I've Been Framed (Said the Story)
by Sam Yada Cannarozzi

frame 1. To construct by putting together the various parts of 2. To formulate or conceive 3. To put into words 4. To provide with a frame; enclose or encircle 5. To rig evidence or events so as to incriminate falsely 6. A basic or skeletal structure designed to give shape or support 7. A single exposure on a roll of motion-picture film.
(from Middle and Old English framian, to benefit, be advantageous)
—from The American Heritage Dictionary,
1980 edition

Aren't Words Wonderful!
I’d like to talk here not about the "frame of a story", meaning its structure or inner workings, but rather "the frame story" or a manner of organizing several, often very different stories, into a coherent and pleasant whole. This, I think, is a question that pre-occupies storytellers when composing an evening of tales, and attempting to give the evening, as a whole, a structure.

In a sense it could also be a way of organizing one’s repertory, especially when it may run into several hundred stories. An elementary memory technique of sorts. I am someone who cherishes and collects good, workable frame stories because once you’ve got your story or stories down, it is a way of highlighting them in relation to each other, different as they may be. It is also a kind of research into how one links different story atmospheres together.

The Classics
Perhaps when one thinks spontaneously of stories within stories, of course The Thousand and One Nights and The Canterbury Tales come to mind. Scherezade night after night, or the Pilgrims one after another adds story to story; Scherezade to save her life, in part by procrastinating, and the Pilgrims to pass a long night at the inn. In the Arab classic one finds, at times, a more complex web. One story begins. Within that story another or several others are born like a set of Russian dolls. They all unravel at the end to come and finish the initial story.

Boccacio’s Il Decameron is another example. This time the external influence is the plague. Sojourners relate tales often bawdier in nature than Chaucer or the Bagdadian minstrels. But that might be a point of discussion. Italo Calvino, Italian fantasy writer and compiler of Italian folktales, wrote a short novel entitled Il Castello dei Destini Incrociati or, literally, The Castle of Crossed Destinies. With obvious reference to Bocaccio, fleeing the plague, travelers spend a night telling their stories. There is an important difference: each makeshift teller must draw a tarot card (Calvino was inspired by the beautiful gold embossed Visconti tarot deck) and, using the image represented, fit his or her story to it. Others who tell must integrate their story to the cards that have already been drawn. Illustrations of the cards appear in the margins of certain editions of this book.

You might even consider Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology a kind of frame story, as Master’s poems turn out to be inscriptions of tombstones in a cemetery. I’m sure you could add other traditional examples. For instance, the Panchatantra of ancient India and the later Arab version that pits two jackals in the telling of tales. This eventually came down to Aesop and LaFontaine.

Lesser Known Frame Stories and Those You Can Create
If there’s a word that’s kind of a fetish for me it is "serendipity". It has an interesting origin. The Gothic writer Horace Walpole coined this word in the late 18th century, having found reference to a literary work that arrived in Europe through Italy in the 17th century; "The Peregrination of the Three Princes of Serendip". Serendip is the old Persian name for the island of Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon. You can find mention of Serendippo in the Thousand and One Nights and perhaps the story dates back to that period.

This is a wonderful frame story that includes six others. They all have to do with the concept of serendipity, the quality of happening upon advantages when you are looking for something else. Basically, the Princes help a king who, in his wrath, has banished the woman he loves. They instruct him to visit seven castles and listen to seven stories. In this way he will find his beloved. As it turns out the storyteller has heard the stories from the banished princess herself. The king finds her and they are married. And so it goes.

When this program is asked of me, I have taken the frame story and, when necessary, replaced the stories with ones from my repertory.

I first performed this program in a prison hospital, each time for an audience of one prisoner and one prison guard. I wandered through the prison hospital in festive costume, from cell to cell, like a peddler. It was, for me, a remarkable experience. I could really develop this story form.

What I try to do now is use my own personal repertory of stories and choose ones that will aid the king in finding his lover—a story of life, a story of death, one of magic, a riddle story, etc. I involve the audience directly with the story and exchange words with them and use colored scarves that correspond to each castle. I have also developed a version that I tell at restaurants and weddings. Between each generally short story we have a different dish to eat. I have also hosted an entire evening of storytellers. I recounted the frame story. When the king was to listen to a story, I presented a different storyteller. In the consummate version it would have to be seven storytellers on seven different evenings with a banquet at each venue and an audience to travel from place to place. It would almost be a festival in itself.

This is why frame stories interest me. There are many ways of organizing one’s repertory or an evening of stories with very different contents. You could tell a story for each of the seasons or each day of the week. You could use a deck of cards and shuffle out a story about a heart, a spade, a diamond or a club. You could tell a story for each planet etc., etc. These are pretty straight forward ways of linking tales and themes together.

In the same vein, I do a young people’s performance I call "Stories from the Sandman’s Sack". The Sandman is actually a sandgirl. After telling her story, we follow the travels of the sandgirl as she sprinkles her magical grains of sand over the entire world. Each country she comes to provides another story.

Another personal example is one I call "The Rainbow Beast". It is based on an Australian Aboriginal story about the rainbow serpent who lays seven eggs. In my version, each egg hatches and out comes a myth about the rainbow from a different part of the world.

You can find reference to this myth in Anne Pellowski’s The Story Vine, which mentions another technique for the frame story. In Zaire, Anne Pellowski explains, the storyteller might wear a necklace of objects. The listener picks out an object, pays, and the teller tells the tale that goes along with it. This is a way of carrying a part of one’s repertory literally around your neck.

I had been searching for and finally found Giambatista Basile’s "Lo Cunto de li Cunti" or "The Tale of Tales". It is half the Il Decameron in length—some fifty tales. They include some of the classics we take to be typically European. The Italy of the 17th and 18th centuries, with ports on the Mediterranean, was an incredible cultural matrix of east and west.

"The Tale of Tales" is as scatological as it is poetical. Princess Zoza has a malediction cast upon her by an old woman. After a journey of seven years she will have to fill a vase with her own tears to awaken a prince who will become her husband. She finally arrives, but is mysteriously overtaken by fatigue and sleep before she can cry the final tears to fill the vase. A slave who knows of the legend is passing by. She finishes the task and the prince falls in love with her instead and they marry.

The rest of the story tells how Zoza tricks her usurper, who is now pregnant by the prince, into asking her husband, Tadeo, to have the best storytellers come and satisfy her yearning for stories brought on by her pregnancy. For five nights ten old, ugly women come and tell stories. Their stories are as beautiful as they are hideous. On the final night the tenth teller is taken ill. A mysterious, disguised teller takes her place. When it is her turn she relates the story of a slave who steals the husband of another.

Of course, I don’t tell fifty stories (each of the ten old hags tells one story each night for five nights). I choose a story or two chosen from each evening. So, this is another frame story that works well and allows me to place the stories of my liking within the larger picture.

Your Own Creations
In another creation for young people, I begin with an ancient Hindu riddle tale. When the audience can’t find the answer, I say we will wait an hour until the answer comes. In fact, we wait about thirty seconds because I suggest I tell some stories to pass the time. This is where the story begins to wind around itself.

I have taken one of the stories I tell and, at key moments, inserted five others. Now there is the frame story of the riddle within which is a story that is a frame to five others. At the end, all must be told and resolved.

This is something that anyone can do with any story with a bit of reflection and playfulness. Let’s use "Little Red Riding Hood" as an example. Imagine the moment that Little Red goes off. Her mother is alone and we don’t know much about her. This might be a moment for the mother to receive a visit from someone who tells her a story. Then we pick up the original story line again when Little Red meets the wolf. Before she starts off again, perhaps she remembers a story about another wolf that you could tell.

Once Little Red and her grandmother are in the wolf’s paunch, Granny might have a story to tell. You could finish up with a last story from the mouth of the woodcutter.

Now, I don’t suggest that any story could be stuffed as full as a turkey with any old tale. I am convinced that, if you think about it, you have many stories that present possibilities of birthing other stories. In this way you can work your repertory or create a program for an evening. You can discover a lot about the stories and ways of juxtaposing them rather than just saying "Well, here’s a story, and then there is this other one I know, and now this one..."

A Last Example
The latest frame story that I am experimenting with is inspired by Edward Hays’ The Ethiopian Tattoo Shop. The overall story tells of a pilgrim who wishes to be marked with tattoos of the Copt religion. The tattooer says that he will tell stories to distract the pilgrim so that he will feel no pain during the tattooing process. He is from a family of storytellers and tells stories all night. He declares the pilgrim is tattooed from head to foot, but when the startled pilgrim looks for the designs, he finds... nothing. The tattooer/teller explains that the pilgrim has been, in effect, tattooed by the stories themselves. They are, from without, invisible; from within, indelible.

I obtained permission from Mr. Hayes to keep just the outline of the frame story and include strange and mysterious stories of my own to tattoo the audience with.

Coming Full Round
I began with the dictionary definition of the word "frame". I’d like to end with another. The American Heritage Dictionary gives a somewhat archaic definition as "to form words silently with the lips". Image calls up word. Word initiates narration. Narration organizes itself into a story. Stories call up each other.
Aren’t paintings or sculptures better set off when pleasantly arranged, exhibited or...framed? I think it’s also true with stories.

Bibliography
The Thousand and One Nights. Traditional (several versions in English)
The Canterbury Tales. Geoffrey Chaucer (several editions in English)
Il Decameron. Boccacio (several translations in English)
Fiabe Italiane. Italo Calvino (Italian Folktales, Pantheon Books, New York)
Il Castello dei Destini Incrociati. Italo Calvino, Einaudi, 1973
Serendipity and the Three Princes. edited by Theodore Remer, University of Oklahoma Press, 1965
The Story Vine. Anne Pellowski, Macmillan, 1984
Lo Cunto de li Cunti. Giambatista Basile (translated from the Neopolitan into Italian as Il Racconto dei Racconti, trans. R. Guarini, Adelphi, 1994)
The Ethiopian Tattoo Shop. Edward Hayes, Forest of Peace Books, 1984.

—published in WIP Summer 1997

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