# "Resonant and Porous" Coastlines: Alan Hollinghurst's Poetics of Relation

Xavier Giudicelli

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Xavier Giudicelli. "Resonant and Porous" Coastlines: Alan Hollinghurst's Poetics of Relation. Polysèmes, 2025, 32 (32), 10.4000/149v7. halshs-05145669

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# “Resonant and Porous” Coastlines: Alan Hollinghurst’s Poetics of Relation

Les espaces côtiers, lieux « résonants et poreux » : poétique de la Relation chez Alan Hollinghurst

Xavier Giudicelli

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DOI: 10.4000/149v7

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Xavier Giudicelli, ""Resonant and Porous" Coastlines: Alan Hollinghurst's Poetics of Relation", *Polysèmes* [Online], 32 | 2025, Online since 01 July 2025, connection on 05 July 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/polysemes/12284; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/149v7

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# “Resonant and Porous” Coastlines: Alan Hollinghurst’s Poetics of Relation

*Les espaces côtiers, lieux « résonants et poreux » : poétique de la Relation chez Alan Hollinghurst*

Xavier Giudicelli

> We are drawn to borders, not because they are signs or elements of the impossible but because they are places of passage and transformation. [...] [W]e need borders, not as places to stop at, but as the point at which we may exercise that right of free passage from the same to the Other.
> 
> (Glissant 2006)

<footnote n="1">1 *Our Evenings*, the latest novel by Alan Hollinghurst (b. 1954), published in October 2024, feels like a testamentary work, or a coda which revisits several of the recurrent tropes in the author's œuvre—homoerotic desire and gay life in Britain over the past 70 years, architecture, Englishness, and politics. It reads as a summation of Hollinghurst's almost thirty-five-year career as a novelist, spanning works from *The Swimming-Pool Library* (1988) to the Man Booker-Prize winning *The Line of Beauty* (2004), and more recent titles such as *The Stranger's Child* (2011) and *The Sparsholt Affair* (2017). In the second part of *Our Evenings*, the narrator and main character, David Win, looks at a photograph taken years before, during a summer holiday at Friscombe Sands, a fictional seaside resort in North Devon, when he was a teenager. He comments: "I saw [that photograph] in a new light now, it was like that long-ago holiday itself, full of strange hints about all our futures" (393). David retrospectively interprets a pivotal episode from the first part of the novel (101-131), marking a transitional moment in his life: both the awakening to his own homosexual desires and his dim realisation of his mother Avril's budding love affair with Mrs Esme Croft, with whom David and his mother are vacationing. Significantly, the place chosen as a site for such a transitional moment is a coastline—</footnote>
the Devon coast, in this instance—picking up on a recurring motif in Hollinghurst’s
*œuvre*, which this essay aims to examine.

2 From a geographical point of view, a coastline is defined as an *ecotone*, a zone of contact and transition between two ecosystems, land and sea, which fosters great biodiversity. Far from being mere boundaries—natural frontiers between land and sea—coastal zones are ever-shifting, dynamic spaces of exchange and *displacements*. They are *margins*—spaces of flow—rather than *edges*—dividing spaces (see Gillis).¹ Time also leaves its mark on coastlines, as is visible in the layers of sediment and fossils they expose. I argue that Hollinghurst’s *promenades* along the coasts—be they American, Belgian or English—often centre on the excavation of “fossils in motion”, a phrase used by Georges Didi-Huberman to refer to the *Pathosformeln* conceptualised by Aby Warburg, i.e. expressions of affect marked by time and movement, yet frozen in the shape of images capable of surviving through time. It is thus as a palaeontologist tracking down those “fossils in motion” that I propose to explore the coastlines in Hollinghurst’s works. I wish to show that those in-between spaces are “resonant and porous”, like the androgynous mind as defined in Virginia Woolf’s *A Room of one’s Own* (114): they function as points of contact between past and present, between texts, between media and cultures; they are “places of passage and transformation” (Glissant 2006, n.p.). In “Drawing Lines in the Sand”, an essay published in the October 2006 issue of *Le Monde diplomatique*, Martiniquais writer, poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928-2011)—responding to the migrant crisis—suggests a politics and poetics of borders as places of change, exchange and memory. My hypothesis is that Glissant’s “taking up of ideas central to the Western intellectual tradition and reformulating them with a Caribbean inflexion” (Wiedorn xviii) may shed light on the queer slant Hollinghurst brings to his exploration of littorals as places where—as Barbara Barrow shows about Edmund Gosse’s 1907 memoir *Father and Son* —“forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern [...] earth becoming as fluid as the sea itself” (102).

3 The starting point of my discussion is one of Hollinghurst’s first published texts (Terzian 44): a poem entitled “Isherwood is at Santa Monica” dating from 1975, when the future novelist, then 21, had just completed his BA in English literature at Magdalen College, Oxford. I contend that this early text prefigures the motif of coastal landscapes as places where historical periods as well as texts and images resonate, a recurrent feature of Hollinghurst’s later works of fiction. Scholarship on Hollinghurst has tended to overlook the lines of continuity between the author’s depictions of coastlines across his fifty-year literary career. It is therefore in the light of the little-discussed “Isherwood is at Santa Monica”² that I then wish to analyse the relationships between seascape and inscape as well as mirror effects in *The Folding Star* (1994), Hollinghurst’s second published novel, through an analysis of the novel’s epigraph (an 1892 poem by Henri de Régnier) and of its enigmatic ending. This will finally lead me to consider the interplay of echoes that characterises the evocation of the coast of Dorset and its cliffs in *The Spell* (1998), the author’s third novel which, like *The Folding Star*, has attracted less critical attention than other works by Hollinghurst such as *The Swimming-Pool Library* or *The Line of Beauty*. The Dorset coastline—part of the so-called Jurassic Coast, spanning 185 million years of geological history—is also a territory layered with sediments of many earlier texts and images, examples of what Didi-Huberman calls “fossils in motion”. *The Spell* may thus delineate what Glissant
terms a “poetics of Relation”: a poetics of fluid boundaries, of diversity, of hybridization, of “free passage from the same to the Other” (Glissant n.p.),³ which may also define Hollinghurst’s literary œuvre as a whole.

## American shores: "Isherwood is at Santa Monica" (1975), superimpositions and transpositions

Alan Hollinghurst's "Isherwood is at Santa Monica" appeared in the autumn 1975 issue of *Sycamore Broadsheet*, an Oxonian poetry review published by the Sycamore Press, a private press founded in 1968 by John Fuller (born in 1937), a poet and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where Hollinghurst was a student between 1972 and 1979. Fuller, a W.H. Auden scholar, had been Hollinghurst's tutor and friend at Magdalen, and had encouraged his student's poetic efforts (Terzian 44). A year before the publication of "Isherwood is at Santa Monica", Hollinghurst had won the 1974 Newdigate Prize for poetry with a poem entitled "Death of a Poet" (Terzian 45; Donoghue 12). He thus began his writing career as a poet: between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, he published poems in reviews, as well as a poetry collection, *Confidential Chats with Boys*, in 1982. Although he turned to fiction in the late 1980s, poetry and poets remain significant in his novels, most conspicuously perhaps in *The Stranger's Child*, which centres around an imaginary War Poet killed on the battlefield, and his long-surviving poem, "Two Acres", written by Hollinghurst himself.⁴

Composed of 28 lines divided into six stanzas of five or six lines each, "Isherwood is at Santa Monica" is a portrait of the Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986). The poem was inspired by a television programme Hollinghurst had seen (Terzian 44), possibly the 1969 BBC documentary "Christopher Isherwood: A Born Foreigner". Isherwood was a member of the "Auden Generation", a group of British and Irish authors active in the 1930s (including Louis McNeice [1907-1963], Cecil Day-Lewis [1904-1972], Stephen Spender [1909-1995]) and a gay man who moved to the United States in 1939 with Auden. Like Auden, Isherwood became an American citizen in 1946, after a prolonged stay in the 1930s in Berlin, where he witnessed the rise of Nazism. His time in Germany inspired his best-known novels, collected under the title *The Berlin Stories* (1945), which later became the basis of the musical *Cabaret* (1966)—itself an adaptation of John Van Druten's 1951 play *I Am a Camera*—a somewhat watered-down version of Isherwood's novels. *Cabaret* gained international acclaim with Bob Fosse's 1972 film adaptation,⁵ a possible prompt for Hollinghurst's poem (O'Donoghue 13).

Originating in visual culture—a TV documentary programme and possibly, indirectly, Fosse's film—"Isherwood is at Santa Monica" places strong emphasis on visuality. It reads as the *ekphrasis* of an imaginary photograph, which seems to superimpose two narratives and two sets of images. The poem is an imaginary reconstruction of a momentous event in Isherwood's life: on February 14 (i.e. Valentine's Day), 1953, Isherwood, then 48, met Don Bachardy on Santa Monica Beach, South California. Bachardy, 30 years his junior, was to become Isherwood's partner until the writer's death in 1986. Yet beyond that biographical anecdote, Hollinghurst also seems to be re-enacting a scene inspired by Thomas Mann's *Death in Venice* (1912)—a novella about
ageing writer Gustav von Aschenbach's obsession with beautiful Polish boy Tadzio—
adapted for the screen by Luchino Visconti in 1971 to much critical praise (fig. 1),
another significant context for Hollinghurst's 1975 poem, according to
O'Donoghue (14). The action of *Death in Venice* is transposed to Santa Monica Beach by
Hollinghurst. Under the eyes of a first-person plural speaker referred to through the
pronoun us (l. 7, 18)—thereby creating a community of readers/viewers—two figures
stand out against a seascape: a solitary, ageing Isherwood and a “gold-haired” teenager
“twirling” on gymnastic rings. The latter appears in the last line of the first three
stanzas, which is identical and thus recalls ballad refrains (“A gold-haired boy twirls
upside-down on rings”, l. 5, 11, 16).

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1. Black and white photograms from Luchino Visconti's *Death in Venice* (1971), with Dirk Bogarde (Gustav von Aschenbach, left) et Björn Andrésen (Tadzio, right)</figcaption></figure>

7 However, paradoxically, unlike Mann and Visconti's portrayal of Aschenbach, it is Isherwood's energy and zest for life, despite the weight of years, which are emphasised. Isherwood “is smiling” (l. 3) and constantly in motion (“he runs towards us on flat feet”, l. 7; “he trots”, l. 14; “running off”, l. 23; “running”, l. 26), as if endowed with eternal youth. He turns the Berlin doctor's diagnosis and taxonomy to his advantage: “The doctor in Berlin classed him / as 'Infantilismus' – he tells us / with the grin of a baby” (l. 18-19). “Infantilismus” (“infantilism”) refers to a disorder, the interrupted development of physical or emotional qualities and the retention of a child developmental stage as an adult. Supposedly accounting for homosexuality, it was resorted to for instance by German physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), the founder of the Institute for Sexual Science, which Isherwood frequented in 1929-1930.⁶ The dash following the German word (“'Infantilismus' – he tells us”) suggests Isherwood’s break with his Berlin past. In Hollinghurst’s poem, Isherwood seems to eschew the time of clocks now he has settled in the United States (“the clock / suspended on a dolphin’s tail / is also a relic of Berlin”, l. 19-20). Time is also materialised in the text through the movements of the boy on the gymnastic rings, who ends up mysteriously leaving the space of the picture and of the poem (“The gold-haired boy deserts the hanging rings”, l. 22), perhaps to join Isherwood off page.

8 The landscape of Santa Monica Beach frames the poem. The text opens on an evocation of the place (“Isherwood is at Santa Monica / with miles of beach and crazy pier”, l. 1-2), a motif reprised in the last lines which suggest a virtual fusion between Isherwood and the setting in which he is depicted:

> [...] The sun shines
> on miles of sand and on his weathered cheeks;
> by the crazy pier, running, a happy escapee,
> home with himself and few secrets. (l. 25-27)
9

The adjective “weathered” can describe both a face and a natural element (a rock, for example), and the use of anaphora and zeugma (“*on* miles of sand and *on* his weathered cheeks”, l. 26) highlights the connection and fluid boundaries between man and space. At the end of the poem, a sense of freedom prevails, encapsulated by the phrase “running, a happy escapee” (l. 26), which hints at the liberation and even transformation the sun-drenched Californian beach signifies for the English writer. Now rooted in America, he is freed from the secrets, particularly regarding his sexuality, which the United Kingdom had forced him to hide.

10

This highly visual poem—both a portrait and a seascape—weaves historical, literary and artistic references. In that regard, it foreshadows the various coastlines summoned up in many of Hollinghurst’s novels, as well as the interplay of temporalities, cultures, texts and images their evocations are based on, as is the case in *The Folding Star*, Hollinghurst’s second novel, published in 1994, in which the Belgian littoral is shown to be *in relation* to other places and other times.

## Seascapes, inscapes and mirror effects in *The Folding Star* (1994)

11

*The Folding Star* explores questions of in-betweenness and liminality. Set in an unnamed Belgian city reminiscent of Bruges (and its extensive network of canals), where land and water seamlessly merge, it follows thirty-three-year-old English tutor and aspiring writer Edward Manners. Manners becomes obsessed with his seventeen-year-old pupil Luc Altidore, an adolescent on the cusp of adulthood. Like “Isherwood is at Santa Monica”, the novel recalls Mann’s *Death in Venice*. In *The Folding Star*, the Belgian coastline stands as the border between the country where two-thirds of the narrative take place, and England, where the second section of the three-part novel is set. It is in fact a porous border: that second part, “Underwoods”—an elegiac evocation of Edward’s love story with his school friend “Dawn” (Ralph) when the two boys were teenagers—mirrors the protagonist’s present passion for Luc. The Belgian coast appears in several episodes. In Chapter 8, for instance, Edward rents a villa in the fictional seaside resort of St-Ernest-aux-Sablonnières to spy on Luc. St-Ernest-aux-Sablonnières is a significant placename in several respects. It possibly alludes to Oscar Wilde’s comedy *The Importance of Being Earnest* (incidentally, a play written in the English seaside resort of Worthing in Sussex [Ellmann 397]) and its coded discourse on homosexuality—*earnest* being for instance a paronomasia for *uranist*, a word used at the time to refer to a homosexual.⁷ *Sablonnière* translating as *sandpit*, the name also suggests silting-up—a *topos* already hinted at in the novel’s epigraph, as we shall see. Much like Mann’s Aschenbach, Edward Manners (whose surname recalls that of Thomas Mann) sinks deeper and deeper into an obsession which verges on madness, and cannot resist the impulse which drives him to contemplate the object of his desire, whom he describes as “a golden dream made solid flesh” (102), a phrase with neo-Platonic overtones which brings to mind Mann’s coded discourse on homosexuality in his 1912 novella, as well as the “gold-haired boy twirl[ing] on rings” in “Isherwood is at Santa Monica”.

12

From its very epigraph—a key element partaking of the paratext, “[m]ore than a boundary or a sealed border [...], a threshold [...], a zone between text and off-text, a
zone not only of transition but also of transaction" (Genette 1-2)—*The Folding Star* sheds
light on the significance of coastlines. The novel ushers the readers into its dreamlike
world with a poem by Henri de Régnier. Quoted in French, the poem temporarily
abolishes linguistic and cultural borders. It is the second section of "Quelqu'un songe de
soir et d'espoir" ("Someone Dreams of Evening and Hope") in the 1892 collection *Tel
qu'en songe* (*As in a Dream*), a text Maurice Ravel set to music in 1906, which is how
music-loving Hollinghurst came across it (as he shared in a private conversation):

Les grands vents venus d'outremer
Passent par la Ville, l'hiver,
Comme des étrangers amers.
Ils se concertent, graves et pâles
Sur les places, et leurs sandales
Ensablent le marbre des dalles.
Comme des crosses à leurs mains fortes
Ils heurtent l'auvent et la porte
Derrière qui l'horloge est morte ;
Et les adolescents amers
S'en vont avec eux vers la Mer ! (Régnier 173)⁸

13

The desolate, windswept winter landscape depicted in the octosyllabic lines of the three tercets and final distich stands in stark contrast with the sun-drenched Santa Monica Beach of "Isherwood is at Santa Monica". Rather than being synonymous with freedom ("miles of sand", l. 25 of the 1975 poem), the sand in Régnier's text buries the city as if under a shroud ("Ensablent le marbre des dalles" ["scatter sand on the marble flagstones"], l. 6). Time is at a standstill ("l'horloge est morte" ["the clock has stopped dead"], l. 9) and vitality gives way to bitterness, a feeling that the winds, compared at the beginning of the poem to "bitter strangers" (l. 3), end up transmitting to teenagers ("adolescents amers" ["bitter teenagers"], l. 10). Régnier's poem is a symbolist *paysage d'âme*—an inscape, or projection of an inner state—echoing those in Paul Verlaine's or Albert Samain's poetry,⁹ but also of course the texts of Belgian Symbolist writers Maurice Maeterlinck or Georges Rodenbach, which are among the most obvious sources of inspiration for Hollinghurst's novel (see Stead). The epigraph by Régnier is a melancholy frontispiece heralding the general tonality of Hollinghurst's novel. It prefigures the "dead town"—which owes much to Rodenbach's *Bruges-la-Morte* (1892)—where most of the action is set, as well as the shifting sands of protagonist Edward's obsession with Luc Altidore. The final couplet of Régnier's poem recalls the last images of Visconti's *Death in Venice*: on the beach of Venice Lido, Tadzio points to the horizon while Aschenbach dies in his deckchair (fig. 1). The poem also traces a movement from the city ("Passent par la Ville" ["Pass through the Town"], line 2) to the sea (the last word of the poem) and thus foretells the *finale* of Hollinghurst's novel.

14

*The Folding Star* ends in Ostend, on the shores of the North Sea, with Edward tracking
down the missing Luc:

Luc was waiting at Ostend, staring out to sea through salt-stippled glass. [...] I stood
in front of him and repeated his name, though I knew he couldn't see me, or recall
the night he had taken my life in his arms. He gazed past me, as if in a truer kinship
with the shiftless sea. A few late walkers passed us, and saw me vigilant in my huge
unhappy overcoat; they didn't know if it was the charts of tides and sunsets I was
studying, or the named photos of the disappeared. (422)
15

That enigmatic final vision suggests that Luc is one of the disappeared, an Antinous drowned not in the waters of the Nile but in the depths of the North Sea. The whole novel may thus perhaps be a mausoleum erected by Edward, a modern counterpart to Roman Emperor Hadrian. Luc has become a ghost doomed to haunt the seashore, a grey place akin to the funereal Bruges described by Rodenbach, a liminal space between Belgium and Britain (Ostend is the harbour from which the ferries bound for Ramsgate leave), and between life and death.

16

That mysterious epilogue is open to several interpretations. Could Edward's gaze have killed the object of his desire by dint of contemplating Luc, like the vampiric painter in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait", who absorbs all the vital matter from his wife and model by turning her into a work of art (Avery 71)? Could the whole novel be seen as a fantasy based on a photograph of a missing teenager posted in Ostend? In any case, the suggestion of death by drowning connects past and present, texts and images, Belgian and English cultures. It recalls the recumbent Ophelia of the 1892 frontispiece for *Bruges-la-Morte* by Fernand Khnopff (fig. 2), which transposes the English theatrical heroine into a visual work of art and places her against a backdrop which is clearly identifiable as Bruges, with canal, bridge and belfry in the distance. Parallels with death by drowning and the Shakespearian character appear in both *Bruges-la-Morte* and *The Folding Star*: in Rodenbach's novel, Hugues Viane "find[s] the face of his departed Ophelia as [he] follow[s] the canals" (Rodenbach 2005, 33),¹⁰ while in Hollinghurst's narrative, late nineteenth-century painter Edgard Orst's Scottish mistress, Jane Byron, is another Ophelia (significantly, she is painted as Ophelia by Orst [297]), who mysteriously drowns at Ostend (67), as possibly does Luc, thus casting Edward as Edgard's alter ego or Doppelgänger.¹¹ Yet if the Belgian coastline is a place of death, it is also a "porous and resonant" space where *surviving images* surface, and past and present meet.

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2. Fernand Khnopff, cover book design for *Bruges-la-Morte* by Georges Rodenbach (Paris, Flammarion, 1892), chalk and Indian ink on cardboard, 10 × 15.5 cm, collection Van Maele, Creative Commons.</figcaption></figure>
17 Published four years after *The Folding Star*, *The Spell* crosses the Channel and marks a return to the English coastline seen as “a place of passage” resounding with echoes from the past.

## The British coast revisited: *The Spell* (1998), echoes and “curling” lines

18 *The Spell* traces a few months in the lives of four gay men in the early 1990s: Alex, a London civil servant in his thirties; his ex-partner Justin, who has relocated to Dorset with his new lover, Robin, an architect in his forties; and Danny, Robin's 22-year-old son, with whom Alex has an affair. The action of the novel follows the back-and forth movements of the characters between London and the English provinces. It revisits the coastline of Dorset, which is layered with the sediments of many earlier texts. The fictional village of Litton Gambril is situated in Thomas Hardy's Wessex, a country John Fowles's neo-Victorian novel *The French Lieutenant's Woman* (1969) had returned to. *The French Lieutenant's Woman* takes place in Lyme Regis, a town in West Dorset close to the border with Devon. Its main protagonist, Charles Smithson, is an amateur palaeontologist. In this novel, which revisits the Victorian past and draws inspiration from Hardy's works, Charles's interest in fossils takes on a metafictional value. Fowles himself pointed out: "The shadow of Thomas Hardy, the heart of whose country I can see in the distance from my work room window, I cannot avoid [...]. I don't mind the shadow. It seems best to use it" (Fowles 146).

19 Hollinghurst, who scatters a few allusions to Hardy in several of his novels,¹² follows in Fowles's footsteps most clearly in *The Spell*, wherein Hardy's shadow hangs heavily, albeit somewhat ironically at times. According to the character of Robin, a pub called "The Crooked Billet" is mentioned in *Tess of the D'Urbervilles* (Hollinghurst 1998, 61), but the cultural allusion produces a bathetic effect (a shift from the literary to the trivial) when his partner Justin quips, "Does Hardy also have a bit about the lavs being the smelliest in Wessex?" (61). Robin also points to a tree which supposedly inspired Hardy's "An Assignment—Old Style" (122)—a poem which, to the best of my knowledge, does not exist. Could this be an oversight on Hollinghurst's part, a deliberate mistake to poke fun at Robin's pretention, or a refusal on the novelist's part to give *The Spell* a clearly identifiable literary genealogy, as Robert L. Caserio suggests (120)?

20 *The Spell* also rewrites the famous and melodramatic cliff-hanging scene in Hardy's novel *A Pair of Blue Eyes* (1873), the very origin of the term *cliffhanger*—literally a character hanging over the edge of a cliff, now referring to a type of ending left hanging to create impatient anticipation on the part of the readers or viewers. In Hardy's novel, two of the main characters, Elfride Swancourt and Henry Knight, are standing on a cliff, watching the ocean, when Henry slips and falls over the edge of a precipice. He cannot ascend because the ground is slippery and is finally rescued by Elfride who weaves a rescue-rope with her underclothes (197-207). In *The Spell*, the cliff-hanging scene is given a treatment that may be considered as somewhat underwhelming. Robin is at the wheel of a car on board of which are his son Danny, his partner Justin, and Justin's ex-partner, Alex:

> The cliffs along here rose to regular arched heights, with sweepy grassy shoulders between them. They were the crumbling cross-section of the line of hills that sheltered the inland villages, and the car trundled up the incline, with the high
gorsy crowns swelling grandly on either side, the sea-wind began to bluster around it, and in at the half-open windows. The sea was close but still invisible: Robin felt his pulse quicken at its nearness, an old excitement that was swallowed up in the dangerous acceleration of his mood. [...] He kept his foot down and drove straight towards the cliff edge, the sea suddenly lifting into view beyond it in a vast unconscious arc of silver green. [...]

Of course, Robin turned in time, it was a trick, though he was shocked to find how clenched he was, and how much nearer the edge than he intended [...]. (62-63)

21 The car finally stops on the very edge of the cliff: the scene is a narrative decoy offering an ironic twist on the episode from *A Pair of Blue Eyes*. Hollinghurst quickly deflates any real suspense, shifting the focus instead to the tensions between the four characters in the car and to Robin's loss of reflexes, a sign of his ageing body. The brittle cliff may be read as a metaphor of Hollinghurst's writing, an unstable space always balancing between a homage to a literary tradition and to his predecessors (Hardy in this instance) and an ironic perspective on those very intertexts.

22 In *A Pair of Blue Eyes*, the cliff-hanging episode, one of the most notable scenes in Hardy's fiction, also testifies to the Victorian author's interest in Darwin's evolutionary theories and in geological time (see for instance Beer 236-237). Suspended above the void and facing imminent death, Henry Knight is confronted with millions of years of world history, embodied by a fossil embedded in the cliff, silently observing him:

> Opposite Knight's eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their place of death. It was the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had ever been alive and had had a body to save, as he himself now had. (200)

The confrontation brings Henry back through ancient times and gives birth to “awe-inspiring vision[s] of infinite spaces and mysterious, irresistible forces” (Cecil 73):

> Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts, and carrying, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears, rose from the rock [...]. Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium, and the mylodon—all, for the moment, in juxtaposition. Further back, and overlapped by these, were perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large as horses. Still more shadowy were the sinister crocodilian outlines—alligators and other uncouth shapes, culminating in the colossal lizard, the iguanodon. Folded behind were dragon forms and clouds of flying reptiles: still underneath were fishy beings of lower development; and so on, till the lifetime scenes of the fossil confronting him were a present and modern condition of things. (200-201)

23 We are certainly far from such Darwinian sublimity in *The Spell*. Yet, I would suggest that Hollinghurst's novel transposes Hardy's geological interest by embedding in his text “fossils in motion”, surviving images and texts which look back at the characters and the readers, and are re-embodied in the present of the narrative and on the liminal spaces of coastlines, points of “free passage” from the past to the present.

24 The last page of *The Spell* takes the characters and the readers back to the cliffs of Dorset and calm returns after the tangled web of love affairs the novel has staged. The characters are watching the sun set over the sea, which is turning grey as the light fades:
They came into the wide dip between the two swelling caps of cliff [...]. Justin stopped at a prudent distance from the crumbly edge [...]. For a minute or two they watched the inky zones of the sea-bed, as the small cloud-shadows sailed across them; then as the sun dropped westward, the surface of the sea turned quickly grey, and they saw the curling silver roads of the currents over it. (256-257)

25 The beginning of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" (1867) comes to mind: "The sea is calm to-night / The tide is full, the moon lies fair / Upon the straits" (l. 1-3, Arnold 170). As in Arnold's poem, which closes on the image of the distant din of ignorant armies ("Where ignorant armies clash by night", l. 37 [Arnold 172])—a metaphor for the Victorian poet's uncertainties—, the calm in *The Spell* is only superficial, as may be signalled by the currents over the sea ("the curling silver roads of the currents over it"), which hint at movement. The sinuous lines they form ("curling") may anticipate the title of the novel by Hollinghurst which followed *The Spell, The Line of Beauty* (2004). Those curving "lines of beauty" may also be the aesthetic principle underpinning the whole of Hollinghurst's *œuvre*.

## Conclusion

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3. William Hogarth, title-page for The Analysis of Beauty, written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas of taste (London, J. Reeves, 1753), Creative Commons.</figcaption></figure>

26 Rather than embracing the dividing or *straight* line, Hollinghurst's *œuvre* unfolds under the sign of the serpentine line of beauty (fig. 3) extolled by William Hogarth —"lead[ing] the eye along the continuity of its variety" (38)—, a line which Peter Ackroyd identifies as the very emblem of literary Englishness (38), whose curlicues and idiosyncratic variations in Hollinghurst Georges Letissier has analysed (Letissier 271-274). It is the meandering, winding nature of Hollinghurst's "lines" that I wish to stress here. His writing often seamlessly shifts from erudition to eroticism,
from “high” to “low” cultures. In his novels, moreover, the past persistently resurfaces
to haunt and shape the present, influencing both the narrative and/or the reader’s
experience: past and present interpenetrate and interact, like land and sea in coastal
zones. The variations on the motif of the littoral envisaged in this essay bring to the
fore some key notions which help to make sense of Hollinghurst’s works, such as those
of superimposition and transposition (“Isherwood is at Santa Monica”), of intertextual
and intermedial palimpsest (The Folding Star), and of sedimentation and surviving
images and texts (The Spell). Throughout the three texts analysed, the entanglement of
bodies and space is also stressed, the littoral being a site to articulate queer desire and
identities.¹³ In the Californian, Belgian and Dorset coastlines explored in this essay,
spaces, bodies, temporalities and media come into contact to form rhizomes—
interconnected, ever-expanding roots—and draw on the sand a “poetics of Relation”, of
“borders as places of passage and transformation” (Glissant n.p.).

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NOTES

1. For this definition of coastlines as ecotones, I am indebted to Sophie Aymes and her essay on Paul Nash and Dave McKean (Aymes).
2. One notable exception is Bernard O'Donoghue's chapter "Abjuring Innocence: Hollinghurst's Poetry" (O'Donoghue).

3. Lamentably, Glissant argues in his 2006 essay, this freedom—the frontier as “an invitation to taste difference, the pleasure of variety” (n.p.)—is denied illegal immigrants. Glissant’s perspective is clearly informed by the Caribbean experience, the “lingering presence-absence of the transatlantic slave trade” (Wiedorn xvi).

4. Other examples include the mention of Alexander Pope's *The Rape of the Lock* (1717) in *The Swimming-Pool Library*, one of the only books Nantwich is allowed to read in prison (256), that of the Georgian poets Robert Nichols and Gordon Bottomley in *The Folding Star* (a novel which also quotes Richard Lovelace, John Suckling [94] or John Milton [101]), or, in *The Sparsholt Affair*, the references to twentieth-century poets W.H. Auden (53) and John Betjeman (132).

5. Bob Fosse's *Cabaret* starred Liza Minelli as Sally Bowles and Michael York as Brian Roberts, the latter serving as an alter ego for Christopher Isherwood.

6. Several pages are devoted to the Hirschfeld Institute in Isherwood's *Christopher and His Kind* (19-36) and Hirschfeld's diagnosis is mentioned, "Hirschfeld had rightly called him infantile" (33).

7. Another pun in Wilde's play may be on the name Bunbury, the imaginary friend the character of Algernon has invented to eschew his duties in town (see Craft). Such punning is referred to in Hollinghurst's *The Swimming-Pool Library*: "Afterwards, James told me his theory about Bunbury and burying buns, and how earnest was a code word for gay, and it was really *The Importance of Being Uranist*. I had heard it all before, but I could never quite remember it" (177).

8. "The great winds from overseas / Pass through the Town in winter / Like bitter strangers // They gather, grim and pale / On the squares and their sandals / Scatter sand on the marble flagstones // As if with rifle butts in their strong hands / They batter against the awning and the door / Behind which the clock has stopped dead // And the bitter teenagers / Go away with them towards the sea!" (my translation).

9. For instance in Paul Verlaine's "Clair de Lune" ("Moonlight") in the 1869 *Fêtes galantes* (Gallant Festivities), which opens on the line "Votre âme est un paysage choisi" ("Your soul is a landscape fantasy"), or Albert Samain's 1911 *Au jardin de l'infante* ("Mon âme est une infante en robe de parade..." ["My soul is an infante in ceremonial gown"]) is the first line of the first poem).

10. "*retrouvant au fil des canaux son visage d'Ophélie en allée*" (Rodenbach 1998, 69).

11. The structure of *The Folding Star* similarly revolves around a series of chiasmi, parallels and doubling effects. Edward, the English would-be writer, settles in Belgium, while his late nineteenth-century alter ego, Belgian artist Edgard Orst, travels to England and is repeatedly said to have been influenced by English art (see Giudicelli).

12. For instance, the tower blocks of a council flat in *The Swimming-Pool Library* are ironically given Hardyan names: "Casterbridge, Sandbourne, Melchester, Egdon Heath" (Hollinghurst 1988, 169); in Hardy's Wessex, Casterbridge is Dorchester, Sandbourne is Bournemouth, and Melchester is Salisbury.

13. For another perspective on the relationship between bodies and coastal spaces, see Robinson Murphy's essay "'Pain Comes in Waves': Eroding Bodies in Colm Tóibín's *The Blackwater Lightship*," in which the author shows how, in his 1999 novel, Tóibín sets in parallel the declining body of the character of Declan, who is dying of an AIDS-related disease, and the eroding Irish coast (Murphy).
ABSTRACTS

Coastal zones, far from being mere boundaries between land and sea, are dynamic spaces of exchange, transition, and interaction; they are sites of rich sedimentation, serving as points of contact between temporalities, cultures, and media. This is clearly reflected in the works of contemporary British writer Alan Hollinghurst (b. 1954). In his seven novels and smaller poetic *corpus*, coastlines function as spaces of intertextual and intermedial dialogue. This article sets out to show that what Édouard Glissant calls a “poetics of Relation” may be at work in Hollinghurst’s œuvre. I argue that such a poetics may find an embodiment in the evocation of seashores and coastlines as “resonant and porous” liminal places, relying on a textual, intertextual and intermedial analysis of works ranging from “Isherwood is at Santa Monica” (1975), one of the author’s first published poems, to two of his lesser-studied novels, *The Folding Star* (1994) and *The Spell* (1998).

Loin d'être de simples limites - des frontières entre terre et mer - les espaces côtiers constituent des lieux dynamiques d'échange et de passage, de déplacements. Ils sont des sites riches en sédimentations et des points de contact entre temporalités, cultures et médias. C'est ce que révèlent les œuvres de l'écrivain britannique contemporain, Alan Hollinghurst (né en 1954) : sept romans et un plus mince corpus poétique au sein desquels les côtes se font souvent zones de dialogues tant intertextuels qu'intermédiaux. Ce qu'Édouard Glissant nomme « poétique de la Relation » est, selon moi, à l'œuvre chez Hollinghurst. Elle s'incarne notamment dans l'évocation de ces lieux de l'entre-deux « résonants et poreux » que sont côtes et rivages. C'est ce que cet article s'emploie à mettre au jour à travers un parcours textuel, intertextuel et intermédiaire menant du poème « Isherwood is at Santa Monica » (1975), l'un des premiers textes publiés par l'auteur, à deux de ses romans, moins étudiés par la critique, *The Folding Star* (1994) et *The Spell* (1998).

INDEX

**Mots-clés:** côte, frontière, intermédiaité, intertextualité, poétique de la Relation, sédimentation

**Keywords:** border, coastline, intermediality, intertextuality, poetics of Relation, sedimentation
**oeuvrecitee** Bruges-la-Morte, Death in Venice, Dover Beach, Folding Star (The), French

Lieutenant's Woman (The), Isherwood is at Santa Monica, Our Evenings, Oval Portrait (The), Pair of Blue Eyes (A), Spell (The), Tel qu'en songe

AUTHORS

XAVIER GIUDICELLI

Xavier Giudicelli is Professor at Paris Nanterre University, where he teaches British literature and visual arts, as well as translation. He is a member of the Research Centre CREA (Centre de recherches anglophones, UR 370). He is the author of *Portraits de Dorian Gray. Le texte, le livre, l'image* (2016), and of several essays and chapters on book illustration, late nineteenth-century art and literature, translation, Oscar Wilde, E.M. Forster and Alan Hollinghurst. He is currently
completing a monograph on intermediality and queer temporality in the works of Alan Hollinghurst.