-
Closet Devotions (review)
- Parergon
- Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Inc.)
- Volume 17, Number 2, January 2000
- pp. 254-256
- 10.1353/pgn.2000.0067
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
254 Reviews specialists in Anglo-Norman will probably await impatiently the publication of volume III before formulating their specific approach to this newly available material. Maxwell John Walkley Department ofFrench Studies University of Sydney Rambuss, Richard, Closet Devotions, Durham, N C and London, Duke University Press, 1998; pp. xii, 193; 14 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. US$49.95 (cloth), US$17.95 (paper). For readers of metaphysical poetry, Donne's famous complaint to God that he shall never be 'chaste, except you ravish m e ' (Holy Sonnet 14) has attained the status of a poetic commonplace, its shock-value eroded by centuries of familiarity. Consequently, it is instructive to encounter Francis Quarles, in his collection Sions Sonets (1625), admitting anxiety about a similar intertwining of the sacred and the erotic. His poems, Richard Rambuss writes, 'come ready-glossed so as not to be received as "loose and lascivious"'; hence an exclamation, 'O H o w I'm ravisht with eternall blisse!', receives in the margin 'the chaste explanation, "By heavenly contemplation'" (p. 96). Rambuss's purpose in Closet Devotions is to explore the cultural and literary significance of such instances of what he terms, after Georges Bataille, 'sacred eroticism'. H e aims precisely 'to press beyond the impasse represented by the designation "simply conventional" and thereby to unsettle some of the usual pieties that continue to govern discussions of the interface between religion and eroticism' (p. 2). The book draws heavily on canonical religious poetry of the seventeenth century, but also discusses a number of sermons, devotional manuals, and other religious tracts. Further, in keeping with the author's profession to be 'an unrepentant presentist' (p. 5), and in agreement with his commitment to reviving a sense of shock value, Sacred Devotions considers alongside Early Modern literature a variety of contemporary texts, from Andres Serrano's (in)famous photograph Piss Christ to gay pornographicfilms.Thefirsttwo of its three chapters focus specifically 255 on the erotic. 'Christ's Ganymede', the chapter which absorbs most of the author's attention, is concerned with 'the possibility that devotion to Christ might be invested as a site of erotic expressions, interests, and energies that are homoerotic' (p. 7). Subsequently, 'Devotion and Desire' i s broader in scope and less focused as a consequence, ranging across a variety of expressions of sacred eroticism, including some interesting passages on w o m e n writers. The final chapter, 'The Prayer Closet', although in some respects the most modest in its arguments and sources, is nonetheless the most compelling, as it links a seventeenth-century movement proclaiming the value of private prayer in secluded domestic spaces with an emergent notion of a mysteriously 'reclusive self (p. 107). According to one godly manual, 'Privacie is to bee chosen, that being sequestred from company, we may more fully descend into our o w n e hearts' (p. 104). George Herbert's 'Confession' looks further into the poet's heart, itself figured as a 'closet' which contains 'many a chest', and 'In those chests, boxes; in each box, a till' (p. 112). The elusive core of his identity thereby recedes from view, drawing the speaker ever inward, in a process that threatens to become infinite. Rambuss's argument about this closeted self might well stand alone, enlightening as it is in the context of ongoing arguments over constructions of Early Modern subjectivity; in the final pages of the book, however, he contends further that it evidences a 'rezoning' of erotic devotion, into 'a space where the sacred m a y touch the transgressive, even the profane' (p. 135). The studied combination of the unnerving and the illuminating in Closet Devotions is nowhere more apparent than in its analysis of Donne's familiar sonnet. Here, as throughout the book, Rambuss seems positively determined to alienate a swathe of readers, as he declares that the poem's opening plea, 'Batter m y heart, three-personed God', voices a fantasy of a sodomitical 'trinitarian gang bang' (p. 50). Yet Rambuss develops from this basis some surprisingly subtle textual analysis. After an extended critique of generations of readings concerned to efface the poem's homoerotics, typically by claiming that the speaker adopts...