DUSTY Review #2: Transgression and Cortezia

Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga was not a phenomenon. No one seemed able to explain it, not even Meyer or the actors. Actually it is fairly easy to explain if you know the structural template and genealogy of the Tristan and Iseult Legend from the 12th century. I keep trying to do that in detail and cannot seem to get there, so here is another piece of it.

Courtly Love or Cortezia came to flower in the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, first with her marriage to Louis of France and then to Henry II of England. She took her troubadours to England with her where they continued to spread the poetry and songs of Courtly Love. In these midieval times knights were rough and ready for war and women. They married for property and advancement and dowries and love was not much thought about, only copulation. Knights pledged allegiance to a Lady (under the secret influence of Catharism against Rome) who was already married, and troubadours sang songs of a Lady's beauty, purity, grace, and goodness known throughout the land.

The knight was probably already married also or betrothed when he pledged his allegiance to his Lady. This involved a long ritual of watching her, sleeping outside her door, jousting with her favor displayed, eventually sleeping on the floor outside her room and ultimately sleeping with her in his arms - many many months of discipline, both of them naked. This is the practice of akesis. There is no consummation, just desire ever increasing on his part and we don't know about the women. But we can guess from Meyer's Twilight that it must have awakened passion within her, since chastity is involved. A genealogy of chastity from the 5th century shows that it was originally a technique of increasing passion. We go to chastity belts which have not been perceived as the erotic garments they were, focusing sensory awareness on the lower part of the woman's body. Surely these woman must have become very aroused and there are instances surmised of transgressing against the rules of the ritual. So when parents of the conservative persuasion insist on chastity, particularly in their daughters, they are insisting on a practice that ensures the flaming of erotic desire which they do not acknowledge.

Transgression is another part of this. Since the woman was married in all cases, she was off bounds. Think Lancelot the Knight, Queen Guinevere and King Arthur. Transgression led to punishment, banishment and/or death. Guinevere, one variation tells, was banished to a leper colony.

In YellowBella's DUSTY, Transgression is doubled. Bella is 9 and Edward is 11 when they meet the first day Bella attends her new school in Forks to begin 5th grade. She immediately makes friends with Alice Cullen and they become best friends right away. So her tender age is a boundary here as her feelings for Edward begin to flower and his for her. Begun in innocence Edward's oncoming puberty becomes a conflict for him and for her. Both are underage, so we have a huge transgression, especially in our prurient provincial times. But the transgression is doubled as she is his sister's best friend, stays overnight all the time and has begun to be loved and thought of as another sister and another daughter by Carlisle and Esme.

So here we come to "psychological incest" as Edward has started thinking of her as his little sister, which slowly changes, and becomes entwined  in his feelings of possession and protection. We have the long akesis of sleeping together and the secrecy involved. The secret adds another layer of transgression between them increasing their erotic feelings. 


Transgression: age; psychological incest; secrecy. 

Transgression is another needed ingredient in Cortezia. There are others but we need not go there now. But two of the most important are in place in DUSTY. The long akesis of guarding and sleeping with the love object and the now triple transgression to heighten erotic desire to the level of Passion Love/Death. It is the intensification of the passion that is the true desire of the two lovers, not consummation in the Legend. This Legend has ruled Love in the Western World - and the western world only -  for 800 years with its rituals of love, courtship and marriage until the 1960's ushered in THE PILL. But its template continued unabated beneath the surface and it seems Meyer tore the scab off and released it with Twilight. Is it any wonder then that it was such a fantastic outpouring of polarizing feelings?

Only the young girl Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights and Wagner in his opera Tristan and Isolde do not shrink from the true desire for becoming one forever in DEATH.

There is no doubt that DUSTY is erotic, but those erotic feelings are triggering deep seated taboos: underage sex, incest and secrecy. Is it any wonder that DUSTY arouses such polarizing feelings?

Now Dusty is out as a book - Innocents

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19214578-innocents

To Love Truly Is To Want The Other Free

LOCKS representing true love forever on Paris bridges

From l'mmoraliste

At the heart of love à la française lies the idea of 

freedom. To love truly is to want the other free, and this 

includes the freedom to walk away. Love is not about 

possession or property. Love is no prison where two 

people are each other’s slaves. Love is not a commodity, 

either. Love is not capitalist, it is revolutionary. If 

anything, true love shows you the way to selflessness.

 The entire article here

So please tell me where is the grey, boring, monotonous 

thought of "cheating" coming from?

The French Know

 Yet, instead of sharing the naïve joy of the world’s 

Romeos and Juliets, some Parisians have felt 

increasingly irritated. Walking on those bridges 

has become almost insufferable for them. The pain 

doesn’t come only from the fact that some bridges, 

like Pont de l’Archevêché and Pont des Arts, now 

feel as if they could collapse under the weight of 

tourists’ undying love but also from the idea 

that a lock could represent love. Such an 

idea is abhorrent to many French people.

“The fools! They haven’t understood a thing about love, have they?” 

.......Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir famously never married and 

never lived together and, although a couple in the absolute sense of the term, 

they had lasting and meaningful relationships with strings of brilliant minds 

and pretty faces. They deemed jealousy bourgeois and 

banal.

In his recent book, “In Praise of Love,” the French 

philosopher Alain Badiou 

reminds us that love implies 

constant risk. There is no safe, 

everlasting love. The idea 

that you can lock two people’s 

love once and for all, and toss 

the key, is a puerile fantasy. 

For Mr. Badiou, love is 

inherently hazardous, always 

on the brink of failure and 

above all vulnerable. Embrace its fragility, wish your 

beloved 

to be free and you might just, only just, have a chance to 

retain his or her undying gratitude, and love. But don’t 

ever 

dream of locks and throwing keys overboard, 

especially not 

in Paris.

DeLillo's Elise in Cosmopolis:

No he (Cronenberg) didn't keep the relationship between Elise and Packer the same as in the book:

What is money to a poet, she says, love the world and trace it in a line of verse. Without Elise there's no love of the world. No Elise makes the movie as detached as Eric is in it. Cosmopolis the book is a verse. Cosmopolis the movie is not, it's a movie.

Instead of words from the book, Cronenberg says he gives an actor's face.
This post is for Elise's face missing in the movie when Eric realizes he loves her and she slips away.

For Elise, the face of love. The kind of love which sprungs out mysteriously in unexpected places; which enables, is not selfish, makes one do foolish things and wear turbans, which supports and understands without asking, which gives and makes one free to be a gull at dawn, anything and everything one can be. Which makes one an overman. Even if everything and anything one is, is dead in the end. Precisely because that which one ultimately is in the end is dead .

Amor fati, nothing altered, nothing alterable.

Cronenberg thought this part was a fantasy because Cronenberg thinks love is a fantasy.

“Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.” - Judith Butler

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison writes (and I have quoted this many times), “Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love.”

In Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes writes (he is speaking of emotional intelligence), “…intelligence is everything that permits us to live superlatively with another person.”

This is where knowing how to treat someone well and wanting to treat someone well converge.

From Masha Tupitsyn: 

http://mashatupitsyn.tumblr.com/post/36858226254/untitled-28

And So The Lion Fell In Love With The Lamb - Isaiah, Twilight

The Lion In Love - Aesop

And it was all those mediocre untalented directors who pulled your fangs Rob.

That you traded your body thrusting, thrusting, thrusting for so they could ride on your back to the box office NOT as it turned out.

Just as you have conspired - knowingly or not - with Cronenberg to defang DeLillo by ringing that fucking NYSE bell this morning.

Occupy do not ever forgive him for this. Do not ever forgive either one of them for this. 

Cronenberg will get his "30 pieces of silver" in financing for his next film for this.

Rob will get maybe some acting acclaim.

THE USUAL for bending over to take it up the ass. 

Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture - Irina Aristarkhova - Reading Through Lacan

Irina’s new book, Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture is a refreshing and bold addition to a truly progressive feminist theory in North America.  I will be completing a series of interviews with Irina about her new work, which draws on Luce Irigaray(one of my favorite theorist working in the field of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Feminist theory).  The synopsis reads as follows:

The question “Where do we come from?” has fascinated philosophers, scientists, and artists for generations. This book reorients the question of the matrix as a place where everything comes from (chora, womb, incubator) by recasting it in terms of acts of “matrixial/maternal hospitality” producing space and matter of and for the other. Irina Aristarkhova theorizes such hospitality with the potential to go beyond tolerance in understanding self/other relations. Building on and critically evaluating a wide range of historical and contemporary scholarship, she applies this theoretical framework to the science, technology, and art of ectogenesis (artificial womb, neonatal incubators, and other types of generation outside of the maternal body) and proves the question “Can the machine nurse?” is critical when approaching and understanding the functional capacities and failures of incubating technologies, such as artificial placenta. Aristarkhova concludes with the science and art of male pregnancy, positioning the condition as a question of the hospitable man and newly defined fatherhood and its challenge to the conception of masculinity as unable to welcome the other” (see the link above).

About the Author

Irina Aristarkhova is associate professor of women’s studies and visual art at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. She edited and contributed to the volume Woman Does Not Exist: Contemporary Studies of Sexual Difference and to the Russian translation of Luce Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference.

This book inspired me to come up with a thought experiment with some of my graduate students after a seminar.  We thought of the idea of opening up a seminar by asking a man the following question:  ”If it were possible, would you give birth to a baby?”  This question is provocative because it asks a man to think about an alien creature entering and growing in his body, which by extension gives birth to the core idea of Irina’s radical notion of “hospitality” because if you are not willing to have your body invaded by a foreign body (literally) than how does this relate to the kernel notion of openness to the other?  And further,  we might ask: How does this relate to the fundamental notion of masculinity?  Does the domain of masculinity, for example, contain within it an open-ness?  Irina and I will discuss these and other basic questions like the future of Women’s Studies in North America, the truth of Feminism, and, of course, psychoanalysis (Lacan style)!

Also I’m thrilled to announce that my friend, and one of Europe’s greatest Feminist thinkers,  Professor Katerina Kolozova will publish her book _The Cut of the Real_ in my book series I co-edit at Columbia University Press!

Likehttp://crestondavis.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/a-refreshing-not-to-mention-funny-feminist-voice-irina-aristarkhova/#respond
Reposted from Creston Davis so see link for a wonderful site.
Why is this posted under Twilight Irruption here?
Because Stephenie Meyer's Bella, played so perfectly by Kristen Stewart, portrays the young woman "who is open to the Other," the foreign, the radical, the strange, the singular portrayed by Rob Pattinson as Edward Cullen also so perfectly. And IMO this is just one of the reasons the books and the films have become so beloved.
“Other people try to distance me from her, but not me,” she says. “I’ve said it a hundred times before: I love Bella.” To that end, she admits to getting frustrated when people label the character as weak or passive; it does seem a faulty argument, considering how many times Bella takes action that endangers her life to fight for what she loves. “If Edward and Bella switched places, he would be viewed as someone to admire, someone who just lays everything on the line,” she says. “It takes such a strong person to completely subject yourself to something and give yourself over to something so wholly. It’s an equal relationship; they both give the same amount, so why is she condemned for it? I don’t get it.”http://teamkristensite.blogspot.com/2012/11/kristens-interview-with-backstage.html

Edward Cullen as a "FLAT" character

 

Stephenie Meyer and Ayn Rand have been accused of writing "wooden" - read flat - characters: Edward Cullen, Roark, Galt (Galt rhymes with halt), are the most celebrity examples. It seems like Meyer is in good company eh? BTW Twilight has more than a few floating signs referencing Ayn Rand - Edward's bronze hair signaling Roark's unruly orange hair for one, inflexible integrity another. Still think Meyer is a dimwit running to the bank, folks? 

This "flatness" has tarred the actors playing the "flat" characters: Gary Cooper, Robert Pattinson for easy quote examples. It seems Diana Hsieh is not the only idiot in town, as almost every reviewer of Fountainhead and the Twilight movies says the same. She is in good company with twenty-fifth rate minds. Exactly where she belongs.

Saturday, 17 March 2012  darren writes of FLAT characters:

A "flat" character does not mean a "boring" character. It's a technical term in literary theory popularized by the novelist E. M. Forster in his monograph on writing titled "Aspects of the Novel." According to Forster, a "flat" character is a kind of token: his or her psychology and values do not grow, change, evolve, or come to any kind of crisis during the course of the narrative because characters — like plot points — have functions within the story; it is simply not the function of a flat character to steal attention away from the main character(s) — the protagonist(s) and the antagonist(s) — by growing, changing, evolving, or reaching any sort of "crisis" within the story in which they must exercise his or her will, and come to a decision — or initiate an action — that would be surprising, i.e., a new pattern of behavior inconsistent with their previous pattern. "Flat" characters remain who they were throughout the entire course of the story, because they are there simply to provide a particular kind of obstacle (or point of affinity) for the main characters. They are part of the stock-in-trade of every playwright, screenwriter, short-story writer, and novelist. They are a particular kind of narrative tool. 
For quotes from Forster go to the above link.


Meyer has solved her problem by making Edward Cullen a vampire. Vampires never change. They are frozen - read flat - where they were when they were changed. Forever.
Edward in the books and more so in the films exists to love Bella. Everything he does and says is to show his love for Bella when really he desires her so much he wishes to kill her and drink her blood until she is drained. (For a fanfic version see Hide and Drink by savage.)


In discussing the Hays Production Code of the 1930's Zizek  (RL p.84)....."it generated the very excess whose direct depiction it forbade.....The Production Code did not simply prohibit some contents, rather it codified their enciphered articulation, as in the famous instruction from Monroe Stahr to his scriptwriters in Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon":


At all times, at all moments when she is on the screen in our sight, she wants to sleep with Ken Willard...whatever she does, it is in place of sleeping with Ken Willard. If she walks down the street she is walking to sleep with Ken Willard, if she eats her food it is to give her enough strength to sleep with Ken Willard. But at no time do you give the impression that she would even consider sleeping with Ken Willard unless they were properly sanctified. (Fitzgerald,TLT, 1960,p.51)


Could we say that every time Edward Cullen is on the screen it is only  to desire Bella. 


A film flat character. A floating sign to assert and deny. 

Zizek - sigh

Breaking Dawn:Reading Bella's Change Through Nietzsche And The Ecstasy Of St. Teresa

You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how else could you become new, if you had not first become ashes? - Thus Spake Zarathustra

Stephenie Meyer wrote Bella's change scene in thrilling, frighteningly seductive, seductively frightening language. Following Baudrillard  she is not the authorial subject describing it to the reader. No, the reader is the object where all the power, interpretation, resonances and emotions lie. Meyer has thrown the challenge to the reader, the literate reader, who seems non-existent, reading the Twilight books.

For the first time, with the dimming shadows and limiting weakness 

of humanity taken off my eyes, I saw his face.

I gasped and then struggled with my vocabulary, 

unable to find the right words.

I needed better words.

Bella Cullen, Breaking Dawn

Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa
The wiki link describes the sexually erotic aspect of St. Teresa's Ecstasy

All mystics, and Saint Teresa as much as any of them, complain of a want of new words (nuevas palabras) with which to praise the works of god as they experience these in spirit. (LITWW p. 161)


To die of not being able to die - Saint Teresa 

The screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, the director Bill Condon, and the Scummit suits are completely unaware of any resonances in the novel or in any of the scenes. Just nope nope nope from the 3 dopes. Bella's internal change is shown through blood red CGI of venom slooshing through her veins and Bella is shown lying on a slab lab table, like an insect with a pin through it, wearing an ugly short blue dress, with her legs parted like the proper specimen, her arms at her sides, shot from above for a bird's eye view. Very very clinical and informative, eh?

How did producer Stephenie Meyer permit this? Does she have no integrity concerning her work? Maybe it's the green stuff - $$$$$$$$$? Is she unconscious about the real power of her work? Mebbe.


Meyer has been clear all along in her writing that Bella is a mystic. All reviews, discussions, arguing, defending, criticizing her have been in the clinical psychological camp. That is not where she belongs. Bella is in the Order of Seduction, not the Order of Production and this is where all the difficulty begins. The films are primarily in the Order of Production and Bella swaying down the aisle in her $30,000 wedding dress designed for provocative back interest with its curved cut out, is for the audience of males who have come with their wives, daughters, girl friends, sisters, mothers, etc. to watch Kristen Stewart undulate down the aisle.  


I'm not even gonna go there to discuss the birth scene, the wolves and the rest of the mess.


This is the dirty, nasty, cynical secret of the movie. It is also very boring.