The Postmodern Picturebook - Essay Example

?How does the postmodern picturebook set out to capture both the adult and the child reader’s interest? The concept “postmodern” is applied to a range of fields including art, architecture, literature and film and it has many different facets depending on how it is applied. The most prominent feature of the postmodern is that it steps away from the constraints of traditional genres and selects a wild confusion of attributes to create multiple effects in deliberately unexpected or even shocking ways. This encourages people to look afresh at the world and enjoy aspects of ordinary things that could be too easily taken for granted because of over familiarity. This paper examines two postmodern children’s picture books, Voices in the Park, and The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Fairy Tales, and explains four techniques that they use to capture both the adult and the child reader’s interest, namely non-traditional plot structure, shifting character perspective, paratextual devices, and intertextual references. The postmodern children’s picture book does not exist in a vacuum, but follows a long history of writing and illustrating which goes back many centuries. It sets itself against the rather rigid traditional stories such as fables and fairy tales, which usually have an anonymous narrator who leads the reader along a steady chronological timeline through a single plot with key characters who play fairly predictable roles. Children and adults alike enjoy the comfortable framework that is provided, and there are conventions like a “once upon a time” beginning, some thrills and spills with good and bad characters in the middle, and a nice, neat “happy ending” in which all the loose ends of the plot are tied up. A postmodern children’s picture book relies upon this framework too, but in a different way. Instead of following these predictable patterns, it springs outside them and introduces different narrative voices and non-chronological structures to mix things up and make the story multifaceted. A good example of this is Voice in the Park which tells four stories in succession, all of which refer to the same actual time frame. No one narrative voice is dominant, and the perspectives of mother figure, father figure, girl figure and boy figure are allowed to coexist, even though they do not exactly agree with each other. Portraying them as gorillas is a clever technique which echoes older traditions of anthropomorphism but at the same time forces modern readers out of any race or class stereotypes: age and gender are what distinguish the characters, and there is an equal number of each. There is no single plot in this book, but instead there is a spell of time in a park in which four people meet, and the book presents this from four different angles. In The Stinky Cheeseman there is a single narrator, who is the “Jack” character from the well-known fairy tale “Jack and the Beanstalk” but he appears in the book outside the confines of his own story, and interacts with characters from other tales such as the Little Red Hen and Little Red Riding Hood. None of the characters in the stories agree to play along with the original plotlines that adults especially will have learned, and the result is a kaleidoscope of fairy tale elements turned upside down. There are short tales within a tale, but the boundaries are fluid and characters appear in stories where they traditionally do not belong, all of which indicates a postmodern playfulness. The narrator is not in control of the stories, and the characters run amok. This is an example of metafiction (Pantaleo, 2004, p. 213) because it draws attention to how the story is put together. This in turn stimulates discussion between readers about both the content of the story and the whole process of story formation, reading, listening and understanding. Returning to Voices in the Park, this book adult and child personas to engage both adult and child interest. Adults will be able to identify with the mother figure, criticising the harshness of her approach and also sympathising with her concern to protect her child from harm. From a child’s perspective sympathy for the little boy is created. All of the characters bring realistic emotional elements to the fore: the boy is lonely, the father is sad, and the girl is happy and friendly. Weaving in and out of the stories are the carefree and chaotic dogs who project an uncomplicated way of relating to each other that the gorilla characters do not seem to manage. For families or classes reading and re-reading this book it is possible to reflect on how the stories affect each character, with a possibility of varying the lens of reflection each time. The lack of emphasis on one or other plotline encourages readers, both adult and child, to try out the different roles and understand what makes the characters so different. The father’s sadness is caused by unemployment, and this very realistic pressure gives the book a strong connection with the world of modern readers. A very obvious feature of postmodern books is the use of paratextual devices to break the expectations of readers and make them take more notice of what is happening. Pauline Harris makes a distinction between the text itself and paratextual devices which are defined as the text’s “surrounding presentation” which can include such features as book covers, title page, illustrations, font variations, layout etc. (Harris, 2005, p.6) In Voices in the Park several paratextual devices are used to underline the changing character perspectives. So for example the father’s dialogue is printed in a bold font, suggesting a big deep voice, while Charles is given a thin spidery font, to suggest a tiny quiet voice. These can serve as prompts to an adult reader to vary the tone of voice and mimic the different characters. The mother has a formal Times Roman style font, while Smudge has a bold font similar to her father, suggesting she is loud and confident. Emotional tone is indicated also in the colours used, so that the father appears in sombre colours while Smudge has bright scenes with plenty of flowers. The same park scenes and street scenes look very different in each of the sections, because a colour palette is chosen to match the character’s mood. Thus font appeals more to the adult sensibility, and colour more to the child sensibility, and both are engaged in the shifting moods and tones of the book. Harris points out also that these non-verbal elements serve another function also: “The paratext of a picturebook is not only important for providing an interface between reader and text. It also provides an interface between reader and other texts beyond the text-in hand which helps shape the text’s interpretations.” (Harris: 2005, p. 6) This feature of intertextuality is a very powerful technique which sets off a variety of different responses in readers, depending on the amount and type of experiences that they have. Children, who may not be able to see the references to modern art in trees that look like fruits, or graffiti on walls, will nevertheless pick up the deep sense of them. Adults pick up the sense but also the references, and this double reading can be both amusing and intellectually stimulating. In some cases it reaches the level of pastiche, as for example when the little red hen debates with Jack when she can be in the story, or when the giant’s foot appears to crush both the beanstalk and the printed text. In summary, then, we have seen how postmodern children’s picture books explode traditional genres and conventions to create a new reading environment which discourages passive listening to a single narrative line with a clear and didactic point of view and actively encourages lots of different tangents of thought. Adults can enjoy the multiple levels of meaning, and the many external references that are conveyed in text, layout and imagery, while children learn what it means to be involved in story building, both as a reader and as a contributor. When interpretations are open, and endings ironic or negotiable, then children must work with each other and with adults to construct meanings that make sense to them, given all their previous knowledge from literature and from life. Postmodern picture books reinvigorate reading for both adults and children, and they encourage exploration of traditional forms, which they use as a starting point, as well as new exploratory forms, which they present as an alternative. References Anstey, Michele. “ ‘It’s not all black and white’: Postmodern picture books and new literacies.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 45 (6), (2002), pp. 444-457. Browne, Anthony. Voices in the Park. London: Doubleday/Corgi, 1998. Goldstone, Bette P. “Postmodern Experimentsm” in Children’s Literature: Approaches and Territories, London: Macmillan and Open University, 2009, pp. 320-329. Harris, Pauline. “At the interface between reader and text: devices in children’s picturebooks that mediate reader expectations and interpretations. Australian Association for Research in Education: Conference Proceedings, Paramatta, 2005. Available online at: http://www.aare.edu.au/05pap/har05606.pdf Panteleo, Sylvia. “Young children interpret the metafictive in Anthony Browne’s Voices in the Park. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy. 4 (2) (2004), pp. 211-233. Scieszka, Jon and Smith, Lane. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. London: Viking, 1992. Read More