Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction

The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity

Robyn McCallum, Jack D. Zipes, Jack D. Zipes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135581299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction examines the representation of selfhood in adolescent and children's fiction, using a Bakhtinian approach to subjectivity, language, and narrative. The ideological frames within which identities are formed are inextricably bound up with ideas about subjectivity, ideas which pervade and underpin adolescent fictions. Although the humanist subject has been systematically interrogated by recent philosophy and criticism, the question which lies at the heart of fiction for young people is not whether a coherent self exists but what kind of self it is and what are the conditions of its coming into being. Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction has a double focus: first, the images of selfhood that the fictions offer their readers, especially the interactions between selfhood, social and cultural forces, ideologies, and other selves; and second, the strategies used to structure narrative and to represent subjectivity and intersubjectivity.

1 INTRODUCTION

The ideological frames within which identities are formed are inextricably bound up with ideas about subjectivity—that sense of a personal identity an individual has of her/his self as distinct from other selves, as occupying a position within society and in relation to other selves, and as being capable of deliberate thought and action. Concepts of personal identity and selfhood are formed in dialogue with society, with language, and with other people, and while this dialogue is ongoing, modern adolescence—that transition stage between childhood and adulthood—is usually thought of as a period during which notions of selfhood undergo rapid and radical transformation. It should come as no surprise, then, that ideas about and representations of subjectivity pervade and underpin adolescent fiction. Conceptions of subjectivity are intrinsic to narratives of personal growth or maturation, to stories about relationships between the self and others, and to explorations of relationships between individuals and the world, society or the past—that is, subjectivity is intrinsic to the major concerns of adolescent fiction. There are two important corollaries to this observation. First, the formation of subjectivity is dialogical, as has been argued by many theorists in the areas of linguistics, philosophy and psychology (such as Bakhtin, Lacan, Vygotsky and Vološinov). There are some significant differences between the positions of these theorists, but a common formulation is that an individual’s consciousness and sense of identity is formed in dialogue with others and with the discourses constituting the society and culture s/he inhabits (see also Smith, 1988 and Levine, 1992). Second, the formation of subjectivity is thus always shaped by social ideologies. My purpose in this book is to examine the representation of dialogic conceptions of subjectivity in adolescent and children’s fiction using a Bakhtinian approach to subjectivity, language and narrative.¹

Mainstream children’s and adolescent fiction has been dominated by premodern conceptions of the individual, the self and the child associated with liberal humanism and romanticism. This orientation, combined with moral assumptions about writing for and about children, perhaps accounts for the reluctance in children’s and adolescent fiction to embrace antihumanist ideologies. Although the humanist subject has been systematically put into question by structuralist, poststructuralist and Marxist literary and critical discourses, the question in adolescent and children’s fiction is not whether the subject exists, but what kind of subject it is and what are the conditions of its coming into being. This question lies at the heart of fiction for young people and it is also fundamental to this study. I am centrally concerned with the images of selfhood that these fictions offer their readers, especially the interactions between selfhood, social and cultural forces, ideologies and other selves.

SUBJECTIVITY, HUMANISM AND CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

It is not within the scope of this book to include a thorough discussion of the theoretical issues surrounding subjectivity—suffice it to say that they are complex and impinge on a range of disciplines, especially philosophy, linguistics, education and sociology. I will touch these issues and areas where they are relevant to my specific concerns with the dialogic representation of subjectivity in children’s and adolescent fiction, though for the most part, I am using a Bakhtinian approach to subjectivity, language and narrative.

Key terms in theories of subjectivity are individual, subject and agent, but because there is a tendency to conflate these terms it is essential to indicate how they are to be used. In Discerning the Subject (1988) Smith makes the following distinctions. The subject is to be understood as a conglomeration of provisional subject positions “into which a person is called momentarily by the discourses and world s/he inhabits” (p. xxxv). A person is not, however, “simply determined or dominated by the ideological pressures of any overarching discourse or ideology, but is also the agent of a certain discernment” (p. xxxiv). Agency, then, refers to “the place from which resistance to the ideological is produced and played out” (p. xxxv). Thus, subjectivity is an individual’s sense of a personal identity as a subject—in the sense of being subject to some measure of external coercion—and as an agent—that is, being capable of conscious and deliberate thought and action. And this identity is formed in dialogue with the social discourses, practices and ideologies constituting the culture which an individual inhabits.

Many critical discussions of subjectivity throughout this century have shown that modern ideas of the self and the individual are relatively recent cultural constructs (Vološinov, 1986, 1987; Smith, 1988; Levine, 1992; Booth, 1993), as are concepts of childhood and adolescence (Aries, 1962; Spacks, 1981; Kessen, 1983; Wartofsky, 1983; Neubauer, 1991). The meanings that are conventionally attached to terms such as self, individual, or child emerged from the political, economic, cultural and moral programs of liberal humanism and romanticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Wartofsky, 1983; Howe, 1992); the modern concept of adolescence is an even more recent cultural invention (Spacks, 1981; Russell, 1988; Neubauer, 1991).

Humanist ideologies appeal to notions of a common core of humanity, or essential humanness (Soper, 1986, p. 12) and insist on the inherent value of individual human beings and the centrality of human experience (Bullock, 1985, p. 155). Underpinning these ideologies are assumptions about the uniqueness of the individual and the idea of selfhood as essential. Thus, poststructuralist theorists such as Althusser, Derrida and Foucault have dismantled humanist ideologies on the basis that they are logocentric. In other words, humanism is a system of thought which relies on an extra-systemic validating presence or center which underwrites and fixes linguistic meaning, but is itself beyond scrutiny or challenge (see Derrida, 1978 and Hawthorn, 1992, p. 94). As poststructuralist theorists have argued, the posited presence that underwrites humanist ideologies is the concept of an essential and universal individual human subject—the point being that this concept is a cultural construct rather than a universal. However, many writers have noted that the idea of an individualized unique and essential self has been systematically undermined virtually since its invention (Howe, 1992; Booth, 1993), particularly within modernist writing (Hutcheon, 1989, p. 108; Gloege, 1992, p. 59). The poststructuralist deconstruction of the humanist self can be understood as an explication of what has always been implicit in the humanist tradition. In admitting the fictionality of the humanist self, contemporary humanists, such as Bullock (1985), Lodge (1990), Howe (1992) and Booth (1993) have stressed the political, social and ethical contexts within which this fiction has been posited and which poststructuralist critiques often ignore. For example, it has premised the social and political agendas of social philosophers like Locke and J.S.Mill, and the American and United Nations Declarations of Human Rights. Thus, the humanist invention of the individual self has also been instrumental in the sociopolitical and ethical constructions of childhood, which for example were an aspect of the child labor reforms of the nineteenth century (Kessen, 1979, p. 266). As Wartofsky (1983) has argued, the cultural construction of the self and of the child “is not simply a matter of reflection in thought, but also of the whole range of practices, interactions and institutions that comprise the social and historical life-world” (1983, p. 190)—of which literature for children and adolescents is an integral part.

A central problem for any theory of subjectivity is how to conceive of the relationship between an individual and society without structuring this relation as an opposition in which one term is privileged over the other. In other words, we need to avoid both essentialist conceptions of the human subject, which ground subjectivity in either consciousness, agency or essential selfhood—as humanism tends to do—and mechanistic social theories of subjectivity, which conceive of the subject as “determined by the social object”—as structuralism and poststructuralism have tended to do (Giddens, 1979, p. 120). As Giddens has argued, the first “takes subjectivity for granted, as an inherent characteristic of human beings,” and hence assumes “that the subjective is not open to any kind of social analysis,” and the second “reduces subjectivity to the determined outcome of social forces” (1979, p. 120). Smith (1988) has also shown that the interrogation of the humanist subject central to Marxist, structuralist and poststructuralist approaches also discounts a theory of agency. Instead, these approaches tend to represent the subject as disempowered by the sociolinguistic structures within which it is passively constructed and to ignore the status of a person as both subject (and hence situated in relation to social practices and discourses) and agent (and hence capable of conscious action and resistance to the social and the ideological). However, it has been claimed by many theorists that Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism overcomes the opposition between individuals and societies, and between humanism, structuralism, Marxism and poststructuralism (Holquist, 1981 and 1983b; Polan, 1983; A.White, 1984; Lodge, 1990, p. 21).²

The cultural construction of the child was coincident with and contingent upon the construction of the humanist self, and there has been a historical complicity between children’s literature and liberal humanism which Rose (1984, p. 8) sees as based on Rousseau’s and Locke’s philosophical conceptions of childhood and of the role of education. As was suggested earlier, mainstream children’s and adolescent fiction has been dominated by liberal humanist conceptions of the individual, the self and the child. However, as Bullock’s history of the humanist tradition (1985) has demonstrated, humanism is not a homogeneous ideology (see also Soper, 1986). In many of the novels discussed in this book, premodernist concepts of the subject, that is, as essential and unique, are questioned, but almost always within the context of a dominant humanist ethic. Thus, the ideological scope of modern forms of humanism emerges through the varied thematic concerns of the novels—with the relations between the self and others, the individual and society, and with the influences of language and social and cultural practices on the formation of consciousness and a sense of personal identity. Many of the novels examined also implicitly inscribe reading positions which interrogate the universalist and essentialist implications of humanism.

Representations of subjectivity in fiction are always based on ideological assumptions about relations between individuals, and between individuals, societies and the world. The preoccupation with personal maturation in adolescent fiction is commonly articulated in conjunction with a perceived need for children to overcome solipsism and develop intersubjective concepts of personal identity within this world and in relation to others. Solipsism is the inability to distinguish between one’s own self and the otherness of the world and of other people. It takes two main forms: a person may be unable to perceive an other as another self, and hence denies that other a subject position independent of his/her self—the solipsistic child’s attachment to the primary caregiver, for example; or a person may be unable to perceive her/his own selfhood as independent of the world, and to construct a sense of her/his self as an agent. In the first instance, it is a viewpoint which denies an other agency; in the second, it is the inability of a person to construct a sense of self as agent. There has been a common tendency in contemporary adolescent fiction to represent the move out of solipsism as one which conceives of the selfhood of an individual as essential, presocial and prelinguistic. However, this move is also represented as one which situates that individual within dominant social and ideological paradigms, a prestructured social order within which s/he is ultimately represented as disempowered and passive. Underlying these representations is an opposition between the individual and society, which also logocentrically opposes subjectivity and agency. Adolescent fiction, and many of the discussions which surround it, typically assume and valorize humanistic concepts of individual agency, that is the capacity to act independently of social restraint. However, the image of empowered individuals capable of acting independently in the world and of making choices about their lives offers young readers a worldview which for many is simply idealistic and unattainable. The question, then, is how to strike a balance between these two ideologies of identity.

Most of the texts discussed in this book are adolescent novels, though a few are children’s novels, such as Antar and the Eagles (Mayne, 1989), Finders, Losers (Mark, 1990) and Charlotte Sometimes (Farmer, 1969/1992).³ The criterion for selecting novels to discuss is twofold, and it is largely determined by my interests in the work of Bakhtin, Vološinov and Lacan on the novel and subjectivity and in adolescent fiction. While Bakhtinian and Lacanian theories are relevant to a wide range of fiction, they have a particular pertinence to adolescent fiction. The main focus is on novels which represent subjectivity as being dialogically constructed through interrelationships with others, through language, and/or in a relation to social and cultural forces and ideologies. My second interest is in novels which use overtly “dialogical” narrative strategies to structure the narrative and to represent subjectivity and intersubjectivity.⁴ The corpus of texts examined evinces a range of genres and narrative techniques, but special reference is made to polyphonic, multistranded, intertextual and mixed genre narrative forms and historical genres. Most of the novels I am concerned with are complex and sophisticated in their narrative techniques and thematic concerns, and many of them express or reflect highly complex philosophical and psychological ideas. A typical criticism of some of these novels is that they are “too difficult” for children or adolescents, and not really “children’s books”—for example Red Shift (Garner, 1973)—and this is a comment that might be leveled at many of the texts that I discuss. The charge of difficulty is often accompanied by calls for “relevance” and equal access to education. The problem is that this concern is often taken to mean that “all books should be relevant and accessible to all children.” Thus, the idea that a book is too difficult for some children comes to mean that it is too difficult for all children, and is more indicative of the assumptions of its adult readers about children and about complex ideas. As Hunt (1991) has observed, “it may be correct to assume that child-readers will not bring to the text a complete or sophisticated system of codes, but is this any reason to deny them access to texts with a potential of rich codes?” (p. 101). Furthermore, many of the novels I discuss do set out to teach readers the kinds of interpretative strategies needed to deal with more complex forms of writing—for example Finders, Losers (Mark, 1990) or Backtrack (Hunt, 1986).

The texts examined are implicated in a range of complex and subtle issues which narratively work upon readers, but which I would not expect the intended readers to be able to articulate at the level of implication. Discussion will center on the representations of subjectivity and the potential significances that texts may offer, rather than the meanings that an intended (actual) audience may or may not directly perceive or comprehend, though these representations will of course impact on readers’ interpretations and reading strategies. This interest has two main focuses: the conceptions of subjectivity that are either implicit in or explicitly constructed by texts; and the positioning of implied readers (as distinct from actual readers) as subjects within texts. First, insofar as childhood and adolescence are typically seen as transitional stages leading (ideally) from a solipsistic childhood to an intersubjective adulthood, narrative representations of maturation are inscribed with ideological assumptions about the nature and possibilities of subjectivity. Thus, even children’s or adolescent novels which are not overtly about subjectivity but which are about personal, social or intellectual growth, maturation, and understanding, entail more or less implicit concepts of selfhood, identity and agency. Second, the genre of children’s and adolescent fiction is a particular kind of discursive practice which is culturally situated and which constructs an implied audience position inscribed with the values and assumptions of the culture in which it is produced and received. Implicit here is a distinction between an actual reader and an implied reader. An implied reader designates a subject position inscribed in and by the discourse of a text as a specific conceptual and ideological position (see Stephens, 1992a, pp. 54–59). Implied reader positions may influence the positions that actual readers adopt in relation to a text and the kinds of meanings that readers infer, but they do not determine either of these aspects. Insofar as childhood, adolescence and adulthood are culturally constructed categories, the relations between which are primarily determined by processes of education, enculturation and maturation, then the implicit audience positions inscribed in literature for children and adolescents will be informed by wider cultural assumptions about what constitutes these cultural categories and the processes involved in moving between them.

BAKHTINIAN CONCEPTS

Bakhtin and Vološinov occupy a central place in my theoretical approach, and to a lesser extent, I also use theoretical approaches adapted from the work of Lacan, Vygotsky and Althusser, as well as concepts derived from more recent narrative theory and critical approaches to subjectivity. One advantage of using a Bakhtinian approach to the study of the representation of subjectivity in narrative is that many of Bakhtin’s and Vološinov’s ideas about subjectivity are formulated in the context of their study of language and narrative. My intention, however, is not to impose these theories on texts, but rather to examine conceptions of subjectivity implicit in texts in the light of the insights offered by the theories.

Over the last ten to fifteen years, the rediscovered work of Bakhtin and Vološinov has had a profound influence on theories of subjectivity, language, culture and narrative, but so far has had a limited impact on the criticism of children’s literature. A notable exception to this is the work of Maria Nikolajeva (1988; 1989; 1996). Nikolajeva first introduced Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope to the study of children’s literature in her study of fantasy, The Magic Code (1988), and her recent book, Children’s Literature Comes of Age (1996), has extended the application of Bakhtinian ideas, such as polyphony and the chronotope, to children’s literature.⁵

Bakhtin was a major proponent of the dialogic construction of subjectivity and of the novel as a dialogic form, and his theories of subjectivity, language and narrative have a significant contribution to make to the study ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Children’s Literature and Culture
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• General Editor's Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Original Half Title page
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Representing Intersubjectivity Polyphonic Narrative Techniques
• 3 Dialogism and Subjectivity Doubles and the Quest for Self
• 4 Alienation and Transgression as Functions of the Social Construction of Subjectivity
• 5 Subjectivity, Cognition and Certainty
• 6 Subjectivity and History
• 7 The Textual and Discursive Construction of Subjectivity I Extraliterary Genres
• 8 The Textual and Discursive Construction of Subjectivity II Historiographic Genres
• 9 Conclusion
• Glossary
• References
• Index