The Metanarrative Escape

Though I don’t often admit to being ignorant, I had no idea that beautiful white sand beaches stretched the length of the shoreline and that I could visit one until Pat Seajack gave Marlene, a proud mother of three and loving wife of one, a six day stay at a Sandals Beach Resort after answering a “before and after” category. I find that our realities, the reality of sipping pina coladas somewhere off the coast of South Padre Island is only as real as it exists solely on the television, a flat screen reality. “The news told me to do it,” is a common excuse for how we have put our trust into a defunct system, void of any real guidance or intent of wholesome human progress and emancipation. As a culture, I fear we are driven by an attitude of consumption, of acquiring new schools of thought and faster ways of accessing the internet from farther removed locations; of acquiring new habits and habitats that come at historically low interest rates. New agencies of motility and Sea-Doo’s are premeditated by a force which we do not understand, a didacticism and social instruction that has led us to our present economical and moral deficiencies. These systems cannot presently be regarded as tools which benefit our existence and lend themselves to more simplistic means. There is now, it seems, an overarching attitude of mistrust in the ways in which we as a society exist.
This is the metanarrative of our life. The way in which we live is part of a totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience. The messages that come through our televisions and IPhones dictate how we live and provide for us our desires and experiences. They are conventions that have the same role in literature that they have in life: they impose certain patterns of order and stability on the view and the reader. We our initiated into this system from our earliest years through the use of children’s literature. These stories serve to initiate children into aspects of social heritage, transmitting the culture’s central values and assumptions and body of shared experiences into our future. But a system that is morally bankrupt should not be passed onto our children. Instead, canonical authors such as Lewis Carroll or Phillip Pullman challenge the assumption that narrative trustworthiness, authorial control, and determinate meaning should be defining characteristics of the reading experience.
Long before “postmodernism” was a glint in the cynic’s eye, authors of our favorite books and stories have sought to liberate children from this controlling force. They have broken from conventions so that they can make what is familiar unfamiliar. Although these authors may find themselves suffocating under such narratives, too far entrenched into the verisimilitudes of society, they realize that the only way to change the future through the future: children. Using several techniques that fall under the auspices of postmodernism, such as pastiche and the homogenization of extremes to create something completely different and utterly nonsensical, authors direly attempt to break the hypnosis of unfounded didacticism and offer to the children an escape from it.
When reading Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, the element of parody pervades with utmost importance. To say the least, Carroll had had enough of the pedagogical morals that are found throughout preceding children’s literature. The intent to teach, he felt, had become overworked, as each story ended with a moral. But it is not the moral that is important, but the story itself. To combat this, Carroll parodied these stories to take authorial control away from the guiding morals of this metanarrative.

“Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you’re at!
Up above the world you fly
Like a tea-tray in the sky.”


Carroll subverts the reading experience through parody, undermining the preconceived notions that stories and the children who read them are repositories for universal truths. Just as the busy bee becomes the busy crocodile, the Gingerbread Man becomes the Stinky Cheese Man in John Scieska’s subversive book, we find that meaning is formed at the intersections of these stories. These reversions of story tales, of which they are innumerable, have common subversive impulses. They seek to undermine and call into question ideological assumptions of their pre-texts. This intertextuality takes the form of parody of a pretext. They are bricolage, a combinatorial arrangement of past images to try and from something new. Though a principle problem of postmodernist texts, or simply texts that attempt to try something different, is whether or not they are successfully lifting the veil of familiarity or perpetuating the very same constructs that they seek to shatter.
The icons of our progress are old, reused, and hackneyed. In order to parody there must be an acceptance of a norm from which they may use as a stepping off point. We have been learning and relearning the same things throughout all of human history it would seem. Northrop Frye says, “there’s nothing new in literature that isn’t the old reshaped.” Carroll’s parodies show this. Though we may tweak it one way or another, Photoshop this, juxtapose that, what we really have are the same images just rearranged, as if our experiences were some sort of anagram. It is at these intertextual intersections when meaning is formed. The creators of these texts take authority from the metanarrative and place it in the hands of the reader, at which time the child finds him or herself on both sides of the text, being apart from and a part of the text at the same time. Alice, for instance, is offered a “time out” from her habitual constraints of society, but, as with most of these texts, Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz included, are eventually incorporated safely back into social normality. In escaping the convolution of street sign and scrolling marquees many options are presented by these authors. As with Little Red Riding Hood or Thoreau we can go into the woods.
Another consideration of postmodernism if the blending of high and low cultures. We are all exposed to the same images and we all want the forty-foot yacht and an episode of MTV’s Cribs. Our desires become the same and the differences between to people, to things, become imperceptible. The notion of the individual is disregarded. Postmodern practice in children’s literature closes this gap by appealing to the extremes of both child and adult; but in an effort to liberate both from the metanarrative, authors of these texts turn simile, two things that are similar, into metaphor, two things that are each other. The desired effect of this is nonsense. When “this is that”, we turn our backs on logic and reason completely, because logically two things can never be the same thing and still remain two things. By using metaphor as a language of identification, leads our imaginations back to our lost identity.
High culture mixes with low culture, positive and negative attractions are mixed, simile becomes metaphor. No longer is something like something different but similar, but everything is like everything else. When simile turns to metaphor, both occur but with auspicious results. Nonsense arrives when two things transcend their similarities and become one another. The veil is lifted, but the nonsense provides for us an escape. A poet is subject to his words, he can become a slave to them, but a nonsense poet—never. For example, Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice, “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less…When I make a word do a lot of extra work like that I always pay it extra.” They provide narratives that defamiliarize the experience of reading and disrupt and subvert the world of fantasy and attempt to undermine the didactic, and thus controlling the force of fairy tale. Wordsworth’s A Defense of Poesy has had a great impact on the way I think about literature, and it seems that these authors seek to defamiliarize old ways of thinking by creating new metaphors. Through new metaphors they lift the veil of familiarity and over usage of our own language. To combat these predetermined horizons of expectations, canonical bricoleurs parody these totalizing conventions by retelling them in a new textual and ideological configuration. They dash preconceived notions of collective progress and existence by creating the nonsensical and imaginative worlds in which characters and readers find themselves.
The world of nonsense changes experience. As humpty proves with his explanation of Jabberwocky, meaning, as with the simulacra of our lives becomes ambiguous. It is a world in which child (an adult) readers may discover meaning for themselves. This ulterior world can be very enticing, inviting to step forth, open one of three doors or jump through a porthole and spin off into another sort of dementia. It breaks the boundaries of textual involvement, fragments and disjoints the author’s and character’s interaction with the readers, subverting what is perceived as a dominant discourse. Like Uncle Sam saying “We Want You”, pointing at you as if his finger, callused from the American work ethic, inviting you to jump through the poster and into the armed services. Or perhaps it would be as if I were to reach out of this screen or paper right now and....
...shake your hand. You get that feeling that the book is reading you and you are an integral part of the text. The reader, and especially the child, finds him or herself on both sides of the book, being its reader and being an integral part of the story itself. The story becomes an experience. “The real realities, so to speak, are things that don’t remind us directly of our own experience,” says Northrop Frye. Carroll’s employs this type of intertextuality as reaction to his own postmodern sentiments and unrest in the way a child’s experience is provided to him just as ours are to us. In order to combat the stalwartly didactic conventions of representing the world to a child and the ways in which children and adults alike read a text, Carroll, as well as my favorite childhood author, John Scieszka, is by taking trite codes of authorship and making them new again. By parodying instructional poems Carroll depletes what was once a teaching device and depleting it almost entirely of moral value. As a result, the moral of the story is the story, that is all that exists or matters. The dream world is the real world, for, what is life but a dream? Carroll’s mocking and antagonistic retellings of tight conventions results not so much in a retelling of the story as a re-version of the story, disassembling it and recreating it as a new textual and ideological configuration.
The postmodern attitude does not incorporate an inherent mistrust in signs or a hermeneutical suspicion of them, but rather the only thing that exists is the image as we see it relayed to us through simulacra. All that exists is the image with no intrinsic root or meaning, but just the image as it exists in its outward form. Philip Pullman demonstrates this point beautifully, quoting John Keats in the Subtle Knife, “…Capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. You have to get into that state of mind.” To interpret the signs, the shadows, the elementary particles of dust and dark matter we must get rid of the notion that we must learn something. As with reading this paper, you must absolve yourself from the idea that what I am saying is in any way correct or founded. I have. We must be completely receptive to what is there. It is the same with nonsense. These shadows come through to us when “you look at the Cave,” or, “the computer. We call it the Cave. Shadows on the walls of the Cave, you see, from Plato.” To the postmodernist, all that exists is the shadow with nothing to cast it.
Children, like Lyra, though, are given the authority to decipher meaning for themselves. The experience of reading, and of living, becomes an active, rather than passive. Instead of accepting television commercials as real and story morals as right, children are urged to be individuals to use their imaginations to transcend what is to what could be. The notion of the individual is dead from our first moments of life, for our metanarrative seeks to assimilate children into society and, through these morals, teach them to be a part socially responsible and civically minded mass, a unified whole. Take for example Dr. Seuss’s “Oh The Places You’ll Go” as he describes people “just waiting. Waiting for the train to go or a bus to come, or a plant to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No.” We are all going in the same direction, or not going anywhere at all, acting the way we are told, but “NO! That’s not for you! Somehow you’ll escape all that waiting and staying. You’ll find the bright places where Boom Bands are playing.” Though postmodernism believes the notion of the individual to be dead because we are all exposed to the same images and conventions, children’s literature aims at defamiliarizing these images which have been the (mis)guiding force in our lives, telling children that it is possible to be an individual. And then of course there is A.A. Milne’s introduction to The World of Pooh. Described is a motion proper, like an escalator and elevator, but it is through a zoo. “You can’t be in London for long without going to the Zoo. There are some people who begin the Zoo and the beginning, called WAYIN, and walk as quickly as they can past every cage until they get to the one called WAYOUT, but the nicest people go straight to the animal they love the most, and stay there.” Children are seen as animals and animals as children, these impulses to identify human and natural worlds become purely metaphors, like Lyra and Pantalaimon
There is always a way out of our current situation. Children’s literature explores these escapes from our postmodern world in many forms. There is nonsense, or you could go into the woods, step through a porthole, and have real experiences. Parents and authors who foster imaginations in their children, challenge their curiosities, and encourage them to explore and be unique little snow flakes challenge our social expectations of becoming a doctor or a lawyer.