Metafiction and Interpretation: William Mayne's Salt River Times, Winter Quarters , and Drift

Abstract

Metafiction and Interpretation:William Mayne's Salt River Times, Winter Quarters, and Drift John Stephens (bio) William Mayne has long been considered one of the more "difficult" of contemporary children's writers. Studies of his work focus mainly on books for older readers and tend to begin by remarking on their difficulty (Sarland 107; Walker 31; Rees 94). The essence of the "problem" of Mayne, first isolated by Charles Sarland and Aidan Chambers, is that he cultivates a narrative stance that distances reader from text, demanding that analysis predominate over empathy. With hindsight, we can see that in the novels discussed by Sarland and Chambers the narrative stance is part of Mayne's use of the strategies of modernist fiction (Stephens "Modernism"). In the early eighties, Mayne began to emphasize further the process of analysis (and thereby to reflect an increasing use of postmodernist modes) by including in his books substantial metafictional episodes that simultaneously advance the story and act as models for interpreting the narrative techniques that inform it. The function of those episodes in Salt River Times, Winter Quarters, and Drift is examined here. All three have again generally been regarded as "difficult" (a reviewer remarked in Horn Book, with some hint of relief, on the "less difficult and complex" prose of Drift), but readers prepared to take up the challenge will not only find the books rewarding in themselves but may also discover that the experience broadens their awareness of how fiction works. Metafiction—the strategy of suspending the illusion of fiction in some way in order to direct attention to the processes of making fiction—is often regarded with suspicion; at worst, it can seem merely a postmodernist self-indulgence. In Mayne's hands, though, it can play an important part in a reader's understanding of his fictions. When they are not being guided through a book by an omniscient and interventionist narrator, readers are subject to less constraint but must also take more responsibility, and this has two notable consequences. First, by drawing attention to aspects of the process [End Page 101] of text production, Mayne invites his readers to share his delight not just in the end-product—at a simple level, the story—but also in the process of production. Second, by focusing on how the text means, he is able to offer analogies to how meaning is ascribed to events in everyday reality. Events in life, as in fiction, may not have a particular and obvious significance, but they acquire it by interpretation, and this in turn depends largely on the presuppositions of the interpreter. The responsibility of the interpreter is enlarged in these three books by the way each involves the representation and interpretation of minorities or subcultures, and each shows to varying degrees how the presuppositions of an outsider result in misinterpretation. The distance Mayne maintains between text and reader reminds us that we, too, are interpreters outside the text. The analogy between interpreting human situations and reading fictions is expressed by the strategy of placing at the center of each narrative some element of mystery, a concealed center that the protagonists strive to reach as they struggle to interpret events and the world in which they live, and then building into the narrative the metafictional episodes, which represent this quest for the center as analogous to a reader's struggle with the text. One of the ways Mayne signals the presence of this metafictional element is by his handling of levels of narration, whereby he virtually eliminates narrator presence in favor of character focalization—that is, presenting the world of the fiction as perceived by one or more of the characters in it. Theories of narrative have for some time distinguished between primary narrators, who tell a story and present a framing point of view; secondary narrators within that story, who may narrate segments of story from a different point of view; and focalizers, characters who do not tell their own story but whose point of view nevertheless prevails because they are presented as the lens through which ideas, events, and other characters are perceived (see Martin 142-46; Stephens "Middle of Being"; Stephens Language 67-69). Broad...