Framed Narratives

Herodotus was born in a city with mixed Hellenic and Carian population, and grew up in a region (south-west Asia Minor) which was in constant and close contact with the great states of the Near East, such as Lydia and Achaemenid Persia. He was thus in a privileged position in terms of communication and exchange with the cultures of the ancient Orient. In this paper I propose to explore Herodotus’ authorial debt to the narrative and intellectual traditions of the East with regard to major, macroscopic compositional tendencies of his historical oeuvre. Two fundamental narrative structures, which condition the organization of Herodotus’ material and the layout of his work, seem to have been inspired by characteristic techniques and thematic patterns of Near-Eastern texts or lore.

Firstly, Herodotus conceives and recounts world history according to the typical structure of West-Asiatic and Egyptian king lists and chronicles: these latter works enumerate a series of successive rulers and record basic biographical data, key historical incidents, and occasionally picturesque anecdotes about the reign of each one of them. Herodotus assimilates this pattern and uses it both on a small and on a grand scale in his narrative. The individual historical sections (logoi) concerning particular peoples (Lydians, Egyptians, Medians) are constructed in the manner of a chronicle; the narrator lists a sequence of kings and offers briefer or longer reports of historical events and anecdotal tales for every name of the list. The Herodotean oeuvre as a whole is built on the same chronographic principle; a succession of Achaemenid monarchs (Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius, Xerxes) forms the framework, which is filled in with extensive accounts of each king’s exploits, wars, and other ventures.

Secondly, Herodotus appears to have taken over from Near-Eastern storytelling the concept of the frame narrative, i.e. the tales emboxed inside other tales like “Russian dolls”. This technique first appears in ancient Egyptian novellas and story collections of the second and first millennium BCE, and subsequently spread all over the eastern world up to Iran and India, conditioning the layout of the great oriental narrative compilations, from the Book of Sindbad to the Pañcatantra and the Thousand and One Nights. Herodotus exploits this pattern already in the first and paradigmatic long novella of his work (the story of Solon and Croesus, 1.29-33) and then in various subsequent narrative sections (e.g. the account of the Spartans’ conference and Socles’ speech, 5.91-93). In all these cases one of the characters of the main narrative tells a series of didactic stories in close sequence, in the manner familiar from ancient Egyptian story collections (Papyrus Westcar, Tales of Petese) and from the Book of Sindbad.

Perhaps more than any other region in the Middle Ages, Iberia demonstrates the fluidity of the pre-modern world. Its position at a cross-roads between East and West and the confluence of cultures and religions that inhabited the Peninsula created far-reaching connections that facilitated the dissemination of people, ideas, cultural forms, and material objects. A land of shifting borders and fluid configurations, Iberia triggers questions about boundaries and power struggles and brings to the fore issues of identity, alterity, and intercultural relations. This essay traces the journeys of a work that characterises the dynamism and porosity of Iberian space and whose history in western Europe is closely linked with the Peninsula: the highly influential Arabic collection of exemplary fables known as Kalila wa-Dimna. It offers a comparative analysis of three translations produced between the XIIIc and XVIIc century: Calila e Dimna (1251), the Exemplario contra los engaños y peligros del mundo (1493), and the Espejo político y moral para príncipes y ministros y de todo género de personas (1654, 1659). While ostensibly the same collection of fables, each version arrived in Iberia via different routes and discrete sources and languages: Arabic, Latin (via Hebrew), and Turkish (via Persian) respectively – a fact that not only demonstrates the complexity of the book’s origins and transmission, but that highlights the Peninsula’s position as a point of intersection for global encounters.
While Calila e Dimna and the Exemplario contra los engaños y peligros del mundo have been the subject of considerable research, the Espejo político y moral has garnered much less critical attention. Previous scholarship has also largely eschewed comparisons between the three Spanish versions. As this essay argues, however, a cross-period, comparative approach provides a particularly productive methodology. The production of these translations spans four hundred years in which the geo-political and ideological boundaries of the world were being recalibrated and the relationships between East and West re-contextualised. Calila e Dimna, the Exemplario, and the Espejo político y moral represent productive textual spaces in which to consider not only the processes of translatio studii et imperii across this period but changing conceptualisations of identity and perspectives on intercultural relations. The essay explores the evolving significance of the fables by analysing how each translation is re-framed for new audiences through prefatory material and changes to physical form, as well as by considering a selection of tales that address topics of good governance, friendship, and enmity.

Cover blurb: Ever since its early modern inception as a literary genre unto its own, the fairy tale has frequently provided authors with a textual space in which to reflect on the nature, status and function of their own writing and that of literature in general. At the same time, it has served as an ideal laboratory for exploring and experimenting with the boundaries of literary convention and propriety. While scholarship pertaining to these phenomena has focused primarily on the fairy-tale adaptations and deconstructions of postmodern(ist) writers, this essay collection adopts a more diachronic approach. It offers fairy-tale scholars and students a series of theoretical and literary-historical expositions, as well as case studies on English, French, German, Swedish, Danish, and Romanian texts from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, by authors as diverse as Marie-Catherine dAulnoy, Rikki Ducornet, Hans Christian Andersen and Robert Coover.

When reading Marlene van Niekerk’s novel, Agaat ([2004] 2006), one initially takes exception to Jakkie de Wet’s satire of his melancholy mothers in the frame narrative. However, I will argue that Jakkie’s perspective in the frame narrative requires closer investigation as it proves to be an essential and cunning narrative tool utilised by Van Niekerk to disrupt the powerful mythologies presented in the mother-daughter story. Although we remain somewhat distanced from Jakkie by an initial allegiance to the redemptive fictional narrative, his detached ironic voice introduces a necessary caveat to the liberatory potential of Milla’s fantasy of reconciliation. Furthermore, he questions the extent of Agaat’s capacity for subverting Milla’s dominant discourse and becoming a vitalising force for Afrikaner culture. Jakkie introduces a dialectic that questions certain founding narratives or mythologies of redemption evident in Milla’s narration. As the ironic dissenter who switches positions and allegiances, his function is to break the frame of the narrative. Frank Kermode claims that master plots are comforting and are often difficult to dispute because they constitute ‘the mythological ‘structure’ of society (in Abbott 2002). It is not surprising then that Jakkie’s role in the frame tends to be sidelined in critical discussions of the novel, as he unnervingly interrupts the authority of Milla’s master plot of redemption. As a postmodern eiron Jakkie plays a similar role to Socrates in Plato’s Dialogues and uses irony to play ‘upon his interlocutors’ discourse in order to draw it out, to develop its possibilities in a dialogue destined to end in aporia’ (Lang 1988).

By launching in 1938 a series of adaptations of folktales in comics form, Thai cartoonist Prayoon Chanyawongse established the Cartoon Likay genre which places the reader as a member of an audience attending a Likay performance. The local theatrical form frames his graphic narratives where scenes of a play performed on a stage continuously alternate with sequences taking place in the vast realms of epics set in the Ayutthaya period. By introducing key Likay conventions such as recurring humorous interruptions and asides, Chanyawongse could effectively address contemporary social issues and political topics within traditional folktales. This paper explores several Cartoon Likay narratives in the context of the Likay theatrical form and the local folktale repertoire to discuss the nature and development of Chanyawongse’s signature comics genre.