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.