Consider The Lobster Ravioli

Way back when, I criticized Natalie Wilson and her Twilight class/blog for being a bunch of bland, standard-issue academic/PC complaints based on a surface reading of the text. Which it is. And the way you can tell his: her book is coming out in March. Oh, I kid Natalie Wilson, I kid!

But that doesn't mean her bland, standard-issue, academic/PC essays aren't worth a look from time to time. Today I read "The Colonial Gaze Of Stephenie Meyer and the Resulting Representation of Indigenous Peoples as Monstrous" (whoa). It's a nice base-layer for a lot of the things we have sort of already been discussing. Most academic writing is either too basic or too esoteric; this blog is the latter and her blog is the former (and of course I apply the term "academic" to this blog with a liberal dash of salt. Once my brother made some cookies but he misread the recipe and added 1/4 cup of salt instead of 1/4 teaspoon. Take this blog with a few of those and a White Russian).



Anyway, Wilson doesn't waste a lot of time, dig the first sentence:

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga romanticizes white privilege and the continuing rule of whites over “the Other” – which, in Twilight’s case, is the Quileute.

Well now. Unfortunately she squanders any good a sentence like that could do by immediately reading Twilight as a "racial allegory":

Read as a racial allegory, a white, working class woman chooses between an ultra-white, ultra-privileged vampire and a far less privileged wolf of color.

Well sure, that's true. But only if you bend the book to the left and squint your eyes, you know?It took me a long time to fully understand the academic habit of "modeling" and the impact it has on scientific and pseudo-scientific findings. I think the problem was, for a long time I didn't realize that academic papers, whether they be scientific or literary (which are basically written like scientific papers these days anyway), don't really prove anything but themselves. In school, the papers on which I received the best grades were the ones in which I brutalized works of literature or whatever else, squeezing them into narrow, tenuous arguments. The only thing you are proving is, "A paper can be written about this." The papers I was happiest with were sprawling and vague, full of footnotes and unanswerable questions and more footnotes. (You guys should be SO THANKFUL Blogger doesn't really accommodate superscript.) I was trying to look at the big picture, which is a bad idea if you want a thesis that makes any sense (a point that will probably be proved again by this rambling post). At best, therefore, a good academic paper gets at a fraction of the truth. If you interpret Twilight as a racial allegory like Wilson does above, that's fine. But obviously that is a very small component of the story, and any kind of pronouncement you make about it is even smaller.

(But whatever, my complaint in this case is mostly a cosmetic one. With a sentence like that, Wilson has already lost anyone who might need persuading. They have an out, because a choice between a white guy and a brown guy is not what the Twilight saga is actually about, even though it partly, optically is. And the fact that it partly, optically is should be talked about more than it is, but penetrating the significance of academic writing is difficult.)

The racial politics of Twilight are troubling, of course (though the socioeconomic difference between Edward and Jacob doesn't really register), but in a very general way. S. Meyer's prejudices seem subconscious more than anything; she is colonialist because America is. It is usually the job of literature to point out society's flaws, though-- not to accidentally reflect them. And Wilson goes on to point out that S. Meyer is vaguely aware of negative/stereotypical depictions, but either doesn't care or doesn't understand the problem fully. This is in keeping with our interpretation of our author, is it not?

Meyer readily admits that she had concerns about her depiction of the Quileute. When asked by a fan if she had “any negative recourse for the fictional portrayal of their tribal members as werewolves?”, Meyer answered:

["]I was pretty worried about this myself. However, to this point I’ve had nothing but positive feedback from Native Americans, both Quileute and otherwise. I actually got a letter on MySpace from a girl who is the daughter of one of the council members… and she loved the werewolf thing.["]

Here, Meyer’s comments reveal that she had some sense she was taking liberty with another culture’s legends and history.

S. Meyer's defense is not dissimilar to "I can't be racist because I have a black friend," then. Wilson also points out in passing the fact that not only do Christians in general have a complex history with Native Americans, but Mormons specifically have an even worse, weirder one. From OnlineNevada.org:

According to [Joseph] Smith, when he found and translated the plates, they told of a lost tribe of Israel that migrated to the Americas many hundreds of years ago. These first Americans built a flourishing and advanced civilization, but one branch, the Lamanites, killed their righteous relatives, the Nephites. For this and their rejection of Christ's teachings, God cursed the Lamanites with dark skin and a degraded existence. The story maintained that the Lamanites would not regain white skin and a civilized way of life until they accepted Christ's teachings. Thus, the heavenly beings instructed Smith not only to restore the true Christian church, but also to bring salvation to Native Americans.

Yikes. Of course, S. Meyer is not to be blamed for Joseph Smith. S. Meyer is also not to be blamed for the way white people treated Native Americans. S. Meyer is not be be blamed for America. But again: literature ought to rise above that shit, because if not why are you even bothering? Wilson quotes the author Sherman Alexie, who says “when non-Indians write about us, it’s colonial literature. And unless it’s seen that way, there’s a problem.” That is sort of the minimum requirement of literature, and basically all art. It's a requirement that S. Meyer rarely meets. "Unless It's Seen That Way There's A Problem" should be our author's middle name.

Now, Wilson tries to suggest that Meyer is willfully tone-deaf of her exploitation of Native Americans by quoting Meyer herself, who admits to less-than-rigorous research when it came to Quileute legends. It's a damning section that would be all the more damning if she didn't cite information gleaned from Twilight In Forks, which is almost certainly complete and utter bullshit.

As far as my research reveals, Meyer did not correspond with any Quileute peoples nor seek out the Tribal Council to enquire whether it was okay to depict their legends in the series, let alone to determine whether her Google research was correct.

In contrast, she did reach out to the owners of Bella Italia restaurant in Port Angeles to find out if it was okay for her to feature the restaurant in a scene. So, she got permission to write about mushroom ravioli but not an entire people (as revealed in the Twilight in Forks DVD).

If you have seen Twilight In Forks, you know that it is a documentary made by crazy people for crazy people. It has no place as a source in an academic work such as this. Especially since that "documentary" treats the Quileutes with a much more exploitive hand than S. Meyer does, interviewing two senile-or-drunk Native Americans who may not even actually be Quileutes while a generic brand of the Pocahontas soundtrack plays in the background. Wilson's point isn't a bad one, but if you are going to criticize someone for being lazy, don't cite one of the laziest straight-to-DVD releases of all time.

Wilson goes on to rightly complain about all the "russet-colored" garbage and the way the wolfpack is portrayed as "beastly, childlike, and sexually violent." True, but kind of obvious. Then she stretches again and interprets the section of Breaking Dawn we are now reading as being about Jacob's "civilization" among the whites. You have to really want that one. Wilson makes out Taylor Lautner's casting as a Native American to be a continuation of Meyer's casual ignorance, which feels like an interesting argument, but she doesn't pursue it. I'm sure somewhere out there is a damning casting call announcement much like the recent one for The Hobbit that specified "light skin tones." If Perez Hilton can find something like that, Natalie Wilson surely can.

Instead, the essay takes an interesting final turn in which we learn that the actor Alex Meraz, who plays Paul, is a kind of interesting and thoughtful dude. Wilson quotes him:

In essence, even though we’re taking some of their mythology, their creation story and it’s mixed in a fantasy, still we’re taking from the culture. Being Native, we needed to be conscious of that and ask permission to the people of the past, present and of the future … Native Americans…have a right to be protective of their stories.

Meraz goes on to say that he likes the portrayal, in Twilight, of Native Americans as "contemporary" as opposed to the "long hair blowing, noble kind of people, leather and feather period pieces." Wilson criticizes this, saying Meraz is "glossing over" the truth about the text. I'm not sure I disagree, but look at the hole we are in at the end here. Wilson has just taken S. Meyer to task for lazily and condescendingly handling a complicated issue. Faced with opposition from Meraz, a Native American, Wilson, a white lady, says he is wrong.

I wholeheartedly agree with Wilson's assertion that race relations (or the lack thereof) in Twilight are "problematic," but she undermines herself every step of the way with modern academic tendencies. (Keeping Sherman Alexie's words in mind, Wilson probably should at least acknowledge her position as a white beneficiary of colonialism writing about this subject just as I will now acknowledge that I am a white beneficiary of colonialism writing about a white beneficiary of colonialism writing about colonialism.) One of the benefits of a blog like this one is arguments can be built and deepened and refined over time. See, and you guys thought I was doing dick jokes simply for the sake of dick jokes.

Okay, I mostly am. Thoughts?