# Most recursive fiction? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 21, 2013, 1:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553 "2013-06-21T13:52:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![The\_Hamster\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8edcca/32.png) [@The\_Hamster\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Hamster_King)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2013, 6:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/21 "2013-06-21T18:18:23Z")
Mark Leyner’s _The Sugar Frosted Nutsack_ is incredibly meta-recursive. It’s a story about mythical gods that look like everyday humans. The book The _Sugar Frosted Nutsack_ is itself the central text of the mythos of these gods and reading and writing and re-writing _The Sugar Frosted Nutsack_ are elements of the rituals the accompany worshiping the gods. The book is simultaneously a prophecy and a history and a commentary on both prophecy and history. It contains rewritten portions of itself and instructions on what parts of itself are apocryphal and therefore should be ignored. And then it gets really weird. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2013, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/22 "2013-06-21T18:28:28Z")
As **Left Hand of Dorkness** said (and beat me to the punch), the idea is used in _The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night_, with at least seven tales-within-tales at one point. Douglas Hofstadter borrowed the idea in one chapter of _Godel, Escher, Bach_. And, of course, it’s in the book (but not the movie) of _The Cloud Atlas_. In the book the story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure is used directly, rather than have the individual tales boken up and alternating. ---
**Author:** ![cmkeller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmkeller/32/118_2.png) [@cmkeller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmkeller)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2013, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/23 "2013-06-21T18:31:39Z")
Issue # 55 of Sandman (the Neil Gaiman masterpiece) has the following: A story is being told in a bar In that story, the teller’s teacher tells him a story In the teacher’s story, he tells of HIS teacher telling him a story ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2013, 6:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/24 "2013-06-21T18:52:44Z")
John Barth uses this trope all the time, with the ultimate being “Frame Tale,” which written on a Moebius Strip and thus never ends. Several others of the stories in **Lost in the Funhouse** use it, too: The title story is about a boy who’s lost in a funhouse, and how tries to get out by imagining he’s in a story called “Lost in a Funhouse.” My own “First Draft” has a character in the story becomes aware she’s in a story and ends up becoming the author of the story. ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2013, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/25 "2013-06-21T18:53:54Z")
The Creature hears Safie and Agatha and Felix and DeLacey talking about Safie’s father being in jail. The Creature tells Victor that this was integral to how he taught himself to speak and read. Victor is telling it to Captain Walton of the ice-bound ship. Captain Walton is writing about this in a letter to his sister. Perhaps it’s not the _most_ recursive fiction ever written, but at the time I read it, _Frankenstein_ was the most recursive I had encountered to date. Also, Raold Dahl’s _The B.F.G._ turns out to have been written by the B.F.G. himself. ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2013, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/26 "2013-06-21T19:04:11Z")
And in the Groening-verse, there’s Professor Frink’s “Dream-within-a-Dream” machine in the Simpsons episode “How I Wet Your Mother”; there’s also the What-If machine and the Fing-longer in Futurama’s “Tales of Interest.” ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2013, 7:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/27 "2013-06-21T19:21:39Z")
> [@kaylasdad99](#): > > And in the Groening-verse, there’s Professor Frink’s “Dream-within-a-Dream” machine in the Simpsons episode “How I Wet Your Mother”; What about the one about some gold coins hidden in a cave… “The Seemingly Never Ending Story.” ---
**Author:** ![HelenGawn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/a88e4f/32.png) [@HelenGawn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HelenGawn)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2013, 7:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/28 "2013-06-21T19:32:56Z")
[Passage to Marseille](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passage_to_Marseille), a Bogart movie about escaping from Devil’s Island. IIRC, it goes four levels deep. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2013, 7:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/29 "2013-06-21T19:39:35Z")
In Martin Amis’ novel _Money_, the protagonist needs to improve a movie script – and hires Martin Amis to do it. (Not very deep, but I take the opportunity to mention one of my favorite novelists.🆒 ) ---
**Author:** ![DocCathode](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/doccathode/32/18773_2.png) [@DocCathode](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DocCathode)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2013, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/30 "2013-06-21T20:58:23Z")
One of the stories Lem tells is of an inventor building machines to tell stories. The machines tell stories of people telling stories etc etc. I forget how deep we get. I know it’s the most nested stories I’ve encountered. ---
**Author:** ![AncientHumanoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ancienthumanoid/32/278_2.png) [@AncientHumanoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AncientHumanoid)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2013, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/31 "2013-06-21T21:15:39Z")
Not really recursive, but I fondly remember [My World and Welcome To It](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_World_and_Welcome_to_It) as a pretty interesting bit of humor with the animation of daydreams and fantasies. As a kid, it looked like he was passing into his drawings. ---
**Author:** ![Ferret\_Herder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e47774/32.png) [@Ferret\_Herder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ferret_Herder)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2013, 9:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/32 "2013-06-21T21:28:41Z")
[House of Leaves](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_leaves) is fairly layered. It contains “The Navidson Record,” an analysis of a family’s discovery of a terrible secret in their house, which was apparently compiled and partially edited by a man named Zampano, using various secondary sources including journal articles, magazine articles, books, etc. The main inspiration is a short documentary film called The Navidson Record, created by the husband of the family of that name, which documents the issues and horrors of the house. A man named Johnny Truant was Zampano’s neighbor, and gained possession of the incomplete book and various materials when Zampano died. He did more editing, and put in a ton of footnotes (some of which go on for pages) that discuss the book, his own life, and how he believes working on the book is affecting his life and sanity. There are also notes from the (unnamed) editor at the publisher in parts of the book. There is an appendix called The Whalestoe Letters that consists of a collection of letters written to Johnny by his mother when she was in a mental hospital. She descends into paranoia and starts encoding secret messages into the letters. There is no acknowledgement of the letters by Johnny in the main text or in this appendix, except for a single mark at one point. There are times when sources are pointed out as not being real (and some of the sources are real in **our** world), certain people are quoted as never having seen the film when elsewhere it seemed that they had, and occasionally at least one of the editors lies and then admits it to the reader. Plus the original editor, Zampano, makes curious text strikethroughs in red over one particular topic - leaving the material intact to be read, unlike with many obliterated redacted portions. He also buried some anagrams and other coded references within the text. So you have a documentary film inspiring articles and analyses, which were being compiled by one man into a book/meta-analysis of the situation, (and the experience of which may or may not have led to his death in a somewhat supernatural fashion), which was then edited by a young man who added his own story and his unnerving experiences/mental deterioration that he felt were caused by editing the book, with the publisher’s editor adding occasional commentary/clarification. Throw in an appendix full of coded letters from a madwoman that is tangentially related. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2013, 10:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/33 "2013-06-21T22:53:43Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > John Barth uses this trope all the time, He was the first name I thought of, too, which probably shows our age. 🙂 “Menelaiad,” from Lost in the Funhouse, goes seven layers deep. Wiki refers to them as metaleptic and that page has this on it: > [@](#): > > ``` > "There are so many examples of forking-path and metaleptic narratives by now that my recommendations will have to seem arbitrary. One of the most thoroughly enjoyable constructions of enigmatic worlds within worlds is Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962). A good short text is Robert Coover's The Babysitter (1969). In film, a frequently referenced forking-path narrative is Peter Howitt's Sliding Doors (1998)." > > "[In Tom] Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound, the framing diegetic situation is here equally a theatre. In this fictional theatre a whodunnit is performed, witnessed by an audience which includes two theatre critics. In the course of the embedded performance these critics become paradoxically involved in the hypodiegetic play within a play, an involvement which even leads to the death of one of them. Thus, as in the case of Pirandello's Sei personaggi, the typical traits of a metalepsis can here also be recognized: a fictional representation consisting of several distinct worlds and levels, among which unorthodox transgression occur." > > ``` “The Babysitter” is one of my favorite stories of all time, sheer brilliance. I had a chance to watch The Real Inspector Hound without knowing anything about it. Wonderful little play. When you finally realize what is happening in front of you the sheer delight of the ingenuity (and it’s one of the funnest and funniest plays ever) is like breathing pure oxygen. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2013, 10:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/34 "2013-06-21T22:53:44Z")
Damn, beaten to **House of Leaves** (excellent book) by Ferret Herder! **The Man Who Folded Himself** should be at the top of this list too. ---
**Author:** ![Ranger\_Jeff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ranger_jeff/32/2065_2.png) [@Ranger\_Jeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ranger_Jeff)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2013, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/35 "2013-06-21T23:56:54Z")
Maybe I’m thinking of the wrong story, but Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” comes to my mind. ---
**Author:** ![Unauthorized\_Cinnamon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/bc8723/32.png) [@Unauthorized\_Cinnamon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Unauthorized_Cinnamon)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2013, 12:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/36 "2013-06-22T00:17:22Z")
I don’t know about going a maximal number of levels down on the Russian doll scale, but a couple I’ve enjoyed that have this theme are John Scalzi’s \*\*Redshirts \*\*and (as mentioned above) Mark Z. Danielewski’s **House of Leaves**. On the other end of the enjoyment spectrum, **Ghosts of Mars** has a notable flashback within a flashback within a flashback, which is the exact opposite of the experience described above regarding Neil Gaiman and his deftness. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2013, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/37 "2013-06-22T00:26:39Z")
How come nobody mentioned [this one](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=16403660&postcount=37)? ---
**Author:** ![BrotherCadfael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@BrotherCadfael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrotherCadfael)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2013, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/38 "2013-06-22T00:29:59Z")
> [@Amateur\_Barbarian](#): > > “The Longest Science Fiction Story Ever Told” - Arthur C. Clarke. It fits on one magazine page. I was gonna mention that one! ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2013, 12:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/39 "2013-06-22T00:40:12Z")
Also, a small independent horror/thriller/scifi called **[The Triangle](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1212111-triangle/?nopopup=true)** is nicely recursive and cyclical-ish. I didn’t expect a whole lot before renting it, but it’s a great hidden gem of a film, strongly recommended. I watched it on Netflix streaming about a year ago. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2013, 12:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553/40 "2013-06-22T00:52:09Z")
> [@BrotherCadfael](#): > > I was gonna mention that one! So was I. I’ll have to mention “Who’s Cribbing?” by Jack Lewis [Who's Cribbing?, by Jack Lewis, STARTLING STORIES - The Unz Review](http://www.unz.org/Pub/StartlingStories-1953jan-00083) instead. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-recursive-fiction/661553.md?page=3)