A Declaration of War on All Things Twilight

I tried to read Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. I really did. I am conscious of the many historical instances in which the seemingly unredeemable popular work of the day—championed by the great unwashed masses, but ridiculed by the literati—later became a pillar of English or American Literature. And so, I very consciously refrain from judging a work before I actually read it for myself and, in all likelihood, determine that it is not, in fact, so much trash, but just another in a long line of additions to English or American pop culture that is mildly entertaining and, perhaps, of latent artistic value to be recognized in some far off date when our children seek to define the age gone by. But fifty pages of Twilight revealed the issue to me in stark detail: we have finally become a nation of literary panderers. For every Cormac McCarthy, there are a dozen Stephenie Meyers who direct the focus of American literary endeavor to the very lowest common denominator. And I, for one, will not watch the ship of American literature founder and sink without at least trying to plug the leak and bail.


There are many arguments to be made against the story of Twilight itself, which anyone who has not been living in a cave for the past decade knows whether they’ve read the book or not. It’s decidedly unoriginal—both Anne Rice and Charlaine Harris did vampires better. It’s also decidedly creepy—the story of a man 109-year old man having an affair with a 17-year old high school girl. Not since Nabokov’s Lolita has a story so successfully cashed in on society’s prurient interest in young girls. And it unabashedly perpetuates the princess myth, wherein the helpless young girl is unable to defend herself against the terrible forces of this world and must seek the protection of the impossibly strong, handsome, and wealthy man that will, of course, dedicate his life to her safety and happiness. That literally millions of young girls around the world are being raised to think that this is an acceptable framework through which to see the world is more our failing as a society than Stephenie Meyers’ as a creative artist.

But none of this is surprising or even particularly bothersome to me. I am sufficiently jaded by popular American culture at this point that lousy, recycled stories roll off my back like so much water off a duck. What does bother me is the scale upon which Twilight has been adopted by and incorporated into American culture and the resulting shift of our collective focus toward those stories that present an airbrushed (if not wholly animated) depiction of American life in a series of clichéd cliffhangers and caricatures while eschewing (or at least relegating to a distant secondary status) any story that accurately depicts the joys and the hardships of this life and the emotional struggles that realistic characters endure in order to survive within it. I genuinely fear that the overriding popularity of Twilight has finally pushed us irrevocably into the category of slack-jawed cartoon watchers, with no interest in stories with organic meaning for our condition as human beings, stories that make us think, stories that make us consider other points of view or strive to be better, or at lease stories that involve an original thought.

And so, somewhat surprisingly, I feel that I owe Stephenie Meyers a personal debt of gratitude. Twilight was, to me, a boot to the head. I can now see the dark night about me, but I refuse to go quietly into it. I am awake, and I recognize that, in order to find those stories that I treasure—stories by which we collectively define and experience the many beautiful variations on the human condition—I must trade Twilight for The Long River Home, Penguin Books for Pushcart, the Oscars for the Independent Spirit Awards, Blockbuster for Netflix, and Amazon for the local library. I must refuse the dry pellets of food poured in my feed bowl and instead beg from the table, because that is where the nutrition lies.
And so, The Literate Man hereby declares war on all things Twilight. I would ask you to join us by making conscious decisions about where your entertainment dollars (and those of your children) are being spent. Rather than dripping amorphously into the jellied mass of the lowest common denominator, let us try to raise it up, slap it around, and help it to recognize that genuine meaning can still be found in literature, if only we are willing to look for it.