Tales Within Tales Within Tales

       Back to Business.

       science-fiction writers are not like you and me; they have more fun. This truth was revealed to me at the Second International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, held at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton in March, 1981. One of the fun things SF writers do is organize convention after convention -- regional, national, international, intergalactic -- among which they hop like drivers on the auto-racing circuit, reinforcing one another's enthusiasm for their genre, enlarging their personal acquaintance with its practitioners, and enjoying one another's company with a high-spirited camaraderie hardly to be found for example at a meeting of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

       My reservations about science fiction are much the same as my reservations about historical fiction, as set forth in that blue-crab Friday-piece earlier on: The more it is about science, the future, other worlds, etc., the less it is likely to be about the proper subject of literature: "human life, its Happiness and its misery." Fantasy is another matter: a mode of literature as old as the narrative imagination.

       Florida Atlantic University's annual International Conferences on the Fantastic in the Arts are unusually well organized, well funded, and well attended affairs, ecumenical enough in spirit to include among their principal speakers each year one "mainstream" writer whose works at least occasionally involve fantasy. I accepted their lecture-invitation partly because it gave me a chance to think again about my friend Scheherazade and partly because Shelly and I planned to spend our vacation that spring sailing in the Caribbean; the Boca Raton stopover would help pay for the cruise and give us a few beach-days to shape up for it. The SF people, however, turned out to be as enjoyable in their way as the British Virgin Islands in theirs; at conference's end, as we took off for Tortola, our fellow fantasts were calling to one another "Next month in Cincinnati. . . next summer in Vancouver. . . next year in Adelaide. . ."

       This lecture was published in amended form in the Autumn 1981 number of the quarterly Antaeus. The figures and footnotes are reprinted here as they were printed there.

       It is an honor to follow Isaac Bashevis Singer as your guest at this Second International Conference on the Fantastic. Mr. Singer has been called by one critic a modernist in traditionalist's clothing: I approve equally of the disguise and of the thing disguised, and sometimes suspect my own case to be simply the reverse. Like a good Cabalist, Singer understands God to be a kind of novelist and the world to be His novel-in-progress; as a fellow storyteller, he is therefore able to appreciate the great Author's masterstrokes and to sympathize with, if not excuse, His lapses. As Horace says, Sometimes even good Homer sleeps. What's more, the story is not done yet: Who knows what plot-reversals the Author may have up His/Her sleeve for the denouement?

       I second that attitude, too; I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist.

       It is remarks like that, I suppose, that have fetched Mrs. Barth and me to Boca Raton so that I can speak to you about a certain standard device of fantastic literature: stories within stories. I have begun by invoking two other storytellers: I. B. Singer and God. I trust that neither of them would disapprove of my pausing here, or anywhere, to tell you a little story.

       Once upon a time -- it was 1971 -- I made up a story about Scheherazade's younger sister, Dunyazade, who sat at the foot of the royal bed for 1001 nights (so we're told in the Arabian version) watching her sister and the king make love and listening to all those beguiling, usually fantastic, old stories. In my version, Scheherazade is assisted in her exhaustive narrative enterprise by an American genie of sorts from the second half of the twentieth century: He has always been half in love with her and inspired by her situation, and he contrives, by a certain arrangement between them, to supply her from the narrative future with those stories from the narrative past which she needs to deal with her present danger.

       My genie gets these stories, needless to say, from his copy of The 1001 Nights. And, like bread cast upon the waters, his assisting Scheherazade solves his problem, too, which is hers and every storyteller's: What to do for yet another and yet another encore? How to save and save again one's narrative neck? The genie's next story, we learn toward the end of my story,* will be the story of his interlude with Scheherazade.

* "Dunyazadiad," in Chimera (N.Y.: Random House, 1972).

       How I wish that that fantasy were a fact: that I could be that genie, and meet and speak with the talented, wise, and beautiful Scheherazade.

       One part of it is a fact: Dunyazade, the narrator of my story, recounting the genie's first appearance to the sisters, says, "Years ago (the genie told us), when he'd been a penniless student pushing book-carts through the library-stacks of his university to help pay for his education, he'd contracted a passion for Scheherazade upon first reading the tales she beguiled King Shahryar with, and had sustained that passion. . . powerfully ever since. . ." What Diotima was to Socrates in the Symposium, Scheherazade has always been to me; her name stares at me from a 3x5 card above my writing table, both to encourage me when the critics are working me over -- for I've never doubted since first meeting her that she is my true sister -- and, contrariwise, to chasten me when my stories are overpraised, for I've never doubted that that true sister is immeasurably my superior.

       Nevertheless, there are two white lies in the genie's protestation. First, Scheherazade's is not the only name on that 3x5 card: My very big brothers Odysseus, Don Quixote, and Huckleberry Finn, towards whom I harbor similar feelings, join her in buoying me up and staring me down. And second, it was never Scheherazade's stories that seduced and beguiled me, but their teller and the extraordinary circumstances of their telling: in other words, the character and situation of Scheherazade, and the narrative convention of the framing story.

       Of that situation I have written elsewhere*: the significance of there being 1001 nights rather than 101 or 2002; the ritual of sex before storytelling; the terrifying but fertilizing relation between the storyteller and her audience; the primordial publish-or-perish ultimatum and its familiar consequence (after the king, on the 1002nd day, awards Scheherazade the relative tenure of formal marriage and orders a deluxe hardcover edition of her work, the woman evidently never tells another story); the crucial role of little Dunyazade at the foot of that bed; the even more intriguing and emblematic problem that she must deal with on her bridal night, etc. I won't speak further of those things here.

* "Muse Spare Me," in Book Week, Sept. 26, 1965; reprinted in The Sense of the 60s, ed. Quinn (N.Y.: Free Press, 1968).

       Let's look instead at the phenomenon of stories within stories. A contemporary of mine, the novelist John Gardner, distinguishes between what he calls "primary fiction," which he defines as fiction about life, and "secondary fiction," which he defines as fiction about fiction. There are several grounds on which one might question this distinction, especially when its inventor turns it into a value judgment and even into moral categories. For the moment let's simply be reminded that the phenomenon of framed tales -- that is, of stories within stories, which always to some degree imply stories about stories and even stories about storytelling -- that this phenomenon is ancient, ubiquitous, and persistent; almost as old and various, I suspect, as the narrative impulse itself.

       Perhaps this is the place to review some elementary propositions about reality and fantasy, which I'm sure have been discussed in a sophisticated way in various sessions of this conference. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, defines the world (which is to say, reality) as being "everything that is the case." The Cabalists, whom writers as different as I. B. Singer and Jorge Luis Borges have found to be a rich source of literary metaphor, maintain that this reality, our reality, is God's text, his significant fiction -- I believe Mr. Singer might even say God's executed fantasy. Arthur Schopenhauer, whose importance to Borges I'll come back to, goes farther and declares that our reality, whether or not it's God's fiction, is our representation, as it were our fiction: that relations, categories, concepts such as differentiation, time and space, being and not-being -- all are ours, not seamless nature's. Eastern philosophy teases these paradoxes out; their bottom line is that capital-R Reality -- to a greater or lesser extent, but strictly speaking -- is our shared fantasy.

       I trust that this conference will agree, in the main, that the difference between the fantasy we call reality and the fantasies we call fantasy has to do with cultural consensus and with one's manner of relating to the concept-structure involved: What we call the real world, we relate to as if it were the case. Psychopathological fantasies are more or less individual concept-structures markedly at variance with the cultural consensus and related to as if they were the case: If you conceive yourself to be Napoleon and act upon your conviction, the rest of us will put you away. "Normal" fantasies are more or less individual concept-structures significantly at variance with the cultural consensus but not related to as if they were the case: e.g. night-dreams (from our waking point of view), daydreams, and aesthetic fictions both "realistic" and "fantastic." On this ontological level, all fiction is fantasy. (The electronic-computer microworlds dealt with by investigators in the field of artificial intelligence would seem to belong to some third category: perhaps secondary fiction in a sense different from Gardner's. The AI computer constructs a world along parameters laid down by its programmer -- a microworld often at considerable variance indeed with the programmer's cultural consensus -- and it relates to that microworld as if it were real; but we don't call either the computer or the programmer psychopathological -- at least not ipso facto. I confess to not having thought this aspect of the matter through very carefully: I'm a storyteller, not a philosopher.)

       Aesthetic realism, then, is any set of artistic conventions felt by people on a particular level of a particular culture at a particular period to be literally imitative of their imagination of the actual world. It goes without saying that one generation's or culture's realism is another's patent artifice -- witness for example the history of what has passed for realistic dialogue and characterization in Hollywood movies from Humphrey Bogart to Robert de Niro. It likewise goes without saying that what the inexperienced find realistically convincing, the experienced may not, and vice-versa: The birds peck at Apelles's painted grapes (almost the only thing we're taught about classical Greek painting); the innocent frontiersman rises from his seat at a nineteenth-century showboat melodrama to warn the heroine against the villain's blandishments. On the other hand, zoo zebras ignore a life-size color photograph of a zebra -- they don't know what it represents -- and the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez tells us that what we gringos take for surrealism in his fiction is everyday reality where he comes from.

       As for aesthetic irrealism -- fantasy of the sort addressed by international conferences on the fantastic -- it must consist of any set of artistic principles and devices, conventional or otherwise, felt by people on a particular level of a particular culture at a particular time to be enjoyable and/or significant though understood to be not literally imitative of their imagination of the actual world. Consider the ghost of Hamlet's father. For most of us and for many Elizabethans, that ghost in Shakespeare's play is/was a device of fantastic literature. For many other Elizabethans and some of us -- those who believe in ghosts -- it was/is a device of realistic literature. We don't know which it was for the playwright or for particular players of the role. For the character Hamlet, the ghost is no device of any sort; it is reality, as it may well have been for some innocent rube scared out of his skin in the stalls of the Globe. Hamlet's mother Gertrude calls the ghost Hamlet's fantasy (". . . the very coinage of your brain": III, iv), even his psychopathological fantasy ("Alas, he's mad": III, iv): She neither sees nor hears the ghost when Hamlet does, in her presence. But there's the complication that not only the watchmen but also the antisupernaturalist university student Horatio all see what Hamlet sees but apparently don't hear what he hears (this after the guard Marcellus had complained, "Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy": I, i) -- etc., etc. We are in the paradoxical world of realistic fantasies like Kafka's and fantastic realities like Edgar Poe's version of Scheherazade's last tale: the one that King Shahryar refuses to swallow, having to do with steamboats and railways and other preposterosities. I shall add that I myself find the fantastic device of Hamlet's father's ghost a good deal more believable than the realistic device of the accidental exchange of poisoned swords in midst of Hamlet's duel with Laertes in Act V. So it goes -- and it is time to wander back to our subject.

       I remarked that the devices of aesthetic fantasy may be conventional or otherwise. In the opinion of Jorge Luis Borges, the most ubiquitous devices of fantastic literature are four: the double, the voyage in time, the contamination of reality by irreality, and the text within the text.

       Of this last, my topic, we're all familiar with such classic examples as The 1001 Nights, in which Scheherazade entertains King Shahryar with stories in which the characters sometimes tell one another stories in which (in a few cases) the characters tell further stories. Closer inspection reveals that the real "frame" of The 1001 Nights is not the relation between Scheherazade and Shahryar, but something "farther out" and more ancient: the relation between the reader, or listener, and the unspecified teller of the story of Scheherazade. I mean this literally: The opening words of the tale (after the invocation to Allah) are "There is a book called The 1001 Nights, in which it is said that once upon a time. . ." etc. In other words, The 1001 Nights is not immediately about Scheherazade and her stories; it is about a book called The 1001 Nights, which is about Scheherazade and her stories. That book is not the book we hold in our hands, with wonderful notes by Richard Burton; nor is it quite the book that Shahryar on the 1002nd morning orders to be written. I don't know what, exactly, that book is, or where. I have asked my friend William H. Gass -- a professional philosopher as well as a professional storyteller -- please to locate that book for me; he's not sure where it is either. To think about that book very long is to invite vertigo.

       The classical invocation to the muse of Greek and Roman epic literature can be regarded similarly as a radical framing device. The "outside" or ground-story of the Odyssey may be said to be, not the situation of Odysseus striving home from Troy, but the situation of the bard who in the opening lines sings (in Albert Cook's translation) "Sing, Muse, of that man of many turns, the wanderer," etc.; "begin anywhere you like." To which the Muse in effect replies: "Since you ask, the story goes this way: All the other Greeks had got Home long since," etc. My experience and intuitions both as a professional storyteller and as an amateur of frame-tale literature lead me to suspect that if the first story ever told began "Once upon a time," the second story ever told began "Once upon a time there was a story that began 'Once upon a time.' " Furthermore -- since storytelling appears to be as human a phenomenon as language itself -- I'd bet that that second story was no less about "life" than the first.

       But let me tell you the story of my romance with this second sort of stories: tales within tales. You've heard its beginning: that student, once upon a time, pushing his book-cart through the stacks of the Johns Hopkins classics library and surreptitiously reading the fantastic literature he was supposed to be filing: The 1001 Nights, The Ocean of Story, the Panchatantra, the Metamorphoses, the Decameron, Pentameron, Heptameron, and the rest. A good many years later, that student found himself metamorphosed into a storyteller as well as a story-reader, and a professor at The State University of New York at Buffalo to boot, one of whose perquisites (this was the palmy mid-1960s) was a graduate-student research assistant. How I could have used one earlier, at Penn State, when I was writing The Sot-Weed Factor! How I could have used one later, at Johns Hopkins, when I was writing the novel LETTERS! But as it happened, my fiction just then in progress required no particular research.

       To keep the situation honest, I therefore resolved to implement my old affection for frametale literature with a reasonably thorough, if non-professional, investigation of the genre -- of which, in fact, there seemed to be little in the way of general examination beyond some useful checklists in German* and some side-glances by Chaucerians.** My objective was neither to publish an essay on the subject nor to teach a course in it: simply to ask certain questions of the existing corpus of such literature in order to satisfy a long-standing curiosity and, perhaps, to discover something about that ancient narrative convention which might inspire a story of my own: a story which, whatever else it was about, would also be about stories within stories within stories.

* e.g., Lohmann, Otto: Die Rahmenerzählung des Decameron (Halle/Salle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1935), and the more specialized Goldstein, Moritz: Die Technik der zyklischen Rahmenerzählungen Deutschlands. Von Goethe bis Hoffmann. (Berlin, 1906?)

** e.g., Bryan & Dempster's Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1941); H.B. Hinckley's "The Framing-Tale" (Modern Language Notes, Vol. XLIX no. 2, Feb. 1934), etc.

       I shall digress again briefly here to remark that it does not appear to matter to the Muses whether a writer invokes them out of a heroic wish like Alexander Solzhenitsyn's, to expose and destroy an oppressive system of government, or a decadent wish like Flaubert's, to write a novel "about nothing": Their decision to sing or not to sing seems based on other considerations. The Muses are a less responsible committee, in the moral sphere, than is the Swedish Academy.

       Well. We proceeded to interrogate literature, fantastic and otherwise: I mean that research assistant, the Muses, and me. Here, briefly, are some of the findings of our leisurely and gentle interrogation and some of the things that those findings suggested to me.

       First, as might be expected, we found it necessary in designing our questionnaire to distinguish categories of frametale literature. Our first distinction was between incidental or casual frames and more or less systematic frames: It is in fact more of a spectrum or continuum than a distinction. In the first category we put such unforgettable but incidental stories-within-stories as Pilar's story of the killing of the fascists in Chapter 10 of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, or Ivan's tale of the Grand Inquisitor in Book V, Chapter V of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov; also the incidental romances with which Cervantes interrupts the adventures of Don Quixote; and, for that matter, such classical retrospective expositions as Odysseus's rehearsal to the Phaeacians of his story thus far (Books IX-XII of the Odyssey) and Aeneas's ditto to Dido (Books II and III of the Aeneid). More fiction than not, I suppose, frames some incidental anecdote or delayed anecdotal exposition. We decided to confine our attention to the other end of the spectrum: stories that programmatically frame other stories.

       There we soon found ourselves making further taxonomical distinctions, which I shall merely illustrate. There is for example what I think of as the Dante/Chaucer continuum: on the one hand, stories Like The Divine Comedy, in which the frame (Dante's impasse in the Dark Wood and his detour through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven) is at least as conspicuous and as dramatically developed as the stories told along the way, most of which in Dante's case are plotless moral exempla or extended epitaphs; on the other hand, stories like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio's Decameron, in which the framed stories are dramatically complete, but the frame-story -- the pilgrimage to and from Canterbury; the retreat of ten young Florentine ladies and gentlemen from the plague of 1348 -- is vestigial, rudimentary, incomplete, or dramaturgically static. I wish now that we had also kept tab of comparatively realistic frames for comparatively fantastic stories -- pretty much the case with the Odyssey and the Nights, for example -- and vice-versa. But we didn't.

       Next, it seemed useful to distinguish between frame-stories with a single frame -- such as Dante's, Chaucer's, and Boccaccio's, and in fact almost all frametale literature at the first level of its framing -- and the very much rarer cases of serial primary frames: as if for example the pilgrimage to Canterbury were but the first in a series of linked Chaucerian ground-narratives whose characters proceed to tell their several stories. Two conspicuous examples of this rarer species are the eleventh-century Sanskrit Ocean of Story, a mammoth work of great structural complexity involving a series of very intricate primary frames,* and Ovid's Metamorphoses, whose armature is an extraordinarily subtle and graceful series of linked primary frametales.

* See my essay "The Ocean of Story," in Directions in Literary Criticism, eds. Weintraub & Young (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973).

       Further, we saw fit to ask of each of the several hundred specimens of frametales and quasi-frametales that we buttonholed whether it comprises merely two degrees of narrative development -- tales within a tale, such as Dante's and Boccaccio's -- or three or more such degrees: tales within tales within a tale, etc. In the oriental literature, we found, it is not uncommon at all for the characters in a second-degree story to tell stories of their own. Where this movement to the third degree occurs more than once -- e.g., in The 1001 Nights -- the second degree of narrative (Scheherazade's stories) becomes a serial frame within a single frame (the story of Scheherazade). Where the characters on the third level of narrative involvement more than once tell further stories, as in the Panchatantra, we have stories serially framed within serial frames within a single frame. The Panchatantra in fact moves to as many as five degrees of narrative involvement, as does The Ocean of Story -- whose primary frame, we remember, is itself serial. Indeed, The Ocean of Story manages to engulf the whole Panchatantra as one of its serial frames, and the Vetalapanchavimsati (25 Tales by a Vampire) as another.

       Such oriental complexity is uncommon in occidental literature, if we ignore that sort of quasi-framing which I spoke of earlier: invocations to the muse and formulae like "There is a story about a man who" etc. But there are pleasant exceptions: Ovid shifts his Metamorphoses to at least four degrees of narrative involvement -- e.g., in Book VI, where in the course of Ovid's ongoing story the Muse tells Minerva the story of the contest between the Muses and the daughters of Pierus, in course of which story the muse Calliope tells the jury of nymphs the story of the rape of Proserpine, in course of which story Arethusa tells Ceres the story of her own rape: a tale within a tale within a tale within a tale. It is managed so subtly that it goes almost unnoticed unless one happens to be reading a translation with conventional English punctuation and sees such strange accumulations of double and single quotation-marks as ' " ' ". The Saragassa Manuscript, Tzvetan Todorov points out, reaches no fewer than five degrees of narrative involvement: a veritable Sargasso Sea of Story. Even more remarkable, though vestigial, is the frame of Plato's Symposium. We all remember that the guests at Agathon's banquet take turns making speeches or telling stories about love, and that the climactic speech is Socrates's famous description of the Ladder of Love, whose final rung he says was explained to him by a lady named Diotima. Many of us will have noticed or had it pointed out to us that the story of Agathon's banquet itself is not told us directly by Plato, but by a fellow named Apollodorus, who is telling it to an unnamed friend. In fact, Plato writes that Apollodorus reports that he has the story from a disciple of Socrates's named Aristodemus, who was among Agathon's party guests. We are given the conversation between Apollodorus and this Aristodemus. However, Apollodorus is not telling his unnamed friend directly what Aristodemus told him: Apollodorus tells his unnamed friend the story of his being importuned in the street two days earlier by yet another friend, Glaucon, who wanted to hear what Aristodemus had reported to Apollodorus of Socrates's speech at Agathon's party. When we sort it all out, we discover that:

       1. Apollodorus is telling his unnamed friend

       2. the story of Apollodorus's telling Glaucon

       3. the story of Aristodemus's telling Apollodorus

       4. the story of Socrates's telling Agathon's company

       5. the story of Diotima's telling Socrates

       6. the story of the Topmost Rung on the Ladder of Love.

       That is, we are about as many removes from Diotima's story as there are rungs on the Ladder of Love itself, even before we add the next frame out -- Plato's telling all this to the reader -- and the next frame out from there: my reminding you what Plato tells the reader. If, as I hope, some of you tell your lovers tonight the story of these remarks of mine, you will be involved in a frametale of nine degrees of narrative complexity, unapproached in the actual corpus of frametale literature.

       To return to that corpus: Its formal possibilities can be visualized, and actual specimens schematized, by conventional outline format, if we ignore the rule of logical outlining that forbids a I, say, unless there's a II, an A without a B, etc. We are dealing here not with logic but with spellbinding. The Canterbury Tales or the Decameron we might begin to schematize as in Figure 1 --

 -- where I represents the pilgrimage from Canterbury or the Florentine aristocrats' retreat from the plague, and the upper-case letters represent the several tale-tellers and their tales. Where a character tells two or more tales serially, we might improve the notation as in Figure 2:

       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.*

* Chimera, pp. 23-24.

       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.

* e.g., in the essay "Partial Enchantment in the Quixote," in Other Inquisitions (Austin, TX: U. of Texas Press, 1965).

       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:

* In the essay "Narrative-men," in The Poetics of Prose, tr. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).

       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.

       Ah, isomorphy! Ah, Scheherazade!

       On with the story.

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