Reviewed by Jesse Swan (jesse.swan@uni.edu)
"Dinshaw Glue and Other Queer Products of Attachment"
If there is one quality forbidden
the late modern professor, surely it is love. Nothing gums up the mind of a
late modern professor more than the sticky glue of love. As soon as “love” is proposed
in one’s professional imagination, one seizes a reflexive guffaw the way John
Milton’s patience seizes his profane question, “Doth God exact day-labor, light
denied?” The seized guffaw, like the activity of patience, closes down passion,
mostly by closing down temporal experience, and as such they are endorsed by modernity,
yet they can, if queered, go the other way. Going the other way, Carolyn
Dinshaw elaborates the unmodern time necessary to have had a guffaw that was
suppressed at the moment of its production and to know such a guffaw, distinct
from many another guffaw. That’s a queer feeling, to late modernity (which is
queer in a different way from that of an early modern Puritanism, such as
Milton’s, or from that of a Medieval religious experience, such as Boethius’s).
In the now of late modernity, such a literary criticism and history as
Dinshaw’s can operate only in queer environments of their own imperfect generation,
such as the environment of the now old-style, 1980’s (gay-inflected) club scene,
the sort of club scene that, for an hiatus from the usual Hi-NRG sound, would
play the song of lovelorn experience, “How Soon Is Now?” The Smith’s song,
title and substance, is borrowed for Dinshaw’s monograph-mashup, and to good
purpose, not only conceptually, but also methodologically. Moving out of
loveless and professional late modernity into unmodern appreciations of
medieval cultures and amateur queers and temporally-flexible medievalists,
Dinshaw makes fascinating, among much more, Aristotle, Augustine, Hope Emily
Allen, Rip Van Winkle, a young man at a public festival in a bathrobe, The Book of John Mandeville, Margery
Kempe, James I of Scotland, and, as she terms it, “the brilliant and baffling
1944 film,” A Canterbury Tale.
Among
Medieval texts Dinshaw’s historiography revives out of “the modernist settlement”
(p. 168 et passim) is Boethius and The
Consolation of Philosophy. I concentrate on Boethius, because I want to
highlight a marvelous product of Dinshaw’s method: that of providing an
experience of Christian divine eternity absent the usual mysticism. Another way
of saying this is that Dinshaw provides knowledge of religious existence
without being permanently or only religious. She provides a sort of chiastic
completion to Augustine’s crede, ut
intelligas (believe so that you will understand), so that Dinshaw provides
an understanding that provides the perception of the belief. The belief
involves, as I’ve written, Christian divine eternity, a temporal experience
that is accessed by way of Dinshaw’s engagement with and engagement of queer
amateur texts and practices. Indeed, it is something of a perversion of
Dinshaw’s method to concentrate upon Boethius as I am doing, but it is
perversion that can be accommodated and even celebrated, if it is left fluid
and not fixed, relational and not settled. To regenerate the Boethian ecstasy
that is the divine and rationally lovely consolation in which the The Consolation of Philosophy
culminates, Dinshaw requires her reader to bring into cognizance and
intellectual reflection her own experience of several nows, including the now
of encountering the “moving headstone [from the destroyed grave of one David
LeValley (1820-1893) that] haunts . . . this chapter” and that washed up the
flooded stream forming the border of the property “in the remote southwest
corner of the Catskill mountain range” that Dinshaw owned with her
“girlfriend,” whom I take to have been her lover, using what I imagine must now
be my old-fashioned, 1980’s nomenclature for same-sex erotic, sexual, romantic,
and community-property partner (129-130). The gravestone commemorating LeValley
floating not entirely unlike one of Derrida’s postcards (and Derrida informs
this chapter’s idealization overtly by reference, but not specifically to his
postcards), is imaginatively combined in the chapter’s reverie with Washington
Irving / Rip van Winkle / Geoffrey Crayon, James I of Scotland, and all that
came before the chapter in the book, including all the discussions of
“asynchronous” time, such as that of Augustine, the experience of colonial and
postcolonial British India, philology, and queer amateurs such as the aptly
named and ever optimistic, Hope Emily Allen. This combination is made in order
to read / to regenerate Boethius’s sensational, ever-present consolation, a
consolation absent to those of “the modernist settlement.” There is no passage suitable for quoting to
provide something of the thrilling experience Dinshaw regenerates, but readers
are urged to consult pages 146 through 149 for something of the experience. Of
course, without all that comes up to page 146, and, really, without all that
comes after page 149, the four pages lack the fullness that they can possess as
they “temporally rent Boethius” (149).
Reading
and rereading pages 146 through 149 the way Dinshaw instructs is
“exhilarating,” which is, as she well knows and even advances, a form of “queer
appreciation of temporal heterogeneity [that we should use] to contest and
enlarge singular narratives of development, and to begin to imagine collective
possibilities for a more attached – that is to say, queer – future” (127). And there can hardly be anything queerer, in
the current moment, than queer and even gay or even LGBTQQIA history that does
not involve sexual practices or even discussion of sexual practices. I mention
this, because this is another fascinating queer feature of Dinshaw’s literary
history: While it does not denigrate sexual practice, and while it even
references sexual practice when apt, Dinshaw’s literary history, like Augustine’s
and like Hope Emily Allen’s among others considered amateur in one way or
another and in one time or another, pursues many queer matters in addition to the
sexual and does so in a manner that is erotically enticing, indeed, lovely.
This is something she is able to discern and celebrate most keenly in the
ultimate chapter, a chapter that is to be considered the chapter that is not
one, to provide allusively another blast from the theoretical and feminist past
(for the Anglophone queer reader, Luce Irigaray’s The Sex Which Is Not One is a distinctly 1980’s sensation, not
unlike The Smith’s “How Soon Is Now?”). In the last chapter which is not one,
called the “Epilogue,” Dinshaw explores how A
Canterbury Tale, “the brilliant and baffling 1944 film, pushes to a bizarre
and criminal point the implications of [her] discussion heretofore” (152). The
criminal nature of the film is part of its plot and theme, not part of its
existence in society, as might be the case with treasonous or pornographic
intention and effect or with queer sexual practices in 1944. In the story of
the film, an amateur historian and deeply patriotic townsman, Thomas Colpeper,
takes to molesting new women to the small town on the road to Canterbury by
sneaking upon them and smearing their heads and hair with glue. Alison, a
British girl new to town, is the one featured in the film being so welcomed,
and, like many another Alison, particularly a Chaucerian one, she reacts, not
with a sense of victimization, but with great self-possession and determination
to discover and denounce the miscreant. All is, naturally, or, more properly
speaking, queerly, which is to say literarily, eventually found out and all desires
are expressed and even, in their way, celebrated by the movie’s end, which is
part of what draws Dinshaw to this odd piece of propaganda produced in war-time
and about war-time experiences, experiences that were very much present at the
time, yet not always, or not for everyone, except for the queerest, most
patriotic, most attached amateurs, historians and humane citizens, such as
Colpeper and the producers of the film. Like the soldiers the molesting,
glue-smearing Colpeper means to save and make interested in their own history
and country (it is discovered that Colpeper molests as he does in order to make
women unavailable to the soldiers on the nights he gives his historical and
literary lectures, knowing that the soldiers will attend his lectures only if
there be nothing better to do), the “indifferent audience” of readers and
students Dinshaw tries to save, with her own queer gestures, writings and
lectures, seems so close, so potentially active, yet so, well, “indifferent.”
Such makes her, and me, “laugh, sort of” (170). The “sort of” is because the
laugh is not that of modernity and its derisive humor that is “a confident
distancing,” but, rather, the laugh is the humane, empathic, attached humor
that makes her – and me – “recoil at my own implication in this image [of
Colpeper]: with his pathetic lonely eagerness to share his enthusiasm about the
Canterbury pilgrims, he’s my personal nightmare version of the Chaucerian – me
– trying to interest an indifferent audience in the Canterbury Tales” (170). The indifference is difficult to address,
because it is the mode of the professional administrator of “the modernist
settlement,” just the sort of job-holder so many of the students are passing
through town to become. Dinshaw realizes, as she hopes we do, how much like a
glue-smearing miscreant the attached queer Medievalist must seem to be now, and
how much she, or he, has to work to remember that she loves being so.
I’m
not sure there’s a way to get this glue onto those who most need it anytime
soon, yet I recommend this brand of glue to all who have some time for it now.
Jesse Swan
University of Northern Iowa
University of Northern Iowa
