Read All Over: Postmodern Resolution in Macaulay's Black and White

Abstract

Read All Over:Postmodern Resolution in Macaulay's Black and White Deborah Kaplan (bio) Numerous critics have written about the conventions of narrative structure and their postmodern subversion. Award-winning novels frequently use unusual narrative techniques that have been heavily influenced by the growth of postmodern and deconstructive theory. The children's book world, too, has begun to use non-standard narrative conventions, usually to similar effect. Usually postmodern storytelling in both adult and children's literature subverts textual authority—the notion that the text has some objectively true wisdom that it is empowered to bestow—and perforce questions the notion of objectively knowable truth. Conventional theorist wisdom has it that some standard narrative structures (such as temporal order, or cause and effect) provide closure, comfort, and resolution. These structures are likely to appear in children's books. Peter Hunt writes of the "truism that in early developmental stages, children prefer stories with an element of 'closure'—that is, where there is a 'sense of an ending.' More than this, they prefer that something is resolved, that normality is restored, that security is emphasized" (127). But a "quality" novelist writing for adults, conventional wisdom holds, is not trying to provide us with closure and comfort. When Hunt writes that "the best of contemporary fiction aims to break the schemas and conventions of text which children's fiction is committed to teaching" (121), he is making the unspoken connection that breaking those narrative connections automatically provides discomfort, lack of closure, disruption.1 In fact, Hunt (possibly speaking ironically) refers to circular narratives that restore normality as something which is found in "'low-level' adult texts, where reassurance is required" (127). Thus, narrative structure is carefully ranked, from the theoretically more advanced texts with disrupted structure, suitable for adults and sophisticated children, and theoretically simpler circular texts, appropriate for children and unsophisticated adults. While many professionals in the children's literature field will question what may or may not be suitable for children, few people question this scale of sophistication that progresses from the circular to the disrupted modern or postmodern text.2 There is a growing body of children's literature that welcomes disruption and revelation over comfort and resolution. Whether or not this disruption is welcome in either adult or children's literature is a subject for numerous other articles, not this one. Instead, I claim that the disruption of codes in David Macaulay's Black and White creates a delightful reading experience, one that promises not the dissolution of narrative, but the creation of infinite narrative. The adult postmodern novel usually does conform to conventional wisdom. Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills, for example, has a nonlinear narrative that conforms to the critical expectation. The three narratives of A Pale View of Hills at first seem to be separate: the story told in the book's present; the flashbacks to the youth of the protagonist; the story she is told by her neighbor in those flashbacks. Throughout almost the entire novel, these narratives are kept separate. Although a reader may see allusions to one narrative in another, these elements of the story are discrete and can be easily separated by their discrete casts of characters and by their placement in different locations on a linear timescale. It is not until the novel draws to a close that the text blurs these distinctions. Suddenly characters who have previously been distinct from one another lose their differentiation. It is no longer clear whether the narrated events have been taking place in the time frames previously stated. Narrative expectation has been disrupted; what was objective fact on the prior page is no longer knowable. The text has become what Hunt (following Chatman) refers to as "the plot of revelation" (118): supposedly a more mature plot for an audience too sophisticated to read simple resolved plots. Authors, critics, reviewers, and teachers of children's literature continually push the envelope of the readership that is considered sufficiently mature for these self-deconstructing plots. Avi's Nothing But the Truth disrupts narrative expectation as much as any postmodern adult novel. Nothing But the Truth presents multiple narratives, each supposed within its own context to...