"Pearl-clutching"?: or, Some random and probably self-contradictory thoughts...

[avevale_intelligencer]

...on this article, and various reactions to it.

One possible definition of civilisation, used by Brian Aldiss in his The Dark Light Years (which I haven't read for a long time because I didn't like it much) is the amount of distance people manage to put between themselves and their own shit. For "shit," in this case, read "uncomfortable realities." I don't think much of this definition myself, but like anyone who grew up in Britain in the post-Victorian century, I am to some extent and in my own way a product of an attempt to put it into practice.

There is a lot more information about uncomfortable realities around these days than there was when I were a nipper, and some of it is even accurate. Accurate information is good, as long as one knows how to detect it, and how to deal with it when one's got it.

Kids, on the whole, look for limits. It's an important part of exploring their world. They want to know which walls they can break through, or tunnel under, or hop over when they've grown a bit, and also which ones they can lean on, build on, bounce off if they're going too fast. It's important, I think, that there are both kinds. To be told that there are no limits does not help them to build a coherent picture of the world, and in any case is not true. On the other hand, parents should only set limits that they can realistically keep, or their credibility will be destroyed.

If there is no information readily available to children on things that seem forbidden and therefore attractive, they will find whatever sources they can, whether they are accurate or not. If internet access is restricted in your house, you will (unless you're a pantywaist like I was) go to a friend's house, or a friend's friend's older brother's house, and look for whatever it was you couldn't find at home. The days when children could be kept under total control are gone; that ship has already encountered its iceberg.

I don't actually know where I'm going with this, if anywhere. I understand the anger that's been voiced in response to this article, which I think is ill-conceived, but on the other hand I don't know how I would have turned out if the deluge of information available to kids these days had been around when I was young and impressionable. It certainly doesn't sound, from the quotes and such mentioned, as if self-harm and other such things are being "promoted" or made to sound desirable, though that might not put off a sufficiently determined adolescent. I suppose one of the things I'm groping towards is that if it's easier for children these days to find information that helps them to discover who they are, even if that isn't who their parents think they are, that's a good thing; conversely, if it's harder for them to navigate through an increasingly confusing world where there seem to be fewer limits of any kind, it's all the more credit to them, and to their parents, when they do make it through safely.

As for the gender-specific lists, hm. I wonder how many of those books would have been deemed acceptable for any child back in 1963, when even "the odd" expletive was anathema? I can't imagine the teachers of my day being overly thrilled to discover one of their charges reading "Angelmonster," or even "True Grit." Perhaps Ms Gurdon isn't aware of how much "coarseness" and "misery" had already found its way into kids' lives when her own moral standards were set.

Please be aware when commenting that none of this is any more than one exceptionally uninformed old idiot's opinion.

Comments

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Um, the last thing I wanted to read about was myself. I wanted to read about people entirely unlike me; hence sf, and Biggles, and Superman, and so on.

Also, the only versions of Grimm and Andersen I encountered when young were heavily watered down, and while I haven't actually read Anne of Green Gables, isn't it true that the reason she's shown as doing those things is so that the dire consequences can be pointed out as a lesson to the reader?

I'm not disputing your main point, and I'd be the last to suggest that teenagers are or should be innocent or that the morality of the nineteen-fifties will still serve us today. But I think in some ways reality *is* darker today.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I still haven't found a translation of either Grimm or Anderson (and my German and Danish aren't up to reading the originals) which isn't watered-down. But via Tolkien I gathered that the tales weren't actually intended for children anyway, originally mainly adults read them until society got the idea that "fairy tales" were only suitable for kids (like worn-out furniture banished to the nursery).

I agree that I don't want the people in books to be too much like me -- someone exactly like me would be dead boring*! At the very least I want them to do things that I don't, that's the point of escapism. (I'm an escapist, and, erm, my name is Chris. Hello Chris!) So yes, Biggles, and Rex, and Chris Godfrey, and John, and Peter, and so on. Some of those were around my age, so it was sort of "there, but for the vagaries of fate, could go I", but some weren't and some lived in clearly a different universe (the Walkers I could believe lived in mine, I wasn't sure about the Pevensies although for some time I tried to get into Narnia, but people like Batman (and indeed pretty much anyone living in America) were clearly not on the same planet).

* I remember when, as teenagers, we found my mother'd diaries which she wrote as a teenager. You'd think that living though the war would make an interesting diary, yes? Nope, they were full of "Didn't see Tom today, walked home with David". The only mention of the war, in something like 5 years of diaries, was the bald statement on one page that said "Liberated Paris!" All by herself, one imagines, having no idea from the diary why Paris might have needed liberating. I gather that she did actually enjoy her life at that time, but to outside people it wasn't what we want to read. And mine at the time was no more interesting...

[erisiansaint]

Ah, but you do want to be able to identify with the characters, don't you? If you're trying to get into Narnia, something must have resonated with you, and it was something you wanted to emulate. (For the record, I /still/ want to be a mutant, thanks to the X-Men, and I used to sit in my closet for hours, trying to get into Narnia.)

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Yes, but that's the point, they were enough like me[1] ("there but for the whims of fate would have gone I") that it could resonate, but they weren't the same as me because they had all those adventures and I didn't. No one would want to make my life into a film, let alone a trilogy or series.

Yes, I still have dreams of discovering that I have mutant powers, or that an alien princess is going to land her damaged spaceship where I can mend it for her and she'll take me with her (and incidentally put me into a medical box so that I become tall and slim and young) and that sort of thing. But I don't believe them. Perhaps that's why such things won't actually happen to me, I'm told you have to believe really really hard (and then they put you in a nice padded room *g*).

[1] Although "like me" is a pretty loose matching algorithm, really, since some of them were female and I'm not, and some were adults or aliens and I wasn't them either. Heck, I "resonated with" Hal Clement's centipede-type people on a 600g planet, and with his detective who breathed liquid sulphur!

[erisiansaint]

Maybe this is why I never really liked the V.C. Andrews stuff that was popular when I was in high school: not enough resonation.

I don't think most people really believe that these things will happen to them, any more than people who read murder mysteries or like slasher films think they'll be in the middle of one. But the main characters have to have /something/ one can identify with, in order to like them. Nor does it mean that most people who read dark things will do dark things. Which was, I think, part of my original point. (At this point, I can't remember which points I was making!)

[erisiansaint]

See, my copies of Grimm's and Andersen were NOT watered down, my mom bought them from the Sci-Fi book club.

But reality's been pretty dark for a long time. I was a teenager in the Eighties, and what was popular when I was in high school was V.C. Andrews. And what I was made to read in high school wasn't Grimm's or L.M. Montgomery, those were for /children/. (Although, yes, the point of a great deal of that were for consequences. And Anne mostly didn't have dire ones. She had to be grateful to someone she didn't like, she didn't get to talk to her friend for a while, and she had to have her hair cut off. Not very dire.)

These are teenagers. When I was a teenager, in school, I had to read the 'classics'. All of my first semester of American Lit seemed to be about adultery, and for World Lit, I can tell you, Thomas Hardy and Aldous Huxley aren't exactly light-hearted. Or the Brontes.

Although, your point about wanting to read about people entirely unlike you does explain the current YA trend of people dealing with the supernatural. Vampires are popular, and werewolves, and witchcraft. But by the same token, these things have been popular for a long time. Which is why I think that article is crap. Any teenager who reads a book and then tries to reenact it has bigger problems than that they read dark literature, and blaming teenage behavior on the books they read is like saying that J.D. Salinger is responsible for any murderer who ever fixated on that godawful "Catcher in the Rye."

(I do apologize if I'm terribly abrasive about this, it's just that I /resent/ the implications that teenagers should dumb down their reading levels to make adults more comfortable.)