Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature (review)

In this bold, beguiling and occasionally frustrating book, Cary Howie proposes a series of interlocking readings of medieval texts in French, Latin, Italian and English which focus on enclosed spaces, and the erotic enjoyment which is afforded or hinted at in accounts of these spaces. For Howie, buildings, bodies, books and historical periods can all be conceived of as spaces which intrude upon and interfere with one another. This is a fruitful method of reading, enabling Howie to explore a number of rhetorical figures and theoretical positions which depend upon contiguity, enclosure and transgression. In Howie's claustrophilic readings, metonymy is a privileged trope, revealing the relation between touching surfaces and enabling the scrutiny of what that touch might mean. His prose style is lyrical verging on the mystical, at its best when performing passionate, audacious close readings. These really get under way after a rather condensed first chapter, which tends to enact rather than explain his theoretical framework. In the second chapter, readings of a series of hagiographies uncover the perverse and the sexy in the saintly and the saint. In chapter three, architectural, bodily and rhetorical openings are threaded together in what are best described as probing readings of selected writings of Peter Damian and Iacopone da Todi. Howie's relentless wordplay throughout his book underlines the proximity of different meanings within the same word; and in his fourth chapter, he opens out the various meanings of 'drag' (as he has done for 'come' in the preceding chapter), arguing that the irony inherent in drag is bound up with that which it touches, dragging it along in its wake even as it drags it up. It is surprising that little explicit attention is given to the medieval understanding of place and space, and its crucial role in figuring learning, memory and attachment —all topics upon which Howie touches. This omission seems almost wilfully perverse —but then this is a wilfully, joyously perverse book. It self-consciously fashions itself as an impossible space: like a Tardis or rooms in Alice in Wonderland, this work opens out onto unexpected vistas, uncovering artefacts and texts (films, television, pop songs, contemporary novels and poetry) which would have no place in a more conventional academic monograph. In a discourse which tends to squeeze out the first person, Howie's confessional tone inevitably leads to reflection on the proprieties of academic reading and writing. In his closing pages, Howie argues that, since reading is always already an anachronistic practice, this anachronism should be embraced and enjoyed. It is hardly groundbreaking to claim that a text's meaning is produced by the reader —and Howie does nod to Barthes in this section —but claustrophilia inflects this notion by conceiving of the reading subject as a space in which texts and readings lie side by side, infiltrating and bumping (not to say humping) against one another. This book both reaches beyond academic medievalism and at times encloses itself in impenetrable academic discourse, and it will rub some readers up the wrong way. Ultimately, however, this is an engaging, provocative work, in which some dazzling and eclectic readings come together in a riot of queer bodies, spaces and associations, exploring the medieval canon from a fascinating angle and inviting academics to reflect on their own place and attachments.