But Children Have Always Been Postmodern : BLACK AND WHITE <i> by David Macaulay (Houghton Mifflin: $14.95; 32 pp.; 0-395-52151-3) </i>

In David Macaulay’s latest pictorial extravaganza and zany tale-spinning, each spread is fragmented into small, full-color frames, much like those multi-screen, stereo-enhanced TV banks of the now-and-near future. Each turn of the page reveals not one, but four advancing stories taking place in, around and beyond those frames. “Black and White” is a meticulously thought-out attempt to cross, blur and even vanquish the barriers between one closed system of reference--the storyline--and the others. Scraps of torn paper in one storyline turn into snow in another, then into shredded newspaper in yet a third. The four storylines themselves act as warp and weft of larger tales.

Viewed one by one, each self-contained story satisfies all the requirements of linear narrative; each has a beginning and an end, causality, denouement and logical finality. First, two children, playing with a train set, watching TV and listening to music, are alarmed by their parents’ off-the-wall giddiness, behavior disturbingly at odds with this household’s normal routines. Second, a boy settles in for his first train trip alone and is curious when the train mysteriously stops because of some boulders on the track. Third, a chorus--rather, a group of commuters waits on a suburban station platform for a delayed train and gradually collapses into silliness and origami-with-newspapers high jinks. And fourth, a group--rather, a herd of Holstein cows is infiltrated by an escaped convict, bemasked and blending in beautifully with the cows’ black-and-white markings.

The real mischief begins when the architecturally erudite author (Macaulay’s previous books include “How Things Work” and “Unbuilding”) leaps from the polymorphous to the single vision and from a piecemeal treatment of storytelling into a summing up of the parts in the whole. Here, the four vertical structures are conjoined in the mind of the beholder to form an all-new, one-of-a-kind, one-to-a-customer linear narrative. Readers are expected--required--to let their imaginations supply at least part of the so-called big picture.

Neither reading between the lines, nor reading between the frames, helps. In the high-tech lingo of textual analysis, the four plots form a tetra-partite structure of parallel processing. But a child’s verdict of “neat,” “weird” or “gross” can be just as relevant. What the book really demands is simply to be read: by children, according to their own standards, their confirmed irreverence, fractured perception, and their birthright--joyous anarchy. If the blatant indeterminacy found in these pages looks annoyingly unconventional, it is perhaps the perspective of stodgy adults, interminably sniffing out meaning and message.

The storytelling, as in a children’s garden of forking paths, roams through several levels of reality. The television--an all too familiar state of suspended animation--is on; perhaps the escaped convict has fled TV-dom for his abstract, cows-and-cubist maps of the earth. The impressionistic depiction of the boy’s train journey implies a dream state. The train station becomes the theater for the improvisational antics of commuters suddenly goofing off with zeal. The children in the comic-book style frames (looking for all the world like the nephew and niece in a soap-opera comic strip, perhaps “Mary Worth”) may be engaged in a game of make-believe--in which their parents are first an interruption and are then cast as an integral part.

Inventive tale-telling of this kind aptly reflects children’s worlds. Geared to short attention spans, their minds shift and hop from one world to the next. Each day a child may do homework in front of the television, dreamily unearthing the day’s school events, perfectly aware of the sounds of dinner preparations, or the dog barking to be let out. Separate realities mingle and overlap, as when a child sleeps and a sound--a knock at the door, for instance--is incorporated into a dream.

This species of interposed images and mad frolic is already used to great effect by MTV and other media pipelines to the imagination. Lost in the fun house, children crave and glory in MTV’s rapid-fire barrage of enigmatic special effects. Not understanding what they see on the screen does not seem to stand in the way of their entertainment--or their absorption in detail. As evidenced in the book’s typographical playfulness, Macaulay draws upon a tradition that existed long before ardent postmodernists started bending type, warping print space and stretching pages. Books with dual existences--as objects and as texts--have long been part of the children’s book corner: lift-the-flaps, pop-ups, edible books, furry-feely books.

Macaulay’s avalanche of creativity requires no more of readers than others have asked, such as Mitsumasa Anno (particularly in “Anno’s Aesop”), Etienne Delessert (“A Long Long Song”) and Robert Cormier (“Fade”), who are children’s books’ ambassadors to the future and to mainstream literature. With this entertaining hopscotch spree, Macaulay joins the others in bringing children’s books smack into the constellation of concepts and neologisms that fall under the rubric of “Postmodernism.”