Deconstructing a childhood narrative

Everyone has stories that they latch onto. When I was a kid I had a huge number of jokes that I thought were hysterically funny and would tell at any chance I got, to anyone I met. Storytelling though was reserved for people who were genuinely interested. The hit-and-run style of joke telling was a good gauge to see whether people were actually planning to have a conversation with me, or whether they were just passing through.

People who told jokes back to me frequently became my friends. Sharing a joke that went into my own repertoire definitely bought you high esteem. I was something of a funny story collector back then, and I still am, though the repertoire has of course varied significantly by now. There were people who you could just tell were the right sort of people; the ones who would want to hear a funny story. In fact, they might even start you off with one of their own.

This goes back to what I was saying in the previous article, about how my favorite type of story-telling is associational. The kinds of stories that people tell in chains, because the story being told made them think of one of their own in turn. Jokes are actually very much associational stories, because there are several deep veins of joke types, which can be mined fairly exhaustively in an evening, simply by starting with "Did you hear the one about the {topic}?" and proceeding to tell a specific type of joke. To a receptive listener, this is practically an invitation for an exchange.

The same is true of funny stories. I've heard several appellations for the practice of trading stories back and forth over the course of an evening and trying to one-up the previous story with an even more ridiculous or outrageous story of your own. Since kids don't generally attend cocktail parties, my first experiences with these types of storytelling chains tended to happen either in the schoolyard, at an after-school activity, or best of all at a sleepover, or during a long adult activity, which gave us lots of unstructured time.

Storytelling wasn't always the upshot of a long period of unstructured time spent with other kids, there were dares, and confessions and various personal competitions, but in a way, these were also types of stories, they were just being couched differently. Instead of formally 'telling ghost stories' or talking about school we were talking and comparing experiences which is also a form of storytelling. At core, storytelling just comes down to data transfer. I tell you something and then you know it. What you do with it, or how you interpret it is up to you.  Over time, it's the types and themes of the stories we tell each other or ourselves that shape who we are.

And that's where deconstructing the stories we loved as children becomes really valuable. Let's say you really latched onto Goldilocks and the Three Bears. What do we see when we tell a reductionist version of the story? Here's my go at it:

Once a person who needed resources sought to obtain them in a place where it seemed some resources had been freshly abandoned. Upon investigating the resources at hand, some were found more favorable than others and those were the ones that our person chose to use up. Faced with repercussions for removing the resources, which turned out to belong to others, the person chose to run away instead of taking responsibility.

Told in those terms this story is a lot less charming, isn't it?

So let's break down the story into its elements: 

{person in need}

{resources}

{sampling of resources}

{appropriation of resources}

{potential punishment}

{fleeing from responsibility}

{punishment} and/or{absolution}

It's interesting to note that in many versions of this story the elements of {punishment} / {absolution} are left out entirely.

Depending on which version you learned you may have seen this story very differently than the reductionist version I just told. The ending of this story is a vast continuum from 'and then the bears chased her away' to 'the bears caught her and hung her in a tree by her ankles until nightfall' to more child-friendly endings like 'she apologized to the bears and they shared their home with her'. There are endings that are even more violent than hanging by the ankles. Sometimes the bears want to be well rid of the threat to their resources. As far as they see it, the protagonist is a pest who threatens their livelihood.

That the original protagonist of this story was not a little gold-haired girl at all, but actually an elderly and poor silver-haired woman means that depending on when or where you learned this story, it had a very different moral flavor. However, when you look at the bones of the story it looks the same. Old woman, young girl and house-dwelling bears are just trappings to tell an essential story of resource sharing, which is itself as old as food and shelter.

We keep telling this story to children and we keep retelling it to ourselves, but it's unusual that people ask themselves who they are in the story. Are they the bears trying to repel an invading force from the safe space that they've made, or are they the outsider seeking resources they don't otherwise have? I would contend that depending on where you are in life these roles look very different. Many children identify with Baby Bear, who is being protected from the theft of his resources by an outsider. Many parents and caregivers identify with the adult bears.

But when do we identify with Goldilocks/Silverhair? I'd say that we identify with her most closely when we hunger for resources we can't seem to get. Say an opportunity to work in a field that seems inaccessible at our current level of education, or which is for one reason or another difficult to break into. I think we also identify with her when there's a resource seemingly going to waste, which we would ourselves love to use. How many times do we think "Boy, if I had {object/opportunity} I'd be doing {thing which is more impressive than what's being done with it now}." It's not hard to identify with Goldilocks. If we look at modern political movements like Occupy, we can readily see why our modern day protagonists may want to raid comfortable houses, whether they're full of bears or not.

> Tune in next time when we'll tackle story repetition