Abstract
This chapter explores the importance of style in The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) in terms of an inheritance of earlier, influential gay literary voices, including most prominently those of Oscar Wilde, E.M. Forster and Ronald Firbank. I argue that while Hollinghurst initially establishes a Wildean stylistic framework, which imbues the novel with a combination of Gothic mystery, sensuality and sentimentality, in other ways he complicates this inflection, interpolating a more direct but also camp creative vision, comparable in different ways to the writing of Forster and Firbank. Indeed, I suggest that a dialogue between these voices runs throughout the novel, such that several scenes can be interpreted contrastingly in terms of opposing Wildean, Forsterian and Firbankian influences. Also, the novel invokes a critical exploration of these writers’ politics both in terms of queer identity, class-relations and colonialism. In the end, however, I suggest that it is desire that remains prevalent, reaffirming Firbank’s innuendo-laden and impressionistic approach to writing.
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Notes
- 1.
In a similar vein, Les Brookes writes of the novel’s ‘central focus: namely, homosexuality’s complicity in—it’s collusion with—the heteropatriarchal system within which it figures as monstrous and abject. […] The novel as a whole could therefore be seen as a dramatization of those conflicts of ideology, concerning notions of identity, difference, and strategies for resistance’ in relation to homosexual identity (see Brookes, 2009, p. 134).
- 2.
J. Stephen Murphy also notes this connection between Forster and Lord Beckwith in his reading of the novel. He writes, ‘Sir Denis and Forster are linked by their insistence on visibility, and in this insistence they both threaten to make certain aspects and certain homosexuals disappear’ (see Murphy, 2003, p. 70).
- 3.
Georges Letissier also notes similar connections between contemporary cinema and Firbankian style in his compelling reading of Hollinghurst’s novel. He writes, ‘While Firbank was a clinical listener to the sheer lunacy of conversations, Hollinghurst records the counterpoint between the voyeuristic silence of an audience of expectant male-spectators, and the hushed sounds, rustling, pushing and jostling as the latter come in or go out, at odd intervals. Reading, in this emblematic scene, involves decoding surreptitious signs, under cover of darkness; deciding on whether a hardly perceptible movement may be interpreted as a token of encouragement or rejection’ (see Letissier, 2007, p. 200). My reading later in the chapter intends to develop and extend this argument, reaffirming the importance of gay cinema in Hollinghurst’s novel as a tribute to Firbank’s impressionistic style.
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Horton, E. (2017). A Conflicted Inheritance: The Opposing Styles of Wilde, Forster and Firbank in The Swimming-Pool Library . In: Mathuray, M. (eds) Sex and Sensibility in the Novels of Alan Hollinghurst. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-33722-1_3
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