In the world of literary experimentation, Robert Glück stands out as an author who is unafraid to challenge convention and reimagine historical narratives. One of his boldest undertakings is his literary engagement with Margery Kempe, a medieval Christian mystic whose autobiographical text,The Book of Margery Kempe, is often regarded as the first autobiography in English. Glück’s engagement with Kempe is not merely a historical reflection, but a radical reworking that collapses time, queerness, identity, and devotion. This topic explores the unique relationship between Robert Glück and Margery Kempe, analyzing how Glück reinterprets her legacy and what this intersection reveals about literature, selfhood, and desire.
Robert Glück A Voice in Experimental Literature
Robert Glück is a prominent figure in American avant-garde literature, particularly associated with the New Narrative movement that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in San Francisco. New Narrative aimed to blur the lines between fiction and autobiography, merging personal voice, theory, and queer identity. Glück’s writing often challenges form, embraces hybridity, and emphasizes emotional truth alongside structural innovation. His works such asMargery Kempe(1994) are notable for their fusion of medieval and contemporary sensibilities.
The Book of Margery Kempe A Medieval Voice
Margery Kempe was a 15th-century English mystic whose writings document her religious visions, pilgrimages, and deeply emotional experiences with Christ. Often crying uncontrollably in public, Kempe’s expressions of devotion were misunderstood, leading to accusations of heresy and social ridicule. Her book is deeply personal, told in the third person, and shaped by spiritual fervor and human vulnerability.
Robert Glück finds in Kempe a kindred spirit. While she was a religious woman navigating the complexities of gender and identity in the Middle Ages, Glück a gay man and postmodern writer identifies with her emotional intensity and sense of spiritual longing. This cross-temporal empathy becomes the foundation of his novelMargery Kempe.
Rewriting the Past Glück’s Reimagination
In his novelMargery Kempe, Robert Glück does not simply retell the story of the medieval mystic. Instead, he recontextualizes her experience through a modern narrator a gay man mourning the loss of love. The narrator, who identifies with Kempe, parallels her tears with his own emotional grief. This method of writing creates a deeply personal and intimate portrayal of suffering, spiritual longing, and queer desire.
Themes of Grief and Longing
The intersection of grief, desire, and identity is central to Glück’s interpretation. Just as Margery Kempe’s crying is a form of divine yearning and self-expression, Glück’s narrator weeps for lost love and spiritual alienation. The mirroring of their experiences, across time and gender, invites the reader to reconsider how emotional expression transcends historical periods.
- Emotional Intensity– Glück taps into Kempe’s capacity for deep feeling and brings it into a queer, modern context.
- Queer Devotion– The narrator’s love, while romantic, is also spiritual, echoing Kempe’s divine obsession.
- Language of the Body– Both texts focus on bodily manifestations of emotion crying, trembling, and physical longing.
Gender, Identity, and Transformation
Another striking aspect of Robert Glück’s engagement with Margery Kempe is how it destabilizes traditional notions of gender. In Glück’s novel, the narrator often shifts between identifying with Kempe and existing in his own body. The boundaries between male and female, medieval and modern, sacred and profane, begin to blur.
Performing Identity
By inhabiting Kempe’s perspective, Glück’s narrator performs a kind of literary drag donning her voice, her suffering, her devotion. This literary performance allows Glück to examine identity not as fixed, but as fluid, performative, and deeply contextual. His use of the third person, like Kempe’s original text, creates a sense of detachment and dramatization, further complicating the narrative voice.
Modern Spirituality and Queerness
Through Glück’s reworking, Margery Kempe becomes a vessel for exploring queer spirituality. Her mysticism once seen as excessive or hysterical is recast as a valid mode of expressing queer yearning. Glück opens a dialogue between secular and sacred, revealing how desire and love, regardless of their object, can carry profound spiritual weight.
Literary Innovation and Narrative Form
Glück’s use of intertextuality is central to his technique. By weaving lines from Kempe’s original text into his own novel, he creates a palimpsest of voices, both past and present. The reader is never sure where Glück ends and Kempe begins. This intentional ambiguity invites deeper reflection on the construction of narrative and the authorship of experience.
Hybrid Writing Style
The prose inMargery Kempeshifts between poetic lyricism, introspective monologue, and historical reference. It mirrors the fragmented nature of memory and mourning. Glück’s refusal to maintain a singular narrative voice reflects the fragmented experience of grief and the complexity of identity.
Time as a Narrative Tool
By collapsing the distance between medieval and modern time, Glück suggests that human emotion and spiritual need are timeless. His novel challenges the reader to see Kempe not as a historical figure, but as a living presence who speaks to contemporary concerns especially those surrounding love, pain, and identity.
Legacy and Impact
Robert Glück’sMargery Kempehas become an important text in queer literary studies and experimental fiction. It challenges the binary between sacred and secular, male and female, past and present. By invoking a medieval mystic, Glück offers a radically inclusive vision of literature as a space for spiritual and emotional exploration.
- Innovative Form– Glück pushes the boundaries of what a novel can be, blending autobiography, fiction, and historical writing.
- Queer Canon– His work has helped establish a queer lineage that stretches beyond the 20th century and into the distant past.
- Emotional Depth– The novel resonates with anyone who has experienced grief, longing, or the need for transcendence.
Reclaiming Voices Across Time
Robert Glück’sMargery Kempeis more than a homage it is a resurrection. It breathes new life into a historical woman’s story and places it alongside a modern, queer voice that aches with similar intensity. Glück teaches us that literature is not bound by time, and that the emotional truths of one era can speak directly to another. In reclaiming Kempe’s legacy, Glück invites us to question the limits of identity, to find beauty in grief, and to honor the power of voice no matter how many centuries separate us.