Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative in 21 st -Century Novels The Fall of Troy and Ragnarok Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz This article addresses relations of frame tale, nested narrative and mise en abyme in two recent novels: The Fall of Troy (2006) by Peter Ackroyd and Ragnarok (2011) by A.S. Byatt. Both make an atypical use of the device of framing stories. In third-person narration, these novels - in spite of their great differences - present the fictionalised history of an individual‟s particular reading experience of an ancient poetical text which is embedded in a modern historic reception situation. The exceptionality of the novels lies in their peculiar arrangement of frame story and embedded mythological epic. They constantly interfere with each other so that in each text, instead of two homogeneous and coherent stories which the reader can clearly distinguish, fragmentation, shifting and fusion of the different narrative levels prevail. In both novels the ancient poetical myth has the greater weight and impact, because it builds an aesthetic illusion which dominates the fictionalised reader figure of the frame tale, which becomes a „secondary story‟. The myth - Greek, respectively Scandinavian - might therefore be called the „primary story‟, despite the aversion of poststructuralist literature towards any hierarchical narrative order. Through the repeated intrusion of the „frame‟ and the lack of coherence in the telling of both frame story and mythology, the present readers‟ immersion in the imaginary world of the mythology is subverted. The „embedded‟ myth, however, interprets the frame and even anticipates the fate of its intradiegetic - possibly also of the extradiegetic - reader. 1. The Problematic Re-Structuring of Frame in Narratives The structure of framing and embedded narratives, including the special case of the mise en abyme, constitutes a curiosity of literature that has AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 41 (2016) · Heft Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen 2 Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 50 been appropriated in England since the Middle Ages. 1 Numerous examples of an inserted narrative or play-within-a-play can be found in drama, and narrative fictions with framing tales abound in British literature. 2 The novel of the postmodern era with its ingrained self-reflexivity and tendency to subversion has a special affinity to this device. It is particularly apt to problematise the fiction/ reality binary in a quest for „truth‟, taking issues of authenticity, identity and perception centre stage. Among the most well-known contemporary novels in English that epitomise the motifs of the novel-within-a-novel and narrator-as-writer is Ian McEwan‟s Atonement. The novel uses the form of a “simple reflexion”, whereas Margaret Atwood‟s award-winning novel The Blind Assassin starts an “infinite reflexion” of three narratives, each with the same title. This figure of multiplying the incidence of the novel-within-the-novel is also referred to with the images of “Russian Doll” or “Chinese Box”. Lucien Dällenbach, whose study The Mirror in the Text (1989, fr. orig. 1977) developed the theory of this widespread construct in visual arts and imaginative literature, adds as a third basic category to the two above the “paradoxical reflexion” (124). This term addresses a structure like that of the ancient epigram about the Cretan who says that all Cretans are liars. 3 Two unusual third-person narratives by established contemporary British authors, which have not been given a great deal of attention in literary criticism, strike me as peculiar and intriguing. They were described by some recipients as little more than unaltered rewritings of well-known tales and not apt to provoke critical interest. Irrespective of these reactions the novels in hand, Peter Ackroyd‟s The Fall of Troy (2006) and Antonia Byatt‟s Ragnarok (2011), display structural concepts 1 Mise en abyme is originally a heraldic term that was metaphorically applied to paintings and literature by André Gide. Abyme is the centre of the heraldic shield, where an identical picture en miniature is sometimes placed, which contains itself an abyme etc., possibly ad infinitum. The coat-of-arms of the United Kingdom implemented during the reign of King George III. (1816-1837) showed such a picture which was then abolished under Queen Victoria. In literature, a repetition or „mirror‟ of the same figure is meant by mise en abyme - that of the narrator telling a story to a narratee or reader in the embedded narrative(s). 2 For frame theory, which addresses cognitive frames and different media, terminological distinctions and recent research, see Werner Wolf‟s “Introduction” (2006, 1- 40), and for definitions concerning narrative texts his chapter “Framing Borders in Frame Stories” (2006: 179-82), where he also debates “liminal cases” of framings (182-85). Nelles (1997) in his narratological study gives an overview and discusses „frame‟ and the history of its theory in his concluding chapter “Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative“. 3 Dällenbach mainly investigates the French nouveau roman, but also includes narrative literature in German. His only briefly mentioned examples in English are - apart from Hamlet with the interlude called “The Mousetrap Scene” (The Murder of Gonzago) - narrative texts from the 19 th century: E.A. Poe‟s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Walter Scott‟s Waverley. A concise explanation (in German) of the mirror-in-the-text motif and its terminology can be found in Goebel (2002: 85-88). Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 51 and narrative modes that do not fit the notion of faithfulness to the original. Nor do they represent postmodern adaptations of myths and fairytales in the wake of - for example - Angela Carter‟s feminist collection The Bloody Chamber or Emma Tennant‟s short story “Philomela”. The framings in The Fall of Troy and Ragnarok consist of narrativised historic events: in Ackroyd‟s novel they comprise the archaeological work of Heinrich Schliemann, introduced as a foreground tale. Byatt, who had already used nested narratives in her historical novels Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002), creates the frame story out of the experience of a child in England during the Blitz. The historically documented subjects of the novels‟ „frames‟ additionally call up the problematic opposition of factional/ fictional narratives. According to a general generic statement, fantasy and myths - the Greek and the Scandinavian mythology in this case - are deemed to be particularly in need of framings (Rubik 2006: 342 n. 2, quoting Bateson). In my article I propose to firstly examine the relation between what I here provisionally present as „frame tales‟ and „embedded stories‟. 4 Secondly, I wish to explain how these narratives mutually interact inside a novel and thereby affect each other‟s reception. Thirdly, my intention is to explore the meaning of the different types of narratives. In Ackroyd‟s novel they consist of the combination of Greek mythology, on which he also published a book for children (Ancient Greece, 2005), with the existent biofiction on Heinrich Schliemann. 5 Byatt‟s narrator retells the Norse myth of the beginning and end of the world. S/ he combines it with a child‟s, perhaps autobiographical, recollection of religious education, her memory of past times and the experience of an ongoing war. In examining the strategies by which a “double reading” of these novels is invited - through recognising noticeable references between the framing and the embedded stories - Dällenbach‟s list (1989: 46-47) can be useful. For the exploration of my topic I have also consulted Dorrit Cohn‟s methodologi- 4 The terms “nested” or “embedded” narrative and “frame” literally apply to fictional texts such as The Canterbury Tales, Mary Shelley‟s Frankenstein or in lyrical poetry to Percy B. Shelley‟s “Ozymandias”, since one narrative encloses the other. Yet many divergences are observed e.g. in Wolf‟s 2006 typology (“Framing Borders”). My article will focus on the conspicuous structural and diegetic violations of the classical pattern in the two examples by Ackroyd and Byatt. 5 It is possible that Ackroyd also happened to know about the 2001/ 2002 renewed and widely publicised academic debate mainly among German scholars who doubted not only Schliemann‟s localisation of ancient Troy and his belief in the historicity of Homer‟s epic, but also more recent research results. Interests of Turkish politicians that were made public may also have played a role in the discussion of whether „Ilion‟ was a colonial city belonging to the Graeco-European cultural sphere or to Asia Minor and that of the Ancient Orient. A monograph (see website 1) by one of the main contestants of this “Battle of Troy with Spades as Weapons” bears the title Crime Scene Troy (Tatort Troja, 2010), which could equally serve as a superscription of Ackroyd‟s novel and supply a recipient‟s epitextual „framing story‟. Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 52 cal statements in her 2012 article. Among the abundant publications criticising Gérard Genette‟s narratological propositions on „metalepsis‟, this article is especially relevant for my analysis of the novels. The term “frame breaking” is used by Wolf (2006: 9) for a specific use of metalepsis in framing tales. Cohn distinguishes different forms of mise en abyme and metalepsis - the shift from one narrative level to another. Additionally, I will consider the two chosen example texts with respect to the empowerment/ disempowerment binary. Structurally, the two novels with interpenetrating stories show noticeable analogies: both confront the reader with several narratives of tremendous significance, whose degree of fictionalisation differs. For each of the novels, the ancient poetic myth remains the weightiest of the entangled narratives, thus relating back to the announcement made by the book titles. In Ackroyd‟s text, the plot consists of the life and death of Heinrich Obermann (alias Schliemann), told by an omniscient but partial third-person narrator. Three narratives are interwoven in The Fall of Troy. They are - in historical-chronological order - the following: the first thematises the forgotten and incomprehensible fragile clay tablets of a written culture found in the ruins at Hissarlik, whose origins may lie in the distant past before the Trojan War that probably - if at all - took place in the 12 th century B.C. On the second historical level, the narrator places the Iliad, which was presumably composed either by several poets or one poet who is himself a mythological figure; this occurred about 450 years after the destruction of Troy (“Ilion”) by the Greeks from the mainland (Homer‟s “Achaeans”). The third level consists of a modern reception situation. Obermann/ Schliemann read the Iliad as a history book with exact topographical information; this was the interpretation the epic poem also received in antiquity. The narrativised popular history of the hero figure Heinrich Obermann-Schliemann as obsessed by and finally identifying with the contents of the Homeric poem amounts to a modern mythology and establishes a fourth level. In Byatt‟s work, a distinct frame story marks the beginning and the end of the myth‟s rewrite. A third-person narrator, who assumes the viewpoint of a small child without omitting the adult perspective of the subject matter, describes the life of a little girl in England during the Second World War. The story embedded in this frame is the Scandinavian myth known from the Edda. After the frame is closed, a conclusion to the novel follows. It consists of a first-person narrative by a well-informed contemporary who presents the dramatic ecological changes on a doomed earth to 21 st -century readers. This section links the apocalyptic contents of The Twilight of the Gods with the world war and the destruction of the environment. The graded ensemble of narratives in Ragnarok comprises the Bible with the Christian doctrine of salvation and eschatology, which is the oldest text referred to and remembered in the frame story. The second level is taken up by the cosmology and end of the world as told in Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 53 the early medieval Scandinavian (Poetic) Edda, whose authorship is hypothetical. 6 Thirdly, we get the memorised childhood experience of the Second World War in England, including the apprehensions of the grownups and the thin child. The fourth and last level is that of the adult thirdperson narrator, about whose identity we may speculatively state that s/ he is conceived as the voice of the writer A.S. Byatt. Only the firstperson epilogue, related by an extradiegetic intellectual and entitled “Thoughts on Myths” (Byatt 2011: 157-61), reveals the preceding intrusive frame narrative about the thin child as autobiographical. With regard to reader response, it can be observed that the reception situation represented in both The Fall of Troy and Ragnarok is multiplied by the „mirror(s)‟ in the text: the protagonist of the frame narrative is in each case a character absorbing a famous ancient literary work. However, a reiterated interlocking of frame story and nested narrative subverts the extradiegetic recipient‟s immersion in the fictional universe during the reading process. This interference disrupts the reader‟s expectation initially built up by the paratextual framings of the book titles, which promise ancient mythological epics and demand disambiguation in view of the contrast they form with the first sentences. For Byatt‟s novel, the publication in a „mythology‟ series, the dedication to her mother who gave her little daughter mythology books, and the prefatory “note on names” establish an additional paratextual framing device. 7 The opening sentence in Ragnarok reads: “The thin child thought less (or so it now seems) of where she herself came from, and more about that old question, why is there something rather than nothing? ” (Byatt 2011: 7) In The Fall of Troy the first sentences are the following: “He fell down heavily on his knees, took her hand, and brought it up to his mouth. „I kiss the hand of the future Mrs Obermann.‟ He spoke in English. Neither she nor her parents understood German, and he disliked speaking demotic Greek.” (Ackroyd 2007: 1) The paratextual framings, which contrast with the first sentences, account for a discontinuous reading experience of the extradiegetic recipient. Instead of retold famous Norse or Greek myths as indicated by the book titles, we are confronted at the narratives‟ beginnings with biographical details of persons who have 6 The Poetic Edda is traditionally distinguished from the younger Prose Edda, which was written by the historian Snorri Sturluson. 7 Pignagnoli (2016: 102; also 105) explains Gérard Genette‟s terminology (1997: 344) that separates paratexts into peritexts, which are part of the narrative as frame or interference, and epitexts, which contextually „surround‟ the published narrative either in printed or digital form (e.g. Byatt‟s 2011a article as well as websites, publisher‟s announcements etc.). Epitextual elements are published separately from the fictional work. For the novels under consideration, title, preface or afterword would belong to the category of peritextual elements, while the publication of Ragnarok in a mythology series has to be classified as an epitextual detail, which directs reader expectations. Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 54 already been addressed as avid receivers of these myths. This creates the device of the mise-en-abyme. The strategy of duplicating the story of fall or destruction as well as the reading of it by introducing an intradiegetic recipient completes this device in both novels. On the other hand, the way of interfering with the embedded narrative, thereby disrupting an immersion in the narrated world of the myth, continues beyond the openings of the novels. The ruptures take place on the intradiegetic as well as the extradiegetic level. In each of the novels, there are two narrated universes - that of the embedded or evoked mythology and that of its intradiegetic recipient - the nameless thin child, respectively Heinrich Obermann. In preference to the usual structure of the enclosing frame narrative and a coherent enclosed story, the texts present discontinuous recollections of mythologies alternating with events and impressions experienced by the central characters in the 20 th , respectively the 19 th century. For the 21 st -century reader, a repeated hampering of the aesthetic illusion is the consequence. This essay attempts at the end to clarify the purpose of this type of fragmentation in either novel. The reception situation in the „framing‟ texts shows parallels to the reception situation of the „framing‟ texts. Ackroyd‟s Heinrich Obermann is obsessed by his reading of Homer‟s Iliad which relates the War and Destruction of Troy, as was the historical German merchant Heinrich Schliemann, who spent all his wealth and much of his lifetime on financing and leading excavations on a hill in Turkey. Both Schliemann‟s biography as discoverer of „Priam‟s Treasure‟ in the ruins of Troy and the Greek epic, whose general contents is not told but presupposed and intertextually invoked, belong to the collective cultural memory of Europeans. They used to ignore the fact that the place in question lies in Anatolia 8 and those inhabitants of Troy were in all probability Asians. 9 In Ragnarok, with the subtitle The End of the Gods, a third-person narrator retrieves the reading experience of a little girl - presumably the narrator‟s younger self - and her situation during the evacuation in the Second World War, when she studies an English translation of the Edda. The historiographic narrative about the 1940s is as well known as Schliemann‟s biofiction, whereas the juvenile point-of-view surprises the reader. The child walks through the countryside far away from bombed British cities and finds herself absorbed by the medieval Scandinavian mythology of doom and destruction. Hitherto, the retrospective story tells us, this child had only been familiar with the Christian history of Salvation, mediated also by litera- 8 Since the founding of the Turkish state in 1923 the whole of Turkey with the exception of Thrace, which lies in Europe, is called Anatolia. For the region between the Mediterranean and the river Euphrat the Latin name Asia Minor was usual before 1923. 9 This is the novel‟s supposition. Actually, there is no historical certainty as to the origin of the inhabitants of Troy in the Bronze Age. Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 55 ture such as Bunyan‟s The Pilgrim‟s Progress. In Ragnarok and in The Fall of Troy, nemesis and the sense of endangered survival characterise both the represented modern reception situation of the thin child, respectively Obermann with his team, and the ancient „embedded‟ tales, which for hundreds and thousands of years held a position as unifying myths with a religious dimension for a cultural community. In contrast to the “Thoughts on Myth”, the three narrativised accounts in Ragnarok are worked into the „story‟ told by a third-person narrator. It is related to an uncommon authorial consciousness, merging a focalising and a narrating agency separated by more than 60 years. The narratee is kept in uncertainty about whether the narrator with his/ her adult perspective and the young protagonist who perceives and reads are meant to belong to the same person at different stages of development: There was a thin child, who was three years old when the world war began. She could remember, though barely, the time before wartime […]. She grew up in the ordinary paradise of the English countryside. When she was five she walked to school […]. (3) Her mother‟s fate too, was paradoxical. Because there was a war on, it was legally possible for her to live in the mind, to teach bright boys, which before the war had been forbidden to married women. […] Her father was away. […] She remembered him. He had red-gold hair and clear blue eyes, like a god. […] The thin child felt a despair she did not know she felt. (4) Oscillating between different levels of time and divergent states of mind - the abstract versus the imaginative and mythological - the narration intermittently and, as we shall see, irritatingly disrupts a suspension of disbelief with regard to the framing tale as well. To consider the application of this narrative technique in the presentation of the Norse myth will be a challenge for a later part of this essay. 2. The Deconstruction of Illusions In The Fall of Troy, a figural contrast is produced by the opposition of Heinrich Obermann and his antagonist Alexander Thornton. They are incarnations of „the two cultures‟, or poetical myth vs. science. Sophia Chrysanthis, a wealthy Greek from Athens, whom Obermann has lured away from her home to his excavations, soon recognises that her husband is irrational and possessed - “You believe these stories, Heinrich” (Ackroyd 2007: 13) - and eventually changes sides. Obermann regards himself as a scientist and craves a reputation as the discoverer of Troy. However, the introductory scenes depicting his courtship of Sophia show his conviction that the contents of the first epic poem of Western culture is “pure” and in a historical sense represents “the origin” (7) of the Euro- Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 56 pean world. His suppression and destruction of excavated written evidence, which proves that his persuasion of Western ancestry is imaginary and based on fiction, expose him as a swindler and mountebank. Obermann‟s elimination of everyone on his road to fame reveals him to be a criminal instead of a legendary idealist. While the mythologising biography of Heinrich Schliemann celebrates him as an icon of archaeology and empirical research, Ackroyd the historian, who has also variously dealt with mystification and forgery e.g. in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (Puschmann-Nalenz 2001, cf. Evans 2007), deconstructs Schliemann‟s claim to scientific methods and fame. The Fall of Troy exemplifies the subversive irony implied in the double refraction of „the Cretan who says that all Cretans are liars‟. Ackroyd‟s slim novel displays the “metafictional paradox” (Hutcheon 1984) or postmodern self-reflexivity of art, which can also instigate reflections on the ethical dimension of fiction. The third-person narrator of The Fall of Troy partly assumes an omniscient, bird‟s-eye perspective dominant in descriptive passages about places and landscapes. The emphasis on visualisation, just like the “strong sense of place in his work” (Unsworth 2006: online), is characteristic of Ackroyd‟s novels and accounts for the strength of the narrative‟s illusionbuilding function, which places the narratee in the ruins of Troy or its surroundings. The narrator evokes the plain in heat or storm and flood, the villages, the dwellings of people in the vicinity, or the coastal town which offers the only possibility of escape from the parallel world of Obermann‟s all-embracing “vision” (Ackroyd 2007: e.g. 93). In other sections, the personalised narrative closely follows the perspective of the characters surrounding Obermann the superman, whose name is insolubly connected with charisma and salient scholarship - a moral illusion soon to be destroyed. Without him, however, Troy would in a material sense be nonexistent for the present, because he alone believed in its preservation below the mounds near Hissarlik in the Ottoman Empire of the 19 th century. Frequently, Obermann is viewed through the eyes of his wife Sophia. Temporarily, several discoverers join the couple: William Brand, a Harvard professor interested in the findings, who enigmatically dies of a fever soon after his arrival, and the Reverend Decimus Harding, an Anglican clergyman from Oxford, whom they met on the boat, who buries Brand; there is Lineau, the blind French art historian, and finally Alexander Thornton from The British Museum, who becomes the German archaeologist‟s fatum. They serve as a foil to Heinrich Obermann‟s charismatic personality and point at his obsession with Homer. A few Turks, who are suspicious of his activities, and Obermann‟s mysterious „family‟ on the fringe underline the shady impression this idealistic searcher, whom the British especially admire, increasingly leaves on the anonymous spectators surrounding the excavations - and on the reader. While the protagonist‟s reported focalisation or introspection generally remains pale compared to outside observations by the narrator or another charac- Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 57 ter, the portrayal shown in scenes of dialogue and action becomes most vivid during represented thunderstorms and fights. The dramatic climax ends in Obermann‟s fatal accident. This also means the terminal Fall of Troy as a vision which he had sustained. The „embedded‟ story which Obermann has absorbed, Homer‟s Iliad, is the omnipresent narrative, which also seems all-powerful, mediated through the hero Obermann. In word and deed he appears invincible because of the might of his conviction that the city Homer described, praised and mourned can be found near Hissarlik, including numerous traces and memorabilia of the war with the united Greek forces. It is Obermann‟s intention to „save‟ the relics from the Turks and instead take them to Athens, which he considers their native place (42; 57; 59). In this manner, the Iliad, quoted and referred to, constantly penetrates the foregrounded „frame story‟ about the excavation and the accompanying disputes, which forms the narrative present. Obermann apparently wins in a sequence of confrontations, though undeniably with obscure methods: Professor Brand mysteriously dies after some kind of allegedly supernatural experience in a cavern, while evidence of the highest importance for Thornton‟s scholarly work is destroyed by fire and his life twice endangered. On the other hand, rising suspicions about the madwoman in the farmhouse and the helper Leonid alias Telemachus - Obermann‟s son - are dissipated. 10 In spite of her husband‟s overbearing, intimidating manner (“Home is here. With me. I am your home”, 11) it is Sophia who comes closest to unmasking him as a bigamist, dubious researcher and criminal. He is eventually killed by his horse Pegasus when he tries to recapture Sophia who escapes together with Thornton. But prior to this totally unforeseen ending the demonic Obermann achieves his nearvictory through his vision of Troy as the Greek “City of Homer” and through his obsessive creation of a discourse, by which the Trojans become Europeans belonging to the same ethnicity as the Greek “Achaeans”, with whom they were at loggerheads. Thus, Obermann establishes the population of Troy as the forefathers of the Occident. “Every day on Troy is a holy day. It is a sacred place. A shrine” (26) he lectures his wife. Obermann‟s speeches assume religious overtones. His belief derives from ancient Greece; his life becomes a sacrifice to the ancient gods (44; 204). Finally he is regarded by his son as Zeus and answers, “We are all gods, Telemachus, when the occasion demands it” (200), confirming his heroism. A place-bound polytheistic religion blends with his overt cultural chauvinism. With the words “Here we are part of the world soul” (201; 207) he claims the excavation place as Homer‟s Ilion for European heritage and European researchers. 10 Heinrich Schlieman had called his son Agamemnon. Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 58 Contemporaneous - that is Christian - religious rites are nonetheless performed on a skeleton found on the site (51-52). Its detection and ceremonious burial parallels Sophia‟s discovery of Obermann‟s gloomy past and of his first wife‟s live „burial‟ as an imprisoned madwoman. Even though Sophia excavates her husband‟s secret and reminds him of the fact that Homer‟s epic is poetry (63) Obermann recklessly tries to turn it into reality by living the fictional text (63), irrespective of all arguments which reject his misguided theories and his hubris. His digging went far below the Troy of Homer - if it is that - to an Iron-Age settlement (81), onto which he tries to imprint the details of the Homeric epic poem. The only opponent who is able to adhere to scientific methods and analytical thinking is Thornton. His letter with a report to the British Museum is intercepted; his finding of inscribed tablets and of another skeleton with traces of ritual human sacrifice mysteriously burns or falls to dust, so that Obermann can triumphantly state “we have defeated the enemy” (197). By “enemy” he means everybody who resists his despotic character and his assertiveness. However, Sophia eventually takes her stand against his tyranny when she relocates herself with his rival of the rational, cognitive party: “Your gods do not exist, Heinrich. […] They are a figment of your imagination. Of your pride” (206). Only an „earthquake‟ in the literal and metaphorical sense as deus ex machina can help protect Alexander Thornton‟s new discoveries, which prove that the ancient city of Troy was founded and peopled not by Greeks but by Asians and that the roots of Western civilisation‟s written culture lie still further east. The scientist explains to Sophia the reasons why her husband became a swindler: “He could not endure the thought of Troy [...]. Of his Troy being demolished. He saw an army of Homeric heroes. I saw a tribe of alien people who cultivated human sacrifice” (196). Though diametrically opposed, both Thornton and Obermann “saw” a long-vanished „reality‟. Is one conception superior to the other? Which one will have the more powerful impact? These rising questions are unambiguously answered by the plot development which ends in the sovereign Obermann‟s defeat. Preceding his unexpected, violent death, the Turkish overseer and Leonid-Telemachus discover a chamber in the ruins (210), where more tablets with the hieroglyphic signs that do not belong to Indo-European languages are preserved (135). Before he can realise that he has been beaten, Obermann is trampled to death in a messenger‟s collision with him on horseback. The envoy is Leonid alias Telemachus, who thus involuntarily kills his father and subsequently pays respect to Obermann‟s persuasion that his stories contained “the truth of vision” and gave Troy “its enchantment” (215). The power of fictions has been proven throughout the protagonist‟s life and beyond his grave, as Heinrich Schliemann‟s mythologised biofiction shows. “His vision makes him powerful” (93), Sophia had recognised early about Obermann. Inspiration and imagination (125) are the sources Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 59 which fuel his power and finally lead to a fanaticism also fed by cultural colonialism. 11 As Thornton states, however, no archaeologist can successfully work without illumination by a vision - neither Obermann, who is referred to as “[t]he priest” (152) and regards himself as led by supernatural guidance, nor Thornton, whom he calls a heretic (135). Thornton thinks that knowledge and a sense of geometry are necessary. Yet with the utterance, “I have often observed that the universe seems naturally to adapt to our beliefs and descriptions” (135), Thornton not only gives credit to Obermann‟s endeavours, but - anachronistically informed by post-Newtonian science - also admits to the anthropomorphous nature of all knowledge. Lineau, the blind man, who believes without seeing, takes sides with Obermann by putting the devout amateur above the man of science (137), thereby ending disputes: “This is Homer‟s Troy. Or it is nothing” (136). As a nondescript market town from the Bronze Age it would simply lose all fascination - indeed hardly any tourist would want to travel there today. While the hero Obermann, for whom believing is seeing, must die, Thornton, the sceptic without much confidence in mythology, who only believes what he sees, survives to demonstrate the results of his research to the world. He is able to maintain and demonstrate that the inhabitants of Troy had written in an Oriental language and that the origins of the „Western‟ world and its culture reach much further east than to Homer and the Greek. 12 The „truth‟ of the most celebrated poem in the history of the world (144) contradicts the facts of historical and scientific research as well as the beliefs of the Turks who live on the plain of Hissarlik. They worship their ancestors in the Homeric epic (151) and reclaim their „national heritage‟ - which meets with Obermann‟s outrage, even disgust. In these controversies his speech becomes fervent; he tolerates no objection or doubt but uses the language of a tyrant and religious fanatic. To strengthen the beliefs of his staff he leads his small party on a pilgrimage to Mount Ida, „where Paris met the three goddesses‟ to pronounce an ominous sentence. Not only does Obermann kneel and pray there on “holy ground” (160), 11 Leavitt (2007) points to the roots of the hero‟s opinionated dogmatism which borders on racism, since he is unwilling to admit that the historic Troy was founded by an Eastern people. Gittes for literary history reveals a similar cultural prepossession in several 20 th -century scholars as that discovered by Leavitt in Obermann: in connection with the device of the frame tale she rejects theories that claim Occidental and Christian literary traditions - drama and spiritual journey - as the organising principle for The Canterbury Tales and considers them biased (1983: 237; 249-50). 12 On the metafictional level this statement is corroborated: the formal prototype of the frame story also has its origins in the Orient long before One Thousand and One Nights, which also includes examples of mise en abyme: Wolf (2006: 201) sees the provenance of the literary device in Egypt. K.S. Gittes, like Seager, claims that corresponding examples from Sanskrit literature in India were translated into Arabic (Persian) in the 8 th century (Gittes 1983: 237). Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 60 but a small miracle is worked in this “sacred place” (163), while he drifts into the realm of dreamy imagination - indistinguishable from conscious deception or a theatre performance. The sculpture of a marble head, which previously represented the golden apple in their imitation of the judgment of Paris, disappears overnight. This is interpreted by Obermann as a gift the gods demanded and took away. By contrast, Thornton works on hypotheses, tries to decipher the written signs on the clay tablets (178-9) and speaks with conviction, but cautiously. He is aiming at conciliation rather than hostility or the outbreak of another “war”, which Obermann will wage against all those who do not believe. Sure of his triumph and unknowing of Sophia‟s change of loyalties and imminent flight with his „enemy‟, the hero - in one of the scenes which David Leavitt defines as “just a little kitschy” (2007: online) - chants and prays to the ancient gods (Ackroyd 2007: 203-4) before fate defeats him. His Troy as the original European heritage, imaginary and discursive, falls with him. In Ackroyd‟s novelistic representation the protagonist must die on the spot when his image of Troy „falls‟ - or fails. This contrasts with Schliemann‟s historical biography, according to which he died after an operation in Naples, aged 68 and world-famous. In this fictional portrayal the hero‟s death, in parallel to the war and the doom of the city, has been predicted by the epic poem which was Obermann‟s gospel. 13 The Fall of Troy cannot be called a proper frame story in the usual sense. The Ilias is not presented in coherent textual sections, nor does the reader find the complete traditional biography of Heinrich Schliemann here. Reading the novel requires some knowledge of both the antique epic and the modern biography. Ackroyd‟s text even takes a certain familiarity with them for granted, so that he can play amusingly with them. His novelistic arrangement, however, transcends „mere‟ intertextuality in alluding to or quoting these pre-texts. The author creates a mise en abyme out of the reception of the Iliad and produces a biographical counternarrative that at some point deviates from the historically transmitted facts of Schliemann‟s mythologised life-story, work and personality. Obermann‟s understanding of the Homeric epic, which he divests of its fictionalising qualities, forms an all-encompassing presence. On the other hand, Obermann immerses himself in the details of the poem to a point where he speaks in religious and poetic verbal expression. Thus a continual exchange and fluency characterises thus the relation between the two narratives underlying this text, which exposes storytelling and narrativisation as an unavoidable human activity. 13 Ann Jefferson argues that the end of a frame tale is always revealed in the embedded story (1983: 205). This would apply to the narrative of Obermann‟s fate and the Iliad. Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 61 3. Myth and Emplotment As an introduction to my reading of Ragnarok, I will briefly outline the mise en abyme device as used in two of Antonia Byatt‟s earlier works. She chose a complex structure of „mirrors in the text‟ implemented through writer-characters and their work in progress, especially for the last novels of the tetralogy referred to as the „Frederica quartet‟, named after the protagonist of her female Bildungsromane. In Babel Tower (1996), the third novel, three different narrative strands alternate and produce a “braiding” structure (R. Todd). While two of them portray the life and development of Frederica Potter in her social environment and are told in the present tense the third narrative line, titled Babbletower, is an antiutopian novel-within-the-novel placed in France in the historic past of the late 18 th century. Diegetically, this branch differs from the „Potter‟ plot in the novel by the use of the past tense and its immersion in the spatiotemporal setting of gothic fairytales. The fate of this dystopian novel, whose author faces a trial for obscenity but is acquitted on appeal, recalls the historic Chatterley trial of 1960. The near-homonymy of the titles Babel Tower and Babbletower already makes a relation between the „nested‟ fantasy and the framing historical novel apparent. 14 The subtitle of Babbletower, A Tale for the Children of our Time, invites both its reading as fairytale and as mirror of the narrative representation of the world in which its (fictional) author moves. 15 As a second novel-within-the-novel Frederica Potter starts writing Laminations, an experimental text reminiscent of the cut-up and fold-in techniques of William Burroughs. Laminations in Byatt‟s follow-up A Whistling Woman (2002) is well-received by several critics. However, it does not become popular or financially successful. Frederica‟s friend Agatha is the author of yet another novelwithin-the-novel: the bedtime-story Flight North written in a Tolkienesque style for her own little daughter and Frederica‟s son Leo. Like Babbletower, the fantastic story of Flight North is characterised by the remote and indeterminate situation of place and time. None of the embedded narratives is coherently told, all are marked by fragmentation. A Whistling Woman realises „the mirror in the text‟ even literally: the members of a „Therapeutic Community‟ finally convene for meditation and sermons in a „hall of mirrors‟ in an ancient farm house (Byatt 2004: e.g. 404), from which several drugged and disturbed individuals have to be rescued at the final breakdown of the community. The literalisation of the mirror metaphor, which gave Dällenbach‟s book its title, discloses a contemplative self-reflexivity of art and recipients, but also illuminates the dangers of a claustrophobic separation implied in a „spiritual journey‟ with ex- 14 Richard Todd (1997: 71) points at the multiple connection between the framing and the embedded fiction in Babel Tower. 15 For a typology of „mirrors‟ see Dällenbach‟s list (1989: 46-7). Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 62 panding consciousness, by which this group seeks to achieve a supreme level of the mind. My digression about the third and fourth books of Byatt‟s quartet exemplifies the degree of her involvement with the form and meaning of „embedded narratives‟. Her latest novel Ragnarok, however, shows exceptionality in the use of the device and an emphasis on the constructedness of the combined framing and nested stories in a mise en abyme. The result is an unusually organised, predominantly third-person fictional narrative with biographical, meta-narrative and philosophical sections. Thematically not unlike The Fall of Troy, the book Ragnarok: The End of the Gods makes war its central metaphor. War is well-remembered by contemporaries of the internal focaliser, the thin child, whose experience finally leads her to the idea of eternal war. The nested mythology, whose coherent presentation is repeatedly interrupted by the voice of the reading child, not only intervenes in the framing memories from the early 1940s, but suggests an altered world view to the young focaliser. It is prompted by the narration of the Twilight of the Gods, the embedded narrative thus “having an additional, non-chronological function as an illuminator of overall theme and design” (Jefferson 1983: 206). In spite of the prevalence of death and destruction, the opening phrase is fairytale-like: “There was a thin child […]” (Byatt 2011: 3). The child remains nameless, only gender and physical appearance are revealed. She is filled by a strong sense of loss - especially of her soldier-father - and feels a latent danger to her life due to the war. A basic paradox, which the novel realises by “metalepsis at the story level”, to use Cohn‟s terminology (105) - that is moving between two different narratives or between the Norse gods and the thin child as protagonists - is announced in the heading of the first part. 16 The section title “The End of the World” (7), which refers to Asgard and the Gods, but also hints at the child‟s and adults‟ anxieties regarding the Second World War, is immediately followed by the chapter title “The Beginning” - which introduces the child‟s reception experience. The „framing tale‟ about the protagonist‟s reading is identified as a juvenile perception, by the narrator retrieved from her early life. Inside this frame a second narrative - that of the Christian gospel - is absorbed by the child as another “human make-up[s]“ (12) like the benevolent legends or cruel fairytales she already knows - only that she considers it less inspiring. In contrast, she appreciates Asgard and the Gods, which she reads in an English adaptation from the 19 th -century German collection of Northern mythology by Wilhelm Wägner. 17 16 Wolf notes that framing and frames are always “located on another logical and/ or physical level than the framed” (2006: 7). 17 Byatt remarked in an article (2011a: online) on her book that after having read the myth about the creation of the world and the Twilight of the Gods as a child she came “to the conclusion that the Christian story was another myth, the same kind of story about the nature of things, but less interesting and less exciting.” Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 63 Both narratives „embedded‟ here - that of the life of Christ and the Nordic saga reaching from the creation of the world to its end - intermittently undergo an interruption by the tale of the thin child‟s reading and living experience. I am precisely interested in this diegetic „mingling‟ and disruption, by which the concept of mise en abyme is subverted. 18 The way and meaning of the interweaving, by which the narrated experience of the child during the war is periodically drawn attention to only to be broken off again, has provoked pejorative comments. No less a critic than American writer Ursula LeGuin feels irritated by the fragmentation of the (auto)biographical recollection intruding into stories which to the juvenile internal focaliser are indiscriminately mythological tales - Christian or pagan. “[F]or me the autobiographical element would have worked better as a framing device”, LeGuin (2011: online) states about the disorganising effect of the narrative break-up and fusion. The child‟s individual experience interrupts the presentation of the myth, and the reverse, even though the shifts in a metaleptic mode do not immediately destroy the illusion-building seduction of the narrative. 19 By repeated figurally performed narrative metalepsis it (con)fuses two stories in an aesthetic coherence, e.g. when the narrator has the thin child address her father upon his return as one of the gods from her book: “The thin child was woken, and there he was, standing in the doorway, his red-gold hair shining, gold wings on his tunic, his arms out to hold her as she leaped at him.” (Byatt 2011: 148) A recently published definition of metalepsis explains how the effect is brought about, which here takes on the form of a fusion of narrative frame and embedded story: “narrative metalepsis is a text-internal transgression of hierarchically ordered diegetic universes which reveals the internal structure of the text” (Gobyn 2016: 121, emphasis in original). The extradiegetic reading experience mirrors its intradiegetic counterpart: Byatt‟s readers are confronted with a discontinuity similar to that of the child consuming the pre-text. In her English edition of Asgard and the Gods the interspersed translated scholarly comments of the German coauthor Wägner are disturbing to the thin child, especially as she cannot avoid realising that he shares his nationality with those who cause her and her parents‟ distress. This thought further disquiets her (77). Being “a thinking child”, she cannot help asking herself whether the adults are also afraid or “who were the good and wise Germans who had written Asgard and the Gods”? (82) Another interruption of the myth is effected by narratorial metalepsis, when free indirect speech results in the narrator‟s metanarrative reflections: “Whose was the storytelling voice that 18 The designs resembling „text bubbles‟, which Genette uses for narrative levels (1988, 85; 86), illustrate the device of the embedded narrative. 19 Cf. Fludernik‟s further theoretical development on shifting and metalepsis, in which she underlines this ambiguous effect (2003: 392). Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 64 gripped her imagination, and tactfully suggested explanations? ” (82) A German scholar‟s? An anonymous poet‟s? By a rapid change between temporal or story-levels and metanarrative remarks the comment of the omniscient narrator, with a voice constructed as contemporaneous to the implied reader, interweaves with those of the child-focaliser and the Norse myth: Bright Baldur was seized by sleep. […] He dreamed of the wolf with his bloody mouth […]. He dreamed of the Midgard-serpent […]. He dreamed of Hel and her dark halls […]. Most dreams, the thin child knew, are wispy and thin, can be torn away by a determined sleeper […]. But there are gripping dreams of real terror […]. She had dreams of this kind in the war time. (80-81) The child enjoys the almost pre-lapsarian abundance and beauty of nature, of plants and animals in the country and regards the city, to which she returns after the end of the war, as imprisonment. The narrative text told in the third person already hints at an ecological change: “It [the little garden in the city] was a small world, into which she had been exiled or evacuated. It was the earthly paradise that once had been.” (153). Sporadic observations such as this one illustrate how “[the narrator] can no longer enclose the subject within his frame” (Pearce 1975: 56). The framing narrative finally breaks with the “Thoughts on Myth”, obviously presented by an adult well-informed intellectual. The fear of the devastation of the world, which was worrying the little girl back in the early 1940s, is in this final section transformed into the threat of a senseless environmental and ecological ruin of the planet including the selfannihilation of mankind. The analogy of the different imagined or real destructions of the world is enabled by a final metalepsis at the discourse level, where report and political discussion replace biofiction and mythology (see Cohn 2012: 105). 20 The voice of the knowledgeable 21 st century heterodiegetic first-person narrator of these metanarrative “Thoughts on Myth” creates another, incomplete frame with missing opening (see Wolf 2006a: 187-8). It is set on a different temporal, discursive and cognitive level and probes the potential of the myth. Its appraisal of the Norse mythology with „all the brilliant destruction“ (Byatt 2011: 164), which the child found more satisfactory than the contradictory Biblical stories about man‟s fault, salvation through Christ‟s death on the cross, and God‟s love (77-8), endorses the significance of the imaginary. The narrative appendix presents an extradiegetic metalepsis and considers Edda‟s Twilight of the Gods as an allegorical anticipation of the 20 Genette‟s definition of metalepsis would only apply to the transgression realised in the “Thoughts“. According to him it is the overstepping of “a shifting but sacred frontier, between two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells” (1980: 236). Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 65 ongoing destruction of the environment. Additionally, the section of the “Thoughts” is exemplary of a metanarrative that “refers (mostly) - implicitly or explicitly - to the creation of the text the reader is holding in his hand” (Gobyn 2016: 129). In Byatt‟s - as in Ackroyd‟s - novel men are by the protagonist viewed as gods. Ragnarok understands the myth as predicting the end of the „gods‟ either in a world war (the thin child) or on a completely ruined planet (the first-person thinker). In this novel, the mythology as the embedded narrative intradiegetically supplies the interpretive help for the juvenile reader-protagonist of the intrusive „frame‟. The first person of the “Thoughts” leads the extradiegetic recipient to an understanding of The Twilight of the Gods as prophetic of a global crisis. The world where the narrator narrates can in hindsight be defined as equivalent to the world of the “Thoughts on Myth“, which contextualise the universe of the third-person narrator who told us about the thin child‟s experience. I contend that this narrator‟s world is shared by the implied author and implied reader. The world that the narrator narrates is split into the world of the musing child and that of her reading, sometimes amalgamating them. In the imminent doom of the gods, the Norse myth is blending with the World War and the ruin of the earth. The disparity between England in 1940/ 41 and the world of the medieval myth is invalidated for the child, because two modes of seeing the end of the world merge for her. A reader may or may not follow this conflation. To complicate the texture of the novel the perspectives of the focalising child as told by the third-person omniscient narrator and that of the author of the “Thoughts” are not only temporally, but also ontologically separated. A metaleptic transgression, which operates between the real reader and the real author (cf. Fludernik 2003: 392), is achieved by the “Thoughts on Myth”, which break the frame, the ontological plane and also the aesthetic illusion, but belong to the novelistic text. Obviously, the transgression of narrative boundaries in the novel does not appeal to every reader. John Harrison (2011: online) describes Ragnarok in the Guardian as “a clever, lucid, lovely book. But it isn‟t a novel, or even a story in the usual sense. It‟s a discourse on myth”, where discontinuity, eco-political polemics and offenses against fictional storytelling by obvious didactic intentions may irritate the reader. The publication in the Canongate Myth Series, on the other hand, may guide reader expectations contrary to these authorial intentions. Similarly, Peter Conrad states the textual hybridity of Ragnarok in The Observer: „Ragnarok is three books in one, and none of them is anything like a novel.” (2011: online) These critics have their expectations of “a story in the usual sense” disappointed by the ostentatious violation of boundaries, which characterises Ragnarok (cf. Gobyn‟s theoretical discussion, 2016: 123-4). I would like to argue that the reproduction of the ancient Norse myth by Byatt has metamorphosed into a postmodern novel - a novel in which two finely graduated levels of fictional storytelling are created, one of Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 66 which - myth - acts upon the other - the remembered empirical reality of the early 1940s (cf. Cohn 2012: 111). The “Thoughts” are added as a third (exterior) level which contributes to the discourse on myth, principally by stating that - irrespective of the anachronism - the myth tells something about us, the 21 stcentury readers. Ragnarok shares the varying degrees of fictionality with The Fall of Troy, since prior to Ackroyd‟s novel Heinrich Schliemann‟s historical biography and reputation were already narrativised; as are the thin child‟s memories. The dissolution of generic borderlines, the combination of styles and text types with divergent profiles - mythology and biofiction, non-mimetic and mimetic, creative or scholarly - are more intense and deliberate in Ragnarok than even Byatt‟s earlier novels suggest, where critics sometimes claim that the intellectual burden of science or philosophy is too much for the characters. This fusion of the seemingly disparate worlds in Ragnarok is informed by an immersion in fantasy and love of learning, apart from the associative thinking stimulated by the organising consciousness behind the narrators. Although Byatt stated in the Guardian shortly after publication that she had not intended to write an allegory or a sermon, LeGuin also observes that a comparison of “the downward behaviour of the Norse gods with the dire direction of modern civilisation is almost inevitable” (2011: online). As the novel‟s concluding “Thoughts on Myth” proclaim, Ludwig Feuerbach‟s dictum “Homo homini deus est” (Byatt 2011: 22; 169) permeates the novel. The human nature of the gods in the Scandinavian mythology asserts the aphorism. The author persona remarks in the “Thoughts”: “I have said that I did not want to humanise the gods” (169), yet also maintains that the myths about god(s) tell stories about man - a statement, she affirms, that went beyond the scope and comprehension of the child who is deeply concerned with these myths. Painful fundamental human experiences like that epitomised in the mother-godhead Frigg after the death of her son Baldur are equally ascribed to the gods and flow into reflections on loss (96-102). The mind of the third-person narrator has the capacity of an adult and is able to explicitly link them with current issues, which may also trouble the present reader. The quoting of Hobbes‟ “Homo homini lupus est” (42) underlines that catastrophes are man-made. The presumptuously omnipotent behaviour of humans raises them to a godlike position, from which their self-inflicted fall will overthrow them. Ragnarok‟s entangled narratives display fragmentation as well as mutual interpretation. 21 The thin child‟s reality intrudes into wartime night- 21 Cf. Wolf‟s definitions of “direct interpretive help” in the relation of frame and embedded narrative (2006: 27-8). His n. 53 explains the term mise en cadre as the inversion of mise en abyme. This phenomenon is illustrated in Byatt‟s Ragnarok or Babbletower: the embedded legends interpret the „framing‟ stories. Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 67 mares and the adult narrator‟s consciousness (80-2). The voice rooted in the 21 st -century writer‟s world, however, controls both the mythology and the juvenile focaliser‟s responses. Confronted with the wartime experience - and subsequently with the impoverishment by urbanisation - the young protagonist‟s „comparison‟ between Christian religious teaching and Ragnarok ends in favour of the ancient Norse mythology, which assumes the impact of prophecy or eternal truth: The gods of Asgard were punished because they and their world were bad. The thin child, thinking of playground cruelty and the Blitz, liked to glance at the idea that gods were bad, that things were bad. That the story had always been there, and the actors had always known it. (122-3) The myth of the gods who irrevocably destroy their world and themselves has here become a powerful and everlasting image, especially when science has made us aware of our exploitative and polluting drive. Thus, Byatt achieves in Ragnarok a straddling of two contrastive „cultures‟ and narratives by introducing in the frame the split into a focalising figure and a narrating voice. The child who is fascinated by the mythologies responds emotionally, while the narrator‟s, and even more the firstperson debater‟s final interpretation of the myth are informed by historical and scientific knowledge. The stylistic and thematic interests displayed in Ragnarok are also not unknown in Byatt‟s work. As Richard Todd foretold in the mid-1990s, a “closure of the „fantastic vein‟ discerned in Julia Corbett‟s fiction represent[s] a path Byatt‟s own fiction has not taken” (1997: 74). The statement‟s accuracy has repeatedly become evident through embedded fantastic narratives by fictional writer figures and Byatt‟s engagement with myth, lately seen in Ragnarok. 22 In the reproduced Ragnarok, which is characterised by the „intrusive frame‟ and oblique mise en abyme, Byatt makes hyperbolic use of textual types and techniques whose beginnings can be traced back to her earlier fictional work. That the thematics of the de-mythologisation of religion and crisis of faith are also addressed reveals itself as another element of continuity extending to her latest novel. 23 22 For Byatt‟s insertion of poetry or invented fiction in other works see Steveker, regarding Possession see also Campbell (2004: esp. 107-11). Annegret Maack gives an interpretation of “The Djinn in the Nightingale‟s Eye”, another frame-tale by Byatt. 23 Cf. Johnson (2012: 81, 85-6, 99-103), who mentions Ragnarok as a culmination point in Byatt‟s development regarding the topic of faith. Even though Johnson considers Ragnarok a “frame story” (100) she pays no further attention to its diegetic and narratorial peculiarities. Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 68 4. The Results: Distancing, Disruption, Disillusion Referring to the title of this article and the opening definitions I conclude that the concepts of “frame” and “nested narratives” are being undermined in The Fall of Troy and Ragnarok. Only at first sight does Byatt‟s fictional text display the framing device by chapters entitled “A thin child in wartime” (2011: 3) and “The thin child in peacetime” (147). This structure is, however, contravened by the interaction and mutual interpenetration with The Twilight of the Gods. As a result, the „flaw‟ of a constant interference of one story with the other can be seen as an asset - depending on the unreliable reader (see e.g. the quoted reviews of Ragnarok). Both novels move between two distinct narrative levels, one of which is the representation of an ancient poetical myth, the other its unique reception experience. In Ragnarok the child‟s emotional immersion in an aesthetic illusion through the mythology proves powerful and additionally inspires her ethical and philosophical reflections, while for the 21 st -century reader the illusionary force of the Norse saga is disempowered by the distancing frame story. The latter‟s effect is equally impaired, as LeGuin regretfully intimates, because Ragnarok disappoints the reader expectations of an (auto)biographical framing tale as an entity, which the chapter titles at the beginning and end supported. I have argued that a synergy effect with a keen awareness of the analogy is achieved by this interplay of different narrative levels. Byatt‟s appended “Thoughts on Myth”, placed on the eco-political discourse level, account for the heterogeneity in a narrative text, and equally serve to point at humanity‟s self-inflicted apocalypse. The novel also illustrates the poststructuralist re-conceptualisation of „discourse‟: “History - both private and public - is discourse; so too is fiction.” (Hutcheon 1984: xiv) The blending of myth and life-story is even more complete in The Fall of Troy. Ackroyd has practised a blurring of the borderlines between representations of different kinds of „reality‟ - material or imaginative - since his earliest novels, for instance in The Great Fire of London, 24 and he is also famous for his fictional biographies. He stages the empowerment/ dispowerment paradigm in The Fall of Troy not on the metanarrative, but on the story level, using the synergy of a „framing‟ tale - the history of archaeological excavations - with a „nested‟ narrative - the Iliad - for an ironic effect. He chooses fiction to challenge the degree of verisimilitude in Obermann‟s beliefs. In the hero, the aesthetic illusion manifests itself as a delusion to be recognised by others. Thereby, the quest for the „truth content‟ is rendered parodic by Ackroyd, mocking not least the reader. 25 The “Russian Doll” image applied to The Fall of Troy becomes a simile for 24 Cf. Puschmann-Nalenz 2009. 25 See Hutcheon (1984: 49) for this aspect in the theory of the postmodern novel‟s self-reflexivity. Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 69 fiction itself. Heinrich Obermann had received the mysterious power he exerted from his addiction to the Greek mythologies and became an Olympian hero in his own as well as in posterity‟s eyes, as the authorial voice - playing with the reader‟s knowledge (or ignorance) as a blank space - sardonically insinuates. The central character desperately tries to make reality imitate art and fact fiction, but this paragon of enthusiasts - like Schliemann a victim of aesthetic illusion - is, contrary to historical facts, physically and academically defeated. His downfall occurs in an illusion-building narrative resembling a circular argument. The analogy between the illusion-destroying plot of the story and the temporariness of a fiction reader‟s suspension of disbelief becomes the sting of Ackroyd‟s novel. Like Ragnarok, it ascribes prophetic qualities to the myth. Obermann, who fought for victory over the negation of the Iliad as historiography or guide book, falls in contrast to Schliemann, and with the hero falls his idea of Troy. In Ragnarok, the Norse myth assumes for the child and the narrator the significance of an allegory for catastrophes of the 20 th and 21 st centuries. 26 Byatt‟s peritextual chapter “Thoughts on Myth” represents a third, nonfictional level of discourse, which incompletely frames the fictional „stories‟. For The Fall of Troy, which is the more unified of the two novels, this third layer would be the contextual frame of the extradiegetic, epitextual controversy about Schliemann‟s work, which led to the Battle of Troy of the early 21 st century (see n. 5). Both novels epitomise the rejection of a binary opposition of fact and fiction as well as of frame and enclosure in the literary text. As a result, these novels demand a continual adjustment of the reception process, underlining its performative character. In connection with the term mise en abyme, one has a visual or narrative device in mind and - since the late 20 th century - also the reader‟s often vain groping for „firm ground‟ and „the truth‟ behind unreliable fictions based upon fiction. 27 For the two novels I wish to point to yet another understanding of mise en abyme - looking (or placing) into the „abyss‟, which is also the centre of the whole picture. The term can be interpreted as literally hinting at an apocalyptic end. The shocking invasion of a grim „reality‟ into the imaginary, and the inverse, namely the 26 Cf. Hutcheon: “At a certain point, however, the mise en abyme becomes so extended in size that it is better described as a kind of allegory.“ (1984: 56, emphasis in original) Wolf speaks more generally of the “dominance of the embedded story” (2006: 182, emphasis in original). 27 Cohn comments on the reader‟s anxiety or vertigo, which is caused by interior metalepsis (2012: 110-1). Several of Borges‟ Ficciones employ it to the effect that the flesh-and-blood reader can no longer rule him/ herself out of being part of a fiction or simulacrum. Several Science Fiction novels e.g. by Philip K. Dick or Daniel F. Galouye (Simulacron-3) achieve a result that destabilises the fact/ fiction respectively reality/ illusion binary in a similar way. Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 70 core of the supernatural tale imposing itself on modern life, are represented in the novels. In Byatt‟s most recent novel the comprehension of the world out of joint becomes possible through reading the nonmimetic myth. The discourse on the Second World War, so far by many remembered as a first-hand experience, is at present, and independently from official historiography, undergoing the complete metamorphosis into multiple narratives. 28 They have partly existed ever since, but now increasingly become the remembered narratives of our ancestors‟ stories. That narrativisation proves extraordinarily powerful is evident in Heinrich Schliemann‟s popularly transmitted biography, which was mythologised while he was still alive. It has become the legend about a hero who believed in his mission to turn poetry into reality and „succeeded‟ in providing fiction with the status of fact, so that the general public was convinced of his vision‟s truth content. Ackroyd‟s authorial narrator demythologises the biographical glorification - but in The Fall of Troy the media of the exposure is fiction, thereby illustrating the famous paradox. Narrativisation has for me become a central concern in the study of culture and literary analysis. In this article the potential of narrativisation has taken centre stage. The graded fictionalisation of imaginings or empirical and historically documented situations into „stories‟ has required a new look at the concept of frame tales and embedded narratives. With respect to the two novels in hand, an overlapping of these concepts with intertextuality in literature is conspicuous. Regardless of whether the alloy becomes disconcerting or enlightening for our reading experience, the combining of diverse interacting „tales‟ demands the reader‟s renewed attention. It may extend to ethical questions such as „truthfulness‟ in narrative or the variety of representations of global developments. Seen from the angle of reader response, the concurrence of text and paratext initially increases his/ her alertness in receiving „old wine in new wineskins‟. These two rather short novels have experimented with a scale of different textual types and devices to the effect that the question „What is a Novel? ‟ appears more challenging than before. Further study of the varieties of the „narrative discourse‟, to use the wording of Genette‟s book title, is also invited by these two hitherto little regarded volumes. References Ackroyd Peter (2007). 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