Swimming-Pool Library Research Articles

The English Studies Interview with Alan Hollinghurst: In Conversation with Dominic Dean

ABSTRACT Alan Hollinghurst is the author of seven novels including The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), The Stranger’s Child (2011), The Sparsholt Affair (2017), and The Line of Beauty (2004), with the latter winning the 2004 Man Booker Prize. He is widely celebrated for his distinctive style, his tragicomical explorations of English life in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and his introduction of richly imagined and humanely observed gay themes to mainstream literary fiction. His latest novel is Our Evenings (2024). Alan Hollinghurst spoke with Dominic Dean about Our Evenings, its themes, inspirations and treatment of social and political history; the role of buildings and material objects in his fiction; his style and formal innovations and influences; and his relationships with TV adaptations and with the literary academy.

From Gay Postmodern to Black/Queer Transness: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library and Paul Mendez’s Rainbow Milk

ABSTRACT This article contends that the evolution from a postmodern to a transmodern paradigm explains the changes in gay and queer representation from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library to Paul Mendez’s Rainbow Milk. With this purpose in mind, the analysis is structured on a triple axis: the articulation of non-western bodies and sexuality; the temporal framings that convey both novels’ discourses; and the progression from neo-Freudian trauma narratives to decolonized ones. After close reading the two novels, it can be argued that Rainbow Milk contests The Swimming-Pool Library on all three concerns. The black queer body is not only vindicated, but given a voice of its own. The teleological framework, which Hollinghurst’s novel revises, does not work in Mendez’s. Finally, Rainbow Milk works through the individual and collective traumata of the protagonist and his community instead of acting out a discursive aporia.

Paysages urbains intermédiaux : Revoir le Londres gay dans Folly/ Monument; Excerpts from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library de Scott Lyman (2014)

This essay focuses on the video installation Folly/Monument; Excerpts from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library, by American artist Scott Lyman, first exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, as part of the Bloomberg “New Contemporaries” 2015 exhibition. The viewer entered a site-specific, pale pink, neoclassical “folly”—an enclosed, intimate space for no more than two visitors at a time—, in which a 26-minute film offering a fragmentary vision of Alan Hollinghurst’s 1988 début novel was played on a loop. This essay analyses the way in which Lyman’s video installation re-imagines the London of 1983 and the relationship between urban space and dissident sexualities explored in Alan Hollinghurst’s 1988 novel. It argues that beyond an aesthetics of discontinuity, based on abrupt, incongruous contrasts, Lyman’s piece—thus mirroring Hollinghurst’s novel—weaves an intricate web of relationships between past and present, notably through its soundtrack and the motif of dancing: Lyman’s cityscape is turned into a soundscape, reconfiguring the gay London mapped by Hollinghurst. This essay finally contends that Lyman’s piece, in a playful and queer mode, blurs the lines between the inside and the outside, the intimate and the monumental, the individual and the collective, questioning our own position or “situational identity” as viewers and London flâneurs.

Utopia and Dystopia in Homoerotic Territory in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-pool Library, The Folding Star and The Spell

Abstract: This essay aims at exploring the use of pastoral Arcadia as a privileged territory for English homoerotic literature to unfold, putting special emphasis on Alan Hollinghurst’s first three novels so far. With this purpose, I think particularly worth noting Terry Gifford’s Pastoral (1999), where he points out the main characteristics of classic pastoral –a utopian genre deeply embedded in English landscape culture and writing–, as well as the dystopian anti-pastoral and post-pastoral. With this in mind, the essay delves into Hollinghurst’s novels to determine whether and, if so, how they make use, update or re-negotiate pastoral traditions to meet the needs of gay writing at the turn of the millennium.Resumen: Este artículo pretende explorar el uso de la Arcadia pastoril como un terrero privilegiado para el desarrollo de la literatura homoerótica inglesa, haciendo especial énfasis en las tres novelas que Alan Hollinghurst ha publicado hasta la fecha. Con este fin, me parece relevante hacer referencia a Pastoral (1999), donde Terry Gifford explica las principales características de la literatura pastoril clásica –un género utópico firmemente arraigado en la literatura paisajística inglesa–, así como del anti-pastoralismo y el post-pastoralismo distópicos. Así, este ensayo ahonda en las novelas de Hollinghurst para determinar si, y si es así, cómo éstas utilizan, actualizan o renegocian las diferentes tradiciones pastoriles para satisfacer las necesidades de la literatura gay en el cambio de milenio.

The Line of Maurice: Forster, Hollinghurst and the ‘Social Fabric’

E.M. Forster’s Maurice, which was written in 1913 and 1914, was published only after Forster’s death in 1970 – almost sixty years later. Its long absence from the public domain renders it permanently anachronistic, since it was was never able to address directly its early twentieth century context. This paper considers how Maurice, in lamenting the oppression of homosexual men, offers a trenchant criticism of aspects of the ‘social fabric’ itself, including contemporary constructions of masculinity. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library, published in 1988, is imbued with Forsterian echoes. Unlike Maurice, it was able to engage more openly with its social and political context; unlike the repressed Maurice Hall, its protagonist, Will Beckwith, enjoys what seems to be a sexually liberated lifestyle. However, Hollinghurst’s social criticism is if anything more stringent than Forster’s, for he shows that, despite the apparent sexual freedom enjoyed by gay men, there has been very little progress where the inclusion of these men in the ‘social fabric’ is concerned. This makes his novel darker and bleaker than Forster’s. Reading the two works together suggests that unpredictability and reversals may lie within ostensibly straightforward literary lineages.

An Alternative Namesake for William Beckwith in Alan Hollinghurst’sThe Swimming Pool Library

An Alternative Namesake for William Beckwith in Alan Hollinghurst’s<i>The Swimming Pool Library</i>

Englishness through the Looking Glass: Intersemiotic and Intercultural Dialogues in The Folding Star (Alan Hollinghurst, 1994) and Bruges-la-Morte (Georges Rodenbach, 1892)

Ah, how beautiful the Weald looked! The hills stood out above its radiance, as Fiesole stands above the Tuscan plain, and the South Downs, if one chose, were the mountains of Carrara. She might be forgetting her Italy, but she was noticing more things in her England.(Forster, A Room with a View 145) Alan Hollinghurst’s second work of fiction, The Folding Star (1994), like his other five published novels – among which The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and the Booker-prize winning Line of Beauty...

&lt;em&gt;British and African Literature in Transnational Context&lt;/em&gt;, by Simon Lewis

Reviewed by: British and African Literature in Transnational Context Patrick Brantlinger British and African Literature in Transnational Context BY Simon Lewis Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2011. ix + 257 pp. ISBN 978-0-8130-3602-1 cloth. In a series of "contrapuntal" readings of African and British writers, Simon Lewis demonstrates much of the diversity on both sides of the divide between black and white, European and African, colonizer and colonized. The opening chapter begins with "probably the most obvious point for looking at Anglo-African literature," the contrast between Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad. Writing about Heart of Darkness, Achebe called Conrad a "bloody racist." But, Lewis notes, Achebe's Things Fall Apart has also influenced Western readers to think in black-white, Europe-(West) Africa terms. The chapter ends with an analysis of Buchi Emecheta, whose work "unpicks Achebe's poetics of indigenism, national identity, and racial authenticity" (36). Emecheta's novels express a feminist viewpoint and what Lewis calls a "Black Atlantic affiliationist poetics" (39). Chapter two discusses Abdulrazak Gurnah, a writer of Arab descent from Zanzibar who now lives in England. Lewis notes that for most non-Africans, ideas about the continent are based on sub-Saharan West Africa, as in Conrad and Achebe. But Gurnah and East Africa complicate matters through Islam and "the history of the Indian Ocean world" (51). In novels such as Dottie (1990) and By the Sea (2001), like Lewis himself, Gurnah "is as suspicious of potentially racist and sexist African nationalism as he is critical of its racist and sexist colonialist antecedent" (54). [End Page 187] The next two chapters, which might have been combined into one, feature British writers William Boyd (An Ice-cream War) and Alan Hollinghust (The Swimming Pool Library). Like Conrad, "Boyd fails to represent Africans as properly articulate and rational" (84). Hollinghurst's "gay novel" illustrates "colonial desire" through the protagonist's "absolute adoration of black people" (qtd. 100) while it critiques British racism and classism. Chapter five contrasts three very different plays, T. S. Eliot's A Cocktail Party, Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, and Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine. In the last two chapters, Lewis turns to writers from South Africa and Zimbabwe. These chapters cover much postapartheid South African fiction. The contrast between two novels by J. M. Coetzee versus K. Sello Duiker's Thirteen Cents and Chris Van Wyk's memoir Shirley, Goodness and Mercy is especially interesting. Duiker and Van Wyk are both grounded in black (and "coloured") South African cultures and locations, while Coetzee—who today resides in Australia—is abstract and metaphysical. The final chapter turns to Zimbabwean Yvonne Vera and "Southern African" "coloured" writers Yette Christiansë amd Zoë Wicomb, with an aside to Tsitsi Dangarembga (Nervous Conditions). Vera's Nehanda features a Shona priestess and heroine of an 1890s anticolonialist rebellion, while Christiansë (Castaway) and Wicomb (David's Story) produce feminist literature that cannot easily be categorized in national or racial terms. All three contest standard assumptions—both European and (male) African—of what it means to be African. Lewis's work is an erudite, well-written study that will be of interest to all postcolonialists and scholars of African literature. Patrick Brantlinger Indiana University brantli@indiana.edu Copyright © 2012 Indiana University Press

Past Irony: Trauma and the Historical Turn in Fragments and the Swimming-Pool Library

<i>Past Irony: Trauma and the Historical Turn in</i> Fragments <i>and</i> the Swimming-Pool Library

Postcolonial and queer theories: intersections and essays

Preface Global Gaze/Global Gays by Dennis Altman The Perfect Path: Gay Men, Marriage, Indonesia by Thomas M. Boellstorff Heavenly Creatures' Queer Sort of Fandom: The Closeted Indigene, Lesbian Islands and New Zealand National Cinema by Elizabeth Guzik Im/De-position of Cultural Violence: Reading Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine by Benzi Zhang Gender Crossing and Decadence in Taiwanese Fiction at the Fin de Siecle by Liang-Ya Liou Racial and Erotic Anxieties: Ambivalent Fetishization, From Fanon to Mercer by Sonia Otalvaro-Hormillosa Race, Class and the Homoerotics of The Swimming-Pool Library by James N. Brown and Patricia M. Sant The U.S. in South Africa: (Post) Colonial Queer Theory? by Ian Barnard Other and Difference in Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory by David William Foster In Search of a Lost Body with Organs: Reclaiming Postcolonial Gay Interiority After Bersani's Reading of Gide by Christian Gundermann Theorizing the Under-Theorized by Erich De Wald Index

Snapshots of Postcolonial Masculinities: Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library and Ben Okri's The Famished Road

Snapshots of Postcolonial Masculinities: Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library and Ben Okri's The Famished Road

"Mappings of secrecy and disclosure": The Swimming Pool Library, the closet, and the empire.

The Swimming Pool Library is a novel of the closet that also offers a post-colonial reading of homosexuality in contemporary culture. Through its interpretation of gay life as a dialogic between Wildean and Gidean readings of homosexuality, and its examination of the closet as what Sedgwick calls "the defining structure of gay oppression," the novel analyzes the tensions of political oppression against sexual freedom. The Swimming Pool Library is thus seen as a text in conflict with itself about the very issues it raises: closeting and gay liberation, sexual freedom and sexual responsibility, loyalty to the past and duty in the present.