Twilight Aesthetics
by grandhotelabyss
Every year or two, a new Twilight movie, and every year or two the same endless debates on narrative and ideology. I appreciated Sarah Blackwood‘s defense of the newest against feminist charges that it glamorizes bad or even abusive relationships:
So, in the weirdest sense possible, the Twilight Saga is a pragmatist’s text; which is just another way of saying that while Stephenie Meyer doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in challenging or reshaping gendered realities, her ability to evoke what it’s like to have a gender in the world — for Bella, for Edward, for Jacob — makes these novels surprisingly insightful on a number of issues feminists still have trouble addressing.
Replace “feminists” with any political partisans, “gender” with any socio-political identity, “the Twilight Saga” with any work of literature or film, “pragmatist” with modernist, and you have a reasonably sophisticated theory of art as mimesis. To wit: the basic task of an artist is to construct a work that represents, with more or less depth and complexity, some aspect of reality, in order that the audience may respond in one or more of the following ways:
1. by experiencing a defamiliarization of the ordinary (which may manifest–in unpredictable ways–as awe, reverence, disgust, fear, erotic arousal, political anger, etc.) caused by encountering it in the transfigured, charged circumstances of the aesthetic object;
2. by feeling psychic relief, and hence probably profound attachment to the aesthetic object, due to the representation of aspects of their lives that had previously gone unrepresented;
3. by rethinking, though the mediation of the aesthetic object’s intricate arrangement of experience, their previously held beliefs on the experiences so represented.
This aesthetic theory assumes the following standard of quality: that work is superior which so invests its mimesis with the organized representation of experiential complexity that it demands all three responses from the audience–first by appealing to it with affective surprise and psychic relief (responses 1 and 2), and then by troubling it with contradictions and difficulties that call forth response 3.
Straightforwardly bad art never even arouses response 1; simplistic art never gets beyond response 2; too much experimental and avant-garde art, or else directly didactic political art, bullies its right-thinking audience into response 3 or its simulacrum without first securing their genuine holistic attention via responses 1 and 2, and thus renders itself even more disposable than Twilight.
The advantage of this art theory is that it combines the best of the two basic aesthetics, classicism (any theory that assumes art to represent reality) and romanticism (any theory that assumes art to recreate reality). While my theory leans toward the classical–it assumes reality’s priority to its representation–it includes the romantic by insisting on the artist’s originary shaping power (which I value far more than convention’s shaping power) over the material he or she seeks to organize and by allowing for the audience, after being provoked to thought and feeling by the work, to act on the provocation and alter the world.
