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Text as Teacher:The Beginning of Charlotte's Web Perry Nodelman (bio) Most recent narrative theories assume that the ability to understand fiction depends upon a reader's prior knowledge of the codes and conventions that any narrative inevitably evokes and depends on. The assumption seems justified; consider how incomplete and pointless unadulterated versions of North American folk tales appear when approached in terms of our usual European ideas about what makes a story a story. In fact, even the simplest of stories imply and seem to demand prior knowledge. Jonathan Culler speaks of the presuppositions of the beginnings of stories—the way they imply a context: Logically the opening sentence with the fewest presuppositions would be something like Once upon a time the king had a daughter. Poor in logical presuppositions, this sentence is extremely rich in literary and pragmatic presuppositions. It relates the story to a series of other stories, identifies it with the conventions of a genre, asks us to take certain attitudes towards it (guaranteeing, or at least strongly implying, that the story will have a point to it, a moral which will govern the organization of detail and incident.) The presuppositionless sentence is a powerful intertextual operator. [115] Such sentences inevitably evoke the vast body of literature they are a part of—perhaps, even, the vast body of all literature. What seems simple is in fact ineffably complex—not a discrete entity, but the small twig of a vast tree. In order to properly comprehend that small twig, we must know something of the vast tree. But even very young children understand and enjoy stories, and many four- or five- or six-year-olds take much pleasure from the longer and more complex novels their parents or teachers read to them. One such novel is E. B. White's Charlotte's Web, a favorite choice of many adults as a first extended narrative to read to young children. How is that possible, when their previous literary experience [End Page 109] is likely to have consisted only of television cartoons and the simple stories in picture books? One possible answer is that the skills required to understand narrative structures are inherent, preexisting in all human beings. In his influential study of the patterns of Russian folk tales, Vladimir Propp implies that they might be; he says that "fairy tales possess a quite particular structure which is immediately felt and which determines their category even though we may not be aware of it" (6). But it seems likely that Propp had such feelings because of his own involvement with the culture these stories emerged from; other cultures have produced quite different bodies of stories with quite different systems of narrative structuring, and, as Seymour Chatman suggests, "What constitutes 'reality' or 'likelihood' is a strictly cultural phenomenon. . . . The 'natural' changes from one society to another" (49). That we have the sort of "feelings" about narrative structures Propp describes only because we learn them is indicated even in the introduction to the English translation of Propp's study, in which Alan Dundes asks, "And how precisely is fairy tale structure learned? Does the child unconsciously extrapolate fairy tale structure from hearing many individual fairy tales . . .? This kind of question must be investigated by field and laboratory experiments" (x). As it happens, such investigations have been carried out in recent years—not by folklorists or even by child psychologists, but by specialists in children's literature. While their conclusions are still vague, they almost always confirm that children must learn how to understand stories. In a recent article in Children's Literature in Education, for instance, Robert Protherough concludes that "children learn from experience the kinds of reading they have to give to different texts" (14). But while Protherough says that happens, he doesn't describe how it happens. Narrative theorists don't provide much explanation either. They usually just assume that such knowledge does already exist, in anyone capable of understanding narratives. "Narrative evokes a world," says Seymour Chatman, "and since it is no more than an evocation, we are left free to enrich it with whatever real or fictive experience we acquire" (120); but he offers no explanation...
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