Resisting Readability: Dyslexia and Sexuality in Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair

Abstract

Resisting Readability:Dyslexia and Sexuality in Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair Helena Gurfinkel (bio) In her review in The New Yorker of Alan Hollinghurst's latest novel, The Sparsholt Affair (2017), Alexandra Schwartz scrambles to list what she considers the author's psychological and narrative oversights. In relation to the novel's portrayal of Jonathan "Johnny" Sparsholt, the son of David Sparsholt, of the scandalous titular affair, she writes: Hollinghurst has further handicapped himself by limiting Johnny's ability with words. He is dyslexic, and not much of a talker, though in place of verbal gifts he has visual ones. He becomes a portrait painter, devoting his life, as Hollinghurst has, to the difficult art of verisimilitude, while himself remaining something of a blank canvas. (Schwartz 2018, n.p.) Even if one understands the ironic use of the word handicapped in the context, its use in relation to a learning disability raises a red flag, as does Schwartz's contention that Hollinghurst seeks verisimilitude above all else. The two concerns are related. Hollinghurst has a longstanding but virtually unnoticed interest in disability, particularly dyslexia. In his 1997 novel The Spell, a secondary character, Justin, the partner of the protagonist, Robin Woodfield, has dyslexia, which, in fairness to Schwartz, does not develop much beyond contributing to Justin's characterization as a childlike, dependent character, a charming but perpetually struggling actor. Queerness and disability problematically collide, in other words, to signify a lack of development, an inability to reach adulthood. Hollinghurst returns to his fascination with dyslexia in his latest novel, which links dyslexia and queerness in ways that are at once empowering and epistemologically destabilizing. Upon the publication of the novel in the UK and then in the US, Hollinghurst went on a book tour and gave several public readings and talks in 2017 and 2018. The themes he covers and the questions he answers are similar in many ways. In a number of interviews the writer notes that the novel's narrative structure encompasses multiple points of view, which makes it not particularly easy to follow. He also underscores the theme of [End Page 277] reading threaded through and mentions the difficulty of reading—both texts and people—as one of the underlying ideas of his latest work. Hollinghurst notes that the novel reveals our frequent inability to know, or to read, well those with whom we think we are intimate or familiar. He also states that he "makes fun" of people who cannot read. In the course of the interview blitz he does mention Jonathan Sparsholt's dyslexia, but he humorously lumps the differently abled character with all those who cannot "read" others metaphorically.1 Without unduly elevating authorial intent, one wonders whether Hollinghurst (or his text) dismisses dyslexia, or makes fun of it, or uses it as merely a metaphor for misreading as an epistemological practice. In both cases, the approach is seemingly ableist. I do not believe we can dismiss the novel quite so easily, however. Hollinghurst does deploy dyslexia metaphorically inasmuch as, like queerness, it forecloses the possibilities of legibility and reading, both of which, if unchecked, can lead to the traditionalist taxonomies of heteronormativity and ablebodiness. Simultaneously, Hollinghurst strategically accords Jonathan Sparsholt legible identities (gay and dyslexic) in order to empower his alternative means of reading, living, and representation. "Wordblindness" The first scientific definition of dyslexia belongs to R. Berlin, who in 1887 published a monograph in which he defined it as a loss or impairment of reading ability. Ten years prior, A. Kussmaul had coined the term word-blindness. Since the nineteenth century, dyslexia has been divided into acquired and congenital types; it has been determined that its origin is in the occipital lobe (Smythe 2011, 39). Ian Smythe additionally quotes the following recent definition produced by the Health Council of the Netherlands in his 2011 article in The British Journal of Hospital Medicine: "Dyslexia is present when the automatization of word identification (reading) and/or spelling does not develop or does so very incompletely or with great difficulty" (43). In an earlier article in The New England Journal of Medicine, Sally E. Shaywitz defines dyslexia similarly, focusing specifically on the dimension of...