A Resurrected Form of Margery Kempe: A Queerly Remembered Icon of the Self
Conference Paper: 'Death and Afterlives of Medieval Mystics', Mysticism and Lived Experience Network, 22 June 2021.
Below is my script from a conference paper given on 22 June 2021 at the Mysticism and Lived Experience Network’s ‘Death and Afterlives of Medieval Mystics’ virtual conference. This research is a much abridged element of my doctoral research, which I am currently conducting as a PhD student in English and American Studies at the University of Manchester.
Before I begin, I would like to clarify my use of names and titles in this essay. Today I will be talking about both The Book of Margery Kempe and Robert Glück’s 1994 novel, Margery Kempe, with substantially greater focus on the latter. Perhaps quite confusingly at points, and so I apologise, I will refer to Glück’s work as‘the novel’. While this does become quite repetitive at points, it is basically unavoidable when presenting on this topic in a spoken format. With that said, thank you for your time and I hope you enjoy.
I begin with a quote from José Esteban Muños’ introduction to Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity:
Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.[1]
Upon looking to the past—from which he hoped to ‘distill’ this sense of queerness in himself—Robert Glück found a ‘creature’ suited to aid in his construction of a quintessentially queer self. This ‘creature’ is Margery Kempe. Glück’s 1994 novel, named for the woman who inspired this self-representation, is a remembered account of two desperately intertwined lives complicated and characterized by the inordinate loves which shape their accounts.[2] Through their entangled affairs and the difficulty of distinction their story breeds, the reader is presented with Margery Kempe as a queerly re-membered icon of the self.
Kempe and her Book have received attention for their perceived proximity to queerness across the last three decades. An unsurprising development, as feminist scholars’ works has often—though not always—sat adjacent to and tasted of the fruits of queer studies (and vice versa). Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern, first published in 1999 and containing a brief discussion of Glück’s work, launched a serious conversation on the queer amongst medievalists and contributed to the enduring foundations upon which scholars would build queer medieval studies.[3] Supported by these foundations, today I endeavor to recognize and unpack the influence of Kempe in Glück’s queer construction and representation as a postmodern attempt at remembering both this medieval woman and himself. My treatment of this issue here will, of course, be very brief, as this paper is a distillation of some of the concepts and issues tackled in the second half of my thesis. Still, I hope that you find some merit in my presentation today, and I look forward to questions at the end of the session.
Upon first encountering Glück’s Margery Kempe, the reader is met by a text perhaps best described, like the love affairs portrayed within, as ‘complicated’.[4] The precise genre to which one might say it belongs is similarly difficult to discern—a feature of the author’s theoretical design:
We were thinking about autobiography; by autobiography we meant daydreams, nightdreams, the act of writing, the relationship to the reader, the meeting of flesh and culture, the self as collaboration, the self as disintegration, the gaps, inconsistences and distortions, the enjambments of power, family, history and language.[5]
Glück’s conception of New Narrative reveals the possibilities of queer self-imagining and -reimagining, -constructing and -reconstructing and the limitless avenues and venues for the production and exhibition of a queer self. In ‘flesh’ and ‘dreams’, in reality, unreality, and in-between, they found new spaces on the edge and between things known, unknown, and shared in secret. The queer is embodied in the difficult spaces between codified, authorised existence; the spaces where emergent and yet timelessly queer ways of life may be found. Glück’s novel presents an exhibition of a self and an attempt to defeat the ‘pattern of engagement’ to which literature is held by the predominately straight-identified, masculine, male hierarchy of twentieth-century literary movements.[6] During the early years of Glück’s career, this hierarchy would come to be challenged by the liberation politics of feminist, queer, and ethnoracial minority artist-activists it the end of the century. According to Glück, this New Narrative movement was the result of desire: desire for the ‘pleasures and politics of the fragment and the pleasures and politics of story, gossip, fable and case history’.[7] An ideology against ideology, this desire to deconstruct heterotypical, masculine forms and terms of engagement results in new forms and terms through this New Narrative approach. Desire and the untold complexities of experience are expressed through a yearning for stability and position and the simultaneously defeating and empowering presence of disjuncture and interruption. Satisfaction is delayed and then fulfilled, only to be negated and yet, simultaneously affirmed. This is the queer. Queer spaces and narratives give voice to desire, even as they endure in a world which rejects their existence and wishes them mute. Opposition finds a position in this movement.
As Glück fostered his early work, he experimented with and cultivated a theoretical approach to heteronormativity-resisting methods of constructing and representing the many ‘selves’ he contains.[8] More than an individual self, the New Narrative project was one of and for community and relation. The ‘we’ of this discourse is bound by ‘relationship[s]’, ‘meeting’, ‘collaboration’, and ‘family’. Communal self-construction, in addition to the individual, gives rise to the efforts of their queer campaign to publish themselves. Glück’s sense(s) of personal and communal self are tangled in the web of fiction throughout his works. Through this novel, this web comes to entangle Margery Kempe’s perplexing, category-disrupting, temporality-defying figure. The ‘Margery’ readers encounter appears strikingly different from the woman first encountered in the Book and described across decades of Kempe studies. She is reconstructed—re-remembered—through Glück’s queer and resistant approach. She becomes collaborative, collaborator, and a member of his community.
Expressions of queer relation through speech and the exhibition of oneself and desires in a variety of venues exemplifies the desire to exist which drives the novel’s narrative and links Glück’s life and experiences with Kempe’s:
First I fought for meaning, now I have too much of it. I disappear from a position too full or empty to reveal the extent of my need. I’m Margery following a god through a rainy city. The rapture is mine, mine the attempt to talk herself into existence.[9]
Glück’s ‘[fight] for meaning’ and ‘attempt to talk [himself] into existence’ exemplify the ultimate desire for the queer political position. Bob expresses a sense of simultaneously feeling as though he has achieved recognition and yet is unrecognizable, both too ‘full’ or ‘empty’, both ‘too much [meaning]’ and none. The binary nature of recognition—both by oneself and others—crumbles. Though Bob ‘disappear[s]’ from his position, simultaneously ‘too full or empty’, this disappearance is characterised by a repeating, insatiable desire to gain or regain a position through relation to the ‘god’ he follows. The only constant in Bob’s bid for relation, up until the final pages of the text, is that it is external and fixed on that identifiable point which ultimately verifies and recognises: his Love, L. This indeterminacy and paradox of position and state reveals an understanding of queer experiences and political existence as dependent upon moments of recognition, proximity, likeness, and difference.
Bob and Margery’s attempts at existence through speaking and being heard, their ‘desire[s]’ to ‘publish [themselves]’ and achieve recognition, sit at the heart of the novel. Now, in the final section of this paper, I examine the queer desire to speak, to be heard, and to process the ability to exist and experience through relational dialogue as central elements of the ‘desire to exist’—the ‘desire’ which drives the text’s narrative. Their respective reasonings for composing themselves in this manner are driven by the experiences and theoretical conceptions of Glück’s New Narrative project and queer aesthetics—elements of my greater argument which I regrettably cannot dedicate more time to today, though I am happy to answer any questions on the topic at a later point. Speaking and permission to speak play central roles in the aesthetics of the text and these techniques for relation and self-construction and self-representations represented therein are constantly constructed, shaped, and represented by the tension of the protagonists’ identities and relations. These tensions betray an even deeper complexity of identification at play for Glück. Through Glück’s work, both Glück and Kempe are re-remembered through dialogue, as they share in this productively impermanent and perpetually shifting exercise. The complex identities represented in the text, in light of the theoretical position of Glück’s writing and the influence of late-twentieth century politics and the politics of aesthetics at play in queer discourse, illuminate this attempt to write the self into existence. This is part of a fight for a ‘provisionally stable identity’—a position from which opposition can speak.
I return to a quote which I have already briefly addressed, where Bob’s voice and identity are tethered to Margery’s, as he states, ‘I’m Margery following a god through a rainy city. The rapture is mine, mine the attempt to talk herself into existence’.[10] This statement tethers the protagonists together, revealing their mutual desires and their shared means for achieving said desires: existence through speech. Throughout the text, Bob and Margery each display a desire to speak and to be heard, as both aim to create an existence through a ‘position’ and a ‘meaning’ for themselves, their constructed, relational identities, and their communities. Margery’s own existence and meaning become bound to Bob’s—bound by their relation—as they are in a constant state of becoming, with a target for that becoming existing through and beyond the text. From the beginning of the text, Bob frames his desire to exist in relation to L; a fixed point against which he can constantly judge his reality:
I need L. to be only mine; for that to happen I must exhibit him and my desire. I call Tom, I call Kathy, I call my old friend Ed. In the theaters of their consciousness I stage my drama. That my love for L. is possible, actual. That my joy exists. Interaction shifts the ground of the finite. They create belief by responding to my story when I meet them in cafés, on street corners, on the phone; Margery turns the cosmos into the witness of her love.[11]
Invoking his desire to share tales of his love affair, Bob ‘need[s] L. to be only [his]’. This need, as we come to see throughout the course of the novel, is driven by a fixation upon L.’s reality and illusion of permanence and security. As though speaking of mystical incantations, Bob declares that ‘for that to happen [he] must exhibit [L.] and [his] desire’. The complexity of this exchange and the recognition and response desired by Bob—and, by relation, Margery—is simultaneously possible and actual; not existing and yet accomplished. This disjuncture reveals the temporal conditions at play in the work, which are never wholly secured but rather always being and becoming. Bob demonstrates his reliance on social relations to establish his existence. This habitual process of engaging in relational dialogues to manifest existence is characterised as a need—‘I must’—and forms an essential element of Bob’s existence in the world and an integral part of his conception of self. Personal knowledge of himself—his love and his relationship with his lover—will not satisfy.
Only a few pages after Bob has ‘stage[d] [his] drama’ to Tom, Kathy, and Ed, Margery is granted permission by Jesus—her own god-man—to speak of their love, as he says to her, ‘Tell whoever you wish: I turn your heart upside down’.[12] To speak of her experience is to make them and their queer intimacy real, to elevate her status as a mystical woman. Through this permission, Margery, like Bob, is given licence to explore the possibilities of speaking and displaying herself and her relationship with Jesus through conversations, such as with the Vicar at St Stephen’s. Through her confessional conversation—she speaks of ‘her vanity’, ‘her obstinacy’, ‘her envy’, ‘her horrible temptations’—Margery is empowered through her testimony; the emotional and physical influences of her speech and her proximity to Christ invoked through it are tremendous:
When she spoke of Jesus, the ground emitted organ music that seemed to have a shouting crowd in it; vibrations weakened her arms and legs. [...] Margery recounted conversations with Jesus more exalted than Stimulus Amoris or Incendium Amoris. She had a rare rose and there were not enough ears in the world to hear of the paradise of its bloom.[13]
Margery’s confession and exaltation are compelled by a desire to possess and demonstrate such possession so as to elevate it and make it real. The ‘rare rose’ she has must be spoken of so that the paradise it holds can be recognised. Like Bob’s proximity to L., Margery’s proximity to Christ and his paradise creates self-recognition through relation and validation through that proximity. The empowerment on display in this account of Margery’s experience illustrates the power of speech in these constructions of the self. The power in speech and the power of relations—especially relations which disrupt power dynamics and disturb heteronormative practices—is displayed through Margery’s relationship with Christ in ways that recounting of Bob’s relationship with L. cannot so vividly invoke. However, what they do share is the desire to preserve their accounts. In this passage, Kempe’s conversations are measured by their similarity to the recorded conversations between Jesus and his other renowned devotees, James of Milan and Richard Rolle. By invoking these texts, rather than the authors, the power of her recognition through Christ is measured by its relation and similarity to these accounts which remain as their authors’ physical, sustaining form on Earth. This similarity is authorising and empowering while also underscoring the importance of the human form and elevating the possibility of autobiographical accounts for sustaining and preserving relation across time.The blending of the persons and desires of Bob and Margery allows for the dramatization of queer experiences of love and the importance of speaking and making oneself and one’s love known so that it may be perceived in the world and made real on these social and political planes of existence. Glück employs Margery as a heteronormative figure with an inordinate love so as to reify Bob’s—his own—experiences.
The end of my time has come too quickly—there is so much more I could say, and I wish, quite selfishly, that I could carry on. As I have had to neglect so much of the material which remains only in my current chapter draft, if any of you would be interested in reading that work and giving me feedback on it, I will gladly burden you with that opportunity. So, in conclusion, Glück’s attempt at existence—his ‘desire’ to ‘publish himself’—sits at the heart of his novel, as I propose—without time to defend such proposition here—it does for Kempe and her Book. While his own reasonings for composing the text and his perspectives on the accomplishments of the work are expressed through various commentary, I have attempted here to briefly critically examine the use of speech as a confessional, dialogical technique for self-publication. Speaking and permission to speak play a central role in the self-construction and self-representations in this text and in Kempe’s Book, as both Bob and Margery are constantly constructed, shaped, and represented by the tension of identities and relations in their works. While I have not had space to discuss the role of confessional speech in Kempe’s Book here and have instead opted to focus on Glück’s medievalism, I am convinced—and go on to argue in my thesis—that the tensions of relation present in bothof these texts betray an even deeper complexity of identification at play for the works’ authors. As it concerns Glück and his novel, he constructs himself and his Margery in dialogue and through creating images and productions of relation of and for those to whom he tethers his existence—his friends, his lover, his community. These complex identities, in light of the theoretical position of New Narrative writing and the political position of queerness, illuminate both the Book and this novel as attempts to write the self into existence; to continue a fight for a ‘provisionally stable identity’—a position from which opposition—opposition both medieval and postmodern—can speak.
[1] José Esteban Muños, ‘Introduction: Feeling Utopia’, in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 1-18 (p. 1).
[2] Citations to this work will henceforth be offered parenthetically. Robert Glück, Margery Kempe, introduction by Colm Toíbín (New York: New York Review Books, 2020).
[3] Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Jonathan Hsy, ‘“Be More Strange and Bold”: Kissing Lepers and Female Same-Sex Desire in “The Book of Margery Kempe”’, Early Modern Women 5 (2010), pp. 189-199; Laura Saetveit Miles, ‘Queer Touch Between Holy Women: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Birgitta of Sweden, and the Visitation’, in Touching, Devotional Practices, and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages, edited by David Carrillo-Rangel, Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel, and Pablo Acosta-Garcia (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 203-235.
[4] Robert Glück, Margery Kempe, introduction by Colm Tóibín (New York: New York Review Books, 2020), back cover. Referenced henceforth as Margery.
[5] Robert Glück, ‘Long Note on New Narrative’, Narrativity, 1 (2004), https://www.sfsu.edu/~newlit/narrativity/issue_one/gluck.html, <accessed 24 March 2020>; henceforth abbreviated as ‘LNONN’.
[6] ‘LNONN’.
[7] ‘LNONN’.
[8] Robert Glück, ‘A Dream Journal of the HIV/AIDS Crisis’, Frieze (14 April 2020), https://www.frieze.com/article/dream-journal-hivaids-crisis, <accessed 25 March 2020>.
[9]Margery, p. 13; italics my own, for emphasis
[10]Margery, p. 13 (italics my own, for emphasis).
[11]Margery, p. 12.
[12]Margery, p. 15
[13]Margery, pp. 19-20.