Story within a story
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A story within a story is a literary device or conceit in which one story is told during the action of another story. 'Mise en abyme' is the French term for the same literary device (and also refers to the practice in heraldry of placing the image of a small shield on a larger shield). A story within a story can be used in novels, short stories, plays, television, films, poems, music, and even philosophy.
Contents |
[edit] Story within a story
The inner stories are told either simply to entertain or more usually to act as an example to the other characters. In either case the story often has symbolic and psychological significance for the characters in the outer story. There is often some parallel between the two stories, and the fiction of the inner story is used to reveal the truth in the outer story.
The literary device of stories within a story dates back to a device known as a frame story, when the outer story does not have much matter, and most of the bulk of the work are is or more complete inner stories told by one or more fictional storytellers. This originated in ancient India, in the Indian epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, in Vishnu Sarma's Panchatantra, in Syntipas' Seven Wise Masters, and in Hitopadesha and Vikram and the Vampire. Another early example of stories within a story are found in the The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights) from the Muslim world.
Often the stories within a story are used to satirize views, not only in the outer story but also in the real world. The Itchy & Scratchy Show from The Simpsons and Terrance & Phillip from South Park both comment on the levels of violence and acceptable behaviour in the media and allow criticism of the outer cartoon to be addressed in the cartoon itself.
Stories-within-a-story may disclose the background of characters or events, tell of myths and legends which influence the plot, or even seem to be extraneous diversions from the plot. In his 1895 historical novel Pharaoh, Bolesław Prus introduces a number of stories-within-the-story, ranging in length from vignette to full-blown story, many of them drawn from ancient Egyptian texts, that further the plot, illuminate characters, and even inspire the fashioning of individual characters.
If a story is told within another, rather than being told as part of the plot, the motives and the reliability of the storyteller are automatically in question. The original author is often regarded as truthful even if he is telling fiction whereas an internal teller may alter or disguise details to make himself appear better. This flexibility allows the author to play on the reader's perceptions of the characters. In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales the characters tell tales suited to their personalities and tell them in ways that highlight their personalities. The noble knight tells a noble story, the boring character tells a very dull tale and the rude miller tells a smutty tale.
In some cases, the story within a story is involved in the action of the plot of the outer story. An example is "The Mad Trist" in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher", where through somewhat mystical means the narrator's reading of the story-within-a-story influences the reality of the story he has been telling, so that what happens in the "Mad Trist" begins happening in "The Fall of the House of Usher". Also, in Don Quixote by Cervantes, there are many stories within the story which influence the hero's actions (there are others which even the author himself admits are purely digressive).
An inner story is often independent so that it can either be skipped over or read separately, although many subtle connections may be lost. A commonly anthologised story is The Grand Inquisitor by Dostoevsky from his long psychological novel The Brothers Karamazov and is told by one brother to another to explain, in part, his view on religion and morality. It also, in a succinct way, explains many of Dostoevsky's own views.
With the rise of literary modernism, writers experimented with ways in which multiple narratives might nest imperfectly within each other. A particularly ingenious example of nested narratives in a poetic context is James Merrill's 1974 poem "Lost in Translation".
Robert A. Heinlein's later books (The Number of the Beast, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and To Sail Beyond the Sunset) propose the idea that every real Universe is a fiction in another Universe. This hypothesis enables many fictional writers to interact with their own (doubly) fictional characters.
[edit] Story within a story within a story
Occasionally a story may include within itself a story within a story. This is almost never done of its own accord (though it does happen, as exemplified below) but usually in some other context.
[edit] Examples
This literary device also dates back to ancient Sanskrit literature. In Vishnu Sarma's Panchatantra, an inter-woven series of colorful animal tales are told with one narrative opening within another, sometimes three or four layers deep, and then unexpectedly snapping shut in irregular rhythms to sustain attention. In Ugrasrava's epic Mahabharata, the Kurukshetra War is narrated by a character in Vyasa's Jaya, which itself is narrated by a character in Vaisampayana's Bharata, which itself is narrated by a character in Ugrasrava's Mahabharata.
Another early example is The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, where the general story is narrated by an unknown narrator, and in this narration the stories are told by Scheherazade. In most of Scheherazade's narrations there are also stories narrated, and even in some of these, there are some other stories.
Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1797-1805) has extremely rich interlocking structure with stories-within-stories reaching several levels of depth.
Plays such as I Hate Hamlet or movies such as A Midwinter's Tale are about a production of Hamlet, which in turn includes a production of The Murder of Gonzago (or The Mouse-trap), so we have a story (The Murder of Gonzago) within a story (Hamlet) within a story (A Midwinter's Tale). (For some, this example does not count as metametafiction, as the play Hamlet exists in full in the real world; however, it is one of the most familiar illustrations of the phenomenon.)
At least one line in the C. S. Lewis book The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader implies that Lewis learnt of Narnia's events - and thus wrote the Narnia books - after the Railway Accident in 1949, when Susan told him them in the belief she was relating mere childhood make-believe. Further still, The Silver Chair states that a Narnian author wrote a book called The Horse And His Boy after the events that book relates.
Several Star Trek tales are stories or events within stories, such as Gene Roddenberry's novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, J. A. Lawrence's Mudd's Angels, John M. Ford's The Final Reflection, Margaret Wander Bonanno's Strangers From The Sky (relating a future book with that title by the fictional author Gen Jaramet-Sauner), and J.R. Rasmussen's "Research" in the anthology Star Trek: Strange New Worlds II. Steve Barnes's novelization of "Far Beyond the Stars" partners with Greg Cox's The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh (Volume Two) to tell us that the story "Far Beyond the Stars" — and, by extension, all of Star Trek itself — is the creation of 1950s writer Benny Russell.
The Quantum Leap novel Knights Of The Morningstar also features a character who writes a book by that name.
Margaret Atwood's novel The Blind Assassin also uses this technique. The novel's expository narration is interspersed with excerpts from a novel written by one of the main characters; the novel-within-a-novel itself contains a science fiction story written by one of that novel's characters.
Stanisław Lem's Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius from The Cyberiad has several levels of storytelling. An interesting point is that all story levels tell stories of the same person, Trurl.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein at one point features the narration of an arctic explorer, who records the narration of Victor Frankenstein, who recounts the narration of his creation, who narrates the story of a cabin dwelling family he secretly observes.
In most stagings of the musical CATS which include the song Growltiger's Last Stand — a recollection of an old play by Gus the Theatre Cat — the character of Lady Griddlebone sings The Ballad of Billy McCaw. (However, many productions of the show omit Growltiger's Last Stand, and The Ballad of Billy McCaw has at times been replaced with a mock aria, so this metametastory isn't always seen.)Depending on the production, there is another musical scene called The Awful Battle of the Pekes and the Pollices where the Jellicles put on a show for their leader.
The Simpsons parodied this structure with numerous 'layers' of sub-stories in the Season 17 episode The Seemingly Never-Ending Story.
[edit] Play within a play
This dramatic device was apparently first used by Thomas Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy around 1587, where it forms the spectacular resolution of the story. Kyd is also assumed to have used it in his lost Hamlet (the so-called Ur-Hamlet). In The Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo is so convinced of the far-reaching consequences of his "revelation" that he predicts it will bring about the "fall of Babylon". In his use of the play within the play, Kyd seems to take Aristotle's idea of drama as catharsis to its apocalyptic conclusion.
William Shakespeare used this device notably in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labours Lost, and Hamlet. In Hamlet the Prince of Denmark, Hamlet himself, asks some strolling players to perform the Murder of Gonzago. The action and characters in the play mirror some of the events from the play Hamlet itself, and Prince Hamlet writes additional material to emphasise this. Hamlet wishes to provoke his uncle and sums this up by saying "the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." Hamlet calls this new play The Mouse-trap, a title which Agatha Christie later took for the long-running play The Mousetrap. Shakespeare also briefly used this device in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, where the character Cassius, a conspirator against Julius Caesar, exclaims "How many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be acted over, in states unborn and accents yet unknown!", and in As You Like It, where the character Jaques said "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players...". Almost the whole of The Taming of the Shrew is a play-within-a-play, presented to convince a drunken beggar that he is a nobleman watching a private performance, but the device has no relevance to the plot (unless Katharina's subservience to her "lord" in the last scene is intended to strengthen the deception against the beggar) and is often dropped in modern productions.
In Anton Chekhov's The Seagull there are specific allusions to Hamlet: in Chekhov's first act a son stages a play to impress his mother and her new lover; the mother responds by comparing her son to Hamlet. Later he tries to come between them, as Hamlet had done with his mother and her new husband. The tragic developments in the plot follow in part from the scorn the mother, a professional actress, shows for her son's play.
When characters in a play perform on stage the action of another play, often with other characters forming an "audience", the audience in the theatre sometimes loses its privileged omniscient position because it is suddenly not clear who is in the play and who is in the play within. The device, then, can also be an ironic comment on drama itself, with inversions and reversals of its basic elements: actors become authors. This form is exploited in Berthold Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle, where a play is shown as a parable to villagers in soviet Russia to justify the reallocation of their farmland: The tale describes how a child is awarded to a servant-girl rather than its natural mother, an aristocrat, as the woman most likely to care for it well.
Alternatively, a play might be about the production of a play, and include the performance of all or part of the play, as in Noises Off, Les feluettes or The Producers.
Laurence Olivier sets the opening scene of his 1944 film of Henry V in the tiring room of the old Globe Theatre as the actors prepare for their roles on stage. The early part of the film comprises these "stage" performances and only later does the action almost imperceptibly expand to the full realism of the Battle of Agincourt. By way of increasingly more artificial sets (based on mediaeval paintings) the film finally returns to The Globe.
There are also several plays about the background of the theatre including A Chorus Line and Kiss Me, Kate.
