[This short essay comments on this article by Rita Koganzon in The Point mag: https://thepointmag.com/criticism/the-age-of-adolescence/, on Judy Blume and the development of a particular fiction aimed at teenagers. It uses the concepts of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism.]
In Frye’s language, the article is expounding on the shift from young adult fiction written in the low mimetic mode, largely comic in structure, like Little Women and Anne of Green Gables, to the ironic mode.
Frye says the defining themes of low mimetic work are “genesis and work” — fitting for the coming-of-age stories that compose the YA field. In a comic structure, the resolution of the novels is a successful genesis of the character’s adulthood. They mature by taking on sacrificial work. They assume responsibility.
Koganzon’s article marks the novels of Judy Blume as a shift into a more “realistic” literature. Koganzon notes that realism, for the Blumite, means gloomy and controversial.
I noted here that, exactly like Frye, Koganzon uses scare quotes around “realistic.” The reason being, of course, that the low mimetic authors were not somehow less realistic — the plots and characters of those novels went to school, formed relationships, had falling-outs, etc. “Realistic” is used to indicate harsh truths, and in its deepest expression, a near gnostic dogwhistle about what parents hide from their children. Blume’s books can awaken the child to reality.
The YA genre took “realism,” as it were, to the extreme:
One of the most popular YA books of 1997, Melvin Burgess’s Smack, for example, told the story of an abused boy of alcoholic parents and his girlfriend who run away, becomes homeless squatters, develop heroin addictions, watch their friends die, get arrested and get pregnant, at which point the girlfriend finally leaves the boy to his demons. Or consider the New York Times best-selling, frequently banned books by Ellen Hopkins. Each, starting with Crank, a 2004 novel about adolescent methamphetamine addiction, is written in free verse and centers on a particular social pathology: child abuse (Burned), suicide (Impulse), teen prostitution (Tricks).
This little passage actually shocked me — my middle and high school libraries were constantly displaying those Hopkins novels. I never picked them up, as I was, thankfully, exclusively interested in the last vestiges of romance (sci-fi and fantasy).
For Frye, “realism” is not an accurate classification. Realism is the intensification of low mimesis, a supposed attempt to portray life exactly as it is, while still remaining literature. If low mimesis is defined by characters that a reader will identify as having about the same amount of power or agency as himself, intensifying low mimesis only ends in the ironic mode. If we’re not going up, then, we can only go down.
These so-called realistic YA fictions have characters with distinctively less power or agency than the reader. And this is the natural result of a progression in modes, something centripetal to literature itself. It emerges from formal development, not necessarily psychosocial externalities.
The author does briefly posit a generational sentiment behind the shift. Perhaps the general feeling among the youth that great forces beyond their control buffet them about leads to exploding popularity of “misery porn.”
A question for future study: Is the causal arrow in the other direction? Did the mirror presented to the youth really distort their image and incept them into low agency?