Sweet Time

Sometimes queer studies needs a kick in the pants to remember that time did not begin with the nineteenth-century coinage of the term homosexual. Medievalists are good at landing that kick. The Middle Ages offers much writing adamantly queer rather than “gay and lesbian” in nature: it is not a comfortable time for tidy identities. Carolyn Dinshaw’s third full-length monograph demands attention from those who do contemporary queer studies and medieval literary studies alike, and from those trying to figure out a less-alienated relationship to academic work in an increasingly corporatized university. The book is shaped, as Dinshaw writes in her introduction, by a desire for “a more just and more attached nonmodernity . . . [to] find this now, this moment that is not detached and not disenchanted” (39). She concludes this introduction with the words “I want more life” (39), echoing Prior Walter’s resonant refrain from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. This is a beautiful book, inviting us to rethink our relationship to our objects of study and to learn anew to love the sweet, always limited time that we lavish on them.

How Soon Is Now is a book about the queerness that temporality itself assumes in the Middle Ages, while also describing how those who love the Middle Ages are queered by that love. In a meaty introduction, Dinshaw traces the intellectual tradition of thinking time in relation to subjective experience, her analysis moving fluidly between Aristotle and Augustine, Aquinas and Heidegger, Bruno Latour and Dipesh Chakrabarty. The introduction’s narrative hinges on the Smiths’ song that gave this book its urgent title, and also on the story of the “Sleepers of Sardinia,” whose uninterrupted centuries-old slumber signifies, for Aristotle, something about how very subjectively time passes. Narratives like that of the Sleepers are termed “tales of asynchrony,” and the book’s first chapter examines several medieval examples of such tales: persons who magically or by divine grace exit the flow of time and reenter again after what they perceive as a short and others perceive as a long (sometimes, multicentury) absence. Dinshaw’s examination of asynchronous time encompasses colonialist notions of how the people of India were considered, by colonial powers of the Victorian era, to be living in a time similar to the British Middle Ages; it also encompasses the popular New England tale of Rip van Winkle and the late medieval prison narrative attributed to James I, the Kingis Quair. One element that ties these disparate theorizations of temporality together is that each is posited by or framed by the research of someone who can be described as an amateur scholar, a category that Dinshaw queers and admires for its nonprofessional, amatory relationship to that person’s object of study.

The structure of How Soon Is Now is a complex and rather spectacularly tripartite one: each chapter examines a medieval work or set of works that deals with time out of joint, along with a later, often Victorian or early twentieth-century reader of that work who is himself or herself queered by the encounter with the Middle Ages. Each chapter also contains an autobiographical narrative, whether that of Dinshaw’s father’s memories of life as a colonial subject or of a headstone that washed up in her backyard during a flood. The triple structure breathes life into the spaces between the subjects each chapter discusses. This is nowhere more true than in the third chapter, which looks at the medieval mystic Margery Kempe, whose passion for oneness with Jesus led her through some pretty hairy theological territory. Dinshaw examines Kempe’s own queer and amatory asynchrony while also considering Hope Emily Allen, the first modern editor of Margery’s Book. Dinshaw makes a discovery about Allen’s relationship to queerness in one of Allen’s archived letters, permitting an unusual moment of connection bringing together the medieval mystic, her editor, and her contemporary critic.

There is something about medieval studies that compels ever greater heights...