Stop All the Clocks: Time in Postmodern Picture Books

Abstract

Time, according to Ursula Heise (Heise 1997, p.48), is one of the most fundamental parameters through which narrative is organised and understood and the mode by which we mediate and negotiate human temporality. This human experience of time depends on cultural contexts that themselves are subject to change (p.48). The novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet (Robbe-Grillet 1962, p.133), claims that time no longer passes and that the question of chronology, of 'clocks and calendars', has become irrelevant. Time, as an aspect of the referential illusion created by conventional narratives, is being undermined, not only in postmodern novels, but also in postmodern picture books. In an effort, then, to understand these new temporal realities of the contemporary world and the ways in which they are represented in postmodern narrative, principally the postmodern picture book, I turned to Heise's text Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (1997). It is Heise's contention that a fundamental change has taken place in the Western culture of time and it is my intention in this paper to examine these changes to our conceptualisation of time and briefly look at the causes of such changes. Following this I examine the ways in which these changes are reflected in narrative, with particular emphasis on the post-modern picture book.