Marvels & Tales

Volume 18
Article 6
Issue 2 The Arabian Nights: Past and Present

10-1-2004

Framing in Oral Narrative

Lee Haring

Recommended Citation
Haring, Lee. "Framing in Oral Narrative." Marvels & Tales 18.2 (2004). Web. <http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol18/
iss2/6>.
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LEE HARING

Framing in Oral Narrative

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said the smith. “I’ll fix your sword for you tomorrow,
if you tell me a story while I’m doing it.” The speaker was an Irish storyteller
in 1935, framing one story in another (O’Sullivan 75, 264). The moment
recalls the Thousand and One Nights, where the story of “The Envier and the
Envied” is enclosed in the larger story told by the Second Kalandar (Burton 1:
113–39), and many stories are enclosed in others. It was quite traditional for
the Irish storyteller, historically disconnected from Arabian tradition, to use a
frame-story. Folktale scholars label it “Story-teller Interrupted by Woman” and
number it AT 1376A*. The Thousand and One Nights shows the literary imita-
tion of that orally invented device; it standardizes the movement from one
story into the next. So too “in the Sanskrit Five Books [the Panchatantra] the
tales are neatly bound together by multiple use of framing” (Edmonson 143).
Frame-stories in such collections are frequent enough for scholars to designate
several as standing alone and establish a genre (Thompson, Folktale 415;
Blackburn 496).
All this is common knowledge to students of the Thousand and One Nights.
I draw my examples from two stratified societies. Ancient Ireland surrounded
its kings with a cattle-owning aristocracy whose dependants were firmly kept
in lower social grades. Ancient India invented a system of caste too well
known to need description (Dumont). Such societies foster the habit of sub-
ordinating one plot to another, creating that affinity that Theodor W. Adorno
perceived, “between the formal configuration of the artwork and the structure
of the social system” (Hohendahl 172). Stratified societies favor frame-stories.

Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2 (2004), pp. 229–245. Copyright © 2004 by
Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201.

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In literary collections, and the criticism they have provoked, framing

becomes either a genre or “a narrative mechanism for the linkage of possibly
unrelated tales” (Belcher 1). In oral performance, framing is one device among
many. What is the mechanism but a formal stylization of people’s habit of
interrupting their discourses, of going to another level? Framing is more than
a mechanism; it is a human habit (Goffman) and a cultural universal.
Therefore it sustains a variety of critical approaches. Modes of criticism,
which intend to make sense of what is said, themselves function as interpre-
tive frames (Bauman and Briggs 231). I discuss half a dozen kinds of framing;
I attach some modes of criticism to them; I draw some examples from islands
of the Southwest Indian Ocean (Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion, Comoros,
and Seychelles).1

Frame-Story as a Genre
If each tale, like the Irish one I began with, is a thing, an autonomous whole,
then a genre becomes a thing as well, and the frame-story is a genre (though
not only that). Still, because it requires other genres to live on, this one is par-
asitic. Perhaps it isn’t an oral genre all over Africa (Belcher), but African per-
formers do link their pieces. For instance, they often tell trickster tales in clus-
ters or chains, so neatly that when collectors reproduce the cluster in the trans-
lations they publish, a reader can deduce principles of sequencing
(Fontoynont and Raomandahy 83–86). One principle is to alternate trickster’s
success with his defeat and lead the audience toward a sense of cosmic order
(Paulme, “Quelques procédés”). The audience’s memory supplies another sort
of frame: their familiarity with trickster’s predictable behavior. Afghanistan and
Ireland show plenty of examples of oral framing (Mills 123), the latter perhaps
under literary influence (Belcher 16–18).
But orality knows them too. In the story I began with, the smith requires
Cúchulainn to tell him a story whilst mending his sword. When the smith’s
wife violates Cúchulainn’s interdiction against eavesdropping, Cúchulainn
breaks off the story of his adventure at its most suspenseful point, where he
was in serious danger from a giant. The framed story is incomplete; the smith,
his helper, and his wife are punished by the curtailment of Cúchulainn’s per-
formance. But the recorded performance is fully completed in an ending for-
mula: “They went by the ford, and I went by the stepping stones. They were
drowned, and I came safe” (O’Sullivan 79). The orderly ending of this perfor-
mance, within which a framed story has been curtailed in a disorderly man-
ner, is echoed in three Russian versions (AT 1376A*), which support the same
moral: disorderly women who steal men’s secrets—which are always commu-

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nicated through narrative—will be punished. Despite the small number of ver-

sions, the tale type exemplifies the frame-story genre.

Framing by Formula
Everyone knows the most obvious sort of framing in oral narrative, the open-
ing or closing formula. English examples, doubtless showing literary influence,
are “Once upon a time” and “They all lived happily ever after.” The elaborate
opening formula (three and a half sentences) in the Irish “Black Thief,” a frame-
story recorded in 1932 from the best storyteller the collector ever met (Dillon
8), illustrates the affinity between social structure and artistic form I mentioned
above. A more egalitarian society, the small Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues,
prefers a less elaborate opening. The region’s characteristic “Sirandan!” demands
a response, “Sampek!” In Mauritian Kreol, the local language, the first word lit-
erally means riddle. Opening a story with it preserves the African association of
riddling with storytelling. The second word is apparently no more than a
rhetorical device; lexicographers set apart its other meaning, a kind of fish
(Baker and Hookoomsing 283). Henri Lagarrigue, of Réunion, remembers the
Malagasy closing formula, “If it’s a lie, it’s not my fault, the old ones were the
liars” (Decros 149–59; Carayol 7: 19–21; Renel 1: 45, 1: 49, 1: 88–9, 1: 153).
But being a true creolizer, with the Malagasy formula he combines a character-
istically Mascareigne “Kriké!” (to which I return below).
Formulas are not always an aesthetically neutral formality. In some tradi-
tions at least, they have a thematic affinity with what is coming (Sokolov 302)
and are not “absolutely independent of the rest of the story,” as Charles Renel
asserted in Madagascar (Renel 1: lviii), only of the surface meaning of the
words. In a society like the Comoro islands (as in Ireland), they have a refine-
ment and elaboration all their own, reminiscent of the stunning wedding cos-
tumes and gold jewelry women bring out for le grand mariage.

Nipetraka ampanjaka, nipetraka tajiry, nipetraka oaziry, zanaka angano

tsàre ela.
Nikomokomoko ka Ravoalavo,
Sôla ny lohany,
—Rafaraka, Rafaraka!
Ino nankadilanuaua vanihanao?
—Fanaovam-bango mandeha doany.
—Voankôy!
Ino nankamena forinao?
—Fipetraha an-tany mena. (Blanchy et al. 99)

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Kings were living, rich people were living, viziers were living. Things
happen fast in tales.
Mr. Rat is gargling,
he has a bald head.
“Hey, wasp, hey wasp!
What made your head so pointy?”
“Tying up my hair to go to The Place.”
“Hey, spider!
What made your bottom so red?”
“Sitting on the red ground.”
Dady ny Saidy, of the village of Poroani in the Comoran island of Mayotte, is
speaking in Malagasy to Sophie Blanchy. At the end of her a long, elaborate
tale, her closing formula resembles the Irish one quoted above: “Nengako ao
reo, zaho niply navy ato. Tsy haiko koa kabaron-dreo afara añy, I left them there I
came back here. I don’t know what happened to them after that” (Blanchy et
al. 130). But it also recalls other formulas in use in the Southwest Indian
Ocean, for instance in Seychelles: “I was passing by there, I said to Soungoula
‘Give me a bit to drink’; he gave me a kick that threw me here, and I fell to St.
Louis” (“Creole Stories” 49).
Formulas can be interpreted in at least three ways. Sociohistorically, they
are a sort of framing, as culturally variable as plots and characters. Restoring
the words of an opening formula to the context of performance invites a
rhetorical mode of criticism, which looks at their effect on a hearer (Lüthi 92).
Speech-act criticism will call a formula a “performative” utterance, a part of the
verbal interaction. By saying, “I am a frame,” the formula becomes a “perlocu-
tionary” act, affecting the mind-set of the audience (Austin 94–101). Doubtless
other interpretive modes will apply too.

Framed Formulas
Opening and closing formulas frame oral performances “from the outside”; into
the tale, a performer may drop equally fixed phrases. Are these “formulas”? In
Irish storytelling, they are called “runs.” Poetry offers the extreme instance of the
use of such fixed phrases for composition (Lord; Foley, Traditional Oral Epic;
Foley, Immanent Art). In prose narratives, the fixed phrase stands out by being
framed by the free phrases around it. No one can miss it (O’Sullivan 40). Even
a transitional formula, “it was well and it wasn’t ill,” stands out from its context
that frames it. Paradoxically, through its very familiarity and repetition, the “run”
exemplifies defamiliarization—the concept that Russian formalist critics held
out as the core of perception and the source of artistic values (Shklovsky).

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The Formula Personalized

Exceptional oral performers personalize their interventions. Gérose Barivoitse,
of Sainte-Suzanne in Réunion, acquired enough fame in the 1970s to be called
le roi, The King, to be invited to festivals of traditional culture, and to appear
on French national television. Mr. Barivoitse explains his technique of the
opening formula by performing it.
Gérose Barivoitse: Kriké!
Christian Barat: Kraké the king!
Gérose Barivoitse: The key in your pocket, the shit in my bag! Always
that’s the habit with us, don’t you find anything surprising in that?
Only if people don’t know, they say we seem to be talking shit. Go see
if it is. Not true! Those are the words in Kreol to begin a story. (Barat,
Carayol, and Vogel 51)
Then he goes into his Kreol version of one of the best-known European folk-
tales, The Brave Tailor, classified as AT 1640, well known in Europe (Grimm
no. 20; Thompson, Folktale 144). To adapt it to Southwest Indian Ocean tra-
dition, Mr. Barivoitse brings in the region’s familiar ogre character, Gran Dyab,
as an adversary for the hero.
Throughout, he intervenes in his own voice. Introducing his main char-
acter, Mr. Barivoitse points to his injured leg, creating a piquant connection
amongst his scabrous hero, himself, and another regional folktale hero, the
scabrous Ti Zan who rescues his sister from her disastrous marriage to a wolf-
man (Ventre; Görög-Karady and Seydou; Baissac 146–61).
Well, there was one guy, he had—he was cleaning a big sore on his
foot. Not like this, ‘cause I’m already cured. I got cut, I did—I couldn’t have
a daughter. I couldn’t go to the king to marry the king’s daughter. What the
fuck am I gonna do with that stuff? I’d rather cut him and cure myself.
Viewed as rhetorical gestures or perlocutionary acts, Mr. Barivoitse’s shifts of
voice serve to maintain his personal connection with his audience.
His version of “The Brave Tailor” can also be viewed phenomenologically.
In Katharine Young’s mode of criticism, there are two frames for experiencing
a story. One is the world where the hero will battle Gran Dyab, which she calls
the “taleworld.” The other frame is the world of communicative interaction,
the interview, which Young calls the “storyrealm.” The interview situation of
the storyrealm formalizes the ordinary two-person situation: “one is likely to
be given the role of speaking straight and the other is likely to be scripted to
engage in the responsive behavior,” which Réunionnais storytelling conven-
tion has prescribed (Goffman 235). Shifting between the taleworld and the

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storyrealm, which Mr. Barivoitse does continually, Young calls “edgework”

(19–68).
Mr. Barivoitse knows the difference between the two frames well enough
to play with them. Rather than hide behind a depersonalized formula (or dis-
appear for many minutes at a time, as Shahrazâd does for her survival), Mr.
Barivoitse remains onstage throughout, continually interrupting the taleworld
to speak from the storyrealm. No sooner does his hero get the princess’s atten-
tion than Mr. Barivoitse commands the attention of his hearers.
He went and passed in front of the king’s house. Ah, ah! The king’s
daughter was up there; he gave her a wink. She said, “Here’s my hap-
piness! That’s a strong man!” ‘Cause he’d killed seven flies and
wounded fourteen. She said, “Papa,” she said, “there’s a man who can
go get the giant in the forest. Then he’ll bring him back.” So the king
came down and said, “Find out who that is.” Long ago they didn’t need
anything. The king, once he said something, that was it! He came down
and asked who he was. He said, “I say—tell me your name.” He said,
“Me, I am Mr. Killed seven wounded fourteen.” He said, “I’ve made
war, I have.” What war?
What war, indeed? The narrator is remembering the war in European ver-
sions of this tale, where the brave little tailor is a runaway hero (motif K
1951.2 in Thompson, Motif-Index). Nor has Mr. Barivoitse forgotten the hero’s
trade or its stereotypical pose.
The guy sat on the ground with his legs crossed. He washed his legs ’cause
they were as rotten, as if there were borers in his legs! So—
Kriké!
Christian Barat: Kraké mésyé!
Gérose Barivoitse: Let’s skip his rotten legs.
And he resumes the narrative. The hero traps Gran Dyab, brings him to the
king, and gets the princess.
By the end, Mr. Barivoitse will have done considerable personalizing.
Twice he compares himself unfavorably to the hero because he’s not an eligi-
ble suitor; he mocks the hero’s shamming; in one breath, he praises and
deflates the hero’s strength.
I was standing there looking, I said, “Fuck your mother,” I said, “that
bugger is strong!” What kind of strong, with that big sore? Poor bug-
ger. Don’t say it!
A deconstructive criticism would fasten on this contradiction between a narra-
tor’s attitudes towards his hero (Culler 225–27). This narrator’s final triumph of

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“edgework,” of shifting between frames, is a quadruple closing formula or

“coda.” It merits full quotation for its portrayal of the hero’s victory, fusion of tale-
world and storyrealm, and reframing of Gran Dyab into the twentieth century.
He said, “Forward march!” Gran Dyab marched marched, got to the
sea, turned over—rrr!
Back on the road! The people cleaned his sores well. The guy was
well decked out, he gave the orders.
I found him and said, “Hey, I know everything that you’ve done.”
Kriké!
Christian Barat: Kraké mésyé!
Gérose Barivoitse: A nice story! The key in your pocket, the shit in
my bag!
I said, “Give me a little something, give me—”
“A little something? Get out!” Baf! I got sores there. If I hadn’t been cut
there, kaf! I got a nice sore. Well, what king’s daughter am I going to kill flies
for? King’s daughters, there aren’t any more. So I came here and told you
the story. But be careful about getting sores. Try and cure them. I’m not
saying you have them. If you get sores on your feet, try and cure them,
because you’re gonna do that, you’re gonna kill seven flies, you’re
gonna wound fourteen! But what king’s daughter will you find, what
Gran Dyab either? You won’t find them, because nowadays Gran Dyab
goes around in his little airplane. Gran Dyab’s plane goes around, he
comes down at night, his two claws on his hand. People try to catch
him, he gets ‘em, gives ‘em a hit in the face, they fall down. He takes
his plane and rrip! That’s Gran Dyab these days! Be careful!
Well, that’s it. (Barat, Carayol, and Vogel 51–53)
His “coda” lies “just outside the story in the realm of conversation, thus layer-
ing a third frame onto the boundaries of the story” (Young 36). His editors see
him as interchanging the container with its contents: “Not only do we get
episodic intrusion of the discourse into the narrative, incursions regulated by
the teller and his audience by ‘Kriké-kraké’; the whole narrative enters explicit-
ly into the narrator’s [personal] history” (Barat, Carayol, and Vogel 101). To
narratological criticism, his closing formula converges two moments. In one,
he narrates into a microphone; the other is the moment of his story. Suddenly
he forces a temporal “isotopy” between the story and himself (Genette 221).

Multiple Descriptions
Phenomenology and narratology describe Mr. Barivoitse’s technique; so does
comparison to literary narrative. Where his editors use words like intrusion and

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incursion, a literary critic would see Gérose Barivoitse as crossing the boundary
between the frames called fiction and autobiography. His interruptions resemble
the practice of novelists like Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, Thackeray, or Dickens,
who often interrupt their narratives to address their reader directly—a device
cast into the shade by Flaubert and Henry James (Lubbock 156–202).
Folkloristics would add, from the point of view of genre theory, that he creates
a new “ethnic genre” (Ben-Amos).
Then, creolization theory would find an affinity between Mr. Barivoitse’s
mixing of genres, or modes of discourse, and the convergence of African,
Malagasy, and European cultures in his island of Réunion. He appropriates ele-
ments of them all. In diglot Réunion, he performs a narrative equivalent of
language-mixing. So his verbal art represents a rearguard action against cul-
tural and linguistic standardization.
His performance is not “straight” narration. His register-switching is only a
tiny part of Mr. Barivoitse’s framing. More relevant is his transformation of atti-
tude. In the Southwest Indian Ocean as in the Caribbean, where cultures clash,
transformation with a satiric purpose comes quickly to the artist. So complex are
Gérose Barivoitse’s interventions that a mythological motif (Periodic sacrifices to a
monster, motif S 262 in Thompson, Motif-Index), his etiological tag, “That’s when
signing with your thumb began,” and his closing formulas themselves become
parodic uses of narrative convention (Haring, “Parody”).
Finally, a rhetorical criticism would notice that Mr. Barivoitse uses the for-
mula Kriké-kraké as a cue to demand reassurance that his listener is attending.
Far from relinquishing his turn at speaking, he is reinforcing his turn by means
of the formal deference of his hearer’s reply. “In performances of all kinds,” says
Erving Goffman, “the obligation to provide continuity for the audience, that is,
constant guidance as to what is going on, accounts considerably for the manip-
ulation of participation status and the enactment of channels” (234). For any
less audacious performer, Mr. Barivoitse’s incursions and intrusions would not
be a performance option. They might even not be accepted by an audience.
After all, there are rules for such things, which are a prominent topic in folk-
loristic analysis and receive much attention from theorists of performance
(Gossen; Ferry; Bauman; Kapchan; Calame-Griaule).
Gregory Bateson reframes what I have said: “Two descriptions are better
than one” (Bateson 67).

Framing One Channel in Another

Repeatedly in the Thousand and One Nights, poetry or song is inserted into the
prose of narrative; the narrator shifts channels (Haring, “Techniques” 25–26).
Whether indicating the ancestry of this device or attesting to the influence of

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the collection, it is a cherished practice of storytellers. A random but typical

example from a strongly Islamic society: in a tale collected in Ngazidja (Grande
Comore) in 1996, an abused youngest daughter, Nyandje, is helped by a
speaking tree she finds floating by the seashore.
I’m sent to you by the mother of this child
Nyandje Nyandje
This Nyandje wanting her father’s blessing
Nyandje Nyandje
Wanting her mother’s blessing, may she get it
Nyandje Nyandje. (Ahmed-Chamanga and Ali Mroimana 132–33)
Later the song is repeated; with this donor’s help, the young woman will pre-
vail. The collectors make the framing clear by indenting the measured verse.
The shift would be called channel-switching by a linguist; a literary critic
might merely call it quotation, especially if the source can be identified.
Audiences often recognize quotations or allusions, which to an outsider may
look only like framing one channel in another.

Personality of the Artist

What psychology is appropriate to understanding framing? Surely one that
accounts for a performer’s learning, his acquisition of “a grasp of the structures
and functions of the genre” (Hymes 50–53). With that knowledge, he or she
can judge which episodes and which digressions will be appropriate to bring
to an audience. Performers have been quite articulate about that learning pro-
cess, none more so than Sydney Joseph of Mauritius, who told me in 1990, “In
the old days, when people told stories, you would listen to them. If you have
a bit of intelligence, you remember the story completely. In the old days when
people told stories, I would remember them gradually so I could tell them the
same way. Now when I tell stories, I invent them, to see if they are the same
style, if they ‘rhyme’ [rime, make sense]” (Joseph).
His creations, then, are built on the models he has observed. Part of his past
comes from Africa, where riddling and storytelling go together. For Sydney
Joseph, inventing stories resembles riddling (which he calls zedmo, puns): “Just
like when you make riddles, it’s the same. There are riddles that people give, but
when they ask for the answers, that’s hard, and no one can get the answers.”
Rime, then, means fitting in to traditional stylistic expectations. His tradition is
precisely “the creation of the future out of the past” (Glassie 395)—a point at
which structuralist criticism becomes relevant. To some readers, structuralism
has sometimes seemed antipsychological or even inhuman (Diamond). Yet this
mode of criticism declares the framing or “embedding” of narrative to be the

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image of all storytelling (Todorov 70–73). Properly understood, structuralist

criticism is an invitation to take in the psychological and personal.

Framing as Part of Narrative Grammar

Imagine being a storyteller. If your first unit isn’t enough for you, what to do?

Right away he goes into a second part, which is actually another story,
conforming to a different formal type from the first. Yet he has
retained the same hero. So he finds himself obliged, if his tale has
been moving upward, to reverse direction in this second part and
move downward. This he manages either by having his hero violate
an interdiction previously unknown, or by dropping that very hero
into a trap that has been laid, most often, by a new adversary. . . . The
listener cannot foresee the particular nature of the peril awaiting the
hero, or the misdeed he will commit. (Paulme, La mère 43–44)

This description of West African framing uncannily anticipates a complex

story Sydney Joseph recorded for me. The contrasting episodes he combines,
in the tale he called “The Siren-Girl,” continually surprise the listener. The
piece also demonstrates that for a gifted narrator, “rhyming” goes far beyond
inventing something that looks like a familiar traditional tale. It includes fram-
ing. Of course it does mean giving his audience “rhyming” elements, which are
known elsewhere in the region, as well as in Africa and India: a submarine
palace where the hero will find his girl; a second palace, which will later be
disenchanted; animals who give him parts of their bodies so that he can later
summon their aid (motifs F 725.3, D 705.1, and B 501 in Thompson, Motif-
Index). Is his inclusion of these motifs also a kind of framing? But when he
goes from one plot into another, he exercises framing at the level of narrative
grammar, a practice quite different from the mechanical switching of the
Thousand and One Nights (which I think he has not read). This practice too sus-
tains a variety of critical approaches.
In “The Siren-Girl,” Sydney Joseph combines five distinct plots. His skill in
combining them reveals a complete mastery of narrative grammar in the struc-
turalist sense: “a set of rules for the creation of artifacts mutually accepted by the
members of the culture producing them” (Deetz 108–9). That is what he means
by “rhyming.” Apparently it includes framing. On the model of Quellenforschung
in classical scholarship and with the aid of historic-geographic folkloristics, I dis-
entangle the plots, hoping to discern “the essential artistic fact of creation”
(Highet 499).

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“Well,” he begins with an almost invisible formula, “there was a man and
a woman in a house. They had one son.” This son will be Sydney Joseph’s Man
on a Quest for his Lost Wife, in a story known all round the world (AT 400), with
three analogues in the Thousand and One Nights and three treatments by the
Grimms (Thompson, Folktale 92). As scholars hypothetically reconstruct this
plot, a father promises his son to a sea-creature; the boy finds a princess with
whom he sleeps chastely; the hero is allowed to visit home on condition that
he does not reveal the secret; he loses the princess by breaking a prohibition;
he sets out in search, gets help, and acquires magic objects; and with their aid
he retrieves and marries the princess (AT 400). All these elements appear in
“The Siren-Girl,” where a folktale scholar will recognize them. That is, the “dis-
ciplinary matrix” (Kuhn 182) of folktale scholarship provides a model against
which the specific performance can be measured.
But as Paulme predicts, that first plot is not enough. Sydney Joseph’s sec-
ond plot comes in at a point when the hero has violated an interdiction.
As she put her head on his arm, to sleep, the boy just lit a match. He
lit the match and saw her face at night. Well, at night, when he saw
her, he just grabbed her and kissed her, and he got a big shock.
According to the rules, he has no right to kiss that young siren. In
that castle, the mother instantly knew, and she made that castle dis-
appear, that very night, under the sea—vanished.
Banished from her underwater world, yet still detached from human society,
he arrives on land; he finds a ponyar, dagger, which enables him to catch octo-
pus as food.
Having isolated and endangered the hero, Sydney Joseph now inserts his
second plot and his second heroine. This is the tale scholars call The Grateful
Animals (AT 554), in which a young man “earns the thanks of several animals
. . . and with their help wins the princess by performing three tasks imposed
upon him . . .” (Aarne and Thompson 199). Sydney Joseph wants us to note
that he follows tradition in using the conventional title for animal characters
in folktales (Baker and Hookoomsing 155): “These animals, what are they? As
the story goes, apparently, we call these the komper. There was Komper Lion,
there was Komper Eagle, and there was Komper Ant, black ant.” With his knife
the hero carves a deer for the three. Each grateful animal gives him a whisker
or feather, which will summon the animal when the hero is in danger. These
motifs are as traditional as the word komper (B 392, B 431.2, B 455.3, B 481.1,
B 501, and D 1421 in Thompson, Motif-Index).
This bit of combining is a traditional move. Sydney Joseph is not the first
Indian Ocean storyteller to combine “The Grateful Animals” and “The Man on a

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Quest for his Lost Wife.” Both are especially well known in Madagascar (Ferrand
102–03; Renel 1: 65–76; Faublée 423–27, 435–49; Haring, “Grateful Animals”),
a shipping point from which many creoles arrived in Mauritius. One Malagasy
narrator made the same combination in the 1870s (Dahle 250–58). So in repeat-
ing the combination (whether labeled as “framing” or not), Sydney Joseph is
“rhyming”—conforming to regional style. That Malagasy precursor, however,
did not poise his hero between two equally desirable women, as Sydney Joseph
does—an extremely unusual feature of his piece.
Now for a third plot and a new sort of rhyming. If the hero wants this new
girl, his first task will be to protect the king’s goats from a marauding lion. This
he accomplishes by summoning the grateful lion from the preceding episode
and staging a duel between the two, so as to move himself towards the classic
outcome where he gets his girl (Propp 63–64). The duel of lions rhymes cre-
atively with one of this region’s favorite animal stories, the false tug-of-war.
Unquestionably of African origin, this is AT 291 and motif K 22 (Thompson,
Motif-Index). Much beloved of East African and island storytellers (Werner
268–69; “Creole Stories” 64–65; Baissac 25–33), this piece of dramatic irony
narrates a deception practiced by a small animal on two large animals, whom
he deceives into pulling against each other. On this model, Sydney Joseph cre-
ates his lengthy duel, which goes on until the one lion loses. It looks as if the
hero must marry her and acquire half the kingdom.
To get his hero out of this marriage, Sydney Joseph rather awkwardly
reconnects him to the siren-girl and draws in a fourth plot, The Monster with
His Heart in the Egg (AT 302). The hero, who can turn himself into an ant with
the help he has received from the grateful animals, learns how to find the life
of the siren-girl’s father and, following her information, kills him. A similar
episode, perhaps with a common source, occurs in a nineteenth-century
Mauritian tale (Baissac 358–89), and in a Radio Seychelles broadcast of the
1970s (“Creole Stories” 19–20). But outraged at this death, the siren-girl dis-
enchants the castle, thus depriving herself of any future. What listener could
foresee that she will now abandon fairyland? Coming closer to the “real”
world, approaching the storyrealm, the siren-girl enters the cash economy by
opening a village pharmacy.
In the end, Sydney Joseph manages the hero’s recovery by a fifth plot,
which spins off from Madagascar’s favorite story of marriage between a mortal
and a water-spirit (Haring, “Water-Spirits”). The siren-girl cleans him up and
hears his story of refusing the other girl.
The siren said to him, “Well, what have I got now? I only have this
shop, I have people who work here. Well, if you agree, we’ll make a
condition. We will get married. Those who live here do not know that

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I am a siren. You are the only one to know this, and you don’t tell
anybody about this, or else I’ll leave.”
They got married.
Sydney Joseph ends his story as modestly as he began it: “So this means I am
telling you this story now. Finished” (Joseph). In the Malagasy legend, marriage
between the underwater woman and a mortal on land leads to a catastrophic
violation of taboo and dissolution of the marriage (Haring, Index 358–60). But
in The Siren-Girl, a marriage between these two enables Sydney Joseph’s tale to
“rhyme” with folktales that award their hero a wife and a place in society.
Critical modes yield their various interpretations. In an “expressive” orien-
tation that emphasizes the artist’s personality, the merits of this extraordinary
narrative might be attributed to his “peculiarities” (Okpewho 39). In the a-psy-
chological structuralist mode, such complex plotting is a special case of Tzvetan
Todorov’s remark about the Thousand and One Nights: “the embedding narrative
is the narrative of a narrative” (Todorov 72). Narratology will call what Sydney
Joseph does a special instance of recursivity. Narratologists use this concept to
introduce “a temporal dimension that makes it possible to describe the structure
of expectations created by the process of self-replication” (Ryan 121). Once the
expectations of an audience are taken into account, the rhetorical mode of crit-
icism returns: the listener is being asked to participate in an alternative experi-
ence of time.
I return to sociohistorical or contextual criticism, which (like New
Historicism) tries to keep the artwork embedded (if I dare use that word) in its
historical moment. From this perspective, the formal configuration of “The
Siren-Girl,” with its combining of plots from different languages and traditions,
mirrors Mauritian creolization. The mirroring appears even in its ironies.
Insertion of the unexpected episodes into the fairy tale’s usual movement
towards marriage and prosperity has a deflating effect. I wonder if both Sydney
Joseph and Gérose Barivoitse aren’t deconstructing the folktale genre. People like
them—creoles in Mauritius, petits blancs in Réunion, people in marginal cul-
tures, people oppressed by the encroachment of international capitalism—often
make use of traditional verbal art as a means of deconstructing dominant ide-
ologies and expressive forms (Bauman and Briggs). Assuredly they do conform
to the rules; they do “rhyme;” they imitate their predecessors. They combine
existing materials, made available to them by the complex history of immigra-
tion to their islands, in imitation of the style they observed long ago. Yet to me
these performances feel parodic, all the more for their use of framing. The play-
fulness of Sydney Joseph’s suspenseful, lopsided structure makes me smile.
But now, having reached the limit of the notion of framing, I reframe what
I have said: framings overlap, in both performance and analysis. In the absence

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of a master narrative on which all critics agree, there is a plurality of metanar-

ratives (Eagleton 110). What a narratologist calls embedding a creole linguist
recognizes as code-switching, which has come into use because cultures have
converged. “Framing” and “quotation” are descriptions that isolate distinct
phenomena, at different levels of communication, that exist simultaneously in
performance. If framing is conceived as an attribute of message-form, the crit-
ic will look for the genre “frame-story.” If it is an attribute of code, say a bit of
fixed-phrase folklore popping up in the middle of free-phrase narrating, the
creolist will perceive code-switching, and the rhetorician will perceive the
prestige value of the alternate code. If framing, say the insertion of song into
speech, is conceived as an attribute of the channel of communication, the
historical critic will see a continuity between the styles of ancestors and
descendants (Haring, “African Folktales” 189–91). The modes of criticism
yield different sorts of information.
The next step for narrative criticism might be “creolizing”: combining the
information of different sorts. As creole languages and cultures are unpre-
dictable, a “creolized” criticism will acknowledge the many ways in which “local
populations and performers draw on ‘global’ culture for their own folkloric pro-
ductions” (Kimberly J. Lau, personal communication). Framing is one such way.
Gregory Bateson predicted that the result of multiplying descriptions would be
“not a simple adding but . . . of the nature of a multiplication or a fractionation,
or the creation of a logical product.” Creolizing the criticism of narrative might
lead to “a momentary gleam of enlightenment” (Bateson 86).
Note
1. Four of the five islands are independent nations; Île de la Réunion is an overseas
department of France. Research there has been supported by the United States
Information Agency, the Wolfe Humanities Institute of Brooklyn College, and the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and assisted by innumerable
cordial persons in all the islands. Dorothy Noyes and Dörte Borchers have given
me the benefit of critical readings of this article. All translations are my own.

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