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

Carolyn Dinshaw, author of two of the most influential theory-inflected books in Middle English studies of the past twenty-five years (Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics [1989] and Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern [1999]), is, in addition, one of the few medievalists—perhaps the only one—who is also influential among Queer Theorists, a group, by and large, with little direct interest in the Middle Ages or medieval literature. Queer Theory’s recent turn to questions of temporality has led thinkers such as Judith/Jack Halberstam (In a Queer Time and Place [2005]) and José Esteban Muñoz (Cruising Utopia [2009]) to cite Dinshaw’s pioneering work on queer historicity approvingly, especially her classic essay “Chaucer’s Queer Touches / A Queer Touches Chaucer” (Exemplaria 7 [March 1995]: 76–92) and Getting Medieval. It thus seems appropriate that the blurbs on the back cover of Dinshaw’s new book, How Soon Is Now?, come both from medievalists and from Queer Theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton. How Soon Is Now? is a fascinating, clearly argued, and beautifully written book that will be of considerable interest to both constituencies, medievalist and queer-theoretical, as well as to those of us whose professional lives dwell in their intersections.

As the 1995 essay’s title suggests, Dinshaw throughout her career has been interested not only in temporality, but in the interactions of temporality and affectivity, another longtime concern of Queer Theory. Linking the past and the present through desire (modernity’s and postmodernity’s ongoing desire for the Middle Ages, for example) is one way to demonstrate the fallaciousness of linear, developmental conceptualizations of time; Queer Theory’s alternate temporalities, in their resistance to narratives of reproduction and development, also challenge straight time. It is this kind of understanding that connects Dinshaw’s work with recent developments in Queer Theory, and that is also the subject of How Soon Is Now?

Dinshaw views this queer, affective resistance to linear time through the lens of certain “amateur” medievalists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, medievalists who stood at a tangent to the period’s professionalization and institutionalization of medieval studies as a discipline, that is to say, of medievalists who did it for love. Dinshaw never forgets that one sense of “amateur” is “lover.” Following the theoretical introduction outlining this potential queerness of time, each of the book’s four chapters (and an epilogue) takes up one or more medieval texts explicitly concerned with non-linear, asynchronous time, and examines both the text itself and its afterlife in the work of an amateur medievalist, suggesting that the amateur’s affective relation to the asynchronous text creates a related asynchronous, queer present, a “now” whose temporality is multiple and non-linear.

Thus Chapter One, on “asynchrony stories,” centers on narratives about time slowing down and/or speeding up: the exemplum of “The Monk and the Bird,” drawn from the Northern Homily Cycle, the story of the Seven Sleepers as found in Caxton’s translation of the Golden Legend, and Walter Map’s story of King Herla in De nugis curialium are all stories in which a character experiences a magical or miraculous reorientation in time, one that forces the reader to hold two or more temporalities in tension simultaneously. These medieval stories in turn are invoked by amateur medievalist Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the nineteenth century, who retells “The Monk and the Bird” in his own medievalizing Golden Legend. The result, for Dinshaw, is that for Longfellow, “reading and recounting medieval texts foster a productive asynchrony, bringing the past into the present” (68). This temporality is also queer in that Longfellow’s story addresses male homosociality “to express attachments and ways of being that were obsolescent in his present world”; thus “the dissolution of temporal boundaries serves as imaginative and affective—serves, that is, as queer—resource” (71).

Succeeding chapters are concerned with further links between medieval challenges...