Betrayed by Beauty: Ethics and Aesthetics in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty

I

Art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences.

—Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction

At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering.

—Elaine Scarry, On Beauty

Bourdieu’s and Scarry’s antinomic views on art and beauty, that is, what the love of beautiful things means to us, lead to the theme of this essay: bewilderingly various notions of beauty and the beholder feeling deceived by them. Bourdieu’s sociological analysis of the class-bound concept of taste and Scarry’s philosophical meditation on beauty inspired by the Greek classics do not represent protean paradigms of aesthetics. Nor do I wish to choose one aesthetic discourse over another for legitimation.¹ But when there exist so many different ways of understanding a single concept—beauty being the case in point—the beholder is likely to feel betrayed by it eventually. Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004) follows the varied aesthetic experiences of Nick Guest, a twenty-one-year-old “solemn little blond boy” (14) who “just love[s] beautiful things” (6). As Nick moves from Oxford University into the posh Notting Hill residence of the Feddens as a lodger, “guest,” and children’s friend, he ecstatically enters into the mixed pleasures and dangers that beautiful things involve, from sumptuous upper-class parties to vulgar yet pleasurable postmodern art-commodities, from beautiful but corrupted people to the grim deaths of loved ones from AIDS. Although no major act of betrayal occurs in the novel, Hollinghurst’s unsparing portrayal of beauty entwined with the money, drugs, politics, and AIDS of the Thatcherite eighties portends a deep sense of betrayal felt by Nick and a curious ethical possibility arising from it.

The ethical dimension of Hollinghurst’s novel is largely revealed by what I would call the “post-moral” reading practice this novel urges on the reader in considering its morally problematic characters: the passive and uncritical Nick and his lover, the glamorous but wanton Antoine “Wani” Ouradi. Wani’s characterization has been an easy target for moralistic judgment by reviewers. Summarized as “a closeted and cokehead Lebanese millionaire” (Hitchings), Wani exemplifies the “figure of novel beauty” (159) depraved by wealth, sex, and power: three interlocking factors obsessing Thatcher’s London. Hollinghurst’s vivid depiction of Wani’s physical beauty, including “the dark curly hair” (68), “the cruel charming curve of his lips” (81), and his “extraordinary eyelashes” (165), spoiled by his love of cocaine (“gleaming mucus, flecked with blood and undissolved powder, trailed out of his famous nose” [339]), causes one commentator to feel nothing but “incredulous revulsion” (Ridgeway) toward him. But Wani’s unbridled desire, the “raw needs of so aloof a man” (191), surprise and captivate Nick, suggesting what Lee Edelman calls “sinthom-osexuality,” a term combining the Lacanian word sinthome and homosexuality. Defined by Edelman as “stupid enjoyment” (231) and “the access to unthinkable jouissance beyond every limit of pleasure” (232), sinthome—and its implication of sinfulness—is entailed in homosexuality. Although viewing Wani as embodying sinthom-osexuality does not turn him into a “good” character, this view transmutes Wani’s beauty destined for death by AIDS into an ethical site of expanding thoughts on beauty, pleasure, and death. Herein lies “the ethical alchemy of beauty” (Scarry 113) conjured up many times in The Line of Beauty.

Insofar as the ethical alchemy of beauty requires beautiful yet “base” materials to be transformed into something refined and invaluable, Hollinghurst’s novel uses the trope of betrayal to rethink “bad” behaviors and “low” gratification, such as promiscuous sex and drug use. In other words, by taking issue with the binary division assumed in the current paradigm of aesthetics between high art versus low nature, and the aesthetic versus the commercial or the political, Hollinghurst’s novel refuses to judge the seemingly “distasteful” lives of Nick and his lovers and betrays the beauty of such lives on their own terms. Nick borrows from “his hero” (5) Henry James and says, “He [James] hated vulgarity . . . but he also...