BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 1: Romeo & Juliet Are Assholes

Dostoevsky once said there are two different kinds of stories (1) A vampire goes on a journey, and (2) a werewolf comes to town. In her infinite wisdom Stephenie Meyer has given us both in one novel. Twilight has set up the stakes for New Moon: Bella Swan, a disaffected teenager in Forks WA, is in love with a vampire. She wants to become one too, but her paramour is an asshole, born before women could vote, who wants to maintain his patriarchal dominance over her and every other woman in his life. She sees becoming a vampire as the start of the life she was always meant to live; her lover has some very troubling ideas about God and the sanctity of life which do not allow him to see it her way. In a lot of ways, the story of The Twilight Saga is the story of Barack Obama, raging against the dying light of Reagan’s America and the backwards ideas about race, women’s rights, and government that still haunt this country today. Of course in most (really almost all) ways it is not the story of that at all. Mostly this installment is about werewolves and inefficient coping mechanisms. But whatever.

Epigraph

Once again, New Moon has an epigraph, and it’s from Romeo and Juliet. Already I’m pissed off; S. Meyer couldn’t reach a little deeper in the Shakespeare catalog? We’re really going with Shakespeare 101? You could at least pull out some Pyramus and Thisbe just as a little “of course I’m not going to be so obvious as to reference Romeo and Juliet” wink to your readers. But no.

Bella is supposed to be a senior in high school now, right? Don’t tell me the curriculum at Forks High is so backwards they are only getting to Romeo and Juliet now! They should be doing The Tempest, or maybe ditching The Bard altogether and getting into some Theater of the Absurd! That would be something wouldn’t it? You turn past the table of contents and you see this:

"Given the existence at uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering what is more that as a result of the labors left unfinished..." -Waiting For Godot

But no. Romeo and Juliet. Okay, fine. It’s important to remember that Romeo and Juliet cuts both ways, like every other Shakespeare play. On the one hand it is the story of star-crossed lovers, on the other hand it’s a story about lust and bad luck. It’s just like how A Midsummer Night’s Dream is simultaneously about how magic is all around us and how magic is nowhere. I think people acknowledge the cross cutting themes in the latter play more than the former.

So that’s one thing we have to wonder about New Moon: like R&J, is there more than one correct way to read it? I don’t actually think there is more than one intended way to read it, and whether intended qualifies as correct is really a matter of opinion. But let’s unpack that a little.

When Edward basically says, “If I fuck you I might lose control and kill you,” it’s hard not to read that as an exaggerated stand-in for domestic abuse. Yet I don’t think this series is going to end with Bella finally getting out of her dangerous co-dependent relationship. Probably just the opposite. And S. Meyer doesn’t seem like she has such a bleak worldview that Bella getting trapped for all eternity in some kind of Sid & Nancy thing is supposed to be our last impression.

I’ve been puzzling over questions this for days, and I realized I was having trouble because I assumed if it wasn’t a metaphor for domestic abuse it had to be a metaphor for something else. It actually doesn’t. It might not be a metaphor for anything.

And it’s perfectly valid to read R&J as a perfect romance, to almost see the violence of the consequence of a love so pure in a world so imperfect. And I think that’s exactly what S. Meyer is thinking, if you look at where she truncated the quote.

The epigraph is from Act 2, Scene 6, right before the Friar marries Romeo and Juliet. Romeo sort of dismisses the Friar’s first line which essentially expresses the sentiment that since good things like this happen (marriage) we shouldn’t sweat the small stuff later on (presumably the Friar means bad luck in the stock market or illness, not double-suicide) and Romeo basically says “hey, as soon as you marry me to Juliet I can die and that’s totally fine.” The Friar sort of blanches at this and cautions him, and here’s the part New Moon reproduces:

“These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die; like fire and powder, Which, as they kiss, consume.” (2.6.9-11)

S. Meyer’s quote stops there and ends with a period. In the text it ends with a colon, because the Friar isn’t done talking. He goes on to say

“Therefore love moderately; long love doth so; Too swift arrives the tardy as too slow.” (2.6.14-15)

Obviously there’s an argument to be made that Shakespeare is making fun of this kind of sentiment and that Romeo and Juliet did have the most pure form of love and that is why they died for it. The implication it has for our story is that the inevitable violence we’re probably going to see soon isn’t something that can be avoided… it’s the stars crossing for our lovers.

But why not keep the rest of the quote in there, even still? It probably doesn’t do anything for younger readers, right? They just see “Romeo and Juliet,” think “Edward and Bella,” and turn the page. But Stephenie Meyer is smarter than that. If that was all she wanted to do she’d just use this line:

“Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon.” (2.2.4)

or “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” and be done with it. Instead we get a section from R&J in which both possible interpretations of the play are included in a few lines, but half of those lines, the ones containing the second interpretation, in a sense, are cut out.

I know, I’m obsessing over the epigraph again, but these first decisions are important. Quentin Tarantino picks the opening music for his movies before he writes them. I thought of the first sentence in this post weeks ago.

(By the way I’m not going to make the obvious argument that New Moon is a lesser art or something and should therefore not deign to compare itself to Shakespeare; The Bard never wrote a phrase as great as “a real crying jag,” anyway.)

And it’s important here because I know what is going to happen, in part, in this book, and questions of authorial intent are going to be really important. Maybe I’m extending too much credit to S. Meyer in even looking for intent in an epigraph that might have been an afterthought, but I don’t think so.

So in suggesting to me that any parallels to moral quandaries living or dead are purely coincidental, this epigraph didn’t do much for me. It could be worse, I know:

“I’ll never let you go Jack, I’ll never let you go.”
-Titanic

But it couldn’t be much worse. In some ways I’m setting you all up here; someone already told me what the epigraph is for Eclipse (you spoiling motherfuckers) and it is awesome. I’m pumped for that fucking epigraph, because even if it is more surface-level literary analysis-as-usual, it’s great surface-level analysis-as-usual. But obviously we have a whole book to get through before we talk about that.

S. Meyer conceived the whole Twilight series after having a dream. Well, the other night I was up until 2am reading New Moon, and thinking about this epigraph, when I got up and wrote a word down on a piece of paper:

Cringetastic

It’s the best word I can think of for experiencing a lot of this book. Some weird shit is coming. Early on in this book we get a theology lesson from Carlisle. Souls are discussed at length. And if you thought we were done with the star-crossed lovers you’re going to want to kill yourself pretty soon.

Preface

Once again we’re media res up in this shit. Bella is running through a “callous crowd” (did S. Meyer read some of Jewel’s poetry between books?) and racing against time or something. She’s running in order to save what she calls “infinitely more precious” than her own life. Unless things have really changed and this book revolves around some kind of McGuffin like a sorcerer’s stone, I’m pretty sure she’s talking about Edward. Or Jacob, I suppose.

I’m totally aware of the Team Edward/Team Jacob marketing campaign that accompanied the film of New Moon, but I’m interested to see if it is totally an invention of marketing, sort of like the fake mystery surrounding Snape in the run-up to the release of Deathly Hallows. What was that shit? Was anyone ever actually unsure how that was going to turn out? I’m suspicious that Team Edward/Team Jacob is the same thing, because I’m pretty sure Bella wasn’t joking about that “irrevocably in love” stuff.

Who is that handsome man?

So anyway, Bella is running, and she alludes to the fact that Alice told her she would probably die. Alice is in this place where Bella is, wherever that is, but the sun is out so she’s hiding somewhere in the shadows. Already we’ve got something to be happy about: Alice is here! If S. Meyer is in the novella writing business now, let me be the first (probably not the fist) to advocate for an Alice novella. And a Charlie novella. Plus then we can get a Twilight Origins: Alice movie someday. Twilight Origins: Charlie would probably be a little too depressing and adult for Summit Entertainment’s target demo.

Bella is in the same kind of death-wish mode she was in toward the end of the last book; she’s convinced that she hasn’t run fast enough for whatever it is she’s trying to do and seeks solace in the fact that she’ll be dead soon. “For in failing at this, I forfeited any desire to live.” That’s our Bella, huh? Always wishing she was dead. I’m happy to be back together with such optimistic characters. This book is going to be like getting a blowjob from a rainbow, isn’t it?