Literal Reading

[mogseltof.livejournal.com]

Title: Literal Reading
Author: mogseltof
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 564
Inspiration: Twilight series in general.
Warnings: Some swearing and sexual references, let me know if the rating's too low.
Author’s Note: I just had a really nice feeling about analysing Twilight properly and writing something like this in the form of a letter to Meyer.

 

Alison was lying in an armchair, legs draped over one arm, head resting on the other when Ignatius got home, and she was reading. Ignatius raised an eyebrow when she saw the stylised apple in the outreached hands – neither of them had any inclination to read Twilight, and Alison avoided pop lit like the plague. The Harry Potter collection sitting on the shelf was only read by Iggy.

She hung her coat up by the door. “Why exactly are you reading that tripe?” she asked, heading eagerly for the fruit bowl and grabbing an apple.

“Tripe?” Alison said absently, flipping a page without looking up. “This is excellent.”

Ignatius paused, apple halfway to her mouth. Had the pod people invaded while she was on the loo at work? Had her sister been brainwashed? Maybe she’d caught brain fever. She put the apple down and turned to face Alison, leaning against the table. “Okay,” she said carefully, “I’ll bite. What do you mean by excellent?”

Alison turned another page, still not looking up. “Well, first up, it’s an excellent critique of the values of modern day society.” Ignatius’ eyebrows shot up her forehead in surprise. That, she hadn’t been suspecting. Alison continued. “It’s also an excellent comment on the degeneration of cultural treatment of love – the fallacy of true love, the melodrama of the stereotyped teenage relationship, and how out of hand things would get if it were all true. Also, it is an excellent mockery of modern interpretation of love in literature – the Wuthering Heights and Romeo and Juliet parody could perhaps have been played a little more subtly, but the Hamlet subtext was quite interesting.”

Ignatius stared at her as she turned another page, and then sighed. “First up, I didn’t think Hamlet was about the love so much as the nature of humanity, second, where exactly do the vampires and werewolves fit in with this, and third, what the fuck are you on?”

“Hamlet isn’t all about the love, but the unhealthy relationships from it are paralleled in Twilight, I haven’t got around to a representations of class reading yet and I’m not ‘on’ anything,” Alison said, looking up for the first time. She sat up properly in the armchair and grinned at Iggy. “Some redheaded bint knocked on the door today and handed me a million pounds and two sets of the ‘saga’, and told me that I could keep the million if I analysed the crap out of it.”

Ignatius stared at her. “You’re shitting me,” she said flatly.

Alison shook her head. “Check the bedroom safe if you like.”

Ignatius did, and returned, mouth slightly ajar. Alison smiled pleasantly. “I’m going back over for a psychoanalytical reading now. It’s absolutely hysterical,” she said, leaning back and reading again.

Ignatius shuddered. She had been home schooled, and after that particular lesson she couldn’t look at her mother in the eye properly for a week. She was also a lot more nervous around cigars.

“She said you could join in too – freaked me out a little at first, but all the residents know we live together,” Alison added over her shoulder. “Second set is on the bench – maybe try a feminist reading?”

Ignatius picked up the apple and tossed it from hand to hand contemplatively. “Sure, why not,” she said finally, taking a bite out of it and heading into the kitchen.

 

Comments

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

I love it. It makes so much sense this way.

Oh, and don't forget to LJ-cut this.

[mogseltof.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I realised I'd forgotten soon as I posted :S Fixed now :)

Thank you!

[kseenaa.livejournal.com]

I suppose it is because I am swedish, but... I don't get it?

[mogseltof.livejournal.com]

Sorry. The basic idea behind it is they're mocking Twilight for everything in it by taking it too seriously and analysing it like you would analyse works considered real literature :)

[kseenaa.livejournal.com]

Oh! Well... No need to apologize... I might not have been to clever either. :-P

[melissatreglia]

Awesome. Then again, I've seen people do completely serious academic studies of Madonna's music videos, so...