Yet Another Article About How Ruth Graham is Wrong
Ruth Graham’s editorial over on Slate has been much discussed and dressed down by such wonderful writers as Mark Shrayber at Jezebel and Lauren Davis at io9, both who had excellent takes on The Fault in Graham’s Thinking (Ba-dish!), but the editorial so irked me both as a reader and a writer that I thought I would share some of my own ideas about why Graham is wrong.
Young Adult fiction is treated like a genre by publishers, critics and readers alike. As pointed out in Davis’ piece; YA in another medium would be more akin to a rating or suggested audience, which is what it should more or less represent in our books, but instead has morphed into a category of fiction which encompasses a certain set of loosely defined features. Almost all YA is primarily about Young Adults or Teenagers; most YA focuses on the relationships their young protagonist has with other people and their own personal, inner struggles and emotions, even as they deal with external pressures. Within of this flimsy grouping of broad tropes rests everything from Romance and “Realistic Fiction”, to Science Fiction and Fantasy, to Horror and Dystopian Fiction. You name a kind of story and someone has written a YA novel about it.
The reason for this is that YA is hot right now! Thanks to books like Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games and more which show the diversity and imagination (if not always quality) of fiction written for young adults. So publishers are putting out anything that they can justify marketing to teenagers as YA. YA for all intents and purposes, is a marketing buzzword, it’s legitimacy as a genre is suspect to me, the legitimacy of the works described as YA are not. To dismiss a book based on who is it marketed too rather than the quality of its story is shallow elitism and smacks of literally judging the book by its cover. YA as a term is problematic only for the way it encourages people like Ruth Graham to split hairs between what is a legitimate literary pursuit, and what is not. That isn’t to say that Graham doesn’t have an idea of the substance that makes literary fiction legitimate and what doesn’t, she does, and she’s wrong again.
Apparently Graham has never heard of Aristotle’s Poetics, or if she has, she doesn’t think much of the philosopher’s feelings on Catharsis; “The purging and purification of emotions that the audience experiences after partaking in a work of art”, traditionally after viewing a Tragedy, though I think many a modern audience as experienced it in everything from Romance and Comedy to Fantasy and Science Fiction, both on page and screen. When the audience undergoes Catharsis, the sensation should be a sense of completeness, of well-being, of satisfaction.
Satisfaction is exactly the kind of thing Graham considers any reasonable grown-up to be above:
“Most importantly, these books consistently indulge in the kind of endings that teenagers want to see, but which adult readers ought to reject as far too simple. YA endings are uniformly satisfying, whether that satisfaction comes through weeping or cheering. These endings are emblematic of the fact that the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction.”
According to Graham, proper literary works don’t leave the reader with a sense of emotional clarity, they do not in-part meaning or understanding about the world and our place in it. Instead they confirm to the reader something they may already feel, that life doesn’t have a meaning, that things just happen and there’s no rhyme or reason or point to the stories that we live everyday. Graham would rather we throw off the ratification of the human experience and accept a nihilist’s point of view. To me, this illustrates a glaring misunderstanding Graham has about storytelling and it’s role in our lives; stories provide us with life’s meaning.
I’m an agnostic, so the belief that life is inherently meaningless isn’t so far from my ideological stomping grounds. I can definitely see the atheistic point of view that the universe does not operate the way our minds do, and so is under no obligation to have a point. But we are creatures trapped in our own perspectives and experiences, and whether by providence or chance we demand that things make sense, we need them to make sense so that we can communicate our experiences to others. This is the purpose of storytelling. We create narratives everyday, from the writer’s personal study to the Physics classroom of a major university. Every time we express a thought, we generate a narrative. Whether we’re justifying why Liz loves Mr. Darcy -Vintage YA right there- or why the Earth revolves around the Sun. The subjectivity and objectivity that separates those two examples doesn’t matter; they’re connected by our limited ability to observe and our need to make sense of why things happen.
Fiction is not about objective truth and ambiguity. Life is objective and ambiguous and we hate it and actively defy it every time we speak or write. Fiction clarifies the human experience for us. It is a simulacrum, not of life, but of the writer(s) thoughts on what life is, what holds true for them. When a reader is moved by a book, they’re discovering a like-mind in the author, they’re having their perspective validated or shifted. No good story is meaningless, even when it’s about the ambiguities and nihilistic nature of things it’s still about something, you should still walk away with a clearer idea about the true nature of things.
So when Graham tells readers that they should be ashamed of what they read, she’s telling them that what speaks to them, what touches and resonates and helps them make sense of life, is wrong. As a reader and writer, for whom storytelling is a close to a religion as I prescribe too. I find her statements to be incredibly arrogant and insulting.
Graham should have remained “bashful” about expressing her opinion, and her begrudging apologetics throughout her editorial show that she knows it. She has exposed herself as a limited thinker who creates and follows arbitrary standards for what is and isn’t good fiction. There is no Young Adult and Literary Fiction, Graham. There is good fiction and bad fiction, there’s fiction that speaks to you, and fiction that doesn’t, and you have to read between the covers to tell one from the other.
