I knew a man, who told a tale…
Yarns have long been spun, by hunters and fishermen, and travelers from afar. They spell the seeds of all tales of Romance and Adventure. Some of these yarns may be true, but the common notion is that they are all lies, truth distorted, facts stretched, over a drink and a wink and a smile.
It may be for this reason that many tales of Romance, in the great Age of Romantic Tales, have for their start a ‘frame.’
This ‘frame’ is exemplified in many of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s tales, such as the way he opens his famous Tarzan of the Apes:
I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale.
When my convivial host discovered that he had told me so much, and that I was prone to doubtfulness, his foolish pride assumed the task the old vintage had commenced, and so he unearthed written evidence in the form of musty manuscript, and dry official records of the British Colonial Office to support many of the salient features of his remarkable narrative.
I do not say the story is true, for I did not witness the happenings which it portrays, but the fact that in the telling of it to you I have taken fictitious names for the principal characters quite sufficiently evidences the sincerity of my own belief that it MAY be true.
The yellow, mildewed pages of the diary of a man long dead, and the records of the Colonial Office dovetail perfectly with the narrative of my convivial host, and so I give you the story as I painstakingly pieced it out from these several various agencies.
If you do not find it credible you will at least be as one with me in acknowledging that it is unique, remarkable, and interesting.
(From the http://www.gutenberg.org text #78, which you may find at http://www.gutenberg.org/7/78/)
Here is Burroughs as he opens A Princess of Mars
To the Reader of this Work:
In submitting Captain Carter's strange manuscript to you in book form, I believe that a few words relative to this remarkable personality will be of interest.
My first recollection of Captain Carter is of the few months he spent at my father's home in Virginia, just prior to the opening of the civil war. I was then a child of but five years, yet I well remember the tall, dark, smooth-faced, athletic man whom I called Uncle Jack.
…
He directed that I remove his body to Virginia without embalming, and that he be laid in an open coffin within a tomb which he previously had had constructed and which, as I later learned, was well ventilated. The instructions impressed upon me that I must personally see that this was carried out just as he directed, even in secrecy if necessary.
His property was left in such a way that I was to receive the entire income for twenty-five years, when the principal was to become mine. His further instructions related to this manuscript which I was to retain sealed and unread, just as I found it, for eleven years; nor was I to divulge its contents until twenty-one years after his death.
A strange feature about the tomb, where his body still lies, is that the massive door is equipped with a single, huge gold-plated spring lock which can be opened only from the inside.
(From the http://www.gutenberg.org text #62, which you may find at http://www.gutenberg.org/6/62/)
The frame, which comprises either a man the author meets who tells him the tale, or a manuscript the author claims to have found, stands in a middle ground between the ‘reality’ where we the audience and the author meet, and Eartherea, where the fantastic happens, men are raised from the crib by savage she-apes, and other men are teleported from an Arizona cave to the weird, dying world of Barsoom, the Red Planet.
The frame has since fallen out of fashion. It is a pity, but perhaps inevitable, since in our real world we so rarely hear such yarns. So the modern readers have no experience of them, to ground the things in their own ‘reality.’
(Composed on keyboard Saturday, July 5, 2008)
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