Young Adult Fictions
November 7, 2017
Slate Star Codex, “Some groups of people who may not 100% deserve our eternal scorn,” defending Harry Potter political analogies:[1]
Comparing politics to your favorite legends is as old as politics and legends. Herodotus used an extended metaphor between the Persian invasions of his own time and the Trojan War. When King Edward IV took the English throne in 1461, all anybody could talk about was how it reminded them of King Arthur. John Dryden’s famous poem Absalom and Achitophel is a bizarrely complicated analogy of 17th-century English politics to an obscure Biblical story. Throughout American history people have compared King George to Pharaoh, Benedict Arnold to Judas, Abraham Lincoln to Moses, et cetera.
Well, how many people know who Achitophel is these days? Even Achilles is kind of pushing it. So we stick to what we know – and more important, what we expect everyone else will know too. And so we get Harry Potter.
“But a children’s book?” Look, guys, fantasy is what the masses actually like. They liked it in Classical Greece, where they had stories like Bellerophon riding a flying horse and fighting the Chimera. They liked it in medieval Britain, where they would talk about the Knights of the Round Table slaying dragons as they searched for the Holy Grail. The cultural norm where only kids are allowed to read fantasy guilt-free and everybody else has to read James Joyce is a weird blip in the literary record which is already being corrected. Besides, James Joyce makes for a much less interesting source of political metaphors (“The 2016 election was a lot like Finnegan’s Wake: I have no idea what just happened”)
Hoo boy did he walk into that one.
Plebeians have been plebeian forever, granted, although the age of SSC’s examples (Medieval Britain?) is telling: contra the above, the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow literature exists whenever the majority of the population is literate.
But regardless, SSC (for the record, mostly Good) is being fooled by branding. No one compares the “fantasy” elements of Harry Potter to the U.S. political system. The fantasy elements are irrelevant, which is why Hamilton works just as well. Wannabe pundits compare the characters. And it is the characters, their psyches, the ambiguity that persists after two millennia of debate, that has made The Iliad stand the test of time. As clever as Artemis Fowl may be, it’s naive to pretend there’s no difference.
What makes it obvious that Deadpool (rating: R) is a kid’s movie while 2001: A Space Odyssey (rating: G) is not? Turn on the TV and flip through a few kids shows—nothing educational, I’m talking epilepsy triggers. After a couple, you’ll notice a unifying theme: everything is turned up to the max. All the characters are live/laugh/loving, fighting, crying; the soundtrack goes major or minor for every ephemeral mood. The characters have saucer eyes and exaggerated movements, The Emoji Movie being the logical conclusion of the genre, every motivation gets a musical number, these shows are MAXIMALLY EXPRESSIVE, leaving no doubt as to what emotion you are supposed to feel by the microsecond.
Please hear that I mean no disrespect when I say that this is why people with autism like Disney.
Q: Why did it feel good to watch [Disney movies] over and over again, that you kept wanting to? Watch them over and over again? How did that feel to you?
A: It felt comforting.
Q: Comforting.
A: It felt comforting.
Q: Why?
A: Because it would help me with…reducing my autism. (Radiolab)
Nothing wrong with that. Partisan bullshit aside, Harry Potter is great. But it’s important to recognize the limitations. Young adult fiction can have complex characters, worldbuilding, and rules of magic/ethics/rationality as long as the complexity is spelled out for you. “Snape was mean to Harry…but [flashback] that’s because, deep down, he was still in love with Lily…” What such stories will never ask you to do is intuit that Snape had tribulations, they assume that you have no instinct for cognitive empathy, which you don’t, which is why your politics are vapid.
(When fiction deprives you of access to any character’s mind or explanation of events, you feel the opposite of comfort: horror. Saw is not a scary film because it is nothing but explanations; a Kafka story feels “off” even before shit goes down because the world and the characters refuse to show their work.)
Young adult fiction is a stepping stone, good if it helps you get better at understanding people without a Wes Anderson narrator whispering in your ear. Unfortunately, the ability to parrot accepted opinions is often taken for the ability to derive judgments of one’s own. I’m thinking of a homestuck 13 year old who is constantly told that he/she is “so mature” for getting straight A’s and being well-spoken with the dinner guests and not ditching class to smoke brick weed with Devin. Whether or not those behaviors are good, the kid isn’t mature, he or she is well-trained, and if you keep claiming maturity then you are going to stunt development. Sorry: not having an adolescent rebellion means you didn’t complete adolescence. The result is neotenous adults who are not overly sensitive—as conservative media would claim—but rather overly dependent on external rules. Cards Against Humanity is so funny, right? You get to say bad words, but it’s only a game.
“Help, I was a gifted kid and now I’m a normal adult!” Different adjective, same problem. Once Hal Incandenza is typecast as “gifted,” everyone will find it convenient to grade him (praise/no praise) on whether he is living up to his label. How do you look gifted? You can solve P vs. NP……or you can read the dictionary. I’ll bet that every ex-gifted kid who now uses “adulting” as a verb is a fan of those faux-pretentious memes, “mfw she confuses epistemics and ontology,” fitting Wikipedia philosophy into preformed joke structures, lowbrow expressions of highbrow concepts, a few college words to suggest immeasurable depths. You do what you know: exert the minimum necessary effort to convince other people of your intelligence. But you can’t convince yourself.
The consequences are predictable. Imposter syndrome. Scrupulosity. Sexual fetishes suffixed with -play. Gushing compassion ruined by the inability to picture how one appears to the outside world. Neediness. Ill-fitting jeans. Trouble with romance, and not because they don’t know how—deep down they do—but because they cling to a rulebook (“milady”) instead of trusting instinct. They were never allowed to have instincts. For that matter they’ve never really wanted, never felt a desire that wasn’t assigned, which is why: open relationships, switched majors, medicated anxiety, and ambivalence, ambivalence, ambivalence.
I know how heavy lies the burden of wasted potential. So please take this in the gentlest possible way: you were never that great. Greatness is a meaningless thing to apply to a kid, or a college student, or any idea that hasn’t forced it’s way onto paper. The only path is forward. “It’s our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” I think that’s Dumbledore, take it or leave it—there’s a time and a place for young adult fiction.
Footnotes
Slate Star Codex discusses the use of Harry Potter political analogies and their historical context. ↩︎