Maturation, Consumerism and Young Adult Literature: the Perpetual Adolescent in Fiction by M.T. Anderson and Scott Westerfeld

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Maturation, Consumerism and Young Adult

Literature: The Perpetual Adolescent in Fiction

by M.T. Anderson and Scott Westerfeld

Emma Kate Wortley

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the

degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of English, Media and Performing Arts

The University of New South Wales

August 2010

PLEASE TYPE THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: WORTLEY First name: EMMA Other name/s: KATE

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School: EMPA Faculty: FASS

Title: Maturation, Consumerism and Young Adult Literature: The Perpetual Adolescent in Fiction by M.T. Anderson and Scott Westerfeld

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE) This thesis argues that the scholarly conception of young adult literature as an aid to maturation is problematised by a strong cultural association between consumerism and juvenilisation, and that such tensions are most evident in contemporary young adult books with an ‘anti-consumerism’ gloss. Scholarship centres on the idea that young adult literature functions primarily as an aid in the adolescent reader’s quest for maturity, underpinned by a conceptualisation of adolescence as a tumultuous period of identity formation requiring adult guidance. However, the young adult novel is also a profit-driven consumer product aimed at a particular marketing demographic, the teenager. The ways young adult literature ‘sells’ itself and an ideology of consumerism to the teenager have begun to receive critical attention in the past couple of decades. This period has also seen the emergence of young adult books in which the implied rhetorical purpose is to interrogate consumerism. Building on such scholarship, I draw on the ‘perpetual adolescent’ stereotype to analyse the tension between the ‘maturing adolescent’ and the ‘consuming teenager’ in case studies of ‘anti-consumerism’ books by contemporary authors M.T. Anderson and Scott Westerfeld, with reference to a number of other texts. Also emerging largely in the last few decades, the perpetual adolescence thesis posits an erosion of traditional ‘adulthood’ in post-World War II Western consumer society, expressing a strong cultural anxiety regarding the apparently juvenilising nature of consumerism. I argue that M.T. Anderson’s Feed (2002) and Burger Wuss (1999) characterise perpetual adolescence as the inability to make ‘adult’ rational decisions in a consumer society, and Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series (2005-2007) and So Yesterday (2004) portray perpetual adolescence as the freedom to defer ‘adult’ stability through continual stylistic redefinition. Though Anderson’s portrayal is more pessimistic and Westerfeld’s more celebratory, both authors ‘sell’ a consumer lifestyle associated with the teenager by, for example, conveying the idea that consuming in a non-conventional way is radical. These books make overt a tension between the ‘maturing adolescent’ and the ‘consuming teenager’ that has always underpinned young adult literature, and show that the ‘consuming teenager’ requires more attention for a fuller understanding of the genre.

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To mum

Acknowledgements

Eternal love and gratitude to my mother, and thanks to my family, workmates and dearest, dearest friends. Thanks to my supervisors, particularly Paul Dawson for his invaluable support and guidance.

Portions of the Introduction, Chapter Four and Chapter Six were presented at the International Research Society for Children’s

Literature conference in Kyoto, Japan, in July 2007 and subsequently published in International Research in Children’s Literature (Wortley

2009).

Abstract

This thesis argues that the scholarly conception of young adult literature as an aid to maturation is problematised by a strong cultural association between consumerism and juvenilisation, and that such tensions are most evident in contemporary young adult books with an ‘anti-consumerism’ gloss. Scholarship centres on the idea that young adult literature functions primarily as an aid in the adolescent reader’s quest for maturity, underpinned by a conceptualisation of adolescence as a tumultuous period of identity formation requiring adult guidance. However, the young adult novel is also a profit-driven consumer product aimed at a particular marketing demographic, the teenager. The ways young adult literature ‘sells’ itself and an ideology of consumerism to the teenager have begun to receive critical attention in the past couple of decades.

This period has also seen the emergence of young adult books in which the implied rhetorical purpose is to interrogate consumerism. Building on such scholarship, I draw on the ‘perpetual adolescent’ stereotype to analyse the tension between the ‘maturing adolescent’ and the ‘consuming teenager’ in case studies of ‘anti-consumerism’ books by contemporary authors M.T. Anderson and Scott Westerfeld, with reference to a number of other texts. Also emerging largely in the last few decades, the perpetual adolescence thesis posits an erosion of traditional ‘adulthood’ in post-World War II

Western consumer society, expressing a strong cultural anxiety regarding the apparently juvenilising nature of consumerism. I argue that M.T. Anderson’s Feed

(2002) and Burger Wuss (1999) characterise perpetual adolescence as the inability to make ‘adult’ rational decisions in a consumer society, and Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series (2005-2007) and So Yesterday (2004) portray perpetual adolescence as the freedom to defer ‘adult’ stability through continual stylistic redefinition. Though

Anderson’s portrayal is more pessimistic and Westerfeld’s more celebratory, both authors ‘sell’ a consumer lifestyle associated with the teenager by, for example, conveying the idea that consuming in a non-conventional way is radical. These books make overt a tension between the ‘maturing adolescent’ and the ‘consuming teenager’ that has always underpinned young adult literature, and show that the ‘consuming teenager’ requires more attention for a fuller understanding of the genre.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction...... 1

Chapter One...... 36

Young Adult Literature and Its Scholarship

Chapter Two...... 75

Consumerism and the Perpetual Adolescent

Chapter Three...... 113

Feed: Juvenilising Ourselves To Death

Chapter Four...... 153

Burger Wuss: The McDonaldization of Dreams

Chapter Five...... 194

The Uglies Series: Chasing Satisfaction

Chapter Six...... 233

So Yesterday: Chasing Cool

Conclusion...... 271

Works Cited...... 281

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

In a postwar world of prosperity and market expansion, teenagers

would prove to be the ideal consumers who not only had the time and

disposition to try out new products, but the inclination to spend more

freely.

Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History, 1996, 93.

[A]dolescence is a time of confusion, insecurity, and even rebellion.

The challenge for the caretakers of those who are making this passage

is to help them safely navigate the turbulence. But for marketers,

adolescent vulnerabilities provide grist for the profit mill.

Susan E. Linn, Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood,

2004, 25.

Young adult literature emerges out of a tension between two cultural ideas of youth: the adolescent who grows up and the teenager who spends up. Scholarship on young adult literature centres on the assumption that the genre functions primarily as an aid to the adolescent reader in her or his quest for maturity, a viable social identity and an understanding of the world. This assumption is underpinned by a conceptualisation of adolescence as a tumultuous period of identity formation during which the individual requires adult guidance. However, the young adult novel is also a profit-driven consumer product aimed at a particular marketing demographic, the teenager. This thesis argues that scholarship must integrate the idea of the readership of young adult literature as a consuming teenager into current constructions of the genre’s definition

Introduction and potential social purposes. To show this, I argue that the teenager is often characterised as a figure defined by consumption practices that are purported to be inherently immature, particularly in examples of the ‘perpetual adolescence’ thesis, which posit an erosion of traditional adulthood in post-World War II Western consumer society. The perpetual adolescence thesis, which has emerged largely over the past few decades, thus expresses a strong cultural anxiety regarding the apparently juvenilising nature of consumerism and points to the need to conceive of the young adult reader as both a maturing adolescent and a consuming teenager rather than focusing on the former.

The ways in which young adult literature might ‘sell’ the desirability of a consumer lifestyle have begun to receive critical attention in the past couple of decades, particularly in the new millennium. This period has also seen the emergence of young adult books which appear to interrogate the problems of consumerism. By examining such books in light of the perpetual adolescent stereotype – focusing on case studies of books by contemporary American authors M.T. Anderson and Scott Westerfeld, with reference to a number of other texts – this thesis draws out some of the more complex ways that young adult literature ‘sells’ consumerism and explores the problematic nature of the idea of ‘mature consumption’. These books make overt a tension between the ‘maturing adolescent’ and the ‘consuming teenager’ – from which the figure of the

‘perpetual adolescent’ also emerges – that has always underpinned young adult literature. While young adult literature scholarship has given ample attention to the figure of the ‘maturing adolescent’, the ‘consuming teenager’ must be given more attention for a fuller understanding of the genre and the way it engages with cultural ideas of youth. To this end, I analyse the narratives of M.T. Anderson’s Feed ([2002]

2004) and Burger Wuss ([1999] 2005) and Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series (2005-

Introduction

2007) and So Yesterday (2004). Anderson’s books offer the reader a portrayal of perpetual adolescence as the inability to make ‘adult’ rational decisions in a consumer society, while Westerfeld’s offer a portrayal of perpetual adolescence as the freedom to defer ‘adult’ stability by continually redefining oneself stylistically. Though

Anderson’s portrayal is more pessimistic and Westerfeld’s more celebratory, both authors ‘sell’ a consumer lifestyle strongly associated with the teenager in different ways. They also sustain a limited conceptualisation of ‘anti-consumerism’ in which, for example, simply consuming in a non-conventional way is presented as radical. These books thus demonstrate that the relationship between ‘growing up’ and ‘spending up’ in young adult literature is complex.

The idea of adolescence as a stage of intense identity formation requiring adult guidance to foster successful maturation and stave off “confusion, insecurity, and even rebellion” (Linn 2004:25) gained widespread institutionalisation and recognition from around the early 1900s, particularly in relation to the education system, the legal system and the discipline of psychology. Young adult literature emerged from about the 1950s as a subcategory of children’s literature aimed at adolescent readers. Robyn McCallum argues that adolescence, as a relatively recent cultural development, is “a shifting social category that is defined and determined by the kinds of meanings and values that contemporary society invests in it” (2006:216), and that this cultural context determines the ways in which young adult literature represents adolescence. McCallum suggests that there are two dominant images of adolescence in books for young people and in popular culture:

The first conceives of adolescence as a time for rebelling against and

rejecting the adult world, being non-conformist, gaining freedom and

experimenting with self-images, lifestyles, and behaviours. The

Introduction

second sees adolescence as a time for maturing, learning, and growth,

becoming an adult, accepting adult responsibility and exploring the

adult world. (2006:217)

She argues that while the rebellious adolescent is heavily mythologised, the maturing adolescent is generally valorised in young adult books, with rebelliousness usually presented as a stage in development toward maturity.

Although they are often used interchangeably and have overlapping meanings, I distinguish here between ‘adolescent’ and ‘teenager’ as terms with different cultural associations and connotations. The teenager is a more recent sociological incarnation of the adolescent associated with consumer capitalism, emerging primarily in Western cultures in the late 1940s and 1950s when post-World War II affluence, a steady increase in school attendance and an unprecedented spike in the adolescent population

(a result of the postwar ‘baby boom’) gave young people the visibility, freedom, sustained peer contact, financial means and leisure time to develop a differentiated consumer identity and thus constitute an attractive market for a burgeoning postwar consumer industry. Although some critics examine similar tendencies in preceding decades – early 1940s bobby soxers (Schrum 2004) or 1920s swingers as enshrined by

F. Scott Fitzgerald (Fass 1977), for example – most critics identify the 1950s as a key decade for the emergence of the teenager. The teenager is thus, essentially, a market demographic version of the adolescent whose abiding goal is to spend rather than to focus on the serious business of growing up.

Products specifically developed for and marketed to this emerging teenage demographic – such as cosmetics, films and clothing – thus began to enter the market in the 1950s. Young adult literature also emerged at this time. I use the term ‘young adult literature’ to describe books specifically written for and marketed to adolescents. There

Introduction is no universally agreed upon age for this ‘young adult’ readership, but critics usually point to the period from the early to late teenage years (Hollindale 1995:84; McCallum

2006:214; Donelson & Nilson [1980] 2008:3). Young adult literature generally features one or more recognisable generic conventions: a focus on the search for identity in the stage between childhood and maturity; the exploration of social issues held to be relevant to youth; the use of a first-person adolescent narrator or substantial focalisation through adolescent characters; the use of adolescent slang (including foul language); and the negative portrayal of adults and figures of authority (Small 1992:282-93;

Nimon & Foster 1997:3; Trites 2000:ix; Donelson & Nilsen [1980] 2008:20, 28, 35).

Such generic characteristics may cross over with other genres – fantasy, science fiction, horror, spy thriller and the like – but they are most strongly associated with realism. A focus on the search for identity is particularly important, put forward by many critics as the primary defining characteristic of the genre (Peck 1978:99; Hunt 1986:23; Small

1992:282; Hollindale 1995:86; North 1996:25; Aronson 1999:20; McCallum 1999:3;

Scutter 1999:11; Trites 2000:3; Wilson 2001:25; Bradford et al 2008:12). In their textbook on young adult literature, for example, Kenneth Donelson and Alleen Nilson argue that:

[C]hange and growth is the most common theme appearing in young

adult literature, regardless of format. It suggests, either directly or

symbolically, the gaining of maturity (i.e., the loss of innocence as

part of the passage from childhood to adulthood). ([1980] 2008:34)

Similarly, children’s literature scholars Maureen Nimon and John Foster argue that the ideological foundations of young adult literature are “the western demographic beliefs in adolescence as a critical time in a person’s growth to maturity” (1997:25).

Introduction

Young adult literature featuring these generic elements and specifically written for a teenage market did not emerge until the mid-twentieth century, though books with adolescent protagonists and books of interest to adolescents existed earlier. Precursors to young adult literature include the eighteenth century bildungsroman (Trites 2000:10;

McCallum 2006:216) and formulaic series such as the Hardy Boys which were particularly popular in the first half of the 1900s (Small 1992:278; Simmons 1993:432;

Cart 1996:148; Donelson & Nilsen [1980] 2008:51, 56-8). Let The Hurricane Roar

(1933) by Rose Wilder Lane (Campbell 1994:xi; Cart 1996:17; Donelson & Nilsen

[1980] 2008:58) and Seventeenth Summer (1942) by Maureen Daly (Carlsen 1971:42;

Cline & McBride 1983:15; Painter 1985:40; Carroll 1996:12; Palladino 1996:113) have also been put forward as early evidence of a teenage book market.

However, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951 for a general audience, is seen as the prototype for subsequent fiction that was expressly written for an adolescent audience , with its idiosyncratic, colloquial, first-person adolescent narration and negative portrayal of the adult world (Carlsen 1978:72;

DeLuca 1978:89; McVitty 1980:5; Cline & McBride 1983:26; Kundin 1985:299;

Alderman 1991:299; Cart 1996:52; Murray 1998:185; McCallum 2006:216). Kenneth

Donelson and Alleen Nilsen, for example, call Holden Caulfield the classic example of an adolescent protagonist “caught between childhood and maturity and unsure which way to go” ([1980] 2008:63). S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel The Outsiders (Stanek

1978:159; Peck 1993:19; Simmons 1993:435; Cart 1996:43; Murray 1998:186-7) and

Paul Zindel’s 1968 novel The Pigman (Simmons 1993:431; Cart 1996:53; Murray

1998:187-8) also helped to establish the young adult genre. Like The Catcher in the

Rye, the books feature first-person narrators (two alternating voices in The Pigman), negatively-portrayed adults and the use of slang. Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War

Introduction

(1974) is also presented by critics as crucial to the emergence of young adult literature because of the way it stretches the boundaries of what is expected of the young adult genre, particularly its pessimistic ending (MacLeod 1981:80; Campbell [1985]

1989:27-8; Oneal 1993:179-184; Peck 1993:20; Cart 1996:84; Coats 2000:290;

Donelson & Nilsen [1980] 2008:72; Beckett 2009:119).

Young adult literature thus did not exist until after the teenager emerged as a cultural figure. However, in Chapter One I argue that the figure of the adolescent dominates the way discourses associated with libraries, the education system and academia characterise the genre. This is evident even in the generic characteristics identified by critics as listed above: they all point to the idea of an ‘authentic’ portrayal of adolescence. Young adult literature scholarship – which also began appearing around the 1950s, developing in library and education journals and as an arm of children’s literature criticism and then as a more discrete discipline over subsequent decades – has tended to focus on young adult literature’s socialising function, often presenting it, implicitly or explicitly, as something that should provide the adolescent with positive examples of maturation to be emulated and negative examples to serve as warnings.

The idea of the ‘consuming teenager’ has generally been less prominent. For example, the teenager is strongly associated with institutions and discourses of consumer-media culture1, such as the marketing industry and the film industry. Critics have often elided the representation of such consumer-media discourses in young adult literature or else

1 ‘Consumer-media culture’ is a term used by Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen (2008). They argue that

“markets and information and communication media together hold a powerful and privileged position in today’s culture, society and economy” (2001:8; original emphasis), and thus the term ‘consumer-media culture’ expresses “the cultural form that arises from this blend of consumption and information and communication media” (2001:8).

Introduction characterised them as trendy and ephemeral, arguing that fruitful study should, instead, focus on universal themes like human fragility and alienation (Simmons 1993:438;

Coats 2000:290).

Nonetheless, over the past decade and a half, young adult scholarship has begun to turn its attention to the implications of consumerism for young adult literature, with two trends emerging. First, there is a sense of hierarchical boundaries between literary discourses and other discourses breaking down, with scholars analysing consumer- media texts such as films (for example: Pearce 2003; Stephens 2003) and examining representations of and intertextual references to consumer-media discourses within young adult novels alongside the more traditional analysis of literary intertextuality (for example: Mallan 2001; Romøron & Stephens 2002). The figure of the adolescent still tends to dominate such analyses. For example, critical analyses of teen-targeted films often focus on the ways in which such texts address a maturing adolescent searching for an identity. The presence of consumer-media discourses within young adult literature is often conceived of in terms of the way the images of self circulated by such discourses might help or hinder the protagonist’s personal maturation.

Second, scholars have become concerned with the status of young adult literature as a consumer product and the role of young adult literature in reflecting and shaping attitudes toward consumerism. Scholars attend to modes of production and paratextual material such as book covers and websites (Yampbell 2005; Pattee 2006;

Toffoletti 2008). This trend is also evident in children’s literature scholarship generally

(Sarland 1999; Zipes 2002; Bell 2007). Critics also examine the narratives of overtly commercialised texts that seem to promote consumerism (Pattee 2006; Bullen 2009) and, conversely, texts that seem to interrogate consumerism (Parsons 2006; Bullen &

Parsons 2007; Bradford et al 2008).

Introduction

Elizabeth Bullen argues that the status of young adult literature (and children’s literature in general) as commodity has largely been conceived of in terms of extra- textual characteristics, with critics such as Jack Zipes (2002) focusing on the commercialisation of the publishing industry – a general tendency towards literary blandness, for example – rather than the intra-textual elements of specific books

(2009:499). Bullen argues that we must pay greater attention to the intra-textual presence of consumer discourses such as brands in young adult literature and the ways young adult texts construct “consumer subject-reader position[s]” (2009:498). Bullen, then, acknowledges that “the idea of the teenager has always been intertwined with the economy, as much a market segment as an identity category” (2009:499). Though I follow Bullen’s lead in bringing this idea to bear on the narratives of young adult literature, my work has two points of departure.

First, Bullen examines a recent subgenre of young adult literature “distinguished by the conspicuous consumption of its teenage characters” (2009:500), in which advertising and socialisation seemingly converge in service of consumer capitalism.

The subgenre – exemplified by the Gossip Girl series – overtly promotes consumer ideologies, such as the idea that buying the right prestige brands will lead to social acceptance. I examine texts that appear to self-consciously interrogate consumerism, because the consumer ideologies at play are more covert and complex. Thus far, such texts have largely been examined in terms of the ways they encourage adolescent readers to question consumerism and perhaps even avert the potential negative future consequences of the consumer lifestyle (for example: Bullen & Parsons 2007).

However, I set out to discover the ways such texts might also ‘promote’ consumerism and thus broaden the notion of what constitutes a “consumer subject-reader position”

(Bullen 2009:498) in young adult literature. For example, Robyn McCallum suggests

Introduction that the rebellious adolescent figure preoccupied with self-image and nonconformity is one of the dominant images of adolescence in Western culture (2006:217). As I show in

Chapter Two, notions of ‘rebellion’ and ‘nonconformity’ are central to the way discourses of consumer-media culture such as advertising position the consumer realm as a space of freedom and unique self-expression. If a character in a young adult book attempts to ‘rebel’ against consumerism, they may be implicated in the circulation of ideologies conducive to consumerism, albeit in a different way from characters who adorn themselves exclusively in luxury brands.

The second point of departure is Bullen’s argument that the commercialised subgenre promotes “a particular developmental path of the reading audience into consumer adulthood” (2009:506), encouraging the pursuit of “adult consumer identities” (2009:501). Her primary text is J. Minter’s (2004) The Insiders. Bullen argues that the text invites the reader to identify with wealthy ‘insider’ characters in opposition to an ‘outsider’ character, and positions the reader to privilege the ‘adult’ luxury brands favoured by the insiders over the ‘juvenile’ brands associated with the outsider. However, the notion of an ‘adult consumer’ being represented in young adult literature is problematic, due to the strong cultural association between consumerism and juvenilisation. For example, Robyn McCallum argues that young adult literature represents personal maturation in three main ways: the formation of subjectivity in relation to others, generally valorising a move from solipsism to intersubjectivity; the formation of subjectivity in relation to various social discourses and structures; and, through these dialogues, the achievement of some degree of individual agency (1999:3;

2006:218). The perpetual adolescence thesis holds that consumerism encourages solipsism, selfishness and shallowness, eroding the ability of individuals to form a coherent, stable subjectivity or achieve individual agency outside the corruptive dictates

Introduction of the market. According to this popular discourse, the idea of ‘maturely’ defining yourself by the brands you buy is contradictory.

Both of these points of departure – the idea that there are more covert and complex myths of consumerism at play in young adult literature and the problematic nature of the idea of an ‘adult consumer’ – are tied to a tension between the ‘consuming teenager’ and the ‘maturing adolescent’, and the emergence of the stereotype of the

‘perpetual adolescent’ out of this tension. In the following sections, I delineate the distinction I am making between the adolescent and the teenager in more detail.

The ‘Maturing Adolescent’

The term ‘adolescent’ appeared in written English as early as 1482 (Wheatley 1994:2), and Thomas Hine refers to it as an “ancient term with shifting meanings” (1999:9).

However, since the early 1900s, ‘adolescence’ has come to refer to a biological and psychological phase of development between childhood and maturity; generally, although certainly not exclusively, defined as the period from about twelve to twenty one years old when the individual has experienced puberty but is not yet considered sexually and emotionally mature or fully socialised into adult society.

Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology,

Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education by American psychologist G. Stanley

Hall, published in 1904, is widely recognised as the first publication to establish a separate adolescent psychology (Kett 1977:204; Gillis [1975] 1981:118; Spacks

1981:228; Russell 1988:59-60; Danesi 1994:2; Fornäs & Bolin 1995:5; Thompson

1998:44; Heywood 2001:28; Osgerby 2004:7; Schrum 2004:12; Nash 2006:17).

Drawing on the principles of Darwinism, Hall posited that the growth of an individual recapitulates the stages of evolution of the human race “from pre-savagery to

Introduction civilization” (Chudacoff 1989:67). He characterised adolescence as a period of “storm and stress”, during which the adolescent is prone to emotional and mental disturbance

(Hall [1904] 1931:xvi). Hall’s work helped establish the idea of adolescence as a

‘problem’ period for which adulthood is the cure, and the associated idea that society has an obligation to lead the individual through this difficult stage in order to maintain social stability. He thus influenced the development of institutions and policies designed to fulfil this duty, from adult-sponsored activities like Scouting to protective legislation for juveniles (Kett 1977:204; Gillis [1975] 1981:118). Hall’s work also influenced anthropological studies that reinforced this conceptualisation of adolescence, such as Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa: A Study of Adolescence and Sex in

Primitive Societies ([1928] 1943). Mead argued that adolescent ‘storm and stress’ is largely a phenomenon of modern Western civilization caused by conflicting social standards of behaviour and a proliferation of choice.2

Subsequent twentieth-century psychological and developmental theories of adolescence paint a similar picture of a period of identity crisis with implications for the human race in general. Peter Blos, for example, characterises adolescence as a limited period of fluidity and plasticity in the progressive psychological development of the individual, tending toward stability until “irreversibility” – adulthood – is reached

(1962:158). Blos relates the development of the individual to what he sees as a fundamental, teleological tendency in nature, stating that the movement towards stabilisation “underlies all processes in nature, animate and inanimate, as modern science has come to view them” (1962:158). Like Mead ([1928] 1943), he suggests that

2 Other anthropologists, such as Derek Freeman (1983; 1999) critique Mead’s overemphasis on cultural factors. Others have found fault in both Freeman and Mead for over-simplifying matters (Côté 1994).

Introduction modern adolescents face particular difficulties, because compared to more ‘primitive’ societies, “Western democratic, capitalistic society provides hardly any uniform processes or techniques to define the adolescent role, nor does this society recognize ritually the adolescent status change” (Blos 1962:203). Another developmental psychologist, Erik Erikson, similarly argues that adolescence is an essential crisis point in the formation of identity (1971:17). As such, adolescents require a “psychosocial moratorium”, a period of selective permissiveness during which they may play with their identity (Erikson 1971:155). Erikson draws a parallel between adolescents and society, positing that the health of a society relies on the successful socialisation of its adolescent population (1971:134). Erikson also argues that adolescence has become especially recognisable and troublesome in modern industrial society (1971:128).

Adolescence is thus seen as a difficult transitional developmental stage, a preparatory life stage to adulthood (Blatterer 2007:11). Psychologist John Collins’ description of adolescence is typical, loaded with phrases denoting liminality:

[Most] assert that the adolescent has left the world of the child but has

not yet been accepted into the world of the adult; that he is in a stage

of transition, a marginal stage, a not-quite stage or a way-station in

development. (1975:53)

This idea is not entirely modern. Norman Kiell, for example, argues that the experience of adolescence as a “transitional, search-for-identity state” (1964:716) can be traced through diaries, letters, autobiographies and other sources back to the time of Aristotle.

However, as David Russell points out, though there may be a “ring of modernity” to, say, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s description of puberty as a crucial “second birth” in the growth process (Rousseau [1911] 1963:172), such descriptions do not constitute

Introduction systematic theories and are largely speculative and conceptual (Russell 1988:59). A systematic, institutionalised meaning is specific to the twentieth century.

The teenager is an even more recent cultural figure. In the next section I turn my attention to a brief consideration of the rise of consumerism following World War II, before examining the parallel emergence of the teenager.

Postwar Consumer Society

Fredric Jameson argues that “non-Marxists and Marxists alike have come around to the general feeling that at some point following World War II a new kind of society began to emerge (variously described as postindustrial society, multinational capitalism, consumer society, media society and so forth)” (1998:19). The spread of consumer ideologies is often tied to the issue of globalisation, a complex, contested term with varying connotations that is generally used to describe a process of ever-increasing global integration and interaction at the economic, social, technological, cultural and political levels. This process is commonly associated with the twentieth century and beyond, although trends that play a part in globalisation have been identified earlier.

Late capitalism is, in its most basic definition, a globalised capitalism in which conglomerate transnational companies are the norm, and in which an ideology of consumerism spread primarily via mass media and new technologies holds sway in both First and Third World countries. Globalisation is a way of describing the dominance of late capitalism as an economic and social model. Leslie Sklair, for instance, contends that globalisation is a general term, and that capitalist globalisation is a more precise label (2002:3-4). Although most cultural critics agree that there is such a thing as globalisation, there is much heated debate about whether the processes associated with globalisation are laudable or condemnable, whether it is possible to

Introduction challenge or change these processes and whether we would want to if we could. In these debates the economic and cultural benefits of globalisation such as opportunities for prosperity, the dissemination of useful technologies and increased consumer power are offset by concerns over such issues as class polarisation, negative ecological impact and reduced cultural diversity.3

Consumerism is a key area of concern in these debates. Charles McGovern defines a consumer society as one in which individuals “depend on the commercial marketplace, with few feasible alternatives, for the necessities of daily life” and in which “manufacturing and selling consumer goods [occupies] a significant sector of the economy” (2006:10). In a consumer society, desire is said to be privileged over need

(Featherstone 1992:114; Bocock 1993:3; Bauman 2002:183). The symbolic and social meanings of products are paramount; much consumption is said to be based on the characteristics, status, values and emotions a particular product represents (Williams

1960:27; Goodwin 1997:1). Where identity was once tied to objects produced and work performed, in a consumer society it is said to be tied to objects consumed and acts of consumption (Bocock 1993:108; Slater 1997:9). Daniel Thomas Cook argues that:

Consumption has become a necessary and indispensable context—

though not sufficient in itself—in which the person or self develops[.]

3 A full account of the large volume of scholarship on globalisation falls outside the scope of this thesis. I primarily draw my understanding from books that focus on the cultural and social aspects, such as

Roland Robertson’s Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (1992) and Michael Featherstone’s

Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity (1995). For an example of a largely celebratory account, see Thomas L. Friedman’s ([1999] 2000) The Lexus and the Olive Tree:

Understanding Globalization. For an example of a pejorative account, see Noreena Hertz’s (2001) The

Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy.

Introduction

[....] It is around consumption and display—in the interaction with the

material world—that personhood and agency tend to crystallize.

(2004:145)

Zygmunt Bauman similarly argues that in modern society the “most common, intense and absorbing experience, the experience most likely to supply the raw material for world-imagining, is that of the consumer” (2002:45).

Many critics and historians point to the 1950s as a turning point in the establishment of consumerism. Stuart Ewen claims that the 1950s saw the realisation of a consumer society dreamed of by ‘captains of industry’ in 1920s ([1976] 2001:206). A monumental growth in productive capacity in the 1920s intensified consumerism, but the propensity for markets to expand was limited between the 1920s and the end of

World War II (Ewen [1976] 2001:189-91). The market was reinvigorated by war industries, and in the prosperity of the postwar boom, consumerism came to hold sway:

“During this period of broad commercialism and suburbanization, the idea of a free world characterized by goods established itself as a pacific social ethic” (Ewen [1976]

2001:190; original emphasis). At the same time, the social costs of consumerism were becoming more evident (Ewen [1976] 2001:192). Mica Nava similarly points to the

1950s as the period during which both consumerism and critiques of consumerism exploded (1992:162). Like Ewen, she argues that an important underlying idea was that of liberation expressed through consumer choice: “the ‘free choice’ of goods came to symbolize the ‘freedom’ of the free world” (Nava 1992:162).

In the next section I examine the postwar rise of the figure of the ‘consuming teenager’, with teenagers often characterised as “the most prominent materialisation of the new mass-consumption ethic” (Lee 1993:109).

Introduction

The ‘Consuming Teenager’

The term ‘teen’, as an expression for someone whose age ends in ‘-teen’, has been in use since as early as 1673 (Wheatley 1994:2; Hine 1999:8). Terms like teen, teen-age and teen-ager were used in the 1920s, especially in advice literature for parents and educators (Schrum 2004:18). However, a 1941 article in Popular Science Monthly is generally credited with the first use of the term to refer to a collective with specific traits rather than individuals of a certain age (Hine 1999:8; Schrum 2004:18). By 1945 the unhyphenated spelling was standardised (Hine 1999: 224). Though often tracing contributing trends from the 1920s onwards (for example: Palladino 1996:53; Osgerby

2004:16; Schrum 2004;1-2), the overwhelming majority of historians and cultural critics locate the birth of the teenager in the 1940s and 1950s (Hebdige 1979:74; Danesi

1994:3; Palladino 1996:52; Willis 1990:16; Kett 1997:246; Hine 1999:224; Bennett

2000:12; Miles 2000:107; Kenway & Bullen 2001:43; Osgerby 2004:19; Grose 2005:3;

Nash 2006:174; Paterson 2006:161; Banet-Weiser 2007:25; Horn 2009:90).

Increased high school attendance played a crucial role in the emergence of the teenager. The development of age-based schooling over the course of the nineteenth century helped to distinguish childhood and adolescence as life stages (Ariès [1962]

1973:230; Gillis [1975] 1981:102). This preceded an exponential increase in high school attendance in the first half of the twentieth century. It was around this time that psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall helped to popularise the idea of adolescence as a troubled time during which the individual requires guidance. Socialisation through education was thus seen as crucial in order to ‘save’ the adolescent from rebellion, delinquency and other antisocial behaviour; Kelly Schrum argues that high schools were designed in part to “create responsible citizens” and “promote social order”

(2004:13). At the same time, increased specialisation of the workforce due to

Introduction technological advances meant that young people required a longer period of education in order to avoid casual labour or dead end jobs (Erikson 1971:128; Kett 1977:203;

Spacks 1981:192). Many low-skill jobs that might previously have been filled by young people could now be done by machinery (Hine 1999:170). The 1930s Depression accelerated the process, with limited employment giving adults stronger incentive to keep young people out of the labour market (Kett 1977:264; Palladino 1996:4; Hine

1999:204; Schrum 2004:13). Kelly Schrum reports that in the US the “the proportion of fourteen-to-seventeen-year-olds in high school rose from 10.6 percent in 1900 to 51.1 percent in 1930 and to 71.3 percent in 1940” (2004:12). Joseph Kett states that the proportion of seventeen-year-olds graduating from US high schools rose from 6.4 percent in 1900 to 50.8 percent in 1940 and to 62.3 percent in 1956 (1977:246). Schrum points out that these statistics are not entirely representative: for example, there was a marked difference in rural versus urban enrolments, and a dramatically lower percentage of enrolment for African Americans (1999:13). However, by the middle of the century high school was becoming “an accepted step on the path to adulthood in

America” (Schrum 2004:13).

As high school enrolment increased, young people came to spend more and more time in close company with age peers, and began to develop a distinctive culture that promoted conformity and age-specific norms (Coleman 1961:3; Palladino 1996:5;

Schrum 2004:14). During and after the Second World War, this newly developing segment of the population gained increasing economic power. In the US during the war, part-time and full-time jobs became more available to the young (Hine 1999:231; Nash

2006:139). Full-time youth employment declined in the postwar economic boom, but young people benefited from the affluence of their parents as well as part-time work

(Osgerby 2004:21). Youth also became more visible, with the postwar baby boom

Introduction seeing the US teenage population rise from ten million to fifteen million during the

1950s, hitting a peak of twenty million by 1970 (Osgerby 2004:20). Bill Osgerby argues that it took slightly longer for youth in Britain to gain comparable spending power to those in the US – he points to the mid-to-late 1950s as the turning point – because the British postwar economy was not as strong (2004:26).

As youth gained spending power and visibility, consumer industries increasingly started creating products specifically aimed at them. Daniel Thomas Cook argues that there was no specific clothing size range for teenagers until the 1940s

(2004:27). Similarly, Kelly Schrum points out that there were inconsistent attempts to understand and capture a youth clothing market from the 1920s onwards, but it was not until after World War II that a teenage market was firmly established (2004:43). Where before teenage girls had used cosmetics made for general use, in the 1940s and 1950s companies started to manufacture products specifically for teenage girls on a large scale, with special colours, prices and slogans (Schrum 2004:69). Films aimed at teenagers proliferated (Betrock 1986; Doherty 1988). Thomas Patrick Doherty asserts that in the period from 1945 to 1956, teenagers made their first firm imprint on the film industry: for instance, the film Rebel Without A Cause (1955) helped to create the cultural idea of the rebellious teenager and the film Rock Around The Clock (1956) showed that teenagers alone as a target audience could make a movie profitable

(1988:92). The music industry also benefited enormously from targeting this audience.

For example, in 1956 the teenage-targeted Elvis Presley sold ten million records out of an industry total of ninety million in the US (Palladino 1996:127).

Historians and cultural critics generally give prominence to the role of marketers when examining the emergence of the teenager in the 1940s and 1950s.

Marketers helped to create the cultural meaning of the teenager because in courting

Introduction them as a demographic they undertook an unprecedented “statistical objectification of youth values, tastes and discretionary spending habits” (Lantham 2002:42). Paul Willis, for example, argues that the concept of the teenager developed thanks to the exploitation of this “newly defined affluent and expanding consumer group of young people” by marketers (1990:16). Some go so far as to assert that the teenager is wholly a marketing invention. Tara Brabazon, for instance, calls the teenager “a figment of our collective imagination, the monstrous progeny of marketing and high school”

(2005:304), asserting that teenage culture was created solely “by an economic system that required niche markets to continue and increase the rate and role of consumption”

(2005:10).

However, most cultural critics acknowledge that there is a more complex relationship between the role of marketers and the agential role of teenagers themselves in pursuing a distinctive youth culture (Palladino 1996:54; Lantham 2002:96; Schrum

2004:20). Stanley C. Hollander and Richard Germain, for example, argue that youth marketing was at the forefront of a general shift in marketing practices from a focus on product differentiation toward segmentation; that is, adapting a product for the characteristics and desires of a specific sub-audience rather than striving to make a product seem different from or better than a competitor’s (1992:27). However, in answering the question posed in the book’s title – Was There a Pepsi Generation

Before Pepsi Discovered It? – they conclude that while marketers were clever in tapping into and expanding the power of the youth demographic, they cannot be credited with ‘inventing’ it (Hollander & Germain 1992:117).

Teenagers attracted the attention of marketers because they were highly peer- conscious (and could thus exert influence on one another in product choice), willing to try new things and possessed a great deal of leisure time and disposable income

Introduction

(Palladino 1996:93; Nash 2006:139). For example, in her examination of promotional materials from the early years of American magazine Seventeen, Kelly Schrum (1998) explains that teenage girls were primarily positioned as valuable consumers. Seventeen magazine, one of the earliest publications to target the teenage girl market, was launched in 1944. Undertaking extensive market research, the magazine conceived of a prototypical teenage girl called ‘Teena’ for use in promotional materials sent to retailers, manufacturers, advertising agencies and trade publications. These promotional materials emphasised the purchasing power of the six million girls between thirteen and eighteen who reportedly spent two billion dollars annually (Schrum 1998:141-2). They also focused on the power of peer influence, making claims like: “Teena is a copycat— what a break for you!” (Schrum 1998:143).

The idea of the teenager as a malleable and affluent consumer is also evident in

Eugene Gilbert’s Advertising and Marketing to Young People (1957). A pioneer in the use of qualitative research to profile the youth market, Gilbert formed the Gilbert Youth

Research organisation in 1947 at the age of nineteen (Palladino 1996:109; Osgerby

2004:21). He became aware of the potential value of such research when he noticed that the shoe shop where he worked attracted few young customers. He persuaded the owner to try youth-directed advertising, resulting in increased sales (Osgerby 2004:21).

In his book, Gilbert champions the purchasing power of the teenager, claiming that the youth market is valuable because it has an affinity for the new and is the origin of most mass trends (1957:27-8). Marketing to the young is also valuable because the teenager can influence peers and parents (Gilbert 1957:43).

Bill Osgerby points out that Eugene Gilbert visited Britain in 1954 and 1956 and concluded that no potential existed for his company to establish a permanent office in London, supporting the idea that the teenager developed slightly later in Britain than

Introduction

America (1998:37). However, by the late 1950s, the teenager was certainly attracting the attention of marketers in Britain. For example, Teenage Consumer Spending in

1959 (1961) by British market researcher Mark Abrams delineates patterns of

“distinctive teenage spending for distinctive teenage ends in a distinctive teenage world” (1961:5). Again, the power of the teenage dollar is emphasised. Abrams states, for example, that in some markets such as clothing, cosmetics and soft drinks, “teenage spending bulks so large that it almost determines the character and prosperity of the trade” (1961:4).

Teenagers are thus defined primarily by their enthusiastic participation in a system of conspicuous consumption. This idea recurs in the work of historians and cultural critics to the point of becoming a truism. Kelly Schrum argues that teenagers are defined largely by “participation in specific leisure activities, styles and fashions”

(1998:137-8). Thomas Hine states that “youth culture is, in essence, a series of decisions about personal appearance and entertainment” (1999:226). According to Bill

Osgerby, what increasingly sets the teenager apart as a distinct cultural group is “not their bio-psychological attributes, but their distinctive patterns of media use and practices of commodity consumption” (2004:9). Marcel Danesi distinguishes between adolescence, the psychosocial behaviours characteristic of all primates at puberty, and what he refers to as teenagerhood, the “socially constructed category superimposed on the life continuum by modern consumeristic culture” (1994:6). Robert Lantham claims that youth has come to be “defined by its ensnarement in the norms and ideologies of consumption, rather than by more conventional measures of identity rooted in the structures of family life” (2002:1). The domination of consumerism in Western society and the emergence of the figure of the teenager are thus parallel tales.

Introduction

The ‘Perpetual Adolescent’

The association of the teenager with consumerism has to do with the way adolescence functions as a kind of cultural barometer, a focal point for concerns regarding society.

For example, Kenneth Thompson, drawing on Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral

Panics ([1972] 2002), argues that mid-1960s British Mod and Rocker youths provoked anxiety in part because they were perceived as “prematurely affluent”, expressing themselves stylistically and emphasising leisure over work as the primary site for shaping identity (Thompson 1998:41). Thompson argues that to some extent, such subcultures sparked moral panics because they were emblematic of the rise of hedonistic consumption in the postwar period:

There was a sense in which youth were regarded with a

mixture of envy and resentment as harbingers of a future in which

leisure and consumption replaced the old relations of production at

the centre of social life. (1998:46)

More recently, Ritty Lukose argues that in popular discourse, youth is often simplistically used as a focal point in describing globalisation, particularly the spread of consumerism:

Youth is seen as a consuming social group, the first to bend to what is

understood to be the homogenizing pressures of globalization, a

globalization fundamentally tied to Americanization. Youth

consumption practices become an index of the presence and reach of

globalization. (2005:915)

Naomi Klein, a prominent critic of globalisation and consumerism, provides a good example of the tendency Lukose (2005) identifies, as she claims:

Introduction

More than anything or anyone else, logo-decorated middle-class

teenagers, intent on pouring themselves into a media-fabricated

mould, have become globalization’s most powerful symbols. (Klein

2001:131)

Klein argues that young people are most susceptible and amenable to the idea of identity as a particular set of consuming practices: buying Coke, wearing Nikes, watching MTV (2001:133). Similarly, Benjamin Barber argues that marketing research suggests that “youth culture is remarkably universal” (2008:17).

When youth is defined in terms of particular consumer choices and behaviours it seemingly becomes available to anyone of any age, including adults. This idea underpins the increasingly prevalent ‘perpetual adolescence’ thesis, which posits the prolonging of adolescence beyond the late teens or early twenties over the latter half of the twentieth century (for example: Calcutt 1998; Danesi 2003; Barber 2008). As I argue in more detail in Chapter Two, critics of consumerism identify two broad dimensions to this alleged protraction. First, individuals are taking longer to move past adolescence in its more traditional sense by delaying the milestones that have typically marked the transition from liminality to stable adulthood, such as leaving home, finding a long-term career, getting married and having children. There is plenty of statistical evidence to support this idea. For example, according to a 2008 report on marriage from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the median age of first marriage has risen from

26.1 years for men and 24.0 years for women in 1988 to 29.6 for men and 27.6 for women in 2007. This thesis is particularly concerned with the second dimension, which is more theoretical and anecdotal, and relates to the role of consumer-media culture in shaping identity, with adults supposedly consuming products and texts like teenagers: defining themselves by what they buy, buying what they ‘desire’ instead of what they

Introduction

‘need’. Teenagers are said to be a lucrative demographic for four reasons: they have money and time; they have a high level of peer influence over one another and influence family consumption; they are capricious in their tastes and therefore perpetuate the rapid obsolescence of products that supposedly feeds market demands; and they treat consumption as a leisure activity (whether because the necessities of living are covered by their parents or because they simply do not care about responsibility). The perpetual adolescent thesis holds that the tendency for individuals to maintain an ‘adolescent’ way of life, avoiding social markers of maturity such as full-time work, is related to this symbolic ‘teenager’-like consumption.

Proponents of the perpetual adolescence thesis do not present this as some kind of ideologically innocent cultural permutation. The vague, villainous ‘they’ of consumer-media culture (corporations, marketers, media moguls and the like) are charged with fostering perpetual adolescence. ‘They’ would like everyone to consume more like the lucrative teenage demographic, and actively encourage it through the dissemination of juvenilising products and texts. Further, the argument goes, products and texts must appeal to the teenage demographic in order to be profitable; and since all culture is mediated by the market to some extent, all culture is being ‘dumbed down’ or juvenilised to suit the tastes of teenagers.

Products and texts aimed at teenagers emerging in the postwar consumer market are thus often strongly associated with an immature identity, and presented as perhaps even antithetical to maturity. Young adult books are such products, but proponents of the perpetual adolescence thesis pay little specific attention to young adult literature

Introduction beyond minor anecdotal mentions4 or occasional references to unusually popular texts such as the Harry Potter and Twilight series5. This thesis is certainly not an exercise in filling this gap by accusing young adult authors and publishers of being part of a villainous ‘they’ out to exploit teenagers or juvenilise adults for profit. I also do not set out to prove whether the perpetual adolescence thesis is ‘correct’ or not. There are elements of truth to the thesis, as well as much hyperbole, over-simplification and a tendency to fall back on rather outmoded quasi-Marxist tropes of ‘blind masses’ and

‘evil capitalists’.6 Rather, I take the perpetual adolescent stereotype as a manifestation of the uneasy relationship between the figures of the adolescent and the teenager: the former strongly associated with progression and maturation, the latter with regression and juvenilisation. The perpetual adolescent stereotype is thus useful for drawing out consumer identities and ideologies at play in young adult literature, as well as illuminating some seeming contradictions in the notion of ‘mature consumption’ or an

‘adult consumer’. The perpetual adolescent thesis is a powerful example of the way the

4 The Hechingers (1962) mention that many teenage books are published annually, but simply say that they range in quality “probably about as widely as do adult books” (Hechinger 1962:137). Dianne West states that readers as old as twenty five are buying young adult fiction written for teenagers, citing this as evidence of “generational intersection” (West 2007:1).

5 Author A.S. Byatt, for example, says that the Harry Potter books are “written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip” (2003:n.p.). David Aaronovitch states: “I don’t like to see grown-ups reading Harry Potter books when they haven’t managed Nabokov” (Aaronovitch

2001:n.p.).

6 Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen provide an overview of the way a wide range of disciplines and theoretical orientations have been brought to bear on the idea of consumer capitalism in the twentieth century, with Marxist and neo-Marxist accounts being interrogated and complicated (2001:13).

Introduction figure of the teenager – the target audience of young adult literature – tends to stand at the centre of concerns regarding consumer society. To consider young adult literature in relation to this powerful cultural anxiety – for example, by examining the way young adult novels portray the role of consumer-media discourses in mediating notions of what it means to ‘grow up’ – will provide a fuller understanding of the genre and the implications of positioning the genre as a socialising tool; particularly when the

‘lessons’ it is seemingly teaching pertain to the consumer lifestyle. This thesis aims to show that it in conveying ideas about ‘growing up’, young adult literature inevitably conveys ideas about ‘spending up’, and the two are rarely reconciled.

In Chapter One I argue that critical accounts of young adult literature have largely positioned it as a socialising aid for the maturing adolescent, and that this assumption has underpinned the scholarship from the very earliest short articles aimed at librarians and educators through to more recent academic poststructuralist analyses of the genre. I argue that critics have most often approached young adult literature as a tool for making adolescents into better readers and better people, rather than a consumer product chosen by teenagers in a marketplace. While this is not a mischaracterisation of the genre as such, I argue that a more balanced account is emerging as scholars begin to examine the commercial nature of the genre. However, thus far there has been a tendency to assume that young adult literature can teach

‘lessons’ about consumerism, with scholars examining works that seemingly ‘teach’ the reader to be an enthusiastic consumer and, conversely, works that appear to ‘teach’ the reader to resist consumerism. However, the kinds of ‘lessons’ about consumerism that young adult literature can convey must be interrogated; there is a need to examine more covert and complex consumer ideologies at play in the genre. This requires an understanding of the complicated and often contradictory nature of cultural attitudes

Introduction toward consumerism and the extent to which the figure of the teenager stands at the centre of cultural anxiety about the effects of consumerism.

To this end, in Chapter Two I argue that the ‘perpetual adolescent’ stereotype circulating in popular discourse stands as the most powerful manifestation of such anxieties. In this chapter, I do not set out to prove that the perpetual adolescence thesis is ‘true’: rather, I aim to show that there is a widespread idea in the public sphere that consumerism is fundamentally incompatible with traditional notions of maturity. I look at the ways consumerism is accused of undermining the ability of individuals to make rational, responsible decisions and encouraging them to eschew stability in favour of a shallow, solipsistic, ever-changing identity defined by consumer products. I argue that four characteristics of consumerism are presented as particularly damaging to subjectivity and agency: ubiquity, symbolic value, idealisation and resilience. This chapter aims to show that the perpetual adolescent thesis illuminates the difficulty of framing a ‘resistant’ stance in relation to consumerism.

In light of this, the choice of texts in this thesis is based on the supposition that the most complex representations of the relationship between consumption and maturation will be found in young adult books that explore the idea of ‘resisting’ consumerism. This thesis aims to establish that the notion of ‘teaching’ the reader to either embrace or resist consumerism is problematic. To this end, in the remaining four chapters of the thesis I undertake a qualitative study of books by two prominent

American young adult authors, M.T. (Matthew Tobin) Anderson and Scott Westerfeld.

I choose these authors in part because they have both achieved critical acclaim and ongoing commercial popularity: the books examined in this thesis are in print and thus circulating in the marketplace. The choice of American authors is deliberate, since accounts of the emergence of the teenager focus on America, accounts of the

Introduction emergence of young adult literature as a genre tend to focus on American publications, and, as will be evident in Chapter Two, the perpetual adolescence thesis is particularly prevalent in America. Books by American authors thus offer the clearest articulation of the tensions I am seeking to explore. Similarly, I have chosen books published in the past decade because, as I argue in Chapter Two, this period has seen the perpetual adolescence thesis –and underlying concerns about consumerism – become increasingly widespread.

Westerfeld and Anderson both have a prolific, diverse body of work. Westerfeld has published vampire novels, fantasy novels and steam punk novels for young adults, as well as adult science fiction books. Anderson has written historical fiction and a vampire novel for young adults, as well as picture books and humorous adventure and fantasy stories for younger readers. Each author has also written both dystopian and realist young adult novels set in North America that overtly engage with the troubling aspects of consumerism that I will discuss in Chapter Two: M.T. Anderson’s dystopian novel Feed ([2002] 2004) and realist novel Burger Wuss ([1999] 2005), and Scott

Westerfeld’s dystopian Uglies series – Uglies (2005), Pretties (2005), Specials (2006) and Extras (2007) – and stand-alone realist novel So Yesterday (2004). By realist novels I mean “young adult fiction with real-world settings in historical periods not far removed from our own” (Donelson & Nilsen [1980] 2008:113). By dystopian novels I mean those that depict “the present as history and [use] this temporal relationship as a strategy to foreground dystopian tendencies in present societies” (Bradford et al

2008:13). As I will show in Chapter One, thus far much of the scholarly attention given to ‘anti-consumerism’ young adult novels has focused on dystopian texts set in the future. I include realist texts in part to address this imbalance and to help make the study more relevant to young adult literature in general, since, as Robyn McCallum

Introduction argues, the genre is often characterised as primarily realist (2006:216): the texts identified above as crucial to the development of the genre, for instance, are all realist novels.

Robyn McCallum argues that “the school, peer group, family, and other social institutions frequently have important metonymic functions within adolescent fictions”

(2006: 218). In the texts considered here, institutions and discourses of consumer-media culture are the dominant metonyms of “larger social structures and processes”

(McCallum 2008:218). In the realist texts, the metonyms for consumer values are within the realms of current consensus reality: a fast food restaurant in Burger Wuss and the Nike corporation in So Yesterday, for example. In the dystopian texts, the metonyms depart from consensus reality: for instance, a neural implant in Feed and advanced plastic surgery technology in Uglies. In the case studies, I analyse intertextual references to and representations (both literal and analogical) of consumer-media culture, such as metaphors and character descriptions that draw on film or television tropes, advertising clichés and the like. In order to explore the ways the texts represent these consumer-media discourse in relation to maturation and consumption, I draw on

James Phelan’s (1989; 2007) account of rhetorical narratology and Roberta Seelinger

Trites’ (2000) and Robyn McCallum’s (1999) poststructuralist accounts of the young adult genre.

I argue in Chapter One that young adult literature is generally conceived of in terms of its ‘purpose’ as a maturation aid, and that scholars have begun to examine texts in which the purpose seems to be to encourage the reader to consume and texts that seemingly aim to encourage resistance. In Chapter Two, I argue that there is strong cultural anxiety attached to the idea that the purpose of consumer-media culture is to encourage individuals to privilege consumption over all else. To explore the ways in

Introduction which the texts might evince such ‘purposes’ – as well as the way these ‘purposes’ might be problematic – my analyses draw on James Phelan’s (1989; 2007) reader- oriented rhetorical approach to narrative, which examines narrative form as “the particular fashioning of the elements, techniques, and structures of a narrative in the service of a set of readerly engagements that lead to particular final effects on the implied audience” (Phelan 2007:3). John Stephens similarly argues that “narrative fictions have referential meaning and are constructed with the intent of shaping reader responses, and hence reader attitudes” (Stephens 1992:48). It is not my intention to enter into critical debates regarding addressivity7; I use the terms ‘reader’ and ‘implied reader’ to describe “the observer position within the narrative world that the flesh-and- blood reader assumes” (Phelan 2007:4), or, at least, is invited to assume.

Phelan argues that narrative is rhetorical: “somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened” (2007:3). There is one text, but more than one teller, more than one audience and more than one purpose

(Phelan 2007:4). Phelan’s work will inform my analysis in that I will approach the texts in terms of narrative progression. Phelan argues that the judgements readers make about characters and tellers – such as moral judgements and interpretive judgements – are crucial to our experience and understanding of narrative form (2007:3). Since we experience narrative form as a temporal process of reading and responding, narrative progression is crucial. Narrative progression is:

the synthesis of both the textual dynamics that govern the movement

of narrative from beginning through middle to end and the readerly

7 For discussion of the issue of addressivity specifically in relation to children’s and young adult literature, see for example Robyn McCallum (1999:15-7) and John Stephens (1992:54-6).

Introduction

dynamics [...] that both follow from and influence those dynamics.

(Phelan 2007:3)

For example, judgements can be conveyed through tensions in the value, belief, opinion, knowledge and expectation of the various ‘levels’ of teller and audience.

Narrative irony, for instance, emerges when there is discordance between two or more of the levels of narrative discourse. The rhetorical approach will frame my examination of the ways the texts ostensibly ‘persuade’ the reader to take a particular stance in regards to consumerism and the ways this might be complicated. For example, when analysing representations of consumer-media discourses, I do so in the context of the progression of the narrative: for instance, in Chapter Six I argue that the Nike corporation and its advertising practices are presented negatively at various points throughout the narrative in So Yesterday, but in the overarching narrative – with, for example, an anti-Nike group also portrayed in a negative light in the climax – the negative portrayal is ameliorated.

To explore the ways the texts represent growth (or lack of growth) in the protagonists, and the ways such representations relate to the depiction of consumer- media culture, I draw on the work of Roberta Seelinger Trites (2000) and Robyn

McCallum (1999), the two dominant poststructuralist accounts of the way young adult texts construct the maturation process and the ideological workings underpinning such depictions. Their accounts of the genre share the idea that the process of maturation in young adult books is represented as the development of subjectivity and agency in relation to other characters and in relation to institutions and discourses of cultural authority. McCallum argues that in adolescent fiction the “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” (1999:3). Out of this dialogue, the

Introduction texts construct the individual as more or less agentive, with a continual tension between the representation of individuals as disempowered or passive and individuals as possessing the capacity to act independently of social restraint (McCallum 1999:7).

Though Trites frames her account of the genre in terms of power, her essential argument is similar:

[P]rotagonists must learn about the social forces that have made them

what they are. They learn to negotiate the levels of power that exist in

the myriad social institutions within which they must function,

including family; school; the church; government; social

constructions of sexuality, gender, race, class; and culture mores

surrounding death. (2000:3)

I thus draw on Trites and McCallum in two ways. First, their work informs my analyses of the manner in which the protagonists in my chosen texts might mature or fail to mature in relation to consumerism. For example, when ‘maturity’ is defined as the attainment of an intersubjective, agentive identity, how do the texts represent the relationship between consumer-media discourses and the protagonist’s capacity to develop intersubjectivity and agency? Second, the idea that relationships with others and interactions with social discourses and authority figures are fundamental to intersubjectivity and agency informs my analysis in that my examination of narrative progression will focus on elements of the plot depicting relationships between protagonists and other characters (what I will refer to as the ‘relationship arc’ in the case studies) and between protagonists and social discourses or institutions of authority

(what I will refer to as the ‘authority arc’). I will thus organise my analysis into a consideration of the intertwined ‘authority arc’ (for the most part, literal or analogical representations of consumer-media institutions and discourses) and ‘relationship arc’

Introduction

(generally, the representation of potential romantic pairings). I will then examine the way the two intertwined arcs are brought to a close and the implications of this closure for “the reader’s evolving responses to the whole narrative” (Phelan 2007:21).

Using this framework, I examine M.T. Anderson’s Feed in Chapter Three and

Burger Wuss in Chapter Four. I argue that Anderson’s two novels portray teenage protagonists who appear set to remain perpetual adolescents in that they are unable to make rational decisions in consumer society. I examine Westerfeld’s Uglies series in

Chapter Five and So Yesterday in Chapter Six. I argue that Westerfeld’s novels feature teenage protagonists who appear set to remain perpetual adolescents because they are, to some extent, able to stave off adult stability through the pursuit of ongoing stylistic change. The chapters progress from the text that is most pessimistic regarding the relationship between consumerism and maturity to that which is most optimistic; moving from Feed, which essentially provides no hope that an intersubjective, agentive identity is achievable in consumer society, through to So Yesterday, in which maturation and consumption are presented as more reconcilable.

This study aims to be qualitative rather than quantitative, undertaking a detailed analysis of the narratives of these selected books in order to tease out the complex ways they represent consumerism, instead of attempting a broader survey of texts with similar themes. However, I will make some reference to other contemporary young adult novels that engage with the idea of critiquing or challenging consumerism, to provide points of contrast and similarity. Chapter Four makes substantial reference to

Deep Fried (2006) by Bernard Beckett and Clare Knighton due to the strong similarities it shares with Burger Wuss. Throughout the thesis, I also refer to Box

Introduction

(2006) by Penelope Todd, Ads R Us (2006) by Claire Carmichael8, The Gospel

According to Larry (2001) by Janet Tashjian, Rash ([2006] 2007) by Pete Hautman and

Teen Inc. (2007) by Stefan Petrucha.

Robyn McCallum argues that young adult literature does not simply reflect its cultural context, but also shapes and to some extent produces cultural ideas of youth

“by determining what issues are deemed to be relevant to young people and by representing what it means to be a young adult in contemporary society” (2006:216-7).

In seeking to understand representations of the relationship between maturation and consumption in ‘anti-consumerism’ young adult novels, this thesis posits that the perpetual adolescence stereotype is the clearest enunciation of the way the teenager in often cast as Western consumer culture’s scapegoat, canary in the mine or Pied Piper in popular discourse about consumerism, and asks: what happens when such ideas emerge in books aimed at this demographic? In what ways do my chosen novels, which seem to offer an interrogation of consumerism, address a consuming teenager who enjoys the pleasures of the consumer lifestyle? What are the implications when consumer-media institutions and discourses are represented as sources of cultural authority? How do the books represent the relationship between consumption and maturation, spending up and growing up? Do the books seem designed to ‘persuade’ the reader that consumerism is damaging or desirable, inevitable or contestable, elevating or degrading? And given the complicated relationship between choosing ‘what to buy’ and deciding ‘who to be’ evinced in these particular novels, what are the implications for the young adult literature genre in general?

8 Ads R Us was published in the US as Leaving Simplicity.

Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

Young Adult Literature and Its Scholarship

In much scholarship devoted to young adult literature, the readership has been discursively conceived of as a ‘maturing adolescent’ requiring guidance rather than a

‘consuming teenager’ choosing products in a marketplace. The first half if this chapter argues that the dominant idea underlying much criticism, implicitly or explicitly, is that young adult literature should function as a maturation aid. This focus on the maturing adolescent partly has to do with the origins of young adult literature scholarship in journals aimed at librarians and educators, as well as its status as an arm of children’s literature studies. There has been a shift from pedagogical to theoretical approaches in the past two decades, but underlying ideas about making adolescents better readers and better people remain. This is not to say that young adult literature has been mischaracterised. Robyn McCallum argues that “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” (1999:9). As I argued in the Introduction, the ‘maturing adolescent’ is a dominant cultural idea. However, there is an imbalance in accounts of the genre because the cultural idea of the ‘consuming teenager’ is also powerful. The second half of this chapter argues that this balance has shifted in the past decade and a half, with scholars exploring the status of young adult literature as a consumer product, particularly in regards to texts that are seen as overtly commercialised and texts that are seen to offer a challenge consumer values. However, such accounts still do not sufficiently problematise the notion of ‘teaching’ lessons about consumerism. 36

Chapter One

Young Adult Literature and the ‘Maturing

Adolescent’

Young adult literature scholarship emerged out of librarianship and children’s literature criticism. The term ‘young adult’ was first popularised as an American library categorisation. Library services specifically for ‘young adults’ existed in the US from at least the 1930s but became widespread and well-established in the 1950s and 1960s

(Campbell 1994:ix; Wheatley 1994:6). The term emerged in the Australian library system by the mid 1960s, but was slower to be picked up in the UK (Wheatley 1994:6-

7). The earliest work on young adult literature around the 1950s was thus largely produced by and aimed at librarians and educators, and mostly consisted of book lists and reviews (Donelson and Nilsen [1980] 2008:63). By the 1970s and 1980s, journals aimed at high school teachers and librarians regularly featured articles specifically addressing young adult literature (Hunt 1996:8). Such articles tended to emphasise the ways young adult literature might improve literacy or help adolescents cope with or solve problems. In particular, young adult literature was often defined as bridging literature, an “important rung on the ladder to reading maturity” (Carlsen 1971:41).

Young adult literature is strongly associated with children’s literature, since they are both non-peer literatures and there is no clear boundary between their readerships. As such, much young adult literature criticism has emerged out of children’s literature scholarship.9 For example, as Caroline Hunt (1996:4) points out,

9 Works examining themes of adolescence and coming-of-age in literature often do not acknowledge young adult literature. Young adult fiction is understandably absent in studies of adolescence that focus on pre-twentieth-century literature or very early twentieth-century literature (see for example: Witham

Chapter One many key works of theoretical criticism on children’s literature published in the 1980s, such as The Case of Peter Pan; or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction by

Jacqueline Rose (1984) and Alice to the Lighthouse: Children’s Books and Radical

Experiments in Art by Juliet Dusinberre ([1987] 1999), refer to books commonly identified as young adult titles without distinguishing them from books for younger children. As Peter Hollindale (1988:7) and others (McGillis 1996:19; Nikolajeva

1996:3) have pointed out, many scholars writing about children’s texts in the early days of the discipline did not utilise critical theory, but rather focused on issues of literacy and morality. This has been changing in the last half-century, with the rise of critical movements like poststructuralism helping to legitimise the discipline (Thacker 2000:12;

Trites 2000a:66). As Charles Sarland (1999:52) points out, poststructuralism allows scholars to consider the complex ideological work children’s literature performs, with the emergence of key theoretical texts like John Stephens’ (1992) Language and

Ideology in Children’s Fiction. Similarly, up until the 1990s, books devoted specifically to young adult literature tended to address a readership of educators, parents and librarians and focus on practical issues such as literacy (see for example:

Carlsen 1971; Varlejs 1978; Donelson & Nilsen [1980] 2008). Other books largely documented the history of the genre and its dominant thematic concerns without

1964; Spacks 1981; Dalsimer 1986; Ralph 1989; Ellis 1999). However, it also tends to be absent from more recent studies such as Kenneth Millard’s (2007) examination of the theme of coming-of-age in modern American literature. Such studies typically define adolescence as a period of identity formation

(see for example: Witham 1964:279; Dalsimer 1986:5). Phyllis Ralph’s description is typical: “The crucial psychological task of adolescence is self-discovery, the quest for identity, and the accompanying development of autonomy” (1989:14).

Chapter One introducing much critical theory (see for example: Cart 1996; Nimon & Foster 1997)10.

However, as in children’s literature studies in general, poststructuralism has become more prominent (see for example: McCallum 1999; McPherson 1999; Scutter 1999;

Coats 2000; Trites 2000; Villiers 2000; Wilson 2001; James 2008).

Scholarship devoted to young adult literature, from early articles aimed at librarians and educators through to more recent poststructuralist work, tends to evince a particular idea of the implied reader of young adult literature as a maturing adolescent in need of adult guidance. In particular, critics attend to young adult literature’s potential psychological, moral and personal benefits and the idea that adults have a responsibility to facilitate the adolescent’s access to and uses of literature. These ideas have underpinned work on young adult literature since its early stages. In a 1957 piece aimed at librarians, for example, Marynia Farnham describes the teenager reader as “an often bewildered, seeking individual who, in his search, is trying to find the one more important and indispensible reality—the definition of himself as a mature individual”

(1957:50). For Farnham, it is therefore the responsibility of those who deal with teenagers and literature to “understand as thoroughly as possible the needs which the adolescent presents, and to make ourselves available to help him meet these needs” through literature (1957:50).

Critics often connect young adult literature to psychological development. For example, Kenneth Donelson and Alleen Nilsen argue that psychology and young adult literature are closely connected, “with psychology providing the overall picture and adolescent literature providing individual portraits” ([1980] 2008:36). They provide a list of books on adolescent psychology, which they recommend that professionals

10 A new, expanded edition of Michael Cart’s book is due to be published in the US in September , 2010.

Chapter One working with young people should read (Donelson & Nilsen [1980] 2008:36-7). Sue

Page (2002) argues that developmental models of psychology share some common assumptions, including the idea that “the ability or failure to successfully negotiate [the changes of adolescence] will in large part determine adolescents’ future fulfilment as adult members of society” (2002:128). She argues that literature can play a role in this process, and, like Donelson and Nilsen, suggests that “anyone working with adolescents, young adults and literature can benefit dramatically through an understanding of some of these [psychological] issues” (Page 2002:130). First-person narration is often put forward as a desirable generic trait in that it enhances the book’s ability to ‘connect’ with the reader on a psychological level. Robert Carlsen argues that

“the most widely read teen-age books tend to be first-person accounts with the ring of psychological case studies on the experience of adolescents” (1978a:12). The connection is particular explicit in John McKenzie’s work on young adult literature that deals with suicide:

The choice of first person to represent the angst of the alienated

teenage narrator is no doubt an effective technique to enable close

identification between narrator and reader; we see inside the situation

from the inside point of view of the person exhibiting suicidal

behaviours. (2002:204)

He suggests, in fact, that it might be too authentic; readers may need a wider perspective, or else a “false reading of the social pain and anguish of suicide may result” (McKenzie 2002:204). These rather utilitarian approaches to young adult literature tend to oversimplify the relationship between reader and text, assuming a straightforward process of reader identification and assuming that the audience of young adult literature is a psychologically sensitive adolescent.

Chapter One

Young adult literature is also constructed as an aid to moral and social development. Addressing librarians and other adults who aim to “help young people become more adept at dealing with themselves” (1983:3), Ruth Cline and William

McBride argue that young adult literature can “nurture a combination of values that will maintain a productive society as well as enrich people’s lives aesthetically” (1983:10).

Similarly, C. Anita Tarr asserts:

We – and I mean not just middle and high school teachers, but college

teachers as well – want adolescent readers to develop cognitively and

morally. (2002:112)

Maureen Nimon and John Foster also suggest that young adult literature can aid moral development by allowing readers to achieve an empathetic understanding of the suffering of others: “For if one can perceive another’s pain and empathise with it, then that concern is likely to be translated into appropriate action to relieve distress” (Nimon

& Foster 1994:xiv). The idea that literature may be “a pathway to becoming more human” is also put forward by Janet Alsup (2003:159). With the right literature – and the right guidance from concerned adults like English teachers – young adults might become “better citizens and more empathetic human beings” (Alsup 2003:166). In such accounts, there is no sense that young adult literature performs any other social function than that ascribed by concerned adults.

Such ideas underpin a key debate related to the representation of social issues held to be relevant to youth and the portrayal of adults. There is a critical preoccupation with how young adult novels should portray the adult world the adolescent reader is expected to join, with critics taking a range of positions along a continuum from protective to preparative (Nimon & Foster 1997:58). Critics at all points on the continuum express concern for the welfare of the adolescent reader and, again,

Chapter One oversimplify the relationship between the reader and text. On the protective end of the continuum are critics who believe it is irresponsible to expose adolescent readers to the dark side of life. Geraldine DeLuca, for example, criticises books that offer the adolescent reader “few authentic signs of hope in the adult world that awaits their coming” (1978:91). At the other end of the continuum are those who believe it is irresponsible to try and protect young people from the negative aspects of life. Joyce

Sweeney, for instance, argues that all teenagers eventually experience the unpleasant side of life: “it’s merely a question of whether a responsible adult prepares them or whether it descends on them unawares and plunges them into depression, or worse, makes them explode in violent frustration” (2002:165)

The extensive scholarship devoted to Robert Cormier’s (1974) The Chocolate

War further demonstrates this critical preoccupation with the moral dimension of young adult literature. In The Chocolate War, high school freshman Jerry Renault tries to defy a corrupt acting principal and a cruel fraternity called The Vigils by refusing to sell fundraising chocolates. However, he is savagely beaten in an orchestrated boxing match and, before losing consciousness, renounces his earlier attempt to defy the status quo.

The corrupt, cruel school order continues. Interpretations of The Chocolate War differ, but all feature a common element: the underlying idea that young adult writers have a moral responsibility to their readership. For example, Norma Bagnall and C. Anita Tarr are scathingly negative in their analyses of The Chocolate War, though each concedes that it is a well-written novel (Bagnell 1980:214; Tarr 2002:96). Both critics object primarily to the pessimistic nature of the book. Bagnell condemns it as “an object lesson in futility” (1980:217). C. Anita Tarr claims that Cormier is an irresponsible, sadistic writer who teaches his adolescent readers: “No matter what you do, it doesn’t matter; you’re screwed” (2002:119; original emphasis).

Chapter One

The majority of critics, however, praise The Chocolate War as a moral novel, though there are varying interpretations of the ‘lesson’ it teaches. Patty Campbell and

Robbie Mach-Penny both assert that Jerry’s gesture of defiance engenders hope regardless of the result (Mach-Penny 1978:83; Campbell [1985] 1989:51). Other critics do not take this hopeful message, but argue that the pessimistic ending is the novel’s great strength. In an earlier edition of their textbook – later editions scaled back the amount of analysis devoted to the book – Donelson and Nilsen decisively interpret the ending as pessimistic, seeing this as a necessary lesson for young adults:

[Cormier] did not compromise by providing a falsely hopeful

conclusion, nor did he sidestep the issue by leaving it open for readers

to imagine their own happy ending. […] It is important for people to

realize that all problems are not that easily solved. ([1980] 1997:82)

Michael Cart also sees the ending as unhappy, and thinks that this is Cormier’s achievement: “Cormier had the courage to write a novel of thematic weight and substance that actually suggested that there might be no happy endings in young adult lives” (1996:84). Anne Scott MacLeod (1981) states that Cormier’s books, including

The Chocolate War, are important because they lack hope and thus stretch the boundaries of the genre. Zibby Oneal is similarly unequivocal in her interpretation of the ending: “Jerry fails and he fails horribly. From this failure his spirit does not rise”

(1993:182). In direct contrast to Bagnell (1980) and Tarr (2002), she believes the value of Cormier’s writing actually lies in this willingness to convey the message: “Failure happens. Despair ensues” (Oneal 1993:182).

These diverse reactions all stem from a fundamental preoccupation with the idea of young adult literature as an aid to maturation. Despite their varying interpretations, all of these critics are arguing, in different ways, about how The Chocolate War should

Chapter One

‘help’ the adolescent reader. These accounts tend to assume that the representation of particular morals and behaviours in young adult literature is a straightforward affair, but poststructuralist accounts of the genre have begun to interrogate the ways young adult texts construct the maturation process and the ideological workings underpinning such depictions. However, the fundamental preoccupation with adolescent growth is generally still evident. For example, it is apparent in the two dominant poststructuralist accounts of the genre, those put forward by Robyn McCallum (1999) and Roberta

Seelinger Trites (2000). Drawing on a range of poststructuralist theory, Robyn

McCallum argues that adolescent literature (she generally does not use the term ‘young adult literature’) is preoccupied with subjectivity, reflecting dominant cultural ideas about adolescence:

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

transformations. It should come as no surprise, then, that ideas about

and representations of subjectivity pervade and underpin adolescent

fiction. (1999:3)

She suggests that even when children’s and adolescent novels are not overtly about subjectivity, they still entail concepts of selfhood, identity and agency insofar as they are “about personal, social or intellectual growth, maturation, and understanding”

(McCallum 1999:9). McCallum argues that young adult literature generally upholds the value of maturation. Though some texts might destabilise essentialist concepts of the self, children’s and adolescent fiction is almost always informed by “a dominant

Chapter One humanist ethic which values socially cooperative forms of intersubjectivity”

(1999:257). McCallum argues that such fiction generally communicates a “perceived need for children to overcome solipsism and develop intersubjective concepts of personal identity” (1999:7).

Drawing on the work of theorists like Michel Foucault, Roberta Seelinger Trites argues that identity in young adult fiction is configured in terms of power (Trites 2000;

Trites 2001). Trites argues that adolescents occupy a liminal space as both powerful and disempowered (2000:xi), and that the adolescent novel (she uses both this term and

‘young adult literature’) depicts the dynamics of empowerment and repression that shape identity. Like McCallum, Trites argues that young adult books depict the tension between the need to recognise one’s own agency – the sense that “we have some control over the various subject positions we occupy” (2000:129) – and the need to recognise that “we are all objects of the cultural forces that constantly shape us”

(2000:129). It is a fluid relationship, and “gaining an increased understanding of one’s power as an acting subject is inevitable during maturation” (2000:129). Trites also argues that young adult literature generally upholds the value of maturation, though more complex books might problematise notions of identity. Trites argues that young adult literature generally reinforces the status quo by depicting adolescent power as limited and conveying the idea that the only way to obtain power is to become an adult; thus it seems at times that “the ultimate purpose of adolescent literature is to teach adolescents to quit being adolescents” (Trites 2000:82-3). Young adult literature reinforces the idea of adolescence by helping to construct it as a separate category worthy of a specific body of texts, while simultaneously undermining it by portraying adolescence as an inferior category and frequently conveying “to readers the ideological message that they need to grow up” (Trites 2000:83).

Chapter One

McCallum and Trites still engage with the idea that young adult books can and should aid the adolescent reader. McCallum argues that adolescent literature can be problematic if it overemphasises the capacity for individuals to act independently of social restraint; a worldview which is idealistic for many young readers whose autonomy is restricted (1999:257). However, if a text overemphasises the role of social institutions in determining subjectivity it “may be criticized on the grounds that it does not offer its young readers the possibility of making empowered choices” (McCallum

1999:258). McCallum concludes her discussion of more complex, dialogic young adult texts by praising the way they “represent and communicate ideas of such complexity and of such significance for any young reader’s quest for meaning and self-definition”

(1999:260). Trites, who has a background in teaching adolescent literature courses to secondary pre-service teachers (Trites 2000:145), similarly looks to the possible value of young adult literature in helping the adolescent reader in their ‘journey’. She argues that teachers must be trained to utilise young adult literature to help teenage readers

“become both more active readers and more socially aware” (Trites 2000:146), and that this is paramount for “the good of ourselves, our students, and their students — the adolescent readers who, when all is said and done, are the ones who matter most in this dialogue” (Trites 2000:152). The potential for young adult literature to help the adolescent reader become a better person is also evident in her reading of The

Chocolate War. Trites argues that despite Jerry’s defeat, readers are left with hope:

“Cormier intends adolescents to understand that it is their moral obligation to disturb the universe” (2000:38). Trites thus states that, like critics such as MacLeod (1981) and

Tarr (2002), she is motivated by the “need to believe in the possibility of adolescent growth” (2000:15).

Chapter One

Young Adult Literature and the ‘Consuming

Teenager’

Roberta Seelinger Trites suggests that the overall message of young adult literature is:

“Grow up. Get over yourselves” (2001:481). In the previous section, I argued that this idea underlies most young adult literature scholarship, implicitly or explicitly, and that the apparent socialising purpose of young adult literature is largely presented in an approving manner. Young adult literature is positioned as something adults provide for adolescents in order to make them better readers and better people, rather than something teenagers desire and consume. For example, Kenneth Donelson and Alleen

Nilsen only refer to the consumer marketplace in expressing concern that books they would like to make available to young people often go out of print ([1980] 2008:xvii).

This tendency to elide the idea that young adult books are consumer products on which teenagers spend money can be explained in part by the cultural idea that literature has a

“unique capacity to educate not only the mind—by enabling us to intellectually comprehend the lives of others—but to educate the heart and the spirit, as well” (Cart

1996:268). Literature is seen as progressive, something that helps us become ‘more’ human (Miller 2006:218). Ted Striphas argues that books are often cast as a “sacred product” in popular and academic discourse:

The value of books would seem to lie, first and foremost, in their

capacity for moral, aesthetic, and intellectual development, and only

secondarily—if at all—in the marketplace. What makes a “good”

book good—or, rather, what makes books good—is their purported

ability to transcend vulgar economic considerations for the sake of

these loftier goals. (2009:6; original emphasis)

Chapter One

Such assumption perhaps account for the fact that crossover fiction – books with cross- generational appeal, particularly children’s or young adult books that are read by adults as well – is rarely referenced in the instances of the perpetual adolescence thesis discussed in Chapter Two. Accounts of crossover fiction tend to be quite celebratory.

For example, Rachel Falconer argues that “[c]ross-reading will not produce a blandly universal literature” (2009:189) and Sandra Beckett praises the idea of books becoming more like other mediums in creating entertainment that appeals to all ages: “From books and films, to television shows and video games, the same works are proving to be equally appealing to and meaningful for children, teenagers, and adults” (Beckett

2009:271).

Books about the publishing industry often centre on the tension between the

‘loftier’ cultural goals of literature and its commercial aspects. Most conclude that the literature industry is a balance of both, with the balance tipping more toward commercialism in the last fifty years or so (Shriffrin 2000:171; Miller 2006:4; Greco,

Rodriquez & Wharton 2007:23-4). Laura Miller, for example, argues that in the last four decades of the twentieth century “economic, technological, and cultural changes finally pushed the book trade to become more rationalized, this is, to calculate the most efficient means to sell books and then develop the organizational forms and procedures necessary to the task” (2006:4). However, Ted Striphas argues that book publishing has been at the forefront of the spread of consumer values since its earliest days. For example, he points out that book publishing was actually one of the first large-scale commercial industries to grow through the rationalisation and standardisation of mass- production techniques (Striphas 2009:7). He also cites research that suggests books were one of the first products to be positioned as Christmas presents, with specially produced gift books emerging over the second quarter of the nineteenth century in the

Chapter One

US (Striphas 2009:7-8). Caren Irr (2001) argues that literature influenced the development of intellectual property rights: the various laws that state that an idea can be owned across time and space. As such, it paved the way for the treatment of valuable intellectual commodities in modern culture, such as pharmaceuticals. It is important, then, to remember that books are consumer products.

Elizabeth Bullen points out that although “the children’s book industry has never operated independently of the market [...] it has been perceived to be above the values of the market” (2009:498; original emphasis). However, there is increasing recognition of the status of children’s literature as a commodity, usually with the view that it is becoming more commercialised. Some critics roundly condemn the commercialisation of children’s literature. For example, Jack Zipes argues that, increasingly, “children’s books are formulaic and banal, distinguishable from another only by their brand labels” (2002:7). As Elizabeth Bullen (2009:498-9) points out,

Zipes is largely concerned with the idea that children’s literature is becoming increasingly bland and homogenous, and focuses on extra-textual issues. While he makes some pertinent points about the children’s book industry, Zipes does not sufficiently take into account the complex and contradictory nature of consumerism. He also has a tendency to hyperbolise, declaring, for example, that “CB—the consumption bug” is rapidly spreading, and that it “may be more deadly than AIDS” (2002:20).

Although his attitude is not as negative, Bruce Butt (2003) similarly makes an overly simplistic connection between commerciality and homogeneity in his analysis of

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events series, as he criticises their apparent literary blandness and the way they are marketed. Butt states that books in the series

“ultimately amount to little more than a handful of jokes repeatedly, and formulaically, retold” (2003:280) and that therefore “there are no conceptual reasons for the Snicket

Chapter One series to extend over 13 books; only financial ones” (2003:282). He also expresses concern regarding the marketing of the books, such as the slick, “intentionally collectible” hardcover packaging and a promotional website that is “undeniably and inevitably commercially motivated” (Butt 2003:281). Similarly, Linda Christian-Smith argues that children’s series fiction like the phenomenally popular horror series

Goosebumps “facilitate children’s incorporation into existing capitalistic social and economic relations” (2002:172). For example, the collectability of such series positions child readers as “possessive individuals” (Christian-Smith 2002:172). The main weakness in such studies is the way they present a financial incentive in book publishing as some kind of new, condemnable development rather than a fundamental motivation that drove the industry from the beginning.

Critics such as Charles Sarland (1999), Margaret Mackey (2001; 2004), Robyn

Sheahan-Bright (2002), Philip Nel (2005), Alice Bell (2007) and T Yung-Hsing Wu

(2010) take a more balanced and fruitful approach, advocating the pursuit of an understanding of the commercial nature of children’s literature and its status as part of a broader media ecology without blanket condemnation. For example, Alice Bell argues that we should “not allow any aesthetic image of literature, nor Romanticised conceptions of the child, to obfuscate the processes of commodity exchange that are at work” (2007:100). Like Zipes, these critics largely focus on extra-textual issues and connect commercialisation to homogeny. Philip Nel, for example, argues that we need to separate Harry Potter as market phenomenon from Harry Potter as literary phenomenon. He briefly analyses the books in terms of the ways they subtly satirise consumer culture (Nel 2005:243). However, he mostly addresses extra-textual issues such as trademark law and J.K. Rowling’s philanthropic efforts, and engages with the idea of commercialisation as blandness by defending the literary merit of the books.

Chapter One

These critics address children’s literature in general. For example, Zipes says that he “shall be using the category of children’s literature to include books for teenagers and young adults” (2002:41). However, similar ideas are evident in scholarship specifically devoted to young adult literature. For instance, Cat Yampbell examines young adult covers in terms of the way they are “carefully manipulated and altered as publishers and marketing experts recognize the necessity of visual appeal to succeed within the difficult arena of the teenage consumers” (2005:348) and Leonie

Rutherford (2009) looks at online marketing for young adult fiction that often disguises its promotional intent. What this survey shows is that, as Elizabeth Bullen (2009) argues, there is a need to pay more attention to the intra-textual implications of consumerism in young adult fiction. In the past decade and a half, there have been two emerging trends in this vein. First, there has been a sense of hierarchical boundaries between literary discourses and other discourses breaking down. Second, scholars have become concerned with the role of young adult literature in reflecting and shaping attitudes toward consumerism.

Consumer-media Discourses in Young Adult Literature

Critics have often argued that intertextual references to and depictions of consumer- media discourses in young adult books are too evanescent to warrant analysis. Caroline

Hunt, for instance, asserts that fashion and identity are linked but concludes that it is not fruitful to study such connections:

Clothing matters to teens as an outward symbol of their search for

identity, and so clothes usually figure in young adult fiction to a

greater extent than in children’s books. Alas, characters in bell-

bottoms may not appeal to the 1990s reader. (Hunt 1996:6)

Chapter One

This attitude also seems to underlie the way critics generally favour discussing the significance of literary intertextual references in young adult literature. For example, critics examining S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders point to the significance of references to

Robert Frost’s poem ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ (Daly [1987] 1989:33-4; Simmons

1993:437) but generally elide the novel’s many consumer-media culture references. For example, in the opening sentence, 14-year-old narrator Ponyboy makes a film reference:

When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the

cinema, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride

home. I was wishing I looked like Paul Newman – he looks tough and

I don’t – but I guess my own looks aren’t so bad. (Hinton [1967]

1972:7)

The narrator’s ideas about masculinity and his sense of self are thus influenced by a media image. John S. Simmons argues that such references make The Outsiders a

“period piece” and that most young adult novels are also very much of their time:

Paul Newman is probably a sex symbol only to the over-50 theater

patrons. Other cigarette brands have replaced Kools among those

widely smoked and advertised in this country. Affluent youngsters

stopped wearing madras shirts long ago, and few, if any, 1990s

teenagers are impressed by the Beatles or their hair styles. Moreover,

such words as “rumble”, “chicken”, “punkout”, and “greasers” are

terms long absent from teenage patois. (1993:438)

Simmons argues that, in contrast to these ‘surface’ elements of identity, the underlying theme of human fragility will be “with us now and probably forever”, and it is in this

Chapter One sense that The Outsiders “possesses a considerable dollop of literary merit” (1993:438).

Karen Coats also argues that such themes are more important than “material expressions” of identity in young adult books, as the latter are ephemeral:

One of the key features of the young adult genre is its currency, its

absolute synchronicity with the concerns of the audience to whom it

is marketed. Characterized by the material expressions of dress,

drugs, music, language, and sexuality, most young adult novels

become quickly dated. (2000:290)

She argues that critics are better off trying to identify timeless tropes and archetypes in studying the genre, such as, for example, the experience of abjection. This tendency to dismiss consumer-media discourses as ephemeral or unworthy of study ignores the significance of the powerful cultural figure of the teenager.

Roberta Seelinger Trites treats consumer-media culture in a similar manner, rarely bringing it into her analyses. She argues that the implied reader of a book called

Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes (1993) by Chris Crutcher is problematised by ‘outdated’ references to, for instance, Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan and The Stepford Wives. Trites argues that such references seem more appropriate for baby boomer adults than adolescents (Trites 2000:82). However, in her discussion of The Chocolate War, Trites analyses the novel’s intertextual references to the poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred

Prufrock’ by T.S. Eliot, with no attendant concerns regarding its potential relevance to teenage readers (2000:1). The elision of consumer-media discourses is particularly puzzling in Trites’ work because, when discussing postmodernism and its importance for the emergence of young adult literature, she argues that:

[I]f everything in culture is constituted by discourse and all discourse

participates in the modes of production that enact society, then

Chapter One

nothing escapes the capitalist institution. We are all subjects

constituted by discourse, so we are all immersed irrevocably in

capitalism. (2000:17-8)

She points out that, as such, maturity is largely defined by the individual’s increased participation in capitalism: “driving, voting, buying liquor, obtaining a credit card, and paying income tax serve as typical rites of passage in postmodern culture” (Trites

2000:18). Her examples of empowerment include “the youthful looks and physical prowess that are glorified by Hollywood and Madison Avenue” and “the increased economic power of middle-class American teenagers as consumers” (Trites 2000:xi).

Her instances of disempowerment includes “the decreased economic usefulness of the teenager as a producer of goods in postindustrial America” (2000:xi). However, consumer-media culture is largely absent from her analysis of texts throughout the rest of the book. This is partly an issue of scope: in listing institutions she does not have space to cover, she includes Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the music industry

(Trites 2000:52).

However, over the past decade or so, critics have increasingly examined consumer-media discourses with the view that they have cultural import rather than merely being ephemeral or shallow, a perspective that is far more sensitive to the cultural context in which young adult literature is produced. Critics have examined adolescent identity in relation to discourses like popular music (Bradford 2003), video games (McGuire 2004), teen films (Mallan 2003; Pearce 2003; Stephens 2003; Pearce

2006; Silva 2010), television shows (Mallan 2003; Mackey 2006; Silva 2010), teen magazines (Stephens 2001) and social networking technologies (Mallan 2008). Such critics strive for an understanding of “how popular cultural texts such as film, television, music and magazines help to shape young people’s worlds” (Pearce

Chapter One

2006:33). These analyses tend to construct the implied audience as a ‘maturing adolescent’. For instance, John Stephens analyses a number of teen films such as horror movie I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and argues that in “theme and ideology, teen films are primarily concerned with subjectivity and intersubjectivity and with the social contexts in which these are produced, lost, or denied” (Stephens

2003:124). Roberta Silva (2010) investigates the exchange dynamics between different mediums, examining the similarities in films, television shows and books that are popular with Italian adolescents. Ultimately, she is concerned with the way such representations influence the “adolescents’ process of self-formation” (Silva 2010:88) and, like Zipes (2002), aligns commerciality with the “superficial, trivial and predictable” (Silva 2010:87). However, the idea of the ‘consuming teenager’ is also acknowledged. For example, in her analysis of the television show Buffy The Vampire

Slayer, Kerry Mallan argues that one dimension of the show’s portrayal of youth is a representation of “the superficiality of youthful narcissism with its celebration of commodity culture and desire to belong to the ‘in’ group” (2003:141). Mallan argues that the show is conservative in a number of ways, including its “reification of

American commodity culture” (2003:141). Sarah Michelle Gellar, for example, “has become the quintessential youth commodity” in her endorsement of a variety of products (Mallan 2003:145).

Scholars have also begun to examine the way consumer-media discourses, and the role they play in identity formation, are represented in young adult texts. Again, the figure of the adolescent seems to underpin such examinations, with these discourses usually framed in terms of the ways they might hinder or aid the protagonist’s search for identity. Robyn McCallum, for example, includes mass media discourses in a discussion of the incorporation of extraliterary genres in young adult novels. She argues

Chapter One that “the public, political and social spheres are mediated, represented and disseminated” through mass media such as newspapers and television (McCallum

1999:208). She argues that the incorporation of the generic codes and discourses associated with mass media in novelistic discourse:

performs an important function in the representation of social and

cultural influences on the formation of subjectivity and of cultural

values and ideologies in relation to which characters and narrators

position themselves and are positioned as subjects. (1999:208-9)

She goes on to briefly discuss two young adult novels that incorporate news discourses, arguing that news items are represented as helping to create a context for world events and positioning characters in relation to those events (McCallum 1999:209).

The representation of consumer-media discourses has largely been examined in relation to masculinity and femininity. Rolf Romøron and John Stephens (2002), for example, argue that while bodies of young adult literature in Australia and Norway evolved fairly independently of one another (with few novels being translated back and forth, for example), both societies:

are in dialogue with a global popular culture (young people see the

same Hollywood films, TV soaps and comedies, for example, all of

which are media fraught with gender imagery), and hence each local

gender regime implicitly, at least, engages in a push-pull dialogue

with more global images of masculinity. (2002:217)

They argue that media images are still dominated by hegemonic forms of masculinity grounded in “domination, physical assertiveness, and egocentric individualism”

(Romøron & Stephens 2002:217), and that these images are commonly evoked in

Chapter One young adult literature. Overall, they conclude that the texts they examine tend to privilege a ‘sensitive new man’ construction of masculinity while also recognising the pull of the hegemonic masculinity valorised in popular culture (Romøron & Stephens

2002:232). Kerry Mallan similarly points to the role of popular culture like film and advertising in proliferating cultural images – including images of masculinity – with “a certain easy appeal and ‘ready-to-wear’ usefulness” (2001:79). The images promoted by discourses like advertising “tend to be reductive and fail to consider the more complex and elusive difficulties of representations” (Mallan 2001:79). She argues that young adult literature is also part of this interplay of cultural images of masculinity: though young adult texts may attempt to redefine masculinity and may engage with such images in a more complex way, they often endorse the same reductive, constraining stereotypes (Mallan 2001:88).

Michelle de Villiers considers the role of consumer-media discourses in constructions of acceptable femininity in a text that focuses on an anorexic teenage girl, including “advertising billboards, teen magazines, and other popular representations of the body” (2000:7). Her greater purview, however, is to contribute to existing ideas about the conservative, socialising imperative of young adult literature. John Stephens

(2001) argues that there are analogies between the implied functions of young adult literature and magazines targeting teenage girls. The objective of both, for instance, appears to be a kind of social advocacy whereby they attempt to “intervene in, and possibly modify, pre-adult females’ consciousness about themselves and their orientation towards males” (Stephens 2001:159). For example, young adult novels and magazines tend to put forward images of sensitive, respectful males as preferable.

Stephens suggests that making such schema available to readers is a potentially affirmative strategy, although the efficacy of such social advocacy is culturally

Chapter One constrained (2001:160). Stephens (1999) elsewhere examines the way female transformations in young adult books often follow the pattern of the makeover as presented in teen girl magazines. He argues that young adult books evince a wariness of a performative concept of subjectivity in favour of a more traditional concept of a stable, agentive identity and communicate the idea that to treat the self as all surface is a “wrong movement” on the path to maturity (Stephens 1999:8).

Such analyses generally engage only implicitly with the relationship between consumer-media discourses and consumer ideologies. John Stephens, for example, briefly refers to the “oblique advertising” purpose of magazine makeovers (Stephens

1999:6). However, scholarship is beginning to examine consumer ideologies more explicitly.

Championing and Challenging Consumerism

There are two broad threads of scholarship centring on the way young adult literature reflects and shapes attitudes toward consumerism, with critics examining overtly commercialised texts and texts that seem to attempt to interrogate consumerism, both of which have emerged from the late 1990s and particularly in the new millennium.

Overtly Commercialised Books

Romance series aimed at teenage girls have thus far received the most attention for being overtly commercialised, with Gossip Girl, A-List, Clique, Au Pairs and other series published since the early 2000s drawing attention in the media and in scholarship on young adult literature. Such series are the most recent incarnation of a trend in young adult fiction. As I argued in the Introduction, a precursor to young adult literature was the formulaic genre stories and series fiction that were particularly

Chapter One popular in the first half of the 1900s (Small 1992:278; Simmons 1993:432; Cart

1996:148; Donelson & Nilsen [1980] 2008:51, 56-8). Two classic examples are the

Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series published by the prolific and profitable

Stratemeyer syndicate (Cline & McBride 1983:19-23; Donelson & Nilsen [1980]

2008:61). Such series often drew virulent criticism and faced censorship efforts by librarians and educators – usually on the basis that they were poorly written – but this did little to dent sales (Donelson & Nilsen [1980] 2008:58). Although usually associated with children’s literature in general rather than young adult literature specifically (see for example: Deane 1991; Inness 1997), these series did help to shape the idea of an adolescent audience. Similarly, the late 1970s and 1980s saw a surge in paperback romance series targeted at (primarily female) teenage readers, starting with

Scholastic’s Wildfire imprint in 1979 (Kundin 1985:361; Alderman 1991:295;

Willinsky & Hunniford 1993:87; Cart 1996:103). These books were created specifically for the teenage retail market, particularly for chain bookstores, rather than indirectly reaching teenagers through schools and libraries (Cart 1996:103). In the tradition of earlier series like those produced by the Stratemeyer syndicate, they were generally created by ‘packagers’: companies producing a large number of formulaic series which were often ghost-written (Pattee 2006:155-6; Donelson & Nilsen [1980] 2008:58).

Sweet Valley High, a series of books about beautiful blonde Californian teenage twins, is a particularly successful example: in 1985, a Sweet Valley High book called Perfect

Summer was the first young adult novel ever to make The New York Times paperback best-seller list (Cart 1996:105). Like Stratemeyer publications, such series are presented by critics as poorly written and formulaic. Michael Cart, for example, says that he is tempted to call them “units” instead of “copies”, “since they are virtually interchangeable in their mass-produced content and format” (1996 148-9). A repeated

Chapter One objection to such series is that they are unrealistic – and therefore purportedly irresponsible – in their portrayal of life. The underlying idea seems to be that such books are objectionable because they are written for profit rather than to help the reader mature; giving them what they ‘want’ instead of what they ‘need’. For example, John

Willinsky and R. Mark Hunniford object to formulaic romances series like Sweet Valley

High because they let the reader “feel as if they are there to be catered to, as the world must appear in the fantasy land of the suburban mall” (1993:90). Defences of such books have similar underlying values. Susan Kundin, for example, argues that romance books are worthwhile because they show characters facing and solving problems, allowing the young reader to “realize that they are not alone in the world and that their problems are not insurmountable” but doing so in “the pleasant guise of escapist reading” (1985:366). Her characterisation of the books is different, but conveys the same idea that the purpose of young adult literature is to act as a social aid.

Recent series have also been released by companies that specialise in packaging rather than in traditional author-publisher relationships. The Gossip Girl series, for example – which follows the glamorous lives of a group of privileged teenagers in New

York – began as a concept created by a product development group (17th Street

Productions) and its parent company (a youth marketing firm called Alloy Inc.), which was sold to the highest publisher bidder (Little, Brown and Company) before being written.11 Like earlier romance series, Gossip Girl and its ilk draw fire for being formulaic, exploitative and unrealistic. In particular, the books are attacked for

‘endorsing’ consumerism in a ‘non-judgemental’ way. All of the characters in such

11 17th Street Productions was the company that published Sweet Valley High in the 1980s. It was acquired by Alloy Inc. in 2000 (Alloy Media and Marketing 2000).

Chapter One series are “obsessed with consumerism” (Litton 2007:127) and “overly concerned with buying designer clothes to appeal to boys and make other girls jealous of their status”

(Litton 2007:131). Naomi Wolf similarly argues that in such books, “[s]uccess and failure are entirely signalled by material possessions—specifically, by brands” and

“brands are so prominent you wonder if there are product placement deals” (2006:n.p.).

There is a sense of disdain regarding the packaging and marketing of the books. The books are phenomenally popular; Sally Beatty points out that series like Gossip Girl sell in the millions, where many young adult titles sell less than twenty thousand copies

(2005:n.p). These critics imply that teenagers do not know what is good for them; that they are being duped, seduced. Naomi Wolf states that the books “package corruption with a cute overlay” (2006:n.p.). Litton states that “these books are incredibly popular thanks to the ways in which they are packaged and marketed” (2007:140). She writes approvingly of Wolf’s scathing article, and dismisses the opinions of teenage girls who responded with letters to the editor defending the books as something they enjoy (Litton

2007:128-9). Gossip Girl should only be read if adults show adolescents the ‘right’ way to read them: “As long as they see the ludicrousness and mistaken values, preteens and teens may not be harmed” (Litton 2007:142).

These articles evince an overly patronising view of the teenager reader. Amy

Pattee takes a more considered, analytical approach to such series in her paper on the

Gossip Girl books. She argues that the density of brand and product references in the texts is a reflection of the series’ highly commercialised mode of production: the series is “the serendipitous product of a capital venture, the goal of which is to sell products – any product” (2006:155). Given their origin, Pattee argues that it is not surprising that series like Gossip Girl “drop product names in the dual service of characterization and advertising” (2006:154). However, as Elizabeth Bullen argues, Pattee pays more

Chapter One attention to extra-textual aspects of the texts (2009:499). Bullen (2009) examines the dynamics of intra-textual brand references in young adult literature in a more sustained manner, arguing that a recent example of paid product placement in young adult literature points to the need to consider informal placement. Formal product placement in literature in general has so far not been widespread, though examples are emerging.

For example, Faye Weldon was commissioned to write a book called The Bulgari

Connection by the Bulgari jewellery company. Her contract stipulated a specified minimum of references, which she far exceeded (Lehu 2006:167). As Bullen (2009) points out, the hardcover edition of Cathy’s Book: If Found Call 650-266-8233 (2006) by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman is the first example – or at least the first disclosed example – of formal product placement in young adult literature. The authors (partners in an interactive marketing company) made a deal with Proctor and Gamble via their agents, agreeing to include references to Covergirl makeup products (the original draft referred to Clinique) in exchange for publicity on a promotional website targeted at adolescent girls which is owned by the company (Rich 2006:n.p.). The product placements were subsequently deleted in the paperback edition published in 2008.

According to a later article, the deal lapsed because it was only ever in place for the hardcover and not because of critical backlash (Rich 2008:n.p.).

Even without the formal product placement, the paperback edition of Cathy’s

Book (2008) still contains a great number of informal brand references. However, as

Bullen points out, such informal product placement has received little critical attention

(2009:499). Bullen suggests there are two reasons for this. First, she argues that literature is perceived as set apart from other popular culture. Film and television, for example, are often seen as primarily for entertainment and pleasure, where literature is understood to be implicated in literacy and education (Bullen 2009:498). Second,

Chapter One informal brand references are perceived as a reflection of social reality “in which brands have become one of the dominant signifiers of identity, social affiliation and status” (Bullen 2009:499). A study conducted by Monroe Friedman (1991) supports this idea. Friedman examined brand names in American and British literature and plays and found that the number and variety of specific brand name references (as opposed to generic product references) appearing in popular literature in America and Britain increased markedly since World War II (1991:76). He also found that the symbolic value of brands and products is drawn on in literature to aid characterisation, descriptions of setting and so forth. The most frequently mentioned brands are those that possess high levels of “value expressiveness”, and thus perform “a symbolic communication function for authors in that they evoke images and associations that are often rich in connotative meaning” (Friedman 1991:103). For example, a Ferrari has different cultural connotations to a Volvo; connotations that are cultivated and encouraged by advertisements for those cars (Friedman 1991:103).

There are countless examples of young adult authors drawing on this “value expressiveness”. The proliferation of brands in books targeted at teenage girls is also evident in those marketed to boys. For example, Stormbreaker (2000), the first in an ongoing series of books by Anthony Horowitz about a British teenage MI6 spy named

Alex Rider, is steeped in brand culture. When Alex is in a meeting with a suspicious adult character, he asks for a Coke when offered a drink:

It wasn’t Coke. It wasn’t even Pepsi. He recognized the over-sweet,

slightly cloying taste of supermarket cola and wished he’d asked for

water. (Horowitz 2000:38)

Alex’s disdainful reaction conveys a firm preference for brand names over generic products (since “over-sweet, slightly cloying” is not an inaccurate description of Coke

Chapter One or Pepsi). Moreover, it reflects a brand hierarchy; the phrase “wasn’t even” suggests that Pepsi is inferior to Coke. When Alex is provided with James Bond-type gadgets by a technician named Smithers, one of them is a modified branded product:

[Smithers] picked up a brightly coloured box that Alex recognized at

once as a Nintendo Game Boy Color. “What teenager would be

complete without one of these?” [Smithers] asked. (Horowitz

2000:86)

The gadget performs different spy functions depending on which games cartridge is inserted. The branded product is thus integrated into the fabric of the plot, and appears in many scenes. The phrase “recognized at once” and Smithers’ comment about every teenager needing one establishes the recognisability and import of the brand. The brand has such a strong identity that the American spelling of “color” is maintained, even within the same sentence as the British spelling. Even products and brands that are not associated with teenagers are given prominence:

The silver-grey Mercedes SL600 cruised down the motorway,

travelling south. Alex was sitting in the front passenger seat, with so

much soft leather around him that he could barely hear the 389-

horsepower, 6-litre engine[.] [...] Alex could feel the power of the car.

One hundred thousand pounds’ worth of German engineering.

(Horowitz 2000:91)

In conveying the enormous wealth of the character who owns the car, the text aligns the

Mercedes brand with a sense of luxury. Although the book is aimed at a readership that is very unlikely to be able to afford a Mercedes (a large percentage most likely cannot even drive yet) the passage also reads like advertising copy.

Chapter One

When the use of brand names like Nike in the Alex Rider series (as well as the film version of the first book) is broached by an interviewer for a movie website,

Anthony Horowitz states:

Well I think the trouble is—the reason for that is—first of all, I have

never taken a penny from anybody to put their products into my

books. You know, obviously the film making a product placement is a

whole another issue, which has nothing to do with me. The reason I

put the brand names in is that kids live by brand names. Modern kids

don’t just buy trainers, they buy Nike trainers. They don’t just buy

jeans; it has to be Levi or whatever. They are very brand-name

conscious, and, Alex, being a modern character, you know, has that.

(Horowitz 2006:n.p.)

This evinces many of the cultural ideas pointed to by Elizabeth Bullen (2009): that brand references in young adult literature are seen as simply mimetic and that paid product placement is simplistically perceived as more problematic. Bullen argues that informal product placement requires attention because “the ideological implications of informal product placement are no less compelling for the fact that reference to brands is not informed by a deliberate intention to sell products or promote consumer desire”

(2009:506).

Bullen also argues, though, that we must look beyond the presence of consumer-media discourses like brands and attend to the ways the narratives of young adult books construct “consumer subject-reader position[s]” (2009:498). To this end, she examines the narrative of the first book in a series called The Insiders, which was also created by Alloy Inc. The Insiders is very much along the same lines as Gossip

Girl, following a group of privileged teenagers in Beverly Hills, California. Bullen

Chapter One argues that advertising sells products to consumers by persuading them they need the product to be the ‘right’ kind of person. Drawing on John Stephens (1992), she argues that through reader positioning, novels similarly aim to persuade the reader “to accept the fictional version of the world and to subscribe to the text’s values and ideology and, very often in the case of fiction for the young, to be the people they ought to be”

(Bullen 2009:500). Bullen puts forward The Insiders as an example of an emerging subgenre of young adult literature in which these “two technologies of persuasion” seemingly converge in service of consumer capitalism, overtly promoting consumer ideologies (2009:500).

Bullen suggests that such overt socialisation into consumer values is a relatively new trend in young adult literature (Bullen 2009:498). However, this is contradicted by

Amanda K. Allen’s examination of what she calls “commodity tales”, a subgenre of young adult literature aimed at white, American, teenage girl readers in the 1940s to late 1960s in which folk and fairy tale elements were used to valorise consumerism

(2009:284). For example, in these stories money stands in for the fairy godmother, allowing the attainment of the symbolic Right Dress (Allen 2009:286). Allen argues that “[l]ike much young adult fiction intended for females, commodity tales function to teach girls how to become women” (2009:284), but that in the texts she examines, the growth narrative is mobilised to promote consumerism. In one of the novels, Rosemary

(1946) by Mary Stoltz, the title character longs for a gaggle of female friends who will

“stop by of an evening for a Coke and gossip” (Stolz 1946:8; quoted in Allen

2009:295). Her fantasies of cosy evening talks draw on advertising discourses, as she imagines being “pajamaed ridiculously like the girls in ads” (Stolz 1946:122; quoted in

Allen 2009:295). Allen analyses these quotes in terms of the way they point to

Rosemary’s desire to be part of the “female dominant class” (2009:295). However, they

Chapter One also convey the idea that brands and advertising communicate “value expressiveness”

(Friedman 1991:103). Coke is associated with conviviality and friendship. Though the use of the word “ridiculously” indicates that Rosemary realises that advertising is unrealistic, she still desires the fantasies it offers.

Though I follow Bullen’s (2009) lead in looking to the ways the narratives of young adult literature engage with consumer values, my work has two points of departure. First, Bullen argues that The Insiders constructs oppositions between

‘juvenile’ brands and ‘adult’ brands, and “equates the transition from child to adult consumer with the developmental transition from adolescence to adulthood”

(2009:505). In the next chapter, I examine the ways that consumerism is often connected with juvenilisation in the cultural imagination, problematising the idea of

‘mature consumption’ or an ‘adult brand’. In my case studies, I aim to show that the relationship between consumerism and maturation is not easily reconciled.

Second, Allen’s (2009) analysis of early young adult books points to the need to look beyond recent brand-saturated commercialised texts and identify some of the more subtle ways that a text might construct a “consumer subject-reader position”. Work in this vein has emerged in regards to children’s films. Sue Saltmarsh, for example, argues that recent Christmas-themed children’s texts portray childhood as “existing in alignment with the kinds of social conditions, personal dispositions and relational arrangements most conducive to the operations of globalised capitalist economies”

(2007:5-6). She argues that extra-textual issues such as the slippage between education and commerce are important, but more attention must be paid to:

the ways in which neoliberal discourse, with its emphasis on

individual responsibility, entrepreneurial endeavour, technological

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innovation and consumer choice permeates contemporary texts

produced for children and families. (Saltmarsh 2007:8)

Jillian Hinkins (2007) puts forward similar ideas in relation to children’s animated films. Such films often have an ostensible didactic purpose, but “the ultimate aim of the corporately produced children’s animated film is to create money, resulting in a profit”

(Hinkins 2007:43). She posits that the didactic aspects of animated film are, to some extent, a marketing strategy to appease adult gatekeepers and reassure them that they are providing their children with nourishing entertainment (Hinkins 2007:49). Thus, a film like Over The Hedge (2006) may have an overt didactic anti-consumerism theme, but implicitly communicates the seductive nature of consumer culture and conveys the idea that individuals can only survive by being immersed in it (Hinkins 2007:48). The case studies in this thesis aim to take this approach to young adult literature with an

‘anti-consumerism’ gloss.

‘Anti-consumerism’ Books

The idea that a text can encourage consumerism implies the concomitant idea that a text might teach the reader to question consumerism. Elizabeth Parsons argues that as the negative consequences of globalised capitalism become more apparent, children’s and young adult novels that overtly attempt to challenge this ‘new world order’ have entered the market (Parsons 2006:29), emerging largely in the new millennium.

Nicholas Sammond argues that one of the social meanings surrounding the cultural figure of ‘the child’ is a fantasy of intervention in regards to “elements of capitalist culture and society that are contestable” (2005:361-2), with the underlying idea that we can create a desirable future simply by distinguishing between ‘bad’ commodities and ‘good’ commodities, and only providing the “as-yet-unencultured

Chapter One child” with the latter (2005:363). This fantasy of intervention can act to foreclose

“solutions to immediate pressing social and economic problems – such as institutionalized racism or gendered economic inequality – by deferring them to the next generation” (Sammond 2005:22). This idea of intervention is evident in regards to the relationship between teenagers and consumerism. Farah Mendlesohn argues that, of all the themes taken up in young adult science fiction, the theme of consumerism “is the one that is most concerned with addressing teens at the heart of what is assumed to be their own lifestyle” (2009:153). While teenagers are often presented as a symbol of the domination of consumer values, their immersion in consumer culture is also seen as a potential strength (Mason 2008:4-5). For instance, Benjamin Barber, one of the proponents of the perpetual adolescence thesis discussed in the next chapter, claims:

[O]ne might say that I am less likely to find a way to remonstrate with

consumerism than will my teenage daughter—who is a far more adept

and avid consumer, and hence potentially a far more knowing and

efficient resister. (2008:260)

The idea that young adult literature constitutes a ‘good’ commodity with the potential to inspire the adolescent readership to question consumerism and create a better society is at play in scholarship on books that purport to challenge consumerism.

In young adult literature scholarship examining books with ‘anti-consumerism’ themes, there is a tension between the idea of young adult literature as a potentially progressive social aid and an acknowledgement of its limitations; the case studies in this thesis aim to further explore this tension. Clare Bradford, Kerry Mallan, John

Stephens and Robyn McCallum argue that utopian and dystopian texts for children and adolescents frequently engage with the idea of young people as “catalysts of social change and/or reform” (2008:10). Such texts, which often explore problems associated

Chapter One with globalisation and consumerism, “invariably construct child protagonists as the ones who must take responsibility for the future […] and implicitly exhort the children to overcome the problems the adult generation has created” (2008:182). For example, they suggest that many novels pessimistically present the capacity for individuals to make a difference as limited, but they suggest that this pessimism can prompt a positive response:

None of these novels, however, suggest that this [limited capacity to

make a difference] is a reason for ennui – on the contrary, it demands

a greater action, as resistance and opposition to the tendencies of the

world. Difference, persistence, even eccentricity, are valorised as

individuals are summoned to play whatever role they can to ensure

that whatever new world order is on the horizon will not be a new

dark age. (Bradford et al 2008:34)

Elizabeth Bullen and Elizabeth Parsons make a similar point in their article on dystopian children’s literature, arguing that such texts frequently construct pessimistic visions of a future shaped by “contemporary techno-economic progress, predatory global politics and capitalist excesses of consumption” (2007:127). Like Bradford,

Mallan, Stephens and McCallum (2008), they argue that this pessimism can act as a kind of summoning or incitement:

Entangled in the pessimism of dystopian writing is the inverse

impulse of hope: demonstrating to humanity the end point of the

course on which they are headed has within it the implicit hope that

the disastrous outcome can be averted. (Bullen & Parsons 2007:137)

Chapter One

Potentially, “the act of reading becomes the impetus to action” (Bullen & Parsons

2007:138). Similarly, Stephanie Guerra argues that young adult science fiction novels that thematise the social conflicts engendered by corporate power and biotechnology provide “an important space for adolescents to question and imagine the future”

(2009:276):

The chance to reflect on these conflicts through reading is particularly

valuable to teens as they become the decision-makers of the future,

navigating complex issues of business and bioethics that are even

now emerging on the social landscape. (2009:276)

She argues that young adult literature can equip the reader to shape this future by

“opening the scope of discussion to a key audience—a population quickly approaching voting age—that might otherwise feel alienated by the vernacular and specialized knowledge of the field” (Guerra 2009:279). The reference to “voting age” directly connects the books to social action.

However, Bradford, Mallan, Stephens and McCallum also point out the limitations of the idea of the child as catalyst for social change:

placing the burden of responsibility on to young shoulders is a fragile

means for ensuring a better future because it assumes not only that

young people share the same desires as those of social reformists, but

also that the process of becoming which constitutes ‘youth’ is

malleable in constant and predictable ways. (2008:183)

They argue that the “social, cultural and political work” carried out by utopian and dystopian tropes is more often conservative than liberatory (Bradford et al 2008:2).

Though their book looks at broad range of texts for young people, including children’s

Chapter One literature and family films, they do discuss issues specific to young adult literature.

They argue that the transformative capacity of young adult literature is limited by its need to “engage with the concerns that both authors and critics concur are the dominant problems and concerns of adolescence” (Bradford et al 2008:12); that is, the formation of subjectivity or development of selfhood. The preoccupation with growth and maturation in the genre means that complex ideas about self and society are often expressed in terms of personal concerns. Farah Mendlesohn also posits that children’s and young adult fiction tends to focus on personal growth at the expense of exploring the “opening out” of possibilities that occurs as a consequence of the character’s actions: “maturity (the growth into adulthood) substitutes for the political and social consequences” (2009:13).

Elizabeth Parsons is similarly more reserved in her estimation of the progressive potential of such fictions in a paper analysing a pair of texts that draw on animal tropes to ostensibly convey a moral message about the “dangers of pursuing wealth”

(2006:29). For example, in one text, rebellious citizens in a future society are ‘re- educated’ in a gated community that ridicules our consumer lifestyle:

Here people are locked into cycles of earning and spending, drinking,

smoking, eating junk-food and joining fitness and wellness programs

in a society that mocks the contemporary western world of capitalist

excess and the meaninglessness of this existence. (Parsons 2006:31)

Parsons argues that, though the texts appear to be trying to critique consumer capitalism, they are quite conservative in their use of underlying Christian themes and upholding of patriarchal values. Thus Parsons also argues that their capacity to challenge capitalist culture is limited: “the role of the novel may be restricted to recording but not to overturning the ethos of its day” (2006:33).

Chapter One

There has been less critical attention focused on realist texts that appear to question consumerism. However, Eric Tribunella’s analysis of the treatment of social problems in The Outsiders shows that realist texts are also implicated in issues to do with literature and social change. In the final passage of the book, it is revealed that the first-person narrator, Ponyboy, wrote the novel as an English assignment in response to the events of the book. Tribunella argues that the novel performs a “sleight of hand”;

Ponyboy expresses a desire to help the community but his way of helping “advocates a kind of rugged individualism in the face of systemic, even epochal, social problems”

(2007:97). Tribunella suggests that, inadvertently or not, “in representing those problems it seems to be offering solutions to them, but the solutions it offers—the representation and knowledge of the problem itself—cannot be seen as constituting adequate or successful responses” (2007:95). To produce, circulate and consume representations is not a sufficient response in addressing such problems:

One can experience the text and be disinterested in or unmoved by it,

or be moved and do nothing. One can experience the text and be

unsure about how to respond effectively, if one is motivated to do so.

One can experience the text and believe that the experience itself is an

effective solution to the problem. (Tribunella 2007:97)

However, Tribunella ultimately pulls back from a full critique of the potential for The

Outsiders to create change:

[A]ny text that in some way addresses a systemic social problem

might work to motivate the reader to seek more information about the

problem, to ask important questions, and to consider alternatives to

the outcomes presented in the novel; it might clarify how the problem

works, what helps produce and sustain it; and it might provoke an

Chapter One

affective response that motivates a coherent, organized, and collective

one. (2007:100-1)

Again, there is evident tension between a recognition that the representation of a social problem is not enough to effect change and the hope – a hope tied to ideas about the progressive nature of literature and adolescence as metonym for society at large – that young adult literature can ‘help’ the teenager reader and make some kind of social difference.

In Chapter Two, I seek to explore the reasons why this tension is particularly pronounced when the ‘social issue’ is consumerism. Robyn McCallum argues that the manner in which young adult literature shapes and represents images of the adolescent experience is “primarily determined by the cultural context in which texts are produced and by the ways in which adolescence is understood in this context” (2006:216). In the next chapter I argue that the ‘perpetual adolescent’ stereotype – emerging out of a tension between the ‘maturing adolescent’ and that other prominent figure of youth, the

‘consuming teenager’ – is a powerful part of the cultural context in which young adult literature is produced. The ideas underlying the perpetual adolescent stereotype inform the way the ‘anti-consumerism’ texts considered in this thesis position themselves as critical of consumer-media culture. The perpetual adolescent thesis also illuminates the problematic nature of characterising young adult literature as a socialising aid. Chapter

Two, then, will furnish my discussion of the complexities and contradictions that arise when young adult books – addressing the age group that is most strongly associated with consumer ideologies – engage with the idea that both the reader and consumer society need to ‘grow up’.

Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

Consumerism and the Perpetual Adolescent

In this chapter I argue that the ‘perpetual adolescent’ – also known as the adultescent, kidult, twixter, rejuvenile, yeppie (Young Experimenting Perfection Seeker) and sufferer of Peter Pan syndrome – is an established stereotype in contemporary Western consumer culture, emerging out of a tension between the idea of adolescent development as metonym for the progression of society and the idea of the teenager as an avatar of consumerism. Patricia Spacks argues that the notion of adolescent progression expressed in developmental theories of adolescence like Erik Erikson’s

(1971) is based on “an optimistic mythology of accretion and improvement” (Spacks

1981:290). Though there has always been an element of ‘suspicion’ regarding the value of development – evident, for example, in the Romantic celebration of childhood innocence – our social system is built on the idea that the movement from childhood to adulthood means progression, since authority is placed in the hands of adults (Spacks

1981:290). Kerry Mallan and Sharyn Pearce, who aim to interrogate cultural constructions of youth, similarly argue that youth has primarily been defined as a state of becoming, with adulthood signifying completion: “The reward of adult status carries with it the mythical virtues of maturity, independence, stability, and above all a secure identity” (2003:ix). When an adult aspires to be young or adolescents aspire to remain young, then, it evokes great cultural anxiety. In the perpetual adolescence thesis, the consumer market exploitation of adolescence represented by the figure of the teenager becomes representative of the triumph of consumer ideologies in society. Consuming individuals are presented as inherently immature, and by extension, the society 75

Chapter Two composed of consumers as regressive. This chapter delineates the perpetual adolescence thesis, before turning to an account of the characteristics of consumer- media discourses that cause the greatest concern: ubiquity, symbolic value, idealisation and resilience.

In arguing that there is a perpetual adolescent stereotype circulating in Western culture, I focus on media articles and popular non-fiction books, though I make some reference to works by sociologists and academics. In this thesis, I take the perpetual adolescence stereotype as an exemplar of the complex and contradictory nature of cultural attitudes toward consumerism circulating in the public sphere. Similar ideas are often implicit in broader, more scholarly work on consumerism. Fredric Jameson’s

(1998) description of a postmodern consumer society characterised by pastiche and schizophrenia, for example, is strongly reminiscent of some of the accounts of a perpetually adolescent consumer culture detailed below. For instance, he describes a society that has “begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of a kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve” (Jameson 1998:20). Journalistic accounts more often explicitly discuss perpetual adolescence or some permutation of this concept and stand as the clearest enunciation of the cultural anxiety associated with the alleged juvenilising effects of consumerism.

The works discussed in this chapter generally emerge from Western countries and were published in the 1990s and 2000s. As I argued in the Introduction, consumerism – and the emergence of the teenager in the wake of its rise – is most strongly associated with Western cultures in historical and critical theory, especially the

US. It is no surprise, then, that perpetual adolescence is most often seen as a largely

American or Western phenomenon, though there is evidence of anxiety beyond

Chapter Two

America. Kate Crawford says that the “phenomenon of adultescence fills column inches in England, the USA, Canada, Germany, South Korea, India and China”

(2006:19). Benjamin Barber notes examples of “pop neologisms” from around the world:

Germans speak of “Nesthocker”, Italians of “Mammone”, Japanese of

“Freeter”, Indians of “Zippies”, and the French of a “Tanguy”

syndrome and “puériculture”. (2008:1)

However, most examples come from America, as well as England, Australia and

Canada. Also, though the majority of books and articles explicitly exploring the perpetual adolescence thesis emerged in the last decade of the twentieth century and in the new millennium, some of the underlying ideas are apparent much earlier. For example, in her anthropological study of adolescents in a Samoan village, Margaret

Mead concludes that adolescents growing up in Western society have a much more difficult transition, and directs some of the blame at the media for propounding an

“American theory of endless possibilities” that obscures the limitations faced by youth in reality: “Moving picture, magazine, newspaper, all reiterate the Cinderella story in one form or another” (Mead [1928] 1943:188). Edgar Friedenberg argues that adolescence is primarily “a social process, whose fundamental task is clear and stable self-identification” and that this process is increasingly fraught in modern society

(1959:17). He suggests that the mass media is one of the institutions interfering with the process: he argues, for example, that the “adolescent movie audience is now about all that is keeping the last few neighbourhood cinemas from being turned into supermarkets; Hollywood now caters to what it believes to be their tastes and thereby keeps their tastes debased” (Friedenberg 1959:68).

Chapter Two

All of the central tenets of the perpetual adolescence thesis are present in Teen-

Age Tyranny (1962) by American education journalist Fred Hechinger and his wife

Grace, with the Hechingers claiming that American society indulges teenagers rather than seeing adolescence as a temporary phase of human development:

American civilization tends to stand in such awe of its teen-age

segment that is in danger of becoming a teen-age society, with

permanently teen-age standards of thought, culture and goals. As a

result, American society is growing down rather than growing up.

(1962:x)

They argue that the “creeping disease” of teenage worship infects music, art, literature, newspapers, television and movies, which are rendered soft and immature: they provide empty, manufactured role models, exploit and spread a distorted view of teenagers and encourage adults to adopt adolescent tastes. Marketers impose “teen-age standards and criteria on the adult market, with taste and quality taking a back seat” (Hechinger

1962:179). The Hechingers present teenagers as leaders in the consumer realm, calling them “Pied Piper[s] who sets the styles and the trends for adult society” and “pioneers of conspicuous consumption” (1962:160).12

In subsequent decades, there are few examples of extended works propounding the thesis, though the underlying ideas are evident in various works. For instance,

Phillipe Ariès, otherwise concerned with exploring the ‘invention’ of childhood, refers to adolescence as the privileged age of the twentieth century: “We now want to come to

12 In some ways, given the time period, this book is at odds with the more recent works. For example, it documents an increase in young marriages at that time, where recent books cite a marked increase in the average marriage age for both sexes over the past several decades.

Chapter Two

[adolescence] early and linger in it as long as possible” ([1962] 1973:28). There is evidence of recognition of both aspects of the stereotype. In terms of the delaying of adult markers, American writer Cheryl Merser’s biography (1987) is largely a defence of those for whom the “trappings” of traditional adulthood – “identities, careers, marriage, children, houses, Pontiacs” (1987:22) – are no longer obvious and automatic.

In regards to the regressive nature of consumer culture, Thomas Doherty argues that, with the arrival of television and the collapse of the studio system, the film industry was forced to chase the teen market:

Since the 1950s, moviemakers have been forced to narrow their focus

and attract the one group with the requisite income, leisure, and

garrulousness to support a theatrical business. The courtship of the

teenage audience began in earnest in 1955; by 1960, the romance was

in full bloom. That shift in marketing strategy and production initiated

a progressive “juvenilization” of film content and the film audience

that is today the operative reality of the American motion picture

business. (1988:3)

Doherty shows how even ‘adult’ films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) were pitched at teenage audiences through advertisements in Seventeen magazine, college newspapers and high school newspapers (Doherty 1988:240-1).13 However, the majority of accounts emerged later, in the 1990s and 2000s.

13Doherty’s thesis differs from later delineations of the perpetual adolescence thesis because he concludes that adults are ultimately cut off from youthful experience. While he allows that “youth has come to embrace a wider expanse of experience”, he states that entry into it “can still be locked tight”

Chapter Two

Major Pejorative Accounts

Sustained negative accounts of the ‘perpetual adolescent’ began to appear with regularity in the nineties. These accounts are generally characterised by hyperbole and a tendency to simplistically blame a faceless corporate ‘they’ for the problems of society.

James Schultze Quentin and Roy M. Anker, for example, argue that the “signs and symbols of youth culture pervade the whole of [North American] society” (1991:5-6).

They claim that America is full of “adultescents” who wear youth fashion, handle relationships in an adolescent manner, refuse to take full financial responsibility for themselves and display other such ‘regressive’ behaviour. American author Robert Bly

(1996) uses the phrase “sibling society” to characterise what he sees as a culture of consumption, aimlessness and selfish individualism in which standards have been lowered so that no one has to be mature. He argues that we live in a culture of “half- adults” in which “[a]dults regress toward adolescence, and adolescents—seeing that— have no desire to become adults” (Bly 1996:viii). “Arrested adulthood” is the favoured term of British journalist and academic Andrew Calcutt (1998). Calcutt posits that after the Second World War Western society failed to find a credible model of adulthood, allowing a burgeoning teenage-oriented consumer-media culture to become the main locus of individual self-expression and self-definition instead of traditional adult criteria. He claims: “What was once the exclusive preserve of youth – youth culture – is now a popular culture (pop culture) which commands the allegiance of almost everyone under sixty” (Calcutt 1998:5). American music journalist David Walley similarly

(Doherty 1988:244). He argues that this “cultural impenetrability”, as he puts it, keeps youth safe from wholesale exploitation because adults are always to some extent taking a gamble on youth’s elusive tastes, tastes they cannot always comprehend or share.

Chapter Two argues that what he calls the “post-Elvis age” from 1954 to 1977 was a turning point for

America, as consumerism fostered a society in which youth is “not only a big business, an infinitely renewable commercial resource, but also a desirable state of being all by itself” ([1998] 2006:3).

The new millennium has seen more iterations of the thesis. Canadian-based

Italian semiotician and linguist Marcel Danesi uses the term “Forever Young

Syndrome” to describe the idea that individuals are obsessed with remaining teenagers, and that “[j]uvenile aesthetics are now the aesthetics of all” (2003:11). Canadian sociologist James E. Côté (2000) argues that we are seeing the emergence of a new developmental stage between adolescence and adulthood, which he calls “youthhood”.

Côté draws on risk society theories (see for example: Beck 1992) and suggests that there are two responses to the challenges of living in “the restructured consumer- corporate society and mass culture of late modernity” (Côté 2000:33). The first is

“developmental individualization”, which describes people who pursue life courses

“based on extensive deliberation on the alternatives and opportunities available in late modern society, with its paucity of (stifling) social markers and its plethora of stimulating and liberating possibilities” (Côté 2000:33). The second, and increasingly common response, is “default individualization”, which describes the life trajectory of individuals who remain in “arrested adulthood” and “passively allow themselves to be manipulated by the profit-based, ‘mass’ structures that have arisen in place of traditional cultural institutions” (Côté 2000:5).

Newspaper and magazine articles frequently focus on the phenomenon. For instance, American journalist Joseph Epstein laments the rise of the perpetual adolescent – he specifically uses this term – and asserts that “youth is no longer viewed as a transitory state, through which one passes on the way from childhood to adulthood,

Chapter Two but an aspiration, a vaunted condition in which, if one can only arrange it, to settle in perpetuity” (2004:n.p.). According to David Dale, this attitude is also proliferating in

Australia, and he asks his readers whether they recognise themselves as adultescents:

You’re in your late 20s, maybe even your 30s, but you think like a

teenager. You are without serious commitments - no mortgage, no

kids - and you live with your parents, so you have plenty of cash to

spend on clothes, phones and music players. (2004:n.p.)

Martin Jacques sees a similar pattern in British society, arguing that teenagers “exercise an extraordinarily powerful influence on the cultural stage”, a worrying state of affairs because an “adolescent culture is one that lives on the surface” (2004:n.p.). David

Aaronovitch also writes that infantilism is becoming a predominant value in British society, seeing it as evidence of a desire to escape reality rather than engage with it

(2001:n.p.).

Some books incorporate the perpetual adolescence thesis into more general attacks on the sorry state of society. British journalist Michael Bywater castigates what he calls “Big Babies” syndrome, a regressive society in which, he claims, people remain “infantile, childlike, perpetually adolescent” (2006:40). Australian journalist

Shirley Gare (2006) similarly criticises trends toward perpetual adolescence as part of a rant against the general regression of society, what she calls the “Triumph of the

Airheads”. Among her many complaints about society, Gare claims that:

Marketers worry whether a young audience will “get” something.

Adults don’t shape our new world; increasingly, the tastes and foibles

(and limited knowledge) of the youth market do because they are the

ones who, researchers have decided, will spend the most. (2006:61-2)

Chapter Two

Australian Daniel Donahoo talks about adultescents as part of a work about the idolisation of youth, claiming: “Youth is no longer a life stage: it is a lifestyle choice”

(2007:47). He argues that this tendency for adults to try and hold on to youth is “an example of how we are neglecting our responsibilities and not undertaking the work of assisting children and young people to develop into independent and competent adults”

(Donahoo 2007:48).

A particularly caustic example of the perpetual adolescence thesis – with a nasty anti-Islamic gloss – is put forward by American journalist Dianne West (2007). West claims, for example, that perpetual adolescence is dangerous largely because it renders

America vulnerable to “Islamization”: perpetual adolescents are more “open” and therefore too accepting of non-Western values (2007:214). Otherwise, West covers similar territory to the books discussed so far. For instance, she argues that when an adult wears the “trappings of adolescence” such as slogan T-shirts and the latest athletic shoes, it is evidence of “a personality that hasn’t fully developed, and doesn’t want to— or worse, doesn’t know how” (West 2007:2).

American academic, journalist and self-described political theorist Benjamin

Barber (2008) is another proponent of the idea that society is being actively juvenilised.

He castigates the infantilisation of society, delineating two dimensions: at the individual level, with “infantilism understood in classical developmental psychology as a pathologically arrested state of emotional development”; and at the societal level with

“infantilism understood in cultural psychology as a pathologically regressive stage of consumer market development” (Barber 2008:34).

In all of these polemics, a large portion of the blame is laid squarely at the feet of consumerism. For example, proponents of the thesis frequently present television as an agent of consumerism and an enemy of maturity. Robert Bly discusses neurological

Chapter Two data indicating that it takes more skill and concentration to eat a meal than to watch television (1996:140). Thus television, demanding so little of the watcher, aids the cultural slide into mindlessness. According to Michael Bywater, entertainment mediums like film and television foster passivity, championing images of “mock- adulthood” that legitimate our regression (2006:50). Joseph Epstein claims that television grows “closer and closer to being a wholly adolescent form of communication” with, for example, shows like Friends and Seinfeld centring on “the permanent adolescent loose in the city” (2004:n.p.). James Côté argues that mass media like television “caters to people’s lower and lazier natures, enticing them to choose forms of default individualization over the more demanding and difficult forms of developmental individualization” (2000:78).

Proponents of the perpetual adolescence thesis also attack marketers. Epstein chastises advertisers because they “strongly encourage the mythical dream of perpetual youthfulness” (2004:n.p.). Côté also castigates “avaricious members of consumer- corporate society who have been carefully constructing the popular culture that increasingly dictates how the transition to adulthood plays out” (2000:220).

Corporations and marketers cultivate “mass markets of identity-hungry consumers”

(Côté 2000:173), encouraging youths to stay in a holding pattern and leading individuals to believe that the right wardrobe or music taste will provide them with a viable identity. He sees this as “the crux of the problem many people face today in making a transition from youth to adulthood” (Côté 2000:34-5). Bly argues that a sibling society rises when the base “acquisitive instinct” reigns, fostered by an advertising industry with an interest in encouraging such “infantile desirousness”

(1996:80) for profit: “We are always under commercial pressure to slide backwards, toward adolescence, toward childhood” (1996:44). Bywater similarly claims that ‘they’

Chapter Two

(the usual vague way of referring to marketers or corporations) want us all to consume like children and adolescents. He argues that children and adolescents consume what they want rather than what they need, and are unable to tell the difference between the two; when the adult’s ability to distinguish between need and want is similarly corrupted, they spend more (Bywater 2006:47). To make an individual feel like a child or adolescent is to make them feel that they do not quite know who they are: “Like the infant, the child, the adolescent, we seem to ourselves to be people-in-waiting, liminal creatures, things of the in-between” (Bywater 2006:49). This feeling of ‘lack’ supposedly stimulates conspicuous consumption, as the individual hastens to paste over these unsettling liminal feelings.

Similarly, Benjamin Barber (2008) argues that consumer capitalism can only sustain itself by fostering consumer markets and manufacturing wants instead of servicing needs. Infantilisation is not cultivated for its own sake, but because it is conducive to selling goods:

Marketers and merchandisers are self-consciously chasing a

youthful commercial constituency sufficiently padded in its

pocketbook to be a very attractive market, yet sufficiently unformed

in its tastes as to be vulnerable to conscious corporate manipulation

via advertising, marketing, and branding. At the same time, these

avatars of consumer capitalism are seeking to encourage adult

regression, hoping to rekindle in grown-ups the tastes and habits of

children so that they can sell globally the relatively useless

cornucopia of games, gadgets, and myriad consumer goods for which

there is no discernible “need market” other than the one created by

capitalism’s own frantic need to sell. (Barber 2008:7)

Chapter Two

The market thus encourages all individuals to define their identity as “a product of what is bought, eaten, worn, and imbibed” (Barber 2008:251). Marcel Danesi also claims that the “the extension of the teen years has been carefully nurtured and vigorously reinforced by adult institutions” (2003:5). Like Barber, he connects this trend to the needs of the market:

Teen tastes have become the tastes of all because the economic

system in which we now live requires this to be so, and it has thus

joined forces with the media-entertainment oligarchy to promote its

forever young philosophy on a daily basis. (Danesi 2003:ix)

He states that “[v]irtually the entire media-entertainment industry today depends for its economic survival on capturing the ‘teen dollar’” (Danesi 2003:24). To have everyone consuming like teenagers aids the perpetual obsolescence of products and culture that fuels consumerism: the turnover of artists in pop music, for example (Danesi 2003:12).

The idea that consumer capitalism ‘needs’ a youth market to perpetuate itself appears elsewhere, not just specifically in examples of the perpetual adolescence thesis.

It is particularly prominent in books that examine advertising and branding. Naomi

Klein asserts that advertising aims to spread the “euphoric corporate hallucination” of the “global teen” (2001:132), selling consumerism as a way of life as much as individual products:

In these ads, the ultimate product – more than the soft drinks, ice

creams, sneakers or jeans – is the global teen, who must exist as a

demographic in the minds of young consumers worldwide or the

entire exercise of global marketing collapses. (2001:133-4)

Chapter Two

Wolfgang Haug (1986) argues that capitalism can only perpetuate itself through regular innovations. Young buyers are ideal because they “respond quickly to what is new, and are malleable and suggestible” (Haug 1986:90). Youths are also valuable because they

“constantly develop new forms and styles and offer a base of subculture from which capital can draw inspiration for fashion renewal” (Haug 1986:90). In making use of these forms and styles, the market promotes youthfulness itself: “Thus a particularly ideal customer becomes a general customer-ideal” (Haug 1986:90). Stuart Ewen asserts that marketers helped to bring about the “symbolic ascendency of youth” by striving to exploit the destabilisation of the traditional family structure: “In pursuing youth, people would forsake indigenous patriarchal authorities and accept malleability, endurance and individualism as positive values” ([1976] 2001:146). Similarly, Thomas Frank claims that advertisements have often been designed to ‘speak to’ young people, but even more frequently youth serves “as a marketing symbol, an abstraction of commercial speech, a consuming vision for Americans of all ages” (1997:118). The important quality of the youthful consumer is “their desire for immediate gratification, their craving for the new, their intolerance for the slow-moving, the penurious, the thrifty”

(Frank 1997:121).

The complementary idea, then, is that adults are not an attractive market because rationality and a stable self are resistant to the message that you can define yourself by what you buy. This idea is evident in early work done on the youth market, with Eugene Gilbert, for example, characterising the adult consumer as resistant to change:

Their lives take on a routine pattern that may make the introduction of

new ideas a more difficult feat. The revolutionary spirit is somewhat

stilled, being replaced by the fulfillment of the many obligations of

Chapter Two

adult living. Expenditure of time, energy and money is carefully

weighed; decisions are made with less spontaneity. (1957:33)

Maturity is thus, implicitly, detrimental to consuming capacity. Proponents of the perpetual adolescence thesis convey the same idea. The Hechingers identify the capacity for the individual to make moral, informed decisions based on the “strength of his convictions that what he knows is solid” (1962:29) as the fundamental characteristic of adulthood. Robert Bly (1996) names autonomous decision-making and a stable sense sense of self based on community values, and Shelley Gare’s idea of ‘proper’ adulthood similarly emphasises the capacity to exercise “commonsense and [an] innate sense of right and wrong” (2006:252). Benjamin Barber presents a set of child/adult dyads and associates adulthood with characteristics such as deliberation, reason, responsibility and a willingness to delay gratification (2008:83). A similar opposition is pointed to by

Andrew Calcutt, who argues that a consumer society values an adolescent-like pursuit of immediate sensation and simultaneity rather than valuing a more adult, distanced rationality (1998:42).

More Optimistic Accounts

My own stance aligns more with that of critics like Gill Jones, who argues that the concept of youth as unfinished or deficient is a flawed model and that the attendant use of such terminology as ‘failed’, ‘stalled’, ‘broken’ or ‘blocked’ to describe an individual’s trajectory is unproductive and damaging (2009:167). This idea underlies some of the more positive accounts of perpetual adolescence. American journalist Lev

Grossman, for instance, identifies what he calls “twixters”: those caught in “a strange, transitional never-never land between adolescence and adulthood in which people stall for a few extra years” (2005:n.p.). However, Grossman does not present this as an

Chapter Two entirely negative development. Firstly, rather than characterising twixters as lazy and regressive, he connects their behaviour to social factors that have made it difficult for individuals to make the traditional transition to adulthood. For example, he argues that the high cost of American tertiary education leaves students with debts that hinder their attempts to become financially independent, and that the resulting degrees do not always make the individual more employable anyway. He also presents the possibility that the twixter period is a positive time of experimentation that helps people to make sure they become the ‘right’ kind of adult. He is not wholly positive, though, and once again consumerism is given a large portion of the blame:

Marketers have picked up on the fact that twixters on their personal

voyages of discovery tend to buy lots of stuff along the way. […]

Some twixters may want to grow up, but corporations and advertisers

have a real stake in keeping them in a tractable, exploitable, pre-adult

state—living at home, spending their money on toys. (Grossman

2005:n.p.)

He suggests that popular culture discourages individuals from wanting to grow up by failing to present adulthood as a desirable state: “There are few road maps in the popular culture—and to most twixters, this is the only culture—to get twixters where they need to go” (Grossman 2005:n.p.).

Austrian-born Australian sociologist Henry Blatterer (2007) argues that perpetual adolescence or delayed adulthood theories in popular media and the social sciences are based on what he calls a “normative lag” or “recognition deficit” (Blatterer

2007:23). They take as their exemplar of adulthood a specific, anachronistic model that flourished between World War II and the early 1970s. Unprecedented stability and affluence meant that what were seen as traditional markers of adulthood – leaving

Chapter Two home, securing a long term job, getting married, buying a house, having children – were achievable on a mass scale. There was thus a high level of correspondence between norms and lived social practices, and the realisation of maturity and full personhood had a recognisable social form: “economic stability plus an explicitly sanctioned normative consensus equals a stable adult identity” (Blatterer 2007:15). For example, a high degree of job security meant that employees could rely on being able to provide for their family in the long term. He contrasts this model to social conditions today, quoting numerous statistics that suggests the Golden Age norms no longer match lived social practices. For instance, for Australian Baby Boomers the median age of entry into the full-time labour market was around twenty one. By the year 2000, it was age twenty seven (Blatterer 2007:39). Blatterer connects this shift to systemic factors, including an ongoing deregulation and casualisation of the labour marker. However,

Blatterer is still critical of consumerism, casting advertisers, corporations and the like as exploitative. As in pejorative examples of the perpetual adolescence thesis, he argues that ‘they’ exploit the destabilised norms to encourage the pursuit of youth through consumption in order to increase the lucrative market for teen-oriented fashion, music, leisure pursuits, gadgets and so forth. He argues that the apparent individual freedom offered when patterns of consumption are liberated from the constraints of age norms is to some extent illusory, as the association between social recognition and an individual’s performance as a market actor (buying the right product, for instance) brings countervailing restrictions (Blatterer 2007:79-80).

There are also examples of the perpetual adolescence thesis that question the idea of consumer culture as inherently juvenilising. Adam Sternbergh (2006) presents a generally optimistic view of the changes in modern adulthood. Borrowing a term from a Star Trek episode, he discusses the rise of “grups”: adults who are redefining what it

Chapter Two means to be grown up. To some degree this involves a change in parenting styles and career choices. However, the main characteristic of grups is that they consume like youths: “He owns eleven pairs of sneakers, hasn’t worn anything but jeans in a year, and won’t shut up about the latest Death Cab for Cutie CD” (Sternbergh 2006:n.p.).

While at times he is critical of grups – for instance, he mocks parents who try to turn their kids into “perfect little Mr. Potato Head versions of themselves”, dressing them in

Ramones t-shirts and making them listen to the latest alternative band instead of The

Wiggles – he concludes that the rise of the grups represents hope and admits to being a grup himself. He claims that while to some degree the new adulthood is about “holding on to some misguided, well-marketed idea of youth” (Sternbergh 2006:n.p.), it is also about reshaping adulthood so that the passion and promise of youth is not lost.

An examination of moral panics about the “insufficiently adult” in the media,

Australian Kate Crawford’s Adult Themes: Rewriting the Rules of Adulthood (2006) offers a challenge to the perpetual adolescent stereotype. Crawford describes her reactions to media stories about ‘adultescents’ and ‘kidults’: while superficially she fit the criteria (young, unmarried, childless and renting) she felt that the values attributed to people living this lifestyle were misrepresented. She did not recognise herself in the media cliché of the adultescent who is “easily bored, scared of commitment, superficial, and interested only in the instant gratification provided by pop culture, fame, travel,

Harry Potter books, mobile phones and iPods” (Crawford 2006:19). Like Blatterer

(2007), she argues that cultural conditions do not receive enough attention. For example, she points to the negative neologisms for those living at home longer or returning home repeatedly: Generation Nest, boomerang kids, yo-yo generation, homebounders, Kippers (Kids In Parents’ Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings), parasite singles (Crawford 2006:168). She argues that this trend is often constructed in

Chapter Two terms of an unwillingness on behalf of the individual to give up luxuries and freedoms such as travel, but that the media rarely pay sufficient attention to the difficult property market or put forward the idea that “individualistic home ownership may not be a self- justifying value” (Crawford 2006:171-2). Crawford does not ‘blame’ consumerism, and derides the idea that televisions shows or clothing choices mark individuals as having regressive taste: “Does your status as an adult depend on what films you see, or what you drink or wear on your feet – in essence, what you consume?” (2006:21).

Consumer Identities

Pejorative accounts of perpetual adolescence generally argue that the concept of

‘mature’ consumption is impossible. Even in the more optimistic examples examined in the previous section, consumer-media culture is often cast as an enemy of maturity. The perpetual adolescence thesis thus embodies a strong cultural association between consumerism and juvenilisation or regression. I am not setting out to prove whether the perpetual adolescence thesis is ‘true’ or ‘false’. The perpetual adolescent is a stereotype, and in many ways perpetual adolescents are the latest incarnation of ‘the masses’ to whom debased tastes have been ascribed for centuries, or a new permutation of the way society creates hierarchies of ‘distinction’ as defined by Pierre Bourdieu

(1984). As with any stereotype, there are aspects of ‘truth’ to the way perpetual adolescence is characterised, but there is also a great deal of over-simplification, hyperbole and incoherency.

For example, proponents of the perpetual adolescent thesis often draw on market research to help ‘prove’ the existence of the perpetual adolescent. However, as

Celia Lury and Alan Warde point out, market research is largely a legitimisation strategy, a way for those in the marketing industry to show – to themselves and to

Chapter Two clients – that they can quantify consumer tastes and use their knowledge to generate sales (1997:89). The marketing industry has a vested interest in creating the idea that market research is capable of expressing ‘truths’ about society. When proponents of the perpetual adolescence thesis draw on market research as a medium of special or expert knowledge, they contribute to its cultural legitimisation. As Kate Crawford argues, words like ‘kidult’ and ‘adultescent’ may be “the mongrel creations of market research reports but as they become increasingly popularised, people begin to identify with them” (2006:270). Those who castigate perpetual adolescence help to give the stereotype cultural weight as a ‘real’ category of personhood.

Generationalism is also implicated in this process of relocating the ‘blame’ for consumerism to the young through stereotypes. As Kenway and Bullen (2001:55) argue, each generation is depicted in popular discourse as being ever more defined by consumption, from the Baby Boomers to Generation X to Generation Y and beyond.

For example, in a business book about the financial potential in demographic shifts,

Paul Wallace describes Generation Y thus:

Tech savvy and purse heavy (thanks to affluent parents), these are the

consumer pioneers of the new economy. Marketers can’t get enough

of them – and their buying power helps drive the cutting edge of

innovation. (2001:xiv)

However, Paul Dawson argues that generationalism is a metaphor based on stereotypes, which has a tendency to be presented in media as a concrete ideal (1997:123). He suggests that “the totalizing concept of generational cultures is dangerously simplistic and unproductive for all but consumerist purposes” (Dawson 1997:125). Kate Crawford similarly argues that “contrived generational differences are developed by people who

Chapter Two have a profit motive in generational otherness: advertisers, market researchers, lifestyle journalists and corporate consultants” (2006:73).

Stereotypes generally perform a variety of social functions. The perpetual adolescent stereotype seems in part to be performing a function akin to the figure of the

‘child as victim of marketers’. Like the teenager, the child has developed a consumer identity over the last hundred odd years. Lisa Jacobson (2004), examining the way children were imagined and socialised between 1890 and 1940, argues that during this period market forces began to compete with the family as the primary locus of socialisation. Daniel Thomas Cook examines trends in the children’s wear industry in the US between 1917 and 1962 and argues that this period saw a shift away from the idea that the family (particularly the mother) consumed on behalf of the child toward the idea that children were “legitimate, individualized, self-contained consumers”

(2004:3). Many point to the advent of television as a turning point. Jyostna Kapur, for example, argues that the debut of the Mickey Mouse Club show in 1955 signalled the beginning of a mutually reinforcing relationship between targeted television programming and toy merchandising (1999:127). Stephen Kline also argues that television played a powerful role in broadening the role of the marketplace in socialisation: “Television constituted children as an audience so they could be integrated into the market” (1993:74).

The figure of the child consumer embodies concerns about the empowering versus exploitative aspects of consumerism. Many books present consumer-media culture as a powerful detrimental force against which children have little defence, such as The Disappearance of Childhood (Postman 1983), Children Without Childhood

(Winn 1983), Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers (Quart 2003), Born to

Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (Schor 2004),

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Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood (Kincheloe & Steinberg

[1997] 2004), Buy, Buy Baby (Gregory 2007), Toxic Childhood (Palmer 2007),

Consuming Innocence: Popular Culture and Our Children (Brooks 2008) and This

Little Kiddy Went To Market: The Corporate Capture of Childhood (Beder 2009). The emotive (and repetitive) titles capture the extreme misgivings attached to the idea of children being sucked in by pernicious consumerism. Many argue that children are being encouraged to ‘grow up too soon’: children and adults meeting teenagers in the middle, all consuming a market version of ‘youth’.

More moderate books such as Sold Separately: Children and Parents in

Consumer Culture (Seiter 1993), Stealing Innocence: Youth, Corporate Power, and the

Politics of Culture (Giroux 2000), Consuming Children: Education-Entertainment-

Advertising (Kenway & Bullen 2001), Everything Bad is Good For You (Johnson

2005), Honey We Lost The Kids: Re-thinking Childhood in the Media Age (McDonnell

2006) and Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (Banet-Weiser 2007) and a number of works on media literacy written or edited by David Buckingham (1993;

1993a; 2000; 2000a) express ambivalence. They convey similar concerns about consumerism but also point to the agency of the child consumer and advocate open- mindedness regarding the pleasures of consumer culture and the potential it provides for new literacies. Henry Giroux, for example, argues that the pessimism of Neil

Postman (1983) and others regarding new media ignores the idea that they can “allow kids to immerse themselves in profoundly important forms of social communication, produce a range of creative expressions, and exhibit forms of agency that are both pleasurable and empowering” (2000:13).

Nicholas Sammond argues that the idea of the child as a vulnerable victim of consumerism works to obscure the reality of “the child preparing for (and being

Chapter Two prepared for) membership in a culture the primary social metaphor of which is the marketplace” (2005:360). The child-as-victim stereotype “maintains the illusion of a humanity separate from and vulnerable to the social and material practices and discourses embedded in the things they consume” (Sammond 2005:361). If the child is originally something that stands outside the market, it means that such a position is possible. In assigning agency to media producers and corporations and suggesting that simply changing the kinds of representations (films, advertisements and so forth) they circulate will fix any problems, the child-as-victim stereotype “offers the comfort of identifiable villains (or heroes) and an easy framework within which to imagine programs of social correction and control” (Sammond 2005:258). Similarly, underlying the perpetual adolescent stereotype is the idea that it is possible for the individual to exist as an autonomous, self-contained individual set apart from the social fabric of consumerism if only they can resist its seductive pleasures and if only the corporations and media-producers stop trying to drag them backwards. In the perpetual adolescent thesis, there is thus a strong tendency to blame a homogenous ‘they’: advertisers, corporations and the like. Some critics acknowledge that this is an over-simplification.

Benjamin Barber, for example, says that the cultural ethos of infantilism:

cannot be said to have a particular “author”, and the linkage between

it and the requirements of capitalism is always oblique and informal,

although no less efficacious for that. This is to say, it does not result

from a silent conspiracy of corporate meddlers and marketing

propagandists. (2008:82)

Joseph Epstein also acknowledges that the tendency for advertisers to encourage immaturity is “not a conspiracy, […] not six or eight international ad agencies meeting in secret to call the shots, but the dynamics of marketing itself, finding a way to make it

Chapter Two more profitable all around” (2004:n.p). Generally though, the vague ‘they’ is charged with a deliberate conspiracy of infantilisation, and the solutions proposed tend to centre on inducing ‘them’ to circulate ‘good’ commodities or representations. Les Grossman, for example, concludes that twixters may be best aided by the dissemination of popular culture that makes people look forward to adulthood (2005:n.p.). Marcel Danesi (2003) also suggests that one solution is to change media representations of adolescence.

What is it we are repudiating in creating these cultural myths and stereotypes – the perpetual adolescent, the child as victim, Generation Y – to regulate the meaning of consumerism and frame our responses to it? What is it about consumer discourses as loci of social meaning that is so disturbing? Four aspects of consumer-media discourses, and consumerism as a way of life, seem to create the greatest concern. The first is ubiquity, the spread of commercial values throughout physical and discursive space. The second is symbolic value, the metabolisation of cultural meaning in consumer discourses. The third is idealisation, the blurring of reality and fantasy by consumer discourses. The fourth is resilience, the propensity of consumer discourses to absorb critical responses. In exploring these characteristics, I focus on consumer-media discourses strongly associated with consumer ideologies; those most often castigated in accounts of perpetual adolescence, for example. I draw on broad cultural accounts of consumerism as well as works that focus specifically on marketing discourses like branding and advertising, and mass media such as television and film. A brand is a name or logo representing a product, range of products, company or corporation, with a collection of associated meanings (Holt 2004:2; Lury 2004:85). Advertising through posters, television commercials, newspaper space and so forth is one of the main ways the collection of meanings attached to brands is cultivated and communicated, as well as being a source of information regarding products and services. Mass media, the

Chapter Two various electronic and print mediums that circulate information and images in the public sphere, are products for consumption as well as mediums for disseminating cultural ideas, including attitudes toward consumerism. As Mica Nava argues, advertising in particular is often simplistically presented as “the iconographic signifier of multinational capitalism, and therefore in some ethical sense, beyond redemption”

(1997:34; original emphasis), though there are also more moderate accounts in which critics argue that advertising must be recognised as an “enormously versatile and attractive genre of social communication” (Leiss et al [1986] 2005:619).

Ubiquity

Consumer values seem to be becoming ever more pervasive. In particular, the spread of advertising is often put forward as emblematic of this trend. Jean Baudrillard argues that advertising is now “the effect of an omnipresent visibility of enterprises, brands, social interlocutors and the social virtues of communication” (1998:149). It “invades everything, as public space (the street, monument, market, scene) disappears”

(Baudrillard 1998:150). Zygmunt Bauman suggests that human attention has become a

“resource” (2002:162), and there are countless examples of the way this ‘resource’ is being mined. James Twitchell describes the way advertising is finding its way everywhere from urinals to airsickness bags on planes, stating: “What distinguishes modern marketing is that it has jumped from the human voice and printed posters to anything that can carry it” (1996:56). Kalle Lasn lists examples like a British athlete wearing contact lenses bearing his sponsor’s logo, IBM beaming its logo into the sky above San Francisco and a Japanese school boy wearing a neon vest on the train to and from school to promote an electronics company (1999:20-1). Sticker advertisements on fruit and an entire American street painted pink to promote Barbie are just two of

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Naomi Klein’s exemplars of the ‘branded world’ (2001:12), while David Boyle tells of families naming their children after brands for the chance to win prizes (2003:29). In something that sounds like a satirical news item rather than a real occurrence, Benjamin

Barber points to a newspaper article describing ‘bumvertising’: a term coined and trademarked by a young Seattle entrepreneur when he started paying homeless people to attach advertisements to their begging signs (2008:182).

The commercialisation of film, television, popular music and other forms of entertainment also appears to be intensifying. For example, the film industry is seeing a rapid expansion of product placement and cross-promotion, and an increasing emphasis on the importance of bottom line profit (Miller et al 2001; Biskind [1998] 2007).

Television in particular is seen as a site for the promotion of consumerism (Spittle

2002:56). We are even seeing the commercialisation of everyday social encounters, with viral marketing – essentially, marketing that tries not to look like marketing – becoming more and more popular (Holt 2002:85; Carducci 2006:127; Walker

2008:167). For example, Sony Ericsson once hired sixty actors in ten cities to ask strangers to take their picture with the company’s latest camera: “And thus an act of civility was converted into a branding event” (Walker 2008:167).

For those in the marketing industry such pervasiveness is simply the positive, logical outcome of the values of innovation and growth that underpin the marketing industry and capitalism in general. Marketing’s success is predicated on reaching consumers and circumventing resistance to advertising. For example, in their industry guide to successful marketing, Max Sutherland and Alicia Sylvester argue that brands must develop new methods to “dominate the clutter of mental alternatives” in a

Darwinian commercial environment (2000:21). Jean-Marc Lehu (2006), in his book on the value of product placement, similarly speaks in terms of evolution and innovation.

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He argues, for example, that product placement is valuable because the anti-advertising

‘defences’ of viewers are lowered at the cinema (Lehu 2006:63).

However, detractors present the suffusion of marketing as a manifestation of the damaging ideological spread of consumerism. Naomi Klein (2001), Kalle Lasn (1999) and many others (see for example: Kilbourne 1999; Boyle 2003) fear a world in which all discourse is commercialised, all physical space is branded and all values have been subsumed or compromised by consumerism. The argument Benjamin Barber puts forward, for example, is typical:

The market consciously aims at exerting a firm and

encompassing grip on time and on space, controlling each and every

of our waking moments and infiltrating the psyche’s most remote and

private geography […] [creating] an all-consuming people who shop

or think about shopping, who conceive or exercise consumer wants,

all the time. (2008:220)

Kalle Lasn claims that consumerism creates many ‘mental pollutants’, advertisements being “the most prevalent and toxic” (1999:19), programming us to be members of a

“consumerist cult” (1999:53). Naomi Klein laments “the transforming of culture into little more than a collection of brand-extensions-in-waiting” (2001:32). In examining contested commodities like organs, Jane Radin argues that the “more we conceive of all things that people value as mere preferences that can be expressed in dollars and traded off against other dollar values, the more it is so.” (1996:223). Such critics argue that the more ‘commercial’ values as represented by brands and advertising spread, the less room there will be for other values like ‘artistic’, ‘political’ and, as evident in the perpetual adolescence thesis, ‘mature’.

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Symbolic Value

Consumer-media culture is not only accused of crowding out important values like

‘artistic’ and ‘political’; it is also charged with appropriating such values in service of consumerism. Cultural critics argue that in its early stages in the second half of the nineteenth century, marketing was aimed at disseminating information about products and making products recognisable (Myers 1999:18; Ewen [1976] 2001:34; Holt

2002:80; Barber 2008:175). This shifted in the early twentieth century, with the 1920s often put forward as a turning point (Goldman & Papson 1995:13; Ewen [1976]

2001:31). Stuart Ewen, for example, argues that an increase in mass production meant that the “utilitarian value of a product or the traditional notion of mechanical quality were no longer sufficient inducements to move merchandise at the necessary rate and volume” ([1976] 2001:34). Michael Schudson also points to the role of mass production in the rise of symbolic advertising, arguing that people are less likely to understand how things are made, leaving them more liable to rely on the product information communicated in advertisements (1986:125).

As a proliferation of products came onto the market with little to differentiate them in a utilitarian sense, marketing increasingly became about distinguishing a product or brand by associating it with a set of ideas, emotions or cultural meanings, with advertising playing a key role in forging such associations: “Brand image has shifted from reputation based on product function to symbolic image value” (Goldman

& Papson 1995:22). A number of critics examining the success of the bottled water industry (Wilk 2006; Royte 2008), for example, argue that what is actually being sold in vast quantities are ideas to do with convenience, hygiene, prestige and mistrust of public services rather than portions of a substance that “falls from the sky for free”

(Wilk 2006:305; original emphasis). The ‘cola wars’ between Coca Cola and Pepsi are

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Chapter Two said to be more a battle of meaning than of taste (Goldman & Papson 1995:20; Frank

1997:169; Myers 1999:7; Walker 2008:xx). Nike, with its ubiquitous swoosh symbol, is the quintessential example of the creation of symbolic value: Nike does not sell shoes and other merchandise so much as it sells the swoosh as a symbol of ideas like victory and athletic prowess by, for instance, drawing on the cultural capital of Michael Jordan in ad campaigns (Goldman & Papson 1995:11; LaFeber 1999:60; Klein 2001:55).

Marketing thus borrows all manner of cultural meanings and metabolises them in service of consumerism. This circulation of symbolic value through consumer goods is a defining feature of modern consumerism (Schudson 1984:8; Jhally [1987]

1990:142; Leiss et al [1986] 2005:5; Wernick 1991:15; Twitchell 1996:13; Myers

1999; Sutherland & Sylvester 2000:71; Danesi 2006:137; Comor 2008:65). This aspect of modern life is often presented as an unfortunate shift. Robert Goldman and Stephen

Papson, for example, are concerned by the “semiotic haemorrhaging” that occurs in culture when advertising appropriates values and meanings to fit commodities, robbing them of their cultural value (1995:274).

Symbolic value is also a characteristic of consumers themselves, as individuals purportedly construct identities out of value-laden products and texts. Andrew Wernick refers to this as the self-construction of the individual as “an advertisement for myself”

(1991:66). This idea can be found in marketing manuals (Sutherland & Sylvester

2000:66) as well as in cultural critiques (Williams 1960:29; Goldman & Papson

1995:6; Lee 1993:169; Finkelstein 2007:96). In critiques of consumerism, investment metaphors are common. A phrase such as ‘I like this’ has great import, according to

John Seabrook:

Your judgement joins pools of other judgements, a small relationship

economy, one of millions that continually coalesce and dissolve and

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reform around cultural products—movies, sneakers, jeans, pop songs.

Your identity is your investment in these relationship economies.

(2000:170-1)

Bill Maurer and Gabriele Schwab refer to this as “acquisitive individualism”: “Self- identity becomes a product to be worked on, invested in, medicated, and competitively performed and deployed as social currency” (2006:9). Similarly, James Côté discusses

“identity capital”, the investments individuals make in ‘who they are’ as they attempt to reap dividends in the “identity markets” of consumer communities (2002:141).

More positive accounts of symbolic value tend to emphasise the way consumers manipulate, subvert and adapt such meaning (Certeau 1984; Fiske 1989). Michel de

Certeau, for example, argues that deterministic models are complicated by “the enigma of the consumer-sphinx”:

In reality, a rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular and

clamorous production is confronted by an entirely different kind of

production, called “consumption” and characterized by its ruses, its

fragmentation (the result of circumstances), its poaching, its

clandestine nature, its tireless but quiet activity, in short by its quasi-

invisibility, since it shows itself not in its own products (where would

it place them?) but in an art of using those imposed on it. (1984:31)

However, Zygmunt Bauman argues that both pessimistic and optimistic accounts of the potential for consumer sovereignty tend to maintain a sense that “the world formed and sustained by the society of consumers stays neatly divided into things to be chosen and their choosers” (2007:12; original emphasis). Bauman argues that in the society of consumers, such distinctions are, in fact, blurred or even effaced. A consumer society is

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Chapter Two one in which people are simultaneously “promoters of commodities and the commodities they promote” (Bauman 2007:6; original emphasis).

As the story of the emergence of the teenager demonstrates, the idea of an identity built out of consumer products is strongly associated with youth. The teenager was seemingly the first to embrace this method of finding an acceptable identity, the idea that being a successful individual involves choosing goods and texts that will bring prestige and connection and avoiding those that are ‘wrong’ or ‘uncool’ (Kenway &

Bullen 2001:152-3; Lury 2001:43; Davis & Dickinson 2004:9).

Idealisation

Consumer-media culture is also charged with presenting an “over-ripe reality” (Boyle

2003:66), distorting ideas of what life should be like. Sut Jhally argues that ads increasingly tend to stress the benefits of consumerism in terms of “self-fulfillment, escape and private fantasy” ([1987] 1990:128). Michael Schudson calls marketing

“commercial realism” or “capitalist realist art”, and argues that it operates on the basis of typification and idealisation, presenting an edited, ritualised, abstract version of life

‘as it should be’ (1986:214). However, he questions the idea that marketing is all- powerful, able to create needs and manipulate minds (Schudson 1984:9). Rob Wernick

(1991) is more pessimistic. He states that advertising is best understood as rhetoric with a promotional aim. Advertising presents a version of reality that has been reconstituted in service of this promotional communicative function, favouring conventionality and positivity: “The picture of the world it presents, accordingly, is flat, one-dimensional, incorporative, and normalized” (Wernick 1991:42). He is inclined to think that advertising, and the spread of promotional culture more generally, has a powerful negative impact on individual consciousness (Wernick 1991:191).

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Wernick (1991) further argues that idealisation encourages consumers to pursue fulfilment through purchases. The distorted world presented by advertising is one in which happiness is available to buy:

Being is reduced to having, desire to lack. No needs or desires are

speakable without a commodity to satisfy them; no commodity

without at least an imagined place for it in our affections. [….] [T]he

images of well-being which promote the product encode the desire to

consume it within a whole paradigm of passive gratification.

(Wernick 1991:35)

Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen similarly argue that the “mass commercial imagery” circulated by ads, packaging, television, film, magazines and so forth is designed to seduce the consumer with assurances of satisfaction through product choice:

[T]he promise of ecstatic delight [...] is the undifferentiated, universal

promise of the marketplace. Utopia is spectacle! Pain is only a

reminder to those who have not yet bought the right product.

(1992:49)

Commercial imagery presents life as a series of consumer choices, with the ‘right’ choices creating a happy life. In their view, this seeming proliferation of choice is an illusion, as is the satisfaction such choices supposedly offer (Ewen & Ewen 1992:197).

The illusion is, however, seductive; Mady Schutzman goes so far as to characterise modern consumers as hysterics, with a pathological incapacity to differentiate between reality and illusion (1999:9). Focusing on iconography of the female body, she argues that advertisements present impossible ideals that leave the consumer perpetually dissatisfied: “We desiring machines roam haphazardly in ad-inspired fugue states, ever

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Chapter Two shopping, seeking self-improvement and satisfaction” (Schutzman 1999:118).

Consumerism is thus paradoxical, because while it is predicated on the idea that we can gain satisfaction from consuming goods, the consumer system only functions if we remain unsatisfied and thus continue to consume (Slater 1997:100; Bauman 2007:47).

While advertising draws much fire, other commercial discourses like television, video games and film also garner criticism. Ian Mitroff and Warren Bennis claim that television has obliterated the line between reality and unreality by, for example, privileging stereotypes (1993:127). In her study of American youth channel MTV, Ann

Kaplan argues that television is the quintessential medium of consumerism:

The TV is seductive precisely because it speaks to a desire that is

insatiable – it promises complete knowledge in some far distant and

never-to-be-experienced future. TV's strategy is to keep us endlessly

consuming in the hopes of fulfilling our desire. (1987:4)

Neal Gabler (1999) claims that entertainment has become the prevailing value of life. It is not just that film, video games and television offer an escape from reality; life itself is expected to be an entertaining and malleable ‘medium’ (Gabler 1999:9).

Concerns about idealisation also seem to underpin the perpetual adolescent thesis. Attaining adulthood to some extent means giving up fantasies, accepting losses.

Adulthood means making choices: at least some potentialities must be left unfulfilled.

Consumerism seems to provoke anxiety in part because it purports to ameliorate losses, fulfil fantasies, allow endless possibilities; an apparently false promise that gives people a distorted idea of what being a grown up should be like. Robert Lantham wonders whether “[r]etreating into a private universe of solipsistic pleasures” is a surprising response given the far less appealing adult realm of work and responsibility in which possibilities and potentialities are increasingly foreclosed (2002:74).

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Resilience

Resilience refers to the propensity of consumer discourses to integrate or simply preclude resistant ideas and behaviour. As Zygmunt Bauman argues:

The society of consumers has developed, to an unprecedented

degree, the capacity to absorb all and any dissent it inevitably, in

common with other types of society, breeds – and then to recycle it as

a major resource of its own reproduction, reinvigoration and

expansion. (2007:48)

In terms of marketing, for example, Thomas Frank (1997) argues that “anti-advertising” has become increasingly popular since the 1960s. Anti-advertising is a style that harnesses “public mistrust of consumerism—perhaps the most powerful cultural tendency of the age—to consumerism itself” (Frank 1997:55). The Volkswagen Bug campaign from the 1960s is a classic example, playing on public mistrust of ‘dishonest’ car advertising and the excesses of the car industry. For example, some ads made fun of the principle of planned obsolescence underpinning the car industry by self- deprecatingly drawing attention to the fact that the design of the Bug remained essentially unchanged year after year (Frank 1997:63). This style of advertising basically says: “advertisers are liars, except, or course, this one” (Frank 1997:65).

‘Anti-consumerist’, then, becomes another commercial identity to be bought and sold (Carducci 2006:124), along with identities like ‘authentic’ (Botterill 2007) and

‘humanitarian’ (Goldman & Papson 1995:48). A number of critics argue that attempts to resist or rebel against consumerism actually fuel consumerism, providing the market with new ways of positioning products (Frank 1997; Holt 2002; Heath & Potter [2005]

2006). Douglas Holt, for example, argues that the pursuit of “consumer sovereignty”,

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Chapter Two whereby consumers try to individuate market offerings and avoid market influence, suits the needs of the market:

Since the market feeds off of the constant production of difference,

the most creative, unorthodox, singularizing consumer sovereignty

practices are the most productive for the system. They serve as grist

for the branding mill that is ever in search of new cultural materials.

[….] What has been termed “consumer resistance” is actually a form

of market-sanctioned cultural experimentation through which the

market rejuvenates itself. (2002:88-9)

This is evident, for example, in Kenneth Thompson’s description of the “commercial exploitation of folk devils such as Mods and Rockers by those engaged in marketing teenage consumer goods, who advertised using the groups’ style images” (Thompson

1998:39; original emphasis). Rob Walker tells of a marketer working for the Pabst

Brewing Company in the US who cited Naomi Klein’s virulently anti-consumerist No

Logo (2001) as inspiration for the brand’s low-key approach to marketing the Pabst

Blue Ribbon beer, claiming the book contains “many good marketing ideas” (Walker

2008:104). Responding to an increase in sales in the young, ‘hip’ demographic, the company sought to foster the idea of the beer as the choice of rebels, dissenters and activists. Members of the marketing team pursued strategies that positioned the beer as an underdog, eschewing television ads and other conventional advertising avenues and instead sponsoring bike messenger rallies and independent publishers (Walker

2008:104). Lynn Spigel (2001) describes an incident that similarly shows the propensity for businesses to make use of anti-consumerist ideas for marketing or business-growth purposes. She recounts a phone call she received from a program manager in strategic marketing at the Intel Corporation, in which he informed her he

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Chapter Two uses one of her earlier books – a study of television’s influence in American homes – in his corporation’s investigations into the way people use new technology. She writes:

“While I considered Make Room For TV in part a critique of the corporatization of everyday life, the corporate world obviously found it useful for exactly that purpose”

(Spigel 2001:381; original emphasis).

In constructing an ostensibly singular identity out of mass manufactured goods or texts, we negotiate a culture in which “persons must be simultaneously and impossibly unique individuals and known quantities” (Sammond 2005:360; original emphasis) and in which “consumers claim to be doing their own thing while doing it with thousands of like-minded others” (Holt 2002:83). Craig Thompson and Diana

Haytko argue that in negotiating this tension between conformity and individuality, individuals tend to interpret their own consumption behaviours as different from the behaviours of others (and consumer society in general):

One way that consumers negotiate this paradoxical situation is to

create a contrast to a generalized other, who is consistently

characterized as a conformist who is highly sensitive to the opinions

of peers. Through this contrasting image, the participants’ can

buttress their sense of being unique and, more important, the

perceived uniqueness of wanting to be unique[.] (1997:22)

This gives rise to the ‘rebel consumer’, a central figure in the construction of consumption “as a volitional site of personal development, achievement, and self- creation” (Holt 2002:82). Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter argue that the rebel consumer figure leads to resistance to consumerism being simplistically framed in stylistic terms: “non-standard acts of consumption come to be seen as politically radical” ([2005] 2006:110; original emphasis).

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There is also a trend toward social change and resistance generally being configured as “consumptive and private” (Maurer & Schwab 2006:9). In part this has to do with the way consumer discourses absorb specific movements for social change, as well as broad values like ‘rebellious’ and ‘authentic’. Joseph Rumbo argues that

“although resistance by environmentally and politically motivated consumers can effect change, marketers also strengthen the consumerist hegemony by absorbing criticisms and converting such resistance into reasons for consumption” (2002:144). Jean

Kilbourne similarly claims that in consumer society social problems are trivialised and reduced to the personal; advertising, for example, “co-opts any movement for social change and reduces it to the narcissistic pursuit of pleasure and perfection” (1999:295).

Ann Kaplan also suggest that in consumer society, oppositional discourses are reduced to “the surfaces/textures/images of opposition rather than to its actuality as something that challenges the status quo” (1987:152).

Environmentalism is one such movement. For instance, in her study of environmental discourses in Seventeen magazine from 1951 to 1991, Dawn Currie analyses an article in which the issue of air pollution is framed in terms of the increased importance of keeping one’s skin clean of pollutants (1994:108). Some companies characterise themselves as environmentally conscious, drawing on the moral authority of the environmental movement to position themselves as superior to competitors

(Goldman & Papson 1995:187). They reassure the consumer that saving the environment involves merely consuming a certain way, rather than questioning the wastefulness and unsustainability of consumerism itself (Goldman & Papson

1995:213). Feminism is also frequently reconstituted. For example, a Dove beauty campaign using ‘real’ women drew criticism for defining feminism in terms of grooming, shopping and individual action; the campaign “prioritizes commodity

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Chapter Two purchases above more ambitious goals such as decentering the role of beauty in women’s lives, processing negative emotions, or challenging men’s relationship with feminine beauty” (Johnston & Taylor 2008:960-1).

Consumer discourses like advertising may frame social change in terms of consumption, but social movements increasingly do so as well. As Joseph Heath and

Andrew Potter point out, social movements increasingly fall back on the idea that “the consumer can disrupt the system simply by refusing to shop where she has been told to”

([2005] 2006:110). For example, an anti-consumerism group called Adbusters – co- founded by Kalle Lasn (2001) – puts forward resistant strategies that conflate political and consumer power. Their most high-profile campaign, for instance, is Buy Nothing

Day, in which individuals are encouraged to avoid consuming goods for one day each year. Joseph Rumbo argues that groups like Adbusters focus on “an amorphous and vaguely conceived nonideological crusade against consumerism” rather than exploring political solutions to ameliorate social inequality and injustice (2002:143).

Resilience is a particularly pertinent example of the way the perpetual adolescent thesis, and the concerns regarding consumerism that underpin it, problematises the idea that young adult literature can ‘teach’ the teenager reader to resist consumerism. In the four case studies that follow, I examine the implications of this problematisation in the works of M.T. Anderson and Scott Westerfeld. In Chapters

3 and 4, I argue that M.T. Anderson’s books are pessimistic regarding the capacity for individuals to both mature and consume, with the protagonists of his books unable to achieve a properly intersubjective or agentive identity in a consumer society. In

Chapters 5 and 6, I argue that Scott Westerfeld’s books engage with a more positive imagining of the potential for individuals to reconcile maturation and consumption, presenting a largely positive portrayal of protagonists who are able to continually stave

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Chapter Two off a stable identity through stylistic redefinition, staying ‘rewireable’. These case studies aim to show that the potentialities and limitations of young adult literature, particularly in regards to its ability to act as a socialising tool, must be considered in relation to its status as a consumer product circulating in a marketplace in which there is a great deal of confusion about whether consumerism needs to be ‘resisted’ and whether such resistance is even possible.

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CHAPTER THREE

Feed: Juvenilising Ourselves to Death

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What

Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for

there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those

who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who

would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and

egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.

Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

[…] In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley

feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the

possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1986, viii.

Cultural critic Neil Postman here refers to his own book, in which he rails against society’s “descent into a vast triviality” (Postman 1986:6). However, this description could easily apply to Feed ([2002] 2004) by M.T. Anderson, which presents the reader with a Huxleyan future of passivity, egoism and irrelevance in which the ‘adult’ ability to make rational decisions has been extinguished by consumer capitalism. Feed is set in a thoroughly juvenilised future American city where ubiquitous consumer values foster a society in which individuals defines themselves through products and ignore reality in favour of the idealised fantasy world offered by consumer-media culture. The book addresses a teenage consumer reader while communicating the idea that the teenage

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Chapter Three consumer is a repository for the worst aspects of consumerism. The ironic narrative style and pessimistic ending of the novel preclude the possibility of a rational response to the problems it poses.

Feed depicts a future in which fears regarding perpetual adolescence and its negative effects on individuals and society have been realised; a juvenilised North

American society wallows in material pleasures, with marketing discourses the primary locus of self-definition and meaning-making. Individuals are, for the most part, subject to the version of selfhood offered by corporations: seventy three percent of the population have a piece of neural technology called ‘the feed’ voluntarily implanted in their brains. The timeframe in relation to the present is left vague, though the first- person narrator Titus mentions that feeds first appeared “[l]ike, maybe, fifty or a hundred years ago” (47). The feed is a product that is willingly purchased, originally pitched as an educative tool to provide young people with instant access to knowledge

(47). However, it has become an integral part of the consumer lifestyle; at least, for those who are able to afford it. Advertising, entertainment, news and the like are fed straight into the brain, and users may communicate with each other and buy products mentally. The feed dramatises the idea of our own rational will (the cultivation of which is fundamental to the traditional meaning of ‘adulthood’) being subjugated to the will of the market.

First-person late-teens narrator Titus is a typical member of this juvenilised future society. He loves the feed and enjoys his middle-class consumer lifestyle of instant gratification and material pleasures, though at the periphery of his narrative are clues that the environment is devastated and socioeconomic inequality is rife. Titus tells the story of his relationship with Violet, who is not a typical teenager: her parents are anti-feed, and she did not get one installed until she was seven. Titus and Violet meet

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Chapter Three on a trip to the moon; they go to a night club where an activist hacks their feeds. They form a romantic relationship while recovering in hospital. The differences in their attitude to feed culture cause friction as their relationship progresses, and a further complication arises when Violet reveals that, post-hacking, her feed is malfunctioning due to its relatively late installation. Titus and Violet ultimately break up, and the increasingly severe feed malfunctions put Violet in a vegetative state. In the final scene,

Titus visits a dying Violet, an advertisement for a jeans sale pulsing through his feed.

In peritextual material included in the 2004 Candlewick paperback edition of

Feed, M.T. Anderson touches on the anxieties regarding consumerism explored in

Chapter Two.14 This edition includes a reader’s guide at the back of the book, consisting of a set of study questions and an interview with Anderson (the interviewer is anonymous, and the source of the study questions is also unclear). In the interview,

Anderson states that he sees the novel as allegorical, with the future setting allowing him to “discuss things we’re dealing with now” (306). He states that the fictional feed device is an allegory for the way individuals interact with consumer-media culture:

I think we all have, at this point, a direct connection to the media in

our brains. It’s impossible for us to think of our life without

conceiving of it in images that are taken from movies, from songs,

from ads, all of which are images that are challenging us to be better

consumers rather than better people. (306)

14 I take my understanding of paratextual material from Gérard Genette, who defines ‘peritextual’ as paratextual material contained in the same volume as the text, and ‘epitextual’ as paratextual material located outside the volume (1997:5).

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Anderson uses the inclusive terms “we” and “us” rather than confining this characteristic to teenagers. When asked if he thinks people know they are being manipulated by the media, Anderson answers:

Well, some people know and some people don’t. Many people are

quite frank about wanting to avert their eyes from the possibility that

the world is a complicated place, one in which we all have a

responsibility and a role to play. (306)

This implies that one of the purposes of Feed is to train the reader’s eyes upon the complicated world and alert them to their responsibility within it. Anderson summarises the purpose of the book as follows:

Ultimately, in writing Feed, I wanted to say to kids who are already

doubting what they see around them, “You already think in ways I’ll

never be capable of, and are dreaming things I can’t conceive of.

Keep it up. We’re counting on you.” (307)

There are echoes here of the ideas underlying scholarly conceptions of ‘anti- consumerism’ books, with the potential for making society ‘grow up’ located in the young.

Of the texts considered in this thesis, Feed has garnered the most attention from scholars, who generally argue that it satirises consumer-media culture. Elizabeth Bullen and Elizabeth Parsons argue that “the evils pervading Feed’s dystopic vision are unequivocally the product of American-driven models of late capitalism” (2007:133).

Similarly, Clare Bradford, Kerry Mallan, John Stephens and Robyn McCallum call

Feed an “ironic satire on consumer culture” that “expresses a cynicism towards corporate and media dominated culture” (2008:166). Stephanie Guerra includes Feed in

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Chapter Three a discussion of young adult books that may act as “a challenge to the consumerist ideology so prevalent in North America” (2009:276). Books like Feed envision a future shaped by corporate power and biotechnology and provide “a ground where anxieties about their interplay may be echoed and explored, the possibilities fleshed out” (Guerra

2009:276). She argues that Feed satirises consumerism by depicting “an unethical marketer’s dream: an illiterate society incapable of critical thought, focused entirely on consumption and prey to every passing ad” (Guerra 2009:282-3).

The feed is a metonym for current consumer culture, as “[s]imilarities between feed and real-world advertising links the text’s ideological message about the feed to the real-world context of ICTs [information and communication technologies] and contemporary media content” (Giardina 2006:85). The text’s negative portrayal of the feed – and, by extension, current consumer culture – hinges on two aspects of the narrative: the ironic nature of Titus’s first-person narration and the pessimistic ending.

As Elizabeth Bullen and Elizabeth Parsons (2007:136) and Natasha Giardina (2006:85) argue, Titus’s narrative is ironic. This is partly a function of the temporal setting. Since

Titus’s world is not entirely familiar to the implied reader, the novel generates

“cognitive estrangement” through a common science fiction narrative technique: the use of a “point-of-view character who understands his or her own world and feels no need to explain its strangenesses to us” (Mendlesohn 2009:11). The opening sentence of the novel captures the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar: “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck” (3). First, there is immediate cognitive estrangement, since Titus mentions visiting the moon so casually.

The use of the word “suck” indicates the colloquial nature of the narration and also creates a contrasting point of familiarity to the mention of the moon, since it is a slang word in use today. Titus employs a great deal of slang throughout the novel. Much of it

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Chapter Three is unfamiliar, but the meaning is recognisable through context: “unit” for friend, “brag” for good, “meg” for very. Titus’s narration is extremely colloquial to the point of being inarticulate at times. One of the chapters, for example, begins: “It was maybe, okay, maybe it was like two days after the party” (94).

Bullen and Parsons argue that Titus is the “epitome of a vacuous teenager”

(2007:134) and that the narrative “establishes a range of commonalities between the first person narrator and the implied reader” (2007:136). The activities Titus enjoys are

“common diversions enjoyed by teenagers in the West” (Bullen & Parsons 2007:136), such as attending parties, shopping and watching soap operas. Titus’s character is constructed, on one level, to say to the reader: “you are like me’’ (Bullen & Parsons

2007:136). However, narrative irony positions the implied reader to judge Titus and his value system negatively, with readers “given the provocative narrative position of experiencing the world of the story through Titus, and simultaneously having to reject and critique that world-view, while they are looking through it” (Bullen & Parsons

2007:136). Titus is thus an unreliable narrator. Robyn McCallum argues that double- voicing is achieved in first-person narratives in a number of ways, such as:

when the viewpoints of other characters indicate that the narrator’s

view of the world is limited or based on misapprehensions; or when

that viewpoint conflicts with consensus views of reality. (McCallum

1999:33)

Titus’s worldview is shown to be ‘wrong’ in three ways: the departure from consensus reality, the inclusion of feed discourse that points to gaps in his narration and the contrasting viewpoint of Violet. For example, Titus’s perspective clashes with consensus reality in that throughout the narrative, what is exaggerated, unnatural or even abhorrent to the reader is presented as natural or desirable to Titus. For example,

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Chapter Three when Titus and his family are cleaning up after dinner one night, he narrates that his mother and younger brother “crinkled up the disposable table together and threw it away” (129). This comically exaggerates a familiar concept – disposable plates, cutlery, cups – in order to draw attention to their wastefulness. Sometimes the conflict with consensus reality is more extreme: when Titus and Violet visit the ocean, for example, they have to wear biohazard suits because the beach is so toxic. Titus’s only concern about this state of affairs is that the suit is an ugly orange that makes him look “dumb”

(179), but the departure from consensus reality draws the reader’s attention to the degraded nature of Titus’s world and invites them to connect it to current pollution problems.

Robyn McCallum argues that the inclusion of extraliterary discourses as structural components in young adult texts can create dialogism (McCallum 1999:204).

Feed does this in a limited way, as snippets of the feed sometimes point to the unreliability of Titus’s narration. The reader is exposed to the feed as part of Titus’s first person narration, as he experiences its interjections and uses it to communicate with friends. Any such feed activity is distinguished using italics. However, chapters are also sporadically interspersed with representations of feed activity without context: it is not made clear whether this is meant to represent Titus’s experience of the feed. In these sections, disjointed snippets of feed are presented in italics (which helps the reader identify them as feed communications, since those in the narrative proper are also in italics) and bookended by ellipses to suggest a sense of channel flicking. The snippets of feed are recognisable as particular discourses: news, music, movie trailers, television programs. For example, there are recognisable advertisements like:

...the cola with the refreshing taste of citrus and butter… (26)

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This is ridiculous, pairing two incompatible flavours in a silly product. Examples such as this convey the inanity of the feed, which may prompt the implied reader to question

Titus’s veneration of it. However, some examples also point to gaps and inadequacies in Titus’s narration. For example, snippets of news discourse make Titus’s narration seem less reliable, as they give clues to terrible happenings in the world.

Titus’s view is also shown as unreliable in relation to Violet, and this is the aspect of the text that critics pay the most attention to in terms of characterising the book as critical of consumerism. Bullen and Parsons (2007) argue that Feed plays out its dystopian vision of the future by presenting a pair of characters that epitomise possible responses to the negative aspects of consumerism as posited by Zygmunt

Bauman (2002). The implied reader is offered a ‘bystander’ subject position in Titus and an ‘actor’ subject position in Violet. Roberta Seelinger Trites does not examine the book at length in her article on social hope in young adult literature, but she similarly characterises it as a novel that depicts “one protagonist with no hope while the other one does hope, despite all evidence to the contrary” (2006:13). Bullen and Parsons argue that although the first-person narrator is usually a sympathetic narrative position, the ironic nature of the narration in Feed means the reader is invited to side with Violet and condemn Titus. Violet “amplifies the reader’s perception of Titus” as a condemnable bystander (2007:134). Thus, though Violet dies, “the novel takes a profoundly activist position by virtue of its narrative structure” (Bullen & Parsons

2007:136).

The pessimistic ending is also implicated in the novel’s critique. Bradford,

Mallan, McCallum and Stephens, for instance, argue that Titus has not changed at the novel’s close: he “merely gazes solipsistically at his own reflection in [Violet’s] eyes”, having “failed to mature or learn anything from his experiences” (2008:168). They

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Chapter Three argue that the text is thus pessimistic regarding the future of a civilisation in which the ideologies of global capitalism prevail. With echoes of critical stances regarding the pessimistic nature of The Chocolate War explored in Chapter One, Bullen and Parsons argue that though the ending is pessimistic in regards to the figure of the ‘actor’, as

“Violet’s resistance comes to nothing, and becomes one of the main factors contributing to her terrible slow death” (2007:134), this pessimism is the key to a message of hope:

[T]o leave the reader grimly contemplating Violet’s wasted life, is to

leave them considering and questioning how this came about. Violet’s

narrative punishment encodes within itself the call to action that the

novel makes. (2007:137)

A more optimistic ending would “release the reader from their engagement with the problem” (Bullen & Parsons 2007:137). Texts such as Feed are thus ultimately empowering:

[I]t is in leaving the reader with some discomfort that they ask the

reader to seek its cause. In this way, the act of reading becomes the

impetus to action. These texts can then be read as empowering,

mapping a trajectory from bystander to actor. (Bullen & Parsons

2007:138)

This idea that dystopian novels have the potential to incite preventative action in regards to an imagined dark future is, as I argued in Chapter One, common in work on

‘anti-consumerism’ books.

However, considering this text in light of the perpetual adolescent stereotype shows that Feed’s critique of consumerism relies on the teenage reader being

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Chapter Three positioned to see themselves as a representative of the worst aspects of consumer culture. This problematises the idea that it offers a path to becoming an ‘actor’ or that the ultimate message of the book is: “Keep it up. We’re counting on you” (306). Such a message requires the reader to resist the seductiveness of Titus’s lifestyle (and, implicitly, their own lifestyle) and to channel this knowledge of the negative aspects of consumerism into action. However, the text conveys the message that neither of these responses is possible. My analysis of the authority arc focuses on the narrative role of the feed as a metonym for the dominance of consumer ideologies and the way the text positions the reader to critique the feed and, by implication, “the Western information- saturated mediascape” (Giardina 2006:85). Although Titus and Violet are constructed as broadly oppositional – Titus as typical and acquiescent, Violet as atypical and resistant – they are both unable to define themselves outside the dictates of the feed. In the depiction of their relationship, the seeming opposition between acquiescent and resistant breaks down further. Titus is unable to resist the seductive nature of the feed in that knowledge regarding its downsides cannot compete with its pleasures, as represented by his reactions to Violet’s strange behaviour and her criticism of

American culture. Violet is unable to resist the seductive nature of the feed in forming ideas of ‘really living’ and being ‘normal’, as represented by her desire for Titus. The pessimistic ending of the novel further denies the possibility of a rational, productive response to consumer-media culture.

“Da da da, evil corporations”: The Authority Arc

The main site of cultural authority in the novel is the feed and the corporate control it represents; corporations are literally faceless. For example, when Violet is having difficulties with her feed and tries to contact FeedTech, she is only able to communicate

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Chapter Three with an automated intelligence called Nina who offers her nothing but shopping advice.

Violet’s requests to be connected to a “live operator” go unheeded (154). This facelessness prefigures the pessimistic ending in that the book provides no concrete

‘villains’ that can be defeated. Other young adult dystopian books often offer tangible human ‘villains’. Claire Carmichael’s Ads R Us (2006), for example, depicts a futuristic city in which, as in Feed, marketing is fundamental to the operation of society and corporations are accepted by the majority of the public as purveyors of societal wellbeing. The reader is positioned to view this “Chattering World” – so dubbed by befuddled teenager Barrett, who is experiencing it for the first time after living in a rustic alternative community for most of his life – as an exaggeration of current society and make negative judgments. Unlike in Feed, however, the narrative features a number of identifiable ‘baddies’, such as a power-hungry politician seeking to use subliminal messages to control the population. Once these representatives of a more

‘extreme’ consumerism are defeated and punished, the status quo is ultimately depicted in a positive way. For example, Barrett, who was once very critical of this consumer society, concludes: “I’ve found the Chattering World has more to offer than I imagined” (249). A similar pattern is evident in some realist books. For instance, Stefan

Petrucha’s Teen, Inc. (2007) tells the story of fourteen-year-old Jaiden, who was adopted and raised by a corporation when he was a baby as a public relations stunt after a faulty piece of machinery produced by the corporation killed his parents.15 The text positions the reader to think about the ways individuals are all, in a more metaphorical

15 At one point Jaiden discusses a school assignment in which he is asked to compare 1984 with Brave

New World. As an aside he states: “By the way, I think M.T. Anderson’s Feed was better than both these books, but it wasn’t a choice in the assignment” (Teen, Inc. 29).

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Chapter Three sense, “raised by corporations” (240). It transpires that the corporation is polluting the local environment, but the fault for this is ultimately laid at the feet of an ‘evil’ executive. Once this executive has been exposed and removed from the corporation, the text conveys an overall positive view of corporations and their place in the world. For example, Jaiden muses:

Corporations are just unavoidable. I mean, think about how big they

are. A decade or so ago, when McDonald’s and Burger King switched

from styrofoam packaging to biodegradable paper, there was a

measurable drop in the number of landfills world-wide. When they

switched to healthier oil? I bet there was a measurable increase in the

average life expectancy of U.S. Citizens.

Now, thank heaven for the Hulk and Ghandi, but that’s power.

(240; original emphasis)

This upholds Elizabeth Parsons’ observation that texts that try to challenge corporate practices can implicitly valorise the empowering potential of corporate enfranchisement

(2006:31). Such books convey the idea that an agentive response to corporations is not necessary; Feed conveys the idea that one is not possible.

In this section, I first consider the ways Titus is positioned as a typical, acquiescent member of his society and the ways this draws attention to negative aspects of consumerism in current culture while also conveying the seductive nature of consumer-media discourses. I then consider the way Violet is positioned as a resistant or oppositional character, and the ways in which her attempts to resist fail. Both characters are unable to define themselves as anything other than a particular kind of consumer, even if in Violet’s case it is the identity of failed consumer.

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Titus as ‘Typical’

For Titus, traditional sites of authority identified by McCallum (1999) and Trites (2000) such as school and parents have surrendered to the authority of the feed. For example,

“School™” is run by corporations, with students learning “how to find bargains” and

“how to decorate our bedroom” (110). Titus’s parents are also subject to the consumer ethos of the feed. Their response when Titus is upset about the hacking incident is to solve the problem with a purchase, buying him his own ‘upcar’ (a personal flying car)

(118). Their language, like that of Titus and his peers, is impoverished. For instance, when Titus’s father comes to visit him in the hospital after the hacking incident, his reaction to his son’s plight is inarticulate: “This is this thing which is… Okay, this is bullshit” (56; original ellipses). Elizabeth Bullen and Elizabeth Parsons argue that:

Titus’s parents’ teen-speak implies that their assumptions about the

world are equally adolescent. The mimicry holds up a powerfully

critical mirror to present day readers. (2007:137)

When consumerism is presented as juvenilising, the teenage reader is essentially told that to be like a teenager or adolescent is a negative thing. However, the reader must identify with Titus’s teenage perspective to some extent in order for this critique to be communicated – for the connections between Titus’s world and the reader’s to be recognised – and thus his narration also enacts the seductive nature of the feed.

Titus’s experience of the feed conveys the ubiquity of consumer values.

Advertisements no longer need to occupy physical space in order to gain attention, since the feed implant is able to deliver incessant, targeted advertisements straight to the brain. The market is literally inside people’s heads, embodying Benjamin Barber’s assertion that marketers today are intent on “controlling each and every of our waking moments and infiltrating the psyche’s most remote and private geography” (2008:220). 125

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The omnipresence of the “burbling” (3) feed is depicted through Titus’s first-person narration, as the feed responds to his physical location or emotional state. When Titus and his friends arrive on the Moon for a visit, for example, Titus is “bannered so hard” by advertisements for hotels, gift shops and “places where you could rent extra arms” that he can barely walk straight (8). The feed immediately turns his desires into possible purchases, such as when he looks around a nightclub at the clothing people are wearing:

“When I looked around, I wanted so much, that all of the prices were coming into my brain, and it was bam bam bam” (35). Ads are even welcome in his most private moments. When he finds himself tongue-tied after Violet implies that she wants to sleep with him, the feed immediately responds with an advertisement for “Cyranofeed”, which provides pick-up lines on demand. Titus’s narration presents the feed’s interjection as simply part of the conversation rather than a commercial intrusion, as natural to the flow of discussion as sentences uttered by Titus and Violet: “I said”, “The feed was like”, “She was like” (174).

Feed communications operate using symbolic value and idealisation. Titus loves the omniscience of the feed, its ability to define him and tell him what he needs: “it knows everything you want and hope for, sometimes before you even know what those things are” (48). For example, when Titus’s father takes him shopping for his new upcar, the car companies woo Titus by feeding him tailored fantasies:

Dodge was bannering me with me driving, and all of these people in

bikinis stuffed into the car with me, this big party, and with a beach

ball, too, like I could be the scene; Nongen, who made the Swarp, was

showing a romantic drive through the mountains with just me and

Violet, who they got pretty much right, except they made her taller

and with bigger boobs, and they made her cheeks kind of sparkly in a

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way that, if it were really happening, I would try to wipe off with a

facecloth. (121-2)

The key phrase here is “like I could be the scene”. It is not “like I could be in the scene”, but “I could be the scene”. The car companies are selling Titus a fantasy, a better version of himself. Even Titus seems to be aware that this version of reality is somewhat ridiculous, with his amusing comment about fantasy-Violet’s sparkly face.

There is often a discrepancy between the world presented to Titus in the feed, and the world in front of him. For example, Titus describes the way the moon is shown in promotions, with images of dancing, fun and everything “goldy and sparkling” (8).

However, the reality is far more unattractive: “there’s just the rockiness, and the suckiness, and the craters all being full of old broken shit” (4) and “all the air vents […] streaked with black” (8). While Titus notes the juxtaposition without extrapolating on it to question the feed’s version of reality, the implied reader is invited to consider the implications of this disparity for current advertising practices.

Feed also draws attention to the way ads sell not just individual products, but consumerism itself as an idealised way of life. For example, Titus states that it is important to have companions when travelling:

When you’re going places with other people, with this big group,

everyone is leaning toward each other, and people are laughing and

they’re chatting, and things are great, and it’s just like in a

commercial for jeans, or something with nougat. (4)

Titus wants his life to be like an ad. Advertising sells a sense of conviviality, connection. It does not matter what the advertisement is for – conveyed by the amusingly vague phrase “something with nougat” – but rather the kind of life the ad represents. When Titus’s friend Loga – the only one not to be hacked – visits the others

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Chapter Three in hospital, she describes the latest episode of Oh? Wow! Thing! for them as she watches it on her feed. When the characters in the show are on a boat, the feed allows her to feel the breeze on her skin:

“It’s warm, like those nights, you know, when we’re like—we’re like,

‘We’re always going to be young.’ The breeze is like that.” (59)

She is consuming a sense of possibility, youth. Titus describes falling asleep, his drifting consciousness flooded with advertising images:

[T]he feed spoke to me real quiet about new trends, about pants that

should be shorter or longer, and bands I should know, and games with

new levels and stalactites and fields of diamonds, and friends of many

colors were all drinking Coke […] and as I fell asleep, the feed

murmured to me again and again: All shall be well … and all shall be

well … and all manner of things shall be well. (147; original ellipses

and emphasis)

This run-on description of a bric-a-brac of images (edited to less than half its actual length) conveys the idea that advertising is selling comfort and wellbeing in the form of consumption as much as it is selling the brands mentioned. This echoes a stand-alone passage of feed discourse that appears earlier in the text (there is no specific framing in this case, but in light of the above example it may represent another incidence of Titus falling asleep), with a similar sense of cumulative fleeting impressions, regressing into single words:

Images of Coke falling in rivulets down chiseled mountainsides;

children being held toward the sun; blades slicing grass; a hand, a

hand extended toward the lemonade like God’s at Creation; boys in

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Gap tees shot from a rocket; more lining up with tin helmets; Nike

grav-gear plunging into Montana; […] snow; altitude; hugs; night.

(27-8)

Again, there is a sense that consumer-media discourses evoke a way of feeling, a way of seeing the world, as much as displaying specific products. The contrast between the reverential tone and ridiculous imagery conveys the idea that the feed’s version of reality is preposterous, while the inclusion of real brand names positions the reader to relate the passage to current advertising.

Titus’s narration features many such brand references. Feed contains a few fake names that implicitly refer to real brands, such as the Weatherbee & Crotch clothing company (50, 147, 274), a parody of Abercrombie and Fitch, and J.P. Barnigan’s

Family Extravaganza restaurant chain (10, 103), with the echo of P.T. Barnham’s name conveying the idea that there is an element of chicanery in branding. However, the majority of brand references are real, including Coca Cola (27, 147, 158, 296), Nike

(28, 277), Gatorade (29) and Ford (70). To some extent this helps to connect Titus’s world to the implied reader’s, enhancing the idea that Titus’s world is an extrapolation of or allegory for the current world. However, their presence is also used to satirise aspects of current branding. The brands are, for the most part, presented in a mocking context. For example, one of Titus’s friends, Marty, gets a Nike “speech tattoo”:

It meant that every sentence, he automatically said “Nike”. He paid a

lot for it. It was hilarious, because you could hardly understand what

he said anymore. It was just, “This fuckin’ shit Nike, fuckin’, you

know, Nike,” etc. (277-8)

This mocks the kind of person who would surrender their ability to communicate to branding, and even pay to have it done to them. It hyperbolises tendencies in present

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Chapter Three culture: David Boyle points out that, at one point, the Nike swoosh was the most popular design requested in tattoo parlours in America (Boyle 2003:29). Titus and his friends find it “hilarious”, suggesting that they consider this to be extreme behaviour and not the norm. However, Titus also concedes that it is “pretty brag” (277). Titus quotes Marty’s corrupted language as though it is worthy of mockery, but his language is impoverished also: trailing off into “etc”, for example.

Though the passage makes fun of the way people express themselves through brands, it does not necessarily constitute a critique of the Nike brand. Brands are resilient. As Michael Schudson argues in his book on advertising:

Not all mentions of products in the media can be classified as positive

or negative. There are also expressions of ironic or ambivalent

attitudes to material goods. This is especially the case with jokes. But

jokes, even as they ridicule the product, may contribute to its

celebrity. [...] Even mockery can be legitimation. (Schudson

1984:104)

Feed dramatises this ambivalence in relation to Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is one of the world’s most successful and widely recognised brands. One study found that Coca-Cola was mentioned over three thousand times “on US network TV (not including ad breaks) in one 6-month period” (Andrusiak & Donahoo 2009:22; original emphasis). As anyone who walked out of the anti-McDonald’s documentary Supersize Me (2004) craving McDonald’s knows, a brand name mentioned in a mocking or critical context may still function the way it is ‘supposed to’, creating recognition and provoking desire. In a chapter entitled “the real thing” – alluding to a famous Coke slogan from contemporary times – Titus and his friends decide to exploit a Coca Cola promotion which promises to reward groups with free six-packs if they mention Coca cola or Coke

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Chapter Three a thousand times (the feed registers the repetitions). They plan to repeat Coke enough times to gain a large supply of the product, aiming to have fun and “rip off the corporations” (158). In the beginning they discuss the product laughingly, talking in a kind of ironic ad-speak: “Hey, how about the great foaming capabilities of Coke?”

(161). However, eventually the repetition has an effect:

[F]inally there was another quiet part, and Link said, “Hey, Marty-

unit, do you actually have any Coke?”

Marty was like, “No. But, fuck, aren’t you getting like meg

thirsty? With all of this talking about the great taste of Coke?”

[…]

“Let’s go out and get some,” said Link.

[…]

We were all standing up. Marty was like announcing, “Okay,

we’ll go out and get some of the great beverage of Coke, with its

refreshing flavour,” but no one was really rattling that way now. (162-

While they initially mock Coke, they find themselves ‘succumbing’ to it. An attempt to

“rip off the corporations” gives way to contributing enthusiastically to their profit margins, conveying the idea that they are dupes despite their initial ironic approach.

Someone working for Coca Cola would probably not have a problem with the idea that the company and its product are still around in the far future – or with the thirty five odd repetitions of the name in this chapter alone – despite the ambivalent gloss.

This issue – the way mentioning brands even in a mocking context plays into their symbolic value – is evident in other science fiction young adult novels. Ads R Us

(2006) answers to the issue by using all fake brand names, such as Magnotoonie Brain

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Tuners (27), Octo-Kola (38) and Flidder Icecream (142). The use of nonsense-sounding words for some of the brands, like Magnotoonie and Flidder, could be interpreted as a comment on the general meaninglessness of brand names. Most books, however, use a mix of real and fake names. For example, Penelope Todd’s Box (2006) is set in New

Zealand in a near future where the government has just enacted a program to have everyone’s health and mood stabilised to a set norm by an implant. The book contains mostly fake brand names and a handful of real ones. The fake brand names rely on recognition of the parodied brands for humour: Barstucks for Starbucks (28), J-Mart for

K-Mart (58), Paradileine for paracetamol brands like Panadol and Panadeine (28).

Recognition of a brand thus brings the pleasure of understanding the joke. Since most of the brands are fictional, the import of the real brands included in the text is highlighted: Google (43), Coke (46) and McDonald’s (155). It creates a sense that these brands are too fundamental to the social landscape and an authentic representation of the consuming teenager’s world to be elided.

Violet as ‘Resistant’

Unlike Titus, Violet is not a typical member of the feed society. For example, she is homeschooled (78), so she has not been immersed in an educational atmosphere that is thoroughly pro-feed. Also, as Elizabeth Bullen and Elizabeth Parsons argue, she is lower on the socioeconomic scale than Titus (2007:134). When Titus visits Violet’s house for the first time, his description of her suburb suggests it is ‘poor’ (as well as conveying information about the physical formation of this futuristic city):

Creville Heights was all one big area, instead of each yard having its

own bubble with its own sun and seasons. They must’ve had just one

sun for the whole place. All the houses were really old and flat. The

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streets were blue and cracked, and they were streets, I mean, for when

things went on the ground. Their sun was up and you could see the

sky was peeling. (135)

When Titus flies through his own suburb, he describes “looking at all the houses and the lawns, each one in its own pod, and everything was all like neat” (77). When Titus and Violet are in hospital on the moon, Titus’s father flies up to visit him almost immediately (55). Violet later admits that her father was not able to afford the trip; he had to save up for a year to send Violet in the first place (103).

In contrast to Titus’s parents, neither of Violet’s parents had the feed installed when they were young. In part, this was due to the expense, but they were also opposed to it (224). Similarly, they initially did not get a feed for Violet because of both financial constraints and ideological objections. Violet’s mother called it a “the brain mole” (224), and Violet describes a childhood memory of sitting on her mother’s shoulders as they walked through a mall, with her mother making fun of mindless consumers (225). However, Violet’s mother is not a stable, mature figure in her life.

Her departure from Violet’s life is left vague. Violet says only that her parents were never married, and she is not sure where her mother is: “Probably somewhere in South

America. […] She likes it warm” (138). Her father, an academic specialising in obsolete computer languages, is also resistant to the feed, although he makes some concessions: for example, he uses an outdated piece of technology called a feedscanner, which features a computer backpack and glasses rather than an internal feed (135). He hates the feed culture, in particular the spread of impoverished language. Violet tells

Titus:

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“He says the language is dying. He thinks words are being

debased. So he tries to speak entirely in weird words and irony, so no

one can simplify anything he says.” (137)

For example, when he first meets Titus, his greeting is flowery: “I am filled with astonishment at the regularity of your features and the handsome generosity you have shown my daughter” (136). Elizabeth Bullen and Elizabeth Parson argue that the text is ambivalent in its portrayal of Violet’s father, presenting him in a mocking manner:

By making the only positive adult character sometimes ridiculous, the

novel carefully sets itself just outside a didactic and sermonizing

critique of contemporary America by decentring intelligent dissenting

characters. Violet’s father is demonstrably right in his critical

assessments of the world of the novel, but he is not recognised or

celebrated for his intelligence in ways that might alienate an implied

reader likely to resent a message about an old-fashioned, adult

academic being ‘‘in the know’’. (2007:137)

In contrast, Farah Mendlesohn calls Violet’s father “essentially the man who values alchemy over physics” (2009:155) and argues that his character is one of the aspects of the text that makes it too didactic in its condemnation of technology. These differing interpretations point to the slipperiness created by the ironic narration. For example, after Titus first meets Violet’s father, he states: “[Violet] was proud of him, even though he was—from what I could see? like, in my opinion?—an insane psychopath”

(141). This makes fun of Violet’s father, pointing to how strange his behaviour seems to a ‘normal’ citizen, but the humorous juxtaposition between Titus’s initial equivocating language and his final, blunt pronouncement also invites the reader to perceive Titus as worthy of mockery. Ultimately, Violet’s father is portrayed as too

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Chapter Three extreme to be “demonstrably right”: for example, he is awful to Titus toward the end of the novel, screaming obscenities, becoming violent and blaming Titus for Violet’s demise. Titus’s seductive status as the narrator – ironic or not – is too powerful for the reader’s sympathies to lie with the father.

M.T. Anderson dedicates the book to “all those who resist the feed” (n.p.), and

Violet does attempt to do so in a number of ways. In the interview in the Feed reader’s guide, Anderson states:

I’m clearly in favor of trying to extend your knowledge into areas that

are obscure and eccentric, as a way of exploring your self and your

place in the world. [...] Because that’s one thing the media does not

encourage: a real sense of curiosity. (307)

This emerges in the text in that one of the ways Violet tries to resist the feed is by finding obscure facts, from “the way people get married in Tonga” (102) to “the scales on butterflies” (190). This is part of her strategy for defying the feed’s simplistic demographic definitions, and also contrasts with Titus’s contentment with leaving all the potential information available on the feed “just sitting there” (49). Where Titus adores being defined by the Feed, Violet tries to fight being catalogued. When Violet and Titus visit the mall, for example, Violet reveals a plan to try and obfuscate the feed and “create a customer profile that’s so screwed, no one can market to it” (98). For instance, she goes into an electronic store and asks for a searchlight to mount on her belly, implying that it is for some kind of sexual fetish (99-100). She tells Titus that she is: “Complicating. Resisting” (99). She also exercises self-control when making purchases, turning it into a game of delayed gratification (143).

As Elizabeth Bullen and Elizabeth Parsons argue, however, Violet’s attempts to shop erratically ultimately serve to reinforce the idea that her only power as a citizen

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Chapter Three lies in the way she shops (2007:134). Further, she fails in her aim to create an unmarketable identity. When her health declines, Violet takes to downloading requiems and burial rites from around the globe (252). Violet admits to Titus that Nina has successfully recommended some other downloads based on those preferences:

“Here’s the hideous thing. […] I liked them. She figured it out. I’ve

been sketched demographically. They can still predict the things I

like. […] I’m trying to resist, but they’re close to winning.” (262)

The word “hideous” conveys her despair, and her use of the nebulous “they” conveys her sense of futility. She does not even really know who she is fighting against.

Resistant behaviour also contributes to Violet’s death in three ways. Her parents’ resistant behaviour plays a role, since, as Violet tells Titus, late installation of the feed is likely the reason the hacking incident affected her so badly:

“[I]f you get the feed after you’re fully formed, it doesn’t fit as

snugly. I mean, the feedware. It’s more susceptible to malfunction.

[....] The feed is tied in to everything. Your body control, your

emotions, your memory. Everything.” (70)

The feed cannot be turned off, because it is “part of the brain” (171). Her father tells

Titus that he relented regarding the feed when she was seven because he attended a job interview where his interviewers started smirking after realising he did not have the feed. He realised that Violet “had to live in the world” (288). However, he chose a cheap model: “I skimped. I read consumer reports and wondered, ‘What’s the difference?’” (289). Violet’s death is partly a result of his failure to act as a judicious consumer; a more sophisticated model might not have malfunctioned so profoundly.

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Violet’s death is also caused by resistant behaviour in that the group behind the nightclub hacking are an anti-feed group. The Coalition of Pity, as they refer to themselves in the calling card they leave behind in the hacked teenagers’ cached feeds, do not change anything for the better. Titus and his friends immediately revert to their consumer lifestyle. It transpires that the man who infected their feeds with the virus was killed by police while being taken into custody (123). The Coalition of Pity succeeds only in causing the feed malfunction that ultimately kills Violet, one of the few members of society who sympathises with their ideologies.

Violet’s own attempts to shop erratically also doom her. Violet is unable to obtain corporate sponsorship to pay for her feed repair. Cheerful automated intelligence

Nina, who conducted the negotiations on her behalf, tells Violet that her incoherent customer profile means that corporate sponsors “don’t feel that you would be a reliable investment at this time” (247). Nina is ignorant of the significance of the refusals, blithely telling Violet to try and create a more attractive consumer profile over the next six months. Violet, of course, does not have six months left. The consumer system does not set out to destroy Violet because of her dissenting views. It is not agentive, seeking resistance and stamping it out. As Stephanie Guerra argues, in the Feed society,

“penalties for resistance are built into the system itself and produce a society so weighted against non-consumers that their chances for survival are seriously compromised” (2009:291). Nina, completely incapable of comprehending Violet’s desperate situation, emerges out of a system that cannot conceive of individuals as anything but consumers. For example, when Nina contacts her with this news, Violet has just had a nasty fall down the stairs as a result of a feed malfunction. Nina is unable to discern her distress, beyond tailoring a marketing message to her panicked state: sensing that Violet is sweating, she recommends a brand of deodorant (246).

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“A squid in love with the sky”: The Relationship Arc

Though Titus and Violet are depicted as oppositional in some ways, neither is able to define themselves outside the feed. The unfolding of their romance further conveys the inescapable and seductive nature of the feed, in terms of Titus’s degree of awareness about the state of the world and Violet’s desire for Titus’s ‘normal’ life. The idea that the novel might provoke an active, challenging response to consumerism rests on the idea that the reader is positioned to resist Titus’s seductive perspective and be incited to action by the knowledge of the negative aspects of consumerism that this double-voiced reading provides them with. However, Titus and Violet’s relationship is a textual embodiment of the seeming impossibility of such a response: Titus is not inspired by the knowledge he gains from Violet, and Violet herself is seduced by Titus’s lifestyle.

In the opening scene of Feed, as Titus and his friends travel to the moon, Titus expresses desire for a relationship:

I was hoping to meet someone on the moon. […] I was feeling like it

was maybe time to hook up with someone again, because it had been

a couple of months. (5)

For Titus, a desire for companionship will seemingly be fulfilled by a casual relationship. This sense of shallowness is reinforced when he talks about his ex- girlfriend Loga, particularly the dismissiveness of the phrase “hook up” and truncated slang word “whatev”: “I was thinking that maybe Loga and I could hook up again, if we didn’t find anyone else, like on the moon or whatev” (12).

When Titus first sees Violet eating alone in a recreation centre on the moon, he is immediately attracted to her: “She was the most beautiful girl, like, ever” (13). It is evident that Titus possesses some self-awareness. When he first spots her, he says that

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I just wanted them all to shut up somehow, I mean nicely, because I

suddenly realized that we didn’t really sound too smart. If someone

overheard us, like that girl, they might think we were dumb. (20)

If Titus was a completely naive narrator, he would assume he and his friends seem funny and cool. Violet joins Titus’s group of friends when Quendy, one of the less popular girls in the group, starts obsessing over a lesion on her face. Link, the unofficial leader of the group, asks Violet’s opinion of the lesion as an objective stranger. Violet reassures Quendy with a quirky, erudite take on the difference between good and bad lesions. Her sense of humour is somewhat beyond Titus and his friends. For example, they are all forced to look up the word “suppuration” on their feeds before they can understand a joke she makes when Link asks her if she likes his lesion: “You put the

‘supper’ back in ‘suppuration’” (23). Titus is fascinated by her oddness: “I thought she was the most amazing person I had ever seen in my life, even if she was weird as shit”

(24). His initial romantic pronouncement stands in humorous juxtaposition to his profanity-laced acknowledgement of her oddness.

Titus is not entirely shallow: Violet’s appeal lies at least in part in her personality. Quendy usually lives in the shadow of Calista, the most popular girl in the group. After Violet’s speech about her lesion, Quendy is briefly the centre of attention:

Usually, Quendy is just like a kind of broken, little economy

model of Calista, and she knows that, and feels real bad about it. But

when this girl helped her, it wasn’t like that. Quendy was the center of

everyone for a long time.

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That was why I kept looking at the girl in gray, and started to

want, more than anything else that night, to be with her. (25)

It is a small act of kindness that triggers Titus’s desire to form a relationship with

Violet after his initial attraction. His understanding of Quendy’s social position reveals that he is not ignorant of the negative aspects of his peer group, with his use of the market simile “broken, little economy model” and his appreciation of her brief reprieve.

Violet accompanies Titus and his friends to the nightclub where the hacking incident occurs, with all but one of Titus’s other friends also effected. Titus and Violet become a couple in the hospital as they wait for their feeds to be reconnected. Titus rails against the unbearable silence of having a broken feed: “Everything in my head was quiet. It was fucked” (44). However, he is content with silence when he is with

Violet: “I was thinking, This is nice. We’re just sitting here. We don’t have to say anything” (53). This suggests that Violet may offer Titus something deeper than a mere

“hook-up”, a relationship with meaning outside the feed. Violet appears to like Titus in part because he is slightly different. After Violet has a private meeting with the doctors

(she later discloses that they told her about her feed malfunction), she takes Titus to see a strange view of a broken greenhouse where leaking air makes the dead plants wave through the holes. Titus says it’s “like a squid in love with the sky” (62). Violet remarks: “You’re the only one of them that uses metaphor” (63). This conveys the idea that Titus possesses some imagination and linguistic ability compared to his peers.

However, with the feeds reconnected, the seductive nature of consumerism plays out through their relationship. First, Titus gains knowledge from Violet, as the reader gains knowledge from the book, but the knowledge does not incite response. He initially gets a kick out of Violet’s strange ways and displays self-awareness about his own lifestyle. He takes pleasure in identifying stupid behaviour that will amuse her.

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When he overhears non sequiturs at the party – such as “I think the truffle is like complete undervalued” (83) and “But he never pukes when he chugalugs” (84) – he plays her the memories through the feed, self-aware enough to comprehend that they make his peers seem ridiculous. When Calista gets a fake lesion, he is delighted at the thought of telling Violet: “Whoa! I got to tell Violet about this. She’ll go crazy. […]

She’s always looking for like evidence of the decline of civilization” (184). He accepts her teasing about his own consumer habits with good grace, such as when they meet up in a mall:

For a second we said hello and just laughed about all the

stupid things people were buying and then Violet, she pointed out

that, regarding legs to stand on, I didn’t have very much of one,

because I was wheeling around a wheelbarrow full of a giant hot

cross bun from Bun in a Barrow.

I said, “Yum, yum, yum.” (96)

Titus participates in her erratic shopping with gusto. For example, he plays along when she goes into a dress shop and implies that she is shopping for women’s clothes for

Titus rather than herself: “I practically started to laugh snot into my hand” (101).

Violet’s attempts to obfuscate the consumer profiling system lead to a flurry of random advertising as the feed tries to respond to her erratic behaviour. She draws Titus into the flood of images and banners:

It was like they were lots of friendly butterflies, and we were smeared

with something, and they kept coming and coming, and their wings

were winking beautifully, and more and more came. And they were

landing on our fingers, and on our lips, and on our eyes, opening and

closing? And we were going—Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! (106)

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Titus’s simile presents the swiftly proliferating shared ads as a pleasant bonding experience, although there is tension in the passage between the positive connotations of phrases like “friendly butterflies” and “winking beautifully”, the negative connotations of the word “smeared” and the sense of relentlessness created by phrases like “they kept coming and coming” and “and more and more came”. There is also tension between Titus’s use of metaphor – which hints that he possesses imagination and which Violet has suggested marks him as special – and the overall clumsy nature of his self-expression.

Though he enjoys her more amusing exploits, Titus is less responsive when she is “too smart” for him (108), by which he seems to mean too informed. For example, in a conversation over the feed, Violet tries to tell him about toxicity and unrest in South

America and suggest some weaknesses in the American democratic system, Titus is completely unreceptive:

I hated it when she got like this, because then she wasn’t like

herself, I mean, she wasn’t like this playful person who drags me

around the mall doing crazy shit, she was suddenly like those girls in

School™ who sit underground and dress all in black with ribbing and

get an iron fixture for their jaws and they’re like, “Capitalist fool—

propaganda tool,” holding up both their hands, etc. (111)

He characterises her resistance as just “doing crazy shit”. He only accepts her dissenting views as long as they are fun and attractive. In explaining her experiment with scrambling her consumer profile, she goes into a long tirade about the way corporations use the feed to simplify culture in the pursuit of streamlined marketing demographics:

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“Everything we’ve grown up with—the stories on the feed, the

games, all of that—it’s all streamlining our personalities so we’re

easier to sell to. […] They keep making everything more basic so it

will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets used to

everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more

simple.” (97)

Her rant is very reminiscent of the examples of the perpetual adolescent thesis explored in Chapter Two. Titus is less than inspired by her passionate criticism: “This was the kind of thing people talked about a lot […] how everything on the feed has its price, and okay, it might be true, but it’s also boring” (97). Titus has already rehearsed these arguments earlier in the narrative:

Of course, everyone is like, da da da, evil corporations, oh

they’re so bad, we all say that, and we all know they control

everything. I mean, it’s not great, because who knows what evil shit

they’re up to. […] But they’re the only way to get all this stuff, and its

no good getting pissy about it, because they’re still going to control

everything whether you like it or not. (49)

His response to Violet, then, is blunt: “That’s the feed. So what?” (97). He accepts the feed as it is.

Violet becomes increasingly bothered by Titus’s complacency. For example, when they are chatting over the feed and she realises he is not aware that only seventy three percent of the population has the feed, she begins a rant about cultural ignorance that, again, is strongly reminiscent of polemics against perpetual adolescence:

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When you have the feed all your life, you’re brought up to not think

about things. […] Because of the feed, we’re raising a nation of

idiots. Ignorant, self-centered idiots. (113)

She back-tracks as soon as she realises she has insulted Titus, but he evidently feels that she is somewhat right. Titus later asks his mother: “Do you think I’m stupid? I mean, am I dumb?” When his mother deduces his question has to do with Violet, he tries to fob her off: “I didn’t want my mom to think Violet was a snob. Violet wasn’t a snob. I was just dumb” (144). The way Violet has made him feel, though, only paralyses him:

“I was sitting around, staring at a corner of a room, where two of the walls and the floor came together” (115). Moreover, the seductive consumer lifestyle provides a cure, as his parents reveal their plan to buy him an upcar: “I was like holy shit, by tomorrow I would be driving to pick up Violet in my own goddamn upcar, and suddenly, I didn’t feel so stupid after all” (118).

Titus’s inability to act on negative knowledge is also evident in his attitude toward the skin lesions that have been appearing on people’s bodies. Titus mentions them early in the narrative: “We had the lesions that people were getting, and ours right now were kind of red and wet-looking” (11). The lesions become worse as the narrative progresses. However, Titus never shows any curiosity regarding the source of the lesions. The only hint comes from one of the free-standing feed sections, in a snippet of news broadcast in which the American President appears to be making a press statement or speech:

It is our duty as Americans, and as a nation dedicated to freedom and

free commerce, to stand behind our fellow Americans and not cast…

things at them. Stones, for example. The first stone. By this I mean

that we shouldn’t think that there are any truth to the rumors that the

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lesions are the result of any activity of American industry. (85;

original ellipses)

This passage satirises political doublespeak, with its bombastic nationalism and deference to big business. The President is inarticulate, groping for a simple cliché and making grammatical errors. It also points to a possible source of the lesions, but Titus never makes mention of these rumours within the narrative proper, and eventually his narration conveys a sense of acceptance:

Violet was standing near the fountain and she had a real low

shirt on, to show off her lesion, because the stars of the Oh? Wow!

Thing! had started to get lesions, so now people were thinking better

about lesions, and lesions even looked kind of cool. (96)

Like the promise of a new upcar, the feed can assuage any negative feelings. Eventually lesions are considered so cool that people start to get fake ones.

The fact that Violet is “showing off” her lesion, thus implying that she has also decided that lesions are “kind of cool”, suggests that she is not immune to the seductions of the feed. Elizabeth Bullen and Elizabeth Parsons argue that “[i]n opposition to Violet, the mainstream characters’ desires for something better have already been co-opted by consumer capitalism” (2007:135). However, to focus on the ways Violet is constructed as an “intelligent activist” (Bullen & Parsons 2007:133) elides that she is also, in Farah Mendlesohn’s words, a “teenage girl trying to fit in”

(2009:120). Violet’s desire for Titus represents, to some extent, her subjugation to the ideas of ‘normalcy’ and ‘really living’ offered by the feed. When she meets Titus and his friends on the moon, she is “there without friends” (28). When she starts to date

Titus, she enjoys his lifestyle. For example, when he takes her to a party for their first date Violet is delighted: “God, I’m so excited to be going to a real party. […] Will it be

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She hadn’t had much of the stuff you see on the feed when she was

younger. A lot of it was too expensive, or her father just said no. But

she had watched all the shows about how other people live normally,

and she really wanted to live like the rest of us. So she and her other

home-schooling friends had tried to copy us. (107)

As it stands, this could be read as a naive statement on Titus’s part – over-estimating the appeal of his lifestyle – but Violet expresses this desire repeatedly throughout the book. She is acutely aware that her life is not ‘normal’, as evidenced by her discomfort when discussing her parents with Titus:

“Your life... It must be kind of strange?”

“Meaning what?”

“Just... it’s not... thing things that most of us... do?”

“No,” she said, like she wanted to change the subject. (138;

original ellipses)

Violet’s death is not just brought about by her attempts to resist, but also by her attempts to fit in. She went to the moon to try being ‘normal’. When she expresses her dismay at the hacking incident, she states: “You go try to have fun like a normal person, a normal person with a real life—just for one night you want to live, and suddenly you’re screwed” (53). Again, there is the repetition of phrases such as “like a normal person”, “real life” and “to live”. She resents being punished for her aspiration to experience how life ‘should be’. The major feed malfunction that precipitates her

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Thereafter their relationship devolves into awkward visits and feed communications from Violet that Titus largely ignores or deletes. She sends Titus long, rambling messages full of fantasies of what she would like to do before she dies. Bullen and Parsons argue that these fantasies of living, such as a desire to see uncorrupted nature, indicate Violet’s “utopian yearnings” (2007:135) and more resemble the current world than the world of the feed. However, in a message left on Titus’s feed, Violet states that most of her fantasies are cadged from the idealised world of the feed:

They’re all sitcom openers. […] Everything I think of when I think of

really living, living to the full—all my ideas are just the opening

credits of sitcoms. […] What am I, without the feed? It’s all from the

feed credits. My idea of real life. (217)

Violet loathes that her fantasies are not her own, but there is little she can do to change it. Rather than representing resistance to the feed, her fantasies embody the pervasiveness of marketing imagery. Like Titus, then, Violet’s desires have been colonised by the feed. If the reader is positioned to judge Titus for desiring life to be as it is on the feed, is Violet also to be judged? Violet’s dreams of ‘really living’ complicate the idea that the reader is invited to condemn Titus for his acquiescence to the feed and side with Violet as a resistor of the feed, and points to the contradictions that arise when a book addresses the teenager in order to tell them that they represent the worst aspects of consumerism.

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Closure

In the lead-up to the climax of the novel, as Violet repeatedly sends Titus messages, this dynamic continues. Violet’s messages convey her desire for Titus: “I like to picture you asleep. You have beautiful lips” (224); “I wish I was with you. I always wish I was with you” (236). To Titus, however, Violet’s meltdown has dehumanised her: “I wanted

Violet to be uninsane again, just a person who would touch my face” (211). She is now associated with degradation: when he reads her messages, he imagines the smell of the hospital in his nostrils (227). Throughout the book, he has ignored Violet’s attempts to draw his attention to the horrors of world. Now Violet herself has become one of those horrors. The climax of the novel occurs when Titus, feeling guilty and confused, agrees to go away with her to a hotel as one of her final experiences. Violet, still preoccupied with ideas of ‘really living’, wants to lose her virginity to him:

“I really wanted this to happen with you. Right from when we started

going out. You’re just so beautiful. You lead this life like I’ve always

wanted to—just, everything is normal.” (267)

Her sexual desire is tied up with her desire to live a certain kind of life, Titus’s kind of life. Titus is unable to respond to Violet’s advances. Any sexual desire he felt for her during their relationship is eroded by his disgust at her physical deterioration, and he cruelly tells her: “It feels like being felt up like a zombie” (269). Violet is too much of a reminder of the degradation he has always ignored in favour of the feed’s fantasies.

This sets off a vicious argument in which they finally break up. Violet describes her hopes for their relationship, again conveying her wish to be like ‘normal’ people:

“When you came along, I thought, ‘Now I’ll have a boyfriend, like

people have boyfriends.’ […] [T]he whole time, I was thinking, Now

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I’m living. I have someone with me. I’m not alone. I’m living. […] I

wanted someone to know me. I thought it would be like when you’re

finally tied to the dock.” (270)

As much as Violet might be an activist or a resistant character, she is also a teenager who wants a boyfriend, like countless other young adult fiction characters. Titus, in turn, is self-aware enough to resent the role in which she has cast him:

“[T]o you, I was the normal guy, I was magic Mr. Normal Dumbass,

with my dumbass normal friends, and oh! Like the whole, like oh!

How delightful, the whole enchanted world of being a stupid shithead

who goes dancing and gets laid!” (271)

Violet reacts with a diatribe about his ignorance, which implicitly connects his rejection of her to his unwillingness to see the horrors that consumerism engenders.

Titus is extremely unsympathetic throughout most of the denouement. After their fight, he drives Violet home, feeling bored, angry and uncomfortable. His discomfort is selfish: “I don’t know how I spent two hours, it was so awful and boring”

(274). An advertisement pops into his brain, responding to his mood:

You low? said a banner. Not for long—not when you find out the

savings you can enjoy at Weatherbee & Crotch’s Annual Blowout

Summer Fashions Sale! (274)

Titus surreptitiously (and gratefully) orders a jersey, happy to be given something else to think about, finding comfort in the feed. Violet later sends him a message in which she denies she ever thought he was stupid and suggests that she would be willing to reconcile:

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I always thought you could teach me things. I was always waiting.

You’re not like the others. You say things that no one expects you to.

You think you’re stupid. You want to be stupid. But you’re someone

people could learn from. (276)

Titus simply deletes the message, telling a friend that it is “nothing” and going off to

“kick some ass on the basketball court” (276). He resumes his “Mr. Normal Dumbass” life, attending parties, visiting the moon, and beginning to date one of his friends. His inability to respond to knowledge of the negative aspects of consumerism becomes more pronounced. It is evident that the world is rapidly deteriorating. References to environmental degradation and random disasters now come thick and fast, no longer periphery but foregrounded in Titus’s narration: bloody riots in malls (284), green clouds and black snow (284), receding skin (278). As well as these horrors, there are hints that his lifestyle does not bring him the same happiness, as when he explains that his friends do not like to ride around in his new upcar:

It turned out that my upcar was not the kind of upcar my

friends rode in. I don’t know why. […] It was like I kept buying these

things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I

could never exactly catch up to it.

I felt like I’d been running toward it for a long time. (279)

He is no longer satisfied with an existence of consumerism as a system of perpetually mutating desires, but he is unable to change.

However, the portrayal of Titus is more sympathetic in the final stages of the book. Violet’s father contacts Titus to tell him that Violet is close to death. His first visit is a disaster, ending in a screaming match with her father (292). Titus goes home and collapses onto his bedroom floor in a kind of fugue state, spending all night

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Chapter Three ordering pair after pair of pants through the feed until all his credit is gone. Then he dresses, goes outside and watches “the shit-stupid sun rise over the whole shit-stupid world” (294). Titus is clearly not indifferent to Violet’s degraded state, he is just incapable of responding to it. The feed provides the only, utterly inadequate, outlet for his inchoate distress. In Titus’s final visit, there are more hints that his perspective of the world has changed slightly. For example, as he interacts with Violet he tries to focus on her: “I tried to talk just to her. I tried not to listen to the noise on the feed, the girls in wet shirts offering me shampoo” (296). Here, for the first time, he represents advertisements as a somewhat uncomfortable intrusion. Echoing the pleasure he earlier took in sharing his peers’ idiocy with her and recalling her desire to know obscure things, he tries to give her what she needs:

“I thought I’d tell you the news, what’s going on, just to talk to you.

[…] And I also found some things like you like. The strange facts.

About things in other places. I thought you’d like to hear.” (296)

However, he is only able to find “little pieces of broken stories” (269). Finally, crying and holding her hand, he wants to tell her the story of their relationship, referring back to her desire to be loved and known by promising:

“You’re still there, as long as I can remember you. As long as

someone knows you. I know you so well, I could drive a simulator.”

(297)

He is trying to tell her she is “tied to the dock”. However, he goes on to tell her the story of their courtship in the form of a Hollywood movie synopsis. As Bullen and

Parsons argue, he can “only describe his experience and his world according to capitalist logic and language” (Bullen & Parsons 2007:138). Further, with the world

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Chapter Three having juvenilised itself to death, it is evident that Titus will not be around to remember

Violet for very long. The last piece of text in the book is an advertisement responding to Titus’s ‘blue’ mood with an ad for blue jeans. The feed has the last word.

Conclusion

When Titus first sees Violet, he has trouble understanding why he is drawn to her: “I stood there wondering what it was that made her so beautiful. She was looking at us like we were shit” (14). During their fight, Violet’s father makes a literary reference and refuses to explain it, prompting Titus to say: “I’m sick of being told I’m stupid”

(291). In drawing on the cultural idea that consumerism is bad because it makes you into a stupid teenager, Feed looks at its teenage audience like they are shit and asks them to look at themselves the same way. As such, Feed conveys the message that no escape from consumerism is possible. This releases the reader from an engagement with the problem because it leaves no room for a rational response; they have no choice but to go on being seduced no matter how much the underlying corruption of consumerism is revealed to them. I am not arguing that Feed is ‘too’ pessimistic or fails as a young adult book for not teaching a ‘mature’ response to consumerism. I am suggesting that the expectation that young adult literature can incite action in regards to the problems of consumerism is problematic, tied to ideologies about what we expect from adolescents as a symbol of societal progression and a sense that literature circulates more ‘helpful’ images of self than other discourses.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Burger Wuss: The McDonaldization of Dreams

[T]he citizens of affluent societies have a new quest—the search for

authentic identity, for self-actualisation, for the achievement of true

individuality [….] but most have ended up seeking a proxy identity in

the form of commodity consumption. People continue to pursue

greater wealth and consume at ever higher levels because they do not

know how better to answer the question ‘How should I live?’

Clive Hamilton, The Freedom Paradox, 2008, 5.

In M.T. Anderson’s Feed, Violet is obsessed with the idea of ‘really living’. Similarly, in Anderson’s somewhat more light-hearted novel Burger Wuss ([1999] 2005), modern day America is presented as a place where consumerism seemingly makes answering the question “How should I live?” impossible, though the pursuit of it is no less seductive for that unattainability. Like Feed, the novel conveys the idea that no rational, productive response to consumerism is available. ‘Really living’ is ultimately presented as a myth mediated by consumer discourses; a perpetually adolescent existence unable to ever find the ‘right’ way to live is a seeming inevitability. I supplement this analysis with reference to a very similar text called Deep Fried (2006) by New Zealand authors

Bernard Beckett and Clare Knighton.

In Feed, the feed neural implant is a metonym for consumer values. In Burger

Wuss, the primary metonym for consumerism is a fictional fast food chain,

O’Dermott’s; in Deep Fried it is Prince of Burgers or PBs. There is a strong cultural

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Chapter Four association between fast food restaurants like McDonald’s and both youth and consumerism. In an example of the former, Eric Schlosser claims that about two-thirds of America’s fast food workers are under the age of twenty (Schlosser [2001] 2002:68) and George Ritzer suggests that teenagers are “the most likely devotees of the fast-food restaurant” (Ritzer [1993] 2008:41). In terms of the latter, critiques of consumerism often pejoratively present McDonald’s as the epitome of a damaging, transnational corporation. Naomi Klein, for example, calls the McDonald’s arches one of the “most familiar and best-tended logos on the brandscape” (Klein 2001:405) and interprets the infamous McLibel case as an example of a corporation suffering deserved comeuppance for questionable practices.16

However, the various ways McDonald’s is evoked in anti-consumerism rhetoric provides evidence of the way critiques of consumerism have a tendency to be incoherent and simplistic. George Ritzer ([1993] 2008) argues that McDonald’s stands as a paradigm, coining the term McDonaldization to describe the process whereby the principles of calculability, predictability and control that underpin the fast food restaurant are rapidly coming to hold sway in society in general. Ritzer presents

McDonaldization as a negative process:

Once, and perhaps still […] the model corporation (in a positive

sense) in the eyes of many, McDonald’s is now in danger of

becoming the paradigm for all that is bad in the world. ([1993]

2008:53)

16 McDonald’s sued activists Helen Steel and Dave Morris for libel for distributing a leaflet criticising

McDonald’s. Steel and Morris were ultimately ordered to pay some damages; however, McDonald’s was humiliated, as the judge found many of the claims in the leaflet to be true (Klein 2001:430-5).

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He thus wishes his work to serve as “a warning that the seductions and attractions of

McDonaldization should not blind us to its many dangers” (Ritzer [1993] 2008:xvi).

For Ritzer, then, McDonald’s is a metonym for a society that is too rational, to intent on the pursuit of predictability and stability. In contrast, Benjamin Barber evokes

McDonald’s as a metonym for the irrationality of consumerism. He argues that the fast food restaurant is “[t]he emblem of the consumerist preference for fast” (Barber

2008:103). According to Barber, McDonald’s and the like are symptoms of a society with a juvenile preference for fast over slow, which he argues is evidence of:

a culture in which we are dissuaded from concentration and

continuity and rewarded for pursuing jump-cut lives. One job, one

spouse, one career, one home, one personality over a while lifetime

seem so monotonous and, well, from the kids’ perspective, so bo-

ring. Enduring commitments, like enduring tastes, do not lend

themselves to the faddishness on which consumerism depends.

(2008:103; original emphasis)

For Barber, the desire for eating to be a fast, convenient activity is a symptom of a society animated by a driving need to move rapidly from one thing to another, a society of individuals who chase constant reinvention and novelty.

Contrasting Benjamin Barber’s argument with George Ritzer’s reveals tensions within formulations of the negative aspects of consumerism. The juvenile lifestyle

Barber decries – the constant pursuit of novelty at the expense of stability or predictability – is actually presented by Ritzer as a way of challenging the negative effects of McDonaldization and creating a happier and more humane society. As Joseph

Heath and Andrew Potter point out, the strategies for resistance to McDonaldization that Ritzer poses – mostly involving an avoidance of routine and an embrace of

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Chapter Four unpredictable behaviour – amount to “fetishising that which is erratic, unpredictable and uncommon over that which is simple, predictable and common” ([2005] 2006:248).

Erratic, unpredictable and uncommon; in a sense, adolescent. Heath and Potter argue that Ritzer’s concept of an ideal individual “seems to be some type of ‘random man’ who, by refusing to follow any rules or conform to any code, winds up being phobic of any type of behaviour that exhibits regularity” ([2005] 2006:248).

Thus, McDonald’s is evoked in order to argue essentially contradictory things, pointing to the oversimplifications and incoherencies that critiques of consumerism such as the perpetual adolescence thesis and McDonaldization theory tend to rely on.

Similar incoherencies are present in Burger Wuss and Deep Fried, and as such the texts ultimately convey the idea that there is no rational response available in the face of consumerism.

Burger Wuss is narrated in the first person from the perspective of American sixteen-year-old Anthony, who has been dumped by his girlfriend Diana after catching her in a compromising position with macho Turner at a drunken party. Anthony obtains a job at O’Dermott’s in order to find an opportunity for revenge against Turner.

Anthony enlists the help of ‘anarchist’ burger-flipper Shunt to exploit an already volatile rivalry between O’Dermott’s (a play on McDonald’s) and a nearby ‘Burger

Queen’ (a humorous conflation of Burger King and Dairy Queen), and set up Turner as a scapegoat. This eventually culminates in a violent confrontation between Turner,

Anthony and two Burger Queen employees during the filming of a commercial at the restaurant. Anthony and Turner are subsequently fired, and Diana declares she wants nothing to do with Anthony. Deep Fried alternates between the first-person perspectives of two New Zealand teenagers, seventeen-year-old Pete and seventeen- year-old Sophie. Sophie sees Pete on the news after he spontaneously protests at his

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Chapter Four local Prince of Burgers – he jumps behind the counter to give away free burgers – and contacts him online in the persona of a guy called Rob. Sophie-as-Rob urges Pete, who is becoming a cult figure because of his actions, to join her in trying to take the company down with a damaging internal memo hacked from a PBs employee’s email

(later revealed to be her father). Pete has to choose between Sophie and a pair of charismatic PBs representatives, Marcus and Lucinda, who offer him a large payment and the starring role in a series of commercials in order to neutralise the threat he poses to the brand. Pete ultimately sides with Sophie, and they are able to get the incriminating evidence to the press even when Marcus and Lucinda turn violent.

Like Feed, Burger Wuss has an ironic narrative style. Anthony’s narration is frequently characterised by ironic humour, and it is not always clear at which narrative level this irony operates. For example, as Anthony contemplates his vengeful scheme, he states that he is being careful to hide any outward signs of distress:

It was just pacing. Nothing strange about that. I guess my teeth were

sort of grinding. And when I got particularly angry, I caught myself

making a kind of barking sound. I kicked the furniture a little. I

occasionally pounded on the desk and cried, “Why, why, why?” But

otherwise, outwardly calm. (16)

Each succeeding admission of outward distress is more histrionic than the last, building the humorous tone of the passage before the final, ironic statement. It is not entirely clear whether Anthony was aware of the ridiculousness of his behaviour at the time

(perhaps implied by the phrase “I caught myself”); whether the narrating Anthony is making fun of the experiencing Anthony from a more knowledgeable or mature perspective; or whether the author is attempting to share a joke with the implied reader at Anthony’s expense.

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In Deep Fried, Pete’s voice dominates the narrative, with about one hundred and ninety pages to Sophie’s fifteen. Sophie’s sections of narrative are placed between

Pete’s chapters in the form of typed diary entries, with a different font and dated headings. Pete tells his tale in the present tense with direct addresses to the reader. He opens with a very Holden Caulfield-like introduction: “My name is Pete. I am not fond of introductions. You can judge for yourself, if you stay” (7). His narrative is also frequently characterised by irony, but of a more straightforward kind than Burger Wuss; the reader is positioned to share Pete’s derision of those around him. For example, he says that a girl at school smiles at him the day after he is featured on the news “because she had seen me on the television, and that made me real to her” (24). His ironic use of the world “real” invites the reader to take on his contemptuous view of her.

In examining the authority and relationship arcs in Burger Wuss, I argue that the ambiguity created by the sustained use of irony throughout the text undermines the idea of a rational response to consumerism as the narrative unfolds, before the closure of the narrative finally disclaims it once and for all. In the authority arc, Anthony’s pursuit of

‘really living’ is mediated by consumer-media discourses, and sustained narrative irony prevents any ‘response’ to consumer culture being presented as mature or fruitful. In the relationship arc, Anthony pursues Diana as a possible cure for his dissatisfaction with life. However, the ironic narration creates tension in the connection between romance and the potential for growth, and the closure of the narrative upholds the idea that romance holds no such curative value or opportunity for satisfaction. Though Deep

Fried constructs consumerist myths of ‘really living’ as far more seductive and features more ‘straight-forward’ irony (in that it is clearer at which narrative level the irony operates), it ultimately conveys a similar message.

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“Your dreams are ours”: The Authority Arc

In Feed, Nina recites the FeedTech slogan to Violet: “FeedTech—making your dreams into hard fact™” (155). Similarly, the refrain of the O’Dermott’s jingle in Burger Wuss cheerfully declares: “Your dreams are ours. Your dreams are ours” (138). This proclamation points to the main thrust of the authority narrative arc in Burger Wuss and

Deep Fried: exploring who decides what ‘really living’ means. Clare Bradford, Kerry

Mallan, John Stephens and Robyn McCallum argue that Burger Wuss is a novel fundamentally concerned with “the impact of the global spread of free-market capitalism in terms of profits, productivity, production, and labour” (2008:43). They argue that, through the representation of O’Dermott’s, it offers a critique of utopian imaginings of workers as a contented collective, exploring “commodity culture and a depersonalised subjectivity of multinational employees” (Bradford et al 2008:49). The novel’s pessimistic portrayal of the consumer life is played out through Anthony’s own experiences as well as the characters of Turner and Shunt. Turner seemingly represents acquiescence to the version of ‘really living’ offered by consumer-media culture, with

Shunt seemingly representing resistance. However, Anthony does not find a way to overcome dissatisfaction. Television, advertising and other such consumer-media discourses circulate consumer fantasies that mediate Anthony’s ideas of what ‘really living’ means, and Anthony is unable to find a ‘mature’ response to their power. In

Deep Fried, the depiction of the power of consumer-media discourses similarly plays out through Pete’s own dissatisfaction and two apparent choices of behaviour represented by Sophie (resisting) and Lucinda and Marcus (selling out). However, neither choice will ultimately bring him satisfaction or allow him to find a ‘mature’ response to consumer-media culture. As in Feed, simplistic oppositions between acquiescence and resistance cannot be sustained.

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Narrator’s Experience

Anthony represents O’Dermott’s as a place with a depersonalising effect on staff and customers. For example, he describes a pair of fellow employees in a way that makes them seem gormless, detached: “Two workers were staring out of Window Number

Two. They were reflected in the glass. Their mouths were both open, like they were dreaming” (41). Other fellow employees include, for example, “an older stoner with stringy hair that was either brown, blond, or grey” (63) and a drug dealer who is “easily angered and a biter” (64). Anthony feels ugly and depersonalised, a revolting machine:

I was not always proud to be wearing the O’Dermott’s green. When

you are wearing a green polyester smock, people don’t treat you like

another person. [...] It was hard not to feel ugly. Crusty. Doped. My

fingernails were black. My shirt was stiff. My hair hung flat. My skin

was shellacked with ambient lard. I had to move as quickly as

possible to keep the line down. (125-6)

The staccato sentences add to the mechanical feeling. The customers are also depersonalised. For example, when Anthony tells his friends Jenn and Rick that he has applied for a job, they start to tell him about some of the regular annoying customers.

Each customer is summed up in terms of a particular unreasonable habit – “Iced Tea

Lady” and “unsalted man”, for example (13) – and mocked. After he starts, customers become a demanding, unappealing blur: “The lines went back, and back, and back.

More people kept coming in. [...] Their mouths were always open” (113). They are not individuals, they are just consuming orifices.

In Deep Fried, Pete’s description of Prince of Burgers, “that cathedral of convenience where every day, in every dimple of the globe, the millions come to

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Chapter Four worship” (8), similarly conveys a sense of degradation and depersonalisation. The staff members are repulsive, depersonalised:

Dark stains spread about the armpits of the android uniforms behind

the counter. Sweat drips off brows and the deep-friars spit it back,

free fertiliser for the pimples of the underpaid slave. (9)

The use of the words “android” and “slave” conveys the idea that being part of the consumer system is dehumanising. The customers are also dehumanised: they are presented as bovine, “docile and confused, mistaking the emptiness within for hunger”

(10).

In Burger Wuss, Anthony’s experience of the landscape also conveys a sense of degradation. Anthony’s descriptions of the natural environment almost always represent the scene as spoiled by some industrial or manmade element. However,

Anthony tends to incorporate these unappealing elements as if they are natural and even desirable. For example, when Anthony recalls a “perfect” day canoeing with Diana, his description of the river is unappealing:

Occasionally we saw a carton or a child’s toy draped in dead weeds.

The water stank like poison. […] We washed the apples in the river

and ate them. The river water on the skin added a delicate hint of

muck and gasoline. (66-7)

The use of food or wine review discourse with “delicate hint”, which has positive connotations, sits incongruously with “muck and gasoline”. It is a more subtle example of the dissonance evoked by Titus and Violet’s dates to the biohazardous ocean (179) and “filet mignon farm” with hedges of genetically engineered meat (142) in Feed. At one point Anthony discusses his love of walking:

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When I am feeling rotten, I like to walk. When you walk, there’s a

kind of rhythm. Your mind slows down to match your body. Your

thoughts start to go in lazy, comfortable circles. I like to walk in the

woods especially. Sometimes hiking through the forest you can see a

doe or a hoot owl out by day.

I was walking through level B of the municipal car park. (71)

The first paragraph sets up an expectation of a Thoreau-esque endorsement of nature’s healing qualities, which is undercut by the revelation that Anthony is actually taking a stroll in a car park. Once again, the use of irony in the text creates ambiguity. Is

Anthony deliberately creating this incongruity, or is the author trying to draw attention to the degraded environment by making Anthony’s apparent acceptance of it appear ridiculous?

Anthony’s narrative thus generally presents O’Dermott’s and the effects of consumerism in a negative light. This unappealing reality contrasts sharply with idealised consumer fantasies. Like Violet in Feed, Anthony’s vague ideas about how a teenager should live seem based in part on pop culture representations of teenagers in sources of consumer fantasies such as television. At one point he expresses this explicitly: “Some days seem perfect. By this, I guess I mean they seem like television”

(66). However, Anthony is also cynical about such images. For example, part of the reason Anthony and Diana connect is that they share a sense of cynicism about the fantasy world spun by consumer culture. When Anthony praises Diana’s sense of humour, for instance, he describes one example: “I remember her saying that she was sick of the O’Dermott’s Happy Lunch, man, and wasn’t it about time to deal with reality and do the Desolate Lunch instead” (28-9). The brief use of free indirect speech, with Anthony taking on Diana’s voice for a moment, conveys their connection.

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Anthony also describes the ironic “Fume Picnic” he and Diana once had in the local parking lot (the same lot described above as Anthony’s favourite walking spot), spreading a blanket on one of the levels, eating sandwiches and acting like a couple from a cheesy advertisement: “She had worn a red-checked shirt and ponytails to look like a girl advertising margarine” (72). They gain pleasure from mocking a consumer fantasy.

A more explicit critique of marketing discourses occurs when Shunt and

Anthony get hold of the script for an O’Dermott’s advertisement set to be filmed in the store where they work. The introductory brief states that O’Dermott’s wants to be seen as “a valued friend”, and the commercial will include scenes like:

kids filing in after a soccer game; Kermit O’Dermott rolling a

promotional plastic jalopy toward a granddaughter/grandfather pair;

two girls, high-school graduates, laughing and throwing their

mortarboards up into the air; double-date situation over shakes and

fries; crowd applauding as laughing baby takes its first steps into

Kermit O’Dermott’s arms. (138)

This recalls the flood of images that lulls Titus to sleep in Feed (27-8; 147). The advertisement is designed to associate O’Dermott’s with warm, fuzzy, human connections, drawing on feel-good clichés. The commercial’s jingle echoes these sentiments, with lines like: “Our commitment’s real and true/‘Cuz you made us and we made you” (139). Michael Schudson argues that “[a]dvertising picks up some of the things that people hold dear and re-presents them to people as all of what they value, assuring them that the sponsor is the patron of common ideals” (Schudson 1984:233).

In Burger Wuss, O’Dermott’s seems to want to be inextricably bound to people’s ideas

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Two girls in blue polyester graduation gowns were being coached.

[…] They were supposed to be laughing and stumbling out of the

glass doors. In one hand they held their mortarboards. In the other

they held O’Dermott’s bags. A prop man was filling up the bags with

more paper. I guess he didn’t fill them with real food because the

grease might bleed. I watched the girls put out their cigarettes and,

after one coughed a few times, they suddenly were happy. (209)

He describes the filming of the commercial without any overtly critical statements. The critique is all implied, as in the sentence: “I guess he didn’t fill them with real food because the grease might bleed”. Again, there is ambiguity as to the narrative level at which this irony operates. Is Anthony being deliberately ironic or is this meant to be read as a naive statement? The Fume Picnic suggests that the former is more likely the case.

In Deep Fried, Pete is cynical about consumer fantasies throughout his narrative. Pete is full of anger and displeasure at the consumer world, especially the version of teenage life it sells:

The best years of our life, if the people who sell us sunglasses and

soft drinks, condoms and fee-free bank accounts are to be believed –

and all of it pisses me off. (7-8)

He rants about, for example, “[p]eople who think that happiness will be delivered shrink-wrapped, with a best-before date stamped across the front and the charges automatically made to the credit card of their choosing” (124). Advertisements,

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Chapter Four television programs and the like offer consumer fantasies of a life in which there is no pain; fantasy lives to aspire to. Pete is scathing of these fantasies. For example, he comments on a poster in a bottle shop window, which depicts a young couple drinking wine at a riverside picnic:

I wonder which one of them will drown that afternoon, after one too

many, or if instead this will be a pregnancy they haven’t planned for.

Or another man will arrive, some time into the second bottle, and look

at the woman the wrong way, and a fight will start. Perhaps I should

be in advertising. (70)

Like Anthony and Diana’s Fume Picnic in Burger Wuss, Pete’s speculation is a playful subversion of the version of life presented by advertising. He introduces grubby reality into the clean fantasy world of advertising. His final ironic statement shows that he is aware of how inappropriate his ideas are for advertising’s purpose.

Turner and Acquiescence

Burger Wuss explores the cultural role of fast food restaurants like O’Dermott’s partly through Anthony’s interactions with Turner. Turner is the character most strongly associated with O’Dermott’s. A year older than Anthony, Turner is one of O’Dermott’s

“star employees” (40). His loyalty to O’Dermott’s is presented as ridiculous. When

Turner solemnly proclaims that working at O’Dermott’s is “something to be proud of”

(47), for example, Anthony presumes he is joking:

I laughed along with the joke. Then I looked at his face. He

was not laughing. His eyes were narrow. He was looking at me. I

stopped laughing. (47)

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Turner speaks in jingoistic clichés: “There’s nothing more American than

O’Dermott’s” (47). He echoes the real-life sentiment of free market cheerleader

Thomas Friedman, who famously (and, as it turned out, incorrectly) asserted that there has never been a war between two countries that have McDonald’s (Friedman [1999]

2000: 248) by stating: “There has never been a war between two countries with

O’Dermott’s in them. You know what I’m saying? We […] are the peace-makers” (49).

Turner’s sense of self is strongly related to O’Dermott’s. His greatest love, for example, is the car he bought with his O’Dermott’s earnings: “This is Margot. She’s about fifteen kijillion burgers made into metal” (44). He explicitly connects the job and car to a sense of freedom, again expressed in clichéd terms: “O’Dermott’s is about the highway. It’s about going places, no time to stop” (48-9). These phrases sound like lines from car advertisement voiceovers. The strong association with O’Dermott’s is reinforced by the way he talks about success with girls in ridiculously commercial terms:

“I think of it like when you’re working the register: you know, they

order a burger and a small fries, and the panel starts flashing drinks,

so you go, ‘Ma’am, would you like a drink?’ It’s just like that with

girls. Like, you’re there, and they’ve let you put one hand on their leg,

the other hand on the back of their neck, and the panel starts flashing,

and you go, ‘Ma’am, would you like my tongue shoved in your ear?’

Always one step further. The hard sell.” (46-7)

In his paper on Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, James Annesley argues that the sustained use of financial metaphors throughout the book conveys the idea that so strong “are the forces of global coordination and incorporation that even the interior world of the individual is subject to the logic of the market” (Annesley 2006:116).

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Similarly, Turner’s conception of ‘romance’ conveys the idea that he has absorbed the consumer values of O’Dermott’s.

Turner is an extremely unlikable character. He treats Diana cruelly after hooking up with her, to the point that she resigns (36). He is nasty to Anthony when he starts working at O’Dermott’s. During Anthony’s first lunch rush, for instance, Turner tricks him into pulling an emergency lever that coats the entire restaurant in fire retardant (60). He beats Anthony up several times, and humiliates him repeatedly. For example, when Anthony is flirting with a pair of female customers at the register,

Turner describes for them, in excruciating detail, Anthony’s wimpy reaction to finding him half-undressed with Diana (129). The most unlikable character in the book is the one most strongly associated with O’Dermott’s, putting the chain – and the consumer culture it embodies – in a negative light.

Turner does, however, possess one desirable trait: “He always seems to know what he is doing” (32). In contrast to Anthony’s self-doubt and desire for something more (which I will explore in the relationship section), Turner is supremely confident and entirely satisfied with a lifestyle of cars and parties: “This is the life, [...] I never want to get older” (45). This certainty is appealing to Anthony. At one point Turner pretends to befriend Anthony and takes him along on a night car ride. Anthony feels the pull of Turner’s way of life, thinking to himself:

You will be living the wild life now, man. Now is your chance to learn

what makes Turner tick. And to live the wild life. No more Mr Nice

Guy. No more Mr Wholesome/canoe-boy/good-good/dork. Into the

Forbidden Zone. (45)

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Despite being disgusted by Turner, Anthony does find his lifestyle – a lifestyle that

O’Dermott’s allowed, since it provided Turner with the funds for Margot – somewhat seductive in his quest to ‘really live’.

The ‘representatives’ of consumerism in Deep Fried are even more seductive: beautiful Lucinda and slick Marcus, who present themselves as associates of a rich benefactor offering Pete a potential scholarship, but who turn out to be corporate trouble-shooters working for PBs. Lucinda and Marcus represent the kind of extraordinary life presented in the idealised reality of advertising and the like. Lucinda and Mark are assured, attractive and cool. Pete describes Lucinda as “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen” and Marcus as “confident in a way I have never seen before”

(101). They carry an aura of extraordinariness, elevating Pete’s “modest” kitchen with a mood of “[e]xcitement, pride, confidence, anticipation; and a hovering unspoken sort of sexy” (102). Adulthood does not render one insusceptible to the lure of such fantasy, since his mother is equally dazzled, rendered “gormless” (101). Being with Lucinda and Marcus is like living in an advertisement. For example, when Marcus picks Pete up to take him away to a cliff-side retreat for testing as part of the purported scholarship selection process, he allows Pete to take a turn driving his Z4 (a real BMW sports car brand). The car is presented as a powerful, exciting machine. Pete succumbs utterly to the thrill of the experience:

Jesus, I feel alive. Anything is possible. [….] Fuck school. Fuck the

internet. This is it. The moment its own reward. Powerful. Goodbye

cemetery. [....] My heart beats fast, my eyes are wide, my head is

crystal clear, sharp, beaming. (114)

Like Anthony in Burger Wuss, he is seduced by a sense of freedom and power, surrendering to the idea that a consumer product can allow one to escape age, defy

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Chapter Four time. This is just a small portion of a lengthy passage describing his driving experience, with details of the minutiae of his gear changes and steering, as well as his emotional reactions and euphoric thoughts, written in staccato sentences and conveying a kinetic sense of excitement. The reader is thus invited to share Pete’s breathless exhilaration, to experience this fantasy with him.

Pete is aware that the fantasy is illusory, though he does not yet know the extent of Marcus and Lucinda’s corruption. He wakes on the final day of ‘testing’ for the scholarship to find Marcus in his room:

‘We need to get going’ Marcus tells me, pulling back a blind,

‘or the chopper won’t be able to take off.’

Or the chopper won’t be able to take off. I live in this world

now, where people say these things, and they fall as naturally as or

the dairy will be closed. I know it isn’t real, not in the solid way of

lasting that real worlds have. I could blink, or turn away, and it would

be gone. But that is for later. First there is a chopper to deal with.

(136; original emphasis)

Pete wants to believe the fantasy, to live in this world, even as he recognises that it is ridiculous, unreal.

Shunt and Resistance

In Burger Wuss, Shunt explicitly opposes consumerism. Shunt is around Anthony’s age with a shaved head; a “vegan burger-flipper on minimum wage” (41) and founder of an anti-O’Dermott’s group called Burger Proletariat (65). His status as a ‘rebel’ is conveyed, for example, by his rejection of his parents. He scorns their conservative values and intolerant attitude toward his lifestyle, choosing to live on the streets (76).

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He refers to them variously as “Ma and Pa Butthole” (76), “Jack ’n’ Jill Suburb” (103) and “The Middle-Management Twins” (103). He similarly opposes O’Dermott’s as representative of everything wrong with consumerism:

[Shunt] was saying, “You smell that smell? O’Dermott’s garbage. A

reek they try to hide. Distinctive. The secret rot of a multinational

corporation. […] Like a sore they hide. Stink will out.” (64)

Much of Shunt’s dialogue involves reciting the negative impact of corporations like

O’Dermott’s, citing alarming statistics and describing their more unsavoury acts.

Bradford, Mallan, Stephens and McCallum argue that Shunt’s “outpourings provide a telling commentary on the problems with multinationals, consumerist society, and the impact of globalisation on developing countries and the environment” (2008:48).

However, their use of the word “telling” does not take into account the way his rants are presented in Anthony’s narration: Shunt is no less a figure of scorn than Turner.

Despite his own negative experiences with O’Dermott’s and consumer culture,

Anthony has the same nonplussed response to Shunt’s anarchist tirades as he does to

Turner’s patriotic rants. For example, though Anthony certainly feels the negative, depersonalising effects of working at O’Dermott’s, he is indifferent to Shunt’s rants about “wage slavery” (97). Anthony falls in with Shunt purely because it suits his plan to hurt Turner, and never comes to share Shunt’s extreme stance. As with Turner, he does get a fleeting taste of ‘really living’ when he and Shunt kidnap a condiment troll from Burger Queen to help set up Turner:

I was excited about the operation. This was adventure. Here we were,

lurking in a parking lot, about to drive off and do things illegal and

tricky. This was Living. (78)

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The capitalisation of “Living” conveys the sense that this is somehow set apart from regular, everyday living. However, his excitement has nothing to do with the ideological implications of the act. He becomes frustrated with Shunt’s ideals: “Shunt was getting excited about parts of the plan that didn’t mean much to me” (97). For example, as Anthony drives the two of them to Burger Queen to grab the troll, Shunt rants about the evils of O’Dermott’s. Anthony pays little attention. The following is a small excerpt from an extended sequence in which Shunt spews statistics and Anthony gives lip service replies:

“These companies are monsters. You line up all the

O’Dermott’s hamburgers that have been sold? Circle the earth thirty-

five and a half times.”

“Wow,” I said absently.

[...]

On he blabbed. (83-4)

The word “absently” and the word “blabbed” convey Anthony’s disinterest. If Shunt is the news, Anthony is the apathetic television viewer flicking channels or using the television as background noise while they do other things. His reaction is similar to

Titus’s in the face of Violet’s attempts to bring his attention to the degraded state of their world in Feed.

In Deep Fried, Pete reacts in a similar manner to Sophie-as-Rob. All of their online chats are narrated from Pete’s point of view. Pete’s hatred of PBs is mostly instinctive, inarticulate, tied to a general feeling of dissatisfaction with life. When his parents ask him why he has targeted PBs, for example, he is only able to reply: “Well.

It’s just crap, isn’t it?” (40). Sophie gives more concrete reasons for her hatred of the company, with much of her narrative as well as her chats with Pete consisting of anti-

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PBs rants reminiscent of real-life anti-fast food rhetoric and Shunt’s speeches in Burger

Wuss. She rails against, for example, the “no-experience-needed-so-we-can-fire-you- whenever-we-want-so-don’t-even-think-about-joining-a-union kitchens” (78) and the fact that “their annual turnover is bigger than [New Zealand’s] entire GDP” (84). Like

Anthony’s dismissive attitude toward Shunt, Pete’s reaction to these hard facts is reserved: “I’m no believer. I don’t know if it’s cynicism, or a fear of looking small when it turns out I’m wrong, but I’ve always been a hard conversion” (88).

In Burger Wuss, then, the progression of the narrative involves Anthony’s struggle to figure out what ‘really living’ means when his experience is subjected to images of the ‘good life’ that circulate in consumer discourses. Turner seems to be living the fantasy, while Shunt seems to be trying to expose the degraded reality behind such fantasies. Anthony covets the fantasy, while his experiences imply that it is illusory. In Deep Fried, Pete also desires the fantasy, but realises that it is corrupt, though he discerns that corruption more in terms of how it makes him feel than in hard facts about its dark side.

“Lovey-dovey-cutesy-wa-wa”: The Relationship Arc

Can a relationship offer an escape from the dissatisfaction of the consumer life? In

Burger Wuss, Anthony makes reference to a few of Diana’s specific appealing traits, such as her kindness and willingness to laugh at his jokes (42-3). However, what Diana most represents for Anthony is the opportunity to ‘really live’, just as Titus seems to represent a desirable normality for Violet in Feed. Due to the first-person narration, the reader is given little insight into Diana’s perspective on their relationship, reinforcing her status as a kind of symbolic figure for Anthony. In describing what it meant to him to start dating Diana, Anthony makes repeated references to being a ‘nobody’. He feels

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Chapter Four he was lucky Diana fell for him, “considering who I am, which is not anyone much”

(17).17 When he contemplates Diana’s appeal, he describes his life before her as:

mostly a landscape of video games, movies, hanging out, eating chips,

not buying things, saying, “What’s up?” saying, “Nothing,” saying,

“Yeah man”[.] (19)

He presents his existence as repetitive and boring. The activities that make up this run- on description bring to mind those aspects of modern culture criticised by proponents of the perpetual adolescent thesis: aimlessness, triviality, impoverished communication.

He describes his life as “dull” and “safe”, tainted by bitter envy of “popular kids in fast cars”:

I would look out the window on hot nights and know, out there,

people are living. By living I guess I meant making out and cow-

tipping. I would be like, I am trapped in here, in my own safe little

life, but I am a teenager and this is supposed to be the time when I am

really living[.] (19)

The phrases “out there”, “trapped in here” and “safe little life” convey the sense that his life feels narrow and inadequate; suffocating, even. The idea of ‘really living’ recurs throughout Anthony’s narrative, although he has trouble articulating what ‘really living’ means; his description of it here, for example, seems based on vague pop culture clichés.

17 Anthony goes into an extended reverie as he describes the beginning of his relationship with Diana.

This portion of the text is in italics, hence the numerous italicised quotations in this section.

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In contrast to his own existence, he perceives Diana as living the ‘right’ kind of life. She seems to represent a chance for him to experience ‘really living’:

I knew she hung out with the kids who all the gossip was about. The

good-looking kids. The kids who laughed in the halls. I imagined the

parties, the ski trips, the beach runs. I wanted unusual things to

happen to me. I was a little afraid of her because I thought they were

already happening to her. (20)

Again, Anthony’s concept of how the popular kids live is based on vague fantasies.

Anthony’s desire is similar to Violet’s wish in Feed to be “a normal person with a real life” (53), and her sense that Titus can help her: “You lead this life like I’ve always wanted to—just, everything is normal” (267).

In Deep Fried, when Pete and Sophie-as-Rob are talking over the internet, each teenager is attracted to the idea that the other can make life seem worthwhile. For

Sophie, Pete represents the potential for ‘real’ connection and understanding. Like

Anthony in Burger Wuss, she feels like a nobody:

Not unique or special, whatever anyone tells you. Not noticeable,

likeable or even slightly unusual. Detached. Hopeless. (13)

After she sees Pete on the news, however, he seems like an answer, a reprieve:

I think if I could find just one person I could talk to, really talk to, I

could survive. […] I think it’s him. Us against the world. Sophie and

Pete. (16)

She makes repeated references to this feeling of connectedness throughout the text:

“Tied to him” (16); “We are tied together” (61); “We belong together” (78). Though she presents herself using the Rob persona, she states without irony: “With Pete I can

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Chapter Four be me” (62).

Similarly, Pete is dissatisfied with life. He finds himself thinking: “Is this all there is? This can’t possibly be it. This is crap” (8). Pete thus cannot help but be attracted to the version of himself Rob seems to see, with Rob telling him via an internet chat: “You’re a hero. A total hero” (51). The certainty about the ‘right thing to do’ that Rob seems to offer Pete is tempting. For example, when Sophie-as-Rob tells

Pete of an incriminating memo that could ruin PBs reputation irreparably (it reveals, for example, that the company has been silencing scientists whose research might damage the brand) Pete admits:

I want to believe Rob. That’s the truth of it. I want to because it’s

something. Me and him against the world. Sounds naff I know, a

four-year-old in a Superman cape, standing on the garden shed roof,

pretending he can fly. (91)

He feels the pull of the same fantasy that tantalises Sophie, that of joining with someone else and standing up “against the world”. He disdains his peers’ desperation for attention:

All around me fellow students scream and shout their familiar

challenge to anyone who cares to listen. Look at me. I am here too. I

am someone. Look at me. (25)

Yet, this is part of Rob’s appeal for him: “All of us sometimes need to be noticed.

That’s what Rob did” (99).

In Burger Wuss, Anthony gets his chance to be a part of Diana’s seemingly superior life when he performs a crazy contortionist act at the school talent show. She compliments his performance and agrees to go out with him. On their second date,

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Anthony asks her what it’s like to hang out with the popular kids, the ones things

‘happen to’. She replies:

“They get boring fast. Really fast. All they care about are their cars

and their beach parties. I’m like, is this all there is to life? Some day I

want to be out there, really living.” (24)

The life Anthony has been coveting, in other words, is no more satisfying or substantial than his own. Diana, too, feels like there must be some indefinable ‘more’ to life. When

Anthony presses the point, Diana underscores the shallowness of his assumptions:

“I always thought you were someone things happened to [...] I

thought you led a life of risk and adventure.”

She shrugged. “Here’s what I know; People will think that, if

you have a certain kind of hair.” (24-5)

Diana’s humorous pronouncement conveys the idea that Anthony’s vision of ‘really living’ is not based on anything concrete. Despite this, once they become a couple, he feels she changes his life, makes it exciting: “[I]t was great being with her, and everything seemed perfect to me. Everything was like an adventure” (28).

As narrator, Anthony’s regard for Diana comes across as sincere: “I have a heart and yes I loved her” (17). Thus, she does seem to represent a potential solution to his dissatisfaction with life. For example, Anthony feels too cowardly to kiss her until she teasingly encourages him: “Don’t you want to be the kind of person things happen to?” (27). She challenges him to change, to act on his desires instead of over-thinking.

However, as argued above, the text is characterised by ironic humour. For example,

Anthony describes his first, rather mundane, meeting with Diana in hyperbolic, romantic language:

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She was so beautiful when I first saw her: all dressed in green like an

elf of the forest, as if she should have been playing a mandolin,

perching in an apple tree, her uniform as she bagged my fries

sparkling in the light, and as I said to her, looking at the smoothness

of her face, “I have exact change”, the smell of the burgers wafted

across us like strands of her flaxen hair in mountain winds. (17)

Anthony presents an ordinary fast food transaction as though it’s a dreamy meeting out of a fantasy story, with images of her beauty juxtaposed with the sensory elements of their real surroundings. It is unclear whether the reader is being positioned to laugh with Anthony or at Anthony.

Further, Anthony’s portrayal of their relationship does not live up to his insistence that Diana changed his life. He sums up their relationship by stating: “She convinced me to do things I would never have done” (19). However, when he describes their relationship, their lifestyle sounds trivial. He has little to say about their first date except: “we had like this great time and pizza” (18). Their subsequent dating activities do not sound all that different from the “safe”, “dull” life Anthony lived before he met her:

We went through automatic car washes relentlessly and were sarcastic

for hours at Toys “R” Us. We hung out after school and I went over

to her house and she came over to my house and we watched movies

about alien intestinal viruses and commandos on golf carts. (27)

The use of run on sentences helps to create a sense of aimless frivolity. When they are broken up and Anthony imagines being with her again, his daydreams are similarly low key: “I pictured us watching some comedy, some zany comedy, with our arms around each other on the sofa” (112).

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Further undercutting the worth of romance is the portrayal of the relationship between Anthony’s two friends, Rick and Jenn. Rick and Jenn are an exaggerated

‘perfect’ couple. Anthony claims that they have “their own little nation, with its own special language” (12) and live on “their own little love-continent” (175). Where the ironic representation of Anthony’s view of Diana is ambiguous, the cynical representation of Rob and Jenn is clearly attributable to Anthony. For example,

Anthony describes their ridiculous behaviour when they are cleaning at O’Dermott’s together:

He and Jenn were scrubbing with their sponge arms interwoven. They

talked quietly to each other.

“You’re the bestest at detoxifying.”

“No, you are. You’re the very bestest-beasty-estest.” (63)

Anthony is evidently the one making fun of them, since this exchange prompts him to imagine a mock eulogy for Rick:

Rick was cut down in the flower of his youth, struck down by that

scourge of manhood, that most repulsive of afflictions, called, in the

medical community, lovey-dovey-cutesy-wa-wa. (63)

Similarly, at one point Jenn apologises to Anthony for making him the third wheel: “It can’t be easy to watch people as in love as the Rick-bear and me when you’re feeling so alone [...] because we’re so cuddly and happy” (108). Anthony demeans her romantic view of her relationship, claiming that it’s actually hard to be around them “because when you kiss it sounds like someone stirring jelly” (108). She is oblivious to his mockery. When Rick gives Anthony love advice, he tells him, very seriously, that alcohol is the answer. His relationship with Jenn started with drunken fumblings: “At

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Chapter Four some point I remember reaching up her shirt. My nose was running and I used the shirt to wipe it” (184). This couple who are ‘really in love’ and see themselves as perfect are thus presented as ridiculous and deluded as to the importance of romantic relationships.

The potential value of romance is rendered more ambiguous by Diana’s appearances throughout the text. Despite Anthony’s ongoing obsession with her, when

Diana is present in his narrative it mostly just underscores his humiliation on the numerous occasions he gets beaten up. For example, Diana witnesses Anthony being beaten up by Burger Queen employees after Turner tricks him into impinging on their turf. Anthony reaches out to her as he lies on the ground, bleeding, with his nostrils full of dirt:

Diana was standing over me. [...] I said, “Diana. I love you.”

“Shut up [...] You’re so damn stupid,” she said, and started

walking away.

[...]

I crawled after her. “Diana?” I said. “Don’t...” I made my way

on all fours. (54)

Anthony is utterly pathetic in this scene, and Diana’s appearances in the narrative generally follow a similar pattern. That Anthony continues to hold onto the idea of

Diana as a kind of ‘cure’ in the face of such repeated humiliation reinforces the idea that romance is an illusory solution to unhappiness.

Thus, although Anthony’s desire for Diana and what she represents is a major element of the plot, there is a thread of cynicism that suggests romance will not cure what ails him. In Deep Fried, the use of alternating first-person narration creates the idea that the faith Pete and Sophie place in one another could be misplaced. Pete, of course, does not know the ‘real’ Sophie: the image he has created in his head is of a fat

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Chapter Four computer nerd. Sophie’s faith in Pete ultimately stems from a mere media image. Yet each sees the other as more assured, more ‘authentic’, seeing themselves as the inferior one. When Sophie-as-Rob first brings his attention to the incriminating memo after Pete has spent a day wandering around feeling sorry for himself, he feels inadequate:

Rob has ideas like this. Rob does shit. I go walking in the hills. Some

time soon, he’s going to realise. (83).

He unsuccessfully attempts to do some hacking of his own: “I imagine Rob sitting at my shoulder, watching me, wondering how I ever got to be this useless” (92). When

Sophie considers meeting Pete in person, revealing her true self, she goes into a frenzy trying to find something to wear, convinced she is not good enough:

If Pete opened the door to me he wouldn’t see someone fascinating or

intelligent or important. I will lose everything I almost had because I

can’t find something to wear that will make me beautiful. (90)

The female character’s greatest source of inadequacy is her appearance, where the male character’s is his ability to act, upholding a simplistic gender binary. Sophie’s sections of the book also lend ambiguity to their relationship because her narration is, at times, somewhat sinister due to her obsession with Pete. For example, she develops a habit of entering Pete’s house at night using the family’s spare key (hidden in a pot plant) and watching him sleep: “Breathing in the same air he has breathed” (57). Sophie seems as much a potential threat as ally, creating suspense and heightening tension around Pete’s desire to believe that ‘Rob’ can help him.

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Closure

The climax of the narrative of Burger Wuss is an O’Dermott’s party held the night before the filming of the commercial, the culmination of Shunt and Anthony’s plan: they plant the Burger Queen troll in Turner’s car before showing up at the party to await the inevitable retaliation from the Burger Queen employees. The party is also the novel’s climax in that the teenage lifestyle Anthony as been coveting is shown up as false and grotesque. There have already been hints of this throughout the narrative. A few days earlier, when Anthony and Rick take a walk near the “Party Hill”, there is a hint at the falsity of teenage mythology:

This was where a lot of kids camped out or had their keggers.

You always heard stories about the skinny-dipping, and how many

virginities were lost in the bushes. There weren’t, in fact, many

bushes. (141)

This hints that the stories that have informed Anthony’s envy of the peers things

‘happen to’ are false or exaggerated. Now, at the scene of an actual party, the reality is exposed as disgusting. Teenagers fight, slosh their drinks and shout at each other.

Turner and some of his friends hold a crass boob-size contest, using their hands to measure and eliminating girls who are “Itsy-bitsy teeny-weenie” (185). A teenage boy wanders around, his shirt “wet with vomit that was not his own” (186-7). Couples writhe on the ground in an ugly display:

One girl was lying on top of a guy, her hands gripping his arms, her

neck craned so she could take in her mouth another guy’s toe. The

rest of his foot was padded with dirt. (186)

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The ‘really living’ in Anthony’s head – a typical teenage party with drinking, music, sexual activity – is not appealing to him in reality: “It was a completely repulsive scene” (186).

Turner and Shunt’s plan comes to a head just as Turner is giving a drunken, impassioned speech about the value of O’Dermott’s:

“O’Dermott’s is […] as American as the open road. It’s as American

as freedom. It’s like driving across the highways of this country with

your roof down.” (187-8)

Again, Turner expresses himself in clichés to convey the idea that working at

O’Dermott’s and owning a car are fundamental to his sense of freedom, his sense of self. This speech, in emphasising Turner’s strong connection to his car, feeds into the climax: soon after, Turner discovers that Burger Queen crew members have dumped his car in a pond, with graffiti keyed into the paint and faeces on the back seat. Turner is crushed, wading into the pond and comforting his car as if it were human: “He caressed the finish. He bent low and whispered tearful things” (192). Anthony takes great pleasure in this victory: “It felt very good. It was like someone had taken my heart and smeared it with a lotion smooth and cool” (192).

His confidence boosted by this success, Anthony decides to take his revenge further and seduce Turner’s girlfriend, Stacey. He is confident, more like Turner in feeling as though he knows what he is doing: “I felt relaxed. Triumphant” (196). With alcohol and manipulation – calculatedly sympathising with her over Turner’s

“bastardry”, for example (196) – Anthony manages to persuade Stacey to join him in the front seat of Turner’s car. Again, he is seemingly more like Turner, telling himself to look at Stacey as little more than a body: “Keep concentrating on the body, and how

I want to bring it close to me” (196). Stacey means nothing to him beyond being a

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Chapter Four means to hurt Turner further by taking his girl in his already-defiled car. His thoughts are directed toward Turner: “I’m taking what you took and more. There’s nothing left of you” (198). When they start to make out, the imagery is grotesque, and he continues to think of hurting Turner:

I pressed up against her beer-smelly mouth. We ate each other’s lips.

[...] Triumph. Got you, Turner. Got you. [...] The reek of beer and BQ

dump. (199-200)

Anthony is now well and truly part of the repulsive scene.

The moment is interrupted by a kind of canary figure. Rick’s older brother (who is never named) is a disturbed individual, obsessed with the idea that the world is a filthy place. He makes a number of brief, absurd appearances throughout the narrative.

For example, he comes into O’Dermott’s when Anthony is working the register and tells him:

“For a while, I wasn’t well. I thought everything was soot. That made

me cry. I washed and washed myself. They took me to the hospital. I

was medicated. Now I am hunky-dory.” (106)

His strange behaviour belies this last optimistic statement, as he grabs Anthony’s arm

“with both hands so hard the blood stopped” (106). At the party, he appears again. He walks amongst the writhing couples, “trembling”, vulnerable and bewildered (181). The presence of Rick’s brother in the text creates a sense of corruption and despair lying beneath the surface of the consumer life.

When Anthony and Stacey hear splashing and moaning, they stop groping and wade to shore. Rick’s brother is in the filthy water, scrubbing himself and moaning about dirt and chemicals: “We’re all just dirt. [...] Look around. Nothing is right.

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Nothing is right anymore” (201). Anthony does look around, taking in Stacey, the car, himself: “I felt a sickness running all throughout me” (202). Anthony expresses his self-disgust to a drunk, uninterested Stacey:

“Now I’m as bad as Turner. Except that I’m a loser. This is stupid.

Revenge. Idiotic. There’s no point anymore.” (202)

This moment seems like an epiphany typical of young adult literature: a moment of understanding and self-awareness that will presumably lead to greater maturity.

Anthony leaves Stacey to take Rick’s brother home, no longer feeling triumphant: “And again and again, what was going through my head was this: this is not my victory.

There is no victory for losers” (202).

The filming of the commercial the day after the party is the denouement of the narrative. As he drives to O’Dermott’s, Anthony initially seems to be maintaining a new sense of self-awareness: “What an idiot I was” (204). When he arrives at the scene,

Rick and Jenn tell him that Turner and his friends were unable to find the Burger Queen crew, and instead threw rocks through the windows of the Burger Queen restaurant.

Turner no longer seems thrown by what happened to his car: “Turner was striding around like lord of the manor” (205). When Anthony tries to explain his new understanding to Shunt, saying he feels “kind of guilty” (209), he expresses himself in clichés:

“I feel like I became what I hate most. But a clumsy, stupid

version.”

“Heads up.”

“Hm? I’m saying I think my greatest enemy was really

myself.”

“Heads up.”

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“It was stupid, what I did to Turner.”

“Um, enjoy the ride,” Shunt said, and stepped backward. (210)

Anthony is so busy making ‘profound’ statements that he is oblivious to Shunt’s warnings that Turner is approaching. Turner grabs Anthony and beats him savagely, and Burger Queen employees join in the fray.

In the aftermath of the fight, the sense that Anthony has changed is further nullified. Diana has once again witnessed him being beaten up. Nothing has changed in the way Anthony interacts with her – compare this scene to the post-beating interaction quoted above – and he still clearly harbours illusions about his chances of winning her back:

I tried to smile with my broken lips. I held my scarecrow arms out to

her. “Diana,” I said. “Diana.” I loved the name, and wanted to repeat

it. “Diana,” I said warmly, “I did this all for you.”

“I know,” she said. “You really are an idiot.”

“You’ve only seen me in the getting beaten up parts. [...]

Everything I’ve done, I did because I love you. [...] I was getting

revenge. I couldn’t stand that he’d stolen you.” (213-4)

Diana once again rejects him utterly. To Diana, he is still aligned with Turner: “I’m not a piece of furniture. […] And I’m finished with both of you. This is gross. This is totally repulsive. You are both completely pathetic” (214). Anthony felt that he had detached himself from Turner’s “repulsive” world, but to Diana he is still mired in it.

Anthony has thus lost Diana once and for all. He is also fired for his behaviour.

If there is “no victory for losers”, then, is there a victory for anyone in the narrative?

Turner is also fired from his beloved job, left screaming threats at Anthony and exchanging insults with the Burger Queen people. Only Shunt emerges as a victor of

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Chapter Four sorts. He exploits the media attention drawn by the brawl to mock O’Dermott’s on camera, taking on a kind of parodic middle-class persona: “Sirs, I’m all for a free market, but when it becomes violent in a way which disrupts my hard-earned spending patterns, I know things have gone too far” (213). When Anthony admits his real motive,

Shunt reveals that he knew all along:

“I know you thought that’s what it was about. But it wasn’t about you

or your problems. They’re tiny. It was all for the cause. [...] Anything

to discredit the system.” (215)

Initially it seems that this is meant as a sincere portrayal of activist commitment, and that Anthony is moved by his words. Anthony describes Shunt as looking “fiercer and more vulnerable than I had ever seen him look” (216). However, the sincerity of the moment is immediately undercut. After Shunt leaves, his statements appear to have had no impact whatsoever:

“Geez,” joked Jenn, to break the silence once he’d gone, “I

wonder what was eating him.”

Rick and I looked at Jenn. Rick rolled his eyes. It was pretty

funny. We all had to laugh. (216)

Their juvenile, dismissive response to Shunt suggests that his sincerity is laughable, that it does not inspire others to follow his example. Shunt, then, does not really ‘win’ either.

Despite being brutally beaten, losing Diana and losing his job, Anthony feels better: “I was free. [...] I felt good about myself for the first time in months” (217-8).

He escapes to the woods, experiencing a sense of serenity, of being comfortable with

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Chapter Four himself. However, narrative irony once again dilutes the sincerity of this portrayal of contentment. For example, he describes the ‘inspiring’ scenery:

The forest seemed full of beauty that day. It smelled as fresh

as laundry detergent. The sun shone down on pines and oaks.

Hubcaps full of bullet-holes were hung on trees like artwork. […]

[T]he sun picked out the yellow industrial foam on the riverbanks and

made it shine like some froth of gold[.] (218)

The description is absurd, again portraying industrial or manmade intrusions in the landscape in ways that make them seem natural. Anthony’s thoughts regarding Diana and her rejection of him are dismissive and shallow, finally boiling down to a cliché:

“After all, there are other fish in the sea” (218). This is the sum of the ‘lessons’ he has taken from his experience.

In Deep Fried, the climax of the novel is a confrontation between Sophie and

Lucinda and Marcus for Pete’s ‘soul’. Lucinda and Marcus want to harness Pete’s rebelliousness, and set about convincing him that the idea of ‘selling out’ is a myth.

Lucinda claims, for example: “There’s nothing noble in trying to free people from consumerism, because if you look around, I think you’ll agree a lot of consumerism is fairly fucken cool” (147). They want to parlay his rebellious image into an ad campaign based around the slogan: “PBs. DO WHAT YOU WANT TO DO” (154). Pete would appear in an ad as himself, rejecting PBs burgers but not other people’s right to eat them if they want to. Pete says: “I should resist” (147). However, he allows himself to indulge in fantasies of a satisfying, easy life:

Silly, happy fantasises. The people I will meet. The way they will

notice me, regard me. The way I will impress; demand new, finer,

opportunities. And the way, of course, I will fall in love. An adoring

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equal. A place, at last. My year of having made it. (160)

However, Sophie, having tracked down Lucinda, Marcus and Pete at the cliff-side retreat, arrives to offer a challenge to this fantasy. Pete finally learns her true identity and is swayed by her anti-PBs arguments. Faced with Sophie’s apparent ‘authenticity’, the consumer fantasy offered by Lucinda and Marcus falls apart. Where Lucinda and

Marcus don’t care “who I am or who I might be” (168), Sophie is ‘real’. When she smiles, for example: “It’s a real smile. She wasn’t paid to make it. I like her” (168). He feels the power of Sophie’s certainty that he is strong and good: “Sophie believes in me. Really believes in me. And I love that” (170). He ‘chooses’ Sophie, and the choice feels natural to him. When she goes to leave, walking out with her is instinctive: “It’s not complicated. It’s not something I have to think about” (171). The fantasy is broken: he sees Lucinda and Marcus as “scum” (168).

However, the choice between ‘authenticity’ and ‘fantasy’ is not so clear cut. For one thing, the reader is given the first external description of Sophie: she is “young, angry, beautiful (admit it, Pete, beautiful)” (165). She is beautiful, worthy of a fantasy, despite her earlier despair about her appearance. Once Pete’s choice is made, the opposition between ‘authenticity’ and ‘fantasy’ becomes muddier. Lucinda and Marcus turn violent, villainous, beating the teenagers and tying them up. Pete and Sophie escape, however, and the narrative becomes a chase thriller. Pete is self-aware that they are still living a kind of fantasy. He urges Sophie to jump off a cliff with him in order to escape. As they jump, he thinks:

This isn’t real. There is another place, inside your head, where things

like this make sense. This is legend. This is a movie. This is fucken

Thelma and Louise. (176)

Having evaded capture, it is now Sophie’s turn to provoke a risk. She needs to get back

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Chapter Four into the lodge to use a computer to get incriminating information to a journalist contact.

Pete is starting to regret his choice. The lure of the fantasy world still exists:

I’m drowning in denial. I’m not at war with anyone. I jumped over a

counter and gave away a few burgers. That’s all I ever did. How’s

that a declaration of war? What about the other world; the world of

television microwave dinners, air-conditioning and Have a Nice Day?

I want to live in that world. Why can’t that world be true? (184)

It is as if Pete is pleading with the reader to let him off the hook for desiring this fantasy. What Sophie is offering instead, however, is not necessarily something real or authentic. When more rational arguments fail, she ultimately convinces Pete using an idiom that has become a television cliché:

‘We’ve got one last shot.’

I like the way she says that. Blame television. The trouble I’m

in right at this moment is bigger and uglier than all the rest of the

trouble in my life so far combined, and I still find myself thinking that

it’s sort of cool the way she says that. I need help. (186)

Television’s version of reality is still so appealing and exciting, it overrides his better judgement. Despite concluding that Lucinda is “scum” and ‘choosing’ Sophie, Pete experiences the truth of Lucinda’s statement that some aspects of consumerism are

“fairly fucken cool” (147).

The risk pays off and Sophie and Pete ‘win’. Sophie is able to safely send all the evidence using Marcus’s email account, thus making it seem as though Lucinda and

Marcus are whistleblowers. Pete and Sophie emerge as victors over PBs, and Pete is momentarily satisfied and triumphant. He has found his sense of certainty and the

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“adoring equal” of his fantasies, and “it feels right” (196). It is like a conventional

Hollywood ending. Where the climax and denouement of Burger Wuss suggests that there are no victors, in Deep Fried victory is given to the ‘authentic’ characters.

However, both books feature an epilogues in which there is a sense of stagnation, a preclusion of feasible rational choices in the face of regressive consumer society.

The epilogue of Burger Wuss, set six months after the events of the narrative proper, seems to further repudiate the possibility of choices for Anthony. Anthony does not appear to have changed. He is “loafing” in a Starbucks, implying that his life is still aimless. He is waiting for Rick so that they can “talk about the latest girl who’d told me she wanted to just be friends” (219). His experiences with other ‘fish in the sea’ thus seem to be following the same trajectory as his relationship with Diana. Jenn and Rick are no longer a couple:

Rick had broken up with Jenn about two weeks after the O’Dermott’s

incident. They had done it and then decided they never wanted to

speak again. It was something about whether to rent Moonstruck or

Bordello of Blood. (219)

The breakdown of Rick and Jenn’s relationship over something so trivial underscores the devaluation of romance.

Shunt is a more ambiguous figure. Anthony has not seen him since the

O’Dermott’s brawl. He enters the Starbucks dressed conservatively and tells Anthony he has joined the O’Dermott’s management training programme as “an infiltrator” for

“the Resistance” (220). His last words to Anthony (and the last words of the novel) are:

“Give me a ring sometime. […] We’ll do lunch” (221). Bradford, Mallan, Stephens and

McCallum argue that Shunt’s use of such clichéd corporate speech suggests that the lure of personal gain has undermined his ideals, and that “he has been absorbed into the

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Chapter Four company ethos, becoming another corporate player” (Bradford et al 2008:49).

However, this interpretation elides the fact that in this scene Shunt also tells Anthony that he is going to visit his parents: “Going to stop at my folks. […] Just long enough to piss ‘Merry Xmas’ in the snow on the front lawn” (220). He orders four bottles of water and starts drinking them on the spot, lending credence to this claim and suggesting that he is telling the truth about his undercover guise. Shunt, then, has taken on the guise of adulthood – prefigured by his performance of a middle-class consumer for the press – in order to hide his continued pursuit of rebellion, unpredictability. He is still a figure of mockery, but emerges as a slightly more admirable figure than any of the other characters. Thus, the only gesture toward a rational response to consumerism is contradictory: an incoherent mix of adolescent and adult characteristics, stable yet rebellious. It is also still a very cynical position. Shunt declares, for example:

“Love is just a myth made up by the middle class to convince

themselves they have an inner life. To convince themselves they’re

more than the meat they eat.” (215)

The transformative potential of romance is again undercut.

In the final chapter of Deep Fried, which takes place several months after the climax and denouement, Pete is no longer a triumphant figure. He is working in a café, earning money to attend university. His job is not satisfying; he is having trouble learning procedures, simply because “I just don’t care enough” (197). He is still restless, feeling like he doesn’t control his life: “I can’t say exactly whose fault it is, that I am standing here. There is plenty of blame to share around” (197). Part of that blame, it seems, lies with Sophie:

Sophie found me the job. She’s an organiser. Dad likes her. Mum’s

kept her opinions to herself. So have I. (197)

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He is in some sort of relationship with Sophie, but the exact nature of that relationship and his feelings for her are left ambiguous. She still has influence over him: he reveals that PBs offered him $50,000 dollars “as a way of saying sorry”, but he didn’t take it because Sophie told him it would be “selling out” (197). There is an underlying sense that he is somewhat resentful about being forced to live up to her principles in this way.

When he says that he must earn money, for example, he can’t help adding: “Not that money should have been a problem” (197). This implies that Sophie made it a problem.

PBs is still in business. Pete claims that it has been “three months since the last time anybody recognised me off the television”, implying that the impact of the news about PBs’ corruption did not last beyond a short news cycle. Pete’s description of the latest headline, for example, implies that something being on the news does not make it important, society-changing: “This week’s story is a little boy who tried to help a blind guy across the street and got bitten by his dog” (197). Pete’s narrative opened with a description of PBs which made it seem an unsatisfying place for employees and customers alike. The café Pete works in is a more ‘virtuous’ business than PBs, but is just as incapable of being truly fulfilling, satirising the idea of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ commodities:

It’s an organic, vegetarian café, but neither of these virtues is

enough to keep the Pissed Off at bay. The customers here are usually

angrier than I am. The come in looking for things I can’t give them;

cures for ageing and endless peace of mind. (197-8)

The novel closes with Pete’s description of a woman who complains about her meal and refuses to pay, before storming self-righteously from the premises: “‘Have a nice day!’ I call after her” (198). This, the final line of the novel, ironically recalls Pete’s desire to live in the fantasy world of “Have A Nice Day” (184). Choosing Sophie did

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Conclusion

Bradford, Mallan, Stephens and McCallum characterise Burger Wuss as pessimistic, arguing that it leaves “little space for envisioning the kind of community where children and young people are considered valuable in terms that are not reductively economic” (Bradford et al 2008:50). In his discussion of advertising, Andrew Wernick argues that a widespread response to consumerism is “a sensibility which oscillates between a playful willingness to be temporarily seduced and a hardened scepticism about every kind of communication in view of the selling job it is probably doing”

(1991:191). Such a response does not invite action, he argues, but rather a kind of

“cynical privatism” or apathy (Wernick 1991:191). Burger Wuss presents a cynical subject position as the only response to consumer society, as does Deep Fried. Like

Feed, then, the books tell the reader that they will never – and should never – find satisfaction in consumer-media discourses, but also tells them they have no choice but to continue defining themselves as consumers. In characterising consumer-media culture as inherently regressive, Burger Wuss and Deep Fried convey the idea that a paralysed stance, perpetually poised somewhere between seduced and cynical, is the only option available.

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Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

The Uglies Series: Chasing Satisfaction

[I]n today’s carnival of identities, you can have any colour you like as

long as you accept the essentially conservative proposition that life is

limited to style.

Andrew Calcutt, Arrested Development: Pop Culture and the

Erosion of Adulthood, 1998, 208.

One of the most seminal effects of equating happiness with

shopping for commodities which are hoped to generate happiness is

to stave off the chance that the pursuit of happiness will ever grind to

a halt. […] The secure state of happiness not being attainable, it is

only the chase of that stubbornly elusive target that can keep the

runners (however moderately) happy.

Zygmunt Bauman, The Art of Life, 2008, 9.

In Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series (2005-2007), the consumer ideal of complete satisfaction is dismantled, but the perpetual pursuit of satisfaction through stylistic change is positively portrayed as a ‘natural’ human state.18 In the first three books of the series, a society of juvenilised individuals living a fantasy existence of consequence-free consumption and complete satisfaction is replaced by a dynamic

18 Page references in this chapter will include book titles for clarity. 194

Chapter Five society in which happiness is to be endlessly pursued through stylistic experimentation.

The series conveys the idea that people – young people in particular – are simply not

‘wired’ to be content, acknowledging that the satisfaction offered by consumerism is illusory yet simultaneously constructing what Bauman calls the “chase” (2008:9) of this perpetually deferred happiness as necessarily human. The fourth book seems to suggest that the free market will spontaneously produce ‘solutions’ to the problems of consumerism – people who are ‘better’ consumers will eventually emerge – while allowing everyone else (including the teenage reader) to continue having fun.

The Tally Trilogy: Conformity ‘Rewired’

The first three books in Westerfeld’s series – Uglies (2005), Pretties (2005) and

Specials (2006) – are set several centuries in the future after the collapse of the

‘Rusties’ society (implicitly, the implied teenage reader’s current society) due to an oil- corrupting nanotechnological virus which destroyed civilisation and decimated most of the global population. While the exact timeframe is unspecified, there are hints that several centuries have passed since the collapse of the Rusties and the rise of this new society. For example, a collection of magazines from the time of the Rusties is described as being “over three centuries old” (Uglies 202). Survivors of the disaster have forged a new, peaceful society in which humans live in small, technologically- advanced, self-contained cities with fixed populations and minimal environmental impact (all resources are recycled with nanotechnology, for instance). An integral aspect of ‘Prettytime’ peaceful living is a strictly prescribed life path. Individuals live with their parents while they are ‘littlies’, before being sent to live in dorms as ‘uglies’ at age twelve. At sixteen, they undergo an operation to become uniformly pretty. Once they have received the operation, citizens live a carefree, fun existence where every

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Chapter Five whim is met by the city as they age from ‘new pretty’, to ‘middle pretty’, to ‘crumbly’.

There are slight variations in this lifestyle from city to city – the exact age for the pretty operation or the extent to which different age groups are physically separated, for example – but all cities are built on the fundamental idea of conformity of appearance and behaviour as the key to creating and maintaining order.

This is not a consumer society as discussed in the Introduction and Chapter

Two, in that there is no mass production, no branding, no advertising. Rather, it is a society in which the desires that are said to fuel consumerism – the desire for life to be easy and fun, the desire to be attractive and youthful forever, the desire to keep up with one’s peers, the desire to maximise leisure – have been fulfilled. Pretty life is like the idealised world presented in advertising, where satisfaction is complete: life is “one big party [...] full of beautiful people” (Uglies 99). It is a fantasy of consumption without consequence: for example, a pretty need only ask a “hole in the wall” for what he or she desires and nanobots recycle available materials to fulfil the request. Citizens are stereotypical perpetual adolescents in that they are shallow pleasure-seekers who get whatever they want, whenever they want it. No one need envy anyone else or desire a different kind of lifestyle. It is a society in which, teenage protagonist Tally

Youngblood proclaims early on, there are “[n]o losers” (Uglies 83). This ideal has been fashioned by government officials and scientists, who strive to maintain peace and prevent the mistakes of the past being repeated. The trilogy tracks the destruction of this society, largely caused (not entirely intentionally) by Tally, who lives in one of the

North American cities. Tally experiences a range of social positions throughout the three books: a typical ugly desiring the pretty operation; a member of an alternative community called the Smoke; a pretty living it up in the city; and a physically- enhanced, mentally-altered soldier called a Cutter, subject to the orders of a power-

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Chapter Five hungry scientist called Dr Cable. Tally discovers that individuals are only content as pretties because their brains are altered with lesions to make them placid and shallow, content with material comforts. Her ‘rewirable’ brain ultimately allows her to overcome any such ‘programming’ and precipitate the fall of the conformist Prettytime. The essential plot of the books, then, is the triumph of individuality over conformity.

Scott Westerfeld positions the Uglies books as a critique of current society. In a guide to the series called Bogus To Bubbly: An Insider’s Guide to the World of Uglies

(2008), Westerfeld expresses the idea that the books might act as a warning to the reader:

A question I’m often asked is: “Are we the Rusties?”

The short answer is: “Yes!” But, of course, what I really mean

is that we could be the Rusties. We don’t have to wind up with a

future like Tally’s. We have a choice. (Bogus to Bubbly 27; original

emphasis)

This suggests that the representation of the Rusties and Tally’s society is meant to reflect on modern culture and, potentially, evoke action. Westerfeld says that the series is about the “issue of how to pursue our dreams while preserving the planet” (Bogus to

Bubbly 57). There is little critical analysis of the series thus far, but that which exists similarly casts it as a critique of consumerism. Farah Mendlesohn, for example, argues that the theme of Uglies, Pretties and Specials (she does not include Extras) is the

“insidious effects of material culture” (2009:154).

The way the books convey ideas about current society pivots on the representation of the Rusties and Prettytime, and the related judgments the reader is invited to make of these two societies. The series is different from the other texts discussed in this thesis in that it is told in the third person, and substantially focalised

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Chapter Five through a female character. Like Titus in Feed, Tally is initially a typical member of her society rather than a doubter. Unlike Titus, however, Tally ultimately questions her society. The change in her perspective is conveyed through a common device in dystopian fiction, in which the impact of a future society is expressed as “a mixture of practices that are internalised without question until the characters find themselves in conflict with society and thus needing to rethink social values” (Bradford et al 2008:21-

2). Throughout the series, as Tally experiences the Smoke, pretty culture, and life as a

Cutter, she gains a new perspective of her own society and of the Rusties. As in Feed, the unreliability of Tally’s perspective – represented in dialogue, focalisation and free indirect discourse rather than a first-person voice – is conveyed through conflicts with consensus reality and with other characters’ viewpoints which are positioned as more

‘correct’.

Because of the volume of material and proliferation of narrative elements in the three books, this analysis has a slightly different structure from other chapters, focusing on the way the narrative progresses in relation to the overarching metaphor of

‘appearance’: Tally’s attitude toward her society is represented by her attitude to appearance; the difference between her city and an alternative community called the

Smoke is conveyed by their respective attitudes to appearance and its relationship to notions of ‘proper’ adulthood; and the change in Prettytime society is framed in terms of a change in the way people treat their appearance. I take the two key ideas that

Prettytime officials use to maintain the idea that this society is ideal – prettiness as the key to peace and the Rusties as aggressive and rapacious – and analyse the ways Tally comes to question these tenets, largely through relationships with others. I then look at the representation of the pretty lesions and argue that the reader is invited to view

Tally’s ‘rewirable’ brain – and the changeable, dynamic society she engenders as a

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Chapter Five result of this rewirability – as desirable. Farah Mendlesohn argues that in the books, the

“tendency to over-consumption is posited in terms of human aggression rather than a result of technology per se: it is built in us” (Mendlesohn 2009:155). Mendlesohn argues that neither Prettytime conformity nor Rusties-like consumption is entirely condemned or embraced and that the is therefore less concerned with making a didactic point about the ‘issue’ of consumerism (Mendlesohn 2009:155). My reading differs from Mendelsohn’s in that the books do ultimately position the “human aggression” that drives consumption as preferable to idealised conformity.

Prettiness and Shay

Uglies establishes an opposition between ‘conformity’ and ‘rebellion’ – largely articulated through the metaphor of appearance – that underpins the rest of the series.

At the beginning of Uglies, fifteen-year-old Tally believes wholeheartedly in the necessity of the pretty operation. To Tally, ‘growing up’ means becoming pretty at age sixteen and living a life that is, as she observes when she sneaks over to New Pretty

Town, “all one big party” (Uglies 12) where the only rules are “Act Stupid, Have Fun, and Make Noise” (Uglies 12). She has eagerly anticipated her initiation into this version of adulthood since making the transition from littlie to ugly at age twelve:

“She’d spent the last four years looking out at New Pretty Town, wanting nothing more than to cross the river and not come back” (Uglies 85). This hints at the way segregation of uglies and pretties is designed to stoke the desire to conform. Tally has been raised to believe that utter contentment is achievable as long as you conform to the city’s version of adulthood.

Tally meets a fellow ugly, Shay, after all her other friends have been turned pretty. Shay shares her birthday, so Tally is excited to have a new friend to tide her over

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Chapter Five for the final few months of her life as a citizen-in-waiting. However, it becomes clear that Shay does not share her enthusiasm for the version of ‘growing up’ on offer. The tension between their views conveys more information about the city’s ‘official’ line on the pretty operation and the way social practices buttress such tenets, so that Tally’s perspective is exposed as unreliable. For example, a popular activity among uglies is the use of morphological software to experiment with different pretty looks. It is a favourite pastime of Tally’s: “It was a great waste of a day, figuring out all the different ways you could look when you finally became pretty” (Uglies 40). The phrase “waste of a day” and the word “finally” convey Tally’s belief that being an ugly is about waiting to be pretty; you are not really living your life until after you have the operation. Shay, on the other hand, does not like using the software and tries to make

Tally see that the ‘different’ pretty looks are actually narrowly prescribed. For example, the first step in using the morphological software involves doubling one half of the face. When Tally asks Shay to pick her best side, Shay protests:

“Why do I have to be symmetrical? I’d rather have a face with

two different sides.”

Tally groaned. “That’s a sign of childhood stress. No one

wants to look at that.” (Uglies 42)

Becoming pretty means erasing any sign that life can be unpleasant, conforming by erasing any individual quirk of appearance created by unique experience. Shay objects to the software, telling Tally: “This whole game is just designed to make us hate ourselves” (Uglies 44). Shay’s comment points to the way this leisure activity encourages uglies to believe that they are just marking time until they turn pretty. It also points to tendencies in current society, such as the manipulation of images in magazines that distort norms of appearance and the idea that we are ‘taught’ by the

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Chapter Five media to pursue perpetual youth and beauty. Shay claims that they have been ‘tricked’ into accepting a narrow definition of pretty, ‘programmed’ to see themselves as ugly.

Tally reiterates what she has been taught to believe:

“It’s not programming, it’s just a natural reaction. And more

important than that, it’s fair. In the old days it was all random—some

people kind of pretty, most people ugly all their lives. Now

everyone’s ugly … until they’re pretty. No losers.” (Uglies 83;

original ellipses)

This idea of ‘fairness’ is fundamental to the way pretty conformity is naturalised as the key to a peaceful society. For example, uglies are encouraged to refer to each other by insulting nicknames: Tally is known as Squint, and Shay is called Skinny. Tally has adopted this convention “eagerly and without reserve”, believing the official stance that such name-calling means “no one felt shut out by some irrelevant mischance of birth”

(Uglies 277). However, Shay only uses Tally’s nickname “as a putdown” when she specifically wants to be insulting, and otherwise insists “that they call each other by their real names” (Uglies 36). As in the case of the morphological software, Shay rejects the way the city encourages uglies to feel inherently flawed so that becoming a pretty adult seems like a ‘cure’. Tally admits to liking Shay’s habit of using her real name (Uglies 36), an early hint that being friends with Shay is influencing her perception of society.

Despite Shay’s influence, at this stage Tally still believes that becoming pretty means becoming properly human: “I want to be happy, and looking like a real person is the first step” (Uglies 84). For Tally, being “real” means looking like everyone else.

Shay is concerned that she will not look like herself anymore after she has had the operation, but rather “some committee’s idea of me” (Uglies 45). Tally again associates

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Chapter Five being pretty with being “real”: “It will be you, though. Really you” (Uglies 45; original emphasis). Tally also associates being pretty with being free: free to have fun, sleep in, do whatever she wants. Shay believes that this freedom is illusory, telling Tally: “Doing what you’re supposed to do is always boring. I can’t imagine anything worse than being required to have fun” (Uglies 49; original emphasis). Shay believes that when you become pretty “you just aren’t very interesting any more” (Uglies 50), stating: “The last thing I want is to become some empty-headed new pretty, having one big party all day”

(Uglies 83). Shay is contemptuous of conformity and rejects the idea of prescribed fun.

The tension between Tally’s desire to conform and Shay’s desire to rebel creates conflict that drives the progression of the narrative. When Shay says she is leaving the city to live in a mysterious alternative community called The Smoke so that she does not have to have the operation, Tally has to make a choice. For Shay, the

Smoke represents freedom:

“We don’t have to look like everyone else, Tally, and act like

everyone else. We’ve got a choice. We can grow up any way we

want.” (Uglies 89)

She wants to be able to choose what kind of adult to be: “It’s about becoming what I want to become” (Uglies 93). She rejects the life course Prettytime society offers her in favour of an ongoing, uncertain pursuit of her own definition of adulthood. At this stage, Tally still wants to be like everyone else. Tally’s reaction to Shay’s description of the Smoke – living close to nature with nobody pretty and nobody in charge – is blunt: “Sounds like a nightmare” (Uglies 91). She does not contemplate joining Shay, telling her unequivocally:

“I don’t want to be ugly all my life. I want those perfect eyes and lips,

and for everyone to look at me and gasp. And for everyone who sees

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me to think Who’s that? and want to get to know me, and listen to

what I say.” (Uglies 92)

Again, pretty life is like the version of life presented in advertising: a place where one is perfect, desirable, the centre of attention. For Tally, she can only be a worthwhile person if she is pretty.

The strength of this desire is used against Tally. When Shay runs away, she leaves behind a set of cryptic instructions, hoping Tally will change her mind. Tally has no plans to do so until she is taken to see a scientist called Dr Cable, who oversees

Special Circumstances, a clandestine group that helps to maintain order in Tally’s city.

Dr Cable is desperate to find and stamp out the Smoke because she sees the alternative values it represents as a threat. Dr Cable tells Tally that unless she follows Shay, she will remain an ugly forever. Tally initially tries to be loyal to Shay. Tally’s reasons for doing so show that Shay has already caused her to begin questioning conformity:

She’d wanted to leave the city as much as Tally wanted to be pretty.

However stupid the choice seemed, Shay had made it with her eyes

open, and had respected Tally’s choice to stay. (Uglies 108)

However, after she has been forced to remain in the uglies dorms for a few days, Tally is unable to bear being relegated to what she variously calls “ugly exile” (Uglies 127) and “ugly purgatory” (Uglies 128). Such metaphors are complemented by Dr Cable’s description of society, the official line ‘they’ want all their citizens to live by: “This city is a paradise, Tally. If feeds you, educates you, keeps you safe. It makes you pretty”

(Uglies 106). Being pretty is heaven. Being ugly is hell.

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The Rusties and David

Just as she initially accepts the necessity of the pretty operation, Tally accepts the idea that the Rusties were reckless, stupid, rapacious and self-destructive; that the Prettytime social structure is necessary to prevent humanity meeting a destructive fate again.

Citizens are educated thus in order to buttress the idea that the pretty operation is necessary, that the current society is superior to the past alternative: if people have everything they want, they will not self-destruct through crazed consumption again.

The official line is that the Rusties were “insane, almost destroying the world in a million different ways” (Uglies 200). The representation of the Rusties involves a discursive tension between the implied reader’s experience of current society, the representation of the Rusties that Tally has been encouraged to believe and the way the

Smokies reflect on the Rusties. Such narrative tension is evident, for instance, in the following exchange between Shay and Tally, in which Tally reacts to Shay’s complaints about the pretty system:

“Right, and things were so great back when everyone was ugly. Or

did you miss that day in school?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Shay recited. “Everyone judged

everyone else based on their appearance. People who were taller got

better jobs, and people even voted for some politicians just because

they weren’t quite as ugly as everybody else. Blah, blah, blah.”

“Yeah, and people killed one another over stuff like having

different skin colour.” Tally shook her head. No matter how many

times they repeated it at school, she’d never quite believed that one.

(Uglies 44)

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This shows the way the education system reinforces the key ideas that underpin the social structure: in this case, that the Rusty society was violent and unfair. This is comparable to the way School™ in Feed has been reduced to teaching shopping skills.

The words “recited” and “repeated” as well as Shay’s use of the dismissive phrases

“Yeah, yeah, I know” and “Blah, blah, blah” creates the sense that they have been taught this lesson over and over again. The negative portrayal of the Rusties creates tension between the reader’s experience of the current world and the version Tally’s society has constructed. For example, Tally’s inability to comprehend racial violence generates irony, with the reader invited to view this negative aspect of current society as so dreadful that Tally finds it to be literally unbelievable. Similarly, when visiting some Rusty ruins (remnants of a North American city) with Shay, free indirect discourse further conveys Tally’s impression of the Rusties:

On school trips, the teachers always made the Rusties out to be so

stupid. You almost couldn’t believe people lived like this, burning

trees to clear land, burning oil for heat and power, setting the

atmosphere on fire with their weapons. (Uglies 62)

Again, educators represent the Rusties as inferior. The reader is again offered an estranged view of aspects of current society: wastefulness, destructiveness and an inability to serve long-term at the expense of immediate gratification.

However, Tally learns that this representation of the Rusties is narrow when she experiences the Smoke. The series has a classic young adult science fiction plot, with a young person leaving a contained, seemingly utopic society, and learning to question it in an outsider society (Nodelman 1983:285; Mendlesohn 2009:2). The Smoke offers

Tally a different perspective on appearance, the Rusties and, by extension, desirable

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Tally has been given in school:

Tally had been taught all about the Rusties and early history, but at

school they never said a single thing about people living outside the

cities right now[.] (Uglies 118)

Tally has been taught that the Prettytime city offers the only feasible form of survival; the very existence of the Rusties destabilises this idea. Still, if the city is a paradise, then what Tally expects to find in the Smoke is hell, something even worse than being an ugly in the city. Tally successfully follows Shay’s cryptic instructions and eventually makes it to a meeting point. As she is taken trekking through the woods to the Smoke, she is miserable and comforts herself by imagining how swiftly she will return to civilization once she activates the tracker Dr Cable has provided her with:

All the food and clothes she would ever need, hers for the asking. Her

face pretty at long last, and Peris and all her old friends around her.

Finally, this nightmare would be over. (Uglies 192)

The city is still “paradise” in Tally’s imagination, offering material comforts and a sense of belonging. She is still motivated by the idea of adulthood offered by the city.

However, Tally does not set off the tracker immediately (she is too happy to see

Shay, too intrigued by the workings of the Smoke). The longer she stays, the more she realises that living like the Rusties does not make the Smokies crazy. Rather, it gives them qualities Tally now realises are missing from her society. She is struck by their self-assurance, their serious approach to life: “as if their lives were a really complicated trick that had to be planned and replanned every day” (Uglies 204). She concedes to

Shay: “I know what you mean, how the uglies here are more grown up. You can see it

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Chapter Five in their faces” (Uglies 226). With echoes of perpetual adolescent rhetoric, Shay replies that everyone in the city is juvenilised: “Everyone’s a kid, pampered and dependent and pretty” (Uglies 226). Dr Cable presented this infantilising aspect of the city as desirable, idyllic: it is part of what makes it a “paradise” that “keeps you safe” (Uglies

106). Shay, in contrast, sees it as a corruption of human nature. Tally starts to align with Shay’s belief: she finds that she enjoys working hard to help keep the Smoke running (Uglies 229) and feels “stronger than ever before” (Uglies 230). The idea of becoming a pretty, the image that initially gave her strength and resolve to endure the

‘nightmare’ of the Smoke, begins to lose its shine. When she imagines herself pretty,

“the image in her mind didn’t give Tally the thrill it usually did; it fell flat, like a song she’d heard too many times” (Uglies 250). A life that’s “one big party” no longer seems like perfect happiness.

Tally changes further as she develops feelings for David, the eighteen-year-old son of the two renegade doctors who founded the community. While the majority of community members are city runaways, David was actually born in the Smoke. Since

David is not pretty, falling for him involves breaking the city’s ‘programming’ and learning to appreciate individuality. David’s innate qualities, his ‘adultness’, make her question the way of life in the city: “He took the world more seriously than any other ugly she’d ever met—more seriously, in fact, than middle pretties like her parents”

(Uglies 46). His natural qualities make pretties seem artificial in comparison. For example, Tally watches David as he makes his way through an uneven rocky outcrop and is struck by his poise:

Tally noticed how graceful David was, how he seemed to know every

step of the path intimately. Not even pretties, whose bodies were

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perfectly balanced, designed for elegance in every kind of clothing,

moved with such effortless control. (Uglies 245)

Pretties possess an artificial elegance: they have been turned into living mannequins. In contrast, David’s grace comes from his unique experience growing up in the wild. He has ‘earned’ his adult qualities.

Over time, Tally finds that looking at David gives her the same warm feeling that looking at pretties used to give her, despite his imperfections (Uglies 249). Her shift in perspective is overtly signalled with a description of David focalised through

Tally:

She could see that his forehead was too high, that a small scar cut a

white stroke through his eyebrow. And his smile was pretty crooked,

really. But it was as if something had changed inside Tally’s head,

something that had turned his face pretty to her. (Uglies 250)

She starts to see herself differently as well. David chastises her when she describes herself as ugly, with “thin lips”, “eyes too close together”, “frizzy hair and squashed- down nose” (Uglies 276). Like Shay, David points out the way the city has distorted

Tally’s self-image: “You’re all brainwashed into believing you’re ugly” (Uglies 276).

When he tells her that he first became interested in her because of scratches on her face

(from running into a tree while hoverboarding), Tally initially parrots what she has been taught: “That’s nuts. Imperfect skin is a sign of a poor immune system” (Uglies

276). David insists that they made her interesting: “It was a sign that you’d been in an adventure [...] a sign that you had a good story to tell” (Uglies 278). She realises that she likes David’s imperfect appearance: “I don’t want you to look like everyone else”

(Uglies 279). She accepts the idea that imperfections can be beautiful and interesting: for example, she asks David to tell her the story behind the scar on his eyebrow (Uglies

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279). They kiss for the first time just after she makes this request, underscoring the significance of her concession to his point of view. When they kiss, Tally no longer feels like nothing that happens as an ugly is important, that only being a pretty matters:

Uglies did kiss each other, and a lot more, but it always felt as if

nothing counted until you were pretty.

But this counted. (Uglies 280)

Like Shay, Tally now wants to be able to decide what is ‘real’ and what is not, what

‘counts’ and what does not. She decides she will stay ugly for life, but “somehow not ugly at all” (Uglies 281). This change in her perception of the meaning of ‘ugly’ reflects a rejection of her society’s values. She wants to spread the word in the cities:

“Your personality—the real you inside—was the price of beauty” (Uglies 406).

The Lesions and Zane

Though Tally comes to appreciate the Smoke, there is evidence of ambivalence. When she speculates about what would happen if everyone in the city began to live like

Smokies, the vision quickly turns nightmarish:

[S]he imagined all those people let loose on the countryside below,

cutting down trees and killing things for food, crashing across the

landscape like some risen Rusty machine. (Uglies 208)

She still associates the Rusties with destructive consumption. Tally has been taught that simply making everyone pretty – essentially, creating conformity – is enough to curb such destructive human impulses and forge a peaceful society. However, as well as starting to see what ‘real’ adulthood might look like at the Smoke, Tally also learns a disturbing fact. David’s parents were originally doctors in Tally’s city. They fled the

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Chapter Five city and founded the Smoke after learning that individuals have their brains altered with lesions while undergoing the pretty operation. The lesions make individuals docile, pleasant and free of destructive impulses. Only one percent of the population is free of the lesions, those in professions in which they “face challenges”, such as working in an emergency room (Uglies 263). The official line is that once people all looked the same, it created harmony. However, David suggests:

“Maybe the reason war and all that stuff went away is that there are

no more controversies, no disagreements, no people demanding

change. Just masses of smiling pretties, and a few people left to run

things.” (Uglies 267)

The implication is that people must become subhuman in order to be content with the pretty life; that they have to be damaged in order to accept the idealised consumer dream of perennially playing with toys and permit a more conventional version of adulthood being taken away from them. Contentment is unnatural.

The idea that making people uniformly content and calm means making them subhuman is a common theme in dystopian young adult literature. For example, Pete

Hautman’s Rash ([2006] 2007) depicts a North American future society obsessed with safety, in which the health care industry is incredibly powerful and strong emotional states have been suppressed. The late teens narrator, Bo, says that students in his high school art class are unable to create worthwhile artworks:

All the best art got made back in the last millennium, before we

learned how to fix depression and schizophrenia and stuff. These

days, with everybody more or less sane, the new art is about as

interesting as oatmeal. (7)

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Conformity means the suppression of human creativity. Similarly, Penelope Todd’s

Box (2006) is set in the near future in New Zealand where the government is implementing ‘Endorsement’. Citizens are to be fitted with an implant and then

‘Calibrated’: that is, regulated so that they all have the same balance of chemicals. As one teenage character argues, it will suppress all the most ‘human’ experiences:

“Anger, strong sexual feelings, depression. Cynics say maybe even love” (47). When teenagers refuse the implant, it is generally presented as an instinctive, physical revulsion. As Marti, one of the renegades, says: “Cause it’s wrong. Anti-nature” (47).

In Westerfeld’s series, what constitutes a properly ‘human’ brain is explored further in Pretties, as it is focalised through Tally after she has had the operation.

After kissing David, Tally decides she wants to stay in the Smoke, and tries to destroy the tracker Dr Cable gave her. Instead, she accidentally activates it. The Smoke is attacked and destroyed by Dr Cable’s Special Circumstances, and Shay is captured and prettified. With the help of the few remaining Smokies, including David and his mother, Tally rescues Shay and they all live temporarily on the outskirts of the city.

David’s mother creates a cure for the lesions but refuses to test it on Shay because, as a brain-impaired pretty, she cannot give informed consent. Tally volunteers to become a pretty and test the cure: she now sees becoming pretty as a sacrifice rather than a reward.

Pretties thus opens with Shay and Tally living the pretty life. Tally’s perspective has been altered by the lesions, as demonstrated by her attitude toward appearance: she once again feels contempt for ugliness. Remembering her old face is painful; she loves looking in the mirror and seeing “someone whose face was in perfect balance, whose skin glowed [...] whose body was beautifully proportioned and muscled” (Pretties 11). Memories of ugly faces from the Smoke now give her

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Chapter Five screaming nightmares (Pretties 21). However, there are hints that she is not conforming with complete success. For example, when Shay has jewels implanted in her irises,

Tally’s first instinct is to laugh at the absurdity of it rather than to shower her with compliments as expected. She immediately chastises herself for making such a

“mistake” and “saying bogus things” (Pretties 9). She dislikes these strange impulses to question her lifestyle and wants to forget everything about her past: “She wanted to feel totally belonging somewhere, not waiting for the next disaster to strike” (Pretties 25).

Having been separated from David at the end of Uglies, Tally has a new love interest in Pretties and Specials. When Tally becomes pretty she initially forgets David even exists thanks to the brain lesions. She starts to fall for Zane, a fellow pretty who is slightly older than Tally (Pretties 27) and leader of a pretty clique called the Crims.

Tally and Zane – like Tally and David – recognise something ‘special’ in each other, and the attraction goes beyond appearance. Tally is initially drawn to Zane because he is different from a standard pretty:

[S]omething behind [his eyes] seemed to pull at Tally. Not just the

usual pretty magic, but something that felt serious. (Pretties 26)

David’s appeal was also ‘seriousness’. Zane expresses that inner ‘specialness’ stylistically by pushing the boundaries of acceptable prettiness, dying his hair black with calligraphy ink and eating little in order to keep his face gaunt: “Of all the pretties

Tally had met since her operation, he was the only one whose looks really stood out”

(Pretties 51). There are connotations of pain, extremeness: “His cheekbones were as sharp as arrowheads underneath his flesh, and his eyebrows arched absurdly high when he was amused” (Pretties 27). In other words, he is appealing to Tally because he tries not to conform.

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Tally starts to find that rebellious, risky and unpredictable behaviour clears her pretty mind after an agent of the Smoke called Croy infiltrates a party to try and remind her of the plan to test the cure. His ugly face, coupled with a surge of adrenalin from seeing Special Circumstances chase him, shakes her up:

For a moment, the world became strangely clear, as if the sight of

Croy’s ugliness and the cruel-pretty Specials had removed some

barrier between her and the world. Everything was bright and harsh,

the details so sharp that Tally squinted as if dashing into a freezing

wind. (Pretties 36)

The words “bright”, “harsh”, “sharp” and “freezing” have connotations of extremity and discomfort. This recurs in the imagery used to describe Tally’s moments of clarity, creating the idea that being pretty and dumb is safe but being ‘properly’ human is risky, that seeing the ‘truth’ is hard and painful. When Tally jumps off a building with a bunjee-jacket to follow Croy, the feeling is stronger: “Everything felt very real […] as if a thin plastic film had been peeled from her eyes, leaving the world with razored edges” (Pretties 38). Everything is “clear and intense” with a “bright focus” (Pretties

39). The feeling fades, but Zane helps her understand the connection between excitement and clear thinking. He senses that Tally is not completely absorbed by the shallow, pretty lifestyle and tries to bring out this side of her: “I’ve been waiting for someone like you for a long time” (Pretties 61; original ellipses). After he shows her that extreme behaviour – going hungry, taking risks – allows her to recapture the feeling of clarity, she is able to follow Croy’s cryptic instructions to find the pair of experimental curative pills he has left for her, which she shares with Zane. Tally and

Zane hide their newfound lucidity while looking for ways to show their fellow pretties

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“the terrible price of being pretty—lovely meant brainless, and that their easy lives were empty” (Pretties 116).

What kind of brain needs to replace the static, impaired, juvenilised pretty brain to create a more desirable society? What replaces the easy, empty life? If conformity is dehumanising, what alternative is offered? In Pretties and Specials, Tally’s kind of brain is established as desirable. Zane, Tally and a number of others eventually escape the city and meet back up with David and his mother at a new Smokie hideout. It transpires that the pair of pills was not designed to be shared. The pill Zane took contained lesion-eating nanos that are now causing him brain damage. Tally took the pill meant to stop the nanos once they had removed the lesions, and thus it had no effect on her. David’s mother, Maddy, states: “Somehow, you cured yourself” (Pretties 337).

This sense that Tally’s brain is ‘special’ is crucial to the idea that constant renewal and conflict are superior to conformity and peace.

Tally’s ‘specialness’ is further established in Specials because she has a new kind of ‘programming’ to fight. Shay, angry that Tally did not share the cure with her, has been recruited by Dr Cable to form a more extreme division of Special

Circumstances called Cutters. The Cutters track Tally and Zane to the hideout. David and his mother escape before they arrive, but Tally refuses to leave a now incapacitated

Zane and is captured and turned into a Cutter. As well as a number of physical enhancements – including razor sharp teeth and nails, enhanced strength and cruel, intimidating facial features – Tally undergoes changes to her brain that cause induced feelings of rage, euphoria and, most importantly, superiority. The ‘wrongness’ of

Tally’s perspective is conveyed by the revulsion she feels for Zane, who still has serious health problems as a result of his brain damage. Her feelings for Zane are presented as an aspect of her ‘true’ self: “Deep inside herself were threads of

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Chapter Five permanence, the things that had remained unchanged whether she was ugly or pretty or special—and love was one of them” (Specials 95). The sense of superiority caused by alterations to her brain goes against Tally’s ‘true’ nature because it conflicts with this love:

[Zane] seemed emptied of something essential, like champagne with

all the bubbles gone flat. [...] There was a split screen in her brain: the

way she remembered Zane and the way she saw him now, two

pictures crashing against each other. (Specials 91)

She tells Shay that being a Cutter makes her feel strange at times: “I don’t like the part where Zane looks wrong to me” (Specials 93; original emphasis). At this stage she focuses on the idea of getting him to become a Cutter, rather than changing her own perceptions: “The war in her brain wouldn’t end until he was a Special—his body as perfect as her own” (Special 141). However, Zane repeatedly tells her she can fix herself again because of her special, rewireable brain. He tells her: “You can do it again, Tally. [...] Undo what they did to you” (Specials 85), “Try to change your mind,

Tally” (Specials 141) and “You can rewire yourself again, Tally” (Specials 142). He tells her she can fight the programming because she did it once before: “You freed yourself once before. You beat the pretty lesions” (Specials 193).

Closure

What does a brain that can ‘rewire’ itself mean for society? In this section I focus on the depiction of the society that begins to rise up to replace the Prettytime. Conformity has been exposed as a damaging way of life; what kind of society arises when diversity and rebellion are paramount? In Specials, Shay and Tally follow Zane to the ‘New

Smoke’, which turns out to be a whole city that has been flooded with the cure. Diego,

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227) – flourishes. For example, Tally encounters a woman with “fingernails decorated with tiny video screens, each showing a different flickering image” (Specials 223) and people with “coats of downy feathers, pinkie fingers replaced with tiny snakes, skin every shade between deep black and alabaster, and hair that writhed like some sinuous creature under the sea” (Specials 227). Conformity has been destroyed, creating uncertainty:

Half the time Tally wasn’t exactly sure what age people were

supposed to be, as if the city’s surgeons had decided to let all the

stages of life blur together. [...] Apparently, you could do just about

anything you wanted here. It was like she’d landed in Random Town”

(Specials 228).

People are creating their own ‘norms’ instead of accepting prettiness. She wonders about Zane, who has been taken to the hospital: “How would he decide to remake himself, here where anyone could look like anything, where the very possibility of being average had disappeared?” (Specials 230; original emphasis). Just as the conformity of the Prettytime is expressed through aesthetic sameness, the new freedom of the city is expressed through diversity. Liberty is explicitly connected to stylistic freedom. Miyuki Hanabusa states that the Uglies series is an example of the way “YA fiction in general presents a hostile view of cosmetic surgery” (2008:86). However, although plastic surgery is sometimes portrayed negatively in the books, this is only when referring to pretty or Cutter surgery: that is, surgery which imposes conformity.

For example, in Uglies, when Tally contemplates the surgery that will make her pretty,

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(Uglies 97). However, when it comes to the exciting, dynamic uses of plastic surgery that emerge in Diego, there are no descriptions of the physical realities of surgery.

The changes in appearance parallel a change in behaviour. Peace and stasis have been replaced by contestation and expansion. The city has started clear-cutting land and expanding into the wild (Specials 216), just as Tally imagined back when she was living in the Smoke (Uglies 208). People are expressing their opinions openly. When

Tally tunes into the city’s newsfeed, it is full of arguments and debates:

Without the lesions making everyone agreeable, society was left

roiling in a constant battle of words, images, and ideas.

[...]

And the changes already in place here in Diego were just a

beginning, Tally realized. All around her she felt the city seething, all

those unfettered minds bouncing their opinions off each other, like

something ready to explode. (Specials 229)

There is an overt association between freedom of consumption and political expression.

The negative connotations of “roiling”, “seething” and “explode” introduce a sense of ambivalence, but the overall impression is that humanity has been set free from artificial constraints.

The city is also presented in a positive light in that Diego’s dynamic environment helps Tally to ‘rewire’ herself and fight her Cutter ‘programming’. The importance of Diego is underlined when Tally explicitly connects the changes she is currently going through with her experience in the Smoke:

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She remembered back in the ugly days, how living in the Smoke for a

few weeks had transformed the way she saw the world. Perhaps

coming to Diego, with all its messy discords and differences (and its

absence of bubbleheads), had already started to make her a different

person. If Zane was right she was rewiring herself again. (Specials

291)

Shay and a number of other Cutters have been ‘cured’, again with something devised by David’s mother. Tally, as in the case of the pretty lesions, does not need a cure to change. Shay informs Tally that their home city has declared war on Diego, with Dr

Cable leading the offence to re-establish order. The first attack from a “hovercraft armada” damages the hospital, and Zane is killed. Devastated, Tally is finally able to

‘rewire’ herself once and for all, breaking away from Shay and the others to travel back to her home city, confront Dr Cable and try and diffuse the war.

She meets David in the wild on the way, and their interaction reinforces the idea that dangerous freedom is preferable to safe conformity. He tells her that a world full of

Tallys is a desirable thing. Given his role in informing Tally about the lesions and breaking her initial ‘programming’, and his ongoing presence as a figure of resistance against the Prettytime, the reader is positioned to regard his opinions as worthwhile.

Tally’s ability to cure herself made David’s mother realise that rather than eradicating the lesions, they needed to stimulate the brain to work around them, making the cure safer and faster: “That’s how we got Diego to change in only two months. Because of what you showed us” (Specials 320; original emphasis). A content, placid mind is unnatural; an “unfettered mind” (Specials 229) clamouring for change is natural. Again, diversity of appearance and freedom are linked:

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“So I’m to blame for those people turning their little fingers

into snakes? Great.”

“You’re to blame for the freedom they’ve found, Tally.”

(Specials 320; original emphasis)

David tells her that Diego is now mass producing the pills, and if she can undermine Dr

Cable’s power the Prettytime system will crumble: “You’re about to fix everything.

[....] The world is changing, Tally. You made it happen” (Specials 321; original emphasis). David’s presence also serves to underscore that Tally has successfully

‘rewired’ herself: “after seeing so many insane surgeries in Diego, his scarred eyebrow and crooked smile just seemed like one more fashion statement” (Specials 323). Where

David’s scar was once a sign that he had a good story to tell, it is now a “fashion statement”: individuality is defined by stylistic choice.

Tally needs to find a way to help make a society of people like her: “She’d spent the last few days focused on rewiring herself, but she needed to rewire everyone”

(Specials 337; original emphasis). Ultimately, she succeeds in stopping Dr Cable by injecting her with the Cutter cure, which drains her natural aggression and desire for power. Without Dr Cable to act as a driving force, the city stops the war against Diego.

The cure floods the city:

The cure was taking hold here, just as it had in Diego, and Tally

wondered exactly what sort of future she had helped let loose. Were

the city Pretties going to start acting like Rusties now? Spreading

across the wild, overpopulating the earth, levelling everything in their

path? Who was left to stop them? (Specials 344)

Though her victory over Dr Cable is Tally’s way of ‘fixing everything’ and ‘saving everyone’, she is thus still ambivalent. She is still suspicious of humanity’s

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Chapter Five rapaciousness. The cure spreads from city to city, “slowly changing the entire continent” (Specials 360). Despite Tally’s ambivalence, the representation of this new, changeable society is largely positive, particularly the characterisation of Diego:

The old static bubblehead culture had been replaced by a world where

change was paramount. So one day some other city would catch up—

from now on fashions were guaranteed to shift—but for the moment,

Diego was still the place that changed faster than everywhere else. It

was the place to be, and it grew larger every day. (Specials 360-1)

The “static” Prettytime of conformity and a prescribed life path has being replaced by a world characterised by dynamism, with Diego as its beacon. The first three Uglies books thus present the dismantling of a world of prescribed, ‘juvenilised’ adulthood and the rise of a society offering a different kind of perpetual adolescence in which individual freedom and stylistic choice are essentially the same thing.

In the first three books of Westerfeld’s series, the negative consequences of a voracious desire for change – such as the use of natural resources – are thus presented as a regrettable but inevitable aspect of being ‘properly’ human. A ‘solution’ is offered in that Tally chooses to live in the wild with David, Cutter enhancements intact, and act as a kind of guardian of the wild. She sends a missive to Shay and the others, telling them to spread the word that “[h]owever hungry the human race becomes now that the pretties are waking up” she and David will be there to “remind you of the price the

Rusties paid for going too far” (Specials 372; original emphasis). There is tension here between the positive connotations of the phrase “waking up” and the somewhat more negative connotations of the word “hungry”. Tally will not let people forget where unchecked progress led the human race in the past. However, this ambivalent ending stands in contrast to the fourth book in Westerfeld’s series. Extras also represents

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Extras: After the ‘Mind-Rain’

Extras is set three years after the “mind-rain” – the cure – has “broken down the boundaries between ages” (Extras 17) across the world. During this time, cities have continued to redefine themselves and try to adjust to their new, ‘dangerous’ freedom.

The book focuses on a different protagonist, fifteen-year-old Aya, who lives in a

Japanese city which has reinvented itself as a reputation economy. In Specials, Diego is depicted as a dynamic city full of a new kind of perpetual adolescent (in contrast to the comformist pretties) where freedom of thought is expressed through diversity of appearance. Aya’s city shares similarities with Diego, in that it is depicted as a kind of metropolitan adolescent. After the cure, the city struggled to develop a cohesive identity. In the Prettytime, individuals were perpetual adolescents in that they were content with material comfort, living an idealised, pampered life free of responsibility.

Now individuals are perpetual adolescents in that they are unable to reach a stable sense of maturity: as I argued in Chapter Two, perpetual adolescence is often connected to a proliferation of choice and a lack of cultural norms. As in Diego, new-found freedom of choice is expressed stylistically:

You could choose among a million kinds of beauty or weirdness, or

even keep your natural-born face your whole life. These days “pretty”

meant whatever got you noticed. (Extras 8)

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People experiment with new skin textures: “fur, scales, strange colors, and translucent membranes—even a stony crust” (Extras 193) and “pixel-skins [...] rippling through colors like drunken chameleons” (Extras 14). Different facial modifications abound, from “manga-heads” with faces made to look like “old Rusty drawings” (Extras 18) to those with faces based on animals or historical figures (Extras 193) to “Plain Janes” who “didn’t want to be pretty or exotic, just normal—as if that concept still existed”

(Extras 27). Some choose to become air-headed pretties again, or have other neural modifications such as altering the brain to prevent lying (Extras 42). In some parts of the city, even the buildings are ever-changing:

To keep the gorgeous views from getting stale, the entire building

rotated at the speed of an hour hand. [...] [A]ll the buildings moved.

They hovered and transformed and did other flabbergasting things[.]

(Extras 31)

Aya’s older brother Hiro exemplifies the uncertainty that leads to such experimentation.

He was only a pretty for a short time before the Prettytime ended. When the system collapsed, he jumped from clique to clique and even considered getting the lesions again: “He hadn’t stuck with anything, shifting aimlessly, unable to make sense of freedom” (Extras 32).

As well as struggling with uncertainty once the Prettytime ended, the city also had problems with resource allocation. In the Prettytime, there was consumption without consequence, as resources were freely available to all: “toys and party clothes popped out of the hole in the wall, no questions asked” (Extras 32). However, this was only sustainable while humans were “brain-damaged” (Extras 12), “perpetually happy and clueless” (Extras 407). The old system of distribution became untenable once everyone was cured, because “creative, free-minded human beings were more ravenous

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Chapter Five than bubbleheads” (Extras 32). The positive impression created by the words “creative” and “free-minded” stands in tension with the word “ravenous”, which is suggestive of a lack of control. However, as in the first three books, there is the sense that unleashing this ravenousness is a preferable state of affairs to keeping people pretty with parts of their brains “switched off”: “bubbleheads were missing willpower, creativity and despair” (Extras 55). The reputation economy was established as a way to allocate resources: ‘merits’ and ‘face ranks’ now decide who gets “the best mansions, the most carbon emissions, the biggest wall allowances” (Extras 33). Merits are awarded for service to the community, such as chores for children and taking on difficult jobs like doctor or teacher for adults (Extras 33). However, the focus of the novel is the idea of face ranks. The representation of the face rank system engages with notions of celebrity and the role of the media in current society. All citizens “over the age of littlie” have a channel or ‘feed’ on the city’s online interface (Extras 33). ‘Face rank’ refers to popularity on the feed interface, with fame levels calculated using complex algorithms based on, for example, the number of times someone’s name is mentioned on the feeds.

As I argued above, in Uglies the Prettytime is built on the notion that conformity brings peace. Tally initially accept this central tenet, and the ‘wrongness’ of her perspective is expressed through conflicts with consensus reality and with other characters’ viewpoints which are positioned as more ‘correct’. She ultimately changes her perspective and the Prettytime is destroyed. In Extras, Aya’s society is built on two fundamental ideas: that the ongoing pursuit of novelty (and resulting fame) is worthwhile and that the human desire to consume and expand is unavoidable. In the progression of the narrative, it appears as though a number of different relationships will lead Aya to reject or at least doubt the values that underpin the city, just as Tally ultimately rejected the Prettytime ideal. Aya’s faith in the value of fame is seemingly

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Chapter Five challenged by her friendship with members of a rebellious clique called the Sly Girls and a potential romantic relationship with a teenager named Frizz; and the idea that the consumption of natural resources is necessary seems to be challenged by encounters with Tally and a group of genetically modified humans called Extras or extraterrestrials. However, at the close of the narrative, Aya still believes in fame and the necessity of progress at the expense of the environment, and continues to participate in her city’s perpetual adolescent-like pursuit of constant reinvention and novelty. The possibility in the progression of the narrative that the implied reader is being positioned to interpret Aya’s perspective as ‘wrong’ is closed off.

Fame, the Sly Girls and Frizz

In the Uglies trilogy, Tally initially desired prettiness, the version of acceptable selfhood her society offered her. In Extras, Aya craves fame. Aya has faith in the fame system because of the way it ameliorates post-Prettytime uncertainty: “a million scattered threads of story to help make sense of the mind-rain” (Extras 33). It gives momentum to the pursuit of novelty, with people striving to be noticed, and provides people with common ground:

People’s faces were so different since the mind-rain, the new

fads and cliques and inventions so unpredictable. It made the city

sense-missing sometimes. Famous people were the cure for that

randomness[.] (Extras 39)

Hiro, for example, was able to reinvent himself as a ‘kicker’, a kind of cool hunter who

‘kicks’ – uploads onto the feed – stories about the ways people exercise their newfound freedom. He tells Aya that “being a kicker is about making sense of the world” (Extras

235). Even criticising the cure and the sometimes “unsettling and downright weird”

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(Extras 40) lifestyle permutations that have arisen in its wake is just another way to be famous: one of the most famous people in the city is a notorious “mind-rain slammer”

(Extras 197).

Tally thought that being pretty would make her ‘real’; Aya believes being famous will make her ‘real’. For example, she thinks of those with very low face ranks as “[n]on-people, practically” (Extras 57). In a city with a population of about one million, Aya’s rank is “451, 396” (Extras 4). She believes this face rank makes her an

‘extra’, a nobody, and is thus preoccupied with the pursuit of a higher face rank.

Expressing herself through the feed is fundamental to her day-to-day life. For example, she is so used to have a flying webcam called Moggle follow her everywhere that she feels as though her actions lack meaning without him:

It was eerie knowing none of this was being recorded. Like a dream,

whatever happened would all be gone tomorrow morning. Aya felt

cut off from the world, unreal. (Extras 52)

She feels incomplete when he is not recording her every move: “Losing Moggle was always unnerving, like looking down on a sunny day to find her shadow gone” (Extras

18). When her feed is not online, she feels like nobody: “blanking her own feed was like erasing part of herself” (Extras 164).

Aya’s desire to improve her face rank and win fame by ‘kicking’ stories is the driving force of the narrative. In trying to find an exciting story, she stumbles across an underground risk-taking clique called the Sly Girls who strive for anonymity and engage in reckless behaviour like riding on top of magnetic trains on their hoverboards.

In contrast to Aya, the Sly girls rebel by trying not to be famous and express contempt for the fame system. For example, one Sly Girl dismisses Moggle, the hovercam that is so dear to Aya: “It’s a toy. Like face ranks and merits, it doesn’t mean anything if you

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Chapter Five don’t let it” (Extras 28). Aya ‘pretends’ to be swayed by their arguments so that she can secretly film them and ‘kick’ the story. As the narrative progresses, it seems as though

Aya may by truly beginning to doubt fame. However, she never truly aligns with the

Sly Girls. For example, although she describes train surfing with the Sly Girls as a

“brain-shifting” experience (Extras 69), her feelings for Moggle and her desire for fame remain intact: “the world felt better with a hover-cam flying beside her” (Extras 86). At one stage she must convince them that she has given up on fame, and gives an impassioned speech: “Fame is radically stupid, that’s all. So I want to try something else” (Extras 103). However, when they accept her as a Sly Girl she immediately wonders “if Moggle had gotten the shot” (Extras 103). Because Aya wants to ‘kick’ a story about the Sly Girls and thus bring them the fame they have repudiated, there is a narrative expectation that Aya will have to change her attitude to fame or face consequences.

A similar expectation is set up in relation to Aya’s love interest, Frizz. Frizz does not share Aya’s enthusiasm for the fame system, even though he is famous himself for founding a clique called Radical Honesty: that is, people who have their brains altered so they cannot lie. She meets Frizz when she crashes a party in pursuit of the

Sly Girls. She is thrilled that someone famous notices her: “A reputation shiver when through her, the realization that she was talking to someone important, connected, meaningful” (Extras 15). Again, there is the sense that being famous means being more

‘real’. As she gets to know Frizz, Aya is even more determined to kick a story about the

Sly Girls so that she can be ‘good enough’ for him: “Once this story kicked, face rank wouldn’t be an issue between her and Frizz anymore” (Extras 99). However, Frizz does not value fame the same way. For example, when Aya equates a low face rank with being invisible, he tells her: “you’re not invisible to me” (Extras 96). Aya’s fervent

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Chapter Five belief that Frizz will only like her if she is famous is contradicted by Frizz’s behaviour.

It seems that the reader is being positioned to question Aya’s perspective and thus the idea of fame. Aya’s choice of story troubles Frizz: when he finds out she is planning to make the Sly Girls famous against their wishes, he suggests they back off from one another (Extras 149). The mismatch in their respective attitudes toward fame and his disapproval of her dealings with the Sly Girls creates a narrative expectation that Aya will have to change.

Freedom, Tally and the Extras

The reputation economy alleviated anxiety about the lack of norms after the breakdown of the pretty system. It also served to moderate the allocation of resources: “You could use all the resources you wanted, as long as you captured the city’s collective imagination” (Extras 33). Even with this system in place, the city is chewing through natural resources:

[T]he city was expanding wildly, plundering nearby Rusty ruins for

metal. There were even rumors that the city planned to tear open the

ground to look for fresh iron, like the earth-damaging Rusties had

three centuries ago. (Extras 19)

The negative connotations of “wildly”, “plundering”, “tear” and the comparison to the

“earth-damaging Rusties” in such descriptions stand in contrast to Aya’s belief in the necessity of progress. For example, Aya admires “tech-heads” or inventors because they are “building the future, making up for three centuries of missing progress”

(Extras 12). This perspective appears to be challenged by her interactions with Tally and with inhuman figures called Extras.

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During her train-surfing adventures with the Sly Girls, Aya stumbles across an apparent plot to destroy the world. Mysterious floating figures seem set to launch city- destroying bombs from a mountain hide-away. When Aya releases a story about this

“City Killer” conspiracy, she instantly becomes famous; but she also finds herself pursued by the mysterious figures. Tally arrives in the city with Shay and other ex-

Cutters in response to Aya’s story – she travels the world trying to control such dangerous plans – and recruits Aya (along with Frizz, Hiro and Hiro’s friend Ren) to follow her into the wild to find and stop the inhumans. With the narrative focalised through Aya, Tally’s perspective is estranged. To Aya, Tally is a figure of legend: her story is told in schools, and there are even Youngblood Cults. Now twenty years old and with her physical Cutter modifications still intact, Tally is a frightening spectacle to

Aya:

[I]n Aya’s school lessons Tally-sama had never looked scary. But in

person her fingernails were long and sharp, her eyes deep black and

penetrating. [...] She lived in the wild now, guarding the expanding

cities. (Extras 258)

As they travel through the wild in search of the “City Killers”, Tally is presented as quick to judge what people have chosen to do with their freedom. Aya is in awe of

Tally: “This was the person who had made her world. Feeds, tech-heads, fame— everything important to her had come out of the mind-rain” (Extras 258). Tally, however, is contemptuous of the reputation economy, just as she was contemptuous of people in Diego for “turning their little fingers into snakes” (Specials 320):

“You mean you all have your own feed channels, too?” Tally

laughed. “This city’s insane!” (Extras 265)

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Though he earlier expressed doubts about fame, Frizz aligns with Aya to defend the city: “Radical is what the mind-rain is all about, Tally-wa[.] [...] [W]e lost so much in the Prettytime—all the foundations were gone. So we’re stuck making it up as we go along” (Extras 338). Tally claims that of all the cities she’s visited “this one went particularly brain-missing” after the mind-rain (Extras 410). Aya’s brother Hiro is also defensive: “The reputation economy isn’t brain-missing! [...] Wanting to be famous motivates people, which makes the world more interesting” (Extras 410). An interesting world, it seems, is paramount. Like the Sly Girls, Tally tries to make Aya less focused on fame. For example, she forces her to leave Moggle behind when Aya becomes separated from it, telling her: “you’ll still be real, even with no hovercam watching” (Extras 324). However, Aya never accepts Tally’s perspective or grows accustomed to being without Moggle: “Moggle’s absence nagged her like a constant toothache” (Extras 334). When Moggle catches up with her, Aya is delighted: “She finally had a hovercam again” (Extras 361).

Aya and her companions eventually become separated from Tally, and find the mysterious figures in her absence. It transpires that they are actually surgically-altered humans planning to launch spaceships, not bombs. They want to live in space so as to have less impact on the environment. These humans who have essentially turned themselves into aliens are positioned as a positive outcome of the freedom to be

‘radical’ that Aya’s city affords individuals, prefigured by the ongoing depiction of people’s experimentation with new technologies and physical appearance throughout the book. The Extras are particularly radical, with long spindly fingers and feet replaced by hand-like appendages. They are hairless, pale and large-eyed, and float around using anti-gravity devices (Extras 73, 236). Throughout the narrative they are sinister figures,

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Chapter Five with Aya referring to them as “inhumans” and “freaks”. However, when Udzir, one of the inhumans, is given a chance to explain, he asserts:

“We aren’t ‘freaks’, Aya Fuse. Every change we’ve made adapts us

better to our future home. [...] Permanent orbital habitats,” Udzir said.

“Close enough to Earth to lift more supplies with mass drivers, near

enough the sun for plenty of solar power. And miniature ecosystems

to recycle our water and oxygen.” (Extras 390-1)

Rather than being out to destroy the world, they want to save it from human nature: however, to do this, they must change themselves to the point that they are not recognisably human anymore. The pretties had to have their brains altered, become subhuman, in order to curb their taste for consumption. The Extras have to become aliens.

Tally’s perspective is further displaced when she finds it difficult to believe the creepy figures have a positive agenda. Aya is the one who discovers their true purpose and must convince Tally of their good intentions. Tally is presented as too quick to think the worst of humanity: “Aya watched suspicion settle on Tally’s cruel pretty features” (Extras 403). Aya is thus demonstrably right in her belief that “human beings really were sane” (Extras 332) and should be allowed to consume resources in pursuit of progress, where Tally is presented as overly negative in her interpretations of

‘radical’ change and too extreme in her willingness to believe “that humanity was always trying to destroy the world” (Extras 403). David even thanks Aya for “helping

Tally rewire herself a little more” and become more inclined to see humanity’s potential for good (Extras 405).

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Closure

At the end of Specials, Tally withdrew from the stylistically diverse, rapacious cities that rose in the wake of the cure. At the end of Extras, she is poised to retreat again. In contrast, Aya enjoys the best her city has to offer at an exclusive party held for the top one thousand face ranks, having won the fame she coveted (‘kicking’ the real story about the Extras), the Sly Girls’ continued friendship, Fizz’s love and Tally’s respect:

[I]t was useless to pretend not to enjoy her single-digit face rank.

After all, here she was with her famous friends, all headed to Nana

Love’s party, a smile on her face and Moggle in tow to capture every

second. (Extras 409)

Her apartment has expanded in proportion to her fame. She accepts that she deserves this resource allocation: “there were some advantages to being the third-most-famous person in the city” (Extras 408). Though the Extras’ goal is presented as admirable, and

Aya helps them spread their message with her story, she cannot identify with them:

The Extras still gave her the creeps, even after Udzir had explained

their surge in detail. The Extras’ pale skin was to help produce

vitamin D from the barest sliver of sunlight. Even the wide-set eyes

made sense—the first orbital habitats would be so cramped that

normal depth perception wasn’t necessary. [...] Still, the overall effect

was unsettling. (Extras 411-2)

There is nothing in the text to suggest that this ending is ironic, that Aya’s fate is to be interpreted as anything other than triumphant. Her desire to capture her life on camera remains, her society is intact, the value of change is unquestioned and the responsibility for finding solutions to consumerism has been deferred to “subhumans” and “freaks”.

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Conclusion

The Uglies trilogy documents the collapse of the juvenilising ‘ideal’ consumers are seemingly chasing through purchases, conveying the idea that the satisfaction sought is illusory but suggesting that the pursuit is what makes us human. A different permutation of perpetual adolescence, the pursuit of a ‘real’ you expressed through appearance, is offered as an alternative to conformity. Any character who removes themselves from the chase is estranged: the pretties, the subhumans and Tally (insofar as her ambivalent perspective regarding the “mind-rain” is displaced in the fourth book). In Bogus to Bubbly, Westerfeld speculates that one day some grand idea might emerge that solves “the problem of overextended resources once and for all” or “maybe we’ll simply learn to ask every time we want something: Is this shiny new toy worth carving up another fraction of the earth?” (57). A solution to the harmful aspects of consumerism is thus someone else’s problem, or is the reader’s problem only in terms of consumer choices.

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Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

So Yesterday: Chasing Cool

‘[C]ool’ is just the dominant term for a cultural stance that is

variously denoted as edgy, alternative and hip. And while cool is

frequently associated with ‘merely cultural’ figures and objects

(actors, writers, musicians; shoes, clothes, electronics), the partisans

of cool have always interpreted their own actions as intensely

political. To be cool or hip, in their view, is to engage in a set of

practices and to adopt a set of attitudes that are designed to liberate

the individual from the shackles of mass society.

Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell: How the

Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, ([2005] 2006), 196-7.

Scott Westerfeld’s So Yesterday (2004) associates youthful cool with the ability to stave off maturity. The novel presents a protagonist who, to some extent, grows in a fairly traditional sense. However, the depiction of this growth is intertwined with a reification of the notion of ‘cool’ and a valorisation of ‘rebellious’ consumption. Of the texts considered in this thesis, So Yesterday is the most hopeful regarding the individual’s capacity to both grow up and spend up. Like Westerfeld’s Uglies series, this novel eschews conformity, champions the pursuit of the ‘real you’ through style and presents a ‘rewirable’ brain as desirable.

Set in New York, So Yesterday is written in the first person from the point of view of seventeen-year-old Hunter. Hunter is a ‘cool hunter’ whose job involves

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Chapter Six spotting and disseminating trends, acting as a source of viral marketing, participating in focus groups and other such activities that rely on his ability to identify what is ‘cool’.

Hunter meets seventeen-year-old Jen when he asks to take a photo of her unusually- laced shoes and invites her to tag along to a focus group that his boss Mandy, who works for Nike, has asked him to attend. Jen makes a strong impression and Mandy asks Hunter to bring her along to a mysterious meeting the next day. However, Mandy never shows up. They find her mobile phone and a stack of beautiful sneakers of uncertain origin – they feature a Nike swoosh in a bar sinister – in an abandoned building before being chased off by an intimidating stranger. Thereafter the book becomes a thriller mystery of sorts, as the pair attempt to find out what has happened to

Mandy and discover who made the shoes. They end up tracking the activities of an anti- corporate group called the Jammers; the shoes are apparently just one of many strategies meant to disrupt established systems of advertising, consumption and identity.

The narrative is bookended by a proleptic prologue and an analeptic epilogue, both written from Hunter’s perspective after the events of the story. Hunter’s prologue suggests that three things will be important in his narrative. First, the story is about cool hunters. Hunter obliquely describes his role as a cool hunter, secretly manipulating the dissemination of trends: “[Y]ou need us. Someone has to guide you, to mold you, to make sure that today turns into yesterday on schedule” (1). One of the purposes of the novel, then, is apparently to let the implied reader in on the mysterious workings of consumer-media culture:

So, if we’re supposed to be a secret, why am I writing this?

Well, that’s a long story. That’s this story, the one you’re

holding in your hands. (1-2; original emphasis)

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Secondly, the story is about “how I met Jen”. Thirdly, it is “about the Jammers” and whether or not he agrees with their agenda (2). This immediately sets up the two primary aspects of the progression of the narrative: Hunter’s romantic pursuit of Jen, and his need to negotiate the seemingly opposing values represented by consumer- media ‘insiders’ like cool hunters and ‘outsiders’ like the Jammers. It also positions the implied reader as one of the manipulated masses: the reader is expressly told that they are not like Hunter, or Jen, or the Jammers. The prologue thus implies that the narrative has two main purposes: to describe Hunter’s journey or growth, and to educate manipulated consumers about consumer-media culture, to act as an authoritative source of information. In my analysis of the authority arc, I examine the representation of

‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ positions in relation to consumer-media culture, as well as the way such oppositions are problematised. In analysing the romantic arc, I argue that the emerging romantic relationship between Jen and Hunter is inextricably bound with consumer-media culture and the notion of ‘cool’. I will then analyse the novel’s closure, arguing that the tension between adolescence growth and the possibility of eternal youthful cool is not reconciled.

Cool is Real: The Authority Arc

Hunter is ostensibly caught between two figures of cultural authority in the narrative.

The company Nike represents the consumer-media appropriation of ‘cool’. As a cool hunter, Hunter participates in this process. The Jammers represent an apparent challenge to such manipulations. The progression of the authority arc thus rests on the question: which side will Hunter choose? However, these authority figures are ultimately secondary to consumer-media culture as an institution so fundamental to society’s construction that the concept of acceding to it or challenging it is a far more

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Chapter Six complex issue than making a simple choice. First, I look at the consumer-media culture’s more subtle, implicit authoritative presence in the text that makes the idea of acquiescing or resisting problematic. Then I examine the overt representation of Nike, cool-hunting and the Jammers, arguing that they are not as different as they first seem: whichever Hunter ‘chooses’ is less important than how he reconciles himself to his position in consumer society. Throughout the narrative, Hunter is ambivalent about

Nike, his job as a cool hunter more generally, and the Jammers. This ambivalence articulates a tension between the construction of adolescence as the pursuit of an authentic self, and the inescapable role of consumer-media culture, fraught with inauthenticities, in mediating this pursuit.

Implicit Authority

In engaging the implied reader by suggesting a sense of shared experience, Hunter’s narrative conveys the habitual, familiar nature of consumer-media discourses.

His attitude toward television is one example. For instance, Hunter is initially cynical about the existence of the seizure-inducing Japanese animated program: “It was hard to comprehend that TV could hurt you – it was like finding out your old babysitter was a serial killer” (155). Television is represented here as integral, familiar and typically a source of comfort. This familiarity is further conveyed by the fact that, while Hunter deliberately censors brand names and film titles, television titles are allowed into the narrative as though they are somehow harmless or beneath notice (7, 16, 90). Hunter jokes about this habituation as he walks through the Museum of Natural History, the site of the Jammers’ party:

I entered a long hall that ran through the entire course of

human evolution – from slothlike primates in trees to a slothlike

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Homo remote controllus watching television in his living room – all

in about thirty seconds. (133)

The hyperbolic idea that humans are in their ‘natural habitat’ at home watching television draws attention to the degree to which this activity has been absorbed into the fabric of culture. Hunter is immediately able to spot that an advertisement made by the

Jammers is a fake, and subsequently claims that:

You know how when you’re watching a movie, and someone’s

watching TV in the movie, and it’s showing some TV show that

doesn’t really exist, with some fake talk-show host they just invented

for the movie? And it always looks wrong? […] Two seconds after

switching on a television show, we know whether it’s from the late

1980s or last year and whether it’s a cop show or a sitcom or a made-

for-TV movie, major network or public broadcasting or the dog-

walking channel, all this from subtle cues of lighting, camera angles,

and the quality of the videotape. Instantly. (124-5; original emphasis)

Television viewing is represented here as a form of literacy, a building up of knowledge and viewing strategies: above all, a familiar medium. The use of second person scaffolds this presentation of familiarity. This is a skill we all share, the narrator tells the reader. This is an overt recognition of a familiarity that Feed implicitly relies on: in recognising the various feed snippets as roughly aligned with advertising, television or film discourses, the reader is exercising this kind of literacy.

A similar kind of habituation can be seen in the various references to mobile phones in the text. For example, Hunter uses the camera on his phone as a flashlight

(40). He is unable to remember anyone’s phone number when he loses his phone: “I don’t actually keep anyone’s number in my head” (67). There are several references to

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Chapter Six the way Hunter is habituated to the physical feel of his phone, the buttons described as

“familiar” (41, 138). Mobile phones are also presented as somehow representative of the owner’s identity. Hunter’s characterisation of his relationship with his mobile phone is comparable to the way Titus and Aya feel about their feeds in Feed and Extras respectively. When Hunter loses his mobile phone, he feels like he has lost a little avatar of himself:

Piece by piece, my identity would be sucked out of the phone. Those

Finns had done such a terribly good design job, making it the center

of my life, filled with my friends’ names and numbers, my favourite

MP3s, pictures of my sock drawer. (83)

The assumption here is that those pieces of information reflect Hunter’s identity.

Making use of Mandy’s phone in his search for her, Hunter again alludes to the idea that a mobile phone is more than just a communication device. Watching Jen go through the phone’s menu feels invasive: “The little beeps gave me a creepy feeling, like going through someone’s pockets” (51). Later, Hunter goes through the phone himself when trying to find more leads in Mandy’s disappearance: “Having just had my cell phone ripped from my life, I knew how much information was trapped inside in the tiny plastic wafer of circuitry” (70).

So Yesterday also conveys the way consumer-media culture influences ideas about ‘really living’. For example, after Jen and Hunter realise that a disaffected cool hunter is most likely involved with the Jammers, Jen cannot resist using a movie cliché:

‘Somewhere in this city a cool hunter has gone haywire.’ She

took my hand. ‘And it’s up to us to stop them, or the world is

doomed.’

‘Eh?’

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‘Sorry, I just had to say that.’ She smiled broadly. (163)

This recalls Pete’s pleasure in Sophie’s use of the phrase “We’ve got one last shot” in

Deep Fried (186). Jen takes pleasure in enacting in ‘real life’ a scenario that frequently plays out on the big screen.

Apart from the climactic ending examined in Chapter Four, this dynamic recurs elsewhere in Deep Fried. Pete is contemptuous of people who absorb such fantasies and aspire to them. For example, when he breaks into the house of a PBs employee

(who later turns out to be Sophie’s father) he criticises the decorating:

The view inside is not surprising. The furniture is wooden and

chunky, the floor is tiled, the benches are stacked with clay pots. They

have watched television shows set in the south of France. All that is

missing is an actor in a beret, paid to sit and add authenticity. And

only because they haven’t thought of it. (93-4)

Pete disdains the owners’ taste because to him it is an expression of their lack of imagination and authenticity, their apparent desire for life to be like television. They have surrendered to borrowed taste. However, he also cannot deny the pleasure he takes in such fantasies or the influence they hold over his behaviour. For example, he must climb up a pipe to a second story window in order to break into the PBs employee’s house, and is forced to take a risk:

To fully grasp the ledge I will have to let go of the pipe altogether and

leap across the gap. The sort of thing that looks easy on television.

Fuck it, why would television lie to us? I count to three and

swing across, feel my heart jelly into my mouth for the split second

when my fate is uncertain. Then I am safe; my hands stretched high

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above me, clinging to the ledge. (94)

The risk is made seductive by the exciting version of reality presented by television.

His action implies that, like the people he elsewhere criticises, he finds a television-like world very attractive. The humorous tone of the passage and the fact that Pete’s risk pays off just as it would in a television program make his relationship with the medium seem one of affectionate exasperation rather than antipathy.

Nike

Hunter refers to his main employer as ‘the client’ throughout the narrative. Implicitly, though, the company is Nike: “a certain athletic shoe company named after a certain

Greek god” (8). A further clue is a reference to the brand’s logo: “Mandy was in serious client-wear, red and white and swooshed all over” (13). Nike is presented by critics of consumer culture as an exemplar of the juvenilising, corruptive forces of consumerism.

The Nike swoosh logo – “one of the world’s best-known symbols, up there with the white flag of surrender and the golden arches” (45), as Hunter says – exemplifies the use of symbolic value in selling products as identity markers. Nike sells shoes and other products, but more importantly it sells the swoosh as a symbol of coolness, victory, and athletic prowess (Goldman & Papson 1995:11; LaFeber 1999; Klein 2001:55). Nike sells fantasy, including the fantasy of perpetual, youthful cool. This semiotic gloss, however, hides a darker side of child labour, ruthless business practices and other such negative corporate characteristics.

Hunter’s narrative hints at the negative characteristics beneath Nike’s public image. Hunter does not begin the narrative as a cheerleader for the company and slowly learn that they are not all they seem. He conveys the idea that he has always been aware of their negative side even when working for them. For example, when Hunter first

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Chapter Six mentions the company, he states that Mandy always calls them ‘the client’ (presumably this is where he picked up his habit of doing the same): “Maybe she didn’t like using four-letter words” (8). Hunter’s play on “four-letter word”, a phrase often used to describe profanities, gives his comment a cynical tone. He is also unsurprised by Jen’s reaction to their name when he invites her to the cool tasting:

I told her the name of the client, which did not get the Nod.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But you get a free pair and fifty bucks.’ (9;

original emphasis)

“The Nod” is a term Hunter uses throughout the book to describe “the slight incline of the head” that indicates the person thinks something is cool (4). Hunter is not surprised that the name Nike evokes a negative reaction and his response suggests that he wants

Jen to realise he is aware of the company’s shortcomings as well. Toward the end of the novel, Hunter also makes a joke about Nike’s infamous child labour scandal: “I swallowed dryly, remembering the client’s record on child labor…” (235; original ellipses). Hunter thus presents himself as a willing, but still self-aware, employee of

Nike. Hunter’s growth, then, does not involve learning ‘the truth’ about big business, but rather deciding how to position himself in relation to these negative aspects.

Cool-Hunting

‘Cool’ and ‘youth’ are closely intertwined: at one stage Hunter states that a colleague in his late twenties is “pretty old for a cool hunter” (177). Apart from his attitude toward working for Nike specifically, Hunter’s narration reveals an increasing ambivalence about his job as a cool hunter more generally. At the time the events of the story take place Hunter has been working as a cool hunter for about three years (97). His discomfort with some aspects of his job is evident from the outset. The phone he uses to

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“The list of features was on my tongue, but this was the part of the job I didn’t like.

[…] I shrugged, trying not to sound like a salesman” (5). From the beginning, then, it is clear that Hunter appreciates his privileged position as a cool hunter but wishes to be above some aspects of it. Later in the book, Hunter cannot resist praising the product:

My phone rang. (Down in the subway! At the risk of product

placement, those guys in Finland do make good phones.) (23)

Despite his knowingness, Hunter evidently finds it difficult not to be seduced by the cool gadgets his job affords him.

This sense that Hunter’s pleasure in his insider status is offset by a desire to be somehow above it is also evident when Hunter brings Jen to the cool-tasting. The group is asked to judge Nike’s latest advertisement, which depicts a trio of beautiful people travelling through an urban landscape in various sporty ways before meeting in a trendy bar. Jen instigates an exchange that mocks the ads mobilisation of symbolic value:

‘Oh, I get it. Run,’ Jen whispered.

I chuckled. There are only about twelve words in the client’s

language, but at least everyone is fluent.

[…]

‘Moving is fun,’ I whispered.

‘Fun is good,’ Jen agreed. (14; original emphasis)

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Jen and Hunter make fun of the image that Nike is trying to convey, cynically zeroing in on the values that Nike is attempting to associate with their brand. Although he has willingly been paid to watch such ads for three years, Hunter gets a kick out of making fun of the “standard client fantasy world” (14) with Jen; in other words, making fun of idealisation. However, he also seems to get a kick out of his special insider status.

When Mandy mentions the name of the ad, “Don’t Walk”, Hunter narrates:

It’s funny that ads have titles, like little movies. But only the

people who shoot them – and people like me – ever find out what

those titles are. (15)

“People like me” apparently being insiders with a privileged knowledge of the way consumer-media culture works, unlike the consumers to whom he is narrating.

Hunter frequently displays this sense of superiority throughout the text. For example, at the launch party for Hoi Aristoi (before he realises it’s a fake magazine)

Hunter ponders its audience:

[F]or every true aristocratic reader would come a hundred wannabes,

pitiful creatures willing to buy a handbag or wristwatch advertised,

hoping the rest of the lifestyle would somehow follow. (117)

This conveys a condescending attitude, implying that the lowly consumer is easily deluded by the consumer fantasies Hunter reads through so easily.

However, Hunter tends to oscillate between contempt for those who pursue cool and his own overwhelming desire for cool. This can be seen, for example, in his attitude toward a cool neighbourhood. During their hunt for the Jammers, Hunter and

Jen take the train to an area of New York called Dumbo, or “Down Under Manhattan

Bridge Overpass”, a playful take on New York neighbourhood nicknames. Hunter calls

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The train was pretty quiet, just the usual coolsters carrying guitar

cases and laptops, decorated with tattoos and metal and all coming

home from their jobs as designers/writers/artists/fashion designers. I

even recognised one of them from our coffee shop, probably one of

those guys writing a first novel set in a coffee shop. (219)

This description implies that the hipsters’ attempts at cool individuality are in fact just a different version of conformity. For example, his use of slashes in describing the typical hipster professions makes it clear that Hunter is making fun of them. However, despite this mockery, Hunter also says: “I earnestly hoped that this neighbourhood would still be cool when I moved out from my parent’s place, but I doubted it” (219). Hunter is aware of the risible nature of pursuing cool but still desires it, still does not doubt that it is worthwhile.

At times, Hunter’s ambivalence about being a cool hunter comes out in the narrative more explicitly, as he wonders what his position makes him:

Once you get paid for being trendy, who knows what you are?

A cool hunter? Market researcher? Scam artist?

A big joke? (21)

His ambivalence is also articulated through aspects of his narrative style. For example, his descriptions of situations often present advertisements as part of the background.

When describing a conversation with Jen in which he surprises her with his insights into her character, Hunter includes an incidental description of advertising:

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Jen stopped right in front of the NBA store, openmouthed,

framed by the merciless windowscape of team logos. I squinted in the

glare. (21-22)

The use of the personifying word ‘merciless’ conveys the inescapable nature of advertising, while Hunter’s reaction – “I squinted in the glare” – suggests that it constitutes a kind of damaging visual radiation. In another example, Hunter calls Nike to try and gather more information about Nike’s possible involvement in making the beautiful shoe:

I waited for a moment on hold, listening to custom rap-Muzak

exalting the latest big sports name who’d signed on the client’s dotted

line. It sucked me in just far enough that my brain got a jolt when the

exec came on. (70)

The pejorative term “Muzak”, the hyperbolic word “exalting” and the cynical connotations of the phrase “sign on the dotted line” combine to suggest Hunter’s negative opinion of the hold music to which he is subjected. However, there is a sense of ambivalence: although the phrase “sucked me in” implies he does so against his better judgement, Hunter does actually succumb to the music.

Hunter also makes a self-conscious attempt to keep brand names and specific commercial media references out of his story. Hunter claims at the outset: “you will read no product placement in these pages, if I can possibly help it” (5). This becomes a running joke, a kind of game throughout the text, with Hunter making coy reference after coy reference to various brands, film franchises and so on as he attempts to occlude commercialism as much as possible. For example, he refers to the iPod/Apple as “an MP3 player […] made by a certain computer company whose name is a fruit often used in making pies” (11). Abba is a “1970s Swedish mega-group whose name is

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(34). He refers to Fox as a “certain megacorporation know for its relentless grip on all media, including scores of newspapers and a certain faux-news channel” (188).

This name game does not avoid product placement all together. For instance, the reader’s knowledge of brands is rewarded with comprehension. Recognising the brands

Hunter refers to brings the pleasure of deciphering his code, of being part of the joke instead of outside it. However, his linguistic game prevents brand names from going unnoticed in the text. Referring to brand names in this oblique fashion acknowledges the prominence of brands in culture – since there are so many of them and since it was seemingly impossible to simply leave them out all together – while playing with their meaning. In one instance the brand name game fails:

She named a certain Web search tool whose name means a very large

number. (Oh, forget it. I’m not going to get very far telling this story

if I can’t say ‘Google’.) (17)

The Google brand is so powerful that he is unable to continue censoring it. To simply say ‘search engine’ would seemingly be too great a sacrifice of verisimilitude. In some cases the oblique references have a critical flavour. The reference to Fox, for instance, is scathing, with the use of the phrase “relentless grip” and the term “faux-news” helping to lend pejorative connotations to the term “megacorporation”. Largely, though, the particular brand’s participation in the ubiquitous branding system rather than the actual product the brand adorns is enough to provoke Hunter’s response. As a narrative device, the name game is a clever way of negotiating the role brands play in creating an

‘authentic’ contemporary teenage voice, with the added benefit of helping to make

Hunter’s narrative voice idiosyncratic.

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In comparison, other realist ‘anti-consumerism’ books are often less consistent in their treatment of brands. In Janet Tashjian’s The Gospel According to Larry (2001) for example, the seventeen-year-old protagonist Josh maintains an anti-consumerism blog in the persona of an iconoclast called Larry. One of his online ‘Sermons’ rails against the daily barrage of brands to which teenagers in particular are subjected:

Slip on your Gap jeans, your Nike T-shirt, your Reeboks – or maybe

even your Cons if you think that makes you cool and ironic in a Kurt

Cobain kind of way. Grab your Adidas backpack, ride to school on

your Razor, drink your Poland Spring, eat your PowerBar, write a

paper on your iMac, slip on your Ralph Lauren windbreaker. Buy the

latest CD from Tower, check the caller ID to see who’s on the phone,

eat your Doritos, drink your Coke. Stare at the TV till you’re

stupefied. (12)

The use of the second person imperative accuses the reader of complicity in the ubiquity of brands. However, while the book conveys an overtly critical message regarding the way teenagers are seemingly unable (and perhaps unwilling) to escape brand names, the book itself does not offer a refuge from them. It is full of brand name references, such as: Blockbuster (13, 71) Borders (25), Gameboy (56), Nike (66, 104,

181), Joe Camel (71), M&M’s (94), Gap (104), Virgin (104), Poland Spring (121)

Beanie Baby (150), Playstation (150), Tommy Hilfiger (161), Calvin Klein (161),

Coca-Cola (161), MTV (161), Mountain Dew (167), Volvo (193) and Toyota (210).

The text does not find a consistent way of negotiating the role such brands play in creating an ‘authentic’ contemporary teenage narrative voice. Some of the references appear in a critical or mocking context, like those in the above passage. In another example, in one of the multiple mentions of Nike, Josh describes a school sports team

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I took a new jar of peanut butter from the cupboard and cut up some

apples from the bowl on the table. […] I handed her the peanut butter

and a spoon. She dipped the spoon into the virgin jar.

“Like being the first person to walk on the snow,” she said.

I’ve always fought to be the first person to nail a new jar of

Jif, but it was worth giving that up to watch Beth lick the spoon clean.

(61-62)

The use of the word “always” conveys the idea that Josh is loyal to this particular brand. It sounds like the kind of scene that would make a successful peanut butter advertisement: two teenagers sharing a homely snack, with a frisson of sexual tension

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A similar tension is evident in Pete Hautman’s Rash ([2006] 2007) The novel offers a critique of corporations and brands with, for example, hyperbolic descriptions of corporate conglomeration:

McDonald’s used to only sell food, back when French fries were

legal. But in the 2020s, they merged with a suv company called

General Motors under the name the McMotor Corporation of

America. A few years later, McMotor was bought by a Chinese

company called Wal-Martong. In 2031, during the Pan-Pacific

conflict, Wal-Martong was nationalized and privatized by the USSA

government and renamed the McDonald’s Rehabilitation and

Manufacturing Corporation. (86-7)

However, the final, hopeful scene of the novel is tied to the symbolic value of Nike.

The first-person sixteen-year-old narrator, Bo, is a runner, but in this imagined future, individuals are forced to run in safety gear on soft running tracks. At the end of the novel, he uses his grandfather’s sixty-year-old Nike running shoes to run without safety accoutrements, giving a detailed description of putting them on for the first time:

The leather uppers were dry and cracked, but still bright yellow[.] [...]

The red and blue soles were still flexible. I took off my walking shoes

and pulled one of the Nikes onto my right foot. It fit pretty good. The

fastening was a set of thick nylon laces running back and forth across

the top of the foot. I pulled on the laces. The shoe snugged itself.

(247)

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This description goes on for several more sentences, along with a description of how in control and light he feels with them on. Bo tries running in the shoes while his grandfather watches on proudly, and they discuss plans for possibly leaving the safety- obsessed North America. The brand Nike – which works so hard to associate itself with freedom, power, athletic prowess – is thus sincerely represented as an integral part of the novel’s positive ending, in tension with the satirical representation of brands earlier in the novel.

The Jammers

In So Yesterday, the fictional Jammers group is aligned with real social movements that engage in ‘culture jamming’. This broad term, coined by a San Francisco band called

Negativland (Lasn 1999:217; Meikle 2002:131; Boyle 2003:28) refers to the disparate activities of a wide variety of social movements that are opposed to globalisation:

It is not globalisation in the obvious sense—the greater

interconnectedness of the world economy—that is being contested,

but the way in which this interconnectedness currently operates.

(Burgmann 2003:244)

While differing in their specific ideals, activities and degrees of radicalism, in general such movements oppose corporate greed and its damaging effect on individuals and the environment, the domination of consumerism, the appropriation of ‘authentic’ emotions and interests for marketing purposes and the use of advances in technology in ways that are detrimental, rather than helpful, to humanity. They aim to make corporations accountable for their actions, reintroduce empathy and compassion into the way humans deal with each other and, above all, ‘mess with the system’. Messing with the system can range greatly in intensity, from buying fair trade coffee, to defacing a sexist

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Other common tactics include spoof advertisements, online activism and hacking, consumer boycotts, conventional street protests and corporate sabotage. A famous early example of this last activity was an incident in 1989 when a group called ®™ark funded the Barbie Liberation Organisation, who switched the electronic voice boxes in talking Barbie and GI Joe dolls (Meikle 2002:110).

If Hunter is ambivalent regarding the consumer-media culture ‘system’ and his role in it, do the Jammers represent an alternative, a challenge to that system? In the prologue, Hunter first mentions the Jammers in ambivalent terms, a potential enemy or potential ally:

They’re the bad guys, the ones trying to bring the system down. They

want to make people like me redundant, unnecessary, ridiculous.

They want to set you free.

The funny thing is, I think I’m on their side. (2; original

emphasis)

In the narrative proper Hunter and Jen originally refer to the Jammers simply as “the anti-client”, again making the ostensible value opposition between the Jammers and

Nike and its ilk explicit. The group’s tactics and aims are revealed gradually through the pairs’ investigation. Although there are clues as to their agenda throughout the narrative – the beautiful bootleg shoe (43), a chaotic fake launch party (114), a fake magazine created out of footage of that party (198) – the explicit nature of the group is only revealed in full at the end of the book when Hunter and Jen finally track them down. In part this is to maintain suspense and drive the mystery plot, but it also allows

Hunter to display his knowledge of the consumer-media “territory” (244) in investigating their agenda.

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The cool shoes are their first clue that the Jammers exist. Hunter and Jen concoct elaborate theories about the shoes origin: whether it is bootleg, or an ironic bootleg, or a radical new marketing concept (45-6). The shoes confuse the system in that they interfere with the symbolic value of branding, where a logo represents a company’s ‘identity’ and the set of values or emotions a consumer buys along with the specific product it adorns. Brand loyalty is about trust: a certain product is bought again and again because the logo tells the consumer it will be worth buying. The shoes distort the Nike logo, confuse such patterns of recognition. Once Hunter and Jen realise the shoes are definitely not made by Nike after they call an executive and realise he is genuinely panicking over the shoes (72), the question becomes: who would want to provoke such confusion?

Returning to the scene of Mandy’s disappearance to look for more clues, Hunter and Jen discover an envelope left by the anti-client and addressed to Hunter (83). It contains two tickets to a launch party for a new magazine called Hoi Aristoi. The party proves to be a site of “[v]ery carefully organized chaos” (146), with phony sponsors providing fake sample products, many of which are booby trapped. For example, a free sample of a shampoo called Poo-Sham is spiked with an extremely strong purple dye, leaving Hunter with purple hands (125). A fake ad for the product ends with strange flashing effects that leave watchers dazed and confused; a small free digital camera has the same effect each time it takes a photo. Salty food and drinks dosed heavily with alcohol enhance the descent into disorder. Hoi Aristoi later proves to be a vehicle for embarrassing the rich attendees of the party. The anti-client collects the unflattering photos of the befuddled, drunken crowd from the free digital cameras to fill the second issue of the magazine (198). Hunter contemplates the anti-client’s reasons for cultivating this confusion:

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Poo-Sham was a pseudo-product. Like the bootleg shoes, it was

designed to confuse the order of things, to disrupt the sacred bond

between brand and buyer. (135)

Jen concurs with Hunter’s insights, suggesting that the anti-client wants them to question everything: “‘Is this party real? This product? This social group? Is cool even real?’”(182). Hunter even compares them to French Revolutionaries who are trying to bring down society (191).

The idea that messing with the semiotics of advertising is a resistant act is also evident in The Gospel According to Larry and Deep Fried. In The Gospel According to

Larry, for example, Josh creates fake ads to post on his blog, which inspires others to do the same. For instance, he turns “the swoosh into a swastika” (71). Josh states that he enjoys emulating his advertising executive stepfather in a “subversive, anticonsumer way” and thereby “commenting on the world of advertising without being in it” (72). In

Deep Fried, Sophie creates a fake Prince of Burgers advertisement to plaster the local

PBs, revealing the ‘truth’ behind the brand image by morphing the Prince logo into a grotesque “worshipper”: obese, soiled, covetously clutching a burger (15). However, both of these texts also engage with the idea of resilience in that both depict an instance where the advertising industry attempts to cannibalise such attempts at resistance. In

The Gospel According to Larry, Josh receives a phonecall from Coke asking him to star in their next campaign:

“A heavily rotated commercial – lots of MTV play, lots of fast cuts,

girls in shirt skirts – you’re walking down this inner-city street,

philosophizing, that’s great – hip-hop music blasting in the back-

ground–trashing Coke while you’re drinking one! It’s perfect!” (161)

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Similarly, in Deep Fried, Mark and Lucinda want Pete to star in a commercial for PBs in which he ‘trashes’ the brand (154).

In So Yesterday, Hunter and Jen’s speculations are confirmed when they finally confront the anti-client, a mix of “renegade cool hunters” (219). Their unofficial leader states that the Jammers want to be mythical tricksters in the traditional cool pyramid:

‘[T]he first heroes were tricksters, coyotes, and hustlers. Their job

was to jam nature, mess up the wind and stars. They messed with the

gods, remixing the world with chaos […] So we’re taking a page out

of the old books, adding Jammers to the pyramid […] We market

confusion, jam the ads until the Consumers don’t know what’s real

and what’s a joke.’ (238)

This echoes the agenda of real-life culture jamming groups as described above. The

Jammers see themselves as heroes and revolutionaries; Nike and its ilk are the problem and the enemy. Does Hunter ultimately accept their stance as the proper alternative to his current position as a cool hunter?

Cool is Desirable: The Relationship Arc

The question that drives the progression of the romantic relationship arc of So

Yesterday is essentially: will Hunter win Jen? Hunter’s growing affection for Jen becomes increasingly obvious throughout the book, as his narration frequently focuses on minor details of her appearance or personality. For example, as they huddle together in a coffee shop to examine Mandy’s lost phone for clues, he describes being hyper- aware of Jen’s physical presence:

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That close, I could smell Jen’s hair stuff, a hint of vanilla cutting

through the musty couch and ground coffee. Her shoulder was warm

against mine. [...] Memo to self: It’s uncool to be overwhelmed by

casual contact. (53)

He later openly declares his crush: “yes, I was dazzled” (113). His feelings for Jen are paramount in his narration, seemingly of more concern to him than the strange events in which he is embroiled. He is self-aware about this fixation. For example, Jen occupies his thoughts as he makes his way to the potentially dangerous fake launch party in disguise, more worried about whether or not she is interested in him romantically than in what the Jammers might have in store for him. His apprehension is exacerbated by “a certain awareness that my anxiety was probably focused in the wrong direction” (113).

Later, despite what proves to be a chaotic and frightening party, Hunter’s primary thought is of the kiss he and Jen have shared (165). Toward the end of the novel, romance is still at the forefront of his mind when one of the Jammers casually refers to

Jen as his girlfriend while describing the group’s anti-corporate agenda:

And of course, all my brain had processed […] was that

someone who was not my parents had referred to Jen as my girlfriend.

Pathetic. (237)

This self-deprecating use of the word “pathetic” again conveys the idea that he is self- aware regarding his preoccupation with romance at the expense of other events or issues. Jen is thus a key influential figure in Hunter’s journey, and the forging of a romantic relationship with her is his primary goal throughout the text.

However, the progression of Hunter’s growth as it relates to his pursuit of Jen is expressed almost wholly through consumer-media culture. In particular, Hunter’s primary frame of reference for categorising himself and others is a marketing conceit

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Hunter imparts to the implied reader throughout the text in his role as ‘authority figure’ on the inner workings of marketing. Cultural critic Rob Walker calls the cool pyramid the “word-of-mouth industry’s favourite graph” (Walker 2008:173). The pyramid is a way for marketers to represent the process by which trends are discovered or invented and subsequently trickle down to the rest of the population. This hierarchy of consumption practices consists of, in descending order: Innovators, those who originate fashions; Trendsetters, those who are the first to pick up such fashions and inspire their widespread emulation; Early Adopters, the first to follow Trendsetters, picking up fashions from magazines and other media rather than straight from the Innovator;

Consumers, who only pick up trends once they’ve reached saturation point and lost their real ‘cool’.

The pyramid is a fictional variation of a common real-life marketing conceit: that is, characterising society in terms of the spread of trends. This view was popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make

A Big Difference (2002). While Gladwell’s book focuses on exploring the notion of

‘innovation diffusion’ rather than providing a practical delineation of its marketing potential, the question of how trends spread preoccupies the marketing industry. For example, in an analysis of young people’s consumer behaviour, Martin Lindstrom and

Patricia B. Seybold argue that youth fall into four categories: Edges, Persuaders,

Followers, Reflexives (Lindstrom & Seybold 2003:15).

Although such pyramids are a marketing conceit, Hunter, Jen, Mandy and the

Jammers all draw on the pyramid as a true and meaningful way of categorising humanity. While some characters may criticise the uses to which the cool pyramid is put by corporations, no one questions the ‘reality’ of the pyramid itself. Hunter’s

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Hunter identifies himself as a Trendsetter: “I can see who’s leading and who’s following, where the trend starts and how it spreads” (173). He reads cool, and takes pleasure in his ability to do so. For example, when feeling anxious at a party, he calms himself by “reading” the crowd (116). Jen, on the other hand, is an Innovator and is thus a source of cool. Jen’s status as an Innovator is a major aspect of Hunter’s fascination with her: she is charismatic, adventurous, unpredictable, special. The reader is expressly told that she is special from the beginning, as Hunter states in the prologue:

She isn’t one of us or one of you, either. She’s on top of the whole

pyramid, quietly making her contribution. Trust me, you need her.

We all do. (2)

Jen is immediately set apart as privileged figure, and the implied reader is expressly discouraged from identifying with her. Hunter frequently makes reference to Jen’s uniqueness, her special status. For example, the pairs’ investigation leads them to an infamous episode of a Japanese cartoon that caused an epidemic of seizures amongst child viewers in Japan due to its particularly frenetic use of paka-paka or flashing colours. Hunter’s tech-head friend Tina shows them the cartoon, and Jen, to her great embarrassment, has a seizure. Hunter theorises:

‘Remember what Tina said: the effect works best on people whose

brains aren’t fully developed yet.’

‘Gee, thanks,’

‘What I mean is, maybe that’s why you’re an Innovator.

Because you don’t see things the same way as everybody else. You’re

like a kid. You rewire your own brain all the time.’ (160)

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Like Tally in Uglies, Jen’s brain is apparently special. Jen’s cool status is here linked to having a youthful, flexible view of the world. When Hunter has an idea, on the other hand, he describes himself as having an “old-fashioned monochrome flash of ordinary

Hunter brain insight” (163). This is reiterated when the pair come across the work of a radical magazine designer – one of the Jammers – who specialises in fonts and layouts that challenge perceptions: “a typographical equivalent of a paka-paka attack” (187).

Hunter finds it painful. Jen, with her ‘unique’ brain, enjoys it, saying it hurts “in a good way” (187). This echoes the metaphors evoking pain used in Pretties to describe

Tally’s clarity when acting rebelliously.

Jen ‘sees’ things that Hunter and other cool hunters cannot see. For example, when Mandy asks for comments on “Don’t Walk”, Jen criticises the racial dynamics of

Nike’s idealised version of reality:

‘[T]he guy on the motorcycle was black. The guy on the bike was

white. The woman was white. [...] I call that the missing-black-

woman formation. It kind of happens a lot.’ (16)

Members of the focus group start naming comic books, movies and television shows that also feature this dynamic. Afterwards, Jen points out to Hunter that the cool tasting itself had been an example of the “MBWF”, and Hunter puts a moral spin on her actions:

‘I hadn’t even noticed. […] That makes it even better that you spoke

up. Maybe it’s not what Mandy wanted to hear, but it’s what she

needs to hear.’ (23)

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There is a sense here that the realm of cool-hunting requires moral instruction. This hints at Hunter’s ostensible rhetorical purpose as suggested by prologue: to bring such hidden aspects of consumer-media culture to consumers’ attention.

However, the reaction of the other members of the focus group reveals that such an ambition is not easily fulfilled. The other Trendsetters/cool hunters take a kind of shallow pleasure in mining their “stuffed-full pop-cultural memory banks” (17) for examples of the MBWF, but are quick to downplay and even mock the term when

Mandy becomes upset. They also have absurdly uniform reactions to Jen’s comment as

Hunter and Jen encounter them throughout the rest of the narrative. Techno geek Lexa

Legualt: “‘I liked what you said yesterday, Jen. Very cool’” (58). Japanese culture- obsessed Tina Catalina: “‘I liked what you said, Jen. Very cool’” (149). Rollerskater

Hiro Wakata: “‘Jen, right? I liked what you said at the meeting the other day. Very cool’” (178). Jen goes from smiling, to simply saying thanks, to suppressing an eye- roll: “For a group of trendsetters, our response to her was annoyingly predictable, I guess” (178). Drawing attention to questionable advertising practices does not necessarily change them or provoke useful actions from people.

Throughout the book, Hunter ends up following Jen’s lead, seemingly helpless to resist following the erratic paths her apparently superior ‘rewireable’ brain leads her to tread. This is evident in their second encounter. They break into an abandoned building after Mandy does not show up for their meeting, and they hear her mobile phone ringing inside. As Jen bluffs her way into a secure building next door to the abandoned structure, Hunter laments:

This was what I got for hanging out with an Innovator.

But as I have mentioned or implied, I’m a Trendsetter. Our

purpose in life is to be second in line, to follow. (36)

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Later in the novel during a similar break-in, Jen jumps a gap between two windows, and Hunter is unable to resist emulating her actions:

Now that Jen was safely over the air shaft, I realized I was itching to

get across myself. Funny how that happens: a minute ago I’d thought

the idea was completely nuts, but once I’d seen an Innovator do it, I

was dying to be next in line. (196)

However, Jen simply lets him in through the door, once again highlighting her special status: Hunter does not get a chance to commit such an exciting, innovative act. This pattern continues throughout the novel, with Jen constantly taking the lead in their adventure. This is true of their romantic relationship as well as their investigation into the Jammers. For instance, Jen is the one who instigates their first kiss, and it is described entirely in terms of her actions:

She kissed me.

Her hands squeezed my shoulders […] her lips firmly pressed

to mine. Her tongue slid across my teeth before she pulled away.

(160)

The relationship thus reflects their respective places in the pyramid. Jen is the instigator, the originator, the leader. Hunter is the follower.

Though they have different statuses in the cool pyramid, Hunter and Jen are equally obsessed with cool and the ways it informs their identities. The mysterious, beautiful shoes – “the coolest shoes we’d ever seen” (42) – that they find at the site of

Mandy’s disappearance are essentially a McGuffin. The shoes represent pure cool, pure desire. Hunter is exhilarated when he sees them for the first time:

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[T]he individual flourishes weren’t what made the shoes incredible. It

was the way they called to me to put them on, the way I was sure I

could fly if I was wearing a pair. The way I needed to buy them now.

A way I hadn’t felt since I was ten. (44; original emphasis)

The reader is invited to interpret this hyperbole as a sincere description. Hunter and Jen are not dupes; they are aware that the idea of such a shoe is implausible. For example, when they discuss going to the police, they realise that they would sound ridiculous telling the police they found “the world’s most amazing shoe” (56). The progression of the narrative relies on the idea that the shoes are truly capable of inspiring such elevated feelings and that the Jammers are worth investigating because they are capable of creating this shoe. To take the description ironically undermines the impetus of the narrative. Their attempt to unravel the mystery of Mandy’s disappearance is motivated by a desire to see the shoes again as much as it is by concern for Mandy. In the sense that the pursuit of this shoe is a major narrative impetus in the novel, So Yesterday is about teenagers chasing the embodiment of cool, a cool that is capable of making the possessor feel perpetually young: “A way I hadn’t felt since I was ten”.

Hunter and Jen also have similar reasons for being obsessed with the pursuit of cool, having both previously experienced painful alienation at school when they failed to find a socially acceptable balance between individuality and conformity. They both describe their alienation wholly in terms of consumer-based identity. It is a moment of bonding that brings them closer together. Hunter tells of moving from Fort Snelling,

Minnesota to New York City when he was thirteen – significantly, his first year as a literal teenager – and finding himself an outcast because he did not consume the right things in the right way. As he explains to Jen:

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‘[B]ack in Fort Snelling, I was pretty popular. Good at sports, lots of

friends, teachers liked me. I thought I was cool. But my first day in

New York, I turned out to be the least cool kid in school. I dressed

from the mall, listened to total MOR [middle of the road music], and

didn’t have the first clue that people in other places did anything

else.’ (95-96)

Being a mere Consumer was now unacceptable. Hunter goes on to describe his sense of meaninglessness and social isolation. His new situation in New York was like “being suddenly erased” (96). He was unable to make friends because he did not consume in the acceptable way. From this abject position, Hunter became an observer:

‘I realized that there was this massive communication system all

around me, a billion coded messages being sent every day with

clothes, hair, music, slang. I started watching, trying to break the

code.’ (96)

After learning the language of cool, he was able to forge a new identity: “After a year of watching, I went on to high school, where I got to reinvent myself” (96). He developed the ability to understand and thus appropriate cool, escaping his old self. He turned into a Trendsetter, a pursuer of cool, eventually creating an obsessive blog that lead to his cool hunter job (97). Hunter earned his position in the pyramid by learning its architecture.

Jen’s obsession with cool was similarly whetted by unpleasant periods of social isolation. However, unlike Hunter, her trouble evidently stems from being too cool for certain situations rather than not cool enough: skewing too much toward individuality rather than conformity. For example, she explains to Hunter that her off-beat style made her an outcast when she moved outside the city in her early teens: “[E]veryone there

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Chapter Six thought I was a freak, with my kiddie-punk purple streaks and homemade clothes” (94; original emphasis). When she tells Hunter that, like him, she lost her cool during this period, he replies: “No really, though. They just didn’t get you” (98). In contrast to

Hunter, Jen does not change her personality to try and fit in. To get her cool back she moves back to the city as soon as she can, to a context where her cool is appreciated.

Although her cool is ‘natural’, Jen has earned her place in the pyramid by continuing to pursue her own version of cool rather than a mass-produced version. The text does not question the reality of cool, but rather configures it in terms of conformity versus being

‘alternative’.

Jen’s effortless, ‘genuine’ cool seems to act as a catalyst for Hunter to question the carefully-maintained guise he has forged and take some risks that might help him gain a better understanding of himself. For instance, hair and clothes play a major role in Hunter’s careful management of his consumer-based identity. Hunter’s fluency in the

“massive communication system” (96) of consumer-media culture allows him to manipulate fashion to express his personality or efface it when necessary. As Craig

Thompson and Diana Haytko argue in their paper on fashion practices amongst college students:

The perceived individuating and transformative power of clothing is

ultimately contingent upon a belief that others will notice and care

about one’s appearance. This belief lends itself to a more intensive

focus on identity management and a tacit assumption that one can

become the center of the social spectacle. (Thompson & Haytko

1997:35-6)

For instance, while other cool hunters at the focus group Hunter and Jen attend at the beginning of the book are all “dressed to represent” (11) – their personal tastes and

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Chapter Six brand affiliations, presumably – Hunters chooses bland “cool-hunting camouflage” clothes that express as little as possible. He deliberately creates outfits that are the fashion equivalent of white noise. Such careful habits are shaken up by Jen. During his third or fourth outing with Jen, he catches sight of himself in a mirror and realises he has inadvertently dropped his disguise:

When cool hunting, I usually disappear into corduroys, sportswear,

and laundry-day splendor, turning invisible. But this morning I’d

unconsciously slipped into my real clothes. (89)

His use of the words “disappear” and “invisible” to describe the effect of his cool hunter clothing conveys their role as a safe disguise. The phrase “real clothes” and the use of the word “unconsciously” suggest that this outfit is a true expression of Hunter’s personality, a none-too-subtle cue that his relationship with Jen is causing him to ‘be himself’. His cool hunter persona is being destabilised by her influence. The capacity for clothes to camouflage or contradict rather than express identity is central to an important plot point, when Jen and Hunter disguise themselves in order to attend the fake launch party without being caught. Hunter must find an outfit that turns him into an “anti-me” (88) or “non-Hunter” (87), which involves the classification of clothes into those that represent his identity and those that do not: clothes that are “too you” or

“very you” are discarded (87-9). Jen pushes him to experiment with his image, conveying the idea that she is forcing him to interrogate his repertoire of personas.

A key aspect of this transformation is a home haircut and peroxide job to make him look as different as possible. Jen instigates the change and performs the alterations.

After Hunter describes his journey from dorky kid to cool young man, Jen comments on his hair:

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‘I’ve been wondering about your hair. It seemed kind of weird that

you were this cool hunter, but you had those bangs hiding your face.

[…] But now I get it. When you moved here from Minnesota, you lost

all your confidence. You had to hide for a while. So it makes sense:

you’re still hiding some of yourself.’ (97)

Hunter, suppressing “flickers of annoyance from being read like a book” (99), concedes that she may be right (101). Jen helps him to identify part of his appearance that is not expressing the ‘real’ Hunter, and her transformative act in changing his hair is a metonym for her effect on his life. She forces him to stand out, gives him nowhere to hide. While the peroxide job is about hiding the real Hunter for the party, the removal of his bangs is about helping to force the real Hunter out into the open. This is a gender reversal of a common young adult literature trope: John Stephens argues that the makeover often acts as metonym for the unfolding of a female character’s selfhood

(Stephens 1999). Hunter’s pursuit of Jen thus also represents the pursuit of the real

Hunter, but more importantly, the real, cool Hunter. The progression of the narrative in

So Yesterday thus revolves around two related questions. Will Hunter win Jen? And will he figure out his place in the consumer-media system? Will the attainment of these goals allow him to finally ‘be himself’?

Closure

Hunter and Jen track down the Jammers and thus find both Mandy and the shoes. This confrontation is the culmination of Hunter and Jen’s investigation and the climax of the novel. At first it seems that Hunter and Jen might join the Jammers. The Jammers are impressed with the fact that Hunter and Jen managed to track them down. Hunter and

Jen, for their part, are certainly seduced by the Jammers’ cool. Jen blooms when their

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Chapter Six leader compliments her enthusiasm, “her smile luminous from the praise” (235). Hunter finds it difficult to resist them, as they are “possessed of that unquestionable authority achieved by being from an older generation but still totally cool” (232). However, it becomes evident that it is not so simple to stand ‘outside’ the system. The Jammers are unambiguously cool: this contradicts their ostensible agenda to expose cool as an illusory concept. Mandy lives up to her role as an ambitious corporate manipulator, as she negotiates a deal with her ‘kidnappers’ to buy the shoe’s design and burn the ones currently in existence. The Jammers agree to the deal: “Anarchy’s a cash business”

(235). This contradicts Hunter’s earlier conviction that the Jammers are not out to make money (173). This deal undermines the way Hunter has heretofore presented the

Jammers as the possible opposite to Nike and all they represent. The Jammers are also quick to cut ties with Hunter and Jen after a cadre of purple-haired aristocrats descend on the Jammers’ headquarters and it becomes evident that they followed the pair (247).

They are no less motivated by self-interest than Mandy.

The confrontation is also the climax of Hunter and Jen’s courtship, as Hunter seemingly loses his chance with her. The Jammers abandon them along with the burning pile of beautiful shoes. While Hunter is still quite happy, pleased that his insider knowledge has proven valid and useful (244), Jen is devastated at losing this opportunity to join the Jammers. As she frantically searches the pile of shoe remains for one intact sample, Hunter plays down the significance of the Jammers:

‘[D]o you really want to work for those guys? Carrying out the grand

plans of the Jammers? Spending every minute of your life thinking

you’ve got to change the world?’ (249)

Jen overtly attacks Hunter’s ‘lower’ status for the first time, accusing him of being someone who watches but does not act, who would rather “poach the latest shoelaces”

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Chapter Six than try and change anything (250). This is a far more devastating blow for Hunter than the Jammers’ rejection, and he takes her assessment of his character to heart. He is abject again, his cool effaced as it was when he first moved to New York:

I was nothing but a fraud. As I’d found out from the moment we’d

left Minnesota, there wasn’t anything cool about me.

I didn’t belong with the Jammers or deserve to be with Jen.

(251)

Hunter has reached a crisis point in both arcs: he has seemingly failed to win Jen and failed to renegotiate the way he relates to consumer-media culture. He is brought lower as the denouement opens, when Mandy contacts him and states she is unable to give him work because of his association with the Jammers (255). This further suggests that an outright opposition between companies like Nike and the Jammers is illusory:

Hunter is expendable to both. Hunter has no choice literally, in that both ‘sides’ reject him, suggesting that he has no real choice figuratively between an insider status and an outsider status.

However, Jen eventually asks him to meet her. She apologises for her outburst and acknowledges that his way of seeing the world has value, claiming that he observes and thinks “in a really cool way” (262). Their reconciliation scene revolves around two key consumer goods. Jen’s first reconciliatory gesture is the gift of a jacket. Hunter bought a suit jacket as part of his non-Hunter look, which got ripped during the chaotic party. It therefore could not be returned, leaving Hunter with $1000 worth of credit card debt. Jen has altered the ruined jacket so that it expresses Hunter’s personality, turning it inside out and removing the sleeves:

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[T]his new jacket – unexpectedly sleeveless, silken ersatz Japanese,

and bow-tie resistant – didn’t belong to the non-Hunter; it was all me.

(262)

At this moment –“it was all me” – Jen brings Hunter back from his effaced state. His

‘real self’ is worthy of her, the real self that has been hidden behind cool hunter camouflage for too long. The fact that the jacket is a “Jen original” (190) – a piece of culture that she has ‘jammed’ – aligns Jen with the Jammers and plays up the empowering potential of consumer-media culture as theorised by critics like Michel de

Certeau (1984). Current systems of meaning can be played with, altered, to suit individuals.

Jen’s second gift is one final existing shoe, found in the remnants of the fire.

She suggests that their complementary skills could still be of value to the Jammers if they can find them again. Hunter expresses doubts about the Jammers’ methods: “I think they shoot for easy targets. And they take risks with other people’s brains” (263).

However, despite his mistrust, the shoe enraptures Hunter again:

I needed this too, I realized. It didn’t take much to rewire Jen. Her

brain was something unique, poised to turn ten years old again at the

drop of a paka-paka attack […] But I hadn’t felt this way in so long –

like I could fly or at least dunk from the free-throw line, like the

mortar in my brain was loosening. I took the shoe from her and held

on tightly. (264-5)

Hunter thus doubts the Jammers’ methods but not their ultimate agenda. Hunter needs the Jammers out there working to create such elevating encounters for the same reason he needs Jen: to allow him access to a feeling of pure youth, pure coolness. Companies

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Chapter Six like Nike cannot provide this feeling with their manufactured cool. They never release the shoe as a whole, instead using its features bit by bit each season:

[Y]ou can’t blame the client for following the first rule of

consumerism: never give us what we really want. Cut the dream into

pieces and scatter them like ashes. Dole out the empty promises.

Package our aspirations and sell them to us, cheaply made enough to

fall apart. (269)

It is in the interest of big business to keep consumers wanting more, creating the illusion of easily possessed cool. This is the only access us mere masses have.

Hunter accepts his role as Jen’s follower when she tells him she still wants to find the Jammers and try to join them: “[I knew] that I’d help her find them. Because

Jen thought she needed them, and I needed her” (263-4). Why does he need her? As much as she represents a step toward adulthood, Jen also represents an idealised perpetual youth, an ongoing ability to be cool: “I got Jen […] and she rewires me like nothing else” (269). Though he is maturing, if Hunter can find and hang onto embodiments of cool – like Jen or the shoe – a youthful cool is always in his grasp.

In the epilogue, Hunter now casts the Jammers as the most important force in society, the people the implied reader ‘needs’ the most. The language echoes Hunter’s coy description of cool hunters in the prologue: “They have to observe carefully and delude and confuse you in ways you don’t realize” (270). The implied reader is discouraged from identifying with the Jammers, as they were discouraged from identifying with Jen: “don’t try this at home” (270). Hunter implies the Jammers really do have the capacity to challenge consumer-media culture and change society:

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Chapter Six

So you ask the question: what can the Jammers do, anyway? … [C]an

a small group of well-organized and charismatic Innovators really

change the world? Maybe they can. (271)

However, while this makes it seem as if Hunter has chosen a side, tension remains.

Hunter says Jen “thought” she needed the Jammers; he is evidently still not convinced that she truly needs them. He chooses Jen, not a side. Further, the Jammers are described in a similar way to the cool hunters, which again reinforces the similarities between the two supposedly opposing sides. Hunter’s mistrust is still evident.

Conclusion

Thus, in So Yesterday, the role of consumer-media culture is seemingly assimilated into the overarching generic imperative of young adult literature: the pursuit of cool is fine as long as you are able to attain a marker of maturity such as a successful romantic relationship. However, the pursuit of cool is not really repudiated, since Hunter’s romantic ‘prize’ enjoys a privileged status as someone who is seemingly able to stave off maturity. Hunter is following a girl whose main stable attribute is her ability to constantly remake herself. She, in turn, is chasing an ‘outsider’ status that has proven to be problematic but seductive; an outsider status that provides the fuel that keeps the consumer system of ‘cool’ ticking along. In drawing on a positive imagining of the perpetual adolescent, So Yesterday tells the reader that youthful cool is real and stylistic reinvention is desirable, but that, as a mere consumer, their only access to this state is via consumer-media culture.

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CONCLUSION

I have argued in this thesis that scholarship must integrate a conceptualisation of the readership of young adult literature as a consuming teenager into current constructions of the genre’s definition and potential social purposes. In Chapter One I demonstrated that young adult literature scholarship has yet to explore the full implications of the status of young adult literature as a consumer product, despite steps in that direction in the past decade and a half. Scholarship has largely conceived of young adult literature as a maturation aid for an implied adolescent reader, something responsible adults

(critics, librarians, authors, educators) give to young people to help them on their journey to adulthood. Even poststructuralist accounts of the genre share these underlying ideas. Scholarship addressing the idea of a consuming teenager as the implied reader of young adult literature has tended either to focus on extratextual elements of books or to fold the notion of a teenage consumer into traditional constructions of the genre by, for example, constructing oppositions between ‘bad’, commercialised texts and potentially progressive, ‘anti-consumerism’ texts. However, such accounts do not consider the complexity of cultural attitudes toward consumption and maturation, such as the way critiques of consumerism so often demonise the consumption practices that define teenagerhood.

To demonstrate the complexity that young adult scholarship needs to acknowledge, in Chapter Two I showed that consumer-media discourses like advertising are accused by cultural critics of mobilising a veneration of youth and a concomitant disdain of adulthood to ‘sell’ the idea that the consumer realm can allow you to perpetually remake yourself, stave of stability and repudiate rationality. The teenager is portrayed as the ultimate avatar of a consumerism-fed desire to shirk

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Conclusion individual agency and renounce an ‘authentic’ subjectivity, but this exists in tension with a strong cultural association between adolescence and both individual and social progress. Out of this tension between the ‘consuming teenager’ and the ‘maturing adolescent’, the ‘perpetual adolescent’ stereotype emerges. When books addressed to this youthful audience draw on the contradictory associations embodied by the perpetual adolescent in order to critique consumerism, it points to some of the more complex and covert ways young adult literature constructs images of a youthful consumer.

The aim of the subsequent chapters, then, was to demonstrate that conceiving of the readership of young adult literature as a teenager consumer as well as a maturing adolescent – in the case of this thesis, by taking the perpetual adolescence stereotype circulating in popular discourse as a manifestation of the uneasy and, to some, irreconcilable relationship between maturation and consumption in Western consumer society – problematises the construction of young adult literature as a privileged medium that can ‘teach’ the reader to either embrace or resist consumerism. I approached the books with the assumption that the narratives would rhetorically explore various ‘stances’ toward consumerism. I predicted that despite the ‘anti- consumerism’ gloss, these novels would nonetheless construct consumer-reader subject positions, and would do so in far more complex ways than, for example, simply connecting particular brands to prestige and peer-acceptance. The case studies subsequently showed that what Elizabeth Bullen calls “consumer subject-reader positions” (2009:498) are more subtle and contradictory in young adult literature than has previously been conceptualised.

In Chapters 3 and 4, I demonstrated that M.T. Anderson’s books produce a pessimistic vision of the potential of individuals to achieve a properly intersubjective or

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Conclusion agentive identity in a consumer society. In Feed, a seeming opposition between the acquiescent Titus and the resistant Violet – by which the overt critique of consumerism is communicated – is not upheld in the progression of the narrative, as both Titus and the ostensibly resistant Violet are unable to define themself outside of the consumer- media culture represented by the feed. The unfolding of their relationship enacts the resilience of consumer-media culture: Violet is unable to resist the temptations of the feed, as represented by her desire for Titus, and Titus is unable to channel his knowledge of the negative effects of consumerism into action, as represented by his eventual repudiation of Violet as a romantic partner. The overt critique, then, stands in tension with the construction of consumer-media culture as inescapably seductive. In

Burger Wuss, modern day America is presented as a place where consumerism makes finding a way to ‘really live’ impossible, though it is no less tempting for that unattainability. Anthony’s pursuit of ‘really living’ is mediated by consumer-media culture, and he is unable to find a rational, productive ‘response’ to consumerism. The idea that meaningful relationships might ameliorate this dissatisfaction is undermined by sustained narrative irony and the closure of the narrative. The book thus constructs a consumer subject trapped somewhere between seduced and cynical.

In Chapters 5 and 6, I showed that Scott Westerfeld’s books engage with a more positive imagining of the relationship between maturation and consumerism, constructing a desirable consumer subject position continually able to stave off a stable identity through stylistic redefinition, staying ‘rewireable’. Scott Westerfeld’s novels tell the reader that the freedom to find their ‘real’ selves can be found in the symbolic and stylistic choices offered by consumer-media culture. The Uglies series conveys the idea that the pursuit of complete satisfaction promised by consumerism is illusory, but constructs the desire to pursue a ‘real you’ through stylistic experimentation as a

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Conclusion fundamental human trait. An overt ‘lesson’ about the dangers of conformity conveyed by the ‘rewirable’ Tally’s destruction of the conformist Prettytime overlays a more implicit valorisation of individual freedom expressed through consumption, largely conveyed by the positive portrayal of the diverse system that rises in the Prettytime’s wake once everyone is ‘rewirable’. So Yesterday suggests that growing up does not mean giving up the pursuit of a youthful ‘cool’, though the identification of ‘true’ cool might be a confusing task. In Hunter’s journey, the tension between adolescent growth and the possibility of eternal youthful cool is not reconciled: he takes a step toward maturity by entering into a relationship, but has committed himself to continue chasing after a girl who has been defined throughout the narrative by her status as an Innovator, someone who staves off maturity through reinvention. The texts considered in this thesis thus all, in different ways, construct subject positions that could be characterised as ‘conducive’ to consumerism, despite evidence of an attempt to critique or encourage resistance of consumerism. They demonstrate that the relationship between growing up and spending up in young adult literature is complex and cannot be accounted for without an acknowledgement that the reader of young adult literature is a consumer in the marketplace as much as he or she is an adolescent maturing under the watchful gaze of adults.

The sample size in this thesis was small due to the qualitative nature of the study; I set out to undertake detailed analyses of the narratives of particular works in order to tease out the complexities in their representation of consumption and maturation. National specificity is also an issue: I have considered American texts because of the strong association in historical and critical theory between America, consumerism and the teenager. Future research, however, could consider the similarities and differences between the ways texts from various nations explore

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Conclusion consumption and maturation. For instance, a comparison between Britain and America may be enlightening given that, as I pointed out in the Introduction, the teenager is said to have emerged later in the UK than in the US (Osgerby 2004:26). A comparative study of American and Japanese texts is another possible research avenue. In her examination of Japanese authors, Sumie Okada (2003) argues that Japanese literature evinces a tension between traditional Eastern ‘groupism’ and the influence of Western

‘individualism’. One might ask, then, how Japanese texts written for teenagers might manifest similar tensions: to what extent, for example, do they engage with the individualistic concerns that pervade the texts considered in this thesis, such as a preoccupation with finding a way to ‘really live’?

This thesis also did not consider texts written for and marketed to a younger audience that overtly explore the implications of consumerism. For example, a recent

Australian book for younger readers entitled Mosquito Advertising (2010) by Kate

Hunter constructs an opposition between a ‘corporate giant’ and small, family-owned business: the happy ending entails the child protagonist successfully launching her own advertising company in order to ‘defeat’ big business. This points to questions such as: how does the general tendency for children’s narratives to offer more hopeful closure relate to their capacity to critique consumerism? It was also beyond the scope of this thesis to consider titles for a general audience that similarly seek to critique consumer culture and the relationship between maturity and consumption, including US books such as White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo, Generation X (1992) and Microserfs

(1995) by Douglas Coupland, Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace, The

Corrections (2002) by Jonathan Franzen, Pattern Recognition (2003) by William

Gibson, The Futurist (2007) and Holy Water (2010) by James P. Othmer; Australian books such as Syrup (1999), Jennifer Government (2004) and The Company (2007) by

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Conclusion

Max Barry; and UK books such as PopCo (2004) by Scarlett Thomas and Blind Faith

(2007) Ben Elton. To point to one similarity, though, critical accounts of such books often engage with the idea that literature has a role to play in the way we conceive of the future of our consumer society and what actions we might take to shape it. In his examination of Don DeLillo’s (1985) White Noise in relation to globalisation, for example, Thomas Peyser argues:

[T]he future patterns traced by the flow of capital, culture, and

political power will, to some extent, depend upon the way the global

field is imagined by those acting as agents within it. (Peyser

1996:255)

Are there differences in the way this “global field” is imagined in young adult literature and literature for a general audience? Are the adult texts more likely to adopt omniscient, third-person narration, and what implications might this have? Can one be said to be more ‘successful’ in critiquing consumerism than the other?

Though the sample size was small, focusing on a particular time period and nation, my findings have implications for the young adult literature in general. For example, critics tend to argue that the commercialisation of young adult literature is a recent phenomenon, but such statements are based on overly simple conceptualisations of ‘commercialisation’: brand saturation, for example. Having shown in this thesis that the construction of consumer subject positions in young adult literature can be far more subtle and complex, I suggest that these more covert consumer subject positions will be evident to varying degrees in young adult literature from its earliest incarnations.

Amanda K. Allen’s (2009) study of 1940s ‘commodity tales’, discussed in Chapter

One, is a step in this direction.

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Conclusion

My findings in this thesis debunk the idea that intertextual references to and representations of consumer-media discourses in young adult literature are ephemeral and unworthy of study. Having shown the significance of consumer-media discourses in texts that explicitly engage with consumerism, I suggest that future research should attend to the way novels engage with consumerism more implicitly by accepting that representations of consumer-media discourses are an important element young adult books. For example, Scott Westerfeld’s novel Peeps (2005) is a fantasy novel in which vampirism is re-imagined as a virus. In Westerfeld’s version of vampire mythology, the virus has an ‘anathema’ effect on the vampire or ‘peep’: they loathe everything they once loved. Crucifixes became a common tool against vampires at a time when religious belief was more widespread. The first-person adolescent narrator, a vampire hunter, explains that it is more complicated in modern times:

These days, we hunters have to do our homework before we

go after a peep. What were their favourite books? What music did

they like? What movie stars did they have crushes on? Sure, we still

find a few cases of cruciphobia, especially down in the Bible Belt, but

you’re much more likely to stop peeps with an iPod full of their

favourite tunes. (With certain geeky types, I’ve heard, the Apple logo

alone does the trick.) (Peeps 21-2)

This book does not self-consciously engage with consumerism in the same sustained manner as the texts in considered in this thesis, but a strong association between identity and consumer products is woven into an essential plot point; the need to discover what brands and objects can be used as weapon against a peep is an ongoing narrative thread in the book. The findings of this thesis show it is important to pay attention to such narrative elements, and move beyond the idea that the presence of

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Conclusion brands or consumer products in a text is either a measure of its ‘commercialisation’ or an ephemeral aspect of the text that will lose significance as popular culture changes.

The specific reference to the Apple logo here, for example, may well become

‘outdated’; but the underlying idea that a logo is capable of inspiring love remains relevant and requires attention.

Following the work of Elizabeth Bullen (2009), this thesis focused on intra- textual elements of young adult literature. However, the continued analysis of extra- textual aspects of young adult literature is also important. In particular, as Alice Bell

(2007) argues, it is important to continue demythologising the status of books. For example, to say that series like Gossip Girl are commercialised texts because they emerge from packaging companies instead of more traditional author-publisher relationships ignores the fundamental commercial nature of the publishing industry. For instance, this is evident in the origins of two classic young adult texts, The Pigman and

The Chocolate War. Originally a playwright, Paul Zindel was approached by a children’s book editor to write a book for adolescents after she was impressed by a television adaptation of one of Zindel’s plays (Forman 1988:7; Donelson & Nilsen

[1980] 2008:164). Robert Cormier wrote The Chocolate War after having three novels published for adults with moderate success. Cormier initially wrote it with no specific age group in mind, but when he showed the book to his agent she suggested that it would be appropriate for the young adult market (Deluca & Natov 1978:110-1;

Campbell [1985] 1989:27). Cormier has acknowledged that he took into account the commercial success of Paul Zindel’s books when contemplating the effect writing for teenagers might have on his career (Deluca & Natov 1978:111; Donelson & Nilsen

[1980] 2008:164): in other words, Zindel’s success assured him that there was a profitable market for such a thing. The acknowledgement that young adult literature is a

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Conclusion product that teenagers purchase opens up the idea that the young adult author is creating a product for consumption. For example, many young adult authors have webpages and weblogs. Scott Westerfeld, for example, has a particularly popular blog.

In what ways do such blogs show evidence of the commercial imperative that drives publishing? Do the authors construct themselves as concerned adults who aim to help readers make the journey to adulthood? In what ways does the interaction between author and reader – through commenting functions, for example – replicate author- reader dynamics in young adult literature? How overt is the advertising purpose of such sites?

Further to the idea of demythologising the status of books, the findings in this thesis also have implications for young adult literature’s status as a medium of socialisation. To say that the books consider here do not necessarily offer a challenge to consumerism despite their ‘anti-consumerism’ gloss is not a condemnation of the books, but a recognition that we must be careful in negotiating the tension between a belief in young adult literature’s progressive potential and a realisation that it is problematic to expect the representations of youth circulated by young adult literature to be more moral or possess more power than other representations at play in the consumer realm in films, advertisements, magazines, music and the like. As part of this recognition, we should consider young adult literature in relation to other discourses, particularly those associated with the ‘consuming teenager’. For instance, what stories is young adult literature telling that are similar to those being told in advertisements?

The cynical irony employed in Feed and Burger Wuss is often employed in advertising: what does it mean for young adult literature when strategies that are often presented by critics as potentially interrogative are also being used in commercials? Is the privileging of literature evident in other discourses beyond young adult literature criticism? For

279

Conclusion example, the association of the teenager with regression pervades works that criticise

‘teen’ Shakespeare films or other modernised film adaptations of classic works aimed at teenagers (for example: Burt 2002; French 2006:34). The classic work is generally presented as having been ‘degraded’ by being reconfigured for teenagers. What might a comparison of teen films that update classic works and a similar trend in young adult fiction – such as books retelling the story of Jekyll and Hyde or Jane Eyre in a modern high school setting – reveal about cultural attitudes toward film, literature and the teenager?

An underlying theme in this thesis has been that literature has myriad purposes and potentialities, and that to overemphasise its progressive potential is idealistic. My findings show that an opposition between ‘good’ products or progressive representations and ‘bad’ products or regressive representations – though such distinctions are often necessary and unavoidable – can sometimes obscure more than it illuminates. Young adult literature is always consumed alongside many other stories of youth. I certainly share the hope that one of literature’s primary functions can be to help make the world a better place. However, such hopes must be accompanied by a recognition of the limitations of literature, particularly in a consumer society in which it competes with so many discourses. Our ideas of what it means for humanity to progress or regress, and the role of discourses like literature in both representing and shaping such ideas, must be constantly interrogated.

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