Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body

Late in this provocative, provisional, and generically complex book, Cary Howie suggests that “we are all medievalists” (133). This might not sound particularly surprising as you read a review in a medievalist journal, but Howie’s meaning is far broader and more inclusive than most disciplinary descriptors. He speculatively locates the essence of medievalist practice in “temporal and ontological incompleteness:” a willingness to see ourselves as critics, not as coherent, self-sufficient individuals but as fundamentally relational, emerging in the interstices of other bodies, other places, other times.Transfiguring Medievalism attempts to embody something like this radically open posture. The shape of the work does not quite fit into the monograph form, spilling over into five poetic interludes interspersing the chapters. The chapters themselves, rather than advancing a fully linear argument, spiral around a constellation of keywords or guiding concepts—transfiguration, illumination, mystery; waiting, touching, enfolding; hope, failure, and resistance, to name several that stood out during my reading. Howie’s prose is both meditative and densely packed, tracking through layers of theory and sparking continual sidelong suggestions of other directions in which he could, and might at any moment, go haring off.This approach, with its allusive and recombinative style, will inevitably be more palatable to some than to others. But these qualities are part of an avowedly self-reflexive methodology by which Howie attempts to “chang[e] the tone and shape of critical language” (13), and to advocate for “a more supple practice of writing, reading, and living” (127).Howie’s primary tool in his performative critical experiment is close reading of a broad corpus of contemporary lyric poetry (although modern prose is explored in a handful of instances, too). Many of these poems, though not all, engage in some form of medievalism, and so one facet of the analysis is an exploration of how and why contemporary poets evoke medieval ideas and images. But a range of medieval literary texts, as well as voices from theory and theology, inform these readings and are also read themselves, singly and together.In chapter 4, for example, Marie Howe’s poem “The Gate” catalyzes the theme of “Waiting for the Middle Ages,” working through the possibility of a critical posture characterized by waiting—in both its senses, of pausing and resting, and of attending carefully to something or someone. Howie presents waiting, and waiting in hope, as a dynamic linking past and future, a practice illuminating their interconnections. This discussion leads the reader on a breakneck journey through Béroul’s Tristan, Adam de la Halle’s Le jeu de Robin et Marion, Elaine Scarry reading Homer, and Dante and Virgil waiting for the Florentine sodomites on the burning plain of Inferno 16, and arrives at an extended reflection on how the moment in which we wait is the site of connection between past and future—in Howe’s poem, a potential future ruefully contemplated in the gap left by grief, “the space my brother’s body made.” The past persists in the space its own pastness makes possible. Howie reads his medieval materials and Howe’s poem together to identify the possibility of a “suspended community” of past and future, opened up by the at once apophatic and erotic practice of waiting—holding back, attending, taking care—in the present: the distress of the Florentines arrests Dante and Virgil, provoking the latter to say “Wait a little” for these already lost souls, now no longer quite as lost.Howie’s spiraling, occasionally meandering critical narrative is held together by this important throughline of self-reflexive consideration of critical practices in the modern humanities. A fundamental assumption of the book is that critical practice expresses our understanding of our own embodiment and embeddedness in time and relationship—or rather, our poverty of understanding in that regard. “If we can learn to see some of our all too familiar objects and concepts through the stained glass of lyric, we might see not just more vibrantly but more truly,” Howie suggests, coaxes, even (3). Reflecting on “the genres that this book flirts with,” he only somewhat abashedly identifies his primary mode as that of the sermon: “something that aims to explicate a text for an audience, something unthinkable without its text, without the prior call of that text” (12). At the heart of the book is the refusal to adopt an objective critical posture, and the desire to “talk this talk” as well as “talk about this talk” (163).Another set piece of the book’s medieval-modern analytic mode is the examination in chapter 5, “Bodies in Waiting,” of the significance of hands in modern and medieval poetry—Dante is read alongside Joseph Campana and Antonia Pozzi, threaded through with Martin Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy, to reflect on the possibilities of a touch that does not grasp, that takes time and takes care. Here and in other places Howie builds on the concerns of his similarly exuberant 2007 monograph Claustrophilia, which mapped out the dynamics of edges, boundaries, and enclosures in (primarily) medieval romance and hagiography.Claustrophilia’s use of queer medievalist approaches to touch, as a phenomenon that both establishes limits and opens connection, informs Transfiguring Medievalism as it seeks to describe and perform a series of medieval-modern “touches” of the kind theorized by Carolyn Dinshaw, among others. Chapter 5 arrives at perhaps the most lucid integration of this central focus on embodiment (and specifically erotics) with the theological orientation explicitly adopted in the book—theology “for lack of a better word,” as the introduction insists, entreating readers not to balk at the mention of God—when Howie suggests that “embodiment in these poems [is] analogous, in some sense . . . to prayer” (100). Being embodied is like prayer in the sense that prayer does not begin with us but is fundamentally a response to the divine call. Likewise the embodied person emerges in reciprocal engagement with other bodies and persons, meeting them at their boundaries and exceeding those boundaries, always already called and illuminated by the other.This paradigmatically erotic framework of Howie’s thinking is brought most vividly into play in the final chapter, “Make me,” which reworks the book’s large-scale preoccupations—existential and critical openness, the excess within love and knowledge that spills over into the apophatic, and the inevitable, always-already imbrication in one another brought about by communication of whatever kind—to sketch out a vision for critical discourse based on an erotics of resistance, “a kind of entreaty that would also be a resistance . . . an invitation to a different violence” (163). An erotically charged reading of Augustine “talking back” to God is set against Simone Weil’s utopian vision of love as the absolute absence of force, concluding thatThe dimension of the world that is unsayable, Howie argues, emerges precisely as an overflow of what can be said and is always being said. Similarly, love, which the book equates at different stages with both critical practice and prayer, is not antithetical to force but assumes that we take the risk of being wounded by the other.Howie’s delicate balance of the erotic and the apophatic, conceiving the latter as the shadow or overspill of the former, is a compelling development of his thought in Claustrophilia. It isn’t perfect—I felt that some complexity in Weil’s argument was being smoothed over, for example—but acknowledges itself as such, and necessarily so: “every ending, including this one, is going to feel a little like failure” (177). Only when we are able to look failure in the eye will the beginnings of genuinely loving critical practice be possible; only by acknowledging that some things are not possible to say can we begin to speak in the first place.

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