A Female Friend of Mine…

…who is as impervious to the Twilight phenom as I am sends along this explanation of Why Chicks Love Twilight.

Meanwhile, Catholic culture warriors put me in the awkward position of, well, not so much defending these tedious books as saying, “Can’t they just be bad books without us going all ooga booga about demons under every bed?”

O’Brien also cites author Steve Wohlberg, who drew out the eerie similarities between Rowling’s inspiration for Potter and Meyer’s for Twilight, both of which began with an unusual dream. “The character of Harry Potter just popped into my head, fully formed,” Rowling reflected in 2001. “Looking back, it was all quite spooky!” She also stated to inquiring media that the Potter books “almost wrote themselves.”

Writes Wohlberg: “When those mesmerizing tales first burst into the brains of these two women, neither was an established writer. Both were novices. They weren’t rich either. Now they are millionaires many times over. Their experiences are similar, with common threads. Both of their novels are permeated with occultism. Based on this, it’s appropriate to wonder, is there a supernatural source behind these revelations? If so, what is it?”

Give thou me a break. C.S. Lewis describes his process of writing in almost identical terms: a picture popped into his head, of a fawn in a snowy wood by a lampost, carrying packages; of a floating island, etc. And then he wondered how to make a story out of it. These dark insinuations inviting readers to conclude that demonism must be the source of a book since the author had a picture pop into his head are inflammatory (and, I think, in Rowling’s case, defamatory). If you want to know what’s going on in the Twilight series you are, once again, best off taking a look at John Granger’s insightful analyses. It’s all about Meyers Mormonism. That doesn’t make them good books (not by a long shot). But it does better prepare readers to think about the books than a lot of hand-waving and fear tactics.

It all reminds me of a recent conversation I had with a friend (a convert) who had given a copy of By What Authority? to his Evangelical relative and asked her to consider the argument of the book. His relative, instead of reading the book, declared that it was “evil” (she could just sense this from the vibe the book was giving off) and refused to so much as open it. Now, I’m quite ready to acknowledge that I don’t have time or inclination to read certain books (Twilight among them). But this whole business of dismissing a book as “satanic”, sight unseen, due to “vibrations” or because you felt a wave of “spiritual nausea” or because you feel that somebody’s writing process was ooky due to ideas popping into the author’s head… Sorry, but you are encouraging a sort of superstitious approach to lit crit that’s got nothing to do with actually analyzing a text and everything to do with reinforcing a sort of tribal conformity among a mass of frightened sheep. Catholics should not live in that kind of fear. They should be able to read a book and give an informed judgement about why it is good or bad that does not boil down to “It gave me the creeps sitting there on my nightstand. So I never read it. But I just know in my heart that it’s evil.” This is, ironically, precisely how Mormons urge us all to evaluate the book of Mormon. Don’t ask hard questions about whether this is verifiable or just a load of bushwah. Instead, trust the subjective feeling in your heart.

Again, unlike with Harry Potter, I’m not defending Twilight. I have no interest in the books, precisely because I have no interest in Mormonism, which is the subtext of these books. But I do have an interest in Catholics not being stampeded around by fear, which is something that seems to be a recurring fact about American life the past decade or so.