The Prestige, tedg, Emphyrio

After watching Nolan's carefully crafted movie dealing with obsession, artifice, and the conundrums of identity; and reading tedg's oracular review of it on imdb, I'm convinced that Nolan would be a good choice for directing a movie adaptation of Emphyrio, given his sensibilities. Narrative sleight-of-hand, an ending that forces us to reevaluate everything, a moody and obsessed protagonist...

Emphyrio is more intricately structured than other Vance novels, and possesses some of the "folding" that tedg enjoys so much. More precisely, there is an interplay between three levels: the life of the legendary hero Emphyrio, the threatrical piece based on such life, and the life of the rebel Ghyl Tarvoke, which comes to parallel both.

At one point, in the good old shakespearian tradition but with a twist, we have a theatrical representation within a theatrical representation. The play-within-the-play scenifies the tragic life of Emphyrio, who is killed at the end. The catch is that the actor (more like a living puppet) is killed for real too, in all levels of the play. The outermost fictitious level deals with a puppet who is set to star as Emphyrio, but doesn't want to die, and escapes. For a time, at least.

The setting of the story was the puppet theater itself. One of the puppets, conceiving the outside world to be a place of eternal merriment, escaped the theater and went forth to mingle with a group of children. For a period there was antic and song; then the children, tiring of play, went their various ways. The puppet sidled through the streets, observing the city: what a dull place compared to the theater, unreal and factitious though it was! But he was reluctant to return, knowing what awaited him. Hesitating, delaying, he hopped and limped back to the theater, singing a plaintive little commentary. His fellow puppets greeted him with restraint and awe; they too knew what to expect. And indeed at the next performance the traditional drama Emphyrio was presented, with the runaway puppet cast as Emphyrio. Now ensued a play within a play, and the tale of Emphyrio ran its course. At the end, Emphyrio, captured by the tyrants, was dragged to Golgotha. Before his execution he attempted to deliver a speech justifying his life, but the tyrants refused to let him speak, and inflicted upon him the final humiliation of futility. A grotesquely large rag was stuffed in Emphyrio's mouth; a shining axe struck off his head and such was the fate of the runaway puppet.

(Jack Vance: Emphyrio)

Of course, Ghyl Tarvoke watches the whole thing:

Ghyl and Amiante walked homeward through the dusk, each occupied with his own thoughts. Ghyl spoke. "Father."

"Yes."

"In the story, the runaway puppet who played Emphyrio was executed."

"Yes."

"But the puppet who played the runaway puppet also was executed!"

"I noticed as much."

"Did he run away too?"

Amiante heaved a sigh, shook his head. "I don't know. Perhaps puppets are cheap... Incidentally, that is not the true tale of Emphyrio."

(ibid.)

I confess the whole episode taxed my powers of comprehension when I tried to parse it for the first time.

Death soaring from the innermost levels of recursive narratives, finally breaking out in reality. Or is it the reverse? Webs of nested histories, that only gain true weight and meaning through the sacrifice of the actor in the real world? The analogies with Christian doctrine are left as an exercise to the reader.

By the way, who's that tedg guy? His cool disregard for the human element in movies, and his emphasis on structural sophistication, narrative self-reflexivity, and recursion, leads me to hypothesize that he is some kind of artificial intelligence (possibly of extraterrestrial origin) that tries to find abstract patterns on human art while ignoring the emotional aspects extraneous to him.