Young Adult Literature: Rite of Passage or Rite of Its Own

ALAN Review, Summer 2005 by Proukou, Katherine Kim

"I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: 'All right, then, I'll go to hell' and tore it up"

-The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, 1339.

"My name is Jerry Renault and I am not going to sell the chocolates"

-The Chocolate War, Robert Cormier, 129.

Rahib-saftib will reach out to me for the rest of his life and never unlock the secrets of my heart"

-Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind, Suzann Fisher Staples, 240.

Myths swirl about young adult (YA) literature, from Huckleberry Finn to Harry Potter: It's literature for teenagers; it's literature about teenagers; it's stylistic and simplified literature; it's overly didactic and, of course, shorter than a real novel. It is a rite of passage.

But it is much more. It is about life, its histories and potentialities, transformations and choices; it is about conflicts between the claim of the individual and the claims of culture (Freud); it is about life's fantastic flux of being. It is about new beginnings and other directions; of young heroes who wind up threads and carry wisdom, of the child-one who sees, clearly, that the emperor has no clothes. It is not only about rites of passage, but is also a rite of its own, an archetypal icon-bearer of the monomyths that recreate us, as an examination of Huckleberry Finn, The Chocolate War and Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind, three very different novels spread out over time, illustrate.

Monomyths, or what Kerenyi named the great mythologems in his essay, "Prolegomena" (2-3), are the immortal plays of primordial history that act like themes of music in the collective consciousness of women and men. They are the "dramas of Providence" (Burke); we know them, but we are not sure of how we know them. They reside in the heritage of imagination that is ours as humans and they carry meanings for us that arrive in our conscious imagination in holistic thematic apprehensions. They are the bridge between earned knowledge and contemplative wisdom. These great myths, the mythologems, recreate us because they connect us to the wealth and beauty of the past and provide the lens through which we may contemplate the future from the conscious present.

One of the most common and significant archetypes within these mythologems is the child archetype (Jung, 70). It is this archetype that young adult literature preserves in the "world history of literature for women and men of all ages. Young protagonists are not young because their intended readership is young. They are young protagonists because it is necessary. The choice of a young protagonist in a literary work allows the author to stake claim to the archetypal function the motif provides, to awaken within the collective unconscious of readers the wonder of the potentialities and prophetic warnings the conscious mind has slept away, forgotten or failed to dream. YA literature is a genre of the possibilities of returning to begin again, an empowerment of the hero child within and the archetypal message bearer of wisdom in the remembering of youth.

The separation from childhood is a complex trial, begun in adolescence and symbolic of all transformations of consciousness, particularly from one state of understanding to a higher or clearer one: A reason why adolescence is worthy, according to Joseph Campbell, of the elaborate rites of primordial societies, who celebrated it. These rites forced the child, he says, "to give up its childhood and become an adultto die, you might say, to its infantile personality and psyche and come back as a responsible adult. This is a fundamental psychological transformation that everyone has to undergo" (124). Because everyone can identify with the transformational 'call' of adolescence and its demands, it is a universal link to its mythological association with the hero's call, its tests and wisdom-based rewards, as well as to psychological associations with transformations of knowing.

Carl Jung in his essay, "The Psychology of the Child Archetype" from Essays on a Science of Mythology, which he co-authored with C. Kerenyi, states that "One of the essential features of the child motif is its futurity. The child is potential future" (83). Furthermore, within the construct of youth there is also a symbol-tradition of mediation, "it is a symbol-tradition which unites opposites; a mediator, a bringer of healing, that is one who makes whole" (83). The child god brings about a cyclic resolution of past, present and future direction, a unification. The powerful futurity images evoked by the archetype of the youth in the collective unconscious, allow us to fully appreciate YA literature as a rite of its own within literary tradition celebrating both fresh directions and recoveries.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

YA literature in the United States has been a rite of its own for 135 years. As a genre of singular merit, its roots extend at least as far back as 1869 and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Yet, as an icon of the potentialities of transformation and regeneration, it is in Mark Twain's 1885 work, Huckleberry Finn, that American YA literature has one of its most defining moment. Like many of the great forerunners of the genre, Huckleberry Finn had immediate trouble with the censors and ranks fifth on the American Library Association's 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000 (ALA).