When asked to map out some discoveries made while reading
the Manuscript found at Saragossa, I couldn’t help but find similarities
between its structure and The Nights.
I was hoping Little, Big would fit in with this structure, and it does
slightly, but not nearly as well as the Nights. These nested stories do not have to end for another to begin, in fact overlap tends to occur quite often. This idea brought vocal intonation to mind, or how one speaks, because the way some cultures speak aloud reminded me of the structure of these nested stories. Jennifer was
discussing (way back when) being frustrated that the story of the sisters in The Arabian Nights would not END, and
she had no closure. This brought
the above visual to mind, which in turn reminded me of something I learned in
my French phonetics class, as well as when I wrote my blog on “reading aloud.”
The French speak in a similar way to children. What I mean by this is that their
sentences continue to go up and up and up until the very last period, when the
intonation goes down. To
illustrate this, I have recorded myself reading this paragraph:
See? I just
keep going and going and going until I get to the end. This reminded me of the way the stories
in the Manuscript go, because the overarching story keeps going up and up and
dangling until you get to the very end, and the stories in between do not help
to assuage the desire for closure. The structure of the written story reflects the structure of spoken word.
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