"Writerly" narratives in picture books or the instantiation of Rosie’s Walk

If it’s not too brash to use Book History’s current theoretical frameworks to postulate « The Future of the Book » (after all, who knows what the future may bring?), then certainly D. F. McKenzie’s well-received concept of the “Sociology of Texts” provides a means for conceptualizing immanent bookish forms. McKenzie posited that bibliography,

“…as the discipline that studies texts as recorded forms and the processes of their transmission, including production and reception…should be concerned to show that forms effect meaning. …For any history of the book which excluded study of the social, economic, and political motivations of publishing, the reason why texts were written and read as they were, why they were rewritten and redesigned, or allowed to die, would degenerate into a feebly degressive book list and never rise to a readable history.” [McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 12-3].

McKenzie, if he were alive, would surely approve of a history of future books (a pre-history?) that examines why traditional formats have been repudiated and what role form had played in that transformation. Critics seem to have declared the codex passé on account of its serial nature. Long ago, Michael Joyce proclaimed that the traditional book, with its linear structure leading to finite closure would be abandoned in favour of the electronic text, which “requires rather than encourages multiple readings”, [Joyce, “Notes toward an unwritten non-linear electronic text,” 45]. The bookish forms du jour are the hyptertext and the electronic reader. According to Matthew Kirschenbaum and Sarah Warner, hypertext was lauded by post-structural literary critics such as Roland Barthes as “writerly”, while the staid codex was derided as “readerly” (think autonomously creative reading through link-chasing vs authoritatively directed chain-reading of consecutive pages). They argue that the new Book History is the study of “pixels and plastic”, the “interplay between text and real life” and the proprietary nature of platforms, [Kirschenbaum & Werner, “Digital scholarship and digital studies,” 406-7, 452-3].

But were readers of the book really such slaves to form? Before we assume that the electronic turn is only about new reading formats, Book History should look back once more to see whether past and postmodern reading habits are really all that different. In his “Sociology of Texts,” McKenzie advocated for the investigation of reading; that is, how people engaged with books, as well as received, interpreted and utilized the information therein. For example, he comparatively examined how treaties were read differently by colonial agents and Maori leaders in New Zealand [McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 122-3]. A history of reading has only begun to be compiled, since evidence for reading practices is difficult to locate and challenging to interpret. Even Darnton, in revisiting his Book History model, which was concerned with investigating books as the foci of human action, urged an examination of intertextuality to recover how people read selectively, concatenating citations and texts in referential chains, [Darnton, “What is a history of books? Revisited,” 506-7].

In my view, readers have always been a picky bunch. To illustrate, I invite the reader to consider the case of the children’s book, (if you so choose!). Picture books generally have sparse texts and bright, expressive illustrations. Their images might be considered paratextual; that is, they serve as thresholds to the text, inflecting and augmenting the story or even creating parallel narratives. Anyone who has read to children will know that such figurative digressions often have the effect of changing the course of the reading, with readers avoiding closure (and bedtime!) altogether. A favorite picture book is Rosie’s Walk, created by Pat Hutchins. The text, located on alternate openings, briefly relates Rosie hen’s stroll around the farm, which takes her “around the pool, over the haystack, past the mill, through the fence, under the beehives and [back home] in time for dinner.” Unbeknownst to Rosie, a fox stalks her. 

On non-text openings, the narrative is propelled by the illustrations alone. There, objects that had formed part of the farm-scape become obstacles, which the oblivious hen avoids, but trip up the goal-obsessed fox. 

My daughter and I would ‘read’ this book in multifarious ways. First, I would read her the story, supplementing with my own narration of the images on the text-free pages. Since I related the story in an identical manner each time, it was a personal reading that we alone shared (her father could never replicate our ‘reading’, leading her to seriously question his literacy!). After we had read the story through, we would flip through the illustrations in no particular order, allowing the images and our imaginations to wander, both within the book and beyond its covers. One doesn’t need hyperlinks to read in a non-linear fashion, only imagination. 

Best, Laura 

If you’d like to read the book, Patricia Hutchins, Rosie’s Walk (New York: Macmillan, 1968; New York: Aladdin Paperbacks, 1986), it is available at the Toronto Public Library.