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| Why have teenage girls been bitten by the Edward Cullen bug to devour the Twilight novels? Why do teenagers eat the Twilight novels? Why do they follow the adventures of young Bella and her vampire lover Edward? What do they think they see? Last night, I encountered some fans. "You are attracted to it because it is dangerous," says Camila, 13. "There is something that sucks you in." "I have Twilight written on my hand right now," says Morag, 11, whispering down the telephone (with her parents' permission). "Once you are gripped you cannot get ungripped. I am completely obsessed."They do not know why they are entranced. They only know how. So I spoke to literary critics and psychologists and I now know what the teenage victim does not. When she reads Twilight, she is sucking up a complex maelstrom of psychosexual metaphor, and all before lunch. Goodbye Famous Five and Timmy, you horrid little dog. Goodbye Harry Potter and your dull suburban wand. You are a 20th-century, one-dimensional metaphor of a character. We have outgrown you.Edward Cullen is the lover the young girl desires and fears. The reader wants to be devoured by him; she wants to be eaten, even if she is being very expensively educated and playing the viola reluctantly. "The vampire is a metaphor for the predatory yet alluring boy," explains the psychotherapist and sometime spin doctor Derek Draper. "The young girl wants to be chased and she wants to be caught. Coarsely put, the bite stands in for penetration." The fang, he says, is a penis.But the young girl also wants to save the vampire; to rescue him from his lonely eternity. He is a photogenic monster with good hygiene. "To be a vampire is a very sad fate," says the psychologist Dr Cecilia d' Felice, "and this brings out the desire to nurture and protect him. They just want to suck on our blood. This is a metaphor for how much we need love and how much we need to be needed. We see our own vulnerabilities in them."So Edward Cullen is Edward Rochester, with fangs. He is rich, too. This appeals to the readers of Teenage Vogue."Who would want to get close to Frankenstein's monster?" D'Felice asks me. You mean to play with his bolts? "The vampire is elegant and beautiful," she says. "They are Vanity Fair monsters, high-end, aspirational monsters." With great shoes. It is true – Edward Cullen, as played by Robert Pattinson, is on the front of Vanity Fair this month and, even if he really were a vampire, he would probably be there anyway.The metaphorical puddle goes on; it swamps us. According to Dr Sara Lodge, a lecturer at the University of St Andrews and an expert on Victorian literature, the teenage girl identifies with the vampire, as well as with his victim. It isn't just a suck-me thing. It's a suck-you thing.In the fourth Twilight novel, Breaking Dawn, Bella becomes a powerful vampire; she finds her fangs and loves them. This happens in Bram Stoker's Dracula, too, to Lucy Westenra. "Lucy is initially a tender virgin but once she has been bitten, she becomes a violent virago stalking cemeteries looking for children to sink her fangs into," says Lodge. When reading vampire fiction, Lodge believes, the teenager is "confronting an image of her own inadmissible desires. She is staring into a dark mirror."Draper agrees: "The vampire is also a metaphor for a teenage girl, because teenage girls are outsiders. They feel unformed and sickened by cravings they struggle to satisfy." Who knew? It is hard to say to your parents "I want to devour and be devoured", even if you live in north London.In the end, becoming a vampire allows the teenager to experience power. Mina Harker, the other female heroine in Dracula, is bitten but survives. (While Dracula is fried like an egg and toasted like a bit of toast.) So the vampire genre, Lodge says "allows the protagonist to be both the author of her own destiny and the victim of forces beyond her control. It allows women to have it both ways – strong and vulnerable to the darker forces."So there you have it – Twilight. No wonder they love it and are longing for more. As Bibi, 14, says: "It has more emotional depth than Harry Potter."WomenYoung peopleFictionTanya Goldguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Embrace by Valerio Magrelli Sean O'Brien revels in a cerebral work of passion fired by witJamie McKendrick's involvement with the work of the Italian poet Valerio Magrelli, which stretches back for more than a decade, arises from a genuine imaginative affinity. In his valuable introduction he writes of "the intensity of recognition" he felt as the possibility of making this book emerged – and it's clear that McKendrick (born 1955) and Magrelli (born 1959) share a combination of meticulous clarity and a sense of mystery. For both poets the task is to present and frame what appears to defeat the understanding.In Magrelli's early work the keeping of a notebook, purportedly an aide-memoire, begins to generate its own world. It is variously "a shield, / a trench, a periscope, a loophole", and the military context shades over into espionage before the writing takes on miraculous powers, multiplying like the loaves and fishes, and next becoming skin, the sole of a foot rubbed "like an instep / after the day's hard slog". These items sound like parts of a secondary world, but the "actual" world has been usurped in the act of contemplating it. Furthermore, the next poem suggests, the original world is largely forgotten by the traveller-poet now concerned with surviving his experience.Magrelli's work seems wholly unconcerned with proving itself poetic except in the making of a poem. McKendrick draws an illuminating comparison with the Frenchman Francis Ponge, a poet of spectacular playfulness and obsessive detail. The title poem, "The Embrace", shows the same relish in an extended working-out of comparison, when the embrace of sleeping lovers is compared to a heating system.In his second collection, Natures and Veinings (1987), Magrelli takes up a Renaissance poetic figure – the eye-beam – and imagines its afterlife: "I've often imagined that looks / outlive the act of seeing / as though they were poles / with measurable trajectories, lances / hurled in a battle." In the next poem, reminiscent of Charles Tomlinson's dramatisation of the visible, Magrelli develops this notion in what seems to be an image of Venice, a city perhaps more than any other built on and sustained by the act of looking. The passage is rendered with superb lightness by McKendrick: "A flying city, self-propelled, / poised upon a forest / of stakes, moving in accord / with the enchantment / of its own weight, with the grace / of its distribution, / leaning, / wavering in a faint tremor, a friction / that will erode it." Never one to let himself off the hook, Magrelli also considers less desirable features of the power that mingles the senses and the world. Tunes stick maddeningly in the head; their erosive effect can be seen, he says, in the interiors of violins, so imagine what they do to us: "worm-eaten with music, / we become light-headed, empty-headed, / as if made of fine lace."The comedy of the idea doesn't undermine the point. In retrospect we see how the original notebook is an attempt to create a vantage point, an act both doomed and necessary, akin to trying to hold yourself out at arm's length. There are those who might object that this work is too cerebral for comfort, but Magrelli's effort to understand is clearly the product of a passion fired by wit, a passion honoured in the knowledge of its cost, as this brief poem suggests: "I should like, one day, / to be turned to marble, / to be stripped of nerves, / glistening tendons, veins. / Just to be airy enamel, / slaked lime, the striped / tunic of a wind / ground to a halt." A lesser poet (and a lesser translator) would have missed the point: the desired outcome is not, primarily, symbolic of anything. How could it be? A nearby poem considers, as a comic contrast, another change of state, that of milk ("as though / it had turned evil") into cheese, "an occult creature".Magrelli's 1992 book Typtological Exercises (derived from table-tapping at séances and convicts tapping on pipes to communicate) opens with a kind of nightmare breeziness. "That matter engenders contagion" offers an account of the world in four theses, where biology, history, psychology and physics interweave in a continual process of self-destruction which is shown to be both necessary and inevitable. As Magrelli concludes, "That the form of every production implies / breaking and entry, fission, a final leavetaking / and that history is an act of combustion / and the Earth a tender stockpile of firewood / left out to dry in the sun, // is hard to credit, is it not?" Not when you put it that way. The saturnine wit, economy and impetus recall the work of Zbigniew Herbert, one of the true giants of 20th-century poetry, and there are few greater compliments than that.Herbert exerted a form of strong pessimism, a readiness to work without hope in the service of a cause long defeated. Perhaps he would have been amused by Magrelli's evocation of one of the contexts in which the hopeless task continues to be carried out. In an eponymous poem, a review page is "Wedged between finance and films, / padded room of a philological / stammer, wafted ribbon of seaweed / jinking in the critical aquarium, / it still holds out. . ." That's the spirit.Sean O'Brien's Afterlife is published by Picador.PoetrySean O'Brienguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Anne Rice masterfully ascends to angels in latest thriller Angels, not vampires, are the supernatural creatures at the center of Angel Time, a metaphysical thriller by Anne Rice. rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Books: Sherlock Holmes, Amorphous Sleuth for Any Era Cerebral soul? Action hero? Who is Sherlock Holmes? Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation has had probably the most successful and elaborate afterlife of any fictional character. feeds.nytimes.com |
There's more to George Orwell than politics It's true that politics drove much of his writing, but we should also value his masterly characterisations of some of literature's most memorable losersLast June, the 60th anniversary of the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four brought an abundance of renewed tributes for its author, George Orwell. Articles sprung up about him from just about everywhere, including some pretty fine ones concerning his time on Jura and how his essays chart the formation of his most famous novel's chilling vision of a totalitarian Britain.As ever, it was his political legacy that garnered the most attention. Alongside examinations of the novel's power from literary perspectives, both the left and the right used his ideas to illustrate their opinions of the problems in modern society.This treatment of Orwell is understandable: after all, he himself wrote, "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism." The motive behind his writing was always intensely political.Nevertheless, Orwell should not be read purely as a political writer. It was his fiction that secured his reputation, and he relied on his characters as much as any other author. Unfortunately, competing against such powerful concepts as Big Brother, Newspeak and Thoughtcrime, Orwell's protagonists are all too often ignored. Today, on the 60th anniversary of his death, they also deserve to be celebrated, especially as they form one of literature's most striking collections of miserablists. Orwell's male leads are particularly compelling. John Flory, Gordon Comstock and George Bowling, along with Nineteen Eighty-Four's "small, frail" Winston Smith, would probably just shrug their shoulders if they were told how often they are overlooked. Like the creatures in Spike Jonze's adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are, their incessant melancholia only makes them all the more endearing. Self-pitying, downtrodden, unattractive and all neurotically well aware of it, you couldn't hope to meet a more wonderful bunch of losers. With Orwell a keen follower of Dickens's habit of making characters' internal weaknesses manifest in their appearance, they're a pitiful bunch in physical terms, too. Comstock of Keep The Aspidistra Flying shares Winston's frailness and can only sigh as girls in the street pass him by, their "cruel youthful eyes" going "over him and through him as though he had not existed." Flory of Burmese Days is consumed by shame at the dark blue birthmark running down his face. And although Coming Up For Air's Bowling insists to readers he really is a rather cheerful fatty, the defining image of him comes while he is having his morning wash: "No woman, I thought as I worked the soap round my belly, will ever look twice at me again, unless she's paid to. Not that at that I moment I particularly wanted any woman to look twice at me."This sense of inadequate masculinity and constant self-awareness – the kind that makes Bowling picture himself walking down the road with his fat face, false teeth and vulgar clothes – is a huge part of what makes Orwell's novels so readable. Just look at how Winston greets Julia's advances with a classically Orwellian self-assessment. "I'm thirty-nine years old. I've got a wife that I can't get rid of. I've got varicose veins. I've got false teeth," he tells her. "What could attract you to a man like me?" Who could resist that for a chat-up line? Had he been around in the real 1984, Winston would surely have been a fan of the Smiths. When it comes to self-deprecation, however, John Flory takes first prize. "Sneaking, idling, boozing, fornicating, soul-examining, self-pitying cur," he tells himself at one point. "All those fools at the Club, those dull louts to whom you are so pleased to think yourself superior – they are all better than you, every man of them. At least they are men in their oafish way. Not cowards, not liars. Not half-dead and rotting."It almost seems unfair to lump Dorothy Hare of A Clergyman's Daughter in with this lot; although her hair is her only "positive beauty", she is at least "just pretty enough" to receive male attention. The only trouble is that, in an inevitable twist, she doesn't want their attention. After catching sight of her parents indulging in "all that" in bed as a nine-year-old, she is firmly asexual, meaning even her slight attractiveness is in fact a disadvantage to her. Trust Orwell to have come up with that.It's true that the pathetic nature of his characters was far from unpolitical on Orwell's part. After all, his tales of repression wouldn't work quite so well if they were delivered via handsome gentlemen and elegant ladies strolling around being suave and poised. But whatever the calculation behind their creation as portraits of inadequacy, his characters make for great reading in themselves.George OrwellFictionRob Hastingsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |