Narrative Fractures and Fragments

Abstract

Narrative Fractures and Fragments Margaret R. Higonnet (bio) The magic circle of a story holds a child while the story is told and afterward as well. What happens when the ring is broken? It is the hypothesis of this essay that the child reader (or listener), when confronted with violations of the narrative contract, may experience both stimulus and a sense of threat. Contract may seem too forceful a term to apply to the free imaginative play of children's literature. Yet by virtue of its intensely repetitive forms, children's literature creates clear expectations about how narratives will proceed and particularly about how they will conclude. The child who asks, "Mummy, tell me a story about a princess, a robber, and a dog," awaits with impatience the unraveling of surprising adventures but has at the same time a firm notion of the characters' relative roles and of genre. However unconsciously, established conventions govern not only a child reader's expectations but even an author's sense of what is the "right" or appropriate way to construct a narrative, Unaconventional works that defy our expectations disturb. One of the purposes of this essay is to explore what functions such disturbances, however rare they may be, may play in the understanding of these texts and their relationship to the canon of children's literature. Children's literature is an imperialist form: its ideological functions of social control have become a routine topic. We have studied how the images and themes of children's literature overtly serve processes of social dominance, most obviously in such explicitly didactic forms as Sunday school stories but also indirectly, for example, in the popular comic books studied by Ariel Dorfman. Much less work, however, has been done on the artistic exploitation of narrative form to direct the child reader's responses. As yet, there is little narrative theory specifically adapted to the phenomenon of children's literature; the fine volume on "Narrative Theory and Children's Literature" edited by Hugh Keenan is the exception that proves the rule. Such a theory should offer, for example, a taxonomy of the relations between the child reader and the adult author, between the child listener and adult readers or performers. It should distinguish between the individual experience [End Page 37] of texts and group experiences. As Peter Hunt has argued, a narrative theory for children's literature should consider the range of experiences from oral to literate and the permeation of literate structures by oral ones ("Necessary Misreadings," 107-21).1 This specialized theory would draw upon clinical studies of children's own narrative patterns as well as studies of their developing responses to narrative. My aims here are more modest. I start from the neo-Aristotelian hypothesis, as formulated by Wolfgang Iser, that a reader's responses are guided by narrative patterns. Iser is particularly interested in adult narratives like Tristram Shandy or Ulysses, whose sharp deviations from established patterns both invoke and challenge the usual responses from the reader. There are many types of deviation, but for simplicity's sake, I deal with two types of pronounced "fracture" in the narrative line. Such "gaps" also interest Iser, who calls them "those very points at which the reader can enter into the text, forming his own connections and conceptions and so creating the configurative meaning of what he is reading" (40). I argue that such fractured forms, familiar to us in adult literature as fragments, have been overlooked in children's literature because of our preconceptions about this genre. Genre itself controls structure; for example, most children's literature avoids tragic closure. Whether because of their sense of genre or the marketplace, publishers may persuade authors to follow certain narrative guidelines. When Louisa May Alcott, for instance, wrote Little Women, she was pressed into accepting a type of closure then deemed suitable to girls' books. As she complained to Sam May, "publishers are very perverse & wont let authors have their way so my little women must grow up and be married off in a very stupid style" (Stern 189-90). The choice of genre limits subject matter as well as structure: most children's literature avoids violence...