FOR THE STORY
TELLER
CHAPTER I
THE APPERCEPTIVE BASIS OF STORY TELLING
APPERCEPTION is a formidable and sometimes confusing term for a very simple and easy-to-understand mental process. I once told Seumus MacManus’ deliciously humorous story of Billy Beg and his Bull to a group of foreign boys and girls in one of New York’s East Side Settlement Houses. The children listened with apparent appreciation, but, halfway along in the story, it occurred to me to ask them if they had ever seen a bull. No one answered me at first. Then Pietro, a little dusky-eyed son of Italy, raised a grimy hand.
“I seen one last summer when we was on a fresh-air,” he said. “It’s a bigger cow, a bull is, with the bicycle handle-bars on her head.”
Pietro’s description of a bull was an example of apperception, the method by means of which a new idea is interpreted, classified, “let into” the human mind. He knew the class, cows. He also knew the class, bicycles. He did not know the class, bulls—at least vividly enough to be able to put the idea into terms of a verbal explanation and description. So he did the most natural thing in the world, the only possible mental process in fact by means of which children or adults classify the new. He interpreted it in terms of the old, explaining the unfamiliar idea, bull, by means of the familiar ideas, cow and a bicycle.
This, then, is apperception. It is the involuntary mental process by means of which the human mind makes its own the strange, the new, the unfamiliar idea by a method of fitting it into the class of familiar ideas already known. Apperception is a means of quick mental interpretation. It is the welcoming of strangers to the mind-habitation, strangers who come every day in the guise of unfamiliar names, terms, scenes, and phrases, and determining in which corner of the brain house they will fit most comfortably. The most natural process is finally to give these new ideas an old mind corner to rest in, or an old brain path in which to travel.
A child’s mind at the age when he is able to concentrate upon listening to a story, three or four years of age—kindergarten age—is not a very crowded house. It is a mind-house tenanted by a few and very simple concepts which he has made his own through his previous home, mother and play experiences. He is familiar with his nursery, his pets, his family, his toys, his food, his bed. If he is a country child he knows certain flowers, birds and farm animals, not as classes—flower, bird and animal—but as buttercup, robin and sheep. If he is a city child his mind has a very different tenantry, and he thinks in terms of street, subway, park, fire engine, ambulance. These to the city child are also individual ideas, not classes. He knows them as compelling, noisy, moving ideas which he has seen and experienced, but they do not at all appeal to him as classes.