"Bridge" Texts: The Rhetoric of Persuasion in American Children's Realist and Historical Fiction

Literal bridges come in many styles and may be structures as makeshift as a plank thrown over a stream or as complex as the Golden Gate Bridge. Associated with them in our cultural consciousness are activities and images as diverse as long lines of automobiles at rush hour, terrifying car chases during gangster films, or the lone presence of a potential suicide perched precariously atop a high suspension bridge. As symbolic tropes, bridges signify simple transitions, complex challenges, even impossible hurdles. Early in our lives we are warned, "Don't cross that bridge till you come to it"; politicians speak of "bridging the gap" between one constituency and another; and media trainers who wish to prepare their clients for a barrage of hostile questions by reporters teach them to construct "bridges" as rhetorical strategies for controlling negative traffic.²

Both literal and symbolic bridges abound in books for children. Bridges dot the landscape of children's literature as early as "The Three Billy-goats Gruff," who succeed in outwitting the "great ugly Troll" on his archetypal bridge.³ The tradition of rhetorical "bridging" goes back at least to the nineteenth century, with its use of narrative direct address to the reader and anthropomorphized animals or fantasy figures as ways of dealing with change, disorientation, or death. In fairy tales and Alice in Wonderland, for example, adult narrators customarily condescend to their protagonists and readers-in parentheses or explanatory asides. The goal with such narrative "bridges" is to mediate the child-reader's experience and soften the blow. These techniques of direct intervention have continued, to some extent, into the present, but they are used much more in fantasy or mixed genres than in the realistic, historic, or "autobiographical" texts that I am considering, in which first-person (immediate or retrospective) narration predominates and the author therefore cannot intercede in her own voice or introduce gratuitously fantastic creatures.⁴

Of the four texts I will use as central examples, only Lawrence Yep's has the potential to cross over from realism to fantasy or a mixed genre-although I would argue that it does not and therefore serves well to illustrate my definition of "bridge texts."⁵

For critics interested in the rhetoric of persuasion, other kinds of "bridges" help provide metaphorical analogues to literature itself, as a project and a structure. Musical "bridges," for instance, are structures of sound that provide links between two entities without "choosing" one side or the other of the musical composition. Unlike the geographical terrain on two sides of an architectural bridge, which tends to be arranged hierarchically toward a destination or goal, a musical bridge enables linkage without judgment; it is "a transitional passage whose primary function is to connect two passages of greater weight or importance in the work as a whole. Such passages often embody a modulation, as between the keys of the first and second themes of a work in sonata form" (Randel 113-14). Modulation, in turn, is "the process of changing from one key to another, or the result of such change.... It may take the form of a simple modulation to a closely related key and back again..., or it may occur as part of a whole series of complex modulations involving many keys in larger works.... A strong authentic cadence in the new key then helps to confirm the modulation, so that the ear's perception of the old key yields to that of the new" (Randel 503-04).

Applying this new formulation to difficult, challenging writing for children, we can see that "modulations" are like rhetorical or narrative strategies and devices, designed to "take" child readers from one "passage" to another, both of which exceed the "bridge" itself in terms of importance. Such bridges would be necessary in books whose materials are exceptionally disturbing or ideologically challenging to the customary expectations of a readership or their parents and teachers, books whose contents involve interventions in the culture texts of the expected audience: with topics including race and racism, sexual or gender oppression, homosexuality, violence, rebellion, the geographically...