Narrative Theory and Children's Literature

Peter Hunt

Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Volume 9, Number

4, Winter 1984-1985, pp. 191-194 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/chq/summary/v009/9.4.hunt.html

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Special Section
Narrative Theory and Children's Literature
by Peter Hunt
But theory is not criticism. Its purpose
is not to offer new or enhanced
readings of works, but precisely to
"explain what we all do in the act of
normal reading, with unconscious
felicity."
Seymour Chatman
1. Why Theory?
Critical theory may not seem to have
much to do with children and books, but it
is, as Alan Garner's Granny Reardun says
of Smithing, "alack of everything" (31).
Good work with children's literature
depends on coherent and thoughtful
criticism, and good criticism depends on
coherent and thoughtful theory. It is not
simply that children's literature studies
should make use of all the available
disciplines, nor simply, as Anita Moss puts
it that "If we believe . . . that children's
literature occupies a place in the traditions
of all literature, we owe it to ourselves to
explore what is going on in the field of
literary criticism, even if we decide to
reject it". (Quarterly, [Spring 1981]:25).
We cannot really "decide to reject it,"
because in time (as happened long ago
with the "new" criticism, and as is
happening already with "structuralism")
new theories change our habits of thought
and become the norm.
Theory is an uncomfortable and
uncomforting thing, for by seeking to
explain what we might have thought was
obvious, it draws attention to some of the
hidden problems of the children's literature
business. We usually get along quite
successfully by assuming things to be true
that we really know to be quite untrue; for
example: that we know how people read,
and what happens when they do; that the
perceptions and reactions of children and
adults to books are much the same; that
we know how and why stories work.
Theory may not solve any of these
problems directly, but it forces us to
confront them.
From another angle, critical theory and
children's literature have an interesting
relationship—for children's literature is an
ideal testing ground. Unlike other forms
of literature, which assume a peer-
audience and a shared context of reading
(and which can therefore acknowledge,
but play down, the problem of how the
audience receives the text) children's
literature is centered on what is in effect a
cross-cultural transmission. The reader,
inside or outside the book, has to be a
constant concern, partly because of the
adults' intermediary role, and partly
because whatever is implied by the text,
there is even less guarantee than usual that
the reader will choose (or be able) to read
in the way suggested. Similarly, children's
literature is a paradigm for
"deconstructive" criticism: uniquely, the
conditions of misreading, and the politics
of power and knowledge are contained
within the books and the circumstances of
their production and transmission.
But, most of all, children's books centre
on narrative: in a sense they are about
narrative—and until relatively recently,
narrative has been the poor relation in
both theory and criticism. The problem
was, of course, summed up by E. M.
Forster in 1927—and things have changed
surprisingly little since then:
Yes—oh dear yes—the novel tells a
story. That is the highest factor
common to all novels, and I wish that
it were not so, that it could be
something different—melody, or
perception of truth, not this low
atavistic form. For the more we look
at the story . . . the less we shall find
to admire (34).
Children's books have suffered from the
association or identification with
narrative, and with the burgeoning of
narrative theory should, perhaps, have
begun to benefit. After all, one major
branch of critical theory has its roots in
Propp's work on folk tales, while
psychological and sociological criticism
uses such tales as central examples (see, for
example, Bettelheim, and Zipes). (Whether
or not the folk tale really has much to do
with children, its 'relegation to the nursery'
as Tolkien put it, is a fact of publication
and marketing, if not of life) (see also
LeGuin). In fact, wherever you look, there
seems to be an inevitable link between
children's literature and modern criticism.
Theories of the developmental stage of
literary response (Applebee, 124) are
strikingly similar to the way in which we
come to understand criticism; the history
of the Novel itself, which developed away
from the explicitly "transferred story
teller" to the classic realist text of the
nineteenth century, and to the present self-
conscious forms, parallels the developing
relationship of the child-reader with texts.
Narrative theory occupies a pivotal
position in our discussion of any fiction. If
we see the text as a hierarchy in which the
syntagmatic "surface" stylistic level (what
we read) and the paradigmatic "deep"
meanings and structures (which make the
cook really interesting)—the thematic
level—are linked, then the link is
191
narrative. Theme is expressed as narrative,
narrative in style. The shape or pattern of
the narrative not only holds our attention,
but also encapsulates and brings us closer
to meanings. (Of course, if we could
express the themes directly, there would be
no need of story). As C S. Lewis
observed,
Something which the educated receive
from poetry can reach the masses
through stories of adventure, and
almost in no other way ... .It must
be understood that . . .the plot is
only really a net whereby to catch
something else. The real theme may
be, and perhaps usually is, something
that has no sequence in it, something
other than a process and much more
like a state or quality (102).
But we must beware of over-
simplification. Because narrative—as
Lewis says, and Bettelheim, for one,
demonstrates—can so easily be reduced to
symbolic action ("She does this; that
means . . . . " "the giant stands
for. . . .") it can lead us straight to that
most insidious and dangerous of critical
educational misconceptions: that a story
has a single meaning. It does not; nor does
it have a single narrative shape (or
skeleton) which, if we are clever enough
we can identify. This may be a convenient
fiction, useful for grading papers, but what
is important is the act of perception—for
this shapes what is perceived. Just as
reading creates meaning, so it creates
rather than describes, the form of a
narrative.
This is important, just because is so
ordinary. We paraphrase novels, retell
stories, summarize for book reports: but as
we do so, we are being our abstractions on
significant elements. When we make our
own narratives, we shape the story
materials in a pattern that depends on
what they mean to us. (Some novels, such
as Humphry Clinker, are based on this
idea). But it is vital to see that the same
thing happens with a story that has
already been told, and which has been
"fixed" as text. Thus we cannot really talk
with any confidence about what narrative
shape will be most appropriate to a child,
or most satisfactory, for we cannot
guarantee what narrative shape will be
perceived.
This may be disturbing enough—but
there is another important point. Narrative
theory relates to and derives from "adult"
readings of "adult" literature. It has
become a commonplace of children's
192
literature studies that, as Rebecca Lukens
puts it, "literature for children differs from
literature for adults in degree but not in
kind" (177): we can, therefore, apply the
same critical theories and tools. Indeed,
the lure of academic respectability has
dictated that we must. But it may well be
that a difference in degree constitutes
difference in kind—and, as we have seen,
things which are obvious in peer-
communication, may not be so obvious
when adults are involved. All of which
suggests that while we may learn from
narrative theory, what we must look for is
a children's-literature-specific theory.
2. The discourse of narrative theory and
the discourse of children's literature
criticism
"Deconstruction" of a text entails "a
careful teasing out of the warring forces of
signification within the text," often "a
demonstration that a hierarchical
opposition . . . is in fact a rhetorical . . .
imposition, and that the hierarch could
well be reversed." (Culler, ix, 183). We
may find, by this "off-centre" reading,
radical possibilities in the text—and as we
clearly need to read quite radically to
approach the child's possible readings, the
concept of "deconstruction" (for it is
scarcely a method) might have something
to offer us. For example, my earlier
quotation from CS. Lewis may appear to
make an interesting theoretical point
(which anticipates Genette): but we should
notice that it contains a very aggressive
and elitist sub-text. "The masses" are
opposed to the "educated" (us); what they
read is "a net ... to catch" something.
His stance has none of Forster's irony, and
may well reveal a disrespect for his
materials and his audience (which some
critics, for example, David Holbrook,
have detected for other reasons).
If we apply this way of reading to
writings about children's books, and to
critical theory itself, we find some
revealing differences. The rhetoric of
critical theory has its own lexis (indeed, its
own sentence structures)—a sub-code
which signals such things as academic
exclusiveness, respectability, and
confidence, We read of "discourse",
"epistemology", and "ideologies"; of
"hegemony" and "dialectic"; of
"hermenutic" and "heuristic" and
"teleological" approaches. Perhaps more
surprising is that the subject is far more
totemic and personality-based than its tone
might imply. Hence we read chapters not
on Structuralism, but on Barthes; not on
folktales, but on Propp and Todorov; not
on narrative classification, but on Genette.
Again, the sub-text seems to be of an
exclusive club: the writers are so far
beyond any question of the validity of the
whole enterprise that a kind of extended
conversation (as if in some celestial
common-room) is quite in order. Even the
occasional refreshingly corrective article,
such as Watts's 'Bottom's Children', begins
with the assumption that here is something
worth the time to correct.
But, paradoxically, the images of the
texts are violent as well as political. These
writers are continually assaulting,
undermining, confronting, conflicting,
calling in question, suppressing, and
molesting, Ironically, perhaps, as they are
generally highly successful members of
prestigious institutions, they find the
threatening, the suspicious, and the alien
at every turn, and they tend to treat high-
level abstractions in terms that suggest an
improbably direct link with reality. The
readers they postulate as the end of
theory, seem quite unable to negotiate
literature.
The rhetoric of the children's
literature "world"... is
relaxed, personal, colloquial,
anecdotal. . . The language
. . . gently positive . . .
The rhetoric of the children's literature
"world"—certainly as far as the
publications of the Children's Literature
Association concerned (and they are, I
think, characteristic)—is quite different.
Reading through the Festschrift and recent
editions of the Quarterly, I am introduced
not to aggression or jargon, but,
variously, to Jon Stott's vacation
arrangements, Perry Nodelman's children,
Anita Moss's grandfather, and Ruth
MacDonald's method of composing her
presidential address. The whole
atmosphere is relaxed, personal,
colloquial, anecdotal. Even the most
abstract of papers have some practical
application tagged on. The language, far
from being radical, is gently positive;
specifics dominate over abstractions,
purpose over personalities. If anything, the
language is unadventurous: the title of the
1984 Conference—'Pride of Place; the
Wellsprings of Story'—parades two
clichés, the second of which seems to
imply a spontaneity in the creative act
which sets up an anti-analytic stance. (It is
rather like Fracelia Butler's title for the
early editorials of Children's Literature—
"The Editor's High Chair"—a joke which I
have always thought we could ill afford).
And we make the kind of assumptions
about our readers that the theorists would
never begin to countenance.
All this is very curious, when you
consider that even now, children's
literature studies are (or should be) a
radical and challenging departure from
Special Section
conventional academic categories, and,
generally, have a somewhat tenuous
existence on the periphery of University
departments. We may be fortunate to
escape pretension and jargon, and because
our audience is far less homogenous than
that for critical theory, we have to be
more pragmatic and more readable. But I
suspect that we are not seeing the
implications of the sub-text clearly. What
do we mean by how we appear?
First, whereas literary theory challenges,
children's literature criticism tends to
confirm. Having borrowed established
literary critical modes wholesale, we tend
to conform to their implications—and as a
result, we encourage the production of
books which can be approached in this
way. Consider Catherine Belsey's view of
criticism:
[In deconstruction] the object of the
critic, then, is to seek not the unity of
the work, but the multiplicity and
diversity of its possible meanings, its
incompleteness, the omissions which
it displays but cannot describe, and
above all its contradictions. [This can
be compared with] Anglo-American
critical practice, where the quest is for
the unity of the work, its coherence
... .In thus smoothing out the
contradiction, closing the text,
criticism becomes the accomplice of
ideology. Having created a canon of
acceptable texts, criticism then
provides them with acceptable
interpretations, thus effectively
censoring any elements in them that
come into collision with the dominant
ideology (109).
When you consider the number of pious
claims made about stimulating the child
audience—"only the best will do"—it may
be that we are subtly restricting and
depriving children by producing "closed"
texts: a fact only revealed in our covert
meanings. We imply that children
cannot—and in effect should not—be
aware of the text as text: that they cannot
cope with subtleties or complexities
expressed through "visible" language (a
suicidal attitude which ignores the
complexity of other media).
An example of the 'double think' which
surrounds books for children might be the
flood of 'game' books, where the readers
choose their own route through the text. In
using them, children destroy a lot of
conventionally accepted notions about
narrative predictability, tension, surprise,
and so on,- the text is continually "re-
run." At the same time, the "freedom"
claimed for these texts is illusory: the
"goal" is clearly defined (both in what is
achieved and the norms of behaviour
prescribed), and it can only be reached by
 Special Section
totally conforming to the rules set up by
the text. As Jacqueline Rose puts it in her
recent The Case of Peter Pan, or the
impossibility of children's fiction,
"children's fiction draws in the child, it
secures, places, and frames the child" (1)—
and "frames" in more senses than one.
While it would be nice to agree with
Nodelman that fantasy escapes this:
Both children's literature and fantasy
place readers in a position of
innocence about the reality they
describe, and create the same peculiar
relationship between the story and its
audience" (Festschrift. 27).
it may be that both the authority of the
text, and the generic constraints are so
powerful that fantasy has been "tamed"—
it is at the mercy of our unspoken
assumptions about the audience.
The second, and vital implication, is
that the way we read texts is so different
from the way in which critical theory
reads texts that we simply cannot take
over the theories without considerable
revision. Is our way of reading different
because we are dealing with a different
audience, a different kind of text: or does
the attitude begin with us and therefore
influence the text?
What we need to think about (for
practical reasons, as well as the future of
our subject) is a children's-book-specific
theory. But we have to start somewhere,
so I would like to glance briefly at what
critical theory can offer us—and where its
limitations lie.
3. Reading Narrative Theory
Narrative theory has no critical axe to
grind. Its objective is a grid of
possibilities, through the
establishment of the minimal
narrative constitutive features.
Seymour Chatman
Narrative theory is really rather
disappointing. Based as it is upon such rich
materials, one might expect it to be as
psychedelic as the rhetoric of poetry; too
often it turns out to be reductive,
schematizing the blindingly obvious, or
disappearing into sterile classification.
One problem is that many insights do
not really survive application. Propp's
identification of the common elements of
the folk tale, or his suggestion that what is
done precedes who did it in terms of
narrative function, are immensely
valuable, with implications for our total
understanding of how stories work. But to
analyze the use of the thirty-one functions
to an actual story (as Rod McLean has
done with Hinton's The Outsiders)—
however meticulously—does not provide
us with the same level of edification.
Genette's distinction of histoire/narration/
text, which is crystallised in text, has a
wide applicability which seems to me to be
far more useful than his detailed
examination and classification of text.
(Not everyone agrees. Wayne Booth, no
mean judge, observes that "on almost
every page of Genette I am learning how
literature and criticism are done" (128).
Equally, some distinctions, such as Prince's
pursuit of what constitutes a minimal story
seem to be academic in the least useful
sense, whereas theories of narrative
grammars may have precise applications
applications (see, for example, Nancy
Stein).
But whatever our opinions, can these
theories be applies? Shlomith Rimmon-
Keenan, for example, suggests that "...
users cannot produce or decipher stories
without some implicit competence in
respect of narrative structure .... This
competence is acquired by extensive
practice in reading and telling stories." (8).
If this is true, it emphasises the gap
between the 'skilled' and the 'unskilled'
reader—or, better, perhaps, the civilised
and the uncivilised, the adult and the
child. The child may not understand (or
may choose not to understand) "content"
items in a text; the whole concept of story,
of inter-relationships may be very
different._____________________________
. . . we simply cannot take
over critical theories without
considerable revision . , .
What we need . . .isa
children's-book-specific theory.
Adult theoretical concepts of the
purpose of plot, indeed, of the novel, run
counter to the customary expectations of
the children's book. Robert L. CaserÃ-o, for
example, feels that plot is a
"defamiliarizing agent": we tell stories in
order to change, and so the erosion of the
ending in the modern novel is in fact as
"retrieval of humanity" (8, 169). But with
children, are we not usually asking them
to conform to the text? To make the
conventions of fiction familiar, rather than
placing the book in the world? Does our
concept of what constitutes an
"appropriate" ending derive from what we
wish to see as an appropriate ending,
rather that from what the child (or, for
that matter, the theorist) sees?
Similarly, Michael Zeraffa, in contrast
to Frank Kermode's view that the work of
a novelist is "making sense of our lives,"
suggests that since Balzac and Dickens" the
novelist seeks to reveal the essential
disorder within the individual the
individual; he tries, in fact, not to make
sense but to make nonsense of our lives"
(Burns and Burns, 32). So, the best of
contemporary fiction aims to break those
193
schémas and conventions of text which
children's fiction is committed to teaching:
which leaves us with a very interesting
conundrum. Is children's literature thus a
pre-literary stage—for if we do not learn
the conventions we will not experience
that art which exists in reaction to, or
conflict with, the conventions? Or is it an
opportunity to short-circuit the
artificialities of art which we are throwing
away?
As we have seen apparently simple
applications of theory take on an added
complication when we are dealing with
children. Take the identification of the
"minimal narrative constituent features"—
the counters we use when telling or
retelling. As Culler noted in his "Defining
Narrative Units," "What a reader is
looking for in a plot . . . is a passage from
one state to another—a passage to which
he can assign thematic value. [That is]
culturally marked significant actions"
(Fowler, 139, 138). However sophisticated
the system of classification (for example,
Bartes' 'event label' or Chatman's kernels
and satellites (Chatman, 15), the
boundaries of narrative units will
ultimately depend on significances: as non-
peer readers, we can only guess at what
these may be for primary readers.
4. Towards a narrative theory for
children's literature
The most important way in which
children's-book-specific theory will have to
differ from other theories is that it must
rebel against the most common—and most
obvious—underlying urge of all theory:
the thrust towards universality. Theory
tries to explain, or predict, all cases; in
children's literature we have seen how
dangerous this can be. Methods of
analysis, means of assigning value, reasons
for selection, have all been elevated (or
reduced) to simplistic rules. Lists provide
excuses for not reading, guidelines
crystallise into marketing strategies. Some
of this can be accounted for by the
pressure that intermediary readers work
under, but it does lead to the kind of
patent nonsense about "what children like"
(castigated in the case of illustration by
Nodelman and Dooley), and a whole
production industry based on
simplemindedness (deliberate or
otherwise).
Every statement about a book in
relation to a child has to have the
qualification, "it depends on the child." As
Rose points out, any scheme which tries to
equate developmental levels with
appropriate texts carries with it an
ideological undertone:
Increasingly, the terms of "capacity",
"competence" and "behavioural
repertory" are used to refer to the way
194
the child acquires the ability to
identify with narrative. The
acquisition of fictional competence is
laid out according to stages which
echo, in their idea of an assured
progression (heaps, sequences,
primitive narrative, unfocussed and
focussed chains, narrative proper)
that march into rationality which
dominates one particular conception
of the development of the child (63-
64).
(It is interesting to note, incidentally, that
the scheme of development cited by
Rose—Applebee's adaptation of Vygotsky
bears a remarkable, and highly suggestive,
resemblance to the development of fiction,
historically. That is, it shows that the most
revolutionary modern fiction, tending as it
does to replace the narrative of resolution
with the plot of revelation, is working
within earlier developmental schemes. As
Chatman puts it, the "strong sense of
temporal order is more significant in
resolved plots rather than revealed plots"
(47-48). Most children's fiction aims
towards resolution, partly for
psychological reasons, and partly, I
suspect, because these are thought to be
simplest. In fact, resolution requires a
more sophisticated series of links than does
the more static plot of revelation).
While children's literature theory should
draw on those things it already does well
(the links with psychology and reading
development, for example), it will have to
aim at a far more open concept of critical
reading. This may sound rather like
anarchy, for we are likely to end up with a
set of multiple readings, and assignations
of value which are very local. This may be
a disadvantage if we are attempting to
parade our credentials in front of
inspecting officers from conventional
disciplines. But just as children's literature
is not a discipline comparable with any
other (its very core of material is selected
on an unique basis), so theories
constructed for other disciplines will not
necessarily help us.
But, finally, theory and criticism come
second to the book itself, and, like
Fernando Savater in his iconoclastic
Childhood Regained, I would dissociate
myself from those "deluded enthusiasts"
who concedes that writers for children
"have interest as symptoms and that they
permit readings somewhat more profound
than the ones usually assigned to them by
entranced adolescents." The study must
remain audience-related: any readings are
possible (the more entranced one
becomes), and profundity is not an adult
preserve. As Savater goes on
"Let me make it clear, therefore, that I
like these storytellers for the same
reasons that children do; that is,
because they tell wonderful yarns,
and tell them well and I know no
loftier reason than this to read a
book" (xii).
Criticism has a humbler function than
literature—to move towards an
understanding of how things like stories
happen. And, more important, although
storying may be a "primary act of mind,"
as Barbara Hardy puts it: "Nature, not art,
makes us all story tellers" (vii), text is not
so "natural." Text is produced by a rather
more devious process, and criticism and
theory, "aback of everything" is part of
that process. Unless we begin to think
radically, it may be that we will continue
to get the books we seem to deserve.
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