Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence

Allan Johnson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137362032
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence proposes a striking approach for reading the influences that interlace twentieth-century gay British writers. Focusing on the role of the textual image in literary influence, this book moves toward a new understanding of the interpenetration of literary and visual culture in the twentieth century.

1

Influence, Image, and the Movement of Time

It has perhaps been the millennial rise of the neo-modern, historical novel – from Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) to A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (2009) – which has asked readers, once again, to consider ‘generations’ of authorship, and the conduction of influence between these generations. If it might seem that the topic of influence is as fundamental to literary studies as ‘plot’, ‘genre’, or ‘style’, it is, in point of fact, a term that had largely fallen out of favour with critics by the end of the twentieth century. In spite of a certain continued currency of Harold Bloom’s influence tetralogy, readings of literary influence were seen through much of the 1980s and 1990s as painfully old-fashioned, or, at worst, as lacking objectivity and neutrality, and, therefore, interpretatively unstable.

Yet the serious discussion of influence has re-entered literary studies in a highly visible way, from the 2008 special issue of the Modern Language Quarterly devoted to the topic, to the 2011 release of Bloom’s own new work, The Anatomy of Influence. Indeed, it is a topic that has recently gained considerable attention in both academic and popular literary criticism. In February 2007, the novelist Jonathan Lethem published a now-infamous essay in Harper’s, which was, his title readily admitted, an entirely plagiarized collation of statements on literary influence. ‘The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism’ is an ingenious essay, and not only for its extraordinary sense of near-seamlessness (it is only on second reading – once the jig is up – when the gaps and gaffs begin to surface). As a meshwork of quotations, it captures a vast array of voices that speak to the nature, value, and potentialities of influence. In the extensive appendix to the essay, Lethem names the nearly 50 writings on influence he appropriated, including, perhaps most obviously, The Anxiety of Influence, the 1972 text in which Bloom first argued that literary influence should be viewed as an outcome of self-conscious misreading.¹

Bloom’s work is, of course, only one thread in a vast body of work on literary influence, but it is one which has had an impressive influence of its own, even if only as position against which to react. Indeed, much of the recent work on influence has sought to envision ways for thinking around this poetics of anxiety, and ways to conceptualize the changing shape of textual relationships in a postmodern age. In a recent consideration of the influences in Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Petrino has made the crucial observation that

critics have tended to focus on direct quotation, rather than images, sounds, or rhythmical patterns, in gauging literary influence on Dickinson, and perhaps for that reason, they have overlooked allusiveness in her poems that might more properly be termed echo.²

These echoes, she continues, are used to write in a ‘creative or generative’ way.³ Petrino’s suggestion that critics have overestimated quotation at the expense of aesthetics seems broadly true far beyond criticism on Dickinson, and many critics are now turning to wider and more flexible understandings of literary influence. Andrew Elfenbein has proposed a valuable distinction between two different forms of literary influence: ‘local influence’ and ‘global influence’. He defines ‘local influence’ as the small moments of evocative textual detail that have made their way into the author’s memory and later spring forth in either planned or unplanned ways. ‘Global influences’, in contrast, are the larger, structural influences that guide the overall course of a narrative and are often more self-conscious in their deployment.⁴ By distinguishing between these two forms of influence, critics can begin to view texts as more widely implicated in spheres of diverse cultural production, with questions of intention being pushed aside to make way for questions of impact and significance. And while not explicitly challenging 1970s models of literary influence, both Petrino and Elfenbein are making room for readings of influence more consonant with a modern literary culture that is, as Katherine Haake describes, ‘moving beyond print or haplessly competing with other forms of narrative more immediate and gratifying’.⁵

This recent reinvigoration of critical interest in influence can be clearly observed across critical accounts of Alan Hollinghurst’s fiction. It was only after the publication of his Man Booker prize-winning The Line of Beauty, a novel profoundly animated by the influence of modernist literary histories, that critics would begin to explicitly discuss his fiction in terms of influence. This is not to say that Hollinghurst’s three previous novels, published between 1988 and 1998, were any less motivated by the spell of the past – only that Hollinghurst’s earliest critics had explicitly avoided the term ‘influence’, along with its attendant implications and interpretative connotations.

In one of the first sustained analyses of Hollinghurst’s work, Joseph Bristow observed that The Swimming-Pool Library serves as ‘an archive of gay literary history, one especially resonant for those who, like Hollinghurst, have undertaken graduate research into the lives and works of homosexual writers from William Beckford to W.H. Auden’.⁶ Later, Alan Sinfield would consider the novel to be ‘celebrating Ronald Firbank, challenging Evelyn Waugh, commandeering L.P. Hartley and Jean Genet, reinterpreting Wilde and Forster’.⁷ While Bristow and Sinfield do not avail themselves of the language of literary influence, they certainly do call on stand-ins. For Bristow, the question of textual influence is quite shrewdly embodied in the form of an ‘archive of gay literary history’, valorized and validated for the impact created through ‘[contriving] to produce a history that maps some of the cardinal shifts and transitions in gay men’s lives in the twentieth century’.⁸ Sinfield’s stand-ins for ‘influence’ are more various – the celebrations, challenges, and reinterpretations – but each deputy seems equally motivated by the desire to keep away from a critical term viewed, when Sinfield was writing, as incompatible with the objectives of contemporary criticism.

Alistair Stead similarly avoids the word ‘influence’ in his reading of Hollinghurst’s second novel, The Folding Star (1994), and speaks, instead, of the manifest acts of textual ‘translation’ and ‘transposition’ that emulate and yet oddly distort the literal acts of linguistic translation and musical transposition within the text.⁹ And David Alderson would later get around the term ‘influence’ by writing of the fantasy of a textual ‘nostalgia’ and of reliving the past, an effort which he saw as being finally rejected in Hollinghurst’s third novel, The Spell (1998).¹⁰

But after publication of The Line of Beauty, ‘influence’ quickly became a central term in readings of Hollinghurst’s fiction. Two articles in a 2005 issue of the Henry James Review paid specific attention to Hollinghurst’s speculating in literary history, particularly the much-noted influence of Henry James in his fourth novel. ‘The sheer range of James’s output’, Denis Flannery writes, ‘and the vast extent of his influence means that both Hollinghurst and [Toby] Litt draw on him in different ways. Hollinghurst’s James is everywhere in the novel.’¹¹ And in the same issue of the Henry James Review, Julie Rivkin asks, ‘what does it mean for the contemporary gay male writer when Henry James is made available as a gay precursor, a literary father, a model for emulation, appropriation, or something else?’¹² Georges Letissier would also later draw on this Bloomian lexis to consider how ‘Hollinghurst summons the well-known precursors that he has chosen for his unconventional return to the English Tradition.’¹³

The topic of influence is thus everywhere and nowhere in considerations of Hollinghurst’s contributions to British literary culture. It has been the topic that has animated nearly all critical accounts of Hollinghurst’s work, but has been rarely addressed frankly or given the critical space that it demands. To be sure, the movement towards influence as a conceptual basis for discussions of Hollinghurst’s fiction is indicative of the wider-scale return to that topic in Anglo-American literary criticism. And there is, I believe, an irresistible motive for pushing this discussion further, and speaking of the full body of Hollinghurst’s work specifically in the context of its influences. Doing so demonstrates that ‘literary’ influence in twentieth-century writing moves beyond textual antecedents, capturing a world of aesthetics increasingly dependent upon the rise of a popular visual culture and the new ways of thinking that it has brought with it.

Hollinghurst is only one of many possible ways to illuminate these developments. When his writing conjures The Picture of Dorian Gray, apparitional forms of J.-K. Huysmans’s À rebours (1884) and Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873) come peering through the page.¹⁴ But, then, The Picture of Dorian Gray seems to have been even more overtly shaped by Henry James’s The Tragic Muse (1890), published in The Atlantic Monthly across the two years before the serialization of Wilde’s only novel. Not only can we see in Nick Guest certain clear affinities with Nick Dormer of The Tragic Muse, but we can also find echoes of Nick Jenkins from Anthony Powell’s duodecology A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–75). And there is, furthermore, Nick Carraway of The Great Gatsby (1925),¹⁵ another infamously eager raconteur and hanger-on.¹⁶ As for a source for the name ‘Toby’, one might conjecture that Iris Murdoch’s The Bell (1958) offered to Hollinghurst the constellation of names ‘Nick’, ‘Toby’, and ‘Catherine’, which are organized by Murdoch, like Hollinghurst, into a sibling pair challenged by a sexually charged friendship between the characters Toby and Nick.¹⁷ On an even broader level, we can recognize how the most important texts of the disparate traditions of modern gay writing become for Hollinghurst the classical models on which he constructs his work. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) would provide an underlying narrative scaffolding for The Line of Beauty, just as Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains (US: The Last of Mr. Norris; 1935) can be seen in the backcloth of The Swimming-Pool Library. James’s ‘The Pupil’ (1891) and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) become almost too-obvious sources for The Folding Star, and it is difficult not to be reminded of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) as the family of a conservative MP continue to worry and wait for the arrival of an important figure of state in The Line of Beauty.

This technique of so explicitly summoning sources is characteristic of the preoccupations and concerns of modern (that is, post-1895) homoerotically invested fiction, and one of that genre’s most deathless conventions. The limitations of this present study mean that it cannot attempt to conclusively justify why influence became a topic of such great concern in this body of literature, yet there are two key socio-historical aspects that speak to its predominance: firstly, the twentieth-century re-evaluation of the temporal, and, secondly, late nineteenth-century re-evaluation of the visual. The blending of these strands – that is, the setting of the visual image in a style fascinated with the movements of time – is a key defining feature of Hollinghurst’s fiction and the influences standing behind it. And it is the blending of these strands which the remainder of this chapter will examine.

Huysmans’s tortoise

In Iconology, W.J.T. Mitchell defines an image as a form of re-citation: a ‘likeness’, a ‘resemblance’, a ‘similitude’.¹⁸ Based on such a definition, one might imagine a literary influence, itself, as merely an image of a prior work. But in the context of literary studies, the textual influence does not inhere in either or both of the products themselves; rather it is born from the popular or professional recognition of such a resemblance. Mitchell goes on to identify five categories of images, each of which has been ‘central to the discourse of some intellectual discipline’:¹⁹

1. Graphic

pictures

statues

designs

2. Optical

mirrors

projections

3. Perceptual

sense data

‘species’

appearances

4. Mental

dreams

memories

ideas

fantasmata

5. Verbal

metaphors

descriptions²⁰

These five categories together represent a sequential movement from stability to instability, from a ‘graphic’ image that exists literally on a substrate to a ‘verbal’ image that is represented only in the intangible interplay of signification. It is no surprise that literary studies has been most regularly concerned with the final of these categories – the ‘verbal’ images that have considerable currency in the discussion of fiction and poetry. A literary text cannot convey the stability of graphic or optical images such as pictures, mirrors, and projections. However, a textual image can simulate this stability by providing the reader with the instructions to ‘see’ a visual image. The instructions for perceiving an image might be read, understood visually, and – if the reader happens to be a writer – perhaps redeployed through a new sequence of language.

In their recent work on psychonarratology, Peter Dixon and Marisa Bortolussi have argued that

the text is a stimulus to which readers respond, and […] this response is potentially subject to any number of influences in the reader’s mental makeup or the reading context. Such influences need to be taken into account in a systematic and fundamental manner.²¹

Drawing upon Bortolussi and Dixon’s argument that narrators are exclusively reader constructions built through quantifiable ‘textual features’, I suggest that textual images are quantifiable to the extent that they are a product of the narratological (that is, something continually remade) rather than the historical (that is, something which has, by definition, passed). The textual image, as I am defining it, is the smallest unit of textual feature that enables readers to visualize an otherwise unstable graphic or optical image.

In a certain sense, this focus on the transmission of materials runs parallel to Julia Kristeva’s model of intertextualité, or, more properly, from the model of intertextuality that has been lately constructed through the misreading of Kristeva’s work. Since its introduction in 1966, the notion of intertextuality...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Influence, Image, and the Movement of Time
• 2 Sun-Worship and the Idolatry of Images: Derek Jarman, Philip Glass, and The Swimming-Pool Library
• 3 The Poets of Our Time: Lateness and Pedagogical Influence in The Folding Star
• 4 Almost Always: Influence, Ecstasy, and Architectural Imagination in The Spell
• 5 Spitting Images: Image, Text, and the Popular Press in The Line of Beauty
• 6 The Latterday Sortes Virgilianae: Confirmation Bias and the Image of the Poet in The Stranger’s Child
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index