A Mysterious Old Mermaid

"Once upon a time there was a mysterious old mermaid named Spot the doggy. And then Spot put on spots."

That's the story Zoe told me this morning. I know, the ending needs work. But the mermaid figure is intriguing.

One of the funny things about these early toddlings into the realm of narrative is, frankly, how much the products resemble stories generated by crude computer programs. It makes me wonder whether my daughter is operating more at the level of syntax or semantics when she comes up and out with the stuff. I mean: is she just stocked with a fair selection of threads she knows how to snip and tie together in random but moderately rule-governed ways? She has a 'Once upon a time there was a mysterious old x named y' function, and sets of possible plug-ins for the argument slots: mermaid, witch, puppy, boy, girl, so forth. Or is she really thinking about a scene for a story and a character, only to lose track of it almost instantly?

Most of the time when she talks - constantly - she is obviously expressing fairly definite beliefs and desires. She could pass a toddler Turing test, no question. But when she decides to 'tell a story', she does appear to switch on a strange sort of syntax-only autopilot; then it's anyone's guess where we'll end up.

I suppose it just goes to show that Plato was right. Those mysterious old great poets have no idea where the stuff comes from. It's very cute.

Comments

[Dell Adams]

Advantage: Kotsko!

[Timothy Burke]

I'm always afraid I'm going to bore both non-parents and old-timer parents with these kinds of things, but I'm equally fascinated right now with the same approximate phenomenon. There's a sort of modular sense of narrative I hear with Emma's stories now, a series of episodes chained together with various linking words. Every time I think she's just free-associating, she'll suddenly link up a module with something that came five minutes ago in the story. I think a lot of the time she's both experimenting with the structure of narrative and its meaning, and that any given episode of story-telling winds in and out of both purposes.

They sure do come up with some interesting stuff that makes your ears tingle a bit when you hear it. The latest one that really grabbed my attention was the story that opened, somewhat ominously, with "He is the passenger dog. He shows us the signs" and proceeded from there to loop back to that phrase and theme a number of times with detours for other animals, food consumption, family members associated with various verbs, several television characters, descriptions of book reading, and a few first-person episodes.

[Ray]

The development of storytelling is fascinating stuff, all right. In attempting an entirely new use for language, the toddler seems to concentrate on the *differences* between that use and other uses, rather than on incidentals such as believability or motivation or coherence.

M. Orsolini, "Episodic structure in children's fantasy narratives": "...the problem of linking verbal information is solved differently in real narratives vs. fantasy stories. The former typically occur in dialogue: shared knowledge between the speakers' memories of the events to be narrated, and conversational cooperation between speakers facilitate the problem of explicating pieces of verbal information and their linkage. By contrast, fantasy storytelling typically occurs in monologues and... in settings in which the teller is expected to challenge the audience and show his or her own ability. ...fantasy narratives require the extension of the discourse topic without relying on conversational cooperation, but using decontextualisation and formal speech."

B. Leondar, "Hatching Plots: Genesis of Storymaking": "Perhaps the clearest signal transmitted by the young storymaker to his audience is... the fictional status of his communiqué....the artifice of the plot; the distancing of events; the storymaker's absence from the tale, even as commentator; the removal of events, through use of the past tense, to some remote other time.... Although occasional primary narratives produced by the youngest children omit the [story] frame entirely, more commonly the frame appears well in advance of the full narrative, and its use persists often beyond the tenth birthday. Its introductory form allows little variation; 'once,' 'one day,' 'there was,' and 'once upon a time' virtually exhaust the alternatives. The conclusion... permits wider inventiveness. Written stories are almost invariably marked 'The End,' and spoken stories frequently conclude with 'That's all.' 'Lived happily ever after' and its inverse, 'were never seen again' [rarely occur] before the age of six or seven. Most often, stories are rounded off by an event which poses a natural temporal or spatial boundary, coming home or going to bed being the most frequent.... The capacity to distinguish fiction from experience and playful from purposeful discourse is a substantial intellectual attainment which the frame both records and protects."

[Jeremy Osner]

I wonder the same thing when I'm listening to Sylvia's narrations. She clearly understands the difference between (a) talking, (b) factual narrative, (c) fantasy narrative -- and uses a different voice for (c) than for the other two -- I wonder what she is thinking about when she does it. Her stories always (?) start, "Once upon a time" and are usually pretty short. Actually there is another category, somewhere in between (b) and (c), which is quasi-factual narrative about her fantasy friends -- she uses her regular voice and does not say "once upon a time" but she knows she's making shit up. She uses the fantasy-narrative voice also when she is "reading" to me.