Abjection and Adolescent Fiction

The publication of Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War in 1974 marks one of those watershed moments when the terms of how we understand adolescent literature and culture are profoundly changed. A boy refuses to participate in his school's chocolate sale. He is threatened, tortured, and eventually publicly beaten and (presumably) killed for his nonconformity.1 Through this text, the reader is forced to confront the horrors of contemporary teen culture—its mandates, its cruelties, its relentless assault on the individual. Also through this text, the reader is introduced to a new kind of figure in adolescent literature and culture—the abject hero.

The shootings at Columbine High School in 1999 mark another such watershed. Two boys, operating at the social rim of their environment, targeted people whom they perceived as being “plugged in” to some group or some identity, be it Christian, athlete, popular crowd, etc. These are precisely the kinds of connections that elude the abject person; as an outsider, he or she has an intensely ambivalent relationship toward the walls that prevent him or her from fitting in. The tension between despising people for whom such connections work and being desirous yet unable to forge those connections themselves erupts in violent and aggressive acts toward the others who make it look so easy. The media is quick to call the perpetrators “monsters,” and to configure such outbreaks of teenage violence as isolated events even as they paradoxically map their occurrence all over the country. The effect of this kind of media attention serves to further isolate people who have already constructed themselves as outsiders, people who cannot seem to fit in with any particular crowd. These teens are living out the condition of abjection. Adolescent fiction that deals with abjection offers us both a means of understanding abjection and its contribution to violent behavior as well as some possible strategies for dealing with abjection that m