Framing the Object of Desire: The Politics of Art in The Folding Star

Abstract

Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library is often viewed as helping to shape a new social and political terrain of queer fiction around the time of the Section 28 controversy, and has become a standard reference point in critical work on both contemporary fiction and fiction about same-sex desire. The Folding Star, however, has been oddly all but ignored in criticism, despite being nominated for the 1994 Man Booker Prize. Set within a strange unnamed city in Belgium rather than dynamic metropolitan London, and focusing on a more anxious protagonist trying to negotiate his relationship with his seventeen-year-old student, The Folding Star offers a very different narrative experience and demands a different critical approach.

In this chapter I consider the ways in which The Folding Star examines ideas to do with art, artistic production and the ‘artistic gaze’, and how these ideas are intricately bound up with Edward’s developing sexual identity and attempt to assert self-agency. The novel is replete with references to the creation of art (painting, photography, film, music, literature) and raises a whole range of key philosophical and political questions regarding the function and value of art in society; its interpretation for specific ideological ends; and the shifting significances of the artist, the model, the archivist and the critic. Certainly, art and sexuality coalesce repeatedly in this novel in intriguing and telling ways.

Within this framework, I focus on three key areas. First, I consider the Belgian city as a place of artistic and sexual potential, and how this potential becomes increasingly complicated as the urban space shifts into something more illusory and disturbing—a telling locus for Edward’s psychosexual explorations. Next, I examine the transfer of Edward’s artistic gaze onto Luc as sexualised object and how Edward insistently constructs him as an artwork in order both to idealise and attempt to control him. Finally, I explore the novel’s intriguing historical parallels between Edward’s own artistic and sexual fantasies, and those created by Edgard Orst, a figure fabricated by Hollinghurst partly in order to explore the radicalism of the sexually and morally transgressive Belgian Symbolist school. The Folding Star, therefore, highlights how the nexus of art, desire and obsession is replayed in different socio-political circumstances. As I argue, however, the novel eventually works to undercut the established ideals of artistic practice and interpretation as enabling and potentially transformative. Rather, Hollinghurst’s major fictional examination of the power of art, and its relations to sexuality, ultimately emphasises an interconnectedness with isolation, withdrawal, impotence and disillusion.