Ogee: The Line of Beauty

Abstract

Hollinghurst uses the ‘ogee’, the Hogarthian ‘line of beauty’ variously in his novel of that name, from structuring his fiction so as to reproduce in textual form its dips and swells, to more specific art-historical, erotic and drug-usage reflections. But to read this complex, subtle novel in terms of ‘lines’ is to run the risk of reducing it to a linear exercise, to have it fall into a grid as ‘an historical novel of 1980s Britain’, or ‘a political novel’, or ‘a gay novel’. Better to explore the way the line, straight and (as it were) queer, signifies in the larger, fluent, curving flow of the text as a whole, from examples of ’ogee’ lines in the novel, and the various excursus where characters discuss the significance of that line, to the magazine Nick sets up with Wani’s money (called, of course Ogee), to the way the movement and proportion of the ogee informs both form and content of the novel. The aim is to avoid forcing the supple elegance of The Line of Beauty into a procrustean model, while simultaneously being attentive to the way Hollinghurst turns a phrase—with a specific emphasis on the way his phrases turn.