Fugitive Explorations inRomeo and Juliet: Transversal Travels through R&Jspace

Abstract

Every time I tell you I'm Romeo,It fills my soul and heart with pain and sorrow.Sublime, Romeo1The lyrics from punk/ska/reggae band Sublime's song are indicative of popular conceptions of and Juliet as tragic love story, and are suggestive of number of meanings associated with play's title characters that have permeated what some might dismiss as lower depths of popular culture. In song, which is featured in Lloyd Kaufman's film adaptation Tromeo and Juliet (1997), lead singer and lyricist Bradley Nowell rejects his current partner who, although willing to please him sexually, fails to live up to his image of perfect mate: Want who can me right/ Not sloppy drunk on Saturday night/ I'm Romeo-Romeo-with to go. Nowell's song indicates not only that manly charm is characteristic of being but that Romeo feels passionate, Petrarchan emotions, including anger, pain and sorrow, over absence of requited love. The singer/wanna-be anguish is also lament for what he imagines is his lack of self-cohesion. Obtaining the woman that will make [him] becomes necessary for Romeo to fashion satisfactory self.Although never mentioned by Nowell, Juliet, female figure usually joined to term with an is invoked by song's title and subject. Conjured in part by her absence, Juliet becomes ideal kinda woman singer-self-identifying as Romeo-longs for. Reciprocated love from intangible Juliet is seen as requisite ingredient for process of self-authorship doomed from onset, as evident by Nowell's lamentation, Because I'm Romeo-Romeo-with to go. According to lyrics, Romeo cannot be Romeo without symbolic and material presence of Juliet, who is relegated to an always unattainable site for selfhood, to go to become ideally real male identity that is, nonetheless, no place in reality. The patriarchal imperatives of song are accompanied by heteronormatizing framework explicit in Nowell's specific search for who can [him] right. As suggested by alliteration of right and Romeo, without woman, wrong is what this/ a/the will feel.The longing male subject and desired female object of song's narrative reflect normativity and formalism. The dichotomous tendencies of song's narrative lead to heart of matter of Romeo's story: this who longs to feel is invested in dominant, idealized notions of transcendent romantic love that Shakespeare's lovers have come to embody. In identifying Dionysian sloppy, drunk sex as wrong, Romeo reveals longing for his lack of inverse, that Apollonian clean, sober love invoked by fictitious figure singer can only be a version of, and by similarly illusive female attached to Romeo.Sublime's song testifies to circulatory power of these iconic lovers who, apparently even within music scene alternative to mainstream music industry, can function as conductors for normative views. More important to present analysis, however, is that song is strong exemplar of what transversal theory refers to as an space, discursive interface where symbolic discourses and social performances commingle and are imbued with meaning. The specific articulatory space that song exemplifies is what we call R&Jspace, conglomeration of official and/or unofficial historical, political, cultural, and social spaces through which and Juliet resound in various manifestations, ranging from emblems of romantic love, legitimaters of forbidden desire, icons of teenage angst, and, in more recent critical incarnations, subversive agents of dominant ideologies substantiated by names they themselves are so eager to doff. …