The Drama of Potentiality in Metafictive Picturebooks: Engaging Pictorialization in Shortcut, Ooh-la-la, and Voices in the Park (with Occasional Assistance from A. Wolf's True Story )

Abstract

In metafictive picturebooks the process of becoming engaged in the story is often due to a realization of its marvellous artifice and a negotiation of the playful collision of multiple sign systems readers are confronted with. In books such as Anthony Browne's Voices in the Park and David Macaulay's Shortcut, Maira Kalman's Ooh-la-la (Max in Love), and Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith's The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, the narrative whole is the result of the contrasts and comparisons set up between the narration and the pictorialization. 1 Readers are drawn in, pushed back, or allowed to participate from a comfortable distance by the pictures' focus, layout, and detail. The narrative engagement in these books is overt; readers engage in an active puzzling together of information, clues, and cues: the drama of potentiality, which results from the interanimation of narration and pictorialization, is a sensory and literary mind game for any number of players. Picturebooks 2 engage their readers in some level of performance every time they are read. One can draw a number of parallels between picturebooks and drama, some of which allow us to consider what it means to engage with characters in metafictive picturebook narratives. The textual combination of pictures and words creates what Murray Smith, a film theorist, calls the of that encourages, permits, or prohibits our alignment with and allegiance to characters in the drama of potentiality constructed by the picturebook's narrator and pictorializer and realized by its reader(s). An examination of the parallels between plays and metafictional picturebooks in section one draws on Shortcut to outline the basics of this always somewhat improvisational text-based game. Section two provides a consideration of some of the games readers have to play in the reading process exemplified by some of the forms of meaning depicted in Ooh-la-la. Together, these two sections provide a framework for the application of Smith's structure of sympathy to the picturebook Voices in the Park in section three. The structure