Some Thoughts about Twilight

a quick book report

Two Sundays ago, San Francisco being much befogged, and my brain, somewhat, likewise, I thought I would read the copy of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight that my woke PhD student friend had lent me the day before, having never done this at any other point in my life. Interesting read! The first thing that stuck out to me was that after a perfunctory flash forward, in which nothing much interesting is revealed about our narrator (Bella) except that one day she will be in a Situation, we get to the good stuff: this freak LOVES Phoenix, Arizona, as well as . . . canonical literature? From whatever afterlife they put literary scholars in, Wayne C. Booth is surely sobbing tears of joy at this masterclass in unreliable narrator establishment — surgical, ruthless. Well, after that, we get to high school, where there’s a guy, Edward, who is lowkey kind of different, not like the other boys at the high school, or even very much like the Edward from the movie Twilight, which I have seen, some years ago: I remember thinking at the time that any admiration for this guy at the high school who is not like the other boys at the high school suggested some deep spiritual rot at the heart of American empire, as he is creepy, and I didn’t like him, but in the book things are different: for one, we’re in Bella’s head, and she thinks a lot (this is not so much a feature of the movie); for another, while my main memory of the movie is that Edward is staring at Bella in class and deathgripping the desk as if it is the only thing standing between him and a rapacious, one might even say a well-nigh murderous, lust, in the book he is a little more British, and they understate — interesting, I thought, as I’ve just been introduced to Jacob, the also charming, but this time indigenous boy who is into cars and dopey smiles and so forth, and while I never read Twilight, I was somewhat aware that each of these boys had Teams, and that Bella would soon find herself in another Situation . . . tea, I thought, familiarly, but I was nevertheless experiencing this text as if it had never been read — no one told me it would be allegorical! Yes, what else is one to think here except that Bella is meant to be a prototypical American novelist, caught between the canonical, Anglophone tradition — charming, sometimes, but also anachronistic, and more than anything, perpetually undead — and the indigenous culture of the land upon which she lives, a crossroads she sees reflected anytime she looks in the mirror of the postcolonial writer, who faces this very same set of paths, only, you know, reflected. A few months ago, I read José Donoso’s Historia personal del boom, in which he mentions how he and many of the other Latin American Boom writers made good use of the techniques of European high modernism in their particular historical context to express something about said contexts, basically how all art and thinking works broadly: take the abstractions made elsewhere and apply them to your concrete reality, thereby engaging in a reciprocal process of change and adaptation for you and the abstractions and also hopefully your concrete reality, something it’s basically universally agreed is cool and woke and even effective, unless you’re a Kantian, in which case, take a lap. Anywho, finished the book that day! Here were some places I read it:

n.b.: I was reminded to use the word rapacious by an interesting man from Rhode Island I met at a then-partner’s mom’s birthday party in upstate New York: it was summer, and his already regulation shortness shorts were creeping quite far up his thighs on account of his quite spread legs — a ball, perhaps, visible — though this didn’t bother me so much on account of him — rare for a man of the Eastern Coast — indulging me talking about growing up in Texas: Texans, he had said, after discussing some time he had spent there, are “fucking rapacious;” a little later on, he asked me if I had read Alexis de Tocqueville, as de Tocqueville, he said, had said this about all Americans, that we are rapacious, and that’s crazy, my interlocutor had said, as de Tocqueville was French, “and they eat and fuck everything.” And how, king. And how.