Queer Foxes. Also, Queer Movie Medievalisms.

by J J Cohen

Where does one find whiskey, foxes, poetry, theory, and queer heterotopoi cohabitating? Under the editorship of Dan Remein, of course, at a promising new journal that many ITM readers will want to read. From the call for submissions (vivid orange coloration preserved):

we are interested in poetry and poetics committed to theory and historiography, and theory and historiography committed to poetry and poetics. The journal is interested currently in shorter forms or fragments, forms which might be classified as a missive, an aphorism, or a raid--although other forms and modes will be considered.

"All those other words make sense," you observe. "But why foxes?" Tsk, tsk, have you not read your bestiary lately? "The fox is crafty and deceitful. When it is hungry it rolls in red earth to look as if it is covered in blood. It feigns death by holding its breath. Birds come to sit on the body whereupon the fox jumps up and eats them."

Many an ITM reader will also be interested in the following book as well, forthcoming from Ashgate Press in the astonishing Queer Interventions series:

Queer Movie Medievalisms
edited by Tison Pugh and Kathleen Coyne Kelly

How is history even possible, since it involves the recuperation of a past that is already lost? In the urge to understand and even to feel or experience history, “medieval” films attempt to re-create the past, but can only do so through a queer re-visioning that inevitably replicates modernity. In these mediations between past and present, history becomes misty, and so, too, do constructions of gender and sexuality. Hence the impossibility of heterosexuality, or of any sexuality, predicated upon cinematic medievalism: identity as constructed through the past cannot escape the charge of presentism, and thus queerness can serve as the defining metaphor for studying both sexuality and historical films. In the collected essays of Queer Movie Medievalisms, contributors grapple with the ways in which mediations between past and present as registered on the silver screen queerly undercut assumptions about sexuality throughout time.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Queer History, Medievalism, and the Impossibility of Sexuality
Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Northeastern University, and Tison Pugh, University of Central Florida

Chapter 1
“In the Company of Orcs”: Peter Jackson’s Queer Tolkien
Jane Chance, Rice University

Chapter 2
Queering the Lionheart: Richard I in The Lion in Winter on Stage and Screen
R. Barton Palmer, Clemson University

Chapter 3
“He’s not an ardent suitor, is he, brother?”: Richard the Lionheart’s Ambiguous Sexuality in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1935 The Crusades”
Lorraine Kochanske Stock, University of Houston

Chapter 4
The Law of the Daughter: Queer Family Politics in Bertrand Tavernier’s La Passion Béatrice
Lisa Manter, St. Mary’s College of California

Chapter 5
Performance, Camp, and Queering History in Luc Besson’s Jeanne d’Arc
Susan Hayward, Exeter University

Chapter 6
The Eastern Western: Camp as a Response to Cultural Failure in The Conqueror
Anna Klosowska, Miami University, Ohio

Chapter 7
“In My Own Idiom”: Social Critique, Campy Gender, and Queer Performance in Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Susan Aronstein, University of Wyoming

Chapter 8
Sean Connery’s Star Persona and the Queer Middle Ages
Tison Pugh, University of Central Florida

Chapter 9
Will Rogers’ Pink Spot: A Connecticut Yankee
Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Northeastern University

Chapter 10
Danny Kaye and the “Fairy Tale” of Queerness in The Court Jester
Martha Bayless, University of Oregon

Chapter 11
Mourning and Sexual Difference in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Parsifal
Michelle Bolduc, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Chapter 12
Superficial Medievalism and the Queer Futures of Film
Cary Howie, Cornell University

Afterword
Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, Queen’s College, City University of New York

Thanks, MOR, for the tip on this one. The book looks terrific, and I have to say: do we not behold here our next ITMBC4DSoMA?

De amicitia

by J J Cohen

Today our second annual ITMBC4DSoMA, a communal reading of Carolyn Dinshaw's Getting Medieval, comes to its close.

CD's book has passed so thoroughly into the conversations of contemporary medieval studies that it is difficult to visit the text anew. Don't get me wrong: GM has been neither surpassed nor assimilated. But as our posts and discussions here have made clear, the volume continues to be a catalyst for some of the most important interchanges in the profession. Less than a decade after its publication, the book is well on its way to status as a classic.

So, some closing thoughts. What GM most leaves me with is its productive utopianism based in affective, heterogeneous communities. CD writes:

We can make alliances across conventional boundaries. And as we try to recontextualize the debates, to empower different players and audiences, I see the necessity of doing what I am doing here: preaching to the converted. (181)

"The converted," she warns, "is never a single, monolithic category":

Everyone reading this, I would hazard, already believes in academic freedom. But not everyone reading this, I imagine, is queer or queer-friendly ... And (in the spirit of Margery Kempe) all of us -- not just the elect -- can preach: each of us can embrace the project of building coalitions (those postmodern communities). (181, 182)

She concludes her book with what in the Middle Ages would be called a benedicite:

Getting medieval: not undertaking brutal private vengeance in a triumphal and unregulated bloodbath ... not turning from an impure identity to some solidity guaranteed by God ... but using ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way in our efforts to build selves and communities now and into the future. (206)

Nine years after reading these lines for the first time, they still leave me dizzy: the vertigo of experiencing temporality in creative and nonlinear ways; the intoxication of their sheer affirmativeness; the (hopeless?) romanticism of believing that we can have a community beyond brutality, vengeance, purifications, boundary guarding -- beyond, that is, what medieval studies can be at its worst: intent on establishing a disciplinary cordon sanitaire, delighting in enforcing a licit ambit and using the anonymity of peer review and other mechanisms of the profession to police that territory.

That is not a vision of medieval studies that will be familiar to many of this blog's readers, thank goodness. Medieval studies is far more congenial now than it was a decade or two ago. Attempts to circumscribe narrowly what the discipline ought to be have not, however, wholly vanished: they are alive and well, and many of us have stories to tell of reader's reports or reviews in journals or comments in blogs. But even though I could tell many such tales myself, I must admit to finding them, ultimately, tiresome. They can come to seem the reality of the field when in fact -- take it from someone who has been working here for sixteen years -- they are only a small fragment of an expansive and, for the most part, convivial discipline.

Mary Kate recently called my attention back to a brilliant essay by Gillian Overing. Composed in 1993, the piece is a response to a paper by Tom Shippey and was delivered immediately after his remarks at an MLA panel. Shippey was, to put it mildly, ungracious towards the works he lingered over and then dismissed. Old English studies, he insisted, was headed in all the wrong directions, with scholars mired in their own narcissism, asking questions to which they were providing the answers. His paper contains statements about Overing's and other scholars' work like:

I often find myself rewriting her sentences ... Isn't this a case of starting with an ideal and turning over a literature till you find a match? ... But as a general rule I would say that any modern investigator who looks back at Old English and finds in it confirmation of a cherished modern thesis should check, and wonder whether this isn't too handy to be true. Also, of course, too familiar to be interesting.

To such an unsympathetic -- not to mention inaccurate -- account of what Language, Sign and Gender in Beowulf attempts or achieves, what is there to say? I suppose, like Kempe, like CD at a pivotal moment, Overing could have said Don't touch me. Who would blame her?

Instead she does something absolutely breathtaking. Mary Kate describes it, spot-on, thus: "in grand style, [she] was amazingly professional in her response ... she used her final paragraph not to excoriate, but as she puts it, to celebrate." I quote some of those words here, because ever since Mary Kate brought them back to me they have been foremost in my mind:

I come to this MLA in an unusual frame of mind--for I am here to celebrate. This session itself, and the reasons which occasion it, are cause for celebration. The developing body of recent critical scholarship in our field presents us with exciting perceptions and challenges, and enlivens and enriches our discipline overall, both our professional exchanges and our work in the classroom. I welcome it, and I would also add "about time." In the not-too-distant past I have been one of those who has lamented--and complained about--the tardy admission of new critical methodologies into the field of Old English. But I have changed my tune, because things have changed; we are changed by this new work. .... I wish to emphasize the connectedness of our work as scholars, and once again, to celebrate the ways in which this new body of scholarship in our field validates and affirms those connections between our present and past academic history, and between our own histories and the texts we study and create.

With their affirmative challenge, Overing's words resonate well with Carolyn's at the close of Getting Medieval. They are laden with possibilities for a feminist-postcolonialist-queerly inclusive future for the field, and they -- not the negative critique and boundary-drawing words to which they responded -- were the true prophecy for the field's best future. The graciousness that Overing's words possess is something that also characterizes CD's writing. We strive for something like it as well at ITM. I would be the first to admit that I often do not succeed. I removed a post recently because of such a failure. But for me it is important that scholarship take risks. Sometimes you will fall flat on your face, and it will hurt like hell. At rare times a book like Getting Medieval will be the yield of your hazard.

So I close, like Gillian Overing, with a celebration ... of friendship, because I find that word better suited to what I attempt here and in my own work than CD's community and coalition. Cicero, one of the many figures who have touched me across time, composed an essay on friendship, De amicitia. Here are some lines that have always been important to me:

When friendship has put itself forth and revealed its light, and has seen and recognized the same radiance in another, it draws near to that glow, and receives in return what the other has to give. From this convergence love [amor], or friendship [amicitia] -- call it what you will -- is ignited. These terms are, after all, equally derived in our language from loving.

Amor/amicitia. You will have gleaned already, readers, that even though we did not know each other well before we started blogging together, we four ITMers have fostered an amity that now lives as much off the blog as on. Recently I wrote to my co-bloggers: "Let some people dislike us. Whatever. We know what we value, and we hold to those values. Primary among these values is friendship, and the best thing about ITM is working and worrying with and celebrating with -- and also, simply, knowing -- you." With Carolyn Dinshaw's closing benediction still ringing in my ears, with Overing and Cicero likewise touching what I have tried to say, let me extend that last sentence and include you, the one who reads these words, whether you comment here or not. Knowing that you form part of an audience that is at times touched by "our efforts to build selves and communities now and into the future" make this enterprise, this work that can sometimes seem without reward, worth every moment spent upon it.

Here is to queer touch. Here is to affirmative challenge. Here is to amicitia, and amor.

ITMBC4DSoMA 2 ends Friday

by J J Cohen

... so if you were thinking of commenting and have not yet posted, well, tempus fugit.

And: welcome Literature Compass readers.

[Noli] me tangere

by J J Cohen

In the comments to this post by Eileen I wrote:

My question ... has to do with community and the noli me tangere of Jesus, the words that leave Margery reeling. The most puzzling moment of GM is for me just after the Kempe chapter has taken its long political swerve, into the controversy over government funding of the NEA. CD writes:

And in defense of our united (but not necessarily unified) interests as queers, as medievalists, as proponents of queer scholarship, as humanities researchers, as advocates of higher education, and as supporters of academic freedom, we say to those who would eliminate us: Don't touch me. (GM 182)

Even after all this time that last imperative startles me, because I must admit that I have always expected something rather different to follow the eloquent injunction other than a boundary drawing differentiation (the entire book has been an argument against boundaries). Why this limit, why the noli me tangere? Why not something like You have already been touched?

Eileen responded:

I was startled, too, but I partly took that as a form of the "answering back" that Dinshaw was illustrating in Margery Kempe's life and also as a kind of political threat to the powers-that-be in the U.S. Congress and elsewhere regarding queer/human rights. Of course, it's paradoxical to much of what Dinshaw is advocating for in the book regarding affective touch as an historical method, and brings back the question of how touch can be too forceful, too appropriative, and violent. But we might also say that we can, and must have both: that we need to argue for and practice a form of life that is affective and in which touch can have moral and ethical agency, while at the same time realizing that there will always be those who will touch violently and who need to be answered "back," whose force might have to met with, at the very least, forceful talk.

Mary Kate added:

Maybe a moment like that, which effectively forces her to halt her "life project" is also a moment where scholarship might help illuminate something that remains from that life project, in the form of the text: A kind of desire in excess of that which is allowed, or allowable -- an excess registered, perhaps, in tears (Jeffrey, do you have something on this from MIM? I don't have it in NC). But moreover, that excess which makes these figures -- these bodies -- exceptional, in a very literal sense. I'm always reminded of another mystic when reading Margery -- Hadewijch of Brabant, whose visions are of Minne, and fulfillment therein. At one point in her visions she explains how she is better than the saints, precisely because her desire can be excessive, can exceed what God wants her to desire. She can want Him more than He wants her to. A Saint, by definition, would desire only as much as God wanted. Maybe a part of this kind of history is also to reclaim these desires -- maybe ultimately wanting more from history than scholarship can give, but opening to being touched by what can still be perceived, and perhaps, partially, remembered. Maybe to letting that excess spill out over centuries -- talking a self into existence.

I want to return to this moment of not touching because it still seems to me anomalous to CD's project, and especially to Margery Kempe's. While it is true that Kempe answers back, she does not typically reply with a Don't touch me. There are obvious, clear cut cases when she must draw an inviolable boundary, of course, as in the face of potential rape. As CD points out so well, a fear of impending sexual violation is constant throughout Kempe's book, and with good reason.

Yet an answering back that takes the form of Don't touch me has an inbuilt limit: the point at which discourse fails and force is deployed, despite any refusal of this force's right to be marshaled, despite firm assertions of noli me tangere. I've argued in Medieval Identity Machines (in a chapter called 'The Becoming-Liquid of Margery Kempe") that in situations where speech has become perilous Kempe relies on the haptic power of pure sound, nonlinguistic utterances that have a visceral effect on her auditors, including herself. She forms alliances with the tears, storms, thunder and music that are the soundtrack of her work. Her tears are infectious, touching those who hear them -- even her scribe: "Also, whil the forseyd creatur was ocupiid abowte the writing of this tretys, sche had many holy teerys and wepyngs ... and also he that was hir writer cowed not sumtyme kepyn himself fro wepyng." Here is how I put it in MIMs:

This contagion "involving terms that are entirely heterogeneous" [Deleuze and Guattari] -- this unnatural participation through which tears seep from Kempe's history to her body to her narrative to her scribe to her book, catching up pages and words and sounds and bodies in its unsettling flow -- also instantiates an affective model for receiving (rather than simply reading) the text. Even if Kempe's tears and cries sometimes failed to precipitate community and understanding during her life, her book will serve not as the recorder but the promulgator of her wepyng, the catalyst for intersubjective assemblages which will implant her affect anew and trigger "unheard-of becomings."

I'm quoting this because I want to emphasize that Don't touch me was not the strategy Kempe used most often, nor most effectively: she touched, affectively, with nonlinguistic sound when necessary, emptying herself into vast spaces like echoing cathedrals and implanting in the bodies of her auditors a vibration that often turned out to be sympathetic. When she answers back, it tends to be through a very material tactility, rather than via the forbidding of touch.

Nor is Don't touch me necessarily our own best strategy as humanists for ensuring that our labors are valued and funded. As the chair of an English Department for two years and newly the director of a medieval and early modern studies institute, I have found myself constantly arguing -- mainly with scientists -- for both these things, recognition of value tied to tangible support. My university is smitten with policy, with globalism, with politics. It also has a strange and enduring love affair with the natural sciences, disciplines we are structurally ill equipped to support. How do you secure funding for a project on narratives of wounded black veterans of America's early wars, for example, when so many resources are being assigned to an (imaginary) science center that started out costing $100 million and now could easily be twice that? When your university has a debt load equal to its endowment, how do you ask for the $120,000 it takes to get a medieval/early modern institute up and running for three years? You do it by touching your would-be detractors, by ensuring that what you do is recognized as already in them, often much to their surprise. When our Dean of Special Projects, a biologist not well disposed to interdisciplinary humanities work [everyone should remain in their category, English professors shouldn't be philosophers, that sort of thing] was meeting with me about funding some disabilities studies related projects, I started off by asking him about his own training, his own passions for art -- and so we had a conversation about the Arthur Quiller-Couch poem "The Twa Corbies" and the representational work of animals in narrative. The key was to find the familiar, and use that to carry him along to a place where he didn't expect to be, a place that had it not initially touched something in him would have been too far away to step -- the place where humanities scholars can speak about animals, or about disability and its queer relation to sexuality, and not have a biologist reject them out of hand. I used similar means with our chief research officer, a man who had never funded a project that was not foreign policy or microscope oriented -- a man, that is, who thought that research was something social and natural scientists did, and that involved equipment and interviews rather than symposia where conversations unfolded. He's the one who finally wrote the check that created GW MEMSI. Likewise, it was selling the allure of the archives -- old books have such cultural cachet, even among those who prefer particle accelerators over Michael Chabon -- that we were able to fund for five years an undergraduate research seminar at the Folger. This seminar has produced works like a brilliant undergraduate thesis entitled "The Whorish, the Objectified, and The Transgendered: Spenser’s Female Others and The Drive of Jouissance."

Persistence -- continued touching -- reminding one's auditors that they have already been touched, perhaps long in the past, perhaps by the past itself: these seem to me far more effective than Touch me not. Why else would Margery Kempe almost die of grief when Jesus pronounced those words?

Tales of the Avunculate

by J J Cohen

Yes, I know, most of you are still reading Eileen's brilliant "little" post. I entered it on the weekend and by the time I emerged the sun was low in the sky Monday. While I am just standing here waiting for everyone else to catch up, I will type out a tiny contribution to our discussion in the form of two vignettes. They are offered in the true spirit of a blog ... something that if published more conventionally would be ficto-criticism.

(1) The Professor
Reading The Woman Warrior with an astonishingly good teacher convinced me to change my undergraduate major from biology to English. Reading Bright's Old English Grammar with an astonishingly good teacher convinced me, once there, to become a medievalist.

I'd signed up for "Introduction to Old English" as my first upper division class in the major because of a lingering methodical disposition -- inherited no doubt from my old identity as proto-scientist. In his tweed jacket with elbow patches, his wood-smelling office filled with unruly books, his propensity to mention the Victorian idea of a necropolis in the same breath as an obscene Old English riddle, the professor who taught this course was a cliché -- and a dream -- come true. I appreciated immediately his irreverence, his wit, his smart way of not taking himself or his field too seriously while also demanding, well, everything from his students. We loved him, so we were happy to oblige.

In November he brought to class a satchel of plastic runes he'd purchased at the bookstore. He spilled them over the table and made merciless fun of their enclosed marketing materials. He gave an impromptu lecture about medieval runic writing. The next week he missed class, and when he did appear announced that he shouldn't have ridiculed the runes. They had come with a warning to pay serious heed to their prognosticative abilities or face dire consequences. A week before the final exam we were told he was in the hospital. I worked in the dermatology department there, filing slides, and tried to see him. He was in a room with a sign announcing that he was IN ISOLATION and that no visitors were permitted. He died early in the new year, without ever having left that room.

Last spring I learned that he was one of the very first cases of AIDS treated at the hospital. He had not been treated as humanely as he should have been.


(2) The Aunt
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has written that

Because aunts and uncles (in either narrow or extended meanings) are adults whose intimate access to children needn't depend on their own pairing or procreation, it's very common, of course, for some of them ot have the office of representing nonconforming or nonreproductive sexualities to children ... It might therefore follow that a family system understood to include an avuncular function might also have a less hypostatized view of what and therefore how a child can desire. (Tendencies 63)

My tutor for a world that might be thought differently from the rather narrow view my parents intended to bequeath was my aunt Marie. The category she clung to fiercely, with a joy that I didn't understand but knew I admired (because her determination told me that for her the stakes were high) was single. She was a woman who had many friends, many intimacies, but she laughed away the pressures that -- even as a child -- I could see were placed upon her to marry, to have kids, perhaps even to give up the career and travel abroad she so loved. Four or five times every year she would take me and my brothers and sisters to stay for a few nights in her old house in Belmont: a double decker building on a quiet street that always smelled like polish and had a window made of stained glass. She insisted that welisten to the Supremes, her favorite group, and it was not optional to dance. When after chemotherapy she lost her hair, she purchased a wig that she said made her look like Diana Ross.

Aunt Marie died when I was seventeen, a very long time ago. This morning I was taking an early run along Mass Ave, listening (as I always do) to my iPod. The device was set to shuffle my thirty million songs ... and towards the end of my route Stop! In the Name of Love began to play. I don't know how that song got on my iPod -- I have no memory of placing it there, and I haven't listened to the Supremes in two decades. But there it was, and I was thinking about Aunt Marie, and my professor who had died, and Carolyn Dinshaw, and Margery Kempe, and being touched by those who, even when they are no longer present, make you realize that the orbits of our ordinary lives need never be so small.

I offer these vignettes partly in response to Eileen's post, with her wondering about vibrations in the archives and real, bounded, embodied persons. I offer this as a way of acknowledging that time's touch, queer or not, is often felt most keenly through those who open the past and the future to us. I can't think GM without the touch of this professor, this aunt, Robert Gluck, EJ, KS, MKH, CD...

Time is the Question of the Subject Seized by His or Her Other: The Intensities of an Ardor of a Different Kind in Dinshaw’s Queer Historisicm

[please note fellowship opportunity at the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana below]

Figure 1. Potter's Field (New Orleans, 1907)

by EILEEN JOY

Realism . . . falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
—Eugene Ionesco

Down here, the sun clings to the earth and there is no darkness. / Down here, the silence of the sea and the silence of the swamp seep into our muscles. // All night, Dolores labors between the sea grapes and the empty park. / Our town prostitute, she listens for a long time. Her listening makes her strong. // The teenage boy locks his door and combs the obscene magazine. / His callused left hand chops the gloss in waves. The silence of the naked ladies builds. // The Cape Sable seaside sparrows’ population dropped 25 percent. Females are silent. / Male calls are counted and multiplied by sixteen: this is how we track what cannot be seen. // Gay waiters examine their haircuts in the mirrors. / Perhaps tonight their pursuit of love will end in some permanence? // Juan escapes from our prison; he duct-tapes Playboy magazines to his rib cage. / With his glossy carapace, he vaults over the razor strips of the chainlink fence. // Egas Moniz wins the Nobel Prize in 1949 for pioneering lobotomies. / I am a pioneer of silence but the silencing of madness haunts me because it is unresolved.
—Spencer Reese, from “Florida Ghazals”

In medieval studies, many articles and books are about the so-called Middle Ages themselves. We might say that they attempt, as best as they can and with as much awareness as possible of the drawbacks and imperfections of any historical methodology and of history’s ineradicable fissures and silences, to draw pictures and tell stories about medieval persons, places, and events that are attentive to what Leopold von Ranke called “how it really was” [wie es eigentlich gewesen]—the only thing “needful” for history, as Ranke also claimed. Other studies are more concerned with historical methodology itself and with exploring how our various methodologies for “doing history” [whether in the form of analyses of literary and other texts, grave remains, architectural ruins, historical persons and events, mentalities, and so on] can never fully capture or fix in any one time what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called the “irreducible plurality in our experiences of historicity” [Provincializing Europe, p. 108], which is not to say that “how it really was” is not a concern of the authors of this second type of study. It is only that, for these scholars, “how it really was” is always a heterogeneous affair, and the main interest is often in tracing the limits of history’s intelligibility—the places at which, again following Chakrabarty, history “knots” up and is resistant to rationalist interpretation—as well as in showing all the ways in which, as Fernand Braudel would have said, history moves at different speeds. This is work that is also sometimes concerned with “working through” [in the psychoanalytic sense] and perhaps even in ameliorating and adjudicating the personal and more largely social traumas occasioned by history and by its resistance to the types of re-narrativization that would “make sense” of the past [we might call this the “redress” model].

And if we are at all concerned with what might be called living in a society without history [a frightening affair well outlined by Carolyn Dinshaw in her book Getting Medieval, especially pages 173-82, and also terrifyingly illustrated in Alfonso Cuaron’s film Children of Men, and well, just consider the Bush Administration’s legal memorandums on torture or the hysterical moralizing that erupts every time a politician sleeps with a prostitute], I am also reminded of something Joseph Kugelmass wrote on his blog The Kugelmass Episodes in May 2007, that our best resistance to a “society without history” might be “aimed at protecting those processes of development and change that are slow enough to have a past; resistance derives its strength from the slow time of human life, including the continual grief of repressed cultural or personal identity, and the protracted agonies of living under oppression. Each step forward should be so fully comprehended, and massively parallel, that it endures. It is the only possible approach for [those of us who are] . . . devoted to literature. Works of art help change to ripen, measuring its costs carefully, and calling it by old names.” What other way would there be, without art (or without history practiced as a form of art—even, as an affective art, even as an affective life, in Dinshaw’s and others’ hands), to record how, as the poet Spencer Reese writes, “Philomela held her cut tongue in her hand like a ticket. Although her past was history, her silence strengthened her, gave her wings.” Or how else could Robert Gluck in his 1994 novel Margery Kempe, as Dinshaw illustrates for us so beautifully, push himself [and his fictional persona Bob] under the surface of Margery’s story, and thereby demonstrate how all of us—not just Robert/Bob, the lover L., Margery, Jesus, and even the scholar Dinshaw herself, but also ourselves/her readers—are always forming and building our selves through various “crossings” across lives, texts, and times that may or may not actually [literally, physically] meet except under the dis/organizing touch of the queer historian, and also the artist, and any of us who might be able to grasp the idea of an individual life as an asynchronous artwork of what Foucault called “not being oneself.”

And this brings me also to the matter of time. Partly thanks to current work in postcolonial studies and in critical temporality studies, current work in medieval queer studies and also in medieval postcolonial studies [and also, I think, in studies in medievalism], has become concerned with the idea, as expressed by Chakrabarty, that “humans from any other period and region . . . are always in some sense our contemporaries,” and thus “the writing of history must implicitly assume a plurality of times existing together, a disjuncture of the present with itself” [Provincializing Europe, p. 109]. In this scenario, historical scholarship might not be overly concerned with von Ranke’s “how it really was” or even with the gap of the “irreducible plurality in our own experiences of historicity,” but rather, in the words of Glenn Burger, it might seek to “practice a historicism that brings the past and the present, premodern and postmodern, alongside each other in a rich heterogeneity, that stresses a temporality and spatiality that is coincidental, affective, and performative rather than stabilizingly teleological, segmented, or hierarchized” [“The Place of the Present in the Middle Ages: A Scene of Possibility,” paper presented at International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 11 May 2008]. Or, following the thought of Elizabeth Grosz, in The Nick of Time, which Karma Lochrie cited at this past May’s Kalamazoo Congress, what history might give us now “is the possibility of being untimely, of placing ourselves outside the constraints, the limitations, and blinkers of the present. This is precisely what it means to write for a future that the present cannot recognize; to develop, to cultivate the untimely, the out-of-place and the out-of-step. This access to the out-of-step can come only from the past and a certain uncomfortableness, a dis-ease, in the present” [p. 117]. And this can’t but help remind me of a point that Jeffrey himself made in 2000 when he published The Postcolonial Middle Ages, where he stressed, in his introductory essay “Midcolonial,” that medieval studies “must stress not difference (the past as past) or sameness (the past as present) but temporal interlacement, the impossibility of choosing alterity or continuity (the past that opens up the present to possible futures)” [p. 5].

And I hope I will be forgiven this long-ish preamble to my thoughts on Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval, as I believe that one of the chief values of her book is in its wrestling with all of the aspects of the historical enterprise I have outlined above: with “how it really was” [which I would say, in Dinshaw’s work, and following her obvious obsession with Foucault’s essay “Life of Infamous Men,” is a concern with the tangible existence(s) of real, but also with fictionalized, historical persons who are capable, even though dead, of producing “vibrations” felt in the body of the scholar situated in the archive]; with the irreducible plurality in our experiences of historicity, or, as Dinshaw might put it, with the disaggregating and anarchic processes of history and of its “surfaces,” its textualities as much as its body-nesses and all the gaps of historical intelligibility in between; and finally, with the ways in which, in Grosz’s words, history “is not the recovery of the truth of bodies or lives in the past; it is the engendering of new kinds of bodies and new kinds of lives. History is in part an index of our present preoccupations, but perhaps more interesting, the past is as rich as our futures allow” [The Nick of Time, p. 255].

This is not to say that, in the final analysis, all of these concerns, evidenced in Dinshaw’s book, are ultimately reconcilable with each other [at times, they are not compatible at all], but that is the book’s greatest virtue in my mind: all the ways in which it foregrounds its own processes of reckoning the past and of making use of the past [processes that are not always companionable with each other, for the past may sometimes want something very different from the desires we detect in it, and how could we ever really know the difference? we can only proceed with ethical caution and care and at least some kind of desire, any desire and hope at all of bringing light, which is like Auden’s “affirming flame,” which is a form of love], for personal but also and more importantly, for more broadly communitarian liberatory ends. The book is also virtuous for its willingness to make what Joan Retallack has termed the “poethical wager”: an “urgent and aesthetically aware thought experiment” in which meaning arises from a “dicey collaboration” between the imagination and the intellect, and the “question of poethics” is ultimately “what we make of events as we use language in the present, how we continuously create an ethos of the way in which events are understood” [The Poethical Wager, p. 9]. Dinshaw’s work is history, or historiography, as poetics, in the sense that John Caputo describes [and thank you, Dan Remien, for first pointing me in the direction of this passage]:

A poetics gives voice to the properly symbolic discourse of the kingdom [for Caputo’s “kingdom,” substitute Dinshaw’s/Barthes’ “the real”], while a logic enunciates the literal discourse of the world. As a symbolic discourse, then, a poetics is a certain constellation of idioms, strategies, stories, arguments, tropes, paradigms, and metaphors—a style and a tone, as well as a grammar and a vocabulary, all of which, collectively, like a great army on the move, is aimed at gaining some ground and making a point. We might say that a poetics is a discourse with a heart, supplying the heart of the heartless world. Unlike logic, it is a discourse with pathos, with a passion and desire, with an imaginative sweep and flare, touched by a bit of madness, hence more of an a-logic or even patho-logic, one that is, however, not sick but healing . . . . [The Weakness of God, p. 104]

This wager, this poethical scholarship, also means taking on, with some courage I imagine, what Retallack calls the “against-all-odds project of recomposing some small portion of the habitus” [p. 17]—and this is why it is not so difficult to see why some in our field were and continue to be discomfited by Dinshaw’s delving into the personal responses to John Boswell’s work on homosexuality in the Middle Ages or reading the “medieval” through a contemporary film like Pulp Fiction or confessing to the bodily feeling of mystical vibrations in the archive or analyzing Congressional debates over NEH funding or describing the delightfully irreligious fucking of Robert Gluck’s novel Margery Kempe, in much the same way many of us are discomfited by James Earl confessing his Freudian dreams in Thinking About Beowulf or by Jeffrey dwelling on the socio-cultural implications of Alfred’s hemorrhoids in Medieval Identity Machines or by Karma Lochrie writing on the Supreme Court case Lawrence vs. Texas in Heterosyncracies—all of these and numerous other examples point to a concerted effort, in whatever increments, to transform the habitus of our discipline and, as Steven Kruger and Glenn Burger have written [in their Introduction to Queering the Middle Ages], to “preposterously” rethink the Middle Ages and our relation to it. This work will always have its detractors, but perhaps these detractions would be far less if we considered that such work does not demand that we all stop doing old-fashioned historicist work and start doing something else, something more presentist or more preposterously theoretical or more temporally “whack,” but rather, in Dinshaw’s eloquent plea at the conclusion to Getting Medieval, that we begin to at least try to imagine a communitarian model for doing our work in which we work very hard not to essentialize: either history or ourselves or others whom we might claim are “too different, too queer” from ourselves [at the same time, I do not completely follow Dinshaw, who is also following Foucault and Bersani, among others, into the desire to imagine new histories in which everything is post-identitarian, disaggregated, and all surface—all bodies turned inside out: more on that in a separate post, with the caveat that Dinshaw herself questions Foucault’s valorization of bodily surfaces].

It has to be admitted at the same time, however, that a “queer” history is what is being privileged in Dinshaw’s and others’ medieval scholarship [that of Glenn Burger, Michael Camille, Jeffrey Cohen, Lara Farina, Allen Frantzen, Cary Howie, Anna Klosowska, Steven Kruger, Karma Lochrie, Robert Mills, James Schultz, Diane Watt, and Lisa Weston, among others] which many will not want to embrace, while at the same time, I am more and more convinced that there cannot be any higher ethical scholarship than that which attends to what Dinshaw has described as a queer and anachronistic history:

[A] history that would reckon in the most expansive way possible with how people exist in time, with what it feels like to be a body in time, or in multiple times, or out of time, is a queer history—whatever else it might be. Historicism is queer when it grasps that temporality itself raises the question of embodiment and subjectivity. Michel de Certeau has written in The Mystic Fable that “time is . . . the question of the subject seized by his or her other, in a present that is the ongoing surprise of a birth and a death.” [“Temporalities,” in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm, p. 109]

The subject seized by his or her other, in a present that is the ongoing surprise of a birth and death. I can think of no better description of what has happened to Dinshaw herself through the craft of her scholarship, of its ongoing-ness as a practice and a mentality, and as a form of embodiment [even, dis-embodiment] in which she allows herself the risk of wanting to be surprised by the “intensities” of past bodies that are almost beyond bearing, or as Cary Howie has described her historical project, of wanting, “like the voice of the Lorenz Hart lyric, a nearness that is ‘nearer than the wind is to the willow’” [Claustrophilia, p. 112]. And this has some affinities, too, with Howie’s own project of an anachronistic reading practice in which “the metonymic, participative touch (or look, or reading) brings more fully into being the bodies, texts, and buildings it brushes against” [p. 7].

And here I want to linger on the phrase in the long quotation from Dinshaw’s essay “Temporalities” above, what it feels like to be a body, with a special emphasis on a body. For although Dinshaw concludes Getting Medieval with a plea for a kind of communitarian disaggregation—an embracing of the idea [or is it a fact?] that there is no such thing as a unified, essential self [and who would disagree? not me, no, not me], and that subjects are formed in the inbetween moments of restless and various crossings between alter persons, places, and times—at the same time, throughout her work, both in Getting Medieval and elsewhere, there is this corollary [and I believe, valuable] assertion of the importance of singular, embodied persons and of the significance, as the political theorist George Kateb has written in his book The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture, of the fact that those persons, in their minds and bodies, have “touched reality and become real,” and some understanding of their understanding of the world, as Kateb would argue, is “indispensable to the completeness of the world.” Dinshaw’s preoccupation with the vibrations and intensities of affect of past, singular persons [primarily embodied, now, in textual and artifactual “remains” as well as in contemporary narratives and artworks that take them up and also, in Robert Gluck’s formulation, “push under” them] is also connected, I believe [or maybe this is my own preoccupation? I confess it is, eternally], to Edith Wyschogrod’s notion that every artifact of the past is “a gift of the past to the presented affected with futurity” and which is “inscribed with the vouloir dire of a people that has been silenced, of the dead others” [An Ethics of Remembering, p.248]. I want to say, I want to say, I want to say . . . . And here I am also recalled to Jeffrey’s words in Medieval Identity Machines that

Time unfolds and enfolds within “individuations,” creating what Duns Scotus called “haeccities,” historical differentiations and particulars. Time therefore cannot be divorced from the material and social world, from particular significations and from particular bodies. [p. 9]

I take it as a salient point regarding what I will risk [again] calling one of Dinshaw’s personal obsessions, that in her essay “Temporalities,” which only just appeared in 2007, she returns to a careful reading of Foucault’s essay, “The Life of Infamous Men” [which was supposed to serve as an Introduction to an anthology, never published, of “lettres de cachet and other documents consigning atheistic monks, obscure usurers, and other wretches to confinement”], which she also treats in Chapter 2 of Getting Medieval. As we know, Dinshaw is interested in this essay primarily for Foucault’s confession of his “physical reaction” as, immersed in the archive of these documents, he “experienced the terrifying, austere, lyrical beauty” of these documents, which was also “the sensory experience of being-made-an-outsider which these unfortunate men lived” [“Temporalities,” 112]. In Dinshaw’s view, such a moment in the archive “introduces a temporal multiplicity, an expanded now in which past touches present, making a ‘physical’ impression,” and “[i]n a genealogical framework that seeks to overcome the denial of the body in traditional historicism, we could attempt an analysis of the experience of such times” [“Temporalities,” p. 112]. Foucault in the archive with his heretics, Dinshaw in the library at Bryn Mawr with Hope Emily Allen--these are queer ghost stories that also call to mind Anna Klosowska's confession in her book Queer Love in the Middle Ages that throughout her work on the book "Roland Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text stayed near, like a fellow passenger on the train" [p. 145] as well as Howie's admonition in Claustrophilia that to "hold is . . . not just to behold; it is to be held, even to be held in suspense" [p. 152].

A personal “shock” for me as I was reading Dinshaw’s essay was an admission of Foucault’s [and also, by extension] of Dinshaw’s, that did not appear in Getting Medieval: that, in Foucault’s words, “the primary intensities which had motivated me . . . might not pass into the order of reason.” What, then, Dinshaw asks, “will allow us to analyze these feelings, these experiences?” [p. 112]. What, indeed? Dinshaw’s essay is partly maddening for the answers it does not provide to that question [I ultimately take away from Dinshaw’s current preoccupation with mysticism, Margery Kempe, the physical stirrings of a scholarly body open to its and others’ implicit inter-temporalities, and queer historicism that the answer lies in some form of mystico-poetic knowledge, as preposterous as that might sound, and to expect a neat answer, in any case, to how something that is decidedly not rational could be explained rationally is a whole other matter], but more important for me personally is Dinshaw’s admirable desire to formulate an historical practice that could help us “to expand our apprehension and experience of bodies in time—their pleasures, their agonies, their limits, their potentials” [“Temporalities,” p. 122]. As regards, especially, those bodies which are marked, historically, as “outside,” “queer,” “perverse,” “mad,” “abnormal” and the like [and this includes Margery Kempe as it does Chaucer’s Pardoner as it does Hope Emily Allen, Kempe’s first modern editor], I see in Dinshaw’s work what Dan Remein has recently termed a poetics of medieval historiography.

This poetics of medieval historiography has real affinity with the work of actual poets, such as Spencer Reese, who in his volume of poems The Clerk’s Tale is preoccupied with the lives of the queer “discounted” living on the fringes of West Palm Beach and elsewhere, as well as with those on the “outside” of history [both “real” and fictional]: Elizabeth Bishop’s “mad” mother incarcerated in Novia Scotia, an escapee from Florida’s death row who drowns in a swamp “thick with processed excrement,” Philomela, Holocaust survivors, AIDS patients, Tiresias, Christopher Isherwood, T.S. Eliot, an aging homosexual sitting alone on a park bench, Anne Frank, the 2,000 migrant workers drowned in the flood unleashed by the 1928 hurricane in South Florida, his young cousin who was beaten and then drowned in a river in St. Augustine: “I press on the keys of the typewriter,” Reese writes, “attempting to record all those lost and unmarked.” [And, yes, the nod to Chaucer is purposeful in the title poem that details the homely yet elegant labors and fraternal solitude of two gay clerks working in a Brooks Brothers in the Mall of America in Minnesota who “no longer have a need to express ourselves”].

In “Florida Ghazals,” Reese weaves together in seven sections of seven ghazals each the lives of Dolores, the town’s prostitute whose son died in Vietnam; his beaten and murdered cousin; Juan, the prison escapee; the nameless migrant workers drowned in the 1928 flood; Robert Fitzroy, the “father of weather forecasting,” who committed suicide by slitting his throat [“Is it brooding on the future that drives us mad? The silence of it?” Reese asks]; Egaz Moniz, inventor of lobotomies; Philomela with her cut tongue; Elizabeth Bishop; and himself, committed to a mental asylum, where, “Behind the dirty jalousie window slats, the AIDS patients play cards.” Practicing poetry as a form of historiography that is almost monastic in its fierce meditative attention to the thrumming silences and unresolved madnesses of the world [human and inhuman], Reese’s poems account, as Dinshaw might say, for the heterogeneities of fragmentary and contingent times and bodies, or as Reese himself writes, “Down here, the lonely claim my voice and make it strong.”

There is always the risk of melancholia, of course, which weighs heavily upon many of Reese’s lines [this is the “darkness” which he claims to have “emerged” from in the mental asylum in “Florida Ghazals”], and which also reminds me of Benjamin’s caution against the type of history that is

a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly. Among medieval theologians it was regarded as the root cause of sadness. Flaubert, who was familiar with it, wrote: “Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage.” [“Theses on the Philosophy of History”]

This is a sadness that I believe also weighs upon some of Dinshaw’s writing on the lives of those, like Margery Kempe or Hope Emily Allen, who often struggled, with great anxiety, to be listened to and often felt isolated and abjected as a result. One could even say that their “life projects” had, at a certain point, to be aborted [or quite literally came to a standstill as in, as Dinshaw details, the point at which Jesus’s noli me tangere puts a kind of halt to Margery’s desire to have a bodily relationship with him], and the work of an affective scholarship such as Dinshaw’s labors mightily to reclaim these voices, bodies, and projects [or to at least register the palpable potentialities broken off “in the middle,” as it were, and maybe even to reactivate these potentialities in the present as what Benjamin would have called “chips of Messianic time”]. And through the process of writing itself, Dinshaw also attempts to “touch” these particles, let’s say, of human abjection across time—this is a deeply humanist project [if perhaps, at times, too appropriative—this risk is always present; think of Czeslaw Milosz’s lines in his poem “Child of Europe”: “He who invokes history is always secure. / The dead will not rise to witness against him. / You can accuse them of any deeds you like. / Their reply will always be silence”]. This project resonates also with the insight of Marguerite Yourçenar, observing and reflecting on the engravings of Piranesi, “let us consider for a moment, magnifying glass in hand, the miniscule humanity which gesticulates on the ruins or in the streets of Rome” [quoted in Michael Moore, “An Historian’s Notes for a Miloszan Humanism,” Journal of Narrative Theory 37.2].

Ultimately, any attempt at rendering these lives and thereby “joining” them, as Dinshaw herself has written, is fraught with the inevitability of belatedness, of always arriving, as it were, afterwards, or while traveling along a different, if related temporal plane, and to feel like an anachronism is to choose, I really believe, to inhabit a plane of temporality that is always, to some extent, constructed by ourselves prior to entering it [which might be another way of conceptualizing a life as an artwork which, nevertheless, possesses its own tangible reality], although granted, the physical body itself is already an archive of history. But can it be advanced, if even tentatively, that Dinshaw labors, as does Reece, at a sort of spiritual discipline? I am reminded, finally, when reading her work of these words from the poet George Mackay Brown [and thank you, Michael Moore, for introducing me to Brown]:

I have a deep-rooted belief that what has once existed can never die: not even the frailest things, spindrift or clover-scent or glitter of star on a wet stone. All is gathered into the web of creation, that is apparently established and yet perhaps only a dream in the eternal mind; and yet, too, we work at the making of it with every word and thought and action of our lives. [quoted in Maggie Fergusson, George Mackay Brown: The Life, p. 289]

The Past in the Past

by Karl Steel

In her post below, Mary Kate writes:

On the final page of the book, CD defines “getting medieval” as this: “using ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way the past in our efforts to build selves and communities now and into the future” (206). This conception seems to get us into the thick of a problem of temporality – how does the unidirectional “arrow of time” stop being so unidirectional upon closer inspection? How, to borrow from CD in her reflection on the book, “Got Medieval” (published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, No. 10), do we identify and examine the “copresence of different chronologies to explore the power of multiple temporalities in a single moment?”

This leads me into my next, brief question. In GM, the medieval past touches the present in various ways. However, as much as CD corrects the homogeneous premodern of Bhabha, Baudrillard, and others, as much as she demands that the so-called modern allow itself to be or realize that it is touched by an abjected, mobile past, her own medieval strikes me as homogeneous as well to the extent that it is not itself touched by its present pasts.

CD writes well about the Lollard assault on the 'crimen Sodomorum' of institutional religion, on its wealth, on its alimentary excess. I don't believe, of course, that CD presents this material as if it sprang ex nihilo (or ex Wycliffo); after all, she cites and uses Penn R Szittya's important The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature. At the same time, I don't think there's enough mobilization in GM of one of the most peculiar aspects of medieval textuality, namely, its habitual, even constitutive reuse of centuries-old writings, and of the mnemotechnics in which production was always a rearrangement of pasts. Antifraternal critique reuses moral approaches from the twelfth-century Parisian critique of bad living clerics, which itself redeployed work by Gregory the Great; no doubt we could keep pushing this further back, or expanding the lines outward to form something more rhizomatic than genealogical. I also imagine--although I haven't done the legwork--that Lollard ecclesiastical critique, especially its antimendicant critique, derives at least in part from the work of the Spiritual Franciscans, and thus we would have seen critiques internal to the Friars turned against the Friars as a whole, and from there, turned against the whole of the Church.

GM is already a big book, and it's certainly a great book. It seems ungracious to complain that it should have been bigger, more capacious, that CD should have loosened the 40-year boundary she set for her medieval analysis. We would have needed another 100 pages. I should, then, present this not as a critique but as a call to be inspired by GM to keep on pushing. Readers of ITM know that this work is already being done, especially with JJC and MKH's attention to the polychronicity of ruins and stones, of the distant past of ruins and the very distant, unfathomable past of fossils inhabiting and confounding various medieval presents, whether they're 8th or 10th or 12th century. Although this question might remind us too much of the postmodern inability to break with the past, we might also wonder in whose voices the Lollards speak when they think themselves using their own voices?

The Ruins and the Past

by Mary Kate Hurley


When Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval first came out in 1999, I was still in high school – I wasn’t even sure I’d be a medievalist yet, though I think by my junior year I’d decided I wanted to be a professor. I’d never heard of queer theory, much less queer history. Moreover, I’d never seen Pulp Fiction. Granted, I still haven’t seen Pulp Fiction, but there’s only so much one can do in nine years. It took me nine years years to come to this text – though while I was reading it this past weekend, it felt familiar, and strangely so. I’d imagine that at least a part of this strange familiarity is because the work resonates with more recent work that I’m also familiar with (if hard-pressed to identify), but the greater part is probably because of a course I took with CD last year at NYU. The course was on "Time and Temporality" in medival literature – and so the ideas I take from Getting Medieval are largely concerned with time. How might we think through what this text means in 2008, and what does it mean to encounter a groundbreaking text later, though still not late, in its reception critically. Moreover, what questions does the text enable us to ask in 2008, nine years after its entrance into medieval studies? What does it do to our relationship to the past as an object of study, when it too now comes to us from a past?*

On the final page of the book, CD defines “getting medieval” as this: “using ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way the past in our efforts to build selves and communities now and into the future” (206). This conception seems to get us into the thick of a problem of temporality – how does the unidirectional “arrow of time” stop being so unidirectional upon closer inspection? How, to borrow from CD in her reflection on the book, “Got Medieval” (published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, No. 10), do we identify and examine the “copresence of different chronologies to explore the power of multiple temporalities in a single moment?”

One of the things that most struck me about this book is that it inspired not a sense of argument in my response, but a more general sense of assent. If I’ve identified it correctly, I think a part of that reaction is bound up in the question of methodology – CD is outlining a methodology that uses texts, not using a methodology to uncover something about a specific text, as Dan Remein formulated so brilliantly in his comments to JJC’s post below. If I’m touched by this book, it’s not in terms of how I view a specific medieval text – Dinshaw outlines a theory of texts which resonates with my experience of them, but if the book is rewriting my sense of the past, it is doing so on a much more global level, like a techtonic plate shifting in the course of centuries, not a minute phenomenon that has quantifiable results.

Still, there is a moment in the text that I think materializes, or at least localizes, the idea that I find most intriguing. Quoting from Glück’s Margery Kempe, CD cites one of the moments in which Glück feels, most profoundly, the articulation of the self-as-performance in relation to Margery Kempe: “But the main interest of the novel lies in the melding of the narratives, characters and voices, most passages in Bob’s voice, one in Margery’s (Chapter 9), others in a hybrid of those two voices: ‘I’m Margery following a god through a rainy city. The rapture is mine, mine the attempt to talk herself into existence.’ (MK 13)” (167)

To talk herself into existence. Depending on how you take this phrase, meanings begin to crop up right and left – to talk so that she might exist, to talk herself into wanting to exist, etc. The question here – raised explicitly in the interview CD cites with Robert Glück—might be phrased thus: “That quandary over what experience means and how the authority, or whatever authenticates experience, runs back and forth between yourself and the world” (GM 170). As Dinshaw herself points out in the chapter, there is a kind of community-forming impulse that goes along with the text, one that is specifically related to the distension or extension in time performed by the text: “The work is thus an “open form,” opening the possibility of relations between characters and readers, not all of which are controlled by the writer” (171). CD goes on to cite Glück in another essay, “Fame,” and she asserts the following: “If ‘the fragment of language evokes the melancholy pleasure of a ruin,’…its ‘eternal’ and ‘shared’ qualities here are nonetheless limited at last.” (173)

I want to question that quotation for one moment. I wasn’t able to find the entire essay on short notice, but I did find the text cited elsewhere, and the lyric beauty which characterizes that first fragment continues through the line: “the relinquishing of meaning, the falling away and recontextualizing of human scale to include the non-human, the unshared, mysterious and unsharable…which is shared.” It seems to me (and I am hardly an expert) but a part of what is so touching, if you will, about a ruin, is that it insists on touching you, without letting you into the reality of its own existence**. Out of time, and therefore, out of place in a landscape that has already outlived the ruin’s first time, if you will, there is a certain untimely-ness about the ruin, the way it impinges on the present in a way that asserts not only that the past endures but that the past continues, and does so with or without the will of a (fictive) present. It suggests, perhaps, that time is a fabric, not an arrow, or a stream. Moreover, it’s a fabric that is remade as parts wear thin, with threads of a past so intertwined with our own that separating them out can unravel reality itself. Now, I’ve taken the metaphor a bit far, but what I think matters here is the gesture: I wonder if, having looked back to see the ways in which we can forge a relationship with the past, part of what we can start to see in 2008 as we re-encounter Getting Medieval –or in my case, are touched by it for the first time—is the way in which what survives from the past is like a ruin, the ways in which Medieval Studies itself might be a kind of ruin***. Untimely in a world that insists on the past AS past, the Middle Ages can profoundly trouble our sense of a the Modern – by asserting, with Bruno Latour, that we’ve never been modern in the first place. The question – perhaps without definitive answer, but still useful for all that – is what are we to do with the past? And what is the past to do with – or to – us?

Footnotes

* - Thanks to Jeffrey for helping me formulate this -- I'd be interested to hear how other readers felt concerning the book, because I had a very hard time finding a way to interface with it...
** - I thought this might particularly resonate with Karl's work on animals.
*** - I know I'm profoundly influenced by Eileen on the past-as-ruin, but can't come up with specific citations.

Touching Carolyn Dinshaw

by J J Cohen

Karl's post foregrounded the haptic, and wondered about phenomenology. The excellent and wide-ranging discussion historicized tactility well, emphasizing its similarity to both sight and smell, a kind of medieval synesthetic array.

My way of entry into the discussion is to hesitate at the welcome mat. Quite literally.

I first met Carolyn Dinshaw when I was a graduate student. This was just when the Dark Ages were becoming Middle. Dinshaw had been invited to my university to lead a discussion of a precirculated paper at a medieval colloquium (a paper that would later be published as "A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"; it was my first real exposure to Judith Butler's work, and made a convert of me). Chaucer's Sexual Poetics was making its big splash. Liz Scala had commanded me to read that book now, so I did (Liz is always right when she commands you to do something) -- and I was blown away. Reviewers would not always be kind to the volume (one of Dinshaw's faculty hosts was preparing a not very favorable one for Speculum at the moment she was visiting, as I recall), but I loved it for its unabashed feminism, for its new readings of works that were beginning to feel familiar, for its panache.

As a prelude to her paper presentation, Dinshaw was invited to an informal lunch with faculty and graduate students. (These lunches, dubbed for obscure reasons the Chester A. Arthur Appreciation Society, were always held at a restaurant more beloved for its inexpensive wine than its good food.) Dinshaw sat directly across from me ... and I was seized with panic because I was just a graduate student, and what the hell could I say to Carolyn Dinshaw? I so love your work, it's the most exciting stuff out there, will you sign my copy of Chaucer's Sexual Poetics? My eyes were drawn to her book bag, which was actually a rubber welcome mat that had been folded in half and welded into a kind of brief case.

"I like your welcome mat," I stuttered. It is possible that we then went on to talk about Judith Butler. Or Bertilak. Or cheap wine. I don't really know, but I do remember this: she impressed me as someone with whom you could speak about all of these things, and in return she would gently suggest that you were wrong and maybe ought to rethink what you were assuming to be true. She would always do this with such interest and intensity that it didn't matter that the ground was being systematically removed from beneath your feet. This loss could be disconcerting, could be queer (in the sense of estrangement, productive disruption -- to steal some synonyms from Getting Medieval). You might feel the roiling effect of that which will "shake up the ground of traditional categories and actions" (157).

But something about that welcome mat bent round into traveler's case was reassuring. Even if the destination was not necessary known in advance, stepping through that door to the unknown (a door that seemed as much in the past as the future and present), giving up on pilgrimages to certain knowledge: these commitments have their rewards, their pleasures, their lingering touch.

As it turns out I was fortunate enough to hear much of Getting Medieval as conference presentations and big lectures before it was published. The book has always had a comfortable feel for me, like coming home -- probably because (as Karl noted in the comments to his own post) to read a book first encountered almost a decade ago is in many ways to meet a temporally disjunct version of oneself. For me, much of what was to come later in my career was catalyzed by my glimpse of a welcome mat at a table in a Cambridge restaurant c. 1991. Returning to Getting Medieval is like traveling back in time, and realizing how much of the past inheres.

So, here is my question for you, dear readers, as well as my welcome mat: did this book touch you in the past? what resonances did a rereading call forth? And -- if you are lucky enough to be giving the book a first read -- does anything I've written do anything besides make your mouth water for cheap wine, and your browser yearn to surf eBay for welcome mat briefcases?

Opening Up

by KARL STEEL

I've a longer post planned, but for now, I offer this, a key moment (for me) in Getting Medieval, one I marked with "a passage to be quoted again and again."

The queer historian...is decidely not nostalgic for wholeness and unity; but s/he nonetheless desires an affective, even tactile relation to the past such as the relic provides. Queer relics--queer fetishes--do not stand for the whole, do not promise integrity of body; they defy the distinction between truth and falsehood, as do ordinary fetishes, but they offer the possibility of a relation to (not a mirroring or completing of) something or someone that was, or that was thought, or that was specifically prevented from being or even being thought. Wrenched out of its context of hypocrisy and stagnant, nostalgic longing for wholeness, the queer Pardoner's preoccupation with the matter of past lives can reinforce the queer sense of the need for and prompt the creation not of the kinds of books that would please 'historians,' as Foucault sneered, but rather of another kind of 'felaweshipe' across time. (142)

I also offer a few (undeveloped) questions provoked by rereading Getting Medieval with two things in mind: the phenomenological turn in queer theory, and Valerie Allen's On Farting.

• Twice, Dinshaw expresses (what looks to me like) impatience with Barthes' phenomenological turn (see 40 and 51), yet I wonder how GM would have looked had Dinshaw attended more to the passivity phenomenology recognizes in touching. Touching brings together, sure, but it is also causes the toucher to be touched. Skin goes both ways, and even to speak of "both" is a limitation. We need a middle voice, a grammar neither active nor passive. Dinshaw of course speaks strongly of affect, but I also feel--at least for now--that speaking of "connection," of "relationships," by preserving the two (or more) separate things being brought into relation, occludes the great altering intimacy of being touched.
• But we can get still closer. Dinshaw speaks of touching as a contrast to sight. Touching brings us into contact with someone or something, and, so long as it is a caress rather than a grasping, it has none of the pretensions to mastery that sight does. We are contaminated by touch (recall: contaminate from con + tangere), each one of us touched, the passive and the active mingled. I wonder, however, how an attention to smell--midway between sight and touch--a sensing at a distance, in which we are contacted by the thing sensed, a sense that seems particularly bodily because particularly animal, would have altered GM. Consider Valerie Allen:

  Like ears, nostrils never shut voluntarily. Permanently open for business, they are how we receive the world. Ears may be stopped for an indefinite period, but without inhalation, we die within minutes. The very act of drawing breath is one with smelling: 'man only smells during inhalation....To perceive no smell without inhaling seems to be peculiar to man.' For as long as we are alive, we sniff the world around us, including ourselves....Through every pore and orifice we wrap ourselves in smell, signing the air. As dogs well know, urine offers the most exact signature, shit and saliva close runners up. To smell the intestinal by-product of another brings one into extimate relation with them; more profound than psychoanalysis, it entails a knowledge of them more intimate than sight or hearing, more detached than touching or licking, a knowledge of the other where their very being participates in yours. (50-51)

Everybody's Reading Dinshaw

by J J Cohen

The Tiny Shriner is deeply absorbed in Getting Medieval. He's seeking "affective relations" and "another kind of 'felaweshipe' across time" (142). He's "using ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way the past ... to build selves and communities now and into the future" (206). Are you?

ITMBC4DSoMA begins on Monday. Earlier if one of us gets bored and posts something before then. You have your weekend reading assignment. There will be a quiz. And we don't care if you read the book in 1999. This is 2008, and it is time to revisit the medieval future.

ITMBC4DSoMA 2 Victor + New Poll

by Karl Steel

Three Things:

A pleasant Florida to the Cohens, although for me a week without a laptop sounds like a phantom limb situation. That tingly feeling in your right hand, Jeffrey, is your RSS feed, desperate to be lanced and drained.

The Winner of Our Renowned ITMBC4DSoMA poll is Carolyn Dinshaw's Getting Medieval (pictured: my copy in its habitat). We'll start discussing it August 1st, so you've plenty of time to linger with it before the book club commences.

By all means, do not neglect the other books in the poll, if you can get them: Anna Kłosowska's Queer Love in the Middle Ages (a favorite insight: "all fiction corresponds to an absolute reality--not of existence, but of desire that calls fiction into being, performed by the authors and manuscript makers; and continuing desire for it performed by readers, a desire that sustains the book's material presence across the centuries" (7)); Valerie Allen's On Farting (I've read, and loved, what I think was part of this in the Exemplaria "Medieval Noise" issue); Emma Campbell and Robert Mills' Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Images; and Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Herd's Queering the Nonhuman (if you can get your library, or your ILL, to give it to you: mine claims it's "too new.")

Finally, look to your left RIGHT please for a new poll! The comments to this post may be used to complain about or to plea for alterations to the poll.

ITMBC4DSoMA 2: vote now

by J J Cohen

Links to your choices are here, poll is up at the right. Note that The Tiny Shriner's Tiny Book of Scatological Verse is NOT an option.

ITMBC4DSoMA 2: You decide

by J J Cohen

Remember last year's In the Middle Book Club for Discerning Scholars of Medieval Arcana (ITMBC4DSoMA , or the Impenetrable Acronym Club for short)? We'll do another version this year, and next week will conduct a poll and allow our readers to decide what book to discuss together. So far we have on the table:

1. Valerie Allen, On Farting
2. Anna Klosowska, Queer Love in the Middle Ages
3. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval (a reappraisal)
4. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills, eds: Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image
5. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird, Queering the Non/Human

Any other suggestions before we rig set up the voting?

Within the Middle: Claustrophilia (again): Quotes of the Day

In a comment on Jeffrey's post on Christopher Tilley's The Materiality of Stone, I complained about the anthropocentrism of Tilly's phenomenology:

To a degree, phenomenology stirs up "embeddedness in context" by reminding us of how the context--the self, that is--always changes through contact, how contact is always dispersing and reforming the self (which means we need another concept for self, a new language). But what are the final limits of that dispersal? I'm tempted to believe that the transformative encounter with the other through our senses is one tethered to our sensory limitations. Even if the "us" is shifted...there's a limit, and because of that limit, the disclosed phenomenon is always, ultimately, translated into an us that is, yes, always shifting, but shifting like an amoeba: within limits, and through assimilation.

And losing sight of that limit, and assimilation, means losing sight of power.

I don't know if I want to let go entirely of that awareness of the limit and with it, power (by which I mean coercive power), but I'm feeling a bit ecstatic right now, because I've just finished reading Cary Howie's extraordinary Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in the Middle Ages. The book's made a few appearances on the blog so far (for example, here's Jeffrey admiring Howie's sparkle). Since I read this book because of Jeffrey's (and, if I remember correctly, Eileen's) recommendations, and since they've presumably read it, I want to declare a mini-itmbc4dsoma on Claustrophilia. What did you two (or three, [EDITED for sense!] if Holly Crocker, who is mentioned in the acknowledgments, wants to say anything), or other readers of Howie, get out of it? What did it to do you? Or, to ask a question more in line with Howie's argument, what happened between you?

Before sharing some of my favorite moments, however, I should say, or confess?, that I was more than halfway through the book before I began to understand it. There's a lesson in that. I've started to think that certain scholarly books should come with warning stickers, something akin to the clown-painted boards that refuse anyone under a certain height their chance to throw up on the Zipper or the Cyclone or what have you. Perhaps Žižek should come with a sticker directing us not to tarry with the negative until we've read a certain amount of Hegel, select portions of Marx, and, of course, Lacan, and probably much else (and a warning NOT to review certain films). With Howie, I would have appreciated a sticker proscribing me entry until I had immersed myself in phenomenology and especially, at least for the first 30 or 40 pages, Heidegger. I've only just begun to get "unconcealment" (which means that the multiple times I've tried to read Agamben's The Open have probably been for nothing), and not getting this concept meant a lot of frustration early on. I would have appreciated, as well, a warning that anyone unaware of queer theory's promotion of the slippage of metonymy, with its preservation and intermingling of objects, over the predictable equivalence of metaphor, with its mere substitution of objects, needed to skip ahead, briefly, to pages 81, 96, 121, or 93, where Howie explains "I would argue that metonymy offers a relationship of contiguity (indeed, contiguity as enclosure), which does not swallow part into whole, but, rather, preserves each of its terms in the surface upon which they touch. Metonymy is thus the trope of borders, tact, and the very spaciousness of desire." Had I had these warnings, which I, perhaps, uniquely need, the noise of my notes would have been less frequently frantic, more often ecstatic, generally less full of difficult muddles. If you will indulge me in my embarrassment, or welcome this abandonment of the illusion of self-possession so typical to the profession, what follows are minimally edited samples from my more frustrated encounters:

"Does hagiography mark, does it write [why does he double up marking with writing? aren't the two essentially equivalent, at least in poststructuralism?], the holy as that which resists the ethical, before whose ambivalence despair and understanding are equivalent?" (21). What is the distinction here? What is "the ethical" here, and what does it look like? (for an assault on ethics, see here)
--
This section has to do with the fetishistic temptation in the work of art as characterized by Heidegger (paradigmatically with a Greek Temple). But even after a few months away, I still have very little idea what it is he's doing. When he says that "unconcealment closes," I suppose this means that things resolve into being (not that nothingness is a void), which means they become bounded, and then adds "but it does not close in or close out; it marks a line, a material edge" (30), I suppose this means that, phenomenologically speaking, we come into contact with that unconcealed stuff and are with it. It's still there, not wholly appropriated, but we are with it all the same: hence it has a line but is not, because of this line, closed OFF (which is perhaps the word he wanted to use) to us. That said, there's still so much that's opaque in this; as if he doesn't want to give it up to truth, as if he WANTS to prevent the illusion of full disclosure, and thus his opaque style models the work of art as characterized by Heidegger.
--
"Marina's technique, together with its dead genital sign, echoes Jehan's writing in exile; these lives, in addition to Marie's dervish-like turning, could be said to constitute an account of experience in the barest sense, by which I mean a compromised inasmuch as mediated, that is, enclosed, traversal of the senses, especially vision. Such a traversal constitutes vision even as it moves toward it: in this way, to ape Jean-Luc Nancy, it spaces vision out" (64). What the fuck? I get mediation as enclosure, since to be mediated is to be carried within something, enclosed by (someone else's sense), but I don't get how traversal is MOVING TOWARD vision, and how this can be separate from CONSTITUTING vision??

Thank goodness that I stuck with it. My (eventual) joy in Howie is not just for his bawdiness (e.g., "Romuald, in Damian's vita, is as cantankerous as Damian himself: he wanders the Italian hills building hermitages, visiting monasteries, and routinely beating the shit out of wayward monks" (74); "If the altar of God is also an asshole..." (77)), nor only for the fluidity of his joyful anachronistic slippage between Jacopone da Todi, Marie de France, Dante, Thom Gunn, Mark Doty, and Fred Schneider.

It's for, and chiefly for, Howie's attention to being, yes, in the middle, and how it offers me a less depressingly closed-off ontology and epistemology than those to which I've lashed myself for so long (whether he offers me anything new for understanding coercive power is a question I suspend for a while). Unconcealed being does not give itself over entirely; keeping something in reserve, or always being more excessive that it appears, it cannot be assimilated entirely; nor do we, in giving ourselves over to texts, to eros, to contact with each other, even to God, become assimilated entirely (even in digestion, I wonder?). As Howie argues, in enclosure, we--and they--are in, not absorbed in each other, embraced, not disappeared: in this moment, we are with-in (a tempting hyphenated mutant for which I claim responsibility, and that I like to imagine Howie erased in an earlier draft).

He wonders, "Is there room, within our thought as comparatists and claustrophiles but also within thought more generally, for a relationship of contiguity or juxtaposition that would not be reducible to either an antagonism, on the one hand, or simple collapse, on the other?" (149) He wonders, "Within an economy of metonymy and anaphora, of dragging and differential repetition, might it be possible to speak of a comparative critical practice, or even a comparative mode of being-in-the-world, where being beside something or someone is not, first and foremost, a question of hierarchical, quantifiable ordering but, rather, a question of how bodies, and bodies of literature, that are allegedly outside but close to me also, again and again, get under my skin and go to my head?" (150). On Purgatorio 26:28-33

For through the middle of the burning road
There came a people face to face with these,
Which held me in suspense with gazing at them.

There see I hastening upon either side
Each of the shades, and kissing one another
Without a pause, content with brief salute.
ché per lo mezzo del cammino acceso
venne gente col viso incontro a questa,
la qual mi fece a rimirar sospeso.

Lì veggio d’ogne parte farsi presta
ciascun’ ombra e basciarsi una con una
sanza restar, contente a brieve festa.

he writes, "Dante is written into the space between homo- and hetero-, a space that grows smaller as the two ranks draw close, and that maps onto the time--of suspense or belated presence--in which Dante sees and sings. The outcome of this drawing close is not, however, an assimilation, not a unity. It is, rather, a touch: the sensible affirmation of proximity within distance. More specifically, it is a kiss" (111).

He speaks as well of our contact with authors, here about one who died just years before Howie discovered his writing:

It goes without saying that I arrived too late for Bo Huston, but thankfully just late enough for the books that bear his touch, which carry him metonymically beyond and into himself. I remember thinking what a shame it was that I had arrived in San Francisco in 1997, merely four years after his passing. But his enclosures persist, and metonymically inflame...When the author is dead, this [metonymical presence] is a small consolation, but it is all we have: a trace neither utterly removed from its putative source nor synecdochically making this source wholly present (as in the medieval cult of relics), but metonymically dragging someone, something, momentarily close. (121)

This is all I have to say for now, all except my asking, my exclaiming, isn't this lovely? Heartbreaking? Don't you want to read the book?