fabliau

The fabliau (plural fabliaux or "'fablieaux'") is a comic, often anonymous tale written by jongleurs in northeast France in the 12th and 13th centuries. They are generally bawdy in nature, and several of them were reworked by Giovanni Boccaccio for the Decamerone and by Geoffrey Chaucer for his Canterbury Tales. Some 150 French fabliaux are extant, the number depending on how narrowly fabliau is defined. According to R. Howard Bloch, fabliaux are the first expression of literary realism in Europe.^[1]

Characteristics

Typical fabliaux concern cuckolded husbands, rapacious clergy, and foolish peasants. The status of peasants appears to vary, based on the audience for which the fabliau was being written. Poems that were presumably written for the nobility portray peasants (vilains in French) as stupid and vile, whereas those written for the lower classes often tell of peasants getting the better of the clergy.

The subject matter is often sexual, that is, the elements of love left out by poets who wrote in the more elevated genres such as Ovid, who suggests in the Ars Amatoria (II.704-5) that the Muse should not enter the room where the lovers are in bed, and Chrétien de Troyes, who maintains silence on the exact nature of the joy discovered by Lancelot and Guinevere in Le Chevalier de la Charrette (4676-4684).^[2] Lais and fabliaux have much in common; an example of a poem straddling the fence between the two genres is Lecheor.

Fabliaux derive a lot of their force from puns and other verbal figures; indeed, "fabliaux . . . are obsessed with wordplay." Especially important are paranomasia and catachresis, tropes which disrupt ordinary signification and displace ordinary meanings^[3]--by similarity of sound, for instance, one can have both "con" and "conte" ("cunt" and "tale") in the same word, a common pun in fabliau.^[4]

The genre has been quite influential: passages in longer medieval poems such as Le Roman de Renart and tales found in collections like Boccaccio's Decamerone and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales have their origin in one or several fabliaux.

The standard form of the fabliau is that of Medieval French literature in general, the octosyllable rhymed couplet, the most common verse form used in verse chronicles, romances (the romans), lais, and dits. They are generally short, a few hundred lines; Douin de L'Avesne's Trudot, at 2984 lines, is exceptionally long.

Famous writers of fabliau include Jean Bodel, Garin, Gautier le Leu, Rutebeuf, Enguerrant le Clerc d'Oisi and Douin de L'Avesne.

The fabliau gradually disappeared at the beginning of the 16th century and was replaced by the prose short story. Famous French writers such as Molière, Jean de La Fontaine and Voltaire owe much to the tradition of the fabliau, in their prose works as well as in their poetry. In fact, Molière's Le Médecin malgré lui bears a striking resemblance to the fabliau, Le Vilain mire.

Representative tales

Gombert et les deus clers

A well-known storyline is found in "Gombert et les deus clers" ("Gombert and the two clerks"). Two traveling clerks (students) take up lodging with a vilain, and share the bedroom with Gombert, his beautiful wife, and their two children--one teenage girl, and one baby. One of the clerks climbs into bed with the teenage daughter and, promising her his ring, has his way with her; the other, while Gombert is "ala pissier" ("gone pissing," 85), moves the crib with the baby so that Gombert, on his return, lies down in the bed occupied by the clerks--one of whom is in bed with his daughter, while the other is now having sex with Gombert's wife, who thinks it's Gombert come to pleasure her. When the first clerk returns to his bed where he thinks his friend still is, he tells Gombert all about his adventure: "je vien de fotre / mes que ce fu la fille a l'oste" ("I've just been fucking, and if it wasn't the host's daughter," 152-53). Gombert attacks the first clerk, but ends up being beaten up by both.^[5]

The tale is found practically unchanged in Boccaccio's Decamerone and in Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale."

L'enfant de neige

In "L'enfant de neige" ("The snow baby"), a black comedy, a merchant returns home after an absence of two years to find his wife with a newborn son. She explains one snowy day she swallowed a snowflake while thinking about her husband which caused her to conceive. Pretending to believe the "miracle", they raise the boy until the age of 15 when the merchant takes him on a business trip to Genoa. There, he sells the boy into slavery. On his return, he explains to his wife that the sun burns bright and hot in Italy; since the boy was begotten by a snowflake, he melted in the heat.^{[citation needed]}

Other examples

Other popular fabliaux include:

• "La vielle qui graissa la patte de chevalier" ("The old woman who put grease on the knights hand")
• "Berangier au long Cul" ("Berenger of the long arse")^[6][7]
• "Le Pauvre Clerc" ("The poor clerk")
• "Le Couverture partagée" ("The shared covering")
• "Le Pretre qui mangea les mûres" ("The priest who ate mulberries")
• "La crotte" ("The turd")
• "Le Chevalier qui fist parler les cons" ("The Knight who made cunts speak")

References

See also

• Anglo-Norman literature
• Medieval literature
• Richeut

Further reading

• Benson, Larry D. (2006-10-03). "The Fabliaux". The Geoffrey Chaucer Website. http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/litsubs/fabliaux/. Retrieved 2009-02-26. 
• Bloch, R. Howard. (1986). The Scandal of the Fabliaux. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Crocker (ed.), Holly A. (2007). Comic provocations: Exposing the corpus of old french fabliaux. Palgrave. ISBN 978-14039-7043-5. 
• Hellman, Robert (1965). Fabliaux: Ribald Tales from the Old French. ISBN 0-8371-7414-7.  (21 fabliaux in English translation)
• Hopkins, Amanda (Autumn 2008). Chaucer and the Fabliau. http://www.amandahopkins.co.uk/downloads/Fabliaux.pdf. Retrieved 2009-02-26. 
• Lacy, Norris J. (1998). Reading Fabliaux. Birmingham: Summa Publications, Inc.
• Lawall (Gen. ed.), Sarah (2005). The Norton Anthology of Western Literature. Vol. 1. New York: Norton. pp. 1430-52.  (four fabliaux in English translation)