Call Me By Your Name

In Part 1 of Call Me By Your Name, Aciman sets up certain tropes of the romantic literary drama to capture the overwhelming inner chaos that happens when falling in love. Aciman characterizes love as simultaneously wretched and beautiful. Wretchedness comes from the pain of having unrequited love and losing a sense of yourself to the passion of love, but beauty comes from the possibility of unrequited love becoming a partnership of passion.

Elio’s love for Oliver comes from a mysterious source. Elio is only 17 years old, and though he has had sexual encounters before, he has never felt a debilitating passion for another person the way he does for Oliver. He tells his story from the perspective of an adult, looking back at his youthful experience with intense love. As an adult, Elio searches for the first moments that made him fall in love with Oliver but ultimately decides that it was everything about his presence and personhood that captivated him. This reflection about the original source of love points to Aciman’s message that love is not meant to be explainable. Desire and love necessarily come from a place of mystery, which adds to its intoxicating and at times terrifying nature. If one can’t explain why and how they fell in love, then they also can’t explain their way out of love. This is crucial because, in this novel, Elio’s romance with Oliver constitutes a coming-of-age story. As Elio deals with a flurry of emotions for Oliver, he learns more about himself without being able to pinpoint how he is changing or evolving.

Elio’s youth is an important part of this romance story. He internalizes anxiety about his age and relative lack of experience in comparison with his imagined understanding of Oliver’s experience. Oliver is 24 years old, and their seven-year age gap makes Elio believe that Oliver’s experience supersedes his and therefore makes Oliver unreachable. Elio’s youth also contributes to his inability to understand himself throughout the summer of Oliver. Elio has a difficult time gaining a hold of his emotions. He finds that his feelings for Oliver, both hot and cold, seize him and make him act in strange ways. Elio turns against himself because he doesn’t have the life experience to help him contextualize this passion. Such extreme emotions, Aciman suggests, are a product of being a teenager. Elio’s lack of experience is part of what enables him to feel a love that terrifies him because, without the context of other relationships, first love feels monumental and earth-shattering. Elio’s youthful perspective highlights the highs and lows of love, that Love is Both Risky and Wonderful.

This is connected to Elio’s lack of comfort with himself. Elio admires how confident Oliver is, and Oliver’s casual expressions and aloofness suggest a self-confidence that Elio desires. But this confidence also makes Oliver somewhat unreadable and unapproachable. Elio feels bad about himself now that Oliver is around, but when Oliver extends his attention to Elio, Elio feels good about himself. Thus, Aciman demonstrates that falling in love can make you question and know yourself in ways you never have before. But Elio’s youth is an important factor in this because he hasn’t lived enough to develop the type of self-confidence that Oliver uses to control his environment. Oliver is at ease in all company, which makes everyone like him. Oliver’s fluidity between countries and cultures masks what Elio notices are signs of Oliver’s own insecurities. After all, confidence can hide insecurity and is not necessarily a confirmation that there are none. For example, Elio notices that Oliver is triggered by people whose behaviors remind him of himself in ways that shame him. As such, this also connotes a self-consciousness that Elio shares. What connects Oliver and Elio despite Elio’s belief that his confidence does not parallel Oliver’s is their ability to read people and understand their own selves in comparison or contrast with others. Elio is self-aware and deeply self-reflective, even if he is uncomfortable with who he is. He keeps a journal that is full of self-analysis, so his adult narrator voice can recall minute details of emotional depth. This demonstrates that Elio can develop confidence in the future because he is adept at understanding certain parts of himself. The reason he feels unconfident around Oliver is that his strategies of self-analysis no longer work in the face of this mysterious passion. Elio has never felt this way before, so he doesn’t yet have the vocabulary or knowledge to analyze his love for Oliver, though he does try to.

This lack of confidence manifests in Elio’s fantasies. When he fantasizes about sex with Oliver, his fantasies often involve some sort of rejection that is disguised as a desire. In Elio’s fantasies, no actually means yes. This demonstrates that on a certain level, Elio is tantalized by the fragility and fear of his desire. It also highlights that he is not confident in this desire. He says no as a way of ensuring plausible deniability while also encouraging more attention, as though Oliver’s insistence would confirm reciprocation of love and passion. Though this seems paradoxical, it is also indicative of his youth. Elio doesn’t know how to navigate a sexual relationship with Oliver, who is a fellow man and also older. Therefore, Elio says no in his fantasies as a way of testing the boundaries between himself and Oliver. Paradox is a safer space to live in because it leaves space for Elio’s confusion.

Connected to this is the idea of debasement as a manifestation of the shame that can accompany love. Elio most profoundly feels this shame when he sneaks into Oliver’s room and cuddles naked in Oliver’s bed. This is a surprising incident to Elio, who is shocked by his own invasion of Oliver’s privacy. But this debasement also feels so right that Elio fantasizes about doing it again. This demonstrates that Elio’s desires are not shameful, but without the ability to act upon his desire, Elio acts in other secretive ways. Aciman does not approach Elio’s desires from a place of shame; rather, he highlights that love can feel so topsy-turvy that it makes people, especially young people, act in ways that make them strangers to themselves.

At no point does Elio have to question if his desire for Oliver is appropriate. Being a gay man is not seen as a problem by Elio’s parents or Elio himself. But Elio uses girls to test out the limitations of Oliver’s heterosexuality and broach the possibility of Oliver’s desire for other men. That Oliver is obviously attracted to Chiara doesn’t discourage Elio because Elio is also attracted to girls. But his attraction to Oliver is deeper, more passionate, and more chaotic than his previous flirtations or relationships. Free of any internalized or externally influenced homoprejudice, Aciman’s novel about a boy uncovering his desire for a man is not about Elio’s right to have this desire but is rather about the passion that characterizes any teenager’s desire.

Another important layer of this novel is the identities of Italian and American. Elio’s mother is Italian, his father is American, and the family lives in Italy. This experience informs Elio’s identity because he speaks multiple languages and sees the world through multiple viewpoints. Still, his comfort with the contemporary American slang that Oliver slings is in development because he is more accustomed to Italian culture. What’s more, Elio’s family is devoted to art and academia, so Elio has a mature connection with music and literature. In the heightened passion of his desire, Elio is like any other teenager, but in other ways, he is very different from his peers. He is deeply introspective, intellectual, and thoughtful beyond his years. His parents treat him like an adult; they encourage him to take risks, have sex, and be with other young people. This characterizes Elio’s upbringing as more European than American because American culture is more closely associated with puritanism than with sexual liberty.

There are many paradoxes introduced in this novel, from Elio’s no-means-yes sexual fantasies to the merging of two distinctly different cultures. These paradoxes parallel Oliver’s study of Heraclitus. Heraclitus was an ancient Greek, pre-Socratic philosopher whose work and life are so ancient that scholars have a difficult time piecing together his ideas and life. But two of the central tenets of Heraclitus’s philosophy are that everything is constantly changing, and opposite things are identical. Thus, Heraclitus would find the paradox of Elio’s sexual yearning or broad identity not paradoxical at all. Furthermore, Heraclitus’s philosophy supports Aciman’s own ideas about the ways in which people, environments, and feelings are ever-changing and ever-evolving.