The Tale of Tales

by Giambattista Basile

  THE IMAGE, THE LETTER, AND THE SIGN

  The letter is the stylized image that voice and sign transmit. The act of sublimating an archetype and formalizing an art through the combination of letters is fascinating and remote, and already presented itself in complete form in the West with the Greeks. Greek civilization realized, at its apogee, a stylistic synthesis of unpredented historical value. Moreover, it took the idea of nature as mysterical center, common to the Egyptians and all the ancient world, and translated it into a more historical and less cosmic mimesis. If on the one hand writing lost its formal and sacral ties to the symbol, toward which it previously tended, on the other hand it affirmed itself as the secular instrument that we still consider it today. Cognitive and speculative paths were disciplined; knowledge became articulated and developed. Nature was no longer only celebrated but observed and investigated in an esthetic and scientific sense. Allegory, with its different levels of reading, is a testing ground for religious and protoscientific authority. With the Greeks it expanded its contexts and interpretative adaptations to comprehend various solutions: the lyric, the epic, and above all the tragic, the prince of genres for the Greeks, born to make intelligible the mysterious and hybrid dialogue between gods and men that distinguished myth.

  The fundamental particularity of literature, its tendency to fix the characters of experience, is also its most notable vocation. This experience, whether it is personal or shared, by definition annuls itself at the same time that it is perceived. The same experience that nourished rhetorical and literary codes in specific historical periods finds, in other contexts, other expressions, redefining its formal values and requiring different sorts of synthesis: new literature, new ideals, new paradigms.

  The cuntu (tale) was traditionally an oral genre (and still is today in places where it is possible to adapt its memory) of southern Italy, a form of ritualized narration that had its own discreet, concealed protocol. By convention, it is situated between the fairy tale and the Boccaccian novella. This fact is registered in the formal choices present in The Tale of Tales, some of which may be uncomfortable for us today. It also explains the text’s explicit parody—an allusion to the popular sources and common roots of Basile’s opus and Boccaccio’s Decameron.

  Even when narration is more stylized, as in the case of a fairy tale, people continue to talk about themselves: memories, voices, words. In the words of Jack Zipes,

  Once there was a time when folk tales were part of communal property and told with original and fantastic insights by gifted storytellers. . . . Not only did the tales serve to unite the people of a community and help bridge a gap in their understanding of social problems in a language and narrative more familiar to the listeners’ experiences, but their aura illuminated the possible fulfillment of utopian longings and wishes which did not preclude social integration. . . . In fact, folk tales were autonomous reflectors of actual and possible normative behavior which could strengthen social bonds or create more viable ones. Their aura depended on the degree to which they could express the needs of the group of people who cultivated them and transformed them through imaginative play and composition in “socially symbolic acts,” to borrow a term from Fredric Jameson. In many respects the aura of the folk tale was linked to a community of interests which has long since disintegrated in the Western world.1

  Although the cuntu can also be addressed to children, it intends to entertain everyone. It is, ultimately, an act of affabulatory convention and social magnetism. In The Tale of Tales the tale-telling is always enthusiastic, vital, and pleased with itself, and the storytellers engage in cheerful rhetorical competition. But Basile did not “collect” his tales only to fix the memory of orality. The Tale of Tales is a literary locus where the tales and novellas of both oral and written tradition re-encounter the mythological fable, with its metamorphoses, but even more its science of allegory—the chemistry of sentiments that constitutes it is fantastic.

  Moving toward a conception of literature based on place and perhaps identity, Basile’s enterprise aspired to attain the social and expressive depths of dialect. Today, not only in Italy but everywhere, we know that to write “differently” does not lead to a disintegration of the common language but, on the contrary, opens up a path, through writing, to territories where the “official” language cannot arrive because of its ingrained rigidity or arrogance. In places where, as in schools, the hegemonic culture feigns magnanimity while knowing in advance that the institution must ultimately serve the cruel laws of its historically established authority, to write differently makes it possible to diffuse literacy in the social and mental territories cut off from history and that have no recognized authority of their own. And yet, in the longer, but still human, duration, every contribution enriches, with or without suffering, the common language, just as in nature every tributary, whatever its course, ends up in the principal river.

  UNITARY IDEALS AND DIALECT

  With the push toward Unification and national ideals in the 1800s (and later with the advent of the Nationalists and the Gentile reforms) came the aspiration to unite culture and territory by means of a rigid cultural and institutional centralization; and even when persistent civic disorder or a cautious moral restlessness made assimilation impossible, the sense of a national interest was imposed. And so dialects were deprived of their dignity as languages, and the people who spoke them of their words. From then on the sounds of the dialects were progressively delegitimized in Italy, until from traditional sources of literary enrichment they had become sites of inarticulate laments. An artificial distance between the learned tradition and natural and social experience was thus formalized, in an institutional and in a moral sense, starting from the schools.

  In the meantime, the question of a common language had become less of a purely scholarly topic of discussion when, in peasant and bourgeois society, mass knowledge and the access to it became the declared locus of social struggle. When literacy, too, became a means of social amelioration and redemption, it was historically clear that the control of knowledge could no longer base itself on an exclusive and unlimited right.

  The greatest quality of the popular imaginary—miraculously made literature in The Tale of Tales—is an inner authority that expresses itself in the power to bring together. It is a presence that unites and strengthens, beyond both subjective values and the boundaries of folklore and against every disintegrative dynamic, a sense of relation and of human reciprocity. In particular, the spirit that animates this text disposes those who read it toward a sort of critical vigilance of the unwritten values of spontaneous cohesion. More precisely, it encourages a wariness toward whatever leads to a consideration of the individual as unreliable or extraneous, toward whatever pushes in the direction of believing that a new culture inhabited by living people is a danger to the larger group, toward conditions in which civic decay leads to a state of criminality or in which rejection is expressed in the form of a prejudicial and senseless negation of all that is excellent, out of an abstract and private sense of social order.

  A SCHOOL WITHOUT THE TALE OF TALES

  In 1960 I attended first grade on the outskirts of Paris, in Ivry sur Seine. I started second grade, but wasn’t able to finish it, because we returned to Italy, to our town outside of Lecce. My younger brother Roberto and I spoke only French, and we played by ourselves until the school year began.

  It is commonly thought that children learn and forget quickly. But I had to repeat first grade. Among the myths and pomp of a sandstone country palace, where my school was solemnly located, words changed sound once again.

  One day I drew a rooster and caused, among my classmates and the teacher, a reconciling and redemptive enthusiasm. I had found a way to prove myself and to communicate with them, and at the same time to attenuate my difficulties with the linguistic transition. But a misunderstanding was also born, and it remained latent and unrepeatable until only recently. That rooster, which I
now evoke with affection, was not the rustic animal that everyone thought it was, but the symbol of France, and, together with the merlons of the Bastille, at the time one of my favorite subjects.

  Between 1963 and 1965 I attended second and third grades in a new school building on the outskirts of town. So as to better remember those years I did some research on the class registers, where I discovered new memories and interesting information on the educational system.

  MISS ANGIOLINA’S PROSE AND THE UNIFIED STATE AS NEUROSIS

  Miss Angiolina P., born in T., was an esteemed mother and teacher. After the bell rang she calmly walked back to her honest but modest house not far from the school. She had a good opinion of me. Back then, the grades at the end of the year weren’t only expressed with numbers that went from 1 to 10, but at the end of the list of grades for each subject the evaluation was summed up with a series of adjectives. Mine for second grade were the following: “studious, neat,” and for third grade: “good student, intelligent, disciplined.” Already in second grade there were no negative traces of my re-adaptation; no signs of delay or anything else. I was a boy like everyone else! A dream come true. With a variety of adjectives that went from “slow” or “not very intelligent,” for the worst of us, to “intelligent” and “studious,” almost all of us, in fact, were admitted to third grade.

  The notes from those registers are the most authentic profile possible of the teaching practices in that school of my early years, as well as of the climate of that Italy, now small and distant. On November 25, 1963, our second-grade year, the class register declares, in a note indirectly addressed to the principal,

  In October and November each part of the scheduled program was completed with good results on the part of the class. There are some members of the class who study, but many who are not able to follow, and a few whom I despair of saving, like M., because he is truly of scarce intelligence; R., because of his many absences; T., because he is incorrigibly lazy; and I., because he is in need of particular care, constant study, and much will, all of which are entirely lacking in him. P., F., P., and A. are street boys who do not study, and I have never, in spite of promises of gifts and other things, had the pleasure of hearing them recite a memorized poem. It appears that once they leave school they lose all memory of it, and in class they are disruptive, especially the last two.

  In January, “after a medical visit,” a boy is transferred to a special education class; another two change schools. A note about a boy who’s never in school states that the parents (peasants) “although repeatedly called, have never presented themselves at school.” In March, when this boy has been absent twenty-five days in three months, it is specified that “his recovery is therefore quite impossible.” In the same note, again addressed indirectly but with all probability to the principal, “special” praise goes to the son of a doctor “who has been able to fill many gaps.” The absent boy has sixty-one absences by the end of the year. He was even absent the day of the final exams.

  In the third grade, six children stay back. Of those who pass, only eight or nine enjoy the full esteem of the teacher, and the remaining ones manage to scrape by. The adjectives used to describe their performance suggest fatigue and severe care on the part of the teacher.

  On October 31, 1964, it is noted, “Two of those who have repeated are lazy, actually extremely lazy, as are two other much older boys, whom I passed only in order to encourage them.” On March 20,1965, the teacher writes,

  We are at the end of the second quarter and there is not much left of the curriculum to cover. Many students, spurred on by me and by their families, have armed themselves with the best of will and have improved; six students, on the other hand, are incorrigible, and there’s nothing that can dissuade them from their lack of interest for school: they are often absent, they come to school without their smocks (I’ve even given smocks to some of them), and they are disruptive in class and make it very difficult to maintain discipline.

  In May 1965, at the end of the year, she adds, “The six students who have made poor progress are in the same conditions as before; they have accumulated numerous absences, principally due to negligence on the part of their families.”

  Based on the “Insufficency Report” compiled by Miss Angiolina for each of the children who stayed back, it would appear that Italian schools rejected those children on the basis of the quality of their family life. But perhaps this is an example, typical of those years, of a provincial school and a provincial petite bourgeoisie, which tells also of the historically difficult relationship between Italy as a national state and its more Mediterranean provinces.

  The truth is that the petite bourgeoisie avoided with disdain its private heritage of an impoverished past, localized in the recent memory of World War II. The early 1960s were the years in which the presence or absence of a television set at home became the cause and effect of a radical difference in attitudes and social behavior. There was a push toward mass consumption and standardization; growth boomed as the Italy of those years struggled in its feverish adaptation to modernity, which on the whole it greeted and interpreted as historical emancipation and social redemption. At the same time, the individual became a fragment of the mass, and his or her needs were anticipated in order to render consumption uniform and to treat differences as the fruit of historical backwardness or ideological dissent.

  Television arrived in Italy in 1954. In 1965 broadcasts were limited to the afternoon hours on just one channel, which telecast many popular programs. The Zecchino d’Oro, even then watched by many, was a singing competition for children. A classroom version of this program was mentioned among the activites in the 1965 class register, right after the songs in honor of the Madonna in May. These were also the years in which, in somewhat contradictory fashion, equality among children was promoted in the public school system created by Giovanni Gentile. Ballpoint pens took the place of fountain pens and inkwells. Boys and girls were rigidly separated—a mandatory black smock (white for girls) with a white collar and light blue bow (pink for girls) and a book bag made up the uniform. The bow could be a little frivolous, or elegant, or else signal negligence and thus announce the drama of dereliction; the way it was folded could influence the fate of the child wearing it.

  “INSUFFICIENCY REPORTS,” THE IDIOTS OF THE TALE OF TALES, AND THE REINCARNATION OF A SAINT

  Pierino shaved his eyebrows because they bothered him. Barefoot, he ran after diffident animals in the steppes at the outer limits of our town, which lacked all buildings but were full of obstacles. The teacher reported that he was “easily irritable,” “quite lazy,” “not very intelligent,” and “not bad at drawing.” And further: “Immature in his reasoning and ability to reflect, lacking in ideas.” If this isn’t prime material for one of Basile’s ogres. . . . Pierino’s family was healthy but “not at all educated.” Instinctive parents!

  The first tale of The Tale of Tales is the well-known “Tale of the Ogre” (1.1), and Pierino would have been an Antuono of more than pleasing temperament for the illiterate ogre who is the pedagogical genius of the tale. And there were other children, like Antonio, who fell under a spell as they listened to the teacher with their mouths hanging open, until a trickle of saliva dropped from their lips and caused them to wake up and participate, laughing themselves, in the general class hilarity. A clearer idea of what I mean can be found (putting aside all closer resemblances) in the credulous fixity of Vermeer’s girls: Girl with a Flute, Girl with a Red Hat.

  Saint Giuseppe of Copertino, the most saintly idiot in the world, was born in our parts, in Copertino in the province of Lecce, and was a contemporary of Basile. He is the saint of enchantment, of mystical raptures, flights, and other “certified” natural phenomena—the same ones traditionally evoked by the fairy tale and other accounts of spiritual peculiarity. When he was a boy he was called “open-mouth,” just like Antonio, and the difficulties in performing his ministry in the chu
rch of the time are documented in the acts of the Inquisition. Even if he was “of scarce intelligence,” Antonio was promoted, perhaps secretly helped, by Saint Giuseppe himself, who as the universal protector of students might have appeared before Miss Angiolina. And how not to think of Peruonto (tale 1.3), flying though the air astride his bundle of kindling?

  Saint Giuseppe of Copertino didn’t help Bruno, unfortunately. Skin and bones, a slacker, full of sudden comic outbursts that were like nervous tics, Bruno was considered “apathetic” in class and fell “gravely” ill for nearly two months. He was “good-natured, sincere,” and according to the teacher “of average intelligence.” But to no avail, since none of this “is applied to bettering his scholastic results.” The teacher might have asked him to chant a nursery rhyme in dialect like “Spingula malingula,” familiar and at the same time obscure in its reference to a historical fact of epochal and local relevance, as it is customarily done, with little pinches on the bony finger joints of a child sitting on one’s knees (“Spingula malingula / stocca stuccante / Fierru felante / cozza nuta / stampagnata / iessi fore / ca si cacciata / si cacciata / te l’Albania / iessi fore te casa mia”), instead of expecting a sonnet stammered in an embarassing Italian, toward which Bruno stoically confirmed his indifference. Perhaps just this small thing, in its humbleness, could have constituted a gesture of foundational importance, like all acts of love.

  Giovanni Battista was also of average intelligence, but he was “extremely negligent” and had “no sense of duty.” Among the salient aspects of his immaturity was an “inability to observe, to apply himself, and to use his will.” What can have happened to him in Germany, where he went with his family? Did he find a pot of gold coins there to bring home to his mother, thinking they were beans, just like Vardiello (tale 1.4), even if he didn’t have the help of an imp?