Nested Frames

Ptim Callan: In an earlier episode, I talked about a frame, which is a narrative that contains another narrative inside it. As a you know, for instance, if someone is in the narrative says, now I'm gonna tell you a story, and then you go into that story. That's a frame that sits inside a bigger narrative. And we define that, go back and look for a definition of that. But what I want to talk about today is the idea of nesting frames. What if there's someone in a frame that says, I'm gonna tell you about something now, and then you go into that frame, and in that frame, somebody says, Well, I'm gonna tell you about something now, and you go into that frame. And that's the idea of those frames being nested. And postmodernists have done a lot of interesting things with nested frames. And nested frames, frames I said, are very common in postmodernism. Nested frames themselves are not uncommon. You see that a fair amount. and some of the I think more accomplished and interesting things that have been done. In postmodern literature, are some of the ones I want to hit today. So I want to start with Stanislaw Lem's The Siberian. I've mentioned the Siberian in the past. The Siberian is an absolutely wonderful book about a series of short narratives, you could call them short stories, I guess, about the two inventors, Caplautius and Truel, the great constructors who make all of these machines and then the machines do interesting things, and we have stories about them. And in particular, one of his stories is Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius. And the basic idea here is that Trurol is hired by this King, King Genius, to deliver to him a storytelling machine. King Genius wants people to come tell him stories. And Trurl, instead of getting locked into this, says, I'm going to actually make a storytelling machine and he winds up making and delivering three storytelling machines to King Genius. And so each of the machines tells a story. So that's already a frame, right? Because we have the frame of Troll and King Genius. Then he delivers the King storytelling machines, and the storytelling machines tell their stories. And the stories are edifying, right? At the end of the day, what they're trying to do is they're trying to improve King Genius and true improve King Genius in a specific way that's to Troll's advantage. Because Truroll in earlier stories in this book has been let's say cheated or otherwise treated badly by powerful figures who hired him to make things. And so at this point he's very cautious. And so part of what he wants to do is he wants to ensure that King Genius walks away from this, understanding not to mistreat Tru. And and so these these stories go about doing this. And the second of these machines tells King Genius a story about a king Who commissions an inventor to make a dream machine for him where he can plug in and experience dreams. And that inventor delivers three dream machines that, according to their cosmetic description, are very similar to Troll's three storytelling machines. And so the parallels between these two things are just very clear and obvious. And as the the the the the that king. Who is unabashedly wicked in the story, because it's edifying for King Genius. That king who's unabashedly wicked is plugging into these different dreams, and we see multi him experiencing multiple of these dreams. And as it happens, he goes down multiple layers. So some of these dreams have dreams or have narratives or have stories or have something in that, or it goes down another layer. And it even gets it all it gets five layers deep. by the by the time it's done. But then what's interesting is in that second layer, or yes, the third layer, I guess, inside the dreams, whatever layer it is where he's experiencing the dreams. At the end of the day, Troll Troll's machine or or Septilius, which is what the inventor in that story is called. puts the king in a dream where basically the dreams are infinitely deep. And I'm gonna read this section. So he the king the king as the king keeps plugging king plugs into a dream where it's a dream of dreaming. And then so as he pushed in the plug and entered the dream, only to find himself still himself, Zipperupus standing in the palace vestibule and at his side, Septilian the Cybernarian, explains to him that all of his dreams, that he basically he's he he finds himself in another dream, and so he plugs in and he and so impatiently plugs into the cabinet and enters the next dream, but it's still the same. The vestibule, the cabinets, the cyberarian and himself. Is this a dream? Isn't it? He shouts, plugging in again. And once again there's the vegetable, the cabinets, the cyber and again, but it's still the same, and again and again, faster and faster. And so he keeps like doing this and and going in and out of more dreams until it eventually it ends. his stupidity could not save him, nor could his cowardice, nor his enormous green, for this time he had gotten himself in too deep. and was trapped and wrapped in dreams, as if in a hundred tight cocoons, so that even when he managed straining with all his might to free himself from one, that didn't help, for immediately he fell into another. And when he pulled his plug from the cabinet, both plug and cabinet were only dreamed, not real. And when he beat subtilian, subtillion two turned out to be a dream. So what happens is he gets in these nested dreams so deep The wicked guy in the story that he can't ever get out of them. And he's caught in the dreams forever. And this, of course, is edifying on the frame level up. So that's an interesting use of nested dreams, right? Nested, nested narratives. And again, these narratives get five deep in this story. But there is a suggestion of kind of infinite depth or so much labyrinthine complexity that you can't ultimately figure out which one's a dream and which one is not. And that's a that's you know, that's so that's that's nested narratives. And interesting things with nested narratives. I think The best example of that sort of technique, and one that I absolutely love, is John Barth's short story, The Menelaid, which comes from his his book of short stories Lost at the Funhouse. And Barth, the Uber postmodernist, gives us this story of Menelaus. And Menelaus is late in his life, and he's narrating things that happened earlier. So as he starts to narrate things happen happened earlier, he starts talking about the conversation he had with Telemachus at the beginning of the Odyssey in the Telemachy books, the first six books of the Odyssey, when Telemachus goes to Menelaus to ask him about his father. And Menelaus, late Menelaus, now Menelaus, starts quoting what he said to Telemachus at that time. So now he's quoting himself. So now we're one level down. And as he's talking to Telemachus inside of that frame, he starts to explain to Telemachus a conversation that he had with Polyphemus, the transforming god, on the shores of some island on his way back from the Trojan War. And he starts quoting himself speaking to Polyphemus inside the conversation with Telemachus, which he's now quoting as late life Menelaus. And then as he's talking to Polyphemus, then they quote somebody and they quote somebody and they quote somebody. And these quotes all get nested inside each other very clearly with quotation marks. So that you have these moments where it'll have these long lists of quotation marks. Where you can see all the quotation marks going up and down in the huge numbers of quotation marks, as that's how far down he is, the narrative, and what he's what he's talking about. And again, these things get seven deep. So you'll see the quotation marks go really, really deep. And it leads us to a number of Absolutely marvelous moments that again Barth being his smart smart self gives us. So I'm gonna quote here, quote. Actually, it's quote quote quote for what it's worth. Nothing for it but to do as Eodithan bid me. I say to myself, I told Telemachus I sighed to Helen, right? Because he's he's saying that he did this and did this and did this, or another spot on the same page. A little later. Got you, I cried, I cried, I cried, I cry. So he does these, it's just smart and and fun and funny and charming and creative and clever. And of course, Barth, as I said, being sort of the the godfather of modern metafiction, takes this to its full metafictional. Nth degree. And it's it's absolutely terrific. It's it's I think my favorite story in Lost in the Funhouse, which is a strong collection, so that's saying a lot. So again, nested frames. Here's a third example of Nested's Frame. This is a children's book, because why can't we do this? Why can't we do postmodernism in children's books too? This is Charlie Cook's favorite book by Julia Donaldson and Axel Alex Axel Schl. Axel Scheffler. Julia Dynanson's the writer, Axel Scheffler's the illustrator. And they actually have a lot of really good books. But this one, Charlie Cook's favorite book in particular, is very postmodern. And what happens is there's a boy, Charlie Cook. And Charlie Cook is sitting down to read a book. And it is a book about, as we turn the page, a pirate! And the pirate is doing things, and as the pirate is doing his things, he finds a treasure chest, and in this treasure chest there is a book. And he starts reading about Goldilocks and the three bears. And the three bears come home to find that Goldilocks is reading one of their books, which is about a knight and a dragon. And the night and dragon wind up reading a book about et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So then that's about a frog and a toad on a lily pad, and then they're reading about some some birds that are reading, and then we've got an old Victorian style thing, and a newspaper article about Jewish thief. We get to astronauts at one point. We have all of these things, right? And it winds up at the end, when we get all the way to the end, about a book, about a book, about a book, about a book, we've got this kind of Headless Corpse Pride Lady, and she was reading a book about what is she reading a book about? She's reading a book about Charlie Cook sitting in his living room reading a book. And so now it's gone full circle. And the nested frames go all the way back to the innermost frame, is the outermost frame. Lovely, charming, smart, very postmodernist children's book, Charlie Cook's favorite book. So That's great. The last example I want to give us today is Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. And how Cloud Atlas works, this is a fabulous book. How Cloud Atlas works is it starts out and we're reading the journal of a nineteenth century doctor, he's on a sailing mission, he's somewhere in the South Pacific or the South Seas, and he's writing about what happened to him on some island. And you're reading this narrative and you you you get engaged and involved in the narrative and then suddenly it stops. And you start with a different narrative, which is someone from Vienna from I think the 19 like early 1900s, like 1900 or so, and this is kind of an artist student, and you're reading his letters, and he starts to be involved in we getting in with him. And it turns out that he has read He has been reading this old journal from the South Seas. And he's read half of it, and then he gets interrupted, and he has a series of adventures which we're seeing in his letters. And then the letters get cut short, that narrative gets cut short, and we go to the next one, which is somebody in like the nineteen thirties, and I think he's a Think he's in manufacturing, he's like a manager at a manufacturing company. I don't exactly remember, but something like that. And it goes, and then that jumps forward to like the 1970s, and there's this investigative journalist, and she's working on a problem with a nuclear power plant, but she's being threatened by people who are going to like kill her for what she knows. And then that jumps forward again into a time in the future. With things that future people are doing, where now we're in, I guess they're almost science fiction because it's stuff that doesn't exist anymore. And then that jumps again even further into the further future. And every step of those, what happens is that person, that that that focal person, that protagonist in the future, is consuming the previous work. So they're reading the journal or reading the letters or watching the tape, watching the movie, watching the holographic recording. As we get into the future, right? And then the middle one, the middle frame resolves itself. The furthest in the future story resolves itself, and at the end, that character sits down to finish watching the holographic recording. And then we go back and we get the second half of one frame out. And that story resolves itself. And at the end of that, that person jumps back to finish watching the movie about the, you know, the one the one before that. And then that one finishes watching the movie about the nineteen seventies, about the nuclear power plant, and that one finishes and it goes back, back, back, back, back. Until the end, the guy, you know, the the artist in Vienna goes back and reads the end of the journal. And as each of these stories, so each of these stories is left in suspension. And then when we get to the middle frame, it resolves itself, and then we get ending, ending, ending, ending. And it cascades back outwards. So it is six levels, I think. Six levels of frames within frames within frames within frames. All built into a big, complex, intelligent, interesting, well-written book from a lot of different perspectives and viewpoints. So now why? So let's talk about the what do we get from nested frames, right? Why do we do it? Well, of course, the first thing we get, just like we said, is we just get some structure. Postmodernists in general like structure and are interested in structure. And are interested in structures and forms. And nested frames gives us very interesting structures. With multiple things inside of other things. And connected to that, they give us opportunities to do fun, interesting things. So in David Mitchell's case, Cloud Atlas It allows us to cover a huge span of time and jump forward, jump, jump forward, jump forward. And also gives him this great technique of leaving us in suspense over and over and over again and then coming back and giving us a conclusion, you know, satisfying us, satisfying us, satisfying us, satisfying us. So that's a great structure that does a lot of a lot of nice things for him. And it also allows him to connect them back. So the earlier works are influencing the people in the later works because they're actually reading and consuming these works. That's information that is going into their heads and then it's changing how they behave. And then the later person who's looking at that, that information is going to their heads and it's changing how they behave. So all of this stuff is possible for Mitchell because of this nested frame structure that he put together, right? Or if we look at the Menelaid Barth. The, you know, the fun he has by jumping up and down between the little l levels of the narrative and having Manelaus quoting himself, quoting himself, quoting himself, quoting himself, is really fun and funny. And it also allows him to get very metafictional and to deal with what John Barth is so often dealing with, which is questions of identity and ontology, what is real and what is not. And he really gets into that hard in that story, the Menelaus, and the the nested frames is precisely the way he does it. Right? Stanisla Lem. The the the the you know again using these stories, we can see on the outside Truel, having been burned by this kind of relationship in the past, is constructing storytelling machines that are going to tell stories that are gonna change the behavior of the potentially capricious monarch that Truarl is dealing with, so that that monarch will not treat Truel badly. And so all of that is built in, and the nested frames give Stanislaw Lem the opportunity to kind of layer in that motivational nuance and how all the characters are behaving is is is both shown and changed by the presence of the multiple frames. Right? So just more. So the first thing is more structure, but second of all is opportunities to do interesting things that you couldn't do otherwise. And then the third one I want to mention, and this is sort of tied into the other two, and I said this in my my episode about frames as well, is frame frames fundamentally flock together with metafiction. It's an obvious thing to go metafictional once you have a frame. And the more frames you have, the more obvious it is to go metafictional. Likewise, if you want to do metafictional things. One of the tools available to you is a frame. Now it doesn't have to be. You can be framing without being metafictional, I guess to a degree. And you can be metafictional without using a frame, right? Absolutely. But they work really well together. There's a huge amount of synergy. be behind the two concepts and the two techniques. And so you do see them coming together a lot. So, you know, if if we're looking at people who are fundamentally interested in metafiction, Barth, big time. Stanislaw Lem, some of the time he has a lot of variety in his writing, but he will go there. David Mitchell, same thing, has a lot of variety in his writing, but he will go there. So when you look at all of those together The use of the frame helps them with that and helps them do that when that's the mode that they're in. So you know it's and and then I guess the last point why would you use frames is they're really good for introducing variety. So we haven't gotten to this one yet in an episode that we will. But the idea that oftentimes what postmodernists wanna do is they wanna include a bunch of different viewpoints or styles or subject matter or stuff. They want to build a mosaic. or a like a stained glass wall so you use a bunch of little pieces of glass and you put them together a window rather put a lunch bunch of little pieces of glass to put together and it makes a bigger picture out of all those little pieces and so if you want to assemble pieces and you're for an assemblage kind of writer which David Mitchell does pretty you know fairly certainly some of the time then the frames make that h are enabling to do that, are helpful for doing that. And Cloud Atlas is a is a perfect example, right? And one of the things about David Mitchell in general is that every one of his narratives, the the voice and tone and style is so unique and the characters are so unique. And they all feel very different from each other and they all feel like snapshots of a real of a real life, right? And so by building the cloud atlas nested frames, you know open open open open close close close close close close structure he is able to deal to provide these very different styles and viewpoints all together in a single integrated work. And so again, that's really helpful and interesting if you're a writer of that bent and that's what you're trying to do. So frames allow people to do a lot of things. Nested frames allow them to do some very interesting things. There are other clever things that authors have done with frames that aren't just about nesting them, but they're clever in other ways. We will return to those in another episode. but this one's good, and I highly recommend if you haven't done it, go back and watch the episode about frames. understanding of how it works, what it is, what's going on with that, and some, you know, examples of them in history and where they come from. And then the last point as always is these aren't the only examples of nested frames in postmodern literature. I would love for you go into the comments and tell me about that work, that story or novel that you loved that had a nested frame itself and maybe it's something I've read and it just didn't make the cut to talk about today. Maybe it should have or maybe it's something I haven't read and you're going to teach me something either way really excited i'm really excited to see what you have to say and thank you