Reading Outside the Lines: Peritext and Authenticity in South African Children's Books

Although the peritext is a significant feature of children's literature, it continues to receive little attention in spite of postmodern interest in metanarrative and the unstable nature of texts. Since Margaret Higonnet's article on "The Playground of the Peritext," published in 1990, pointed out some features of the peritext and their implications, my reading of South African children's literature has suggested some further observations on the part that the peritext can play.

Every book contains a space outside the space occupied by the text itself that is taken up with additional features comprising, among others, titles and subtitles, authors' names and pen portraits, prefaces, forewords, introductions, acknowledgements, dedications, cover blurbs, endorsements, quotations from reviews, letters from readers, datelines, tables of contents, epigraphs, glossaries, notes, epilogues, and illustrations. Higonnet includes in her definition of peritext the material nature of some books, which goes beyond the inclusion of illustrations or the design of a book as a picture book, to embrace constructions such as pop-up, moveable, and fold-out books. On a more arcane level, modern collectors, as Cooper and Cooper (vii) point out, value dust wrappers of children's books, and in fact the British Library has a special catalogue to enable researchers to consult its collection of wrappers.

A simple inventory of peritextual items suggests how many voices and readers are at work. Among the voices are authors and implied authors, illustrators, editors, publishers, reviewers, and prominent personages. Some of these are identified, some anonymous, and some have an identity that is complex and problematical. Similarly, the identity of the implied reader of the peritextual material is not a simple matter. Often the implied reader is not the youthful reader of the book, but the mediating adult--usually a parent or relative, librarian or school teacher, or (in the nineteenth century) the Sunday school teacher, who is going to buy the book or approve it for reading, or even read it to young children. Adults also read children's books, and authors sometimes connive at this, even when ostensibly addressing children.

One of the functions of the peritext that Higonnet describes is playfulness, which has affinity with the ludic dimension of intertextuality and metafiction analysed by Wilkie and McCallum respectively in Hunt's International Encyclopedia of Children's Literature. The effect of this playfulness is described by Wilkie:

[It] causes readers to pay attention to the fabric and artifice of these texts as works of literature, and of the textuality of the world to which they allude; it also causes readers to recognise how they are being (have been) textually constructed in and by this intertextual playground. (137)

A second function of the peritext identified by Higonnet is that it adds meaning to the text, and this is the case with the South African literature examined in this article, since the peritexts are not overtly of the self-reflexive kind but seek rather to provide a context for the text.

One of the French critics who have written on the peritext is Derrida, whose essay on the preface, entitled "Outwork," appears in Dissemination. It is possible to see his comments applying more broadly to other peritextual forms as well. Derrida calls the space that the preface occupies a "liminal space" (18), the contents of which are a "third term which cannot simply, as a text, be either inside . . . or outside" (15). It is "a completely other structure, a more powerful one, capable of accounting for effects of meaning, experience, concept, and reality" (35). In the children's literature, we find in this space concerns of authorship, readership, sales, reception, social issues, contemporary events, and personal concerns of the author, which add other qualities of meaning to the books, turning them into more complex social documents.

However, the contribution of the peritextual material to the overall meaning of the book is not simply...