The story within a story

Fiction often operates with tickling “story within a story” or even more! A story within a story, also referred to as an embedded narrative, is a literary device in which a character within a story becomes the narrator of a second story. Multiple layers of stories within stories are sometimes called nested stories.

The inner stories are told either simply to add entertainment or more usually to act as an example to the other characters. In either case, the inner story often has a symbolic and psychological significance for the characters in the outer story. There is often some parallel between the two stories, and the fiction of the inner story is used to reveal the truth in the outer story.

In Sizwe Bansi is Dead, a play by the great South African dramatist, Athol Fugard, there is “a play inside a play inside a play.” You see it, for instance, when Styles plays himself, his workmates, his boss, his clients at the studio – all by himself on stage.

At some point, Styles becomes director and producer of the play by facilitating Sizwe’s story, beginning with the photograph.

Much later, Buntu helps Sizwe rehearse the different roles of Robert Zwelinzima. This helps us reflect on various meanings of the word acting in this play. Life for black people under apartheid becomes a series of acting. They end up acting even the acting!

At the level of basics, the play sets out to expose the awkwardness of apartheid South Africa’s pass book laws. However, this basic issue opens up finer challenges (physical and spiritual) that Africans face in the system of apartheid.

Brian Crow and Chris Branfield, refer to what they call “a social theatricality” in the play. This refers to a complex play about a society in which people are playing at being what they are not in order to survive.

This means that on stage, we see a play that says life is a play. Sizwe is looking for a job but he has neither a pass nor a job permit. He risks arrest and deportation back to the homeland.

When Sizwe and Buntu pick the late Robert’s pass-book and a valid worker’s permit, Sizwe has to now spend his life acting Robert in order to live. Therefore there is a brute collapse between acting and living:

“All right, I was only trying to help. As Robert Zwelinzima you could have stayed and worked in this town. As Sizwe Bansi …? Start walking, friend. King William’s Town. Hundred and fifty miles. And don’t waste any time!”

Dying and death operate at various and related levels, but with huge ironies. Indeed Sizwe dies physically in as far as no one with the official identity of Sizwe will be seen again.
Sizwe has died and becomes Robert and because this is the only the way to make Sizwe live a more economically convenient life. That suggestion of resurrection is rude, sinister and absurd:

“Are you really worried about your children, friend, or are you just worried about yourself and your bloody name? Wake up, man! Use that book and with your pay on Friday you’ll have a real chance to do something for them…”

Sizwe Bansi is Dead was created and improvised by white dramatist, Athol Fugard and black dramatists; John Kani and Winston Ntshona. It was finally put into written form by Athol Fugard in 1972.

In William Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, before the three witches meet with Macbeth and Banquo after the battle, there is a witch who tells a story to the other two witches about her escapades.

She says she has met a sailor’s wife who was eating chestnuts and she asked for some. The witch says that the wife of the sailor refuses with the nuts. As a result, the witch sets off to revenge through causing the woman’s husband to have an accident out at sea. She wants to spite the sailor’s wife by haranguing her husband! The witch’s poetic narrative goes:

“A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap,
And munch’d, and munch’d, and munch’d.
“Give me!” quoth I
“Aroint thee, witch!” the rump-fed ronyon cries.

The witch becomes angry at being scolded. She goes out to sea to torment the husband of this woman who is a captain of a ship. The witch speaks proudly about her exploits:

“I myself have all the other,
And the very ports they blow;
All the quarters that they know
I’ th’ shipman’s card.
I’ll drain him dry as hay.
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his penthouse lid.
He shall live a man forbid.
Weary sev’nnights, nine times nine,
Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine.
Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-tossed.”

One clear cause of conflict is that the sailor’s wife is a “have” and the witch is a “have-not.” This has always been a source of conflict in society at all times. The sailor’s wife, though she is a “ronyon,” a scabby thing, gets to eat all the good food, so she is “rump-fed” and has a lap full of chestnuts, which she eats right in front of the “have-not,” who can’t stand it, and bursts out with

“Give me!” But that only makes the sailor’s wife call her a “witch” and order her to go away.

This sort of scene was probably played out many times in the real life of Shakespeare’s time, because poor, old women often received little food and less respect. Naturally, the witch wants to get back at the sailor’s wife.

From this section of the play one can see that the witches were seen as supernatural and could control the wind they were able to trap the sailor at sea until he ran out of rations and died. Storms and wind were often thought to be attached to witches during the Elizabethan era.

In addition to the witches’ supernatural abilities to control weather, they also often predicted the future or gave prophecies to specific individuals. This occurred many times during Act One in Macbeth.

Not only did the witches predict that Macbeth would become king and could not be replaced by anyone born of a woman but they also predicted Banquo’s future along with his children’s.

The Witches’ curse of the sailor foreshadows what Fate has in store for Macbeth. The sailor is the captain of a ship, in the same way that Macbeth is to become “captain” of his land; like the sailor, Macbeth will be blown by the tempests of ill-fortune. Sleep will be denied to both.

King James VI of Scotland was deeply concerned about the threat posed by witches. He believed that a group of witches had tried to kill him by drowning him while he was at sea (a curse echoed here by the First Witch). During his reign thousands of people in Scotland were put on trial for witchcraft.

In 1604, under his rule as king of England and Wales, witchcraft was made a capital offence, meaning that anyone who was found guilty of being a witch could be executed. When Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in 1606, then, he knew that his audience would have felt a mixture of fear and fascination for the three ‘weird sisters’, their imaginations captivated by the mysterious meeting on the desolate heath with which the play begins.

In Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things fall Apart, chapter 11, there is a tale within the larger tale. It is the Tortoise Tale which is told by Ekwefi to Ezinma, her daughter.

In summary, the tale is about a tortoise whose greed gets the best of him, thus making greed his tragic flaw. One day, when the tortoise hears that the birds are having a feast in the sky he asks them to make him wings so that he can join. With reluctance the birds do what they are told.

The tortoise then goes to the feast and changes his name to “All of them.” The changing of names shows that the tortoise is very manipulative or, in the text described as “cunning.”

By changing his name, the tortoise convinces the birds that the feast is for himself and that he should get first pick on the food. Tortoise ends up eating all of the food which makes the birds very angry and they each take back the feathers they had lent him. They then betray the tortoise when he asks them to tell his wife to bring all of the soft things he owns to soften his fall from the sky.

Instead, the birds do the opposite and the tortoise lands on a pile of hard objects and breaks his shell.

Maybe Chinua Achebe included the Tortoise Tale in the book as a sense of foreshadowing to what might happen to Okonkwo because he killed Ikemefuna.

In the case of the tortoise and Okonkwo, both of them have a tragic flaw, the tortoise’s being greed and Okonkwo’s being pride. Based on the tale of the tortoise, we can conclude that something bad may happen to Okonkwo or his family in the near future as a result of his actions.

The broken tortoise shell is a very important component to the story because it symbolises the tortoise’s downfall because of his greed. This refers to the tortoise’s tragic flaw in the story.

Scholars of literature and some keen readers in Southern Africa must be aware of a small but very powerful novel by Joseph Conrad entitled The Heart of Darkness. Although it is a novel of 1899, it has sparked debate which could be very useful to both writers and scholars in Africa.

For decades the debate goes: is Conrad of Heart of Darkness a racist writer? Some say, ‘Yes,’ others say, ‘No’ and yet others say, “There are complexities in this matter.” The source of conflict is that the novel “portrays Africans as animals and savages.”

Here is the challenge: Heart of Darkness begins on the deck of the Nellie, a British ship anchored on the coast of the Thames. An anonymous narrator, the Director of companies, the Accountant and Marlow sit in silence.

Marlow begins telling the three men about a time he journeyed in a steam boat up the Congo River. The narrator tells us (the readers) the story as directly and as immediately as it was told to him and others by Marlow.

The novel causes a lot of interpretative questions which are often difficult to answer convincingly and hence the divisions when it comes to answering the fundamental questions that it provokes.

Is Conrad the writer of this novel racist? If Conrad is not racist, what about Marlow, Kurtz and the nameless narrator? Does any one of these three stand for Conrad’s views and experiences? Or, is there a bit of Conrad in each of them? If Heart of Darkness is anti-imperialist, is it necessarily anti-racism also?

The structure and style of the novel Heart of Darkness is the first challenge. We have a narrator reporting Marlow’s narration of Marlow’s experiences in Africa. This is a story inside another story, inside a story! Technically, Heart of Darkness ceases to be Conrad’s story.

It is partially Marlow’s story because only what is remembered or deemed important by him is narrated. It is also partially the narrator’s story because his record of what he heard Marlow say is his sole experience. We are therefore faced by a situation where we have no one to fully ascribe the story to. The story operates from several “subsequent” points of view.

Indeed, the story within a story technique continues to baffle or tickle readers over generations.

Memory Chirere