BOOK REVIEWS
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are similar in their major plot points. However, “D/7 Chahta Hai does not name
itself as a Shakespearean adaptation. Rather, it is very Shakespearean about its
intellectual borrowings and never names its sources, even as it
sometimes . .. half acknowledges them” visually (82). What “ties Much Ado to
Dil Chahta Hai, then, is not that the latter has plagiarized the former, but rather
that the two texts comment on plagiarism in the context of desire. These
questions of legitimacy—Can a text be like another text without knowing it?
Can a hetero text turn out to be homo?—are at the heart of the debate over
citation” (82). A set of related concerns arises in regard to Much Ado about
Nothing: “The play’s central dilemma—has Hero been unfaithful to Claudio?—
is coupled with the text’s incessant play between speech and silence in relation
to desire. What is Hero’s desire? Who does Hero desire? Does Hero ever name
her desire? And who desires Hero” (88)? Hero’s desire is never named in the
play; it is never cited properly, and thus it remains a stubborn problematic.
While traditional (hetero-)history finds this lack of citation particularly
troubling, homohistory steps in to assert “not that desire should not have a name,
but that no name, even and especially the most seemingly valorous one [Hero],
can ever be self-evident or transparent” (91-92). What this could lead to, Menon
suggests, is the “knowledge that desire always exceeds the boundaries of a name
that seeks to explain it. Such an understanding of desire will highlight the
methodological incompatibility between desire and citation” (93). Since at least
the 18th century, we in the West have been obsessed with citation, whether
through the use of footnotes, endnotes, or some other system of documentation.
As the example of Shakespeare—who borrowed liberally from other authors
while rarely, if ever, providing attribution—himself shows, those in earlier
periods of time were far less concerned with leaving an intelligible trail back to
their sources. We have also been obsessed, probably since Aristotle, with the
form of citation known as naming, or labeling, or categorizing. In the realm of
erotic desire, that desire must be known by its proper name—heterosexual,
homosexual, bisexual, sodomitical, and so forth—or nothing but anxiety results.
Yet, as Menon argues, these names, labels, and categories cannot ever totally
contain these desires which, in turn, renders citation as ineffectual as teleology
and facts in the study of the history of sexuality.
The idea of origins is Menon’s concern in Chapter 4. Shakespeare’s early,
bloody, and violent tragedy Titus Andronicus serves as the locus around which
she builds her argument about origins. This play “is faulted for not being classy
despite its almost arrogant display of [uncited] erudition. What is the origin of
this dismissal, and could it have something to do with origins themselves” (95)?
Of course the main source for Titus Andronicus is the tale of Philomela from
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who is raped and mutilated by her brother-in-law,
Tereus. But, in Ovid, Tereus “only” mutilates Philomela by cutting out her
tongue; in Titus, brothers Chiron and Demetrius cut out Lavinia’s tongue and
chop off her hands after they have both raped her so that she will never be able
to reveal them as the perpetrators of the crimes committed against her. From this