1

Chapter I: Introduction

Chapter I

Introduction
___________________________________________________________________________

If one really thinks about the body as such, there is no possible outline of the body
as such. There are thinkings of the systematicity of the body, there are value
codings of the body. The body, as such, cannot be thought, and I certainly cannot
approach it.
- GayatriChakravortySpivak
“In a Word: Interview with Ellen Rooney”

1.1 Introduction: Queer Theory

Queer theory is the academic discourse that has largely replaced what used to be

called gay/lesbian studies. The term was first coined by Teresa De Lauretis for a working

conference on theorising gay and lesbian sexualities that was held at the University of

California, Santa Cruz, in February 1990. The theory, as such encompasses a whole range of

understanding issues relating to sexual orientation and gender identity. Queer theory is

largely based on the works of Michel Foucault, the French Philosopher. Besides Foucault, the

works of Derrida, Lacan and Freud have contributed as important theoretical references.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, sexuality gradually assumed a new status as an object of

scientific and popular knowledge. The last two hundred years or so have seen what the critic

and historian Michel Foucault once described as a ‘discursive explosion’ (Foucault 1998: 38)

around the question of sex, by which he did not simply mean that it came to be talked about

more widely or more often or more explicitly, relaxing the grip of repressive conventions or

taboos but also calling for a genealogical analysis of sexuality as it has been lived and

understood in Western culture over the last couple of centuries. The breadth of output in

literary and cultural criticism which has investigated the specificities and constructions of
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Chapter I: Introduction

human sexualities is vast and it is a corpus which continues to grow and explore some aspect

or representation of sex, sexuality or sexual desire.

Sexuality is much more than a facet of human nature, the seat of pleasure and desire.

It has become a principle of explanation, whose effects can be discerned, in different ways, in

virtually any stage and predicament of human life, shaping our capacity to act and setting the

limits to what we can think and do (Glover & Kaplan 2007: 12). Thus, the growing

willingness to put sex into question, even to search for the truth about sexual behaviour,

gradually opened up new ways in which the entire field of sexual possibilities and sexual

identities could be imagined, permanently transforming people’s most intimate sense of their

sexual selves. The present study thus aims in studying anomalies of sexual instincts with

special emphasis on queering homosexuality in the works of the two novelists - Hollinghurst

and Selvadurai.

After 1945, and increasingly since the 1960s, the terms ‘bisexual’, ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’ and

‘straight’ have been used to index a connection between sexual desire and identity. Although

the terms ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ take their initial meaning from 19 th century

medical and legal documents, theory and criticism dealing with homosexuality continues to

be written. Critical studies of ‘homosexual’ literary traditions exist alongside works dealing

with bisexuality and the politics of representation of transgressive desires, lesbian aesthetics

and gay male writing. Over the years, theory and criticism has witnessed the ‘queering’ of all

these terms. Many recent studies propose that all identity categories have been, or should be

or must be, disrupted, questioned and queered. Condensing the results of much sexual-textual

theory and criticism, Alan Sinfield (1994) has suggested that the central argument in studies

of sexuality has ultimately sought to resolve outstanding problems which converge on and

surround the notion of sexual identity.

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Chapter I: Introduction

Queer theory is a brand-new branch of study or theoretical speculation; which has

only being named as an area since about 1991. It grew out of gay/lesbian studies, a discipline

which itself is very new, existing in any kind of organised form only since about the mid-

1980s. Gay/lesbian studies, in turn, grew out of feminist studies and feminist theory. Feminist

theory, in the mid-to late 1970s, looked at gender as a system of signs, or signifiers, assigned

to sexually dimorphic bodies, which served to differentiate the social roles and meanings

those bodies could have. Feminist theory thus argued that gender was a social construct,

something designed and implemented and perpetuated by social organisations and structures,

rather than something merely ‘true’, something innate to the ways bodies worked on a

biological level. In so doing, feminist theory made two very important contributions. The

first is that feminist theory separated the social from the biological, insisting that we see a

difference between what is the product of human ideas, hence something mutable and

changeable, and what is the product of biology, hence something (relatively) stable and

unchangeable. The second contribution is related to the first: by separating the social and the

biological, the constructed and the innate, feminist theory insisted that gender was not

something ‘essential’ to an individual identity. The humanist idea of identity, or self, on the

other hand focuses on the notion that one’s identity is unique, that who you are is the product

of some core self. These aspects include sex (I am male or female), gender (I am masculine

or feminine), sexuality (I am heterosexual or homosexual), religious beliefs (I am Christian,

Jewish, Buddhist) stating our core sense of identity. Within humanist thought, these core

aspects of identity are considered to be ‘essences’, things that are unchangeable and

unchanging. This concept of an essential self separates ‘self’ from everything outside self –

not just ‘other’, but also all historical events, all things that change and shift. Feminist theory,

by challenging the idea that gender was part of this essential self, caused a ‘rupture’, a break

that revealed the constructedness of this natural self. From this rupture came the post-
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Chapter I: Introduction

structuralist idea of selfhood as a constructed idea, something not ‘naturally’ produced by

bodies or by birth. Selfhood, in post-structuralist theory, becomes ‘subjecthood’ or

‘subjectivity’. The switch in terms is recognition that, first of all, human identity is shaped by

language, by becoming a subject in language. The shift from ‘self’ to ‘subject’ marks the idea

that subjects are the product of signs, or signifiers, which make up our ideas of identity.

Selves are stable and essential; subjects are constructed, hence provisional, changing, and

quite often redefined or reconstructed. Selves, in this sense, are like signifiers within a rigid

system, whose meanings are fixed; subjects by contrast, are like signifiers in a system with

more play, more multiplicity of meaning. Thus, ideas about sexuality as an innate or

essentialist category became open to reformulation. This is where gay/lesbian studies, as a

discipline and as the academic arm of a political movement began, in the early to mid-1980s.

It is harder to define sexuality in part because of the way our culture has always taught us to

think about it. While gender may be a matter of style of dress, sexuality seems to be about

biology, about how bodies operate on the basic level. Our culture tends to define sexuality in

two ways: in terms of animal instincts, of behaviours programmed by hormones or by

seasonal cycles, over which our free will has no control; and in terms of moral and ethical

choices, of behaviours that are coded as either good or evil, moral or immoral, and over

which we are supposed to have complete and rigid control.

Gay/lesbian studies – looks at the kinds of social structures and social constructs

which define our ideas about sexuality as an act and sexuality as identity. As an academic

field, gay/lesbian studies look at how notions of homosexuality have historically being

defined. Gay/lesbian studies also looks at how various cultures, or various time periods, have

enforced ideas about what kinds of sexuality are normal and which are abnormal, which are

moral and which are immoral. Gay/lesbian literary criticism, a subset of gay/lesbian studies,

looks at images of sexuality, and ideas of normative and deviant behaviour, in a number of
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Chapter I: Introduction

ways; by finding gay/lesbian authors whose sexuality has been masked or erased in history

and biography; by looking at texts by gay/lesbian authors to discover particular literary

themes, techniques and perspectives which come from being a homosexual in a heterosexual

world; by looking at texts – by gay or straight authors – which depict homosexuality and

heterosexuality, or which focus on sexuality as a constructed (rather than essential) concept;

and by looking at how literary texts by gay or straight authors operate in conjunction with

non-literary texts to provide a culture with ways to think about sexuality.

Queer theory emerges from gay/lesbian studies’ attention to the social construction of

categories of normative and deviant sexual behaviour. But while gay/lesbian studies focussed

largely on questions of homosexuality, queer theory expands its realm of investigation. Queer

theory looks at, and studies, and has a political critique of, anything that falls into normative

and deviant categories, particularly sexual activities and identities. The word ‘queer’, as it

appears in the dictionary, has a primary meaning of ‘odd’, ‘peculiar’, ‘out of the ordinary’.

Queer theory concerns itself with any and all forms of sexuality that are ‘queer’ in this sense

– and then, by extension, with the normative behaviours and identities which define what is

‘queer’. Thus, queer theory expands the scope of its analysis to all kinds of behaviour,

including those which are gender-bending as well as those which involve ‘queer’ non-

normative forms of sexuality. Queer theory insists that all sexual behaviour, all concepts

linking sexual behaviours to sexual identities, and all categories of normative and deviant

sexualities, are social constructs sets of signifiers which create certain types of social

meaning. Queer theory follows feminist theory and gay/lesbian studies in rejecting the idea

that sexuality is an essentialist category, something determined by biology or judged by

internal standards of morality and truth. For queer theorists, sexuality is a complex array of

social codes and forces, forms of individual acitivity and institutional power, which interact

to shape the ideas of what is normative and what is deviant at any particular moment, and
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Chapter I: Introduction

which then operate under what is ‘natural’, ‘essential’, ‘biological’, or ‘god-given’. Broadly

speaking, queer describes those gestures or analytical models which dramatise incoherencies

in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire.

Resisting that model of stability- which claims heterosexuality as its origin, - queer focuses

on mismatches between sex, gender and desire. Institutionally, queer has been associated

most prominently with lesbian and gay subjects- but its analytic framework also includes

such topics as cross-dressing, hermaphroditism, gender ambiguity and gender-corrective

surgery. The association between queer practices and deviancy opens the growth and

popularity of the queer culture which as an ideological standpoint represents the queer

community - its arts, lifestyles, institutions, writings, politics, relationships and everything

encompassed in culture. Eve Sedgwick drawing on the work of Derrida and Foucault offers

a summary of what queer theory aims to cover. ‘Queer’, she writes in Tendencies (1994), can

refer to ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses

and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s

sexuality aren’t made or can’t be made to signify monolithically’.

The main project of queer theory is exploring the contestations of the categorisation

of gender and sexuality. Theorists claim that identities are not fixed- they cannot be

categorised and labelled – because identities consist of many varied components and that to

categorise by one characteristic is wrong. Queer theory, thus includes a wide array of

previously considered non-normative sexualities and sexual practices in its list of identities.

The recent intervention of the word ‘queer’ in academic discourse suggests that queer

theory’s debunking of stable sexes, genders and sexualities develops out of a specifically

lesbian and gay reworking of the post-structuralist figuring of identity as a constellation of

multiple and unstable positions. Both the essentialist and the constructionist paradigm

became associated with the identity politics which powerfully marked lesbian and gay
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Chapter I: Introduction

activism before and after the Stone Wall riots in 1969. During the Post-Stone Wall era,

personal identity was more overtly sexualised and politicised. The debate about identity

which is a significant feature in the works of queer theorists like Butler, De Lauretis and

Sedgwick connects with an on-going investigation of the notion of identity in the historical-

philosophical contests. Queer theorists are wary of identity politics believing as they do that

identity is fluid. Queer theorists have also argued that identity politics tend to reinforce a web

of heterosexual and heterosexists ‘norms’. Building on these insights, queer theorists have

questioned the solidarity and pride aspects of homosexual liberation movements. They argue

among other things that lesbians and gays should not be grouped together given that their

separate histories are defined by gender differences. Judith Butler in this sense, writes,

‘identity can become a site of contest and revision’ (cited in Barry 1995: 144). Taking this

further, she argues that all identities, including gender identities, are ‘a kind of impersonation

and approximation...a kind of imitation for which there is no original’ (ibid. 145). This opens

the way to a post-modernist notion of identity as a constant switching among a range of

different roles and positions drawn from a kind of limitless data bank of potentialities.

Further, what is called into question here is the distinction between the naturally-given,

normative self of heterosexuality and the rejected other of homosexuality.

Butler outlines the queer project as activating an identity politics attuned to the

constraining effects of naming, of delineating a foundational category which precedes and

underwrites political intervention, that it may better be understood as promoting a non-

identity or even anti-identity-politics. The ‘Other’, in these formulations, is as much

something within us as beyond us, and ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ are always implicated in each other,

in the root sense of this word, which means to be intertwined or folded into each other. As

basic psychology shows, what is identified as the external ‘Other’ is usually part of the self

which is rejected and hence projected outwards. Another critic, who argues the fluidity of
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Chapter I: Introduction

identity, is Eve Sedgwick in her highly influential Epistemology of the Closet. Sedgwick

considers how coming ‘out of the closet’ (openly revealing one’s gay or lesbian sexual

orientation) is not a single absolute act. Gayness may be openly declared to family and

friends but not to employers and colleagues. Hence, being ‘in’ or ‘out’ is not a simple

dichotomy or a once and for all event. Sedgwick’s point, then, concerns the way subject

identity is necessarily a complex mixture of chosen allegiances, social position, and

professional roles, rather than a fixed inner essence.

Queer, then, is an identity category that has no interest in consolidating or even

stabilising itself. It maintains its critique of identity - focussed movements enabled in part by

the knowledge that identities are fictitious – that is, produced by and productive of material

effects but nevertheless arbitrary, contingent and ideologically motivated. For Halperin, as for

Butler, queer ‘does not designate a class of already objectified pathologies or

perversions...rather, it describes a horizon of possibilities whose precise extent and

heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance’ (cited in Jagose,

http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/ copyright.html). Queer thus, is an identity under

construction, a site of permanent becoming. It is likened to language which is never static but

is ever evolving. The key element is to view sexuality as constructed through discourse, with

no less or set of constituted pre-existing sexual realities but rather identities constructed

through discursive operations.

1.2 Post-Colonial Criticism

The past couple of decades have seen the publication of a vast number of cultural

critiques of empire and its aftermath designated with the label ‘post-colonial’. Despite their

many disparities of perspective and subject-matter, what the critical texts and studies which

make up this body of discourse share, is a single common reference point. They are all
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Chapter I: Introduction

broadly concerned with experiences of exclusion, denigration, and resistance under systems

of colonial control. Thus, the term post-colonialism addresses itself to the historical, political,

cultural, and textual ramifications of the colonial encounter between the West and the non-

West, dating from the sixteenth century to the present day. It considers how this encounter

shaped all those who were party to it: the colonizers as well as the colonized. In particular,

studies of post-colonial cultures, texts, and politics are interested in responses to colonial

oppression which were and are oppositional and contestatory, and not only openly so, but

those which were subtle, sly, oblique, and apparently underhand in their protests. ‘Post-

colonialism’ is thus, a name for critical theoretical approach in literary and cultural studies,

but it is also, as importantly, designates a politics of transformational resistance to unjust and

unequal forms of political and cultural authority which extends back across the twentieth

century, and beyond (Boehmer 2006: 340).

Post-colonial criticism draws attention to issues of cultural difference in literary texts

and is one of several critical approaches focussed in the works of Hollinghurst and Selvadurai

apart from the issues of gender, class and sexual orientation. The ancestry of post-colonial

criticism can be traced to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, published in French in

1961, and voicing what might be called ‘cultural resistance’ to France’s African Empire.

Fanon (a psychiatrist from Martinique) argued that the first step for ‘colonialised’ people in

finding a voice and an identity is to reclaim their own past. For centuries the European

colonising power will have devalued the nations past, seeing its pre-colonial era as a pre-

civilised limbo, or even as a historical void. Children, both black and white, will have been

taught to see history, culture and progress as beginning with the arrival of the Europeans. If

the first step towards a post-colonial perspective is to reclaim one’s own past, then the second

is to begin to erode the colonialist ideology by which that past has been devalued. Despite the

importance of theoretical concepts like orientalism, subalternity and hybridity some of the
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Chapter I: Introduction

most influential and compelling of post-colonial ideas continue to be those which initially at

least, emerge out of post-colonial literatures.

Post-colonial writers reject the claims to universalise canonical Western literature and

seek to show its limitations of outlook, especially its general inability to empathise across

boundaries of cultural and ethnic difference. Hollinghurst and Selvadurai point out the

cultural and social repressions that are experienced by their characters for being homosexual

in a heterosexual society. Post-colonial writers also examine the representations of other

cultures in literature. They show how such literature is often evasively and crucially silent on

matters concerned with colonisation and imperialism. They also foreground questions of

cultural difference and diversity and examine their treatment in relevant literary works. Post-

colonial writers also celebrate hybridity and ‘cultural polypalency’, that is, the situation

whereby individuals and groups belong simultaneously to more than one culture (Barry

2002). As Shyam Selvadurai states after writing Cinnamon Gardens ‘It’s not a novel that’s

merely set in that period – it’s a parable for today. So far, when I have sat down to write, I

have in mind a Sri Lankan readership. The Sri Lankan English-speaking upper-middle class –

it’s their sacred cows I am attacking. It’s them I am addressing. Ceylon is a multicultural

society, a mosaic, and we can’t use a British system, a Whitehall system here’ (Smith 1998:

3). Selvadurai’s works have posed creative challenges to Western understandings of the real

world and its relations to the smooth unfolding of identity - in formation. It is also within the

pages of post-colonial texts that the concept of subversive anti-colonial rewriting – the

dismantling and realigning of colonial systems meaning has been practically and forcefully

demonstrated.

Post-colonial writers also develop a perspective, not just applicable to postcolonial

literatures, whereby states of marginality, plurality and perceived ‘Otherness ‘are seen as

sources of energy and potential change. Hollinghurst and Selvadurai ranks as writers
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Chapter I: Introduction

celebrating this status of marginality, hybridity and the sexual ‘other’ as represented in their

works. Their thematic concerns have been contested as their novels portray richly developed

portraits of the ways in which sexuality, class, race, art and history enter into complex

interrelationships focusing almost exclusively on the experiences of gay men and gay

adolescence. Both Hollinghurst and Selvadurai as post-colonial gay writers mutually project

political agendas against repressive authority seeking social justice for the long crisis of

sexual definition and setting right the view that same-sex object choice is not a matter of

liminality or transitivity. Hollinghurst through his representation of the Margaret Thatcher

1980s Conservative Party and the relationship between politics and homosexuality and

Selvadurai by projecting the conventional morality and the power given to such forms of

discrimination to downgrade certain cultures in relation to others through the characters of

the Mudaliyar and the Mr Chelvaratnam. Hollinghurst and Selvadurai as post-colonial writers

thus, questions, overturns and critically refracts traditional set-up authority, its epistemologies

and forms of violence and its claims to superiority by engaging in questioning through their

works which aims to challenge structural inequalities bringing about social and political

justice.

1.3 Review of Literature

Foucault’s (1998) book, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality: 1 explores

the evolving social, economic and political forces that have shaped our attitudes to sex and

shows how we are in the process of making a science of sex which is devoted to the analysis

of desire rather than the increase of pleasure. His work in the field of sexuality makes sense

in relation to changes in sexuality as well as in relation to his important theorizations of

knowledge, discourse and power. It also continues to inform how sexualities and genders are

theorised today. Bristow (2007) in his book, Sexuality: The New Critical Idiom introduces

readers to the most influential contemporary theories of sexual desire. Revealing how
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Chapter I: Introduction

nineteenth-century scientists invented ‘sexuality’, he investigates why this term has been the

source of such controversy in modern culture. Analysing the work of Michel Foucault,

Joseph considers how the history of sexuality paved the way for queer theory today. Sullivan

(2008) in his book A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory aims to consider critiques of

normalising ways of knowing and of being that may not always initially be evident as sex-

specific – hence the inclusion of topics such as community, popular culture, race and so on.

This sort of approach is crucial, if we are to understand the broader significance of queer

theory and the extensive range of ways in which notions of sexuality and gender impact – at

times implicitly – on everyday life. Whilst the list of topics covered in the book is far from

exhaustive, the theories and issues discussed do lend themselves to other applications. For

instance, the analysis of the culturally and historically specific ways in which transsexualism

and transgender have been understood and experienced may well prove useful for those

interested in intersex issues. The aim of the book is to queer – to make strange, to frustrate, to

counteract, to deligitimise, to camp up- heteronormativeknowledges and institutions, and the

subjectivities and socialities that are (in)formed by them and that (in)form them. Freud (1905)

in his book Three Essays on the Theory of Sexualitywas originally published by Freud in

1905 and reedited by him over the course of his life. The edition reprinted is the 1949 London

edition translated by James Strachey. In this work Freud advanced his theory of sexuality, in

particular its relation to childhood. The three essays are ‘The Sexual Aberrations’, ‘Infantile

Sexuality’ and ‘The Transformation of Puberty’.. Freud’s work, like Foucault’s, is essential

reading. While some of his specific arguments surrounding the sexual development of the

subject raise rather than resolve problems, his contributions to how we understand sexuality

and everyday life, sexuality and desire, sexuality and culture, are fascinating and deeply

relevant to contemporary debates. Freud’s work has been important to literary, feminist,
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Chapter I: Introduction

Marxist, queer and Lacanian studies that it is worth making the effort to grapple with some of

his arguments and ideas

Butler (2007) in her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

states the aim of the text was to “open up the field of possibility for gender without dictating

which kinds of possibilities ought to be realised.” She further explains that the text sought to

wield a discourse of truth to delegitimate minority gendered and sexual practices. Gender

Trouble had considerable bearings on much of the thinking which took place in the sphere of

feminist theory during the 1990’s. Butler (1993) in her other book Bodies That Matter states

the discourse of ‘construction’ that has for the most part circulated in feminist theory is

perhaps not quite adequate to the task at hand. It is not enough to argue that there is no

prediscursive ‘sex’ that acts as the stable point of reference on which, or in relation to which,

the cultural construction of gender proceeds. To claim that sex is already gendered, already

constructed, is not yet to explain in which way the ‘materiality’ of sex is forcibly produced.

What are the constraints by which bodies are materialised as ‘sexed’, and how are we to

understand the ‘matter’ of sex, and of bodies more generally, as the repeated and violent

circumscription of cultural intelligibility? Which bodies come to matter – and why? This text

is offered, then, in part as a rethinking of some parts of Gender Trouble that have caused

confusion, but also as an effort to think further about the workings of heterosexual hegemony

in the crafting of matters sexual and political. Bodies That Matter consolidated Butler’s place

and impact in the sphere of queer theory and studies.

Sedgwick (2008) in her book Epistemology of the Closet questions how we, thinking

from one fleeting historical moment, can wrap our minds properly around the mix of

immemorial, seemingly fixed discourses of sexuality and, at the same time, around discourses

that may be much more recent, ephemeral, contingent. We can’t even tell reliably which ones

are which. So it shouldn’t be surprising that, as current as Epistemology of the Closet may
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Chapter I: Introduction

feel in many respects, in others it bears the mark of its origin in a different decade – not to

mention a different century and millennium. Sedgwick proposes that many of the major

nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are

structured –indeed fractured – by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual

definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the twentieth century. The book argues

that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely

incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a

critical analysis of modern homo/ heterosexual definition; and it will assume that the

appropriate place for the critical analysis to begin is from the relatively decentered

perspective of modern gay and antihomophobic theory. As a critical rearticulation of various

theoretical practices, including feminist and queer studies, Sedgwick (1985)in her book,

Between Men: English Literature & Male Homosocial Desire talks about gender studies,

men’s studies and gay studies turning queer theory from a latent to a manifest discipline.

Sedgwick’s work has enlivened and enriched the study of sexualities over the last decade.

Nardi’s (2000) book, Gay Masculinities attempts to understand men and masculinity

providing a comprehensive understanding of gender and gender relationships in the

contemporary world. The chapters illustrate the conflation of gender and sexual orientation

and raises salient questions about social construction and relational nature of femininity and

masculinity. It also attempts to understand how contemporary gay men in the United States

engage in contest, reproduce, and modify hegemonic masculinities. Vicinus (1994) has in his

article; TheAdolescent Boy: Fin de Siecle Femme Fatale discusses the adolescent boy as a

vessel where the author as well as the reader could pour his or her anxieties, fantasies, and

sexual desires. He also points out the striking feature of the late Victorian culture with its

emotional focus on boys.

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Chapter I: Introduction

Aaron (2003) in his article, Choosing Sides: Gender and Sexuality as Boundaries in

Funny Boy and Cereus Blooms at Night examines gender stereotypes imposed by family and

society that explicitly demarcate the separate words of boy and girl. Arjie’s sexuality is

negotiated solely within the confines of gender, male and female. His exclusion from both the

boys and girls suggests that Arjie himself inhabits some third space in between these two, but

that third space is merely described as funny and never named. Waters (1998) portrays

Shyam’s figure as a gay man in relation to his protagonist Balendran in Cinnamon Gardens

in his article, Shyam Selvadurai on his Alternate Selves in Cinnamon Gardens. He imagines

Balendran as a phantom figure walking step by step with him. It also relatively brings out

Shyam’s decision to return to Sri Lanka to get to the emotional core of that ‘phantom self’

and the hurdles associated with rebelling against conformity. Shankar (1999) in his article,

Love, Rebellion and Punishment in Ceylon elaborately looks into disturbing stories involving

Hindus and Christians, Tamils, Sinhalese and the British – the gays and lesbians and

heterosexuals. It also examines the price individuals paid for their rebellion against

conventional life. Rigidity around Annalukshmi and Balendran in Cinnamon Gardens and

around Arjie Chelvaratnam in Funny Boy brings out the challenges these characters undertake

to meet societal norms.

Hitchings (2004) in his paper The Double Curve combines the fathoms of male

sexuality as presented in The Line of Beauty with an unsentimental moral intelligence and an

ear for the glorious fatuities of fine living that recalls Thackeray as well as Firbank. It also

talks about the rampant nature of HIV infusing the characters’ lusts with a deathly

significance. The article casts a revealing light on the implications of the virus for

homosexual man. It also points out the vastly disingenuous treatment of homosexuality by

politicians. The article also presents characters like Gerald openly demonizing homosexuality

and gay self-expressions, laughing at the idea of equal rights during his conversation with
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Chapter I: Introduction

Nick, the main protagonist. Cox (2001) in his article, The Pain and Joy of The Spell presents

the pain and joy of The Spell as a comedy of manners depicting the torrid emotions and

passions simmering below a very well bred British unctuous demeanour. It also looks into the

inside of life rather than the outside dropping the formal, crusty facade to the real self inside

and the experiences associated with homosexuality and the hallucinatory, rapturous narcotics

in contemporary London.

Penrose (2001) in his article, Hidden in History: Female Homoeroticism and Women

of a ‘Third Nature’ in the South Asian Past talks about the role of ‘hijra’ which is notably

absent in most present-day South Asian cultures as a masculine ‘third-gender’ role for

women. He mentions on ‘lesbian invisibility’ in South Asia and the South Asian Diaspora,

recounting frightful tales of women who identify as lesbians but whose families force them to

marry. Although female gender variance now finds little acceptance except in a few remote

areas of India, an examination of ancient and pre-colonial texts reveals that distinct social and

economic roles once existed for women thought to belong to a third gender. Hidden in

history, these women dressed in men’s clothing, served as porters and personal bodyguards to

kings and queens, and even took an active role in sex with women. Duberman, Vicinus and

Chauncey (Ed. 1991) in their book Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian

Past has a really useful collection of essays on lesbian and gay history. Without peer, this

volume, gathers together the works of the most exciting scholars in the dynamic field of

homosexual studies, making this a ground-breaking and provocative work that reveals the

history of gays and lesbians in different cultures and eras.

Misra and Chandiramani (2005) in their volume Sexuality, Gender and Rights:

Exploring Theory and Practice in South and Southeast Asia documents work across

intersecting categories and seeks to demonstrate how linking gender and sexuality issues with

human rights can have practical impacts on individual lives. Although the collections of
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Chapter I: Introduction

articles cover sexuality, gender and rights, the weight of the volume is on sexuality, since this

area has been the subject of less investigation than the field of gender and rights. The book

explains the theoretical underpinnings of the project, tracing the development of the linkages

of sexuality, gender and rights, both worldwide and in Asia. It suggests that the concept of

‘sexual rights’, which links different aspects of sexuality to a range of specific rights claims

(e.g., for equality, non-discrimination, freedom from violence and the right to sexual health)

is being increasingly used to build the conditions for new claims of inclusion. It then outlines

the aims of the volume, before concluding with a discussion of its practical implications. Roy

(1999) in her book Patterns of Feminist Consciousness in Indian Women Writers states an era

of rapid social changes, Indian women writers have a vital role in defining and formulating

contemporary consciousness. This book is a significant comparative study of five selected

novels on the basis of different patterns of feminist consciousness depicted in the narratives.

The study reveals interesting variations in the manner in which different authors handle the

problem of female selfhood. Making flexible use of a wide range of feminist theories, the

book explores the fictional depiction of various repressive forces marginalising Indian

women, the gradual questioning of these forces in the narratives and the ultimate resolutions

suggested, either directly through the characters, or indirectly through devices like images,

symbols, narrative structures and strategies., making a right contribution to the growing

corpus of feminist literature.

1.4 Alan Hollinghurst and His Works

Alan Hollinghurst was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, England in 1954. He read

English at Magdalen College, Oxford graduating in 1975 and subsequently took the further

Degree of Master of Literature in the year 1979. While in Oxford, he was awarded the

Newdigate Prize for Poetry in 1974. Late in the 1970’s he became a Lecturer at Magdalen

and then at Somerville College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1981, he moved on to
 18
Chapter I: Introduction

lecture at University College, London and joined The Times Literary Supplement the same

year as the paper’s Deputy Editor. Hollinghurst is openly gay (Stephen 2004: 1) and lives in

London.

Hollinghurst was one of Granta magazine’s ‘Best of Young British Novelist’ in 1993,

his writing is therefore, clever and highly literary. His acclaimed first novel The Swimming

Pool Library (1988) won the Somerset Maugham Award (1989) and was also hailed as ‘The

Best Book about Gay Life yet Written by an English Author’ (White 1988: 2). The novel

gives a vivid account of London gay life in the early 1980’s through the story of a young

aristocrat, William Beckwith, and his involvement with the elderly Lord Nantwich. It focuses

on the friendship of two men, William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of

priviledge and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwitch, an old Africa hand, searching for

someone to write his biography and inherit his traditions. A critical chance meeting in a gay

locale public toilet between Beckwith and Lord Nantwitch where Beckwith saves the life of

the elderly collapsed Lord Nantwich; leads to a friendship between the avuncular survivor

and his life saver.

It takes place in London during 1983 and in retrospect constitutes and extended elegy

to a pre-AIDS era of reckless sex and open relationships. Lord Nantwitch belongs to a more

furtive era in gay life. The peer asks Beckwith to write his biography, and the materials

teasingly given out by him piece together the ‘crazes mosaic’ of his life, as a Colonial

administrator in Sudan during the 1920s who later served time in prison for homosexual

offences. The novel beautifully balances an air of mystery with a rich portrait of past

homosexual history – from the romantic 1920s to the promiscuous 1970s-80s. The Swimming

Pool Library is an enthralling, darkly erotic novel of homosexuality before the scourge of

AIDS. The novel possesses a chilling clarity for ways of life that can no longer be lived with

impunity. Disease and death are far from the mind of young connoisseur William Beckwith,
 19
Chapter I: Introduction

who is initially conscious only of ‘riding high on sex and self esteem…it was my time, my

belle epogue’ (Hollinghurst 1988: 6). Beckwith’s hedonistic lifestyle revolves around daily

exercise-and-gossiping visits to the Corinthian Club, ‘gloomy underworld full of life, purpose

and sexuality’ (Hollinghurst 1988: 13).

The novel’s title emerges in chapter 7 of the novel where William explains about his

prep school, Winchester College (for some errant Wykehamical reason) where prefects were

known as ‘Librarians’, the designation often taking a prefix to indicate the particular prefect’s

area of responsibility. ‘So there were the Chapel Librarian, the Hall Librarian, the Garden

Librarian and even more charmingly, the Running and the Cricket Librarians’ (Hollinghurst

1989: 163). Will was a keen swimmer at school as afterwards, so he is appointed ‘Swimming

Pool Librarian’. His father writing to offer congratulation, amusedly comments, ‘…you must

tell me what sort of books they have in the Swimming Pool Library’ (Hollinghurst 1989:

163). Also at Charles Nantwich’s home there is a room that has served as a library and was

itself once a Roman bath and, Will exchanges trashy homoerotic novels with one of the

lifeguards at the swimming pool at the Corinthian club. This as well, then is a swimming pool

library.

The novel is pervaded with references to Ronald Firbank, up until the very last page.

Many of Ronald Firbank’s novels are also mentioned which echoes themes central to The

Swimming Pool Library; secrets and discretions, extreme old age, colonialism, race and

camp; the sense of deeper truths residing behind a thin facade of artifice. Homophobia is

addressed in many forms in the novel through getting arrested by the police and by gay-

bashing. At Nantwich’s house, Will and Charles talk about Ronald Firbank. Charles gives

Will a beautiful edition of one of Firbank’s novels as a gift. Afterwards, Will goes to Arthur’s

address in a working class area of London and calls but there is no answer. (Arthur is William

Beckwith’s black boyfriend). Returning, he encounters a group of skinheads who demand his
 20
Chapter I: Introduction

watch, attack and queer-bash him, destroying the Firbank novel in the process. The novel is

also concerned with the lives of gay men before the Gay Liberation Movement, both in

London and in the colonies of the British Empire. It beautifully welds the standard

conventions of fiction to a tale of modern transgressions.

It was followed by The Folding Star (1994) which was short listed for the Booker

Prize for Fiction and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). This hypnotic

and exquisitely written novel tells the story of Edward Manners, a sentimentally detached

thirty-three year old English gay man who leaves England to earn his living as a private

language tutor in a Flemish city. The exquisite prose of this novel delineates a man’s aching

melancholy and longing for love despite his odd sexual economy during the few years prior

to his arrival in Belgium. Edward falls desperately in love with Luc Altidore, his student.

This desire is inflated by continual frustration and is pushed to absurdly funny lengths when

the boy later goes on the run. At the same time, he is employed to work with Marcel’s father,

Paul, on a catalogue of an obscure artist, Orst, a symbolist artist of the 1890s with a tortured

love life who, he later finds out, came to a squalid end many years later during the wartime

occupation. EdgardOrst’s pursuit of his muse, a beautiful English actress, to her death, begins

to infiltrate Manners’ own desperate feelings for Luc. Edward’s obsession with Luc causes

more problems than he could possibly imagine, and reveals secrets he could not dream of.

The adoration quickly becomes a morbid infatuation that manifests into a pepperoni type of

spying on the boy during his weekend excursion. He has no doubt driven Edward mad at

times – he feels empty and is aching for him. The boy has affected everything Edward does to

the point that he suffers without feeling afflicted. The stream of consciousness reflects

Manners’s despair over the unfulfilled love. He can only console himself with other affairs to

which no sentiment constitutes, other than the minimal trust of two people pleasuring

themselves together without much grasp of friendship or understanding.

 21
Chapter I: Introduction

The Folding Star is about the unrequited love that leaves a man constantly longing,

without the prospect of ever finding love. The mixed feelings of anxious longing and fear of

commitment constitute a poignant air that hovers over the novel. It delivers the message that

the course of true love never runs straight. The novel is a stoic tale about the quest for love.

Edward Manners lives among many gay men not only in the regard of the longing for a

relationship but also in the sense of the nervousness, excitement, sensuality and anxiety. It

exquisitely depicts the nuances of affection, the anticipation for intimacy, and the desire of

fulfilment of unconditional needs. This novel has been compared by many critics to Thomas

Mann’s novella Death in Venice. Like his forerunner von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s

novel who obsesses over the beautiful Tadzio, and the artist Orst, Edward is a lover of

beauty, not a lover of people and people’s beauty is fleeting. The long-lost Jane Byron,

beloved model for Orst, had swum out to sea at Ostend, Belgium, decades ago and was never

seen again leaving the artist with a life-long obsession for painting her image. The beautiful

youth Luc, obsessive love interest of the protagonist Manners, also disappears. Thus, the

disappearance of Jane Byron, Orst’s beautiful model, and later of Luc, Edward’s version of

Tadzio, represents how cruel life can be to those who worship at Beauty’s altar. Luc is last

seen looking out from one of many photographs of missing children on a bulletin board at the

beach in Ostend. Thus, like Jane Byron, he ultimately ends up existing only within a frame,

and his disappearance is poetically linked to the ‘shiftless’ North Sea waves at the famous

beach. With this novel, Hollinghurst exposes us fearlessly to the consequences of unfulfilling,

annihilating desire.

His next novel The Spell (1998) is a gay comedy of manners which interweaves the

complex relationship between forty year old architect Robin Woodfield, his alcoholic lover

Justin and Justin’s ex-timid civil servant Alex, who falls in love with Robin’s son Danny. The

novel is much shorter than his other novels and funnier. The story alternates between Dorset
 22
Chapter I: Introduction

– where Robin shares a house with the impossibly self involved Justin and London. When

Justin’s ex, Alex, arrives for a weekend in the country, the atmosphere is instantly rich with

jealousy and power plays. And after the trio is joined by a younger gay man, Danny who

turns out to be Robin’s son the attractions and duplicities multiply exponentially. Various

sub-plots and parings of characters are interwoven around a central theme of romantic sexual

disillusionment. Most of the characters are metropolitan sophisticates in search of good

country life, who drive down from London to the Dorset weekend cottage. Alex is introduced

to the drug ‘ecstasy’ by Robin’s son Danny who also introduces him to ‘house’ and ‘techno’

music. Alex starts on a journey of self-discovery, feeling himself, ‘released’ by the drugs,

allowing himself to indulge in romantic illusions about Danny. Alex’s despairing

involvement eventually reconciles him sadder and wiser to life. Money- its capacity for

instant access to pleasure, with ambiguous moral consequences is a persistent minor thing in

most of Hollinghurst’s novels. The Spell also has the theme of money, sex and art

heartbreakingly, entwined.

The play has musical prose and is highly sensual apart from being deeply witty. Even

the birds in this novel modulate their song from somnolent calls to outright chuckles –

echoing the pleasures and absurdities of the humans they circle. And the author’s feel for the

easy intimacies and brutalities that his characters exchange is unmatched. Apart from

effectively capturing different generations and bringing in the theme of homosexuality

Hollinghurst deals openly with the theme of AIDS and drugs. AIDS is dealt with very

obliquely and marginally and as a gay writer this was an expectation in his writing. He

explores the lives of gay men, their internal feelings and thoughts with the intention of

driving a change in attitudes towards homosexuality. The novel attempts an ambitious

exploration of gay male experiences and relationships. Each of the four principle characters

muddles along professionally, socially and romantically in the grip of their own distinctive
 23
Chapter I: Introduction

obsession or spell. Moving confidently among their several viewpoints, Hollinghurst brings

these four into an out of varying degrees of intimacy and commitment.

His most recent novel, The Line of Beauty (2004) traces a decade of change and

tragedy. It won the 2004 Men Booker Prize for Fiction; it was also short-listed for the

Whitbread Novel Award, the British Book Award, Author of the Year and Commonwealth

Writers Prize. The book touches upon the emergence of HIV/AIDS, as well as the

relationship between politics and homosexuality, exposing heterosexual hypocrisy towards

homosexual promiscuity. The novel has been compared to Antony Powell’s A Dance to the

Music of Time (Hickling 2004: 4) with special regard to Powell’s character Nicholas Jenkins

(Quinn 2004: 4). The protagonist has also been likened to Nick Carraway in F. Scott

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Set in the UK in the early to mid-1980s the story surrounds

the post-Oxford life of the protagonist, Nick guest who is a James scholar in the making and a

tripper in the fast gay culture of the time, is staying in London with the Fedden family –

whose son, Toby, was Nick’s dearest friend at Oxford. The book is divided into three

sections, dated 1983, 1986 and 1987. The first section shows Nick moving into the Notting

Hill mansion of Gerald Fedden, one of Thatcher’s Tory MPs, at the request of the minister’s

son, Toby. Nick becomes settled on the less worldly business of post graduate study

specifically, a thesis concerned with style in the works of Conrad, Meredith and Henry

James. Nick is a typical Jamesian scholar obsessed with aesthetic beauty, who is coming of

age against the backdrop of Thatcher – era England. He is an outsider – gay, living with a

wealthy family. Nick is typical of the young man who populates Hollinghurst’s novel:

beautiful, intelligent, scholarly yet thoughtless. His hosts are seduced by his gravity and shy

polish and mesmerised by his wit and perspicacity. Nick in the novel is a spectator disguised

as an actor. Although Nick is not the novel’s narrator, events are consistently seen from his

point of view and the result is that the novel’s pages are suffused with a queasy aestheticism.
 24
Chapter I: Introduction

The novel also presents the rampant nature of HIV by infusing the characters’ lust with a

deadly significance.

As in Hollinghurst’s previous books, the theme of sex and lust is minutely depicted.

Of necessity, every male character has his sexual potential assayed revealing light on the

implications of the virus for homosexual men. He also points out the vastly disingenuous

treatment of homosexuality by politicians. Nick by his proximity to the Feddens attends

swank parties, packed with MPs, cabinet ministers and nobility, all of whom harbour the

expectation that ‘the Lady’ might appear at any minute. The book explores the attention

between Nick’s intimate relationship with the Feddens, in whose parties and holidays he

participates, and the realities of his sexuality and gay life, which the Feddens accept only to

the extent of never mentioning it. Nick has his first romance with a black council worker, Leo

Charles whom he meets through a Lonely Hearts Club. The relationship is a sexual education

for Nick. Leo dies from AIDS, presumably contracted from his ex-boyfriend Pete. Nick later

develops a relationship with Antoine Wani Ouradi, the son of a rich Lebanese businessman

and a friend of Nick and Toby from Oxford University. He later contracts AIDS from Nick.

He remains closeted until the end. Nick’s transgressions in the novel supposedly enlightens

Gerald Fedden, father of Toby, a conservative MP, yet, even after several illuminating

conversations with Nick, he still maintains the culture of intolerance. Appearing on the BBCs

‘Question Time’ he laughs off the idea of equal rights with regards to homosexual men. Yet,

as Hollinghurst implies, Gerald and his like cause far more damage than any disease, their

blithely self-serving policies devastate swaths of Britain and their sexual conduct destroys

more families than any amount of gay self-expression. The novel thus, explores the themes of

hypocrisy, homosexuality, madness and wealth, with the emerging AIDS crisis forming a

backdrop to the book’s conclusion. The title of the book The Line of Beauty refers to the

double ‘S’ of the ogee shape, described by William Hogarth in his The Analysis of Beauty as
 25
Chapter I: Introduction

the model of beauty. Conjured by Nick to describe a lover’s body, it also illustrates the ways

in which opposite compulsions and conflicting feelings flow into each other incessantly.

Most of Hollinghurst’s novels are conceived brilliantly on the solipsism of love, the

rituals of homosexuality, the vertigo of passion and the apocalypse of AIDS. Though most of

his writings have been marginalised by its flagrant queerness and its opulently open

descriptions of homosexuality and sex, yet perhaps these are strengths in Hollinghurst as a

contemporary post-colonial gay writer. Three of Hollinghurst’s four novels are tragicomedies

of manners in which a history is gradually made explicit through the lives of the protagonist.

Through these novels Hollinghurst brings to light a buried history of gay London, from the

Romans to the 1950s, its writers and musicians from Shakespeare to Pope, Wilde to James,

E.M. Foster and Brittan to Firbank. Themes of violence and racism darken some of these

books while some talk about the darkening shadow of AIDS and death. His three novels The

Folding Star, The Line of Beauty and The Spell all talk about the penumbral presence of

AIDS with frequent connections between sex, AIDS and money. Although the main

protagonists of all his novels are young gay men, his novels strictly speaking do not come

under the category of a ‘gay novel’ but is more about the unravelling of a family that happens

to have a gay man at its centre. His novels are a survey of gay life over the past two decades

exposing mainly gay London and also revealing shades of his own sexuality. Alan

Hollinghurst ranks as one of Britain’s premier writers of fiction. He owes this status to a

combination of stylistic qualities and thematic interests as well as to the socio-cultural

context within which his work has emerged. His style has a touch of wit, lyricism and pitch-

perfect dialogue which finds great admiration from many fellow writers as well. His novels

are a presentation of richly developed portraits of the ways in which sexuality, class, race, art

and history enter into complex interrelationships. They excel at psychological depth and

social satire apart from focussing on the experiences of highly educated gay men. It is this
 26
Chapter I: Introduction

focus that also explains the importance of historical context in the establishment of his

reputation as Britain’s first and foremost gay novelist – a status which was solidified by the

aesthetic merits of his later works, culminating in his winning of 2004 Men Booker Prize.

1.5 Shyam Selvadurai and His Works

Shyam Selvadurai is a Sri Lankan Canadian novelist, essayist and a writer for

television, born in 1965 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and is of mixed Tamil and Sinhala

background, (mother – Sinhalese, father – Tamil), members of conflicting ethnic groups

whose troubles form a major theme in his work. Ethnic riots in 1983 drove the family to

immigrate to Canada. Selvadurai was nineteen. He studied creative and professional writing

as part of a Bachelor of Fine Arts Programme at York University. Upon graduation, he

produced work for magazines and television. His fiction and essays have appeared in journals

and anthologies. As a Sri Lankan-Canadian gay writer Shyam Selvadurai’s literary output has

been relatively modest thus far. Funny Boy, his first novel, was published to acclaim in 1994.

It won the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award and, in the U.S; the Lambda

Literary Award for Best Gay Men’s Fiction and was named a Notable Book by the American

Library Association. His second novel, Cinnamon Gardens (1998) was short-listed for the

Trillium Award in Canada, the Aloa Literary Award in Denmark and the

PremioInternazionale Riccardo Bacchelli in Italy. Selvadurai’s third novel, Swimming in the

Monsoon Sea published in 2005 was a finalist for Canada’s most prestigious literary award,

the Governor’s General Awards, in the category of Children’s Literature. It was honoured

with a Lambda Literary Award in the Children’s & Youth Literature category in 2006, the

Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award and the Silver Winner in the Young

Adult Category of Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award. He has also edited a

collection of short stories, Story Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers (2004),

which includes works by Salman Rushdie, Monica Ali and HanifKureishi, among others. He
 27
Chapter I: Introduction

is represented in the anthology by “Pigs Can’t Fly,” the first of the six stories that comprise

Funny Boy.

Almost all of Selvadurai’s works are informed by meticulous research and a haunting

evocation of Sri Lanka, which remains vital in his imagination despite his having lived in

Canada for so many years. All his novels have a subtle and deeply humane style, wit and

perspicacity that establish him not only as an important chronicler of the complexities of

social and cultural difference but also ensures his place as a significant figure in post-colonial

and gay writing. As the Sri Lankan critic Prakrti has noted, ‘Selvadurai’s particular gift is to

understand how such factors as ethnic tensions and the legacy of British colonial rule are

interweaved with dominant ideologies of sexuality and gender’ (Hunn 2005: 1).

His first novel Funny Boy announced Selvadurai as a major new voice in Canadian,

post-colonial and gay literature. Funny Boy was set in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, in the

seven years leading up to the bloodying riots that erupted in 1983 between the Buddhist

Sinhalese majority and the minority Hindu Tamils. The novel is autobiographical in certain

respects as it was the same communal riots that led Selvadurai’s parents – his father Tamil,

his mother Sinhalese to migrate from Sri Lanka. As an immigrant writer Selvadurai

acknowledges the fact that a homeward pull to Sri Lanka inhabited his creative mind

capturing a world that hunted his imagination. He further regards the isolation from that

world and the act of migration important for the creation of Funny Boy. The novel is a

moving and honest coming out story of, Arjie Chelvaratnam as he grows from a ridiculed

‘funny boy’ more content to dress up as ‘bride-bride’ with his female cousins than play

cricket with the males, to an intelligent, reflective teenager dangerously awakened by his first

love, rebellious schoolmate Shehan. Set in Sri Lanka, the novel charts a boy’s loss of

innocence as he grapples with family conflict, political realities and his homosexuality.

Funny Boy is innovatively structured as ‘a novel in six stories.’ In structure, the novel bears
 28
Chapter I: Introduction

close resemblance to two novels published by gay writers in Canada during that period:

Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony (1995) and Derek McCormack’s Dark Rides (1996).

The novel gives a brilliant portrait of the anxieties aroused by gender non-conformity,

especially in patriarchal societies. The story revolves around Arjie Chelvaratnam who hates

sports and enjoys wearing his aunt’s jewellery and playing the role of bride in imaginary

weddings. His worried father, a wealthy hotelier, sends him to a strict private academy

hoping it will force his son ‘to become a man’ (Selvadurai 1994: 205). Instead, Arjun,

rebelling against a sadistic principle, strikes up an intense friendship with a fellow renegade

pupil, Shehan, who is rumoured to be gay. After their first sexual encounter, Arjun’s

immediate feelings are anger and guilt, but he gradually comes to accept his sexuality and his

love for Shehan. The story is shot through with the tensions and bloody violence between Sri

Lanka’s Buddhist Sinhalese majority and it’s Hindu Tamil minority. In loving Shehan, a

Sinhalese, Arjun, who is Tamil, breaks two taboos. Retribution follows and in 1983 Arjun

and his family migrate to Canada as penniless refugees. Selvadurai in the novel captures his

protagonist’s difficult passage into his own identity as a Sri Lankan and also as a homosexual

in Sri Lanka amid the political/ethnic tensions. The novel won the Lambda Literary Award

for gay male fiction and the books in Canada First Novel Award. In 2006, CBC radio

presented a radio dramatisation of the novel, directed by the filmmaker Deepa Mehta.

His next novel Cinnamon Gardens (1999) is about personal courage and liberation.

Set in Sri Lanka’s wealthy suburb in the 1920s Cinnamon Gardens is a novel about the risks

and rewards of Independence, whether the relationship is political or personal. It is also

wonderfully atmospheric, a fascinating and compiling portrait of time and a place. The name

Cinnamon Gardens comes from a fashionable district of Colombo and as such the setting is

in the tropically lush and socially complex Ceylon of the 1920s. The novel tells the story of

two people who must determine, if it is possible to pursue happiness without compromising
 29
Chapter I: Introduction

the happiness of others. Selvadurai focuses in part on Annalukshmi, one of the main

characters in the novel and a young woman from a proper respected family who chafes

against the traditional restrictions and pursues a teaching career in favour of an arranged

marriage. Annalukshmi is the eldest of three girls in the family, she is very much the new

woman: educated, independent and occasionally scandalous. She works as a school teacher

and has no desire to give up her job, which worries her family. As a woman Annalukshmi

cannot get legally married and remain employed. And, since she is the oldest daughter, this

puts her family in a difficult situation: Ceylonese society dictates that she must get married

before her sisters. Her father, Murugasu is estranged from the rest of the family and runs a

plantation in Malaya. Annalukshmi’s troubles begin when Murugasu notifies her mother that

he has selected a husband for Annalukshmi and will brook no disagreement.

AnnalukshmiKandiah often felt that the verse from that great work of Tamil

philosophy, the Tirukkural – ‘I see the sea of love, but not the raft on which to cross

it’ – could be applied to her own life, if ‘desire’ was substituted for ‘love’. For she

saw clearly the sea of her desires, but the raft fate had given her was so burdened

with the mores of the world that she felt it would sink even in the shallowest of

waters (Selvadurai 1998: 3).

The novel weaves in the complex yet striving story of Balendran Navaratnam along

with the social and cultural complexities of Ceylon in the 1920s. It’s also a time in which

every thing is changing. The British are making tentative steps towards de-colonisation and

the Island’s inhabitants are just beginning to face the many problems that will come with

self-government. Ceylonese society is deeply divided: long standing tensions between the

Sinhalese and the Tamils are resurfacing; the introduction of Western political ideology has

given birth to new conflicts; labour unions and universal suffrage are becoming prominent
 30
Chapter I: Introduction

issues; and the primarily conservative members of the upper classes are fervently lobbying

the British in an attempt to prevent social change.

Balendran is the steward of his formidable father’s holdings, which include a temple

and a prosperous agricultural estate. He is a liberal, and is deeply sympathetic to the new

movements brewing in the Island. His father, known simply as the Mudaliyar, in contrast is a

fervent conservative and a domineering patriarch. Balendran is trying hard to be a dutiful son

to his tightly controlling father, the Mudaliyar Navaratnam. Married to Sonia, a beautiful and

caring wife and a son who has gone abroad to University, Balendran is unable to forget his

lover Richard Howland with whom he left behind in London twenty years ago. Problems

arise when Richard Howland arrives from England. He is a journalist covering the

Donoughmore Commission hearings (which is examining issues of suffrage, self-government

and independence). After an awkward reconciliation, Balendran and Richard resume their

affair which leads to all sorts of difficulties as Balendran struggles to balance his familial

duties with his love for Richard and his own sense of morality. This uneasy reunion with a

lover from the past throws Balendran into turmoil and reignites tensions with his father who

had aborted their affair twenty years ago. Balendran thinks of the terrible time when the

Mudaliyar had come to his flat in London somehow knowing of his relationship with

Richard. Balendran’s story bashes against the boundaries of Ceylonese society in a dramatic

exploration of both individual and cultural differences.

Cinnamon Gardens is a novel critiquing the foolishness behind the prejudices of its

characters while acknowledging the great difficulties facing anyone who attempts simply to

shrug off the demands of their culture. Selvadurai’s characters in the novel are constantly

being confronted with choices, and none of them is simple. It is difficult to claim any moral

highground as there are no virtuous heroes or shiftless villains. Selvadurai almost invisibly
 31
Chapter I: Introduction

links the small, unknown individual with the faceless society, and portrays a nation on the

verge of a great change without seeming overtly political or pedantic.

Selvadurai’s third novel, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, was published in 2005 and

targeted to Young Adult Readers. Set in 1980, Sri Lanka, the novel chronicles a fourteen

year old Sri Lankan boy’s falling in love with his visiting Canadian cousin, Niresh, who turns

up with his father, who has come to sell off family property. Amrith is anxious to make a

connection. Eventually, he realises his feelings for Niresh go beyond friendship, which

finally makes him aware of his sexual identity. This novel is much closer stylistically to

European novels such as Per Nilsson’s You and You and You (2005) and Andreas

Steinhofel’sCentre of the Universe (2005). Swimming in the Monsoon Sea was a finalist for

Canada’s most prestigious literary award, the Governor General’s Awards, the category of

Children’s literature. It was honoured with a Lambda Literary Award in the same category.

The story is of fourteen year old Amrith, a boy orphaned in early childhood when his parents

died in a motorcycle accident. Amrith is adopted by old family friends, the felicitously

named aunty Bundle and uncle Lucky and their daughters, Mala and Selvi. The family is

privileged, cultured; warm hearted and tremendously kind to Amrith. The book explores both

the good and bad aspects of family: love and trust, inherited traits and feuds. Amrith is shy,

with few friends until his Canadian cousin Niresh visits Sri Lanka. The two boys

immediately hit it off. The facts of Amrith’s life are slowly and gently revealed over the

course of the book and Selvadurai paints a beautiful picture of Amrith’s growth and his

learning of acceptance.

Swimming in the Monsoon Sea is set in 1980, when being gay is at best the subject of

gossip and at worst illegal. Having lived a sheltered life, Amrith does not understand what

the gossip is about and becomes even more confused and storm-tossed as his feelings for

Niresh strengthen. Shakespeare’s Othello with its powerful theme of disastrous jealousy is
 32
Chapter I: Introduction

the backdrop to the drama in which Amrith finds himself immersed. Amrith’s jealousy leads

to Selvi, telling him ‘don’t be so jealous, you don’t own Niresh’ (Selvadurai 2005: 123). The

world Selvadurai creates in the novel is both believable and emotionally driven. Amrith

struggles with his friendship with Niresh, slowly falling in love with him and also with the

social and cultural repressions in the society that he is living in. Selvadurai allows Amrith to

be torn apart as he slowly comes out and also comes to terms with being gay in Sri Lanka

where homosexuality is not something that’s common or even talked about.

While Sri Lanka’s ethnic clashes may have led to Selvadurai’s family’s emigration,

the country’s homophobic attitudes, as expressed in anti-homosexual laws, have intensified

his embrace. He feels virtually alone as an openly gay cultural figure in Sri Lanka, but he

sees his first novel as having helped him put the issue of homosexuality on the table.

Selvadurai takes seriously both the effect his books may have on other young gay Sri

Lankan’s and his position as a role model for other gay Asians in North America. In

explaining his decision to be openly gay, he remarks, ‘I remembered how it was for me

feeling there was no one out there who was a role model of any sort. When I decided to be

out in public, I was really thinking of that version of me in Sri Lanka who would read my

book and feel relieved to not be alone. If I decided not to be out, I would be sending a

message to that young person that I was still afraid and ashamed’ (Hunn 2005: 2).

Selvadurai’s works are informed by meticulous research and a haunting evocation of

Sri Lanka which remains vital in his imagination, despite his having lived in Canada for so

many years. He clearly has a deep engagement with his country of birth and its troubled

history and the ethnic clashes that led his family to emigrate. His novels ‘share several

thematic pre-occupations with the inherited legacy of the British colonial past; with the more

recent strife caused by post-independence ethnic and religious divisions; with journeys of

migration and return; with the rending of families by long suppressed secrets, generational
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Chapter I: Introduction

conflicts, duties compelled and traditions neglected. In this regard, Selvadurai’s work has

much in common with that of other South Asian – Canadian writers like Neil Bisoondath,

M.G. Vassanji, Anita Rau Badami and Michael Ondaatje. However, what is distinctive about

Selvadurai’s novels, and what sets them apart from the above list, is their skilful interweaving

of issues of sexuality into the standard narrative of South Asian cultural dislocation’

(Dickinson 1998: 1).

1.6 Objectives and Significance of the Study

The study is conducted with the following objectives:

(a) To assess how the creation of queer identities has impacted upon the study of

literature.

(b) To study how the politics of transgression contribute to cultural and social repressions

in the works of Hollinghurst and Selvadurai.

(c) To critically look at how Hollinghurst and Selvadurai establishes their homosexual

identity and ties those stories to larger themes of family and country.

(d) To study how Hollinghurst and Selvadurai offer insights into the contemporary gay

world set against a wider backdrop of art in all forms and obsession, in the generally

well-to-do-world.

(e) To analyse how Hollinghurst and Selvadurai interweaves various sub-plots and

characters around a central theme of romantic sexual disillusionment.

Further, it creates avenues and prospects for future research works and studies on

Alan Hollinghurst and Shyam Selvadurai, and on gender and queer studies.

The research study aims to contribute significantly to the realm of knowledge in

general and literary studies in particular. The research also was intended to provide a better
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Chapter I: Introduction

critical understanding of the works of Alan Hollinghurst and Shyam Selvadurai. The

investigation and interpretation on the proposed line not only enhances the enjoyment of

reading literature and contributing to critical studies but also presents how these two writers

portray the complex issues around class, sexuality, race and minority groups as social reality

truths.

1.7 Materials and Methodology

The researcher undertook a modest study of some major perspectives on the issues of

gender and post-modern sexual identities, conflicting accounts of sexual orientation and

contemporary emphasis on sexual diversity in the novels of Alan Hollinghurst and Shyam

Selvadurai. The researcher finally argues to justify the title of the research consulting,

surveying and interpreting all the primary and secondary sources, interviews and other

authentic documents. As far as the documentation is concerned the latest edition of MLA

Handbook for Writers of Research Papers was followed.

1.8 Schematization of Chapters

The first chapter introduces Alan Hollinghurst and Shyam Selvadurai as creative

writers in English and their position as important post-colonial gay writers. Further, it

explores the works of Alan Hollinghurst and Shyam Selvadurai and the recurrent themes of

the personal and the political which exists in almost all their novels. The chapter surveys

related literatures and journals. The objectives and significance of the study, research

methodology is elaborated in this chapter.

Chapter two brings out how homosexuality has either been strategically suppressed or

categorically demonised in all straightgeist cultural representations and how it has been read

as a crime, sin, a disease and an abnormality in western societies in the later 19 th century. The

chapter looks into the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in some western countries in
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Chapter I: Introduction

the 20th century and how it has gained credibility as gay communities in literature, religious

institutions and civil rights organisations. The chapter looks into recent understandings of

queer studies (which include gay and lesbian theories; cultural studies and a portion of

gender/feminist debates) that have contributed to complex and nuanced studies of

homosexuality. It explains the term queer - long used pejoratively to refer to homosexuals,

especially male homosexuals – and how it has been reclaimed and embraced by queer

theorists. The work of queer theorists such as Eve K. Sedgwick, Judith Butlerand Michel

Foucault is extensively discussed and how their contributions have made to look at

homosexuality in a new perspective. The enriching ways that Queer theorists have suggested

to understand the on-going debates on gender and desire is developed throughout the

chapter.. When used to refer to sexual relations, queer encompasses any practice or behaviour

that a person engages in without any reproductive aims and without regard for social or

economic considerations. This chapter elaborately looks into contemporary approaches to

Gay/Lesbian and queer theories for a complete and comprehensive understanding of

homosexuality.

The third chapter addresses the issue of being ‘different’ in a funny way which does

not conform to accepted gender and sexual norms. The novels of Selvadurai give a brilliant

portrait of the anxieties aroused by gender non-conformity, especially in patriarchal societies.

Arjie Chelvaratnam in Funny Boy is ‘funny.’ He likes to wear saris and play with girls, and

hates sports. When Arjie is caught dressed in a sari his grandmother decides manual labour

will teach him to be more masculine. This is the first time Arjie is embarrassed about his

‘funniness’ though he does not understand why. Like Arjie, the other protagonists in the other

novels also experiences discomforts and risks associated with being a non-conformist in a

country with persistently traditional and conformist norms about sexuality. This chapter

focuses on the gradual and ultimate passage of the protagonist to accept their sexual identity.
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Chapter I: Introduction

It also highlights the author’s own passage to becoming gay openly. In his own words he

remarked ‘I remembered how it was for me feeling there was no one out there who was a role

model of any sort’. The chapter talks about the concept of a third gender as tendencies of the

unnamed third place and the metaphor of twilight moments that stigmatises identities and

forbidden acts. It will also bring to light the risks and the rewards of understanding and

experiencing sexual liberty and independence.

Chapter four focuses on how the novels of Hollinghurst bring to light a buried history

of gay London from the Romans to the 1950’s, its writers and musicians, from Shakespeare

to Pope, Wilde to James, Forster and Brittan to Firbank focussing mainly on the lives of gay

men before the gay liberation movement both in London and the colonies of Great Britain.

The chapter analyses contemporary gay life as represented in his novels, The Line of Beauty

and The Swimming Pool Library. The issues about class, family, social politics and sexuality

in the 80’s era London exploring related themes of hypocrisy, homosexuality, madness,

wealth, drugs and the emerging AIDS crisis in novels like The Spell and The Line of

Beautywhich forms a central backdrop of modern gay culture. This chapter also brings to

light the enticing yet painful panorama of metropolitan gay life highlighting gay parties, gay

clubbing and gay cruising.

The fifth chapter focuses on the cultural and traditional repressive forces that act like

an institution curtailing homosexual tendencies. It also highlights the importance of the

prejudices that the characters of Hollinghurst and Selvadurai are made to face and the great

difficulties that they have to endure while simply yet persistently trying to shrug off the

demands of their culture. Balendran in Cinnamon Gardens by Selvadurai is a character who

struggles with his identity and his homosexuality against the strictures of family, marriage,

and tradition. While conforming to social and cultural expectations he enters into a sexually

unfulfilling marriage, and reveals himself as a decent but weak individual, racked by the
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Chapter I: Introduction

guild he feels for neglecting his wife and for having betrayed his feelings for Richard. But by

the end of the novel, however, Balendran is able to see through the hypocrisies and deceits of

his society and, though remaining bound by his marriage and family, acknowledges his love

for Richard. Lord Charles Nantwich an 83 year old aristocrat is jailed for being a homosexual

in The Swimming Pool Library by Hollinghurst. The novel is pervaded with homophobia

which is addressed in many forms. Through Nantwich’s diary in the novel which is given to

William Beckwith, the life of gay men before the Gay Liberation Movement is brought to

light. From the moment Will starts reading his journals, new truths and new perspectives are

opened up to him. The Line of Beauty also talks about the tension and the realities of gay life

against the backdrop of Thatcher – Era England. Nick, the protagonist, who is new to both his

sexuality and the manners of high society, experiences the dangers and rewards of his own

private pursuit of a beautiful identity. The chapter opens the discussion to look into the forces

of repression and its social and cultural implications. It also mentions the nuances of gender

orientation and the policing of homosexuality and homosexuals by political and state

institutional forces like law makers, police authorities and social elites.

The concluding chapter contains a summing up of the aspects that have been

discussed in the previous chapters. This chapter makes an analysis of the novels of Alan

Hollinghurst and Shyam Selvadurai. It covers the far-reaching changes in the various stages

of evolving homosexual consciousness. It also brings out the influence of Alan Hollinghurst

and Shyam Selvadurai’s contribution as writers creating a forum in which the discussion of

homosexuality finds a way into social and literary discourse.