The Mirror, The City and The Sea: Investigating Intertextuality in The Folding Star

Abstract

The Folding Star is a haunted text. In part a fable of the dangers of attempting to relive youth and love through its reanimation in the present, the novel itself is haunted by the ghosts of past literary texts and modes. Its contemporary story is told through the elegiac pastoral mode and the fairytale Gothic, the one conjuring its protagonist’s youth in rural England and the other, in later years, his time as an English literature tutor in a Medieval Belgian city. Hollinghurst employs a vast array of literary intertexts which double, distort and counterpoint our understanding of the story itself including John Milton’s Comus (1634), Henry James’s The Pupil (1916) and Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-morte (2005). By following these labyrinthine paths to their furthest extent, I argue for their significance to the text, but also suggest that their proliferation and complexity is itself a source of Gothic menace. The Folding Star ultimately reveals itself to be a story of aesthetic exhaustion and surfeit both in its literary strategy of intertextual proliferation and in its commentary on the relationship between the literature and the ardent lover. I use the artistic triptych ‘Autrefois’, a fictional work at the centre of the story, as a key to the novel’s richly symbolic exploration of its themes.