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How Soon Is Now? Medieval
Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time
Carolyn Dinshaw
Durham (North Carolina):
Duke University Press, 2012 Paperback. xix + 251
p. ISBN 978-0822353676. $23.95
Reviewed
by Jessica Stephens Université Sorbonne
Nouvelle–Paris 3
Time
warps; time travel; disruptions in the chronological time frame; altered
perceptions of time; the “voyage East” ... such are some of the themes that
Carolyn Dinshaw explores in her book, How
Soon is Now?, whose title is taken from a song by the British rock band, The
Smiths. The
introduction focuses on three themes: what does it mean to be in the now – through various philosophical
definitions of the concept of time, namely by Aristotle and Saint Augustine –, queerness – strangeness and the fact of
being “outside of normative reproduction” –, and, thirdly, amateurism – as referring to the work and attitude of scholars,
journalists and others who feel and write passionately about the Middle Ages. Carolyn
Dinshaw draws on a variety of genres – tales, sermons, treatises, short
stories, letters and a movie – ranging from the 12th century to the mid-20th
century, in order to illustrate the fundamental “asynchronies of everyday life”,
that is the manifold and heterogeneous dimensions of the now. The accounts that provide the basis for her analyses are
interspersed with less well known stories but are also often related to more
seminal texts. In the same way that the present and the past criss-cross and
are intertwined, the stories that Carolyn Dinshaw discusses are often embedded
– “A Royal Poet” by Washington Irving is haunted by a subtext, the Kingis Quairis, which itself echoes
Beotius’s Consolation of Philosophy. In
the first chapter, “Temporal Warps”, Carolyn Dinshaw examines liturgical and
scriptural temporalities through tales relating asynchronous experiences during
which characters fall asleep only to slip into another world, another temporality
– The Monk and the Bird, The Seven Sleepers, King Herla and Longfellow’s Golden
Legend tell of time warps whose consequences prove meaningful or
disruptive. In
the second chapter, “Temporally Oriented”, the author maps the complex
correlations between the journey back in time and the “voyage East”. In The Book
of John Mandeville, the narrator, Sir John, claims that his travels have
taken him from the West to locuses such
as the court of Gengis Khan, the holy land, India and even the Fountain of
Youth – an episode inspired, in fact, from the Letter of Prester John written in the 12th century. In Sir John’s
retelling of his adventures, the correlation between the past and a sense of geographical
and social distance is highlighted. Carolyn Dinshaw then goes on to analyse the
identification process between Henry Yule, a 19th-century colonial administrator
and philologist who travelled to the East, and the explorer Marco Polo. In the
late 19th century, John Mandeville’s book is seen by the scholar, Andrew Lang, as
“proto-imperialist” (Letters to Dead Authors) and
Lang senses the waning of the British Empire. Melancholy permeates the supposed
lost fragment of Mandeville’s book, a “Supplement” in fact written by M.R. James who was a
Cambridge scholar writing under a pseudonym: James’s writing also carries a
sense of failure, as the gap between past and present can never be fully
bridged through the science of philology, a science which remains incomplete. In
her third chapter, “In the Now”, Carolyn Dinshaw explores the “everlasting now
of divine eternity” in the present through religious accounts like that of
Margery Kempe (The Book of Margery Kempe) and she discusses
how the issue of time – and more specifically mystical time – when it is not in
sync with our habitual chronologically linear perception – can be addressed. According
to Gadamer and Ruskin, understanding a medieval mystical experience is perhaps easier
for the modern reader whose necessarily broader scope of knowledge facilitates queer
identification with past experience. The independent scholar, Hope Allen, did
just that as she developed a personal relation with Margery Kempe when she edited
The Book of Margery Kempe, thereby
bridging the divide between the Middle Ages and the 20th century. Carolyn
Dinshaw, sitting in the archive of Bryn Mawr College, perusing Allen’s notes on
Margery Kempe, feels that she is caught up in a very similar identification
process. A
personal anecdote opens the fourth chapter: Dinshaw’s land in the Catskills having
been flooded, she is led to ponder the concept of “the stream of time “ as
critiqued by Johannes Fabian, but she also has the distinct impression that she
has travelled back to the 19th century and is experiencing the same disruption
as Rip Van Winkle. In this tale by Washington Irving, time is subjectively
perceived by Rip as elapsing in a smooth and orderly fashion but, when he wakes
up from his sleep, his body now grown old and no longer able to procreate, belongs
to one timeframe whilst his mind has remained youthful. In another story taken
from the same book (the Sketch Book of
Geoffrey Crayon), Geoffrey Crayton, a fictional avatar of Irving himself, travels
from the New World back to Old Europe: he looks at England through the prism of
the Middle Ages. Because it is steeped in nostalgia, his perception is outdated
and at odds with the reality of life in England at the time. Perhaps it is this
very sensitivity which allows him to deeply connect with King James I of
Scotland as he wanders around Windsor Castle. In
the epilogue, Dinshaw further explores the notion of asynchrony through an analysis
of the 20th-century filmic reworking of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales into a detective story:
in The Lay of the Land, the local
magistrate, Thomas Colpeper, endeavours to teach the local inhabitants the
traditions and history of the region. He devises a wild and very odd scheme to
boost attendance at his lectures. The film can be seen as a “propaganda” movie
celebrating the traditions and values of England where the past is welcomed
into the present. In How Soon is Now, the author’s literary inquisitiveness,
her ability to create links between very different, heterogeneous concepts, together
with her narrative flexibility rooted in a plethora of examples, make for a
very creative, dynamic and didactic book.
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