Narrative Expectations: The Folklore Connection (1990)

Narrative Expectations:The Folklore Connection C. W. Sullivan III (bio) When we act as literary critics and examine the texts offered as children's literature, we seldom seem to take into account the fact that children are just as familiar with, and in some cases more familiar with, the texts of oral narratives as they are with the texts of literary narratives. The literary narratives to which they are first exposed are chosen by adults. Later, children may seem to be choosing their own books, but these choices, too, are often predicated on the books and authors they have come to know through the offices of the adults—parents, teachers, babysitters, librarians, and the like—who provide those books and reading experiences. The oral narratives in which children participate as listeners at first and later as tellers are also initiated by adults, but quite early on, children begin to develop a repertoire of narratives which come from their own experiences and peer groups. Such oral or folk narratives certainly reflect children's growing awareness of narrative and help condition their narrative expectations. Folklorists, unlike most literary critics, have studied oral narrative, and some of their research can be of use here. Two basic reference works, The Types of the Folktale (1961), compiled by Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, and The Motif-Index of Folk Literature (1955-1958), compiled by Stith Thompson, index folktales according to their basic plot-outlines and according to their motifs respectively. Thus, the versions of "Beauty and the Beast" collected from around the world are all listed in The Types of the Folktale under 425C. Another reference work, Vladimir Propp's The Morphology of the Folktale (1928), suggests that folk narratives can be determined and interrelated [End Page 52] according to their structures. All three works support, at least tacitly, the basic assumption of folklorists that those materials called folklore have both formula and variation so that all versions of "Beauty and the Beast" will share the basic structure and narrative elements of the story while each version will have some element or elements which mark it as a variation on that formula. In The Dynamics of Folklore, Barre Toelken suggests that "folklore scholarship is based almost entirely on the study of variation. . . . Structural and comparative studies are predicated entirely on the observation that certain units are continually recombined within the frame or genre type, and that an examination of such patterns as may thus be produced leads to valuable insights into the genres themselves and into the processes by which they are developed" (33). One such insight reveals the variants of a basic formula to be responsible for folklore's adaptability. In the case of traditional narratives, like "Beauty and the Beast," for example, the formula of the story will remain the same while the variations allow it to adapt as culture, time, and place require or allow. Thus, "Beauty and the Beast" can take place in the Black Forest of medieval Germany, the moors of early mercantile England, or most recently, the over- and under-cities of modern Manhattan. Such studies, by examining variations, validate formula as a continuing, conservative structural element of folk materials; and although the formulaic structure may seem to take second place to the discrete variants at times, they are, in fact, dependent upon the formula for their existence. This sense of structure, implicit in the Aarne-Thompson study and explicit in Propp's, is informally communicated to children through the earliest narratives with which they come into contact. For example, two of the most popular traditional games by which adults play with babies have definite narrative structures. "This Little Piggy" describes the everyday activities of the five pigs which are represented by the baby's five toes, and "Patty Cake, Patty Cake" tells a brief tale about food preparation. Even the "Alphabet Song," while it does not tell a tale as such, has a definite beginning-middle-end narrative structure. As the child passes out of babyhood and leaves these narratives behind, he or she will encounter other traditionally-structured narratives of increasing length. The familiar nursery rhymes—"Mary Had a Little Lamb," "Jack and Jill," "There Was an...