5 Awesome Stories About Storytelling

But first: apparently, I have an Internet kindred spirit on Cracked!

OK, so what do I mean by a “story about storytelling”? There are lots of stories in which characters tell stories to one another, from the trivial type like, “Let me fill you in on the entire plot up until now, Dr. Smith, so we can get on with fighting aliens” to the thought-provoking type like, “Can we ever get the truth of what happened when that bandit attacked the samurai and his wife as they passed through the woods?” But to be on this list, I decided that the story has to meet three criteria. Why these three? Because that’s where my personal taste lies today.

First, duh, a character in the story must be telling at least one story at some point. This rules out stories that are about the nature of narrative or even about creating stories but don’t actually have anyone telling stories in them. For example, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a play about characters in a story, but no one in the play is explicitly telling the story; we don’t get to see how the agency of a storyteller or narrator interacts with the story being told and vice versa.

Second, to be on this list,  the storyteller must be at least as important to the overall work as the characters in the story he or she is telling. This is essentially to rule out stories about writers or filmmakers where we never actually find out what their great opus is about, like the otherwise fantastic Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel (Edward Gorey), and also stories in which storytelling is used as a framing device but doesn’t really have a major plot of its own, like Edward Scissorhands.

Third, the story must have something to say about the act of storytelling and narration, rather than about the particular medium the story happens to be told in. This rules out some great works of metafiction that have a lot to say about the conventions of their own media, like the classic Warner Brothers cartoon “Duck Amuck”, but that don’t really speak to these themes.

Obviously, there are lots more awesome stories about storytelling that meet these criteria, and I’m not trying to say these five are the best. But, look, I’ll level with you. I re-watched “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” and it was awesome and I wanted to write about it a little. Okay?

1. “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” (The X Files)

I can’t in good conscience recommend this one unless you’re already familiar with The X Files. Half the joy comes from seeing this show riotously send up exactly the sorts of plots it normally takes very seriously.

The titular novelist, Mr. Jose Chung, spends 44-ish minutes of our time interviewing Agent Scully about a ridiculously complicated case she and Mulder investigated, involving two teenagers who were allegedly abducted by aliens, random government craziness, and… uh, Jesse Ventura. We get the story as told to him by Scully, by other witnesses, and even by the guy in the diner where Mulder claims to have had dinner with a UFO-flying Air Force pilot. Naturally, their accounts all conflict, and we’re treated to some hilarious contradictions and expansions on what people have said.

But after all the laughter, like any good storyteller, Chung ties the whole thing together and shows us how we can take something bittersweet out of even this zaniness. Although The X Files always focussed on the importance of the truth, it’s also always been about how truth isn’t necessary for meaning, and this episode underscores it like no other.

2. “Three Stories” (House, M. D.)

One of the things that can be really tough about fancy storytelling stories is keeping the audience along for the ride as the characters pick apart or reveal what’s “true” and what’s a representational part of storytelling. “Three Stories”, the House episode in which House has to do a guest lecture for some med students and tells the stories of three patients who all presented with leg pain, does this brilliantly — unless you already know what to expect, the exact significance of Carmen Electra is unclear until the moment of revelation, and fascinating afterwards.

I think the reason this episode succeeds is both because its neat meta-narrative is handled cleverly and deftly, and because it the overall story arc deals with hugely important events in the lives of characters we care about. By the time the credits roll, our understanding of the protagonist, House, is forever changed, his character revealed both through the content of the story he told and the choices he made in the act of telling it. And we learn more about the other characters, too, by their reactions to the story. (Which is a small part of meta-narrative, but an important one. After all, don’t we sometimes draw conclusions about people in real life based on the stories they enjoy?)

3. The Neverending Story (the book – by Michael Ende)

Those of you who’ve only seen The Neverending Story movie are missing out. Pick up a copy of this book as soon as you can. Translated from Michael Ende’s original German, it gives both halves of the story that the movie truncates at the midpoint.

The first part of this The Neverending Story deals with Bastian’s discovery of the titular item, a magical book that tells of the adventures of Atreyu, travelling the length and breadth of Fantasia to try to find the one who can save his universe from the Nothing. The movie ends when Bastian, realizing he’s Fantasia’s saviour, takes his place as the dreamer-creator-storytellor and stops the Nothing. But the book continues to tell of Bastian’s adventures in Fantasia, and his slow loss of self until the creatures and characters he rescued must band together to help him come back to reality.

I love this book for all its careful details: how each chapter begins with the letter of the alphabet corresponding to its number, or how so many chapters end with “But that’s another story, and shall be told another time.” And I love it for its sweeping exploration of the nature of imagination. Bastian must not only embrace his imagination but must find balance between fantasy and reality. Every time he creates something in Fantasia, he loses his connection to something in real life. But in the end, it’s imagination that brings him safely back home to the real world again.

4. Maus and Maus II (Art Spiegelman)

I remember these graphic novels being favourites among my classmates during elementary school, when Holocaust education was a subject we often studied. Now that I read them again, I wonder that adults directed us toward them. The cartoon-world veneer — Jews are mice, Nazis are cats, Americans are dogs, etc. — laid over this survivor story is an integral part of how it’s told, but even a cursory glance ought to show that despite its use of talking animals, often associated with the sweetest kinds of children’s story, this is a harrowing and complex work.

The Maus graphic novels tell the story of the author interviewing his father, a Holocaust survivor, about his experiences during that awful time. The father’s story of his own past is interwoven with the son’s story of his father’s present. They serve not only to preserve the historicity of what happened — how at times, the father isn’t sure what came next or can add commentary about things he didn’t actually know at the time — but also to illuminate the relationship between father and son and ask difficult questions: how can we properly understand such horrific historical events when they come to us through people whose own behaviour sometimes seems wrong or mean to us?

5. Tales From the Arabian Nights (Ed. Andrew Lang)

If you know the name of Andrew Lang, it’s probably from his “fairy books”. They come in many colours (blue, red, green, yellow, pink, grey, violet, crimson, brown, orange, olive, and lilac… yeah, sorta sounds like Joseph’s Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat), and each features a collection of what he’d call fairy tales. His edition of the Arabian Nights follows the same sort of pattern, and although I can’t properly recommend another translation, not having read any, I don’t see how the elements I like could fail to be preserved by authors writing for different audiences, with perhaps more fidelity to the original sources.

Most people are familiar with the story of Scheherazade, the clever woman who marries a king who’s decided to marry women one after the other and kill each after their wedding night so they can’t dishonour him. Scheherazade tells him the beginning of a story each night, forcing the king to keep her alive in order to hear the ending. The text is an interwoven tapestry of stories within stories within stories, closing each other in neatly like nested sets of parentheses. There’s something for everyone here, whether you like the stories themselves or whether you like the puzzle-like structure of the book itself.