identifiable metafictive narrative techniques and discursive strategies is to reduce the
possibilities of critical insight and analysis. In other words, both aspects need to be
taken into account: the specific strategies through which metafictions play with literary
and cultural codes and conventions, and the historicity and conventionality of these
metafictive textual practices.
Postmodernism, metafiction and experimental picture booksMetafiction is a mode of writing which has recently flourished within a broader cultural
movement referred to as postmodernism (Waugh 1984:21) with which it shares some
common features: narrative fragmentation and discontinuity, disorder and chaos, code
mixing and absurdity of the kind which appears in the picture books of John
Burningham, Chris Van Allsburg, Anthony Browne, David Wiesner, David Macaulay and
the novels of William Mayne and Terry Pratchett.
Two recent studies have focused on postmodern features of contemporary picture
books (Lewis 1990; Moss 1992). The tendency toward parody, playfulness and openness
in many recent picture books constitutes a metafictive potential: picture books comprise
two inherently different modes of representation—verbal and visual—the relations
between which are always to some extent more or less dialogical. Words and pictures
interact so as to construct (and defer) meanings, rather than simply reflecting or
illustrating each other. The visual and verbal components of a picture book can thus
imply a dialogue between text and picture and readers—for example, Burningham’s
Shirley books or Van Allsburg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick.
The combination of two sign systems clearly provides a way of problematising the
representational function of visual and verbal signs and of foregrounding the ways in
which the relations between signs and things are structured by culturally inscribed
codes of representation and signification. The extent to which meanings are socially and
culturally constructed, and hence open to challenge, is a concern addressed in many of
Browne’s picture books, for example A Walk in the Park (1977) or Willie the Wimp (1984).
Browne characteristically uses surrealist visual elements to foreground the gap between
signs and things (for example, his construction of settings out of pieces of fruit and
other odd objects). Similarly, Wiesner’s pictures in Tuesday (1991) are constructed out of
a bricolage of visual quotations. Van Allsburg uses realist pictorial conventions to
represent fantastical situations, blurring textual distinctions between the fantasy and
reality.
Metafictive and Experimental Narrative TechniquesThough we can make broad distinctions between implicit and explicit forms of
metafiction and between texts which reflect on their own narrative processes and those
which reflect on their linguistic construction, metafictive strategies tend to be used in
combination, which means that individual texts have a curious habit of refusing
classification. For this reason, rather than attempting to classify texts, I have organised
the discussion which follows around specific metafictive and experimental strategies.
396 TYPES AND GENRES