Recently, while spelunking down some time-wasting cavern of Internet articles, I stumbled across a 2014 article on Slate called “Against YA” by Ruth Graham, a “regular Slate contributor” who lives in New Hampshire. (This is on the article, set aside in a little box along with her photograph. I’m not really sure why. If all my blogs included a little box that said I live in California, it would make sense, because then you’d know you could just dismiss all my weird views as more California crazy-talk. But all “lives in New Hampshire” says to me is “gets way more visits from Presidential primary candidates than I do”.)
Graham argues against the now-trendy idea that it’s okay for adults to read and love young adult novels. “Adults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children,” Graham writes. She goes out of her way to mention that it’s fine for teenagers to read these books, but she finds it shameful for adults to be turning to them instead of to something more painfully literary. I can’t really name names; Graham doesn’t, and I don’t keep up with contemporary literary fiction at all, which probably tells you something about where I fall in this argument, alongside the fact that I write a blog devoted to exegeses of superhero films and perversely sexual animated shows from Japan. There are three subtleties to the previous sentence to keep in mind as signposts marking out the fuzzy boundaries of my feelings on this issue. The first: contemporary literary fiction. The second: exegeses. The third: modern mythological masterpieces and artistic works offering insight into the culture of today’s third-largest economic power. Okay, that’s not what I said, but it highlights what a flip-flopper I am on this issue.
After setting out the problem, Graham spends the first part of her argument talking about how she didn’t cry at The Fault in Our Stars, and even found herself groaning a few times at its sappy dialogue and characters, because she’s an adult. But visceral reactions like that are a matter of taste, and arguing over taste is entirely unproductive, especially when you’re arguing with unsophisticated readers who might not be able to articulate why they like something, but will feel attacked on a personal level if you insult it like this. (Guess how I know this. Yup, there are lots of unsophisticated “readers” in the world of sexually perverse animated shows from Japan.) The more interesting part comes later, when she starts building a logical case for the shame adults should feel reading YA novels, saying that “the enjoyment of reading [YA] has to do with escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia” and that “the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction”. YA fiction is oversimplified, Graham argues. It presents an unreal picture of the world that adults should know to reject as too easy, too childish. Instead they’re embracing the books that present this simplistic worldview, and, Graham fears, ignoring stories where they could find “satisfaction of a more intricate kind in stories that confound and discomfit, and in reading about people with whom they can’t empathize at all.”
The pseudo-literate keyboard poundings which follow are not exactly a rebuttal to Graham, because I don’t entirely disagree with Graham. But I do think her argument takes a lot of fundamental assumptions on faith, and said following pseudo-literate keyboard poundings are my attempt to lay out these fundamental assumptions and explain whether I find them to hold or not, with reasons.
Every text is good, every text is great...
There is no such thing as a text you should feel ashamed of reading.
I have a philosophy. Like all great philosophies, I invented it to justify some decision I’d already made based on gut feeling. I’ve enjoyed fantasy, superheroes, Star Wars, Star Trek, James Bond, Lord of the Rings, and anime since I was young. When I became old enough to grow out of them, I did what lots of people my age did, and chose not to. To justify my decision not to grow out of these things, I adopted the philosophy that every text is good, every text is great, and if a text is wasted, Dr. Johnson gets quite irate. All texts are equal. All texts are worthy of literary analysis. We can learn something from every text. If you find a text that you can’t learn anything from, either you haven’t adopted the right perspective, you aren’t looking hard enough, or you’re letting your feelings cloud your analysis. (I’m using “text” here in the literary criticism sense. A “text” might be something other than words printed on a page. It might be a song, a film, a comic book, a cave painting, a magazine advertisement, a perversely sexual animated show from Japan. In literary criticism, “text” basically means “object of analysis”.)
Sometimes, to learn something from a text, you have to look behind the text. Sometimes you have to look multiple levels behind the text. Star Wars doesn’t teach us much at a textual level, nor does looking behind the text to its author, George Lucas. But if you look multiple levels behind the text to the way it connects to people on an emotional level, and even further behind it to what Star Wars and its popularity say about American culture and society in 1977, you can indeed learn something from it. Luke Skywalker’s plot arc, for instance, is the most American thing ever, even though it takes place a long time ago in a galaxy far far away: a young man who grows up on a farm in the middle of nowhere leaves to fight an evil empire, gains power and privilege due to his special talents, and eventually attains moral superiority over his foes, which allows him to militarily overcome them despite their overwhelming power. What’s more American than that? All it needs is some apple pie and a white picket fence. Star Wars is a real hard-case, too. It’s unusual in its determination to make sure you can’t learn anything from it.
This philosophy isn’t original to me. It’s in line with schools of critical thought made up by real literary critics who know things about literature and weren’t just trying to make themselves feel better about being man-children who won’t grow up and start praising Manchester by the Sea. In modern universities, you’ll find people who make serious study of comic books and science fiction, and probably also YA novels. I’ve read a Master’s thesis on the depiction of evil in the works of Stephen King. I’m sure someone out there has written a dissertation on The Fault in Our Stars, despite the fact that it made Ruth Graham say “Oh brother”. Should these people feel ashamed of themselves? Maybe they should. Personally, I think they should, but not because of comic books or The Fault in Our Stars. They should feel ashamed of themselves because they get paid by a university to sit around and read books and make up elaborate theories about them, instead of doing something useful for society, like prospecting for oil, or selling credit default swaps, or coding up cat picture blogs and fake news delivery systems in an open plan office while guzzling free soda. Seriously, guys, get a real job! (Unless you’re willing to hire me to read books and make up elaborate theories about them with you. Then you guys are great, I love you, you’re the salt of the earth, real paragons of society.)
Because every text, in theory, can teach us something, there’s no reason we should feel ashamed for choosing to learn from one text over another. Labels like “YA” and “literary fiction” are for marketing. They don’t tell us much about what we can learn from a text; they’re designed to tell people whether they’re likely to enjoy this book if they buy it. People also read for aesthetic pleasure, of course, but which texts give you aesthetic pleasure is a matter of taste. There’s nothing stopping us telling someone that their taste is wrong, but it won’t sit right with me to do it unless we’ve got a better reason than “Because it’s not my taste”, which is where arguments of taste usually end up. Later on, I want to try to develop an argument why certain tastes are wrong, but we’ll table that for now and talk about a caveat of another sort to my philosophy.
...But some texts are more equal than others...
So if every text is good, every text is great, then all texts are equal, right? That means it doesn’t matter what we consume. All texts are equal, so all of them are equally good.
That’s what I used to think. But it’s not exactly true. All texts are worthy of study, but some are more worthy than others. Some will reward your close study more than others. The best texts, the worthiest of analysis, are multi-layered. They have a surface story which can be enjoyed as pure entertainment, but a closer look will reveal an interesting substructure of ideas, symbols, influences, and commentary. It doesn’t matter what genre, audience, or time period you look at: some texts have more to teach us than others. This is presumably what separates Ruth Graham’s “very literary novel Submergence”, or the other “adult” writers she mentions such as John Updike, Alice Munro, Charles Dickens, and Edith Wharton, from writers like Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, James Patterson, Dean Koontz, and Danielle Steel, who specialize in airport bookstore potboilers. This latter group of writers writes for adults just as much as Alice Munro and John Updike do, but their books tend to be pure escapism, meant to occupy an adult’s mind while sitting on a plane or on a beach or by a poolside. As such, the stories, characters, and language are straightforward and not particularly multi-layered.
Even among anime, there are some that reward close scrutiny more than others. Shows like Dragon Ball and Yu Yu Hakusho are fun, but there’s nothing below the surface. The characters even tell us their motivations in long monologues during the middle of a fight, just in case we were thinking of trying to figure something out for ourselves. You can try to analyze them, but they’re hard-cases like Star Wars: they bring out all the subtext and parade it in the open, so there’s nothing left to discover. One Piece is similar, but even it plays with its genre in some interesting ways that give it a little more to explore. Card Captor Sakura is a fun series with likable characters, but Madoka rewards close scrutiny more richly. It plays with and subverts its genre just like Card Captor Sakura does, but directly and indirectly touches on bigger, more fascinating ideas, while also having an exciting surface story to enjoy. And I hope I don’t need to explain how Evangelion yields a tenfold return on whatever energy you invest into trying to understand it, only payable after ten viewings. If you’re not seeing it, check out the three-part tear I went on about Eva back in 2012, which was honestly pretty superficial for an analysis of Eva; I wrote it when I was just starting to figure this stuff out, and nowadays it reads like Baby’s First Literary Analysis. (I’ve moved up to I’m a Big Kid Now Literary Analysis by Fisher-Price.) I even got a pretty good harangue out of Ore Imo, which illustrates both sides of my point: Ore Imo was obviously a richer ground for analysis than a lot of other anime I’ve seen, but there’s nothing about it that suggests it would be, so I never would have realized this if not for the principle that every text is good, every text is great.
...And there’s more at stake here than pleasure
If this were all just a matter of taste, if it were all just about what gives people aesthetic pleasure, then I would join the YA fans of the world in dismissing Graham as a stodgy old geezer bent on imposing her ideas of quality on others in a desperate bid to stay relevant. The thought had crossed my mind anyway, as you can probably tell by how easily I came up with the specific obloquy. But she does have a point.
Every text is equal, but some are more equal than others. Some are more complex, more subtle, constructed with more care, woven through with more sophisticated ideas, more provocative commentary, better at putting readers into an unfamiliar place, letting them walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. When I was a kid, the buzzword was that books can use your imagination to take you to faraway places and times, to show you incredible new things, let you have amazing new experiences. It’s true, they can, but they don’t all do it equally well.
Travel is supposed to broaden your horizons, but imagine you go to France, stay at a hotel where everyone speaks English, look at the Eiffel Tower, eat at McDonald’s, and then go back to the hotel in the evening to watch Duck Dynasty. You’re not broadening your horizons. You’re doing the same shit you always do, but in another country. It’s the same with texts. If you always read the same kind of shallow texts, whether those are YA novels or potboilers about spies or perverted Japanese cartoons about cute girls (urgh, that one hit close to home), you’re not letting your imagination transport you to a faraway place or experiencing incredible new things. You’re doing the same shit you always do, but in a different text.
Is that wrong? I wouldn’t go that far. You’re not a bad person for always sticking with the same kind of shallow texts, and always reaping the same kind of shallow harvest. But you’re not the best person you could be. You’re selling yourself short by not trying to grapple with more complex narratives. We all understand the world through narratives. It’s how we reduce the vastness of nine billion people, of a world of 197 million square miles, an observable universe with two trillion galaxies, deserts, mountains, wolves, snow, blue whales, streptococcus, Liberian child soldiers, quasars, plankton, thermal vents, string theory, into something small and personal enough that we can think about it, analyze it, have an opinion on it. The death of one is a tragedy; the death of one million is a statistic. Not because people are all unfeeling monsters, but because our minds lack a way of understanding a narrative on that scale. If someone tells me that one million people were slaughtered in a brutal pogrom, I can’t compass the scale of that destruction, and it ultimately means little to me. But tell me a story about a family who hid in a neighbor’s basement for six weeks, until they were finally dragged out, and the mother cut down in front of her husband and young son, and the horror of that pogrom becomes something I can understand and feel. The narrative gives an emotional context to the mass tragedy. It’s the reason stories like Anne Frank or the work of Elie Wiesel or Art Spiegelman’s Maus are so popular: they build personal narratives of the Holocaust that we can all feel and empathize with. A dry recitation of number of deaths at prison camps has no emotional truth without a narrative, whether it’s one told by those who were there or one we bystanders create out of our imaginations.
For your consideration, here’s another philosophy of mine: I believe that there is an objective reality, but no human is capable of perceiving it. Things happen in this world, independently of whether we know about them. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it does still make a sound. But as soon as we perceive this objective reality, before it even enters our conscious thoughts, our minds start adding things, embellishing it, filtering it through our own biases. It starts without us even realizing it, and we can’t stop it. Even data, like measurements of radio waves emanating from a distant galaxy, start to take on meaning as soon as we perceive them. Are they coming from a new kind of neutron star or an extraterrestrial intelligence trying to reach out? Which one you leap to depends on how you see the world.
As soon as we perceive objective reality, we start to weave a narrative around it, so we can make sense of it the only way we know how. The more sophisticated we are at understanding narratives, the more sophisticated we are at making them. People who can only understand simple narratives in simple terms will weave simple narratives in simple terms around complex realities. Politicians and ideologues take advantage of this. They reduce difficult, multifaceted issues to the narrative complexity of a GI Joe cartoon: Cobra bad, GI Joe good, go Joe! Many religious leaders take advantage of this. Thousands of years of debate on what certain passages of the Bible mean, complex moral issues, subtleties of theology, all get boiled down to the level of a children’s picture book.
Experience grappling with a complex narrative helps weave a narrative sophisticated enough to encompass the realities we experience, but it also helps us know when to reject someone else’s narrative as too simple. What would you think about a book where a fat kid starts drinking Gatorade every day, becomes a musclebound Adonis without ever lifting a single weight, dumps his bullies in the trash, and hooks up with a hot rich girl who falls in love with him at first sight? Ridiculous, right? Nothing works out that easily in real life. So when a commercial tells us that drinking Gatorade will solve all of our problems, we know it’s not true, because nothing works out that easily in real life. We know this narrative is too simple to explain anything in our experience of reality.
Is escapism tantamount to burying our heads in the sand?
A lot of people nowadays will defend dumb, escapist texts like the Fast and the Furious movies, simplistic narratives without a grain of reality in them. They see narratives as entertainment, a pure matter of taste, and you can’t argue with someone’s taste.
As I argued above, narratives like this still have some value, but they’re definitely on the less equal side of “some texts are more equal than others”. They’re more interesting for what they say about the society that spawned them than for what they themselves say. Does that mean it’s wrong to enjoy them? Are people who enjoy these films hobbling their own ability to understand complex narratives, dooming themselves to believe every ideologue’s ranting?
Let’s go back to what Ruth Graham said about YA novels: “[T]he enjoyment of reading [YA] has to do with escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia”. Graham argues that adults should feel ashamed for enjoying escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia instead of finding pleasure in unraveling a complex, ambiguous narrative. This argument assumes that if you seek out those qualities in some of the texts you read, you then only seek out texts with those qualities.
But people can enjoy escapist and nostalgic texts without making those the only kind of text they enjoy. I can eat Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups every once in a while, and experience a moment of instant gratification and nostalgia, and yet still go out and enjoy the subtly layered flavors of a ratatouille, or the freshness of a spinach and mint salad. The problem isn’t that I eat Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, the problem comes when I eat only Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
Graham’s argument also assumes that every such text offers escapism, nostalgia, and instant gratification, and nothing else. But even a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup can be enjoyed from a more adult perspective. As I eat it, I can note how the chocolate has a peculiar graininess to it, unlike the smoothness of more expensive chocolate. The peanut butter has a dry, gritty texture unlike other peanut butters. It’s not exactly good, not by my adult standards, but it’s sweet and it brings back memories of my childhood. It also offers fodder for self-reflection: how much have my tastes changed since I was a child? Have I really gotten more sophisticated, or am I just living on Justin’s peanut butter cups instead of Reese’s? And sometimes, things you enjoyed in your childhood turn out to be more complicated than you expect. I don’t have a good food analogy, but when it comes to books, I read A Wrinkle in Time and its first two sequels again recently, and was amazed at how much deeper and more complex they were than I remembered. Unlike The Chronicles of Narnia and The Hobbit, which stand out in my mind as the other two important works that got me into fantasy and speculative fiction, the Time books directly engage with subtle ideas about morality, growing up, society, and one’s place in the universe, against a backdrop of unique fantasy elements that even start from a soupçon of real science.
So the answer to my rhetorical question from the heading title is, yes, escapism can be tantamount to burying your head in the sand, if you seek out only the lowest common denominator of escapist texts and consciously avoid taking on anything that might challenge you, if you purposefully blind yourself to anything deeper a text might be saying and focus only on its surface elements. And if you fall too deeply into this habit, you might not only stop developing your ability to understand and create complex, layered narratives, you might actually hobble it.
On the other hand, go ahead and eat the occasional peanut butter cup. It’s not going to kill you. You’ll still be able to appreciate that dish of paella.
