No Frame Dive In

What’s the opposite of a frame tale?

Yesterday, in The Frame Tale I wrote about the old tradition (especially in Romance tales and yarns) to ‘frame’ the main tale by having the nominal author pick up the story from someone he meets, or some old manuscript.

This frame does a good job of offering a middle ground between the reality of the reader and the fantastical events of the main tale. Each step we must take on the way to Eartherea allows us to lighten our burden of disbelief a little, until at last, the talesman hopes, we can swallow talking apes or near-naked red Princesses held captive by green six-limbed giants on Mars.

But this approach backfires when we consider a tale where we want it to seem as though it is taking place within the very bosom of the reality we know and share. ‘A tale ripped from today’s headlines!’ as they used to proclaim in ads for exploitation movies.

In the ‘reality’ or ‘raw’ kind of tale, we want to ‘disintermediate’ the whole experience, we want to be plunged into the thing, the untamed sensory experience, we want to feel as though it is happening — now — to us.

Here indeed, the Narrator is out of place, both the talesman who really is telling the tale, and any fictional tale-spinners he puts into a frame tale or prologue.

Here the very point is to keep it as raw as possible. Cinéma vérité is the model. The text should be as transparent as possible, and as unadorned. Any fancy literary turns of phrase only remind us ‘it’s only a story…’ and break the illusion of reality and immersion. Fragments of sentences are perfectly acceptable. Chapters should be short and made to look unlike chapters — they should not be numbered or named. Paragraphs should be short. Description should be stripped to the bare minimum.

It does need a point of view character, I think. Objective narration is a possibility, but it is hard to pull off and keep the reader trapped inside the experience. Best to give the readers some character through which to live the tale, and only one such character for the whole tale. And we should never know anything that character does not know at the moment he knows it.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, July 6, 2008)