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

Twilight Is A Modern Variation of Tristan and Iseult

Twilight is a retelling - not a template -  of the old old tale of Tristan and Iseult from the 12th century. The revealed and concealed meaning is of a passion love to be consummated in death. All of western romances based on this template avoid expressing the truth of this now mythological story, that death is the desired outcome so that Oneness will be forever. In no other civilization has sexual passion been coupled with death. Asia couples sex with eroticism and sensuality within a variety of rituals, but death is not the desired outcome of passion love although the circumstances may lead to it. It is not wished for. But in western civilization it is to die for a love that is so passionate separation is inconceivable.  Millions of women have wished to experience such a love and many of those who have, never wish to be cured of it. So deep has this myth permeated western civilization that even the pill and the PC feminists have not been able to efface it. It captured the imaginations of women of the leisure class in the middle ages who read romance novels and poetry and listened to the troubadours. And then continued on into our modern romances.

And this lies at the root of the present hysteria around Twilight, the movies, Edward and Robert Pattinson. About the only thing any commentator has come up with is that it is a phenomenon. No it is not. It is an Event, and Irruption into the world of many women and young teens. It has reopened a Foucauldian cut in sexuality that has been obscured and virtually invisible since the pill became widely available. The past fifty years of contraception control has had consequences undreamed of by the women who flew to the pharmacy to get it. Unfortunately the women screaming about it have been right wing political activists and their followers, and they embrace Twilight in all innocence and are very pleased their sons and daughters are in love with the books and the films.

Seduction has virtually disappeared but Twilight has breathed new life into this practice, this ritual of sexual play with desire. The pill put an end to it but Stephenie Meyer has brought it back. How did she do it? Her secret is very simple. She has followed Jean Baudrillard's demand. If you are going to write about seduction, then you must write even more seductively than what you are writing about. Twilight particularly the first book, a great amount of New Moon and some of Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, does exactly that.

Desire is coupled with lack. Always. Lacan has developed this carefully and repeatedly. When the desire of the couple is consummated then lack disappears. When lack disappears then desire does also. This is why sex does not happen in the myth. Since consummation is not to take place there must be obstacles, external and internal to keep desire at a fever pitch. Because it is the all consuming desire that the two wish to prolong forever and they will do anything to ensure that those feelings continue. It is the feelings that they are in love with. The intense and irreplaceable feelings.

So we have the underlying motif of death for the final and everlasting union. This is rarely made explicit. Romeo and Juliet  ending in death is an accident as is Tristan's death. It takes tremendous courage for that fact to be faced. Wagner's  music in the  opera Tristan and Isolde is unmistakable in the desire of death. And Toni Morrison's Sula  is equally brave. But all the hundreds of thousands of romances based on this template avoid saying it, and most often go for the triangle as obstacle and the happy ending.  Emily Bronte, that courageous young girl, does not mince words:

'And we must past by Gimmerton Kirk,' cries Catherine to Heathcliff, in her last interview with him, 'to go that journey! We've braved its ghosts often together, and dared each other to stand among the graves and ask them to come. But, Heathcliff, if I dare you now, will you venture? If you do, I'll keep you. I'll not lie there by myself: they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw the church down over me, but I won't rest till you are with me. (Cecil- Victorian Novelists, p. 178)(Wuthering Heights)

And Catherine means what she says and takes him to death 400 pages later.

Stephenie Meyer knows this full well but has said she could not have anything but a happy ending. Happy ending? I don't think so. But she conceals so wonderfully that no one has noticed. Edward is the only voice of warning. He labels Bella's wish for changing as a tragedy. And it is. And she does die even though the reader does not read her change as death. And this is where it all gets fascinating. Edward is already dead. He is immortal and unchanging. He is a clone as a matter of fact. He is the Foucauldian and Deleuzean Body Without Organs. And Bella's wish and her change is to become that Body Without Organs. So Edward has been right all along. He has been warning all of us that living in a simulated world is not to be desired. Virtual Reality is hell and as Baudrillard says we are embracing it as fast as we can. Reality is being stolen from us in homeopathic doses. We are living within The Perfect Crime. DeLillo's Eric Packer wakes up to the fact that he is not living, that he is only surviving, however sumptuously. Survival maintains a denial of death. Living embraces it as a stake in living fully.


And now Baudrillard through Nietzsche:

14. Fatal Strategies  

(a) page 104: Seduction begins with Christianity – it is a “diabolical curse that comes to fracture the divine order – or else it is Christ himself, according to Nietzsche, Christ come to seduce people to his own person, come to pervert them with psychology and love?” Refers, it appears, to Genealogy I:8. Compare Will to Power§ 172. 

Breaking Dawn: Edward and Bella's Wedding Night NC-17

WARNING: SOFT PORN AHEAD 

Breaking Dawn Scummit Release

Breaking Dawn Wedding Night?

I see from these pictures that Condon is going to go for the soft porn look. Actually the one officially released looks like an ad for Cialis if they were a wee bit older. All airbrushed, soft lighting, artfully posed, cliched of course. What can one expect of Scumit and their director for hire of the month.  I am already expecting the worst and I know I am gonna get it.

Stephenie Meyer wrote the wedding night as she wanted it: In your imagination! If she had wanted to be explicit she would have been. But what she did was leave a rather large white blank space. And then they woke up the next morning. Now why did she do that? Because she didn't know what to write? Because she wanted to be sure it would pass the censors for young adult fiction? I don't think any of the above. She just wanted her readers to imagine it. The movie is going to deprive you of your imagination but you have had a few years to wonder so you can decide if he did it better than you did in your mind. I doubt it though.

In interviews Stephenie has said she leaves clues in the earlier books as to what is going to come. She has left plenty of clues about what to expect on this night of nights for them. Now we are going to get the production of sex rather than seduction. But what else to expect from the film merchants.

Stephenie has been leaving clues all over the place. Bella has practically memorized Wuthering Heights and Edward has also read it. They have discussed it together. Then we read about all the feathers all over Bella and the shredded pillow that Edward has bitten. If you have read Wuthering Heights you will know exactly how it went down. Bella did almost die. Edward did almost kill her. Theirs was no soft rather chaste embrace as shown in the pics. The images are to program your mind into thinking that that's the way it was. Soft porn. And that makes it PG-13. All passionate feelings rinsed out in the warm water and we get languid sex without deep feelings between two people and that is what is supposed to be the way it's supposed to be. 

Here's Emily Bronte, that young girl with great courage writing with enormous passion. You the reader were supposed to connect the dots and if not right away perhaps some time in the future when you could say to yourself, Ah ha! There's no reason you had to get it immediately.

Tossing about, she increased her feverish bewilderment to madness, and tore the pillow with her teeth; then raising herself  up all burning, desired that I would open the window. We were in the middle of winter, the wind blew strong from the north-west, and I objected. Both the expressions flitting over her face, and the changes of her moods, began to alarm me terribly; and brought to my recollection her former illness, and the doctor's injunction that she should not be crossed.  A minute previously she was violent; now, supported on one arm, and not noticing my refusal to obey her, she seemed to find childish diversion in pulling the feathers from the rents she had just made, and .....she begins to separate the feathers, naming the birds they are, following mad Ophelia's  monologue with her bouquet of flowers in Hamlet. 

The scene reveals the emotional intensity and frenzy as the gender inversion conceals Meyer's referent to Edward. Useless as feathers float all over the room and bed as would happen when pillows are torn in the heat of passion. I can't find a good image and am not going to make one so you will have to use your imagination.

In Abel Gance's Napolean there is a dormitory pillow fight and Lindsay Anderson copied it in his movie If.... Actually I saw a special screening of Abel Gance's silent film and when the intermission came I stood up and who was sitting behind me but Lindsay Anderson! I laughed out loud and said to him, "So that's where you got your pillow fight from!" and he roared with laughter at me. In both movies the feathers are flying all over the room. I hope you get to see them someday.

But please, let's cleanse all emotional intensity from young minds and give them soft porn instead. Much better for their psychic health, don't you think? And while we are at it let's steal their imagination from them too in another homeopathic painless dose. They're too stupid to notice and it's important to program their emotional responses to suit the Order of Production/Reproduction/Cloning. We don't want our young people, especially young girls becoming too excited. It might be more difficult to control their behavior then.

Stephenie Meyer has respect for her readers. Hollywood does not. Hollywood holds them in contempt.