Seeking common signage

I’ve been prepping a reading of the first novel in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series for an upcoming “Issues in Popular Culture” course, dealing with the issue of community-building or tribalisms. Part of the motivation for the theme is from Michel Maffesoli, "The Ethic of Aesthetics." Part from John Fiske's idea that we create (or join) popular cultures from the cumulative consumer choices we make from among the products of the "culture industries." Effectively, consumption becomes an act of production as many, many individual choices combine into a community of common interest.

Three quotations rub together in this context: “A work of art only stirs those for whom it is a sign” (J.M. Guyau, Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction, trans Mafessoli, I think, in “The Ethic of Aesthetics”: 17);  “In a ceaseless movement of actions and retrospective effects, I recognize a sign by recognizing it with others, and so I recognize what unites me with others" (Maffesoli); and “The combination of widespread consumption with widespread critical disapproval is a fairly certain sign that a cultural commodity is popular” (Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 106). Critical disapproval would be an ironic "stirring" of a different sort, by that combination. We can join with the lovers of the sign, or the haters: with those who see a positive, inviting sign, or those who see a negative, off-putting sign.  Or we can, after Stuart Hall, take a more "negotiated" position that sees or accepts some aspects as having value in our personal circumstances, but only when taken just so far.

 Twilight is certainly in the prime seats of Fiske’s arena of the popular: huge enthusiastic consumption combined with some of the most desperate and disparate critical disapproval. It is just as “popular” a different way to scorn Twilight, as it is to “consume” it. Of course, “consumption” is a loaded term when dealing with a vampire book, in which the heroine gets called a “snack” on one occasion. But the book can be “used up” a variety of ways. One novel option I read of was invented by Regina poet and educator Gerry Hill. He did an exercise with his writing class, giving each student a page torn from a found copy of Twilight, with the instruction to find something in the flattish prose to build a poem around. Not that hard, actually, if you get the right page, since Meyer does have a skill with description--so page 8, for example, provides a rich imagery of an “alien” landscape of too much green. But I have to admit, some of the pages of dialogue would pressure the most willing imagination to find some touchpoint from which to go somewhere metaphorical.

Yes, Twilight could use a serious edit as a single title and as a series. But it also provides so many points of connection and decoding for so many potential audiences, ranging through Hall's schema of reading positions from dominant-hegemonic to counter-hegemonic (oppositional). It develops lines and relationships that are right out of the formula that has made the romance novel a staple since the formula was first used “seriously” over two-hundred years ago. A heroine who has to overcome her own squeamishness about herself and others to accept the finer qualities of herself and of the hero (or to bring them out in him). A darkly mysterious but wealthy and caring hero who evolves into a “perfect” match once he overcomes a problem in the way he behaves or is perceived by the heroine. A “rival” (Jacob), who is also a stud, but not quite “perfect” for her—in this case too young. And, as it turns out, expresses himself through the wrong kind of inner animal to cure what ails her.

Fine. Harlequin has made a fortune off this formula, and it is one that actually does open up a wealth of signs. The solutions (love conquers all, after it soothes and humanizes the beast in the man) are often laughable, but the problems are real enough to stir something familiar in a reader, to stir that “ethical” attachment Mafessoli writes about: “something which leads me to recognize myself in something which is exterior to me” (“Ethic of Aesthetics” 17).

Just consider two of the “critical” points of departure: What do we usually call a 100+-year-old man who hangs about in a high school and picks up a seventeen-year-old girlfriend?  “Hero” is not quite it. (Dorian Grey, maybe?) Then again, Edward is an eternal seventeen-year-old himself, in one sense, having been "saved" to eternal living death at that age. In Washington State, Bella and Edward are at least past the age of consent--Edward WAAAAY past. The age of consent for sex, anyway. I have not been able to fine an age of consent for vampire conversion, for allowing oneself to be envenomed (serpent allusions, anyone) by the love bite of your boyfriend.

What do we call a man who hangs hidden in a girl’s bedroom, watching her and listening in on her when she talks in her sleep? “Hero,” again, is not quite it. Consider what Bella would say if some other classmate, Tyler for example, were found at her window at bedtime? Yet in Edward's case, all she can do is worry about what he might have heard. 

So where is Edward’s “heroic” quality? In his self-control, apparently. When he practices self-control, and prevents Bella from acting on some of her own self-destructive impulses (urges, stirrings---), he is exercising positive choice. Of course, as a 100+-year-old, he has a much bigger perspective than she has. And he is a typical older man in the way he controls her options. Model of self-control? Or control freak? 

Where do I recognize myself in Twilight? Where would I find my contact point with “others”? My "ethical vector"? The logical node would seem to be Charlie, the concerned father/law-and-order enforcer, who wants his child to have a normal and safe life, with lots of friends, but has no sense of what she has attached herself to (he defends the Cullens against local gossip), so has to be protected in and by his own ignorance of what’s really going on. Maybe.

I feel a more common bond with Tyler, I think: The class clown, the eternal optimist who thinks he’s finessed a prom date with the delectable Bella, and shows on the night up all tuxxed out only to be told she’s been taken by that weirdnik, Edward. Any of several of the high-schoolers, actually—maybe a combination of them, even if I’m maybe now almost as close to Edward’s true age as to the seventeen-year-old I once was. They have so much to learn about themselves and each other, our life-long pursuit. The big thing they have to learn is that they have a lot to learn. That's always such a downer.

I think what stirs me most is the sense I am just as glad not to have to be that age again (though it would be nice to be it physically, if I could age eternally like the hard-bodied Edward), needing to go once again through all that awkward socializing into functional adulthood. Then a sense of chagrin mixes in, and I have to acknowledge that we never really age past the need to adjust, explore, reread the signposts, and find our fit; we just move farther along in our starting (over) points.