posted
A rash of recent narratives pit noble young and early adults against wicked older adults: as recent as maybe Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, certainly, of note, Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games franchise and James Dashners' Maze Runner saga, among others. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight cycle fits the canon somewhat.
I wondered for a while what that's about and admit to disturbed from the trend -- encourage youth to violently rebel!? Today, realized, ah hah! a subtler subversion within the canon; that is, exhortation to question and challenge corrupted adult agendas, even parents and kin, and forge one's own path and wise sapient aptitude development -- on one's own initiatives.
Those age phases are, after all, adult initiation and apprenticeship stages, respectively, where adulthood exploration and experimentation transpire to greater degrees than other age phases, with ever less tolerance for youthful antics and indiscretions as humans age. Yet the canon discovers youth's moral truth that adults are wont to be as wicked as noble and at variant proportions. Two hundred fifty-six shades of gray, so to speak, more than the mere black-and-white absolutes, of digital imagery protocols. And how many colors of jpegs? Satire, yes, subversive!
posted
I enjoy reading stories that explore the change between youth and adulthood, either through multiple characters or the progression of one character. Unfortunately for me, those stories usually unfold over multiple volumes of books, and I can't devour books as voraciously as before these days.
I find it a little cliche that some (or most) books of the "noble youths, wicked adults" sort will draw such a distinct line between "noble" and "wicked". Isn't it far more interesting when both/all sides are equally noble and wicked for different reasons? Now that I'm well into adulthood, I see this muddy scenario play out much more often than the clear cut kind.
I might have gone off topic there...
Posts: 252 | Registered: Feb 2013
| IP: Logged |
posted
Right on topic and insightful contributions. I too observe less distinct differences between noble and wicked personas, nemeses' contests more so than hero and villain contests, for more appealing narratives, at least in my more attuned, older adulthood ages, that is, rounded and natural humans and personas otherwise. However, greater overall reader accessibility develops when noble and wicked characters are at opposite extremes: wider audience appeal and appeals to mass culture.
The contests of those pit archetype personas against each other and who represent good and evil forces at extremes, that is, more or less, conflict's function, a conflict of good and evil's polar duality represented by such distinct personas in contentious opposition.
High school English instructors wonder why pupils cannot relate to, say, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, often required reading once upon a time. The novella is about the difficult transition into late adulthood. Santiago duels with himself against Nature and cannot win against the natural onslaughts of old age. A cautionary tale for youth to enjoy youth's carefree delights while they may, perhaps, otherwise, unrelatable, for old age is far away in their futures.
Posts: 6037 | Registered: Jun 2008
| IP: Logged |
posted
Robert Heinlein's subversions are legend, even subversions of himself. His satire also leans toward Kierkegaard's "infinite absolute negativity" due to ever changing aesthetics which deny stable locuses. Stability of irony is a paramount feature for receiver accessibility.
A craft facet for which Heinlein is known is "indirect exposition," a misnomer, a technique Heinlein derived from Rudyard Kipling. Heinlein overturned the to-date space opera derivatives and stereotyped science fiction topos, in part, by not relying on readership's familiarity with hidebound and repetitious, diluted conventions of a canon, and pushed the social sciences science fiction envelope. Subversive on both accounts and more: subverted the culture, subverted the canon, subverted conventions, subverted the true social function of literature yet pushed it further forward.
The misnomer is due to writing culture's then as now misunderstandings of the term "exposition." Diluted to mean any flat, drama-less introductions that stall or stop, not even start dramatic movement at the start, taken to mean regressive backstory usually. Heinlein's works spanned both that and "exposition's" true meaning and art: "a setting forth of the meaning or purpose (as of a writing)" (Webster's), to more than narrative start purposes, any occasion at any point in a narrative that wants a dramatic setting forth of a meaning and purpose.
"Indirect exposition" predates Kipling. The method entails fresh perspectives of event, setting, and persona description in an economy of words that imply more than the word count's superficial substance carries, adds deep representational substance through implication (fewer words, more work), and emotional charge, yet as well is both foreground and incidental at the same time, also known as "telling details." Subversive enough, rare any literary era, subversion of convenient composition habits, that small nudge more that works more expression magic and mischief than the effort requires.
Printer-friendly view of this topic
