David Lewis, uses fictional worlds as a way of exploring the idea of the proximity of possible worlds, but confesses he's not quite sure what to do with fictions within fictions.

One thing some writers have done is to write the actual (our-word) fictional work that some fictional work only mentions.  They give it to us for our use.  (This is the converse of the sort of thing that Borges and Lem do.)

A few such useful texts spring to mind right away, in chronological order:

Prencipe Galeotto: Dante has Francesca say of the book she and Paolo are reading together when they stop reading, "Galeotto fu 'l libro e chi lo scrisse."  So Galeotto -- Prince Galahad (perhaps; it's not clear whether Dante identified Galeotto and Galahad), vicariously catalyzing their mutual seduction -- is both the author and the book itself. Boccaccio gives the Decameron the sub- or alternative title Prencipe Galeotto, making it into the book that Paolo and Francesca were reading, and promising it as a conversation piece for later lovers to seduce each other with.

Spenser completes one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Squire's, in Book IV of The Faerie Queene.  (Spenser takes it as complete -- a real thing that Chaucer mentions, but that we don't have.

"Where is the Life that Late I Led?"  Petruchio interrupts himself after he starts singing this song in Taming of the Shrew.  Cole Porter gives us the whole song (with a bridge and a slight modification of Petruchio's second line).

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came": Browning writes the poem that Edgar quotes in King Lear.

The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: From Muriel Spark's Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the book that Sandy Stranger writes when she becomes a nun (Sister Helena). Arthur Danto (not Dante!) then wrote a book about the philosophy of art with that title.

The Secret Goldfish: D.B.'s "terrific book of short stories" in Catcher in the Rye, and the title of a book of short stories by David Means.

Can you think of others? 

Ghost stories

"Récit de fantôme où meme le fantôme est absent...."  --Blanchot ("Ghost story where even the ghost is absent")

"Schreiben aber heißt, sich vor den Gespenstern entblößen" --Kafka ("Writing means, denuding yourself before the ghosts")

"Frate, / non far, ché tu se' ombra e ombra vedi." --Dante (Virgil to Statius: "Brother, / don't [try to embrace my legs], for you are a shade, and are seeing a shade.")

As one of those quick heuristic claims, I found myself saying the other day that every good short story is a ghost story.  We'd done Turn of the Screw, so that was the context: ghost story or not, it's a ghost story.  So we quickly went through the syllabus of stories we'd read, proving the point and identifying the ghost.

"Hills Like White Elephants"? The fetus. Their love. Their past. Their future. (Of course: since the fetus represents all those things.)

"A Day's Wait": The boy. (His mother too: what do you say about two people and two ghosts?)

"Gift of the Magi": The hair, the watch.

"Miss Lonelyhearts": Miss Lonelyhearts, Shrike.  "They were not worldly men." Sick-of-it-all's mother.  Mrs. Shrike's mother. Any of the letter writers. Christ.

"Slave on the Block" (Langston Hughes): The "wonderful colored cook and maid" who sleeps in the basement and takes sick and dies.

"Wash," Faulkner's short story version of the death of Sutpen: Sutpen himself, riding home from the War.  The past.  The missing daughter, the dead son.  And much, much more.

Kate Chopin's "Story of an Hour": The dead husband.  Who turns out not to be dead.

Hammett's great pair of stories: "The Big Knockover" and "$106,000 Blood Money": Papadapolous.  The Old Man.

"The Swimmer"?  The swimmer.

Anything by Alice Munro: what more needs to be said?  Anything by Dennis Johnson: likewise.  Ditto Javier Marías.  And Bolaño.  Hawthorne.  Melville. Carver. Alistair Macleod, Borges.  Flaubert.  Chekhov.  Tolstoy.  Megadittoes to Isaac Babel. No need to mention Duras or Blanchot.

I wondered a little about comic stories - farce, really - but all you have to do is read "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."  Or Saki.

Salinger: "See more glass" could be the epigraph to this entry.

Listing it like this makes the game too easy, maybe, but it shouldn't be quite that easy. The ghosts haunt the stories, come to haunt them, make the stories haunting.

That's as far as we got in class, but later I found myself trying to think in a literal-minded way. The lesson I thought this game taught me was that stories play off of an interesting juxtaposition of anecdotal specificity and the generic world.  Novels have time to invent their world, invent background and context for their characters. Unhappy families are represented as unhappy families in an unhappy world, in a world which reflects and explains their unhappiness.  But in stories, everyone else is just "reasonably waiting for the train."  So the juxtaposition between the characters and the generic world always, in one way or another makes the characters into survivors.

Survivors: those who outlive a world or space or time or community or family or love or hope in which they're in sync with the world.  The story begins when they're no longer in sync.  This idea is generically related (how else should it be related?) to Warshow's description of "the gangster as tragic hero":

Thrown into the crowd without background or advantages, with only those ambiguous skills which the rest of us—the real people of the real city—can only pretend to have, the gangster is required to make his way, to make his life and impose it on others. Usually, when we come upon him, he has already made his choice or the choice has already been made for him, it doesn't matter which: we are not permitted to ask whether at some point he could have chosen to be something else than what he is.

The short story character is faced with a generic world: a world become generic for him and her, however rich and specific it is for everyone else.  The rich and specific have become generic, and the character doesn't belong to that generic world.  It's a ghost for her or him, or the character is a ghost in that world.  Those two ideas are the same: the character's relation to the world is what's ghostly.  The ghost is the relationship, and whoever represents that relationship in the story: fetus or husband or dead first wife (Edith Wharton's "Pomegranate Seed") or Shrike or Mr. Sappleton ("The Open Window) or Billie, the Oiler (Crane's "Open Boat"), or the child in the dream of the burning child reported to Freud is the ghost.

Anyhow, I was wondering whether this was fair and accurate.  Is that what a real ghost is like?

What a question!

Why would I even ask it?  Why would I think I could think about a real ghost? And the answer that came to me was that it's in stories that you interact with ghosts. These characters you interact with: they don't stay. And unlike lyric poetry, they don't repeat themselves either, in endless songs of love or longing or farewell.  Lyric is about the generic as the place we can continue to live, interact with, belong to, take comfort in.  But the stories are not our stories.  They're ghost stories.

Merwin's similes

I had a thought about W.S. Merwin's similes today. "Still Morning" is one of the great poems in his latest book, The Shadow of Sirius:

STILL MORNING

It appears now that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age as the flying birds know
nothing of the air they are flying through
or of the day that bears them up
through themselves
and I am a child before there are words
arms are holding me up in a shadow
as I watch one patch of sunlight moving
across the green carpet
in a building
gone long ago and all the voices
silent and each word they said in that time
silent now
while I go on seeing that patch of sunlight

Why would he think that the flying birds know nothing of the air they are flying through? They would, or might, know as much about the air as we do about the fact of age. To say that at this age (in his eighties), age knows nothing of age is to say that what it once thought would be the knowledge of age that would come with age turns out to be nothing. It doesn't feel different at eighty from at eight. Here, now, he sees the world as he did there, then.

How did he see the world then? The way we all did, before we were surprised by light or air or having a body or the voluptuousness of looking. When did we learn that air existed? We didn't used to know it, or if we knew, we knew it in our breathing, not in our knowing. That was knowledge before the knowledge came that we would die. And now, trying to recall that tacit knowledge of air, all we can do is find a simile for how we once breathed: the way the birds fly, without thinking of the air they fly through, the day that bears them up.

So let's say that this simile is false. The flying birds must know much about the air they are flying through in order to be able to live as they do. But trying to remember early childhood, and the not knowing of that time, we imagine it not as we imagine being a bird, but as we imagine a child imagining being a bird.

Would a child really imagine being a bird like that? I doubt it. But however a child imagines things, it seems continuous with that imagination to imagine a child imagining that way. We imagine childhood the way a child would - a child our age.

And an interesting thing about this similes is what it brings out, by contrast, about similes in general: Similes focus on the true. When you use a simile to make a comparison, the thing you're comparing your theme or subject to is something true and public. If the hangers rattle like madmen, it's because there is a way that real madmen cause disturbances.

But Merwin's similes are different. Part of their amazing economy is that both sides of the simile are figurative. His poetry has always been about the comparing of figure with figure, not figure with the already established truth. That's what give his poetry its gossamer quality, its fragility, its sense of subjectivity in every direction. Merwin's similes are as delicate as the things they're supposed to be stabilizing and explaining. And that's what this poem is about.

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It's also what another poem in the same book is about, "Blueberries After Dark," which begins

So this is the way the night tastes
one at a time
not early or late

The night, every night of old age, turns out to be like a blueberry eaten at just the right moment, neither harsh and crude nor falling overmellow into the rotten mouth of death. That's good. How do we know it's old age? Because of the title: "Blueberries After Dark." It's not the night that brings the dark. The sequence of nights here are those that come after dark. The metaphor is half-joined to what it's figuring: in the night, each night comes at the right time. A clear and well-formed version of this metaphor might go something like: "In the late autumn, each night comes at the right time." But here night and the dark it brings are both simultaneously tenor and vehicle: the way they come together is the way subjectivity feels in Merwin.

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I think that it's also the way subjectivity feels in Proust, partly because "Still Morning" reminded me of this great passage at the beginning of La Prisonnière:

Jadis, un directeur de théâtre dépensait des centaines de mille francs pour consteller de vraies émeraudes le trône où la diva jouait un rôle d’impératrice. Les ballets russes nous ont appris que de simples jeux de lumières prodiguent, dirigés là où il faut, des joyaux aussi somptueux et plus variés. Cette décoration, déjà plus immatérielle, n’est pas si gracieuse pourtant que celle par quoi, à huit heures du matin, le soleil remplace celle que nous avions l’habitude d’y voir quand nous ne nous levions qu’à midi. Les fenêtres de nos deux salles de bains, pour qu’on ne pût nous voir du dehors, n’étaient pas lisses, mais toutes froncées d’un givre artificiel et démodé. Le soleil tout à coup jaunissait cette mousseline de verre, la dorait et, découvrant doucement en moi un jeune homme plus ancien, qu’avait caché longtemps l’habitude, me grisait de souvenirs, comme si j’eusse été en pleine nature devant des feuillages dorés où ne manquait même pas la présence d’un oiseau.

***

In the old days, a theatrical producer would spend hundreds of thousands of francs to constellate with real emeralds the throne where the diva played the empress role. The ballets russes have taught us that the simplest play of light scatters, directed rightly, gems just as sumptuous and more varied. This decoration, already tending towards the immaterial, is nevertheless not as graceful as that by which, at eight in the morning, the sun replaces the decoration that we are used to seeing there when we don't get up until noon. The windows of our two bathrooms weren't smooth but textured with an old-fashioned artificial frosting, so that we wouldn't be seen from outside. The sun suddenly yellowed that glass gauze, turned it gold, uncovering within me a young man from longer ago, hidden for a long time by the force of habit, intoxicated me with memories, as if I had been right out in nature looking at golden leaves which didn't lack even the presence of a bird [since Albertine is whistling].

One of the things he'll be remembering was the sun he longed for because it might mean that Gilberte would go out: he watches for "cet or inaltérable et fixe des beaux jours" - that fixed, inalterable gold of a lovely day.

And Stevens of course:

to feel that the light is a rabbit-light
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained... --"A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts"

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Rabbit Light and Frosted Glass