Australian School Library Association > Publications > Commentary Vol 18 Issue 2 2004

Iceland, television and Markus Zusak (Volume 18 Issue 2, 2004)

Julie Lawrinson

Julia Lawrinson is a writer of young adult and children's fiction. Her first novel, Obsession (Fremantle Arts Centre Press), won the West Australian Premier's Award for young adult writing. Her second, Skating the edge (FACP), was named one of the best books of 2003 in The Australian. Her latest novel, Loz and Al (FACP), is for upper primary readers and was released in February 2004, while an Aussie Nibble, The girl who fell into a book, will be published by Penguin in 2006. Julia has received an Australia Council grant for 2004 to work on a historical novel set in the WA wheatbelt, and is currently chair of the Arts Development Panel at ArtsWA. Her next young adult title, My neighbour the boy god, will be published by Lothian in 2005.

(The views expressed in articles are those of the author(s) concerned and do not necessarily represent the views of ASLA.)

I want to discuss Iceland, television, psychiatrists, airplanes, Mein Kampf and Markus Zusak. But first, I want to ask two important questions. Why do we want young people to read? What experiences do we want them to get from reading that they cannot get from television, video games, or their friends?

These two questions come down to the heart of what you and your colleagues do as school librarians, and to what me and my colleagues do as writers. The way you answer these questions will probably determine what kind of librarian you are, and what kinds of interactions you have with the children you come in contact with. While you consider these questions, I want to mention Iceland.

High literacy levels

As well as being full of volcanoes, Iceland is full of readers. Iceland has the highest number of book readers per head of population in the world. This correlates with the fact that it has a near 100 percent functional literacy rate. In comparison, Australia’s rate is about 80 percent (give or take a few percentage points, depending on how you measure functional literacy). Apart from having incredibly long, dark, cold winters in which there is nothing much to do except read books and form weird pop groups, what makes Iceland so different to Australia?

A few things suggest why Iceland has achieved world’s best practice in creating literate, bookish citizens. One is that half the schools have less than a hundred students each. Another is that by the age of 15, all students in Iceland are studying Icelandic, English, and Danish. They have a well-funded public education system, so there is no need for private schools, and university education is free. The entire culture supports and values language, literacy, and education.

In Australia, we are not doing too badly at getting children literate and reading. Our literacy rates are still pretty good by OECD standards, even if they are not as spectacular as Iceland’s. Nevertheless, research commissioned by the Australian Centre for Youth Literature in 2000 shows that in high school, the reading rate drops dramatically. Teenagers, on the whole, still want to read, but they read less than they did in primary school. Why?

Part of the reason is that there are pressures on teenagers that younger children do not experience––homework, increased interest in belonging to a social group, and, in the case of most boys, the inability to concentrate on anything that is not related to sex. But I would like to suggest that there is another reason that teenagers do not hook up with the books that will speak to them, and that is the impact of censorship.

Impact of censorship

In 2000, the Medical Journal of Australia published an article written by three psychiatrists who had analysed the main characters of all CBC short-listed books between 1996 and 1998. The psychiatrists discovered that: 64 percent of these characters experienced severe stress; 78 percent had suffered a major loss; 57 percent were generally distressed; and 26 characters had suicidal thoughts, while 10 actually followed through and killed themselves. The authors noted particularly that 55 percent of the characters that sought professional psychological help showed no change in their condition; indeed, for 13 percent, it actually made them worse. The conclusion the authors reached was that ‘the past decade appears to have been a time of trauma and loss for youth, unrelieved by humour or hope…considering this image of our times, we may well ponder whether the genre has crossed the threshold from realism into nihilism’ (Sullivan 2000).

I will leave aside picky academic questions about why the psychiatrists consider young adult fiction a genre; how realism, a category used to describe a form of art, film or writing, can somehow become nihilism, a belief system; and why the psychiatrists have confused fictional characters with real patients. The point I would like to make is that this type of conclusion echoed the well-publicised concerns of Heather Scutter and others, who believe that young adult fiction, particularly young adult realism, is having a negative effect on the world view of ‘naïve and vulnerable’ readers. The hoo-ha raised by the publication of books such as Dear Miffy, Margaret Clark’s Secret Girls’ Stuff and so-called gritty realist books has led to an increased level of censorship––not only at the level of the school library or the English class, where teachers are concerned at the response of parents to particular types of material, but by publishers and by writers themselves. The result? A rash of conservative, neat, fake books written for and marketed towards awards committees rather than for readers.

I am not saying that there are not great books being written and published, or that award-winning books are necessarily conservative, neat, or fake. But there has been a swing away from a discussion of content in novels to a promotion of books according to how marketable the author is. If you were at the CBC conference in Tasmania and saw the reactions of teacher librarians to Markus Zusak, you will know what I mean. But books are not three-minute pop songs, and writers should not have to pluck the literary equivalent of their eyebrows to have their books read.

Impacts of literature

The whole gritty-realism furore really comes down to the notion that books have the power to influence young people in particular ways. But how can we measure the effect of literature on the minds of young adults? Why is it that some people are so certain that reading so-called depressing or bleak material will translate into the readers themselves becoming depressed, miserable, or suicidal? There is no empirical evidence that suggests what impact literature has, because nobody has done this type of research. In lieu of this, I would like you to consider research done into the impact of another maligned medium¾ television¾ so that we can start to think of parallels in the ways that young adult realism and television are viewed, and how young people use them.

Television has been held responsible for everything from childhood obesity to the continued electoral success of the Howard Government. Consequently, it has been the focus of many studies about its possible impacts since its inception in the 1950s. A book written by David Gauntlett in 1995 examines all these studies critically, and his conclusions are very interesting. The first problem he found was with the way the effects of TV were measured. He suggests that most of the so-called effects that researchers have found were actually due to the influence of the context in which television was viewed. It is often impossible to tell whether television ‘present[s] viewers with new attitudes and behaviours, or merely reflect[s] these as they already occur’ (p. 10). So, a study will look at, say, depressed children, and conclude that depressed children watch more television, and therefore it is television that makes children depressed. But perhaps children who are already depressed only want to watch television, or perhaps these are the types of children who do not get any attention from their parents so TV is a way of switching off. None of these other possibilities is covered by these studies, though. Gauntlett says that the notion of the effects of television needs to be a nuanced one, and that these effects are ‘self-evidently not effects of the same kind as that of a bat hitting a ball’ (p. 12).

Further, critics of television do not differentiate between types of effects. Gauntlett points out that ‘the choice between soap powders A and B can in no way be compared to the choice of whether or not to go out and commit a violent act’ (p. 86). Advertising is a case in point. Advertising is commonly held as being particularly persuasive of, and damaging to, children. Gauntlett, however, argues that it has effects that are limited to children ‘being led to appreciate and even desire an item’ but that this effect ‘does not lead directly to any behaviour, and is certainly not a function of all adverts to all people’ (p. 90).

The argument that children are passive consumers of television, and especially advertising, is undermined by several studies that show even very young children (three to six year olds) are able to work out the difference between advertising and other programs. Research has also found that five to seven year olds ‘recognised the selling motive of adverts to some extent’ (p. 86). In one study conducted in 1993, the interviewer found that eight to ten year olds,

If children of this age show this level of scepticism of the motives of ads in a medium that evidently provides so many more seductive pleasures for them than reading (going by a comparison of the average child’s ratio of reading to television watching), it would seem debatable that a written text would or could be more powerful or persuasive. This kind of research suggests to me is that the more exposure someone gets to a medium, the better they are going to be at analysing it and being critical of it. These children are obviously not sceptical because they have been taught to be, as children of this age do not generally receive critical skills training in schools––their critical skills have been developed through exposure alone. I see the effects of this teaching at university, where students can do the most incredibly sophisticated analyses of a visual text, but when given a novel or a poem, they come out with something that looks like a year 10 book review.

Heather Scutter, in her book Displaced fictions, called for children and teenagers to be taught how to be critical of what they read. If the research I cited earlier were accurate, it would appear that increasing exposure to a medium naturally increases critical competence. It would seem logical, then, to recommend to teenagers the books that they will enjoy in order to promote such competence. But instead, many teachers and teacher librarians shy away from recommending realist young adult fiction to their students¾ the very fiction that many of them will enjoy and relate to¾ because some of it contains issues or language that adults find disturbing and they fear they will be criticised by parents or other teachers.

I was recently a writer in residence at a public high school in Perth. On my first day, I read, to groups of year eight and nine students, a section out of my novel Obsession, which deals with the narrator almost having drunken sex against her will at a party. The children absolutely love this scene: it is realistic, but it is humorous, and it also suggests that getting drunk at parties, if you are a bogan girl, is not necessarily the safest thing to do. Two teachers complained¾ one who had seen my presentation and one who had not¾ but this was enough to cause waves of concern through the staff. I was asked not to read the scene again to the younger students, and to delete a couple of other sex references, which I did. What the offended teachers did not see, however, was the number of boys who came up to me after that first day and said, ‘I don’t like reading, Miss, but I really want to read your book’. When the head librarian saw the boys who came later in the week to buy the book, she was so shocked she forced them to have a photograph taken with me and the books they had bought, as proof. If those boys had been read a safe, nice passage from the book, they probably would not have been interested in reading it, but they were alerted because I had written about something they spend a great deal of time thinking and making jokes about¾ sex. But how many high school libraries will ban a book if it has mention of sex, if it has language, or if it has any of the other things that kids want to read about, unless it is disguised in the kind of literary language that turns most teenagers off? How many publishers will recommend authors cut out these kinds of things because it will affect sales?

If we want teenagers to read, we have to let them read. We cannot say, ‘Read this, but don’t read this’. We cannot say, ‘You’re not ready for this, and therefore we won’t let you have access to it’. The e-mailed responses I have had to my second novel, Skating the edge, which deals in part with sexual abuse, indicates that the readers who are not ready for something simply will not read it. They will look for the characters, the setting, or the storyline they can relate to, and ignore the rest.

I have a quote from a teenaged reader of Skating the edge, who seems to have picked up the kinds of concerns that adults have about young adult realist fiction, and shows why we should let teenagers choose for themselves. She says:

‘It reached inside me, touched my heart, pulled my insides around and left me analysing every part of it after I’d read it. I’m not saying it freaked me out, or scared me, I meant that it was really moving and I’ll never forget it…I felt like I knew the characters personally, I cried and laughed and sort of lived with them. It’s a book that has made me think twice about everything in my life, and I thank you for that. I loved the style of writing that was used, it made everything more believable. Thanks from everyone you would have touched with this book, especially me.’

In other words, this teenager left her own world, and entered the world of the novel, using nothing else but her imagination. John Ralston Saul, philosopher, ex-economist and spouse of the Canadian Governor-General, wants to put imagination back on the agenda as something we actively think about, nurture and value. One day, he says, someone was sitting on the edge of a cliff, looking out to the horizon, imagining what it would be like to fly. A hundred years after the person on the cliff, we are all flying here, there, and everywhere in these improbable tin tubes. There has been a lot of physics, mechanics, engineering and so on in that hundred years, but it all started off with someone sitting there imagining what it would be like to fly and, Saul says, continuing to imagine and re-imagine as progress is made. Imagination is what enables us to do all sorts of things, as individuals and collectively, whether you are an aeronautical engineer, a writer, a librarian, or an accountant.

Imagination, however, has to be able to have room to move. Imagination has to work to produce all the possibilities from a given situation, and if you give it an area where it cannot go, it will not work. Saul says that imagination is ‘the quality that most naturally draws all of our other qualities together’ (p. 115). Imagination exists in and through the extension of uncertainty, and uncertainty is the fluid that imagination swims in.

As a writer, I want children to read so that they can use their imaginations, something that they may or may not get much practice in doing in their day-to-day lives. I want them to imagine what it is like to be other people, to live other lives, to have experiences different to what they experience. This imagining has real effects. It means that if they have a friend who is going through a lesbian crush, or one who is not having a great time at home, they might understand rather than turn their back. It means that if their father has died of lung cancer or their brother is dying of HIV, they might find new ways of dealing with it and understanding what a life is. It means that if they come across the children from Afghanistan or Somalia in their school, neighbourhood, or city, they might offer them a smile and understanding instead growing up to vote for the people who will send them back to where they belong. Beyond these moral results, there are so many more things that imagination can and might do. But we cannot afford to be fearful of them, or to try to shove them into this function or that function. We have to let imagination and all its effects go, and stop trying to control the outcome.

I want young people to read because I believe that books, unlike television, video games, and school, encourage the exercise of the imagination. Heather Scutter asks whether getting children to read is really enough. What if they are reading bus tickets or Mein Kampf? If a teenager who has never read a book in his or her life comes across Mein Kampf, we might be in trouble. But if the teenager knows what texts are and what they can do, what is quality and what is not, I do not think we have any reason to worry. And if kids are used to using books to imagine with, they might be able to use the bus ticket as the trigger for an imaginative journey of their own. Or they might be able to imagine the kind of scared, hating, small human being that created a book such as Mein Kampf and decide that they never want to become or support such a person. All we have to do as adults is give them the tools to fire the imaginations that already exist, and let the children take care of the rest.

References

Bokey, K., Walter, G. & Rey. J. (2000), From Karrawingi the emu to Care factor zero: Mental health issues in contemporary Australian adolescent literature, Medical Journal of Australia, 173: 625-628.

Gauntlett, D. (1995), Moving experiences: Understanding television’s influences and effects, London: John Libbey & Company Ltd

Lawrinson, J. (2001), Obsession, Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press

Lawrinson, J. (2002), Skating the edge, Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press

Saul, J.R. (2001), On Equilibrium, Melbourne: Penguin Books

Scutter, H. (1999), Displaced fictions: Contemporary Australian books for teenagers and young adults, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press

Sullivan, J. (2000) ‘Are teen books just too bleak?’ in The Age, 16 December 2000 (Media Monitors copy).