The Pedagogy of the Post-Modern Text: Aidan Chambers's The Toll Bridge

Although literature has the potential to expose readers to new ideas and experiences, it can also prompt readers to question their own ways of thinking. Yet the truly unique characteristic of literature is the opportunity it provides for readers to become actively engaged with texts through the process of interpretation. French literary theorist Roland Barthes recognized the significance of the relationship between a reader and a text and developed the notion of the writerly text, in which the reader acts as a collaborator in producing textual meaning. Barthes argues that this collaboration of the reader in the act of interpretation is essential to exciting and creative literary experiences. Pedagogically, this theory is especially important in increasing children’s interest in reading. However, both young adult and children’s fiction that guides readers directly to an intended meaning fails to challenge its readers to accept such active participation. Although readers can interact with any book in a critical manner, closed texts do not encourage readers to do so. Rather, it is the post-modern or experimental text that, through its open construction, invites readers to interpret its meanings for themselves. Rarely feeding their readers neat answers, post-modern texts inspire their readers to critically carve them up, find textual evidence, and accept or reject meanings. This manner of active reading has exceptional educational benefits in that it forces readers to think about the meaning of a text, empowers them to make their own judgments regarding interpretation, and refuses to simply feed them a moral or precept. Aidan Chambers’s The Toll Bridge is one young adult novel that achieves this pedagogical function. Through the story of three friends who search for love, friendship, and their own identities, young readers are encouraged to embark on their own quests for meaning and understanding.

Literature can be a uniquely pedagogical medium. We read literature in order to explore and make meaning of human experience and the human condition, and it is through literature that we contemplate and celebrate the nature of the human realm. Children approach literature for the same purposes as adults; they use it to make sense of their world. Through the process of reading:

children are forming attitudes, finding points of reference, building concepts, forming images to think with, all of which interact to form a basis for decision-making judgment, for understanding, for sympathy with the human condition. Literary experience feeds the imagination, that faculty by which we come to grips with the astonishing amount of data which assails our everyday lives, and finds patterns of meaning in it.

(Chambers, Introducing Books to Children 28)

Literature, then, is a multi-functional medium for adults and children alike. It is a pedagogical tool through which readers come to terms with their world.

Although the position of the reader and his/her engagement with the text determines the ultimate status of a book, Barthes distinguishes between two types of texts: the “readerly” and the “writerly” (or scriptable). He identifies the readerly text as a closed text that guides the reader to an intended meaning. Conversely, he identifies the writerly text as an open text that encourages the reader to act as an interpreter, to fill in gaps in the narrative, and to create meanings. In his essay, “From Work to Text,” Barthes makes a similar distinction between a “work” as a closed text and a “Text” as an open text. “The difference is this: the work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books. . . the Text is a methodological field” (Image-Music-Text 156–57). In other words, the work is the content or substance of a book, which represents only a small part of the book’s essence, while the Text represents a whole methodology of communication, including form, approach, and content. Furthermore, the notion of the Text is not limited to books. Barthes recognizes music, images, and cultural practices as “Texts” that can be analyzed, read, and interpreted. To see a novel as a “work,” one interprets the novel as a closed construction with a...