Twilight and the Future of the Novel

Lev Grossman, author of The Magicans and book critic at TIME, wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal last month that raised something of a firestorm in the relatively closed crucible of literature cognoscenti. That article, Good Books Don’t Have to be Hard, which I’ve discussed at greater length over at HogwartsProfessor, made the counter-cultural but hard-to-deny points that genre novels are not by definition junk writing and that the ‘modern novel’ aka ‘psychological realism’ or ‘literary novel’ is not only inaccessible and unpopular but also and for those reasons on life-support.

What makes this relevant for serious readers of Twilight is that Mr. Grossman mentioned the success of Mrs. Meyer’s work in his discussion, was raked over the coals for even suggesting there was anything of value in the Forks oeuvre, and, remarkably, he made a spirited defense of taking these books seriously in a response he made to these critics.

First, where he mentions Twilight in the WSJ article:

There was a time when difficult literature was exciting. T.S. Eliot once famously read to a whole football stadium full of fans. And it’s still exciting—when Eliot does it. But in contemporary writers it has just become a drag. Which is probably why millions of adults are cheating on the literary novel with the young-adult novel, where the unblushing embrace of storytelling is allowed, even encouraged. Sales of hardcover young-adult books are up 30.7% so far this year, through June, according to the Association of American Publishers, while adult hardcovers are down 17.8%. Nam Le’s “The Boat,” one of the best-reviewed books of fiction of 2008, has sold 16,000 copies in hardcover and trade paperback, according to Nielsen Bookscan (which admittedly doesn’t include all book retailers). In the first quarter of 2009 alone, the author of the “Twilight” series, Stephenie Meyer, sold eight million books. What are those readers looking for? You’ll find critics who say they have bad taste, or that they’re lazy and can’t hack it in the big leagues. But that’s not the case. They need something they’re not getting elsewhere. Let’s be honest: Why do so many adults read Suzanne Collins’s young-adult novel “The Hunger Games” instead of contemporary literary fiction? Because “The Hunger Games” doesn’t bore them.

In response to the outrage of all those who invested their lives and lucre in advanced degrees so they could always dismiss “genre fiction,” i.e., anything not by Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, or a Faulkner disciple, Mr. Grossman discussed the Twilight books in a frank interview with Joth Jasper at Publisher Weekly’s Genreville weBlog.

Jasper: You’re implying that you think Stephenie Meyer is a good writer.

Grossman: Well, I think that one’s a yes and no. I think it would be more accurate to say that I’m interested in the fact that tons and tons of people read her (I’m one of them), in numbers that make the number of people who read literary fiction a borderline statistically insignificant number. I want to know why that is.

Obviously there are a lot of things the Twilight books do, and don’t do, that you can point to and say, good books do/don’t do those things, therefore the Twilight books are ass. But — hear me out — millions of people love them. All those millions of people might be idiots or have bad taste. But I think it’s kinda intellectually lazy to say that. Meyer is doing something very very well, or at least giving people something they really really want, and I don’t think we have a good critical vocabulary yet for talking about what that something is. But I’m interested in it.

I hope you’ll read the whole thing as well as Michelle Kerns’ two defenses of Mr. Grossman from his blind-to-the-world critics at Book Examiner. In the second one, ‘The Nasty Debate Over the Future of Fiction,’ she picks up where Mr. Grossman leaves off about Twilight:

In that article, Mr. Grossman beautifully crystallized everything the literary intelligentsia have been dreading while they were busy hoping, praying, waiting for the hey-day return of the high-brow literary novel. He pronounced the end of the esoteric, hard-as-hell-to-understand novels of the past and announced a brave new world full of plot-driven, exciting stories. He predicted that literary innovation wouldn’t come from the hoity toities anymore, but from the purveyors of genre fiction. And he did something that infuriated the literati beyond endurance – he connected the argument to Twilight.

The literary types had been waiting for some sort of break on the book front, but this was not what they’d anticipated. Mr. Grossman didn’t just drop the other shoe: he hurled it – CRASH! – into the literati’s pretty little glass house with a cry of “This is the future of fiction.” It would have been bad enough coming from an anonymous book blogger. But coming from a critic as intelligent, as respected, and as influential as Mr. Grossman, it was insufferable. And when their accumulated rage, frustration, and irritation over the state of literature swarmed out, it wasn’t Stephenie Meyer or Twilight or even the Twilight fans that became the target. It was Mr. Grossman.

By connecting his argument about the future of the novel to Twilight, Mr. Grossman inadvertently made himself the focal point of the literati’s anger. To them, he became the one championing the destruction of the writing they hold dear. They ignored Mr. Grossman’s excruciatingly careful statements about NOT advocating Twilight as great writing. They ignored his exhortation to look at the popularity of Twilight as an opportunity to question what readers really want. They ignored his insistence that literary innovation wasn’t vanishing, just changing. They, instead, chose to react emotionally.

It’s funny how oddly people will act when emotion – not intellect – is driving an argument. Rational points give way to bare-faced personal attacks. That is precisely what happened to Mr. Grossman. His attackers didn’t bother to confine themselves to the topic in question but branched into directly attacking him and his writing.

Mr. Grossman doesn’t need my defense with writers like Ms. Kerns skewering his critics and I’ve said much of what I wanted to say over at HogwartsProfessor about “literary fiction” as the accepted gold standard of value for writing. Here I just want to say three things before asking for your comments and corrections.

(1) Mr. Grossman says about Twilight readers:

All those millions of people might be idiots or have bad taste. But I think it’s kinda intellectually lazy to say that. Meyer is doing something very very well, or at least giving people something they really really want, and I don’t think we have a good critical vocabulary yet for talking about what that something is. But I’m interested in it.

My first point is that this is the question that literary critics are supposed to answer about popular novels, namely, “Why do readers love these books?,” which, as a rule, they wil not address. If a book is (a) not a literary novel or (b) carries the burden of any one of what James Thomas called “the three Deathly Hallows” of literature, being “too popular, too current, and too juvenile,” the gatekeepers in Book Reviews and the Watchmen in the Ivory Towers dismiss them out of hand. This is essentially genre revulsion, and, in its being an unexamined and prejudicial reflex, it is intellectually lazy, just as Mr. Grossman asserts. Forgive me for enjoying the “Emperor has no Clothes” quality of that assertion and its appearance in the Wall Street Journal, which, if not The New York Review of Books, probably caused more heart-burm for its publication where thoughtful people might actually read it.

(2) I would dispute Mr. Grossman’s assertion that we don’t yet “have a good critical vocabulary” for describing what it is that makes books like Twilight so remarkably popular. Of course, we do. What we lack is not the tools but the understanding to use the critical tools of traditional critics like Coleridge, Ruskin, and Lewis; we fail in this understanding, almost certainly, because we lack both the faith and understanding the human person as homo religiosus (as Eliade would describe us) that pre-modern critics had. Eliade wrote in The Sacred and the Profane that reading serves a mythic or religious function in a secular culture. Mirabile dictu, the most popular books in our profane world are those saturated with religious symbolism and those that are tales of spiritual transformation, even apotheosis, in the face of evil.

We have the tools to describe and explain this. As a secular culture, however, we’d rather not admit what the history of English literature and the current marketplace tell us flat out. Christian content in novels written up by Christian authors for the edification of Christian readers is what sells — because it is the spiritual experience, albeit only imaginative, that the reader is pursuing — and these books deliver what that reader wants.

(3) And what part do plot, story drive, and accessibility have to play in this? Again, this is not a mystery; it’s all in Coleridge. For us to have some experience of the Imagination (much more than “fancy” in Coleridge’s anthropology), we need to be able to “suspend our disbelief,” our ego personas, and enter fully into the story and identify with the hero or heroine and thereby experience the drama and catharsis of their journey.

No plot, no access, no suspension, no transformation of self or experience or even hint of experience of Self, no sale.

Let me say the blasphemous, obvious thing: without a more compelling argument than a dismissive “they’re stupid,” the prima facie reality of the millions of Twilight readers is that Mrs. Meyer, like Ms. Rowling, the Inklings, and the Greats, is delivering spiritual content in her writing. That it lacks anything magisterial, nuance, and aesthetic majesty means little to nothing except, perhaps, that by achieving what she has without those things, her success should invite a closer examination of what she does well.

What she understands better than Pynchon and Salinger and their devotees is that romance, and by that I mean male-female relations, the seemingly pedestrian “boy-meets-girl” story, may be the heart of every great story, especially if it works allegorically for ’subject-other’ or, best of all, ‘Man-and-God.’ This is more than three fourths of Shakespeare, all of Austen, the Gothic engine, and the better part of Dickens as well. Edward-Bella with a touch of Jacob as both paranormal romance and the vehicle for alchemical drama is simply genius.

Which I will explain at greater length in Spotlight.

Anyway, three cheers for Mr. Grossman for saying out loud what he demonstrated in The Magicians, a marriage of the literary novel and fantasy fiction, which is that Good Books Don’t Have to be Hard — and even that for books to work their magic they have to be easily entered into. I’d go even further and say they need significant spiritual content and anagogical artistry to win readers’ hearts and that a romance is the fast track to that victory, but, really, I have to think Mr. Grossman would have been butchered if he’d dared say any of that.

Your comments and corrections, please. (Many thanks to Library Lily for all the links in this post and for alerting me to the controversy!)