Stories Within Stories

[IdleRich]

Just thinking about these cos of having watched the - not particularly successful - film The Fall the other day. I do however often find the story within a story quite an interesting framing device.

I guess the big daddy of all these is quite possibly 1001 Nights (which I always find myself wanting to write as knights) which I've always found quite magical. If I remember rightly there are various versions of both the framing story itself and the stories contained within, but broadly the gist of it that I read first is something like; the Sultan catches his wife at it with someone else and quite reasonably decides to cut off her head and also that of her lover. He then marries someone else and, slightly less reasonably, decides that to prevent that happening again he had better preemptively cut off her head the morning after he has consummated their marriage. And then the next day he marries someone else, and, oops, off with her head too. He repeats this pattern until he's gone through every eligible girl in the kingdom apart from the daughter of the Grand Vizier, however while she saw him cutting a swathe through the entire female virgin population of the country towards her she has had the time to formulate a plan, and, after they have behaved as man and wife, she decides to tell him a story, a story so entertaining that when morning falls at a cliff-hanging juncture, he is so keen to know the ending that he allows her to live until the next night - on that night she continues the story and finishes it only to lead into another that also has a cliff-hanger buying herself another day of life. This goes on and on for approximately 1001 Nights, with a huge variety of stories, at times growing deeply nested with the characters in her stories sometimes telling their own stories which include stories of their own, each of which is finally resolved by an equally complex unwinding process. After 1001 Nights the Sultan (who hasn't slept for three years) decides this woman isn't too bad after all and agrees to not chop off her head.

Another similar one is The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Polish nobleman Potocki

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Again it grows very complicated with stories within stories within stories within stories in all kinds of genres, all stemming from a book found in Saragossa (Zaragoza now I think) by some officer in the Napoleonic wars I think.

You've also got the Decameron, and Canterbury Tales of course.

When you think about it it's sort of slightly surprising that such a complex device was so popular in such old books.

But I am also interested in modern examples of this where the story within the story somehow relates to the story without. I'm thinking of things such as Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin - to be honest I can't remember exactly how this works, but I remember thinking at the time that it was really good. Wikipedia says the following

The novel's protagonist, Iris Chase, and her sister Laura, grow up well-off but motherless in a small town in southern Ontario. As an old woman, Iris recalls the events and relationships of her childhood, youth and middle age, including her unhappy marriage to Toronto businessman Richard Griffen. The book includes a novel within a novel, the eponymous Blind Assassin, a roman à clef attributed to Laura but published by Iris. It is about Alex Thomas, a politically radical author of pulp science fiction who has an ambiguous relationship with the sisters. That embedded story itself contains a third tale, a science fiction story told by Alex's fictional counterpart to the second novel's protagonist, believed to be Laura's fictional counterpart.

The novel takes the form of a gradual revelation illuminating both Iris's youth and her old age before coming to the pivotal events of her and Laura's lives around the time of the Second World War. Laura and Iris live in a house called Avilion. Their mother dies at a young age leaving Reenie, the caretaker, to take on full responsibility for the girls. As the novel unfolds, and the novel-within-a-novel becomes ever more obviously inspired by real events, Iris, not Laura, is revealed to be the novel-within-a-novel's true author and protagonist. Though the novel-within-a-novel had long been believed to be inspired by Laura's romance with Alex, it is revealed that The Blind Assassin was written by Iris based on her extramarital affair with Alex. Iris later published the work in Laura's name after Laura committed suicide upon learning of Alex's death in the war. Following the suicide, Iris realizes through her sister's journals that Richard had been raping Laura for much of their marriage, blackmailing her to comply with him by threatening to turn Alex in to the authorities. Iris takes her young daughter Aimee and flees her home, threatening to reveal that Richard had impregnated Laura and forced an abortion on her. This move estranges Iris from the last people who were supporting her, and creates bitterness between her and the grown Aimee. Iris deceives Richard into believing that Laura was the one having an affair with Alex Thomas, which drives him to commit suicide. The novel ends as Iris dies, leaving the truth to be discovered in her unpublished autobiography that she leaves to her sole surviving granddaughter.

Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective has the main character in bed with a horrible skin disease and in his bedridden feverish state he composes a noir story featuring a singing detective with the same name as him (which after all is the name of Raymond Chandler's famed detective in The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye etc etc), but the characters in the story are clearly drawn from his own life, as you discover when his childhood is revealed in numerous flashbacks - and the three different narratives all get twisted up together to deliver a powerful emotional blow that transcends any kind of clever clever post-modern writing which many feel tends to undermine any kind of true emotion.

Anyway, when this is done well I find it a brilliantly effective way to tell a story, a complexity that can somehow smooth itself out like one of those fake knots that vanish when you pull the string taught, everything coming together in one staggering moment like a complex illusion. At the same time, I'm finding now that, perhaps due to that complexity, I find it very hard to remember exactly how the plots of these novels worked, what exactly was the trick they pulled off. Which is unusual for me, normally I can remember the plot of a novel or film pretty well I'd say, especially ones I enjoyed as much as those above. I don't know if the fact I can't remember these ones is a weakness or simply an inevitable result of their complexity.

Enough of me waffling on, I hope you lot can say some good stuff on this topic. First off and most simply I'd be glad for some suggestions - what are other great stories within stories that I should read or watch? Why are they so good? More than that, do you rate this way of writing or is it just a flashy trick for writers who can't write a good old fashioned story that can stand on its own two feet? Just say something... please.

 

[jenks]

David Mitchell immediately springs to mind - so much so that his whole oevre has become one massive self reflexive story world with characters popping up across novels as well.

I’m not surprised it’s there in old texts - the framed story device allows the writer to essentially write an anthology displaying lots of different styles of story - romance, comedy etc

 

[you]

Hypodiegesis is a horror trope.... think Frankenstein etc

 

[IdleRich]

Hypodiegesis is a horror trope.... think Frankenstein etc

Can you expand on this?

 

[you]

A narrative within a narrative. Many horror stories are stories told to a character. A man (and it is often a man in classic horror) finds an old acquaintance... 'and this is what he told me'.... then the story takes up the bulk of the book. Stepping through the narrative frames, being informed by proxy is a classic horror narrative structure.

 

[Mr. Tea]

A narrative within a narrative. Many horror stories are stories told to a character. A man (and it is often a man in classic horror) finds an old acquaintance... 'and this is what he told me'.... then the story takes up the bulk of the book. Stepping through the narrative frames, being informed by proxy is a classic horror narrative structure.

I wonder if any story has more nested layers than 'The Call of Cthulhu'? At one point, the 'deathless Chinaman' who is the leader of the Cthulhu cult has told Castro, a cult member, about the Great Old Ones; Castro relays this information to Inspector Legrasse while being questioned following his arrest in the raid on the cultists; the inspector recounts this to, among others, Professor Angell; the main narrator, Thurston, finds all this written up in the late professor's notes; and he synthesizes the whole lot into a coherent story which you, the reader, are then able to consume, after Thurston himself has died (presumably under mysterious circumstances). That's, what, five layers? Maybe four, depending on how you count them.

 

[IdleRich]

David Mitchell immediately springs to mind - so much so that his whole oevre has become one massive self reflexive story world with characters popping up across novels as well.

He did spring to mind yeah... but then I decided against putting him as an example cos his books have so many devices and techniques going on that he's not a pure example of this. When I think of him I don't think "Oh the story within a story guy".

Though when I read Cloud Atlas I instantly thought of If On A Winter's Night A Traveller... which is arguably the ultimate story within a story within a story within a story, story. Although it departs from the norm by not unwinding these at all and having no real story.

I’m not surprised it’s there in old texts - the framed story device allows the writer to essentially write an anthology displaying lots of different styles of story - romance, comedy etc

I suppose a frame story allowing lots of stories within it is relatively straightforward, but in my mind, the thing of multiple nested stories is a much more complex idea. But maybe I'm just being patronising, underestimating story tellers of the past, perhaps it is simply the logical and obvious next step. And when was the Unreliable Narrator first used, perhaps that too falls out fairly naturally once you have narrators, I dunno.

 

[Murphy]

The Man in the High Castle, sort of

 

[woops]

haha nice one, it's also called mise en abyme

Hypodiegesis

 

[Clinamenic]

The Grand Budapest Hotel is a triple-frame story, and Synecdoche, New York has a pretty recursive structure too. Also Adaptation is about a screenwriter adapting a novel and then encountering the subjects of the novel, and the screenplay ends up being the film itself.

Kierkegaard’s Either/Or had a great authorial structure, with the narrator being an editor who bought a desk and found all these manuscripts in it, by more than one author.

 

[IdleRich]

I wonder if any story has more nested layers than 'The Call of Cthulhu'? At one point, the 'deathless Chinaman' who is the leader of the Cthulhu cult has told Castro, a cult member, about the Great Old Ones; Castro relays this information to Inspector Legrasse while being questioned following his arrest in the raid on the cultists; the inspector recounts this to, among others, Professor Angell; the main narrator, Thurston, finds all this written up in the late professor's notes; and he synthesizes the whole lot into a coherent story which you, the reader, are then able to consume, after Thurston himself has died (presumably under mysterious circumstances). That's, what, five layers? Maybe four, depending on how you count them.

That's a good question, what is the deepest level of nested stories?

 

[you]

W.G Sebald goes through a few layers too.

 

[IdleRich]

Googling the Saragossa Manuscript I read this description of part of it....

Avadora is hired by a jealous husband to spy on his wife, whom he believes is unfaithful to him. Being a bit of trickster, Avadora instead visits her lover, Don Toledo, to inform him of her husband’s suspicions. At Don Toledo’s home Avadora’s story begins to fragment, becoming a series of nested stories – sometimes to five or more degrees – as each character relates events to others and, in turn, it is told to Avadora. Avadora’s stories of infidelity and mistaken identities all intertwine, further confusing van Worden, before arriving at some place very familiar: the story of van Worden’s father.

I believe that 1001 Nights also goes pretty deep in that way at times, though that must surely depend on which version you read as there are many different versions with different people adding in their own favourite tales and chucking in similar sounding stuff which can plausibly fit but which was not in the original version such as the Voyages of Sinbad.

 

[woops]

Pale Fire is another one

 

[IdleRich]

Another one that comes to mind is Godel, Escher, Bach - there are parts in that where he uses stories within stories to illustrate points. I don't know how many layers he uses for this but I do think that there is probably a distinction to be made between this kind of artificial nesting which is created deliberately for a specific purpose, and that of the Saragossa Manuscript which is done... for a different reason.

Deliberate was perhaps the wrong word above cos in Potocki it's also deliberate of course, but the fact it's part of a story or series of stories means that it seems more natural, it's done for the sake of art or just for the fuck of it, but certainly for a different reason from those in GEB which are really mere examples which are created to demonstrate a point.

When I say "mere examples" I don't mean to be dismissive, I'm sure Hofstadter would agree, they are are created with the purpose of demonstrating or illustrating something and when that is done their simply defined task is complete, whereas a novel is something much more open-ended than that, at least a good one is...

 

[IdleRich]

Pale Fire is another one

I'm glad someone mentioned that cos it's another one I almost mentioned in the first post but ultimately chose not to cos the structure is more complex than simply "a story within a story" - if we did describe it like that then which is that story within, is it the poem itself or something else? I'm trying to remember the structure, I think that it's something like...

There is a guy (I looked him up, he's called Kinbote) who is an academic at a university and who may well be completely insane, he lived next door to a celebrated poet (John Shade) who was also at the university and who has just died, leaving behind his final poem, which our narrator has stolen as he believes that he has a special right to the poem. This is because, before Shade died, he and Kinbote spent lots of time together and the narrator told the poet - on the understanding that he would record it for posterity by devoting his next poem which would be his masterpiece to revealing this hitherto hidden truth - how he is in fact the unfairly deposed king of a minor Eastern European country called Zembla (had to look that up). However on reading his prize he is at first disappointed to see that the poem is nothing to do with what it was supposed to be about ie him... or is it? Cos close/insane study reveals that absolutely every single line is in actual fact filled with deeply coded metaphors that can be deciphered by those who know and which do indeed tell the sad story of the brutal coup that ended the golden era of the imaginary country from which our hero originated.

So for the reader, the novel has

a) the frame story of the Kinbote talking about university life, memories of talking to the poet, Shade, and then stealing the poem and going on the run
b) Within that frame story there is the entirety of the poem itself Pale Fire - which I understand can now be purchased as a standalone item, some publisher somewhere having taken on board Kinbote's claim that it is an unimpeachable masterpiece of the forrm, and not considering that that may in fact have been a slight joke on the part of Nabakov.
c) but then, based on that poem, we have the notes on the poem, these notes are of course still within the original frame story but they stand perhaps at some kind of twisted angle to the poem and to reality itself. And it is these notes that we read and which slowly reveal to us that Kinbote is a king/madman and so on.

Is that right? Have I got that structure roughly correct? I also believe that many see the book as a kind of puzzle with many clues pointing to the fact that the basic straight-forward structure that I have identified above is in fact a trick and that it should really be understood that Kinbote is not the narrator but it is in fact someone else pretending to be him or... I dunno, there are loads of interpretations.

From wikipedia; Some readers, see Charles Kinbote as an alter-ego of the insane Professor V. Botkin, to whose delusions John Shade and the rest of the faculty of Wordsmith College generally condescend. Nabokov himself endorsed this reading, stating in an interview in 1962 (the novel's year of publication) that Pale Fire "is full of plums that I keep hoping somebody will find. For instance, the nasty commentator is not an ex-King of Zembla nor is he professor Kinbote. He is professor Botkin, or Botkine, a Russian and a madman." The novel's intricate structure of teasing cross-references leads readers to this "plum". The Index, supposedly created by Kinbote, features an entry for a "Botkin, V.," describing this Botkin as an "American scholar of Russian descent"—and referring to a note in the Commentary on line 894 of Shade's poem, in which no such person is directly mentioned but a character suggests that "Kinbote" is "a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine". In this interpretation, "Gradus" the murderer is an American named Jack Grey who wanted to kill Judge Goldsworth, whose house "Pale Fire's" commentator—whatever his "true" name is—is renting. Goldsworth had condemned Grey to an asylum from which he escaped shortly before mistakenly killing Shade, who resembled Goldsworth.

Alternatively

Other readers see a story quite different from the apparent narrative. "Shadeans" maintain that John Shade wrote not only the poem, but the commentary as well, having invented his own death and the character of Kinbote as a literary device. In an alternative version of the Shadean theory, it's argued that Kinbote is not a separate person but is a dissociated, alternative personality of John Shade. (An early reviewer had mentioned that "a case might be made" for such a reading.) "Kinboteans", a decidedly smaller group, believe that Kinbote invented the existence of John Shade. Some readers see the book as oscillating undecidably between these alternatives, like the Rubin vase (a drawing that may be two profiles or a goblet)

Any of you lot read it? From those of you that have, I want to ask whether either of those readings would have come to you unbidden. Cos honestly I just don't think I'm smart enough that I would have thought up either myself.

As an aside, I do find it quite interesting that Nabokov actually said one of those readings was correct and you might think that that would sort of end the debate but apparently it seems as though a load of readers who had theories about it thought to themselves something along the lines of "just cos he wrote it, there is no reason to believe that he understands it any better than someone such as I who have read it very closely and studied it deeply. In fact I believe that I have a greater knowledge of what any of it means that VN ever could". Which is something I do find quite fascinating I guess.

 

[woops]

I'm glad you made that post cos i couldn't be bothered trying to explain it all

 

[IdleRich]

But does that sound about right as you remember it?

 

[version]

Pynchon does it in Mason & Dixon. The frame's this old Reverend telling the story of Mason & Dixon to various people on a wintry night by the fire and it jumps in and out and at one point veers off into another story one of the children's reading in some pulpy thing they have in another room.

 

[woops]

But does that sound about right as you remember it?