Before the library takes my e-copy of Twilight back into the ether whence it came, I wanted to comment on its cosmology. There isn’t much of one, to be honest; maybe the subsequent books do more world-building, but in this one there’s not much indication of what kind of universe we’re operating in. Still, we get a provocative remark by Edward, when Bella asks him about the origin of vampires:

“Well, where did you come from? Evolution? Creation? Couldn’t we have evolved in the same way as other species, predator and prey? Or, if you don’t believe this world could have just happened on its own, which is hard for me to accept myself, is it so hard to believe that the same force that created the delicate angelfish and the shark, the baby seal and the killer whale, could create both kinds together?”

Edward here appeals to an issue near to my heart: the problem of natural evil. If God is such a bastard to make a natural world that runs on predation, then why not make vampires? And yet, the vampires as described in this story not only go against all Christian concepts of natural law, but against Darwinian laws also. Despite the rhetorical tone of his question, vampires couldn’t evolve as other species do. Immortality is unnatural, and even if some creature obtained it, it would obviate the need to eat. One of the visceral horrors of vampires is that they are cannibals, violating a nearly universal human taboo and to some extent a natural one as well. (Animals do cannibalize on occasion, but for obvious reasons no species has evolved to specially hunger for its own kind.) This isn’t really a scientific explanation or a theological one; it’s more a cry of despair at a random universe.

It’s interesting to contrast this with Bram Stoker’s version. In keeping with an ancient theory that evil can’t create things on its own, but simply mock and imitate creation, Dracula is portrayed explicitly as a perverted shadow of Jesus. The blood-drinking is a warped version of the Eucharist and also of marriage; approaching one victim, he even uses the biblical phrase, “blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh.” He has an acolyte prone to saying things like, “Master, give me eternal life!” And indeed, the eternal life of a vampire is a parody of the eternal life in heaven. Although I wouldn’t exactly call Dracula a Christian novel, you only really get the horror if you assume that you have a soul and that it should be headed for a Christian version of the afterlife. If you think you’re a soulless beast headed for oblivion, then what really is the downside?

It seems to me that most vampire stories of the last 20 or 30 years have struggled with this question, and Twilight is no different. Like many of its fellows, it falls back on the power of sentient minds to make moral choices — even in a social and spiritual vacuum. Sci-fi author D.G.D. Davidson did an amusing review of both the book and the movie last year; I don’t entirely agree with it, but he made an interesting observation down in the comment thread:

Though you are probably ultimately correct that vampires — if they exist — would be supernatural and evil with no free will, I would suggest that fiction, where the author can within certain moral limits make up his own rules, allows for vampires with free wills, capable of receiving grace and choosing to cooperate with it. However, when you add in Twilight’s paradox, in which the vampire can choose good and yet is barred from salvation by his vampiric nature, the idea of the good vampire becomes objectionable theologically, even within a fictional framework.

As a fiction writer, I can attest to the strong temptation to create repentant characters shunned by God. It has pathos. It is, in fact, an easy, instant recipe for pathos (probably a good reason to avoid it). I forgive Meyer and attribute it to well-meant, misguided naivete.

As I pointed out a while ago, even C.S. Lewis couldn’t quite integrate the needs of the heroic fantasy narrative with the idea that we’re all hopeless screw-ups without God’s grace. But as Davidson points out here, another problematic character of the genre is the innocent victim. You get instant pathos from someone who is damned through no fault of his own, or who is basically good but is persecuted for something he can’t help. Yet the Christian story insists there was only one truly innocent victim in all of history. It messes up our favorite stories in all kinds of ways, which I suppose is part of the point.

NOTE: I’ve always been a one-draft kind of a writer. Just get it together in your head, and slam the thing out. Which means that if I get stuck, like I did writing this review of Twilight, I’m not very good at getting unstuck. So in an unprecedented move on my blog, I am posting an unfinished rough draft for comment/discussion/critique/whatever. And any ideas about why I got stuck on this, of all things…

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Last weekend I gave in to curiosity and downloaded a copy of Twilight through my library’s digital check-out system. (This, by the way, turned out to be a lot easier than I expected. None of the usual cursing and gnashing of teeth that normally goes with me trying a new app.) I normally enjoy a juicy chunk of pop YA fiction, but I’d been uncertain about Twilight. Romance isn’t my favorite candy, and I couldn’t see the romance in a hero with cold, hard flesh. No matter how good looking he is, that’s just not sexy!

Well, having read it, I still don’t think it’s sexy, but it does suit the novel’s peculiar heroine. Stephenie Meyer’s writing is not terribly respected by other writers, but she does have the essential gift of a strong narrative voice. Bella Swan sounds like a real teenager — not in the self-conscious colloquial way of a Holden Caulfield, but like a literate teenager trying to explain, in the plainest way, what she is thinking and feeling.

Yet she’s not exactly a normal teenager. She actually made me think of the protagonist of a completely different kind of novel, P.D. James’ Innocent Blood, which I described in the second half of this post. That book implied that both the heroine and her criminal mother were, while not complete sociopaths, somehow lacking in the full range of human emotions, and lived at a kind of icy remove from most people. Bella, likewise, rather curdles the milk of human kindness. When she moves to a new school at the start of the book, the locals are as friendly and solicitous as a newbie could want, but she finds them all a little annoying; one boy who is attracted to her she rather harshly compares to a golden retriever. After getting a minor injury in a car accident, she dreads people fussing over her. Mostly, she likes being alone.

Her attitude seems to partly extend from her background; she’s accustomed to being the grownup for her divorced, feckless parents, so perhaps it’s not surprising that she assumes relationships will be an endless string of demands. But the overwhelming impression I get is a contempt for weakness, including her own. She fears embarrassment above all, and avoids any occasion for it, of which there are many since she’s physically clumsy. Sympathy doesn’t allay her mortification at the frailty that an injury exposes.

From that angle, the cold, hard flesh of her vampire paramour makes perfect sense. Last year I wrote about how superheroes and supervillains are the modern version of the dream of the transfigured, glorified body; and Twilight, while formally a vampire story, is at least as much as superhero story. Vampires, in this universe, are not only immortal but endowed with superhuman beauty, strength, speed and grace. Our hero, Edward, is an almost literal Man of Steel, or more accurately a Man of Stone. Bella is constantly describing him as a marble statue, pale and glittering. He looks “more like a Greek god than anyone has a right to,” she says at one point, gesturing back to superheroes’ cultural ancestors. In that respect, the stony flesh is the transfiguration of warm squishy mammals and all their terrible vulnerabilities.

That still doesn’t make it very sexy. It would have made more sense to take vampires somewhere beyond sex as we know it — they don’t need to reproduce anyway — or perhaps toyed with something like the Joker’s anti-sexy sex appeal. But ultimately Twilight is too tied to romantic conventions for that. So instead, the nature of Edward’s body keeps getting jarringly brought up at intimate moments. “I drifted to sleep in his cold arms,” she says, giving me a shudder.

To some extent, the book follows a by-now longstanding convention in making vampirism itself a metaphor for sexual desire. Halfway through, Edward tells Bella that her blood smells more delicious than anyone else’s, and so his struggle for self-control is an image of noble chastity. Everyone seems to read it that way, at least. Still, for me the metaphor of lust as vampirism was dampened by the fact that vampires also experience literal lust, as a separate sensation from blood-thirst. I don’t know, maybe this shows the influence of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which also brought us Edward’s obvious predecessor, Angel), but as I remember it, the vampirism in Buffy wasn’t even trying to have an erotic subtext. In Twilight, the vampirism doesn’t heighten the eroticism so much as provide a distraction from it. Edward explains to Bella that they can probably never have sex because he might hurt her by accident (evidently he’s been reading Larry Niven), which would normally be devastating for a 17-year-old in love. But in the context, it’s the least of his problems.