2nd August 2021. Fiction | Blake

Reluctant heroes; Blake’s version of Jerusalem

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#1: Reluctant heroes

Young adult fiction has been booming for the last two decades—the breakout category among fiction, and a lot of it not read by young adults.

That’s the starting point of a long review article by Tanner Greer in City Journal which argues that one of the reasons for this is that young adult fiction speaks more exactly to the anxieties of our time. 

(Image by Mike Mozart/flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Greer positions Twilight and The Hunger Games as the opposing poles of young adult fiction:

Twilight and The Hunger Games, in many ways one another’s opposites, stake out the outer bounds of speculative YA lit. Twilight and its sequels glammed up sappy romance with the supernatural; The Hunger Games was a gritty dystopian thriller.

But there are also important similarities:

A defining feature of both Bella’s and Katniss’s stories is the painfully limited agency of their respective heroines. In a world of supernatural individuals, Bella is weak, mortal, and helpless. She cannot save herself from the many dangerous situations she stumbles into, nor can she fulfill her wish to become a vampire, except by appealing to forces more powerful than herself. Katniss is more resourceful than Bella, but she, too, is the plaything of powers she cannot control... This preoccupation with authority, agency, and surveillance unites the two series.

And you can add the other great young adult franchise, Harry Potter, into this overall preoccupation as well, he suggests. And there are some common narrative patterns in young adult fiction as well:

Under the surface of normal life exists a hidden world more vital, dazzling, and dangerous than most people ever realize. The YA heroine may enter this society as a stranger, but eventually discovers that she (more often, the hero is female) is the fulcrum upon which this new world turns... This is the defining feature of the YA fictional society: powerful, inscrutable authorities with a mysterious and obsessive interest in the protagonist. 

We are, in general, in a world where the important conversations take place out of earshot, in other rooms, among people who are out of touch with the way the world is. The protagonists have to work it out for themselves, even though they lack the agency to do so (and usually have to work out how to acquire it as the plot unfolds).

There are also similarities with a lot of recent adult television series, from X-Files to The Man In The High Castle.

Well, this might well sound like the world we actually find ourselves in (Greer writes from a US perspective, but the point is a broader one). 

The YA novel’s adolescent attitude toward authority speaks to the experiences of the many millions shaken by their own impotence. The mania for dystopia is a literary sensation custom-made for the frustrations of our age.

Greer suggests, however, that it is a poor guide to escaping from these frustrations. For the typical YA hero becomes a hero only reluctantly, having exhausted the alternatives:

In the world of YA speculative fiction, those who possess such power cannot be trusted. Even worse than possessing power is to seek it: our fables teach that to desire responsibility is to be corrupted by it... The protagonists of our fairy realm do not embrace heroics. This poses a practical problem: if power degrades those who seek it, how can protagonists ever become skilled enough to defeat the enemies of good?

Greer argues that this is an exact parallel with the politics of our time, in “a culture that can articulate the anxieties of the overmanaged but cannot conceive of a healthy model of management”.

I’m less persuaded by this. One of the thongs we seem to know about Gen Z, now approaching their mid-20s, and brought up in the world described in the article, is that they’re pragmatic about changing the world. They focus on a bit they can do, and find some tools and some people to get on to do it, often in creative ways. That’s a lot healthier—for them and for everyone else—that having a vast plan to change the world. That often doesn’t turn out so well. 

#2: Blake’s version of Jerusalem

The writer and cultural historian John Higgs has just written a book about the poet and artist William Blake.

(‘Europe—A Prophecy’, by William Blake. Image by rawpixel via Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0)

There’s a long and informative review at Andy Wilson’s blog, which reminds us of the paradox of Blake:

Rarely has any artist gone from total obscurity to global acceptance as surely as William Blake—albeit that his triumph was some time coming. It is startling to think that the work many consider to be his greatest achievement, Jerusalem, was printed using an original method of mass production of Blake’s own design, yet sold as few as five copies in his lifetime. Blake’s books didn’t need techniques of mass production, since his readers were so few. His greatest success, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, still sold less than thirty copies. And yet, somehow, in the two centuries since his death, Blake has acquired mass appeal.

There’s an extract from the book in The Art Newspaper about Blake’s catastrophic exhibition above a shop in Broad Street in London, and Robert Hunt’s scathing review, designed, it seemed to put the working-class Blake back in his place.

Yesterday on his newsletter Higgs shared a link to a discussion about Blake at the British Library that he had been involved in to launch the book. That can be seen here (51 minutes). 

But he also linked to the performance of Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ by the poet Kate Tempest. This concludes the British Library video, and puts the famous extract that is sung (say) at the Last Night of the Proms into the full context of the whole poem.

Higgs says Tempest’s reading “brings out the radical and revolutionary nature of those words”. I agree.

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