Dan Tovrov’s Book Club
Twilight Series

I thought I would kick off my book club with a series of books that’s become quite a phenomenon in the past year or so. Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer. There are four books in all, and the first one, and soon the rest will be too, is a major motion picture.

The books follow Bella, a sixteen year old girl who just moved to Fork, Washington, where she meets Edward, a teen-age Vampire, and there subsequent love affair and the complications involved with a paranormal romance. Now, the whole series is a pretty translucent allegory for the Ramayana; the epic Hindi poem from the second century BC, but it also could be an allegory for the Egyptian-Nubian war, and the invasion of the Hyksos under emperor Rehoboam II, but I thought that would be ridiculous. It’s a bit of a stretch, you see.

Moving on. Twilight, as a literary work, is completely obsolete, even though it came out only last year. In fact, it was obsolete even before it was published. Meyer failed comprehend the metaphysical magnitude of the figure of the vampire, especially in relation to the relation to the symbolic order, which we all know, is constructed around the void of the metonymical chain of signifiers.

As a creature, the vampire represents those outside the hetero-normative symbolic order, a body-politic based on the concept of reproductive futurity. The vampire, being an ‘undead’ creature, is instantly and textually castrated. It is neither living, nor dead, and so how can it exist in the realm of futurism, am I right? BEAT Vampires can of course reproduce, but only in a viral way, by attacking a host and planting it’s phantasmagorical essence inside a person, a person created by the very social order the vampire is ostracized from. So, back to Twilight…

When Bella gets pregnant with Edward’s half vampire child, the very significance of having a vampire in the first place is shattered by the ungraspable ironical nothingness! We cannot ignore Jacques Derrida’s famous axiom “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” when thinking in these provisos, especially when dealing with Lacan’s post-structualist symbolic order. Shouldn’t Edward be the representation of The Big Other, the petit object a to Bella’s desire? The answer is yes! He should, but he isn’t. There is no jouissance in Bella’s orgasmic petit-mort. Edward lies un-ironically inside the very system based on futurity that repudiates him! It’s ridiculous!

The vampire represents the trope, the way at which all words are built around nothing. Like the vase, which is clay molding around lack, around an empty centre, but the emptiness only becomes emptiness when a presence is constructed around it. The Vampire, like that absence, is always already present. It’s both representative and queering the very element…

That’s queering like gay, in case you haven’t been following this.

So, the book sucks.

That’s correct, Dan Tovrov’s book club is for books I don’t like.

So, what else is in there? All of the Harry Potter books, except the third one, The Adventure of Tom Sawyer, the collected works of Emile Zola, Are You There God? It’s me Margret, and Totally Frank: The Autobiography of Frank Caliendo.

Lastly, the final reason these books suck is because the vampires can come out during the day, which is totally gay.

Thank you.

(The actual clip from the show to be up shortly, and is currently available on the Yippie Museum feed with the rest of the show)