Far from the record-holder, but the play Man of La Mancha reaches four layers: You’ve got the actual actors, then you’ve got Cervantes and the other prisoners who are acting out the tale, then you’ve got Alonzo Quijano and Aldonza, and then you’ve got the Don Quixote/Dulcinea delusional world they create.
I also once played a four-layer-character in a different play, but it seems to have been written by the drama club faculty director, so none of you would have heard of it.
I’d just like to point out that Scott Bakula played Sam Beckett playing an actor named Ray Hutton playing Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha.
Whoa, deja vu!
I swear, I came across a story like that during the '80s (maybe '90s). In that one, the publisher was a friend of the writer and trusted that he was telling the truth. Also, the protagonist had only submitted his story a few weeks later than the original manuscript, and the protagonist was not the only writer to whom this had happened.
Then the publisher went to his friend the next time the “mystery writer” submitted a manuscript and showed it to him. They were both perplexed by the fact that the paper was perforated on four sides, and that the text was right-justified.
The writer did some investigating on his own, based on the return address from the manuscript.Turned out to be a hot chick with a time machine.
Anybody remember the name of this iteration of the idea (probably appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Magazine of Fantasy and science fiction)?
This xkcd cartoon is funny.
The story was “Hindsight” by Eric G. Iverson (pen name of Harry Turtledove*). It appeared in Analog in mid-December 1984, their spoof issue.
*At the start of his career, Turtledove’s editors thought no one would believe his real name, so he used “Eric G. Iverson” as his pseudonym. Eventually, he decided his real name was good enough, and stopped using Iverson. The editors had a point: I remember someone complaining about a Turtledove story and wondering why the author hid his real name.
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
Jasper Fforde’s books about Thursday Next, who can enter the world of books and interact with the characters, are very meta. Right now I’m reading One of Our Thursdays is Missing, in which there is Thursday, the fictional Thursday (as the books about her are in the world of books) and and “understudy” Thursday.
So, chinchalinchin, are you being meta or recursive? And that applies to your name as well.
This is the title of the story, which is also found several times in the story itself. This is the first sentence of this story. This is the second sentence. This is the title of this story, which is also found several times in the story itself. This sentence is questioning the intrinsic value of the first two sentences. This sentence is to inform you, in case you haven’t already realized it, that this is a self-referential story, that is, a story containing sentences that refer to their own structure and function. This is a sentence that provides an ending to the first paragraph.
This is the first sentence of a new paragraph in a self-referential story…
Several books already mentioned are included in the fascinating list 10 Phenomenally Tricky Books Everyone Should Read at flavorwire.
Not “the most recursive”, but the Terminator movies, especially the first one, wraps around nicely on itself.
Not a sic-fi story, but Deathtrap as being blurred between what is real and what part is the theatrical play story.
The one that springs to mind is Perec’s wonderful *La Vie, Mode d’Emploi *(Life A User’s Manual).
The book is a collection of dozens of stories that are linked by the fact that they happen to the inhabitants of the same apartment block in Paris over the course several decades. Moreover, most of the characters are themselves connected to an eccentric rich man, who also lives there, and has dedicated his life and fortune to a ridiculous, time-consuming and completely pointless task. It is so sprawling that there is appendix at the end which contains a list of the main stories, a chronology and the names of all the people that appear in the book (who can be real like Napoleon, imaginary like Superman, real “within the book” like the characters and imaginary “whithin the book” like a character in a book read by one of the characters).
It was written following a very strict set of writing constraints (one of Perec’s favourite trick) but the great thing is that it doesn’t feel that way: it’s a very funny book, full of whacky adventures and colourful characters.
The (appropriatley absurd) ending is the icing on the cake as you realize that the whole 600+ pages book actually takes place in a single moment. When I got there, I wondered how I had missed it since there are clues in every chapter. It made me want to reread the whole thing right away 
.
Clever and very funny.
I was thinking of “All You Zombies”.
“It was a dark and stormy night. The tribe’s leader stood up before his people, and began to speak: 'It was a dark and stormy night. The tribe’s leader stood up before his people,…”
There’s an episode of The Prisoner called The Schizoid Man that involves impressive degrees of evil twin imposters. 6 disguised as 12 pretending to be 6 pretending to be 12, etc.
ENOCH SOAMES, a short story by Max Beerbohm has only two or three degrees of recursion, but still seems worth mentioning. I stumbled across a mention of it just a few minutes ago (in Littlewood’s Mathematician’s Miscellania of all places – he writes “Reflexiveness flickers delicately in and out of the latter part of Max Beerbohm’s story Enoch Soames”) and Googled for it only because of this thread. It’s 11,000 words – is that typical for a short story? – but I enjoyed it.
As an extra level of recursion, I remember being mystified (never having heard of Soames) 16 years ago to read an account that Soames did indeed visit the British Museum’s reading room as predicted 80-odd years earlier!
The story has been mentioned at SDMB before in threads titled
Fictional references that became true
Proof that time travel is impossible?
What’s your favorite Short Story?
Famous People Who NEVER Existed!
For example:
Finnegans Wake.
Would “The Iron Dream” by Norman Spinrad count?
“Pyramis and Thisbe”?
There was a novella-within-a-novel in The World According to Garp wherein Garp writes a sordid story about a sex crimes detective in reaction to learning about his wife’s infidelity with a student. IIRC, there was also another one that John Irving later rewrote as The Hotel New Hampshire.
There’s an episode of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – The Play – where Michael Tolan plays Rollin Hand disguised as vain actor Vitol Enzor rehearsing a play in-character as an Eastern European head of state.
That’s not too noteworthy for M:I (Shock, for example, features James Daly as secret agent Briggs pretending to be impostor Gort pretending to be diplomat Wilson), except the whole twist of The Play is that the actors on-stage keep delivering perfectly innocuous lines right in front of the government minister putting on the show – while the real Premier, a little farther back in the theater, hears a piped-in track of insulting pre-recorded slander that syncs up perfectly with the performers’ lips.