Almost Always: Influence, Ecstasy, and Architectural Imagination in The Spell

Abstract

In Hollinghurst’s first two novels, the portrayals of opera, film, and Symbolist art serve to unsettle the line of influence that connects one generation to the next and defines one generation in contrast to another. But in the case of both novels, this record of particular innovation is subjected to the even more capable authority of living influences. The first-person narrators of both The Swimming-Pool Library and The Folding Star contrive to stage their own influential energies as records of vitality and self-possession, and, in doing so, ultimately reject the artistic, textual, and psychical violence that allegedly characterizes poetic influence. But with the third-person narration of The Spell comes a very different relationship to the literary and aesthetic past. Perhaps The Spell feels, at first, as if it has been cut from a different cloth than Hollinghurst’s other, more aesthetically and historically animated works. David Alderson has argued that the novel possesses a ‘less ambitious scope’ than either The Swimming-Pool Library or The Folding Star.¹ And, in at least one sense, Alderson’s estimation is reasonable. The text stands out from Hollinghurst’s other works by virtue of its self-removal from an imaginative consciousness built upon images drawn from literature, performance, and visual art. Thomas Hardy, though regularly name checked within the novel, serves more as a topic of conversation then an incisive symbol or a celebrated stylistic icon.