I’ve read a few books where the author set up a framework for his story that makes it look like it’s based on something real, but in reality the framework itself is fiction as well. For example:
The Princess Bride: author pretends he’s taken the story from an old Italian novel and weaves this elaborate narrative about how he came to discover the novel and rewrite it
Life of Pi: author says the story is based on interviews with an actual shipwreck survivor
Memoirs of a Geisha: author says the story is based on interviews with an actual former geisha
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice: author says the story is based on a mysterious package she received in the mail, with a bundle of papers in it which turn out to be the memoirs of a girl who worked with Sherlock Holmes
I know that a story within a story is called a frame narrative, but is there a name for a frame narrative where the frame is set up to make the fictional story take on the air of a non-fictional account?
In German this is called herausgeberfiktion or manuskriptfiktion. (n.b. I think “Fiktion” here refers to the fiction that the author is merely the editor or publisher of a found manuscript, interview transcript, etc, not to a sub-genre of fiction.)
I haven’t found a corresponding English term. People at my favourite user edited German-English dictionaryseem to think that metadiegetic frame or metanarrative frame might work but I’m doubtful; metadiegetic and metanarrative have, if I recall correctly, narrowly defined uses in literary theory that do not match this.
Most framing stories work this way; that’s the entire point. There are very few stories where the frame doesn’t have someone setting a background and then going into the main narrative (I suppose John Barth’s “Frame Tale” would count, but that’s very unusual). The goal is to add verisimilitude to the story.
Even JRR Tolkien used this type of thing…the literary conceit was that he’d found the Red Book of Westmarch, a book about the history of Middle-Earth, written by Bilbo, Frodo and Sam, with translations of Elvish tales as well, and translated it into English. It wasn’t used as an overt frame for the books, but was mentioned in the Appendices and a bit in the Hobbit, I believe.
The story is framed as an interview between the geisha and the fictional “translator” Professor Haarhuis. The fact that Golden actually did research, including interviewing a former geisha, does not make the frame “true.” The rest of the story is also fiction.
Is the literary conceit described by the OP considered different in quality from that in things like Canterbury Tales or The Decameron? In other words, is a book supposedly taken from documentary evidence that is as fictional as the plot itself the same as a book describing stories as told by a group of people to each other?
Also, moving from literary to musical, Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley have a project going called Evelyn Evelyn, which is supposedly a pair of conjoined twins discovered on MySpace by Palmer and talked into recording their songs. It is, in reality, Palmer and Webley singing, but the backstory has garnered interesting reactions, including outrage by certain conjoined-twin-advocates for “exploiting” the condition.
The songs are cute, though. (I get Elephant Elephant running on constant loop through my head if I listen to it once)
There certainly are exceptions, though. Off the top of my head, Eddison’s Worm Ouroboros begins with a frame that is just as fantastic as the story that follows: a guy mind-travels to Mercury and gets the tour guide treatment from a talking bird.