Written On the Male Body. A. Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library

Abstract

Published in 1988, Alan Hollinghurst’s debut The Swimming-Pool Library is undoubtedly his most carnal novel. The exclusively male characters of the story operate within a world where the usual social hierarchy of class, education, and economic status is suspended, or rather – renegotiated through the bias of another set of factors: condition of body, size of penis, sexual role etc. Certain categories, such as age or race, gain new importance and fresh meanings, and they create alternative power relations which result in unexpected shifts and minglings. Hollinghurst emphasises the dichotomies between the clashing spheres of the protagonists’ lives: the “official”, rational domain of the public (i.e. institutions, socialized selves, visible surfaces), and the “underground”, untamed, dark realm of the body, rebellious and often ruthlessin its pursuit of desires. The novel adds a historical dimension to the debate on male bodies by discussing the changing nature of “the homosexual form of existence” which realizes itself differently in the ideal of Ancient Greece, the romantic dream of the pre-war era, and the contemporary, commercialized exploitation of the body-machine, perfectionist, and pornographic.

Keywords

• holli nghurst
• the folding star
• homosexuality
• body
• power relations