The answer is not to abandon Browne as too difficult, but to encourage readers to see
and hear more of him, to accustom themselves to his idioms—much as teachers would
expect to help older students to attune themselves to the ironic voice of Jane Austen.
Once children taste the rewards of their ‘work’, they are eager for more.
Picture books which require a reader to work hard (or, better, to play hard, since it is
a lively act of the imagination that is needed) offer much to almost all ages of school
students. Picture books have been very helpfully used in the early weeks of literature
courses for older students, since they raise certain issues about reading with particular
clarity; the relationship between author and reader, how readers come to know what
kind of a text they are handling, how readers need to move back and forth within a text,
how endings are anticipated, for example.
Picture books can give younger readers insights into how narrative is structured.
Teachers have given groups separate photocopies of each page of wordless picture books
such as Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman (1978) and asked them to sort them into a
‘correct’ sequence. Again, students can readily understand how irony works through
certain picture books, since it is at the root of the satisfactions offered by some books
where there is a seeming dissonance between pictures and words. In Pat Hutchins’s
classic Rosie’s Walk (1968), the print constitutes a single 32-word sentence. The delight
for readers is that they are ‘in the know’ as Rosie the Hen takes her circuitous farmyard
stroll without noticing (or does she?) that a fox is in hot pursuit, thwarted from his supper
only by a series of painful calamities. The sentence makes no mention of the fox, and
the irony emerges as the reader puts words and pictures together.
Many picture books require a reading not unlike that of shorter, complex poems and
an understanding of how they ask to be read may be a helpful step on the way towards
reading poetry. The reader needs to move around within the text, checking picture against
picture, connecting patterns of one element of the book with patterns elsewhere; much
as the reader of a poem discovers how images or rhymes, for example, work together
throughout a poem. The superb The ox-cart man, by Donald Hall and Barbara Cooney
(1980), invites a reader to explore the pictures in following the rhythms of the year as
they dictate the work and life of a nineteenth-century farm in rural New England. Bit by
bit, we see the family grow and craft the goods they sell at Portsmouth Harbour market
each year in order to sustain them through the next. Visual images work in ways similar
to verbal images in that they are often multi-faceted and ambiguous of interpretation.
Picture books present puzzles, and they refuse to be hurried over. They demand to be
read more than once, just as many poems do, and as parents soon discover, young
readers regularly insist that favourites are read many times. We still need to discover
more precisely what is the function of rereading for these young children, and how their
numerous return visits differ from each other.
A further value of picture books is simply that they promote searching discussion
among pairs or groups, often between students of quite different abilities. Those who are
‘visually literate’ may not be the most fluent of readers or writers of words. Visual
images prompt verbal interpretations, often provoking differences of opinion. The book is
‘out there’, a focus away from the students and argument is thus ‘safer’ or less
confrontational; indeed, there is usually a sense of shared exploration, leading to the
creation of a reading which the group agrees upon.
APPLICATIONS OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 593