• 1 Hollinghurst’s novel also echoes Henry James’s “The Pupil” (1891).

1Alan Hollinghurst’s second work of fiction, The Folding Star (1994), like his other five published novels – among which The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and the Booker-prize winning Line of Beauty (2004) – offers a reappropriation of former narratives, a rewriting of the canon (see Letissier). In that respect, The Folding Star partakes of a palimpsest, as its paratext already makes clear. The title of the novel evokes the pastoral tradition and is a double reference to Comus(1634), a masque by John Milton (“The Star that bid the shepherd fold /Now the top of heaven hold,” l. 93-94; quoted in The Folding Star 216) and to “Ode to Evening” (1746) by William Collins (“For when thy folding star arising shows /His paly circlet […],” l. 21-22, quoted in The Folding Star 247). The epigraph in French is an extract from Henri de Régnier’s 1892 collection of poems Tel qu’en songe (Asina Dream), more specifically from “Quelqu’un songe de soir et d’espoir” (“Someone Dreams of Evening and Hope”), which was set to music by Maurice Ravel in 1906: “Les grands vents venus d’outremer /Passent par la Ville, l’hiver, /Comme des étrangers amers” (Régnier 31, l. 1-3; [“The great winds from overseas /Pass through the Town in winter /Like bitter strangers”]). Within its pages, The Folding Star weaves a dense intertextual network, bringing to mind George Crabbe’s The Borough (1810), Henry James’s TheTurn of the Screw (1898)1 and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), as well as their operatic adaptations by Benjamin Britten (Peter Grimes, 1945, based on Crabbe’s 1810 poem; The Turn of the Screw, 1954; Death in Venice, 1973) (Johnson 64).

• 2 The portrait of the Belgian visual artist in the Hollinghurst novel is partly based upon the life a (...)

2Uncharacteristically however, Hollinghurst, who is usually regarded as a novelist of Englishness (see Letissier), sets the action of the first and third parts of The Folding Star in Belgium, a one- off occurrence in his works. The main character and narrator, Edward Manners, is a disillusioned, thirty-three-year old, gay Englishman who settles in a Flemish city – which remains unnamed but is reminiscent of Bruges – to give private English classes. There, he falls madly in love with seventeen- year-old Luc Altidore, one of his pupils. The central part of the novel, “Underwoods,” set in England, is an incursion into the past of the protagonist and a key component in the triptych that Hollinghurst’s work pieces together. The Folding Star is also arguably the Hollinghurst novel that most references the visual arts: it has been described as being “chock-a-block with visual artefacts” (Kemp 19). The plot sets in parallel the characters of late-twentieth century Edward, a reluctant English teacher and an aspiring writer, and late-nineteenth century fictional Belgian Symbolist painter Edgard Orst.2

• 3 Hollinghurst also translated plays by Racine into English (Bérenice and Bajazet. London: Faber, 201 (...)
• 4 It is likely that Rodenbach was involved in the choice and positioning of the illustrations (Edward (...)

3Besides evoking Belgian Symbolist poet Émile Verhaeren’s Flemish landscapes (“Le moulin” [“The Mill”], for example, Letissier 204), The Folding Star seems to be haunted by Belgian writer Georges Rodenbach’s 1892 novel, Bruges-la-Morte, composed six years before his death. Hollinghurst himself acknowledged the debt to Bruges-la-Morte in a 1994 interview (Pateman 17) and even wrote a preface for an English translation of Rodenbach’s novel published in 2005 by Dedalus.3 Both Bruges-la-Morte and The Folding Star share a similar setting. Both are dark tales of passion concerned with the duplication motif. In the 1892 novel, widower Hugues Viane takes refuge in Bruges, where he lives among the relics of his former wife and becomes obsessed with a dancer who bears a likeness to his dead spouse. Yet, if the debt that Hollinghurst’s narrative owes to Bruges-la-Morte has already been explored (see Stead), what has not sufficiently been stressed is the extent to which both works engage in a dialogue between text and image. As Jean-Pierre Bertrand and Daniel Grojnowski underlined in their 1998 edition of Rodenbach’s novel, Bruges-la-Morte is fundamentally based upon the relation- ship between the text and the thirty-five black-and-white photographic illustrations which initially ac- companied it. Those illustrations, reproduced using a halftone engraving technique, form an intrinsic part of the original edition, as Rodenbach’s prefatory note makes clear (Rodenbach 1998, 49-50).4 Bruges-la-Morte relies upon the paradox inherent in the juxtaposition of an allusive, poetic prose and apparently realistic photographs to illustrate it. Another important visual component of the 1892 edition of Bruges-la-Morte is the frontispiece by Fernand Khnopff [fig. 1]. In The Folding Star, Hollinghurst reappropriates that visual dimension by repeatedly resorting to ekphrasis, literary descriptions of – or commentaries on – visual works of art, thus linking together text and image.

• 5 The impression of musing in a picture gallery recalls Dorian Gray’s “strolling” through the picture (...)
• 6 This awe-inspiring wandering common to both Bruges-la-Morte and The Folding Star cannot fail to be (...)
• 7 The two novels bring to mind Wilde’s meditation on the depth/surface binary and the relationship be (...)
• 8 The hybrid thus fostered is not unlike Wilde’s 1894 Sphinx (The Sphinx 874-883).

5I will first look at the manner in which the experience of reading the two novels is akin to wandering in a picture-gallery,5 or to visiting a museum hung with pictures which cast a shadow upon the text, like the tall towers of Bruges evoked by Rodenbach in his prefatory note (Rodenbach 1998, 49- 50). It will be argued that the reappropriation of Bruges-la-Morte in the photographic illustrations and in Hollinghurst’s text is based upon the logic of metonymy, the selection of details.6 I will then ponder over the interplay of reflections upon which Bruges-la-Morte and The Folding Star hinge, as well as over the mirror which the reconfigurations of Rodenbach’s novel hold up to the original narrative.7 The final part will tackle the question of crossovers and transfers, demonstrating how text and image act as transposition – a word which pertains both to music and translation studies – of Rodenbach’s Symbolist text, and how Hollinghurst’s novel pays homage to – and rewrites – the enigmatic art of the past, thereby engendering a composite creature, and text.8

• 9 The metaphor of the labyrinth is used in Bruges-la-Morte (« le dédale embrumé des rues de Bruges », (...)
• 10 During the fifteenth century, the waterway linking Bruges to the sea silted up. This point is devel (...)
• 11 For a complete list of the captions of the illustrations and an account of their original placing, (...)
• 12 The main exception is the eighteenth illustration (Rodenbach 1998, 159), which pictures béguines. S (...)

6“Rather like A.E. Housman laying claim to an imagined Shropshire while walking on Hampstead Heath, Rodenbach evoked the dead city where he had never lived from his Paris apartment.” Alan Hollinghurst writes this in his 2005 introduction to Rodenbach’s novel (14), thus drawing a parallel between an English and a Belgian author and also suggesting that the 1892 novel paints a cityscape of Bruges from memory and imagination. The map of the Flemish city that Bruges-la-Morte – and The Folding Star in its wake –, draws is at once realistic and oneiric. Admittedly, such landmarks as the belfry or the Grote Markt are mentioned (Rodenbach 1998, 88; Rodenbach 2005, 41; Hollinghurst 12). The two novels open with an account of two of their main characters – Edward Manners and Hugues Viane – wandering in the town (Rodenbach 1998 51-52; Rodenbach 2005, 25; Hollinghurst 3) and later show the protagonists stalking their respective objects of desire – Jane Scott and Luc Altidore – through the streets (Rodenbach 1998, 77-79; Rodenbach 2005, 35-36; Hollinghurst 43-44). Yet, in both cases, the city comes out as uncanny, labyrinthine and unreal, acting as an objective correlative to the protagonists’ states of mind.9 As Rodenbach writes in his prefatory note, the town is “an essential character” in the novel (Rodenbach 2005, 21; [« un personnage essentiel », Rodenbach 1998, 49]), an idea further expounded in chapter 10, when the narrator explains that “[e]very town is a state of mind, a mood which, after only a short stay, communicates itself, spreads to us in an effluvium which impregnates us, which we absorb with the very air” (Rodenbach 2005, 93 [« Toute cité est un état d’âme, et d’y séjourner à peine, cet état d’âme se communique, se propage à nous en un fluide qui s’inocule et qu’on incorpore avec la nuance de l’air », Rodenbach 1998, 193]). The idea of a dead, silted-up, out of time town is also articulated in The Folding Star: “[…] I couldn’t quite admit to myself the uncertainty I felt already at its deadness, its air of a locked museum, the recognition that what had happened had all been centuries ago” (7).10 Curiously enough, an impression of unreality also emanates from the photographic illustrations that adorn the 1892 edition of Bruges-la-Morte. The thirty-five images, regularly interspersed in the text, represent the canals, quays, churches, buildings, streets, squares, and gates of Bruges and, at first sight, have a documentary, postcard-like quality.11 They picture such sights as the belfry (Rodenbach 1998, 91), the béguinage (155) and the Lake of Love (151). Yet the conspicuous absence of human figures, but for a few exceptions,12 endows them with a ghostly quality.

• 13 A Jew, Edgard Orst hid from the German occupants during World War 2. He was discovered because of P (...)
• 14 This is possibly reminiscent of E. M. Forster’s Maurice, in which Alec and Maurice visit the Britis (...)

8The Flemish city through which the reader/viewer is invited to stroll, following the footsteps of Hugues and Edward, is a museum town. Wandering through its streets is equated with visiting a picture-gallery. Significantly, the first part of Hollinghurst’s novel is entitled “Museum Days.” In much the same way as Bruges-la-Morte alludes to the painters Pourbus, Van Orley, Erasmus, Quellin, Crayer, Seghers (Rodenbach 1998, 202; Rodenbach 2005, 95), Memling (96, 205) and Van Eyck (123, 260), The Folding Star is teeming with references to the visual arts: from still-lifes (10) to seascapes (90), etchings (174), watercolours (281), lithographs (295) and photographs, be they artistic (298) or pornographic (305). The novel’s palette includes artworks by Jerome Bosch (9), Félicien Rops (183), David Cox (189) and, most prominently, fictional Symbolist painter Edgard Orst – a composite figure partially inspired by Fernand Khnopff –, whose secrets the novel sets out to uncover.13 The narrator-protagonist even ends up working at the Orst Museum (129). Chapter 1 stages an emblematic scene, as Orst is mentioned for the first time; Edward visits the Town Museum, where he picks up Cherif, a Moroccan with whom he will have an affair:14

• 15 Salomé and her mother Herodias are often hardly distinguishable one from the other. Herodias was re (...)

9A variation on Salomé’s mother Herodias, who is one of the most emblematic figures of both Symbolist art and literature (Marchal 125-132),15 the imaginary painting somewhat defiantly beckons to the character (the title translates as “Herodias in days of yore, what next?”) and takes the reader into a world which weaves together two fins de siècle – the ends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – and two cultural traditions – Belgian and English.

• 16 In the novel, the windows of Edward’s flat look onto the aptly named school of St. Narcissus. The c (...)

11Bruges-la-Morte and The Folding Star finally have in common a concern with visuality and scopophilia. Both Hugues Viane and Edward Manners are voyeurs, deriving pleasure from the mere act of looking (see for instance Hollinghurst 102-116, when Edward goes to the seaside resort of St-Ernest-aux-Sablonnières for the sole purpose of spying on Luc). Theirs is also a flawed, partial or blurred vision. Edward’s short-sightedness is repeatedly insisted on (Hollinghurst 22, 280), as well as Orst’s near-blindness because of syphilis (280), whilst Bruges-la-Morte finally underscores the main character’s optical illusion consisting in seeing a likeness between his dead wife and the dancer Jane Scott (“Hugues was suffering. Day by day the dissimilarities were increasing. He could no longer maintain the illusion, as far as her physical appearance was concerned,” Rodenbach 2005, 102; [« Hugues souffrait ; de jour en jour les dissemblances s’accentuaient. Même au physique, il ne lui était plus possible de s’illusionner encore », Rodenbach 1998, 215]). Both Edward and Hugues are narcissists,16 as the pervasive presence of mirrors and reflecting surfaces in the novels testifies (Rodenbach 1998, 52, 53, 70, 121; Rodenbach 2005, 25, 33, 56; Hollinghurst 11, 22, 59, 89, 119, 166, 391). Theirs is the eye of the melancholy man, described by Starobinski as “staring at the insubstantial and the perishable, at [his] own reflected image” (« L’œil du mélancolique fixe l’insubstantiel et le périssable : sa propre image réfléchie ». [Starobinski 50]). Gazing at The Folding Star through the looking glass of Bruges-la-Morte thus allows us to lay bare the various strategies of duplication and repetition upon which Hollinghurst’s novel is based.

• 17 A further parallel is between Edward and Paul Échevin, the curator of the Orst Museum. It turns out (...)
• 18 For instance, Edward tries to initiate both Dawn and Luc to English poetry (see Hollinghurst 45, 24 (...)
• 19 This is akin to the numerous portraits of Jane Morris by Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rosse (...)

13The structure of The Folding Star similarly revolves around a series of chiasmi, parallels and doubling effects. Edward, the English would-be writer, settles in Belgium, while his nineteenth-century alter ego, Belgian artist Edgard Orst, travels to England and is repeatedly said to have been influenced by English art.17 It is suggested that Edward’s obsession with seventeen-year old Luc Altidore has to do with his fixation on Ralph, nicknamed Dawn, his teenage love, who in the course of the novel dies in a car crash (Hollinghurst 190).18 For his part, Edgard finds a substitute to his drowned mistress, Jane Byron (whom he obsessively paints [see 68-69]19) in Marthe, a prostitute who is said to bear an uncanny likeness to the Scottish actress (290). It is just then that The Folding Star most clearly reads as a pastiche of Bruges-la-Morte. The scene of the encounter between Marthe and Orst is described in almost the same way as that between Viane and Jane Scott: the same idea of resurrection is emphasised; the same details are highlighted, in particular the fiery, femme fatale hair, whose colour is referred to as “textuel[le]” by Rodenbach, an adjective which connotes the ideas of fluidity but also of textuality, as if the woman’s apparition made her hair into the pages of the book; the same terms are used, in particular the word “apparition,” which operates as a reminiscence of Flaubert’s account of Frédéric Moreau’s first encounter with Mme Arnoux in Flaubert’s Éducation sentimentale ( « Ce fut comme une apparition » [“It was like an apparition”], Flaubert 7) and also echoes Gustave Moreau’s depiction of Salomé, entitled L’Apparition (c. 1875), and to Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “Apparition” (Mallarmé 7):

• 21 Rough Common, like Stanmore Hill in Hollinghurst’s 2011 The Stranger’s Child, is also situated in “ (...)
• 22 In Hollinghurst’s novel, the parallel between England and Belgium is also suggested by a certain nu (...)

14Moreover, in Hollinghurst’s novel, England and Belgium are placed in a mirror relationship. Rough Common is Edward’s hometown, south of London,21 bearing a metonymical name based on the expanse of open public land which is its main feature and which, over the years, has become a gay cruising area where the narrator-protagonist had his first sexual experience. The middle section of The Folding Star, “Underwoods,” is “an elegiac interlude which evokes the memories of an allegedly pastoral adolescence and a first love that is tragically overshadowed by the experience of loss” (Lassen 222), namely the accidental death of Dawn, Edward’s first lover. What Lassen calls the “pastoral camp” finds its parallel locus amoenus in the Flemish town, a park called the Hermitage, where Paul Échevin, the curator of the Orst Museum, another of Edward’s alter egos, met up with a German soldier with whom he had an affair during the Second World War. Edward, like his Aunt Tina – a British expatriate in Africa who wrote novels offering a “topsy turvy,” romanticised picture of the England she no longer lived in (46) – rewrites England and his own past in the light of his present Belgian experience. At the same time, he maps Belgium through his literary and musical references, such as Allemonde, the imaginary kingdom where the action of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1893) – turned into an opera by Debussy in 1902 — is set: “I knew nothing of this country, to me it was a dream- Belgium, it was Allemonde, a kingdom of ruins and vanished pleasures, miracles and martyrdoms, corners where the light never shone. Not many would recognise it, but some would. I seemed to have lost Luc in it” (379).22

• 23 If the seventeenth and eighteenth illustrations (Rodenbach 1998, 159) mirror Viane’s servant Barbe’ (...)
• 24 See Mallarmé’s famous 1897 Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard (Mallarmé 1315-1325). Rodenbac (...)

15In his introduction to the 2005 English translation of Bruges-la-Morte, Hollinghurst writes disparagingly about the photographic illustrations to the novel’s first edition published in 1892 by Flammarion. He underlines the discrepancy between the “obscure Symbolist refinement” of Rodenbach’s poetic prose and what he calls “the illustrations of a Baedeker” (Rodenbach 2005, 12). This idea echoes the prejudices of earlier critics, such as Thomas Duncan, the first translator of Rodenbach’s novel, who specifies in a note following his preface: “The illustrations referred to in the foregiving preface have been, for the most part, omitted in this translation, as they do not appear to succeed in conveying the imaginative impression intended by Rodenbach” (Rodenbach 1903, 65). I would tend to disagree, for a number of reasons. First of all, these illustrations, which endlessly feature the same places and the same buildings – the quai du Rosaire, for instance, onto which the windows of Hugues Viane’s residence look, is pictured four times (Rodenbach 1998, 83, 94, 139, 271) [figs. 6-7-8-9], with subtle variations of standpoints – harmonize with the poetics of stasis that the narrative develops and with the reflection upon sameness that the novel offers. Besides, the illustrations do not merely repeat or mirror the text (and rarely precisely correspond to it),23 but rather act as counterpoints to the diegesis, establishing with it a relationship of discontinuity and/or commentary. They materialise a form of chance reading as advocated by Mallarmé24.

• 25 Walter Pater. Portraits imaginaires. Trans. Georges Khnopff. Introduction Arthur Symons. (Paris : M (...)
• 26 In 1894, Burne-Jones sent Khnopff his 1890 drawing Study of Woman, with a dedication, and in 1896, (...)
• 27 Khnopff also entitled a drawing from 1891 Who shall deliver me? (collection N. Manoukian).

18In The Folding Star, Edgard Orst’s house is the aptly named “Villa Hermès,” thereby placing the artist under the aegis of the messenger of the Gods, “the interpreter between worlds, the god of communication, associated with commerce and secrets” (Stead 361). Orst is said to have been famous in England (36); some of his works are exhibited in museums in the United Kingdom, such as in the British Museum and in the (imaginary) Corley-Cripps Museum in Eastbourne (36-37). The novel also embeds a (fictional) article by an English journalist’s recounting a visit to Orst’s house in 1904 (182- 185), and it emphasises the influence of English artists upon Orst’s works. As a boy, Orst was set the task of copying his grandfather’s English watercolours before being allowed to paint Belgian landscapes (281). He is also reported to have been influenced by – and to have befriended – Edward Burne-Jones (67). This testifies to the extent to which Hollinghurst drew on anglophile Fernand Khnoppf’s life and works to create the character of Orst. Fernand Khnopff, and his brother Georges (who translated Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde into French),25 were cultural intermediaries between Britain and Belgium. The discovery of Burne-Jones at the 1878 Paris exhibition was a key-element in the evolution of Fernand Khnopff’s career: the two artists expressed their mutual esteem by exchanging gifts of their drawings (Draguet 175).26 Another major influence on Khnopff was Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In Hollinghurst’s novel, Orst’s masterpiece is entitled La Porte Entr’ouverte (66-67), possibly an echo to Khnopff’s I Lock My Door Upon Myself [fig. 10]. One of Khnopff’s most obvious debts to Dante Gabriel Rossetti is the Belgian artist’s 1891 I Lock My Door Upon Myself, which features a dreamy-eyed, red-haired Pre-raphaelite creature in the centre of the composition. The title is the seventh line of “Who Shall Deliver Me?”27 a poem by Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel’s sister, offering a picture of a fractured self, imprisoned in a self-constructed cell, stylistically represented through a system of echoes, repetitions and anaphoras (Rossetti 88-89), for instance of the phrase “I lock myself” (l. 5 and 7). The oil on canvas by Khnopff ushers the viewer into a closed, oneiric world, juxtaposing and reassembling disconnected fragments (a bust of Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, a poppy, a charm dangling from a chain). The status of the rectangular frame to the right of the composition is ambiguous: is it a window opening onto a landscape or a painting within the painting?

• 28 The character from Hamlet was turned into a myth at the fin de siècle, giving rise to many variatio (...)
• 29 She is painted as Ophelia by Orst (Hollinghurst 297).

19The long-haired creature leaning against a blue surface recalls the recumbent Ophelia of the 1892 frontispiece for Bruges-la-Morte [fig. 1],28 the parallel being confirmed by the presence of similar-looking flowers in both works (arum lilies or irises). This frontispiece, moreover, epitomises the various connections and reappropriations that this article has tried to bring to the fore. It first transposes the English theatrical heroine into a visual work of art, and, secondly, it places her against a backdrop which is clearly identifiable as Bruges, with canal, bridge and belfry in the distance. Parallels with death by drowning and the Shakespearian character appear in both Bruges-la-Morte and The Folding Star: Hugues Viane “find[s] the face of his departed Ophelia as [he] follow[s] the canals” (Rodenbach 2005, 33 [ « retrouvant au fil des canaux son visage d’Ophélie en allée », Rodenbach 1998, 69]. Edgard Orst’s Scottish mistress, Jane Byron is another Ophelia29 who mysteriously drowns at Ostend (67). Ostend is also the place where the novel ends, with Edward tracking down the missing Luc:

• 31 There are actually three different versions of this image: a frontispiece produced for the eponymou (...)
• 32 For instance, Khnopff resorted to the form of the triptych in l’Isolement (whose three panels are A (...)

21The notion of triptych may link together the different modes of reappropriation this article has tried to outline. At the core of Hollinghurst’s novel is the attempt to reassemble a triptych by Edgard Orst entitled Autrefois, dispersed during World War 2. This imaginary painting gives rise to an ekphrasis in the text (278): the panel on the left is “[a] candlelit image of [a] woman whose face [is] only seen in a mirror,” reminiscent of Khnopff’s 1889 Mon cœur pleure d’autrefois,31 in which a woman looks at herself in a mirror with Bruges in the background. The right-hand panel is a seascape and the larger central panel represents a deserted town. The form of the triptych points to Hollinghurst’s own reappropriation of the Symbolists’ reappropriation of medieval altarpieces.32 It sends back to the construction of Hollinghurst’s three-part novel and possibly hints at the importance of the middle section of The Folding Star: a moving English interlude which rescripts the English pastoral through the prism of Belgian Symbolism. The imaginary painting also materialises both the rewriting of Bruges-la-Morte and the two-way relationship between text and image which, in Bruges-la-Morte and The Folding Star alike, mirror and complement each other. To shift metaphors, The Folding Star builds a large chamber of echoes, a melancholy symphony wherein text and image, Belgium and Britain, past and present, respond to each other.