A few years ago, I was unbelievably high, and I was having a phone conversation with a friend. We were talking about how so many people, like my dad, are dependent on coffee and can’t get through the day without consuming three to five cups of caffeinated coffee. I said: “It’s like the people are robots, and the coffee is their fuel. Hey! I have an idea for a story!”
Here was my story idea: a writer writes an allegorical story about a fictional world where people are robots and they are fueled by coffee. His story, which is basically a criticism of our society’s dependence on coffee, angers a Colombian dictator who controls the coffee trade, and the dictator tries to have the writer assassinated.
But I couldn’t leave at it that: I said, “Wait, how about I write a story about a writer who writes a story about the fictional writer who writes the coffee allegory story?” And I started laughing at the absurdity of it all, and then suggested writing a story about a writer who writes a story about a writer who writes a story about a writer who writes a story about an allegorical world where robots are fueled by coffee.
My basic question about this concept is a logic question. How far could you take this before the story became incomprehensible? In other words - how many “story-within-a-story” levels are possible?
There’s no limit to how many “story within a story” levels you can write. The real question is where you lose your audience. Some people will be lost at the first level. Others can hang on though half a dozen “levels”. Beyond that, if most intelligent readers don’t see a point, they’ll probably bail on you. I point out that, in The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, the so-called Arabian Nights, there are routinely sets of stories-within-stories down to seven Inception-like levels. People in the past, with fewer distractions like movies, television, and video games, paid attention to things like this. I note that even they didn’t go down to ten-level stories, though.
John Barth was one of the major figures transitioning from modernism to post-modernism in the 1960’s. He conducted any number of experiments in his stories and novels. The story pertinent here is “Menelaiad” which contains a seven-leveled nested structure. You can find it in the 1968 collection Lost in the Funhouse.
Even more pertinent than Barth’s “Menelaid” is his story “Frame Tale” from the same collection. It’s designed to be read on a Mobius Strip.
There was also a children’s book from the 60s called something like “Tell Me a Story,” where a child ask his father to tell him a story, and the story is that of the child asking his father to tell him a story, whose father then starts to tell a story . . .
Robert Anton Wilson included himself as a character in some of his books. He was this crazy guy that would go around telling the other people that they were just characters in a book he was writing.
Jeremy Leven wrote a novel Creator which is supposedly written by a guy named Harry who’s writing a novel about a character named Bruno. The novel includes passages from Harry’s novel. But Harry’s character Bruno begins to complain about his role and he retaliates by starting a novel of his own in which Harry is a character. The book then contains passages from Bruno’s novel. The book then goes back and forth between sections of Harry’s novel about Bruno and Bruno’s novel about Harry. The passages written by Harry start to shrink and Harry appears more and more as just a character in Bruno’s novel. By the end of the book, Bruno has become the main character of Creator.
I know I’ve read about a study on something similar to this, but I can’t find it on Google. The best I can dig up at the moment is a student’s Livejournal mentioning it.
So, until someone finds a more reliable cite, the answer is four.
The premises for stories my imagination comes up with when high also tend to contain lots of “story-within-a-story” style devices. I wonder if there’s any reason for that.
If you ever decide to write the “story within a story within a story, etc etc etc,” I suggest you have “Paperback Writer” by the Beatles playing in the background.
~VOW
Some of the “dialogs” in Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach cover this ground. One of them has about seven or eight layers of story (and never actually resolves the outermost layer), and another (in a tribute to Escher’s Drawing Hands) has two characters each of whom has authored the other, suggesting an infinite regress.
In the “Cerements” story in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic (in the World’s End book) there’s a point at which Gaiman is telling a story about a man telling a story to a bartender about a man in an inn telling a story about a man at a funeral telling a story about a traveller he once met (Destruction) telling a story about the first Necropolis.
That Gaiman makes this work without the slightest blip on the readers’ radar is a testament to his storytelling genius.
We seem to have the high art literary tradition covered so I will nominate Erica Jong, who wrote a book called Fear of Flying about a writer named Isadora Wing, who wrote a book called Candida Confesses about a writer named Candida who…sounded a lot like Erica Jong. Actually I think Jong wrote four books about this Isadora person, but the last ones weren’t quite so convoluted, and maybe even less autobiographical.
David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas has, IIIRC, six nested stories, each told in a different style and format. Each has a character that stumbles across the story that comes after it in the embedding, and it’s done in a format of A->B->C->D->E->F->E->D->C->B->A, with all the stories but F coming in two halves.
