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| DUSTY A Fanfic by YellowBella |
The postmodern way of reading has changed the way we read. The text is no longer expected to contain all the TRUTH that the author intended. The claim that if the author said it that's what s/he meant, or if the author did not say it then it was not meant. All that is gone.
It is the reader who brings meaning to the text. The deeper the reader has read, experienced, contemplated etc enriches the text. Authorial style is no longer the important component. We are following Nietzsche now: the style must be even more so than what the text is revealing and concealing; and it must have music to our listening ears.
To explain: Anyone can read 50 Shades and like it. Reading Twilight first and seeing the movies is not a necessity for its enjoyment - or purchase.
BUT: IF you have read Twilight - carefully and lovingly - and seen the movies over and over, 50 Shades will be a different book for you than it is for the woman - or man - buying it over the counter. I don't think there is a fan of Twilight who will disagree with me. It's probably the only one thing they can agree on BTW.
Yes, you can read DUSTY without having read Twilight. BUT you will have a different reading experience than the Twilight afficianado. And by precession - another post modern term - you will now reread or remember Twilight with added resonance. So bringing yourself to the text resonates both forward and backward.
YellowBella have taken (there are 2 authors) have taken Twilight and owned it. DUSTY has created resonances in Twilight that were concealed and revealed them to us.
1. We meet a Renee who might have been, had she stayed in Forks and remained married to Charlie. A charming, lovely mother with bourgeois aesthetic tastes instilled by a sophisticated advertising milieu that is total. Bella herself is a product of it. Renee is in a symbiotic attachment with her daughter. She infantilizes her as a means of controlling her. Renee and Charlie are authoritarian parents as befits the Chief of Police of Forks. We surmise they vote conservative and have drawn hard limits and boundaries for behavior that their daughter must conform to. They are the family microcosm of one aspect of our larger political spectrum.
2. We first meet a Bella who is striving to conform to those boundaries set for her. Many Twilight fans have expressed over and over how important this is in parenting. How very necessary, and Kristen Stewart is openly and covertly criticized for not adhering to these ladylike expectations of proper normal behavior. Bella is securely caught in the Foucauldian Grid of power/knowledge/normality Foucault so painstakingly draws in his 1974-75 Lectures on Abnormal at the College de France and in his books: Madness and Civilization and in Discipline and Punish.
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| Agnes Martin Grid Painting |
This Grid is inescapable and DUSTY fictionalizes it so beautifully that anyone of any age reading DUSTY can immediately understand a profound, graduate level world wide, original contribution all of human behavior - that of the relation of power/knowledge. Power and knowledge are not separate, cannot be separated, cannot exist separately as they are always in a relation. Power cannot be given, taken, traded,or any other verb used. There is no Big Power, Big Other over us. Power seeps through the Foucauldian Grid through the interstices of that Grid. When we meet Bella she has assumed the responsibility of being perfect in order to adhere to those requirements. She looks perfect, dresses perfect, acts perfect, behaves perfectly. She is an alive, lovely, charming Barbie doll that her mother has created and we can imagine what might have been her fate had she never met the Cullens, and far more so than in Twilight. This is why DUSTY is an exceptional example of fanfiction that stands on its own merits, inverts Meyer's Twilight and rips into our hearts in a real way that Twilight never attempts.
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| Michel Foucault |
I am hesitating here because I see that one blog post is not going to do it. So I will stop and continue in manageable fragments as you read it, read through me, and then carry my reading back to DUSTY.
Just as DeLillo's Cosmopolis is a far richer book if read through:Moby Dick; James Joyce: Lacan: Freud; Baudrillard; Nietzsche; Foucault; Gradiva; Greek Mythology; Ayn Rand; etc than if you read it just as a story on its own as women are reading 50 Shades without a clue of Twilight or other fanfic.
What you bring to DUSTY will determine the depth of your reading of DUSTY, as aspects of Kristen and Rob fold in as well as the characters of Bella and Edward. And fans are going to bring going on 5 years of obsessive contemplation and observing. Now it is time for DUSTY to reveal some hidden secrets to you. And in doing so, introduce you to cutting edge philosophical and political thinking for our damned times. You do not need a graduate education to understand it. Kristen already understands it and acts on it unknowingly but surely, adroitly, and in an absolutely original way.
Can you keep up with her? Bella in DUSTY can.
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| Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon late 1700's - Design for a Prison |
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| Panopticon Jeremy Bentham |
