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AIDS
and the Infection of Narrative in Recent Gay Fiction
Richard
R. Bozorth
Dept.
of English
Southern
Methodist University Dallas, TX
While the advent of HIV has affected gay culture’s
sense of the future, it has also shaped representations of queer history
pre-AIDS and pre-Stonewall. In Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool
Library (1988) and Mark Merlis’s An Arrow’s Flight (1998)—two of
most highly regarded English-language gay novels of recent times—narrative
structures of historical revelation coincide with tropes of infection to
explore the determinative force of history in the lives of their
protagonists. But in their manipulation of these formal elements, these
two novels comprise radically opposing responses to the power of fate and
the attractions of fatalism in the age of AIDS.
In The Swimming-Pool Library, the life of Will
Beckwith, a handsome young aristocrat, revolves around casual sex during
his “belle epoque” of the summer of 1983. The novel interweaves his
sexual encounters with his reading excerpts from the journals of Charles
Nantwich, an elderly “queer peer” he has befriended, and this
structure yields intricate parallels and ironies of which Will is largely
oblivious. By novel’s end, Nantwich’s journals destroy Will’s
historical innocence about life before Stonewall and his assumption of his
own sexual-political liberation, for they reveal Will’s grandfather’s
role in the prosecution of gays in 1950’s Britain, including Nantwich.
But while the novel might have ended with Will maturing into
sexual-political consciousness, he seems unchanged. Instead, we are left
to imagine a further, literally fatal surprise for Will in the form of HIV—an
unnamed presence whose all-but-inevitably fatal trajectory haunts this
novel of the early 1980’s.
Ultimately, HIV registers as an asymptomatic
infection in the body of the novel, which climaxes with Will’s shocking
discovery of his own inheritance of homophobia—a revelation Nantwich has
engineered to avenge his prosecution by Will’s grandfather.
The novel, therefore, traffics both in fantasies of
innocent sexual pleasure and in sado-masochistic moralism, indulged by a
plot that punishes reckless historical ignorance. Merlis’s An Arrow’s
Flight retells the tale of Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, who in Greek
tradition won the Trojan War with the magic bow of Philoctetes, the
warrior abandoned by the Greeks because of his unhealing snake-bite.
In Merlis’s modernization, Neoptolemus is working
as an anonymous gay hustler when Odysseus comes to recruit him into his
prophesied role. The narrator’s frequent reminders that we know how the
story ends promote a sense of Greek-epic inevitability—the infection of
history by Fate. But we are fooled, for this is a novel, not an epic:
Neoptolemus falls in love with the chronically ill Philoctetes, who breaks
the bow rather than giving it up; the Greeks sail home without conquering
Troy. Moreover, the story of Philoctetes provides an alluring fable about
the origin of AIDS as punishment for violating divine law. But by ending
the novel with Neoptolemus as the now-infected lover of Philoctetes, who
lives on, Merlis suggests that fantasies of Destiny and moralizing,
fatalistic readings of infection are more deadly in the age of AIDS than
HIV itself. |
