Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton by Katie Kadue (review)

Abstract

Domestic Georgic is one of the most irritating works of scholarship I have read in some time. I mean this in the sense mobilized by Catherine Brown in her expression ‘hermeneutic irritants’ — conceptual objects akin to chemicals secreted by molluscs to create a pearl: things that galvanize the imagination, and provoke dense, luminous forms of thinking (Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic, and the Poetics of Didacticism (Stanford: CA, Stanford University Press, 1998)). For irritation, as Kadue herself proposes in her chapter on Montaigne, is what might sustain us in the often painful processes of self-preservation that both writing and embodied existence require. Caught between a rock and a hard place (the life of the mind and that of the body), irritation (from irrito, to stimulate, provoke, excite, instigate) is what keeps us attuned to things that matter, even if those things are small-scale, local, even mundane. At the heart of Kadue’s study is the claim that the poetics of Rabelais, Montaigne, Spenser, Marvell, and Milton had more in common with the ‘mundane maintenance work of [...] domestic laborers’ than the large-scale projects of systemor world-building, epic narrative, or digressive expansion with which they are often associated. On Kadue’s reading, Montaigne is not a sorcerous stylist forging a new genre through alchemical experiments with words, but a writer who knows that at best writing constitutes a form of self-management whose effects are often slow and excruciating, like drawing blood out of a stone, or stones out of a kidney. Similarly, in situating Rabelais’s œuvre between a coherent ‘grand design’ elicited by a reader like Edwin Duval and the infinite generation conjured by postmodern readers such as Michel Jeanneret, Kadue allows us to suspend commonplace interpretative strategies to consider what might hang in the in-between. While many of Kadue’s arguments rest on such tempering proclivities, an erring towards conservativism is itself tempered by the constellation of theorists interpolated throughout the book’s close readings. From Hannah Arendt to Silvia Federici to Sianne Ngai, it traverses a spectrum of political thought at the intersections of labour, gender, affect, and (re)production. Kadue encourages readers more or less complacent in their safe postures of early modern historicism to perform mental frottage between texts and time periods, and proves that analysing canonical early modern texts under the microscope of theory is enlivening, rewarding intellectual labour. In all this, Kadue eschews grand political gestures, proposing instead that the domestic is not just political, but might be where political theorizing is most at home. If Kadue’s razor-sharp prose focuses our attention on the affinities between writing and housework, I found myself thinking about the absence of the aleatory promenades of distraction in the picture she delivers of these early modern works. My own mental wanderings, made possible through Kadue’s meticulous research and argumentation, led me to wonder about philology as a form of labour that combines a grandiose view of language and culture with the kind of thankless drudgery that Kadue associates with feminized domesticity. Philology might, in other words, provide not an in-between, but a third model that fuses hubris and humility, ‘ masculine’ heroism and ‘feminine’ care.