A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
My serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana, entered a major new phase this week with the beginning of Part Two, released in both text and audio formats: “Hollow Well.” A long novel needs its changes of pace, tone, setting, mood, even theme. A long novel is a city with mirror-fronted high rises camouflaged against the sky and tenements sinking back below the concrete, with planned and immaculately swept grids and boutique’d boulevards, on the one hand, and trash-strewn warrens of bar and brothel on the other—a city big enough for divergent weather systems to drop showers on one neighborhood and sunshine on another and then, in convergence, to produce cyclones, floods, catastrophes. With the first three chapters of Part Two, Major Arcana returns to the matrix of American literature itself with a nightmarish delirium of New England Gothic before setting off for a major American metropolis to chart a late-20th-century career in comics. Please subscribe today!
For this week’s essay, I take the occasion of a recent article on YA fiction to provide an autobiography of my own early reading life and to ask what young people should be reading. My answer is guaranteed to offend. Please enjoy!
The Fascination of What’s Difficult: YA Fiction, Literary Form, and the End of Bildung
The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,
Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being...
—Wallace Stevens, “The Motive for Metaphor”
I didn’t read children’s books when I was a child, not after the first. The first book I remember reading on my own—the book with which I somehow managed, almost all at once after months of struggle, to crack the code, to begin to match the marks on the page with both the sounds and the significances in my head—was The Little Golden Book of The Christmas Story.
I have a very distinct, almost sensory memory, of struggling inwardly with the phrase “swaddling clothes.” The accompanying illustration of the divine infant wrapped in a sheet seemed to me to show not what I in my OshKoshes understood by “clothes” but rather the less formal “cloths,” though this was obviously some kind of verbal kin to “clothes.” Wouldn’t “cloths” better emphasize the poverty of the scenario?
In other words—how wonderful it is that there are always other words—I discovered how to read at the exact same time as I discovered the plural and ambiguous nature of language, even the very possibility not only of reading but of writing. These, in fact, comprised one discovery. I didn’t know “swaddling clothes” was an established phrase. Waging an inadvertent early skirmish—if not a total war—against cliché, I definitely would have gone with “cloths.”
After this simultaneous arrival of baby Jesus to the black iron prison and of baby John to the paradise of literacy—I would have been about four years old—I pretty much only read superhero comics, DC for preference. I couldn’t have articulated it then, but I found Marvel too mundane. Marvel’s celebrated motto, “the world outside your window,” seemed to my growing brain to defeat the purpose of reading, to evade “the motive for metaphor.” If I want to see the world outside my window, I’ll just open my window. If I’m going to read a comic book, I want cities that cannot exist on earth because they are literary genres unto themselves (utopian Metropolis, dystopian Gotham: Art Deco at two different times of day) and characters struggling not with how to pay the rent or with ambient social prejudice but with impossible self-imposed moral codes and inconsolable life-long griefs.1
Then, when I was about six or seven, I read that unholy trinity of adult Batman graphic novels: Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke, and Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum. That was it for me. Some people come to the arts late, after they’ve been lawyers or surgeons or something, but I determined very early on that I would, first, understand what remained obscure to me in those gruesomely intricate books, and, second, learn how to create such authoritative waking dreams and nightmares myself.
I tried once or twice to read some of what they call “middle-grade books” by Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary—Fudge-A-Rama, Dear Mr. Henshaw, etc.—but got nowhere. My response, to put it in more adult vernacular, was something on the order of, “What is this shit?” After Grant Morrison’s cross-dressing Joker and Frank Miller’s mercenary Superman, after visions that showed me what a very rich and strange place this world could be, I just could not get interested in books that showed little kids (just like meeeee!) dealing with homework, bullies, and divorce (just like meeeee!). Please. The goal was to become more and better than oneself, on some other, more lively planet. Even then, though I couldn’t have put it this way at the time, the goal was major arcana.
From comic books I moved to adult science fiction—including a memorable run-in at about age 11 with Philip José Farmer’s pornographic phantasmagoria A Feast Unknown—and to further adult comics (Watchmen, Sandman).2 Guided by the allusions in these, I leapt to Shakespeare, the Romantic poets, and the modern and postmodern novelists.
I’m not telling you this because I think I’m exceptional; I’m telling you this because I think I’m not. I think, rather, that organized civilization—to include its reactionaries and its radicals—have an interest in preventing for the purpose of instrumentalizing, and therefore necessarily of arresting, human development. My own parents’ laissez-faire attitude ironically accomplished much more for my bildung.
As for school, I don’t remember what kind of fiction they gave us to read until I reached about the seventh grade, when they finally started handing out a little of the real thing: Poe, Dickinson, Bradbury, Steinbeck.3 In a documentary I used to show students as a prelude to Sula, Toni Morrison Remembers, Morrison says that when she was a girl, there was no YA, that once you were done with the picture books, you had to go straight to Tolstoy and Faulkner on the next shelf up. She, too, seems to have read only adult books pretty much as soon as she could read. This seems reasonable to me.
I have almost never read a YA novel, and I’m not even perfectly sure why anyone would—not when you could read the Arkham psychiatrist’s monologue arguing that the Joker’s polyphonic and polygendered persona models the ideal subject of 21st-century urban society and then follow the thought out to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”4
Luckily for me, then, in a recent essay in The Point, the better-informed Rita Koganzon traces the development of young adult literature and contests the stellar reputation of Judy Blume. Adolescent literature before Blume, argues Koganzon, depicted development with a definite ethical telos; by contrast, Blume’s celebrated honesty and avoidance of didacticism strands the budding reader in the moral chaos that has led to the contemporary middle class’s permanent adolescence: unmarried, childless, and still reading children’s books.
As with many other YA novels, Blume’s books transformed the facts of life from peripheral eventualities into the defining social dramas of adolescence. Blume’s aversion to “moralizing” on the grounds that children’s self-destructive or cruel behavior is intractable and “you can only make them aware” reduced coming of age to a sequence of mechanistic facts, a series of social and familial “issues” to be “confronted” and bodily changes to be passively experienced on the inexorable path to reaching the legal age of majority. This is particularly true of her rendering of girlhood, which has been her most influential legacy. Coming of age is not a moral or intellectual transformation, but something that simply befalls you.
Compare this view of coming of age to the view promulgated by the kinds of “moralistic” girls’ books, like Anne of Green Gables and Little Women, that YA set itself against. They took growing up to be a process of character formation—which depended on the protagonists’ choices, efforts and how they fared in their endeavors—rather than a series of encounters with uncontrollable bodily and social phenomena. Anne of Green Gables is the formation of the impetuous, irreligious and vain Anne into a capable, self-controlled, accomplished and lovable woman. Jo March’s arc in Little Women is similar. Both characters must fit their desires into a demanding world, and both are asked to sacrifice some of them—Anne gives up her secondary education to stay home and help her adoptive parents, Jo cuts off her prized hair to pay her mother’s visit to her father and puts her writing ambitions on hold to nurse her sister. These stories are about what characters do to become adults, not what befalls them. In these older, “moralistic” books, girls become women.
This essay seems to point toward a welcome resuscitation of didactic fiction for young people. From my own vantage, though, I think this evades the question not of what the content of adolescent reading should be rather of its form. Do adolescents need to read simplified narratives in simplified language directly reflecting their real-life struggles toward adulthood? Must we return to Victorian realism?
Speaking of Victorian realism and its adversaries, we could understand the growth of YA as simply carrying literary modernism into young people’s books. It is the adolescent echo of the transition from Jane Eyre and David Copperfield to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and To the Lighthouse, from an explicitly moralizing bildungsroman aiming at both the hero’s and reader’s integration into bourgeois society to a much more ambiguous and private development of the outcast and exilic artist. The aforementioned adult superhero comics of the 1980s carried this sense of modernist form into popular entertainment—this was the explicit goal of at least Moore and Morrison, if not of Miller.5
YA’s absence of significant form, however, works against the inherent utopianism of the modernist project. The reader of the modernist bildungsroman undergoes a greater bildung than does the protagonist just through learning to read the book. This difficult act of reading doubles as strenuous acculturation to the sophisticated utopias Joyce and Woolf keep in view as against bourgeois society. Because YA, with its programmatically simplified style, cannot by definition develop the readerly mind in this way, it extends to a child audience the destructive part of modernism without modernism’s concomitant affirmation.
Nowadays, given its manipulation by provincial progressives with their meretricious “banned books week,”6 YA fiction is just another weapon in the war to obliterate bourgeois civilization and replace it not with the finer and more decent society implied by the pleasurable rigor of modernist form but only with rule by soulless expert and machine empire.
The difficult act of reading—what I experienced that first time I ever read a sentence on my own, hesitating in the manger between “clothes” and “cloths”; what I experienced soon after in the asylum, trying to parse the Freudian and Jungian symbolism of Arkham Asylum at age seven—is what enchanted me from the first, what made me at one and the same time, and well before adolescence, both a writer and a reader.7
Yeats rued “the fascination of what’s difficult” for sapping his native and naïve strength—and I rue it, too, for just the same reason. But these, like lower back pain or a growing intolerance of loud music, are old men’s complaints. The young need what’s difficult before they need anything else—if anything is to fascinate them at all.
Even now, I sympathize in my head with those who complain about the lack of class struggle in contemporary fiction, but I nevertheless believe in my heart that the fight for survival isn’t very literarily interesting—that literary interest begins when a character is already free and has to decide what to do with that freedom. A nerd-culture aphorism says that DC Comics are about gods trying to be human, while Marvel Comics are about humans trying to be gods. The former holds more interest because we humans are world-making creatures trying to decide what we should do with these powers—we are gods already, trying to know what it would mean to be human.
My great aunt and great uncle, then in their 70s, saw me reading this pornographic novel (admittedly, I was reading it at the kitchen table). “Boy, when I was your age,” my great uncle said, “you had to read that kind of book under the covers!” My great aunt agreed. They were Catholics of the working class, but, still, their tone was bemused rather than outraged. Neither bothered to pretend there was ever a time when one simply wouldn’t read such a thing, even a child, it was only a question of public or private. Now in my 40s, I grasp the possible superiority of private rather than public per- and subversions—this is connected to what friend-of-the-blog Blake Smith is developing after Barthes as a theory of “second liberalism”—but I also appreciated and still appreciate those now dearly departed old folks’ lack of moralism and self-righteousness.
One memory of school reading. In the sixth grade we each had to read a Newberry Award-winner and then write a book report. The kid sitting next to me in class said, “My book’s about sheep and a boy named Miguel. What’s yours about?” I told him, truthfully, that mine was about llamas and a boy named Cusi. In other words, little lessons in liberalism—the kids in faraway lands are (say it with me now) just like meeeee!—even in books written during the supposedly dark and fascist decade of the 1950s. Over this simplistic pabulum, even now I will take Batman bloodily giving himself photorealist stigmata after being mock-psychoanalyzed by the Joker, this in a graphic novel where a killer cuts off a little girl’s head and puts it in a doll house, where Jung and Crowley have walk-on parts. In defense of my Catholic education, however, I will say they taught me English grammar with a rigor that would serve me well later on, especially when I got to public high school. The public high school English teachers always complained that the only students who could write a grammatical sentence came from Catholic K-8 backgrounds.
As my précis of Arkham Asylum indicates, neither today’s left nor today’s right would be pleased with young people—or even adults—reading this book. The ostensible villain is a gender-noncomformist? “Transphobia!” cries the left. “Grooming!” cries the right. (That the ostensible villain is nevertheless the novel’s prophet compounds the offense in different ways for both sides, though I do have an asymmetrical faith that a left-lib, if not too Tumblr-addled, could find his-her-their way to appreciation.) As for the book’s overall magic-mushroom hallucination of atmosphere and vicious violence of event, the left will construe it as “traumatic” for young readers (in their new scientism, they might restrict it to readers under age 25, when, to cite this infantilized left’s new favorite ideologeme, the brain is supposedly finished developing), while the right will take it as an affront to the putative innocence of childhood, if they won’t simply condemn it as Entartete Kunst inappropriate for any solid citizen. I suspect, by contrast, that you have to be very young to appreciate Arkham Asylum; educated adult readers coming to it for the first time will encounter nothing they haven’t seen before somewhere else.
It proved to be an anomalous moment when comic-book companies, consolidating into the same conglomerates with book publishers that were themselves still more concerned with serious literature than they would later be, found themselves willing to try anything. They still publish nominally adult graphic novels—a recent one controversially showed Batman’s penis—but nothing of comparable literary-artistic ambition or erudition. Perhaps relatedly, and then again perhaps not, the most celebrated DC Comics writer of the 1980s was a radical put under surveillance by MI6 for his subversive political polemics; the most celebrated DC Comics writer of today is a former CIA officer.
They construe a book to be “banned” if any school board anywhere has challenged it. This allows them to present their largely hegemonic worldview as besieged and to promote the propaganda of the state and the corporation as dangerous contraband, alongside, admittedly, a few actually good books (e.g., Beloved) that our aforementioned provincial conservatives, timorous and moralistic philistines to be sure, also don’t want anyone to read. In a democracy, however, one has to put up with moralistic, philistine school boards. They can be escaped, but a world-swallowing progressive mega-state cannot. If your local school board hasn’t taken it out of the library, read Brave New World to see why. By the way, given the present state of communications technology, who cares what’s in the middle-school library? Even when I was in middle school, I had a card to the real library and read whatever I wanted for free. Now one carries every library on earth in one’s pocket, for however long the signal lasts. They’re purging books on paper from all libraries, the school ones and the real ones, anyway, so, since I assume the signal will eventually go out, a better use of our time than the culture war might be the Bradburyesque expedient of memorizing one or more masterpieces.
I concede it was a difficulty I felt I could master; this was its irresistible charm. Numbers, then and now, were by contrast a difficulty that seemed to exclude me entirely. Numbers were difficult but also possessed no human content, so I never bothered to learn to manipulate them. I’m still basically innumerate. Some reaction against words on some similar principle may be operating in the world’s intelligent non-readers. I will leave the implications for those who believe more strongly than I do in innate ability. It’s true I have no “gift” for math, but I also just genuinely have never cared about it either, not even later—maybe by then it was too late—when they finally got around to explaining why the calculus was devised in the first place and told us about Plato and Pythagoras and other mathematical mystagogues. Not every mystery is meant for every seeker, I suppose.
I’m with you about math! My own encounter with YA was quite different- I read a great deal of it when I was the appropriate age and then grew out of jt (indeed, found it virtually unreadable as early as my teens) On the “second liberalism” I *think* I’m with you and Smith (whom I admire very much as a writer of such subtlety that I often can’t tell if he’s with me or against me!) although I have issues with the position I think I perceive (and very possibly misread) underneath that masterful subtlety- that we should all just learn to be normal men and women in the daylight and save our complications and deviances for the bedroom and the nightwoods. Finally- I’ll disagree about Arkham Asylum- I’m sure it’s lost some of its charm with age and education, but I mostly find it and Morrison’s other work of the period still exhilarating, unlike oddly enough The Killing Joke, which while still a formal triumph I found almost entirely deflated by its vaunted place in comics history and lore.