Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film by Madhavi Menon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Really 3.5 stars. A more thorough (and even-handed) review from me is forthcoming on Shaksper.net, so I thought I'd make just a few overall comments and mention the things that really bothered me about this book.



Menon is clearly very intelligent, and her work is very theoretically sophisticated. Her argument about the problems with the way scholars "do history" is significant and timely. BUT... at times her desire to differentiate herself from what she calls "heterohistory" results in her obscuring or even contradicting her argument. Her primary argument is that scholarship that assumes a paradigm of difference distorts/obscures its subject in many ways; how ironic, then, that she is so insistent about how different her work is -- to the extent that she distorts/obscures some potentially interesting ideas. This is, though, only natural when one attempts to do something as ambitious as Menon does in this book.



The other thing that bugged me about the book were the rather pretentious lines Menon sprinkled throughout the work. Sometimes intended to be humorous, other times as poetic statements that encapsulated her ideas, they were usually both annoying and off-topic. A few of the most egregious examples:



1) In her chapter on Venus and Adonis and teleology: 'In such a realm, we would stop having successful sex. Or, perhaps, more unhistorically, we would have sex endlessly.' She'd just written about how the poem is essentially devoid of sex/sexual completion (but not desire), but, OK, whatever.



2) In her chapter on Titus Andronicus and origins (which is, I think, the best chapter, besides the introduction): "Shakespeare does not deprive Ovid of a tongue. Instead, he mingles his juices with that of the Roman to produce a melange of tastes that homohistory finds delectable." This is just pretentious. Probably should have gone the way of that old chestnut (Hemingway's?) about always deleting your favorite sentence from your work.



3) In her chapter on Shakespeare in Love and authenticity: "Shakespeare in Love suggests that the sanitary and historical act of giving face is always stained by the messy and unhistorical scene of giving head." Um, what? This is really, really lame, and the oral sex metaphor has nothing to do with (and never otherwise appears, as far as I noticed) in the chapter.



That said, the introduction was pretty great and will be useful to anyone interested in sexuality/desire, Shakespeare, and historiography.



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Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Some Spoilers follow...



The second volume in Frank Herbert's original Dune series. This one finds us 12 years after the end of Dune. The Jihad that Paul Muad'Dib Atreides had feared has been unleashed upon the Imperial Galaxy, leaving over 6 billion dead. Paul himself has ascended to near-divine status, ruling through a theocracy that reveres him as a quasi-god, his mother as a sort of Virgin Mary, and his Sister Alia as an almost demonic force of nature. At the same time, the ecological changes begun by Pardot & Liet-Kynes have been accelerated, starting the generations-long transformation of Arrakis from desert wasteland to water-rich world. As Paul struggles to find a way out the present-future his prescient visions have created, various forces in his imperium -- the Spacing Guild, the Bene Gesserit, disillusioned Fremen, and the newly introduced Bene Tleilax -- are working against him, trying to assassinate him and end the Atreides reign.



Much like Dune before it, Dune Messiah is all about plots, counter-plots, counter-counter-plots, bluffs, double-bluffs, trickery, scheming... you name it. When I first read it in high school -- over 15 years ago -- I didn't like it as much as Dune. I still find it somewhat inferior to the first book (whereas a number of reviews I've read recently actually prefer it to the first), but I appreciated it much more this time around. The tighter focus on Paul humanizes him for the readers at the same time as he is de-humanized in the world around him. His story is far more tragic in this volume; in Dune, he had been a boy coming to grips with an awesome power, struggling against monstrous forces and trying to take control of his future. In Messiah, we see that in struggling to control his future, he has trapped himself in it. Paul's story here is a story of a "great man" who doesn't move history so much as become just another tool in history's passage. The story offers us a fascinating insight into what it means to be a "messiah": a human being forced to become inhuman, looking for a moment when he can slip out of the mantle that has been placed on his shoulders. Most intriguingly, the messiah is only partially aware of the world he is meant to usher in. He knows his actions lead somewhere, but he cannot or will not see it fully.



All this makes for some rather opaque storytelling at times. The book is about mystery, as Paul's prescience is challenged by the muddying prophecies of others with a limited ability to see -- and therefore create -- the future. Each eye sees something else, but only part of the big picture. As readers, we read these competing visions, but only at the climax of the book do they begin to come together. Even then, we have the birth of the Children of Dune (the title/subject of the next volume) Leto II and Ghanima, and the hint at a grander vision beyond even Paul's Jihad and religious Empire. This can be frustrating at times -- one of the reasons why I found the book less appealing when I first read it -- but it is fundamental to what the story is about.



As for the things that bothered me, some of them still do. First is the introduction of the Bene Tleilax. They are thrust into the story without much explanation, but at the same time there isn't a whole lot of "mystery" about them -- it is as though you are just to know who they are. They do become more important in later books, but its a little confusing at first, as you feel like you've missed something from the first book. But more annoying than their sudden importance to the Dune universe is the revelation by one of the Tleilaxu that they had created a Kwisatch Haderach before -- the superbeing that had been the goal of the Bene Gesserit breeding program. A line casually tossed off by one of the Tleilaxu, this really undercuts the sense of Paul's importance and uniqueness. More importantly, though, it makes the Kwisatch Haderach seem less like an evolutionary leap in humankind and more like a science experiment. It also makes the Bene Gesserit look like idiots -- they've spent thousands of years breeding an superbeing, but the Tleilaxu somehow engineered one years before, and that one committed suicide? It really undermines the whole concept.



I was also somewhat bothered by the importance of the resurrected Duncan Idaho. In Dune, Idaho had largely been on the periphery. He rarely interacted with Paul, from what I remember, and died rather early in Paul's journey protecting him and his mother. Noble warrior and all, but a side character. He is reintroduced in this novel as a ghola, a resurrected body created by the aforementioned Tleilaxu. All of a sudden, he is Paul's closest companion. And Idaho continues to be central to the story through the next few novels. Not a big deal, but given how taken Paul is with Duncan you'd think he would have thought about him occasionally inbetween his death early in Dune and his return midway through Messiah. But, I guess Herbert wanted to bring back someone from Paul's past, and Idaho made sense, even if the lines between Paul's past with Idaho and his reaction to him in Messiah are thinly drawn.



So, overall, a very good book. Not quite as good as Dune, and I think the weakest of the first 4 (which are, in a sense, the "first part" of the Dune Saga, with Heretics & Chapterhouse being the "second part"). But still exciting and enjoyable. One thing, though: you can read Dune and stop there, but once you get to Dune Messiah, you're in the middle of a fairly continuous story that runs through God Emperor, the 4th book. So, be ready to invest a good bit of time.



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