Examples of Mise en Abyme (in form)

April 2, 2008 6:57 AM

Recursion filter: I recently came across the phrase 'Mise en Abyme' and have become fascinated by recursion in literature, language and film. What writings have used these themes in their form to address the questions they posed?

The idea of presenting the form of a text/film/critique so that it exemplifies the question posed fascinates me (so for instance, if I asked 'what is recursion?' and my essay contained a footnote which refered back to the text which then refered back to the footnote, then in some simple sense I have a form of recursion in my essay).

What writers, film-makers etc. have integrated aspects of Mise en Abyme into their work in this exemplary manner? (I am more interested in non-fiction pieces, but realise that a lot of fiction out there which has used this technique are formally very unique.)

I have a copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach sitting on my bookshelf, staring at me. I am also well versed in the works of Foucault, Barthes and Derrida.

Thanks for reading

posted by 0bvious to writing & language (18 comments total)

Ooops. I missed a '/' from the end of the 'recursion' link. Any chance of putting that in for me mefi editors? Thanks
posted by 0bvious at 7:05 AM on April 2

If you don't want to read all of Godel, Escher, Bach (which is worth it!), take a look at Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, which contains several excellent essays dealing with recursion in art, language, and programming.

If you can stomach the often substandard prose, much of Philip K. Dick's fiction uses recursion and Mise en Abyme to explore the relationship between perception and reality, albiet somewhat obliquely. See especially The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
posted by googly at 7:08 AM on April 2

Palmer Eldritch is a personal favourite. Thanks for the reminder...
posted by 0bvious at 7:09 AM on April 2

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (a novel) has that russian-doll, story-within-a-story (-within-a-story- etc.) thing going on, which seems to fit what I'm reading on the wikipedia page about Mise en Abyme.
posted by vytae at 7:13 AM on April 2

As far as movies go, Incident at Loch Ness seems like it would be an example, though I can't claim to have seen it myself. Otherwise, Adaptation fits as well.
posted by ictow at 7:31 AM on April 2

Oh, and The Five Obstructions.
posted by ictow at 7:34 AM on April 2

Samuel Beckett's Endgame has been called a theatrical Mise-en-abyme by-Adorno, I think? Make of that what you will, Endgame is such a baffling, enigmatic play that its setting has been interpreted as everything from nuclear winter to the inside of a skull.
posted by Ndwright at 7:57 AM on April 2

I think the film "The Science of Sleep" has elements of this. Gondry is great at weaving in this kind of trickery.
posted by loiseau at 8:58 AM on April 2

Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (and the movie adaptation of it). Also Georges Perec’s unfinished novel 53 Days.
posted by misteraitch at 10:19 AM on April 2 [1 favorite]

Blindness, a novel by Jose Saramago, is written in such a way that the flow of the narrative creates an obfuscation similar to the blindness experienced by the characters.

I used this kind of recursion once in an essay analyzing a German novel in my undergrad, but that doesn't really help you. Let's see...other examples of this:

Oscar Wilde's play Salome, deals directly with language imitating music / music imitating language. But subtly so.

This person has written an essay on recursion in music and mathematics (specifically fractals).

Mozart created a Musical Dice Game that would generate minuets and canon pieces based upon the principles of recursion and chance.

And from pop culture:

The movie Adaptation: When one of the fictional brothers dies, the movie begins to resemble the narrative structure that the dead brother preferred for the movie....begging the question of whether that brother is actually dead or if he actually won the struggle in taking over the writing of the movie.
posted by whimsicalnymph at 10:49 AM on April 2

I would say Infinite Jest since the book is structured like a Mobius Strip (or lemniscate {although Wallace himself claims the subplots of the book are structured as a Sierpinski Gasket}). There are also several other metafictional recursions throughout the novel: In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace imagines a fungus that grows on another fungus; a nuclear reaction fueled by the byproducts of nuclear reactions; and movies whose audiences watch an audience watching them. For this kind of derivative process, he invokes the adjective annular, which the O.E.D. defines as "ringlike" or circular, but which presumably shares some roots with "annul" - to make into nothing.
posted by mattbucher at 11:27 AM on April 2

Experimental fiction that may be right up your alley:
-Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller...
-Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves and his more recent book Only Revolutions
-Short stories by Borges (if you haven't read him, go get one of his books now; you will really like him)

Previous questions about:
-recursive narratives
-experimental authors
posted by LobsterMitten at 11:37 AM on April 2

Thanks for the input...

I really should have mentioned Borges in the beginning. Very much up the alley of what I am looking for.
posted by 0bvious at 11:44 AM on April 2

Some great stuff, thanks. I should probably have mentioned Borges in my pre-amble...

Any non-fictional ideas or examples you can think of? Or any specific writers/theoreticians who grapple with these concepts (especially in literature and poetry)?

As an after-thought I realised that specific poems must exemplify a recursive structure. In particular some of the Concrete Poets came to mind. Any other ideas, as always, would be much appreciated.
posted by 0bvious at 12:00 PM on April 2

Check out this article on Oulipo poetry that talks a bit about recursion techniques.

"The Oulipo anticipated the potentiality of recursion early in its history: in a report submitted to the Collège de Pataphysique (an institution dedicated to the pursuit of the “the science of exceptions”), the group proclaimed that computers would make possible the abstracting [of] commonplaces from the structures of commonplaces—and then a “squared” topology of these places, and so forth until one attains, in a rigorous analysis of this regressus itself, the absolute, the Absolute “whose armature,” according to Jarry, “is made of clichés.” (Motte 1986a, 50)"
posted by mattbucher at 2:43 PM on April 2

John Barth's collection of short stories, Lost in the Funhouse, fits very well. In particular, check out "Menelaid." Here's a line from roughly the middle of the story:

“ ‘ “ ‘ “ ‘ “ ‘ Love! ’ ” ’ ” ’ ” ’ ”

Maybe a little pretentious, but I love him.
posted by themadjuggler at 7:57 PM on April 2 [1 favorite]

Paul Auster's New York Trilogy does this pretty well, as do some stories by Donald Barthelme (and his acolyte Dave Eggers). I'll also add Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, which seems in line with your interests.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 9:43 PM on April 2

Some sweet stuff on here. Thanks muchly
posted by 0bvious at 4:30 PM on April 4