SOURCE: Moss, Geoff. “Metafiction and the Poetics of Children's Literature.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 15, no. 2 (summer 1990): 50-2.

[In the following essay, Moss explores metafictional children's texts.]

My starting point is the question: “Do metafictional texts have any place in children's literature?”—This is a little like asking: “should children be exposed to post-modernism … ?” To which the answer from children's literature circles might be either, “what on earth are you talking about?” or more likely, “Not bloody likely!” However, there is a Chinese proverb which goes like this: “If you draw your sword against the prince you must throw away the scabbard.” And it is in this spirit of revolutionary (and probably foolhardy) zeal that I want to answer my first question against the background of how we might arrive at and understand the underlying systems of convention which make literary meaning—or a poetics of children's literature.

One way to approach work in this area is through looking at texts which seem to fit unproblematically into the category of children's books. Charlotte's Web, The Wind in Willows, The Secret Garden or The Eighteenth Emergency may be books that are problematic in other ways, but it is never argued that they are not fiction for children. Another approach is to look at books which don't fit, books which seem to defy the rules. Perhaps the most useful way to describe such works would be as “counter texts”—a term I borrowed from Barthes. Counter texts are aberrations within the body of a plot structure which, when recognised, shed light on functional norms at play within the whole text. Here, I want to use the term not within a single text, but to signify individual texts within the broader “text” of children's literature.

At the limits of children's literature there are a number of innovative or experimental texts. Robert Cormier, Alan Garner and Jill Paton Walsh have written novels which place considerable demands on teenage readers. In picture books David McKee, John Burningham, Fulvio Testa, Anthony Browne and others have toyed with the interplay of language and picture in radical ways. However, the form of writing generally exemplified in fiction for children invites the reader to accept that the author has expressed his or her personality in a unique vision or interpretation of the world and that the reader has direct access to that personality. Technique and structure are backgrounded so that the message of the text is conveyed through an apparently neutral or transparent medium which allows the utmost identification with the author's intention, provided that the text is read carefully. The majority of the fiction aimed at the teenage market is “closed”; it aims to deny the plurality of meaning and might be termed “readerly” after Barthes. Such texts assume a form of innocence, especially about the medium of language, on behalf of the reader who is invited to accept, without question, an established relationship between signifier and signified. It is this assumed innocence of the reader which gives us a clue as to why this is the dominant form in children's literature.

At the other end of the continuum (although Barthes did not truly intend his terms to be classificatory) the “writerly” text has the tendency to foreground technique and structure and propounds no simple mimetic connection between fiction and reality, between signifier and signified. Metafiction is a term that can be applied to some writerly texts. Patricia Waugh describes it thus: “Metafiction is writing which consistently displays its conventionality, which explicitly lays bare its conditions of artifice, and which explores thereby the problematic relationship between life and fiction” (4). My “counter texts” are all varieties of metafiction, but I would like to draw the distinction here between the texts I shall examine and those texts which have characters telling stories within their own narrative. Although often worthy of study, the story within the story tends to follow in the tradition of self-reflexivity in the novel as a form, but it is rarely self-consciously questioning enough to come under the radical umbrella of metafiction.

Before I look at these counter texts, I want to look at the reasons why there are so few metafictional texts for children. There does seem to be a resistance to experiment in certain quarters. John Rowe Townsend, for example, quoting Isaac Bashevis Singer, proclaims that “while adult literature is deteriorating, literature for children is gaining quality and stature” and he sees “the modern novel giving the impression of slinking into a corner: narrow, withdrawn, self-occupied” (17, 18). Clearly the influence of Fowles or Calvino must not be allowed to pollute the purity of children's literature. Townsend would far rather see child readers “enter into things and live the story.” David Rees, too, is intent on judgement. Alan Garner's Red Shift is “very nearly impenetrable” (61) and “not a children's book” (65). Departure from the narrative norm, such as in I am the Cheese, is viewed with suspicion and perhaps even distaste. Steve Bowles, a young British critic, probably sums up this kind of evaluative stance when he condemns Aidan Chambers's Dance on my Grave as the kind of “arty farty stuff” which “has plagued British teenage fiction for years” (17). These critics provide useful examples of the attitude that metafiction is undesirable and too difficult for children.

So are metafictional texts for adults only? Are they just too difficult for children? Charles Sarland, looking at the structure of popular novels by Dahl and Blyton concludes that “children are remarkably competent at handling all sorts of technical devices of story telling provided that the story is clearly of their culture, for them” (170). He argues that there might be a case for children being able to cope with quite complex forms. For Sarland, “modern adult fiction may be infinitely more complex (than children's fiction) but the difference is quantitative not qualitative” (169). Hugh Crago claims that “our creative and publishing practice has denied many child readers the chance to experience anything but the simplified.” Furthermore, he takes Sarland's arguments about competency a stage further when he wants us to perceive two important consequences of looking at response: “first, that children's responses to literature do not differ in any significant way from adult responses given that the comparison is made between individual children and adults whose articulacy and sophistication is roughly equivalent; second that critics and educationalists have no more right to predict the responses of ‘child readers in general’ than they have to predict that of ‘adult readers in general” (148).

If it is inappropriate to assume that children will find metafictional texts difficult or uncomfortable we have to look elsewhere for an answer to the mystery of the paucity of such texts. Jacqueline Rose observes that many commentaries of children's literature praise the qualities of the readerly text; she goes on to argue that children's fiction is impossible because it is always an adult construct which “sets up the child as an outsider to its own process, and then aims, unashamedly, to take the child in” (2). She argues that the child is portrayed as a pure point of origin in relation to language, the state and sexuality and that through this conceptualization of the child and the world as knowable in a direct and unmediated way, adult relationships towards them are made safe. If this ideological reading of literature is accepted then we can see that metafiction, which denies that language is invisible and prevents total absorption in or identification with a book, subverts this framing or repetition of the child which has become canonical in children's literature. If Rose is right, then the tendency is for adults to promote closed rather than open texts for children, to cut the child off from the experiment lest it should be dangerous and to deny metafiction because it turns the reader into a self-conscious collaborator rather than an easily manipulated consumer.

Recent literary theory has presented a view of the self not as unitary and whole, but as problematic, a fiction which arises from a polyphony of discourses (see Belsey). Children's literature, perhaps because of its early didacticism and late liberal humanist tendencies, has continued to promote and privilege the status of the subject except in a very few cases. Breaktime by Aidan Chambers is one of these rare examples. It traces the journey of an adolescent boy named Ditto, to manhood through his first sexual experience, his relationship with his ill father and his desire to escape the suffocation of home life. In this, we have nothing especially different from the run of the mill realism of teenage novel. However, the ways of telling this story are as important as the story itself. In fact, the book begins with a framing device which calls into question the whole process of fiction writing. Ditto's friend, Morgan, believes that literature is useless and too logical to be lifelike so Ditto challenges this with a record of his “jaunt” which will “take what form I feel like giving it at the time of writing. I do this because you feel fiction is contrived, designed to fit certain pre-set ends. I shall use whatever styles of prose or verse or writing of any kind I wish to use and which seems best for what I want to say” (31). What then follows in the book is Ditto's account of his travels; he uses dialogue, playscript, typescript, stream of consciousness, first person, third person, cartoon, lists, reports, graffitti, letters, jokes, guidebooks, history books, quotation, footnotes and any amount of self-conscious cliche.

Breaktime emphasises rather than suppresses its intertextuality and consequently is, in Bakhtin's phrase, “dialogic.” Thus, the voices within the novel are relativized so that no one form is given a privileged position—such as when the suspense of a burglary scene is fractured with the contrasting effects of inane jokes and quotations from Dickens and Chaucer. At other times the reader's journey becomes what Chambers calls “graphematic as well as linguistic” (Booktalk, 96) as drawings, letters and even blank pages help the story along. And there is a story which is easy to follow through the realistic conventions within the text. As Waugh points out: “very often realistic conventions supply the ‘control’ in metafictional texts, the norm against which the experimental strategies can foreground themselves” (18), thus keeping the readers from extreme dislocation. When Ditto takes Helen back to his tent with the intention of seducing her, the episode is recounted in the first person by Ditto—a common technique in many realist novels. But the seduction itself suddenly disrupts any feeling of being at home in a “transparent” text when the text on the page splits into two columns. The right hand column is Ditto's reaction to the sexual act; it, in turn, is split into two voices: in italics are his initial attempts at self control (“ten nines are ninety”) which are gradually transformed into the Molly Bloom-like rhythms of sex (“… is this what makes the body is this the howdyado the I'm all right jack …” (124)); in normal type are the more observable events (“her hands ran down my chest” (123)). The two voices become one at the moment of climax. On the right hand side of the page is a dry factual account of sexual intercourse from an educational book by Dr. Spock. The effect is a distancing from Ditto's involvement in the event because, although we see clearly his feelings and thoughts, we also have to read the section three times and at each reading Ditto's position seem more amusing and absurd because it is so self-conscious.

This section is typical of the novel. The alternating perspective shows us how much the character of Ditto is constructed by the novelist and the reader rather than by reference to reality. Another section is entitled “Who is Ditto?” and we are given a range of descriptive devices through which Ditto constructs himself. At the end, however, we are given a space to add “any other attributes you think are important and which you note or deduce from a study of these pages previous and to come” (34). As Ditto is, apparently, obsessed with identity, we, as readers, are abruptly shown that he is exactly what we make him to be. Ditto's many escapades all apparently enable him to come to a greater awareness of self. As he gains sexual and emotional maturity we see some hope for his relationship with his father. But the irony of this is that the change in him is itself a construct realised through fiction. When the novel ends there is perhaps a confirmation of Barbara Hardy's celebrated phrase “narrative is a primary act of mind” when Morgan asks: “Are you saying I'm just a character in a story?” Ditto replies: “Aren't we all?” (139).

Breaktime, then, is a major metafictional novel for teenagers just as Chambers's other books Dance on my Grave and Now I Know also make use of experimental technique to subvert not only our view of the teenage novel, but also, our own attitudes to homosexuality and religion.

Peter Hunt's A Step off the Path seems to be another kind of metafictional novel which works both as “fabulation” which Scholes has defined as fiction which “offers a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know and yet returns to confront that world in some cognitive way” (12) and also as “historiographic metafiction” which, Linda Hutcheon argues, explores history as text, deconstructing the continuities of narratives about the past. With its passing references to the popular “famous five” adventures of Enid Blyton, it can be read simply as a time-slip story in which a group of children get caught up in an Arthurian legend. But behind this conventional device is the idea that the whole adventure is apparently actually “told” by another character in the book who is not caught up in the main storyline. We are warned at the start that there is “a long weekend of storying ahead” (18). Jo, the young storyteller, seems to be structuring what is happening in the main story, but sometimes this is in doubt, and we are called upon to question the authority of the author or storyteller in any story. The relationship between the Arthurian story world and the real world is constantly questioned through positing alternative storylines, through confusing telephone calls from one world to the other and through the storyteller herself losing interest in a story which seems to be telling itself. Through making Merlin a villain and a woman, Hunt makes us re-read cultural history and in doing so he shows us that reality and history are fictive constructs. He allows us to read conventionally, but warns us to question this involvement: “No,” Matt said. “You're getting mixed up with real life. You can change what happens in real life but you can't change stories.” He stopped, thinking. “Or is it the other way round?” (139).

The book is less self-conscious than Breaktime but it might well give teenagers a thought-provoking introduction to the playfulness of metafiction just as The Book Mice by Tony Knowles might do the same for younger readers. The mice in this book draw attention to the conventions of sequence, pagination, linearity and suspense as they crawl through holes in the book, climb over the edges of the pages and even clamber out of the book onto the desk on which it is resting. “Leave the book, how can we possibly do that?” “Easy,” says Kipps, “just climb out like this” (10). On the desk they spill some ink which seeps into the book and grows as a black splodge on the later pages. When they return to the book they are frightened by their own inky footprints on the blank page. Of course, at the end of the book they decide to turn over a new leaf. Clever and playful as it is, it is interesting how, in the world of picture books and young readers, where conventions are easily challenged because they are newly learned, not so ingrained, The Book Mice, despite its metafictional thrust, is not a counter text in the same way as Breaktime and Step off the Path.

Metafictional texts do seem to me to have a place in the field of children's literature. Firstly, because children do have an interest in these kinds of texts—certain kinds of readers find them fascinating. Secondly, because such texts may well have the function of providing an active criticism of more mainstream texts, of defining the limits of poetics and finally because children's literature, like any form of literature will inevitably build on, toy with and perhaps even destroy conventional forms as it develops. Perhaps provocation is as important as satisfaction for children. That's why it is worth throwing away the scabbard.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. London: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. London: Jonathan Cape, 1975.

Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Methuen (New Accents), 1980.

Bowles, Steve. “New Horizons?” in Books for Keeps, 42, Jan. 1987.

Chambers, Aidan. Booktalk. London: Bodley Head, 1985.

Crago, Hugh. “Cultural Categories and the Criticism of Children's Literature,” Signal, 30 (1979): 140-150.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Methuen, 1988.

Rees, David. The Marble in the Water. Boston: The Horn Book, 1980.

Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan. London: Macmillan, 1984.

Sarland, Charles. “The Secret Seven versus The Twits: The Cultural Clash or Cosy Combination?,” Signal, 42 (1983): 155-171.

Scholes, Robert. Structural Fabulation. London: Notre Dame University Press, 1975.

Townsend, John Rowe. A Sense of Story. London: Longman, 1971.

Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction. London: Methuen (New Accents), 1984.