Olga Antsyferova

Aestheticism Revisited: "The Line of Beauty"

by Allan Hollinghurst

On the eve of the 21st century literature reiterates many philosophical

and artistic drifts of fin-de-siècle, appropriating its aesthetic discoveries

in the form of numerous allusions. Each being peculiar in its own way,

both epochs have much in common, which can be accounted for by their

crisis and transitional character, their antitraditionalist pathos, disap-

pointment in rationalist world view (in Natural Science paradigm, in the

former case, in logocentric model of the world, in the latter), by their

explicit rupture with bourgeois values. In both cases this leads to the

assertion of the specific epistemological role of Art and “poetic think-

ing” (F. Nietzsche, M. Heidegger, J. Derrida et al.). Whereas philoso-

phers and artists of fin-de-siècle argued that only Art with its imagina-

tive and associative nature was capable of adequate rendering reality

and restoring its primordial integrity lost in the process of scientific

analysis, postmodernist thinkers postulate the universal character of fic-

tionalizing which guides both artistic and scientific thinking and renders

all texts fictional character. Consequently, both epochs manifest explicit

interest in the problems of Art and its correlation with life. This is the

brief outline of the context for modern revival of interest in aestheti-

cism — the fin-de-siècle way of thinking which considered reality as an

aesthetic phenomenon, maintaining Art for Art’s sake, believing that

Art is beyond moral and ethics.

These tenets of aestheticism are explicitly actualized in the novel of

the modern British writer Allan Hollinghurst The Line of Beauty

(2004). The Booker prize winner, Hollinghurst can be viewed as an art-

ist with an established literary reputation whose works give a vivid ac-

count of gay life, where art and sex are the consuming passions, ‘where

happiness can depend upon the glance of a stranger, caught and re-

turned' (Smith). The title of his first novel Swimming Pool Library

(1988) can be considered paradigmatic for this writer: swimming pools,

baths, lavatories are seemed to be habitual topoi of the gay novels — the

only places where important meetings of main characters might take

place. The word library beside the swimming pool designates character-

istic for Hollinghurst’s prose intertwining of two themes — Eros and

Art, Eros and intellectualism. This bipartite structure of the title signals

about a double coding of the British writer’s novels: their plots are usu-

ally based on a more or less explicit consonance of his characters’ exist-

ence with some other period — mainly, with fin-de-siècle. Thus, the

novel Swimming Pool Library (the action of which takes place in 1983)

is imbued with a certain nostalgia about the careless and hedonistic

1980s — the time when AIDS was yet unknown. The antagonist charac-

teristically calls this time “my belle époque”. According to critics, the

prose of Hollinghurst is pervaded by the atmosphere of Decadence and

often contains hidden allusions to his predecessors — Wilde and Proust.

All his novels are united by “a pursuit-of-the-love-object theme, for

which the models are Mann’s Death in Venice and Nabokov’s Lolita”

(Smith).

The Folding Star (1994), short-listed for the Booker Prize, is the sto-

ry of the morbid obsession of a teacher with his 17-years student and is

often compared to Death in Venice (the comparison might be extended

to Henry James’s tale “The Pupil” as well). The narrator’s main preoc-

cupation is to prepare a definitive catalogue of paintings by Edgard

Orst, a Symbolist artist of the 1890s. The artist’s tortured love life, his

fin-de-siècle ‘twilight world’ begins to infiltrate the main character’s

hopeless feelings for his pupil. The fin-de-siècle story turns out a textual

mirror of the protagonist’s narrative.

The most remarkable thing about The Line of Beauty (2004) is how

the novel set during the Thatcher era of the 1980s abounds in allusions

to one of the prominent fin-de-siècle authors Henry James who had un-

easy artistic correlation with the Aestheticism, combining both mutual

attachment and repulsion. It might be alluring to explain the appearance

of Henry James in the novel of a gay novelist by the 1990s’ powerful

branch of Jamesian studies where Henry James’s legacy was viewed, in

full concordance with PC, from the point of view of sexual minorities

(Gay and Lesbian, Queer Studies), and the contents of his work was re-

duced to manifestations of latent homosexualism. However, neither the

main character of The Line of the Beauty, not its author in his interviews

have ever motivated their interest in the American Master in this ways.

Hence it would be an oversimplification to account for the aesthetic

proximity of the two artists by the alleged similarity of their sexual ori-

entation.

Before starting his career as a professional writer, Hollinghurst

worked on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement from 1982 to

1995. Impressive list of literary prizes he won or was short-listed for,

not only speaks of PC recognition of a gay novelist, but of his deserved

reputation of an intellectual author and brilliant stylist. Hollinghurst lav-

ishly comments upon his work. In his 1995 interview he said, “The way

I start is with images and atmosphere that slowly conglomerate until this

other world seems to define itself. The plot is actually one of the last

things that tends to happen with me… I'm interested in that poetic or

symphonic way of writing with different motifs in circulation that are

brought back around in the novel in different combinations” (Keehnen).

When asked which comes to him first — how a character looks, what

they say and how they speak, or what they represent, Alan Hollinghurst

replies, “I tend to define them first by their relationships.” Obviously it

is very similar to the aesthetic principles of Henry James who, in point

of fact, equaled character and plot and found an ideal balance of it in

Turgenev’s prose: “His [Turgenev’s — O.A.] vision is of the world of

character and feeling, the world of the relations life throws up at every
hour and on every spot; he deals little, on the whole, in the miracles of

chance […] No theme that he ever chooses but strikes us as full; yet

with all have we the sense that their animation comes from within, and

is not pinned to their backs like the pricking objects used of old in the

horse-races of the Roman carnival, to make the animals run. Without a

“patch” of plot to draw blood, the story he mainly tells us, the situation

he mainly gives, runs as if for dear life” (James 1031).

Sexual life is apparently the main sphere where the otherness of gay

characters is most explicitly manifested. Hollinghurst admits that he

writes about people “wasting a great deal of time […] and being swept

up in the sort of plotlessness of life.” And his main point as the author is

“in describing that and running it up against something which does have

plot and takes place in the past which forces these characters to come to

terms with their solipsistic world views. The whole question of the past

and the experience of others underlies” all his books. (Keehnen. Italics

mine.—O.A.) In other words, the story of a gay character always un-

folds against the background of some other past story which is free from

explicit homosexual connotations and, consequently, is more acceptable

for a reader indifferent to gays’ problems or insufficiently tolerant to

them.

Writing on Hollinghurst, critics sometimes tend to accentuate certain

universal merits of his prose, those which are not connected with his

very up-to-date untraditional sexual orientation. Often it is done with a

certain note of irony as if giving a tribute to the fashionable marginality

of the author. Thus, the American reviewer James Good argues that the

secret of Hollinghurst’s literary charm is that of any novel: “Part of the

pleasure here is the traditional novelistic one of being invited to inhabit

a new world, and of being confined to the radical optic of this world.

Women are never physically appraised in Hollinghurst's fiction and

barely noticed as sexual beings […] But men are described and rede-

scribed as eagerly as Melville's whales,” the critic concludes, confining

the essentials of the novel (and gay-literature as a whole) to its thematic

peculiarities, and that’s it. This can hardly be argued, to my thinking.

According to Michael Dirda, in The Line of Beauty “Hollinghurst in-

terlaces three different plots —a Condition of England novel set during

the Thatcher era of the 1980s, a Jamesian psychological inquiry cum

social comedy about the well-to-do Fedden family and their friends, and

a gay coming-of-age story.”(Dirda) The protagonist Nick Guest, gay

from a petit bourgeois background, accepts the invitation of his friend

Tobby Fedden, a son of a Tory MP, to stay at their house. Thus Nick

gets involved in the life of the British elite circles and even happens to

dance with Margaret Thatcher at one of the parties. But, as Dolan

Cummings rightly puts it, “Nick Guest, has a very partial view of what

was happening in Britain at the time […] It is rather that he fails even to

understand the social class within which he is ensconced.” (Cummings).

Nick’s phrase “There is sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism”

(Hollinghurst 104) sounds absolutely in Oscar Wilde’s vein. Nick in-

termittently writes a thesis on Henry James’ style, and as a matter of

fact it is literary style, form, beauty that really excites him, alongside

with first instances of homosexual experience. Unlike Tony Kushner’s

play “Angels in America”, gayness in Hollinghurst’s novels does not

contain any social or political challenge, but rather turns out to be an

unmilitant manifestation of the protagonist’s otherness. The latter is

clearly represented by his surname (Guest—the alien, the other) and

finds various other expressions in the novel — psychological, social,

aesthetic. So, in my view, we can speak here not of gay sensibility as

such, but of a specific aesthetic flair of the hero. To be more exact, ac-

cording to Hollinghurst’s artistic logic, the one is inseparable from the

other.

Certainly, the combination of aestheticism in art with untraditional

sexual orientation in life is not absolutely new (it is sufficient to re-

member Oscar Wilde’s scandalous suit). Generally speaking, ambitious

striving to affirm priority of Art before life often correlated with at-

tempts to break a routine, to challenge common moral standards, which

sometimes found expression in morbid eroticism or flamboyant immor-

alism. So, the combination of aestheticism and marginal sexual orienta-

tion actually goes back to fin-de-siècle. On the eve of the third millenni-

um this culturally based correlation prompted to our author a special

way of artistic coding for gender otherness, for gender self-

identification.

Hollinghurst is often named a Henry James adherent in literature. As

we have already seen, it shows even on the level of the author’s literary

statements. Forms and functions of Henry James’s presence in Holling-

hurst’s novel are both numerous and various, being expressed in plot

construction and in the style of the book. Most interesting are the Jame-

sian allusions by means of which the character seeks for his self-

identification. On the one hand, they help the character realize and ver-

balize his otherness, on the other — to veil it. One of his essential per-

sonal peculiarities — homosexuality — is mediated on the social scale

by his otherness of an aesthete. Here we again come across with the

above mentioned double coding: the life story of the hero is complicat-

ed, mediated, played off by putting it in a special perspective which is

constructed by various forms of Henry James’s presence in the novel.

The initial situation of The Line of Beauty clearly reminds of Henry

James prose: Nick Guest finds himself in an unusual social circles and is

fascinated by their elegant way of life. It seems only natural that the first

acquaintance of Nick with the luxurious interior of the Fedden’s home

evokes the first Jamesian allusion in the text: “Above the drawing-room

fireplace there was a painting by Guardi, a capriccio of Venice in a guilt

rococo frame; on the facing wall were two large guilt-framed mirrors.
Like his hero Henry James, Nick felt that he could ‘stand a great deal of

guilt’” (Hollinghurst 6).

In some episodes attempting at deep probing for the motives, Hol-

linghurst resorts to the stylistic devices reminding of Henry James psy-

chological artistry. Nick establishes confidential friendship with Toby’s

nineteen-year-old sister Catherine who has had a series of unhappy af-

fairs and a suicidal attempt. As we remember, Henry James preferred to

avoid categorical and unequivocal definitions: he seemed to protect his

reader by his exquisite style, by his meaningful and ambiguous words

from the nightmare which he felt to be at the actual core of the exist-

ence. The relations of young Hollinghurst’s characters seem to develop

according the similar principle: “He [Nick— O.A.] wished he knew

more about what had happened and why, but he was squeamish too. He

thought that asking her [Catherine—O.A.] about it might only reopen

the horror, and added, ‘I wonder what it was all about,’ as if referring to

a mystery of long ago. She gave him a look of painful uncertainty, but

didn’t answer. ‘Can’t really say?’ Nick said and heard, as he sometimes

did, his own father’s note of evasive sympathy. It was how his family

sidled round its various crises; nothing was named, and you never knew

for sure if the tone was subtly comprehensive, or just form of coward-

ice”(Hollinghurst 16; italics mine.— О.А.). In this passage Jamesian

famous “semantics of stylistic equivoque” (Antsyferova 324—329) is

applied only to be ironically defamiliarized and undermined by the

words “squeamish” and “cowardice” bearing univocally negative con-

notations uncharacteristic of James’ style and his treatment of his per-

sonages.

Dialogues between Nick and the Feddens are also constructed ac-

cording to the lines of Jamesian verbal communication. Here is an in-

stance of Nick’s “small talk” with Toby’s parents who have just come

back from France: “It’s wonderful— thank you so much’, said Nick. As

an outsider he found himself floating again in a pleasant medium of

social charm and good humour […] Nick…conversed with his hosts in

an idiom of tremendous agreement. ‘Did you have glorious weather?’ ‘I

must say we had glorious weather’ ‘I hope the traffic was not too fright-

ful…’ ‘Frightful!’ ‘I’d love to see the little church at Podier’. ‘I think

you’d love the little church at Podier’. So they knitted their talk togeth-

er. Even disagreements […] had a glow of social harmony to them, of

relished license, and counted almost as agreements transposed in to a

more exciting key”(Hollinghurst 22). The accentuated aimlessness of

the conversation in a way ironically parodies the esoteric discourse of

“mysterious mutual appraisal” (Yeazell 73) used by James’ characters

striving at concealing the truth and creating the illusion of harmony by

means of their sublime discourse. Anyhow, while in James’ case some-

thing serious and essential looms up through the fine verbal veil, Hol-

linghurst’s characters communication is limited to meaningless word-

play.
 The second part of the novel is titled by the quotation from James

“To Whom Do You Beautifully Belong?” Three years have passed.

Nick has covered a considerable way realizing and recognizing his oth-

erness. He is more brave and unfettered in his quest for pleasure and

passion than the innocent boy of the first part. He is having a serious

affair with Wani — a well-to-do Lebanese and a heir to the supermarket

network. They plan to found a film-production company Ogee (allusion

to Hogarth’s “line of beauty”), but the project mainly serves as a pretext

for spending time together (Wani hides his homosexuality from his rela-

tives and his fiancée). Nick’s tortured affection for Wani lacks harmony.

He wants their relation to be less hypocritical; he does not want to share

his affection with other partners. This inner discord induces psychologi-

cal tension which can be strongly felt in the episode of Wani’s visit to

Nick’s room. Allusion to James has many functions here and connects

in one focus main psychological and thematic lines of the novel. The

episode is based on striking incongruities. For Nick, Wani’s visit is a

long-expected chance to stay alone with his friend. For Wani, Nick’s

room is just a good place to take a sniff of cocaine. In this absurd at-

mosphere of psychological tension, the allusion to James is also ironi-

cally absurd: Wani uses the book with the telling title Henry James and

the Question of Romance which “had a sleek Mylar sleeve protecting its

dark jacket” to form a cocaine line: “Wani was working painstakingly

and a little defensively with his gold card, making rapid hatching
movements to and fro across the partially visible features of Henry

James — not the great bald Master but the quickly-eyed, tender, bril-

liant twenty year old, with an irrepressible kink in his dark hair” (Hol-

linghurst 254).

Obviously it is Nick, but not Wani, who discerns features of young

James under “the stuff”. And this interplay of points-of-view (consum-

er’s reification of James by Wani and heartfelt intent stare of Nick)

makes a curious counterpoint for the guys’ having it out with each oth-

er, for the conversation which is tormenting for Nick and just an occa-

sional exchange for Wani. Sudden implementation of a Jamesian book

for a purely pragmatic purpose ironically reveals the measure of James’

importance in the world of Hollinghurst’s characters. The portrait of the

young James disappearing under cocaine is a striking metaphor the du-

ality of Nick’s existence, of his impossibility to reach harmony and mu-

tual understanding even with those whom he loves. Finally, Wani’s

mocking invitation for Nick to inhale cocaine, “Now there’s a line of

beauty for you!”(Hollinghurst 255) sounds at once a bad-tempered ridi-

cule of Nick’s feelings and a malevolent parody of aestheticism which

both guys (supposedly) follow — sincerely and wholeheartedly by Nick

and to conceal his less spiritual desires by Wani.

The more hopeless and lonelier Nick feels (Wani loses his interest in

him) the more pragmatic Jamesian allusions become. Playful erotic

overtones change to semi-pornographic situations. The allusions to

James get more and more ironical: in the world where Nick is just a

“Guest” Henry James is tolerated only as a source of funny quotations

and cumbersome style to make fun of, while the “reified “ James in the

form of heavy volumes is in need to inhale cocaine lines from their

jackets, or else a thick volume of “A Small Boy and the Others” serves

to hide a spontaneous erection at the sight of a naked guy near the

swimming pool.

At the end of the book Nick is shown in the state of complete frustra-

tion, having lost both his friends by AIDS and driven out of the Fed-

dens’ house after a scandal. Nick remains absolutely lonely. In his 2005

interview Hollinghurst said that The Line of Beauty was "a book about

decadence. It's about the lure of the aesthetic life, but also its dangers”

(Rose), which means that the novel was intended as a critique of aes-

theticism. But probably right is James Wood, one of the few critics ana-

lyzing the moral message of the novel, arguing that Hollinghurst is far

less consistent in his attacks on aestheticism than James: “In the end, the

explicit moral doubleness of Hollinghurst's ogee curve, ‘the line of

beauty,’ is less effective as a mode of critique than Hollinghurst thinks

it is. The reader gathers that the line of beauty may be both a good thing

and a bad thing. Beauty can be dangerous: is not this a properly Jame-

sian argument about the menace of aestheticism? But Hollinghurst's

own conceit of the doubleness of the line of beauty seems to offer some-

thing more reduced than James offers. After all, while the novel certain-
ly seems to condemn the line of beauty that leads to a line of coke, it

does not seem to condemn — and why should it? — the line of beauty

that is a boy's ass. The very device that seems to bind beauty and moral-

ity together — the double curve of beauty — in fact enacts a binarism,

an alternative, in which we are free to choose one line of beauty (the

good kind) over another line of beauty (the bad kind). In other words,

the novel seems to be delivering itself of a critique only about the poten-

tial uses and abuses of aestheticism; whereas James suggests that aes-

theticism is intrinsically dangerous. It is not just that Gilbert Osmonds

come along and pervert aestheticism, it is that aestheticism lends itself

in some essential way to perversion.” (Wood)

The concluding trope of the novel is highly contradictory marking a

certain turn, if not the end of something, in Nick’s life: “It wasn’t just

this street corner but the fact of a street corner all that seemed, in the

light of the moment, so beautiful” (Hollinghurst 501), the last word of

the novel being “beautiful”. And this metaphor of the “turn” promising

something new for the hero is loaded with tragic solitude. Nick remains

loyal to himself, but according to artistic logic of the novel, devotion to

Beauty and consecrating one’s life to the pursuit of pleasure leads to

inner devastation and indeterminacy which is still perceived by the hero

as… beauty. Hollinghurst’s logic is ambivalent and paradoxical. The

line of its development echoes “the line of beauty” — Hogarth’s og-

gy — the line reminding the Latin letter “S”, or the mathematical sym-
bol of infinity. This line is heavy with meaning, it has both sexual and

aesthetical overtones. The structure of the novel is also organized ac-

cording to this convolution, the final point of which comes close to the

initial (solitude).

In the semantic aspect in the fin-de-siécle art marginalsexual orienta-

tion and outrageous eroticisms could be arbitrary manifestations (a sig-

nifier) of the aesthetic view of life. On the eve of the 20—21st centuries

structural and semantic correlation of these elements changes: according

to the law of double coding aestheticism becomes one of the possible

social and psychological masks of homosexualism. Cultural topos of

aestheticism is used by Hollinghurst as a floating signifier for marginal

sexual orientation of his hero. Paradoxically, aestheticism is revived at

the beginning of the 21st century to alleviate the scandalous break with

the traditional moral.

Viewed from the angle of reader’s response, the technique of media-

tion of the sexual otherness by means of aesthetic otherness helps the

author to broaden the target audience of his novel beyond the bounda-

ries of gay community. The duality present at all the levels of the novel

might account for the institutional success of the novel expressed in the

Booker prize and in its status of bestseller.

Works Cited

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3. Dirda, Michael. “The Line of Beauty”. Washigton Post. Septem-
ber 26, 2004.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/articles/A45748-2004Sep23.html
4. Hollinghurst, Alan. The Line of Beauty. London: Picador. 2004.
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Prefaces to the New York Edition. New York: The Library of Ameri-
ca. 1984. Pp.1027—1034.
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http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/Keehnen/Hollinghrst.html
7. Rose, Peter. Books and Beauty: An Audience with Alan Holling-
hurst. Interview in Australian Books Review.
http://www.readings.com.au/bookweb/html/hollinghurst-
interview.html
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http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth48
9. Wood, James. “The Ogee Curve”. The New Republic On Line.
December 9, 2004.
http://www.powells.com/review/2004_12_09.html
10. Yeazell, Ruth. Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of
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