Resumo de The Young And The Restless

When did teenage angst and arrogance begin? Many baby boomers, still
fighting over the legacy of the 1960s as they lurch toward retirement,
think of themselves as products of the rock ?n? roll rebellion that
shattered the bourgeois proprieties of the 1950s. Chronicled in song
and witnessed by the new electronic media, the impudent saga of the
?60s counterculture seemed unique.

Jon Savage?s massive new book, ?Teenage: The Creation of Youth
Culture,? provides the prequel. There has in fact been wave after wave
of youthful defiance ? Savage begins his study in the 19th century ?
whether idealistic or hedonistic or both. The author of ?England?s
Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond,? Savage seems
more at home with popular culture than with the fine arts. Hence the
material in ?Teenage? on ragtime, swing and the movies is stronger than
that on modernist painters and poets.
Savage traces his
interest in generational insurrection to his childhood in the tranquil
London suburbs of the 1950s and ?60s. His father was a World war II
veteran, and the legacy of that war was still visible in the bombed-out
districts of England?s major cities. Savage feels that the ?unresolved
horror? of the war period ?informed the extreme manifestations of youth
culture? in which he ?thoroughly immersed? himself during the 1960s and
?70s.
?Teenage? takes a while to hit its stride. The first
chapter awkwardly interweaves the journal of Marie Bashkirtseff (a
Russian-born painter who died of tuberculosis at the age of 25 in Paris
in 1884) with the grisly crimes of a 15-year-old serial child murderer,
Jesse Pomeroy, who was jailed in 1874 in Massachusetts. This strained
pairing, with its manufactured shock, was all too typical of
pretentious academic books in postmodernist cultural studies in the
late 1980s and ?90s.
Worse, the chapter ends with a
whiplash-inducing jump backward to the late 18th century of Rousseau
and Goethe ? the crucible of youth-powered Romanticism that should have
been front and center at the start. Given this book?s sympathy to every
modern glimmer of homosexuality, it is strange that there is no
discussion of the ancient Greeks? glorification of youth, which was
revived by Italian Renaissance artists like Donatello and Michelangelo.
But
once it gets going, ?Teenage? becomes compulsive reading. Savage
parallels the ?militarist vision for youth? promoted by newly
industrial and aggressively nationalist Germany in the 1870s and ?80s
to the ?cult of masculinity? and bullying suppression of individuality
embodied in team sports in elite British schools, which shaped boys for
imperial service.
Savage amusingly juxtaposes the earnest
social prototype of the ?muscular Christian? with the capricious
iconoclasm of Arthur Rimbaud and Oscar Wilde.
Missing, however, is the Romantic lineage of these writers in Théophile
Gautier and other aesthetes : not everything in literature should be
interpreted as a direct response to current events or social conditions.
The
portrait of Wilde is distorted in treating him only as a decadent and
an oppressed gay outcast. Wilde?s success as a writer of stage
comedies, as well as a bon vivant who catered to the elite, is ignored.
Furthermore, when Savage says that ?Wilde?s influence over the young
was a central issue? at his two trials and that he was accused of
?sodomy with 12 youths,? the running theme of social class is oddly
erased. Wilde?s violation of class borders in consorting with grooms,
valets and coachmen was a major point raised against him in court ? and
one he did not honestly answer.
Savage?s account of the ?Apaches?
? criminal bands of ?inner urban savages? ? of early-20th-century Paris
is fascinating, but in rightly calling them ?essentially a media
creation? he neglects to trace their popular lineage. Apache dancing ?
a fierce psychodrama of sex war ? would be introduced to film by
Rudolph Valentino and would linger as an erotic trope well into the
Beat era, as can be seen in Audrey Hepburn?s brilliant feminist parody
of it in a Parisian nightclub in ?Funny Face.?
Whether L. Frank
Baum?s ?Wonderful Wizard of Oz,? published in 1900, should be
classified as an artifact of youth culture seems questionable. Savage
is on firm ground when he links Baum?s Emerald City to the White City
of the World?s Columbian Exposition. But tornado-tossed Dorothy belongs
to an earlier fairy-tale tradition of the questing girl-child, revived
in Lewis Carroll?s spunky Alice.

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