The Tale of Tales

by Giambattista Basile

  THE NOVELLA HERITAGE

  While it is undebatable that the complex interplay among traditions and sources is one of the distinctive features of The Tale of Tales, the generic line in which it most obviously situates itself is that of the novella, or short story. Following Boccaccio’s groundbreaking model of the Decameron in the mid-fourteenth century, the novella thrived in Italy and in Europe throughout the following centuries. The first part of the sixteenth century, especially, saw the publication of numerous new collections as well as an explosion of the popularity of the genre amid a reading public whose size and avidity for novità—just what the novella purported to offer—were growing. The novella was in many ways the ideal genre for satisfying the Renaissance curiosity about the human being in his or her multifarious social and ethical roles as protagonist of history. Due to a number of factors, among which were the Counter-Reformation and changing economic conditions, by the late sixteenth century the “bourgeois realism” of Boccaccio’s model was, however, on the wane, and the generally optimistic vision of human peregrinations ending in equilibrium gave way to a much more turbulent view of the relationship between man and his surroundings, in which it was often disequilibrium and unreined instinct that triumphed. At the same time that the forms and functions of the novella were being rearranged, the narrative content of the tales themselves was also expanding to include materials gleaned from the most diverse traditions. Italian authors augmented the traditional Boccaccian repertoire of beffe and amorous intrigue more and more with motifs borrowed from contemporary chronicles, chivalric epics, and folklore.

  The Tale of Tales marks a generic crossroads, appearing as the Italian novella was waning in both influence and production. It was one of the last great expressions of a tradition in which Italian authors were the most admired and imitated in Europe; it is undeniable both that Basile himself conceived of his collection in this manner and that “you cannot read the Pentamerone without thinking of the Decameron.”9 This is evident, for example, in the structure of the collection and in Basile’s predilection for middle-class heroes; several of the tales even resemble novellas more than they do fairy tales (the tragic “Face,” “The Buddy,” an urban novella, and “Sapia,” which bears similarity to tale 3.9 of the Decameron). But The Tale of Tales is also one of the first expressions of a nascent genre in which Basile’s brilliant but nearly solitary example would have its greatest influence outside of Italy.

  Why the choice of the fairy tale to fill the void left behind by bourgeois realism? One explanation sees the attraction to the enchanted realms of the fairy tale as an attempt to both evade and compensate for a dire social reality in which mobility was evermore restricted and active virtue seemed to count for less and less; a reality where magic became one of the only viable means to achieve social betterment and a privileged life. Others suggest, in like fashion, that by choosing to write fairy tales authors like Basile withdrew from engagement with the pressing social issues of their times. The attraction to a genre that depicts worlds driven by magic and imbued with the marvelous can certainly be read in autobiographical terms as the search for consolation from the harsh injustices encountered in the “real world”: in the case of Basile, frustration with court life. Ultimately, though, I would agree with those who contend that Basile’s work is profoundly and polemically engaged with the social reality in which it was produced.

  The fairy tale tells of the changes brought by modernity, the first effects of which make themselves visible in the realm of the family as a result of the cultural battles between urban groups and between the city and the country. The fairy tale tells the story of this historical drama through the metaphor of the journey and signals the possibility of violating the static grid of the social classes . . . the poor may become rich, peasants may become city-dwellers.10

  Indeed, a substantial number of Basile’s tales not only parodically disfigure representatives of social and political authority and the hierarchies of power in which they operate, but they also figure different paradigms of social interaction where virtuous ingenuity becomes a winning quality.

  It is not surprising that a seventeenth-century author such as Basile was drawn to a genre in which a reassuring happy ending is a standard feature. His was an age wrought by socioeconomic turmoil, an age in which vast cultural transformations could and did engender an anguished sense of the unstable, ever-shifting nature of things, and a pessimistic erosion of confidence in the human capacity to fathom reality and to act with the benefit of that knowledge. The fairy tale simultaneously embodies such anxieties and responds to them. No matter how much the fate of its typical protagonists seems controlled by inscrutable forces, they ultimately emerge triumphant in their quest to overcome even the most insurmountable of obstacles, often aided by the “magic” of powers newly discovered within themselves.

  BASILE AND THE HISTORY OF THE LITERARY FAIRY TALE

  Although Basile’s authored tales are among the earliest in western Europe, the fairy tale as genre had existed, in both literary and oral forms, for thousands of years before Basile. The oldest example of an “Italian” literary fairy tale is the story of “Cupid and Psyche” embedded in Apuleius’s second-century Latin novel The Golden Ass, which offers a prototype of the motif of the mysterious groom found in later classics such as “Beauty and the Beast.” By Basile’s time there were also, of course, well-established traditions outside of Europe that had already produced collections like the Arabian Nights and the Panchatantra.

  The advent of vernacular culture, in particular from the thirteenth century on, marked the point at which the mediation between popular and literary traditions began to express itself in the form of inclusion of fairy-tale elements in the short narratives of the novella tradition. Early collections that contained motifs and compositional devices common to the fairy tale included the anonymous late thirteenth-century Novellino, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349–50), and Ser Giovanni Fiorentino’s Pecorone (second half of the fourteenth century). A number of the cantari, epic or romantic ballads that in their early form were recited in town squares by minstrels, also had a fairy-tale structure; the cantari, in turn, were one of the most important influences on Italian chivalric epics, which emerged in the fifteenth century and were populated by dragons, ogres and ogre-like wild men, miraculous animals, and fairies. But although from the late fifteenth century on there was an increasing interest in fables of the Aesopian mold (e.g., Girolamo Morlini’s Latin Novellae [1520]), and general interest in popular culture and folkloric traditions permeated the Renaissance, until the second half of the sixteenth century the novella generally favored realistic subjects. Giovan Francesco Straparola was one of the first to include entire fairy tales in a novella collection. His Le piacevoli notti (The Pleasant Nights [1550–53]) is an eclectic mix of various forms of short narrative, and of the seventy-four tales approximately fifteen are fairy tales. Even if Straparola’s tales are not as innovative as Basile’s, he undoubtedly had a significant influence both on Basile, who reworked several of the tales, and later fabulists like Perrault and the Grimms.

  The spread of print culture, the anthropological interest that the continuing geographical discoveries inspired, and the attraction to the marvelous that permeated late Renaissance and Baroque culture were contributing factors to the reevaluation of native folkloric traditions and the attempt to transport them onto the printed page. And Basile’s work signals precisely this passage, from the oral folktale to the artful and sophisticated “authored” fairy tale. Despite its subtitle, “Entertainment for Little Ones,” The Tale of Tales is not a work of children’s literature, which did not yet exist as a genre, but was probably intended to be read aloud in the courtly conversations that were an elite pastime of the period and whose dynamics we can find described in the frame tales of many novella collections (Basile’s included). But Basile did not merely transcribe the oral materials, which he most likely heard in and around Naples and on h
is travels through Italy and the Mediterranean. He transformed them into spectacularly original tales marked by an irresistible comic verve; pyrotechnical rhetorical play, especially in the form of extravagant metaphor; and meticulous attention to the rituals of everyday life and popular culture of the time. Their moral indeterminacy can be surprising in a form often so given to explicitly drawn lessons; their characters likewise do not always meet our expectations of fairy-tale characters; and a parodic intertextuality that has as its principal targets courtly culture and the canonical literary tradition contributes further to the distinctive flavor of the tales. The Tale of Tales contains the earliest literary versions, in the West, of many celebrated tale types—Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, All-Fur, Hansel and Gretel, among others—which on the whole outdo their better-known counterparts in sheer narrative exuberance.

  In the years following its publication The Tale of Tales inspired much admiration but few further experiments with the genre; the only other Italian fairy-tale collection of the seventeenth century is Pompeo Sarnelli’s Posilicheata (An outing to Posillipo [1684]), comprised of five tales told in Neapolitan by peasant women at the end of a country banquet described in the frame story. The enormous production and popularity of fairy tales in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France saw no parallel phenomenon in Italy, and it was nearly a century and a half before the advent of another major Italian fairy-tale opus, Carlo Gozzi’s Fiabe teatrali (Fairy Tales for the Theater [1760–70]), several of which were directly derived from Basile.

  With the explosion of interest, in the nineteenth century, in the archaeology of popular traditions such as folk songs, oral poetry, legends, folktales, and fairy tales, Basile received new attention. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, pioneers in this field, wrote what has become one of the most famous collections of fairy tales in the world, Children’s and Household Tales; one of their unfinished projects was an unabridged translation of The Tale of Tales. In Italy, too, there was an abundance of studies and compilations of tales, especially following the period of Italian unification (1861–70) and the concurrent attempts to “rediscover” the roots of national identity. These include Laura Gonzenbach’s Sicilianische Märchen (Sicilian Tales [1870]), Vittorio Imbriani’s Novellaja fiorentine (Florentine tales [1871]) and Novellaja Milanese (Milanese tales [1872]), the multivolume Fiabe novelle e racconti popolari siciliani (Fairy tales, novellas, and popular tales of Sicily [1875]) by Giuseppe Pitrè, and others. Although the hybrid character of Basile’s tales—equally marked by the personality of their author and the impersonality of the “raw material,” as one early scholar, Imbriani, commented—distinguishes them from the sort of tales collected by these folklorists, without exception they recognized Basile as a groundbreaking figure whose mark on the subsequent tradition, both oral and literary, was undebatable.

  The first significant critical work on Basile of this period was Imbriani’s lengthy essay titled “Il gran Basile: Studio biografico e bibliografico” (1875). But it was Benedetto Croce, whose lifelong passion for Neapolitan culture culminated in a number of essays on Basile, who had by far the largest role in bringing The Tale of Tales to the attention of the scholarly community, if not the general public. In 1891 he published an edition of the first two days, with an extensive apparatus; a version of the introduction to this edition, “Giambattista Basile e il Cunto de li cunti,” was later included in the 1911 volume Saggi sulla letteratura del Seicento. In 1925 Croce’s complete Italian translation was issued, with another landmark essay, “Giambattista Basile e l’elaborazione artistica delle fiabe popolari” (later appearing in Storia dell’età barocca in Italia). Croce, for whom the Baroque was synonymous with artistic and moral aberration, defined Basile as an “unconscious ironizer” of the aesthetic codes of his period and considered The Tale of Tales the most supreme expression of the Italian Baroque for the very reason that in it the Baroque “dissolves” in a “merry dance.”

  As Croce was reevaluating Basile’s work in its literary and cultural context, the fairy tale was sparking interest in the fields of narrative theory and psychology. Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928) provided the groundwork for a rigorous structural analysis of the fairy tale that was later appropriated by scholars not only of folktales and fairy tales but of other narrative forms as well. Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung occupied themselves with the inner meaning of fairy tales and folk motifs, and each had disciples who dedicated full-length studies to the analysis of fairy tales.

  By mid-century Basile had been canonized as a key source in Italo Calvino’s masterly compilation, Fiabe italiane (Italian Folktales), published in 1956 and often considered the Italian equivalent of the Grimms’ collection; and in the last several decades many of the prejudices expressed by earlier scholars have given way to a more nuanced consideration of Basile’s work and the age in which he created it. In Bruno Porcelli’s words,

  The art of The Tale of Tales is no longer considered to be in opposition, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, to the tastes of its age, but in full harmony with them. Today it is all too easy to maintain that the comic and grotesque elements of the work are not an ironization of this or that element (literature, or contemporary social reality, or the popular material of the fairy tale), but that they express the need, common to so many seventeenth-century authors, to explore, by means of the comic and the grotesque, a new world, to discover expressive forms different from the traditional ones.11

  During the same period folklorists such as Max Lüthi and Lutz Röhrich were bridging more traditional folklore studies to the fields of literary criticism and cultural history, Lüthi by emphasizing the “literariness” of the fairy tale, and Röhrich by addressing the relationship between the folktale or fairy tale and the reality in which it was created. The most recent studies of Basile have capitalized on these sorts of methodological shifts, offering detailed analyses of the ways in which Basile “reconstructs” the oral, popular tradition of folktales to produce the new genre of the literary fairy tale; of the relationship between the seemingly fantastic universe represented in the tales and the sociohistorical reality in which they were written; and of how Basile’s narrative strategies suggestively foreshadow certain postmodernist narrative techniques.

  Although critical work on Basile in the English-speaking world still remains scarce (the only full-length study is my own), there are signs that this may change. In this century, Basile has already been the subject of a major international conference in Zürich (2002), a volume of essays, many articles, and a number of new translations into various European languages.

  THE STRUCTURE OF THE COLLECTION

  The Tale of Tales shares many structural features with the Decameron and other novellas as well as fairy-tale collections. The most apparent of these is its framed structure, in which the urgent circumstances of one tale—in this case, also a fairy tale—generate the telling of the rest of the tales, which in their turn lead to a resolution of the dilemma presented in the opening installment of the frame. (Basile’s re-elaboration of the framing device is, in reality, closer to the tradition of Eastern collections like the Arabian Nights than to the more typical novellistic framing technique of a simulation of reality with respect to the “fiction” of the tales within, such as we find in the Decameron.) In The Tale of Tales the frame centers around a number of common fairy-tale motifs—“the princess who would not laugh” and “the supplanted bride,” among others—and unfolds in this way: after many unsuccessful attempts to make his daughter Zoza laugh, the king of Hairy Valley finally has a fountain of oil erected before his palace. An old woman stops to collect some oil, but her jar is broken by a rock hurled by a court page, who after her outraged reaction continues to taunt her. She responds by lifting up her skirts and exposing, to the courtly audience, her “woodsy scene,” which sets Zoza laughing. At this ultimate offense the old woman lays a curse on Zoza: she must depart on a quest for her destined husband, prince Tadeo, a
nd wake him from the deep sleep in which he lies by filling a pitcher with her tears. After many adventures Zoza finds Tadeo and sets to her job, but just as she is finishing she falls asleep and the pitcher is taken by a slave, Lucia, who at that moment happens to be passing by. Lucia marries Tadeo and becomes pregnant; determined to win back Tadeo, Zoza moves into a palace across from Tadeo’s and uses three magic objects she has previously obtained from fairies to attract Lucia’s—and Tadeo’s—attention, finally casting a spell on Lucia that makes her crave tales. One of the most telling anti-Boccaccian moments occurs at the end of the frame, when Tadeo summons the ten “most expert and quick-tongued” tale-tellers of the city, who come in the form of grotesque crones: “lame Zeza, twisted Cecca, goitered Meneca, big-nosed Tolla, hunchback Popa, drooling Antonella, snout-faced Ciulla, cross-eyed Paola, mangy Ciommetella, and shitty Iacova.” They, he and Lucia, and the rest of his court then convene around a fountain outside his palace to hear tales. At the beginning of the fifth day, as Lucia is nearing her time to give birth, Zoza substitutes for an ill teller; after the ninth tale she tells her own story and reveals the slave’s deceit. Lucia, still pregnant, is buried alive from the head down, Zoza takes her rightful place as wife to Tadeo, and The Tale of Tales ends.