Alan Hollinghurst/Ronald Firbank: Camp Filiation as an Aesthetic of the Outrageous

Abstract

Alan Hollinghurst claims his literary kinship with Ronald Firbank, the Edwardian author, whose works he edited and analysed. He also introduces Firbank in The Swimming Pool Library, his first novel published in 1988, which explicitly dealt with male homosexuality at a time when Margaret Thatcher with Section 28 of the Local Government Act enforced what amounted to a homophobic policy. Starting from the notion of Camp (Susan Sontag), subsequently taken up by queer studies, this essay investigates Firbank’s poetics whose outrageous excessiveness clearly aimed at shocking the middle classes. However, such deliberate display of outrage veils indubitable vulnerability and a genuine prudishness on whatever bears on the intimate. So, Firbank’s short literary career would mirror Hollinghurst’s own evolution from the publication of a scandalous fiction, dealing with unbridled gay sex in the pre-AIDS halcyon days, to The Stranger’s Child (2011) with its aesthetic of concealment and obfuscation. In the last resort, the study of a Camp filiation discloses a poetic and psychological tension between extroversion and introversion.

Keywords

• Alan Hollinghurst
• Ronald Firbank
• Camp
• Susan Sontag
• queer studies
• outrage