John Mark Reynolds on ‘Twilight’

John Mark Reynolds, Biola University Professor and Director of Biola’s Torrey Honors Institute, has given a mixed review to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga. In a Scriptorium Daily featured article, ‘Twilight’s Flawed Faith,’ Prof. Reynolds notes the front and back of the books themselves and the enthusiasm many readers have for them.

Read the article and then let’s look at what he says. I think he’s onto something but misses the elephant in the room (if I am glad he doesn’t twist his hands endlessly about a vampire in the upstairs bedroom with a teen girl he loves).

Prof. Reynold’s Twilight tour is in three steps:

(1) He opens by making it clear he thinks the books and one movie do not qualify for serious attention as ‘fine writing or film-making.’ Chesterton’s phrase for dime store novels fits: both the films and the books are “dreadful and vulgar.”

(2) Having set us up neatly to expect a Harold Bloom-like dismissal of anything-not-by-Updike-Salinger-or -Roth (or a Torrey-esque ‘O, Tempora! O, Mores!’ longing cry for Austen, Sayers, and Goudge), Prof. Reynolds neatly switches field to note that Chesterton loved “penny dreadfuls” and found their morality not only uplifting for all but essential to their readers’ moral lives.

(This Chestertonian two-step using GKC’s marvelous essay ‘A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls’ has become almost a default position for academics, alas, who want to say something nice, even thoughtful, about popular novels without losing their credibility in the Ivory Tower by taking them seriously as literature. See Alan Jacobs’ essay on Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, The Youngest Brother’s Tale, and the Hogwarts Professor essay about it, for another instance of this prudent if patronizing posture using Chesterton.)

Prof. Reynolds notes in this vein that:

* “Like the best ‘dreadful and vulgar’ books, the Twilight series is fun, a ripping good story, and reinforces many traditional American values.”

*”Twilight, like this blog post, will never be considered great literature, but it might spur an interest in better books. At best, Edward and Bella, the main couple in the book, are signposts pointing to the great romantic couples of literature.”

*Twilight is “God-soaked in the quiet American way,” “points to the inadequacy of any view that forgets romance, poetry, and the metaphysical,” “infused with the hope of divine mercy,” and “contain(s) some big metaphysical truths.”

He concludes the second stop of his tour with the affirmation: “If one thinks about it in this way, those vulgar Twilight books are amazing!”

(3) Lest he leave a flank exposed, though, Prof. Reynolds closes with a short Platonic reflection on the limitations of eros and an invitation to read better books:

Meyer never shows the limits of romantic love and anything, or almost anything, getting in the way of Eros is discarded. Love is entirely disconnected with reason. Hunches replace thoughtfulness and critical thinking on the part of the characters is hard to find. Meyer should really read Plato’s Symposium to see the dangers that putting Eros in the place of Jehovah cause….

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is pretty useful in that regard.

Full disclosure, here: Prof. Reynolds and I are friends, share Orthodox Christian faith, and I have been a guest at Biola/Torrey several times to speak about books by and ideas of Rowling, Lewis, and Coleridge. (Listen to these Scriptorium ‘Middle-Brow’ podCasts on Harry Potter if you’d like a ‘for instance.’) Our friendship, I hope, and life at Torrey is such that he probably expects me to disagree with him or at least to expand on his argument (and might actually take offense if I don’t, especially if I think he is in error). Fun place, Torrey.

In that expectation, I feel obliged to note that ‘Twilight’s Failed Faith,’ while delivering both a better essay than the title promised and the insights I hoped for about the largely edifying messages in the moral layer of Mrs. Meyer’s paranormal romance, was something of a disappointment. Prof. Reynolds is a paragon of scholarship and an exemplar of serious reading skills, so, no doubt, this disappointment is due to my unrealistic expectations. Nonetheless, I am obliged to note:

The criticism of Mrs. Meyer’s Forks Adventures as being excessively erotic is a criticism of the genre rather than the specific. As he points out, the books celebrate the Romantic and the restraint consequent to a theocentric understanding (Edward’s concerns about the soul) that values chastity and marriage. The conclusion of Twilight’s Failed Faith was disappointing because Mrs. Meyer had written counter to the current of the core genre in which she was writing — Young Adult Romance — but was chastised for the excesses of the genre and her audience that she labored significantly to check and correct.

More substantively, I was disappointed that Prof. Reynolds didn’t speculate about why these books are so popular beyond suggesting it had something to do with the dating-obsessed nature of her adolescent readers: “The books encourage the reader to get drunk on romantic love, which given the core audience, may be like preaching the joys of liquor to budding alcoholics.”

I don’t accept the truism that these books are a “teen girl” phenomenon; the sales numbers make that position as hard to believe as the idea that Harry Potter is “primarily” a children’s book. I am confident that, as with Rowling, most of Mrs. Meyer’s readers are adults. You cannot hold a two year grasp on the Amazon and USA Today Best Seller lists on tweenie dollars alone.

Beyond that, the argument that the love that drives the series and hence its remarkable popularity is a “romantic love” simultaneously with positive metaphysical notes and optimism, both of which Prof. Reynolds notes approvingly, but without a larger love than eros seems prima facie implausible. The writing, which Prof. Reynolds dismisses as poor, and the plotting, which he suggests are poorly constructed on much better models, are together insufficient cause, especially given the author’s restraint on delivering combustible scenes, to have generated the following and reader engagement these books have.

I am disappointed that Prof. Reynolds didn’t share what I’m sure occurred to him while reading the first book, namely, Mircea Eliade’s aside in The Sacred and the Profane that in a secular culture like our own, entertainments serve a religious and mythic function. The Granger corollary to that thesis-aside is that the more religious elements are embedded in said entertainments the more popular they are because they satisfy that much more profoundly the spiritual longing in a God-deprived heart.

Prof. Reynolds, I know, noticed the apple being offered on the front cover of Twilight, the Genesis epigraph in that book’s opening, Bella’s thinking of herself as “Eve” in her first meeting with Edward, and her choosing the apple from his tray in their first meal together. Why, then, doesn’t ‘Twilight’s Flawed Faith’ mention the allegorical meaning of the books?

And, because he is one of the world’s authorities on the Timaeus and is a great admirer of the Inklings, especially C. S. Lewis, how did he overlook or, at least, fail to share with us his Platonic Christian observations about the mental super-powers of the quasi-divine Cullen Athanatoi? These are pointers to a universe which is “mental,” founded on a Cosmic Logic, as Lewis had it (from Barfield from Coleridge from Sts. Maximos and Dionysius). The pull of the books on readers with suspended belief and open hearts is an anagogical one in addition to the Edenic allegory.

Prof. Reynolds is familiar with traditional hermeneutics because he knows his Boethius, Aquinas, and Dante so he knows every text to which human beings respond profoundly can be, even should be read on four layers: the surface, moral, allegorical, and anagogical or sublime. The excellence of his exegesis of Twilight’s moral layer, which, as I noted, goes well beyond the usual reading that cannot get past Edward over-nighting in Bella’s bedroom, and his noting the metaphysical touches both point to the greater depths. Why doesn’t he go there?

I’ll have to ask him next time I’m in California.

My best guess here is that he was trapped in the Chesterton ‘Two Step’ I wrote about above. If you choose to praise books that high-brows are dismissing with no little disdain, your best cover is to elevate them, using Chesterton as your admirable model, to the level of “morally edifying” trash.

That choice, unfortunately, doesn’t leave open the option to explore the books as having more profound or resonating depths. “Trash” can only be elevated from ‘Beach Read’ to ‘Amazing Penny Dreadful.’

This is unfortunate because the answer to why the books are so popular, in brief, that they’re delivering a Spiritual Romance, an allegory of God’s love for Man and Man’s love for God in a fallen world, is lost without at least a dip below the surface and moral readings.

Why this spiritual romance is so erotic, too, is obscure except for an exploration of the many Latter-day Saint teachings and memes interwoven with the text because of Mrs. Meyer’s faith. It is not a Christian allegory, per se, of the Fall and God’s walking in the Garden with Eve but a Mormon one — and the Salt Lake City version differs significantly from the Augustinian or Cappadocian ideas we’re used to. For beginners, to simplify LDS doctrine grossly, Celestial Marriage and Reproduction are Mormon means to salvation, hence the Fall was necessary, even salutary. The Twilight Saga, the story of Bella’s conversion and transformation to an immortal Creature of Light, a god of conscience, is a Mormon Pilgrim’s Progress or Comedia wrapped inside a Harlequin Romance.

The almost unprecedented popularity of Mrs. Meyer’s vampire books is due to the resonance its American readers, young and old, male and female, have with the Latter-day Saint “restored” Gospel. Like it or not, Mormonism is a home-grown American faith and reflects many of the Radical Reformation ideas and hermeticism woven into the late 18th and early 19th century fabric of our national psyche. It may be wrong, but the marriage of the sensual and spiritual is undeniably American. (Any monasteries in your neighborhood? Didn’t think so.)

I explore the four layers of meaning in the Twilight books, as well as the Mormon dream material that are the heart of Mrs. Meyer’s inspiration, in Spotlight: A Close-Up Look at the Artistry and Meaning in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Novels, coming out this November. Look for it.

Here’s hoping I haven’t ended my relationship with Biola by taking the Man to school about his essay… Do you think Prof. Reynolds will want me to talk about Twilight to his Torrey students after this?

[Post: I have learned that Twilight's Flawed Faith was originally published at The Washington Post in its 'Under God' column. Reading the responses that Prof. Reynold received there (and his extremely charitable notes to his detractors), I don't think I have anything to worry about!]