Backwardness in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library

Alan Hollinghurst’s debut novel The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) engages queer temporality, specifically Heather Love’s idea of “ backwardness” (2007). The narrator fatefully discovers the historical injuries in Britain’s past: colonialism, racism, and homophobia. This past interacts with the narrator’s dislocated and alienated present. Backwardness conveys a temporal and cultural force that upsets liberal discourses about progress in late-twentieth-century sexual politics. The narrative rejects easy resolutions for historical injuries in the past and for abiding effects of cultural memory. Backwardness shapes conflicted queer subjectivities, thwarts hegemonic temporality, and undermines progressive sexual politics.