Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Sunday, November 19, 2006

 
This article by Alan Hollinghurst on Ronald Firbank does rather make me want to reread both writers:

"By making the novel a structure of bright fragments, Firbank had aestheticized it, and in the aesthetic realm the normative claims of morality are relaxed. Firbank’s difficult inconsequential manner is part of a bigger subversion of the novel, and what is in many ways a homosexualization of the novel. Characteristically, he didn’t do this by writing a "gay novel" of the kind that E. M. Forster had struggled with in Maurice, or of the kind that James Baldwin or Gore Vidal would later write in Giovanni’s Room and The City and the Pillar – novels in which the homosexual condition is itself the subject, with an unusual dominance of maleness. For Forster, the crisis which led him to abandon the novel form altogether was the impossibility of writing about the one thing which most determined his view of life. "


Although one of the striking facts about the novel in the twentieth century is that it easily adapted to producing gay novels like a A Boy's Own Story as readily as it had adapted to women's writing in the previous century, the notion of fragments as a gay aesthetic is interesting idea, particularly when one considers parallels between the fragmentary approach described here and the Burroughsian cut-up technique (or Gertrude Stein's verbal collage). EM Forster's dictum, only connect, may have largely been applied to a conventional interpretation of the novel but it was nonetheless applied to a context of alienation as much as Genet's novels or John Rechy's City of the Night (and goes some way to explain why modernism, with its emphasis on epiphany and fragment proved a fertile ground for gay writers like Proust and Gide). With that said, the most interesting example in this regard is Hollinghurst himself, given the influence of the Victorian novel on The Line of Beauty (the first post-gay novel, as Edmund White called it and very far from being concerned with outcasts and outsiders in the way Rechy, Baldwin or Vidal were), where the main character certainly does allude to Trollope's The Way We Live Now and the novel depicts a broad swathe of nineteen eighties society and depicts the transition of conservatism from being a party of the landed gentry to being a party of upstart magnates. Where a Victorian social novel would have shown how different parts of society were inextricably joined, Hollinghurst deliberately emphasises the divisions of an increasingly atomised society, as the main character's homosexuality clashes with both his middle-class background and the upper-class milieu he has become accustomed to.

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posted by Richard 10:51 am