Shaun Tan's The Red Tree (2001): A Visual Reading of A Postmodern Picturebook

Abstract

The present study seeks to examine the poetics of the visual narrative art in a postmodern picturebook as exemplified in Shaun Tan's The Red Tree (2001). The Red Tree illustrates a fragmented journey through a gloomy world. The text is bare and matches the dim and surreal illustrations. The Red Tree is a postmodern visual narrative in tenor and form appealing to the resourcefulness of the child reader. The subject matter of the visual narrative is the visual narrative itself, i.e. fiction about fiction which celebrates the floating of meanings, the boundary-breaking indeterminacy and the counterpointing relationship between the text and the illustrations. The postmodern picturebook, unlike traditional picturebooks, does not seek to deliver a specific meaning, but rather provides the child reader with an experience of exploring an array of possible meanings. This study seeks to explore the notion of the child reader as a co-author of a postmodern picturebook in an endeavor to interpret the visual narrative's paralinguistic cues. With this rationale, The Red Tree is a picturebook without a specific narrative which follows a red-haired girl as she wonders aimlessly through a series of selfcontained, highly detailed surreal landscapes accompanied by a vague and minimal thread of text, thus, the illustrations are purposefully open to interpretations and are mostly quite surreal in both the stylistic approach and the subject matter which is characteristic of postmodern texts. Therefore, it is my attempt to pursue the metalanguage of children's postmodern picturebook, a genre of literature worthy of serious analysis and investigation. The current study explores the visual syntax of the illustrations to construct a visual discourse through 'reading images' in a postmodern children's picturebook.