relatively diminished in power; and then, as the plot develops, our power diminishes
relative to the participants in the ensuing monstrous clash.
The significance of variation in the patterning of meanings might equally be pursued
with regard to language. For example, we might ask how, linguistically, readers initially
are given a sense that this night—the night of Max’s transgression, journey and
restoration—is a night with singular qualities.
Grammatically, the text has an unusual beginning which ‘foregrounds’ the
particularity of the night. This comes about because of the choice the author has made
for the initial element of the first clause of the text. Halliday (1994) describes how
English gives readers a choice as to which constituent is placed in first position in a
clause. As a consequence there is a meaning significance attaching to the initial
element, which gives information about the textual organisation of the message by
indicating the speaker/writer’s ‘point of departure’. Speakers may begin a clause with
the grammatical Subject, as the writer of the publisher’s introduction did in the Puffin
edition:
Max’s wonderful adventure began the night he put on his wolf suit.Alternatively, a speaker might begin with an atypical choice or marked choice as Sendak
did when he brought to the foreground not Max, nor his adventure, but instead
The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another his
mother called him ‘WILD THING!’Notice, too, that grammatically a good deal of information about the particular night is
built up immediately around the noun ‘night’ itself. Technically this is achieved through
embedded clauses in the noun group, which are constituted by all the words in italics
after ‘night’. The physical distribution of the language on the page also supports this
marking of the moment in time since the noun group is extended over the first two
pages. Grammar and orthography together draw attention to the particularity of the
moment.
To return, then, from the detail of the particular text to the general argument. The
point to which Meek and others draw attention is this: many literary texts written for
children enable readers to take up ways of meaning relevant to literary readings of text
through the patterning of semiotic resources in both language and visual image. On this
account children do not become ‘literary’ readers by first developing a bank of skills in
‘decoding’ and ‘comprehension’, and then apply these skills to literary (and other) texts.
They learn how to act as literary readers partly because the resources of the texts they
care about make it possible for them to act as literary readers.
The sense of ‘act’ is important. It draws attention to the fact that literacy is
constructed in action, in and through the reading of texts and through engaging in the
forms of interpretation which these texts make possible. The selection of verb here in
fact owes much to Vygotsky’s insight into the resources which mediate meaning in
interaction and over time become part of a child’s ways of meaning (Vygotsky 1986).
568 APPLICATIONS OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE