Chapter 22: Hide and Seek

451 pages in...

Haha...I just can't get over these videos. They're so funny.

Sassy Gay Friend: Eve
Sassy Gay Friend: The Giving Tree

Sorry for the delay this week. I read this chapter on Monday and was actually eager to comment on it, though I didn't, because I am lame and a procrastinator. Clearly I wasn't THAT eager.

I didn't mind this chapter so much for three reasons:

1. Events are actually taking place.
2. There's some acknowledgment of Stuff That Happened Beyond Bella&Edward
   
3. Bella gets thrown against a wall.

So, yes. In a sequence of events that reminds me of nightmares I've had when I'm fleeing from some pursuer I can't see, Bella manages to escape from her vampire babysitters at the airport via a restroom with two entrances (meanwhile, Jasper stands at the doorway like a chump, "Du-heerrrrr, she sure is taking a long time"). She takes a bus back to her house and gets directions from James via telephone to the ballet studio where he's "keeping her mother" (why not just tell her to go straight there? I don't--oh, whatever). We get some decent paragraphs as Bella accepts her fate with a kind of despondent sadness:

"From the corner of my eye, I could almost see my mother standing in the shade of the big eucalyptus tree where I'd played as a child. Or kneeling by the little plot of dirt around the mailbox, the cemetery of all the flowers she'd tried to grow. The memories were better than any reality I would see today. But I raced away from them, toward the corner, leaving everything behind her." (442)

Not bad, yeah? Bella seems almost likable, though I'm still reminded that this is a tenderness that I NEVER SEE IN BELLA EVER, and suddenly she has it by Mary Sue magic, because Meyer wants us to sympathize with her plight.

And I'm not completely inhuman; I feel myself manipulated and drawn in by Bella's situation. Of course, I'm annoyed by how much the story wants me to see Bella as being a selfless martyr. She's remarkably cool about it when she arrives at the ballet studio and figures out that James tricked her (he used one of her home movies to convey her mother's voice over the phone), and James of course goes on some pretentious monologue about what a special and unusual human Bella is. Though she comes to find out that this whole thing isn't TOTALLY about her, which I appreciated.

I feel neutral about James. He's so fucking POLITE and exhibits a sick kind of voyeuristic pleasure in what he's doing, which I think is well done. He is nonsensically (but also quite creepily) invested in Bella's emotional state at any given moment. But he also has that irritating trait that a lot of comic book villains have, reiterating how he managed to get to this point and monologuing about what he's going to do now and why. Much of it is very dull, with a sensibility of "I heard what you said you were gonna do and felt sure that you were gonna do the opposite, but then I thought that you would think I would think that, so then I thought you're probably gonna do what you said you were gonna do and here I am!"

I don't need to know HOW James got to Phoenix, honestly, and I don't see why he thinks Bella needs to know either. In fact, he would be scarier if he simply appeared, with no real explanation. He's a TRACKER after all. I'm sure he would find a way.

James also reveals another layer to his motive. See, James had this obsession with Alice back while she was still human and in an insane asylum for her prophetic visions. She smelled SO GOOD to him, but he never got to taste her because another vampire stole her away from him and turned her before he could get her. He killed this "other vampire," though Alice somehow ended up in the Cullen clan, and that's why James is going to film himself murdering Bella slowly and show it to Edward later.

I don't know. It actually makes a little more sense in the chapter. Summarized, it feels quite stupid.

Regardless of how silly it all seems, it was refreshing to see Meyer thinking in multiple dimensions. Actually, this situation is LARGER than Bella and Edward, albiet flimsily so. It shows evidence of potential complexity for Meyer's vampire world, which continues to be much more interesting than Bella Swan ever could be.

Then James pitches Bella's head against a mirror and comments on what a "nice effect" the broken glass will be for his film. And I feel a twinge of this long lost feeling called enjoyment.

The chapter ends with Bella going unconscious, because this novel needed more moments in which Bella is incapable of making decisions.

WHAT'S WORKING: I know that I'm being manipulated in this chapter. But I think the reason tricks like this have been used in literature and media for years and years is because they work. As a reader who loathes Bella's character, even I can feel the intensity of what's happening, and I feel compelled to read on. For someone who genuinely feels invested in a character that reminds them very much of themselves, the pull would be of cosmological proportions.

There's also something that I thought would annoy me, but really doesn't, and its Meyer's emotional connection to this scene. At this point, I don't think Meyer is being channeled solely through Bella. I think she's also being channeled through James.

It's not surprising to me that this novel would end up in Phoenix, Meyer's home town, in a setting that is most likely a ballet studio that Meyer herself attended as a girl (I would stake a pretty big bet on it; why else would the climax take place in such a random location, out of all the dramatic locations James could have chosen?). But her relationship to her characters reads as more complicated. This whole event has been set up specifically so that James can fuck Bella up, hurt her, kill her slowly, and comment on the fact that she's a martyr and a victim.

I've said before, "What better way to force people to admire and feel emotion for your character than to put them in a situation in which they get fucked up?" I've found myself doing this before. I've read many amateur stories in which this happens. And it's always really visceral and detailed .Just read the passages describing Bella's injuries:

"He was over me at once, his foot stepping down hard on my leg. I heard the sickening snap before I felt it. But then I did feel it, and I couldn't hold back my scream of agony." (450)

"Over the pain of my leg, I felt the sharp rip across my scalp where the glass cut into it. And then the warm wetness began to spread through my hair with alarming speed. I could feel it soaking the shoulder of my shirt, hear it dripping on the wood below." (450)

"The blood -- spreading crimson across my white shirt, pooling rapidly on the floor -- was driving him mad with thirst." (450)

Bella can HEAR her own blood dripping? Either she's obsessed with her own wounds, or this is clearly Meyer imposing her own voyeurism. And of course our sacrificial lamb is wearing white for the occasion. Anytime you describe your own blood as being "crimson," you're desperately reaching for theatrics.

A writer's relationship to her characters is complicated. You could argue that all characters are in some way a part of an author, unless the author is making characters specifically to hate them and have readers hate them. It's good to be able to emotionally connect to what you're writing, but it can also be a big obstacle to overcome in creating believable human beings. This chapter is not the first time I've felt a disconnect with the way Bella narrates and the way Meyer is trying to force us to see her. Bella is supposed to see herself as plain and yet describes her own skin as "ivory" and "translucent-looking" (all the way back in Ch. 1! Pg 10) and makes a reference to her own hair "swirling around" her (435) when she leaves it down. This makes some people see Bella as secretly vain, but I think it's just that Meyer prefers us to see the character as pretty and delicate. Meyer, after all, KNOWS that Bella is actually beautiful and wonderful, and she makes no attempts to really hide that, even if it contradicts with Bella's "I hate myself; I'm so plain and clumsy" persona.

Despite the obvious adoration with which Meyer treats Bella, I think Meyer's kind enjoying this scene with James.And I don't hate her for enjoying it. I mean, is it sick that I can appreciate a writer's urge to fuck up her characters? Sure, it's not an intellectual urge on any level. It's just a gut kind of...instinctual...it's, um...



Yeah. That's pretty much the best way to put it.

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Chapter 23 for next week. I glanced over next couple pages and oh boy. I have a feeling my enjoyment will be short-lived. I see the word "angel" at least ten times.

Wish me luck,
Jenchilla