children's fiction
Jenny Pausacker
Heather Scutter
Displaced Fictions: Contemporary Australian
Fiction for Teenagers and Young Adults
MUP $29.95pb, 330pp,
0 5222 84813 3
UNLIKE MOST OF THE Whitlam generation, Heather Scutter has
maintained her rage. In this nervous, pre-millennial era whose
censors generally operate by neglect or ridicule, it was
initially exhilarating to come across a book like Displaced
Fictions and find Scutter serving out opinions, left, right and
centre.
Heather Scutter believes that 'complex and powerful forces have
constructed a strangely malign context' for Australian young
adult fiction. She would like to see Australian young adults
become more 'sceptical, even resistant readers', through a close
evaluation of the overt and hidden values in fictional texts --
'their context, production and ideology'. And she feels that it's
time for a critical book deflating 'some of the unguarded
enthusiasms and excessive claims' about the past two decades of
adolescent fiction in Australia.
It's a potentially challenging enterprise but unfortunately I
doubt that Displaced Fictions will prompt the same methodical,
multi-positioned debate as Mark Davis' Gangland, for two reasons. Firstly, Scutter's maintained rage manifests throughout the book in bursts of sarcasm or facetiousness -- for example, describing one book as 'sort of redneck Queensland meets Dracula, with Pretty Woman walking off into the sunset' and another author as 'dispensing [meaning] ambivalently with the coolth of a sibyl and the charlatanry of a spruiker'. This kind of bitchy parody can be fun between consenting adults in private but as a strategy for public debate, it seems guaranteed to provoke the precise defensiveness that Scutter wants to erode.
The second problem is that Displaced Fictions comes across as an oddly unmethodical work. The promised critique of 'complex and powerful institutional forces' boils down to a point-by-point rebuttal of four articles by a freelance editor, an academic, Victoria's Youth Literature Officer and a contributor to the Victorian Writers' Centre newsletter. It's a puzzlingly random choice, especially when Scutter supplies no similarly detailed analysis of testimony from publishers, the Children's Book Council, school curriculum bodies, literary editors from the major newspapers and specialist journals or any of the other institutions that are crucial context-constructors.
The same criticism applies to the analysis of individual texts that occupies most of Displaced Fictions. Scutter focuses on seven themes -- the pastoral, landscape, comedy, sentimentality, national identity, mothers and feral children -- and discusses approximately forty books by twenty writers, only ten of these texts meeting her critical standards. This gives apparent substance to generalisations like, 'I wish we could offer children's minds more than this half-baked stuff' but Scutter's grand scale conclusions are achieved by manipulating the data. Her themes are as randomly chosen as her experts, allowing her to concentrate on texts that support her thesis -- most notably in the chapter on comedy, where none of her examples actually come from young adult fiction. And in a field where eighty books per year are submitted for the Older Readers section of the Children's Book Council Awards, forty titles is way too small a sample to be considered representative.
In short, although Displaced Fictions presents an overview, it reads like a collection of unrelated articles on aspects of Australian children's literature. While Scutter's generalisations struck me as willed or asserted, rather than reasoned and proved, I enjoyed a lot of her meditations on specific issues. Her chapter on sentimentality, for example, investigates the proposition that some modernist and postmodernist writers reject sentimentality, only to replace it with an 'ostentatious antisentimentality; that is equally self-indulgent -- a concept that illuminates not only some areas of young adult fiction but American Psycho, grunge fiction, Ernest Hemingway and the detective stories of James Ellroy.