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

The Music Says: Edward/Rob Pattinson; Tracy Into the Wild; KD Lang /Leonard Cohen- Babette Babich - Hallelujah

curioushairedgal

 

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Iseult

This is not to look for meaning or delve into how things from the past might illuminate the present. This is just for being sentimental and about thinking of Edward and Tracy, two characters understood so well that they were alive up on the screen. It's about the music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

"You should never think

what's in your heart

what's in our home

It's all I want

You'll learn to hate me

but still call me baby

oh lord

just call me by my name

And save you soul

Save your soul

Before you're too far gone

And before nothing can be done..."

http://youtu.be/7akLiwqq1x0

"I am an old woman

Named after my mother

My old man is another

child that's grown old

If dreams were thunder

Lightining was desire

This old house would have burnt down

Long time ago

Make me an angel, 

that flies from Montgomery

Make me a poster of an old rodeo

Just give me one thing

that I can hold on to

To believe in this living

is just a hard way to go..."

KD Lang Sings Cohen's Hallelujah

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

The music of a fucked up and hard and beautiful life of love.Hallelujah!

So I turn to Babich.

" There was a time you let me know

What's really going on below

But now you never show it to me, do you?

And remember when I moved in you

The holy dove was moving too

And every breath we drew was Hallelujah.

It will be Lang's gestures, it will be her eyes, the turn of her head to speak of the moonlight and its rapture, winding the cord of her microphone to illustrate being tied to the kitchen chair but also looking straight at the audience as she does so, that make it plain that this is a sexual come on, she, of course it was she who did this: "broke your throne," and cutting with her fingers to illustrate, "and cut your hair." Here after all this, is nothing more than the space of the musical phrase and the listener knows, this gets under your skin, that the one addressed is you yourself, a different you, some other you, son of man: "and from your lips, she drew" and here there are disputes between the need to add an article, Wainwright and most men name it determinate -- 'the' Hallelujah.

What is it, what would be, to, as Nietzsche says, praise the demon who speaks thus? What kind of belief do you have to have, what kind of abased, abashedly awful love do you have to have, to still say, as Abraham, Job, David -- "Your faith was strong, but you needed proof" -- Hallelujah? Any one who has felt at all, and what is the reference here? It is to you and to the appeal of the senses, sensuality. "Her beauty in the moonlight."

On the matter of affirmation, Nietzsche reflects that if there is just one thing to which you would say 'Yes,' then you also and inevitably affirm every other thing, because everything is inextricably intertwined, interknotted. Tied, broken, cut -- "and from your lips she drew, what? a groan? of ecstasy? suffering? Hallelujah."

The four "hallelujahs" that follow are small miracles of understatement and perfectly articulated power, one after another.

If the composer's confidence is that he can tell us what he is doing with his chord, the composer/singer brings it home, and brings us back to the present as s/he does so, referring to the song itself, sung as the singer sings it: " Baby, I've been here before/I've seen this room and I've walked the floor," eroticized, consummately so in the Juno performance where kd cocks her head and puts her had on her hip, the classic instantiation of eros, I need you, I don't need you: "I used to live alone before I knew ya" Doing this, exerting distance, one is brought to the extraordinary pathos of Cohen's song: "But I've seen your flag on the marble arch," and this is kd, this pathos she takes home, this point of desolation, abasement, sorrow, wounding reproof: "our love is not a victory march, it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah." This is all we are given, all we have, this is all there is. This is a deity whose only redemption, whose only blessing for us, whose only grace is emptiness, indigence, frailty.

This is also what Nietzsche named the "becoming human of dissonance," this is what I once named elsewhere in a reflection on eros, love "coolly and mightily wrong," 18 not the redemption of love, not the saving love, the kind that works out in the end, the love that ends well, finding glory and secured joy, but a shattered love, wrong from the start, all the way down, "a cold and broken hallelujah."

Cascade, crescendo, hallelujahs in chorus, ascending again and again.

"Maybe there's a god above." Maybe indeed. But this god is already close enough to the Jewish and close enough to the Christian that Cohen like Nietzsche turns to reflect on what it might mean to be a god at all, and to be implicated in love. 19

Here, and this is the Liberty Valance moment as kd plays it perfectly. all mimesis, given away: "All I've ever learned from love," she confesses, is "how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya." Shaking her head, we know that this is no achievement, that this shows nothing but the abjection, the inadequacy of love: what we are moved to do, and what we ultimately do, anyway. And this is brought all the way to the top, to what it is to love god, to praise god, pleasing/displeasing and the vast distance between what that is and what we commonly take it to be. "It's not a cry you hear at night, it's not someone who's seen the light: it's a cold and broken hallelujah." And it is what lang does with the hallelujahs to follow, punctuated and powerfully sung, and in contrast with the visceral as she crouches into the pain of these hallelujahs, finally unutterably, impossibly sustained, eyes closed, an extraordinary peace out from the center of being, her being, to open and raise her eyes and our thoughts."

Babette Babich of Fordham University (Nancy Babich)

It's about less than nothing and more than everything.

  

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Review of Dark Twilight Fanfic: Hide And Drink by Savage

Hide and Drink

Hide and Drink

http://youtu.be/4aoqfNidOZI  Dark and dangerous film clip from Twilight footage illustrating what Hide and Drink is like.

I find most Twilight fanfic simply piggy-backing off Stephenie Meyer, and then degenerating into banal and boring genre because the writer is just not a good enough writer - not well  read and going for the cliched ending. Like Sarah Gruen in Water For Elephants just offing people at the end because she didn't know what else to do. 

BUT Hide and Drink is a challenge thrown in the face of Meyer! And this is what makes it so intriguing to me. When Edward first smells Bella in the biology classroom the monster appears. That is, the Double appears. The Double always appears with Death (Cosmopolis) and takes the person or character into Symbolic Exchange and Death: reversibility, Destiny, seduction,surprise, risk, challenge, duel, pact, out of the Order of Production: irreversibility, accumulation, reproduction, contract, denial of death, simulation, and survival.  This moves the person and/or story into the Order of Seduction and out of the Order of Production (plot). It is clear that Stephenie has Edward willing himself to deny himself Bella's blood. Good old-fashioned capitalistic moral  self-control. Hide and Drink surprises by exploring the monster Double, what the acting out of the fantasy Edward has in the classroom in Twilight might lead to. Edward's dangerousness appears that Pattinson saw and wanted to portray, but that frightened Catherine Hardwicke, Scummit and all the rest of them. 

The great Herzog in Nosferatu confronts the erotic vampire head-on in consummate artistic brilliance.  In Hide and Drink Edward initially gives his will over to instinct and then to Bella, letting her decide. This is Jean Baudrillard and cutting edge post modern theory. Turning and offloading your will on to another is part of many cultures, historically and in the present, (Canetti The Human Province). Relying on your own autonomy, good old-fashioned rugged individualism, is a denial of the Order of Seduction and Destiny. 

Hide and Drink explores the complicity of the captive/abductor dyad so wonderfully elucidated for us by Baudrillard, (and denounced for)  and, in its beginning is a frightening and bravely erotic parallel to Jaycee Dugard's captivity, resonating with all of the Marquis de Sade's work. It is quite simply, Beauty and the Beast. The Master/Slave  concept so beautifully clarified by Baudrillard is presented fictionally in Hide and Drink and astonishes, as it parallels and exemplifies Baudrillardian theory, following in the shadow  of Barthes.  

Hide and Drink is not plot driven except in an internal mythological way.  The other extraordinary aspect of Hide and Drink is the avoidance of relying on external superficial occurrences and characters to move the story onward. It just does not deteriorate into plot occurrences, normality (marriage and family in BD) and become ho-hum what else is new Happy Ending. Hide and Drink has an ambiguous ending, certainly an ending in Death with Bella's change that reveals and conceals a secret meaning.  Edward's descent into madness is classical, and Savage does not fall into the interpretive psychological swamp of either pop clinical psychology or psychoanalytic theory, another amazing surprise. And since it is full of clinical case study referents it would be so easy to slide into that way of thinking about this Edward. Edward's slow movement into madness is not hysterically portrayed with only some wild actions and gestures, but  perceptually, and even more important, linguistically, resonating with the subtle and prevailing influence of Lacanian theory, and Antonin Artaud's own linguistic descent so excruciatingly quoted in Deleuze's The Logic of Sense.  

The new invention of Meyer's sign ambiguous masculine figure of Edward is extended in Hide and Drink and Baudrillard's doubts as to the counterpart of the femme fatale feminine being imagined in a new and modern archetype of the masculine emerges more fully in Hide and Drink's Edward and disappears Baudrillard's objections to the male's inability to satisfy the woman endlessly. Women can offer themselves  and receive the male endlessly, but the male is limited by his ability to sustain an erection over and over and over and over. Baudrillard's observation has been overcome fictionally by Hide and Drink's vampire Edward, but Edward's hands, fingers and mouth speak to the non-vampire male.  

And so this does exactly what Baudrillard wishes, it disappears his doubting theoretical meditations. Just as Eric Packer in Cosmopolis sees the chink in Vija Kinski's theoretical oral musings - following Baudrilard - and commits an act of intellectual terrorism, imploding the global currency market, thus disappearing Kinski's Baudrillardian observations to Packer in his moment of self-transcendence. DeLillo believes in the transcendence of the narrative  and differs from Baudrillard, who does not accept transcendence following Foucault. In Cosmopolis DeLillo has thrown the challenge fictionally to Baudrillard, and in Hide and Drink Savage has thrown the challenge of darkness, dangerousness, lust and perversion to Meyer.  

Of course the underlying structure of Twilight and all the fanfic seduction part in the beginnings is based on Time and resonates with Proust's In Search of Lost Time. As soon as plot takes over, and the pace increases, thus accelerating Time, all the fanfic stories lose it. They just come undone, every single one of them and every time Meyer succumbs the same thing occurs in the Twilight Saga. It is the difference between the Meadow Scene imaginatively written by Meyer and the jump cuts CH made out of it to destroy contemplation. Savage in Hide and Drink does not make that mistake. 

Edward and Bella in Twilight are Tristan and Iseult but Bella and Edward in Hide and Drink and the captive Jaycee Dugard/Phillip Garrido are Beauty and the Beast.

I have discussed many of these concepts elsewhere on other of my blogs.