ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter we explored children’s growing control of narra tive texts as decontextualized texts. ‘Decontextualized’ here does not mean ‘entirely removed from context’ (an impossibility and theoretical incoherence) but ‘freed from immediate reliance upon and disambiguation by a co-present teller and addressee’. As the previous chapter suggested this involves learning to use language and genres and conventions. But while narrative text can be decontextualized as far as immediate situation is concerned, it can hardly be so as far as the broader cultural framework is concerned. A narrative is never without contexts which both shape and come to be shaped by the story that is told and heard. Contexts may be put in the plural for the too-often-neglected reason that the teller and addressees of a narrative may assume quite different grounds for a particular tale being told, and may separately deduce rather different morals or consequences. It is because any narrative inevitably has some effect on its addressees and consequences in the real world that we have to recognize that narratives are, among other things, a kind of political action. This is true of all narratives, even the most escapist, or those turned to ‘just for a bit of fun’. Narratives, in short, invariably carry political and ideological freight.
