The combination of typographical experimentation and overt genre mixing is
widespread in recent popular children’s fiction, but as Stephens has suggested, ‘seems
to be settling into its own formulaic conventions: two or three clearly delineated genres
or modes...are juxtaposed in order to suggest restricted perspective and to complicate
otherwise flat, everyday surfaces’ (1992a: 53). In novels such as Libby Gleeson’s Dodger
(1990) or Aidan Chambers’s The Toll Bridge (1992) the metafictive and experimental
potential of genre mixing is repressed through the combination of these strategies with
an implicit authorial position and with realist conventions. The discourse is treated as a
transparent medium which simply conveys information, rather than as a specific
linguistic code which constructs and inscribes this information with meaning. Novels
such as Hunt’s Backtrack, Chambers’s Breaktime or Crew’s Strange Objects consistently
fore-ground their own textuality. Extra-literary genres and discourses are combined so
as to effect abrupt shifts in the diegetic levels of narration, disrupt relations between
fiction and reality within the textual frame, and draw attention to the discursivity of
extraliterary genres.
Multistranded and polyphonic narrativesTwo common experimental strategies which can also be used metafictionally are
multistranded and polyphonic narration. Multistranded narratives are constructed of
two or more interconnected narrative strands differentiated by shifts in temporal or
spatial relationships, and/or shifts in narrative point of view (who speaks or focalises).
In polyphonic narratives events are narrated from the viewpoints of two or more
narrators or character focalisers. These are strategies which enable the representation
of a plurality of narrative voices, social and cultural discourses, perceptual, attitudinal
and ideological viewpoints. In doing so they can work to efface or destabilise a reader’s
sense of a single authoritative narratorial position, and thereby situate readers in more
active interpretive positions. These are not in themselves metafictive strategies though
they can be used as such, particularly in texts which use multiple narrators or
focalisers to represent different versions of the same events, such as Mayne’s Drift.
One of the most common narrative structures used is interlaced dual narration. The
narratives of two narrators or character focalisers are represented as two parallel
strands interlaced together in alternating chapters or segments. This can work to overtly
structure a novel as a ‘dialogue’ between two social, cultural, historical or gendered
positions, as in Hunt’s Going Up (1989), Caroline Macdonald’s The Lake at the End of the
World (1988), Jenny Pausacker’s What Are Ya? (1987), Jan Mark’s The Hillingdon Fox
(1991) or Dickinson’s A Bone from a Dry Sea (1992). However, like typographic and
generic forms of experimentation, interlaced dual narration has also settled into its own
formulaic conventions and is frequently structured so as to privilege one dominant
authoritative position.
These narrative forms are at their most innovative when combined with other
experimental narrative features, such as intertextuality, complex shifts in narrative
point of view, and indirect and effaced modes of narration (see Stephens 1992b and Hunt
1991:100–117). Two of the most sophisticated examples of polyphonic multistranded
402 TYPES AND GENRES