Looking Beneath the Surface

Abstract

One of the major characteristics of postmodern literature is its challenge to realist fiction. The challenge is two-fold: to the ideologies embedded within realist texts and to the apparent ‘naturalness’ of the various narrative strategies. The major concern of this chapter is to examine these challenges by considering how various narrative processes that are often ‘below the surface’, as Travis phrases it, are made overt in postmodern picturebooks. As the discussion demonstrates, this overtness is achieved largely through the employment of a range of metafictive strategies which, as Hutcheon (1988) notes, self-consciously comment on their own narrative and linguistic characteristics. This self-reflexivity is a dominant subject of postmodern fiction, and is also a defining feature of metafiction. As Waugh (1984) notes, metafiction refers to self-reflexive fiction which intentionally draws attention to its status as fiction and, in so doing, poses questions about the relationship between fiction and the reality it purports to represent. In the first section of this chapter, I discuss metafictive strategies drawing on a number of postmodern picture-books to illustrate their use. The second section examines several picturebooks in more detail, illustrating further how these strategies are incorporated into texts to offer different points of view and multiple ‘truths’.

Different codes and layers of meaning below the surface of a classic realist text are on open display in a postmodern text, which exhibit the fact that it is not natural, finished and seamless but rather is constructed, open, fragmented and plural. (Travis, 1998, p. 47)