Texts within texts.

What are your favorite examples (in fiction, perhaps obv)?

John Shade's poem in Pale Fire is a "natch."
A.S. Byatt wrote pretty good Victorian poetry for her protagonists in Possession, or at least I thought so at the time I read it(maybe seven years ago?).

The Courier's Tragedy in The Crying of Lot 49.

"The Mad Trist" in The Fall of the House of Usher!

"Fuck" by 'Stagg R Lee' in 'Erasure' by Percival Everett--it's a parody of gangsta fiction, very funny

In American Literature 1010 I laughed out loud when we read the part of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn where Huck finds the Grangerford girl's poem that includes the line "I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas." I was embarrassed about this at the time because I was some asshole kid who thought she was better than Mark Twain or something.

ODE TO STEPHEN DOWLING BOTS, DEC'D

And did young Stephen sicken, And did young Stephen die? And did the sad hearts thicken, And did the mourners cry?
No; such was not the fate of Young Stephen Dowling Bots; Though sad hearts round him thickened, 'Twas not from sickness' shots.
No whooping-cough did rack his frame, Nor measles drear with spots; Not these impaired the sacred name Of Stephen Dowling Bots.
Despised love struck not with woe That head of curly knots, Nor stomach troubles laid him low, Young Stephen Dowling Bots.
O no. Then list with tearful eye, Whilst I his fate do tell. His soul did from this cold world fly By falling down a well.
They got him out and emptied him; Alas it was too late; His spirit was gone for to sport aloft In the realms of the good and great.

And there are tiny plays within some of Shakespeare's plays. Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream... I'm sure there are more.

http://pd.xanga.com/dd/90/dd90ffad70369235934eb363c62cda6f12542196.jpg

i remember being impressed by some experimental poetry in Sciascia's Il Contesto/Equal Danger but it was probably wack, i was probably just pleased with myself for reading it in italian! back when i was able to read italian, this was.

roxy is blowing everyone away in advance. Still, my favorite text within text comes from PKD's A Maze of Death. It's a theological treatise explaining the universe, written in dense metaphysical prose, and all the characters consult personal copies. Its title is How I Rose From The Dead In My Spare Time And So Can You.

raymond roussel to thread

Doesn't Alasdair Gray's Lanark have a little James Kelman story hidden away inside a footnote?

The doggerel in 'The Devil's Dictionary'

Laurence Durrel did this a lot as I recall. There are poems by characters in several books and there's the whole Les Moeurs thing in 'The Alexandria Quartet'.

In Camus' the Plague the character of Grand spends years on an opening phrase to something, including taking weeks agonising over single words. The sentence he comes up with is:

"One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne."

i remember one that freaked me out as a kid was the excerpt of garp's novel in the world according to garp. it was also called "the world according to..." don't really remember why it freaked me out, but it did. i guess the whole book did, come to think of it.

text messages within texts

lol tristram shandy to thread

(that curse, for one)

has anyone here actually finished house of leaves? johnny truant's stuff irritated the hell out of me, but the navidson record was pretty fucking creeeeeepy

I did but it was like 7 years ago and I remember very little of it.

Whatever P.G. Wodehouse story has the poem beginning with "Across the pale parabola of Joy."

Or the one with the poem "Be." Which goes something like "Be!/ With every fibre of your being/With every drop of your red blood/ Be!

I guess the first is Leave It To Psmith and the second is "The Aunt and the Sluggard."

OK, here is the full text:
Be!
Be!
The past is dead.
Tomorrow is not yet born.
Be today!
Today!
Be with every nerve,
With every fibre,
With every drop of your red blood!
Be!
Be!

I used to be very fond of the author Dorothy Gilman, who among other things wrote the Mrs. Polifax series of pseudo-espionage (I just made that term up) and a mystery called The Tightrope Walker. In TTT, another book called The Maze in the Heart of the Castle plays a key role but I assumed at the time it didn't really exist (I think I was searching for it pre-internet and came up with nothing).

It turns out Gilman DID write Maze, but not until 6 years later. A lot of people like it on its own, I don't recall ever finding a copy, but this thread has got me thinking now....

Does 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller' count, since none of the texts has an ending?

one of my favourite borges short stories "tlon, uqbar, orbis tertius" contains excerpts from fictonal books that themselves have excerpts from a fictional encloypaedia.

xpost: I was just coming in here to post If on a winter's night a traveler (it totally counts, as far as I'm concerned)! I especially love the part with the excerpts from the writer's diary as he's brainstorming about the two rival authors watching the perfect reader from earlier in the story through telescopes and trying to imagine what she's reading... fuckin' a, what a completely wonderful book.

Also, I was just thinking about Pale Fire earlier today -- didn't realize it, though. Suddenly got the phrase "orbicle of jasp" stuck in my head and couldn't remember where it came from until I googled it. Weird.

I was also coming to post If on a Winter's Night . . . ". I had completely forgotten about Pale Fire which is weird because it was once one of my favorite books. I happen to have both here so I think I know what I'll be reading for the next couple weeks.

Search: Goldstein's book and The Principles of Newspeak in 1984
Destroy: the songs in Lord of the Rings

if we're counting calvino then shld we count 'cloud atlas'?

I said on another thread that Byatt's Victorian poetry doesn't convince me somehow, in Possession. And I love that book a lot, but something about the blank verse doesn't ring true. I feel like she should've used rhyme and that she doesn't because it would've been too hard to write a great rhyming poem?

The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

It's just occurred to me finally that Byatt's doing Browning so I might have to rethink the blank verse thing.

Hmmm, huge penny dropping. Should've read The Ring and the Book before now maybe.

The right-wing pamphlet in Mishima's Runaway Horses.

Most of Pinget's Mahu or the Material, since its about a failed novel.

MS Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie, scifi short story by CM Kornbluth. Author of the titular MS is Cecil Corwin, which was a pseudonym of Kornbluth's, and this was his way of killing him off!

Pirate comic in Watchmen.

Aristotle's second volume of the Poetics, dealing with comedy, in The Name of the Rose.

The Necronomicon!

I remember really enjoying The Manuscript Found in Saragossa when I read it, but I don't remember much about it. Does Vonnegut ever show us any of Kilgore Trout's stuff? I can't remember that either.

All those letters in Herzog. I couldn't really get into them on first reading, or indeed any of Saul Bellow's stuff (The Dangling Man apart), but I just started an audiobook of Augie March and it's so alive - I reckon Herzog would also really benefit from hearing it in a frustrated, manic voice

I also really like the Liner Note in Fortress of Solitude

Roxymuzak answered her own question but at least I can wonder aloud what this article says:
http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/citation/55/1/82?rss=1

Did I get carried away?! I'm sure there are thousands of answers to this question.

my dad has a kilgore trout book - it's an actual paperback book with a lurid sci-fi cover

this:

http://www.pjfarmer.com/bimages/voths.jpg

ha! yeah, i have a friend who has that.

Which was written by Philip José Farmer, no?

There's something else like that where Arthur C. Danto wrote a book called The Transfiguration Of The Commonplace which title came from the title of a thesis written by a character in The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie.

This situation here has given rise to what the head shrinkers call 'ideas of persecution' among our personnel and a marked slump in morale ... As I write this I have barracaded myself in the ward room against the 2nd Lieutenant who claims he is 'God's little hang boy sent special to me' that fucking shave tail I can hear him out there whimpering and slobbering and the Colonel is jacking off in front of the window pointing to a Gemini Sex Skin. The Captain's corpse hangs naked at the flagpole. I am the only sane man left on the post. I know now when it is too late what we are up against: a biologic weapon that reduces healthy clean-minded men to abject slobbering inhuman things undoubtedly of virus origins. I have decided to kill myself rather than fall into their hands. I am sure the padre would approve if he know how things are out here. Don't know how much longer I can hold out. Oxygen reserves almost exhausted. I am reading a science fiction book called The Ticket That Exploded. The story is close enough to what is going on here so now and again I make myself believe this ward room is just a scene in an old book far away and long ago...

-- William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded

See also The Invisble Library: http://invislib.blogspot.com/

There's a bigger resource with a similar name which used to be at http://www.invisiblelibrary.com/ but it seems to have vanished

just remembered: Leonora Carrington's wonderful The Hearing Trumpet contains a very entertaining manuscript about a bizarre conspiracy involving flying nuns and Templars.

Has anybody mentioned Don Quixote in Don Quixote yet?

I'm a bit of a metafiction dork but am stuck to think of many things that haven't already been said. (Am guessing that the bits of children's writings in Albert Angelo don't count, and Johnson was never that sort of metafictionalist anyway.)

Oh my gosh, there are about 20 Daniel Pinkwater books where he does this, most notably Borgel.

'encyclopedia of the inexact sciences', a study of (actual) literary lunatics, embedded in raymond queneau's novel 'children of clay'

That pamphlet in 2666, explaining Master Race connections between certain Chileans and Ancient Greeks.
As with Kilgore Trout's book, behold:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Necronomicon-Simon/dp/0380751925

The ultimate text-within-a-text so far (not counting hidden-withins) might be Pale Fire.

The Golden Age, by Michael Ajvaz, about an island civilization where the only text is "The Book" - "a handwritten, collective novel filled with feuding royal families, murderous sorcerers, and narrow escapes. Anyone is free to write in “The Book,” adding their own stories, crossing out others, or even appending “footnotes” in the form of little paper pouches full of extra text—but of course there are pouches within pouches, so that the story is impossible to read “in order,” and soon begins to overwhelm the narrator’s orderly treatise."

Oh, and The King in Yelllooowww
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_in_Yellow

beaten to a mention of the hearing trumpet by five years, so: think it's in antic hay that huxley inserts the modernist play that a couple of the characters are attending.

My daughter read House of Leaves last year and loved it, now my wife's reading it. Their descriptions have me intrigued so I'll probably give it a go.

Dhalgren's last section is worth a mention -- a trancription of notebook pages with insets representing other bits written in the margins, and one case of a third level of text. Identity of the 2nd- and 3rd-level authors uncertain, all narrators unreliable.

at swim-two-birds

All those letters in Herzog. I couldn't really get into them on first reading, or indeed any of Saul Bellow's stuff (The Dangling Man apart), but I just started an audiobook of Augie March and it's so alive - I reckon Herzog would also really benefit from hearing it in a frustrated, manic voice

― Ismael Klata, Wednesday, October 22, 2008 8:06 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm trying to remember now if in Humboldt's Gift, the actual "text" of Humboldt's film treatment is written out or just summarized. That's a great bit.

In John Gardner's October Light, an elderly man locks his sister in a room where she spends most of the novel with nothing to do but read an old beat-up pulp novel which is missing several pages.

Nigel Dennis's 'Cards of Identity' and Arthur Phillips's 'The Tragedy of Arthur' both have entire plays contained within them, and in both cases they're pretty hard-going compared to the eminently readable novels around them.

Johnson was never that sort of metafictionalist anyway

likely common knowledge, but as i've just this moment discovered: house mother normal includes an extract from the book being read by one of the characters - bs johnson's albert angelo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxnXcBBdUBU

SKOKIAAN by the Bulawayo Sweet Rhythm Band 1947

Actually this song was composed by one of my relatives who was a shona individual who just so happen to live in the Ndebele part of Zimbabwe (The Rhodesia). The song is based upon a shona beverage called Chikokiana Translated to skokiaan in Ndebele not Zulu.

Amazing cant believe that's my grandpa blowing the saxophone August Machona Musarurwa you were a man of great talent! Gone but not forgotten. So many copies of this song but the original was the best...thanks for sharing just made my day!