and sadism that cannot be discharged.’46 Narcissism, for Kohut, emerges in such dynamics. Kohut’s conception of the tripolar self consists of these main components: ‘grandiose-exhibitionistic need’, ‘the need for an omnipotent idealized figure’ and ‘alter-ego need’. 47 Exhibitionism and grandiosity are two important concepts here, because they represent the two problematic the narcissistic individual has. The failure of the mirroring self-object leads the person to look for other ways develop a self. Kohut’s ‘self-psychology’ offers us a relevant and detailed framework in which we can analyze and interpret the homosexual man’s struggles in life. As seen in many of the Hollinghurst characters, the homosexual man is usually identified with a sense of grandiosity, all the traits of narcissism and aestheticism, momentary sexual gratification and promiscuity, sado-masochism and a tendency towards other sexual acts which are identified with anality and perversity. Trying to read Hollinghurst’s homosexual characters in terms of Kohut’s different narcissistic personality types will enable us to understand how they relate themselves to the outer world. The mirror-hungry personality for Kohut, for example, is in need of exhibiting himself and demands the attention and admiration of others around him. The character of Justin in The Spell, as an example, fits in this type of personality as well. The ideal- hungry personality, similarly, looks for people whom he can admire. Edward Manners in The Folding Star can be analyzed as an ideal-hungry personality.48
46 Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of The Self, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, p. 75-76. 47 Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self, Madison. 1971.p.114. 48 Oğuz Cebeci, in his Psychoanalytic Literary Theory (Psikanalitik Edebiyat Kuramı) claims that Kohut’s model of self-psychology and different personality types could be used on literary characters fro a richer and deeper literary analysis. p. 273. 32
The survival of the homosexual individual in a patriarchal society is undoubtedly very difficult. Queer theory successfully explains how society prescribes sexual norms onto people and how these norms are kept alive and repeated through ‘performative’ strategies. On the other hand, a less medicalized mode of psychoanalysis and models like Kohut’s self-psychology enable us to understand that the homosexual individual enters society with low self-esteem from the very beginning. The homosexual man is an individual who is in need of some special defense mechanisms and strategies of survival to achieve self-legitimization in society. The awareness of the psychic condition in which the homosexual individual is initiated into society reveals his plight even more bleak. Heinz Kohut in his psychology of self calls for a conceptual framework which brings the psychological and the social together. Kohut’s model of the development of the self, its possible failures and their consequences, the dynamics of the disintegrated self and how it tries to compensate for these failures enable us to understand the inherent conflicts of homosexual identity. The object relations theory and self psychology in general offer us a framework in which we can understand how the homosexual man relates himself to other individuals and society around him. Psychological models like Kohut’s also make it possible for us to have am ore general grasp over man’s psychic organization in the context of society. Psychoanalysis as such unravels the psychic dynamics of the self essentially in close interaction with society. Once these inner, psychic dynamics of the self are clearly understood and the underlying conflicts of the homosexual identity are unearthed, it is the task of queer theory to deconstruct and challenge the structures of the alienation and suppression of the homosexual man both in fiction and in reality.
33
1.2. Identities
To understand the composite nature of human beings, the interaction between our impulses, instincts and the social laws should be deciphered. If psychoanalysis offers us an analytical perspective to understand the dynamics of selfhood, queer theory contextualises the forces of society that build the individual’s identity based on the structures of selfhood.
1.2.1. The Queer Identity
The traditional meaning of the term queer has been ‘odd’ and ‘not normal’. The recent usage of the term refers to kinds of sexualities deviant from society’s accepted norms. The term has another contemporary meaning, deployed by academics and activists, to designate movements in sexual identity politics and theories on gender. Queer stands out as a highly contested term. Disagreements on what queer actually means and refers to abound in activist and academic circles. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual communities might call themselves as queer communities. Thus, queer emerges as an umbrella term to denote sexual identities within a certain community. Giving a name to a group of people whose sexual orientations are different from heterosexual norms creates a sense of commonality and solidarity. It is through this sense of commonality and solidarity that homosexual people can identify with one another and produce sustaining communities. The word queer in this context is also used to describe a gendered community which can also initiate a political movement. Since the members of these gendered communities do not abide by the hetero-normative dichotomies imposed on them by the society, they are in need of another spatiality. The stereotypical and social expectations of gender should be performed do not always coincide with the performance of homosexual identities. Queer communities in this context might produce political agendas and most of the time they resist possible extinction in the face of heterosexist impositions. The contextualization of queer in this context might
34 offer a sense of solidarity to an otherwise marginalized group. However, the use of the term queer in its own might still not be able to escape from simple dichotomies, because queer might be defined against ‘normal. The great variety in terms of identity among what is sweepingly called ‘queer communities’ is too large to be ignored. Queer theory in general produces arguments against the dichotomous notions of sex, gender and sexuality in society. These dichotomies produce binaries like man/woman, male/female, masculine/feminine and heterosexual/homosexual. Since these binaries create a disequilibrium between minority groups and those who fall in what is accepted as normal, queer theory problematizes these binaries and negates all kinds of hierarchy between different groups of people. Homosexual desire, for example, is not deemed as inferior to its heterosexual counterpart. In a similar vein, masculinity cannot and should not be deemed superior than femininity. Queer theory, within this framework, challenges the traditional ways of understanding gender and sexuality in society. Queer theory aims at a general acknowledgement of various kinds of identities, sexualities and discourses that are not contained within so-called normal binaries. The concept of ‘queer’ from this perspective comes to hint at something which is not ‘normal’. In order not to be self-defeating, queer becomes something fluid and unfixed, a concept that cannot be defined by the inherent dichotomies of human societies. Queer represents neither man nor woman; hence it spans a much larger spectrum of gender-related and sexual experiences. Many queer theorists argue against the idea that queer is something that could be pinned down to a single definition. Different from this essentialist resistance to any definition of queer, some other queer theorists suggest that queer as a concept should be defined so that it can really challenge the way people perceive the world in the heteronormative order. They argue that it would be only through a clear definition of queer that it could be made part of people’s perception of life and society. Only such a definitive framework built for queer can give some fluidity and flexibility to socially imposed binaries and rigid gender boundaries. The general aim of queer theory, going beyond these discussions on definability and undefinability, is to eradicate inequalities and artificial differences in society.
35 We should also note that the term queer has been challenged in transnational platforms. Since the ways different cultures attach meaning to and perceive homosexuality are different from one another, the term queer cannot claim universality. Southeast Asian and Latin American cultures, for example, might even exalt homosexuality as sacred and a state of being to be respected1. Some academics within this respect look for a more inclusive and more nuanced concept to be able to talk about different sexualities and genders in different societies and cultures. The concept of queer envisages a political commitment as well, which is to include all and exclude none as other. Queer studies makes use of empirical research and theories on gender and sexuality in an interdisciplinary manner. The concept of queer, used as an umbrella term for all forms of gender and sexual diversity, is the basis of a body of both theoretical and empirical work called as queer studies. Queer studies openly criticizes the normative binaries of sexuality and gender and call for a more flexible and inclusive perception. The essential argument of queer theory posits sexuality as fundamentally social. Human sexuality for queer theorists is not biologically determined but culturally conceived. Queer theorists surmise that human beings assume sexual characteristics through enacting culturally and socially imposed norms and roles.2 Another argument of queer theory is that sexual and gender identities act as channels of social control. Since social gender distinctions are imposed and enacted in strict manners, asserting one’s sexual identity or orientation openly does not offer liberation. Society has certain expectations from each artificially constructed sexualities; hence, being openly ‘gay’ for example imposes certain expectations on the person in question. The homosexual as a designation presupposes a certain mode of behaviour and standing in life. It is based on this delimiting and prescriptive social distinctions that queer theory envisages gender and sexuality in a much wider spectrum of behaviours and identities. This last tenet of queer theory fights against the classifying of human sexuality. The hetero-normative
1 David F. Greenberg, in his The Construction of Homosexuality, discusses the perception of homosexuality in kinship-structured societies in Asia and South America as radically different from European and American perceptions. He analyses the berdaches, men raised as female in Indian societies and how they are respected as persons with special vocations in life (Greenberg 1988: 25). 2 This is a point of argument where queer theory and object relations theory of psychoanalysis and self-psychology could be referred to and utilised simultaneously.
36 society rests upon a strict conception of distinctly defined sexualities. In this hierarchy, heterosexuality is deemed higher than homosexuality. Queer theory, in general, argues that sexuality can act both as a liberating and a controlling platform for people. Issues of sexuality and gender have been studied in academic circles since the nineteenth century. The area of study was first defined as sexology. Studies of this first period focused on issues like biological and psychological characteristics of sex and deviant gender roles. Richard von Kraft-Ebing 3 , Magnus Hirschfield4 and Havelock Ellis5 are among the pioneers of this area of study. The institutionalization of studies on sexuality in time turned into what we know call queer studies which is studied in many universities around the world. The issue of identity and discussions around it defined the scope of studies on gender and sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s. The studies carried out during these years had a political and ethical stance in that they were trying to claim a distinct and positive social and political identity for homosexuals. As different perceptions of sexuality and gender have been attributed to social conditioning, queer theorists tried to understand the evolution of social perceptions of same-sex eroticism. This historical stance of queer studies is significant in the sense that scholars have started to search for a certain temporality and spatiality for homosexual people. This, in turn, has triggered a new focus on history and community. Queer studies has also focused on social and political representations of homosexual people of all cultures and ethnic origins. Hence, in the 1980s and 1990s a conception of a common and shared gay identity came about that envisages a larger gay community. This larger community of homosexual people, however, has been attributed heterosexual norms like monogamy, pre-defined gender roles and hetero-normative politics. This mirroring of heterosexual norms has somehow excluded many alternative identifications and practices. Within this generalizing framework, lesbians and homosexual men of different colours were expected to focus more on their sexual identity and not on their racial identity.
3 Richard von Kraft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, Trans., Franklin S. Klaf, First Arcade Edition, 1998. 4 Magnus Hirschfield, The Homosexuality of Men and Women, Prometheus Books, 2000. 5 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, F.A. Davis Co., 1928.
37 The reason for such exclusionary and regulatory exercises was to build unification as a homosexual community against the discrimination of the dominant hetero-normative mores. This strong call for unification and liberation for a homosexual community in the 1980s was interrupted by a political backlash triggered by the outburst of the AIDS epidemic. It was largely because of the AIDS epidemic that the hetero-normative order evaded from acceptance of the homosexual community and stigmatized them as sickly disease carriers. Queer theory is essentially a response from the side of academics and activists to this stigmatization of gay and lesbian communities. Before going into a detailed exploration of queer theory, it might prove fruitful to trace the intellectual history behind the main concepts of queer theory. In order to understand the roots of queer theories we should mention several philosophers and radical thinkers who had posed some important questions. The term ‘queer’ in theoretical discussions in the academy was first used by Teresa de Lauretis in her 1991 article ‘Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities’. De Lauretis makes it clear in her article that there was a need for an umbrella term to talk about different sexualities without any bias:
‘the term queer theory was arrived at in the effort to avoid all of these fine distinctions in our discursive protocols, not to adhere to any of these terms, not to assume their ideological liabilities, but instead both to transgress and transcend them – or at the very least to problematize them.’6
Thus, queer theory is conceptualised as not gender specific, in other words, like the term homosexual, queer theory designates same sex desire without designating which sex is desired. The focus of queer theory is positioned on ‘selfhood’ itself. Queer theory perceives and analyses selfhood not necessarily in sexual and gender terms. In order to have a firmer grasp of selfhood and identity, queer theory had to question the very concept of normalcy and challenge the received notions of normality. Although they have not addressed issues of same sex
6 Teresa, de Lauretis, ‘Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities’ in differences 3.2. (1991), iii- xviii, p. v.
38 desire directly, both John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche have questioned the received notions of normality in society. They have both drawn attention to the fact that the construction of normality by society was an artificial one.7 Dave Robinson, in his Nietzsche and Postmodernism, explains Nietzsche’s concept of genealogy to shed light on society’s artificial constructs:
‘Nietzsche’s ‘genealogical’ histories are so called because they examine the historical origins of certain concepts that are thought to lack a history. His sociological and psychological investigations reveal that those concepts often thought to be universal, eternal or divinely ordered are in fact contingent human constructs with specific histories, and so are in no way ‘natural’ or ‘given’. Genealogical history is descriptive and interpretative, but also evaluative. In Nietzsche’s genealogy, for example, Christian moral beliefs in humility and obedience have a long track record, but they are still a social phenomenon with a specific and rather dubious history, and are now no longer valuable or worth preserving. Michel Foucault’s subsequent genealogical investigations into madness, medicine, sexuality, punishment and the self are clearly influenced by those of Nietzsche.’8
Through Nietzsche, we can relate the roots of queer theory to the existentialist philosophy. Philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus investigated the ‘existential’ condition in which human existence predates any human ‘essence’. Sartre and Camus have not specifically investigated the socio-sexual aspects of human beings, but another existentialist, André Gide, came up with a very ‘queer’ sexuality as depicted in his works like The Immoralist9 (1902) and Corydon10 (1924). Gide, in a very queer manner, separates sexuality from a necessary basis in affectional relationships. In this way, Gide has disrupted the received notions of selfhood. As Leo Bersani in his book Homos argues that Gide, in The Immoralist, constructs:
7 Nietzsche’s influence on queer theory cannot be ignored. It was from Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals (1887) that Michel Foucault borrowed the notion of genealogy. 8 Dave Robinson, Nietzsche and Postmodernism, New York: Totem Books, 1999, p. 69-70. 9 André Gide, The Immoralist, Trans., David Watson, Penguin Books, Suffolk, 2000. 10 André Gide, Corydon, Trans., Richard Howard, Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 2001.
39 ‘… a model for intimacies devoid of intimacy. [He] proposes that we have responsibility among other bodies, somewhat indifferent to them, demanding nothing more than that they be as available to contact as we are, and that, no longer owned by others, they also renounce self-ownership and agree to that loss of boundaries which will allow them to be, with use, shifting points of rest in a universal and mobile communication of being. If homosexuality in this form is difficult to know, this is because it no longer defines a self.’11
The move from structuralism to post-structuralism is another significant dynamic in the history of queer theory. Both structuralism and post-structuralism trace their insights to the field of linguistics and the study of language. Structuralism looks for clean and clear relationships, whereas post-structuralism is sceptical of any knowable structure in language. We should be mentioning the work of Jacques Lacan, too, because, he focused on the central role of language in human relationships and constitution of selfhood. Revisiting the work of Freud, Lacan pursued his claim that an individual’s self is formed through the internalization of social constructs and hierarchies of value in and through language. The child’s encounter with the Symbolic, the Father’s word, according to Lacan, is when society, through language, images and other means communicates itself to the child. It is in this relationship that social hierarchies of values are replicated. Jacques Derrida is another post-structuralist who has paved the way for queer theories. Derrida’s greatest theoretical methodology was questioning the binary construction of meaning -male/female, light/dark, proper/improper. Derrida revealed that these binary structures always give precedence to the first term, because it is regarded socially more valuable, but the substantialisation of this value is always possible through the less valuable constituent of the binary structure. The same relation exists between the heterosexual/homosexual binary. This is a very key binary which structures our conceptions of human identity and these identities are not equal in terms of their value. The social conception of the ‘homosexual’ provides certain images, characteristics and markers against which the ‘heterosexual’ defines itself as a legitimate identity. The incontingent conception of society and its dynamics in matters of identity and the fluidity of gendered identities as discussed by
11 Leo Bersani, Homos, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 128.
40 queer theory owe a lot to Derrida’s method of deconstruction. Feminist theorists like Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous were greatly affected by such a deconstructive mode of analysing society and its values.
1.2.2. The Sexual Identity
Michel Foucault’s ground breaking work The History of Sexuality has changed the scope of gay and lesbian studies dramatically. Foucault’s work is deemed as the foundation for queer theory and queer studies. Foucault’s main argument is that the concept of ‘sex’ is invented in the nineteenth century as an object of knowledge, hence it is not innate or natural. The Victorian era is characterized by its strict sexual mores, prohibitions and censorship. The nineteenth century is also defined by a scientific pursuit to understand the universal truths about human sexuality, hence we can also trace the emergence of the sexual subject as an area of scientific and theoretical study. During this proliferation and discussion of human sexuality, the sciences have tried to classify and categorize sex, sexual desires, thoughts and behaviours of sexuality. Foucault’s main argument is that, all these attempts to understand human sexuality did not result in a discovery of human sexuality, but it culminated in an artificially produced conception of sexuality. This artificially constructed sexuality was something to be chartered, studied and controlled. It was through sexuality that bodies and behaviours of people were controlled during the Victorian era. As a result of this classification, distinctly defined discourses have emerged that produced some very strictly defined sexual frameworks. These discourses have made themselves deeply felt in areas of law, medicine and psychology. Foucault’s work is also important from another perspective in that he explains how these social powers that be have invented the ‘homosexual’. Foucault surmises that since these nineteenth century attempts of classifying human sexuality have limited the scope of sexual behaviour accepted as normal, many sexual
41 behaviours were defined as ‘abnormal’ or ‘perverse’. Foucault’s historicizing the labels attached to people with same-sex desires charts the denominative shift from ‘sodomy’ as a mere illicit sexual act to ‘homosexuality’ which was come to be seen as ‘abnormality’ and ‘perversity’. Sodomical acts before the nineteenth century were condemned and severely punished, but they were not definitive acts pointing at a certain type of person; however, the nineteenth century made use of same-sex behaviours as definitive traits of certain types of people. Based on their sexual orientation, people came to be defined as ‘homosexuals’ and ‘lesbians’. This new type of sexual perverts, especially the homosexual, became the object of regulatory and oppressive institutions. Foucault’s linking ‘discourse’ and ‘identity’ has been central to queer theory. ‘Discourse’ is a critical base for Foucault’s investigation. Foucault’s conception of discourse comprises language, images, beliefs and prejudices, laws and scientific concepts and all other means by which human values are ‘naturalised’, communicated and reproduced. In parallel to Lacan’s argument about the function of the ‘Symbolic’, Foucault argues that subjectivity is created through an internalization of discursive categories. Foucault’s reconceptualization of discourse, sexuality and power has had a great influence on queer theory. David Halperin, in his book Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography explains how Foucault has contributed to the emergence of a ‘queer’ identity:
‘(Homo)sexual identity can now be constituted not substantively but oppositionally, not by what it is but by where it is and how it operates. Those who knowingly occupy such a marginal location, who assume a de- essentialised identity that is purely positional in character, are properly speaking not gay but queer. Unlike gay identity, which, though, deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, ‘queer’ does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.’12
12 David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 61-62.
42 Such a conception of homosexual identity as ‘queer’ focuses on ‘an ongoing process of self-constitution and self-transformation’.13 Foucault’s is not a struggle to liberate ‘a common, repressed pre-existing nature’. 14 Positionality, non-identity, discursive reversibility and collective self-invention are the main concepts of Foucault’s conception of ‘queer’. Queerness is being against the norms, or not abiding in these norms, assuming no identity, but existing in a fluid framework in which self and desire are not categorized.15 Identity for queer theorists have come to represent the outcome of certain discourses and languages that contextualize bodies, sexual practices and desires in certain ways. The concept of identity, in other words, emerged as a prescriptive preconception of people. Foucault’s significance as a queer theorist is felt at this very critical point: he makes it very clear that these identities do not liberate people, because they place people in stifling boxes of social norms and expectations. Liberation for Foucault can only be attained by keeping a multiplicity of desires and acts alive. Foucault argues that, cultural and social contextualization of these desires will only oppress and stigmatize the individual. Queer theory also deals with the internal politics, inequities and modes of oppression within the realm of sexuality. Eve Sedgwick, an eminent queer theoretician of the 1990s, investigates the internal politics of queer communities and their external relationships to oppressors and institutions. Her groundbreaking study Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire16 had a profound influence on queer studies at large. Sedgwick in her book investigates the psychosexual relations among men. These relations, according to Sedgwick have through the centuries evolved not only to control women but also to excise unacceptable manifestations of ‘homosexual’ male bondings and other relationships. Sedgwick looks for specific structures of such relationships , which she calls erotic triangles, in works by writers like Shakespeare, Tennyson and Dickens.
13 Ibid., p. 122. 14 Ibid., p. 122. 15 This conceptualization of queer is very much reminiscent of psychoanalysis’ conception of the homosexual man abiding in the anal order and rejecting the father’s order of the symbolic where taxonomies and categories rule. 16 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire,New York, Columbia University Press, 1985.
43 The most important contribution of Sedgwick to queer studies came from her second book, Epistemology of the Closet17 which was published in 1990. Sedgwick in her book questions the shifting and uncertain grounds of our knowledge about homosexuality. She highlights the distinction between ‘minoritizing’ and ‘universalizing’ paradigms in the discussion of same sex desire and reveals how uncertain and shifting our conceptions about homosexuality are. Sedgwick’s discussion does not aim at determining the superiority of one approach to the other:
‘In the last chapter, I suggested that the current impasse within gay theory between ‘constructivist’ and ‘essentialist’ understandings of homosexuality is the most recent link in a more enduring chain of conceptual impasses, a deadlock between what I have been calling more generally universalizing and minoritizing accounts of the relation of homosexual desires or persons to the wider field of all desires or persons. I argued, too, that not the correctness or prevalence of one or the other side of this enduring deadlock, but, rather, the persistence of the deadlock itself has been the single most powerful feature of the important twentieth century understandings of sexuality, whether hetero or homo and a determining feature too of all the social relations routed, in this sexualised century, through understandings of sexuality. This deadlock has by now been too deeply constitutive of our very resources for asking questions about sexuality for us to have any realistic hope of adjucating it in the future. What we can do is to understand better the structuring, the mechanisms, and the immense consequences of the incoherent dispensation under which we now live.’18
It is from this perspective that Sedgwick examines different understandings of sexuality without trying to attach superiority and legitimacy to any of them. Sedgwick provides us with a definitional touchstone of an expansive notion of queerness. Sedgwick’s outlook has many overlaps with Judith Butler’s performative understanding of sexuality, which is a theoretical elaboration on the normative framework of society and its influence on gender construction.
17 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. 18 Ibid., p. 91.
44 1.2.3. The Performative Identity
Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble sets another frame for queer theory by elaborating on the performative aspects of gender. Butler’s performance theory deals with the concept of gender and identity as perceived and expressed in society by men and women. Butler’s main critique in Gender Trouble is towards feminists theorists who still base their arguments on the so-called innate gender differences. Butler thinks tahat they fail in calling for a universal identity. Feminists analyse cultural manifestations of power and oppression, sex and the biological not within the framework of gender. This perspective offers a firm theoretical ground on which how systems of power produce oppression based on sexual differences, however, this perspective also takes it for granted that sex is neutral, both in natural and in cultural terms. Feminists perceive gender as an expression of something internal to a person, as if a masculine or feminine identity defines the essence of a person. The dynamics of gender in society have not changed for millennia, perhaps because men and women often have markedly different appearances, behaviours and expectations. However, the changing structures of family and economy in the 1990s caused a shift in these dynamics. Gender identities came to be discussed in more flexible frameworks. The economic success women enjoyed during these decades, for example, has caused a significant change in women’s fashion. Androgyny and power suits became very popular. This was a different mode of gender expression that has arisen out of these shifts and structural changes. It is upon this very expression of one’s gender that Butler builds her theory of gender performance. Butler’s argument is that one’s gender is a process or performance people undertake in their daily lives and it is not an innate sense of masculinity or femininity. What Butler draws our attention to is that social norms prescribe themselves upon each individual starting from childhood. Children step into distinct gender roles that already exist in society; they do not choose them consciously or freely. This involuntary performance of gender roles is repeated constantly to the extent that these roles are thought to be innate in individuals. Since
45 these individual gender performances are not stable internally, acts highlighting the differences between men and women need to be reinforced repeatedly.19 What should be asked at this crucial point of Butler’s argument is the relevance of the concept of performativity to intersex and transgender identities. In other words, we should understand how homosexuals ‘perform’ the genders society prescribes them if society as a hetero-normative order, has no homosexual genders to offer in its repertoire of gender identities? It can be argued that all possible answers to this question would reveal the inner paradox of the homosexual person has in his or her identity. It is true that society does not offer homosexual people distinct ‘performative’ gender roles based on same-sex desire. What society offers to be performed to all people is either a feminine or a masculine gender role. The paradox, perhaps the tragedy, lies in the fact that homosexuals find themselves ‘performing’ and replicating these binary gender roles. This naturally leaves out the polymorphous desire which cannot be contained in binary structures. The hetero-normative society structures and dictates a homosexual identity based on its own tenets and homosexuals more than often find themselves ‘performing’ heterosexual gender roles in their homosexual relations and same-sex acts. The French queer theorist Guy Hocquenghem, in his book The Screwball Asses explains the performative dimension of homosexuality gone astray:
‘Our lobster walk, head down, tail up, is nothing but a cliché of normalcy reversed. We program homosexuality just like a heterosexual imagines it can be experienced, the same way he would speak of it or fantasize it, with males on one side and females on the other: here the bears that desire a failed man instead of a woman, here the flaming queers that desire a bear […] Yes, we copy normal relations, we either occupy the place of the subject or that of
19 Butler’s notion of performativity of gender is not compatible with ‘deviant’ gender identities which do not fall into the hetero-normative scheme. Jay Prosser, in her Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, for example, rejects the notion that gender is performative: ‘there are transgendered trajectories, in particular transsexual trajectories, that aspire to that which this scheme [i.e.performativity] devalues. Namely, transsexuals who seek very pointedly to be non-performative, to be constative, quite simply, to be’ (Prosser, p. 32). Butler, in her Preface to the 1999 edition of Gender Trouble, addresses some of these criticisms and acknowledges that the first edition of Gender Trouble omitted issues of transgender and intersexuality. Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, New York, Columbia University Press, 1998.
46 the object, but we copy them in any case. Today’s homosexual does not embody polymorphic desire.’20
The repetition of heterosexual norms in homosexual relationships reflect the frailty of the heterosexual order itself. It lays bare the need of the hetero-normative order to repeat itself so as to be seen legitimate. Judith Butler in her 1991 essay entitled ‘Imitation and Gender in Subordination’ argues that:
‘if the heterosexuality is compelled to repeat itself in order to establish the illusion of its own uniformity and identity, then this is an identity permanently at risk, for what if it fails to repeat, or if the very exercise of repetition is redeployed for a very different performative purpose?’21
Again in the same essay, Butler pursues the claim that the ‘parodic replication and re-signification of heterosexual constructs within non-heterosexual frames bring into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called original.’22 This could be the very genesis of homophobia, an acknowledgement of the revealing function of homosexuality as a gender performance which is seen as a parodic replication of heterosexuality in same sex relationships. The perpetuation of this binary system requires oppositional distinctions between how a man and a woman should be. In this vein, for heterosexuality to be a solid identity, homosexuality should be defined as a stable and universal identity. Queer studies, in line with the performative gender theory of Butler, aims at destabilizing norms of gender and sexuality and focus on identities like intersex and transgender.
20 Guy Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses, Semiotext(e) intervention series N.3 (trans. Noura Medell), 2010, England: London, p. 15-17. 21 Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Subordination’, in inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, Ed. Diana Fuss, London and New York Routledge, 1993. p. 307-20. 22 Ibid., p. 23.
47 1.2.4. The Hierarchic Identity
Another tenet of queer theory rests upon the assumption that sex acts and identities function in a hierarchical system of moral values. Human societies prioritize heterosexuality, because it is biologically required for procreation and procreation is essential for the continuation of the human species. Hence, heterosexuality is ascribed the highest moral value in society. Rubin, in his important article titled as ‘Thinking Sex’ makes an analysis of sexual oppression as an ethical hierarchy created and maintained by society23. Judith Butler’s focus was on the performance of sexual identities and Rubin offers a similar critique to feminism in rejecting their assumption that sexual practices are natural and innate in human beings. However, different from Butler, Rubin tries to analyze the way people attach meaning to sexual identities and behaviours. Rubin, in his article, exposes how sexual acts positioned higher in the ethical scale of society, like heterosexuality, monogamy, procreation and private sex are deemed as normal, natural, healthy and holy. On the other hand, hierarchically lower sexual acts, like transsexuality, homosexuality, sadomasochism and public sex are considered abnormal, unnatural, pathological and sinful. Long-term homosexual couples, masturbation and unmarried heterosexual couples hold an intermediate place in this hierarchy. Rubin contends that this seemingly strict and stable hierarchy regarding sexuality in society, although very slowly, shifts and changes due to some social conflicts. Premarital sex and non-procreative sex, for example, have been placed in higher levels in this hierarchy. This kind of positioning of sexual acts on the basis of their ethical hierarchy has a deep impact on how individuals undergoing respective sexual practices are placed in society as individuals as well. It is mostly on the basis of conforming to or going against the dictates and borders of this social/sexual hierarchy that human beings find themselves in or out of certain communities. The enacting of these different sexual behaviours might bring certain rewards and penalties which reflect this inherent moral hierarchy. Mental health, legality and material benefits are some of the rewards given to people who
23 Rubin, G., ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of The Politics of Sexuality’ in C. Vance (ed.), Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, Boston, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.
48 conform to morally high standards of sexuality, whereas subjects of low sexual behaviours are subject to be defined as mentally ill or criminal. By forming such relations between sexual acts and social positions, Rubin sheds light on how individuals are given places in society according to their sexualities. It could be generally argued that queer theory aims at constructing an anti- normative framework in which people’s sexual behaviours and identities could be perceived. Serving to that purpose, queer theory deconstructs the normalizing dichotomies and tendencies of society in areas of sexuality and gender. By denaturalizing the hetero-normative society and its mores, queer theory shows that gender and sexual identities, like gay or straight, are not innate and natural, but rather are socially constructed within hierarchical binaries in certain cultural and historical contexts. This denaturalizing strategy of queer theory deems sexual identities not as innate biological facts, but as historical constructs. It is one of the most important tenets of queer theory that human sexuality and identities around it have been constructed historically and culturally. The denaturalizing strategy of queer theory has epistemological, ontological and political significance. This strategy influences how we understand and perceive sexual identity, how we live those identities and how we are engaged in progressive sexual politics. By arguing that the subject is the product of a certain discourse and not of some innate biological essence, queer theory deploys a poststructuralist stance. Queer theorists challenge the notion of a unitary sexual identity and natural sexual identity categories. Thus, queer theory envisages that sexual identity is something unstable, fluid and incoherent24 because it is a product of clashing systems of signification and not of biological determinism. Michel Foucault was a pioneering thinker and theorist in that he radically changed people’s way of thinking about how sexual identities in society are produced. Judith
24 Alain Berliner’s 1997 film, Ma Vie en Rose is a striking example drawing on the fluidity and incoherence if gender. The protagonist of the film, seven-year-old Ludovic Fabre, is a biological male who lives out his gender identity as a female. In one of the crucial scenes of the film, he blurs the gender distinctions and announces to his parents that he is a “girl-boy.” Since Ludovic defines his sexuality on the basis of his gender identity and not on his biological sex, he takes a step further and wants to marry his male friend Jerome. The film Ma Vie en Rose reflects the main critical strategies of queer theory: it denaturalizes identity categories imposed by the hetero-normative order, it rejects binaries of gender and sexuality and it problematizes the validity of prescriptive gender categories.
49 Butler, in a similar vein, mocks any so-called ‘natural’ gender roles and identities and offers a ‘queer politics’ that would encompass all kinds of fluid and incoherent sexual identities.
50 1.3. Communities
Heterosexual communities, since they are bound to clearly-defined localities and accepted values, reflect a strong and unquestioned impression of normalcy. The homosexual man is deliberately cast out of heterosexual communities and thus, he cannot have any claim of normalcy. He cannot construct his identity with the support of an already existing community which would offer him values to stick to and a locality to survive in. The only option the homosexual man is left with is to find himself some compensatory means of relating his self to certain values or people so that he can construct himself an identity in society. The inner conflict of the homosexual man that emerges early in life in his selfhood in his family, in the smallest unit of society, prevents him to make himself part of a ‘legitimate’ community in the heterosexual society. This situation leads him to look for other ways of relating his self to a formative and sustaining structure. It can be argued that the homosexual man, very much in line with his inner conflict in his selfhood looks for legitimization and a sense of being an individual through some compensatory means. The community the homosexual person looks for is not always bound to a physical locality and temporality, indeed, what he looks for is a kind of community that does not exist in the physical world. The homosexual man’s community, unlike its normative, heterosexual counterpart, does not try to hide its constructedness. Actually, the very essence of the homosexual man’s community is its deliberate constructedness and parodic stance against society. It will be argued that this kind of a ‘relational’ community the homosexual man searches for, as depicted in Alan Hollinghurst’s novels, is threefold. The homosexual man’s interest in aesthetics and beauty, in the arts and the significance of sexual desire in his life are the very key elements of the kind of communities he looks for. These fictional, erotic and aesthetic communities the homosexual man aspires for will be discussed as compensatory means of identity construction in Hollinghurst’s novels. Before detailing these three kinds of community, we will first elaborate on the concept of community from a general perspective.
51 The human being lives in a community. The communal life presupposes a societal structure around which human beings are positioned. We cannot talk about an utter loneliness, because even solitary lives are defined in juxtaposition with society itself. One might be lonely, because he or she might be on the fringes or outside the defined boundaries of society and might not be interacting with other people. Even the lack of communication as such necessitates a number of ‘others’ who stick to one another whereas the ‘lonely’ person does not or cannot relate herself or himself to those ‘others’. From a gender perspective, human societies are formed around heterosexuality. The heterosexual family is defined as the main pillar, even the ‘nucleus’ of society. Collectivity is a main defining characteristic of the concept of community. Since collectivity presupposes a group of people staying together in the context of shared social values and responsibilities in a certain and clearly defined locality and temporality, heterosexuality emerges as one of the most important concepts around which human beings gather. The shared roles of men and women, procreation and turning children into adults within family and in social institutions all ascribe definitive roles for men and women leading their lives in line with heterosexual norms. Since the human society in general has essentially been defined as heterosexual, it is very difficult for the homosexual individual to relate herself or himself to people around. The story of the homosexual person, whether in reality or in fiction, has always been evolving around dynamics like their sense of being different from others, an ever-impeding sense of loneliness and being marginalized, a struggle to relate themselves to people or entities through which they can construct themselves an identity. If the existence of a community is essential for the construction of an identity, it should be essential for also preserving the position of that identity through future generations. Community in other words, present a sense of continuity for the identity. Hetero-normative masculinity and the masculine identity are very much related to the concept of community. The constructedness of community as such is a very significant point. Human communities are constructed around certain shared values. Linda McDowell, for example, in her book Gender, Identity and Place
52 discusses the relationship between community and the masculine identity as a shared value of lower class workers:
‘A strong sense of belonging to the place, which is passed on from generation to generation, and pride in the tradition of hardship and hard work go hand in hand with a particular form of labour politics.’1
McDowell pursues her claim that in many community studies, women’s daily lives are virtually invisible and gender divisions are most often ignored. We can expand her argument to include homosexual men in this invisibility as well. The exclusion of the homosexual man from the hetero-normative (masculine) communities where masculine solidarity is very strong deserves special attention. Before trying to understand the homosexual man’s exclusion from and relation to ‘community’, we should be asking ourselves where human communities are formed, or whether they have any locality or not. The term community is usually used to designate a small-scale and spatially bounded area in which people have certain characteristics in common that tie them together. The origins of the term community dates back to the evolutionary sociology of Tönnies.2 Community might be regarded as an ambivalent term in that it has both positive and negative connotations. Community evokes a sense of warmth and solidarity; it is a binding force among people. Based on this meaning, lack of community emerges as something undesirable. However, sometimes it is used as a kind of euphemism to define ethnic minority groups, being part of a community as such does not seem something favorable. Within the framework of this dissertation, we will be focusing on the term of community as a positive concept, in which warmth and solidarity reigns. The concept of community as we will be using it will not be a territorial designation. Although community is closely related to place and locality, it is not necessarily tied to territory. Community might also be discussed as an arena of social
1 Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999 (reprint 2004), p. 99. 2 Tönnies, as Linda McDowell explains, ‘at the end of the nineteenth century distinguished a community united by common association, gemeinschaft, social life in its entirety, from those, particularly affected by industrialization, where associations are based on restricted areas of life, which Tönnies termed gesellschaft.’ Linda McDowell, op. cit., p. 100.
53 relations in a fluid and dynamic network. The material social relations and symbolic meanings are the main constituents of communities. The discussion of community among homosexual men is very much context dependent. Contingencies, power relations and mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion define the homosexual man’s relation to community. The concept of community is not only about people staying together in solidarity and around some shared values. Community as a relational concept allows people to perpetuate their identities through generations and it is in communities that we construct and learn our gender roles and social functions in the first hand. Hence, search for community for the homosexual man does not only refer to a search for a togetherness with other people, but also a search for an identity. The formative role of a community for building oneself an identity cannot be denied.3 A community and the urban space in which that community is formed are crucial aspects of identity construction, knowledge acquisition and social action. The eminent French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu talks about how behaviours and attitudes are learned in localities. For Bourdieu, these behaviors and attitudes acquired in certain localities are reflected in style and language. Bourdieu defines this as an ‘embodied knowledge’.4 Thus, we can pursue the claim that the individual and her or his identity cannot be considered as something separate from the community she or he lives in. Community as a framework includes norms, formative structures, certain discourses and its members in different constellations of relations to one another construct their identity in relation to a community. It should be noted, however, that the scope of the present study will not be focusing on the concept of community as locality, but as a set of relationships which might not be necessarily related to a physical locality. We can discuss community as a variety of different concepts, value being one of them5. Community as a value might include traits like solidarity, commitment, mutuality and trust. These values remind as one of the crucial ideals of the French
3 Linda McDowell refers to Kelly M.P. Fernandez, who in the early 1990s undertook a fieldwork in different neighborhoods in West Baltimore in the US to examine the ways in which people living in certain communities form their values. As McDowell quotes, Kelly recognizes that ‘people derive their knowledge from the locations where they live’. op. cit., p. 99. 4 Pierre Bourdieu, Social Space and Symbolic Power, Sociological Theory, 1989, p. 14-25. 5 Frazer, E., The Problem of Communitarian Politics. Unity and Conflict, Oxfrod: Oxford University Press, 1989, 34.
54 revolution: fraternity (liberty and equality being the other two). William Morris, from a Socialist standpoint, also talked about ‘fellowship’ in a similar vein. Willmott, in his Social Networks, Informal Care and Public Policy, talks about community in three different spheres: place, interest and communion.6 Place is the main concept that defines a territorial of place community where people have geographical affinities. This can also be understood as locality. Another trait that builds a community among human crowds is interest. In interest communities, people share a common characteristic other than geographical proximity. Religious belief, sexual orientation, occupation or ethnic origin might link people together as binding forces. Issues of identity and selfhood emerge as important concepts in this understanding of community which is not bound on place only7. ‘Gay community’, ‘Catholic community’ and ‘Indian community’ might be examples of such interest based communities. If what constitutes a community is an attachment to a certain place, group or idea, we can talk about a third type of community in which the sense of communion plays an important role. This kind of community, of course, refers to a spiritual union between creation and God. It is beyond discussion that these different modes of community do overlap in different combinations. There might be communities sustained by interest and place at the same time, like ‘communities of mining villages’8. This triple structure, of course, would not always suffice to define the great variety of human communities. When communities of place or interest do not include a sense of shared identity, for example, the concept of ‘attachment’ emerges as an important binding force. Actually it is this feeling of ‘attachment’ that people construct specific communities for themselves. Communities function on a symbolic level. Community on such a symbolic level plays an important role in building people’s sense of belonging. Members of a certain community perceive the world in a specific way. As Cohen argues: ‘People construct community
6 Willmott, P., Social Networks, Informal Care and Public Policy, London, Policy studies Institute, 1989. 7 Hoggett, P. ‘Contested Communities’ in P. Hoggett, Ed., Contested Communities. Experiences, Struggles, Policies, Bristol, Policy Press, p. 7. 8 Willmott, P., Social Networks, Informal Care and Public Policy, London, Policy studies Institute.
55 symbolically, making it a resource and repository of meaning, and a referent of their identity’9. Being similar to and/or different from others are two essential traits of a community of people. As Cohen states, ‘community’ involves two related suggestions that the members of a group have something in common with each other; and the thing held in common distinguishes them in a significant way from the members of other possible groups10. Being in lack of such shared values and most of the time a physical locality, the homosexual man’s identity is not granted to him under favourable conditions by an already established community. Hence, he first has to construct himself a community himself in which he can have a sense of identity. The homosexual man, as depicted in Hollinghurst’s novels, looks for communities in fictional, erotic and aesthetic realms.
1.3.1. Fictional Communities
Reading texts of other authors, aspiring to write like them and the problematization of reading and/or writing texts can be related to processes of ‘community building’ and ‘identity formation’ of Hollinghurst’s characters as homosexual individuals. Homosexuals, similar to many other kinds of minotirized cultural groups, are in need of fostering a communal identity through which they could resist oppression and forge a sense of history together with a distinct set of cultural values. It is within this framework that Hollinghurts’s novels and the intertextual elements in these novels will be interpreted. The constant references to authors who are canonized within the established gay fiction reflect the ongoing quest for identity of the homosexual characters depicted in Hollinghurst’s novels. Gay characters in Hollinghurst’s fiction turn to gay fiction in order to see aspects of their own experience as reflected and illuminated in the novels of other gay authors. This intertextuality and allusive literary style also function as a reconfirmation of the
9 Cohen, A.P., The Symbolic Construction of Community, London, 1985, 13. 10 Ibid., p. 12.
56 existence of other similar voices who speak of struggles and joys comparable to Hollinghurst’s characters. Identities exist in communities. Forming an identity and assuming a position where an identity can exist can only be possible through the existence of others with whom one can identify or from whom one can dissociate. This mutual and interdependent relation between the concepts of ‘community’ and ‘identity’ defines both concepts as sites of ‘textual production’. Community building and identity formation can be likened to production and elaboration of texts. Homosexual writing in Hollinghurst’s novels functions as a literary genre that explores the parameters of the homosexual experience, which in turn, offers a validation of identity positions for the gay individual. The sense of identity formation and community building can be seen in parallel with the notion that sex and gender are not natural givens, but socially constructed attributes. This aligns Hollinghurst’s novels with Foucault, Butler and the historians, sociologists, feminists and queer theorists. The search for community in the realm of fiction, or literature, could also be analysed on an authorial level. Alan Hollingurst, a homosexual novelist writing about the experience of homosexuality in the last decades of the twentieth century, looks for a fictional community himself. His search for a fictional community represents a search for a sense of belonging to and developing a certain literary community. The great number of allusions to previous novelists, especially in his first two novels, the rich intertextuality embedded in his novels all reflect Hollinghurst’s attempt to have a distinct voice of his own, an identity as an original novelist in the British gay novel tradition of the twentieth century.
1.3.2. Erotic Communities
The association of the homosexual individual with a seemingly overflowing desire and promiscuity is not unknown. Indeed, the homosexual man might feel
57 himself ‘obliged’ to form his identity around the principle of sexual pleasure and gratification. From a psychological and developmental perspective, this could be explained as the homosexual man’s attempt to strengthen his sense of selfhood; from a social perspective, as discussed by queer theorists, the homosexual man’s obsession with sexual pleasure reflects a rejection of the categorization of desire by the hetero-normative order. From both perspectives, though, sexuality and the elements of the erotic, emerge as binding forces the homosexual man utilizes to cohere his selfhood into an identity. Many of Alan Hollinghurst’s characters immerse themselves in sexual pleasure to feel themselves as existing individuals. In his The Swimming-Pool Library, for example, the main character William Beckwith is defined by his strong urge for sexual gratification. William is depicted as a character chasing young and good-looking men without doing any other substantial thing in life. Even his day time job is an alibi for an office task to reflect respectability. The principle of sexual pleasure for Hollinghusrt’s protagonist is so strong that he shows no interest in history. He is immersed in his own temporality; he is blindly and consciously bound to the present time. His conscious ignorance of a gay history could be read as his detour from a temporal community. The kind of community he builds for himself is based on physicality and sexuality. Desire as a ruling principle in William’s life looks for nor history. It is the very contingency and fluidity of sexual desire and erotic gratification that William seems to be sustaining his sense of integrity and identity. The search for an erotic community by the homosexual man burdens him with obsessive pursuits. Edward Manners in The Folding Star, Hollinghurst’s second novel, is a character through whom we can trace how this search for the erotic can turn into a melancholic and deathly nemesis, which again proves the futility of the homosexual man’s pleas for communal sustenance. Edward Manners is obsessed with a sixteen-year-old boy named Luc Altidore. His obsession for the young boy evolves into his greatest aim in life. Edward structures his life and selfhood around the image and the sexual potentiality of the young boy. However, once consummation he looks for is realized, he loses his object of desire to others and he is left with an emptiness in life. His self is drained of its sustenance, he is in the void
58 again and the novel ends when he looks for Luc in a frenzy at the seaside. The sea functions as the maternal element from which Edward cannot escape. As other homosexual characters in Hollinghurst’s novels, Edward too cannot promote himself to the symbolic order of the father where he can have a strong selfhood and an identity. The erotic community he constructs for himself crumbles into pieces once it is almost perfected.
1.3.3. Aesthetic Communities
The homosexual man’s interest in aesthetics and the arts and in beauty are interpreted from different, but converging perspectives. From a psychoanalytic framework, the interest in aesthetics and beauty is a possible means of bringing together a self so as to build it into a solid whole. To put it in psychoanalytic terms, the homosexual man, through aesthetics and beauty, tries to compensate for the weaknesses in the constitution of his selfhood. The aesthetics and the arts and what looks beautiful to him are compensations for his missing self-objects. From another perspective, the homosexual man’s obsessive relationship to aesthetics and to beauty could be read as a strategy of survival in a hostile society. The very artificiality and lack of genuine aspects of such an aestheticism create a parodic functionality in which the homosexual man consciously subverts the hetero-normative order in his relations and through his identity. Nick Guest, in Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 novel The Line of Beauty, for example, is a striking example to a homosexual man who tries to strengthen his selfhood and to build himself an identity through aesthetics. Hollinghurst depicts Nick as a young homosexual man who is very much interested in beautiful antique objects, in the arts and in literary style. It could be argued that the gratification of his aesthetic concerns offers him a seemingly strong selfhood and it is through his interest in aesthetics, again, that he attempts at doing something of substance in society: with a Lebanese lover of his, Wani, Nick publishes a magazine of aesthetics named as The Ogee. The magazine, whose title refers to the line of beauty as defined
59 by William Hogarth, consumes its publication in one issue only, because the mode of life and the community Nick has mistakenly thinks to be functioning prove themselves to be illusions only. They cannot sustain Nick Guest as a self-realized and autonomous identity in society. Hence, the homosexual man’s search for a community in the realm of aesthetics has been shown as illusionary and futile. , The homosexual man’s search of community, his need to construct a healthy selfhood and an autonomous identity is realized in three different realms, namely the fictional, the erotic and the aesthetic. This triple structure conceptualizes the search for community as depicted in Hollinghurst’s characters. Other kinds of communities should also be not ignored. Apart from the normatively legitimate communities of the heterosexual order, which are mostly based on locality and physicality, there might, for example, be political communities. The reason why this study leaves out political communities is because Hollinghurst does not depict homosexual individuals with openly political causes. The analyses of Hollinghurst’s novels within the framework of the present study will be focusing on the triple structure suggested above. The dynamics and functionalities of these different kinds of communities will be elaborated with reference to Hollinghurst’s novels.
60 CHAPTER TWO Canonising The Queer
2.1. The British Gay Novel Tradition
Alan Hollinghurst (b.1954) stands out among other contemporary ‘gay’1 novelists with his elegant prose style and focus on moral ambiguities. In his novels, he depicts sexual acts in a very frank manner, but his novels also expose the homosexual man’s alienation in society and the different ways he reacts to this multi- dimensional alienation, which is sometimes even self-inflicted. As a contemporary British novelist, Alan Hollinghurst extends the narrative tradition of Christopher Isherwood and Edmund White and he is regarded as the most important British gay novelist after E.M. Forster. In the works of Isherwood, White and Hollinghurst, a character’s homosexuality is simply a given. Hollinghurst’s novels do not contain any idealization or melodramatizing of homosexual characters. What readers are offered is the emotional complexities of these gay characters in their ordinary everyday lives. Perhaps more important than that, Hollinghurst’s characters stand out with their great potential for self-delusion. This self-delusion of Hollinghurst’s characters reflects the homosexual man’s problematic relation with society. The alienation of the homosexual man in society rests upon an inherent paradox. While it is true that it is the hetero-normative society which ostracizes the homosexual man as an other, as supported by the opponents of queer theory, the homosexual man also builds up defenses himself to shy away from society due to his own feelings of inadequacy and other kinds of psychological problems. Alan Hollinghurst’s novels very successfully depict the alienating forces and mechanisms of society, but they shed light on the psychological dynamics and forces on a personal level as well. Many Hollinghurst characters fail in being part of
1 Alan Hollingurst does not like to be defined as a ‘gay’ novelist; however,for purposes of clarifying his position among other novelists dealing with homosexual themes, this study takes the liberty of using the word ‘gay’ to define Hollinghurs’t tradition of novel. Richard Canning, ‘Conversations with Gay Novelists: Gay Fiction Speaks’, Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 331-365. 61 the society they live in and in finding themselves a home, not only because the society casts them away, but also because they cannot bring themselves to an integration as such. Before focusing on Alan Hollinghurst’s characteristics as a novelist, we should try to understand where he stands in the British gay novel tradition. This section will give a brief overview of the important novelists who have paved the way for the novels of Alan Hollinghurst. E.M. Forster (1879-1970) as a novelist holds a very significant position in the British gay novel tradition. His novels Howards End ( 1910) and A Passage to India (1924) have established his fame. His novel Maurice, published posthumously in 1971 positioned E.M. Forster as a novelist who has dealt with homosexual themes indirectly in all his novels except for Maurice, where the main characters are openly homosexual. Forster’s first novels and short stories reflected a society which was trying to free itself from the residues of Victorianism. Although Forster adopted certain themes (the importance of women in their own right, for example) from earlier novelists such as George Meredith, he broke with the elaborations and intricacies favored in the late 19th century and he wrote in a freer, more colloquial style. Starting with his first novels, he nurtured a strong strain of social comment and observed the middle classes very acutely. Forster has also developed a concern associated with his interest in Mediterranean ‘paganism’, that if men and women were to achieve a satisfactory life, they needed to keep contact with the earth and cultivate their imaginations.2 This sentimentality could well be read as a reflection of his homosexual psyche in which the male and female elements are interconnected. Forster’s interest in the Mediterranean culture, his short sojourn in Alexandria is reflected in the character of Lord Nantwich in Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library. Lord Nantwich, like E.M. Forster, had lovers in Middle Eastern countries and is in need of his personal story to be written down by William Beckwith, the novel’s main protagonist. E.M. Forster, when he was nearly forty, fell in love with an Egyptian tram conductor in Alexandria in 1919. Forster’s homosexuality, both in reality and in fiction, manifests itself in an erotic preference
2 ‟E.M. Forster”, Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, 2011, Web, 20 June 2011. 62 for foreigners and for men of the lower social classes. This results in a romanticization of lower, working classes in his fiction, which is most clearly visible in his novel Maurice. Such a romanticization of lower classes results in Forster’s harsh criticism of the effects of imperialism abroad. The homosexual desire’s erasing social boundaries and its bringing down the class barriers led Forster to think that homosexuality could serve a positive social function by helping to bridge the barriers that separate the classes.3 The echoes of this Forsterian sentimentality could also be traced in Hollinghurt’s novels. William Beckwith, in The Swimming-Pool Library and Nick Guest in The Line of Beauty, for example, desire black men and thus negate the social distinctions that rest upon race. Forster was greatly influenced by the persecution of Oscar Wilde. This event has created in him an acute consciousness of gay oppression and fueled his anger at social and political injustices. Forster’s sensitivity to the gay oppression is society is created his mildly sad literary style which came to be defined as the characteristic of the Forsterian voice. Although Forster did not deal with homosexuality openly in his fiction, except for Maurice, homoeroticism emerges as a significant element in all his novels.4 The implicit treatment of homosexuality in E.M. Forster’s work makes his literary style interesting in the sense that it hides and reveals things at the same time.5 Forster’s novel Maurice, the only one where he treats homosexuality openly, positions him in a very important place in the British gay male novel tradition. Maurice is actually similar to Hollinghurst’s novels, because it largely deals with the
3 Forster’s way of thinking is very clearly reflected in his novel Maurice. This belief derives from the Whitmanesque ideal of comradeship as expressed in the early English gay liberation movement and in writings by ‘Uranian’ leaders as Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds.
4 In Where Angels fear to Tread (1905) the character of Philip Herriton is a painfully self-conscious and sexually oppressed aesthete; The Longest Journey (1907) depicts Rickie Elliot whose weak passion for his wife Agnes is aroused by his unconscious desire for a soldier. A homosexual consciousness is more subtly present in Howard’s End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924), where the emotional centre of each work resides in a same-sex (though non-sexual) relationship, that of Margaret and Helen Schlegel and Fielding and Aziz. Although the plot of A Room with a View (1908) makes it Forster’s fullest celebration of homosexual love, the novel is actually the product of the author’s self-conscious attempt to discover a homosexual literary tradition; and it is suffused with homoeroticism and with the ideology of the late nineteenth century homosexual emancipation movement.
5 This is exactly the subject of Nick Guest’s theses in Hollinghurst’s novel The Line of Beauty.
63 inner feelings of individuals and how they attain self-awareness. This self-awareness is worked on in a strong relationship with society. Maurice reflects Edward Carpenter’s view of homosexuality. 6 Carpenter argued that homosexuality and heterosexuality represented equal emotions and he considered neither to be more or less spiritual than the other. His contemporary Symonds held completely opposite views, implying the superiority of homosexuality to heterosexuality. Forster juxtaposes these two conceptions in Maurice. Maurice and Alec’s relationship, which could only be sustained in the country, reflects Forster’s way out for homosexuality. By pairing a middle class man and a worker, Forster comes to the rejection of society and social reform. This very much reflects Oscar Wilde and his arguments in De Profundis. E.M. Forster’s fiction is echoed in Hollinghurst’s novels with characters trying to come to terms with their identity and acknowledging an inherent confrontation through their gradually attained self-awareness, the characters’ seeking refuge in the country so as to survive. Hollinghurst’s novels could be read as a somehow negative reply to Forster’s wish that there will be better days for homosexuals7. A visit Forster paid to the sixty-year-old Edward Carpenter in 1913 triggered in him the wish to write about homosexuality directly8. Carpenter himself as a homosexual man shared a simple life with a young working-class man. In Carpenter’s well-known essay ‘The Intermediate Sex’, we have a description of the
6 Edward Carpenter in his The Intermediate Sex (1908) and other works pursued the claim that the increasing incidence of ‘uranism’ (homosexuality) was anticipating a new era of sexual freedom for all. 7 E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice is dedicated to ‘a happier year’. However, in his epilogue to the novel, Forster draws a rather bleak picture to define the position of homosexuality in the English society in 1960: ‘Note in conclusion on a word hitherto unmentioned. Since Maurice was written there has been a change in the public attitude here: the change from ignorance and terror to familiarity and contempt. It is not the change towards which Edward Carpenter had worked. . . . And I . . . less optimistic, had supposed that knowledge would bring understanding. We had not realised that what the public really loathes in homosexuality is not the thing itself but having to think about it. If it could be slipped into our midst unnoticed, legalised overnight by a decree in small print, there would be few protests. Unfortunately it can only be legalised by Parliament, and Members of Parliament are obliged to think or to appear to think. Consequently the Wolfenden recommendations will be indefinitely rejected, police prosecutions will continue, and Clive on the bench will continue to sentence Alec in the dock. Maurice may get off.’ E.M. Forster, Maurice, Penguin Classics, London, 2000, 224.
8 Scott-Kilvert, Ian, Ed., ‘E.M. Forster’ in British Writers, Volume VI, New York: Simon Schuster, MacMillan, 1983, p. 407. 64 male homosexual that fits Forster: the homosexual man, for Carpenter, ‘tends to be of a gentle, emotional disposition’ and he is ‘generally’ intuitive and instinctive in [his] perceptions, with more or less of artistic feeling.’9 The heterosexual framework of Forster’s novels actually reflect this feminine temperament in an indirect way. The sisterly tenderness of Helen and Margaret in Howards End, for example, reflect a kind of love relationship in their unity against maleness. Going beyond the immediate context of the novel, readers can sense an elaboration on ‘eternal differences’.10 Margaret’s words in Howards End reflect the tension in E.M. Forster himself:
‟It’s only that people are far more different than is pretended. All over the world men and women are worrying because they cannot develop as they are supposed to develop. Here and there they have the matter out, and it comforts them.”11
It could be argued that through his novel Maurice, E.M. Forster had his ‘matter out’ by dealing with homosexuality directly. Forster, through Maurice, finds an opportunity to portray the plight of the homosexual in an unsympathetic and uncompromising world. His main protagonist Maurice’s loneliness and his search for the friend of his boyhood dream is the main focus of the novel. Themes of search for a friend and companion in life, developing relationships with lower class men and leaving one’s home all emerge in Alan Hollinghurst’s novels as well. Maurice’s journey in the novel is a journey of self-realisation which is very similar to the experiences of William Beckwith in The Swimming-Pool Library and Nick Guest in The Line of Beauty. Another significant novelist who is echoed in Hollinghurst’s novels is Ronald Firbank (1876-1926). Firbank was an idiosyncratic figure. He was an aesthete and he wrote short, satirical and almost plotless novels with eccentric characters. Firbank as an English novelist was greatly influenced by the literature of the 1890s. He is
9 Carpenter, Edward, The Intermediate Sex, The Echo Library, New York, 2007, p. 15. 10 E.M. Forster, Howards End, Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, London, 1991, p. 353. 11 Ibid., p. 353. 65 defined as a peculiarly fantastic writer with a ‘perverse’ and idiosyncratic humor. He has developed a peculiar style as well, which depends on the shape and cadence of the sentence and an eccentric use of vocabulary. Hollinghurst’s novels also bear the stamp of Firbank’s authentic style and aesthetics. It could be argued that Firbank enacts his homosexuality as a high vocation and very much like Oscar Wilde, he nurtures an exacting devotion to art. Firbank’s novels represent homosexual desire with a revolutionary consciousness of the aesthetic element in the novel form. Vainglory (1915) depicts characters including a male composer and his male lover; The Princess Zoubaroff (1920) is a play about the founding of a lesbian convent, The Flower Beneath The Foot (1923), which is read by William Beckwith in Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library, deals with lesbian longings and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926) depicts a bisexual hero who dies during a nude chase after his favourite choirboy, which is reminiscent of Edward Manners in The Folding Star. Ronald Firbank stands out in his generation of writers with his original and peculiar style. He excels the indirect and elliptical style which paves the way for an independent homosexual voice in fiction that precedes many other authors. Although Firbank was not deemed as a serious and eminent writer12, many critics have acknowledged his literary style to be diligently constructed so as to serve for his literary ambitions in his novels. Such positive criticism of Firbank relates him to previous canonical writers like Laurence Sterne and William Congreve. Edward
12 Ralph C. Boettcher in his entry for Ronald Firbank in British Writers refers to a number of critics who defined Firbank as a trivial novelist: ‟The distinguished critics Mark Longaker and Edwin C. Bolles in Contemporary English Literature (1953) dismiss the novels of Ronald Firbank as "trivial impertinences" (p. 342). And Cyril Connolly, in his essay "The Novel-Addict's Cup- board," in The Condemned Playground (1946) writes that "it is quite useless to write about Firbank— nobody who doesn't like him is going to like him, and he can be extremely aggravating and silly— but," he immediately adds, "he was a true innovator, and his air of ephemerality is treacherous in the extreme." This assessment follows Connolly's judgment of "the poetry of Horace and Tibullus, the plays of Congreve, the paintings of Watteau and Degas, the music of Mozart, and the prose of Flaubert"—and the fiction of Firbank—as attempting "to portray the beauty of the moment, the gaiety and sadness, the fugitive distress of hedonism." Further, he catalogs Ernest Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, and F. Scott Fitzgerald as "among the Firbank derivatives" (p. 115).” George Stade, Ed., ‘Ronald Firbank’, in British Writers, Supplement II, New York: Simon and Schuster MacMillan, 1992, p.480.
66
Martin Potoker, for example, refers to some structural similarities between Firbank’s novels and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy:
‟One may have thought, when one first looked at his books in the twenties, that they were foamy improvisa- tions which could be skimmed up in rapid reading. Yet when one tried to run through them, one found oneself pricked by something that queerly impressed; one was aware of artistic seriousness, even if one did not linger to find out what the writer was up to. When one returns to them today, one realizes that Ronald Firbank was one of the writers of his time who took most trouble over their work and who were most singlemindedly devoted to literature. The memoirs of him testify to this. His books are not foolish trifles, scribbled down to get through the boredoms of a languid and luxurious life. They are extremely intellectual, and composed with the closest attention: dense textures of indirection that al- ways disguise the point. They have to be read with care, and they can be read again and again, because Firbank has loaded every rift with ore.”13
The techniques Firbank has adopted from Sterne are employed as a queer attitude towards society in his work. The displacement of logical continuity of action through free association of ideas ruptures the linearity of the hetero-normative order. The free association of ideas that defines much of Firbank’s work reflect the free-floating consciousness of the homosexual man that cannot be contained in a single framework. Alan Hollinghurst himself deems Firbank’s literary style as a ‘creative use of homosexuality’ in fiction. Homosexuality in Firbank’s novels, for Hollinghurst, could be read as a textual phenomenon. Firbank’s work, in other words, integrates homosexual desire into a canonical literary and aesthetic tradition. The continuation of and fulfillment of this attempt could be traced in Hollinghurst’s own work14. The most prominent aspect of Firbank’s style is his use of ellipsis which rules out chronology and continuity. In Firbank’s work, narration and description are
13 E.M. Potoker, Ronald Firbank, New York, Columbia University Press, 1969, p. 491. 14 Alan Hollinghurst has produced a number of critical works on Ronald Firbank. He has an MA Thesis and some shorter pieces focusing on Firbank: -‟Introduction to The Early Firbank”, Ed., Steven Moore, London and New York, Quartet Books, 1991. -‟Introduction to Ronald Firbank”, Three Novels, London, Penguin, 2000. -Alan Hollinghurst, The Creative Uses of Homosexuality in the Novels of E.M. Forster, Ronald Firbank and L.P. Hartley, M. Litt., thesis, Magdalen College, 1979. (Unpublished. A copy of the manuscript can be consulted in the Bodleian Library.) 67 minimal and dialogue functions as a glue which builds the plot. The use of ellipsis and free association links Firbank to poets and authors like Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf15. Writers like Ronald Firbank and E.M. Forster represent an era during which men of literature mostly kept their homosexuality in secret and dealt with this theme only indirectly in their works. But in the 1930s, starting with writers like Auden and Isherwood, the homosexual was no longer depicted on heroic terms, but as real people with their sexual desires and pleasures. Starting with the 1930s, writers no longer exalted or mystified homosexual desire, but subordinated it to more comprehensive political ideologies – socialism, communism, liberalism and fascism. Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) is perhaps one of the most important predecessors of Alan Hollinghurst, because he created homosexual characters whose homosexuality is a simple given, an integral part of the wholeness or personality and an emblem of their common humanity. Isherwood’s homosexuality had a major influence on his art. He developed an interest in certain psychological predicaments and his books include some recurring character types and themes like the Truly Weak Man, The Truly Strong Man and The Evil Mother and such obsessions as war, The Test, the struggle toward maturity and the search for a father. Some of these character types and themes occur in Alan Hollinghurst’s novels as well. A greater affinity in terms of character types and themes between Christopher Isherwood and Alan Hollinghurst could be found in Isherwood’s later novels. Isherwood deals with more deeply and focus more on the plights of the homosexual man in a homophobic society. Isherwood’s homosexual characters belonging to the works of his later period are very similar to Hollinghurst’s characters in that they nurture apparently incongruous needs to assert their individuality and to feel a sense
15 A characteristic device is his use of ellipses to create a conversational vacuum that the reader is invited to fill. In this snippet from The Flower Beneath the Foot, for example, a young man registers horror, dis-belief, and chagrin (let us say) on hearing that fleas have been found at the Ritz Hotel: " !? ...!!" (p. 509). In chapter 8 of the same novel, a third of the page is filled with rows of dots (compare the blank pages of Tristram Shandy) to disclose the awful interiority of Countess Yvorra's prayer. He frequently uses stichomythia. A unique motif is passages of fragments of overheard conversations -"confusion of voices''- to suggest the chatter in a crowded room.
68 of community. The World in the Evening (1954), for example, gives us a portrayal of such a character, Bob Woods, who rebels against the plights he is burdened with because of the homophobic society he lives in. The need for community is an important issue in Isherwood’s most important novel, A Single Man (1964). The novel’s main character George is a late middle aged homosexual who grieves at the death of his lover of many years. Isherwood, through his homosexual character George, deals with issues like commitment and grief, alienation and isolation in a framework of homosexual sensibility. Isherwood as a novelist presaged and embraced the gay liberation movement. His novels focus on the need for solidarity among homosexuals and the recognition of homosexuals as an aggrieved minority. However, Isherwood’s greatest achievement as a novelist, and in a way as one of the authors who paved the way for Alan Hollinghurst, is that he portrayed homosexual characters whose homosexuality is a single given, an essential part of their personality. Homosexual novelists of the 1930s and 1940s also dealt with the hypocrisy of society in its relationship with homosexuals. Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) in his Brideshead Revisited (1945) deals with the fact that the heterosexual world simultaneously permits and condemns homosexuality. One of the novel’s homosexual heroes, Sebastian Mardman is first idolized by the novelist and his narrator and then denounced and condemned for his homosexuality and aestheticism. The same pattern of society’s consecutive and/or simultaneous glorification and condemnation of homosexuality is strongly echoed in Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004), where Nick Guest, the main character of the novel is first welcomed by the Feddens family and then severely condemned and stigmatized by them because of his homosexuality. Writers of the last quarter of the twentieth century largely dealt with two issues: first the resurgence of religious, moral, and political conservatism in England since 1979 and the social stigmatization of homosexuals with the society’s discourse on the AIDS plague. Thus, Alan Hollinghurst draws on retrospective mediations on English homosexual life’s stories and pleasures in his novels. Hollinghurst’s novels evoke the great variety of discourses and stories on homosexuality in the English tradition. It is 69 through this dialogue between these earlier novelists that Alan Hollinghurst attempts at creating a literary canon for novels dealing with homosexuality. His emulation and reworking on these previous novel traditions and styles enable him to create a queer canon.
2.2. Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst as a British novelist is very often compared with eminent writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Jane Austen and Henry James. In his novels, he deals with some perennial themes like love, death, age, mourning, manners and memory. What differs him from his predecessors and contemporaries is his queer perspective. His perspective could be defined as queer not only because his novels deal with homosexuality, but also because his works surprise, make fun of and perplex the normative order. Such ‘queering’ of the norms reveals the plight of the homosexual man in an unprecedented way. In Hollinghurst’s novels, the homosexual man is related to the hetero-normative order in an ambivalent way. He is both accepted and cast out of society. Hollinghurst offers us a new literary framework in which the homosexual man finds himself a literary voice. Alan Hollinghurst is praised for his elegant prose style, which is strengthened by his satiric impulse and lyrical gift. Hollinghurst uses his aesthetic sensibility to unveil sexuality ‘as an essential thread running through everything … in a person’s life’16. Thus, sexuality emerges as one of the important triggering forces in a person’s life that gives direction to the route the person takes in life. However, Hollinghurst’s characters are not only operated by their sexuality, but by their personalities and characters as well. This differs Hollinghurst from his predecessors who have dealt with the homosexuality of their characters as the only defining trait they have. Hollinghurst’s characters’ sexuality is a given in his novels; in other words, Hollinghurst does not present his fictional characters in a moral dilemma
16 Richard Canning, Conversations with Gay Novelists: Gay Fiction Speaks, Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 332. 70 about being a homosexual. What Hollinghurst mostly works on in his novels is the way his characters interact with society and how they position themselves against other groups of people. The issue of community, thus, emerges as a main topic in Hollinghurst’s novels. It could be argued that, the predecessors of Alan Hollinghurst, novelists like Christopher Isherwood, E.M. Forster and Edmund White dealt with homosexual characters to show how they are alienated by the hetero-normative society. Writers like these tried to depict the impossibility of survival for homosexuals. Happiness could not be granted to these earlier homosexual characters, because that seemed theoretically impossible17. These characters did not even come out of their closets. On the other hand, Hollinghurst’s characters are known as homosexuals by society. The main fictional concern is not their sexuality, but the deceptiveness of the modern acknowledgement of homosexuality in society. Although they seem to be living in a liberated environment, it is very difficult for Hollinghurst’s characters to feel themselves at home wherever they might be. This ever-present sense of alienation haunts them at some important moment throughout the novels. The characters, along with readers, come to the understanding that it is not only the hetero-normative society that casts these men out, but these homosexual men themselves also cannot bring themselves to building close ties with the society. The inner conflicts they develop in their selves and the incongruities that haunt their identity formation will not allow them to live in compromise with the heterosexual order, even if they are allocated certain seemingly-liberated spaces in the margins of society. The narrative techniques used by Alan Hollinghurst in his novel reflect the way he deals with the inner lives of his characters. The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and The Folding Star (1993), his first two novels, are narrated in the first person, whereas The Spell (1998) and The Line of Beauty (2004) are narrated in the third person. Hollinghurst himself states that ‘the book [The Spell] had to be inside the mind and preoccupations of its narrator’.18 Hollinghurst’s choice for the first person narration enables him to reveal the feelings of his characters in minute detail.
17 E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice could be read as its author’s struggle to resolve the paradoxial stituation of the homosexual man in society. 18 Canning, Richard, Ed., Conversations with Gay Novelists: Gay Fiction Speaks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 332. 71
It is through this first person narrative that the readers can follow the characters’ responses to people and events. Hollinghurst explains his choice in the following words:
‘There are all sorts of reasons for writing in the first person, however. They’re partly aesthetic; partly technical and partly something else; to do with the lack of moral heavy handedness that comes from writing in the first person, because everything is floating and unknown. Everything is responded very subjectively. There’s an especially interesting engagement, I always think, between the reader and the narrator. It’s like getting to know more in real life, forming a view, and changing your mind about him or her. It’s interestingly unstable.’19
When Hollinghurst switches to the third person narration, it is so in order to unravel the underlying interrelations among his characters. The Spell (1998), for example, through its third person narration gives its reader the opportunity to see the relations between characters from each others’ perspectives. The Spell is a novel in which characters seem to be dancing to a symphony of human relations. It is like a slow movement between the city and the country and between men of different characters. Hollinghurst states that he wanted The Spell to ‘be a study of people and their relations to each other.’20 Hollinghurst uses these narrative voices so as to come up with a detailed and deep excavation into the mind and feelings of the homosexual man. Unlike his predecessors, Hollinghurst does not only focus on what society does to the homosexual man, but on how the homosexual man reacts to society and tries to defend himself so as to survive. Another significant characteristic of Alan Hollinghurst as a gay novelist is his concern with aesthetics and the formal laws guiding creativity. In all of his novels, his characters are very much concerned with the arts, whether it be literature, music, art and architecture. Hollinghurst’s concern with aesthetics and creativity is the reflection of the attempt to construct an order on the part of his characters. The current of aesthetics and creativity represents the gap in Hollinghurst’s characters which is opened by the hetero-normative society’s disavowal of them. Hollinghurst’s
19 Ibid., p. 332. 20 Ibid., p. 334. 72 characters all suffer from a psychic gay which is there because of their being alienated by the hetero-normative society. Art and all kinds of aesthetic pursuits in Hollinghurst’s novels might be read as the homosexual man’s attempt to disguise this psychic gap both from himself and from others around him. Thus, Hollinghurst’s concern with aesthetics and the formal laws guiding creativity emerges as a strong narrative current through which he portrays the subjectivity of his characters as gay men.21 This aesthetic concern of Alan Hollinghurst also differs him from other gay novelists, because the depiction of his homosexual characters’ aesthetic pursuits act as insights into their subjectivity. It is through their relation with art and aesthetics that we learn more about their personalities and their feelings. In the works of Ronald Firbank, E.M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood, for example, we do not have such in-depth analyses of homosexual characters. Their novels mainly deal with the homosexual person’s interaction with society and they mostly depict almost stereotypical homosexual characters. In The Swimming-Pool Library, for example, William Beckwith’s qualms about writing Lord Nantwich’s diary, his chasing after beautiful black men portray a very strong character into whose mind we can so easily enter. The Spell’s concern with architecture, strengthened by the fact that the main character of the novel, Robin, is an architect himself, does not only highlight the underlying search for a home, but also the homosexual man’s inherent attempt to beautify his surroundings so as to disguise the psychic gap caused by his separation from and his rejection of his father. In The Folding Star, the side story which evolves around a mysterious Dutch painter functions as the reflection of Edward Manner’s obsession with his young pupil and his beauty. The Dutch painter’s obsessed love affair reflects how desire gives shape to people’s fortunes in life. The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst’s 2004 novel, is perhaps the most deeply concerned with art and aesthetics. Nick Guest, the novel’s protagonist, is a young man perhaps too much disillusioned with what is beautiful and aesthetic. He is so overwhelmed with what is
21 Alan Hollinghurst, in his interview with Richard Canning, explains his concern with aesthetics in following words: ‘I’m not quite sure how I’d define it though. All my books have quite a lot about buildings. This happens to be a preoccupation of mine. I love inventing buildings and describing them. I’m interested in the atmosphere of buildings. People often wonder why the hell I have got an enormous description of building at a certain point, but I’m afraid they just have to put up with it.’ Ibid., p. 335. 73 on the surface that he misses his true standing in life and falls prey to a ‘narcissistic’ self-deception. At the end of the novel, he is tragically cast out of what he previously deems as naturally his own. Through these characters, Alan Hollinghurst very effectively portrays the plight of the homosexual man in society who has to make a deliberate and conscious choice in accepting his essential ‘otherness’ in the hetero- normative society and living in deep awareness of forces against him or in living in a self-built narcissistic illusion that he is already part of a large community and other people around him are there to love him no matter what he is. Talking about his novel The Spell, for example, Alan Hollinghurst himself makes it very clear that, beyond the depictions of the colorful lives these homosexual men lead, he wants to highlight a more obscure problem. The lives of homosexual men, very easily defined as ‘colorful, enjoyable and ‘gay’’, disguise a darker dimension which is fed by a mostly unacknowledged sense of loneliness and being cast out:
‘… with The Spell, I wanted to write more about pleasure. I know that the idea of pleasure itself has become a slightly charged thing – for instance, with the anti-gay movement and the perception that pleasure’s the only thing certain gay people want to have. I hoped to take a fairly ironic position on pleasure; one that shows it’s good to have fun, but that it isn’t the only thing.’22
The characteristics of a pleasurable and enjoyable life, which are generally attributed to homosexual individuals and their lives should be interpreted as an alibi of an underlying psychological cause and also as the society’s forced way of perceiving the homosexual man. Alan Hollinghurst, by both acknowledging and problematizing this ‘pleasure principle’ in the homosexual man’s life, presents some very realistic depictions of homosexual man and how they are positioned within society. In The Swimming-Pool Library, for example, William Beckwith’s colorful and social London life hides the inherent alienation of homosexual people by society. In his fast-paced and pleasure-oriented life, it is perhaps William Beckwith himself who keeps some dire facts out of his immediate perception. The turning-point of the novel
22 Ibid., p. 339. 74 emerges when William Beckwith comes to the understanding that in this pleasure- oriented life, he cannot have an autonomous and established personality. He has to shift the focus of his life from pleasure to ethics and make a choice between hiding his true self in transient pleasures and structuring a free and self-reliant individual. The novel ends with the main character’s unresolved paradox. Similarly, The Line of Beauty deals with the self-delusions of its main character, Nick Guest. Nick Guest is a young homosexual man who is very much concerned with beauty and aesthetics. He is almost obsessed with beauty and his fixation is to such an extent that he undervalues people around him and thinks that he can survive on his own. He cannot perceive the pretence of the Feddens family he is hosted by until the end of the novel. Nick’s tragedy reveals itself not when he is looking for a community, but when he deliberately distances himself from others like him. Alan Hollinghurst presents Nick’s coming to the awareness of the significance of community in his forceful exit out of the pretentious world of aestheticism. Hollinghurst also differs from his predecessors in that he depicts his characters as very active figures in the heart of cities they inhabit. His characters present us a portrayal of a very clearly defined metropolitan gay culture. It is in this metropolitan gay culture that the characters’ sexual pursuits and desires find themselves a scene. The city that engulfs the homosexual man to the degree of an involuntary invisibility seems to be simultaneously opening up underground spaces for him in which he can fall into the delusion that he is being himself by chasing beauty and momentary sexual gratification. Actually this self-deception is very much strengthened by society itself. The society prescribes its own image of a homosexual person onto homosexual people and they somehow feel compelled to act in certain ways.23 This affect of society and the need to strip one’s self24 out of these social
23 The French queer theorist Guy Hocquenghem, in his book The Screwball Asses pursues his claim that it is society itself simultaneously condemns and creates homosexuality, hence it is this socially prescribed version of homosexuality that many homosexuals live. Guy Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses, Semiotext(e) intervention series N.3., Trans. Noura Medell, England, London, 2010.
24 Guy Hocquenghem, in his book The Gay Nation, talks about how society gives shape to our desires: ‘However, the desiring machines operate above as well as below the level of ‘the human person’, for it is society which at different points in historical development distributes desire in different ways through a process of coding, that is of signification which stabilises desire in patterns.’ Guy Hocquenghem, The Gay Nation,Pluto Press, London, 1996, p. 27. 75 frameworks are given voice by some queer thinkers like Guy Hocquenghem. The pursuit of beauty and momentary sexual gratification constitute the main engines of plot in Hollinghurst’s novel. However, Hollinghurst does not only utilize these as pieces of a grand narrative mechanism. Obsession with beauty and a focus on sexual gratification also reflect how the homosexual individual gives meaning to his identity as it is positioned in society. This relationship between the homosexual individual and society is mutual, in the sense that, it is the society itself which channels the homosexual man into a chase after beauty and sexual gratification. The homosexual individual, being psychologically prone to resolve the inner conflict in himself through art and perhaps camp elements, turns his chase after beauty and sex into a habitual way of living. This habituation is encouraged by society. Queer theory defines this as the ‘performative’ aspect of gender. The homosexual individual, in other words, most of the time learns to be a ‘homosexual’ by observing others like him in the ‘metropolitan gay culture’. Hollinghurst is aware of how these inclinations in the homosexual individual are prone to be turned into habit: ‘But I think desires, appetites and their innate tendency towards addiction, towards obsession, towards a need which becomes a habit, is what The Spell is about’. 25 The Folding Star, in a similar vein deals with a homosexual man who turns his desire for a young boy into a fixation and a kind of obsession. The libidinous dimension of the novel reveals the fragility of the homosexual individual in dealing with his quest for beauty and sexuality. One important defining characteristic of Alan Hollinghurst as a gay novelist is that he foregrounds the often marginalized homosexual characters who are obsessed with beauty and art. The mainstream literature, even the gay novel itself, positions such ‘wounded’ and ‘flawed’ characters at the margins of books. Hollinghurst does not depict his characters as only clubbers and as effeminate aesthetes; the pursuit of art and beauty and the sublimation of sexual desire are used as narrative foci through which the characteristics and personality traits of Hollinghurst’s characters are revealed and developed. Alan Hollinghurst explains
25 Canning, Richard, Ed., Conversations with Gay Novelists: Gay Fiction Speaks, New York, Columbia University Press, 2000, p. 343. 76 why he foregrounds and explicates artistic pursuits and artistic sublimation in his characters:
‘Bringing to the centre people who could acknowledge and fulfill themselves, however compromised or satirized it may be, was certainly part of my conscious intention in The Swimming-Pool Library. The idea was not to write about people in some was disadvantaged and sitting in the margins, but up there, in your face … So one doesn’t associate those characters with habits of mind and repressive social patterns one wants to discard. But I think I’ve always had characters who can’t quite make it into this world of hedonistic fulfillment. Will’s friend the doctor in The Swimming-Pool Library very much sublimates his feelings into his work [my italics]. Hugh in The Spell is similar.’
As the above quotation makes clear, many of Hollinghurst’s characters do not really fit into the stereotypical image of a homosexual man. This enables his readers to see the homosexual man confronted with society. Since we do not see his characters in full compromise with the machinations of society, the rupture they live in reveals the traumatic encounter society. Lord Nantwich in The Swimming-Pool Library, for example, is an elderly homosexual man who has simply failed himself into invisibility by not being able to construct himself an autonomous identity. The task of writing his diary, which symbolizes his ‘word’ in this life, his only and last chance to be someone, befalls on the shoulders of William Beckwith, who is himself not strong enough to tackle with this. The Spell, in a similar vein, in the person of Robin Woodfield, portrays us a homosexual man who consciously keeps himself out of the libidinous world of the gay metropolitan life. Robin is very successfully juxtaposed with his own son Danny, who seems to be enjoying himself in chasing and being chased in the sexual dance of the gay men in the kind of life his father had rejected. Nick Guest, in The Line of Beauty, is again somehow out of the homosexual milieu he would normally be accepted to inhabit. He does not know about the colorful gay social life and the dynamics of ‘cruising’26. It is only through his new lover he meets in London that he is initiated into the metropolitan gay world in London. Still, his
26 ‘Cruising’ is a word used to refer to the act of trying to pick up someone for anonymous gay male sex. 77 fixation on beauty and his pretentious characters do not allow him to come together with ordinary gay men; he spends his time with high-ranking people in society. He distances himself from the social dimension of his gayness; he does not give much thought on the significance of the AIDS epidemic, for example. The AIDS issue, very much like the serious social aspect of his standing in life, is presented only very fleetingly. The fact that the AIDS epidemic is treated in a seemingly shallow manner in Hollinghurst’s novels hints at another novelistic and literary characteristic of Hollinghurst which differentiates himself from his peers. Unlike many other gay novelists, Hollinghurst’s novels do not center around the theme of AIDS. Hollinghurst consciously ‘evades’ focusing on AIDS, because he thinks that it is rather cliché to construct characters dealing with AIDS in the gay novel. In other words, this strategic evasion on the part of Hollinghurst prevents his novels to be the voice of society that haunts homosexual individuals with the constructed AIDS narrative. Hollinghurst seems to be aware of the fact that if he had dealt with AIDS in the centre of his novels, they would only be accentuating the discourse of society itself. Gregory Woods, in his A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition, explains Hollinghurst’s narrative strategy in the following words:
‘The British novelist Alan Hollinghurst has adopted two different strategies of ‘evasion’; or rather, to phrase it more positively, he has twice refused to submit to the considerable pressure, from gay readers and straight critics, on all gay male writers, to write about AIDS. His first novel, The Swimming- Pool Library (1988) is a lusty celebration of pre-AIDS freedoms, already a ‘historical novel’ at the time of its publication by virtue of being set in London in the 1970s, a decade so radically different from the 1980s in the common experience of urban gay men.’27
The Swimming-Pool Library, for example, is a novel in the shadow of AIDS, but it is not acknowledged as a threat in an open manner. The main character William Beckwith leads a life which is very much ignorant of the impeding epidemic. Still, he
27 Gregory Woods. A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 1998. pg. 368-369. 78 voices his sense that the summer in which the events of the novel unfold would be the last happy summer of his life. This sense of an ending of one sort or another is there, because we have the AIDS epidemic behind the curtain. The Folding Star is a novel is too much concerned with the psychology of its main character to deal with AIDS openly, but even there, the main character Edward Manners is given an ex- lover who has died of AIDS. In a way, the novel starts with the loneliness triggered by AIDS in Edward’s life, but AIDS is not the main issue. This enables us to see more about the person influenced by AIDS. Any other narrative and stylistic strategy would only be strengthening the discourse wound up and let loose by society. The way Hollinghurst deals with the AIDS question is perhaps the most revealing aspect of his authorship. Hollinghurst himself has dealt with this issue in his Master of Arts thesis which is titled as ‘The Creative Uses of Homosexuality in the Novels of E.M. Forster, Ronald Firbank and L.P. Hartley’. Hollinghurst in his thesis makes a differentiation between homosexuality as a ‘content’ and homosexuality as a ‘lifestyle’. Richard Canning hints at a problematic of the British gay novel as put forward in Hollinghurst’s thesis:
‘… an unresolved question concerning the British gay literary canon; namely, what is the relationship between gayness as a matter of content and gayness such as it might be traced as literary lifestyle. In the thesis you argue for a clear division. For instance, you say Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man in ‘not distinctively homosexual for it relies on a new moral climate free from discrimination against homosexuality’. 28
It could safely be surmised that Alan Hollinghurst’s fiction is related to the tenets of queer theory that was developed in the 1980s and 1990s. Similar to queer theorists like Eve Sedgwick, Hollinghurst is interested in homosexuality not only as a concealed or revealed identity, but as a textual phenomenon. By working on the dynamics of the textual representation of homosexuality, Hollinghurst offers a wider fictional realm for the understating of homosexual selfhood and identity. He achieves this through creating a distinctive homosexual style in fiction which reveals the
28 Canning, Richard (ed.), Conversations with Gay Novelists: Gay Fiction Speaks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 350. 79 homosexual man’s positioning both from a psychological and social perspective. Another significance of Alan Hollinghurst is that he attempts at building a distinctive form for the homosexual experience. Hollinghurst’s fiction could be read as a striving step for an autonomous ‘queer’ canon in which the plight of the homosexual man is linked to the perennial issues of humanity without being marginalised.
80
CHAPTER THREE Fatherless Men
‟Why have you grown up such a dull dog, when I gave you such a good start? Why have you spent your time in dusty libraries, cataloguing other people’s books instead of writing your own?” L.P.Hartley, The Go-Between
The main theme of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Swimming-Pool Library is coming to terms with the tension between the acceptance and active ignorance of the inherent strains of male homosexuality. The high degree of self-contentment of the insular and free-floating main character of the novel, William Beckwith, is crumbled into pieces as he becomes aware of the hypocrisy of society towards homosexuals, a recurring theme in Hollinghurst’s novels. The development of the main character of the novel, William Beckwith, lets us trace the course of the perception of male homosexuality in the 20th century. It can be argued that The Swimming-Pool Library is mainly about the male homosexual’s search for identity and community in the 20th century British society. This search for community is characterised by a state of constant flowing and deprivation of any kind of fixation, as the words ‘pool’ and ‘library’ in the title of the novel indicate. The male homosexual’s conscious and most of the time the socially forced rejection of the patriarchal order and the anxiety of coming to terms with that order create a sense of ‘fatherlessness’ which permeates the novel from beginning to end. This rejection of the father and his order makes it compulsory for the male homosexual characters in the novel to forge for themselves a new identity and a new community in which this fatherlessness could be compensated. A queer reading of this struggle attaches attributes like secrecy, double lives and illusions of freedom to the mainstream homosexual idendity. Homosexual characters in The Swimming-Pool Library have rejected their fathers and their ways; instead of begetting children, they have directed their urge to create on their own bodies in a narcissistic way. They have fallen prey into a kind of suffocating
81 insularity in which they had to create themselves. Thus, a common conflict that emerges in The Swimming-Pool Library is between this inherent insularity and the wish to be sustained by a community. The narrator and the main character of The Swimming-Pool Library is William Beckwith, a twenty-five year old English aristocrat. William Beckwith, as a good-looking and self-indulgent homosexual man, has a very high self-esteem and the novel depicts the gradual crumbling of this self-esteem, through which readers can see both the internal structure of and the inherent potential for disintegration of the homosexual male identity. As William Beckwith is invited by the eighty-three year old Lord Nantwich to examine his writings and to help him write his biography, he is taken out of his self-made and seemingly liberated world and forced into a comparison of emotional and sexual liberations of his own time and that of Lord Nantwich’s. By reading Lord Nantwich’s diaries, an ongoing act throughout the novel, William Beckwith can no longer be oblivious to rupturous homophobic history he has been living in. Through the diaries, again, he learns that his own grandfather had played a key role in the arrest and prosecution of Lord Nantwich for committing homosexual acts. It is interesting to note that it is not through his own father, but through someone his grandfather has sent to prison that William Beckwith becomes conscious of his identity and position in the world in a diachronic way. William Beckwith also comes to the realisation that his seemingly more liberated generation is trapped in a pursuit of physical gratification which leaves no room for emotions and lacks an intellectual background. The names of the characters and the characters’ concern for names in The Swimming-Pool Library strengthen the sense of creating an alternative universe to that of the patriarchal one. The title itself betrays a sense of dichotomy which is inherent all through the novel: the juxtaposition of the words ‘pool’ and ‘library’ indicate a clash between fluidity and fixation. Almost all of the male characters in the novel are frequent visitors of The Corry, a swimming-pool and sports centre exclusively for men. In this homosocial environment, most of the men are often protrayed in the pool. The water’s fluidity parallels with their constant search for identity and community. The pool itself, in bringing men of same sexual orientation, functions as a substitute community. It is when they are in this pool that these men
82 can feel themselves part of a sustaining community1. The image of water in this context could be read as a realm where the female principle rules. It is as if these homosexual men seek refuge in a regression to the anal order the mother. Since they cannot and do not come together in places socially allocated for heterosexual men, they rebuild the chaos of the anal world in this swimming-pool. The swimming-pool, in other words, functions as a regressive alternative to the patriarchal order to which the homosexual man cannot annex himself. We learn, at the very beginning of the novel, that William Beckwith has a ‘taste for black names, West Indian names’2. This is the first piece of information in the novel which makes it clear to the readers that, along with William Beckwith, many other male characters in the novel have turned their faces to African men. Apart from a sexual preference and taste, this tendency can also be read as a search for an alternative culture and social order. For William Beckwith, these black names ‘were a kind of time travel’ for him3 and they were different from the Edwardian names which he finds ‘unflecked by sex or malice’4. The main character’s surname, Beckwith, contains connotations of going back in time and being a proponent of a reverse order. William, indeed, goes back in time while reading Nantwich’s diaries and draws comparisons between Nantwich’s and his own life. The name Beckwith also connotes anal sexuality, which is in itself a reversal of the given dictates of the patriarchal order. Lord Nantwich’s name Charles brings to one’s mind Charles I, the beheaded English king. The prosecution of Charles I during the English Civil War echoes Lord Nantwich’s persecution by Sir Denis Beckwith. The first syllable of the surname Nantwich is very similar to the word ‘nan’ or ‘nanny’, which attributes feminine elements to Charles Nantwich. It can also be related to ‘non’, indicating the fact that Charles could not do anything with his life and his diaries and is in need of William Beckwith to write about his life. Nantwich is also a name of a market town in the
1 Alan Hollinghurst’s novels abound in scenes in which homosexual men come to an understanding of such communal gatherings and specifically homosexual places. Nick Guest, in The Line of Beauty, for example, feels what such a community of homosexual men can offer him when he is pulled into a boat by other men frequenting such a homosexual pool. 2 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, London, Vintage, 2006, p.1. 3 Ibid., p.1. 4 Ibid., p.2.
83 unitary authority of Cheshire East which was founded in Roman times. We later learn in the novel that there is a floor mosaic of a Roman bath on the basement floor of Nantwich’s house, which creates an immediate link between Nantwich the town and Nantwich the man who lives above what used to be a Roman bath, which again foregrounds the rupturous homosexual history going all the way back to Roman times.
3.1. Men of the Underworld
The novel permeates with many references to and connotations of a kind of underlife and an alternative social order. The opening scene of the novel takes place in the underground train and the readers are immediately shown ‘men moving along the tunnels’5. William Beckwith likens these tunnels to ‘labyrinths’6, which strengthen the sense of alienation and alternative routes in life. Similarly, the swimming-pool at The Corry, where most of the action of the novel takes place, is ‘reached down a spiral staircase from the changing rooms’7. This spiral downward movement leads us to the swimming-pool itself, which is pervaded by darkness8. All these images of going into a kind of dark underworld ‘makes the pool seem remote from the rest of the world’9. Men in this underworld, it seems, have created an alternative world for themselves. Men from many different planes of life are assuming different selves in this ‘naked mingling’10. Many male characters in the novel are homosexuals and due to their ‘marginality’, they are forced to inhabit the fringes of society or certain underworlds which are invisible to normal inhabitants. Charles Nantwich’s house, for example, ‘was on a street off Higgin Hill, so narrow that it had been closed to traffic and was
5 Ibid., p.1. 6 Ibid., p.1. 7 Ibid., p.11. 8 Ibid., p.12. 9 Ibid., p.12. 10 Ibid., p.16.
84 no longer marked in the London A-Z’11. Lord Nantwich’s house not being marked in the London A-Z signifies not only his alienation from and deterritorialization in society, but also his already lost ties with any specific community. Thus, he is forced to live in his own unchartered land. This alienation of the homosexual character is not the product of an oppresive society only, it is also self-inflicted. William Beckwith, similarly, spends his days in an insular existence: ‘Because I was so easily moved by people, I had learned to distance myself, just in those moments when I felt them taking hold’12. William’s lover Phil is also described with some subterranean adjectives. When William visits Phil for the first time in the hotel where Phil works, they walk along the parts of the hotel frequented by the visitors, but then they go into the corridors where the workers of the hotel are running about. William likens these corridors to ‘subterraneous parts of the worst schools we used to play matches against’13. Hollinghurst portrays William Beckwith as a young homosexual man who is very much obsessed about sex. His love of beautiful young black boys and his promiscuity reflect an underlying conflict which he tries to resolve through sexual gratification. William Beckwith has no sustaining parental relationship with his mother and father. Since he could not merge his selfhood with a parental figüre in a healthy manner, his selfhood demands a compensatıry affirmation through the sexual act. William Beckwith’s self-cohesion, in Heinz Kohut’s terminology, demands the pursuit of sexual gratification. Sex and the pursuit of lust act as a kind of purgation for many of the male characters in the novel. It can be argued that it is through the sexual act itself that these characters feel themselves alive. The function of sex in William’s life is most evident in his words:
‘If I had not been so fiercely and sexually in love with him [Arthur], these days would have been utterly intolerable. And even so there were spells of repugnance, both at him and at my own susceptibility. Sex took an almost
11 Ibid., p.70. 12 Ibid., p.84. 13 Ibid., p.103.
85 purgative quality, as if after hours of inertia and evasion we could burn off our unspoken fears in vehement, wordless activity’14.
William’s words hint at some ‘unspoken fears’ which define their mode of existence as homosexual characters. These ‘unspoken fears’ reflect the inner conflict in his self and lack of completeness. This conflict directs the homosexual man to take refuge in sex as an act of purgation. Sexuality for the homosexual man could be read as a compensatory act through which they can feel themselves completed and autonomous.15 Sex, being defined as a ‘wordless activity’ in the above quoted paragraph, builds up a connotation of sexual activity going against the Word as the epitome of social order, namely that of the patriarch and ultimately of God. William Beckwith, his lovers and all those male characters around him seem to have created for themselves a sphere of life which functions as an alternative to the accepted patriarchal order around them. William’s fanciful love for Arthur, their lovemaking and hangovers, references to vomiting, excrement and urine as accessories of the sexual act16 all produce a sense of an unusual and ‘perverted’ existence. Lord Nantwich’s great admiration for black people and his having spent long years in Africa are strong indications of this search for an alternative life and society. Lord Nantwich’s interest is not only a sexual one; he nurtures a very deep admiration for the culture and people of black people in general:
‘The beauty of the men is so openly displayed that it seems a reproach to lust. I felt anger and something akin to remorese last night when I thought of
14 Ibid., p.29. 15 Charles W. Socarides, in his book Homosexuality, offers a psychoanalytical perpestive to and explanation fort he homosexual man’s rejection of the patriarchal order: ‘The homosexual strives to fulfill his own masculinity, to identify with a strong male figure to reinvest his penis with male interest, to become whole, complete, satisfied and without fear of the castrating influences of both mother and father [...] In all instances of male homosexuality the patient attempts to deny the existence of a hostile, cold, and antagonistic father. The effect of this rejection in the unconscious of the patient may vary in harshness from rebuff to deprivation to persecution. Consequently, central to his attempt at any relationship with a man, he must idealize the good father figure’. Charles W. Socarides, Homosexuality, New York and London, Jason Aronson, 1978, p. 113 and 149. 16 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, London, Vintage, 2006, p.47.
86 how this noble, graceful people has, until so recently, been stolen into slavery or mutilated into eunuchry’17.
This admiration of black people and culture reflects the homosexual man’s search for and consciousness of other cultures and identities. Since the established, normative and patriarchal culture and its communities do not include them, homosexual men are forced to take divergent and marginalised routes in life. The possibility of creating an alternative to the patriarchal order which prioritizes heterosexuality and create a counter-order in which homosexuality could be regarded as a normal human condition, not a pathological one which could only be realised by eliminating the father and his mores. William Beckwith, through the novel, makes almost no reference to his father. The few references are very weak and they are always related to his grandfather in one way or another. William’s grandfather Sir Denis Beckwith and Lord Nantwich are elderly figures who are there to confront William with different understandings of the queer identity in the Twentieth century. The passage where Nantwich invites William into his library and shows him his valuable works of art is significant, because it is about a historical figure who has rebelled against the established order. Nantwich shows William King Akhaneten’s relief and explains its significance along with its history:
‘… he broke away from the worship of Amon and made everyone worship the sun instead. Something I’m sure you’d agree with him over,’ he added, patting my wrist. ‘But such apostasy was not in itself enough. Oh no. He had to change the way he looked as well. He shifted the court from Thebes, where it had been for God knows how long, and set it upat Tel-el- Amarna…’18.
King Akhaneten’s moving away from the worship of Amon is a parallel act of defying the order of the father. Lord Nantwich’s telling the story of Akhanaten’s rebellious rule creates a historical bond with himself and the story also ties William
17 Ibid., p.108. 18 Ibid., p.76.
87 and Nantwich together as two fatherless men. Receiving this piece of historical information, William looks at the relief of Akhanaten again. The relief was actually an artist’s attempt to sketch and stylise Akhanaten before doing the original relief. In these attempts of the artist ‘the king seemed almost to turn into a woman before our eyes’19. Nantwich’s house is full of similar artefacts and they all ‘enshrined secret metamorphoses’20. This sense of stylisations and collection of art works all strengthen the idea of an alternative mode of existence. This attempt of creating an alternative mode of existence can be analysed within the framework of concepts like ‟creativity” and ‟perversion”. The concept of ‟creativity” could be linked with a need to form, shape, originate, to give existence to, to renew, to re-construct, to give new form or character and to form out of nothing. In creation, we either make something new or renew/reconstruct something that has been made before. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel’s Creativity and Perversion offers us an analytical framework to contextualise the homosexual man’s interest in the aesthetics and beauty from a personal and psychoanalytical perspective. Smirgel’s hypothesis is that ‟perversion” represents a reconstitution of chaos, out of which there arises a new reality, that of the ‟anal universe”. This new reality might be defined as a replacement of the psycho-sexual genital dimension, that of the father: ‘The pervert is trying to free himself from the paternal universe and the constraints of the law’21. This attempt to get free from the paternal order is quite evident in William’s closest friend James’s words:
‘Anyway, back here, I thought what does this all mean? It means we must be as creative as possible –even if we can’t actually have children, we must give ourselves completely to whatever we do, as I’ve always sort of thought, we must make something out of everything we do’22.
For Smirgel, the laws governing the undifferentiated ‘anal-sadistic universe’ do not coincide with those governing ‘the genital dimension of psycho-sexuality’, which is
19 Ibid., p. 76. 20 Ibid., p. 78. 21 Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, Free Association Books, London, 1985. 22 Op.cit., p. 220-221.
88 one with the paternal universe, that of logic23. Smirgel exmeplifies this urge to dethrone the Father God-Creator in three Luciferian characters, which are Caligula, Dr. Moreau and Hans Bellmer. Smirgel’s aim is to show the ‘reversal of values’in the doings of these characters24. Freud, similarly, emphasizes more than once in his works the fact that over and above all, the child wishes to be grown-up and take the place of the father. For example, in ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1908) he writes: ‘A child’s play is determined by wishes: in point of fact by a single wish -one that helps his upbringing- the wish to be big and grown up. He is always playing at being ‘grown up’, and in his games he imitates what he knows about the lives of his elders.’ When a child cannot be sustained by a healthy parental figure through whom her or his existence could be affirmed and apprecited, the indivudal cannot patterm hsi selfhood after an idealised parental figure. In other words, he is denied an Ego Ideal. We may consider the wish ‘to be big’ as a basic content of Ego Ideal. As a matter of fact, all feelings of admiration push toward identification. The mother’s attitude of seduction may, however, destroy in her child his wish to be big and grown up and prevent him from experiencing this admiration for his father who becomes his model for identification, the bearer of the child’s Ego Ideal. Lord Nantwich’s ‘worship for bigger boys’ can be an example to this psychic replacement. For Smirgel, this can be likened to a trap set up by the mother:
‘Then, it is as if the mother had pushed her child into a trap, making him believe that, with his infantile sexuality and his prepubescent penis, he is a perfect partner for her, and consequently, that he has nothing to envy his father for –halting, in this manner, the child’s evolution. The child’s Ego Ideal remains attached to a pregenital model, instead of cathecting the genital father and his attributes. As a matter of fact, the pervert, helped more often than not by his mother, lives under the illusion that pregenitality is equal or even superior to genitality. The father and his attributes come to be disqualified’25.
23 Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, Free Association Books, London, 1985, p.18. 24 Smirgel mentions Adolf Hitler as a Luciferian character who has rejected the paternal order and worked on the image of an almighty mother: ‘Nazism has often been compared to a religion, the Nuremberg meetings to a Roman Catholic mass, and Hitler to a High Priest. However the cult thus celebrated has a Mother Goddess (Blut und Boden, or blood and earth) -rather than the father- as its object. In such groups, what we see is an actual eradication of the father and paternal universe as well as of all the Oedipus Complex derivatives. In the case of Nazism, the return to nature, to the old Germanic mythology, expresses a yearning after the fusion with the almighty mother.’, Ibid., p. 69. 25 Ibid., p. 28.
89
This emphasis on mothers and fathers reveal an attempt of the homosexual man to free himself from the constraints of the patriarchal order. He sides with his mother to rule out the father to create a new order of his own. Lord Nantwich’s admiration for his mother and his writing to her on a daily basis might be reflections of this inclination to reject the fathery order. When William visits Lord Nantwich’s house for the second time, he sees an old tie on the bed and remembers ‘how [his] mother used to stand behind [him] at the mirror each morning to knot [his] tie when [he] was a little boy’26. Lord Nantwich’s mother in this scene is portrayed as someone who has a powerful grip over her son. By knotting a tie for her boy, she both prepares him for the patriarchal world, but does not let him move away from her in full freedom. She puts him in stead of his father, before he is a fully grown man. As Smirgel argues: ‘The pervert’s mother who makes her son believe that there is no need to wait and grow up in order to take the father’s role…’27. Smirgel, in summary, tries to point out the impact of the seduction of the mother on the Ego Ideal. The main idea here is that, contrary to the ‘normal’ subject, ‘the future pervert does not Project his Ego Ideal onto his father’28. In the Freudian framework, a normal developmental process would encourage the little boy to be interested in his father: ‘he would like to grow like him, and take his place everywhere. We may say simply that he takes his fathjer as his ‘ideal’29. This attempt to create, to instate a new order for themselves in life can be seen in other homosexual characters in the novel. William’s closest friend James’s urge to do something in life, William’s anxiety nurtured by his very idleness, his almost drained creative force in and towards life and Nantwich’s admiration for strong men are all indications of the homosexual man’s attempt to compensate fort he lack of an Ego Ideal in the construction of their selfhood. Their failed merging
26 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, London, Vintage, 2006, p.91. 27 Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, Free Association Books, London, 1985, p.61. 28 Ibid., p. 69. 29 Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921, p. 105.
90 with the father and his order leads them to the aesthetic and sexual gratification as an attempt at building themselves a cohesive self. Smirgel talks about this conflict in following words:
‘Those who have not been able to project their Ego ideal onto their father and his penis, and, who subsequently have gaps in their identifications, will feel the necessity, for obvious narcissistic motives, to grant to themselves their missing identity by different means, creation being one among others. The work thus created will symbolize the phallus, the gap in the identity being likened to castration. Despite being unable to identify with his father, the subject will be led to create; yet, instead of begetting his work, he will fabricate it. This work does not obey the principle of filiation, as he himself does not. As the introjection of paternal capacities and attributes has not been accomplished, and as the desires linked to that process have been repressed and counter-cateched, the subject will not have at his disposal the desexualised (sublimated) libido necessary to achieve his work. Its originator will be the ego ideal but the raw material employed will not have been basically modified. As he is ‘the Son of Nobody’ (the title of a play by Henri de Montherlant), the creator I am describing will find it difficult to be the father of a genuine work. The identity he bestows upon himself is necessarily usurped, since it is based on the negation of himself as being a link in the chain of the generations’30.
Smirgel’s discussion falls within the boundaries of the concept of narcissism. A wider interpretation of Smirgel’s theory of perversion and creativity refers to the inherent conflict in the homosexual man’s selfhood. Since the homosexual man cannot be sustained with a healthy merging with his parental figures, he is deprived of the self-affirmation and acknowledgement he needs to build himself a coherent self. The homosexual man’s inherent sense of incompatability with the father’s order leaves him within the world of the mother. Since he finds himself no place in the father’s order, in the symbolic paternal world, he sticks to the mother’s anal world. Lacking the father’s symbol, he finds himself in an ongoing attempt to compensate for this missing symbol which would cohere his selfhood. Smirgel’s discussion of ‘perversion’ and ‘creativity’ actually develops around this compensatory act of the homosexual man.
30 Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, Free Association Books, London, 1985, p.69.
91 The creativity of the homosexual man for Smirgel is a fake one and it is never an orginal act of creation. This is the very point around which Smirgel is criticised for ascribing ‘fakeness’ and a strong sense of inadequacy to the homosexual man’s attempt to create. However, her analysis of the homosexual man’s ‘deviant’ sexuality and ‘creativity’ unfolds the Dynamics of his inner conflict that develops around his need for self-affirmation. Nor being affirmed in family and society alike, the homosexual man seeks refuge in the arts, beauty and the aesthetics. In line with Smirgel’s argument, the homosexual man’s occupation in the aesthetics and all other compensatory acts of his do not suffice to give him a legitimate place in society, hence he is left fatherless and homeless.
3.2. Men Roaming:
The Swimming-Pool Library is a novel in which a young homosexual man learns from the past and looks to the future. The main character of the novel, William Beckwith, has to come to terms with the fact that society defines him by his sexuality only and he is devoid of the support of any cohesive community. Thus, the novel can be read as an (un)conscious quest for community in which a homosexual man can relate himself to other people and form his identity. William Beckwith leads an effortless life in London’s wealthy Holland Park. His view of the city of London is a very privileged one thanks to his class and wealth. Lord Denis Beckwith, William’s grandfather, had settled his inheritance on him. William’s grandfather, Lord Beckwith worked as a Director of Public Prosecutions31 and it’s one of the backbones of the novel that William’s grandfather was behind the prosecution of homosexuality in the 1950s. It’s ironic that it’s through this income generated out of the prosecution of homosexuality that William enjoys the freedom he has in his sexual pursuits.
31 In the eary 1950s, laws prohibiting sexual behaviour between men were actively enforced by the police. The policy resulted in the arrest and trial of some high-profile people.
92 The chronological framework in which William Beckwith as a fictional character is situated tells us a lot about how his actions should be contextualized. The passing of the Wolfenden Committee Report32 almost coincides with Will’s birth. He was a teenager in the post-1967 period. The Sexual Offences Act33, which was passed around these years, initiated the decriminalisition of homosexuality in society. In the homosexual milieu of Will, young men are more privileged than the middle aged or elderly men. Will’s early adulthood coincides with the 1980s explosion of the disco world and London homosexual clubs.34 The arrogant, selfish and intolerant nature of Will is largely nurtured by these advantages of his social milieu. Will’s fate is thus completely different from the earlier generations of homosexual men who had to face arrest, imprisonment and public scandal. The lack of a continous homosexual history is very evident in Will’s life. The ruptures created by the state do not allow a continuous and incremental flow of history in which specific homosexual identities could be embedded. It is as if each generation of homosexual men are left alone to define themselves in society and they cannot benefit from the cohesive function of a continuous history. Unlike many homosexual men who are desperate to discover a homosexual history for themselves, Will has never felt such a need. He is very much like a character who is blindly content with his illusionary favorable social conditions around him. He doesn’t give much thought to the battles fought by the previous generations of homosexual man to attain the rights he greatly enjoys. He is very much content with his present time. The achievements of Stonewall and the Homosexual Liberation Front are taken for granted by Will.35 As he himself makes it clear, when his friend is arrested by a
32 ‘The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution’ was published in Britain on 4 September 1957 after a sucession of well-known men, including Lord Montagu, Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood. The chairman of the committee was Lord Wolfenden. 33 The Sexual Offences Act of 1956 is an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom that consolidated the English Criminal Law relating to sexual offences. 34 Matt Cook, A Gay History of Britain, Oxford: Greenwood World, 2007, p.188. 35 The Stonewall Riot took place after a police raid in 1969 on the Stonewall Inn, a homosexual venue in Christopher Street, New York. This was the first time homosexual people had openly fought back in this way against the authorities. The New York Homosexual Liberation Front was formed in the wake of this, with the Christopher Street Homosexual Pride March in new York in June 1970. The formation of the London Homosexual Liberation Front followed soon after. See Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out, 1990, p.188.
93 ‘pretty policeman’36, he observes that it ‘gave me an urge to solidarity with my kind that I wasn’t used to in our liberal times’37. Will’s remoteness and ignorance of the battles fought before him can also be observed when he discovers the truth about his grandfather’s part in the ‘homosexual witch-hunt’. When this information is revealed to him, he comments to his friend James: ‘…There was a whole sort of homosexual pogrom, apparently …’38. The word apparently here reflects Will surprise and ignorance. The meeting with Charles Nantwich creates a rupture in Will’s life and the dynamics of his seemingly comfortable life fall apart. Through Charles Nantwich, Will becomes aware of a hidden and suppressed history. Will also learns that this hidden history is also closely related to his own life in 1983. It’s after this revelation that Will is going to understand the relationship between the community and the individual. Public spaces like public toilets and open parks are largely used as a symbol of the lack of place granted to homosexual men in Hollinghurst’s novels. It is only in these public spaces that homosexual men can meet with one another. It is in a public urinal that Will meets Lord Nantwich. Through writing his memoirs, William Beckwith is supposed to reach a certain level of awareness about his homosexual identity. Charles Nantwich was born in 1900. Remembering the fact that homosexuality was a criminal offence until the 1967 Sexual Offences Act 39, he had to keep his sexual life in great secrecy. Lord Nantwich’s life is juxtaposed with that of William Beckwith’s in the novel. Charles, too, comes from a wealthy family which had afforded him a more privileged life. Still, especially after World War the Second, secrecy and coded living became an indispensable part of the lives of homosexual men. In the 1950s, some sociological studies and the popular media
36 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, London, Vintage, 2006, p. 222. 37 Ibid., p. 223. 38 Ibid., 278. 39 1967 Sexual Offences Act is an Act of Parliament in the United Kingdom. It decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men, both of whom had to have attained the age of 21. The Act applied only to England and Wales and did not cover the Merchant Navy or the Armed Forces.
94 claimed that, as Matt Cook puts it, ‘queers were undermining the post-war social reconstruction, not least by turning their back on family life.’40 Another parallel which could be drawn between Charles’s and William’s lives is that they both witness an assault on their nascent freedoms in society. The discrimination of homosexuals in the 1950s might be taken as a reaction to the freedoms available during World War the Second. The counterpart of this discrimination in William’s life in the 1980s emerges in the form of AIDS. In the 1980s again, Margaret Thatcher’s focus on ‘strengthening the traditional family’41 nurtured the anti-homosexual prejudice, which is the backbone of Hollinghurst’s latest 2004 novel The Line of Beauty. Reading Lord Nantwich’s diaries, William becomes aware of the fact that there is a strong need for solidarity, for forming a community to fight against oppression and discrimination in society. Nantwich’s diaries offer him a framework in which he is expected to write down a queer history. It would be through this history he is expected to write that he can carve out a place for himself in society and exist in a sustaining community. History in that respect has a cohesive function. In Walking After Midnight, Gay Men’s Life Stories, groups of homosexual men talk about this cohesive force of history:
‘History can be a cohesive force. By looking back and seeing how other homosexual men have lived their lives, struggled and survived, we develop a shared sense of the past, a clearer understanding of the present, and an indication of the possibilities of the future.’42
The novel is narrated through Will’ voice. The description of Nantwich through Will’s voice is not a bright one. Will depicts him as an old and dull man: ‘I saw he was dribbling gin from his glass onto the carpet. He touched my outstretched hand. ¨Whoopsy! he said, as if I were being a nuisance.’43. However, through Nantwich’s journals the readers hear a completely different voice from that of Will’s. Nantwich’s
40 Matt Cook, A Gay History of Britain, Oxford: Greenwood World, 2007, p.167. 41 Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, London: Harper Collins, 1993, p.628. 42 Hall Carpenter Archives, Homosexual Men’s Oral History Group: Walking After Midnight, Homosexual Men’s Life Stories, London: Routledge, 1990, p.3. 43 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, London, Vintage, 2006, p. 36.
95 voice is more direct and does not contain Will’s obsessive and selfish sentimentality. David Alderson, in Territories of Desire in Queer Culture: Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries, argues that Charles Nantwich ‘addresses the reader directly, and is lucid and self-reflexive – far more so than the self-deluding Beckwith.¨44 In order to understand the status Will holds in the city he lives in and his position in the community therein, one should analyze how he is related to the city. The beginning of the novel makes it clear that Will perceives London as nothing but a playground. Although he visits many homosexual places in the city, he has neither knowledge nor interest in their historical significance. His disregard for homosexual history within the city is to the extent that he despises older homosexual men who frequent the homosexual cinemas. He refers to a ‘spry little chap of sixty-five or so’45 seated in the front row like a schoolgirl innocently absorbed at a romantic ‘U’ certificate film: ‘A fiver from his pension, perhaps, and 30p for the humbugs, might be set aside weekly for this little outing. How he must look forward to it!’46. Ironically enough, William will soon become aware of the fact that Charles Nantwich and his elderly circle are the very producers of these films. While travelling in the underground train, Will mostly uses the Central Line and he describes it as ‘a great bleak drain’. His disregard for history can also be seen in his conception of the underground trains and stations: ‘… I had given up looking out for their unlit platforms and, perhaps, in a flash form the rails, the signboards and good- humored advertisements of an abandoned decade’47. Will’s dismissal and ignorance of the city’s hidden stories is very evident in these lines. The city for William is not a place which holds people together in a meaningful framework. The city for William functions as a playground, it’s like a library of desires for him. With his private income, he enjoys control over the city. He ventures from his comfortable Holland Park for adventures in Soho and the West End. He usually picks up young boys who are mostly his social inferiors:
44 David Alderson, Desire as Nostalgia: The novels of Alan Hollinghurst.Territories of Desire in Queer Culture: Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries, Ed., David Alderson and Linda Anderson, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, p. 33. 45 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, London, Vintage, 2006, p. 51. 46 Ibid., p. 51. 47 Ibid., p. 52.
96
‘I took home boys from far out – from Leyton, Leytonstone, Dagenham, New Cross – who like me made their pilgrimage to this airless, electrifying cellar in the West End, but had no way, if they failed to score, at three or four a.m., of getting home’48.
Emma Higgins, in her article titled as ‘Alan Hollinghurst and Metropolitan Homosexual Indentities’, argues that while Hollinghurst describes the excitement of the metropolitan world, the novel is ‘both promoting the pleasures of the homosexual scene and questioning the ethos behind it.’49 The novel questions the issue of spatiality. Although he seems rather heedless of his surroundings, Will is depicted as a character trying to find his way in the city he lives in. The fact that the novel opens in the last tube train heightens this sense of awareness of place in Will’s life. Will looks at a ‘severely handsome’ London Transport maintenance man and he thinks of the ‘lonely, invisible’50 work in an underground world. It occurs to him that these maintenance men are not seen by daily commuters. This draws a parallel between Will and the maintenance man in that Will has carved himself out a deceptively free space in a ruthless and stigmatising society. This first scene of the novel also creates a sense of things unseen, of another world functioning below the surface of the city. While watching the workers, Will wonders at their ‘inverted lives’51. The very use of the word ‘inverted’ here draws a parallel between the word ‘inversion’ that was used to define homosexuality by the nineteenth century medical profession. Thus, the references to the underground in the novel create a strong sense of affinity between the lives of homosexual men that need to be lived in secret. The way William positions himself in the city changes throughout the novel. At the beginning Will has a regular route in London. He travels just a short distance
48 Ibid., p. 192. 49 Emma Liggins, ‘Alan Hollinghurst and Metropolitan Homosexual Identities’ Posting the Male: masculinities in post- war contemporary British literature ed. Daniel Lea & Berthold Schoene (New York: Rodopi, 2003) 159. 50 Op.cit., p. 1. 51 Ibid., p. 1.
97 on the Central Line on a daily basis: from his Holland Park flat to Tottenham Court Road and the Cory, Soho for Shaft Disco and the cinemas. Will observes that:
‘It was perhaps only of that very stretch of the Central Line which I always travelled that its fastidious rectilinearity gave a true picture: from Shepherds Bush to Liverpool Street the line had that Roman straightness which I so admired above ground’52.
The ‘straight lines mentioned in the above quotation are illusionary. Their straightness offer only a seemingly order which is highly deceptive. Will’s meeting with Charles changes his routes in the city as well. He starts to journey further out, to St. Paul’s for Charles’s house and then on to stations such as Benthal Green and Mile End, where he changes his direction towards northern stations. In a way, Charles widens Will’s horizons and he goes out of his seemingly safe straight lines. Through Charles’s diaries Will is not changing his spatiality, but his temporality as well. Charles’s diaries take him to the Africa of the 1920s. Will also travels in time within his own city. He visits the 1920s Soho, the cottages of the West End in wartime and Wormwood Scrubs in the 1950s. These excursions are ‘underground’ in that they would not have been mapped on any official tourist guide. This creates a sense of suppression and secrecy. Making use of the tube as a key motif in his novel, Hollinghurst makes Will rediscover the London that he thought he knew very well. This very underworld also reveals a hidden history to Will. The underground tube system, the streets of the city above it and Will’s consciousness are all related to one another in the novel. While looking at Harry Beck’s famous London Underground Map, for example, Will muses:
‘It was clever piece of work, all the lines being made to run either up and down, from left to right, or at forty-five degrees, so that the whole thing became a set of dissolving and interpenetrating parallelograms’53.
52 Ibid., p. 46. 53 Ibid., p. 46.
98 The straight lines referred to in the above quotation might be visually pleasing to Will, readers are shown that there is more than that. This map might be interpreted as an example of ‘strategic mapping’, which is a term coined by the cultural geographer Michel de Certeau. This ‘strategic mapping’ refers to the attempts of modern city planners to impose order on the city. Frank Mort, in Sexual Geographies, argues that ‘operating from on high, these techniques mobilise a panoptic vision of the city and its subjects’.54 There is not a direct relation between the actual layout of the city, but it still influences the way it is imagined. The tube map, on the other hand, distorts reality so as to make it fit in the prevailing hegemony. The tube in that respect can be seen as a grand narrative that is heedless of the real shape of the city. The margins of the metropolis above are ignored in the tube system. Mark Turner argues that:
‘The difficulty in writing queer history (as with any history, in fact) is in getting the story down without levelling it out. How can we tell a story without unnecessarily negating other, linked stories that might also be told? Where are our priorities?’55
Beck’s map ignores the complexity of London as a real city; similarly the patriarchal hegemony erases queer culture. It is through Charles’s diaries that William will become aware of the city in its all complexity and it will be only after this revelation that he will try to find himself a community in the city. Hollinghurst’s novels have a lot of references to houses and architectural details. Houses are symbols of spatialities where people sustain their identities. Houses are concrete proofs of belonging to a certain community. The novel abounds in references to architectural details and buildings. Many of these buildings are historically significant. The Brutus cinema in Soho, for example, specializes in homosexual pornography. The cinema is situated in a secret part of London. The visible part of the cinema, that is its façade, is an official beauty, whereas there are unofficial delights below:
54 Frank Mort, Sexual Geographies, London, Lawrence&Wishart, 1999, p. 105. 55 Mark Turner, Backward Glances, London, Reaktion, 2003, p. 43.
99
‘The Brutus Cinema occupied the basement of one of those Soho houses which, above ground-floor level, maintain their beautiful Caroline fenestration, and seemed a kind of emblem of homosexual life (the piano nobile elegant above the squalid, jolly sous-sol) in the far off spring of 1983’56.
The novel connects architecture and history. This relation between history and architecture also reflects the dichotomy between the official and the unofficial. The secrecy behind and below the official side of buildings can be seen in Charles’s memories as well:
‘It is always gone on, of course, Charles recalled. We had little private bars, sex clubs really, in Soho before the war, very secret. And my Uncle Edmund had fantastic tales of places and sort of homosexual societies in Regent’s Park – a century ago now, before Oscar Wilde and all that – with beautiful working boys dressed as girls and what-have-you. Uncle Ned was a character...‘ Charles sat beaming.’57.
Another place William frequents is the Corinthian Club. Will is depicted as drawn to the excitement of the secret underworld of the club, which is again related to the underworld: ‘It was a place I loved, a gloomy and functional underworld full of life, purpose and sexuality’58. This underworld recognizes no social distinctions. As artificial disctinctions of the heteronormative order, class disctinctions do not exist in this underworld. This is an alternative order where homosexual men can enjoy a sense of ‘community’ among one another regardless of their social status and their ascribed positions in life. The homosexual man’s sticking to such underworlds in Hollinghurst’s novels reflect their prolonged stay in the mother’s anal world. This anal world is both an alternative and a trap-like realm ruled by the symbiotic mother. As evident in the imagery of water through the novel, The Swimming-Pool Library portrays the homosexual man as essentially positioned in anality. Pools as places of homosexual communities exist in other novels of Hollinghurst as well. In The Line of
56 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, London, Vintage, 2006, p. 48. 57 Ibid., p. 247. 58 Ibid., p. 9.
100 Beauty, for example, although initially heedless of the sustaining powers of a homosexual community, Nick Guest is initiated into an awareness and appreciation of such a community in such a public pool. The sexual excitement Will observes in the Corinthian Club, for example, is like a ritual of the club in which class distinctions no longer exist:
‘This naked mingling, which formed a ritualistic heart to the life of the club, produced its own improper incitements to ideal liaisons, and polyandrous happenings which could not survive in the world of jackets and ties, cycle- clips and duffel-coats. And how difficult social distinctions are in the shower’59.
In order to deepen this sense of homosexual eroticism erasing social boundaries, Hollinghurst makes a reference to a scene from a film. While depicting the atmosphere of the Corry’s swimming-pool, he makes the following reference:
‘It is the most subterraneous zone of the Club, its high coffered ceiling supporting the floor of the gym above. Corinthian pillars at each corner are an allusion to ancient Rome, and you half expect the see the towel-girt figures of Charlton Heston and Tony Curtis in deep senatorial conspiracy’60.
This image is a direct reminder of a scene that was cut out because of its homoeroticism from the 1960 film Spartacus.61 The roman General Crassus (Laurence Olivier) is in the bath with his body servant Antoninus (Tony Curtis). Antoninus washes him and the servant sexually approaches his master. A discussion about the eating of oysters and snails follow: ‘My taste includes both snails and oysters,‘ says Crassus, and points out that taste is not the same as appetite and is therefore not a question of morals. Another scene in which class distinctions are blurred can be seen in Charles Nantwichs’s Africa diaries of 1926. Charles’s nursing and taking care of his man
59 Ibid., p. 16. 60 Ibid., p. 11. 61 Spartacus, Dir., Stanley Kubrick, Universal, 1960.
101 servant Taha when he is bitten by a scorpion leaves out class distinctions in a similar vein: ‘Taha slid his hand shyly across the blanket & clasped my own...I felt a squeezing in my chest & throat & hardly dared look at him as, all unconsciously, I made our two hands more comfortable together, interweaving his long fingers with my own’62.
Taha makes Charles feel ‘a complete freedom from self-consciousness’63. The nature of their master and servant relationship does not exist in any of Will’s relationships. The lack of class disctinctions and any sense of hierarchy in these communities hint at different Dynamics of the homosexual community. The homosexual community as depicted in Hollinghurst’s novels negates the disctinctions of the heteronormative order. It could be surmised that the homosexual community envisaged in Hollinghurst’s fictional world does not include a presiding and normative father figure.
3.3. The Primal Father: Homosexual as Vampire
The sense of fatherlessness and hence placelessness is depicted is another theme in the novel. Vampire lore is used in The Swimming-Pool Library to accentuate the sense of loneliness and placelessness of the homosexual man in society. The vampire lore in the noval also conjures up a sense of deviant sexuality. Lord Nantwich, born in 1900, in this reading of the novel, would emerge as the Primal Father in the vampire lore. Like the Primal Father, it might be said that Lord Nantwich has fathered himself. His leaving England, his father’s land for Africa is a rejection of his father’s establishment. William Beckwith, too, might be seen as a vampire, who has to come to terms with the Primal Father by writing down and compiling his diaries.
62 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, London, Vintage, 2006, p. 211. 63 Ibid., p. 207.
102 Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula depicts the vampire character Count Dracula as a lonely and old man who sets out to look for a new home. Count Dracula lives in rural seclusion in his ancestral castle in Translyvania. Through the English real estate agent Jonathan Harker, he buys houses in London. Bram Stoker depicts the character of Count Dracula as a man who is in need of other people and a community:
‘I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl of and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is’64.
Count Dracula’s leaving his ancestral estate and venturing into a new country, his search for a new community enable us to draw parallels between the homosexual man and the vampire. The vampire image has been largely used in homosexual fiction by a number of writers. As Richard Dyer argues, the ‘vampire returns again and again in popular homosexual writing’65. Dyer argues that the reasons for this association between homosexuality and vampirism are historical. Vampires are associated with a decadent aristocracy. As Dyer expemplifes, the vampire character in fiction had been developed in the hands of aristocrats like de Sade and Byron or ‘writers posing as aristocrats’ like Lautréamont and Wilde’66. However, the real relation between vampirism and homosexuality, for Dyer, has emerged in a wider metaphorical association. The vampire’s bite on the neck resembles a kiss. This quintessential vampiric act usually ‘takes place in private, at night, most archetypally in a bedroom’67. Voyeurism and secrecy, essentially attributed to vampires, are the main characteristics that strengthen the relation between vampires and homosexuals. Dyer suggests that the suspense in the vampire tale concerning the discovery of the
64 Bram Stoker, Ed., Leonard Wolf, The Definitive Annotated Edition of Bram Stoker’s Classic Novel, London, New York, Plume Books, 1993. 65 Richard Dyer, ‘Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism’ in Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction, Ed., Susannah Radstone, London, Lawrence, 1988, p.47-72. 66 Ibid., p. 53. 67 Ibid., p. 55.
103 vampire’s secret nature is analogous to ‘the suspense of a life lived in the closet’68. In a similar vein, the languor and paleness of complexion are traits of a shared imagery between vampirism and homoexuality, which again derive from decadence. Another type of decadent aristocracy is the nineteenth-century figure of the flâneur, who also has a strong link with vampirim. The queer vampire in contemporary Gothic fiction has a marked resemblance to the nineteenth-century figure of the flâneur as defined by Walter Benjamin in his famous study of Charles Baudelaire (1973). Anne Rice’s vampire novels and the vampire films of Hollywood abound in such flâneur-like vampire characters. Benjamin defines the flâneur as a male individual ‘who strolls the streets contemplating the dream-like appearance of the urban spectacle’69; and this is very like Lestat de Lioncourt in Rice’s The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), for instance, who has ‘a Parisian background . . . refined sensibilities . . . with leisure enough to watch the world go past and skill enough to read its various ‘commonplace’ signs’70. Very much like the flâneur character, Lestat is a city stroller and performer: charming, cultivated, dandified, sexually voracious, and abnormally aware. William Beckwith in The Swimming-Pool Library has some very close affinities with these characteristics of the flâneurian vampire. Like the flâneurian gentleman, Beckwith is a young man with an aristocratic background who has no obligation to work for a living. Hence, he leads an almost parasitic and loitering, leisure life. Starting from the very first lines of the novel, the readers are informed about his vampire-like vigilance and lustfulness during his journey back home on the last tube train of the night in the company of a couple of London Transport maintenance men:
The black was looking at his loosely cupped hands: he was very aloof, composed, with an air of massive, scarcely conscious competence—I felt more than respect, a kind of tenderness for him. I imagined his relief at getting home and taking his boots off and going to bed as the day brightened around the curtains and the noise of the streets built up outside. He turned his hands over and I saw the pale gold band of his wedding ring.71
68 Ibid., p. 59. 69 Paulina Palmer, Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions, London, Cassell, 1999. 70 Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire, London, Routledge, 1994. 71 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, London, Vintage, 2006, p. 1.
104
The gold ring the black maintenance man wears on his finger strengthens the sense of difference between William Beckwith and other people. ‘The pale gold band of his wedding ring’ reminds Beckwith that he cannot be one of them. The fact that William Beckwith is attracted to black and working-class men is an act of breaking down barriers and ignoring social boundaries, which are again among the main characteristics of vampires in fiction. This kind of trespass of social classes is also a kind of disruption of identity. The attempt to identify with the black men in the above example also reflects William Beckwith’s search for empathise and community. Very much like the fictional vampire character, William Beckwith is chasing after people in dark underground tunnels. Another line of similarity between the homosexual man and the vampire figure could be drawn in their defying the normative paternal order and seeking an aternative life and community. Beckwith through the novel seeks what is taboo, forbidden and repressed. The first scene of the novel in the underground tube frames a discussion of established binaries in society. The juxtaposition of white and black men highlights an evocation of values ascribed to white people and black people, namely evil, danger, crime, uncleanliness, and rampant sexuality and their counterparts. The novel opens at night time, in an underground tube, which draws up a realm of unconscious as opposed to the conscious mind. The openly acknowedged and the repressed are confronted. Hollinghurst draws attention to the way the work of these black men functions as an invisible, if indispensable, counterpart to the visible, overground world of the London commuter: ‘I looked at them with a kind of swimming, drunken wonder, amazed at the thought of their inverted lives, of how their occupation depended on our travel, but could only be pursued, I saw it now, when we were not travelling’72. Presenting the main character of the novel in an underground tube at the beginning of the novel accentuates the sense of looking for a community. This search for community takes place between extremities, namely the
72 Ibid., p. 1.
105 daylit heteronormative order which is respected above the ground and the dark, subterranean world ascribed to homosexual men, likened to parasites and vampires. The parallelism between the flâneurian vampire, as expounded by Walter Benjamin, and the homosexual man is further elaborated in the later episodes of the novel. As Pauline Palmer expounds, Benjamin’s work establishes another relation which is between the flâneurian and the detective. As Paulina Palmer points out, Benjamin’s study of Baudelaire also establishes the relationship between the flâneur and the detective. The flâneur has a watchful and vigilant character. This characteristic identifies him with criminals and outlaws. Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library could well be read as a detective story in which William Beckwith is both the detective and the criminal. He investigates into Lord Nantwich’s life like a detective and he uncovers a family secret through the process. William learns that the political ambition and homophobic policies of the time have imprisoned Lord Nantwich and the prosecutor was William’s own grandfather, who was the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time of the arrest. William’s learning about this fact unsettles him. He is no longer the self-confidant young homosexual man who thinks that he can live comfortably in the heteronormative society. This revelation robs him of the sense of control over his life. William’s position as a sleuth is here double-edged; he is both the subject and the object of the investigation the half-voluntarily leads. Palmer refers to similar situations in depictions of lesbian flâneurs in fiction, where in appropriating ‘the male prerogative of the gaze . . . [the lesbian sleuth] simultaneously makes herself vulnerable to the gaze of others’73. The scene in which William is bullied by the skinheds on the street marks his awareness of being ‘in danger of becoming an abject presence on the city streets, vulnerable to ridicule and assault’74. There seems to be a strong relation between The Swimming-Pool Library and late nineteenth-century works by authors like Stevenson, Wilde, and Stoker—The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Dracula (1897). Willim Beckwith’s coming to understand the homophobia inherent in society and the way he responds to the normative order before and after
73 Paulina Palmer, Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions, London, Cassell, 1999, p. 131. 74 Ibid., p. 131.
106 his awareness could all be seen in a fictional continuity. What William Beckwith feels through these series of events is a kind of ‘homosexual panic’ as the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls it. For Sedgewick, this homosexual panic ‘is the most private, psychologized form in which many twentieth-century western men experience their vulnerability to the social pressure of homophobic blackmail’75. The vampire character, in Sedgewick’s framework, could be seen as a lonely and outcast figure who haunts ‘normal’ society and hopes for a place in it. In his attempt to integrate with the society, he causes a homosexual panic in society, which in turn, forces him into a closet. This social reaction and pressure could be related to the late nineteenth century focus on sexual taxonomy and the crisis in the male psyche. The novels referred to above all reflect this perceived threat within the society and we can very easliy follow how the social dynamics work to turn deviant male sexualities into monstrous perversions. The Swimming-Pool Library, dealing with a homosexual history of the last one hundred years, charts the evolution of this perception of homosexuality a something monstrous.
3.4. Men Reading
Gay fiction in Hollinghurst’s novels usually functions as a sanctuary for homosexual men who seek to see the reflection of their experiences in the novels of canonised homosexual authors. The intertextuality The Swimming-Pool Library draws on is also a reconfirmation of the existence of other homosexual men who have written about similar struggles and joys which can be compared with William Beckwith. Affinities with and references to authors like E.M. Forster and Ronald Firbank point at a process of ‘community building’ and ‘identity formation’ for Hollinghurt’s characters on a fictional level. William’s relation with other gay authors is triggered through a confrontation with history and the dilemmas he experiences during this confrontation are reflected in the references to two different
75 Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York, Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 89.
107 homosexual writers in the novel: E.M. Forster and Ronald Firbank. In 1980 Hollinghurst completed his M.Phil thesis on the strategies adopted by writers such as Ronald Firbank, E.M. Forster. These novelists express covertly their sexuality in an age that demanded concealment. Hollinghurst is seen as part of the narrative tradition inaugurated by Christopher Isherwood and developed by Edmund White. Like in their novels, a character’s homosexuality is simply a given in Hollinghurst’s novels. Social excesses and the individual’s inclination for self-delusion, the social lives of homosexual men and their search for a community and identity are the major themes of his novels. Athough he initiated his writing career as an Edwardian, E.M. Forster (1879- 1970) could well be evaluated as a precursor to the gay novel Alan Hollinghurst is part of. He was very much influenced by the repression and self-conscioussness in the English society and he could not work on homosexual themes in his novels as openly as he wanted. This resulted in a somehow encrypted style of fiction which dealt with homosexual love only fleetingy. Still, his posthumously published novel Maurice (1971) marks a new movement in gay fiction in that it has triggered and encouraged gay fiction to be more open and less apologetic. Ronald Firbank (1886- 1926) is known for his witty, highly camp and modernist works including novels and short stories. Firbank could be included among writers who pay a homage to Oscar Wilde and his aestheticism. He has developed a very strong modernist irony and skepticism through which he criticized and mocked the hypocritical Victorian morality into which he was born. His work deals with blacks, lesbians, women and homosexuals in a sympathetic way. E.M. Forster and Ronald Firbank not only appear as historical figures in The Swimming-Pool Library, they represent two modes, two poles of homosexual identity and representation. The narrative force of the novel itself is nurtured by the confrontation of these two modes as represented by Will’s psychological journey starting from blissful ignorance of his peripheral homosexual identity and move towards a troubled sense of his need to be part of a community. Ronald Firbank is explicitly linked with Sir Charles Nantwich: the two men knew each other in Nantwich’s youth. There are many references to Firbank in Nantwich’s journals. Nantwich’s and Will’s attraction to young African men and their witty sense of
108 humour also link the two characters to Firbank. The novel also links Forster with Sir Denis Beckwith. When Will, James and Sir Denis Beckwith go to see Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd76, Will comments on the ironic indirection of the opera: ‘He’s sort of coming out with it and not coming out at the same time.’ Sir Denis responds: ‘That was very much Forster’s line actually… He wanted it to be much more… open and sexy, as Will puts it’77. What Sir Denis refers to here is the publication of E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice (1971) only after his death. By writing Maurice, Forster made his homosexuality visible in fiction, but not letting the novel to be published in his lifetime, he confided his homosexual identity to a close circle of readers and friends only. It is ironical that, in The Swimming-Pool Library, E.M. Forster is paired with a man who led a political and criminal campaign against homosexuals, but it is suggested in the novel that the two men share a common interest in a shameful sexuality, albeit for different reasons. Sir Denis worked on this ‘shameful’ sexuality and tried to expose it to gain political power; but E.M. Forster was trying to get rid of that shame and to move homosexuals out of that shame so that they could have a place in society. Hollinghurst himself has argued in a review of a collection of Forster’s letters that this attempt of Forster to find a stable place for homosexual men in society triggered much of his fiction as well. ‘The moral drift of Forster’s books,’ Hollinghurst writes, ‘is always against respectability and in favour of responsibility and self-fulfillment’78.This self-fulfillment is very much linked with creating oneself an identity and finding a community. Forster aspired for a more open style of homosexuality which need not be relied on strategies of concealment or camp effeminacy. Camp effeminacy79, as argued by Alan Sinfield, became the dominant image of homosexuality in the aftermath of the Wilde trials. Sinfield argues that Forster’s Maurice ‘is designed to show that Maurice doesn’t have to be like Oscar
76 Herman Melville’s Billy Bud portrays a young, good-looking, androgynous homosexual man among a crew of other men on a ship. Melville’e treatment of this theme in an encrypted manner is stylistically interesting in that the text is full of inferences and indirect statements. Benjamin Britten’s opera version of Melville’s work also reflects this ambiguity seen in the text. 77 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, London, Vintage, 2006, p. 140-141. 78 Alan Hollinghurst. ‘Parting with Respectability’, Times Literary Supplement, 18 November 1983, 1267. 79 In very general terms, camp is a strategy of dealing with the oppressive heteronormative society by making use of exaggeration, theatricality and irony.
109 Wilde’80. In his review, Hollinghurst also draws our attention to the significance of masculine solidarity for Forster and argues that Maurice, Howard’s End and The Longest Journey all close with the creation of a community that has left respectable, bourgeois society behind so that its members can be who they truly feels themselves to be81. ‘With total accuracy’, Hollinghurst argues, ‘Forster looks to an unborn community of homosexuality’82. Forster looked to a community that emerged after the Wolfenden Report and Stonewall and that is still being created today, the community of William Beckwith. Will lives a life of self-fulfillment and openness that was envisaged by Forster. Throughout the novel Will goes from one homosexual space to another and transforms all spaces into sexualized zones. The London depicted in The Swimming-Pool Library is devoid of women and almost so of heterosexual men. Both Sir Denis and Forster insist on visibility. Firbank and Nantwich can be regarded as part of the ironic, campy and Wildean tradition that Forster tries to to erase in fiction. Hollinghurst, however, tries to preserve the implications of that tradition in The Swimming-Pool Library. Like Nantwich in Hollinghurst’s novel, Ronald Firbank has been largely ignored in homosexual and modernist literary history. Forster’s vision of a homosexual community might have been futuristic in his own time and his novels have become key literary works in both the homosexual and the modernist canon. Part of Forster’s prestige in contemporary criticism is attributable to his interest in and treatment of colonial and class politics and culture; however, these same issues come up in Firbank’s novels as well. Rarely written
80 Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment, New York, 1994, p. 140. 81 The British author E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice might quite legitimately be accepted as the first example of what we today call ‘gay fiction’. Although written in 1913 and 1914, it was published after the death of its author in 1971. This postmortem publication alone indicates the fact that Maurice was a hard-to-swallow novel for its time. What makes the novel the first example of ‘gay fiction’ is that it deals with men’s homosexuality in a very open way and in a social setting where even the euphemistic hints at the subject were strict taboos. The fact that Forster lets them escape from the city to the country instead of inflicting death on them might be seen as a fierce reaction against the fictional mores of the time which incline to send such characters to poverty or death so that the society could draw lessons from them. E.M. Forster’s promise of a lifelong happines for Maurice and his social inferior Alec in the country was a revolution for its time and a turning point in the general history of fictional works dealing only tangently with male homosexuality. 82 Alan Hollinghurst. ‘Parting with Respectability’, Times Literary Supplement, 18 November 1983, 1268.
110 upon, little taught or read, Firbank and his work are usually taken as minor curiosities, reading for fun83. William Beckwith begins reading Firbank’s Valmouth very much in this manner. ‘I had imagined him . . . to be a supremely frivolous and silly author. I was surprised to find how difficult, witty, and relentless he was. The characters were flighty and extravagant in the extreme, but the novel itself was evidently as tough as nails. . . . [I]t gave the unnerving impression that on deeper acquaintance it would turn out to be packed with fleeting and covert meaning’84. The Swimming-Pool Library fits into this description quite well: On a first reading, the book is enjoyable enough for its entertaining prose, its rich depiction of London life, its wit and sexiness, but it is hard to hold off the impression that the narrative is too much the product of its narrator and his wandering obsession with himself and with sex. It is only after the revelation of Will’s family history that the book takes on a larger significance, as the readers are forced to recover all that has gone before it. The movement of discovery, rupture, and recovery Will and the readers go through mirror the act of historical recovery Hollinghurst undertakes in The Swimming-Pool Library. Using the ironic style of Ronald Firbank, he writes his favourite author back into literary history, and in so doing challenges the paradigms of homosexual literary history. E.M. Forster’s perspective focusing on responsibility, visibility and community and Ronald Firbank’s irony are coming together in Hollinghurst’s fiction. It might be argued that Hollinghurst initially uses Firbank’s style in his novel so as to create a narrative of development – his main character Will, and the general tone of the novel as well move from an ironical stance to an historical consciousness and maturity. Hollinghurst relates Ronald Firbank to earlier comic writers – Restoration Comedy, Alexander Pope’s satires and Tristram Shandy – and a great deal to writers of the 1890s85. There is also a strong current of fairy story elements in Firbank.
83 Firbank’s novels have begun to receive more attention recently, perhaps due to Hollinghurst’s popularity. See, for example, Christopher Lane’s The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire (Durham, 1995) and Joseph Bristow’s Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (New York, 1995), both of which make reference to The Swimming-Pool Library. 84 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, London, Vintage, 2006, p. 64. 85 Alan Hollinghurst, ‘I Often Laugh When I’m Alone: The Novels of Ronald Firbank’
111 ‘The main features of Firbank’s stylistic revolution were the suppression, or at least concealment, of plot; a texture made up of elliptical-seeming fragments; and an extraordinary brevity’86.
This concealment might be related to the suppression of homosexuality. In addition to this concealed and fragmentary87 nature of his style, Firbank is defined by his ‘restlessness’ and ‘loneliness’88. Firbank constantly travelled and has never bought a place of his own to settle down. This restlessness and unsettled position in life reflect the position of homosexual men who cannot assume legitimate places for themselves in society.
‘The mood of passivity and frustration in hi work stems in part from the fact that he chose to write about a female world, shut off, like that of Jane Austen’s women, from power and action. His dramatis personae are spinsters, widows, or grass widows, who refer with pity or disdain or horror, but very rarely with regret, to the absence of men; the counterpart to their powerlessness is a paradoxical sense of freedom and of relief from the stuffness, difficulty and physical exactions of the opposite sex’89.
Like E.M. Forster, Ronald Firbank’s exclusive focus on the female view point offers him an alternative and implicit way of reflecting his own homosexuality. Firbank’s 1921 novel The Flower Beneath The Foot can be related to The Swimming-Pool Library in that the spinsters and widows living in the English colony read titles like Man, and all About Him, Men – My Delightful by Cora Valesquez, The Beard Throughout the Ages and Men are Animals by the Hon. Mrs. Victor Smythe. Hollinghurst relates this to being ‘camp’ and ‘a sort of emotional transvestism’90.
86 Alan Hollinghurst, ‘I Often Laugh When I’m Alone: The Novels of Ronald Firbank’ 87 ‘Firbank is described by several contemporaries as writing his novels on postcards; none of these manuscripts survives, but the notebooks for each novel, in which he amassed descriptive phrases, lines of dialogue, sketches dresses and hats, can still be read, and suggest something of his mosaic like practice’ Ibid., p. 2. 88 Ibid., p.3. 89 Ibid., p.7. 90 Ibid., p. 6.
112 ‘The Flower comes at a suggestive juncture in the literature of homosexuality; and again there are connections wit Proust that might bear further investigation. The first volume of Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe, with its account of the overheard sexual encounter between the Baron de Charlus and the tailor Jupien, and its extended metaphor of floral pollination for human sexual activity was published on 2 May 1921. Firbank arrived in Paris on 22 May, left after a week for a short visit to London, and returned on 3 July, when he moved into an apartment at Versailles and began writing the Flower Beneath the Foot’91.
The flower imagery that is used in The Swimming-Pool Library can be related back to Proust. In Sodome et Gomorrhe, Proust makes use of a floral metaphor to talk about the relationship between Baron de Charlus and the tailor Jupien. This floral pollination is hindered when William is bullied by a group of homophobic men and when his flowers are crushed on the ground. Hollinghurst’s novel hearkens back to Proust through Firbank. The Swimming-Pool Library has many references to different texts. The characters in the novel are often depicted when reading literature. The act of reading in the novel is significant in many senses. It is through this act of reading that the characters and their notions about life and society are formed in an intertextual milieu92. The first reference to William’s reading a novel is when he returns from the cinema where he played around with Phil, the boy from the Corry. After he gets out of the cinema, he gets on the underground metro and starts reading Ronald Firbank’s Valmouth. It is in this scene that readers are informed about William’s ‘mania for Firbank’93. Through the novel, there are many other characters who read Firbank as
91 Ibid., p.6. 92 Murat Seçkin, in his book Reading Texts in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion elaborates on how the act of reading in Jane Austen’s novels change and mature her characters. It is through an act of reading that Austen’s characters ‘go through a change that can be termed as becoming a mature member of that society; their maturation processes also maket hem people who understand the problems of that society so that they can become more ethical human beings’.The act of reading functions in a similar way in Hollinghurst’s novels. It is through reading that the homosexual man learns and understands the society he lives in and is faced with ethical responsibilities. Murat Seçkin, Reading Texts in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, Istanbul University Press, 2002, p.1. 93 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, London, Vintage, 2006, p. 54.
113 well. It might be argued that it is through reading Firbank that William comes to understand his times and the past better. In another significant scene of the novel, William, his grandfather Sir Denis Beckwith and James, William’s closest friend, go to the opera-house to watch Billy Budd. William makes a venture and talks about the sexual undertones of the opera piece in front of his grandfather: ‘It’s an odd piece, though, partly the sex thing, of course, Claggart’s bit about beauty and handsomeness could win a prize for general ghastly creepiness. He’s sort of coming with it and not coming out with it at the same time’94. This suspension between coming out and staying in the closet brings to mind E.M. Forster’s own position as a homosexual. Sir Denis Beckwith, remembering Forster, tells his grandson that ‘That’s very much Forster’s line actually. Though I don’t think it’s generally known’95. Billy Bud, Melville’s unfinished novella published in 1924 deals with themes like power and desire. The work is deemed as important among other Melville novels in that it represents a shift in the conceptualization of homosexuality. In the 1890s, when the novella was first conceived, homosexuality was being seen as an object of medical science. It was no longer seen as a vice ascribed to non-western societies only. This period time when Billy Bud was first penned also coincided with the early works of Sigmund Freud. The main character of the novella, the villain Claggart could well be defined as a repressed homosexual whose desires for Billy are only translated into false accusation against him. Claggart’s villainy stems from the fact that he does not acknowledge his own homosexual desires. Unlike Moby Dick, Billy Bud does not presence love that disrupts order and causes chaos. Captain Vere’s paternal love stands out as a parody only. When Billy is accused of spreading a muting aboard the ship, his inability to speak fuels up his anger to such an extent that he strikes out against Claggart. Billy becomes the victim of everyone around him. Being too beautiful and androgynous, he cannot cope with the masculine authority of the ship. Billy’s illiteracy strengthens the sense of ambiguity inherent in his tragedy. Since he cannot read, he cannot decipher the heteronormative order around him and he cannot decipher the signs of hatred triggered by his inherent homosexuality.
94 Ibid., p. 120. 95 Ibid., p. 120.
114 The texts read by the characters in the novel are very much in parallel with their experiences and development in the novel. When William visits Charles Nantwich in his house, he finds the elderly lord reading Pope’s The Rape of the Lock96. When William enters the room, Nantwich puts down the book in a thoughtful manner. We later learn that ‘The Rape of the Lock’ is a significant text in Nantwich’s life. Reading Nantwich’s diaries, William learns to his astonishment that Charles was sent to prison because of his homosexuality. For Charles, his imprisonment was a kind of ‘fall’97. It was during this fallen state of his in the prison that he read Pope’s The Rape of the Lock: ‘I had not read Pope since I was a child myself, but I had a sudden keen yearning for his order and lucidity, which was connected in my mind with a vision of eighteenth-century England, and rides cut through woodland, and Polesden and all my literate country origins’98. The Rape of the Lock is a humorous indictment of the vanities and idleness of 18th-century high society. Basing his poem on a real incident among families of his acquaintance, Pope intended his verses to cool hot tempers and to encourage his friends to laugh at their own folly. Pope’s mock-heroic treatment in The Rape of the Lock underscores the ridiculousness of a society in which values have lost all proportion, and the trivial is handled with the gravity and solemnity that ought to be directed to truly important issues. The society displayed in this poem is one that fails to distinguish between things that matter and things that do not. The poem mocks the men it portrays by showing them as unworthy of a form that suited a more heroic culture. Thus the mock-epic resembles the epic in that its central concerns are serious and often moral, but the fact that the approach must now be satirical rather than earnest is symptomatic of how far the culture has fallen. Another interesting scene when the lives of the characters and the texts they read are converged to one another is William’s being bullied by skinheads on the street. When William is bullied and attacked by skinheads, the original copy of Ronald Firbank’s The Flower Beneath the Foot falls on the ground. This is an
96 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, London, Vintage, 2006, p. 166. 97 Ibid., p. 249. 98 Ibid., p. 256.
115 interesting scene, which shows how Firbank and his fiction is intermingled with William’s life in an ironical way99. Towards the end of the novel, when James shares his loneliness with William and tells him about his depression, he likens himself to a Forsterian character100, because he feels that he has ‘turned into that archetypal middle-class intellectual out of touch with everything’101. This hopelessness leads him into an urge to create something, which at the same time, reflects the change of mind in William and in other characters in the novel: ‘It means we must be as creative as possible –even if we can’t actually have children, we must give ourselves completely to whatever we do, as I’ve always sort of thought, we must make something out of eevrything we do’102. It might be argued that the awareness of social exclusion leads these homosexual men to a kind of self-hatred. Artistic pursuits and an attachment to aesthetics emerge as possible ways to cleanse this self-hatred. This change of mind is most evident in Will as well. He feels a great attachment and something like love towards Phil and he wants this to be seen: ‘I wanted men to walk out together. I wanted a man to walk out with’103. James’s arrest by Colin, a police officer who himself was a homosexual, angers Will and makes him feel the hypocrisy of society deep inside: ‘James’s experience, like mine with the skinheads, made me abruptly selfconscious, gave me an urge to solidarity with my kind that I wasn’t used to in our liberal times’104. Such moments of sudden awareness are seen in other Hollinghurst novels as well. In The Line of Beauty, for example, when Nick Guest goes to a public bath, he senses for the first time how he had been in need of a male solidarity and community. In one of their talks, Charles shares his experiences in Africa with William. Charles tells William that these men who went to Africa were ‘quite out of touch with the rest of the world’105. In line with the homosexual man’s sense of displacement in the hetero-normative society and his quest for new spatialities,
99 Ibid., p. 174. 100 Ibid., p. 220. 101 Ibid., p. 220. 102 Ibid., p. 220-221. 103 Ibid., p. 194. 104 Ibid., p. 223. 105 Ibid., p. 242.
116 Charles Nantwich immediately draws a parallel with a literary figure: ‘It sounds like something out of Conrad’106. Expanding Nantwich’s literary analogy, William contextualizes him as a Firbankian character: ‘I mustsay, I see you as more of a Firbankian figure’107. This constant attempt of the homosexual man to relate himself to a literary father reflects his fatherlessness in society. Since he is denied the support of the family and the father, he need to look elsewhere to relate himself to an established order. This leaves him, most of the time, as a child groping for a surrogate parent in fiction. William Beckwith, too, considers adults and children in this manner: ‘It’s this idea that rather apeals to me, of seeing adults as children. His adults don’t have any dignity as adults, they’re all like over-indulged children following their own caprices and inclinations…’108. This reference to ‘children’ actually summarizes the whole argument that these homosexual men are not accepted by their fathers and their normative order and/or they all consciously reject the patriarchal order. This exclusion and rejection leave them homeless and lonely. Society and institutions deem them as undergrown. That’s why they are mostly seen as children. In all novels of Hollinghurst, the homosexual men are portrayed as children who are marginalized and kept in the periphery of society. Edward Manners in The Folding Star inhabits a room of an old woman’s house and he is not part of the daily life of the house he lives in. As someone who uses the back door to enter and go out of his room, he is very much like a child character in social gatherings as well. Similarly, Alex in The Spell, although a public officer in the Home Office, feels like a child with his low self-esteem and vulnerable ties with other people. Nicholas Guest, in The Line of Beauty, is another child-like Hollinghurst character. As his surname suggests, he is only a ‘guest’ in the Feddens house as their son’s school friend. This paralelllism between the homosexual and the child reflects their incomplete individuation. They lack the patriarchal stamp which makes them legitimately autonomous individuals, therefore they have to declare their autonomy and individuality on their own. As this chapter indicates, they seek to find literary
106 Ibid., p. 242. 107 Ibid., p. 242. 108 Ibid., p. 242.
117 surrogate fathers for themselves. They can build themselves identities through these surrogate literary fathers.
3.5. Men Writing
‘To live, the poet must mis-interpret [his literary] father, by the crucial act of misprision, which is the re-writing of the father.’ Harold Bloom
If the act of reading could be seen as the homosexual man’s attempt to find himself a surrogate father and enjoy a sense of community through fiction, then, the act of writing could well be perceived as the homosexual man’s first claim on an autonomous identity. The act of writing in The Swimming-Pool Library is equally significant for the characters in the novel. It is this very act of writing that William will ever be strong enough to reject his father’s order and acknowledge something which is essentially against the patriarchy his father represents. Harold Bloom’s theory on literary influence and misreading offers us a sound and relevant framework in which we can discuss the significance of writing in The Swimming-Pool Library. The tension of the novel, after all, lies in William’s possibility of writing down Nantwich’s biography. After reading Nantwich’s diaries, William comes to the realisation that the society he lives in is rather hypocritical and oppressive. The misfortunes of Nantwich, his marginalisation and prosecution as a homosexual by William’s grandfather all conjure up series of events which lead William to a self- conscious state. He is in a way, put in a point of rupture. His self-contentment with his own self and with the society is shattered. The skinheads who bullied him have broken his nose and hurt his self-esteem; Charles Nantwich has shown him the hypocrisy of the patriarchal society. The novel ends in a kind of suspensipon: William is clearly unwilling to write down Nantwich’s biography and seems to be decided to continue with his former lifestyle. The fact that his own grandfather had
118 played an important role in the prosecution of many homosexuals in Britain is a source of a great amount of anxiety for William. Writing Nantwich’s biography would necessiate a kind of confrontation not only with his grandfather, but with society at large as. When Nantwich asks William to write his biography for the first time, the prospect of writing about Lord Nantwich’s life seems like an invasion into William’s constant leisure109. This prospect, William tells us, ‘is alluring, but also oppressive’110. William is rather undecided about assuming this task of writing. He constantly tries to justify for himself why he should not be writing the biography: ‘By then, I had more or less resolved not to write Charles’s memoirs, and to keep my life clear of interference from the demands and misery of other people’111. Will’s refusal to write Nantwich’s biography could be read as symptoms of a kind of alienation. However, it could also be interpreted as an ethical response to the catastrophe. Hollinghurst and his protagonist William refuse to turn Nantwich’s past and AIDS into fixed objects of knowledge by putting them into a narrative frame. This is also evident in the way William explains his feelings about the situation: ‘… you know how it’s… I hate the idea of tying myself down’112. William Beckwith’s hesitation about writing Lord Nantwich’s biography might be interpreted as a kind of anxiety. This anxiety, in Freudian terms, is nurtured from a potential confrontation with the father and the order of the father. This anxiety might be linked to a kind of literary anxiety as discussed in Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973 and 1997). Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence113 outlines a theory of modern poetry in Romantic, Anglo-American traditions. Bloom argues that all poets in these traditions find their greatest inspiration and their greatest source of anxiety in John Milton and his followers. For Bloom, Milton inaugurates a fateful narrative in which each follower, latecomer, or ‘weak’ poet must come to terms with his ‘strong’ father- like precursor. For Bloom this coming to terms takes the form of influence—a
109 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, London, Vintage, 2006, p. 81. 110 Ibid., p. 85. 111 Ibid., p. 86. 112 Ibid., p. 88. 113 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, New York&Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975.
119 paradoxical vortex of attraction and repulsion, of absorption and distance. For Bloom this attraction to and repulsion against the works of a master takes the form of a latecomer's ‘mis’ reading. For Bloom a poet seeking to be strong necessarily ‘mis’reads his precursors by using one or more of his six revisionary ratios114. Bloom offers a ‘theory of poetry by way of a description of poetic influence, or he story of intra-poetic relationships’115. His aim is partly ‘corrective: to deidealise our accepted accounts of how one poet helps to form another’116 and partly ‘corrective, . . . to try to provide a poetics that will foster a more adequate practical criticism’117. His argument is that ‘[p]oetic history is . . . indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative for themselves’118. Bloom’s focus is on ‘strong poets’119, major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death. Weaker talents idealise; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves. It could be argued that Lord Nantwich in The Swimming-Pool Library did not have the courage to mis-interpret the patriarchal text and come up with a new, alternative text of his own. The fact that he could not create a unity out of his diaries and that he needs someone else to write about his life during his lifetime shows a certain degree of incapability in him. Since he cannot write about his own life, he feels he has to persuade William to assume this responsibility. William, however, has to overcome his own ‘anxiety’ before doing so. Bloom quotes Oscar Wilde on this score: ‘Influence is simply a transference of personality, a mode of giving away what is most precious to one’s self, and its exercise produces a sense, and, it may be, a reality of loss. Every disciple takes away something from his master.’ This is the anxiety of influencing120. For Harold Bloom, ‘every major aesthetic consciousness seems peculiarly more gifted at denying obligations as the hungry generations go
114 Blooms six revisionary ratios are: Clinamen or Poetic Misprison, Tessera of Completion and Antithesis, Kenosis or Repetition and Discontinuity, Daemonization or the Counter-Sublime, Askesis or Purgation and Solipsism and Apophrades or The Return of the Dead. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, New York&Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 5. 115 Ibid., p. 5. 116 Ibid., p. 5. 117 Ibid., p. 5. 118 Ibid., p. 5. 119 Ibid., p. 5. 120 Ibid., p. 6.
120 treading one another down’121. Bloom is of the view that the ‘relations between poets’122 are ‘akin to what Freud called the family romance. It is the relationship and ties between their parents that they feel themselves as part of a tradition or a literary fanily. The artist figures and poets, like the homosexual man, go against the given norms. The rejection of the normative as such compels them to a search for surrogate fathers. This search of the poet for a father reminds us of Otto Rank’s discussion of family romance. The family romance, for Rank, is a conscious fantasy of the child which is repressed later on. The artist figüre and the poet askes the basic question ‘Who am I?’ more urgently than any other because they are in need of a definitive history. The homosexual man, too, like the artist figüre, is compelled to question and think on his position in society, hence, the dyanmics of the fanily romance are kept alive all through hi life. Commenting on Nietsche and Freud, Bloom tries to read the interrelations among poets as a kind of family romance. At this point, it is interesting to note that the previous Lord Nantwich, Charles’s father, was a gifted poet. Staines, the photographer friend of Charles Nantwich explains to William: ‘He wrote plays in verse for his servants to perform. My grandmother used to know him – which is how I came to meet Charles’123. Thus, Will’s discovery of the past is a revelation in itself, but this revelation does not offer him a smooth passage into a community and a sense of identity. This discovery is a point of rupture in Will’s narrative and it is only after this point that Will begins to build a narrative for himself. Will uses this history to enter into a community, but that history rejects him and tosses him out. Will is financially dependent on his grandfather and after this rupturuous revelation he understands that his indolence and vice are made possible by Sir Denis Beckwith’s ‘crusade to eradicate male vice’124. Will is not simply a product of the ‘power and the compromise in which (he) had unthinkingly been raised’125 however he admits he ‘loved his grandfather, too … (He) made one feel part of something superior and
121 Ibid., p. 6. 122 Ibid., p. 8. 123 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, London, Vintage, 2006, p. 157. 124 Ibid., p. 304. 125 Ibid., p. 314.
121 precious’126. Will actively identifies with his grandfather’s world, therefore Will cannot write Nantwich’s biography. His writing Nantwich’s biography would be exposing his own grandfather’s cruelty on homosexual men. On a deeper level, this should be in contradiction with his identification with his grandfather, which could also be read as self-hatred. Under these circumstances Will could only write a compromised book. William Beckwith’s anxiety in The Swimming-Pool Library could well be read as a young poet’s anxiety in producing new poetry after his predecessors. Harold Bloom’s metaphor which links young poets to sons and masters to fathers can be extended to William Beckwith’s situation. What William Beckwith comes to understand in the novel is the dynamics of the relationship between texts; or on a metaphorical level, between sons and fathers. This relation is also a dialogue, or sometimes a deadlock between the past and the present. In William Beckwith’s case, the past that illuminates the present only causes a muteness on the part of the young homosexual man. William does not have the courage to stand against his grandfather’s Word so he cannot write. William Beckwith is not strong to acknowledge his ftherlessness even to himself. He has to beget himself, because his father’s mores will not suit him. For Harold Bloom, such self-begetting free of the father is the aim of the poet. The fatherless, hence self-created, deterritorialized, marginalised into the outer spheres of society and characters in constant flux are depicted in The Swimming-Pool Library through images of writing and reading, hints of an alternative underworld, fluidity of water, reflections of mirros either exclusive or inclusive and doubleness. The images of mirrors in the novel are significant in terms of the formation of the identities of the characters. Characters are framed by mirrors in different ways through the novel. When William visits Charles Nantwich’s house, William, Charles and Charles’s man servant are all three framed by a mirror:
‘Charles laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘Kind of sandbrown isn’t it. Jolly good, jolly good.’ He also indulged the mirror’s grouping us for a moment, his eye
126 Ibid., p. 319.
122 flinching from the stare of the taller Lewis, who hung about behind us. There was evidently a strange, and I thought pathetic, story behind all this’127.
This ‘grouping’ of the mirror actually shows how these characters are interrelated with one another. Mirrors are there to make things visible, but sometimes they do not clarify, but obscure. When William ponders on writing Nantwich’s memoirs, his image on them mirror’s surface is obstructed: ‘I shaved as the bath run, the steam repeatedly obscuring my image in the mirror’128. Mirrors can also take their onlookers to the past. When William visits Charles for the second time, he sees a tie on the bed and remembers ‘how [his] mother used to stand behind [him] at the mirror each morning to knot [his] tie when [he] was a little boy’129. This mirros scene’s significance is that William is framed with his mother and there exists no father figure in this reflective mental image of his. Mirrors can also function as surfaces on which people are confronted with their own selves. When William, towards the end of the novel, looks at himself at the mirror, he is both probing his own personality and comparing it with his grandfather’s:
‘And as for grandpa … As I shaved I looked at myself quizzically, yet his image was also in my mind, the groomed, sharp-eyed, authoritative face, ‘handsome suavete’ … I remembered the rather frightening figure of my childhood, the trenchancy and reserve, and what I could now see as a slow softening of outline as he left politics and received his viscountcy’130.
Mirrors have been used largely by psychiatrist in their discussions of formation of the self and in their explanations of the infant’s first realization of the other world and his/her own self as something else from that outer world. From a psychological perspective mirrors function as forces of affirming the individual’s existence. The infant comes to know itself by looking at the mirror as a surface which reflects its own otherness back to it. Mirrors could also be seen as maternal forces responding to
127 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, London, Vintage, 2006, p. 71. 128 Ibid., p. 86. 129 Ibid., p. 91. 130 Ibid., p. 263.
123 a child’s newly forming self. If the mother fails in reflecting back a positive affirmation of her child, the child develops a low self-esteem. As Heinz Kohut, in his theory of self-psychology argues, the child reverts to narcissism to disguise this low self-esteem. An impaired reflection on the surface of the mirror is closely linked with teh quality of selfhood the individual develops. William Beckwith in The Swimming-Pool Library perceives himself as having two different versions of himself. He is aware of the fact that his identity is not a settled down identiy. It is in constant flux and in a never-ending search for unsatiable sexual gratification:
‘Though I didn’t believe in such things, I was a perfect Gemini, a child of the ambigious summer, tugged between two versions of myself, one of them the hedonist, and the other –a little in the background these days- an almost scholarly figure with a faintly puritanical set to the mouth’131.
The idea of double personality in the novel comes up when William talks about his closest friend James. For William, James was his other half and in moments of hesitation and guilt, it was as if ‘one half of [him] were accusing the other’132. The opera scene in the novel, where William Beckwith, his closest friend James and Sir Denis Beckwith meet to watch the opera version of Billy Budd, puts these characters in confrontation with one another and with the homosexual identity. Sir Denis Beckwith in this trio, represents the state and its rigid outlook on homosexuals. As William tells us in the novel, Sir Denir Beckwith ‘had spent all his adult life in circles where good manners, savoir-faire and plain callousness conspired to avoid any recognition that homosexuality even existed. The three of us in our hot little box were trapped with this intensely British problem: the opera that was, but wasn’t, homosexual, the two young homosexual friends on good behaviour, the mandarin patriarch giving nothing of his feelings away’133. William Beckwith has a father, but he consciously ignores his existence. It is only very rarely that he refers to his father in the novel. Most of the time he talks
131 Ibid., p. 4. 132 Ibid., p. 5. 133 Ibid., p. 120.
124 about his grandfather who seems to have superseded his father as well. Thus, we have some kind of a generation gap which results in William Beckwith’s looking for surrogate fathers in the novel. William seems to have spent his childhood mostly with his grandfather. It is significant that on the first page of the novel William refers not to this father, but to his grandfather. When he mentions his father later on, it is only to relate him to social ties and how different his tendencies were from his father’s dictates: ‘My father had had me kitted out with morning suits and evening dress as I grew up … But I rarely wore this stuff. I had always been a bit of a peacock…’134. When William accepts Lord Nantwich’s invitation for a lunch, he wears a suit and remembers all about his father’s suits. William’s six year old cousin Rupert makes us think further on father and son relations. One day Rupert leaves his home without telling his mother and father and he comes to William’s house where he is received by William’s boyfriend Artur. This little escapade implies that Rupert as a child is not happy at his home and there are some problems in his relation to his parents. He evidently likes the company of William and when waiting for his mother, William shows him his photo album, which the little boy enjoys very much. The photos in the album are mostly William’s grandfather’s and not his father’s135.
134 Ibid., p. 34. 135 Ibid., p. 60-61.
125 CHAPTER FOUR Merchants of Fetish
‘There remained no possibility of dependence on others; to myself alone could I look.’ Charlotte Bronte, Villette
If The Swimming-Pool Library is about the homosexual man’s confrontation with history and the homophobia inherent in the hetero-normative society, then Hollinghurst’s second novel The Folding Star1, mainly deals with the place of the homosexual man in society and his quest for a definitive identity and a search for a sustaining community. The way the main character of the novel, Edward Manners is positioned as a lonely man with no ties in society reminds us a Jane Austen female protagonist who tries to find herself a secure position in society. This similarity is further strengthened by the fact that Edward Manners, the main character of The Folding Star, is an English teacher who decides to work and live in a foreign city. Many Jane Austen characters, indeed, find themselves in unexpectedly low positions in society with reduced means of living. The Dashwood sisters in Sense and Sensibility (1811), for example, try to adapt to a new position in society, because they are left in reduced circumstances. Elizabeth Bennett’s story in Pride and Prejudice (1813) is mainly the struggle of a woman to secure herself a marriage in the society of the landed gentry. Reminiscent of homosexual men, Fanny Price in Mansfield Park (1814) is a lonely and poor dependant raised by her rich relatives. Both Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey (1818) and Anne Elliot in Persuasion (1818), similar to Edward Manners in Hollinghurst’s novels, go on a visit to another city and try to find themselves a place in society that does not promise them much unless they decide to fight for things. Hollinghurst’s second novel The Folding Star mainly evolves around the theme of love. The main character of the novel, thirty-three year old Edward Manners, moves to an unnamed Belgian city as a tutor to a seventeen-year old boy
1 Alan Hollinghurst, The Folding Star, London, Vintage, 1993. 126 named Luc Altidore. The name of the main character of the novel, Edward Manners, has a symbolic significance in the novel. The name Edward is of old English origin and it means ‘wealthy guard’. It had been used in the royal family by kings of England before the Norman Conquest. King Edward the Confessor was also a saint and came to be venerated as a model of a Christian king. This relates Edward Manners to the character of the Attendant Spirit in John Milton’s masque Comus. Edward Manner’s moving to a new city might be interpreted as an attempt to find a more meaningful and sustaining place for himself in the world. Luc Altidore, Edward’s seventeen year old student comes from a wealthy Belgian family and he has been expelled from a local school for a much gossiped about, but never detailed scandal involving a group of sailors, drug addicts and gigolos. Edward Manners will also be offering private lessons to a sickly boy named Marcel who is the son of a local museum curator, Paul Echevin. Marcel’s father Paul likes Edward Manners and hires him to help prepare a catalogue of the works of Edgard Orst, a symbolist painter who died under the Nazi occupation. Edward develops a deep obsession with Luc to the extent that he regularly goes out of his way in order to pass by the boy’s house on the chance or running into him; he spies on him during a weekend holiday at a beach resort and steals photographs, pieces of underwear and socks from his bedroom. At the end of the novel, he is depicted while searching frantically for him in a rainstorm. Apart from references to numerous writers and poets throughout the novel, intertextuality has seeped into the very essence of the novel in that the psychological drama of the pursuit of an elusive love object by a man who is himself no longer young can be compared to Swann’s obsession with Odette in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; von Aschenbach’s shadowing of the boy Tadzio in Mann’s Death in Venice, and Humbert Humbert’s obsession with the barely post- pubescent Lolita in Nabokov’s novel of the same title. This current of intertextuality will be analysed in terms of a search for literary ancestors in the novel, because many gay characters in The Folding Star, including Edward Manners, his school friends in the past and Luc Altidore are very much interested in literature and literary figures like John Milton and William Wordsworth.
127
Edward’s obsession with Luc is so deep that Edward hates all those around him whom he deems potential rivals in his obsessed love for Luc. Ronald Strong, who constantly turns up at very crucial points when Edward is about to start an important speech with Luc, is seen as a very strong rival for Edward. A similar instance of such unrequited passion can also be seen in the works of Jean Racine, whose Bajazet Hollinghurst has translated. In Racine, as Roland Barthes points out, the erotic is a stage on which is enacted the conflict between one person who, seeking to captivate another, irrationally hates his or her suspected rivals. Thus, in Racine's Andromache, Orestes loves Hermione, who only has eyes for Pyrrhus, who is obsessed with Andromache, who is devoted to the memory of her dead husband, Hector. Each, in turn, hates a ‘rival’ who, ironically, is either indifferent to his or her would-be lover, or has been rendered unavailable through death. There are other obsessive pursuits which drive the action of Hollinghurst’s novel. Because of his insatiable obsession with Luc, Edward unintentionally inflicts pain upon Cherif, a charming and sexually obliging Algerian worker Edward meets in a gay bar and with whom he conducts a casual affair. More interestingly, towards the end of the novel the fifty-year-old museum curator Paul Echevin tactfully admits his attraction to Edwards and kisses him. Apart from adding another layer of obsession to this chain of obsessive loves, Paul’s admission of his interest in Edward ironically reverses the situation of Edward’s pursuit of the seventeen-year Luc and makes Edward the uncomfortable object of an older’s man attention. Other chains of unrequited desire abound in the novel: Luc’s two school friends, Sybille and Patrick, together with Luc, form a tripartite web of relations, which Edward tries to decipher all along in the novel. It is only towards the end of the novel that Patrick reveals the essence of this tripartite relationship: Sybille, who was once in love with Patrick, can now think only of Luc. Luc, however, is in love with Patrick himself, who -while having experimented sexually with Luc years before and continuing to value Luc as a friend-declares himself uninterested in other men. This tripartite relationship among two young men and a young woman will be interpreted as an ‘erotic triangle’ as discussed by Eve Kosofky Sedgewick in her book titled Male Homosocial Desire. 128
Towards the end of the novel, again, Edward Manner’s friend Matt, who is a charismatic but conscienceless amateur photographer, enters into an affair with Luc and thus exposes Patrick’s vanity. Edward learns that Luc has also been obsessed with Matt and he had been dreaming about him. This chain of unrequited passions is futher complicated by the fact that Sybille herself is shyly worshipped by Marcel, the sickly son of Edward’s own admirer, the curator of The Orst Museum, Paul Echevin. The chain of obsessions and unrequited desires in The Folding Star can be analysed in terms of anality, falsehood and the rejection of paternal order as discussed by Smirgel. Hollinghurst makes an essential part of the novel Edward's explicit fantasies in which he seduces or sexually humiliates the handsome boy. Edward's fantasies of control are undercut when a bartender's casual comment reveals that Luc is not the innocent whose sentimental and sexual education Edward has hoped to conduct, but a hormonally overcharged, emotionally unstable teenager responsive to the allure of Matt, and possibly even capable of offering himself to a group of sailors.
‘You could have a great romance in here,’ Edward's friend Edie says upon visiting his apartment. By juxtaposing Edward's passion for Luc with Orst's for Jane Byron, the model whose beauty Orst rendered so enigmatically in painting after painting, Hollinghurst calls into question not simply whether a post-Stonewall gay man is capable of Orst's seemingly ennobling love, but the truth of the nineteenth- century ideal of the ‘grand passion’ as well. Edward is delighted by the fact that Luc's name is ‘cul’ (which is French for ‘asshole’) spelled backwards, indicating the site of Edward's desire. But the parallel story of Orst's obsession with Jane reveals a similar anal eroticism when Paul shares with Edward an uncatalogued cache of photographs that Orst had made of a Jane-look-alike defecating.
The Folding Star--with an epigraph by Symbolist poet Henri de Régnier, its subplot concerning a fictionalized Symbolist painter, and its celebration of the damp, autumnal atmosphere favored by the Symbolist poets--functions as an extended
129
Symbolist poem in prose.2 Strangers, the sea imagery and the juxtaposition of man and nature, youth and old age in the poem are also building the generak framework of the novel.
4.1. The Man and the Boy
The Folding Star evolves around Edward Manner’s obsession with a young by. The readers witness the psychological drama of the pursuit of an elusive love object by a middle aged man. This obsession of an older man for a young boy coud be compared to novels by Proust, Mann and Nabokov. However, Edward Manner is
2 This is the poem by Henri de Regnier with which Hollinghurst opens his novel The Folding Star. My translation is from my friend Ekin Öyken’s Turkish rendering of the poem:
Les grands vents venus d'outremer Passent par la ville, l'hiver, Comme des étrangers amers.
Ils se concertent, graves et pâles, Sur les places, et leurs sandales Ensablent le marbre des dalles.
Comme de crosses à leurs mains fortes, Ils heurtent l'auvent et la porte Derrière qui l'horloge est morte.
Et les adolescents amers S'en vont avec eux vers la mer!
---
Winds coming from the dark blue sea Are passing through the town, the winter, Like strangers giving one the creeps.
They get along with one another, grave and pale, From squares and from their boats Sand is scattered to the marbles of paving stones.
As if there were crosses in each of their strong hands, They bump into the cave and the door. Behind what the wall clock knits.
And adolescents, giving one the creeps Are moving away with them into the sea. 130 portrayed as an erotically debased man who even pilfers Luc’s soiled linen. Edward’s pursuit for the young bot is juxtaposed with another pursuit: the painter Orst’s passion for his beloved lost model Jane Byron. This juxtaposition and intermingling of erotic and artistic obsessions questions the very possibility of an ennobling love. Orst’s seemingly noble love for his long-lost model Jane could be compared with Edward’s desire for Luc. Hollinghurst in this novel questions what ‘grand passion’ means for a post-Stonewall homosexual man. The Folding Star deals with the relationship between a mature man and a young boy. This stereotypical relationship between an older man and a younger boy can also be traced back to other fictions like Death in Venice by Mann and Lolita by Nabokov. It will be argued in this chapter that such a relationship between a man and a boy is not only sexual, but a kind of didactic relation as well. The older man falls in love with a young boy’s beauty and almost idealizes him. This might be interpreted as the gay man’s pursuit of beauty as had been explained in the previous chapter on The Swimming-Pool Libray. The young boy, on the other hand, develops a relationship with the older man, because he learns the ways of gay love and relations and how to situate himself as a marginalized figure in the patriarchal order. The thirty-three year old Edward Manner’s obsessive relationship with the seventeen-year old Luc Altidore might be read as an instance of pederasty on the surface. However, the different and ever-floating positions taken by Edward and Luc during the course of this relationship beg for further and deeper interpretation. In several instances, as will be shown, Edward cannot determine his position against Luc; he cannot be sure whether he is a teacher, a lover or even a father to Luc. Luc himself, though very young, is depicted as a character who can generate great amounts of gossip, but who doesn’t easily let others enter into his mind. Before going into more detail about the relationship between Edward and Luc, it might prove fruitful to summarise what a sexual relationship between man and boy in ancient Greece meant. As described by David F. Greenberg in his The Construction of Homosexuality, the idealized homosexual relationship in ancient Greece involved an adult lover, ‘usually between the ages of twenty and thirty (the erastes), and an eromenos or paidika, a prepubescent adolescent whose beard had not begun to 131 grow’3. This relationship was ordinarily temporary. The erastes-eromenos relationship in ancient Greece played an important role in the social and educational system. Pederasty was regarded as educative and many Greek authors from Aristophanes to Pindar deemed it as an essential part of aristocratic education4. At the beginning of the Symposium, Plato makes Phaedrus utter these words:
‘For I know not any greater blessing to a young man who is beginning in life than a virtuous lover, or to a lover than a beloved youth. For the principle, I say, neither kindred, nor honour, nor wealth, nor any motive is able to implant so well as love. Of what am I speaking? Of the sense of honour and dishonour, without which neither states nor individuals ever do any good or great work… And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour and emulating one another in honour; and it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that when fighting at each other’s side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world’5.
What Plato hints at in this passage is the potential and promises of a love relationship between a young boy and a mature man. From the perspective of the young man, such a relationship could be analysed in a different way. The young boy learns from this man lover and thus strengthens his identity. The ancient Greek forms and version of such a relationship is mostly explained in this teacher-student relationship. From the perspective of the mature man, this relation signifies a kind of delirious love to attain youth through a young boy. It also reflects the mature man’s quest for beauty and aesthetics in their most obsessive forms. In such a relationship, the young boy assumes a destructive character which is most stunningly depicted in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. In Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star, we have a similar dimension to Edward Manner’s obsessive love towards Luc Altidore.
3 David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, Chicago&London, The University of Chicago Press, 1988, p. 147. 4 Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, London, 2003. 5 Plato, Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, Trans., W.R.M. Lamb, Cambridge, Massachuetts, London, Hrvard University Press, p. 103. 132
In the beginning of the novel, Edward Manners goes into a gay bar called The Cassette, which is ‘the city’s one gay bar’6. It was during his first visit to the gay bar that Edward notices a boy and an older man sitting together. He feels something like envy at the sight of the man and the boy, which might be read as a foreshadowing of his own ‘pederastic’ obsession with Luc. Again, during his first visit to the gay bar, we learn that he had been abstaining from sexual encounters with men in the last few years; we learn, for example, that a middle-aged businessman’s advances towards him are left unanswered. Edward is very much aware of his ‘odd sexual economy of the past few years’7. The beginning of the novel also gives us some clues about why this almost middle-aged man has left his home in London and moved to a town in Brussels. The man at the bar in Cassette asks him: ‘Then why did you come here, for God’s sake?’8. The answer Edward gives to this question defines not only his reasons for coming to this little town in Brussels, but it also sheds light on his physiological constitution as well: ‘It was something to do with growing up in a singer’s household, to the daily accompaniment of art, and with this little old city being famous for its music and pictures’9. This explanation leaves us no doubt that Edward is in search of something which will complete his somehow weak and lacking identity. He has to feed on music and art to keep his ego alive and healthy. Although assuming a father role, Edward himself is in need of some guidance as a gay character as well. From the very beginning of the novel, Edward’s relation to his young student is being problematized. When, for example, he is spending some time in the gay bar The Cassette, he mentions that he will be tutoring a young student and we learn that his companion does not like this idea of Edward teaching a young boy, because ‘[Edward] had become less likeable to [his] companion’10. After this, Edward is left alone with ‘the boring businessman who previously approached him’11. These scenes
6 Alan Hollinghurst, The Folding Star, London, Vintage, 1993. 7 Ibid., p. 5. 8 Ibid., p. 8. 9 Ibid., p. 7. 10 Ibid., p. 8. 11 Ibid., p. 8. 133 might be read as premonitions of Edward’s inherent and impeding loneliness and isolation in his desire for boys. After going out of the gay bar The Cassette, Edward visits the Town Museum. The fact that his visit to the museum is followed by his stay in the gay bar, which is in itself a kind of museum of desires, can be read as a juxtaposition of art and desire. In order to understand Edward’s disposition as a gay character, it is important to interpret this juxtaposition of art and desire as a gay man’s constitutive characteristic. While roaming around the town museum, gazing at portraits, Edward meets a young Moroccan called Cherif: ‘In the austere Town Museum, I picked up Cherif, a Moroccan, born in Paris and uncircumcised’12. Such kind of gay crusing accompanied by an admiration of art is again an instance of this ‘queer’ juxtaposition. As suggested before, although he has a pre-defined task of tutoring two young boys in English, Edward cannot determine his real position when he is with Luc. In his first assignation with Luc, for example, Edward ‘feels half master and half victim’13. Luc, too, seems not sure of his position when he's with Edward, because when they first meet, Luc ‘measures him up and down’14. The same scene presents us a scrutiny not only on the side of the boy, on the side of the man as well. During their first lesson, Edward gazes at the physical features of Luc. This mutual scrutiny between man and boy is interrupted by the entrance of Luc's mother who brings in coffee for them15. Luc Altidore’s mother, throughout the novel functions as a kind of barrier between Edward Manners and Luc Altidore. The scenes in which she brings in coffee, for example, are constant reminders of her strict guardianship over Luc. The educative function of Edward Manners in his relation to this young boy situates her mother as someone who should be cleared away. Her strong grasp over Luc should be weakened, and even eradicated, so that Luc will emerge as an autonomous person with a separate identity. During their first lesson, Edward and Luc have a talk only. Luc tells Edward about his friend Patrick and the beach house they sometimes visit. Both Patrick and
12 Ibid., p. 9. 13 Ibid., p. 27. 14 Ibid., p. 28. 15 Ibid., p. 29. 134 the beach house will function as pivotal elements in Edward's obsessive relation to Luc. Later on, the subject of their talk shifts to books and authors. References to Charles Dickens and Gramsci abound in this scene, which is significant in the sense that they are actually talking about literary fathers. The interest in literature, books and authors is common in Luc and Edward. When their first lesson ends, the obscure feelings of Edward for Luc are not yet clarified, because when Luc shows Edward out, Edward feels nothing. He asks himself: ‘Though the question insisted on forming whether I had really come all this way for that’16. It is interesting to note that at the end of this scene, when Edward leaves Luc's house he ponders on Luc's former school St Narcissus. Hoe doesn't know why Luc was expelled out of that school. The fact that the very name of the school reminds him of ‘the pagan myth of the boy- flower’ foreshadows a narcissist undercurrent in Edward's relation to Luc. Luc Altidore, as a boy of 17, could be depicted as a beautiful, but destructive ephebe. Similar to the mythological narcissistic beautiful boy, Luc is emotionally undeveloped and self-contained. As Camille Paglia, in her Sexual Personae, indicates ‘it is the apprehender, the aggressive eye, who brings him into existence’17. Edward Manners, thus, assumes the role of the apprehender and the aggressive eye in his relation to Luc Altidore. This parallels the story with the mythological character of Narcissus who had never seen his reflection. The cursed nymph Echo, who could only have the last word, followed Narcissus through the forest. However, their love cannot be consummated, because Narcissus pined away in the pool looking at his own reflection. Similarly, at the end of the novel, Edward Manners searches for Luc Altidore in a frantic rainy storm and loses him to the sea. Following Luc's lesson, the readers are introduced with Marcel, the other boy whom Edward will be teaching English. Marcel's parental relations are problematic as well. Unlike Luc, who has an absentee father and an obsessive mother, Marcel has mother and a ‘removed’18 father. Marcel has lost his mother early in life and after his
16 Ibid., p. 31. 17 Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, New York, Vintage Books, 1991, p. 514. 18 Op.cit., p. 34. 135 real mother's death, the housekeeper has acted as a mother to him19. This description of Marcel's father abounds in characteristics of a queer disposition:
‘Echevin was a late father, a handsome man in his sixties, pleasantly bald, and without the moustache I for some reason expected him to wear, so that his face had a sensitive, suprised look of some charm. His eyes were large, with oaky flecks in their blue pupils. It held on the grey suiting of a businessman, but with unusual trucks and vents, which seemed to hint at his role in the arts’20.
This detailed description of Paul Echevin as a father gives us clues about his psychological disposition as well. His being ‘pleasantly bald’, his being beardless and his ‘large’ eyes with ‘blue pupils’ and his ‘unusual trucks and vents, which seemed to hint at his role in the arts all portray a male figure who doesn't completely fit in masculine expectations. Towards the end of the novel, the relationship between Edward and Luc will be reflected in an unexpected and spontaneous relationship between Paul Echevin and Edward. When Paul surprisingly kisses him, Edward finds himself in the position of a young boy, courted by an older man. However, long before this tripartite chain of man and boy relations among Paul, Edward and Luc is revealed to readers, Edward somehow regards Paul as a fatherly figure: ‘Paternal love, watchful and removed, as I had known it and lost it myself, showed through for a moment’21. If Edward will be acting as a guiding fatherly figure for Luc and assume a responsibility to teach him the ways of love, Paul Echevin, in a similar manner, will be silently and patiently watching Edward. It is as if all these gay male characters are acting as substitute fathers to one another. As if to strengthen this sense of a father and son relationship, Paul invites Edward to his study to talk about Marcel, his son who will be tutored by Edward. The study room of the father in fiction can generally be defined as a locus of confrontation between father and son. While sitting in the study together Paul reveals to Edward that the avant-garde artist Orst holds a very important place in his life22. Paul Echevin is working in a catalogue of the works of Orst and later on the readers
19 Ibid., p. 34. 20 Ibid., p. 34. 21 Ibid., p. 34. 22 Ibid., p. 35. 136 will be informed more about how Orst as an artist fathered Paul Echevin's artistic side. After this first introduction into the different dimensions of man and boy relations in the novel, we are given clues about the psychological dispositions of these men taking part in these relationships. What we have to confront is homosexual men falling prey to defragmentation and men who have to live with a weak self- image. After Edward has his first lesson with Luc and meets him for the first time and has his first meeting with Paul Echevin, he returns home and looks at himself in the mirror and he wishes Luc could see him, but this seemingly positive image of himself is a very weak and defragmented, because Edward would be content only if ‘(Luc) could see it in the mirror, which left out sly the rest of (him)’23. This is again a significant indication that these men are in search of strengthening their weak egos and construct a complete identity in their respective relationships. Later on, we see Edward walking along the streets of the town to which he has recently moved. He visits the animal market in the town centre and there he meets Luc for the second time. Followed by his obscured feelings after their first meeting, this second confrontation with Luc ‘was a turning point in (his) life’24. It might be argued that Luc's being with his friends in the market place has triggered feelings of competition and jealousy in Edward. After following Luc and his two friends in the market25, Edward goes into a bookshop and chooses some books for Luc. It seems as if he is making use of some help from greater literary fathers to get hold of Luc, because he deems his two friends as opposing partners in a rigid competition. This feeling of jealousy makes it clearer now what kind of a role Edward will be assuming in his relation to Luc. As the plot of the novel unfolds, Edward is depicted dreaming about Luc26 and from time to time he cannot help learning more about Luc and his friends27. His being in a flux of identity is revealed to us when he is shown with Luc. While talking
23 Ibid., p. 40. 24 Ibid., p. 43. 25 Ibid., p. 44. 26 Ibid., p. 57. 27 Ibid., p. 58. 137 to Luc, he cannot be sure about his position: ‘Am I a teacher or a friend to him’28. As Luc talks about his previous friends and his relations with them, Edward instinctually assumes the role of a fatherly figure and thinks: ‘My poor darling Luc! What hateful lessons you have to learn!’29. In this same dialogue, Luc tells Edward that Sybille is ‘perhaps (his) best friend’30. Since the possibility of Luc's having a girlfriend would take him out of the sphere of homosexual relations, Edward feels rather intimidated about this, but since he cannot disclose his true feelings, he goes into playacting and ‘like some creeping old hetero’ asks ‘is Sybille as beautiful as her name?’31 Later on, when Edward has his lesson with Marcel, his other student, he cannot help ask the boy about Sybille: ‘and what do you know about Luc's girlfriend?’32. Edward blushes while asking this question, which shows that he is interested in Luc himself. Marcel answers this question not in English, but in Flemish and lets Edward know that ‘(Luc) was never interested in girls’33. This is a very striking scene in the sense that the issue of homosexuality has to be foreignized and encrypted in one way or another, because it is not something to be talked about in a comfortable way, even in a child's discourse. Similarly, upon hearing this response in Flemish, Edward thinks that ‘the idea (was) too serious or shocking to manage in this difficult other language’34 for Marcel. In a slower pace, Edward's relations with Paul Echevin also develop in parallel with his relation to the young boy. While visiting the Orst Museum, whose curator is Paul Echevin, Edward becomes conscious of its different architecture. Again we see how prone Edward's perception of art is. It is during this visit that Edward acknowledges ‘the unexpected understanding (he) believed existed between
28 Ibid., p. 58. 29 Ibid., p. 66. 30 Ibid., p. 62. 31 The very name ‘Sybille’ reminds us Sibyl Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian’s courtship with Sibyl Vane results in her destruction, which is another depiction of the cruelty of the young and beautiful boy. Camilla Paglia, in her Sexual Personae, refers to this relationship in the following way: ‘The beautiful boy’s cruelty appears in the Sibyl Vane episode, where Dorian courts and brutally spurns a young actress, causing her suicide. Like Alcibiades turning on Athens, he is merely following the destiny of type. I said the beautiful boy straying into the social world is a destroyer, serene in his Apollonian indifference to the suffering of others. Wilde later called the ‘terrible moral’ of the ending ‘an artistic error’, the only error in the book.’ Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, New York, Vintage Books, 1991, p. 515. 32 Op.cit., p. 74. 33 Ibid., p. 75. 34 Ibid., p. 75. 138
Paul Echevin and (him)35. But Edward is still unaware of Paul's interest in him and his relation to Edward is still unclear to the extent that he was not sure what to call him36. Paul's sense of obscurity regarding his position does not only exist in his mutual relationship with men; he has to confront this feeling in all planes of his life. During the dinner party at Paul Echevin's house, for example, he makes it clear to readers that he does not feel himself as a mature man, but as a child. Even when among his peers, due to his homosexual constitution, Edward feels that he is somehow more prone to assume the role of children in society37. Even on a larger scale, when he thinks of his homosexual friend Matt and his own house, he cannot help but make the same analogy: ‘It was odd that we both lived hidden away behind old people whom we never saw; comfortably, too, as it allowed us to be children again, free and disadvantaged’38. This observation of Edward might be read from many different perspectives: on a psychological level, the analogy with children represents the homosexual man's wish to return to the maternal order; on a sociological level it represents how the homosexual man is forced towards the fringes of society in an alienating manner and how society ignores and creates a space for gay men at the same time. Within the framework of the relationship between man and boy, on the other hand, this analogy proves that the roles and positions of the two parties in such a relationship is often a blurred one. Men are not necessarily fatherly figures, they feel like children and may find themselves in the position of ‘boys’ unexpectedly and boys are not necessarily inexperienced kids, because they, too, might have a lot to teach older men. When Paul Echevin asks for Edward's help at the museum, Edward feels ‘charmed, and a little intimidated’. He later confesses to himself that:
‘Then I saw myself, still about nine years old, sitting at Paul Echevin's immense desk, chin on forearm, in the first week of winter time, in the
35 Ibid., p. 65. 36 Ibid., p. 70. 37 Ibid., p. 86. 38 Ibid., p. 97. 139
teatime lamplight and gloom and the busy adduct silence. Lost in a world of words and pictures’39.
This passage, again, shows us how easily interchangeable the man and boy roles are and how these homosexual men find themselves in the position of fathers. During the dinner party at Paul Echevin's house, Edward meets Maurice, a teacher at St Narcissus, Luc's former school, who previously taught Marcel and Luc40. Maurice tells Edward about the mystery surrounding Luc, which is his much gossiped adventure with the gay sailors. Later on, Paul intervenes with a story of his own about a gay dentist. The evening party ends for Edward with a series of narratives about ‘dentists and sailors’41, stories with gay characters in it. This dinner party gives us clues about how Edward's new society perceives him: it is clear that his homosexuality is not something unknown to many and by telling such stories of men advancing towards men, they might be trying to understand each others' dispositions. As his obsession towards Luc deepens, Edward’s anxiety grows as well. Before one of his lessons with Luc, for example, Edward’s passion increases his anxiety to such an extent that he ‘was calming [his] nerves with tricks against stage- fright that [his] father taught [him]’42. By using the word stage, Edward unconsciously likens his situation to that of an actor, which heightens the sense of ‘acting one’s life out’ as if on a theatrical stage. It could be surmised that these men are aware of their constant need to enact certain identities. Fathers, whether present or not, play a significant role in the lives of the characters in The Folding Star. Luc’s relations to others around him, his perception of life as a young boy are also greatly affected by his father’s place in his life. We know that Luc’s father and mother are separated and in consequence Luc lives in a particularly fatherless household. It is interesting to note not only his father’s absence, but that sudden and unexpected presences cause a lot of chaos and commotion in Luc’s life:
39 Ibid., p. 123 40 Ibid., p. 93-94. 41 Ibid., p. 95. 42 Ibid., p. 117. 140
‘So your father’s coming?’ I opened with. ‘Yes, that’s right, my father. We don’t see him for ages, and then, bouf!, he just goes and turns up’43.
Upon the sudden visit of Luc’s father, his mother gets so anxious that she gives many orders around to get the house ready for the visit. The chaos and commotion caused by this event prevent Edward and Luc to have their coffee which had somehow turned into a habit. Later on, we are not given any piece of information about the interaction between Luc’s father and his family. Edward himself makes it clear for several times that he anxiously dreads any possible contact with Luc’s father. It is only Luc’s own words that we learn about Martin Altidore, Luc’s father. On the day of Luc’s father’s arrival, Edward and Luc, very much like children to be kept out of the way, are sent to Luc’s bedroom to have their lesson, but instead of having a lesson they start talking about Luc’s father’s past and his business. Luc tells Edward ‘I call it The Fall of the House of Altidore’, which is an almost direct reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’44. There is this constantly alive discourse on fathers clad in literary frameworks which leaves no doubt that these men and young boys are evading and rejecting their real fathers and looking for surrogate fathers in words and images instead. It is this very paradoxical search which defines their dispositions in life that puts them in the position of children: children who are looking for fathers and acting as fathers to one another. The very title of the novel, ‘The Folding Star’, is a direct reference to John Milton’s ‘Comus’.45 ‘The Folding Star’ in Comus is the Attendant Spirit ‘which bids
43 Ibid., p. 139. 44 The characters in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ also suffer from the absence of fatherly and motherly figures. 45 In John Milton’s Comus, two brothers and their sister are lost in a journey through the woods. When their sister, called The Lady in Milton’s masque, gets tired, her brothers wander off in search for some food. While alone, the Lady encounters Comus, a character inspired by the god of mockery, who is disguised as a villager and claims he will lead her to her brothers. Deceived by his amiable countenance, the Lady follows him, only to be captured, brought to his pleasure palace and victimized by his necromancy. Seated on an enchanted chair, with "gums of glutinous heat", she is immobilized, and Comus accosts her while with one hand he holds a necromancer’s wand and with the other he offers a vessel with a drink that would overpower her. Comus urges the Lady to "be not coy" and drink from his magical cup (representing sexual pleasure and intemperance), but she repeatedly refuses, arguing for the virtuousness of temperance and chastity. Within view at his palace is an array of cuisine intended to arouse the Lady’s appetites and desires. Despite being restrained against her 141 the Shepherd fold’46. This attendance and guidance attributed to this star puts it in a fatherly position. ‘The Folding Star’ in Hollinghurst’s novel functions on two levels: both as a guiding figure that is looked for and a paternal figure that assumes an active guiding role. When Edward talks about his younger days, when he still lived with his family, for example, he explains that this ‘Folding Star’ was something he awaited in the evenings: ‘And when I sat in my special tree and waited for the folding star, I did’47. On another level, Edward will himself be acting as ‘an attendant spirit’ for Luc, as a man-lover for a boy. His obsession with Luc is not only a sexual one; in many instances, Edward expresses his willingness to teach Luc the ways of life. His very name, Edward, meaning ‘wealthy guard’ in Old English, relates him to John Milton’s Attendant Spirit in Comus. The Attendant Spirit guards over the young lady and her two brothers while they are walking in the forest. Edward Manners, too, like the Attendant Spirit and the cursed nymph Echo, follows Luc Altidore all throughout the novel. The underlying reason for Edward Manner’s roaming in the streets in not merely hs love for Luc Altidore. On a symbolic level, he is in search for his identity and a community for himself in the unknown Belgian city. His very position as such reminds us Charlotte Bronte’s Villette. As Kate Millett in her Sexual Politics states, Charlotte Bronte’s Villette depicts Lucy as a female character who tries to survive in a male-supremacist society48. Edward Manners in Hollinghurst’s novel
will, she continues to exercise right reason in her disputation with Comus, thereby manifesting her freedom of mind. Whereas the would-be seducer argues appetites and desires issuing from one’s nature are “natural” and therefore licit, the Lady contends that only rational self-control is enlightened and virtuous. To be self-indulgent and intemperate, she adds, is to forfeit one’s higher nature and to yield to baser impulses. In this debate the Lady and Comus signify, respectively, soul and body, ratio and libido, sublimation and sensualism, virtue and vice, moral rectitude and immoral depravity. Meanwhile her brothers, searching for her, come across the Attendant Spirit, an angelic figure sent to aid them, who takes the form of a shepherd and tells them how to defeat Comus. As the Lady continues to assert her freedom of mind and to exercise her free will by resistance, even defiance, she is rescued by the Attendant Spirit and her brothers, who chase off Comus. The Lady remains magically bound to her chair. With a song, the Spirit conjures the water nymph Sabrina who frees the Lady on account of her steadfast virtue. She and her brothers are reunited with their parents in a triumphal celebration, which signifies the heavenly bliss awaiting the wayfaring soul that prevails over trials and travails, whether these are the threats posed by overt evil or the blandishments of temptation. 46 Milton, John. Comus and Some Shorter Poems of Milton. Eds. E.M.W. Tillyard & P.B. Tillyard. George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd. London. 1952. 47 Alan Hollinghurst, The Folding Star, Vintage, London, 1993, p. 212 48 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, Chicago, University of Illinois Press, p. 140. 142
The Folding Star, has strong parallels with the character of Lucy, in that, they are both outcasts in their own society and both arrive at Belgium to teach young students English. Charlotte Bronte’s novel Villette can be read as a chronicle of a woman’s life. Since Villette depicts the psychosexual development of its heroine Lucy Snowe, it might be regarded as a kind of a psychoanalytic novel. Villette’s solitariness gives the novel an existential nature: ‘Thus, there remained no possibility of dependence on others; to myself alone could I look’49. This is how Lucy Snowe sets out to make a life for herself. At the end of the novel, she will end up as a self-made nineteenth century career woman; she will prosper, open a school of her own, own a home of her own and become financially independent. Edward Manners on the other hand ends the novel without having a place of his own. The character of Lucy Snowe is a divided character. Many critics attribute schizophrenic characteristics to Lucy Snowe.50 Lucy Snowe insists she does not have an ‘overheated and discursive imagination’51; she is not ‘artistic,’ nor she is a ‘sudden and dangerous’ nature, ‘sensitive as they are called.’ She insists she is ruled by reason, prefers peace to stimulation, and experiences excitement only as a ‘disturbace’. Her ambition is to hold the quick of her nature ‘in catalepsy and a dead trance’52. She is a model of repressed, rational womanhood. The tragedies that leave her orphaned, friendless, and penniless are always indirectly evoked, referred to as sea voyages in which the entire crew and the captain are lost. The course of Villette appears to be linear, but while its events move forward in time, every forward motion is also an excavation of things past, so that linear action is only linear in appearance. The movement of the novel is actually cyclical, almost circular. When Polly anticipates finding herself in the situation soon to be Lucy Snowe’s, with ‘no one but myself to look to’, her first effort is to become precociously independent. ‘No need, no need,’ she says when her nurse offers to
49 Alan Hollinghurst, The Folding Star, London, Vintage, p. 32. 50 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979, p. 416. 51 Op.cit., p. 9. 52 Ibid., p. 102. 143 carry her up the stairs, and the next morning, she proceeds to wash and dress herself with ‘pains and difficulty’53. Six-year-old Polly’s problem – how to attach herself to a new life, ‘to settle,’ – is the problem Lucy Snowe will confront throughout Villette. Once in Villette, Lucy Snowe quickly finds a home that is, to her, deathlike. Her first glimpse of the rooms where she will sleep reveals ‘the queerest little dormitories- which, I heard afterwards, had once been nuns’ cells’54. To Lucy Snowe, the love of the dead is of absolute importance. It is changeless, unalterable, immutable. Hence her terror when she dreams that the dead have ceased to love her and have forgotten her. Hence her determination to remember them, to be faithful to them, since it is only in her mind that the beloved dead continue to live. Her mind keeps them alive, and in turn, they keep her alive. In the eyes of the dead, she sees herself as someone well-loved; the eyes of the dead are mirrors reflecting a sustaining, anchoring image, whereas her actual reflection, come upon suddenly in real mirrors, often frightens her and is experienced as uncanny or alien. Alone in the world, she is alien to herself, without substance, like the cut flowers she so dislikes: a thing ‘rootless and perishable’, a shadow of the bright fabric of the world. In Villette we have a plot line that is not following events in the external world, the so-called real events. Instead, the plot line follows the internal events of Lucy Snowe’s psyche. In a metaphorical sense, Lucy must recover enough of what was vital in her childhood before she can go on. This process of recovery and reclamation is accomplished, on a realistic level, by real restitutions, real rediscoveries. The Folding Star, in a similar vein, opens up the inner psyche of the gay man to us. We follow the gay man as he roams around in streets, trying to find himself a place and a community, very much like Villette. This similarity between Edward Manners and Villette also calls for an analogy between the woman and the homosexual man in society. Hollinghurst here draws a strong parallel between the plights of women and homosexual men. Both of them try to be part of a society which very harshly oppresses them and grants them no liberty.
53 Charlotte Bronte, Villette, New York&London, Bantam Books, 1986, p. 8. 54 Ibid., p. 62. 144
Towards the end of the novel, Edward’s desires for Luc are consummated. The way this consummation takes place, however, represents the enigmatic characteristics of their relationship. One day when Edward goes into the gay bar The Cassette, he surprisingly sees all three, Luc, Patrick and Sybille sitting together. After Edward and the three of them talk together for a while, Patrick and Sybille decide to go home. Luc, however, surprising Edward tremendously, tells his friends that he wishes to stay a bit longer with Edward. Luc starts to talk about love and feelings and asks for advice from Edward. Their talk is intermittently interrupted by other men in the bar who are interested in Luc as a boy55. Later on, Luc says ‘for some considerable time I have wanted to see your place of residence’ to Edward56. Edward excitedly accepts this proposal and the two go out of the bar. Once they go out the zip of Luc’s coat stocks up and Edward helps Luc with his zip57. This very scene, again, portrays us a father and son relationship, with a caring father bent over his son. Still, Edward isn’t able to define his position with Luc in a clear manner. While sitting in the bar, for example, he asks himself whether he was ‘his buddy or his moral tutor?’58. When Edward takes Luc to his home, ‘[Luc] threw off the cap with a breathy laugh, wandered to where I was standing and put his arms around me with a loose hug’59. In this scene, Luc voluntarily puts himself into the position of a passive lover to Edward. Edward, in his amazement, reacts to this unexpected consummation in a very emotional way:
‘He was lying in my bed, naked, sleeping – flat out. It was a triumph. Tears slipped down my face; I didn’t really know why – it felt like gratitude, but also they were the tears that register some deep displacement; a bereavement sending up its sudden choking universe’60
The underlying sense of ‘deep displacement’ and ‘bereavement’ felt by Edward about his unexpected consummation with Luc might refer to the fact that he doesn’t see himself on an equal basis with Luc. He feels a current of ‘mischief’ on the part of
55 Alan Hollinghurst, The Folding Star, London, Vintage, p. 328. 56 Ibid., 329. 57 Ibid., p. 329. 58 Ibid., p. 324. 59 Ibid., p. 334. 60 Ibid., p. 335. 145
Luc in his coming to his home and letting himself be possessed by an older man. Edward, from a father-like stance, can also understand Luc’s position as a young boy who was seeking love, experience and fun:
‘Of course it wasn’t just mischief, he wasn’t trying to trap me: he wanted fun, experience, anything wild – either you did it with him or you didn’t. Somewhere out there was the person he loved, a boy or a girl, but for now he was making do: I felt I was getting the benefit of some stored up passion intended for someone else...’61.
Luc and Edward make love on the armchair62 and after his possession of Luc, Edward remembers ‘the old Altidorean legend ...which made Luc a direct descendant of the Virgin Mary’63. This is interesting in that the homosexual relationship between Luc and Edward is related to fathers, forebears and descendants. The paternal imagery, which is also evident in the very title of the novel as has been explained, has its stamp on this consummation of the men and the boy at the end of the novel. Edward’s suspicion about the transience and spontaneity of his consummation with Luc proves true when the boy unexpectedly leaves his home and most probably the town as well. It is Luc’s mother herself who thinks that Luc has left the town. She thinks that her son misses his father64. The obscure and ever shifting positions taken by Luc and Edward, as boy and man, or son and father, is heightened when Edward wears Luc’s clothes before going on a search for Luc in his mother’s car. It can be said that the boy has forced him into his own position by eloping from him. After their consummation, after Luc’s submitting to Edward’s sexual will, he immediately rejects him and goes away to redeem his own independence, that is to claim his own manhood.
61 Ibid., p. 335. 62 Ibid., p. 337. 63 Ibid., p. 339. 64 Ibid., p. 345. 146
4.2. Erotic Triangles
The Folding Star deals with the juxtaposition of heterosexual and homosexual order. The problem with the father figure and his hetero-normative order can be traced in many sub-plots of the novel. It can be argued that Hollinghurst makes use of ‘erotic triangles’ to reflect on the patriarchal control. The dynamics of ‘threesomes’ in Hollinghurst’s novel signify the hetero-normative male bonding and simultaneous remobilisation of patriarchal order. Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, a queer theorist, in her book titled as Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, talks about ‘erotic triangles’ of the Victorian literature as enacted in a continuum which defines homosexual and homosocial relationships. Sedgewick analyses such ‘erotic triangles’ to uncover the ‘homoeroticism that undergrids patriarchy and male homosocial relations’65. Sedgewick argues that for men, society tells us that strong, healthy, ‘buddy’ relations between men are entirely distinct from unhealthy, queer, sexual relations between men. By naming a continuum, Sedgewick is able to bring all kinds of relationships between men into the same critical light, which leads to her analysis of different texts from English literature to examine. She identifies a common triangular pattern (the ‘erotic triangle’) of two male lovers, rivals for the attention of a female, who by the end of the work display as much an attachment for each other as for the woman who has ostensibly been the object of their attentions from the outset. But to Sedgewick, there is no need for criticism to draw attention to a similar continuum linking female homosocial and homosexual behaviour, since the connection between ‘women loving women’ and ‘women promoting the interests of women’ does not worry society really as much. In her terms, the bond between men is as much an axis of patriarchal oppression of women as anything else. Society has a vested interest in breaking up male bond and replacing it in marriage bonds as a means of controlling men and allowing men to control women. This is very much reminiscent of the patriarchal urge to separate the male child from his father once he is no longer biologically dependant on her. This way of thinking, whose origins could be traced in the
65 Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York, Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 32. s 147
Enlightenment, presupposes that in order fro them ale child to be a strong individual, that is to say a strong patriarch himself, he should be removed away from the realm of the mother. He should make a successful transit from the world of feelings, dreams and plays to the world of rationality, fact and learning. In a similar manner, society deems very close male bonding as something threatening and has this strong urge to break it up once it is unbearably strong. Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star abounds in groupings of three66. ‘The Three’ of Patrick, Luc and Sybille, Orst’s artistic triptych that Paul reassembles67, the illustration for the story of the False Chaplain68, the childhood triad of Paul, Maurice and Lilli are some of these groupings of three that we come across in many instances in the novel. Even the title of the novel refers to some kind of a grouping of three in that ‘the Folding Star’ refers to John Milton’s Comus, in which two brothers and their sister go through an enchanted wood where the sister gets lost and falls victim to Comus, the magician who lives in that wood. These groupings of three seem to be signifying some important issues in terms of the balance among their respective members. The group of Patrick, Luc and Sybille, for example, might be implying an inherently unbalanced relationship in which the respective parties exist at the expense of at least one of their members. Starting from the very beginning of the novel, when Edward develops his first interest in Luc, he gets curious about his friends. He soon learns that Luc has two close friends, Patrick and Sibyll. These three friends, their doings and whereabouts induce a high level of curiosity in Edward. The three friends are simply referred to as ‘The Three’ or ‘Les Trois’, which makes it clear that they are regarded as indispensable by many. The relations among the members of this tripartite group are rather enigmatic. The readers are not well-informed about the dynamics of this group. We don’t know how they are positioned to one another until the very end of the novel. Edward himself states that:
66 Three is regarded universally as a fundamental number, expressive of an intellectual and spiritual order in God, the cosmos or mankind, and either synthesizes the three-in-one of all living beings or else results from the conjunction of one and two produced, in this case, ‘from the marriage of heaven and hell’ (from The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, (eds.) Jean Chevalier, Alain Gheerbrant, (trans.) John Buchanan-Brown, p. 993). 67 Alan Hollinghurst, The Folding Star, London, Vintage, p. 278. 68 Ibid., p. 177. 148
‘They enhance each other’s mystique to no end. They’re all beautiful and well off and give the impression of being crazy about each other’69.
Patrick is a physically very attractive young man; Sybille is an attractive girl whose father works in the Ministry of Culture and Luc comes from one of the aristocratic families of the town: These ‘beautiful and well-off’ youngsters, as Edward defines them, act in a very secretive manner. Edward cannot be sure about the nature of their ineractions. He cannot understand, for example, whether Luc and Sybille are going out or whether there is some kind of a homosexual attachment between Patrick and Luc. Edward’s curiosity about these three young people grows to such an extent that he decides to follow them when they go to the seaside on a weekend. Edward and Matt break into a beach house just next to the one in which Patrick, Luc and Sybille are staying70 and starts watching them secretly behind closed curtains. This voyeurism on the part of Edward makes us think of this trinity as something closed to the outer world. Apart from this curiosity, Edward nurtures some jealousy towards these three friends. Since he doesn’t want to share Luc with anybody else, he wants to exclude any potential rival to him. However, in order to be able to do that, he has to know who stands where in this triple relationship. That’s why he constantly follows them in the streets of the town and walks around Luc’s house. Edward’s attempt to decipher this tripartite web of relations among Luc, Patrick and Sybille goes on all along in the novel and it is only towards the end that ‘the three had finally declared themselves’71. We learn that Sybille was once in love with Patrick, but now she can only think of Luc. Her love for Luc is so deep that when Luc goes away from his home and the town without letting anyone know where, Sybille regards Edward as a rival and tells him that he ‘will never have him!’72. As for Patrick, we know that he and Sybille were once in love, but Patrick
69 Ibid., p. 153. 70 Ibid., p. 103. 71 Ibid., p. 349. 72 Ibid., p. 370. 149 now stands as a very close friend of Luc in this trinity. We also know that Patrick and Luc had some sexual experience with one another. Patrick, in this manner, is presented to us as a young man who had a homosexual phase at one moment of his life and who is interested in girls only at the moment. He is shown to be tolerating Luc’s being gay, but he tells Edward he can’t sleep with Luc anymore. All these complex sets of relationships between these two young men and the young woman can be analysed from the perspective of different gender roles confronting and making use of one another. It also shows us how homosexuality exists in a web of homosexual relationships. Before going into a deeper analysis of this, other tripartite relationships in the novel beg for an explanation as well. The idea of tripartite relations exists in some other parallel stories within the novel. Paul Echevin, the curator of the Orst Museum, for example, tries to bring a triptych of Orst together. The triptych was made by Orst for the altar of a church, but later, during World War II, the three pieces were sent to other places. While preparing for the Orst exhibition, Paul Echevin brings these three pieces together, but ‘the three pieces of ‘Aurefois’ didn’t fit’73. The triptych, as a work of art, is not a harmonious one. The discordant nature of this triptych as a work of art represents the homosexual man who cannot fit in society. Another disharmonious tripartite relation exists in a story illustrated by Edgar Orst. In this story called ‘The False Chaplain’, a knight and his lady live peacefully in their castle; however their happiness is soon overshadowed by the fact that they can’t have any children. They ask the advice of a chaplain and he tells them that the Knight should take part in the Crusades so that God will grant them a child. The Knight consents and goes onto the Crusades, but during his absence the Chaplain tries to seduce the Lady. He can’t resist his passion towards her and he at last makes the Lady believe that she will have a child if she sleeps with him. The Lady consents and gets pregnant, but upon the Knight’s return, she insists on telling the truth. The Chaplain wants her to stay silent at all costs so he kills her by poisoning her wine. This is how the story ends: two men, rivals to one another, for a woman. This is the story for which Edgar Orst made three illustrations:
73 Ibid., p. 278. 150
‘The first picture was simply an icon of her [...] In the second she was sewing with her women [...] In the third she lay on the brink of death... The wings of the Knight’s cloak sheltering her, his face, though, was out of the picture and the black figure of the Chaplain rose exaltedly behind, with upraised hands and eyes’74.
While looking at these three illustrations, Edward thinks that the unusual ending of the story had attracted Orst and the artist had given it ‘a hint of perverse sexual triumph to the shaven phallic upright of the priest, and the supine surrender of the female’75. The Folding Star abounds in such triple relations. Lastly, towards the end of the novel, when Paul talks about his childhood to Edward, he confesses that he had his own ‘threesome’ during his childhood. While World War II was still going on, Paul’s father decides to take care of two Jewish children: a boy of about Paul’s age and a younger girl. This, again, makes a threesome of two men and a woman. Paul tells Edward ‘our threesome became quite close in time’76. The mysterious aura surrounding Patrick, Luc and Sybille existed in Paul’s threesome as well:
‘There being three of us gave us a sense of mysterious power, to ourselves and to outsiders. It also made it hard to do anything independently, or in a couple without the third. I don’t know if you’ve experienced anything similar’77.
These parallel layers of threesomes in the novel create a continuum of men and women positioned to one another around the axis of desire. This continuum, although in different ways, can be detected in The Folding Star as well: Patrick goes through a phase of homosexuality, but then follows a heterosexual route, leaving Luc and Sybille alone in a relationship in which Luc makes use of Sybille as an alibi in society. He lets people around him see Sybille as
74 Ibid., p. 178. 75 Ibid., p. 178. 76 Ibid., p. 386. 77 Ibid., p. 386-387. 151 his girlfriend, so that he can roam around with men. In Luc’s quest for males, Sybille as a woman is forsaken. The same thing happens to the Lady in ‘The False Chaplain’ story. She falls victim to the Chaplain’s desire and the last illustration portrays the Knight and the Chaplain, the two men together standing over the dead body of the Lady. In John Milton’s ‘Comus’, as if foreshadowing all these defeats in the novel from the very beginning, the sister falls victim to Comus and the two brothers would not be able to save her, if the ‘Folding Star’, the attendant spirit, were not there. The dynamics of sexuality as enacted by men and women in the novel are rendered through an intertextual framework. The main analogy with John Milton’s The Attendant Spirit is further expanded through short stories and art. The ever- changing roles and groupings of people in the novel, the ever-fluctuating positions taken by the members of these unstable groupings are there to reflect the ‘homeless’ nature of love as felt and enacted by the homosexual man. Love as such is not fixated in pre-defined strict frameworks. Since this love is left homeless by society, both its subjects and objects are in an endless fluctuation as depicted in Hollinghurst’s novel.
4.3. The Artist as Father
The fact that the homosexual man’s love is homeless stems from his being expelled from the house of the father. Since the hetero-normative order denies him an autonomous identity as part of society, the homosexual man is in need of finding another father who would be a surrogate parent for him. Art and aestheticism from this perspective could be analysed as spheres of identity formation for the homosexual man. From a psychoanalytical perspective, the inclination of Alan Hollinghurst’s characters to art and aestheticism can be read within the theoretical framework of Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. The homosexual’s focus on and attachment to art and aesthetics originate from his problems with the father figure and his order by which he doesn’t abide. Since the homosexual doesn’t internalise the paternal order as part
152 of his identity, he feels compelled to fill in that gap by something else. Art and aesthetics, as most rewarding means of sublimation, offer homosexuals a sense of fulfilment and satisfied identity. Smirgel, in her book Creativity and Perversion, argues that the ‘relation between creation and perversion is enigmatic’78 and she later also states that ‘the creative process implies having recourse to sublimation’79. Smirgel thinks that for most of the homosexuals, there are a great number or problems which hinder creation80. Smirgel also cites Freud’s ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’ where it is argued that artistic disposition in an individual is related to perversion and neurosis. Later on, Smirgel argues that the artistic urges of the homosexual, or ‘the pervert’ as her designation goes, are mostly derived from the Oedipal conflict and the denial of the father. Smirgel deems the artistic urges of the homosexual as a continuation of this paternal denial and a futile attempt at creating81. Leo Bersani, in his article “Sexuality and Aesthetics” also focuses on how sublimation, that is, transformation of erotic energy into socially useful achievements, defines the homosexual. Bersani, too, refers to Freud’s work and his article on Leonardo da Vinci and argues that the escape of sexual desire from sexual repression is transformed into ‘intellectual curiosity’:
78 Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, London, Free Association Books, 1984, 89. 79 Ibid., p. 89. 80 Ibid., p. 90. 81 ‘At the time of the Oedipus conflict the neurotic, or normal subject projects his Ego Ideal onto his father, thus making him his model, his identification aim, in order to become like him, i.e…, like the mother’s object, in the hope of replacing him at her side. The future pervert -usually encouraged in this by his mother who pampers and admires him and excludes the father- lives with the illusion that, with his pregenital sexuality, his immature and sterile penis, he is an adequate sexual partner for his mother and has nothing to envy in his father. In my opinion, he is forced to project his narcissism onto his pregenital erotogenic zones and past objects; he subjects them to an idealization process in order to preserve his conviction. […] This is the point where the compulsion to idealise steps in. In my opinion this accounts for the pervert’s obvious affinities for art and beauty; the pervert is often an aesthete. The pregenital libido -which, if diverted, may be sublimated- is not always available to the pervert since it is directly released in the perverse act. Moreover, because he has not projected his Ego Ideal onto his father and genitality, he has not introjected his father’s genital attributes. The resulting identification gaps constitute a major obstacle to a real sublimation process. Idealization tends more toward aestheticism than creation and when creation nevertheless develops, it often bears the stamp of aesthteticism’, Smirgel 1984, p. 92. 153
‘This libidinal energy, Freud suggests, is no longer attached to the original complexes of infantile sexual research, which means that the intellectual interests in whose service it now operates are not substitutive formations for those complexes. In this form of sublimation, sexuality would therefore provide the energy of thought without defining its terms. Or, to put this in another way, he would have a non-referential version of sexualised thought’82.
In his analysis of Freud’s treatment of Lenordo da Vinci, Leo Bersani comes up with some very interesting ideas. Bersani argues that for Freud, Leonardo da Vinci as ‘an example of genuine sublimation’83 repeats the ‘original complexes’ of his Oedipal trauma. This repetition, for Bersani, is a neurotic one. It’s very clear in Bersani’s assessment of Freud’s work on Leonardo that Freud centered Leonardo’s sexual, artistic and scientific life on a paternal trauma, which, in turn, produced a maternally derived traumatic model of sexuality. Bersani details Freud’s commentary on Lenordo in the following way:
‘The absence of a father in the artist’s early years meant, according to Freud, that no beneficently inhibiting Law put an end to the child’s inconclusive investigations of his mother’s being. As a result, Leonardo is “condemned” to repeat those experimental and traumatic identifications which are so many attempts to repeat representation ally the eroticising shocks of his mother’s love, to locate both her and himself in those experiences of shattering pleasure. And yet, the unarticulated conclusion to which the Leonardo essay points is that sublimation as nonrepressed sexual energy in fact depends on the “absence” of the father, or more exactly, on a certain failure on the part of the father during the Oedipal period to crystallise into the prohibitive LawS, that is on the defeat of at least subordination of the so called dominant Oedipal configuration’84.
As the quotation above makes it clear, Freud attributes Leonardo’s inability to complete a scientific project to the absence of a father. Jacques Rancière, in a similar way, in his book The Aesthetic Unconscious discusses Leonardo da Vinci in this manner and argues that the absent paternal order in the artist causes him to fall in a
82 Leo Bersani, ‘Sexuality and Aesthetics’, October, Vol. 28, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis, 1984, p. 35. 83 Ibid., p. 36. 84 Ibid., p. 36-37. 154 futile love with his father85. Bersani concludes his discussion of Leonardo by stating that ‘the repeated attempts to identify an erotically traumatising and erotically traumatised human subject is in fact the source of Leonardo’s aesthetic power and that his artistic achievement therefore depends on a certain failure to represent’86. In the light of these arguments it can be stated that the homosexual man, by rejecting the order of the father and insisting on staying in the anal stage, feels this urge to fill in this psychic gap in himself which is not filled in a by a benevolent father. His constant urge to sublimate his socially unaccepted sexual drives, his anality, through art and aesthetics defines his disposition on a psychological level. The homosexual is in need of an environment which would be functioning like a mirror that reflects aesthetic things onto his Ego so that his anality would be disguised and covered ‘with a thousand glittering jewels’87. As in all novels of Alan Hollinghurst, the plot of The Folding Star centres around the figure(s) of father(s) from different perspectives. The problem with the father, originating in the Oedipal dynamics, from a psychoanalytical perspective, positions the homosexual in close affinity with art and aestheticism. Since the homosexual cannot project his ideal onto his father, he will not be able to re-enact the ‘creative’ powers of the father, but will have to make do with being an aesthete only.88 The homosexual figure in Hollinghurst’s novels is very closely related to art and aesthetics. Will in The Swimming-Pool Library is an aesthete in the sense that he tries very hard to keep his Adonis-like body in shape at all times. The character of
85 ‘As the incarnation of victorious consciousness, Freud’s Moses stands in opposition not so much to idolaters or dissidents as those who have produced nothing and remained victims of unexplicated fantasy. We are of course thinking of Michelangelo’s legendary alter ego, Leonardo da Vinci, the man of notebooks and sketches, the inventor of a thousand unrealized projects, the painter who never manages to individualize figures and always paints the same smile, in short, the man bound to his fantasy and stuck in a homosexual relation to the Father.’ Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious, Trans., Debra Keates and James Swenson, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2009, p. 67-68. 86 Op.cit., p. 36-37. 87 Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, London, Free Association Books, 1984, p. 95. 88 In Hollinghurst’s 2004 novel The Line of Beauty, for example, Nicholas Guest is constantly referred to as an ‘aesthete’ by other characters. Apart from his being linked to Henry James, this reference to Aestheticism reflects his interest in beautiful objects and art. It could be argued that, similar to the proposition above, since he has left his father’s home and has no strong relations with him. Nick has to stick to art as an alternative creative channel in which he can assert his personality, cleanse himself of the ‘dirt’ society ascribes him and get some kind of a redemption. 155
Robin in The Spell, is an architect; Nick in The Line of Beauty is a literary person with great knowledge in arts and antiques. Characters in The Folding Star, including Edward Manners, are closely related with art and aestheticism as well. The fact that Edward’s father is a musician, and his aunt is a novelist makes this relation even stronger. The issue of art and aesthetics from this perspective might be considered as a continuation of the homosexual man’s continuum, or repetition, of his denial of the order of the father. Readers are reminded of the close relation between art and sexuality from the very beginning of the novel. While roaming around the Town Museum for the first time, Edward picks up a young man among the crowd and takes him home. The idea of men cruising in the museum among famous paintings accentuates this relation between sexuality and art. Even Edward’s first impression of the Belgian town is an artistic one: ‘... the sense that I had at every corner that the whole city aspired to be an artist’s impression’89. Again, while admiring some Brueghel paintings in the museum, Edward thinks of the figures on these Brueghel paintings as ‘bored’, ‘stylish’ and ‘desirable’90. The significance of art in The Folding Star, can also be strongly felt in the character of Edgar Orst. Edgar Orst is a symbolist painter who died during World War II and who acted as a kind of fatherly figure to Paul Echevin during his childhood. It’s interesting that Orst’s paintings are defined with a deep sense of sexual perversion. After his death, Edgar Orst continues to act as a fatherly figure for Paul Echevin in that Paul Echevin assumes the role of protecting and organising his works in the Orst Museum. Paul works on a catalogue of Orst’s paintings. Many characters in the novel think that he will never be able to complete it. This reminds us of William Beckwith in The Swimming-Pool Library, who will similarly not be able to write down Lord Nantwich’s biography. Both of these novels hint at a duty towards the father which cannot be fulfilled. Paul Echevin’s case, is perhaps more interesting, because he partly blames himself for Edgar Orst’s death. During the war, Paul has an affair with a young soldier. Orst, being a Jew, was in great danger then, and it was because of his homosexual affair with this young soldier that Orst’s place
89 Alan Hollinghurst, The Folding Star, London, Vintage, p. 12. 90 Ibid., p. 12. 156 is revealed to German soldiers. By having a homosexual relationship, Paul defies the paternal order and kills his surrogate father. But later on, he will be trying to fill in this self-inflicted gap in his life by trying to bring the pieces together in the form of a catalogue. This attempt of his, on the other hand, is a futile one and it will never turn into a real creation. The rejection of the fatherly order and the following contradictory attempt to fill in that self-inflicted gap by something else can be seen in Edward’s interest in literary pursuits and his constant remembering of his musician father. When asked about the reasons for his presence in this Belgian town, Edward almost always tends to talk about his father and about his being a musician: ‘I started to tell Gerard about my father, and the record he had made, and what it was like growing up in the house of a musician’91. His father and his being a musician forms a strong fixation in Edward’s mind. When in distress or in contemplation, Edward thinks of his ‘dear dead father’ singing92. His father is not a constant in his thoughts only; there are some very concrete remnants of his father in his life as well. When he visits the Rough Commons, his hometown in England to attend his first lover’s funeral, for example, he remembers the never-changed order of his father ‘...echoing from surfaces my father had kept bare and polished for acoustic reasons my mother had changed almost nothing in seventeen years’93. Edward’s sensitivity for his father affects his childhood as well. Again during his visit to his mother, he remembers his childhood days and confesses to himself that ‘... there was something risible about my father’s name ... After the Matthew Passion one of the boys gave a strangulated parody of my father’s performance, not from malice, but it brought tears to my eyes’94. Edward remembers the way his father sing:
‘My father had a great aversion to character-acting in songs, any rolling of the eyes, putting hands on hips or wringing out of humour. He tended to sing like a sentinel, sworn to some higher purpose’95.
91 Ibid., p. 50. 92 Ibid., p. 53. 93 Ibid., p. 190. 94 Ibid., p. 196. 95 Ibid., p. 228. 157
This description of his father’s way of singing makes it clear that Edward is far from a complete comprehension of his father’s perception of music. The very words ‘some higher purpose’ hint at Edward’s alienation from his father’s conception of art. Edward’s being remote from his father is also explained in an earlier description of him by Luc:
‘Of course he didn’t always have the alien rectitude of the concert platform. He loved getting out of his frac. At home he was a quiet ironist, closer with my brother Charlie than with me, though I was the one who inherited his habit of sitting and gazing into the middle distance’96.
Music is one current through which the theme of art and sexuality flows. A musician father and a homosexual son are two elements in which the Oedipal conflicts are perpetuated. It is music’s inherent relation to rhythm and ‘repetition’ that this sense of perpetuation is accentuated97. Music is not the only artistic outlet in The Folding Star. Edward Manners is a graduate of English and he is greatly interested in literature. He has this tendency to perceive the world around him through literary images. When he sees Luc’s house for the first time, for example, he remembers the Faerie Queene: ‘Altidore, it was a gothic belfry in itself, or else a knight-errant out of the Faerie-Queene...’98. While having one of their lessons, Edward and Luc talk about writers like Henry James and Somerset Maugham. The relation of the very title of the novel, ‘The Folding Star’ to John Milton’s Comus is a very deliberate one. When Edward goes to Rough Commons to attend the funeral of Dawn, his first boyfriend, he takes quite a lot of time to decide on the text he would be reading during the funeral and he chooses Gray’s Elegy. Just before the consummation of Edward’s desire for Luc, when they meet at a gay bar, Edward hears Luc talking about ‘The Prelude’, Wordsworth’s
96 Ibid., p. 196. 97 Leo Bersani, in his study of Mallarmé, for example, argues that the faun’s musical sublimations are extensions of his sexual desires rather than repressive substitutes or symptoms of those desires. According to Bersani, ‘the faun’s music can in no way be thought of as a substitute formation, as the disguised symptom of his sensual impulses. On the contrary: it repeats those impulses with an increased visibility’, Bersani 2009, 38. 98 Ibid., p. 16. 158 autobiographical poem. Literature as these examples clearly show, is very much part of these characters’ lives. Edward Manners is also depicted as a character who had been nurturing some literary pursuits since his childhood. During his visit to his mother, which functions as a flashback chapter in The Folding Star, Edward mentions his childhood friend Lawrence and how they dreamed of being writers:
‘My great friend was Lawrence Graves. We went through school in tandem and both wrote a lot, though he always assumed, with his combination of names, that it was he who was destined to be a major literary figure whilst I would fill some ancillary role: in one his fantasies I edited his poetical remains after his mysterious early death’99.
Interestingly enough, as if willing to hinder his son’s potential creativity, Edward’s mother didn’t like Graves. However, Edward’s father and Graves used to have some ‘nocturnal talks about music’100 and Edward’s ‘editing’ another person’s work is again an implication of how society and institutions interpret the gay man’s creativity as secondary. It can be argued, in conclusion that, the homosexual characters’ occupation with art and aesthetics can be defined as a search for some kind of a substitute for the gaps in their selves caused by the rejection of the fatherly order and the father’s failure to take the child out of the symbiosis of anality of the mother. The fact that Edward Manner constantly remembers his father and his music strengthens the relation between homosexuality and aesthetics Even more indicative than this is the fact that Edward Manners is depicted as a character who had nurtured literary ambitions in his younger days, but who could not realise them later on. This kind of incompleteness of an artistic pursuit or attempt is very much in parallel with the psychoanalytical conception of the relationship between art, aesthetics and homosexuality.
99 Ibid., p. 195. 100 Ibid., p. 197. 159
4.4. The Fetish as Father
If the homosexual man, as psychoanalysis suggests, tries to make up for his inefficiency as a socially accepted father figure and deliberately rejects the order of the Father through artistic and aesthetic pursuits, he feels that he has to establish and alternative order instead of the paternal one. Fetishism, in that respect, might be regarded as another current through which the homosexual man attempts to construct this alternative order. The etymology of the word ‘fetish’ already suggests a sense of ‘artificiality’ and ‘making up’. Fetishism, in this respect, could also be linked to camp which conjures up a strong sense of artificiality. The etymological roots of the word fetish are related to the Latin facticius (artificial) and facere (to make). Fetishism, in this sense, functions as another way of enhancing the bond between Edward Manners and Luc Altidore. Hollinghurst in The Folding Star, portrays Edward Manners as a homosexual man who constantly seeks refuge in fetishism. In the beginning of the novel, for example, when he visits the swimming-pool in the town, he is fooled and bullied by a number of young boys in the shower. Seeing one of the boys stealing his wallet in the locker room, the first thing that comes to his mind is the possibility that his father’s gold watch might have been stolen as well: ‘My dear father’s gold watch with the stop-hand that had slyly times many a Messiah and Gerontias..’101 It is clear that Edward Manners had fetishised his father’s watch and makes use of it as a kind of defence mechanism so that his Ego will not be dissolved. We sense his fear of such psychic dissolution in his panicky situation in the locker scene. Another strain of fetishism in the novel is seen when Edward steals Luc’s pieces of clothing and the negatives of his photographs from his bedroom. This is when in one of his lessons with Luc, he is left alone in his bedroom and decides to get hold of those objects belonging to his lover. Later on, when Edward’s friend Edie visits him, he confesses that ‘[he] has stolen lots of things. I’m wearing a pair of his
101 Alan Hollinghurst, The Folding Star, London, Vintage, p. 78-82. 160 pants at the moment, and one of his vests and one of his socks’102. Edward calls these pieces stolen from Luc as ‘Luciana’ and tries to keep them hidden from others: ‘I kept all the Luciana tidied away from Cherif’103. Smirgel, in her book Creativity and Perversion, links fetishism to the disavowal of the father. For Smirgel, ‘the exclusion of genital penis and of the genital father is signified and maintained through the very presence of the fetish’104. Smirgel cites and refers to several psychoanalytical case studies and concludes that fetishism functions as an attempt to structure a new reality:
‘I suggest the following hypothesis: the “trauma” of the “discovery” of the primal scene, after an attempt at working it through which is supported by the fantasy of anal coitus with the father, has been overcome only at the cost of a massive disavowal of reality, as the dream of an anal creation of the world shows. The little boy thus manages to disavow the painful sexual truth -that of the genital primal scene, the father’s genital penis and the procreative capacities it involves- thanks to a solution which puts an end to his feeling of dereliction. If my hypotheses are well-grounded, fetishism must be closely linked to the whole question. It must constitute a part -no doubt an important one- of the creation of a new reality in which the father and his attributes are disqualified and in which the genital level of sexuality is disavowed’105.
This passage presents us an irrefutable argument that the homosexual is in constant need of nurturing the illusion that the father’s order has nothing to offer him. Fetishism, for Smirgel, acts as a kind of substitute. The homosexual, through fetishism, feels convinced that ‘he has nothing to envy in his father, no need for a genital, fertile penis and can therefore escape from the conflicts ensuing the introjections of the father’s virile attributes without needing to identify with his progenitor’106. If we are to interpret the fetish as a symbol, as something that stands for or suggests something else by reason of relationship or association, The Folding Star stands out as a deeply symbolist novel. The novel starts with an epigraph by the
102 Ibid., p. 154. 103 Ibid., p. 330. 104 Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, London, Free Association Books, 1984, p. 81. 105 Ibid., p. 80. 106 Ibid., p. 82. 161
Symbolist poet Henri de Regnier, its subplot concerns a fictionalised Symbolist painter. The whole novel, actually, might be read as an extended Symbolist poem in prose, to the extent that Luc’s much gossiped adventure with the sailors echoes the young Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud’s supposed rape by a train car of soldiers107. For Hollinghurst, the love object is often a symbol, not an actual person. When Paul Echevin was a teenager, for example, he falls in love with a young man whom he later discovers to be a fascist soldier to his dismay. Similarly, Edgar Orst, the painter who is the main character of the novel’s subplot, was obsessed with a woman who either mysteriously drowned or faked her disappearance to escape the painter’s obsessive attention. Another instance of fetishism is seen in the character of Matt. Matt and Edward have a sexual relationship of a short duration. Matt’s main source of income is fetishism. At one point in the novel, Edward defines him as a ‘fetish merchant’ (p.157). We learn through Edward that Matt ‘sells porn videos, very cheaply by mail, he buys them and copies them, which I suppose is illegal. And he also sells people’s clothes, which must be illegal, too, and is much more profitable’108. Matt’s fetishism, too, can be regarded as a futile attempt to make do for some lost pillar in his identity.
4.5. The Homosexual Psyche
A great number of narcissistic characters in The Folding Star reflect the sense of self-containmet of the homosexual man and his rather fragile sense of community. Narcissism itself functions as a strong influence on the short duration of homosexual relationships. Hence, it could be argued that the fragility of homosexual community and bonding does not only triggered from the outside in the form of hetero-normative societ, but from the inner narcissistic urge of the homosexual man. It is often through mirros that we are presented with the main traits of these narcissist men: transient relations, a very weak and fragile and self-image, a sense of
107 Robert Drake, The Gay Canon, New York, Doubleday, 1984. 108 Op.cit., p. 157. 162 displacement, a sense of fragmented identity, a high degree of self admiration and a tendency to fall into a ruthless criticism of others. When Cherif and Edward make love for the first time, their eyes meet for a second on the wall of Edward’s bedroom and Edward feels that Cherif is bothered by this intimacy109. This might be an implication of the argument that, as narcissist characters, both Edward and Cherif abstain from a potentially long-lasting relationship and seek short-term sexual relations only. Another main characteristic of a narcissist person, that is, a weak self-image, can also be observed in Edward Manners, again through mirrors. When Edward meets Luc and falls in love with him, he has not much confidence in him. Again while looking at a mirror, he utters these words in his mind: ‘I hung back and looked in the mirror at Edward Manners, the pudging, bespectacled English teacher twice his age’110, which show us how weak and fragile his self-image is. Another scene from the novel, in which Edward’s weak self-image is revealed is when he goes to Paul Echevin’s house after a chat with Cherif at the bar and looks at himself in the mirror. He becomes aware of the fact that his clothes are worn. He looked poor in the mirror111. This was ‘an unhappy self- inspection’. It is interesting to note that this weak self-image produces a seemingly- strong identity: ‘... and I had always anyway loosely thought of myself as some kind of artist, who has a duty not to conform...’112. This very remark of Edward clearly signifies the fact that Edward as a narcissist tries to disguise his weak self-image with assuming artistic and self-confident traits. However, Edward is also aware of the fact that he is cheating and that he actually has no definite and secure place in society: ‘... or perhaps it was just my own sense of dislocation, out of breath after running between one world and another; a smoky bar with a juke-box and the silent elegance of an unknown house’113. When admiration comes at some rare moments, it is only very transient and partial. It is again through mirrors that Edward tries to decide whether he is capable of being a lover to Luc or not. In one scene, he admires his black hair in the mirror, but this self-admiration is very limited and defragmented.
109 Ibid., p. 22. 110 Ibid., p. 22. 111 Ibid., p. 33. 112 Ibid., p. 33. 113 Ibid., p. 33. 163
He wishes Luc could see his black hair, but he “ought to see it in this mirror, which left out all the rest of me”114. Narcissism is discussed as a complex ‘personality disorder’ in psychoanalytical literature. The main characteristic which defines a narcissistic personality is a grandiose sense of self importance, but underneath this grandiosity lies a chronically fragile low self-esteem. Like the mythological character of Narcissus the narcissist can only love himself. Despite his sense of grandiosity, which is on the surface only, the narcissist nurtures deep feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. The reason for narcissists to develop and nurture a grandiose self-image is that they need to reaffirm their sense of adequacy. The narcissist is not able to reaffirm his identity on his own, therefore he seeks to be admired by others. Because the extremely fragile sense of self cannot tolerate any criticism, the narcissist avoids meaningful emotional interactions: hence we have homosexual characters who take part in short-lasting relationships and lead promiscuous lives115. The concept of narcissism was first related to psychological phenomena by Ellis in 1898. Ellis described narcissim as a special state of auto-eroticism, in which the sexual feelings became absorbed in self admiration (Goldberg 1980). Freud, in 1914, incorporated the term in his own psychoanalytic theory in his essay ‘On Narcissism’. Narcissism, in Freud’s conceptual framework, was defined as a sexual perversion involving a pathological sexual love of one’s own body (Sandler&Person 1991). After Freud, several psychological theories attempted to explain and treat the concept of narcissism. Mainly, the most comprehensive psychological theories have been advanced by the psychodynamic perspective and to a lesser extent the analytical (Jungian) perspective. Both of these theories have centered their arguments around
114 Ibid., p. 40. 115 Akhtar (1989) [as cited in Carson&Butcher, 1992: 271] discusses six areas of pathological functioning which characterise the narcissist. In particular, four of these narcissistic character traits best illustrate the pattern discussed above: ‘(1) a narcissistic individual has a basic sense of inferiority, which underlies a preoccupation with fantasies of outstanding achievement, (2) a narcisistic individual is unable to trust and rely on others and thus develops numerous, shallow relationships to extract tributes from others, (3) a narcissistic individual has a shifting morality – always ready to shift values to gain flavour, and (4) a narcissistic person is unable to remain in love, showing an impaired capacity for a committed relationship.’ 164 developmental problems in childhood which they argue lead to the emergence of the narcissistic disorder. The self psychology school and the object relations school present an overlapping model of narcissism. The self psychology school is represented by Heinz Kohut, who argues that narcissism is a component of everyone’s psyche. Kohut posits that people are all born as narcissists and their infantile narcissism gradually matures into a healthy adult narcissism. If this process is disrupted, the individual has a narcissistic disorder. For Kernberg, however, who represents the objects relations school, narcissism does not stem from a disruption of the normal maturation of infantile narcissism. Narcissism for Kernberg, should be defined as a fixation in one of the developmental periods of childhood. The narcissist for Kernberg is fixated at a developmental stage in which the differentiation between the self and other is blurred. For Kohut, narcissism is a normal developmental milestone. A healthy person is able to transform his or her infantile narcissism into adult narcissism. The process through which this transformation takes place is called ‘transmuting internalisation’. As the infant is transformed into an adult, he or she will encounter some challenges which might result in some frustration. If this frustration is beyond the coping abilities of the person only slightly, the person experiences optimal frustration. This optimal frustration leads the person to develop a strong internal structure. In the narcissist, the process of transmuting internalisations is arrested, because the person experiences a level of frustration that exceeds optimal frustration. Within this framework, the narcissist remains stuck at the infantile level and displays many of the characteristics of the impotent and invulnerable child116. Kernberg’s conception of narcisssim is based on Mahler’s theory of separation-individuation process in infancy and early childhood. In Mahler’s model, the developing child assumes a stable self concept by successfully mastering the two forerunner phases (normal autism and normal symbiosis) and the four sub-phases (differentiation, practising, reproachment and consolidation) of separation-
116 Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self, New York, International University. 165 individuation. In Kernberg’s view, the narcissist cannot successfully master the reproachment sub-phase and is thus fixated at this level117.
117 The practicing subphase (age 10 to 14 months) marks the developmental stage at which the child learns to walk. The ability to walk gives the child a whole new perspective of the world around him. This new ability endows the child with a sense of grandiosity and omnipotence which closely resemble the narcissist's behavior. However, reality soon catches up with the child as the child enters the rapprochement subphase(age 14 to 24 months). At this stage the child discovers that he or she is not omnipotent, that there are limits to what he or she can do. According to Kernberg if the child is severely frustrated at this stage he or she can adapt by re-fusing or returning to the practicing subphase, which affords him the security of grandiosity and omnipotence (Kernberg, 1976).
166
CHAPTER FIVE A Dream in Vain
‟For thy sake youth is fallen and grown cold, And there is blood upon Love’s wings of gold, And hope is mockery, and passed is pride of pain; For thy sake I am grey and lost and old, Broken because I dreamed awhile in vain.”
Edmund John, ‘Dream’, The Flute of Sardonyx, 1913.
The Spell deals with issues of identity, search for a community and friends, love, lust, loss and the vulnerability of the homosexual man in society in a different vein when compared with other novels of Alan Hollinghurst. Unlike the other novels, The Spell has less political and historical overtones. The novel simply deals with the relations and uneasy conflicts among friends, ex-lovers, fathers and sons. The story in The Spell starts when the 36-year old Alex accepts the invitation from his ex-boyfriend Justin to spend a weekend in the country home with his new lover Robin, a 40 year old gay father. Although Alex accepts Justin’s invitation, he cannot help feeling some jealousy and a deep current of loneliness at seeing Justin’s new life. By making use of a series of weekend gatherings in the country and in the hearts of these gay men, Hollinghurst portrays a kind of topography of the hearts of these gay men. The aim of this chapter is to show how important a sense of community is for the homosexual man. The topography the novel charts is a direct representation of the search for a community. The series of weekend visits in the novel draw us a kind of a circular route on which this search for a home and a community takes place. The emphasis of the novel on architecture and houses heighten the sense of belonging and the homelessness of the homosexual man in society. The novel’s main character Robin Woodfield is an architect who mainly renovates old houses. Robin himself has moved to the country and thus portrays the essential placelessness and/or shifting spatiality of the homosexual man. This theme of leaving one’s homeland for another one and having no distinct history reflect the very position taken by the homosexual man in society. A close analysis of the search for a community and for a home in the
167 novel will reveal how society and its institutions have been casting out the homosexual man and molding him into a rootless outcast figure. It will also be surmised that the alienation of the homosexual man prevents him from forming well-rooted, close relationships. Men in The Spell suffer from loneliness, depression and a strong sense of low self-esteem. Alex, for example, although very often in people’s company, cannot get rid of his sense of loneliness and the sense of being rejected by society. This alienation and the low self-esteem as its product culminate in a never-ending search for love. The result is a discontinuous gay desire, which is again reflected in the circular plot of the novel. In line with a post-structuralist reading of the novel, dichotomies like old and young, the country and the city will be deconstructed so as to show the vulnerable dynamics of homosexual relationships. Childhood and adulthood, for example, are juxtaposed in the novel, which highlights the presumed nature of the gay man as a child who is not accepted as an adult in society. Ultimately, the chapter will focus on how homosexual relationships can be compared with the heterosexual family. It will be argued that the roles assumed in a homosexual family are not unidirectional, but multidirectional. Members in a homosexual family might assume the roles of fathers, mothers and/or children simultaneously. This multi-polarity of the homosexual family or partnership reflects the anti-binary nature of it. Unlike the heterosexual family structure which is sustained in a binary gender system, its homosexual alternative defies such binarism. Hence, roles of father and mother and siblings mingle with one another.
5.1. Traffic of Men
Fostering a communal identity is essential for all individuals to be able to exist in a common history and to have a distinct set of cultural values. For minotirised and alienated groups like homosexual men, this need for a communal identity becomes something even more urgent to resist social oppression as well. In
168 The Swimming-Pool Library and The Line of Beauty, the characters search for a community in fiction and they try to come up with a continuous and common history in literary fathers. In The Folding Star, this search is carried out in and through art. The Spell, on the other hand, reflects a search for community and continuity in spatial terms. Characters in the novel are in constant move. Robin Woodfield, at the beginning of the novel, moves from England to the United States. Alex, although temporarily and for short durations, moves from the city to the country. Despite these constant movements which represent the search for community and history, men in The Spell are devoid of any continuous history around which they can build their own community. The reference to a piece of broken porcelain in the novel represents this sense of fragmentation and discontinuity. While roaming around the old house during his visit, Robin finds a piece of sanitary porcelain 'with the letters SEMPE on it' perhaps part of SEMPER forever'1. This broken piece of porcelain foreshadows the sense of freedom and continuity which is constantly challenged and proves itself as rather fleeting and rudimentary in the novel. This little piece of porcelain, with a lost 'R' on it, might be regarded as a pendant of identities that could not be fixated in a community. While driving through the Native American village on his first days in the United States, Robin feels a sense of loneliness. A boy drives him through an unknown road and while looking at the empty streets, Robin feels a strong wish to fit in this new society/community: “I need a baseball-cap, Robin thought: then I’ll fit in”2. The sense of loneliness and the urge to fit in a community are the main working themes in novel. The young boy driving Robin points at the bar which is called “Blue Coyote”. This is the gay bar which will be mentioned several times in the novel and it can be argued that this gay bar, like others, acts as a kind of surrogate community. The gay bar also functions as a segregated environment where homosexual man can be themselves. It is the only place allocated to them where they can pursue their desire, but at the cost of being publicly labeled as ‘unfitting’ individuals. The young driver’s
1 Alan Hollinghurst, The Spell, London, Vintage, 1998, p. 4. 2 Ibid., p. 6.
169 pointing at the gay bar The Blue Coyote affirms his heterosexuality and the alienation of Robin as a homosexual man. In a way, he expels Robin out of his heterosexual world. The scene has an ironical stance in that it is only at the end of their encounter that Robin learns the name of the boy. As if to give a sense of superiority over the homosexual Robin, the boy reveals his name as “Victor”3. The name Victor in this context symbolizes the young man’s victory over Robin a young heterosexual man. Unlike Robin, he fits in society and is not alone. The Blue Coyote is described as an isolated building. The bar’s having no windows signifies the fact that it has no ties with the outer world4. As the action of the novel moves from open landscape to some inner space, readers are transferred into a closed spatiality:
“The Blue Coyote had no windows, and saw nothing of the boulevard-ranking sunset, or the gorgeous combustion westward over the mountains”5.
This sense of closeness, again, points at a kind of discontinuity. The normative, heterosexual world is left outside the building. These men have to live in spaces which are not interrelated with one another and where different rules abide. The sense of entering into a new community pervades when Robin enters The Blue Coyote. Robin “as a stumbling incomer” feels himself “eyed from the shadows by the dark-adapted regulars”6. The fact that the inside of the bar is depicted as dark and gloomy perpetuates the perception of the gay world as dark and dangerous. Places inhabited by homosexual men in Hollinghurst’s novels are generally depicted as dark and gloomy. This reflects how the hetero-normative society conceives the homosexual world. The Swimming-Pool Library and The Folding Star depict many gloomy places. Belgium, for instance, in The Folding Star is a black and gloomy city that makes one feel alienated and alone. As a place isolated from nature, a place dark and gloomy, The Blue Coyote can be perceived as an underworld as well. The segregation of homosexual places is repeatedly highlighted in Hollinghurst’s novels. Lord Nantwich’s house in The Swimming-Pool Library, for example, is not seen in
3 Ibid., p. 7. 4 Ibid., p. 7 5 Ibid., p. 7. 6 Ibid. p. 7.
170 the London A-Z. It is a street and address forgotten long ago. It might well be surmised that the city of London as a representative body of the hetero-normative society does not include Nantwich and his home. The Blue Coyote, in a similar vein, is a gay bar and it has no windows looking out. Although it is visibly part of the city, the fact that the building of the bar has no windows dissociates and marginalizes it. This secretive coexistence of homosexuals and heterosexuals in society, a dichotomy in itself, can only be made possible in invisible places: “It was the gloomiest bar he’d ever been in and seemed designed to waken unease in the stumbling newcomer”7. Robin’s being a newcomer from England strengthens his sense of alienation. When Robin enters into the bar, the barman asks him from what part of England he is “with a frown that might have meant distrust of England in general”8. The fact that Robin comes from Dorset has connotations of the gay man’s escape into rural areas, away from the society. This escape of the homosexual man from his hometown could be read both as an outcome of the segregation inflicted by society and as aquest for freedom. As in E.M.Forster’s fiction, especially in his novel Maurice, Dorset is a place which represents the gay man’s self-inflicted isolation from society; it is also a self-obtained freedom, a liberating escape from the father’s house. The same sense of discontinuity and exclusion from society, which results in the constant moving and shifting identities in the novel can be best seen in the character of Alex. On visiting his ex-lover's new home, Alex feels a kind of intimidation and a need to be accepted in. He develops a 'a fright about the incoming encounters' and 'a desire to please' like someone on a first date’9. His feeling himself like an intruder grows to such an extent that before knocking on the door of the cottage he is invited to, he peers through a window. Alex, in this scene, represents a character poised between the city and the country. He is like a man of the city who peeps into a rural home. This shows his suspended position between the city and the country as two alternative lifestyles for the homosexual man. When Alex finds Justin, his ex-lover at last, the dichotomy between the urban and the rural is foregrounded again, because Justin is depicted as sunbathing next to the pool. Justin
7 Ibid., p. 7. 8 Ibid., p. 8. 9 Ibid., p. 15
171 was ‘lost in the senseless countryside and the unsocial vacancy of sun-worship’10. We are also made aware of the fact that Justin himself feels this very dichotomy between the city and the country. He tells Alex that he looks very groomed for the county. The traffic of men from the city to the country is given as an accepted fact in the novel. Justin's half sarcastic remark, ‘Apparently there’s another homo moving into the village,’ reflects his awareness of the dislocation of homosexuals. This remark of Justin also reveals how the hetero-normative society shies away from homosexuals; hence we have this constant movement of homosexual men as individuals floating in society. When Alex enters Robin's cottage, he feels like an ‘idiot’. Once in the cottage, he senses the existence of the man who owns it. Robin’s very surname, ‘Woodfield’ strengthens Alex’s feelings of intimidation. The words ‘wood’ and ‘field’ in Robin's surname create a strong sense of a rural existence. Robin’s surname also indicates a psychic combination of the masculine and the feminine, since ‘wood’ might be interpreted both as a female and a phallic symbol, whereas ‘field’ represents the mother earth, a symbol of a womb. Alex’s feelings of intimidation and unease might be stemming from his half-voluntary confrontation with a gay man who is capable of exhibiting his masculine and feminine sides at the same time, which is something he cannot yet do. The fact that Robin has left his hometown in England for another country makes him an individual who makes peace with his homosexuality. Moving away from the city to the country, he creates himself a ‘homosexual’ home in which he can enact both his masculine and feminine sides. Alex, on the other hand, still lives in the city and leads a seemingly normative life as a public officer. While looking around Robin's cottage, Alex sees the pictures and watercolours by Robin. He also sees a photograph of Robin's younger days. Seeing how good-looking Robin was, Alex feels some kind of a comfort thinking that he had not been left for a boy, but for a 37-year-old mature man. Alex's constant comparison of himself with Robin reveals his low self-esteem: "...the muddled desire to have been replaced by someone better, which was crushing but evolutionary, and by someone inferior, which would show Justin’s weakness of
10 Ibid., p. 17.
172 judgement and prove to Alex that he was better off without him"11. Alex's low self- esteem is actually part of his homosexual psyche, however his disappointed love deepens this even further. In his 'depressed' and ‘shaken’ mood, he could not ‘believe that any other man would want him' or could ever fall in love with him’12. When shown his guest room in the cottage, Alex 'had a vague sense of being in a servant's room'13. As in other novels of Hollinghurst, the homosexual characters in The Spell are juxtaposed with children and servants. Their being likened to servants and children stems from the society's need to present them as incomplete and immature so as to legitimize its own superiority. Alex's guest room contains books as well: "Queer Folk of the West Country, Who's Who in Surtees, Remarkable Sayings of Remarkable Queens"14. The very title of these books foreground the significance of history for a community. Robin is very clearly seeking specific roots for himself and for his country home through acquiring some information about the place he lives in. He also tries to find himself a lineage. Since he is expelled from his father’s order, he feels he has to find himself a queer father and a queer history. The theme of identity formation through reading books is alive in this novel as well. Justin, too, is depicted like a childlike figure. He does not like assuming responsibilities, he seeks physical pleasure all the time, he makes jokes about almost anything around him. When Alex gives the present he bought for Justin to him, Justin just says 'No,' and does not thank Alex. Justin's being unable to thank to people is another important indication of his ego-centric and childlike bearing. Alex sees that Justin was 'still unable to say thank you', but Justin claims that Alex will 'find him changed in many respects from the old lezzy (he) used to know'15.This very assertion of Justin shows that he is very much aware of his follies. The sense of displacement Alex feels in his visit to the country reveals the unsettled nature of his identity. This unsettled aspect of Alex’s identity also reveals itself when, in his new
11 Ibid., p. 20. 12 Ibid., p. 21. 13 Ibid., p. 20. 14 Ibid., p. 20. 15 Ibid., p. 20-21.
173 environment, he dreams himself “as a golden-haired drover or hay-harvester”16. This is very much like a child’s state of mind in that Alex, as an adult individual, still puts himself in other’s places. It is like he is still trying to find himself an identity he can cling to in society, because he had not been able to acquire one until then. While Justin shows Alex around in the village of Litton Gambril, Alex is very conscious of the architectural texture of the place. The ruined castle on the hill overlooking the village connotes a sense of failed masculinity and patriarchy: To Alex, the whole place “communicated a slow shock of domesticity and loss”17. Looking at this rural landscape, Alex’s thoughts revert to his own neighborhood in Hammersmith. He thinks of how Justin used to give names to the streets they passed through. This comparison between the city and the country reveals a kind of concern for being accepted by others, and being able to exist in a community. He remembers how Justin “was his entree to pleasure, to the routine of certain bars, the instant friendship of good-looking men’18. Justin made him accepted in lively communities of gay people, which was ‘faltering’ for Alex. However, during this rural weekend Alex feels lonely and trapped in his ex-lover’s seemingly idealized relationship. On his second day in Robin’s cottage, Alex is introduced to Danny, Robin’s twenty-two-year-old gay son. Robin’s having a gay son is like an “undreamt-of-fact” for Alex. Another instance of discontinuity emerges in Robin’s previous relationship. Chapter 3 of the novel opens with a flashback into the lives of Robin and his previous partner Simon. The virility of Robin, described in the previous chapters, is contrasted with the plight of a dying man. Simon’s demise because of an AIDS related disease again functions as a rupture point in Robin’s life in that Simon’s illness and his ultimate death made Robin understand that the society did not acknowledge their relationship as legitimate. Hence, Robin was not granted a formal position in Simon’s family, both before and after his death. Robin’s sense of loneliness, his awareness of his being an outcast in society is similar to the situation of George, the main character of A Single Man (1964) by Christopher Isherwood. Robin directs his loneliness and sense of rootlessness towards houses. His
16 Ibid., p. 24. 17 Ibid., p. 25. 18 Ibid., p. 25.
174 renovating old houses and building a country house for himself all reflect his search for and need of a community and a fixed home. Hence, it is significant that Robin was working on a ruined villa during Simon’s illness. Robin, as a man who loved saving houses “from near ruin”19 had nothing to do to prevent the ruin of his own relationship. It was during these ‘ambiguous April days”20 during which he lost Simon that Robin met Justin. As if to perpetuate the sense of illegitimacy ascribed to gay men in society, Robin and Justin meet in a public-toilet, which signifies a discontinuous and rapturous spatiality. Robin and Justin’s meeting in a public toilet hints at a closeted homosexuality of the late 19th century that made its way into the 20th century. Before the gay liberation movement, public toilets, called as ‘cottages’ were used as meeting places for young homosexual men. As a British gay slang term, ‘cottaging’ also signifies the cottage life Robin has built for himself. Very much like the 19th century cottaging hosting anonymous homosexual activity, Robin’s cottage in the country, too, is a kind of escape into a self-built liberation from the hetero- normative society. Being unable to repress his ‘long-obscured need’ for sexual activity, Robin follows the young man (Justin) to public toilets and they make love there21. Robin feels concerned about Simon, but his vague sense of guilt is accompanied by a certain degree of exultancy as well. He does not know the name of the young man and he feels ‘lost in the image of the nameless man’22. Robin’s ex-partner Simon’s death of an AIDS related disease reveals a lot about the gay man’s exclusion from the patriarchal order. The death scene in which Robin and Simon are accompanied by Simon’s sister and father seems to be uncovering the illegitimacy of a homosexual relationship in society. But then, the gravity of death itself cannot suppress the social pressure and ignorant of the social stigma, Robin said to Simon: ‘I love you’, which he had never done before in the
19 Ibid., p. 31. 20 Ibid., p. 31. 21 Freud argued that love and death, Eros and Thanatos permeate all relationships. Freud ascribes these concepts to sadomasochistic relationships. With these two extremes at work, the ego, the rational and controlled part of the psyche, can allow the individual to experience behaviours which are not only unpleasurable, but which actually incite pain and humiliation. 22 Op.cit., p. 33.
175 presence of the young sister and the admittedly deaf father.23 Simon’s death shows us how the homosexual man is consciously left outside the patriarchal model of family. The deafness of Simon’s father makes him a paternal figure who has no capability to listen to what others have to tell. He is a father who would grant no place and legitimacy, hence no community, to the socially-disruptive homosexual man. It is also interesting to note that Robin’s grief after Simon’s death turns into a sexual urge. This juxtaposition of the life instinct (Eros) and the death instinct Thanatos reminds us of Freud’s dualistic theory. Just after Simon’s death and the scene in the hospital, Robin felt:
“...unpleasantly sexual, he pictured Simon as he had been ten years ago, with his fat Jewish cock always thickening up and needing work! There was something suspect in thinking of his cock as Jewish, as if it was a little person! He imagined it now, cold and bloodless between the wasted thighs’24.
This juxtaposition of death and sex emerges in another flashback. After Simon’s death and Robin puts on his running-shorts ‘with tense excitement’25 and remembers the day twenty years before ‘when his grandmother had died ... and he had gone out as if in a trance to one of the Earl’s Court pubs and picked up a man ... and fucked him all afternoon”26. The juxtaposition between death and sex could also be read as the coming together of two seemingly oppositional urges to create community. The aim of the sexual instinct, Eros, for Freud was to “establish ever greater unities”27. Thus, it can be argued that once he loses Simon, Robin feels this irresistible urge to bind with someone. After this first meeting with Justin in the public toilets, which reflect their placelessness, Robin feels so constrained that he “found he was gripping the other man’s [Justin’s] shoulder and saying quite loudly, ‘I’ve got to see you again’28. However, the relationship between Robin and Justin is not a full one. It is fragmentary, illicit and is defined with duplicity. They can only meet ‘in the
23 Ibid., p. 34. 24 Ibid., p. 35. 25 Ibid., p. 35. 26 Ibid., p. 35. 27 Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 1938, p. 148. 28 Op.cit., p. 36.
176 afternoons at Robin’s flat’ and ‘Justin lived with a boyfriend in Hammersmith’29. Justin did not have a proper, regular job. He sometimes worked as an actor, which again symbolises a shifting identity. This fragmentary fulfillment of their relationship, which is already illicitly annexed to an ongoing relation creates a deep sense of ‘duplicity’ on the part of Justin’s life30. Robin develops a fixation on Justin. The limited time Justin gives him during the day is not sufficient. They can only meet in daytime, but Robin wishes to spend nights with him as well. The duplicity and secrecy that surrounds their relationship reflects the double identity that the gay man is forced to assume. The weekends are forced moments of silence. The word games played by character in the novel signify the emphasis on the shifting nature of the homosexual identity. The ever-changing forms and meanings of words used in these games can also be interpreted as a search for a common history and a meaningful community. Justin, during Alex’s visit to Robin’s cottage, suggests to play a game invented by Alex. The Encyclopedia Game invented by Alex reflects the shifting ground on which the identities of these gay men rest:
“It’s based on the idea of a multi-volume dictionary, like the OED or something. You have to make up the names of the volumes, like ‘Aardvark to Bagel’, that sort of thing. Except that they have to describe the other people you’re playing with. Then they’re all read out, and you have to guess who they are. It’s not a game anyone can win, it’s just a bit of fun”31.
This description of the game reminds us Lord Nantwich’s absence in the London A-Z in the Swimming-Pool Library. In a way, Lord Nantwich was trying to make himself visible in society by making William Beckwith write his biography for him. Similarly, Alex and other gay men around him are trying to concretize their identity and make themselves visible in such a game. They create encyclopedias of names for them as spaces of existence. As far as the formation of identity is concerned, the clothes we wear also
29 Ibid., p. 36. 30 Ibid., p. 36. 31 Ibid., p. 45.
177 define our position in society. Each having a very low self-esteem, gay men in The Spell try to make up that feeling of inferiority through their clothes. While trying to get dressed for their first date for example, both Alex and Danny are very much concerned about their clothes. The attention they pay to their clothes might be interpreted as an epitome of their weak self-image and their uneasiness about their overall perception by others. Their being too much focused on their way of dressing reflects their rejection of the straight mode of dressing and their wish to create their own independent image:
¨… uncertain whether to admit to his own dress anxiety, his desire to fit in while still somehow being himself. He saw that since Justin had gone he was in tatters as a social being; he didn’t know what effect to make, or how to make it¨32.
Both Alex and Danny deem clothes as something which will define their character and which will create an image for themselves in society. Both attribute defining roles to clothes. While choosing clothes, they also reveal a lot about how they position themselves in society. Alex, for example, watches Danny choose among his clothes and ¨the clothes he had finally chosen were a cheery signal of the distance between them¨33. The web of relationships and the positions taken up by the characters in the novel are in constant change. Just before Danny’s birthday party, Alex’s unacknowledged position transforms the ‘rival Robin’ into a ‘potential father-in-law’ for himself. Chapter 12 directs the story to Robin’s cottage again. When Robin and Justin decide to spend two weeks out of town, which will be a ‘trial separation’ for them34, they suggest Alex to stay at the cottage with Danny during that time. This functions as Robin’s approval of their relationship. When Alex receives a call from Robin about this offer, he feels ‘proud and embarrassed at the same time to be coupled with Danny by his father’35. This turn of events makes Alex think about the role of change
32 Ibid., p. 71. 33 Ibid., p. 72. 34 Ibid., p. 155. 35 Ibid., p. 152.
178 in life in more detail. Following his almost magical courting with Danny, Alex had consciously been going through changes in his life. Change itself was what made his relationship with Danny ‘spell’-like. As he himself puts it: ‘… change itself became beautiful to him, and he looked at Justin’s new life with causal fondness and scepticism’36. Just before their trial separation, Justin learns that his father’s house is finally sold and he gets hold of a serious sum of money. Once he decides to break off with Robin and moves out of the cottage, he considers buying a house for himself. Buying a new house reflects his wish to have new roots in a new spatiality and a new community. Justin’s discontentment with living in a cottage in Lotton Gambril is evident from the very beginning of the novel. Although he is depicted as someone essentially hard to please, his unease about living in Robin’s cottage stems from the fact that he has been feeling himself as an outcast figure. Just before his trial separation with Robin and before leaving the cottage to Alex and Danny, he warns Alex about his strong feeling that they are ‘hideously unpopular down there’37. Justin very bluntly defines the essence of his neighbors’ discontent as ‘homosexual noise’38. This reflects Justin’s awareness of their alienation as a gay man by society. Alex, too, feels alienated by the hetero-normative society. Although he is a character who seems having closer ties with society than others, even Alex is an outsider in a heterosexual community:
‘He went disconsolately to a straight dinner-party in Wandsworth, in the house of contemporaries who seemed to him already middle-aged; he felt he had dropped a decade. He wanted to tell them about his new impromptu in life, so remote from these pleasant predictable evenings, and he noted their nostalgia and worry when the talk touched on what their teenage children did, but he kept it to himself. He always took the young people’s side, which was droll for someone who worked in pensions’39.
36 Ibid., p. 153. 37 Ibid., p. 156. 38 Ibid., p. 156. 39 Ibid., p. 157.
179 The sense of time Alex perceives is very different from his heterosexual peers, as he feels ‘he had dropped a decade’. His young lover Danny and his relationship with him, which he defines as an ‘impromtu’ in his life, makes him feel young and full of joy. His feelings and his homosexual disposition remove him away from a linear predictability of adulthood and take him to a non-linear and unpredictable childhood. A distinction between queer time and heterosexual time needs to be drawn here, because the flow of time is not felt in the same manner by homosexuals and heterosexuals. The heterosexual time is continuous and forward-looking. It follows a normative developmental route. The phases of a heterosexual life are clearly defined and its members follow those phases regularly. The homosexual time, on the other hand, reflects the homosexual’s psychic fragmentation. Since the hetero-normative society does not include him, the homosexual man is all alone to build himself an identity in a sustaining community. This lack of social and familial support results in fragmentary and short-lasting relationships. For the homosexual man, reach new relation is a new spatiality, identity and temporality. Hence, Alex’s relation with Danny forces him to move out of his closeted sense of time and move into the more free-floating time of a 10 year younger lover.
5.2. Architecture and Men
In all novels of Alan Hollinghurst, architecture holds an important place, but in different veins. In The Swimming-Pool Library, the focus is on how different modes of architecture charts the homosexual territory within the city. In The Folding Star, the way architecture of the houses (spying windows, etc) accentuate the functions of inclusion and exclusion. The Line of Beauty, again, makes use of architecture to emphasize class distinctions in society. The Spell, different from the
180 other three novels, makes use of architecture in a more phenomenological manner so as to show ‘how bodies inhabit spaces with other’40. It can be argued that The Spell deals with the issue of bodily dwelling through a focus on architecture. Thus, the novel expounds on how the homosexual man inhabits spaces in society, how he tries to find himself a space in which he can build himself an identity and relate himself to others in a community. Houses, from this perspective, function as a prerequisite for building an identity and a community. Judith Butler, in Bodies That Matter, surmises that the ‘mothering, rearing, caring, teaching, sheltering and enabling’ functions of houses:
‘These men ‘mother’ one another, ‘house’ one another, ‘rear’ one another, and the re-signification of the family through these terms is not a vain or useless imitation, but the social and discursive building of community, a community that binds, cares, and teaches, that shelters and enables. This is doubtless a cultural re-elaboration of kinship that anyone outside of the privilege of heterosexual family (and those within those ‘privileges’ who suffer there) needs to see, to know, and to learn from, a task that makes none of us who are outside of heterosexual ‘family’ into absolute outsiders to this film. Significantly, it is in the elaboration of kinship forged through a re- signification of the very terms which effect our exclusion and abjection that such a re-signification creates the discursive and social space for community, that we see an appropriation of the terms of domination that turns them toward a more enabling future’41.
What Butler hints at in the above quotation, where she discusses the opposition between social space and physical space, is in direct relation to what these men in The Spell are trying to do. Robin moves to a new country, a new spatiality, and builds for himself a new country home. Throughout the novel we see men coming to and going from this house; their gatherings look like family reunions, but as Butler suggests, these men are actually trying to forge for themselves a meaningful existence in a community. The novel opens with a strong sense of loss when the young architect Robin is being driven to an old house to be renovated in mid parts of the U.S. This sense of
40 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham and London, Duke University Press, p. 5. 41 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York, Routledge, p. 137.
181 losing one's way in the middle of nowhere and being driven by someone else to an unknown place far away from one's home might be interpreted as a search for a new place to Iive in. Robin from the very beginning of the novel is depicted as a man who is very sensitive to the landscape and to houses. Since Robin is full of anticipation about his prospects in this new land as a young man, the foreign landscape is not threatening and intimidating for him, on the contrary, this new country was full of "magic and admonishment"42. It could be argued that Robin's need for a new spatiality as a young homosexual man who could not find fulfillment in his home country creates most of the 'magic' that he thinks he sees in this new land. Another dimension to Robin’s move from England to the States is that, The USA was a kind of new frontier for many Brits. Both homosexuals and heterosexuals fled their homeland for a brighter prospect of life in the States. It is the very prospect of a new community that this land offers him which creates an illusion or simulation of magic throughout the novel. Looking at the remains of the old house, Robin thinks of people who used to visit the place: “People had been there, hundreds probably, scholars and students and the unfriendly reflective men who lived in the spell of the desert”43. Robin’s contemplation of people before him signifies his attempt to situate his existence in a certain context and community. This willing contemplation and admiration of a ruined house is very much reminiscent of a Romantic consciousness. Robin as an architect has plans of the house in his pocket and we are informed that the old house has a triangle layout. As in other novels of Hollinghurst, triangles hold an important place in The Spell as well:
“He was twenty-three, and it was his first time in America. He found the company of Americans made him stiff and formal, though these were qualities he was unaware of in himself before. His vocabulary felt embarrassingly large and accurate, though in conversation he had a recurrent sense of inarticulacy. He was doing research for a doctoral thesis, but knew he was ignorant of the simplest things in the landscape he had come, in part, to see”44.
42 Alan Hollinghurst, The Spell, London, Vintage, 1998, p. 1. 43 Ibid., p. 2-3. 44 Ibid., p. 2-3.
182
Robin finds it rather difficult to talk about his motives for being in America. Robin was doing some research on the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Frank Lloyd Wright is an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator who lived between 1867 and 1959. In 1991, Wright was recognized as “the greatest American architect of all time” by the American Institute of Architects. One project of Wright is very significant within the framework of themes in the novel. Frank Lloyd Wright was interested in site and community planning throughout his career. Robin finds it rather difficult to tell people in the bar that he was doing some kind of research as an architect, but the implication of community building is strengthened through this reference to Frank Lloyd Wright. Robin’s being juxtaposed with an architect focusing on community planning is significant. The spatiality of the homosexual man is expounded when Robin takes his guests to a cliff nearby his cottage. While on the way to the cliff, Justin mentions a gay bar to Danny:
“Do you know it, darling, it’s a gay restaurant. It’s called the Limp Ritz. It was the first restaurant in England to serve openly gay food’45.
The reference to the gay restaurant made when they are on a cliff ascribes this segregated homosexual space a sense of disaster, lack and lagging behind. Justin’s remark reflects how these men are constantly thinking about the spaces they inhabit. This uneasy concern is there, because they are not completely comfortable and purely themselves in any place. The name of the restaurant ‘Limp Ritz’ refers to ‘limp-wristed’ men. This gives the place a sense of effeminacy. This sense of lack and lagging behind permeates the cliff scene as well. When on the cliff they narrowly escape from an accident. The ‘close’ and ‘invisible sea’, the quickening pulse of Robin and an immanent sense of fatal danger permeate the scene:
45 Ibid., p. 63.
183 “The sea was close, but still invisible: Robin felt his pulse quicken at its nearness, an old excitement that was swallowed up in the dangerous acceleration of his mood”46.
Defining homosexuality by negative adjectives hints at the perception of homosexuality, or queer desire in more theoretical terms, as something deviant and disruptive. As Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology argues, ‘being directed toward the same sex becomes seen as moving along different lines’47. This ascribed sense of not moving along the normative line, the line of the father, leads the gay man to death or a death-like annihilation. Sara Ahmed explains the ‘threat of queer’ as a ‘death threat’, because they are not in line with the father’s line (Ahmed, pg.77). 48
Since the homosexual man is seen as inherently deviant49 by the hetero- normative society, he is in a constant dilemma between trying to fit in the normative society and denying that normative order which expels him. This quest for order could be traced in in Hollinghurst’s characters as well. The Swimming-Pool Libray could be read as a ‘catalogue’ of queer desires as experienced in different generations of men. The word ‘library’ used in the novel’s title points at a taxonomy of desires, an attempt to attach meaning to this flux of identities. The Folding Star, similarly, deals with museums. The Orst Museum in the novel is not only a place where an artist’s paintings are exhibited, it is a place in and around which the characters in the novel try to construct a meaning. Hollinghurst’s 2004 novel The Line of Beauty, in a similar vein, evolves around Nick Guest’s admiration for beauty and order. A similar quest for order exists in The Spell as well. Chapter 6 opens with a scene in a museum. The attention of the readers is drawn towards the subtitles of architecture, art and sculpture. Among the tourist
46 Ibid., p. 63. 47 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham and London: Duke University Press, p. 70. 48 ‘The threat of queer is a ‘death threat’: queer desires threaten to discontinue the father’s line. To bring such queer desire in line is to continue the father’s line, and indeed the line of psychoanalysis itself’, Ibid., p. 77. 49 ‘When the sexual instinct is directed towards persons of the same sex we are in the presence of an aberration variously seen as ‘sexual inversion’ … as opposed to normal heterosexuality’, Havelock Ellis 1940, p. 188.
184 crowd, Alex feels ‘anonymous’50. The scene is significant in the sense that it depicts and makes visible the self-conscious existence of the homosexual man. In front of the Royal Academy, where the exhibition is held, Alex feels being watched. This scene, again, foregrounds the homosexual man’s being stigmatized in society.
“In the courtyard of the Royal Academy, under the blank windows of the various learned societies, he felt a familiar awkwardness as though being watched; though he knew the only watcher was himself”51.
The quotation above reveals a strong sense of being watched by the patriarchal order and by its taxonomy. Alex’s attention in the exhibition is drawn to the sculptures of young men and he meets Danny among them. The scene, with its ‘grand continuity of the galleries’52 reminds us of The Swimming-Pool Library in the sense that these gay men cruise among a wide array of possibilities. This metaphor of galleries and bodies being available to one another without any limitations reflect the multiplicity of desire which often defines the homosexual man. Alex later learns that Danny works as a guard in the museum. Danny’s position in the museum as a guard is significant in the sense that he is both a controller of men passing by and also an object of desire for them. Danny mentions how men visiting museum want to seduce him: “They hurl their phone-numbers at you’ he said. ‘I’ve had twelve this week”53. This adds up to Danny’s symbolic resemblance to a Pan figure throughout the novel, which will be explained in the following pages. Danny’s mention of these potential suitors makes Alex somehow uneasy. He feels a thread of jealousy, but also feels himself intimidated because of his age:
“He wondered, with his usual instinct of the bleakest view, if he was just another old queen hoping for the young man’s favour”54.
The museum scene depicted above contains a web of relations which reminds us of Edward Manners and his feeling towards Luc in The Folding Star. Edward Manners
50 Alan Hollinghurst, The Spell, London, Vintage, 1998, p. 64. 51 Ibid., p. 64. 52 Ibid., p. 64. 53 Ibid., p. 66. 54 Ibid., p. 66.
185 in The Folding Star steals Luc’s personal belongings and creates a small museum of his own. These small objects enable him to construct meaning in his life. Whether it be in a museum, in a gay bar or in a house, the novel reveals the uneaseness ascribed to the homosexual man in all these spaces. Chapter 7 opens in Robin’s cottage. This shift from bars and restaurants to Robin’s cottage represent a shift from the public to the domestic. Justin is alone in the cottage and is rather bored. Justin’s presence in Robin’s cottage as his lover in this chapter can be juxtaposed with the previous chapter’s depiction of a gay identity in bars and cubs. The previous chapter positions gay men in a cheerful and colorful milieu, whereas in this chapter a gloomy sense engulfs both Justin and the cottage. Justin is portrayed like a small child roaming around the house; he thinks about his ex-lovers. He doesn’t like Robin being away from him, he pities his ex-lover Alex, who is still very much in love with him and he fancies Robin’s son Danny. While roaming around the house, Justin looks at the photographs of Robin’s youth. The family photographs of the young Woodfields tell Justin a lot about the inherent lies and ‘sexual conspiracy’ in the family. The depiction of one of these family photographs functions as a parody of the traditional family:
‘In one of the pictures the young Woodfields were joined on the lawn by the hunky little Marcus whom Robin was probably already seeing on the side. There was a seventies mood of sexual conspiracy about them, as if they had all just been in bed together; though clearly that was far from the case – Jane had been blind to her husband’s dammed-up queerness ’55.
Justin, looking at this photograph with the queer eye of his in a way deconstructs the dynamics of the traditional family. His senses how Robin, as a father and a husband is already an outcast in his family. Justin is portrayed as a kind of man who can never feel satisfied within his relationships. He always seeks pleasure outside the relationship. When he was still together with Alex, for example, he has an affair with Robin and with another black man. His insatiable hunger for lust, his tendency for camp, his inability to thank and to apologize hint at a pre-AIDS ideology in which monogamy, domesticity, civil partnership and marriage are seen as boring. The very
55 Ibid., p. 91.
186 cottage he lives in comfortably cannot fulfill his expectation of excitement in life. He is rather bored of Robin’s country life:
‘And now, really, with the appointment pretty well certain, he thought how outrageous it was of Robin to leave him locked up here, like a slave, a mistress with no life of her own … he despaired of the country, with its loathsome hedges and alarming animals and smelly little shops selling nothing but canned fruit and knicker elastic. No one he could talk to down here would know the meaning of anything he said’56.
In this bored state, Justin makes it very clear that he wants to be seen by people: ‘He thought about how he wanted to be found out’57. While nurturing these feelings, the twenty-year-old Terry, the son of Robin’s neighbor comes to the cottage and Justin sleeps with him. Justin’s feelings in this scene reveal his low self-esteem. Although portrayed as a character who is more outgoing than Alex, Justin, too, does not feel part of the hetero-normative society. His seemingly insatiable lıust is an attempt to assert his existence and identity. Robin’s visit to Tony Bowerchalke’s Victorian house is another scene where the significance of houses is revealed. The scene abound in architectural references. Robin’s life is constantly juxtaposed with houses and with their architectural details, which brings into mind the relation between building houses and building identities.
‘Victorian country-house plans still had their special appeal; they were like board-games mimicking the business of a social labyrinth that had once been serious enough’58.
While they are looking at the rooms of the house, Robin constantly relates them to people’s characters who used to live in them. There is a strong relation between the house and Tony’s mother. If we take the house itself as the character of Tony which builds itself like a house, this impact of his mother’s on the house gains special significance. The pyramid-shaped mausoleum of his grandfather is ‘an ongoing worry’59 for Tony, which represents the unease in the patriarchal lienage of the
56 Ibid., p. 93-94. 57 Ibid., p. 94. 58 Ibid., p. 175. 59 Ibid., p. 174.
187 family. For Tony, the house is an ‘apex of bad taste’60, but his mother has always loved it. The house had a sequence of large bedrooms. Tony’s mother and aunt had their bedrooms next to one another, which strengthens the power of matriarchy in the house. The influence of Tony’s mother can be further traced in the still preserved ‘silver-backed hairbrushes and tassled perfume spray on the dressing-table’61. The presence of a strong matriarchy in this house and its spiritual engulfment are represented in the maze-life staircases of the house. The ‘maze of odd-shaped stuffy rooms with tiny windows, linen cupboards with skylights and ladders of empty shelves, unannounced changes of level’62 all conjure up an insecure and treacherous spirit in the house. When Robin sees Tony’s bedroom, he shows some unwillingness to examine it closely, because ‘the singleness of the room agitated him’63. Since he can easily develop an empathy towards Tony as a gay man, his awareness of Tony’s singularity which has seeped into his bedroom makes him uneasy:
‘Robin didn’t like to examine the bedroom too closely. He knew little about Tony’s intimate life, but the singleness of the room agitated him, as if he had suddenly come on evidence of something he would rather ignore’64.
Tony’s singularity reminds Robin of his own life, which he sees as a flux of different people without any point of anchorage. Robin thinks of his own life as ‘gripped and shaped by sexual love, the constant indispensable presence of another person, one after another’65. The novel’s focus on houses, in general, reflects the gay man’s (dis/mis)placement in society. The house itself stands for a spatiality the homosexual man seeks.
60 Ibid., p. 175. 61 Ibid., p. 176. 62 Ibid., p. 177. 63 Ibid., p. 176. 64 Ibid., p. 176. 65 Ibid., p. 176.
188 5.3. Sons and Men
Rejecting the father’s normative line, roaming around deviations, discontinuing the patriarchal lineage through non-procreative relationships are the main frameworks in which Hollinghurst’s characters are related to one another in The Spell. It can be argued that since the gay desire is not in line with patriarchal order it is mostly labelled as perversion. This perversion is mostly linked with promiscuity, which is clearly seen in Robin’s gay son Danny. Danny, with his youth, sexual charm and outgoing character can be likened to the mythological Pan character. 66 Robin’s place of origin has these connotations of pastoralism and woods, which continue further in the novel. The very name ‘Robin’ is also a bird’s generic name. The barman Robin meets in his first days in the United States name is Sylvan, which makes us think that this rural escapism will continue in the new country Robin has just arrived. Danny assumes the characteristics of Pan when he tempts Alex to use drugs; by doing so he will draw Alex in a childlike situation in which only an unabashed sexuality and a strong animal instinctuality will dominate him. When Danny first makes the offer, Alex tells him he is a ‘narcotic virgin’67. The word ‘virgin’ here strengthens Danny’s association with Pan in that the mythological Pan character is known to have seduced Aphrodite. Alex decides to give the drug a chance and Danny tells him that they should find a person called Dave. Dave is likened to ‘a prefect in the school of pleasure’68. The pornography shop he works in is portrayed
66 ‘Pan, the god of woods and and fields, of flocks and shepherds, dwelt in grottos, wandered on the mountains and in valleys, and amused himself with the chase or in leading the dances of the nymphs. He was fond of music, and, as we have seen the inventor of the syrinx, or shepherd`s pipe, which he himself played in a masterly manner. Pan, like other gods who dwelt in forests, was dreaded by those whose occupations caused them to pass through the woods by night, for the gloom and loneliness of such scenes dispose the mind to superstitious fears. Hence sudden fright without cause was ascribed to Pan and called Panic terror.As the name of the god signifies all, Pan came to be considered a symbol of the universe and personification of Nature; and later still to be regarded as a representative of all the gods and of heathenism itself. Sylvanus and Faunus were Latin divinities whose characteristics are so nearly the same as those of Pan that we may safely consider them as the same personage under different names’ Thomas Bulfinch, The Greek Mythology, London, Thames and Hudson, p. 205-205. 67 Op.cit., p. 78. 68 Ibid., p. 79.
189 as ‘a garish little shrine’69. The words ‘prefect’ and ‘shrine’ connote a sense of hierarchy and place. It is through roaming around different pleasures and enshrining them that these gay men can structure an identity for them. The pornography shop referred to here is a good example of how certain archetypes are perpetuated in the minds of homosexual people:
‘He felt compromised being here, he found pornography depressing, and the glimpse of the video, in which a man was rolling a condom on, was a flustering anticipation of what he hoped himself to be doing in a few hour’s time. He stepped back and wandered round, insofar as wandering was possible, coming face to face with the raring phallus at every turn, like a surreal sequence in a fifties thriller: there was no escape from his depravity. He picked a magazine called Big Latin Dicks, a little more blunt than exotic; penes magni, he thought, and for some reason found himself imagining the men who printed it, perhaps as equably as if it were Homes and Gardens, and the men who put it together (‘What does your dad do, by the way?’ ‘He’s the deputy editor of Big Latin Dicks. I thought everyone knew that.’70
The passage above is significant in the sense that the perception of gayness is nurtured and perpetuated by ‘gay’ institutions again. The porn shop referred to above is depicted like a shrine in which images of gayness are produced and commoditized in earlier periods of homosexual history. The porn shop could also be linked to the character of Pan, because it functions like a heathen shrine. The way Danny reveals himself in the museum scene, for example, reminds us of the character of Pan in that he makes a lot of jokes about having had sexual experiences with a number of men who had cruised Danny in the museum. When two young men, Aubrey and Hector greet Danny, for example, Danny explains to Alex that “Shagged them both¨71. Like the mythological Pan character, Danny`s mind usually drifts to the phallic implications of sexuality. He is depicted as a character who seduces many. Danny makes use of his youth and attraction to seduce people into acting for his own pleasure. This is again another reflection of his Pan like character:
69 Ibid., p. 79. 70 Ibid., p. 80. 71 Ibid., p. 68.
190
‘At the crowd barrier Danny leant over and kissed the bomber-jacketed security guy on the lips, a few jeering fondnesses were exchanged, and that was all it took – the barrier was pushed back and they walked through, a ripple of nods and calls …’72.
The relation of Danny to the Pan character is not only evident in his seductive constitution, but also in the very environment in which he spends his life. Alex has his first drug in a bar where there ‘was an endless jostling parade of half-naked men, faces glowing with happiness and lust’73. The scene in which Alex had his first drug is also likened to a place where ‘some dodgy brainwashing cult’ was going on74. All these details hint at characteristics of unabashed sexuality and animal instinctuality which all define the mythological character of Pan. With Alex’s taking the drug, the master and novice relationship turns upside down. Alex is positioned as a novice once he gets under the influence of the drug. Danny urges Alex to ‘sit back, breathe deeply’ and he wants him no to ‘fight it’75. Alex senses a kind of annoyance in Danny, ‘as if the novice was stubbornly defying the master’76. Once the drug has Alex under its spell, he forgets about his low self- esteem and is drawn into the allure of the crowd around him. He takes off his T-shirt and becomes aware of people paying attention to his beauty. It can be argued that, under the spell of the drug, Alex forgets about all his intimidations and feels part of a community: “He danced like everyone else now, but better, more remarkably¨77. The community depicted here is very much drug-induced and short-lived. The very music being listened to in the club might be taken as a symbol of this search for home. Music opens up a space in which these men can live in a satisfied way. Music is also part of the characteristics of Pan. Danny explains to Alex that the music being played is called ‘house music’78 and when Alex asks why, he tells him
72 Ibid., p. 81. 73 Ibid., p. 81. 74 Ibid., p. 82. 75 Ibid., p. 83. 76 Ibid., p. 83. 77 Ibid., p. 85. 78 Ibid., p. 87.
191 that ‘it’s because you just want to live in it’79. The gay club stands out as a place where a gay community can be built. Dancing, drugs and music are supplementary forces that contribute to the building of such a community. The chapter, as if to strengthen this sense of search for a home, ends with Danny saying ‘Let’s go home’80. After Alex’s meeting with Danny in the museum, he feels quite happy and becomes conscious of ‘the beautiful unwise emotions of something starting up’.81 That feeling of happiness is nurtured by ‘the long-for surprise of being wanted’82. Danny invites Alex to his home on Saturday. Danny lives ‘in a tall terrace house which until last Christmas had been a private hotel’83. While walking to Danny’s house, Alex gets conscious of his existence and position in the town:
‘So this was Danny’s neighborhood. Alex wondered if he ever used that gloomy, velvet-curtained pub, the Chepstow Castle – though of course gay men nowadays were meant to use bars, where there was nowhere to sit down and the drinks cost twice as much as neighborhood. Alex wondered if he ever used that gloomy, velvet-curtained pub, the Chepstow Castle – though of course gay men nowadays were meant to use bars, where there was nowhere to sit down and the drinks cost twice as much’84.
Before leaving Danny’s house, they have some wine together. It was perhaps due to the influence of the wine that Alex later on becomes aware of Danny´s Pan-like characteristics:
‘When Alex looked quickly at Danny he saw something mischievous and self-absorbed in him that he hadn’t noticed in Dorset’85.
While they were walking among the crowd, Alex sees how popular Danny was: ‘Danny knew every beautiful or interesting looking person who came towards them’86.
79 Ibid., p. 87. 80 Ibid., p. 88. 81 Ibid., p. 69. 82 Ibid., 69. 83 Ibid., p. 69. 84 Ibid., p. 70. 85 Ibid., p. 73. 86 Ibid., p. 74.
192 On their first date, Alex is very much surprised by Danny’s sociability and the allure he has over his friends. Alex doesn’t know how to position himself in Danny’s community. He becomes aware of his age and social status. The camp element in Danny’s community surprises Alex as well. It can be argued that Danny himself and his community, into which Alex is about to enter, would act as a catalyst that would uncover his gay identity. Danny creates a new consciousness in Alex about his gayness and the community he inhabits. Alex’s meeting with Danny makes him aware of a strong sense of community.
‘He felt somehow provincial, and afraid of showing his ignorance. Words like Trade, Miss Pamela and Guest-list were produced and received with the gratified ennui accorded to a well-established ritual’87.
Alex feels a strong wish to be part of this new and exciting community: “… he saw his own childish longing to be known and greeted in a world other than a third-floor corridor in Whitehall’88.
In Chapter 5, the whole group visits Tony Bowerchalke, Robin’s neighbour. A short chaos pervades while they are trying to get into Robin’s Saab. Both Alex and Justin wants to sit at the back next to Danny, but Danny himself wishes to sit in the front. Then Alex sits in the front next to Robin89. This commotion reflects the awareness of positioning oneself in accordance with others and how important it is for these men to relate themselves to people around them. Tony lives in an old Victorian house. The group sits on the terrace and has some drinks. The lady who helps Tony in housework is called Mrs. Bunce who has “a remote resemblance to the Duchess of Windsor”90. She plays “an ambiguous role as a silent hostess”91. They all like the house Tony lives in. When Danny asks him whether he has ever thought of selling the house, Tony says that he could not do such
87 Ibid., p. 74. 88 Ibid., p. 74. 89 Ibid., p. 52. 90 Ibid., p. 53. 91 Ibid., p. 53.
193 a thing, because his mother was very happy there92. His relation to his mother and to the house are juxtaposed. Tony’s mention of his mother opens up a new talk about fathers and mothers in general. Tony turns to Danny and says:
“I once met your grandfather. We didn’t really see eye to eye. General Woodfield, he explained to Mrs. Bunce, in a tone of inseparable ridicule and respect’ was said to be the handsomest man in Wessex. His wife, Lady Astrid, was the daughter of the Ear of Hexham”93.
Robin goes around the house to have a look at it. We learn that Tony Bowerchalke’s great-grandfather had dreamt up the house:
“... an ambiguous local architect undertook the plans for him, differentiating the various offices and quarters of the male and female servants, the sculleries and pantries, the plate safe and the fuel stores. At the end of the wing was something described as ‘Odd Room”, provision having outrun the most ingenious requirement”94.
The description of the house as such is the drean of an ancestor and this dream is not without its ‘oddities’. This connotes a sense of malfunctioning transmitted from one generation to another. Later on Danny wished to visit the mausoleum of Thomas Light Bowerchalke, which was in the shape of a pyramid. They are visiting the tomb of a patriarch. The scene in which these gay men visit a patriarch’s pyramid is significant in the sense that it acts as a kind of confrontation with a ‘primal father’. The entrance of the mauseloum hints at a potential trespass and blurring of gender:
“Tony was saying something about the mask over the door - an impassively staring Roman face that had been vandalized into noseless Egyptian flatness: Robin at least was never sure if it was a man or a woman”95.
The Roman mask with a broken nose referred to in the above quoted paragraph conjure up a sense of failure and an interruption of the hetero-normative lineage
92 Ibid., p. 53. 93 Ibid., p. 54. 94 Ibid., p. 55. 95 Ibid., p. 56.
194 because of a failed and ridiculed masculinity. The image of the broken nose comes up in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy as well. The story of Tristram’s life begins with an illness. Because his birth was full of complications, a doctor was called for his birth and the doctor decided to use the forceps of his own invention. This medical intervention causes an injury to Tristram’s nose. The image of an injured nose is also an integral part of Walter Shandy’s theory of noses. Due to this injury, Tristram’s life begins with an illness. This relation between an illness and a broken nose is quite significant for Hollinghurst’s novel as well. It is also significant that Tristram’s injury to his nose is followed by his involuntary circumcision. Due to these series of accidents full of symbolic meaning, Tristram’s father thinks that his son is condemned to continued failure in life. The association between nose and penis conjure up a sense of failed masculinity. It is this failed masculinity which defines Tony Bawerchalke’s house, because the house is not transferred to a ‘healthy’ patriarch, hence it is gloomy and has a deserted look.
The association of men, fathers and grandfathers create a sense of inherent deviation and corruption. The pyramid shaped mausoleum that Robin has difficulty in giving meaning is equated to an “architectural phantasmagoria of an opium dream”96. While Robin was pondering in the architectural aspects of the mauseloum, he hears his son Danny’s interpretation of the architectural style of the tomb:
‘He was embarrassed to hear Danny saying something about opium. Tony had once confided in him, as if it were still a problem, that his great- grandfather had been an addict; and Robin had mentioned to Danny his theory that the pyramid, and perhaps the house itself, was an attempt to realize the architectural phantasmagoria of an opium dream”97.
It is noteworthy that in their first meeting, Alex and Danny’s talk also reverts to fathers. Alex tells Danny how Justin had started to drink a lot after his father´s death. The death of Justin´s father marks a significant phase in Justin´s life, to the extent that ¨after the funeral things were never the same¨98.
96 Ibid., 58. 97 Ibid., 58. 98 Ibid., p. 75.
195 Danny’s sensuality, his unabashed sexual appetite grant Alex a sense of belonging and being part of a community. The drug Alex had tried with Danny’s encouragement might be regarded as the physical epitome of the magical aspect of their relationship. In a moment of self-inflicted exclusion at Robin’s cottage, it was through Danny that Alex felt part of a community again. And it was through the pill Danny had given him that he also started to feel part of his surroundings:
‘It was the combination of the pill and Danny of course, feeling suddenly on the inside of life rather than the outside. It made me see how depressed I’d been, I think the depression was so insidious and all-pervasive that I only noticed it when it was gone’99.
These words by Alex reveal how Danny, as the unconscious side of Alex and as a Pan character, has uncovered the hidden aspects of his psyche. The focus on houses in The Spell functions in a different manner when compared with the focus on houses in other novels of Hollinghurst. In The Swimming-Pool Library, houses are presented as sites of heterosexual and homosexual places which are discussed in terms of their visibility and/or invisibility. In The Folding House, houses function as sites of desire. They offer people living in them to gaze at society and people. The main theme of The Line Beauty is about the inclusion and/or exclusion of the homosexual man in hetero-normative houses. The Spell, in a similar vein, works on the house imagery as sites of failed and interrupted heterosexual lineage. Tony Bowerchalke’s house, in this respect, represent the awkward positioning of the homosexual man in a house designed for heterosexual purposes of procreation.
99 Ibid., p. 107.
196 5.4. Men in Dichotomies
Centering around ‘gay romance’ and sexual longing, Hollinghurst’s novel The Spell is largely nurtured through certain dichotomies and analogies. Dichotomies like adult/child, father/mother, homosexual/heterosexual, city/country and old/young portray the four main characters of the novel poised between opposing poles and positions in society. Being very sensitive to signs of attraction in other men and eventually falling prey to waned interest, men in The Spell are constantly considering themselves in different frameworks and descriptions. They are too much concerned with their own image and intended allure; hence their minds are too much occupied with behavioral analogies. These dichotomies and analogies in the novel reflect the homosexual man’s dialogue with the world he inhabits. The adult and child dichotomy can be observed in rapid fluctuations in the novel. While Danny acts like an adult teaching ways of a colourful world to Alex in initiating him into drugs and night life, when it comes to work life he is positioned as a child. When Danny finds a new job as a security officer in an office building, he finds it difficult to explain to Alex that he would have to work six days a week. Although Alex encourages Danny not to work and spend more time together, Danny is unwilling to accept the ‘masses of money’100 Alex has and insists on earning his own money. In order to make Alex understand his insistence, he tells him he is unlike Justin, who would be willing to live off someone else. Danny’s drug addiction is a direct reflection of his conscious anchoring in childhood. The drug enables him to keep his distance from the restrictions and rules of adulthood. In his first week of working as a security officer in an office building, he meets with a banker who uses cocaine as well and he goes into a drug transaction with him. When another security officer named Martin sees Danny while exchanging cocaine, he orders him to leave the building immediately. Danny’s being fired from this position is one among the many instances which hints at the fact that he has no easy and smooth transition from childhood into adulthood and that the two cannot coexist in his life.
100 Ibid., p. 141 .
197 When Danny leaves the office building when he is fired, it is too early in the day and he could not go home directly. In order to pass some time he roams around and feels a surge of defiance and wish to make himself known to the world:
‘As they raced out through the plastic chicanes which constituted the ‘Ring of Steel’ around the City he wished he could give the place some symbolic insult, like Becky Sharp throwing her Dictionary out of the carriage window’101.
At this moment of defiance, Danny remembers what Gordon had told him about change in life during his birthday party. Both Robin and his son Danny are offered the same piece of advice and Danny seems more willing to pay attention to it. Danny’s being laid off from his work is followed with another plunge into childhood and sexual instincts. He visits a gay club and meets the Brazilian boy Luis. At the end of the day, he invites another man called Edgar and the three of them sleep together. Danny himself knows that this sexual escapade is something beyond reason and also out of his current relationship with Alex. Danny ‘didn’t feel like accounting for his night with Luis and Edgar’102. Promiscuity in this context emerges as an urge and reaction to compensate for loss. Edgar, for example, stands out as another sexually potent Pan character living in promiscuity:
‘They had been through every reasonable sexual permutation that three of them could manage, and given up on one or two others with baffled laughter. They just didn’t stop. Edgar what was Alex quaintly called Danny: a demon’103.
On that night of the threesome escapade, Danny loses his pendant. The loss of the pendant signifies the termination of his relationship with Alex as well. At the end of Chapter 11, it becomes clearer that Danny’s insistence on staying in a childlike state through drugs and casual sex prevents him from having a regular job and a long-term relationship with someone. The small amount of information we have about Justin’s father and mother
101 Ibid., p. 146. 102 Ibid., p. 149. 103 Ibid., p. 150.
198 suffices us to surmise that his relation with his mother is rather guilt-laden and he had no close ties with his father. When Danny asks questions about Justin, although Alex senses a certain degree of jealousy on the part of Danny towards Justin, he still offers him some explanation. His explanation largely rests upon Justin’s father and his business. We learn that Justin came into a lot of money when his father died. Justin’s father had a factory where he had a dye-cast business. The explanation of Justin’s relationship with his father below is one of the most detailed descriptions we have about his life:
‘He sold out in the eighties some time, as Justin didn’t seem to see his future in the die-cast business. The father was about sixty when Justin was born, I was quite unusual. He adored him and believed he was going to be a great actor, and never seemed to notice his lack of progress. There was a terrible bronze bust of Justin in their house, done when he was about twelve. He was very wounded when I laughed at it, it was highly idealized, and very sulky – it was the ideal sulk, I suppose; though I can tell you it was nothing compared to the moods he got in later on’104.
Later on, Danny also asks about Justin’s mother:
‘She’d died, from drink I think probably, when Justin was a schoolboy. I’m sure that increased his sense of guilty panic – he was the only one left. Actually guilt’s a huge problem with him, but that’s another story. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of his tempers, but in my view they’re always violent repudiations of guilt. So we rushed back on the first train, we were almost the ony people on it, and then we got another train straight to Coventry, but when we reached the hospital his father was already dead’105.
The juxtaposition between the homosexual partnerships and the hetero-normative family order is clearly felt from the very beginning of the novel. The homosexual is shown as unfitting and incompatible within the traditional family. While still in the bar, Robin gets interested in males around him. As if to remind us that this male community is an alternative community for Robin, Hollinghurst makes Robin call his fiancé, Jane. Jane tells Robin that she is pregnant. Once Robin hears this piece of
104 Ibid., p. 167. 105 Ibid., p. 167.
199 news, it is not the pregnancy of Jane that disconcerts him, but the “we” that Jane used when delivering the news: “We are going to have a baby.” The scene very effectively reflects Robin’s reluctance to situate himself in a traditional and normative father role:
“It was the ‘we’ that disconcerted him. He thought for a moment she was referring to herself and some other man. And when he saw, almost at once that he must himself be the father, he retained an eerie sense that she had somehow done this without him”106.
This sudden entrance of fatherhood into his life created a plunging anxiety in Robin. He feels ‘he had inadvertently ruined not only his own young life, but someone else’s, too”107. Once he learns about this fatherhood, he feels this urge to be with the man in the bar, Sylvan. He escapes from the fact that he is about to become a father. He feels that he spoilt a woman’s life. After this telephone conversation he feels a fiery urge to find relish in a man’s arms and looks for the man he met at the bar. The name of the man, Sylvan, reflects Robin’s rural escape. “He wanted nothing in his mind, in his sight, in his hands, but Sylvan. He span into the bar almost in a panic for Sylvan”108. This very scene foreshadows Robin’s self-inflicted retreat in the country. The second chapter of the novel, in parallel to this mood, opens Robin’s cottage in the country. The second chapter opens with Alex’s arrival at Robin’s cottage. The dichotomy between the city and the rural exists in this chapter as well. Alex cannot decide where to park his car. Under normal circumstances he would like to have his car off the road, but due to feelings of insecurity and displacement in the country as “a town-dweller” Alex feels this urge to leave his car outside the gate, “ready for escape”109. Alex, in this scene, represents another community. Alex visits Robin's cottage, because Justin, his ex-boyfriend who has deserted him for Robin had invited him to spend a weekend there. Alex enters the cottage with feelings of deep melancholy. The description of the cottage given by Alex reflects Robin's attempt to
106 Ibid., p. 12. 107 Ibid., p. 12. 108 Ibid., p. 13. 109 Ibid., p. 14.
200 build a home for himself:
‘The cottage was low and very pretty ... It was the ideal of a cottage turned close to the point of parody, the walls of gold-brown rubble patched with bits of chalk and brick, the straw fantail pigeons on the crest of the roof and the real ones that sidled on the slope of the thatch below, the white clematis and yellow Mermaid rose trained tumblingly above the small dark windows, the air of stunned homeliness ....’110
The dichotomy between the old and the young can be seen during the first date of Alex and Danny. When they are having their drinks, they talk about being givers or takers. As always, Alex becomes conscious of his age and he constantly questions his nascent relationship with Danny. He cannot believe that their relationship will work out, because he is much older than Danny. Chapter 8 begins with the description of another relationship between a young boy and an older man. Danny meets George on his first night alone in London. George lives in a ‘richly over-furnished flat in Holland Park’111 and works as a dealer in antiques. It’s through George that Danny gets his first experience or cocaine. Danny falls in love with George, but ‘George was a self-reliant bachelor used to much genuine emotion, and wary of entanglement with a kid of twenty-one’112.
‘He could see how ripe Danny was to be hurt, which was why he decided not to see him again after the dream debauch of the first visit’ […] ‘But then George, perhaps out of a guilt that even he was not frank enough to acknowledge, had insisted on their staying friends, they were lovers from the start; but George had also been his guide, and that perhaps was what made it possible to meet again, like a bright pupil and teacher whose affection he had won’113.
This pupil and teacher relationship between George and Danny is extended to the degree where (rephrase this) Danny is initiated into the gay life and community in London. It can be argued that Danny finds a father in George. While they were driving to Robin’s party, George tells Danny that he hopes there’s someone he could
110 Ibid., p. 15. 111 Ibid., p. 97. 112 Ibid., p. 98. 113 Ibid., p. 98-99.
201 talk to. Danny mockingly answers:
‘You can always talk to my hunky daddy.’ And Danny laughed, as he did more and more, at the farce of sex, and the thought of novel pairings of people he knew’114.
This wish to pair people with one another in a mischievous manner reminds us of his Pan-like character again. On the way to Robin’s party, Danny tells George that he could set him up with the young Terry. During their talk, George asks Danny about how he feels about having a gay dad. Danny tells him ‘it’s quite cool’:
‘And there was a sort of anxiety which he tended to blink away, that one of the figures at the edge of the dance-floow could perfectly well be his own father’115.
The fact that Robin’s father being also gay intensifies the ambivalent relationship between them. Danny, as the son of a gay father, cannot help think his father being with another man , and Robin quite often feels overwhelmed by parental protectiveness of his promiscuous son. In this special father and son relationship, the father and the son see their own selves in each other. Danny tells George about his new boyfriend Alex. In this new relationship, Danny assumes the role of the more experienced party. He puts Justin on his first drug and initiates him into his colorful gay community. When George learns from Danny that Alex is a cultured man who reads a lot, he tells Alex: ‘It’ll do you good to get some culture’116, which highlights the function of education in their relationship. The dichotomy between the country and the city is worked out through shifting positions taken up by the characters. Justin’s discontent with a rural lifestyle had been evident from the very beginning of the novel. This is clearly confirmed when Justin calls Danny and Alex during his trial separation between Robin and tells
114 Ibid., p. 99. 115 Ibid., p. 101. 116 Ibid., p. 104.
202 Danny that ‘it’s marvelous not being in the country’117. On the contrary, Danny reveals his complete satisfaction with being the country. For Justin, this is related to being in love. He warns Danny to ‘make most of it, because it doesn’t last long’118. Love, for Justin is something fleeting and of very short duration and he links this with the country. The city, in this scheme, emerges as an area of searching for love. During their trial separation Robin feels rather lonely. He questions his place in life and his physical appearance. He feels the nascent marks of approaching old age. As his sense of loneliness and isolation increase, he starts listening to some chamber music. When Terry Badgett knocks at his door to his surprise, Robin feels a little bit awkward. He wonders ‘if he should offer an explanation for listening to chamber music shirtless by candle night’119. Then he offers Terry a drink and decides to enjoy ‘the company of someone fresh and handsome and remote from any intuition of his own gloom’120. Robin’s sense of loneliness is followed by a strong wish to be admired by someone. When he raises his arm onto a shelf to take a music CD, he becomes aware of his biceps curling and getting veined: ‘He was surprised by his need to be admired by the boy’121. We find another instance of the old man and boy relationship between Robin and Terry. When Robin decided to sleep with Terry in Justin’s absence during their trial separation, he takes him to his bedroom telling him ‘Come on then … It’s late … It’s past your bed-time’122, which positions Terry as a young boy who is to be taken care of by an older man. Terry’s young age, on the other hand, reminds him of, his aging body:
‘His hands rubbed across the skin and joints and smooth transitions of a body that hadn’t yet dreamt of the changes Robin had studied earlier in the mirror. It was interesting - like an eerily privileged visit to his younger self, or to some aspect of it. But he wouldn’t want to make the journey often. How could all the aging lovers of boys bear it, the distance growing longer and lonelier year by year?’123. […] ‘Quite often, Robin called Justin Simon, and was forced to
117 Ibid., p. 170. 118 Ibid., p. 170. 119 Ibid., p. 183. 120 Ibid., p. 185. 121 Ibid., p. 186. 122 Ibid., p. 188. 123 Ibid., p. 189.
203 apologise. In the dark, as breathing slowed and the hands lost the sense of where they lay, it seemed one lover could become another, like the smoothly metamorphosing figures in dreams’124.
These dichotomies in the novel function as contrasting frameworks into which the homosexual man in the novel try to fit. It is through these dichotomies like young/old, city/country and adult/child that Hollinghurst’s characters try to relate themselves with certain identities. On another level, these dichotomies also represent the strictly binary society these men have to cope with. These dichotomies represent binaries around which the homosexual man has to forge themselves an identity and a form a community.
5.5. The Homosexual Father
Since the hetero-normative society does not grant clearly defined and legitimate roles to the homosexual man and since the homosexual desire is incongruous with its heterosexual alternative, the homosexual man generally finds himself in a fluctuating and shifty ground in terms of identity formation. Within the homosexual household, the definition and division of certain roles are accordingly highly fluid and ever-changing. Homosexual partners might assume both the roles of a father and a mother. The distinction between young and old is also blurred in the homosexual milieu. Characters in The Spell are similarly multi-dimensional in that their identities and roles are in constant flux. During the drive back from the mausoleum, Justin makes fun of Danny that he had been a naughty boy: “I gather you were a very naughty boy last night, Danny”125. Danny in this scene assumes the role of a mother.
124 Ibid., p. 190. 125 Ibid., p. 59.
204
“The parental instincts that Justin was lampooning were awkwardly strong sometimes”126.
Justin’s acting like a mother to Danny is ironic in the sense that Robin nurtures a sense of failure when he thinks about Danny. For Danny, he is a failed father; and for Danny’s mother he’s a failed husband.
“The weekends, the half-vacations, were planned as treats, but for Robin were always reminders of his failure as a husband” (pg. 60).
Robin also nurtures a deep sense of anxiety over his son’s promiscuity:
“He didn’t want his boy turning into a slut. But Danny had come back from California last summer in a perversely independent mood”127.
Chapter 10 begins with the birthday preparations for Danny. Organized as a social gathering of some men in the novel, this birthday party is very significant. It uncovers the concerns of these gay men about the way they present themselves to society and also about the way they are perceived by others. Robin, for example, thinks that ‘they must look like a pair of affluent queens who’d hired a whole chorus of hustlers for the weekend’128. This thought of Robin represents the way society perceives any gay community. When one of Danny’s friends give him a white T-shirt as a birthday present, Danny puts it on and Robin sees the pendant on his chest. He immediately relates the pendant with Alex and feels great dislike for him. His sense of unease is coupled with a deep sense of inadequacy as a father:
‘Some of the boys didn’t yet know who he was and said, ‘Oh, you’re the cook, are you – great food!’ or ‘How long have you known Danny?’ as though he might be some secret sugar-daddy rather than his real inadequate father’129.
126 Ibid., p. 60. 127 Ibid., p. 60. 128 Ibid., p. 116. 129 Ibid., p. 119.
205
Seeing his son Danny among a group of men and o sure of himself, Robin has to face the individuality of his son. This scene once again shows that being in a community is something which certifies one’s adulthood and individuality. Robin ‘had never seen him like this, as an adult at the centre of a circle of friends’130. The desire and attempt to fit in a certain community pervades the novel from beginning to end. When Robin talks about his dissatisfaction of Alex, Justin explains to him that ‘he just wants to fit in, darling. He’s terribly lonely’ 131 . The fact that such an understanding of one’s psychological condition comes from someone like Justin, who is depicted as a character not very much concerned about others’ feelings, foreground his own loneliness as well. While people are partying in the house, Robin assumes the role of the housekeeper. He goes in and out of the kitchen and tidies up the house. When at one point he enters into the kitchen to Danny’s discontent, he replies to Danny in a camp way that ‘A father’s place is in the kitchen dear’132. This is one of the rare moments when Robin is camp. Robin’s campinesss in this scene reflects his way of dealing with the nervous situation he thinks he is in. During his son’s birthday party his country home is ‘invaded’ by homosexual men coming from the city. Hence, along with his own son, they represent a different current of homosexual desire. The promiscuity he senses among these men is against his conception of life which is to be led in a homosexual monogamy. But then, one part of him inclines towards this promiscuity and in this guilt-laden state of mind and conscience, he takes refuge in camp. The irony and parody of hetero-normative roles somehow make him feel secure in the clearly defined spatiality of his kitchen. However, when Danny and his friends start chopping coke on his kitchen table, even his campiness cannot keep him upright and Robin leaves the kitchen so as not to see his son using the drug. Drugs in the novel create ‘the spell’ felt by characters in Hollinghurst’s novel. Drugs function as a kind of defense through which Hollinghurst’s characters deal
130 Ibid., p. 120. 131 Ibid., p. 123. 132 Ibid., p. 125.
206 with the social stigmatization they suffer. Drugs not only put them into a trance of pleasure, but also offer them a transitory ignorance of social labeling. It is through drugs that most of the homosexual men can be truly themselves. When the civil servant Alex takes ecstasy for the first time, he gets rid of his awkwardness in the gay bar and starts dancing in a more relaxed manner. Danny’s use of cocaine gives him a self-pleased sense of power. Hence, when Robin sees his son Danny ‘chopping coke’ on the kitchen table, he does not want to witness this scene, because as a father, he knows that this is because his son’s vulnerable situation as a young homosexual man. In other words, being more experienced than his son, Robin knows and feels very well that the hetero-normative society is rather hostile to homosexual men and his son’s taking refuge in these drugs to feel complete is only a misleading illusion.
207
CHAPTER SIX Homeless Love
“Oh! help me, heaven,” she prayed, “to be decorative and to do right! Let me always look young, never more than sixteen or seventeen–at the very outside, and let Yousef love me–as much as I do him. And I thank you for creating such a darling, God (for he’s a perfect dear), and I can’t tell you how much I love him; especially when he wags it! I mean his tongue…Bless all the sisters at the Flaming-Hood–above all Sister Ursula…and be sweet, besides, to old Jane…Show me the straight path! And keep me ever free from the malicious scandal of the Court. Amen.” And her orisons (ending in a brief self- examination) over, Mademoiselle de Nazianzi climbed into bed. Ronald Firbank, Flower Beneath the Foot
The Line of Beauty can be read as a sequel to The Swimming-Pool Library in chronological terms. The Swimming-Pool Library takes place in the summer of 1983, when Will Beckwith meets with Lord Nantwich; it is again in the summer of 1983 that Nick, the main character of the novel, starts staying with Gerald Fedden’s family. Both Will Beckwith and Nick Guest go through a period of transition. The summer of 1983 affect them in similar ways in that their perception of themselves in society, the way they relate themselves to people around them change deeply. Their ‘charming’ summers precede the threat of AIDS, which would soon be functioning as a backlash against the gay community under the propagation of the written media and institutions of patriarchal society. Members of Parliament of the period, like Dr. Rhodes Boyson have spoken against homosexuality as ‘a fashion’ which is ‘anti- fanily’ and ‘anti-life’.1 Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979 started a planned effort to promote traditional values in society. This governmental campaign negated the progress made by lesbians and gay men in the 1960s and 1970s. Jeffrey Weeks, in his Coming Out, talks about this period in this way:
1 Matt Cook, A Gay History of Britain, Oxford, Greenwood World, 2007, p. 204.
208 From the late 1970s there was a distinct shift to the right in the political geography of Britain. From 1979 into the 1990s, Margaret Thatcher presided over an administration that was more sharply of the radical right than any previous administration’.2
Nick Guest greatly admires Henry James as an author and he writes a thesis on the hidden sexuality of Henry James and how this secrecy is reflected on his style. Nick Guest, like William in The Swimming-Pool Library, acquires a similar awareness of a need for secrecy in society during his stay in the house of a Conservative Member of Parliament who represents traditional family values. The very term ‘traditional values’3 was used by Margret Thatcher herself, in opposition to ‘pretended’ homosexual family relationships.4 Margaret Thatcher propagated the idea that ‘the common source of so much suffering’ was the disintegration of the traditional family.5
6.1. Men in the City
Hollinghurst develops most of his fiction in and around the image of houses and cities to give his readers a sense of how the homosexual man relates himself to and lives in these places. It could be surmised that The Folding Star and The Spell deal with houses, hence their focus is on the inner psyche of the homosexual man. Houses in these two novels assume a multi-layered symbolic significance. The Swimming-Pool Library and The Line of Beauty, while still dealing with houses, take this fictional framework one step further and evolve around the larger scope of cities as inhabited by homosexual men. In The Swimming-Pool Library we chart the stigmatization of society and how the homosexual man is pushed into forgotten and invisible blind alleys. The Line of Beauty, too, makes use of the city as a spatiality
2 Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out, London, Quartet, 1990, p. 237. 3 Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, London, Harper Collins, 1993, p. 629-630. 4 Matt Cook, A Gay History of Britain, Oxford, Greenwood World, 2007. 5 Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, London: Harper Collins, 1993, p. 630.
209 full of new prospects for a recently come out homosexual man. We can follow the development of Nick Guest through the directions he takes in the city of London. Nick Guest is first depicted as a lonely character moving around the city and trying to find his way in a new community. Nick comes from a middle-class family and he has a first degree from Oxford. Nick’s position in the Fedden family is rather bleak. The initial portrait of the Fedden family presents us a self-sustaining patriarchal structure. The daughter Fedden, Catherine, receives great support from Nick and Catherine’s parents very much appreciate it and they are content with having Nick at their home. However, Nick’s sexuality must be hidden in this family. His perception of London, his excitement for being in this city promising him a free gay life are in strict contradiction of the Feddens’ social standing. The dichotomy between Nick’s hometown Barwick and London could be read as a juxtaposition of the country and the city. Although Nick perceives the Fedden family very positively and almost admiringly at the beginning of the novel, he will later become aware of the fact that Feddens are selfish and intolerant people and they exclude anyone different from their patriarchal circle. In order to protect and reinforce the rigid class system they are part of, they even support the government’s negative attitude toward homosexuality and AIDS. Nick’s first days at the Fedden family house are very promising in that he has access to a very special London of private houses and gardens and dinner parties. However, in this new community he will soon become aware of the fact that his acceptance into this heterosexual world, he has to hide his homosexuality. Tim Edwards, in his Cultures of Masculinity, describes the 1980s perception of homosexuality in the following way:
‘…when copying more traditional patterns of monogamous sexual practices with long-term partners in private, gay men risked little social opprobrium, but in publicly displaying a promiscuous desire for the masculine, they often felt the full wrath of their stigma and heterosexual society’s homophobia’6.
6 Tim Edwards, Cultures of Masculinity, London: Routledge, 2006, p. 87.
210 The beginning and the end of the novel represent this hypocrisy of society through the image of doors. At the beginning of the novel Nick is depicted when entering into Kensington Park Gardens. The novel ends with Nick locks Feddens’ door behind him and walks away. This door imagery represents the patriarchal system into which Nick cannot be accepted. Nick develops a special relationship with the city of London. From the prestigious point of view of the Feddens house, he can elaborate on the city itself and on his position there. Shortly after his arrival in London, Nick stands on the balcony of the Feddens house and looks out over the gardens. His observant and scrutinizing gaze seem to be scanning the whole city and all its potentialities. ‘The unsleeping traffic numble, far-off car horns and sequals of brakes, voices, faint shouts, a waveband twiddle of unconnected music’ are some voices and noises that reach up to his ears7. These noises are coming from another version of London which rather disresembles the Feddens privileged London. Nick also wonders about how he is perceived by others. He enjoys the spectacle he creates on the balcony: ‘an enviable figure poised against the shining accomplished background of the lamplit room’8. It is evident in this scene that Nick feels himself part of this house. Similar to William Beckwith’s anticipation of a new period of time in his life in The Swimming-Pool Library, Nick feels that he is on the verge of some new and exciting experience promised by the city: ‘Nick felt he had been swept to the brink of some new promise, a scented vista or vision of the night, and then held there’ (pg.19). The balcony, and the Feddens house in general might be likened to a vessel carrying Nick to a new country. As a potential outcast figure on the fringes of society, Nick also has some ties with a darker London; which is both exciting and dangerous. In the first pages of the novel Nick arranges a blind date with a young black man called Leo. In terms of class, race and sexuality Leo represents the queer side of Nick Guest. The Feddens’ rich house seemingly shrouds Nick’s homosexuality; however Leo and the streets of London Nick looks at from the balcony represent his wish to live out his real identity
7 Ibid., p. 19. 8 Ibid., p. 19.
211 as a gay man. The panoptic vision he enjoys from the Feddens balcony is in contrast with his inherent wish to roam around the back streets. The annual carnival of Notting Hill coincides with Nick’s arrival at the Feddens house. Whereas the local residents fear possible riots9, Nick finds this mixture of danger and excitement very appealing. He lies in bed and listens to the ‘…long-legged beat of reggae from down the hill, mixed in, like the pulse of pleasure, with the sighing of the garden trees 10 . This very scene creates a juxtaposition of the high culture and society Nick is in and the low culture represented by the riots and Leo himself. Nick has his feet in two different communities and he is to learn the dire fact that he cannot exist in both of them simultaneously. He feels this tension all the time: When the Feddens got to France for a holiday, they entrust the house and their daughter Catherine with Nick. Since Nick has to stay indoors, he yearns for participating in this enticing carnival and he imagines Leo moving along the crowds. He longs to be with him:
‘The music shocked him with its clear repetitive statement of what he wanted. Then one vast sound system warred happily with the next, so that there were different things he wanted, beautiful jarring futures for him’11.
The communal gardens at Notting Hill Gardens symbolise another potentiality London offers to Nick. With its ‘hidden’ and ‘discreet’ places, these gardens offer secrecy and privacy for those who have no real place in society.
‘The communal gardens were as much part of Nick’s romance of London as the house itself: big as the central park of some old European city, but private and densely hedged on three sides with holly and shrubbery behid high Victorian railings’12.
9 The anxiety of local residents referred to here stems from the Brixton Riot that took place in Lambeth, south London on 11 April, 1981. The reason for the riots was the high rate of unemployment of the local community. The riots also represent a deep tension between the police and the community. Peter Widdowson, The Palgrave Guide to English Literature and Its Discontents 1500-2000, London, Palgrave, 2004, p. 245-246. 10 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, London, Vintage, 2004, p. 44. 11 Ibid., p. 45. 12 Ibid., p. 15.
212 When Nick and Leo go to these gardens on their first date, they discover that they are ‘two men on a summer night, with nowhere to call their own’13. They simply have nowhere to go. They cannot go to Leo’s house and Nick cannot take Leo to the Feddens house. Nick decides to take Leo to the gardens. He opens the impressive Victorian gate and lets him in. These gardens represent the inbetweenness of the gay characters in the novel. The public and the private, the indoors and the outdoors merge with one another in these gardens. The fact that they can only make love in these gardens reflect the fact that the hetero-normative society has no place to offer for their love and desire. This also shows us how they are not part of a distinct community. It is because of their sexuality that they cannot enter the Feddens house, but they feel they have to hide their sexuality even in discreet and privileged spaces. Nick and Leo head for the shadowy part of the garden, where: ‘There were hidden places, even on the inside, the path that curled, as if to a discreet convenience, to the gardener’s hut behind a larch-lap fence’14. During their sexual encounter, Nick is very much aware of space and time:
‘… Just before he came, he had a brief vision of himself, as if the trees and bushes had rolled away and all the lights of London shone on him: Little Nick Guest from Barwick, Don and Dot Guest’s boy, fucking a stranger in a Notting Hill Garden at night. Leo was right, it was so bad, and it was so mychh the best thing he’d ever done’15.
This delusive contentment of Nick gives him a sense of achievement and freedom. However, the freedom he feels is nurtured by his very much romanticised view of London. This creates in Nick an illusion of freedom, which is very similar to William Beckwith’s sense of freedom in The Swimming-Pool Library. The scene of their first love making gives away hints of future problems: ‘… he had a sense of being noticed by the house, and the verdict of ‘vulgar and unsafe’ seemed to creep out like a mist and tarnish the triumph of the evening’16. Most of the action of the novel takes place among rich and influential people. The Line of Beauty criticizes the Thatcherite politics for discriminating and
13 Ibid., p. 35. 14 Ibid., p. 15. 15 Ibid., p. 40. 16 Ibid., p. 42.
213 suppressing homosexual communities. When the narrative leaps from 1983 to 1986, the miners’ strike of 1984 and 1985 is simply skipped and not mentioned. Alfred Hickling, in his review of the novel notes that:
‟Hollinghurst has extended his powers tp create a universe rather than a clique … the novel has sufficient breadth to envoke the full spectrum of 1980s Britain and straight, rich and poor.”17
The homosexual experience in Alan Hollinghurst’s novel is situated in a heavily social and historical context. On the other hand, it could also be argued that a great number of characters in the novel, aristocrats and Oxford graduates alike, are not really related to and affected by the social upheavals around them.
6.2. Men in the House
The Feddens have a large, white house in Notting Hill, which is a highly wealthy section of London. The house’s green door, in a way, opens and closes the novel itself. The door is green at the beginning, but before the Prime Minister’s arrival, Gerald paints it Tory blue, which shows the pretentious alignment of the Feddens family with the established order. The changing of the colour of the door foreshadows the changes that are coming to the Feddens family on the other side of the door. Nick’s story actually begins with him admiring the ‘three-locked green front-door’. His final interaction with the Feddens family is again with this door. The house is full of elegant French furniture, porcelain and works of art. The house has several floors with grand stairs. The first flight of stairs is made of stone, whereas the upper ones are made of oak. Kensington Park Gardens is surrounded by communal gardens. Only residents with keys are allowed to enter these gardens. The key is a symbol of
17 Alfred Hickling, ‟Between the Lines”, Guardian Review, 10 April 2004, http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,1189089,00.html accessed 17 February 2011.
214 belonging to a certain community in this exclusive neighborhood. Nick is only temporarily allowed into these gardens, hence we have a door opening at the beginning and at the end of the novel. Nick is given the room up in the roof, which is essentially a children’s area in the traditional English home. The fact that his bedroom is located the farthest end of the house also symbolizes that although Nick lives in the Feddens house, he is not a central member of the family. Nick develops a kind of emotional tie between himself and the Feddens’ house. Especially during the time when the Feddens were in France, Nick felt a strong sense of belonging to that house. This mood of his represents how he is in need of a home. He likes ‘coming home’ to the house in the early evening ‘when the wide treeless street was raked by the sun, and the two white terraces stared at each other with the glazed tolerance of rich neighbors’18. The front door with its three locks is especially appealing to Nick. He likes opening and locking it again. Once he locks the door behind him, he relishes in the ‘still security’ of the house19. Houses in The Line of Beauty represent the characters’ different positions in society. One of the strongest ironies of the novel is when Margaret Thatcher dances with Nick. She is unaware of the fact that her partner is a homosexual. Considering the fact that it was her government which has out the oppressive legislation of Clause 29 into force, Thatcher in this scene is actually dancing with what she has been suppressing. As depicted in this ironical scene, Hollinghurst in The Line of Beauty usually portrays homosexuality and homosexual life seemingly compatible with a conservative society. Nick’s Oxford background itself has hosted a number of well- known homosexuals like Oscar Wilde and Evelyn Waugh. However, society’s acceptance of the homosexual individual is rather ambiguous. Nick eventually comes to understand this ambiguous permissiveness of society around him20. The scope of this permissiveness is wide enough to include a certain degree of camp in it. The Tory MP Paul Tompkins is a ‘bitchy’ character and he seems clearly welcome in his circle21. Nick Guest observes that: ‘Actually what amazes me
18 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, London, Vintage, 2004, p. 5. 19 Ibid., p. 5. 20 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, London, Picador, 2004, p. 86-7. 21 Ibid., p. 61-2.
215 is the fantastic queenery of the men. The heterosexual queenery’.22 As evident in the depiction of some social moments in the novel, the homosexuals acceptance in society is not a sincere and real one. The homosexual figure is perceived and accepted as an eccentric, a marginal part of society. The two potential film financiers who arrive from the US in The Line of Beauty are a homosexual couple intent on meeting as much of British aristocracy as possible during their visit23. This intention to meet aristocratic people is very much in parallel with what Susan Sontag tells us about the self-legitimisation of the homosexual man in her article ‟Notes on Camp”.24 Sontag claims that the homosexual man makes use of camp to legitimise himself in society. Acquiring an aristocratic posture, Sontag argues, is a clear epitome of this attempt of self- legitimization of the homosexual man. Nick’s status in the novel is also very ambiguous and marginal. The Feddens household very often strands him between intimacy and formality. When Gerald tries to express that Nick is welcome in his house, he does not, perhaps cannot, use the word ‘family’: ‘(you are) part of the … part of the household’.25 The fact that he cannot bring himself to use the word ‘family’ points at Nick’s ambiguous and uncertain status. Another example from the novel strengthens this sense of uncertainty. When Rachel and Nick talk about Nick’s rent, she treats the money Nick pays her not as a rent but as an unnecessary gift.26 Although ambivalently and in an uncertain manner, Nick seems acceptable through the novel until an instance of public homophobia strikes him. When Gerald’s illicit affair with his secretary hits the media, Nick finds himself publicized as a ‘misplaced’ homosexual in the Feddens household. The Standard’s caption ‘Gay Sex Link to Minister’s House’27 turns Nick into an almost abject figure and the Feddens family no longer welcomes him. When the scandal hits the media, Gerald’s previously uncertain acceptance of Nick immediately turns into a certain hostility and rejection of Nick. In this public scandal, Nick’s sexuality, which had been
22 Ibid., p. 382. 23 Ibid., p. 427. 24 Susan Sontag, ‟Notes on Camp” in Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, Ed. Fabio Cleto, Edinburgh University Press, 1999. 25 Op. Cit., p. 121. 26 Ibid., p. 118. 27 Ibid., p. 468.
216 ignored and tolerated until then, becomes definitely unacceptable. For Nick, this is a belated awareness of his sexuality’s incompatibility with the heterosexual society. He comes to the understanding that his sexuality has no place in society. What he is capable of is a homeless desire and love. Hollinghurst’s focus on and attention to art and architecture abounds in this novel as well. It is with relation to beauty, art and the physical characteristics of buildings that Hollinghurst’s characters try to understand their habituation in society. William Beckwith in The Swimming-Pool Library lives in a prestigious and luxurious seclusion made possible through his favorable financial background; Edward Manners in The Folding Star is aware of the fact that he is cornered into a children’s quarter at the back of an old woman’s house; Robin Goodfellow in The Spell has built himself a kind of rural shelter in the form of a cottage which keeps him at bay in society. Nick Guest in The Line of Beauty finds a seeming privilege in the Feddens house which he thinks could enable him to cut across ‘the lines of privilege and homophobic exclusivity’ 28 . The Feddens’ house lets Nick to romanticize his future; he greatly enjoys the beautiful art objects in the house, ‘… as if it were really his own, or would be one day: the pictures, the porcelain, the curvy French furniture so different from what he’s been brought up with’29. The Feddens house is completely different from the house in which Nick has grown up. Nick has grown in a cramped post-war house in Cherry Tree Lane in Barwick. The Feddens’ house in Kensington Park Gardens30 has a ‘red-walled dining
28 Daniel K. Hannah, ‘The Private life, the Public Stage: Henry James in Recent Fiction’, Journal of Modern Literature, 2007, p. 88. 29 Op.cit., p. 5. 30 Kensington Park Gardens is part of the Ladbroke Estate in Notting Hill, one of the many large houses in the area to have been recently gentrified. In his study of the London rich, Peter Thorold observes that: ‘In the context of the rich, the importance of gentrification was that it prepared their way bytransforming battered and shabby housing and in revivifying neighbourhoods it opened out new ground.’ Peter Thorold, The London Rich, London, Viking, 2004, p. 336. However, what appears to be a progressive development with an increased provision of quality housing is an illusion. It will not benefit those most in need. As with the Feddens themselves, apparent benevolence masks blatant self-interest. The houses in this location are given new status by Thatcher’s free market and a new wealthy area is created. This is how Nick in The Line of Beauty thinks about the place: ‘There might well have been only three or four owners in the years since the whole speculation rose up out of the Notting Hill paddocks and slums. It was a house that encouraged the view its inhabitants had of themselves.’ Nick’s musing here represent an inherent hyporisy in the Feddens as a family trying to move up the social ladder. Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, London, Vintage, 2004, p. 492.
217 room’, a ‘double drawing room’ and many ‘white bedrooms’31. The Feddens house also represents the state which suppresses homosexuality in society. Kensington Park Gardens represents the Tory view, supported by Gerald and Rachel. The persecution of homosexuality by society is visible even at the beginning of the novel. Hector Mattby, a junior minister in the foreign office, gets caught with a rentboy in his car. Wattby has to resign from his post and his marriage32. The ever present possibility of such prosecution and discrimination is yet very alien to Nick. His conception of gay life is full of positive potentialities and romanticism. Nick still nurtures dreams which are: ‘…. Aesthetically radiant images of gay identity, gathering in a golden future for him, like swimmers in a sunlit bank’33. However, at the end of the novel Nick will see that Gerald and Rachel’s seeming tolerance will not suffice to keep him as an openly gay man in the Feddens family. The Feddens house represents the sense of belonging of the Feddens family. It includes the Feddens in, as representatives/supporters of associated of accepted social mores, on the other hand it excludes Nick and Leo as others. Gerald and Rachel express their discontent with Catherine’s boyfriends from the perspective of the house. They describe her boyfriends as: ‘Consciously chosen their unacceptability at Kensington Park Garden…’ The house itself is the very embodiment of their wealth and class values. The Feddens family represents the rigid patriarchal system which excludes all kinds of ‘others’ which could be potential threats to the workings of the system. The Feddens family, in general, represents the double standards and hypocrisy of the patriarchal society. The Feddens house itself is the physical embodiment of this hypocrisy. When an Indian cab-driver named Bentford brings Catherine home to help her, the Feddens view of him as ‘…completely and critically different from everything else in the house’34. Gerald demands to learn how he has got to know Catherine and Rachel looks at the driver with ‘a hint of fear in her face, as if
31 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, London, Vintage, 2004, p. 5. 32 Ibid., p. 24. 33 Ibid., p. 25. 34 Ibid., p. 149.
218 Bentford had brought some threat much larger than Catherine’s tantrum’ into the house35. Likewise, Nick’s sexuality is also a threat for the Feddens house.
6.3. Masters of Men
Lord Kessler in the novel symbolizes the homosexual man in the closet. His private and reserved constitution in his stately home represents a kind of deficient patriarchy which cannot intermingle with the outer world. When Nick visits him in his library, he finds Lord Kessler rather enigmatic and notices an air of secrecy about his ‘discreet’ cologne36. Lord Kessler’s sexuality is unknown to all. Even his family knows little about him. Catherine’s boyfriend Russell asks her: ‘He’s a fruit, is he, Uncle Lionell?’ 37 . Catherine answers in the negative, but we know she had previously asked Nick: ‘What do you think, he’s not gay, is he?’38. The fact that Lord Kessler shows no signs of homosexuality about him can be explained in his being sixty years old. As a man of sixty, the first half of his life, at least, coincides with a period during which homosexuality was illegal and punished by prison. Hence, his strategies of secrecy and discreetness should have evolved as the main traits of his closeted homosexuality. His sexuality imprisons him in his stately home. He is another placeless homosexual man in a strictly defined ‘place’! When it comes to hidden sexuality, a strong parallel could be drawn between Lord Kessler and Henry James. Lord Kessler’s secrecy and the suspicion he arouses in other people about his sexuality are reminiscent of Henry James’s hidden sexuality. While talking to Kessler, Nick senses Kessler’s style as leaving many things unsaid. The subject of Nick’s doctoral dissertation, too, as he explains it to Kessler, is about things said and unsaid: ‘… style that hides things and reveals things at the same time’39. This very dialogue between Nick Guest and Lord Kessler is
35 Ibid., p. 149. 36 Ibid., p. 52. 37 Ibid., p. 59. 38 Ibid., p. 57. 39 Ibid., p. 54.
219 moving along shifty ground whose boundaries are blurred by the fact that two homosexual men cannot reveal their true identities even to each other. Even when Nick explains his subject of study to Kessler, he feels like he had been indiscreet. His references to Henry James could well be interpreted as comments on Kessler’s constitution and identity. The dialogue that develops between Nick and Kessler centers around Henry James. The obscurely gay author acts as a kind of surrogate father both for Nick and Kessler. Their dialogue centering around Henry James opens up a space in which they can come out to one another. In other words, it is through the fictional world and the authorial identity of a homosexual novelist that these two men can get to know each other. Kessler, for example, calls Nick as a ‘James man’ and in confirmation of this Nick says ‘Oh, absolutely!’40. This short dialogue leaves Nick with pleasure and defiance. In Hollinghurst’s novels, artists and authors act as surrogate fathers through whom the gay characters try to forge themselves identities. Kessler also tells Nick that Henry James stayed at his estate, Hawkeswood, in 1903. Kessler takes Nick to his library and shows him some leather-bound photograph albums. This is very reminiscent of the scene in The Swimming-Pool Libray in which Lord Nantwich shows the Roman mosaics in his cellar. Both the ground mosaics of the ancient swimming-pool and the photographs of Henry James are relics of the past which help these homosexual men to position themselves in time. While looking at the photographs, Nick feels a juxtaposition between the present and the past: ‘Now the house seemed settled and seasoned, a century old, with its own historic light and odour, but then it was ostentatiously new’41. Although William Beckwith in The Swimming-Pool Library was not wholeheartedly willing to learn about Lord Nantwich’s past, Nick Guest shows a genuine interest in Kessler’s history that intersects with the subject of his doctoral dissertation. While looking at the photos Kessler has shown him, he develops a child-like curiosity about those bygone days. At last he finds Henry James’s photo:
40 Ibid., p. 54. 41 Ibid., p. 55.
220
‘And then, May 1903, a gathering of twenty or so, second row, Lady Fairlie, The Hon. Simeon Kessler, Mr. Henry James, Mrs. Langtry, The Earl of Hexam … a cheerful informal picture. The Master, with his thumb in his stripped waistcoat, eyes shaded by a traveller’s wide-brimmed hat, looked rather crafty’42.
There is a strong parallel to be drawn between Henry James’s position in Kesslers’ estate in 1903 and that of Nick Guest’s in 1983. They are both outsiders to the highbrow Kessler family and even after 80 years, Nick Guest still has to be discreet as a gay man in a heterosexual community. The still pervading double standards prevent Nick to ‘speak about Leo as freely as Catherine spoke about Russel’43. The reactions to such stifling social norms of Nick Guest and Henry James are not the same. As the case generally is with Hollinghurst's characters, Nick Guest is not very much aware of the hypocrisy of society he lives in. Nick Guest, like William Beckwith in The Swimming-Pool Library, seems allured by the illusionary privileges of society. As Julie Rivkin, who discusses Henry James's fiction, states that ‘[James's] crafty expression as he stands there amidst the titled company suggests someone who is undeceived by the worldliness that dazzled and seduces Nick’44. A closer analysis of the dialogue between Nick Guest and Kessler reveals how choice of words and discourse can disclose and reveal things at the same time. At some points during their talk, Nick feels that Kessler deliberately blocks even an obscure mutual acknowledgement of homosexuality. When Kessler asks Nick how he came to know Toby, for example, he uses the word 'contemporaries':
‘You were contemporaries?’ ‘Yes, we were, exactly,' said Nick, and the word seemed to throw a historic light across the mere three years since he had first seen Toby in the porter's lodge and felt a sudden obliviousness of everything else’45.
42 Ibid., p. 55. 43 Ibid., p. 57. 44 Julie Rivkin, ‘Writing the Gay ‘80s with Henry James: David Leavitt’s ‘A Place I’ve Never Been and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty’, in The Henry James Review, 26 March 2005, p. 289. 45 Op.cit., p. 53.
221 The very choice of the word 'contemporaries' by Kessler denies Nick's true feelings for Toby any visibility and Nick feels a current of offence at being singled out like this. In this scene, Nick is not allowed to offer his own version of his history with Toby. In another scene in the novel, which could be juxtaposed with this one, Nick offers his own perception of the line of beauty. He tries to explain this to Toby's family in this way:
‘He couldn't unwind the line of beauty for Catherine, because it explained almost everything, and to her it would seem a trivial delusion, it would seem mad, as she said. He wouldn't be here in this room, in this country, if he hadn't seen Toby that morning in the college lodge, if Toby hadn't burnt in five seconds onto the eager blank of his mind’46.
The aesthetic defines The Line of Beauty’s one of major concerns. Starting with the novel’s title to the book’s final word ‘beautiful’47, The Line of Beauty is definitely concerned with the aesthetics. When Nick Guest visits Bertrand Quaradi’s house, he is introduced as an aesthete. Nick’s interest in the antique is very telling in terms of his identity and sexuality. Nick knows a lot about antique objects, because his father was an antique-dealer. When Nick first came to the Feddens house, he was very much influenced by the beautiful old objects there. He also had a talk with Lord Kessler48, the Jamesian figure in the novel, about the antique objects displayed in his estate. Nick’s interest in the aesthetics reflects his attempt to relate himself to the outer world and build himself a coherent self. The novel’s title refers to the ‘ogee’ or doubly-curved line described in William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty (1753). The fact that Nick’s conception of beauty belongs to tradition and art history rather than reflecting his contemporary sentimentality at the twentieth century reflects his attempt to relate himself to the outer world. Nick develops a regressive strategy; unlike the prospective outlook of the father’s world which looks ahead into the future, Nick as a homosexual man, looks back in time to find roots. His being denied a definitive place in the father’s world, compels him to turn his face to the past. The disjunction between the historic houses and eighteenth-century furniture and the
46 Ibid., p. 53. 47 Ibid., p. 501. 48 Ibid., p. 50-1.
222 1980s also reflect an essential sense of discontinuity in Nick’s identity. He cannot relate himself to his contemporary sentimentality and hearkens back for finding another anchor. The residual aestheticism he thus acquires reflects the homosexual man’s essentially regressive attitude towards identity formation. Another thread of aestheticism reveals itself in Nick’s interest in Henry James. His doctoral dissertation is about Henry James and his literary style. However, Nick’s interest in Henry James is not only academic, he integrates Henry James into his private life, to the point of emulating him. Nick deliberately uses a Jamesian style in his letters.49 What draws Nick into such emulation of Henry James’s style is its ambiguity. James’s style floats between discernments and judgements. When Gerald’s future secretary Perry Kent asks ‘What would Henry James have made of us, I wonder?’50, it is very clear that he lacks a fatherly figure who would be a role model for him. That is why he resorts to the literary style of Henry James. Nick, through Henry James, imagines for himself a literary style with which he would give meaning to the world he lives in. Nick answers to Penny Kent’s question in following words:
‘Well ...’ Nick chewed it over. ‘He’d have been very kind to us, he’d have said how wonderful we were and how beautiful we were, he’d have given us incredibly subtle things to say, and we wouldn’t have realized until just before the end that he’d seen right through us.’51
The answer Nick gives reflects the essential antagonism between the political climate of the 1980s and the artistic temper can meet. It is in this confrontation that we can trace Nick’s attempt to find himself a lineage in aesthetics as a homosexual man. For Nick, his quest was after the beauty. He also felt that he would be following and chasing after more beauty. The paragraph above reflects much about how Nick conceives his homosexuality. Nick seems to be reduce his identity to a quest for beauty and a production of a series of coincidents. This creates an interesting paradox with his doctoral dissertation which is about Henry James and hidden
49 Ibid., p. 396-7. 50 Ibid., p. 140. 51 Ibid., p. 140.
223 sexuality. Since he doesn't seem to be much aware of the bearings of his immediate gay milieu, his academic attempt to understand and reveal a more subtle and developed identity greatly contradicts with his oblivion. However, Nick's seemingly oblivious distance towards homosexual identity and gay history is not a self-inflicted one. This contradiction between Nick's words and deeds stems from the fact that the very society he lives in has offered him a very ruptured gay history. It would still be very difficult for him to fill in this history for a meaningful whole on his own. That's why he is in need of fictional fathers. What London represents for Nick Guest is a new spatiality in which he can form a new community. Through his new boyfriend Leo, Nick meets someone who represents the city of London with all its potentialities. "Old Pete", Leo's old boyfriendand Nick meet at Pete's antique shop. Nick quickly realises that Leo and Pete share "the steadiness of something both long-established and over"52. When Pete learns that Nick has only been in London for six weeks, he asks him if he is sill "doing the rounds". He mentions a list of pubs and clubs which represents a well- established gay sub-culture. Most of these, bars and pubs are unknown to Nick. The very word "round" in Pete's question reflects a sense of directionality. Although Nick tells Pete that he's "exploring a bit", we know he hardly ever ventures out of the secure premises of Kensington Park Gardens. Pete represents a different phase of gay history. As a man who is in his mid- forties, he was in his twenties in the 50s and 60s. He witnessed the freedom of the 50s. Sexuality was an important and defining issue for him. Nick himself feels the inherent difference between himself and ‘Old Pete’.
‘He wrote tight old jeans and a denim shirt, and something else, which was an attitude, a warily aggressive challenge – he seemed to come forward from an era of sexual defiance and fighting alliances and to cast a dismissive eye over a little child like Nick, who has never fought for anything’53.
Nick feels somehow intimidated by Peter’s world. However, beyond these feelings of ‘discomfort’, ‘snobbery’ and ‘timidity’, Nick also looks down on Pete as having
52 Ibid., p. 107. 53 Ibid., p. 106.
224 little relevance to his own world and his advantages of youth and class. He doesn’t like the fact that Pete so easily deciphers his taste in men, which ‘he had only just guessed at himself’54. This feeling of discomfort on the side of Nick reminds us of William Beckwith’s delusionary self-esteem in The Swimming-Pool Library. Like William Beckwith, Nick has built himself a romance in which he lives in seeming security. This confidence in himself does not allow for such transparency. Another difference between Nick and Pete is that camping as a queer strategy of defense against the hetero-normative oppression has different meanings for them. Nick is rather unfamiliar with the significance of camp as a weapon against oppression and its place in gay history. When Pete refers to Leo as ‘she’, for example, Nick feels rather uncomfortable. Nick finds it hard not to react when Pete says ‘That’s what I call her, Leontyne Price-Tag’55. Nick remembers that he had ‘laboured through’ conversations calling men ‘she’, but that ‘he’d never found as necessary or hilarious as some people did’56. If this difference between Nick and Pete should be read as a difference between the old and the young generations of gay men, it would also represent the difference of attitude between these generations. Andy Medhurst, in his ‘Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Critical Introduction’ for example, gives the example of early Gay Liberation protests, ‘which often drew on cross-dressing, gender-blurring and flagrant theatricality before those elements were sacrificed in favour of politer methods’57. Like William Beckwith in The Swimming-Pool Library and Danny in The Spell, Nick has not felt the necessity to be assertive about his sexuality in the face of oppression and prejudice. Neil Bartlett, in ‘Who Was That Man?’ mentions the essential role of camping and camp language in confronting with the hetero- normative assumptions:
‘The small phrase look at her, as applied to a straight man by a queen holding court with her sisters, redraws the perspectives of the city. It
54 Ibid., p. 108. 55 Ibid., p. 109. 56 Ibid., p. 109. 57 Andy Medhurst, ‘Camp, Lesbian and Gay Studies, A Critical Introduction, Eds., Andy Medhurst and Sally Munt, London, Cassell, 1997, p.282.
225 undermines the authority of the dictionary in its function of guide book to our culture’s sights and monuments’58.
Camp language emerges as part of the unofficial heritage of the city which, Medhurst argues, has been ‘… conceptualized from the historical, palpable, raw material of gay men’s cultural experiences …’59. As a typical Hollinghurst character, Nick distances himself from this heritage. Pat Grayson, Catherine’s godfather, as a character can be juxtaposed with Henry James. Pat is another older gay man in the novel whom Nick finds embarrassing and irrelevant. If Henry James represents the high culture for Nick, Pat Grayson is the embodiment of the ‘low’ culture as depicted on the TV. We are informed that Pat has starred in the popular drama series ‘Sedley’, which is also Nick’s mother’s favorite programme Nick ‘wasn’t clear if she knew that Pat was a whatnot’60. During Toby’s 21st birthday party, Nick observes him while camping on the dance-floor and perceives him as ‘a famous man who was a fool, a silly old queen’61. This scene again reflects the arrogance and snobbery of Nick. When Nick hears about Pat’s death from AIDS in 1986, he remembers his carelessness of his ‘brand of cagey camp’62. This reaction is no different from his earlier feelings towards Pete, Leo’s ex-boyfriend It can be argued that Pat represents ‘an unwelcome future’ for Nick. As Andy Medhurst argues, Nick does not comprehend the significance of camping:
‘Camp answers heterosexual disapproval through a strategy of defensive offensiveness. Camp thrives of paradoxes, incarnating the homophobe’s worst fears, confirming that not only do queers dare to exist but they actively flaunt and luxuriate in their queerness’63.
58 Neil Barlett, Who Was That Man?, London, Serpent’s Tail, 1988, p.85. 59 Andy Medhurst, ‘Camp, Lesbian and Gay Studies, A Critical Introduction, Eds., Andy Medhurst and Sally Munt, London, Cassell, 1997, p.290. 60 Alan Hollinghurt, The Line of Beauty, London, Vintage, 2004, p. 79. 61 Ibid., p. 79. 62 Ibid., p. 336. 63 Andy Medhurst, ‘Camp, Lesbian and Gay Studies, A Critical Introduction, Eds., Andy Medhurst and Sally Munt, London, Cassell, 1997, p.276.
226 Camp is a mere issue of taste for Nick’s generation, whereas Pete’s generation regards it as ‘a survival mechanism in a hostile environment’64.
6.4. Men in the Community
There is a strong relation between Hollinghurst characters and the cities they inhabit. The significance of spatiality and the formation of identity in relation to spaces can be traced in the different ways the Hollinghurst characters are interrelated with places. In the first section of the novel we have a depiction of London that is full of excitement and potentiality for Nick. However, as the novel progresses, the city changes along with the sentimentality of Nick Guest. As Nick becomes more aware of certain things, the city of London itself reflects this awareness as well. Margaret Thatcher’s political authority is felt around the city. We witness how London is being transformed into a functional and transparent architecture. Although the Thatcherite politics pretend to be libertarian, the transparency London is beginning to assume is only on the surface and this visibility is only there so that people could be policed more easily. As Michel Foucault has argued, this transparency and the functionality the society assumes create people who are very much aware of being watched:
‘He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the construction of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection… it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance’65.
64 Ibid., p.276.
65 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, London, Penguin, 1977, p. 203.
227 When Nick visits an old friend of his who works at Lionel Kessler’s London bank, he observes these changes himself: ‘Kesslers had just rebuilt their city premises, with a steel and glass atrium and high-tech dealing floors fitted in behind the old palazzo façade’66. As Nick observes the bank staff as they hurry in the building, he thinks they look ‘both slavish and intensely important’67. Although all the glass and steel in the building create an illusion of openness and freedom, since the employees within are more visible in this transparency, they are more easily watched over. Another implication of this social transparency and seeming libertarianism in Nick’s life is that he starts a relationship with the son of a newly rich Lebanese family. The new rich of the 1980s is another symbol of Thatcher’s ministry. Wani Quaradi, Nick’s boyfriend, is the son of Bertrand Quaradi, a millionaire Lebanase Tory peer. Wani’s homosexual identity and his gay life would ruin the family’s respectability, hence he leads a double life. Wani’s parents, the Quaradis, pay for a girl named Martine to act as a fiancée of him. Although his parents actually know about their son’s homosexuality, their sole concern is to save their face in front of society. The Quaradi and the Feddens family are similar to one another in that in their Tory community they cannot tolerate and show empathy towards homosexuality. Although the concerns of the Quaradi family to save their face in society as a heterosexual family, their undisclosed awareness of Wani’s homosexuality and their wealth open a space of freedom for Wani. Wani buys a house built in the 1830s and refurbishes it. The top two floors of the house are flat, whereas the ground floor has an open floor plan. This ground floor, used as an office, is called Ogee. Ogee is the headquarters of a glossy art magazine published by Nick and Wani. This recurrent theme of acquiring a house and renovating it is very significant. It reflects the gay man’s attempt to build himself a space in which he can be his real self. In Wani and Nick’s case, their 1830s house reflects the very conflict they are in. The top two floors of the house, with their flat floor plans, represent the linearity and the imposed order of the hetero-normative order, whereas the ground floor of the house, with its non-linear shape and curves, represent the fluid and non-normative identity of the gay man.
66 Alan Hollinghurt, The Line of Beauty, London, Vintage, 2004, p. 203. 67 Ibid., p. 203.
228 The name of Nick and Wani’s publication venture has its origin in Hogarth’s ‘line of beauty’68. This ‘line of beauty’ comprises of a double curve which turns first one way and then the other. Nick’s justification of naming their office as ‘ogee’ again reveals a lot about how these gay men position themselves against the hetero- normative order: ‘… it had a rightness to it, being both English and exotic, like so many things he loved’69. This ogee curve draws our attention to the gay man’s fixation on the aesthetic side of things. In this respect, the ogee curve should be interpreted as a decorative expression rather than a structural element. While lying on a curved bed, with a canopy of two transcending ogees, Nick ponders on this artistic form:
‘He ran his hand down Wani’s back. He didn’t think Hogarth had illustrated this best example of it, the dip and the swell – he had chosen harps and branches, bones rather than flesh. Really, it was time for a new Analysis of Beauty’70.
Another image of the ‘line of beauty’ emerges when Wani cuts a line of coke on a copy of Henry James and the Question of Romance by Mildred R. Pulllman71. Wani looks at the line of cocaine and says to Nick: ‘Now there is a line of beauty for you’72. The name ‘ogee’ comes to Nick’s mind when he lies in bed with Wani. His attention is drawn to the ogee curve in the mirrors, pelmets and mainly the canopy of the bed. The ogee shape is the reflection of Nick’s focus on aesthetics. In line with Nick’s interest in aesthetics, the readers are also referred to the ogee shape throughout the novel, like the curve of the staircases and the S-shapes in the back and gilt floor at Kensington Park Gardens. Another line of beauty Nick is drawn to is on
68 The English painter William Hogarth produced highly original paintings. In his narrative paintings like Harlot’s Progress (1732), Marraige a la Mode (1745) and The Rake’s Progress (1735), Hogarth used humour for moral ends in a satirical manner. Some of his satirical targets were men called as ‘fops’ in his time. In contemporary terminology, ‘fops’ refer to ‘gays’. Later in the 20th century, David Hockney personalized the theme of the ‘Rake’ and identified him as an outsider gay artist ostracised by society. 69 Alan Hollinghurt, The Line of Beauty, London, Vintage, 2004, p. 79. 70 Ibid., p. 200. 71 Ibid., p. 252. 72 Ibid., p. 255.
229 the human body where the back curves meet the buttocks. Nick has fantasies about this area on Leo’s body. When Nick ponders on his relationship with Leo, for example, he thinks their romance comprises of ‘days (with) upward and downward curves’. The first issue of his magazine Ogee also includes an article about the line of beauty. The ogee shape, on another level, symbolizes the curves of the story in Hollinghurst’s novel. It is a reflection of the rise and fall of fortunes. The early 1980s, the beginning of the novel, is the bottom of the curve. The mid-1980s witness positive and happy thrivings; the peak of the shape represents the height of indulgence and opulence and the great illusion Nick is in. The curve goes down with the end of a certain era. AIDS hovers on Leo and Wani; Geralds’s political career is doomed and the Prime Minister’s re-election is not a brilliant success as expected.
6.5. The Man and The Illness
The way Nick and Wani deal with their homosexuality in society differ from one another and this difference reflects alternative ways of dealing with a sexuality not welcomed by the hetero-normative society. Wani’s insistence on secrecy about their relationship frustrates Nick. He reproaches Wani with his seeming naivete: ‘I’ve never pretend not to be gay, it’s you that’s doing that, my dear. This is 1986. Things have changed’73. Wani’s insistence on secrecy and his deep anxiety reflect the pressure of the widespread homophobia, attacks on the gay community and the treatment of HIV and AIDS. Nick and Wani’s situation, within this framework, could be likened to that of Lord Nantwich’s in The Swimming-Pool Library, because they live in a climate of media hysteria and governmental ignorance as well. Different from Lord Nantwich, however, Nick falls prey to the illusionary glamour and glitter of his decade. As Julie Rivkin comments:
73 Ibid., p. 254.
230
‘Nicholas lives as much in denial of AIDS as he does in denial of the corruption and greed and other unsavory elements of the decade’74.
Beginning with the second half of the novel, the readers feel how society victimizes homosexuality and ascribes to it connotations of illness and disease. In a time when HIV and AIDS have struck Britain, ‘The press coverage of gay men and AIDS in the 1980s was unsympathetic, sensational and overtly homphobic’75. The 1980s was a period when the government designated AIDS as a ‘gay plague’. It was seen as something which mainly affected the gay community. As a representative of the state, Gerald is ignorant of the AIDS problem. Instead of dealing with this issue, Gerald is more interested in organizing a musical supper party at Kensington Park Gardens. The second half of the 1980s produced a fashion for musical house parties. When Rachel’s brother employed the Medici Quartet for his party, Nick recalls that: ‘Denis Beckwith, a handsome old saurian of the right enjoying fresh acclaim these days, had hired Kiri te Kanawa to sing Mozart and Strauss at this eighty-fifth birthday party’76. Actually, it is a very apt juxtaposition on the part of Alan Hollinghurst to put Denis Beckwith into this scene again. Denis Beckwith first appears in Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library. He is the person who was responsible for the gay hunt during the 1950s. He worked as the former Director of Public Prosecutions. Hollinghurst’s staging Denis Beckwith in such an ignorant environment again is hence very meaningful. As Alan Sinfield observes, AIDS was a ‘godsend’ weapon to be used in stigmatizing gays77. It is another ironical hint of Alan Hollinghurst that the readers see Denis Beckwith in another novel as well, whereas Charles Nantwich has to confront with invisibility. Denis Beckwith is still alive and it is as if he is celebrating his triumph over homosexuals. The now invisible Charles Nantwich, on
74 Julie Rivkin, ‘Writing the Gay 80s with Henry James: David Leavitt’s A Place I’ve Never Been and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, The Henry James Review, 26.03.2005, p. 288. 75 Matt Cook, A Gay History of Britain, Oxford, Greenwood World, 2007, p. 204. 76 Ibid., p. 244. 77 Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics - Queer Reading, London, Routledge, 2009, p.77.
231 the other hand, had ended up in prison under Beckwith’s ‘crusade to eradicate male vice’78. Denis Beckwith’s reappearance in The Line of Beauty also draws a parallel between the 1950s and the 1980s in terms of the prejudices inflicted on gay men. Both attacks towards gay men during these two decades stem from the appraisal of traditional family values, in other words, the hetero-normative order. After World War II, people thought that the traditional family values were loosened and homosexuality was blamed and attacked to strengthen these values. Deviant sexual roles acted as a stray ‘other’ from which the hetero-normative order could live on. As Jeffrey Weeks argues in The World We Have Won, underneath the seeming normality of the 1950s, there were ‘campaigns against sexual perversity’79. The 1980s, in a similar vein, echo this attack on homosexuality backed up by traditional mores. The mid-1980s were terrorized by ‘the media panic about AIDS, largely fed by homophobia, far from galvanizing government’80. The traditional family values are embodied in Gerald Fedden’s person and in his family. The musical gathering he has organized in his family home as a government minister positions him next to the State and against any deviance to its norms. A second balcony scene depicts Nick as an outcast in this musical house party. Repeating the scene in 1983, he again looks at London. In the first scene, he was full of hope and new prospects, but this time Nick thinks about his past. He feels ‘an invincible solitude stretching out from the past like the slowly darkening east’81. As the distant couple who had been reclining on the grass ‘faded and disappeared’ Nick stares out in the darkness alone82. This scene clearly leaves Nick out of the social game played in hetero-normative rules. The nature of Nick’s loneliness could also be related to the social and political order he lives in. He feels lonely, because he doesn’t live in a nourishing community. The relationship he builds with the Feddens family is not aligned with his homosexual desires. Although they represent a high class and many privileges, the Feddens’ influence in society cannot sustain Nick in the same way as a
78 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, London, Vintage, 1998, p. 260. 79 Jeffrey Weeks, The World We Have Won, Oxford, Routledge , 2007, p. 21.
80 Ibid. pg. 17. 81 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, London, Vintage, 2004, p. 259. 82 Ibid., p. 259.
232 community of his own friends should. The political mores of the decade are also far from supporting Nick as an accepted individual in society. Margaret Thatcher has propagated a world which comprised of ‘individual men and women … and families’83. Such a conception of society would not support and sustain Nick as a gay man. The Thatcherite model of society cannot protect Nick against the impending crisis of AIDS. Rather than a stigmatizing society, Nick is in need of support and comradeship of his own lot. As Alan Sinfield observes: ‘In the face of AIDS, gay community is more, not less, necessary and rewarding’ 84 . However, the gay community that exists in The Line of Beauty is only a frugal one. It is as fleeting and weak as the one depicted in The Swimming-Pool Library. In The Line of Beauty the only reference to a gay community is a glimpse at Hampstead ponds, and this little community is already threatened by AIDS. We learn the situation of this little community from an elderly man who speaks to Nick: ‘George has gone then. Seteve’s just told me, went last night … he was always here. He was only thirty- one’85. Like William Beckwith, Nick Guest in The Line of Beauty is in a great delusion. Being surrounded by many privileges, although not his own, he thinks that he and Wani, his lover, is not in need of a specific community. We know that this is mere illusion on the part of Nick. At some moments in the novel Nick is depicted as yearning for a kind of solidarity. One such scene is when Nick is swimming in the Hampstead Pool. While swimming, he comes near a floating raft. Someone extends an arm to him and takes him up to the raft and two men make room for him:
‘He stood breathing and grinning in a loose but curious embrace with the men in the middle. He had a sense of something fleeting and harmonic, longed for and repeated – it was the circling trees, perhaps, and the silver water, the embrace of a solitary childhood, and the need to be pulled up into a waiting circle of men’86.
83 Margaret Thatcher, Interview for Women’s Own Margaret (‘No Such Thing as Society’) 31 October 1987, Margaret Thatcher Foundation 24 June 2007, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=106689 84 Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics - Queer Reading, London, Routledge, 2005, p. 77. 85 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, London, Vintage, 2004, p. 182. 86 Ibid., p. 185-186.
233 The Hampstead Pool functions as a new queer space for Wani and Nick. In the eyes of Nick, the place offers him an unfamiliar sense of community. The hand sticking out to him represents an intimacy which is not sexual. It reflects a comradeship from someone of his own kind. For Wani, on the other hand, the space itself is frightening with its limitless transparency. As someone who has grown up hiding his true sexuality from others so as not to lose the respect and acknowledgement of his father and the society. Wani is not used to meeting people ‘in the near-naked free-for-all of a public place’87. Scenes like these, when we see Nick and Wani both disliking and liking these new spatialities that we are reminded the relationship between a community and an identity. What these Hollinghurst characters lack is a community that would sustain them in society. Jeffrey Weeks argues that a sense of belonging and a strong community is needed to sculpt oneself an identity: ‘a sense of community, of wider belonging, was more than a pious aspiration. In a real sense it was a precondition of making new identities possible’88. The raft with two men in it, pulling Nick next to them symbolizes the potential community Nick has missed because of his vanity and illusionary conception of freedom. He could have known people like him, who would be offering him comradeship, if he had named around London a bit more instead of confining him among sophisticated and privileged people . As the novel progresses, however, Nick comes to understand that he is living in an illusion. He feels how naïve he had been in believing that his immediate society offered him freedom/liberation to act out his homosexuality. In one of the scenes, the hypocrisy of society is revealed to Nick in a shocking way. When the Feddens family is visited by Maurice and Sally Tipper, Gerald’s party learns about Grayson’s death. However, all members in the party ignore this piece of news. There is a communal effort by the rest of the family to veil the matter’. The scene very clearly exposes the Feddens’ liberalism as mere pretension. Gerald and his immediate circle deem AIDS as a gay plague, the result of an unspeakable vice. Rachel, although she had claimed to be fond of him, does not acknowledge the real reason of his death and suggests
87 Ibid., p. 187. 88 Jeffrey Weeks, The World We Have Won, Oxford, Routledge, 2007, pg. 82.
234 that he had ‘picked up some extraordinary bug in the far east’89. Rachel’s not naming the disease and slowly its origin in the far east reflects how the hetero-normative society distances homosexuality and everything related to it away from ‘home’. However, only Catherine announces the disease in a dramatic and open manner to the whole table. Witnessing the reaction of the Feddens and their friends’ to AIDS, Nick is somehow enraged. Because he feels angry, he develops an urge to ‘come out’ to the Tippers. He has a further shock when Wani refuses to support him and tries to strengthen his illusionary homosexuality by saying: ‘I’m probably just old-fashioned on these things, but actually I was brought up to believe in no sex before marriage’90. This is one of the rare moments when Nick comes to understand that in this privileged world of the Feddens there is only the individual and no community as such. In line with the overarching Thatcherite politics, there is no such thing as society in the minds of these people. This lack of community for the homosexual man is produced by a society which is very much oppressive and alienating. The politics of the 1980s, when the main characters of the novel lived, not only granted these men no community, but made the existence of such a community very difficult. When Nick’s lover Wani is diagnosed with AIDS, Nick is further alienated from the society into which he was trying to enter. Wani’s illness creates a kind of disequilibrium in the novel in that it marks two different conceptions of the world by Nick. In the beginning of Part III of The Line of the Beauty, Nick is depicted on the balcony again, however he is not looking over the city as a cluster of potentialities he could enjoy ay his free will, but as the abode of missed opportunities and even as perhaps more fulfilling paths that could have been taken in life. As he stands on the balcony, Leo is dead and it is the night of the 1987 Tory election victory. The politics of the time were very much against homosexuals. According to Matt Cook:
‘The government played the family and morality ticket strongly in its 1987 election campaign, and after Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s third
89 Op.cit., p. 333. 90 Ibid., p. 354.
235 successive election victory, she used her conference speech of that year to ‘question those who claim an inalienable right to be gay’91.
Shortly after Thatcher’s third election victory, ‘The 1988 Local Government Act’ introduced the infamous Section 28 into law. In Jeffrey Week’s words, this was ‘the most significant attack on the lesbian and gay community for almost a hundred years92. Clause 2A(b) of the section banned the promotion of ‘teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.93 In such an environment of dire politics, the disheartening fact of his lover’s illness forces Nick to make a reassessment of his life. He remembers his affair with Leo and the naïve escapades in London streets. He thinks of ‘the beautiful rawness of those days’94 which is in stark contrast with the pretensious society he had tried to annex himself to. That summer he had spent with Leo had ben an innocent and warm time for him. AIDS also marks the crucial point of rupture when the inherent hatred of homosexuality can no longer be made invisible by members of society. When Wani falls prey to AIDS, Nick is no longer accepted by Wani’s family. His sharp alienation is a striking moment of revelation. In one of the scenes, when Wani is too weak through AIDS to drive home, he is being delivered to his mother by Nick:
‘Wani himself, with the women at each elbow, seemed to shrink into their keeping; the sustaining social malice of the past two hours abandoned him at the threshold. They forgot their manners, and the door was closed again without any one saying goodbye’95.
In this scene, Nick is not considered as part of the family and he is completely ignored. This denial is not only a denial of Nick, but a denial od AIDS as well. Such
91 Jeffrey Weeks, The World We Have Won, Oxford, Routledge, 2007, p. 204. 92 Ibid., p. 204. 93 http://legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/9/pdfs/ukpga_19880009_en.pdf 94 Op.cit., p. 415. 95 Ibid., p. 442.
236 stigmatization, such ignorance and exclusion of gay men in the 1980s was not something uncommon. As Matt Cook observes:
‘… non family members found themselves shut out of medical decisions and funeral arrangements. As there was no legal recognition of same-sex couples, surviving lovers had no rights in the law when it came to illness, death and inheritance’.96
This isolation also reflects the placelessness of the gay man in the traditional family. With no legitimate status and place in the family, the gay man is doomed to be excluded in matters of life and death. In Nick’s isolation there is also an underlying sense of blame for Wani’s impending death and illness. The gay man in such a context is sickening, impure and an enemy of the established order. Another striking aspect of Nick and Wani’s plight is that, they are tremendously alone in dealing with AIDS. Neither of them are aware of any supporting agencies. Their former vanity and illusionary sense of freedom, which exists in many of Hollinghurst’s characters, lead them to this inescapable loneliness. Nick describes the HIV test as something experienced totally alone. It is only after some time that Nick comes to understand that others like them have been sharing this experience; even then, Nick feels he is receiving no support from others around him: ‘The words that were said every day to others would be said to him, in that quiet consulting room whose desk and carpet and square modern armchair would share indissolubly in the moment’97. This loneliness in Nick’s life is in stark contrast with what was then going on in the streets. Despite Margaret Thatcher’s oppressive and stigmatizing politics against homosexuality, there were gay communities in which gay men could stand against social and political stigmatization. Tony Whitehead, for example, in the December 1989 edition of Capital Gay writes about the functions of such gay communities. They provide education and support groups for victims of AIDS.
96 Matt Cook, A Gay History of Britain, Oxford, Greenwood World, 2007) p. 202. 97 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, London, Vintage, 2004, p. 500.
237 These victims, according to Whitehead, have ‘… grown out of the kind of community we were long before anyone had heard of AIDS. In a decade when Thatcher said there was no such thing as society, only people and families, the gay community has proved her wrong’98. One problem with Nick Guest, in The Line of Beauty, is that such a community does not exist in his life. He has isolated himself from society to the extent that he had not been able to accumulate shared experiences with others like him. The chance of getting to know the streets and the gay community around him is missed with Leo’s death by AIDS. Wani’s world of privilege and vanity and the illusionary sense of freedom have kept Nick away from such communal interaction with other gay men around him.
The romance Nick has developed around the Feddens house and its illusionary freedoms are shattered when corruption of all kinds result in the ‘fall’ of the family’s respectability. When Catherine, Gerald Fedden’s daughter, in order to wound his father, exposes his secret affair with his secretary to the media, she reveals Nick and Wani’s homosexuality as well. It is interesting to note that the real fall of the house is not caused by this heterosexual cheating (‘Millionaire MP, his elegant wife, his Blonde, or His Blushing Blonde Secretary’99, but by the scandal of ‘AIDS’ and ‘homosexuality’which are presented as shameful events in the Feddens household. This corruption, the fall of the house of Feddens is symbolized in the image of the ‘house’. The Feddens house represents normative patriarchy, and the house of Feddens, especially, is an ideal Thatcherite household. The greatest possible blow to this household is not a breach of heteronormativity but a complete attack on it by unacceptable homosexuality. The Feddens house, symbol of the successful Thatcherite family, is now flawed with its link to homosexuality; as the headlines now define it: ‘Gay Sex Link to Minister’s House’. Gerald Feddens’ immediate circle does not criticize the fact that Gerald has cheated on his wife, but he is to blame for letting his household host a gay man. His business partner Barry Groom criticizes Gerald with following words: ‘I mean, what’s the little pansy doing here?
98 Tony Whitehead, ‘Look Back With Pride’, Capital Gay, 22 Dec. 1984, p. 4. 99 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, London, Vintage, 2004, p. 500.
238 Why have you got a little ponce hanging round your house the whole fucking time?’100. Wani’s AIDS and Gerald’s demise are all related to Nick’s homosexuality and in both events he is expelled from the family life of these two households. This series of events accentuate the position of Nick as a ‘guest’ among these people. As Daniel K. Hannah argues in his paper ‘The Private Life, The Public Stage: Henry James in Recent Fiction’, Hollinghurst’s novel The Line of Beauty questions the position of the ‘guest’:
‘The Line of Beauty points to the gay citizen’s status within the nation-state as the ever invited yet excluded ‘guest’ of both the conjugal family and the family’s institutional extension, the State’101.
AIDS as an illness not only reveals the inherent enmity towards Nick in the Feddens and the Quaradi families, but it also underlies the fact that even if a gay community exists, the homophobic Thatcherite society and politics would not allow those communities to function properly and sustain the gay community suffering from this affliction. As Alan Sinfield in his book Cultural Politics-Queer Reading argued, the IDS epidemic has caused a backlash on the privileges and advantages gained by the lesbian and gay communities102. With the influence of Thatcherite politics, the media in the 1980s was talking about the demise of the family. Margaret Thatcher herself thought that ‘the traditional family’ was undermined. 103 Nick, in this context, emerges as a threat to the kind of family envisaged by the politics of the 1980s. He is a ‘dangerous’ guest invited into the Feddens household. 104 This image of a
100 Ibid., p. 476. 101 Daniel K. Hannah, ‘The Private Life, The Public Stage: Henry James in Recent Fiction’, Journal of Modern Literature, (30.3.2007), pg. 85. 102 Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics - Queer Reading, London, Routledge, 2005, p. 77. 103 Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, London, Harper Collins, 1993, 629-630. 104 Neil Barlett, in his ‘A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep’ quotes a radio phone-in of the time. This reflects the gay man as a threatening guest in the house: ‘... the time has come to ban this homosexual propaganda in the schools and on the television these people have to realise that their obnoxious sexual practices are a danger to our society and you might invite one into your home without knowing it’. Neil Barlett, ‘A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep’, Solo Voices, London: Oberon, 2005, p.32.
239 threatening guest, in the character of Nick, who ironically has the surname ‘Guest’, strengthens the sense of placeslessness and not being sustained by a certain community. Nick’s being dispelled from the Feddens family reflects how the hetero- normative society denies gay men a family and a sense of belonging. Despite the fact that Nick had been discreet over Gerald’s extramarital affair for a very long time, Gerald, in a time of crisis, does not hesitate to word his hatred for homosexuality. His condemnation goes like:
‘I’ve been giving it some thought. It’s the sort of thing you read about, it’s an old homo trick. You can’t have a real family, so you attach yourself to someone else’s. And I suppose after a while you just couldn’t bear it, you must have been very envious I think of everything we have, and coming from your background too perhaps … and you’ve wreaked some pretty awful revenge on us as a result. And actually, you know …’ he (Gerald) raised his hands, ‘all we asked for was loyalty’105.
Gerald’s remarks are very much reminiscent of Clause 28 and its distinction between ‘real’ and ‘pretended’ families. The novel is opened and closed with a door image. At the end of the novel, when he is expelled from the Feddens house, Nick is shown closing the beautiful front door for the last time and the keys of the house he is given into the letter box. The beautiful iron door and the keys that opened it has also opened up a new world for Nick. These were the keys that had opened up an ‘innocent summer of 1983’ for Nick. The beautiful iron door at the beginning of the novel now closes upon Nick s a failed illusion. As he walks away from the Feddens Estate, Nick looks at the façades of the houses. Like doors, the façades of the houses also tell a lot to Nick. When he first arrived in London, the houses were very bright in the sun; they had white terraces, but while taking his leave from Kensington Park Gardens, the house fronts had ‘a muted gleam’. This transition from brightness to darkness is also a foreshadowing of the AIDS test that Nick was going to take that afternoon. He senses that the test would be positive, because of his unprotected sex. The now far-away gloom of the
105 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, London, Vintage, 2004, p. 481.
240 Feddens House and the iron gate Nick himself had locked up behind him represent the power of the hetero-normative society. Although Nick will have to deal with the result of the AIDS test and will most probably die, the Feddens household will continue unperturbed. As Nick imagines his own death, he seems to fade pretty quickly. As he looks at the house while leaving it forever, Nick no longer can see the alluring beauty of the house. The house now has an ordinary beauty. It represents the hetero-normative society that does not accept him in. Nick’s being brutally expelled from the Feddens family and the final isolation he faces, proves the London society to be an extricating and harsh one. The London society Nick very happily finds himself in is no way a sustaining community for him. Hollinghurst’s ironical stance towards the 1980s and the Thatcherite politics reveal the pretension of the family relationships of the Feddens.
It is only at the end of the novel that Nick comes to understand the illusionary, fake friendliness of the Feddens family. He becomes aware of how the Feddens house is isolated from people and society:
‘Inside the hall: the sound …. The impassive rumble of London shrink to a hum, barely noticed, as if the grey light itself were subtly acoustic. Nick felt he’d chanced on the undisturbed atmosphere of the house, larger than this year’s troubles, as it had been without him and would be after he’d gone’106.
The xenophobic grandeur of the Feddens is not interested in the needs of others and is unwelcoming to anyone who would threaten its rigid system. While collecting his belongings, Nick feels that Gerald and Rachel will go on living in this house without changing their lives. Nick knows that Gerald has already been offered a high-salary job as a director. What Penny tells Nick about the order of things in this life is very wise: ‘That’s how this world works, Nick. Gerald can’t lose. You’ve got to understand that’107.
106 Ibid., p. 491. 107 Ibid., p. 497.
241 CONCLUSION
‟Often you stop when you have run about halfway down it, and then you are lost; but there is another little wooden house near here, called the Lost House, and so you tell the man that you are lost and then he finds you.” J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
The general aim of this study has been to elucidate the significance and dynamics of the homosexual man’s search for community as depicted in the contemporary British novelist Alan Hollinghurst’s four novels The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell and The Line of Beauty. These novels, in vibrant dialogue with previous British homosexual novelists like Ronald Firbank, E.M. Forster and L.P. Hartley, not only contribute to the canonical quality of the British homosexual novel, but they also reflect the homosexual man’s plight in a gender-discriminative and hetero-normative society. Hollinghurst’s fictional characters stand out with their failed attempts to build themselves an identity and a sustaining community. The present study has developed around the significance of the lack of community of the homosexual man in the hetero-normative society. The study mainly argued that since the homosexual man cannot relate himself to physical communities defined by locality and temporality, he looks for alternative ways of feeling himself intact and part of and orderly existence. The main argument which has been pursued within the framework of the present study was that the elements of fiction, sexual desire and aestheticism offered the homosexual man compensatory ways of strengthening his selfhood and building himself an identity. In other words, it has been argued that the homosexual man’s community, unlike the hetero- normative order’s physical communities defined by locality and temporality, is built and ruled by the forces of fiction, sexual desire and aestheticism which are not dependent on physicality, locality and temporality. Any attempt to understand the mode of existence of an individual who has been defined as ‘illegitimate’ and an ‘other’ by the ruling norms necessitates an analysis of the dynamics of marginalization and alienation. The present study has employed the arguments and concepts of queer theory to deconstruct the relationship
242 between the homosexual man as an individual and the society. Queer theory has been claimed to offer a sound framework in which the forces shaping an individual’s gender identity could be conceptualized. The scope of this social analysis and deconstruction offered by queer theory, however, has been expanded towards the personal by way of utilizing the concepts and arguments of psychoanalysis. Not denying the psychological dynamics giving shape to a person’s selfhood within the family, it has been argued that any discussion of the homosexual man’s selfhood and identity should bring together the personal and the social. Thus, a marriage of seemingly contradictory schools of thought, psychoanalysis and queer theory, has been suggested as a broader framework of analysis of the homosexual man’s search for community as portrayed in Alan Hollinghurst’s novels. The object-relations theory of psychoanalysis has a developmental stance which takes into consideration the interrelations of individuals among family members and the dynamics of the formation of the self. This developmental dimension of the object-relations theory differentiates itself from a drive-ridden psychoanalysis which leaves out the feelings of the individual and presents a less- medicalized analysis of the individual’s psychology. Since queer theory, too, focuses on an understanding of the relationships between the individual and society, these seemingly contradictory modes of analysis converge with one another in their aims of analyzing concepts like selfhood and identity. In line with the object of this study, Alan Hollinghurst’s fictional characters have been analyzed with reference to their search for a community in different ways. The analyses reveal a strong focus on sexual desire on the part of these characters. Hollinghurst depicts the homosexual man as obsessively concerned with sexual gratification to the point of promiscuity. In The Swimming-Pool Library, William Beckwith’s attachment to young black men, his evasion from taking any professional responsibility in society and promiscuous quest for momentary sexual gratification have been read as the reflection of his struggle to strengthen his selfhood and enjoy a sense of belonging through momentary but intense physical attachments through sex. As the very title of the novel suggests, William Beckwith seems to be building himself a ‘library’ of desirable young men in whom he can enjoy an erotic mode of existence and community. Although William Beckwith’s promiscuity offers him
243 momentary satisfaction for his selfhood, his failure in writing Lord Nantwich’s dairy is an indication of his lack of identity. Although Lord Nantwich’s diaries offer him a history and a context in which his homosexual identity could take roots, William Beckwith cannot bring himself to organize and write them down as a biography. This depraves him of a definitive history. The reason for William’s failure in writing, in saying something, is his inherent sense of loss and defeat in the eyes of the hetero- normative order. He cannot bring himself to any kind of confrontation with society and the word of the father. William Beckwith finds himself a safe haven in an erotic community where he does not have to challenge and compromise with the father. Edward Manners in The Folding-Star, Hollinghurst’s second novel, also stands out as a homosexual character who is deeply steeped in eroticism. Edward Manner’s search for a new home in another country and his obsessive love for a young boy indicate his essential fatherlessness and need for sexual gratification. The fact that Edward Manners is depicted as a character who is greatly interested in literature enables us to surmise that he attempts at building himself an erotic and a fictional sense of belonging. Hollinghurst’s third novel The Spell evolves around the erotic more than the other three novels. All the main characters in The Spell could be traced along their ongoing struggle to find meaningful positions in life. The dance- like plot of the novel offers readers continuously changing permutations of relationships in which the characters try things anew each time. The search for community in The Spell, in other words, is ruled by the erotic principle. Hollinghurst’s fourth novel The Line of Beauty unfolds around the aesthetic and fictional quests of its main character Nick Guest. Nick is a young aesthete who revels in beautiful antique objects, music and the arts. This is how he tries to attain roots in life. Apart from his aesthetic concerns, he also nurtures a literary interest. His being a great admirer of Henry James is very much telling in that he adopts and emulates the ‘Master’s ambiguous style. Henry James, for Alan Hollinghurst’s character, functions as a literary surrogate father. The other novels also abound with allusions to novelists writing about homosexual themes. The rich literary allusions in Hollinghurst’s novels reflect both his attempt to build a homosexual novel tradition and his characters’ struggle to assert their existence in relation to literary father.
244 The general aim of the analysis of the four novels by Alan Hollinghurst was to unravel and deconstruct the paradoxical existence of the homosexual individual. The present dissertation has not aimed at discovering why an individual could be sexually attracted to his or her own sex. The aim was to understand the dynamics of the homosexual man’s selfhood and identity as depicted in Hollinghurst’s novels. The analyses of the novels focused both on the unconscious processes of selfhood and the conscious dynamics of identity and society. The convergence of psychoanalytic approaches and queer theory has revealed that the homosexual man’s identity is shifting, contingent and always in progress. The homosexual man, as depicted in Hollinghurst’s novels, finds no healthy assertiveness in family and in society. This lack of assertiveness leaves him with a disintegrated self whose pieces he should bring together himself so that he could build himself an identity. Lacking the fatherly guidance and supportiveness of the patriarchal society, the homosexual man looks for alternative and compensatory ways of asserting his identity. It has been shown that, as depicted in Hollinghurst’s characters, the homosexual man makes use of aesthetic, fictional and erotic principles to compensate for the disintegration he is made to feel in himself by family and society. His search for an acknowledged identity takes place in the elusive and most of the time illusionary gratification of the aesthetic, fiction and sexual desire. The homosexual man’s search for a sense of belonging could be read as a search for aesthetic, fictional and erotic communities. This search is the very attempt of the homosexual man to find roots in life, to feel that he ever exists and to relate himself to meaningful frameworks of existence. Perhaps we will never be able to understand what really makes up the human being. One thing that seems certain is that our complex existence depends on an ongoing negotiation and compromise between our instincts, impulses and the social laws that position us in society. The homosexual man’s homelessness and fatherlessness is the outcome of the interaction and respective workings of these different forces. In his attempts of negotiation and compromise, the homosexual man invests in erotics, fiction and aesthetics so as to protect the coherence of his self and identity which would otherwise be denied to him.
245
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY TEXTS
Hollinghurst, Alan: The Swimming-Pool Library, London: Vintage, 1988.
……………. The Folding Star, London, Vintage, 1993.
……………. The Spell, London, Vintage, 1998.
……………. The Line of Beauty, London, Vintage, 2004.
OTHER SOURCES
Ahmed, Sara: Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006.
Alderson, David: ‟Desire as Nostalgia: The Novels of Alan Hollinghurst” in Territories of Desire in Queer Culture, Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries, Ed., David Alderson & Linda Anderson, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000.
Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, Trans. by., Roger Crisp, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Armstrong, Neil: How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Audi, Robert: Ed., The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, (Second Edition), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Barber, S.M. and D.L. Clark: ‟Queer Moments: The Performative Temporalities of Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick” in Regarding Sedgewick:
246 Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory, New York: Routledge, 2002.
Barrie, J.M.: Peter Pan, London, Collector’s Library, 2008.
Barthes, Roland: A Lover’s Discourse, Trans., by., Richard Howard, London: Vintage Books, 2002.
Baum, L. Frank: The Wizard of Oz, London, Collector’s Library, 2009.
Beauvoir, Simone de: The Second Sex, Trans. by., H.M. Parshley, London: Vintage, 1997.
Benjamin, Jessica: Shadow of Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis, New York and London: Routledge 1998.
Bersani, Leo: “Sexuality and Aesthetics”. October, Vol. 28, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis. pp.27-42, 1984.
……………. The Freudian Body, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
……………. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October, Vol. 43, AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, pp.197-222, 1987.
……………. Homos, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995.
……………. Intimacies, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Beynon, John: Masculinities and Culture. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2002.
Bieber, Irving: Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study, New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1962
Blasius, Mark: “An Ethos of Lesbian and Gay Existence”. Political Theory. Vol.20, No. 4 (Nov., 1992), pp. 642-671, 1992.
247 Bloom, Harold: A Map of Misreading, New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975
……………. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Bourdieu, Pierre: Social Space and Symbolic Power, Sociological Theory, 1989.
Bristow, Joseph: Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing After 1885, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995.
Brod, Harry and Kaufman, Michael: Theorizing Masculinities, London: Sage Publications, 1994.
Brontë, Charlotte: Villette, New York, London, Bantam Books, 1986.
Butler, Judith: Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, New York: Routledge, 1993.
……………. ‘Imitation and Gender Subordination’, in inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, Ed., Diana Fuss, London and New York, Routledge, 1993.
……………. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjections, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
……………. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1999.
C., Smith: “What is This Thing Called Queer?” in Morton Ed., The Material Queer: A LesBiGay Cultural Studies Reader, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, p. 280, 1996.
Canning, Richard: Gay Fiction Speaks: Conversations with Gay Novelists, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Carpenter, Edward: The Intermediate Sex, Middlesex, The Echo Library, 2007.
Carpenter, Hall: Homosexual Man’s Oral History Group: Walking After Midnight, Homosexual Men’s Life Histories, London, Routledge, 1990.
248 Carson, Robert and Butcher, James: Abnormal Psychology and Modern Life, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1992.
Cebeci, Oğuz: Psikanalitik Edebiyat Kuramı, İstanbul: İthaki Yayınları, 2004.
……………. Komik Edebi Türler, İstanbul: İthaki Yayınları, 2008.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine: Creativity and Perversion, London: Free Association Books, 1984.
Chevalier, Jean & Gheerbrant, John: The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, London: Penguin Books, 1996.
Chodorow, Nancy: The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1978.
Clark, Anna: Desire: A History of European Sexuality, New York and London: Routledge, 2008.
Cohen, A.P.: The Symbolic Construction of Community, London, 1985.
Cohen, Jeffrey J. And Ramlow, Todd R.: Pink Vectors of Deleuze: Queer Theory and Inhumanism, Rhizomes 11/12: Fall 2005, 2006.
Cook, Matt: A Gay History of Britain, Oxford: Greenwood World, 2007.
Dean,Tim: Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Deleuze, Gilles: Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975- 1995, Ed. David Lapoujade, Trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, Columbia University: Semiotext(e), 2007.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, Continuum Press, 1984.
249
Derrida, Jacques : ‟Scribble/Writing/Power” in Yale French Studies, 58, New York, 1970.
……………. Of Grammatology, Trans. G. Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, MD and London, John Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Drake, Robert: The Gay Canon, New York: Doubleday, 1998.
Dyer, Richard: ‘Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism’ in Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction Eds. Susannah Radstone, London: Lawrence, 1988.
Edwards, Tims: Cultures of Masculinity, London: Routledge, 2006.
Elfenbein, Andrew: Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Ellis, Havelock: Psychology of Sex, London: William Heinemann, 1940.
……………. Sexual Inversion, New York, Arno Press, 1975.
Firbank, Ronald: Valmouth, London, Penguin Books, 1982.
……………. The Flower Beneath The Foot, London, Penguin Books, 1987.
Flieger, Jerry Aline: Is Oedipus Online? Siting Freud after Freud, London: The MIT Press, 2005.
Forster, E.M.: Maurice, Penguin Classics, London, 2000.
……………. Howards End, New York and London, Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
Foucault, Michel: Discipline and Punish, London: Penguin, 1977.
……………. ‘Of Other Spaces’ Trans, Jay Miskomiec, Diacritics 16, no.1, pg.22-27, 1986.
Foucault, Michel: Discipline and Punish, London, Penguin, 1977.
……………. ‘Of Other Spaces’ (trans.) Jay Miskomiec. Diacritics 16, no.1, pg.22-27, 1986.
250 ……………. ‘Friendship as a way of life’ in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, Ed., S. Lotringer, 204-12, New York: Semiotext(e), 1996.
……………. The Will to Knowledge. The History of Sexuality: 1. London: Penguin Books, 1998.
……………. The Use of Pleasure. The History of Sexuality: 2. London: Penguin Books, 1992.
……………. The Care of the Self. The History of Sexuality: 3. London: Penguin Books, 1990.
Frazer, Elizabeth: The Problem of Communitarian Politics: Unity and Conflict, Oxfrod, Oxford University Press, 1989.
Fresh, Stephen: For and Against Psychoanalysis, 2nd, Ed., London and New York, 2006.
Freud, Sigmund: Totem and Taboo and Other Works, London: Vintage The Hogarth Press, 2001.
……………. Deviant Love, (trans.) Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin Books, 2006.
Gelder, Ken: Reading the Vampire, London, Routledge, 1994.
Gidé, Andre: The Immoralist, Trans. David Watson, Penguin Books, 2000.
……………. Corydon, Trans. Richard Howard, Farrar Strauss Giroux, New York, 2001.
Glover, David & Kaplan, Cora: Genders: London and New York, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2009.
Goldberg, Carl: In Defence of Narcissism, New York: Gardner Press, 1980.
Goldstein, William N.: Eds., Rossand Myers, ‘Kernberg on the Borderline: A Simplified Version’, 1980.
Greenberg, David F: The Construction of Homosexuality, Chicago & London, The University of Chicago Press, 1988.
251 Haggerty, George E: Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Halberstam, Judith: In a Queer Time and Space: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York and London: New York University Press., 2005.
Halloran, Michael S: Aristotle’s Concept of Ethos, or if not His Somebody Else’s, Rhetoric Review, Vol.1, No.1, pp. 58-63, 1982.
Halperin, David: Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995.
Hannah, Daniel K: ‘The Private Life, The Public Stage: Henry James in Recent Fiction’ in Journal of Modern Literature, 2007.
Hartley, L.P.: The Go-Between, London, Penguin Books, 1977.
Hickling, Alfred: ‟Between the Lines”, Guardian Review, 10 April 2007, http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,118 9089,00.html, accessed 17 February 2011.
Hirschfield, Magnus: The Homosexuality of Men and Women, Prometheus Books, 2000.
Hocquenghem, Guy: The Screwball Asses, Semiotext(e) intervention series N.3 Trans., Noura Medell, England: London, 2010.
……………. The Gay Nation, Pluto Press. London. 1996.
Hoggett, P.: ‟Contested Communities‟ in P. Hoggett Ed., Contested Communities. Experiences, Struggles, Policies, Bristol, Policy Press, 1996.
Hollinghurst, Alan: The Creative Uses of Homosexuality in the Novels of E.M. Forster, Ronald Firbank and L.P. Hartley, M. Litt. Thesis, Magdalen College, 1979. (Unpublished. A copy of the manuscript can be consulted in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.)
……………. ‟Introduction to the Early Firbank” in Three Novels, Ed., Steven Moore, London and New York, Quartet Books, 1991.
……………. ‟Introduction to Ronald Firbank” in Three Novels, London, Penguin, 2000.
252
Hopcke, Robert: Jung, Jungians & Homosexuality, Boston & London, Shambhala, 1991.
Isherwood, Christopher: A Single Man, Vintage Classics, London, 2010.
……………. The World in the Evening, University of Minnesota Press, London, 1999.
Johnson, Stephen M: Humanizing the Narcissistic Style, New York: Norton & Company, 1987.
Kernberg, Otto F: Object-Relation Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis, New York: Jason Aronson Inc., 1976.
Kohut, Heinz: The Analysis of the Self, New York, International University, 1977.
……………. The Restoration of the Self, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Kraft-Ebing, Richard von: Psychopatia Sexualis, Trans., Franklin S. Klaf, First Arcade Edition, 1998.
Kristeva, Julia: Tales of Love, Trans., Leon S. Roudiez, New York, Columbia University Press, 1987.
……………. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Trans., Leon S. Roudiez, New York, Columbia University Press, 1989.
Lacan, Jacques: ‟The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as revealed in Psychoanalytic experience” in Écrits: A Selection, London, Routledge, 1977a.
……………. ‟The Signification of the Phallus” in Écrits: A Selection, London, Routledge, 1977b.
Lane, Christopher: The Ruling Passion, British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire, Durham, 1995.
Lichtenstein, Heinz: The Dilemma of Human Identity, New York, Jason Aronson, 1977.
Liggins, Emma: ‟Alan Hollinghurst and Metropolitan Homosexual Identities” in Posting the Male: Masculinities in post-
253 war Contemporary British Literature, Ed., Daniel Lea & Berthold Schoene, New York, Rodopi.
Lucy, Niall: Postmodern Literary Theory: An Introduction, Oxford, Blackwell, 1997.
MacDowell, Linda: Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999 (reprint 2004).
Mann, Thomas: Death in Venice, Trans., David Luke, London, Vintage Books, 1998.
Meade, Teresa A. & Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. Eds.: A Companion to Gender History, London and New York, Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
Medhurst, Andy: Camp, Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Critical Introduction, Eds., Andy Medhurst and Sally Mint, London, Cassell, 1997.
Mijolla, Alain de: ‘Unconscious Identification, Fantasies and Family Prehistory’ in International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 68, 1987.
Millett, Kate: Sexual Politics, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Milton, John: Comus and Some Shorter Poems of Milton, Ed., E.M.W. Tillyard. London, George G, Harrap & Co. Ltd, 1952.
Mort, Frank: Sexual Geographies, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1999.
Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita, London, Penguin Books, 1995.
Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Genealogy of Morals, Dover Thrift Editions, New York, 2003.
Paglia, Camille: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, New York, Vintage Books, 1991.
Palmer, Paulina: Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions, London, Cassell, 1999.
254 Palombo, Jospeh, Bendicsen Harold K., Koch, Barry J.: Guide to Psychoanalytic Developmental Theories, Springer, New York, 2009.
Parini, Jay, Ed.: ‟Alan Hollinghurst” in British Writers, Supplement X, New York and London, Cengage Gale, 2004.
Plato: Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, Trans., W.R.M. Lamb, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, Harvard University Press, 2001.
Potoker, E.M.: Ronald Firbank, New York, Columbia University Press, 1969.
Prosser, Jay: Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, New York, Columbia University Press, 1998.
Rancière, Jacques: The Aesthetic Unconscious, Trans., Debra Keates and James Swenson, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2009.
Rank, Otto: The Trauma of Birth, 1929, Dover, 1994.
……………. A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures [talks given 1924–1938; edited and with an introductory essay by Robert Kramer], Princeton, 1996.
Robinson, Dave: Nietzsche and Postmodernism, New York: Totem Books, 1999.
Robson, Catherine: Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2001.
Rubin, Gayle: ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of The Politics of Sexuality’ in Ed., C. Vance, Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.
Rivkin, Julie: ‘Writing the Gay ‘80s with Henry James: David Leavitt’s A Place I’ve Never Been and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty’, in The Henry James Review, 26 March 2005.
Sandler, Joseph &
255 Person & Ethel Spector: Freud’s ‘On Narcissism’: ‘An Introduction’, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1991.
Scott-Kilvert, Ian, Ed.: ‟E.M. Forster” in British Writers, Volume VI, New York, Simon and Schuster MacMillan, 1983.
Seçkin, Murat: Reading Texts in Jane Austen, Istanbul, Istanbul University Press, 2002.
Sedgewick, Eve Kososfky: Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
……………. Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990.
……………. Tendencies, Durham, DC, Duke University Press.
Sinfield, Alan: Gay and After, Great Britain, Serpent’s Tail, 1998.
……………. “Lesbian and Gay Taxonomies”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 29. No. 1, Autumn, 2002, pp.120-138.
……………. Cultural Politics-Queer Reading, London, Routledge, 2009.
Socarides, Charles W: Homosexuality, New York & London, Jason Aronson, 1978.
……………. The Homosexualities: Reality, Fantasy and the Arts, ‘Paul Gaugin: Art, Androgyny and the Fantasy of Rebirth’, Madison, Connecticut: International Universities Press, Inc, 1990.
Sontag, Susan: Fabio Cleto Ed., Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Stade, George, Ed.: ‟Ronald Firbank” in British Writers, Supplement II, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1992.
Stoker, Bram: Ed., Leonard Wolf, The Definitive Annotated Edition of Bram Stoker’s Classic Novel, London, New York, Plume Books, 1993.
Sullivan, Nikki: A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, New York University Press, New York, 2003.
256
Teresa, de Lauretis: ‘Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities’ in differences 3.2., iii-xviii, 1991.
Thatcher, Margaret: The Downing Street Years, London, Harper Collins, 1993.
Thorold, Peter: The London Rich, London, Viking, 1999.
Tuhkanen, Mikko: “Binding the Self: Baldwin, Freud and the Narrative of Subjectivity”, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 7:4, pp. 553-591, 2001.
Turner, Mark: Backward Glances, London, Reaktion, 2003.
Vangaard, Thorkil: Phallos: A Symbol and Its History on the Male World, Trans., by the Author, New York: International University Press, 1972.
Warren, Carrol, A.B.: Identity and Community in the Gay World, New York: John Wiley, 1974.
Watson, Eve: “Queering Psychoanalysis / Psychoanalysing Queer”, Annual Review of Critical Psychology, p. 114-139, 2009.
Waugh, Evelyn: Brideshead Revisited, Penguin Books, London, 2000.
Weeks, Jeffrey: Coming Out, London, Quartet, 1990.
……………. The World We Have Won, Oxford, Routledge, 2007.
White, Chris, Ed.: Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook, London and New York, Routledge, 1999.
Whitehead, Tony: ‘Look Back With Pride’ in Capital Gay, 22 December 1984.
Willmott, P.: Social Networks, Informal Care and Public Policy, London, Policy studies Institute, 1989.
Widdowson, Peter: The Palgrave Guide to English Literature and Its Contents 1500-2000, London, Palgrave, 2004.
Woods, Gregory: A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.
257 Woods, James: ‘The Ogee Curve: Review of The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst’ in The New Republic, 13 December 2004.
258
Figure 1. Title cover of William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty, 1753
259
Figure 2. Drawing of the shape of ogee, the line of beauty, from William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty, 1753
260 ÖZGEÇMİŞ
E-Mail: [email protected]
Gökçen Ezber lisans eğitimini 2001 yılında İstanbul Üniversitesi İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Anabilim Dalı’nda tamamladı. 2004 yılında, Prof. Saliha Paker danışmanlığında yazdığı ve 1990’lı yıllarda Türkiye’deki editörlerin ve çevirmenlerin yazın dizgesi içindeki konumlarını incelediği teziyle, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Çeviribilim Bölümü’nde yüksek lisans derecesini aldı. Yine Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Çeviribilim Bölümü’nde çeviribilim doktorasına başladı, fakat daha ufuk açıcı gördüğü edebiyat ve İngiliz filolojisi alanına geçiş yaparak, İstanbul Üniversitesi İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı alanında doktora eğitimine yeniden başladı. 2001 ve 2009 yılları arasında, İstanbul Üniversitesi İngilizce Mütercim Tercümanlık ve İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı anabilim dallarında araştırma görevlisi olarak çalıştı. Gökçen Ezber, 1998 ve 2005 yılları arasında kırkın üzerinde kitap çevirdi. Aynı dönemde, çeşitli gazete ve dergilerde kitap eleştirileri ve şiir çevirileri yayınlandı.
261