Another example is the use of direct quotation from historic artefacts, not least, from the
inscription of the great bell of Eyam ‘SWEET JESU BE MY SPEDE’ (54). The book
reinforces the historic authenticity of its subject matter by a consistent capitalisation
throughout of the word Plague, and by use of an invented dialect which pastiches what
we know about the dialect of sixteenth-century Derbyshire.
In contrast, Robert Westall’s novel Gulf (1992), is embedded in the events of the 1991
Gulf War which began after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the retaliation by the
United Nations. Gulf, unlike A Parcel of Patterns, assumes (for its Western readers) a
shared, contemporary, intertextual experience. This makes recovery of the pre-text more
likely and it therefore calls for little explanation and contextualisation. But the novel’s
foregrounded meaning centres on the need for its readers to see the connection between
the out-of-body experiences of the narrator’s younger brother, Figgis, and the
experiences of a young Iraqi boy soldier whose life he shares. The detail of the geography
and history of Iraq is an intertextual experience that cannot be assumed; so the
narrative deals with it by way of explanation, ‘I looked up Tikrit in our atlas; it was north
of Baghdad. Then I read in the paper it was where Saddam Hussein himself came from’
(Westall 1992:47). This is an example of the way in which texts written for children
sometimes have a felt need to be overreferential; the need to fill intertextual gaps to
mobilise a positive reading experience in its young readers.
Literature for children has to tread a careful path between a need to be sufficiently
overreferential in its intertextual gap filling so as not to lose its readers, and the need to
leave enough intertextual space and to be sufficiently stylistically challenging to allow
readers free intertextual interplay. It is on the one hand a formally conservative genre
that is charged with the awesome responsibility to initiate young readers into the
dominant literary codes of the culture. On the other hand, the genre has seen the
emergence of what we now confidently call the ‘new picture books’ and the ‘new young
adult’ novel. Picture book writers such as John Scieszka, Maurice Sendak, the Ahlbergs,
Ruth Brown, David McKee, Anthony Browne, John Burningham; young adult writers
like Robert Cormier, Aidan Chambers and Peter Hunt, and books like Gillian Cross’s
Wolf (1990), Berlie Doherty’s Dear Nobody (1991), Nadia Wheatley’s The Blooding (1988),
Aidan Chambers’s Breaktime (1978), and Geraldine McCaughrean’s A Pack of Lies
(1988), are challenging conventional literary forms of children’s literature and breaking
the codes.
A theory of intertextuality of children’s literature points the way forward for a genre
that acknowledges the lost codes and practices and underlying discursive conventions
by which it functions and is defined, and urges the breaking of ranks. Some of the
children’s writers I have mentioned here have demonstrated how this is beginning to
happen. They have been prepared to take risks with their writing and with their young
readers. Some of these books, such as Scieszka’s The Stinky Cheese Man, Chambers’s
Breaktime, Cormier’s, After the First Death, and Fade (1988), and McCaughrean’s A Pack
of Lies, have a metafictional dimension which causes readers to pay attention to the
fabric and artifice of these texts as works of literature, and to the textuality of the world
to which they allude; it also causes readers to recognise how they are being (have been)
textually constructed in and by this intertextual playground. Since both using codes and
breaking codes are sites for intertextual interplay, the work of these writers is a
INTERTEXTUALITY 133