How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time by Carolyn Dinshaw (review)

Carolyn Dinshaw’s How Soon Is Now?, titled after the Smiths’ song, is part philosophy, part history, and part literary analysis, but its greatest value is to queer studies and medievalism. Her professed goal is ‘to claim the possibility of a fuller, denser, more crowded now . . . This means fostering temporalities other than the narrowly sequential. This means taking seriously lives lived in other kinds of time’ (p. 3). Two broad temporal dichotomies emerge as Dinshaw’s themes: professional, ‘clock-bound’ time as opposed to the less-regulated time of amateurs; and the time of ‘the normative life course . . . what José Esteban Muñoz calls “straight time”’ (p. 31), set against queer time. ‘Time can queer you’, she argues (p. 137), and ‘by “queer” I don’t mean only “gay” or “homosexual” . . . And I don’t mean just “odd” or “different”, though there’s inevitably some of that here, too. In my theorizing of temporality I explore forms of desirous, embodied being that are out of sync with the ordinarily linear measurements of everyday life’ (p. 4). A hypothetical embodiment of ‘straight time’ haunts How Soon Is Now?, assumed to exist but never encountered within the text, in which queer temporalities proliferate instead; although Dinshaw writes that her main use for the binary oppositions is ‘to set up a general framework for more nuanced looks at engagements with medieval texts’ (p. 28).

This volume offers both a reading of texts and a reading of readers, including early medievalists, ‘amateur’ responders to the medieval, and the author herself. Chapter 1 covers ‘asynchrony stories’, tales ‘of people shifted into another temporality’, which express ‘the constant pressure of other temporalities on our ordinary image of time’ (p. 136). In ‘The Monk and the Bird’, a retired monk follows a singing bird some distance, only to return to the abbey to find time has moved on. Once his temporal mystery is solved, the monk dies: he ‘cannot simply live on with a temporal gap inside’ (p. 54). In Dinshaw’s reading, the monk is queered by his desire for another kind of time. Dinshaw later returns to asynchrony stories in Chapter 4 with the tale of Rip van Winkle.

Chapter 2 explores The Book of John Mandeville, in which ‘to travel east … is an asynchronous activity: it is to travel back in time’ (p. 75). From here, Dinshaw moves to nineteenth-century responses to Mandeville, including Andrew Lang’s ‘Letter to Sir John Manddeville’, and a parody by M. R. James. Lang’s ‘Letter’ describes India in terms of England’s conquest, thus reading The Book of John Mandeville as ‘proto-imperialist’ and the British Empire as a realisation of Mandeville’s project, fulfilling ‘the past in a glorious neomedieval present’ (p. 94). In this colonial context, Dinshaw reflects on her family heritage, and her childhood in California in which her mother’s American culture commingled with her father’s Parsi heritage, including different kinds of time: her father’s birthday, in the Zoroastrian calendar, was a moveable feast (p. 103). So, ‘A different time frame was always subtly but definitely present. It meted out my forward strides a little out of step, a little behind “real” Americans: I was always playing a no-win game of catch up … It has made me keenly attuned to the ways that cultural differences get turned into temporal distance, the ways sex, gender, race, religion and nation, work and play, West and East get graphed on a timeline. It has made me permanently feel like an amateur’ (p. 103).

Chapter 3 begins with the asynchronous experiences of Margery Kempe. Dinshaw argues that an ‘historical understanding’ of Margery Kempe ‘is made possible by a prior experience of contemporaneity between us and Margery’ (p. 116). The nineteenth-century scholar Hope Emily Allen experienced a connection with Margery which ‘bred yet more and more...