Week 6 Reading and Discussion

Voices in the Park by Anthony Browne is styled in a cartoon-ized Social Realism but has many of the characteristics of a post-modern picture book.  It tells its story through multiple narrators, and uses four “interconnected narrative strands differentiated by shifts in temporal and spatial relationships, and/or shifts in narrative point of view” (Serafini, 2014).  In addition to these, Voices in the Park uses a typographical effect by changing the font for each narrator.  According to Frank Serafini, these are all indicative of a post-modern picture book.

The book also utilizes several picturebook codes.  It uses the code of position and size by placing the image at the strong place on the page.  The pictures always sit the left, so as the catch the eye first before the text is read.  The book uses the code of frame by placing the image in a box that we must look through into another world.  The text lingers in the margin land outside of the picture where we will notice it after we have explored visual elements.  Finally, the code of color draws us in to see the image and “read” it before we read the black and white text.  The color is used to set the majority of the mood on the page, and the text relies heavily upon it to convey the story.

Speaking of the text relying upon the image, like many picturebooks, Voices in the Park lets the image tell more than half of the story.  Whereas a textbook or a newspaper page tend to use pictures to supplement a page full of text that could otherwise stand alone, a picturebook could not stand without its images.  The emphasis of picture and text are reversed.  The picture tells the story and could almost stand alone without the text.  A careful observer might infer the entire story of Voices in the Park without any text at all.  This is how it should be, otherwise the text and the images might actually render one another superfluous or redundant. 

In structure, the book is arranged into four different chapters, narrated by four different characters, who are arranged around a map of a park where all of the stories will intersect.  As the reader travels through the stories, we see that each image is positioned at the left, and is filled with color and movement.  To supplement the story we see a text narration in the margin outside of each page.  By the end, of the book we are able to use both image and text to see how each story has intersected.

Ideologically, we may notice that the book deals with how communal spaces, like a park, and the interactions that happen there can provide some healthy alleviation for the burdens caused by urban isolation.  Both people and dogs find some release and encouragement from what had begun as a very bland and lonely day.  The reader is left to conclude that people (and dogs) need other people… even strangers at times.

References

Serafini, F. (2014). Reading the visual: An introduction to multimodal literacy. New York: Teachers College Press.