Robert Cormier and the Postmodernist Possibilities of Young Adult Fiction

"My God, I know it's complex and ambiguous and everything, but why not try to have young people reach?"

—Fabio Cohen, publisher of I Am the Cheese, quoted in Sutton 30

This study of Robert Cormier deals with a positive view of children's literature: its possibilities not its impossibilities. For Jacqueline Rose, the impossibility of children's literature stems from those adult readers and writers who desire a literature that returns us to "something innocent and precious which we have destroyed" and who, consequently, impose their wishes upon the literature they produce for children (45). Cormier's works challenge this imposition by denying his readership a romantic view of society and by subverting a unitary view of childhood through the content and form of his work. Fiction such as Cormier writes interrogates the boundaries of children's literature as a genre, and the presence of his adolescent audience brings a further challenge to any notion of a unitary childhood that is the "Other" of a unitary adulthood.

Peter Hunt's opening to "The Text and the Reader" provides a useful summary of the tradition of viewing children's texts as monological—interpretable on only one level. Hunt describes First Term at Trebizon as such a text: "It is very familiar, it is predictable; because it involves little deduction, it can be read easily . . . it is not so much implying a readership as prescribing the level of reading" (82). He goes on to say that the problem with texts that "challenge these assumptions" is that they "commonly find themselves in the no-person's land between writings for adults (so-called) and writings for children (so-called)" (84). This no-person's land often goes under the heading "Young Adult" or "adolescent" fiction. Adolescent literature often embraces cultural references that do not make for a safe read: violence, suicide, and sexuality, not conventional topics in the genre of children's literature. Moreover, the security of the text is often destabilized further by the narrative form, which tends to foreground the instability of the narrative through fragmented or cyclical narrative structures and multiple narrators. Nevertheless, it is important to align adolescent fiction with the genre of children's literature, rather than to discuss it on a purely literary and theoretical level as popular fiction, because it operates as a "supragenre" that at once moves beyond the generic expectations of much children's literature and is dependent upon it. If the term "children's literature" refers to a genre housing non-peer texts (that is, texts with an adult as implied author and a child as implied reader), Cormier, and other writers of adolescent literature, operate within this genre because even while they work on the cutting edge of children's literature, they still maintain a non-peer relationship with their readers.¹

Rose describes books written for the child-within-the-adult; what I am describing are books written for the adult-within-the-child. The latter type of writing challenges the construction of childhood that is the concern of Rose's book. Her depiction of the impossibility of children's fiction comes from a definition in which "children's fiction sets up a world in which the adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after (reader, product, receiver) but where neither of them enters the space in between" (2). The postmodernist features of Cormier's writing bring new possibilities to reader and critic, because the relationship between author and reader is foregrounded, and the implied adult author and the implied child reader can enter the space in between.

The name "Cormier" conjures up descriptions of violent acts, shifting narratives, institutional power, and lonely protagonists. Cormier's work interests me in two contexts. First, his writing of adolescent fiction extends the possibilities for fiction within the genre of children's literature. The challenging aspects of his stories are not just his coverage of taboo subject areas but also what may be called the postmodernist features of his writing: his uses of metafiction and multiple points of view, his destabilization of the reader, and his...