 |
| Mass market paperback, 222 pages Published 2015 (originally 1998) Acquired November 2016 Read February 2017 |
I have a friend-- herself much more of a young adult literature scholar than I-- who, when she found out that I was assigning Holes in my YA literature class, objected strongly. Holes is not young adult, she said, it's middle grade. And indeed, if you look at the back of my copy it indicates "Ages 10 & up," and ten years is definitely below the somewhat fuzzy middle grade/young adult barrier. I couldn't muster much of a defense of it myself, having not actually read it prior to assigning it, but having had a hole to plug (I needed a male-written YA novel published in the 1990s to balance out my course) and finding it on a list.
Once I read it, though, I realized that age range aside, it's definitely young adult fiction. Something I talk about a lot is the difference between the features and the projects of genres, and Holes, I would argue, has the project of young adult fiction. Or, at least, one of them. In her book Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature (2000), Roberta Seelinger Trites argues that "[t]he chief characteristic that distinguishes adolescent literature from children's literature is the issue of how social power is deployed during the course of the narrative. In books that younger children read [...] much of the action focuses on one child who learns to feel more secure in the confines of her or his environment, usually represented by family and home" (2-3). But in the YA novel, Trites continues, "protagonists 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" (3).
Holes is all about power. Stanley confronts all sort of social forces during his time at Camp Green Lake: race, class, childhood, prison, probably many more you can think of (and my students did). And in complicated ways, too-- Stanley is accused of being racist when he uses the labor of a black child, Zero, to relieve his own (in exchange for which he teaches Zero how to read). Was Stanley wrong? Were his accusers? I don't think there are any good answers here; what's more important is how Stanley becomes aware of an entire dimension of racial power of which he was previously unaware. Trites says that "the YA novel teaches adolescents how to exist within the (capitalistically bound) institutions that necessarily define teenagers' existence" (19).
Stanley doesn't just learn about institutions, but he learns how to operate within them to get what he wants. And this goes to Trites' other take on power: it's also "the force that allows for subjectivity and consequently, agency" (5). Your internal power allows you to act. And that's one of the big trajectories of Holes: Stanley starts out seemingly powerless, but as the novel goes on, he finally learns how to act, how to do something instead of having things done to him, and that's how he saves the day. So, in terms of its concerns, I think Holes is much more YA than children's.
In fact, considering Trites's theory of power and YA literature allows us to solve one of the novel's complexities. Something my students were really into was whether the curse placed on the Yelnats family was real or not. It seems real, given that when Stanley solves the historical injustice, the land is regenerates (shades of what Farah Mendlesohn says in Rhetorics of Fantasy, and indeed, the climax of Holes bears some traces of what she calls the portal-quest fantasy). But the narrator deliberately casts doubt on the reality of the curse, and coincidence is a perfectly plausible explanation for the events of the novel, too. When this kind of discussion arises, my inclination is to redirect, away from asking which is real? toward why create the ambiguity? Hopefully it's there for a reason other than just love of ambiguity, and I would argue that in the case of Holes, it is.
By introducing the idea of a curse, Sachar can literalize the kind of institutional power and make it visible: the curse is classism and racism in action, distant institutions turned into concretized force. We can see the real effect these powers have on the world in general, and Stanley and Zero in particular. On the other hand, were the curse to be clearly real, that would remove its power as a symbol, Stanley wouldn't be fighting an institution, but magic, and he would have no real reason to assume personal responsibility (as Trites's formulation tells us he must) because the curse would have predetermined his life. Leaving the curse ambiguous creates a sweet spot, where we know there's something real out there working against Stanley, but it's not no powerful that it can defeat him.
No comments:
Post a Comment