André Aciman: Call Me By Your Name

Excerpt from Recent Gay Novels and the Return to Literary Modernism

Chapter excerpted from my book Recent Gay Novels and the Return to Literary Modernism, available in paperback and kindle versions. Read the introduction for free here.

Elio, the central character of Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name (CMYN), is a seriously aesthetic young man who is spending his summer at his family’s vacation home in Italy, during the early 1980s. At seventeen he is unusually skilled at transcribing musical works for piano or guitar. As I noted in my introduction, his reference scheme in the arts and literature is almost entirely one available to a literary modernist of seven or eight decades earlier. Among the composers he refers to are Bach, Handel, Busoni, Liszt, Haydn, Schubert, Mozart, Wagner, and Brahms. Writers mentioned by him include Dante, Stendhal, Montaigne, Shelley, Leopardi, Ovid, Homer, Chekhov, and Gogol. While he ventures a few times into the twentieth century, mentioning Paul Celan, Katherine Mansfield, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, and Italo Calvino, he brings up the last of these only to offer his opinion that Calvino’s work, the most obviously postmodern, is inferior.

The novel is about Elio’s highly intense affair with Oliver, a graduate student from Columbia University who is living in Elio’s home for a few weeks while working on an academic project. We see matters through Elio’s eyes. What is clear is that he is not simply going through a typical adolescent education of the sentiments through a relationship with an interesting stranger. Rather, fundamental issues of identity are at stake. Some of our most difficult psychological achievements must take place in our very early years. We begin with an intensely close relation with a primary caregiver, so close that it is hard to tell where the boundaries of the self are to be located. Am I feeling my mother’s emotion as if it were my own? If I feel the emotion of anger emerging in me, do I project it onto her and think she is angry at me? Yet I must gradually learn to form clearer boundaries and to accept my own separateness, a move that may be both exhilarating and terrifying. There will be long transitional stages during which self-identity and boundaries can be rather fluid and shifting. In caressing a blanket or a doll, am I identifying with my mother’s position in an earlier psychological structure and soothing an externalized version of myself? Or is the object something properly other that I myself am soothing? Can we make a distinction between these two states clearly? The issue is complicated, perhaps more so in the male case, by the issue of gender identity. The disturbing rupture with the primary caregiver may be exacerbated if one is growing into a gender identity that is different from that of one’s early and primary attachment.

At some point you are supposed to have made the boundary line between what pertains to the self and what to external reality, between what pertains to the self and what to other persons, a reliable and relatively accurate one, in accord with your actual situation in the world.  You will not get along very well in most businesses and games without being able to tell the difference between your own stance on the world, with its accompanying mental states, and the stances of other persons, with their distinct mental states. Individuals can best negotiate about strategies for satisfying their mutual or varied interests if they understand what desires are at stake on either side. You come to see yourself as an independent individual, a negotiating self that can secure its identity and its style of individuation on its own, without the continuing support of earlier-in-life identifications. Sexual attraction to another will fit into that overall picture of distinct selves seeking to negotiate about mutual satisfactions and goals.

But that outcome is not the only one that might occur. Aciman presents us with a subtle examination of Elio’s form of desire. Elio does not simply want sex and companionship. The most basic self-to-other architecture within him is triggered, complicated, and blurred by his relationship with Oliver. “Did I want to be like him? Did I want to be him? Or did I just want to have him? Or are ‘being’ and ‘having’ thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone’s body to touch and being that someone we’re longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks of a river that passes from us to them, back to us and over to them again in this perpetual circuit where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of desire, and the wormholes of time, and the false-bottomed drawer we call identity share a beguiling logic according to which the shortest distance between real life and the life unlived, between who we are and what we want, is a twisted staircase designed with the impish cruelty of M. C. Escher. When had they separated us, you and me, Oliver? . . . Is it your body that I want when I think of lying next to it every night or do I want to slip into it and own it as if it were my own?” (CMYN 68)

An earlier transitional space, where mental investments were more mobile and shifting, may still hold its attractions in later periods of life. The early symbiotic, boundary-blurring relation with a caregiver may retain a powerful pull, especially in a cultural world that puts more and more pressure on individual self-making and that emphasizes the separateness, aloneness, and individual responsibility of selves. There can be psychological rewards in keeping a space open where you can be simultaneously on both sides of the self-other divide, where your stance may nimbly oscillate between different positions, so that you can both assert yourself and surrender yourself (you can both accept separateness and give it up) at the same time. If we picture the psyche as a parliament with many competing voices or programs trying to influence mental formations and overall actions, then that kind of mobility in your pattern of identifications may allow your choice, when you become attracted to another individual, to compress in its meaning the goals of several different inner programs, instead of having to select just one. Your choice may be reflecting a diverse inner coalition whose members are not smoothly compatible. Something similar may occur on the matter of gender. A male may wish to retain both some aspects of an earlier identification with a female caregiver and a later identification as male. From an engineering standpoint this overall process becomes more worthy of note when there is some conflict and ambivalence in the achievement of separateness and individuation. Perhaps you feel a degree of guilt through having “betrayed” the primary caregiver through claiming an independent distance from her and through adhering to a different gender identity. So a solution that allows you to occupy different stances and different structures simultaneously may be appealing. You are both the self that has broken ties and declared its autonomy and the self that hasn’t done this yet, that still finds pleasure in an engulfing experience that dissolves boundaries.

Matters become especially interesting when erotic forces are strongly recruited in ordering one’s relation to the world. If patterns of a transitional space of self-formation are still effective in the individual’s mental life, then an intricate constellation of mobile identifications and investments may be especially called into play when the self’s powerful erotic energies are aroused. The energies of eros are themselves so abundant and mobile that they may be recruited for and attach themselves to psychological projects that are rather different from the typical goal of sexual intercourse. They may especially attach themselves to the entire issue of self-identity, of self-other differentiation, of securing a style of selfhood that can be more autonomous, and of being able to compress quite different mental programs into a single overall erotic choice. When free-floating eros gets linked up to such basic matters of identity, with their powerful recall of earlier, more fragile stages of self-formation, then a very forceful erotic attraction to another may have been unleashed. The other may be sexually attractive as a different and other person, but he may also straddle the self-other divide and be an idealized version of the self, one more capable of maintaining a confident individuation. So many diverse, shifting programs regarding identity may come into play in such an attraction that it is extremely and unusually powerful. You are both self and other, both adult and child, both male and female, in many different shifting permutations. There is slippage, as Elio noted, between having this other person, being like him, and being fully identified with him. Everything about you seems at stake in whether the other will respond or not. It may seem to be the compelling integrity of the other that holds together the shifting, mobile, wavering elements of your own psyche. If the other does not hold you firmly in view, then you may feel unable to maintain your boundaries, as if you were drowning. (I am analyzing the particular sort of relationship exemplified by Elio’s attraction to Oliver, not offering a general account of same-sex attractions.) Contact with the other person may seem to magically bring out certain transformations in yourself that remain vital only through touching the lover; otherwise they weaken and vanish. Such archaic magical programs exist in you right alongside your sophisticated self-conscious reflections.

Elio is deeply moved by the idea of oscillating identities. As the novel’s title indicates, he wants the two lovers to use each other’s name when they are intimate. He will call Oliver Elio and Oliver will call him Oliver. He is strongly aroused by the idea of wearing Oliver’s bathing suit while having sexual fantasies and later he will want to retain Oliver’s shirt when the latter is leaving Italy. During a three-day visit to Rome they wear each other’s clothes and underwear. “But what turned me on wasn’t this. It was the porousness, the fungibility, of our bodies – what was mine was suddenly his, just as what belonged to him could be all mine now.” (CMYN 142) Total ductility is the goal. “Perhaps the physical and metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me. To be in his mouth while he was in mine and no longer know whose it was, his cock or mine, that was in my mouth. He was my secret conduit to myself – like a catalyst that allows us to become who we are . . . the other man’s heart that makes us more us than we were before the transplant.” (CMYN 142-43) An apparently external factor, as with the chemical catalyst, turns out to be essential to making the internal self-activity what it is. The machinery enabling self-knowledge is diverted through this other person in order to become available. Self-to-other and self-to-self relations blur in a manner that enriches the latter, so that one has a more satisfying engagement with one’s own life. There will be a similar blurring of gender, as Elio, on the bed with Oliver, thinks: “and next to me my man-woman whose man-woman I was.” (CMYN 161) Is he a man relating to a man when they are intimate? A woman relating to a man? A man relating to a woman? A woman relating to a woman? When he has a sexual fantasy about the two of them, which body is he in during the fantasy? Does he move from one to the other? He finds great pleasure in that mobility of perspective and of gender roles. The compression of so many different roles into a single attraction allows for great intensity. “. . . it would finally dawn on us both that he was more me than I had ever been myself, because when he became me and I became him in bed so many years ago, he was and would forever remain, long after every forked road in life had done its work, my brother, my friend, my father, my son, my husband, my lover, myself.” (CMYN 243)

In ordinary maturation you are gradually learning to make clearer distinctions between what is your own and what is not. One might be somewhat worried for young Elio’s future when one recognizes how much of his sense of his own identity, of what is truly himself, comes from a near dissolving of the boundary between him and Oliver. “From this moment on, I thought, from this moment on – I had, as I’d never before in my life, the distinct feeling of arriving somewhere very dear, of wanting this forever, of being me, me, me, and no one else, just me, of finding in each shiver that ran down my arms something totally alien and yet my no means unfamiliar, as if all this had been part of me all my life and I’d misplaced it and he had helped me find it.” (CMYN 133) It is like Odysseus coming home after his long journey, Elio says elsewhere. Oliver can seem to possess more of Elio’s identity than Elio does himself. He finds in Oliver what he is lacking, a sense of being fully at home with himself, of an easy, self-supporting integrity. “But before he stepped out of the cab and walked into our home, it would never have seemed remotely possible that someone so thoroughly okay with himself might want to share his body as much as I ached to yield up mine.” (CMYN 25) It seems a very risky strategy to find your integrity in another who seems to possess such a quality convincingly. For then you are not building up your own independent resources capable of backing a self-supporting wholeness, a style of self-ordering and experiencing that can be maintained even in the absence of others. Oliver is himself very much attracted to Elio, but one has the strong intuition that he does not need Elio for a sense of his own integrity and that he will be far more capable than Elio of negotiating a future in which he can weigh his own self-interest more impartially.

Does this attention to a fluidity of self-other differentiation and of gender make Aciman closer to a postmodern queer theorist than to a literary modernist? Perhaps there is a bit of evidence for that claim, but ultimately it is not convincing. The evidence in question involves one of the repeating metaphorical structures in the book. Elio’s great interest in music includes his practice of writing transcriptions, for piano or guitar, of musical compositions written for other instruments or groups of instruments. He also likes to rewrite certain musical pieces in the style of another composer. One day with Oliver he takes a work by Bach and plays it the way Liszt would have played it if he had “jimmied” around with it. Then he does it the way Busoni would have altered Lizst’s version of Bach. On another day he hears someone humming a popular song from the radio and improvises a “Brahms variation on a Mozart rendition” of the same song. (CMYN 55) Several mentions are made also of the way that the gardener Anchises is improving the orchard by his practice of grafting. The idea seems to be that identity is not a matter of the unfolding of a fixed essence from within. Instead layers are built on earlier layers through a series of transformations, repurposings, reformulations, and graftings. There is no deep basis for identity but just a set of slightly arbitrary interpretations of earlier interpretations. When the word ‘apricot’ is being discussed, Elio’s father claims that it is from Arabic. Oliver replies that it is actually a Greek borrowing from a Latin word. It migrated from Byzantine Greek to the Arabs of West Asia, and then eventually to European languages from the Arabic. Again we have a set of layers and borrowings as with Elio’s musical transcriptions.

That overall metaphor is made the central point of a long section of the text. Elio and Oliver are spending time in Rome, just before the latter is to return to America. They attend a literary party and a Roman poet tells of the recent time he’d spent in Thailand. A handsome young male hotel clerk, just off duty, comes to sit with him at a table and soon reveals, with cap removed, that “he” is a woman, as he lets his hair down. The poet has just accepted this fact when, in another switch, the clerk reveals that no, “she” is actually a man. As “he” takes off for a rest room, the poet becomes convinced by his legs and other features that this is really a woman. He tells the others at the Roman party that Thailand convinced him that identity is thus a matter of layers, with each one constructed over earlier ones in surprising sequences that might change earlier meanings quite thoroughly. Mentioning a particular church in Rome, he calls this the San Clemente syndrome. The basilica of San Clemente was built over another church, which was built over an earlier church that had burned down. This church, in turn, was constructed over a pagan temple to Mithras, which was itself erected over the home of a Roman consul. He concludes: “Like the subconscious, like love, like memory, like time itself, like every single one of us, the church is built on the ruins of subsequent restorations, there is no rock bottom, there is no first anything, no last anything, just layers and secret passageways and interlocking chambers . . .” (CMYN 192)

We seem to be in the familiar academic territory of a deconstruction of identity, of a postmodern play with constructed identities that can easily be exchanged for other ones. Jacques Derrida claims that the idea of wholeness or identity is illusory, is fraudulent. Even the notion of what is “one’s own” needs to be deconstructed until its emptiness and arbitrariness are apparent. We are, on his view, multiplied and dispersed as selves across networks of discourse, and we cannot master, or appropriate as our own, the different identity positions we find ourselves almost arbitrarily occupying, with no deep and stable sense to the self at all. Michel Foucault tells us that in the face of different power-knowledge constellations in the social order, which try to impose their definitions and forms of discipline upon us, we need a subversive playing that keeps multiplying identities, that keeps multiplying zones of pleasure, that maneuvers within various power complexes in ways that destabilize and rewrite the power strategies at work. We win the game, it seems, by not taking seriously the notion of a project of self-formation that has substance and depth to it, that shapes an enduring emotional world over the long course of an individual life.

Identity thus becomes performative and mobile. We move easily into different “subject positions” without any sense that something has been left behind that is a real and profound loss. Proust says you get over grieving for a person you have loved and lost because eventually you are no longer the self that did the loving. We move across time and become different selves and the new selves that appear are not committed to earlier attachments in the way that the older ones were. A postmodern sensibility strongly radicalizes that conception of Proust’s. On his account there is still a lengthy period of very painful mourning before the slow emergence of a new self can alleviate matters. One notes as well that in his own life, he seemed hardly to get over the death of his mother even after much time had passed. There is something of a similar outcome with Roland Barthes. His theoretical works spoke of the subject-position as a linguistic construct and made light of human emotions, to the extent that he envisaged a literature divorced from any meaning that is supposed to depend somehow on an individual’s psychological life. But when his mother, with whom he lived his whole life in a relation of powerful attachment, died, Barthes was crushed by the loss and never got over it at all. (I will cover this matter in detail in a later chapter.) On the postmodern account, the self is not substantial or enduring or metaphysically deep enough to experience such a loss. Only the social-linguistic construction of identity in a particular socioeconomic setting, on that story, makes a loss of an earlier attachment seem so powerful. The same result may be taken to apply to what some experience as a loss of the world. Richard Rorty considers the philosophical issue that arises as we worry that our discourses, like the mental ideas of Descartes’s individuals, may not be grounded in a reality that makes them true. In an aptly titled essay, “The World Well Lost,” Rorty argues that this “lost” world is an illusion.¹ There is nothing beyond our discourses and their ongoing constructions against which these all have to be measured. Like the self, the world for the postmoderns is not metaphysically substantial enough to create any profound sense of loss if we feel we have lost contact with it. The postmodern novelist is free to construct worlds and human selves and human psychologies out of whatever materials she wishes, with no sense of an already given depth of actuality that must be honored. One can hardly make sense of loss anymore. There is nothing substantial enough to be lost, including one’s pattern of selfhood. One earns an easy lightness that is an artifact of shallowness and ephemerality that are not to be regretted.

Here we come back to Elio. All this talk of musical transcriptions and reformulations as well of the San Clemente syndrome may suggest that he, in Aciman’s conception of him, is on the side of the postmodern and the deconstructive. But there is a very serious flaw in that analysis. Elio experiences the most crushing, enduring loss possible when Oliver returns to America and calls soon afterward to say that he is getting engaged to a woman. Twenty years later, as we find in the book’s final section, the power of Elio’s grieving and of his loss have diminished very little as he has one brief meeting with Oliver. He has not moved in a postmodern manner from one shallow embodiment of self to another, with the commitment to Oliver a distant attachment of one briefly constructed self long ago left behind. He has not multiplied identities and moved nimbly among them, as in Foucault. He has not disseminated himself across a scattering of investments, as in Derrida. He remains at a deep and enduring level the very same self who, in falling profoundly in love with Oliver, seemed able to invest in him so many of the mobile, conflicting patterns of eros within himself. It is because his identity has endured so rigorously over time, because of elemental features of his psyche that could not be given up while he keeps on being Elio, that he can miss Oliver to the powerful extent that he still does, so many years later. Long ago he had the exhilarating experience of a loss of self, an erasing of boundaries, that recalled a joyous earlier self-other symbiosis, and he had an identification with the confident individuation of Oliver, so that he managed not to lose himself in thus submitting to a blurring of any demarcation between himself and Oliver. The conditions that compressed so many of the voices of his internal parliament into a single, powerful erotic attachment were not likely to come again. If Elio’s psyche is like the San Clemente church, its earlier layers shape a fundamental architecture that is not very plastic in terms of the structures it supports on the surface.

If we look at Elio’s attachment more carefully, we can perhaps see a possible way of distinguishing between the practices of literary modernism and those of the postmodernist. Both put the matter of identity in jeopardy, but in very different ways. Literary modernism looks to the way that a fragilely achieved self-identity is put under great pressure by the strong appeal of an earlier psychological space of transition, where the multiple satisfaction of quite varied mental structures was possible because self-other differentiation and gender boundaries were not yet fully determined and stabilized. A return to that space has its evident dangers, as when Nietzsche says that we can endure only so much of the de-individuating pull of the Dionysian as we have Apollinian form-giving powers to counteract it. Prior to meeting Oliver, Elio has handled that desire to lose himself in an embracing otherness by his devotion to music and literature. Music especially (again we can follow Nietzsche) seems to allow access to that Dionysian moment where the pressure of individuation is fainter, as we seem bound to Schopenhauer’s oceanic world of biological will and unconscious emotion. Elio’s skill in giving form to that music, through his transcriptions and reformulations in new styles, shows that his individual form-giving power is not overwhelmed by that pressure from a larger realm. The sustaining of identity through possible loss of self is a crucial feature of his aesthetic engagement. Through his transcriptions he is actively shaping his musical experiences instead of being passively overwhelmed by them.

We have a very different structure at work with deconstruction, postmodernism, and queer theory (these three are obviously not the same). Here identity is not a fragile but highly valued achievement that one must find ways of sustaining even as one gives oneself over to the more mobile, more boundary-blurring, more de-individuating patterns of an earlier transitional space of self-formation. We are not anxious about slipping back into a pre-identity psychological world; we are trying to go forward into a post-identity one. We think of ourselves as already having passed through a bourgeois social order with its forming of a certain kind of individuation; we now move beyond that notion of identity to a more radically subversive one. Identity is seen as a socially imposed structure in the interest of systems of dominance, surveillance, and control. One needs, in response, to develop dissident practices that undermine and destabilize identity. One shows how it is shallow, performative, and able to be played with as a form of resistance to power. One turns oneself into a disseminating world of multiple selves that cannot be easily grasped and manipulated by the systems around one.

A lightness of mental and linguistic maneuvering may be a goal for both the literary modernist and the postmodernist, but the meaning of that lightness is very different in the two cases. In the latter case, it comes from the belief that there is no rich metaphysical givenness, whether of the world itself, of biological nature, or of the psychology of the self, that can limit the free play of a postmodern mobility within the realm of signs. Objects and selves are just the precipitate of a socio-linguistic machinery and so can be easily changed as that machinery is changed. There is no resistant depth to the world that our languages and vocabularies are about. We give up metaphysical identities and stabilities and tell ourselves that we have lost nothing in the process. If self-identity is an illusion forced on us by power systems that we should not trust, then we are freer when we learn to do without it and to move lightly among performative identities as they are embedded in the various discursive systems available to us. We use dissident and fluid identities to challenge a world that tends to see matters in terms of binary oppositions. We would never, then, have the sense of devastating loss, of an irreplaceable lost attachment, that Elio experiences for so long.

Nietzsche, so powerful an influence on the modernists, shares that goal of lightness. Again and again he has Zarathustra tell us that his enemy is the spirit of gravity, that he seeks a kind of lightness in his thinking and writing that will make him feel like a bird flying over lofty regions that others cannot hope to reach. But that lightness is achieved only by extremely difficult and rigorous work against the inertial power and weight of what is given by nature. His metaphors illustrate that conception. Intellectual and aesthetic achievements, on his account, are like the mountain peaks that once were layers at the bottom of an ocean. Stupendous geological forces were required to elevate them to those heights. What appears to be serenely beautiful, he says, is like the beautiful column that stands admirably as it is only because it is invisibly balancing extremely powerful physical forces, such that if small changes were made, the column would collapse under the power of those forces. The mountain pines grow tall on the peaks, he claims, only because they are strongly rooted in much lower levels. So we have a very different picture from that of the postmodernist. Nature, biology, and the unconscious retain extremely potent and substantial, and elevation and lightness are earned only through a very great labor of transfiguring the inertial forces of what is given. If one attains the lightness of a surfer maneuvering beautifully at the crest of powerful waves, one recognizes at the same time how very easily those lower forces can swallow one up.

That Nietzschean structure is repeated in much of literary modernism. In Billy Budd, the young sailor climbs lightly to the height of the rigging, but the pull of the oceanic world upon him will be fully realized. In The Waste Land, the figures we encounter are not free to maneuver lightly in a world without metaphysical or psychological depth. Instead the great fear is that the apparent self-sustaining autonomy of the West and of the individual self, while desirable and important, are fragile appearances against a still powerful realm of West Asian nature religions that have infiltrated these Western practices from the start, so that we are likely to be drawn back by the strong gravity of what we thought we had emerged from. We might go back and find the Oresteia as a template for literary modernism. The realm of nature associated with the Furies and with Clytemnestra has allowed the cultural world of the polis to emerge, but might swallow it back into itself if certain conditions are violated. So Nietzschean lightness can be almost the opposite of postmodern lightness.

Nietzsche is clear in his work that identity and a distinctive style of individuation matter. Identity is not something either to be dissolved back into the Dionysian currents of nature or to be transformed into a game piece in a shallow performance game whose rules are easy to change at any time. He speaks of a deep underlying fatum, an unconscious shaping of selfhood that cannot be much changed by individual or social construction. Through Zarathustra in “The Night Song,” he mourns the loneliness that comes with being a separate individual who has a hard time finding satisfying relationships. He says that it is painful to be someone whose light must shine for others but who receives no light in return, only what is reflected back from his own illumination. Nietzsche claims in his work that he must use literature and music to attain a healthy selfhood against the pressure of external intrusions and against more histrionic models of a Wagnerian sort. Over and over he talks about the loneliness and solitude he must experience in order to form an individuality that is not a mere impress of the ideas circulating in the culture. Such painful, exhausting work that eventually attains its own lightness and style is very different from the postmodern readiness to migrate to a gravity-free world of endlessly disseminating selves, where lightness is so ubiquitous as to be no achievement at all. (When I trace themes in recent gay novels back to works of literary modernism, I keep finding Nietzsche as the deep basis of the modernism that matters to my account.)

What is crucial for understanding Aciman’s Elio is that, as much as the San Clemente syndrome is praised in the novel, he maintains the fierce identity, even after decades, of the person whose attachment to Oliver is what has mattered most in his life. He is characterized even after many, many years by a profound loss and grief that the postmodern model can hardly make sense of. In his loneliness Elio is far closer to the modernist Nietzsche than to the postmoderns. If he really took the template of San Clemente or of the Thai desk clerk seriously, then he would know how easy it is to reformulate the identity that makes him feel that pain. He just needs to put a new identity layer on top of the earlier one, as if choosing a different performative way to express gender or some other feature. Since there is supposedly no psychological depth to the self, he can easily remake the self that fell in love with Oliver by adopting new styles of discourse and performance. He can just accept the deconstruction of the self and the resulting lightness of maneuver that the Derrideans recommend. But what is absolutely crucial to Elio is that he cannot do these things. It is never even an option. He simply cannot be like the Thai desk clerk when it comes to the absolutely enduring identity of the person that fell terribly in love with Oliver. He remains at the powerful core of his psyche that very person. Something was brought out by that relationship that expressed what Nietzsche called the deep fatum of the psyche. In those days a fragile coalition involving many competing goals and mobile patterns of identification was at work in him. In an almost miraculous way Oliver turned out to be an object of investment that allowed many of those competing, shifting, oscillating patterns of investment to consolidate and to realize themselves at the same time. Elio could be a man relating to a woman, a woman relating to a man, a self relating to another, an other relating to an externalized version of the self, a self relating to itself, a child relating to an adult, an adult relating to a child, and so forth. A powerful coalition came together and allowed the compression of different identities into an attraction to a single object. A modernist concentration and compression of meanings rather than a postmodern dispersal of them was at work. There could be a desirable loss of self and a desirable regression, but an identification with the confident, beautiful individuality of Oliver meant that one could be sure of not suffering a permanent loss of self through that allowing of more mobile, more transitional stages to emerge.

Deep biological factors might come into play here. Elio felt a need to remain in Oliver’s field of vision, as if he might come apart if he were removed from it, in the way that a child in a hunter-gatherer society on the savannas of Africa would experience terror at no longer being in the view of a caretaker. Oliver’s removal from his life would feel like being left in a stark aloneness when other tribal members had moved on to another location. The odds are slim that Elio would find another attachment that would allow him both the loss of self and the securing of self that Oliver allowed, both a regression to a symbiotic togetherness and a sense of partners sharing a complicated but deeply satisfying structure of psychological engagement. Elio’s understanding father definitely does not take the postmodern attitude described here, one that would make light by making shallow. He tells Elio after Oliver has left: “Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner that we’d want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start something new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything – what a waste!” (CMYN 224) Again it is a matter of one’s patterns of attachment and relinquishing and the recommendation here is that one hold on firmly to the self that is feeling the loss, rather than flitting to some newer and more shallow identity by removing aspects of ourselves. As we survey the Elio-Oliver relationship, the odds against its lasting seem high, given the overall engineering patterns at the base of it. It may be that only by turning to aesthetic practices will Elio be able to realize a similar structure in a more enduring, but considerably less intense, form. Art might allow some of the identifications and the self-other ductility that the Elio-Oliver partnership once did.

The energies of the postmodern or deconstructive worlds are centrifugal. Derrida valorizes fragmentation, dissemination, and errancy; that which is supposed to give a stable ground to matters is always slipping off elsewhere. Whatever hints at integrity or wholeness keeps being destabilized as its parts break off and migrate into further arbitrary configurations. But those centrifugal energies are not the forces that characterize Elio’s world. In a great centripetal project he is focusing all his diverse mental energies on a single object of attachment, Oliver, someone who manages to attract simultaneously the goal-seeking investments of many diverse and poorly compatible inner “programs.” Literary modernism typically aims at that focusing and concentration of energies so that more powerful aesthetic gestures ultimately become possible, rather than having those resources remain scattered and arbitrarily juxtaposed. (I am thinking of writers such as Proust, Mann, and James. The modernism that turns into Dada and surrealism clearly takes a different direction from this.) One hopes to find oneself at a focal point or cresting, so that one can compress into one’s aesthetic identity and style of selfhood these many diverse forces, with a resulting intensity and power. That was Nietzsche’s model that he bequeathed to the literary modernists. It might appear that The Waste Land is an exception to this claim, since so much of it is made up of fragments, of parts that together do not achieve the integrity of a traditional poem. But in fact Eliot’s labor here is one of centripetal concentration. The range of images and literary references he presents begin to gather into ever more powerful, more cohesive configurations the more we read the poem. Just as all the voices (as Eliot himself asserts) ultimately have some identity with that of Tiresias, so Hyacinth, Actaeon, Coriolanus, Augustine, Ludwig II, the Phoenician Sailor, and other characters begin to appear in structures that bind them together. (One might show as well a centripetal power, centered around Leopold and Stephen, that is holding together the diversity of cultural styles in Ulysses.) In The Waste Land there is no Derridean dissemination to an ineffable and unmasterable elsewhere. Eliot is trying against great psychological pressure to produce an aesthetic achievement that, through the ways the various literary references resonate with each other in crucial unconscious patterns, is precisely a way of holding himself together. Elio will likely have to use the aesthetic realm to do the same thing, once Oliver has become unavailable. That realm, which his ordinary lifestyle has already been exploiting in his love of music and literature, will also allow a satisfying compression and a mobility of identifications, along with a self-securing style of ordering experience. As with his musical transcriptions, he will have through aesthetic means a technology for making powerful experiences his own and for redesigning his psyche in the way that Nietzsche recommends. Otherwise he may be severely depressed by the idea that he has no way of keeping the self together anymore. His regression to a transitional, more fluid psychological space no longer has Oliver to keep the overall structure stabilized.

I mentioned in the introduction how Aciman at certain points is employing allusions to Eliot, that great exemplar of modernism. It is not only that he refers to a wish to cuddle “when the night is spread out against the sky,” but even more that he offers his image of Oliver eating the peach that Elio has ejaculated into. “Do I dare to eat a peach?” asks Eliot’s Prufrock, and Aciman, through emphasizing the similarity between the shape of the peach and that of a young man’s buttocks, seems to be calling him out as someone who refused to recognize the homoerotic unconscious behind some of his poetry. When Elio talks about Oliver as “that man-woman whose man-woman I was,” one is reminded of Eliot’s Tiresias, who has experienced sexuality both as a man copulating with women and as a woman copulating with men and who is said to be the poem’s central voice.

Perhaps it is another modernist writer who comes closer, in at least one of his works, to certain of the erotic and identity structures explored by Aciman. Hemingway in The Garden of Eden has two figures, David and Catherine, who are experimenting with more fluid aspects of their sexual identities. They have seen a Rodin sculpture that captures one of Ovid’s tales: where a young woman who has been brought up as a boy and who is attracted to women is changed to a man on the night of her wedding. Catherine focuses on the moment the statue captures where the young woman is just transitioning from female to male. She says that she wants to become male herself when she and David have sex and that David must learn to play a female role in the sexual act. It is not just gender boundaries that become more porous and shifting. So do the boundaries of self and other. Interestingly enough, given what we have seen in the case of Elio and Oliver, Catherine wants to call David by her own name. You are changing into Catherine, she tells him. You are my girl Catherine. She gets a haircut so that she will look like a boy. David soon has a similarly fluid relationship with a different woman. She also has gotten a short haircut and has tanned her skin so that she comes off clearly as an Arab street boy, a comparison she emphasizes by her manner of dressing. Is David in sleeping with her allowing himself an expression of homoerotic desires that he could not otherwise express? Is he allowing himself a measure of feminine identification in sleeping with someone identified as male? Both Catherine and the other woman, as their skin becomes darker and darker, are compared to young male chieftains of an African tribe. If the move of Gide, Wilde, and others was to go after actual Arab street boys in North Africa, Hemingway’s move to a hotter Mediterranean south seems to require that those playing these adolescent boys in the sexual act, at least as he represents them in The Garden of Eden, must ultimately be revealed as women. A more determinate homoerotic situation will not be allowed. Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises can seem at times to take on, as a writer, the stance of Lady Brett as she admires the beauty of Pedro Romero, a very young bullfighter whose costume to some degree feminizes him. In other work Hemingway seems to have an obsession with the question of whether certain bullfighters are homosexual or not.   

Aciman devotes a substantial section of the novel to the three days that Elio and Oliver spend in Rome. His narrative emphasizes the beauty of the city, its promise of happiness, and the ways its layers are constructed over historically earlier ones. A “statue” of Dante comes to life to recite his lyrics from a long-ago past. Rome appears as well as a theme in some of the other novels under investigation here. O’Hagan’s David Anderton spends several years in Rome as a seminarian after his lover dies. The city appears to stand for his choice of a life of rituals tied to an enduring past, one whose habits generate beauty and a compelling, lasting style of appropriating the experiences of a human life. In Tóibín’s The Master, Henry James has come back to the beauty and light of Rome and there he meets the attractive young sculptor Hendrik Andersen. He visits the Protestant Cemetery and notes the graves of Keats and Shelley, while reflecting on all the English and Americans who journeyed from their Protestant nations to Catholic Rome. He remarks “that they had lived in beautiful places believing that the light and the views and the grand rooms were worth all the years of exile, the loss of their native countries.” (M 269) Even Crain’s Necessary Errors, which takes place almost entirely in Prague, allows a report from this city. Two of Jacob’s friends, Melinda and Carl, have become strongly attached and have moved from Prague to Rome. She reports that it is “fearfully beautiful” and that the two of them have a top-floor apartment near the Campo dei Fiori, one with a balcony that overlooks the red-tiled roofs of their neighborhood. There is a change in Nietzsche’s intellectual life as he moves away from German culture and begins to favor the Romanic cultures of France and Italy. He says that the Romans have much more to teach us than the Greeks and has strong praise for Petronius, Sallust, and Horace. Eliot makes the Roman victory over Carthage a central axis of The Waste Land, though he wonders if the contemporary successors to Rome can achieve an analogous triumph.

That Roman element might suggest a useful distinction within modernism. There is an iconoclastic modernism and there is a somewhat elegiac modernism. The former wishes to eliminate the ornaments, the complex layerings, the rituals that have their power from an enduring past, and the twisting cultural alleyways that retain their power in European culture. Instead there will be a new beginning from the ground up, whether in a more rational and functional architecture, in atonal and serial music, in logical positivism in philosophy, in radical and experimental literature, or in other areas as well. The latter kind of modernism finds modernity itself to be an impoverishing and flattening phenomenon and it looks to mine resources from the past that retain a difficult-to-plumb aesthetic, metaphysical, and even religious depth. One might note that a great deal of energy can be concentrated at the cusp of a change, when a very rich culture is receding into the past and one wishes to hang onto powerful and fertile elements of it, while recognizing that one can no longer live within such a culture itself. Our own psyches are built in the manner that the Roman poet in Aciman calls the San Clemente syndrome. So much of what we do depends on earlier, unconscious layers that we cannot give up. We may thus be at home especially in cultures that themselves keep alive a range of resources from different eras of the past. The more iconoclastic cultural programs fail to acknowledge that fact as they erase the features of such earlier cultures. A reference to Rome, then, can be used to come down on one side of this debate, the anti-iconoclastic one. Elio himself has an aesthetic life that is richly steeped in the European past. He takes Oliver to a point near where Shelley died while swimming, which is not far from the family residence. He remarks on Dante’s cantos while walking the streets of Rome and loves the old-fashioned features of his family’s Italian vacation home. He wanders Roman streets past buildings that have been there for centuries. He is closer to Proust, Pound, and Eliot than to any experimental writers of the post-1930 twentieth century.

In Aciman’s sequel novel, Find Me (FM), we see some of the characters of Call Me By Your Name ten, fifteen, and twenty years later. The latest scenes take us well into the twenty-first century, but once again the cultural reference scheme might for the most part have been offered a century earlier. Elio is now a concert pianist and the concert program he mentions consists of two piano concerti by Mozart. In the music class that he teaches he is using a Beethoven sonata as an example for the students. He has an affair with a man whom he meets at a concert in an old church in which two Beethoven string quartets are being played. There is a mysterious music manuscript with a special cadenza to a Mozart piano concerto. Elio’s father Samuel meets a young woman and entertains her by quoting Goethe and by using his privileged access to the Villa Albani, where he can show her its classical sculptures of Antinous and Apollo. She herself is reading Chateaubriand to her ailing father. Oliver at a party near Columbia University thinks of Elio when he hears a piece by Bach being played on the piano. When Elio and Oliver finally meet again at the end of the book, after twenty years, they travel to Alexandria and visit the former home of the modernist Greek-Alexandrian poet Cavafy. So the aesthetic reference scheme seems to remain that available to a literary modernist of a hundred years ago.

The novel points repeatedly to the situation of groups who are losing, but never quite fully losing, their culture as they have moved to a new cultural environment. We hear of an ancient Greek colony in Italy that was being Romanized even as, one day a year, they focused on celebrating their Greek heritage. We hear as well of Greeks from Constantinople who fled to Venice in the fourteenth century, became thoroughly Italianized, and almost forgot why there were still many Greek-origin words in their Venetian dialect. Then there are the Alexandrian Greeks who still speak a somewhat old-fashioned modern Greek in an Arab city with ever weaker ties to mainland Greece. In all these cases, the earlier cultural forms still come through, as in Aciman’s earlier model of the San Clemente church. There is the suggestion of nostalgia for these earlier forms, which can lead to an interesting richness of culture, rather than any preference for an iconoclastic modernity that would wipe out what came before. (In Aciman’s second novel, we do move forward into the twentieth century through a number of references to the Holocaust, but most of the high culture of that century might never have occurred.)

There is in the new novel considerably less exploration, than in Call Me By Your Name, of a possible plasticity and mobility in the eroticizing of the self-to-other structure of engagement with others. Elio tells a possible lover that he has had few affairs. “Maybe because I never really let go or lose myself with others. After an instant of passion, I always fall back into being the autonomous one.” (FM 141) He has earned a more reliable autonomy and separateness, something he did not have in his boundary-blurring loss of self to Oliver, such that he was never sure what was self and what was other. But the price has been a serious loss of intimacy in his life. And Aciman has decided that the largest section of the book will be devoted to the affair of Samuel, Elio’s father, with a much younger woman, an affair that seems to play out all the elements of an idealized power fantasy of an older male. When Elio and Oliver finally get together at the novel’s end, in a very brief section, we are offered rather little about the psychology of their interaction.

If you would like to read the rest of the book, you can purchase it on Amazon in paperback or kindle version. Read the introduction for free here.

1. Richard Rorty, “The World Well Lost,” in Rorty, The Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 3-18.