Chinese Boxes
Dear Friend,
Another tool that narrators use to endow their stories with power of persuasion is what we might call the “Chinese box” or matryoshka technique. How does it work? The story is constructed like those traditional puzzles with successively smaller and smaller identical parts nestled inside each other, sometimes dwindling to the infinitesimal. It should be noted, however, that when a central story begets one or more subsidiary stories, the procedure can’t be mechanical (although often it is) if it is to be successful. A creative effect is achieved when a construction of this kind contributes something to the tale—mystery, ambiguity, complexity—that makes it seem necessary, not merely a juxtaposition but a symbiosis or association of elements with a mutually unsettling effect on each other. For example, though one might say that the Chinese box structure of The Thousand and One Nights—the collection of famous Arabian stories that upon being discovered and translated into English and French were the delight of Europe—is often mechanical, it is clear that the puzzle box structure of a modern novel like A Brief Life by the Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti is enormously effective since the extraordinary subtlety of the story and the clever surprises it offers its readers depend almost entirely upon it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. It would be better to start at the beginning and discuss this technique or narrative device at leisure, moving on later to examine its variants, applications, possibilities, and risks.
I think the best example of the method is the work already cited, a classic of the narrative genre: The Thousand and, One Nights. Allow me to remind you how the stories are pieced together. To save herself from being beheaded like the other women possessed by the terrible Sultan, Scheherazade tells him stories, scheming so that each night the story is interrupted in such a way that his curiosity about what will happen next—the suspense—makes him prolong her life one more day. In this way, the renowned storyteller manages to survive for a thousand and one nights, and finally the Sultan (won over to the point of addiction by the tales) spares her life. How does the skillful Scheherazade manage to tell so steadily and continuously the interminable series of stories that her life depends on? By using the Chinese box method: fitting stories inside stories through narrative shifts (in time, space, and level of reality). For example: four merchants appear in the story of the blind dervish that Scheherazade tells the Sultan, and one of the merchants tells the other three the story of the leper of Baghdad; in that story, an adventurous fisherman turns up and proceeds to regale a group of shoppers in a market in Alexandria with tales of his maritime exploits. Like Chinese boxes or nesting dolls, each story contains another story subordinate in a first, second, or third degree. Thus, the stories are connected in a system and the whole of the system is enriched by the sum of its parts; each part—each particular story—is enriched, too (or at least affected), according to its dependent or generative role in relation to the other stories.
You yourself can no doubt think of a number of works that feature stories within stories, since the device has long been in use and is very popular; despite being so common, it is always fresh in the hands of a good narrator. At times, as I’ve said of The Thousand and One Nights, the Chinese box method is applied in a somewhat mechanical manner, and the generation of stories by other stories does not trigger significant reverberations within the mother stories (let’s call them that). These reverberations occur, for example, in Don Quixote when Sancho tells the story—periodically interrupted by Don Quixote’s commentary on the way Sancho is telling it—of the shepherdess Torralba (a Chinese box tale in which there is an interaction between the mother story and the daughter story), but other Chinese box narratives, like the excerpt from the novel The Curious Impertinent that the priest reads at the inn while Quixote is sleeping, don’t work the same way. When speaking of such an episode, it makes more sense to speak of collage than of Chinese boxes, since (as is true of many daughter stories or granddaughter stories in The Thousand and One Nights) the story has an autonomous existence and doesn’t exert a thematic or psychological effect on the story it is contained within (the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho). Something similar may be said, of course, about another Chinese box classic, A Captain’s Tale.
The truth is that a lengthy essay could be written on the diversity and variety of Chinese box stories in Don Quixote, since Cervantes’s genius gave the device a formidable utility, first evident in the invention of the supposed manuscript of Cide Hamete Benengeli of which Don Quixote is said be a version or transcription (whether or not this is true is left purposefully unclear). One could say this was a convention worked to death in chivalric novels, all of which pretended to be (or to derive from) mysterious manuscripts discovered in exotic locales. But not even the use of conventions in a novel is empty: it has consequences, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. If we take the existence of Cide Hamete Benengeli’s manuscript seriously, the structure of Don Quixote is a matryoshka of at least four levels of connected histories:
- The manuscript of Cide Hamete Benengeli, only made known to us in a partial and fractured state, would be the first box. The box immediately subordinate to it, or the first daughter history, is
- The story of Don Quixote and Sancho, so far as we are allowed to observe it, a daughter story that contains many granddaughter stories (third box), although of a different kind:
- Stories told among the actual characters, like Sancho’s story about the shepherdess Torralba, and
- Stories incorporated in collage-like fashion and read by the characters; these are freestanding, written stories not intimately linked to the story that contains them, like The Curious Impertinent or A Captain’s Tale.
Now, despite the fact that Cide Hamete Benengeli, quoted and mentioned by the omniscient narrator, appears only outside the bounds of the narrative in Don Quixote (though he is still involved in the text, as we noted in our discussion of the spatial point of view), we must step back even further and point out that since he is quoted, his manuscript can’t be discussed as the first level, the foundational reality of the novel—the progenitor of all the other stories. If Cide Hamete Benengeli speaks and airs his opinions in the first person in his manuscript (which he does, according to the quotations cited by the omniscient narrator), it is obvious that he is a narrator-character, which means he is part of a story that only in rhetorical terms may be considered self-generated (this, of course, is a structural fiction). All stories told from a point of view in which the narrative space and the narrator’s space coincide are also contained by an initial Chinese box outside fictional reality: the hand that writes, inventing (in a first instance) its narrators. Once we become conscious of that first hand (and only hand, since we know Cervantes had only one arm), we must accept that the Chinese boxes of Don Quixote are actually four superimposed realities.
The passage from one of these realities to another—from a mother story to a daughter story—constitutes a shift, as you will have noticed. When I say “a” shift, though, I must immediately contradict myself, since the reality is that in many cases a Chinese box story is the result of several simultaneous shifts: in space, time, and level of reality. Let’s take a look, for example, at the impressive Chinese box system that A Brief Life by Juan Carlos Onetti is built on.
From a technical point of view, this magnificent novel, one of the subtlest and most artful ever written in Spanish, revolves entirely around the artifice of the Chinese box, which Onetti manipulates masterfully to create a world of delicate superimposed and intersecting planes, in which the boundary between fiction and reality (between life and dreams or desires) is dissolved. The novel is narrated by a narrator-character, Juan María Brausen, who lives in Buenos Aires and is tormented by the idea that his lover, Gertrudis, who has cancer, has lost a breast; he also spies on and fantasizes about a woman, Queca, and is trying to write a screenplay. All of this makes up the basic reality or first box of the story. The tale slides in a surreptitious manner, however, toward Santa María, a small provinicial city on the banks of the Rio de la Plata, where a doctor in his forties, a shady character, sells morphine to one of his patients. Soon we discover that Santa María, the doctor Díaz Grey, and the mysterious morphine addict are all figments of Brausen’s imagination and represent a second level of reality in the story; Díaz Grey is really a kind of alter ego for Brausen, and his morphine-addict patient is a projection of Gertrudis. This is how the novel unfolds, shifting (in space and level of reality) between these two worlds or Chinese boxes and swinging the reader from Buenos Aires to Santa María and back again. Though disguised by the realist-seeming prose and the effectiveness of the technique, these comings and goings are a voyage between reality and fantasy, or, if you prefer, between objective and subjective worlds (Brausen’s life and the stories he elaborates). This Chinese box setup isn’t the only one in the novel. There is another, parallel one. Queca, the woman Brausen is spying on, is a prostitute who receives clients in the apartment next door to his in Buenos Aires. The story involving Queca takes place—or so it seems at first—on an objective plane like Brausen’s own, although it reaches the reader through the medium of the narrator’s testimony, and the narrator is a Brausen who must imagine much of what Queca is doing (he hears her but can’t see her). And then, at a certain moment—one of the cruxes of the novel and one of its most effective shifts—the reader discovers that the crooked Arce, Queca’s pimp, who ends up murdering her, is also really another of Brausen’s alter egos, just like Dr. Díaz Grey, a character (partially or totally—this is unclear) created by Brausen—that is to say, someone who exists on a different plane of reality. This second Chinese box is parallel to the Santa María box and coexists with it but it isn’t identical, because unlike the Santa María subplot, which is entirely imaginary—the place and its characters existing only in Brausen’s imagination—the second box is halfway between reality and fiction, between objectivity and subjectivity: Brausen has added invented elements to a real character (Queca) and her surroundings. Onetti’s formal mastery—his writing and the architecture of the story—makes the novel seem to the reader a homogenous whole without internal rifts, even though it is composed, as we’ve noted, of different planes and levels of reality. The Chinese boxes of A Brief Life aren’t mechanical. Thanks to them we discover that the true subject of the novel isn’t Brausen’s story but something vaster, involving shared human experience: the way people retreat into fantasy and fiction in order to enrich their lives, and the way fictions created in the mind are built on the little occurrences of daily life. Fiction is not life as it is lived but a different life, conjured out of the materials supplied by life; without fiction, real life would be a paler and drearier affair.