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Popular Culture Review
Facts, as discrete pieces of information that can be relied on to be objective
and truthful in the substance they convey, came into being during the 16th
century; and facts form the subject of Menon’s second chapter in Unhistorical
Shakespeare. Within traditional history that seeks to create “a deterministic
chain of cause and effect. . . the fact is the cause and history is its effect” (54).
But facts, Menon demonstrates here, using Shakespeare’s Romance Cymbeline
as her test case, are far more unreliable and slippery than historicists have ever
conceded. Indeed, in “this play, every fact turns out to be appearance, and every
failure to read appearance as such results in devastation. Giving the lie to the
fact does not, however, produce a new order of truth so much as disturb the
conviction of its efficacy” (63). Examples of unreliable and slipper y facts in
Cymbeline abound; one of them is Iachimo’s production of Imogen’s bracelet
for Posthumus upon his return to Rome from Britain. Posthumus takes the
material reality of Imogen’s bracelet being in Iachimo’s possession as factual
proof of Imogen’s infidelity to Posthumus. Yet, as soon as this fact is registered
as true, Posthumus’s host and friend points out that the bracelet could have come
into Iachimo’s hands by any number of means, including by theft and duplicity
on the part of Imogen’s servants. Thus what was a factual truth only moments
before—Imogen’s unfaithfulness—has become subject to question. This fact, in
other words, is not what it pretends to be. Cymbeline's “skepticism of the fact,
and the tension between facts and desires, become urgent theoretical concerns
for homohistory” (61). The fact, Menon explains a short while later, “necessarily
has to come after the fact but needs to posit itself as coming before so that it can,
in fact, count as fact. . . the fact conceals the fact of its own making. Facts are
therefore predicated on a constitutive anachronism,” an anachronism that “has to
be forgotten in order to posit fixed difference—between past and present,
sodomy and homosexuality, homo- and hetero desire—as truth” (68). Historians
of all disciplines quite literally create facts by identifying and labeling them as
such, hence Menon’s notion of the “constitutive anachronism.” Where the
history of sexuality is concerned, difference between the “us” of the 21st century
and the “them” of Shakespeare’s time has been fashioned by historicists into an
incontrovertible fact and, therefore, an undeniable truth, as well. But, as with
Imogen’s bracelet/infidelity, this fact of difference in terms of sexuality, when
challenged, proves to be an illusion that, once recognized for what it really is,
makes room for the sameness of homohistory; for tangible links between past
and present, sodomy and homosexuality, and all kinds of uncontainable homoand heteroerotic desires.
Chapter 3 is concerned with citation. Citation, Menon writes, “is the tool by
which one lends authority or, rather, by which one’s authority is acknowledged
as being separate from another’s authorship. Citation renders authoritative what
quotation merely authors” (77). But, what happens when an earlier work is
quoted without being cited explicitly and properly? To explore this question,
Menon compares the 2001 Hindi film Dil Chahta Hai (translated as “The Heart
Desires”) to Shakespeare’s 1598 play Much Ado about Nothing, both of which