The Degenerate in Falling Slowly (1998)

Silence and rereading are key discursive practices of Miriam and Beatrice Sharpe, the sister protagonists of Falling Slowly. Their forms of absence and excess cause critics to herald the decline of Brookner’s powers in her early reception.The sisters also share a number of behaviours with the aesthetes and Decadents labelled degenerate in Max Nordau’s Degeneration including Joris-Karl Huysmans, Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. Such behaviours include dullness, decline, ennui, inactivity, boredom, invisibility, anxiety, restlessness and absence. This chapter spins the hierarchical figure of the degenerate across the sister relationship of the domestic fiction to produce a queering of the domestic fiction. Rejecting the normative impulse of the figure, it instead engages its deconstructive capacity to render transparent the mechanisms of epistemological production and expose the way in which subjects and objects attain status as real or unreal, healthy or sick, visible or invisible, literal or figurative, heterosexual or lesbian. Inspired by Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, it mobilises a ‘no future’ narrative as the narrative form of the degenerate. The rhetorical form of syllepsis, which governs shifts between the literal and figurative, is reappropriated from the male canon to underscore the open-ended nature of signification.

The Dandy in Brief Lives (1990)

This chapter utilises tropes of French and British aestheticism to read character, female friendship and asexual sexuality in Brief Lives (1990). Brookner’s Brief Lives is explored as a text that embraces multiple performance modes through Fay Dodworth’s self-described dull and boring first-person narration and her biographical representation of anachronistic diseuse, Julia Morton’s, celebrity persona.Based on the intertextual indications between John Aubrey’s Brief Lives regarding inconsequential and scandalous detail, and the significance of nineteenth-century detail in aestheticism, the dandy is proferred as the novel’s key personae. Balzac’s understanding of the dandy as constituted by behaviours of talking, dressing, eating and walking operate as the central narrative categories through which Brookner’s text is read. It emphasises the text’s narrative orality and ex tempore forms, Julia’s styling by Madame Gres, Patou and Lelong, Fay’s delicately crafted menus, her walks through West London as well as a romance of interiors. In addition, the dandy’s particular forms of boredom, and gender, sexual and temporal subversion are engaged. Clara Tuite’s specification of the rise-and-fall narrative as the key form through which Captain Jesse James writes Life of George Brummell provides the device through which to propel the dandy’s movement through the text.

Introduction

This chapter establishes connections between Brookner’s novels A Friend from England (1987), A Misalliance (1986), Brief Lives (1990), Undue Influence (1998), Falling Slowly (1999) and Hotel du Lac (1984); her French Romantic art criticism in The Genius of the Future, Romanticism and its Discontents and Soundings; andthe queer nineteenth-century literary canon of the Romantics, Decadents and aesthetes including Stendhal, Baudelaire, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Karl-Joris Huysmans. It outlines the strange behaviour of the solitary yet homosocial ‘Brooknerine’ and her female friendships in the domestic fiction, and the mixed responses of Brookner’s early reception from 1980-2010 frequently organised by gender, temporal and heterosexual normativity which tethers behaviour to a unilateral historical context. Alternatively, Brookner’s performative Romanticism is delineated as a queer cross-historical, intertextual, temporal literary practice which combines nineteenth-century and contemporary behaviours, tropes, narrative devices and temporal periods to expand historical context and subject to cross gender and historical temporalities. The book’s queer lesbian, intertextual, cross-historical methodology is illuminated, along with its performing cast of Romantic personae of the military man, analysand, queer, aesthete, dandy, flâneur, degenerate and storyteller.

The Storyteller Returns: Hotel du Lac (1984)

The epilogue reads Hotel du Lac through the figure of the storyteller, which it links to the genius woman writer, and argues that Brookner’s Booker Prize winner proleptically anticipates her aestheticist emphasis on beauty, form and technique. Utilising Walter Benjamin’s essay on the storyteller, and iconic figures of Staël, Colette, Woolf and Proust, the storyteller is produced through narratives of exile and return and focuses on the craft of the writer and artist persona including misreading, reversal, orality, frame narrative, epistolary form, paraprosdokian and anagnorisis. Colette’s The Pure and the Impure helps contextualise Edith’s scopophilic fascination with the mother/daughter pairing of Iris and Jennifer Pusey, which symptomise as a homoerotic narrative excess in the unsent letters to her lover. Edith’s queer preoccupations further illuminate the satirical treatement of gender, love, marriage and the heterosexual romance narrative in Hotel du Lac and more broadly in Brookner’s oeuvre. Like most Brooknerines, Edith rejects conventional romance for the romance of art and women’s writing. In conclusion, this chapter reviews the cross-historical intertextual performance of creative male gender through the contemporary female subject which sanctions a host of queer possibilities between female characters and plotlines. It celebrates Brookner as consummate aesthete, artist and storyteller.

The Flâneur in Undue Influence (1998)

This chapter takes protagonist Claire Pitt’s speculative imagination, walking and misreading to read Undue Influence through the figure of the flâneur. Tracing the walking journeys undertaken by Claire Pitt and Martin Gibson, it presents a literal and literary map of the novel. It argues against Michel de Certeau’s assertion that maps constitute procedures for forgetting by demonstrating how Brookner’s women’s walking texts have been largely unrecognised. Drawing on Charles Baudelaire’s theories of Romantic imagination and walking, Harold Bloom’s narrative of intertextual influence and the rhetorical figure of peripeteia (reversal), this chapter recasts the relationship between Claire and Martin as the relationship between ephebe and precursor poet. In staging the performance of the flâneur, it rereads Undue Influence through the ‘revisionary ratios’ of Bloom’s narrative of influence—clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonisation, askesis, apophrades. It argues against the heterocentric presumption of Brookner’s reception in which personal and romantic failure is the dominant narrative to tell about the novel. By freighting emphasis on women’s creativity, imagination, artistry and subversion and finding new ways to read intersubjective relationships, this chapter underscores value and industry of the woman writer and women’s writing.

The Aesthete in A Misalliance (1986)

This chapter mobilises key nineteenth-century aestheticist motifs to render a Sapphic lesbian homoerotic in A Misalliance. Protagonist Blanche Vernon’s nympholepsy is related to the text’s sensual motifs and the intertextual matrix surrounding the ancient Greek poet Sappho. The novel’s early reception is reviewed, including comments by Frank Kermode and John Bayley whose gendered readings obscure the text’s symbolism. On the contrary—emblematic of contested narratives of lesbian sexuality, women’s writing and political subversion in Sapphic texts by Charles Baudelaire and Renée Vivien—Sappho becomes the intertextual springboard for the production of the aesthete. In addition to the sensual motifs of the novel, key behaviours of aestheticism are indicated across the intertextual arc between Brookner’s text and her aestheticist predecessors including Renaissance revival, the desire to live life as art, the homoerotic gaze, the backwards turn, a trans-generational homoerotic and the subversion of bourgeois utilitarianism and family life. The performance of the aesthete is staged across the rhetorical figure of metaleptic prolepsis as supplied by Thomas Bahti’s reading of Walter Benjamin, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s narrative of metamorphosis with its contours of guilt, punishment, redemption, purification and blessedness. Reasserting women’s contribution to Romantic aestheticism, Brookner is read as both women’s writer and aesthete.

The Military Man, the Analysand, and the Queer in A Friend from England (1987)

This chapter takes key discourses of Romantic masculinity to reimagine the relationship between female friends in A Friend from England (1987) and excavates three queer nineteenth-century narratives from the text. Based on an intertextual reading of Stendhal’s Scarlet and Black, Life of Henri Brulard and On Love, the figure of the military man is produced through behaviours of energy, passion, risk, duty, strategy, romantic love, obstacles, failure, experience and innocence. The performance of the military man is staged across the adventure narrative and the rhetorical figure of hendiadys to represent protagonist Rachel Kennedy’s cross-historical lesbian desire for Heather Livingstone. Rachel’s hydrophobia brings to light a network of psychoanalytic narrative associations and homiologia (inane repetition) arcing over Freud’s ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (‘Dora’) and Brookner’s novel. The figure of the analysand is sketched to emphasise a second historical formation of lesbian desire in A Friend from England. For the performance of the queer, Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle and Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray are recruited to read Rachel’s characterisation of Michael Sandberg through the rhetorical device of preterition and the narrative of the secret.