Texts which challenge these assumptions commonly find themselves in the no-person's land between writings for adults ( so-called ) and writings for children ( so-called) .sx In peer-texts , the adult reader ( real or otherwise ) can adjust to the degree of control which the author appears to be exercising .sx As an adult reader , my selection of a text may be governed , in part , by the amount of effort I wish to bring to it and by a judgement of how much effort is warranted .sx With books 'for children' , or 'unskilled' readers , because of the status of the audience , the author-reader ( or narrator-narratee ) relationship is a more than usually unbalanced power relationship .sx The audience is created by the writer much more directly than with a peer-text , in the sense that the text does more than display its codes , grammar , and contracts ; it suggests what the reader must be or become to optimize the reading of the text .sx Drawing on the power-codes of adult-child , book-child , and written-oral relationships , it prescribes what the reader must be , and indeed , because there is both an authoritarian and an educational element involved , what the reader can be .sx The exercise of such power is by no means inevitable , although it is so characteristic as to define the children's book for many readers .sx Very often there seems to be a deliberate attempt to limit the child-reader's interaction with the text .sx This may seem to be benevolent , if one believes that the 'open' text is fundamental to literary development or , as Jacqueline Rose suggests merely a fact of life for the 'impossible' category of children's fiction .sx What Texts Imply .sx Criticism , especially of children's literature perhaps , is controlled by perception of genre ; is children's literature identifiable by lexical items , grammatical structures , higher level narrative units , or an overall tonal strategy ?sx For example , what gives away the 'implied audience' for this quotation ?sx " He woke up with a jerk , shivering with cold .sx He began to stretch his cramped legs but they hurt .sx Opening his eyes , he looked around in the darkness .sx He knew immediately where he was .sx He had been locked under the stairs .sx He peered through the crack at the side of the small door .sx It was pitch black .sx " .sx It could be that the verb " woke up " , rather than 'woke' or 'was awake' and the economical syntax ( and lack of punctuation ) of the second sentence are intended to link the discourse to the mind of the character .sx But unfortunately , the stylistic simplicity of the passage - that is , its lack of deviation or variety - merely points up the logical and referential anomalies .sx ( How could he " peer through " a " crack " ( or is it really a 'gap' ?sx ) which he could not see ( as it was " pitch black " ) ?sx Indeed , how could he know that he was under the stairs if it was so dark ; and if he knew by some means other than sight , why are we not informed about it ?sx ) The summarizing mode is so pervasive that it constantly shifts towards implicit authorial control , which in turn becomes a marker ( or an assumed marker ) of the genre of children's literature .sx And this is quite apart from the grammatical features ; five of the seven sentences have the same structure ( six if we discount the clause " Opening his eyes " ) .sx Yet Michelle Magorian's Goodnight Mr Tom not only won the British Library Association's Carnegie Medal , but also ( ironically enough ) , the International Reading Association's Children's Book Award ( 1982) .sx Since this extract is characteristic of the novel , we may have here some indication of the relative stress laid by judges upon content and style .sx Magorian's text tells rather than shows , explicates rather than demonstrates ; and books which retain this dominating narrational presence , the residual or 'transferred' storyteller , are a textual echo of storying as an event which the storyteller essentially controls .sx In general , it seems that this control is only reluctantly relinquished ( which may say something about the adult-child relationship ) , which can scarcely be for so simple a reason as that the reading audience cannot understand the text without a built-in prompter .sx In fact , even skilled readers have difficulty with the voice of the storyteller addressing the audience 'directly' in 'two - dimensional' printed texts .sx As the history of the early novel demonstrates , the act of storying involves a narrative voice or stance , an implied narrator or author or quasi-storyteller ( or a device to replace it ) ; and this produces a grammatical and psychological situation of immense complexity .sx When , as in texts designed to be read to children ( or , indeed , any audience ) there is a first-person marker , there can be problems , as we have seen from The Tale of Tom Kitten .sx One of the most complex instances is the opening of Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh .sx The narrative begins with a direct address to the implied reader , marked by second-person form :sx " Anyhow , here he is .sx .. ready to be introduced to you .sx " It then moves to a situation where the first-person narrator describes how she or he tells a story to Christopher Robin , who now becomes both a character and an addressee :sx " You aimed very carefully at the balloon , and fired .sx 'Did I miss ?sx ' you asked .sx " .sx The problems confronting a reader of that text and a listener to that reader are formidable , not least because the reader implied ( and thus required ) by the text is not the actual receiver .sx Hence the linguistic needs are different .sx There is an entertaining paradox here .sx The storyteller's summaries , intended to make things easier for the listener , are quite likely when they appear in a text being read silently to make things more difficult for the reader .sx They have not sprung from a genuine need ( on the part of the reader ) , and as a result they require an artificial convergence of text-codes and reader-codes , rather than , as in the case of the 'given' text , allowing an exploration of codes which may not cohere , and may not need to .sx ( The implications of this can be seen in Robert Leeson's account of the history of children's literature , which emphasizes the interplay of oral and written patterns in a socio - political context .sx ) .sx An example of both the summary and the quasi-storyteller's voice can be seen in Ruth Park's novel Playing Beattie Bow ( which won the Australian Children's Book of the Year Award in 1981) :sx As she stood there , looking up at the askew , rusted pulley , and the edge of the roof above it , a small patch of the sky suddenly lost its stars .sx Someone was lying on the warehouse roof looking down at her .sx Chapter 7 .sx When Abigail realised that she was being spied upon .sx .. .sx Here we have three renditions , or variations , of the same essential semantic set , which progressively 'close' the text .sx " A small patch of the sky suddenly lost its stars " requires a considerable interpretive effort by the reader , and it carries several possibilities .sx " Someone was lying on the warehouse roof " restricts these possibilities .sx " Looking down on her " and " realised that she was being spied upon " similarly move from 'showing' to 'telling' , from 'open' to 'closed' .sx Of course , it could be argued that this progression reflects the deductions made by Abigail , so that Park holds to the contract of narration through a single consciousness .sx However , the progression from stylistic deviation ( the adverb in an adjectival position in " askew , rusted pulley " ) to clich e ( " being spied upon " ) re-assumes control .sx This is further corroborated by the explanatory work of the first sentence in the new chapter , and of course we need not assume that the presence of a chapter division requires a break in the flow of reading .sx The Reader and Meaning .sx Children are developing readers ; their approach to life and text stems from a different set of cultural standards from those of adult readers , one that may be in opposition , or perhaps based on orality .sx Hence they do 'possess' texts , in the sense that their meanings are their own and private , even more than adults .sx Adult readers know the rules of the game , even if they don't know that they know ; and their understanding , as we have seen , may rest on belonging to 'interpretive communities' which not only know the rules of the game but share their knowledge and attitudes .sx I would like to lay bare some of these rules , and suggest that child-readers cannot possibly have access to all of them .sx So , regardless of what the text prompts , they are not necessarily in a position to make use of it .sx But surely we can have some idea of what children understand , otherwise the whole edifice of communication , publishing , and language teaching for children comes tumbling down .sx For example , what about comprehension texts , still so much alive in public examinations ?sx It seems obvious that all we are doing if we ask questions about the 'content' or 'meaning' of a text is testing a child's social competence ( which is , perhaps , all we should do , or should hope to do) .sx That is , children who are successful in comprehension tests demonstrate no more than that they can find the answer implicit in the question .sx The 'real' meaning of the text to the individual remains hidden ; children ( perhaps for ever afterwards ) develop the skill to say what they are supposed to say , and may well assume that their private understandings are in some way 'wrong' - just as those who set the examination questions must assume that their own reading of the text is in some way 'right' .sx In his excellent book Developing Response to Fiction , Robert Protherough suggests that there is a spectrum between what is 'objectively' correct - that is , something which all speakers of the language will agree on as being 'there' in the text - and things which are subjective and purely personal .sx His spectrum ( which could , I think , bear some modification ) runs , in outline , thus :sx 1 Matters of fact .sx 2 Clear implications .sx 3 Manifest literary effects [e .sx g. symbols , motifs , shifts of viewpoint] .sx 4 Shared associations .sx 5 Significance to the reader based on 'a particular stance' [that is , a doctrine or ideology] .sx 6 Private associations .sx Some of these - perhaps the first four - might seem to be the common property of all readers .sx We read within a reading community , and therefore can share meanings and understanding .sx But is this really so ?sx To look at it another way , are there degrees of understanding , which , when we are writing or prescribing fiction , we will accept ?sx Is there another spectrum between total understanding of what the writer intended and a free-form , totally personal reading , which , say , takes After the First Death as a drawing-room comedy or The Lion , The Witch , and the Wardrobe as a pagan text ?sx ( The latter example is not as grotesque as it may appear .sx The book has been banned in certain areas of the USA on just those grounds .sx ) Is there such a thing as 'total' comprehension ?sx And are there degrees of comprehension which we might accept as adequate , or normal , or worth giving a good mark to ?sx It is obvious that there are limits to the shared making of meaning .sx What the author meant is , strictly speaking , unknowable , even to the author .sx But we have to assume a certain congruence between what you see and what I see and what a child-reader sees ; otherwise the whole business of making books ( and , especially , talking about them ) becomes a nonsense .sx There must be a middle ground of common-sense agreement about what meaning is .sx This may not seem to have got us very far ; but it may at least have made us cautious about assuming any similarity of understanding between readers .sx What we need to do now is to investigate the way in which texts work - what the shared rules are - so that we can see where individual readers are likely to go their own ways .sx Equally , the way texts are organized and our understanding of that organization have a profound effect on the way we see the world .sx As Roger Fowler puts it :sx " Linguistic codes do not reflect reality neutrally ; they interpret , organize , and classify the subjects of discourse .sx They embody theories of how the world is arranged :sx world-views or ideologies .sx For the individual , these theories are useful and reassuring , making his relationship with the world simple and manageable .sx "