The Ovidian allusions underscore Elio’s double-role as pursuer and pursued.
So these allusions most notably show that they take on both roles in their relationship which highlight not only the fluidity of their relationship, but more fundamentally the dynamism and contradictions that lie in individual identities.
The height of their emotional and physical connection is marked by their exchange andconformity of identity: their love is all about each seeing himself in the other
Thesis: Their love is founded on seeing oneself in another, the exchange and conformity of identity
Now Elio stares intently at Oliver,but is “fleeing” with the same gesture, playing both the role of the pursuer and the pursued lover.Narcissus, in the same way, conveys both signs of pursuing and being pursued with his gestures,as the reflection of his attempts to court his reflection look to him like gestures appropriate forone being courted
Important quotation because this is the point of Gianelle's articulation about the references to Narcissus. It is that they have contradictory (quite literally opposite: pursuer and pursued) roles in their dynamic, and that hints to a flexible and fluid and contradictory identity
Acimanoften writes summary dialogues between his characters that give us the gist of their conversationwithout including quotation marks.
Yes, but why?
This sets up Aciman’s thematic comparison of Elio and Oliverwith Alcibiades and Socrates, which I will address in the following chapter.
This was just pre-knowledge for the real argument in Alcibiades and Socrates? Because this did not confound expectations, simply established a kind of perceived imbalance in love?
Through Elio’s espousal of Sappho’s affective language, which is marked as effeminate,his performance of gender subverts our gender expectations
Highlighting that Elio is effeminate and not manly, subverting gender expectations
It is notsurprising, then, that his representations of Elio’s relationship with Oliver through references toancient Greek and Roman literature should perform, by themselves, a queer reading of thosetraditional categories of gender and sexual power dynamics.
Gianelle aims to investigate the dynamic between Elio and Oliver on the assumption that Elio represents the difficulty in categorizing or defining oneself, hypothesizing that the dynamics will be queer and confound gender norms (+ adds contradictory nature of identity)
Aciman has intended for his narrator to resist a single interpretation because Elio is himselfmeant to reflect the condition of people to be dynamic and difficult to categorize.
Elio is meant to reflect the condition of people to be dynamic and difficult to categorize. Gianelle supports this idea with the Goldman Sachs Talk with Andre Aciman talking about the San Clemente Syndrome when Elio tries to transcribe the quartet.