Hide and Drink: Reading Savage's Edward Through the Foucauldian Matrix of Power/Knowledge

 Savage's Edward in Hide and Drink begins with the Double, the monster in Meyer's Twilight, the one who sits in the classroom fantasizing about all the ways to kill Bella and drink her blood. He kidnaps her, takes her to a series of isolated apartments and places where he can hide her and drink her. After drinking she sobs and he holds her telling her how sorry he is over and over, holding her all night. He begins to unknowingly love her and takes her to Bella Island so they can be completely alone.

While there there is a plot twist in which Bella almost bleeds to death and Edward must rush her to the hospital with the help of Emmett. It is at this point halfway through the story the reader enters the Foucauldian grid of power/knowledge/capital. The hospital.  And Edward becomes caught in this web just as Bel Ami, Nina in Black Swan, Lily Bart in House of Mirth, Eric Packer, and ourselves. "She's lost so much blood. I have to get her to a hospital. I have to get her to Fiji. Please…" I looked up into his darkened eyes. "Please help me!"

The doctors see the scars on her wrists and neck where Edward has been drinking.

"She's had a transfusion and she's going to be just fine," the doctor said. "But I want to hold her for seventy-two hours for a psychiatric evaluation."

"That's not necessary," I said, shaking my head.

"I believe it is."

With this exchange Edward is stonewalled by the bureaucracy. At Bella's bedside he is inconsolable at what he has done to her and promises he will find a way to stop drinking her blood. His words are overheard and the nurse plans to report him. So he plots to kill her:

"I understand your desire to approach the authorities given the exchange you witnessed." I moved up close, my hand reaching out and stroking down her neck. I felt her pulse against my fingers and swallowed venom back down my throat. "But you misunderstood. Regardless, I can't take the chance that you will go to the authorities. I can't take any chances with Bella. So, I must apologize for what I have to do. There just isn't any other way to protect what is mine."

Bella is interrogated by the therapist and backed into a corner. She does not want to tell the truth, afraid of what Edward will do or perhaps because she has grown to care for him or both. The authorities begin to threaten him as they correctly suspect he has been abusing her and she is afraid to reveal this to them. 

"It's all right, Edward." Bella sat up straight and I helped her fix the pillow behind her back. "They aren't going to let me out of here until they go through all their little procedures, so it's better to just go with it and get it over with. I have a feeling she isn't going to be easy to convince, though."
"We won't have to convince her," I replied.

As if to prove my day truly could get worse, Ms. Spencer and the doctor from the first night decided to walk in as Bella was throwing me out. Two men who could have been orderlies, but were obviously chosen for their physical prowess, accompanied them.

The grid is tightening, closing in on Edward, leaving him struggling like an insect in a web that will only result in an act of violence. But Emmett has been pursuing alternative ways of dealing with the power/knowledge matrix, a more effective and standard way, an alternative threatening power coupled with money.

I growled, but then I heard his mind recount a conversation with a local attorney who was on one of Jasper's personal "lists," and also a personal friend of the hospital administrator. They were close, personal friends, apparently. Close enough for their wives to have had the opportunity to catch them being particularly close. The scandal would ruin both men.

Then they begin to intimidate Bella to force her to sign an affidavit so they can take her to a shelter and arrest Edward.  

"So you let us do our jobs." He pushed the paper and a pen towards her. "Sign here."

"No."

"Listen," he said. The second officer moved to the other side of Bella's bed, effectively crowding her. I felt a growl rising from my chest. "We understand these things. Doctor Sans and Ms. Spencer are going to take care of you. They will take you to a shelter and help you in whatever way they can. But first you have to help me. Now sign this."

"Just sign it, Bella," Sophia moved up next to the officer. Bella wrapped her arms around her own shoulders. "Then this will all be over."

"Yes," Doctor Sans agreed. She also moved up closer to the side of the bed. "He can't hurt you anymore.

And then more power enters into the equation to oppose this part of the matrix of power/knowledge, because it also is within the matrix, the administrator of the hospital.

I hope we aren't too late.

"That's enough, Doctor Sans," the tall dark haired man said as he approached. I recognized him as the hospital administrator from the night Bella was admitted. I thought I may have thrown a tantrum at him about having Bella's room changed. "Harassing the Masens is not in your best interests."

"Mr. Delai," Doctor Sans started, "I hardly think..."

"I said that's enough," he repeated. He made his way over to Officer Baravilalas. "Officer...?"

"Baravilalas."

They shook hands tentatively.

"I am Manasa Delai, the administrator of this hospital. I'm afraid there has been a misunderstanding here."

"As I said," Manasa repeated. "A misunderstanding. Mr. Masen is not responsible for his wife's injuries, and she will be discharged to his care as soon as possible."

"What are you talking about?" The doctor's face began to turn crimson. "She is my patient and I decide..."

"No, she is not," Manasa scowled at her. "She is a patient in my hospital and you will stop harassing her and her husband. If you don't, you will find yourself unable to practice medicine before the week is out. Clear?"

As perfect a fictionalized account of the Foucaudian grid of power/knowledge that often leads to a frustration turning into violence as you are likely to find. Other descriptions I have posted:

Bel Ami: here and here
Black Swan
Eric Packer in Cosmopolis and also here

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.

Twihards: Why You Didn't Get the Meadow Scene You Wanted

Benjamin's 1936 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction on Dadaism:

Illuminations

One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could not be fully satisfied only later.... The Dadaists attached much less importance to the sales value of their work than to its uselessness for contemplative immersion. (Illuminations 237)

.... Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality. It promoted a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator. Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested. Duhamel, who detests the film and knows nothing of its significance, though something of its structure, notes this circumstance as follows: "I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images." (Duhamel, Scenes la vie future, 1930 p. 52) The spectator's process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind. (I p. 238)

Benjamin does not note here that the destruction of memory is a consequence. Memory requires time for contemplation, a quality of time not too slow and not too fast. Just right as Goldilocks would say.

In the decline of middle class society, contemplation became a school for asocial behavior; it was countered by distraction as a variant of social conduct. (I p. 238)

New Moon

Distraction and contemplation form polar opposites. (I p.239) And we are aware how Meyer has used the concept distraction any number of times in Twilight. Vampires are easily distracted. Bella is not. Until she is a vampire.

What might all this have to say about ADHD or ADD if there is a difference? Are we reinforcing and provoking shifting attention spans?

The Tree of Life by Terrence Malick is pure contemplation. It is also true that his films have not been blockbusters, although they all have been critical successes in one way or another. Malick is an artist first. He makes the films he wants to make.

He is far more than an auteur director. He is a consummate artist of film in our time. He is preserving contemplation as a way of thinking and he is introducing it to those who have not experienced it before: The distractible ones, the ones who tend to walk out on this film. The ones who find it excruciatingly

The Tree of Life Terrence Malick

boring. The ones who hate it. The ones who would have hated the Meadow Scene as Meyer wrote it. The ones who have probably never watched a Bergman film. And what Rob Pattinson's fans love about him without knowing is his intensity in contemplation, his way of gazing at a person and really seeing them, not a distracted flicking of the eyes. And by consuming every single banal image floating globally the fans are destroying their ability to contemplate him. They are just flicking their eyes down and across a myriad of images on a screen.

Here's DeLillo:

He stood a while longer, watching a single gull lift and ripple in a furl of air, admiring the bird, thinking into it, trying to know the bird, feeling the sturdy earnest beat of its scavenger's ravenous heart. (C p. 7)

Didi: Don't you see yourself in every picture you love? You feel a radiance wash through you. It's something you can't analyze or speak about clearly. What are you doing at that moment? You're looking at a picture on a wall. That's all. But it makes you feel alive in the world. It tells you yes, you're here. And yes, you have a range of being that's deeper and sweeter than you knew. ( p.30)

He watched her. He didn't think he wanted to be surprised, even by a woman, this woman, who'd taught him how to look, how to feel enchantment damp on his face, the melt of pleasure inside a brushstroke or band of color. (C p. 3)

Rob Pattinson as Eric Packer

My mood shifts and bends. But when I'm alive and heightened, I'm super-acute. Do you know what I see when I look at you? I see a woman who wants to live shamelessly in her body. Tell me this is not the truth. You want to follow your body into idleness and fleshiness. .... Tell me I'm making it up. You can't do that. It's there in your face, all of it, the way it rarely shows in any face.  (C 49)

Jane Melman:Pull back. I am advising you in this matter not only as your chief of finance but as a woman who would still be married to her husbands if they had looked at her the way you have looked at me here today. (C 34)

Rob Pattinson as Eric Packer

For Twihards: Reading The Meadow Scene Through Walter Benjamin

Eclipse Meadow Scene Too Little Too Late and All Wrong

This is for all the Twihards who have taken so much shit over their opinions and criticisms. Let me start off by telling you that you have been correct all along. Stephenie Meyer wrote Twilight, and especially the Meadow Scene, as a novel about seduction. Not sex, not PC feminism, but the seduction of Courtly Love from the 12th century. What you imagined it from the novel was not what you got in the film by Catherine Blabbermouth Hardwicke. You got the PC feminist version not the secret heart of the story by Meyer.

Now imagine if Twilight, or even just the Meadow Scene had been shot by an artist director like Terrence Malick. Forget the fact that he wouldn't have done it with all the baggage accompanying it. It would have looked, sounded and felt like The Tree of Life, all long slow shots allowing contemplation and associations to develop in your mind.( Click on the link to get the flavor if you haven't seen it and then go to my other blog focusfree for more if you so desire.) I haven't finished with Tree of Life but I'll say here that it is a film experience not to be missed in a lifetime. It is that wonderful. Now what I am going to say is from Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay The Work of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction. Read it as if your life depended on it as it does.


In 1936 he foresaw the fate of film in our time. This fate is exactly why Twilight was fucked up good by the Scummit film merchants and the PC feminists. Twihards have been right from the beginning as they are the only ones who really knew how it should be. But alas they were fighting the wall of what Foucault calls the Dominating Discourse both of film theory and criticism and the PC feminist domination and censorship of all things girly and feminine.


more to come...

Stephenie Meyer Dreamtime: Dreaming Edward Cullen Into Existence and Robert Pattinson

In discussing the feminine and outraging PC feminists Jean Baudrillard says that the femme fatale was hallucinated into existence from male hysteria. But now there are no men for her. Madonna keeps changing herself in the hopes of finding one but there is no one there. Perhaps the situation can be saved by female hysteria inventing a male counterpart of the femme fatale?

 Possible Solution - hystericization of the masculine by women as quid pro quo of masculine
hysteria of the feminine, (Baudrillard - Screened Out p 53)

This is what Stephenie Meyer did by creating the character of Edward Cullen played by Rob Pattinson

It would seem that Stephenie Meyer has responded to the challenge by dreaming Edward Cullen, a vampire who falls in love with a human girl. Upon waking from this dream Meyer began writing instead of getting her kids off to school with breakfast and their packed lunches.

Against the 'objective' analysis of an 'objective' state of affairs (the stupidity of sociology!) it must be seen that we think and speak well only of what we have not experienced - that is to say, of what  we have not exhausted the imagining of by lived experience - just as one truly loves a woman only if one has not exhausted one's imagining of her in physical pleasure. (Baudrillard Fragments 145)

Stephenie has said  - on Oprah? - that she never knew an Edward. Ah, that truly is a loss for her but a gift to the world's women. For in imagining Edward Cullen, she has brought Robert Pattinson into existence. Yes, I know, he says he is not like Edward at all, but he contradicts himself all the time by the way he behaves with Kristen. He is loving, affectionate, considerate, protective, sensitive, honorable, all those things modern men have no idea how to be because the originals are gone in their lives. 

The subject/object cannot be separated. In experimental research the experiment must be designed as a double-blind experiment. As the experimenter, or even the lab assistant giving the dose, pill, treatment situation, the assistant cannot be allowed to know whether it is the real one or the placebo, nor can the recipient know either. When one or the other or both know, the results are contaminated. Almost all behavioral research before the 1960's is contaminated. A mathematical correction has been applied to the previous data, but the raw data is gone now, so we are stuck with what we have in all its contamination.

At the micro-particle level it is the same. A particle cannot be observed without being affected. Can anyone expect that Robert Pattinson was completely separate and unaffected by the character of Edward Cullen? Or Edward Cullen unaffected by Robert Pattinson? Who is the subject? Who is the object? I have no idea.

Toby McGuire

I only know that now there is a new type of masculine seduction out there. And I have noticed that male actors are imitating certain of Rob Pattinson's habitual gestures. Like biting his lower lip. You will see the abandoned bridegroom in The Adjustment Bureau doing this as he stands against the wall - doorway - smoldering. And Toby McGuire in his new Prada ad seems to be creating a new look for himself. Smoldering.

"Psychoanalysis overturned. Instead of the dream being the fulfillment of desires unsatisfied in real life, real life would be the site where desires born of dreams were fulfilled. Instead of being the dumping ground of the unconscious, dreams would be the matrices of real events - thus becoming like the 'dream' of the Aborigines, for whom a child has to be dreamt before he can be begotten, 'real' paternity being merely the fulfillment of the dream." (Cool Memories IV 105)

Bella dreams her child into existence, does she not? (Breaking Dawn)

Dreamtime

Herzog's film Where the Green Ants Dream follows a group of Aborigines in Australia following the Songlines of the Green Ants. They believe that the world was dreamt into existence. The mountains, the hills, the valleys, Rocks, rivers,and they make pilgrimages to these places dreamt into existence. They know where to go because the Songlines are an orally remembered song map of where these places are. The Whites have built over many of them, or there is a store where they sit in the corner and hum because that's where the Green Ants are. These pilgrimages last months and they walk all the way with their babies and children teaching them the songs and places. The first toys of the babies are leaves, pieces of grass, flowers, and so they learn to love the earth this way.

Songlines

Bruce Chatwin's Songlines is Chatwin's walking tour of Australia. He used to be a very successful antiquities specialist for Sothebys. He bagan going blind and his doctor advised him to quit and go traveling. As Chatwin walked across the tarmac to his plane, his vision returned. His books are a marvel to read.

Breaking Dawn: Sex and The Back of Rob Pattinson: Cloned Into Muscles For Adoration

The squealing and drooling over Rob Pattinson's back makes one wonder what women and teens are turning into. As Jean Baudrillard says: Children are carrying the virus of the future. Does that go for teens and pre and post menopausal women? I didn't mention all the younger women with husbands and children nor those hoping for the same. Now his back has been added to the fetish collection. Even guys weren't this bad over Marilyn's tits and ass.

The cinema today: end or impossibility of ending? Most current films, through the bloody drift of their content, the weakness of their plots and their technological trumpery - useless high-tech - reveal an extraordinary contempt on the part of the film-makers for the tools of their own trade, for their own profession: a supreme contempt for the image itself, which is prostituted to any special effect whatsoever; and consequently, contempt for the viewer, who is called upon to figure as important voyeur of this prostitution of images, of this promiscuity of all forms beneath the alibi of violence. There is in fact no real violence in  this, nothing of the theatre of cruelty, but merely  a second-level irony, the knowing wink of quotation, which no longer has anything to do with  cinematic culture, but derives from the resentment that culture feels for itself, that culture which precisely cannot manage to come to an end and is becoming infinitely debased - a debasement being raised to the power of an aesthetic and spiritual commodity, bitter and obsolescent, which we consume as a 'work of art'  with the same complicity with which we savour the debasement of the political class. The sabotaging of the image by the image professionals is akin to the sabotaging of the political by the politicians themselves. (Baudrillard, Fragments p117)

This is why Rob Pattinson said yes to Cronenberg right away.


Are these complicit fans the fans Pattinson wants? Are these fans the fans Pattinson deserves? What order of fans does Pattinson himself desire?                                                                                                                                        

Do you want more? Do you want different? Do you want every little banal gesture he makes? Maybe we can see him pick his nose? Eat some cake? Ruffle his hair for the zillionth time? Squat? Open a car door? Smile at someone? Frown at someone? Rub his eye?

This is conspicuous consumption. His digital code is global. Rob images circulate like the numbers on Eric Packer's screens. At what point will Rob images implode? Which image will be the one to bring on the implosion? Which dollar of Eric Packer's was the one that started the implosion of the yen?

Are you understanding Cosmopolis yet? DeLillo means what he writes you know.

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.