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Three: Framed
- Fordham University Press
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105 t h r e e Framed Out of Bounds Detha’s version of the story of the switched heads provokes a fundamental question: What ethical landscape does a community map for itself in its very framing devices? Common sense tells us that the exercise of translating a story as a telling requires in turn that members of a community use material inherited from the past to mark out a narrative space in the present that they envision future generations might happily and hopefully step into. The very bounds of the community are thereby established in such a gesture. I have already suggested that this space is neither the lost unity that Romantics pine for in nationalist movements, nor the utopia that revolutionaries dream of, but something more flexible, fluid, and as heterogeneous as its many speakers. The riddle of belonging that we considered in Chapter 1—that what I say already includes what you say to me—reveals to speakers that they 106 Framed are necessarily, as Terry Eagleton puts it, “caught up in a pleasurable play of shifting solidarity with others” that assumes a form collectively imagined .1 Thematically, the story of the switched heads teaches us to question the fixity of the line we draw distinguishing our bodily selves from those of others; Detha’s version has us meditate on this riddle to question in turn the fixity of the line we draw distinguishing one value system from another. If the frame story of Detha’s version of “Chouboli” were to be switched with four of the embedded narratives written eight centuries earlier by Somadeva in the Katha Sarit Sagara (“The Ocean of the Streams of Stories”), then what do we imagine the value system of the resulting narrative community to be? To ask about framing devices is to ask what kind of world is being created collectively in the ongoing storytelling process we are engaged in at that moment, in comparison to other possible performances located in various points in time and space. How do we map such fluid boundaries of belonging? To begin addressing such a question, one might look at how these temporal relationships of past to present to future are posited in the narrative. Which past, present, and future do we wish to claim as our own? Here the paradoxical temporalities of Narayana Rao’s riddling community referred to in the opening chapter assume a metaphorical locatedness in riddling framed narratives that Eagleton describes as a “semiotic puzzle”: such repetitions create a space for themselves that seems both very much their own world, he observes, and yet intimately connected to the world outside.2 To judge the effect of a story such as that of the switched heads requires we first set about solving this semiotic puzzle. When we look closely at the devices framing such insides and outsides, for example, we need to understand how these two distinctly demarcated worlds—imaginary and real, inside and outside—delineate themselves in the very telling. While in the previous chapter we were presented with a similar puzzle with regard to the narratives of belonging associated with language use and storytelling circulations, here I focus on Eagleton’s concern with a different sort of revolutionary-minded appropriation—that of historical repetition. I have already argued that the final riddling stories of the “Chouboli” cycle each in their own way have challenged and even subverted the inherited rules of possession by which we relate (in both cases: Which is her spouse? To whom does she belong?). In his book on Walter Benjamin and revolution, Eagleton is interested in the ways the subversive humor of such [3.84.7.255] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:20 GMT) Framed 107 stories might tell a larger, metatextual story about our place in the world. He asks: How might we understand dialectical materialism as a big joke that history plays on us? Playfully transgressive stories such as “To Whom Does Chouboli Belong?” allow us to understand these rules of relation in a way that does not assume the tales can be categorized sui generis as strictly subversive nor ultimately conservative but that instead sees them as narrative rituals leading us to consider more carefully the function of playful transgression in the cultures in which they circulate (including our own). Following Eagleton, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have likewise dismissed the standard line of inquiry which asks whether the licensed release of carnival—especially as depicted in Mikhail Bakhtin’s euphoric...