The Folkstories of Children

Abstract

The Folkstories of Children* Brian Sutton-Smith I have approached children's folklore partly as a psychologist and partly as a folklorist. In consequence, my contributions are often the progeny of a mixed theoretical marriage. After all, there are folktales and [End Page 14] there are stories, but what on earth are folkstories? In my misce-generative mind, these are stories which children make up voluntarily and which they continue to tell in much the same fashion over continuing periods of time. One finds that such stories can be analyzed as we analyze true folktales, so I call them folkstories. If we kept listening to them and if children repeated each other's stories and continued to enjoy them, they might indeed become children's folktales, but that doesn't seem to happen. It is true that there are still children in parts of the world who tell something like folktales (McDowell, 1975; Watson, 1972), and one might suppose that where an oral tradition is dominant this could be a regular form of child behavior. Several hundred years of literacy training, however, seem to have made it an infrequent form of children's folklore in industrial civilization. In some recent studies (with Mary Ann Magee), we have attempted to find out how children first learn to tell these stories. For example, we studied a two-year-old child for approximately a year, having the parents tape record their storytelling sessions with her every week or so. The first thing to note is that like other researchers (Ninio & Bruner, 1976) we found an enormous amount of repetition on the part of the tale telling adults. The child ultimately came to tell a story of her own, but she had had thousands of storytime repetitions before that event came about. The early stories were made up about picture books with both adult and child looking at the pictures. Increasingly, however, the child herself began to ask the questions (What is it?) and call out the names of the animals and say what they were doing (The doggy is running). This shift from the passive audience posture seems to be a basic way in which children become participators in the act of story making. It needs to be emphasized, though, that participation can only occur easily if the parent gives the child leeway. The same process was then gone through with storybooks. For several months the child mainly listened. Then she increasingly anticipated and told the story of the action to come. Perhaps more importantly, in the story telling as in her active role with the picture books, she enacted the story to come with gestures and noises and movements. The increasing volume of this play enactment was the most prominent feature of her response over the year. One could well argue that an active response through play enactment was the major basis for subsequent story confidence in this girl. Surprisingly, however, when the first story emerged, it was not derived from any of the stories she had heard in the books. It came directly out of her own experience. Several times throughout that first year she began to talk about somebody biting somebody else, but, although this was recorded on the tape recorder, the parents did not recognize what she was attempting to do and ignored her. We should say that she had already acquired a reputation as a biter, having bitten several other children. As one writer might have put it, this was her "peremptory metaphor." Finally she got her "story" out, and it was about herself biting her cat and then kissing it better. Our preliminary thinking about this sequence (very barely sketched here) is that the parents provided the "staging" for how to tell stories and how to make them up. They repeatedly rehearsed the child in these procedures, and then when the time was ripe she used her knowledge of this staging to project onto it a novel story derived from her own personal concerns. From them she learned story staging (rhetoric) and story form (structure), but the precipitating metaphor (or symbolism) was directly from her own experience. She had bitten a cat, and been bitten by a...