by John Barth
Note that there is no II in nonserial primary frametales such as these.
Such elementary notation can be modified to indicate major returns to the frame, as distinct from the merely formulaic returns between each of The 1001 Nights. Figure 3, for example, schematizes the ten storytellers and ten days of the Decameron —where I represents the framing story, its exponents represent the several evenings of tale-telling with their fore-and afterplay, and the letters represent particular tellers in the successive orders of their telling:
Again there is no II.
Where narrative involvement exceeds the second degree but returns to it between third-degree tales, we may simply extend this modification of conventional outlining (as does the orientalist N. M. Penzer in his schematic table of contents to Tawney’s translation of Somadeva’s Ocean of Story). A hypothetical example, indeed a model, might look like Figure 4—
—where the columns indicate degrees of narrative involvement, and II indicates that the primary frame is itself serial, as in The Ocean of Story. Notice that the symbols for conventional outlining are exhausted at about the fourth or fifth degree, just as narrative involvement tends to be in the actual corpus: The peculiar example of the Symposium excepted, we found in our primitive explorations no frametale more involved than five degrees. No doubt there is a message here, a warning, as in Hindu cosmology: It is enough to know that (1) my hat sits securely on the head of (2) a man whose feet are more or less on the ground of (3) an earth borne securely upon the back of (4) an elephant standing securely upon (5) four tortoises. To press the inquiry further may be impious or boring. But one person’s caution is another’s challenge: Why stop at four or five degrees—tales within tales within tales within tales within tales—when, given the model, one can so readily imagine more? Why not press on, press on, like Kafka’s Hunger Artist, to “a performance beyond human imagination”? I shall return to this challenge.
Please notice two things further about my hypothetical specimen, Figure 4, that in fact are rarely to be found together in the actual literature. First, the degrees of narrative involvement are not random but incremental, in an order of increasing complexity. The primary frame and then the secondary frames are returned to systematically, as if for orientation and there are “retreats” (1C and ID3) before each escalation of narrative involvement. This is a typical feature of such analogues to frametales as Baroque musical themes-and-variations, for example, or jazz improvisation, or the common (and common-sense) design of juggling tumbling, trick diving, and acrobatic routines, of fireworks displays and of very many other things: No sensible magician will likely open his performance with his cleverest trick. But I am anticipating my conclusion.
Second, the most complex point of narrative involvement having been attained—ID4c1) and ID4c2) in the model—the narrative returns without delay to home base. Who wants to see three more simple somersaults after the triple-double-1½-inverse whammy? Alas, the standard frametales seldom recognize this simple principle of both showmanship and dramaturgy.
I mean, of course, the principle of climax and anticlimax. Give Figure 4 a quarter-turn counterclockwise, and you will see the Gibraltanan profile of Freitag’s Triangle: exposition, complication, rising action, climax denouement. Now the order of climax, when applied to dramaturgy, implies more than the simple saving of your best stunt for last and then your getting offstage in a hurry. It implies dramatic logic: a denouement which not only follows the climax but is its effect, just as the climax was the effect of its preceding complications. Imposed upon the genre of frametales, an order of climax suggests the possibility of a dramaturgical relationship among the several degrees of narrative involvement: a narrative strategy in which the inner tales bear operatively upon the plot or plots of the outer ones, perhaps even precipitating their several complications, climaxes, denouements.
Back to the questionnaire: We also asked of the existing body of frametale literature what sorts of relations obtain between the framed and framing stories. We found, unsurprisingly, three main kinds of relationships, which shade off into one another and sometimes occur in combination.
First and by far the most frequent is the gratuitous relation: little or no connection between the contents of the framed and the framing stories. The Decameron, most of The 1001 Nights, most of the Canterbury Tales, even most of The Divine Comedy, I would assign to this category, the formula for which is:
“Tell me a story.” “Okay. Did you ever hear the one about [etc.]? Now you tell me one.”
Or:
“What are you in here for? And you? And you? Mm hm.”
Or:
“Today let’s all tell stories about people reduced from great fortune to great misfortune; tomorrow, vice-versa.”
This is the gratuitous relation.
Second, there is the associative, thematic, or exemplary (or cautionary or prophetic) relationship: “You’re not the only person ever deceived by a faithless lover, let me tell you about [etc.]”; or, “That reminds me of the one about the chap who [etc.]”; or, “Here but for the grace of God go you; I too, when I walked the earth, loved a certain lady, until one day [etc.].” Quite a lot of frametale literature is in this category, at least occasionally. Dante’s interview with Paolo and Francesca in the circle of the lustful, for example, surely bears on his own situation—his adoration of Beatrice—more directly than does his interview with Count Ugolino in the circle of the traitors, howevermuch Hell might be argued to be all of a piece. Scheherazade’s stories about faithless and faithful spouses bear more upon the future of her own story than does “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” or “Sinbad the Sailor.”
Finally there is the dramaturgical relation, which we subdivided into low-level, middle-level, and high-level pertinencies—understanding these to be not categories but points on a scale.
1. “Aha,” Shahryar might be said to say to himself here and there in the Nights: “I see now that my own cuckolding is as nothing compared to X’s; moreover, the story of Y suggests that my misogyny may have been an overreaction, particularly given such a brave, wise, and beautiful storyteller. Perhaps I should consider not executing my bed-partners every morning.” This is the low-level dramaturgical relation, distinguished from the thematic only because it portends a general course of action in the frame-story.
2. “Why does Demodocus’s song of Troy make you cover your face and weep, stranger?” Or, “The more I see and hear this wise and beautiful storyteller telling her stories and giving birth to my children, the more it occurs to me that I really ought to rescind my murderous domestic policy and marry her.” This is the middle-level dramaturgical connection: The framed stories specifically trigger the next major event in the frame-story.
3. “If that trick [or password, or whatever], which I have overheard this talking bird speak of, worked for X, whose predicament was not dissimilar to mine, then it should work for me as well; I’ll give it a try.” Or, “If that messenger’s story is correct, and that shepherd’s story, and Tiresias’s story, then I have unwittingly murdered my father and sired children upon my mother. That being the case, there is nothing for it but [etc.].”
This last, high-level dramaturgical relation (the “inside” story’s climaxing or reversing the action of the “outside” story) is common in stories which, like Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, are not properly frame-tales; in such cases it is no more than the narrative device of operative delayed exposition, laid on in anecdotal or confessional fashion. In actual frametales, where the material and characters of the framed story are not normally those of the framing story, the high-level dramaturgical relation is almost nonexistent. And once one goes past the second degree of narrative involvement, any relation at all between the third or fourth level, say, and the first is almost certain to be gratuitous.
Yet the model teases us with the possibility not only of breaking the Five-Degree or Under-the-Tortoise Barrier, but of discovering or imagining a frametale so constructed that the plot
of the inmost tale, far from merely bearing upon the plot of the next tale out, actually springs that plot, which in turn springs the next, etc., etc., etc., etc., at the point of concentric climax to which the whole series has systematically been brought. Indeed, I think that any gutsy writer who happens to be afflicted with a formalist imagination would, in the face of these observations, feel compelled to go the existing corpus one better, or two or three better—not simply in that Guinness Book of World Records spirit which leads to eighty-foot pizzas and fifty-page palindromes, but also—turning now from the number of degrees of narrative involvement to the dramaturgical potential of the model—in order to actualize an attractive possibility in the ancient art of storytelling that one’s distinguished predecessors have barely suggested.
Scheherazade herself, I am confident, would approve. I made bold to have little Dunyazade report, in the novella aforementioned, vis-à-vis her sister and the Genie:
They speculated endlessly on such questions as whether a story might be framed from inside, as it were, so that the usual relation between container and contained would be reversed… and (for my benefit, I suppose) what human state of affairs such an odd construction might usefully figure. Or whether one might go beyond the usual tale-within-a-tale, beyond even the tales-within-tales-within-tales-within-tales which our Genie had found a few instances of… and conceive a series of, say, seven concentric stories-within-stories, so arranged that the climax of the innermost would precipitate that of the next tale out, and that of the next, et cetera, like a string of firecrackers or the chains of orgasms that Shahryar could sometimes set my sister catenating.¶
It is safe to suppose that the author of that passage must have been imbued with that very ambition. The fact is, between the time of these frametale researches in the middle 1960s and the Chimera novellas of circa 1970, I had already written the tale that Scheherazade and her genie speak of. It is in the series Lost in the Funhouse; it is about the Greek general Menelaus, Helen’s husband, still in love with his errant wife despite the Trojan War, of which she impossibly declares herself innocent. It is a good story, I believe, though not uncomplicated.
But I want to close by addressing Dunyazade’s question: What human state of affairs might such odd, even fantastic constructions usefully figure? Why in fact have human beings in so many cultures and centuries been fascinated by tales within tales within etc.? I shall mention two interesting speculations and then venture a homely one of my own.
The first speculation is that of Jorge Luis Borges. Borrowing from his beloved Schopenhauer, Borges declares** that stories within stories appeal to us because they disturb us metaphysically. We are by them reminded, consciously or otherwise, of the next frame out: the fiction of our own lives, of which we are both the authors and the protagonists, and in which our reading of The 1001 Nights, say, is a story within our story. This speculation of Borges’s strikes me as wise and unexceptionable.
The Bulgarian/Parisian formalist/structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov,†† mentioned earlier, draws a less philosophical but equally interesting parallel between the formal structure of stories within stories, which he calls “embedded stories,” and that of a certain syntactic form, “a particular case of subordination, which in fact modern linguistics calls embedding.” He illustrates the parallel with a wonderful sentence in German:
Derjenige, der den Mann, der den Pfahl, der auf der Brücke, der auf dem Weg, der nach Worms fuhrt, liegt, steht, umgeworfen hat, anzeigt, bekommt eine Belohnung.
Richard Howard’s translation of this sentence seems to me to miss Todorov’s point:
Whoever identifies the one who upset the post which was placed on the bridge which is on the road which goes to Worms will get a reward.
A word-for-word translation reveals clearly the six degrees of “embedding”:
Whoever the man who the post which on the bridge which on the road which to Worms goes, lies, stood, knocked over, identifies, gets a reward.
In the German sentence, Todorov remarks,
… the appearance of a noun immediately provokes a subordinate clause which, so to speak, tells its story; but since this second clause also contains a noun, it requires in its turn a subordinate clause, and so on, until an arbitrary interruption, at which point each of the interrupted clauses is completed one after the other. The narrative of embedding has precisely the same structure, the role of the noun being played by the character: Each new character involves a new story.
To this fascinating analogy I would add the observation that Todorov’s German sentence is constructed much more dramatically than most frametales. What gets postponed in that sentence are the verbs: If the nouns are characters and the subordinate clauses are tales within the frametale of the main clause, the verbs are the dramaturgical climaxes, and the sentence exemplifies the structure not only of frametales but of that high-level dramaturgical relation I spoke of earlier. It is Dunyazade’s string of firecrackers.
Todorov asserts that this analogy is no accident; his implication is that narrative structure in general is an echo of deep linguistic structure, and that frametaling reflects, even rises out of, the syntactical property of subordination. He suggests further that the “internal significance” or secret appeal of frametales is that they articulate an essential property (Todorov says the most essential property) of all narrative: namely, that whatever else it is about, it is always also about language and about telling; about itself. All fiction, in short, even the most “primary,” is “secondary fiction.”
Further yet, Todorov argues (with splendid examples from The 1001 Nights) that narrating almost literally equals living. Here he joins Borges, but on linguistic rather than metaphysical grounds: We tell stories and listen to them because we live stories and live in them. Narrative equals language equals life: To cease to narrate, as the capital example of Scheherazade reminds us, is to die—literally for her, figuratively for the rest of us. One might add that if this is true, then not only is all fiction fiction about fiction, but all fiction about fiction is in fact fiction about life. Some of us understood that all along.
Whether or not the relation between frametale structure and syntactic structure is causal, as Todorov declares, his examples make clear that the two are isomorphic. Earlier on I remarked, apropos of that hypothetical model of an ideal frametale (Fig. 4), that it reminded me of some common musical forms and of magicians’ and acrobats’ routines, for example. I conclude, less daringly than Borges and Todorov, by suggesting that frametales fascinate us perhaps because their narrative structure reflects, simply or complexly, at least two formal properties not only of syntax but of much ordinary experience and activity: namely, regression (or digression) and return, and theme and variation. The two are not mutually exclusive, as the structure of this essay itself exemplifies: Digression and return is a variation on the theme of theme and variation. I wish I had time and space to show you how the frametale model reminds me of, for example, trampoline exercises, meal preparation, taxonomy, love-making, scientific research, argumentation, psychoanalysis, crime detection, computer programming, court trials, and my grandson’s progress from crawling to walking unassisted. If the supposition is valid, these isomorphies will not be hard to see.
But I cannot resist one example from recent personal experience: what I call the horseshoe-nail subspecies of multiple-delayed-climax structures. It will illustrate the shared formal properties of, among other things, tales within tales, the pursuit of happiness, and the painting of sailboat bottoms. Here is the story:
Once upon a time I wished, and indeed I wish still, to lead a reasonably full, good, useful, and therefore happy life. In pursuit of this objective I have made up the best stories I can to entertain and instruct myself and others, and have assisted numerous apprentice writers in the same activity, and have refrained from becoming e.g., a CIA agent, a book reviewer, or an author of either romans à clef or nonfiction novels. On another front, I have fortunately managed to secure a wife whom
I enjoy living with, a house on the water that I enjoy living in, and a sailboat to sail on that water from that house with that wife for our innocent recreation when our more serious work is done. All that remains is to cast off.
But before we can cast off we must get launched for the season; and before we can launch for the season we must get fitted out; and fitting out includes the chore of applying new bottom-paint to the hull. But before we can bottom-paint we must wet-sand, mustn’t we, and wet-sanding requires both a certain sort of sandpaper, of which we are out, and lots of water, which won’t be ours until we have turned on the outside faucet for the spring and rigged up the garden hose. But before I can turn on that faucet I must repack its leaking valve, a chore that requires valve-packing material of which we are also out; and so we must drive into town to the hardware store for valve-packing material and wet-sanding paper; but while we’re in town we certainly ought to do the grocery-shopping and stop at the local marina to have a look at the sailboards they’ve just picked up a dealership in. Which reminds me that I ought to consider adding one more off-campus lecture to my schedule, to cover the cost of the Windsurfer which I promised my sailing-companion for her last birthday and have yet to come across with: Perhaps I shall take time to write a lecture on—well, this whole phenomenon of tasks within tasks, it occurs to me en route to town, as I pause to refuel the car and, while I’m at it, to check the tire pressures and tisk my tongue about the price of fuel and shake my head at the narrative connection, so to speak, between the gasoline in my tank and the American hostages in Teheran—it occurs to me, I say, as I correct my tire-pressures and make a joke with the service-station attendant about inflation, that this whole business is a regression isomorphic not only to the pattern of many mythical heroes’ tasks (to marry the princess you must slay the dragon, to kill whom requires the magic weapon, to acquire which requires knowing the magic word which only a certain crazy-lady can tell you, to bribe whom requires etc., etc.), but also to the structure of certain sentences, e.g., this one, and, come to think of it, to a great many other things (are the capers on the grocery list, that we need for the tuna sauce to serve with the cold veal and champagne to celebrate the semester’s end and the launching of a new sailing season?) including gourmet cooking, broken-field running, navigation by deduced reckoning, and at least a certain category of frametale literature—any activity or process, let’s say, whose progression is suspended by, yet dependent upon, digression and even regression of an ultimately enabling sort; et voilà mon essai, which I shall either postpone pursuing till the boat is launched or postpone the launching to pursue, depending upon which—as we prepare the capers to prepare the sauce to prepare the vitello tonnato to celebrate the season—seems to us to be the framing situation and which the framed.
