The ghost replies "This nesting of stories is a warning to you. Don't get caught in a cycle or drown in an ocean of stories. Your fate hangs in the balance." Then it stands up and stretches forth its hand. "Come with me," it demands.
The ghost replies "This nesting of stories is a warning to you. Don't get caught in a cycle or drown in an ocean of stories. Your fate hangs in the balance." Then it stands up and stretches forth its hand. "Come with me," it demands.
Storiese told inside stories are familiar to us from the Thousand and One Nights, and from portions of The Lord of the Rings. There are much more elaborated examples such as the Indian collection, the Ocean of Story.
The majority of the stories brought together [in van Buitenen's book] have been taken from two Sanskrit works, one very famous, the other virtually unknown--which are themselves translations and adaptations of a lost original. The more famous collection, which is also the larger one, is the Brhatkathasaritsagara, "Ocean of the Rivers of the Great Romance." ... [The author] Somadeva notes that he has followed his [lost] original with utmost fidelity but has abbreviated its prolixity.... However his Sanskrit rendering, which is a delightful one otherwise, is rather handicapped by this fidelity, for the main narrative has almost irretrievably got lost in the maze of stories that are added to it. At the slightest provocation a speaker recalls a tale in which a speaker recalls another tale; and the banquet conists of nothing but hors d'oervres.
The quotation is from J. A. B. van Buitenen, Tales of Ancient India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), pp. 1-2. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathāsaritsāgara. An English translation in two volumes can be downloaded from
http://www.archive.org/details/oceanofstorybein06somauoft.
This kind of story within a story is not what we're trying to discern.
No it's not, but one story surrounding another is something like what we're trying to show. The Indian example is a compilation of preexisting stories; the outside story doesn't much guide or influence the writing of the inside story. What we're looking for is the surrounding but usually implicit meta-story about the composition/performance of the explicit story.
Our comments do show some of the decisions that went into the little example story. But do the comments we make on our side form a "story"?
There's the story of trying to pin down what we do mean. Some of that is hidden in successive revisions of this document.
That's the story guiding the composition of our side, but not the story expressed on our side.
There is always a meta^ n-story around and guiding writing and reading on any level.