My Writing Lockdown continues apace, but I do have to emerge from time to time to fulfill other scholarly obligations. Below my draft of a review of Carolyn Dinshaw's How Soon is Now? for Clio. The journal has a theory-savvy interdisciplinary readership, so I do not focus on the book as a contribution to medieval studies but to the critical humanities at large.
My thanks to the students of Environ Body Object Veer for their thoughtful symposium on the volume, and to Rick Godden and Eileen Joy for reading early versions of this piece. Now let me know what you think.
How Soon Is Now?
Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. By Carolyn
Dinshaw. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. xix + 252 pages.
A groundbreaking scholar
whose work has long been as important outside the field of medieval studies as
transformative within, Carolyn Dinshaw turns her attention in her third
monograph to the textual and lived complexities of being in time. Bringing her ongoing
research on medieval texts, cross-temporal community, gender and embodiment,
postcolonial desires, and the queer into an ongoing critical conversation on
how time itself is thick with difference, How
Soon Is Now? is a cumulative and synthetic project that also maps
significant new ground. Through the figure of the amateur Dinshaw explores powerful
moments of asynchrony within late medieval English works, especially as these
works are framed and desired by nineteenth and twentieth century nonprofessional
readers. At such moments may be glimpsed the irreducible heterogeneity characterizing
all temporality, rendering time (like the amateur who loves history too much) disjunctive,
queer.
How Soon Is Now? builds upon and deepens
Dinshaw’s mapping of trans-historical community in Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (1999). This book is just as learned, just as
marvelously connective, but looser in structure, wider in scope, and deeper in
its affective texturing. Most chapters are structured as triptychs: an erudite examination
of one or more medieval texts is followed by a reading of these same materials
by an amateur figure (real or fictional) and then juxtaposed with an
autobiographical narrative that intensifies the chapter’s themes and enmeshes
the late medieval, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (when most of
the amateur readers considered lived), and the present. Among the medieval
texts Dinshaw considers with her characteristic insight, verve and good humor are
two works long familiar within her oeuvre (the Book of John Mandeville and the Book
of Margery Kempe) as well as a sermon from the Northern Homily Cycle about a monk who steps into the distant
future; the legend of the entombed Seven Sleepers; the curse of King Herla, who
cannot alight from his horse without time rendering him dust; and the Kingis Quair of James I in its
intersections with Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. A compelling examination of “the present
power of past things, past bodies, past lives” (148), the medieval portions of
these chapters also tend to be exclusively Christian in their interpretive
ambit, so that I sometimes wondered if their queerly and resolutely out of time
figures were not signifying slightly more challenging narratives about the
heterogeneity of the Middle Ages. The Book
of John Mandeville even contains a powerful Jewish story involving the
antichrist – and as Israel Yuval has argued, the Christian antichrist is the
Jewish Messiah. The tale could have been unpacked at greater length to detail
asynchrony’s more than Christian complexity, especially because that chapter
culminates in a conversion narrative close to home. The book concludes with an
epilogue containing a compelling section on the relation of race and fantasy to
asynchrony. The theme is latent from the introduction, though, a riff on the
singer Morrissey’s lyrics as trigger to thinking temporal thickness. The former
singer of The Smiths, Morrissey has deployed
possible far right imagery in live shows and made some potentially racist
statements (noted in a brief footnote when discussing the complicated relation
of Latino audiences to Morrissey’s music). Dinshaw even stages an imaginary
meeting in the chapter between the singer and Martin Heidegger, a conjunction that
will bear for many readers an undercurrent of asynchrony’s darkest side. Non-affirmative
trajectories of perceived out-of-timeliness, especially in relation to race, must
always be potentially present, and could usefully have been plumbed earlier in
the book – especially because Dinshaw argues convincingly that through a creative
refiguring of nostalgia (as critique as well as yearning), asynchrony can yield
a vision of a more attached, more just world.
The anchoring of each
chapter in the personal foregrounds what Dinshaw calls her “queer kinship” with
the amateur through her own “uncertain progress and uneven development as
medievalist and queer” (32-33). These autobiographical moments include a meditation
on the ambivalence of growing up with a Parsi father who assimilated into Anglo-American
culture and religion; an examination of the material histories conveyed when a
gravestone is propelled by flooding rains onto her property in the Catskills; memories
of undergraduate days at Bryn Mawr in their uncanny intersection with an important
archival discovery she makes while conducting research at the Bodleian; and the
admission that she fears when she lectures that she might be out of place and
time. A renowned scholar, the former president of the New Chaucer Society, a senior
professor and accomplished administrator at a prestigious university, as well
as a revered speaker who always packs a room, Dinshaw confesses that she feels at
times like an amateur. Given her secure position, she writes, such an admission
might seem facile, but she emphasizes that the “current atmosphere of
professionalization in the university” does not give great hope for future
stability, and the affective turn in medieval studies (a movement which she has
been fundamental in precipitating) has not always been well received. Her project
in How Soon Is Now? is therefore to attempt
to “help in the development of different conditions” (32), and her emphasis upon
changing the circumstances under which the scholarship of those who follow after
her might be conducted is admirable. Her most quotable line is, to my mind, her
succinct mission statement, provided at the end of the introduction: “I want
more life” (39).
Dinshaw’s amateur is
a complicated figure. At its simplest, the amateur (from Latin amare) is one who loves: that is, one
who pursues a project or an obsession ardently, motivated by desire rather than
the lure of remuneration or fame. Professional expertise is associated with knowledge
as a commodity, not shared but sold. The amateur shows us the way to what
Dinshaw has labeled elsewhere “post-disenchanted” modes. The amateur loves the
past with queer enthusiasm, and is therefore a little bit embarrassing, a
little bit out of time. Although like the queer dismissed as immature,
underdeveloped, and improperly seduced by or attached to objects and histories,
the amateur is not so easy to pin down, and does not form the second term of a
neat binary. The professional and the amateur do, after all, share desires.
Among the amateurs who populate How Soon
Is Now? are professor and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who penned a verse
drama about the monk who steps far into the future; fairy tale collector Andrew
Lang, “highly educated but not an academic,” impersonating John Mandeville; M.
R. James, eventually provost of Eton, but as a Fellow at King’s College the
author of his own Mandeville parody (lampooning the rigors of Germanic
philology) as well as the writer of numerous ghost stories that materialize
uncanny relations between past and present; Hope Emily Allen, whose endlessly
proliferative mode of connection making ensured that she never finished the
second volume of her edition of the Book
of Margery Kempe; Geoffrey Crayon, Washington Irving’s fictionalized
self-representation in The Sketch Book,
an out-of-time American admirer of King James’ Kingis Quair; and Thomas Colpeper, a Chaucer-loving and rather
deranged country magistrate in the film A
Canterbury Tale (1943). Each of these amateurs is an astute reader of a
late medieval text, demonstrating how thick with various time frames such texts
were and remain, as well as how active these narratives prove as they move
through the world, drawing readers into their orbits, generating “a vibrantly
asynchronous now” (77). Not everyone
who feels out of time will offer through their ardency some utopian promise, of
course. How Soon Is Now? makes this
point clear through references to the self-perceived belatedness of the Nazis
and an examination of Thomas Colpeper’s violence against women.
Most of the
amateurs Dinshaw treats come from privileged, highly-educated backgrounds. They
are also mostly figures from the past. If professionals are those who are paid
for their work, so that their time resembles their money (“abstract, objective,
and countable,” 21), then for many reading this book the professional will be recognizable
as a denizen of the board rooms or classrooms of corporate and increasingly
globalized universities, thriving under STEM obsessed administrative regimes, publishing
books in venues so expensive or elite that amateurs have little access. The
time and resources that this contemporary class of knowledge distributors
requires to produce and commodify their research often comes about through a
reliance upon adjunct labor: scholars who are well trained, but whose
substandard wages, absence of benefits, and lack of access to work space,
travel subventions, and research funding effectively exclude them from the
category of the professional. Dinshaw is acutely aware that to be an amateur is
not to be outside capitalism, and that the state is not be romanticized,
especially because to do so plays into neoliberal dreams of a flexible,
creative, cheap workforce (23). She suggests that amateurism operating
“outside, or beside, the culture of the professionalism provides an opening of
potentials otherwise foreclosed” (24). Many of us know this space of adjacency
as the para-academy: not outside the profession, not separate from the
university, but alongside, a space for invention and proliferative alliance,
changing the intellectual landscape through blogs and social media, open access
publishing, and other nontraditional modes of sharing knowledge.
How Soon Is Now? opens with a meditation
on professionalism, anachronism, and creative amateurism spurred when the
author spots a young man in a bathrobe attending the Medieval Festival at the
Cloisters. The possibility that he might be a “simple, unconscious naïf loose
in the park” is quickly rebuffed when Dinshaw notices that he is taking notes, perhaps
conducting his own research (xiv). The vignette is accompanied by two alluring photographs
of the young man. In the first he plays a recorder with his back turned, while
in the second he appears lost in his notebook. These images are credited to the
photographer Marget Long, Dinshaw’s partner and the dedicatee of the book. The pictures
quietly gesture towards the companionship and conversations that animate the
wide-ranging discussions of How Soon Is
Now? – and I love this gesture towards the sustaining power of
collaboration. In a compelling moment of self-reflection Dinshaw turns her
“professional gaze” away from the young man in his bathrobe and wonders if the
notes he writes “were on me” (xv). It’s impossible to read the passage and not
be convinced that amateurs (who often do not choose their status, who often
lead precarious lives) ought to be part of a wider, boundary-crossing
conversation. It’s also impossible not to wonder what would have happened if
the young man in the robe had been asked what brought him to the Cloisters,
what he was writing, what more life
might mean to him. He and Dinshaw are, after all, the books only two living amateurs:
what would their collaboration look like?
How Soon Is Now? is scholarly, eminently
readable, and insightful. Creative in its structure and wide in its ambit,
Carolyn Dinshaw’s long awaited book cogently argues that the now we inhabit is denser with
possibility than we have imagined – and that medieval writers as well as their
amateur readers have known this conjunctive truth for a long time. The book is
required reading for anyone interested in the intersections among history,
community, textuality, sexuality, writing, dreaming, loving – that is, for
anyone who cares about the humanities today.
