The Trigger of Storytelling

"All children talk to their toys;

their toys become

actors of the great drama

of life..."

Charles Baudelaire

I was thinking about the reason for my foray into the ancient craft of telling stories when my mother approached me from behind with a gift: a toy car, a '56 Ford. The surprise moved me quite a bit and the water in my eyes dissolved in my cheeks, slowly and without scandal; This is the way adults cry when the feeling catches you by surprise. After exchanging some phrases full of joy and nostalgia with her, I was left alone again in front of my computer and rambled for a while more about the consequences of those games and my love for stories.

I am twenty-seven years old and that gift led me to remember the relationship I had with my cars as a child and the way my mother set the stage for me to turn my collection of vehicles into a universe of stories. Some recent readings raised questions: did my toy cars give rise to my first fictions or does any object serve to trigger creative discourse in a child? Do these stories that we create as children obey different, unknown, divine, social or genetically inherited roots?

With these questions I ended up combining some famous names to generate this light dissertation. Roland Barthes, in his essay Juguetes, tells us: "The toy provides the catalog of everything that does not surprise the adult", to say later, when developing this idea, that toys "condition" our future work in the world. Something like saying that the child who is given shovels will be made a gravedigger and that he is a gravedigger because he lacks the fear of being one. Following the same order, it would be logical to say that the toy conditions the production of speech in the infant and that such speech is the anticipated example of what will be like as an adult. Now, I could not avoid the internal journey towards my childhood and I discovered there other origins, another relationship with the toy-object and that adds something more to my superficial understanding of what Barthes said.

I lived a childhood without luxuries but it was not a poor childhood either, perhaps because I was taught that poverty is more of a mental state and is independent of the accumulated amount of expensive objects. My mother waited until the end of the month and made her salary pay in order to take me to the supermarket, to the toy section, and see me choose a cart among the many that I wanted. My selection did not obey the brands and I remember that I clung to any car, in a kind of connection that I still cannot remember. I freely associate the fragment from Hernando Tellez, in which he says how the child "affirms in the same way his prodigious tenderness for a person or toy, for a wasted piece of wood, for a useless artifact." And yes, perhaps the quality of the object is the least important thing, but...

Then I would run to my room to climb barefoot on the first floor of my cabin and from there rise between a plank opening on a second floor without a mattress. My body came out in the middle of the two wooden groups connected by metal rules, hanging bridges that allowed the characters to pass from one side to the other and I, like an "almighty" over the magnificent polis, started the scene and had the actors roll between buildings made with chess boxes, erasers, tapes, containers. Then, the new vehicle entered the situation and a new character appeared. Thus, with my omnipresent narrator, the detective stories took place, a fight between good guys and bad guys, a fight between pretty and ugly cars.

I relived the fight between good and evil and mixed everything with the pyrotechnics of the action movies and series that my older brothers watched on television. The plot is almost always the same: problem, intrigue, discovery, action, all is lost, miracle, happy ending.

Example: something bad happens. The investigation leads the good guys to the lair of the bad guys. A great chase breaks out. The good guys about to be defeated, it can't be!... Vehicles spin in the air when jumping a ramp. Shootings more terrible than twenty versions of Fast and Furious. Something unexpected. The bad guys in a soda truck, the kind we won for bringing tapas to the real truck. The villains camouflage the evil of the world inside the vehicle. A version of The Godfather spreads sewage from the Yankee empire on the wooden roads and launches a missile of death and everything seems lost, but... The new car appears, perhaps a Majorette, a Hot Weels or some other that rolls without a father, without gender, without clear heritage or inspiration, perhaps made in China, and that nobody appears to save everyone and weave an infinite friendship with the good guys. The good guys always win in the end: Bettelheim, I agree with you!

Yes, Bruno Bettelheim; I find in him a clearer guide than that of Barthes on this aspect. I remember that he said, paraphrasing it a little, that fairy tales help us as children to understand our relationship with the world, they establish the canon for us and they are the ones who initially serve as a model for us to understand good and evil. Of course, the children of my generation, and much more so the children of today, received content other than the fairy tales that fulfilled a similar task.

We should contemplate, in any case, another wonderful influence. Possibly my world and the morality of my narratives were shaped by family stories delivered orally, adding television, radio, and literature. In all these discourses the beautiful is associated with the good, the ugly with the bad. Consequently, for example, the most beautiful cars belonged to the good characters and the most damaged were the bad ones. The topic can be taken to matters that are less difficult to detect. If I reviewed today's man better, how many paradigms from that first age could be found in my current narratives?

Seeing it this way, it is primary socialization that allows us to build those stories. Boys and girls get the idea of ​​the world through that set of words that we transmit to them in that familiar orality or under that download of audiovisual media and thus, with that constantly growing capital, they will develop when they are adults.

In a greater percentage, it is those previous stories that condition the object and it is not the object that makes the stories. It seems evident to us that the toy without a story is nothing more than a dead thing and although it is effectively a "microcosm of the adult world", as Barthes affirms, it is the child in his free will, that mixture of information that is produced in his imagination, which defines the production of these discourses.

Of course, in my case, and perhaps in that of many children, the way the toys appeared influenced the mechanism that triggered my stories. Delivering a hundred cars in one day is not the same as receiving each one in dribs and drabs. Regarding the latter, I must thank life and my mother.

Now, I accept this concession, if we have to be subject it will be to the same language, to which I am irremediably and I will be chained by that cultural heritage that was transmitted through those close to me. For now, genetic inheritance is far from being evaluated at this moment, as is divine predestined talent, but I can say that I owe this hobby to my elders and their practices.

There is much more to say about this, but I must step away from my computer keyboard and walk to my mother's room. I will hug her tightly and immediately express eternal gratitude to the woman who, month after month, provides a new trigger for my stories.