It’s ninety years since André Breton — re Surrealism and the extravagant possibilities of ‘marvelous’ literature — wrote: “At an early age children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they fail to retain a sufficient virginity of mind to thoroughly enjoy fairy tales. No matter how charming they may be, a grown man would think he were reverting to childhood by nourishing himself on fairy tales, and I am the first to admit that all such tales are not suitable for him. The fabric of adorable improbabilities must be made a trifle more subtle the older we grow, and we are still at the age of waiting for this kind of spider…” In 2014, the fact that ‘virginity of mind’ is being retained further into chronological adulthood is evident in the dominance of Marvel/DC franchises (10 DC Comics movies are slated for 2016-2020), intertextual TV crud like Once Upon A Time, and Grimm, the spate of forgettable fairy tale adaptations that included Hansel and Gretel, Red Riding Hood, and the capitalist triumph of young adult fiction as a manufactured marketing category. We’ve got the wrong kind of spider, man. According to Publisher’s Weekly “55% of buyers of works that publishers designate for kids aged 12 to 17 — known as YA books — are 18 or older, with the largest segment aged 30 to 44, a group that alone accounted for 28% of YA sales. And adults aren’t just purchasing for others — when asked about the intended recipient, they report that 78% of the time they are purchasing books for their own reading.” This represents many things, primarily that Breton’s surrealist ache for a challenging imaginative literature for adults has been largely defeated by the anodyne placebos of young adultism as the most prosperous antidote to 19th century versions of realism, and the comfortable bourgeois trust in mimesis. Of course, this arachnid writing that Breton proposed did exist, has existed, and does exist, under the floorboards and tiles. Yet, the result of such pervasive young adultism in our culture is that childish things are not put away, but have spread like unruly grout to fill the cracks where an imaginative avant-garde should be, spread by a trowel of materialist nostalgia, and boredom. The problem, at this point, is that this suspended adolescence, this chastity club-pledged virginity of mind, threatens us with a point where new writers become suspended kidults writing downward and backwards, in a bathroom without spiders.
