Imagine a discourse between the arts in which the conventions of what we might call "ordinary" cognition do not apply, on a site of intense lobbying neither tethered by history or cultural integrity, nor, frequently, concerned with social cohesion or communicative norms. It will be a discourse in which the categories of an imperial culture are abrogated (however temporarily) by an "indigenous" one, yet it will undoubtedly also be a site of intense "colonization." On it, likewise, there will be an appropriation of language on an unprecedented scale. Past experience will play little part. Memory is short and episodic, rather than semantic. It is a primal discourse. Primal in that it is the site of first contact. Primal also in that it is most often considered to be the meeting of a primitive culture and an advanced. Primal, likewise, in a behavioral sense: in it, the satisfaction of physiological needs is tantamount. Indeed, body and mind here are in a state of kinetic unrest. This is a scene of prolonged immat urity, yet ontological and epistemological questions held in a private language are encouraged to be made public. Here the verbal arts have no canon. Literature has no prevailing cultural standard of merit. Questions of the popular and the high cultural are not naturalized and the fictional and nonfictional carry the same degree of verisimilitude as works of propaganda, rhetoric, and didacticism. In modem times, the West has become the site of this tenacious yet frequently unacknowledged imperial discourse, the discourse between multifarious forms of artistic representation to win the attention of children. It is in such a discourse that the picture book is located.

Arguing the need for a critical language for the discussion of children's picture books, Peter Hunt suggests that "to force pictures into the same mould as words seems to be potentially unproductive, except in terms of establishing conventions, when, of course, it is, by definition, necessary" (181). It is impossible, however, to conventionalize pictorial representation to the same degree as linguistic representation. Linguistic systems are mastered painstakingly, piece by piece, referent by referent, word by word. Pictorial systems, by contrast, are mastered all at once; they involve what Flint Schier has called "natural generativity" and are therefore much less conventional than linguistic systems. Each system, nevertheless, relies on general agreement and on a willingness to engage in communicative activity: the pictorial system on deep recognitional capacities that link object and its picture, the linguistic system on lexical and syntactical regularities and rules.

In the media-saturated culture of the contemporary West, the commonalities and differences of our separate but shared experiences are frequently offered up in a televisual or hypertextual format in which what Hunt describes as "force" is a set of discursive practices that address and interpellate both adults and children as potential viewers or listeners. The linguistic and the pictorial are frequently experienced as synergistic or polylogic systems bound up in this mass media, a media whose intention, according to Jean Baudrillard, is to transcribe the complexity of contemporary life into an ongoing procession of meaningless simulacra, a hyperreal, "a real without origin or reality" (2).

Baudrillard's disenchanted vision of postmodernity, articulated most profoundly in the late 1970s and 1980s, produced an interesting ontological metaphor. "Disneyland," he claimed, "is there to conceal the fact that it is the 'real' country, all of 'real' America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social, in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation" (25). As Baudrillard's dystopic metaphor of America was offered up, somewhat questionably, as a metaphor appropriate for the entire West, it is worthwhile noting its prime rhetorical flaw. Simply, that Disneyland's aesthetic, its communicative philosophy, has a very specific cultural origin. It is constructed, not as Baudrillard intimates, in adulthood; rather, it is constructed within the realms of childhood.

Childhood is a construct of modernity. As Phillipe Aries argues, [...] the new sciences such as psycho-analysis, paediatrics and psychology devote themselves to the problems of childhood, and their findings are transmitted to parents by way of a mass of popular literature. Our world is obsessed by the physical, moral and sexual problems of childhood. [...] The preoccupation was unknown to medieval civilization, because there was no problem for the Middle Ages: as soon as he had been weaned, or soon after, the child became the natural companion of the adult.