Narratee and Implied Readers in the Manolito Gafotas Series: A Case of Triple Address

At the beginning of Cómo molo, the third book in the Manolito Gafotas series by Spanish author Elvira Lindo, the child narrator declares, "[D]esde que cuento mi vida tengo muchísimos más amigos de los que nunca hubiera podido imaginar, aunque no haya visto sus caras ni sepa sus nombres" (13). ("[S]ince I've been telling the story of my life I have a lot more friends than I could have ever imagined, even if I haven't seen their faces or know their names.") As the testimony of real readers of many ages shows, the friends he refers to include children, adolescents, and adults. The seven novels, although their covers indicate that they are marketed for children twelve to fourteen, have been extraordinarily popular with younger children, older teens, and adults as well, fulfilling the stated aspiration of their creator to write books that all audiences will enjoy (Fernández-Prieto 36).¹ By the year 2000 sales had reached over a million copies, an unprecedented phenomenon among Spanish books for young people (Mota 5). Ana María Rico Martín declares that the first book, eponymously titled Manolito Gafotas, was very successful among children ten to twelve; students in the last year of primary and first year of secondary school liked the book so much that they requested others in the same series for later courses (10). In an article on current children's and adolescent literature in Spain, Eliacer Cansino indicates that the books about Manolito Gafotas are read by adolescents, or young adults, of seventeen (35).² Rico includes these books in the group Juan José Lage Fernández calls "libros de familia" ("family books") in part because they generate interest among adults, including parents and educators, as well as among children (Rico 30). William Sherzer declares that the Manolito Gafotas series "has constituted the entry of children's literature into the realm of popular adult culture" (166). What is it about this series that has engaged readers of such diverse age groups?

Triple/Triadic Address

One approach to answering this question would be to consider the books as a case of what I will call triple address. Here I elaborate on Barbara Wall's theory of address as presented in The Narrator's Voice: The Dilemma of Children's Fiction. Wall identifies three basic types of address in children's books: single, double, and dual. She defines double address as that in which the narrator addresses the child narratee "overtly and self-consciously" and also addresses adults, either overtly, as the implied author's attention shifts between the implied child reader and an adult audience, or covertly, as the narrator "deliberately exploits the ignorance of the implied child reader and attempts to entertain an implied adult reader by making jokes which are funny prima-rily because children will not understand them" (35). In dual address the narrator addresses a child narratee, covertly or openly, "either using the same 'tone of seriousness' which would be used to address adult narratees, or confidentially sharing the story in a way that allows adult narrator and child narratee a conjunction of interests" (35). I would like to modify Wall's two types of double address and assign different terms to them. Rather than refer to them as overt and covert, I would assign to the first type the term "alternating double address" and describe it as one in which the narrator alternately addresses a child and an adult narratee; to the second type, I would give the term "split double address," that is, one in which the narrator addresses a child narratee while the implied author addresses an adult implied reader.

Illustrated by Emilio Urberuaga, written by Elvira Lindo, published by Alfaguara Publisher.

In her discussion of double address Wall does not pay a lot of attention to the adolescent implied reader as such. In general, she confines herself to the binomial child-adult. I would further expand her theory, taking the adolescent more into account. Although continuities link childhood, adolescence...