The Tale of Tales

by Giambattista Basile

  The collection is thus divided into five days (and there is certainly a playful false modesty toward Boccaccio in this precise halving), each containing ten tales, one per teller. Each tale is introduced by a rubric that sums up the story and a preamble that includes a summary of the audience’s reactions to the previous tale as well as reflections on the teachings of the tale to come (often leading to discussions of favorite Renaissance and Baroque topics such as fortune and virtue, wit, envy), and concludes with a moralizing proverb. Days 1–4 open with a description of the various pastimes of the group—banquets, songs, and dances—and conclude with the performance of extrinsic works, lengthy satiric dialogues that in spite of their decidedly unpastoral nature go by the name of “eclogues” and are recited by characters who are servants of Tadeo’s court but not tellers themselves. Whereas in the tales proper the way in which characters are depicted and their adventures unfold only hint at Basile’s views, the eclogues give full rein to Basile the moralist and commentator on social ills. The first, “The Crucible,” has as its theme the contrast between appearance and reality, a favorite Baroque topos; the second, “The Dye,” deals similarly with the ways in which the true motivations of individuals are masked and made to seem their opposite by society; “The Stove” treats the fleeting nature of all worldly institutions and pleasures, which ultimately result in tedium; and “The Hook” presents a theme of the greed and thirst for material wealth that lead to the search for personal profit by any means possible. The eclogues thus provide a counterpoint to the narratives by which they are surrounded: satires in the grotesque-pessimistic Baroque mode, they are a darker and more realistic note amid the optimistic fantasy of the tales.

  Elements of an overall narrative organization, both within the confines of each day and from day to day, are present, although not to the degree of the rigorous thematic arrangement of a collection like the Decameron. References to the frame tale are found throughout The Tale of Tales, providing a constant reminder of the genetic link between the tales and what has spawned them as well as increasing the suspense around the ultimate destinies of Zoza and Lucia. A certain thematic progression is also evident, beginning with the tales of social rise that dominate day 1: seven of these tales feature an initially poor, simple-minded, or neglected protagonist who by means of a magic helper ends up in a socially superior position. In day 2 Basile takes the reader into more “fantastic” realms, where the emphasis, in the protagonists’ journeys, is less on the final social legitimation of the traveler than on the adventures encountered in the course of the journeys themselves. The esoteric and, in general, magic are also more pervasive in these tales, as is discussion of the effects of envy and gratitude. Day 3 expands the theme of violation of conventional hierarchies to include tales of protagonists (mostly female, bourgeois, or both) who actively rebel against destinies that have been prearranged for them (usually marriage) by astutely manipulating their surroundings and fashioning their own fates, thus adopting strategies very different from the heroes of the first two days, who much more passively await their change of fortunes. The preambles move away from discussion of envy, gratitude, and fortune and instead figure their tales as parables of obedience and disobedience, in which the latter brings the most rewarding results. Day 4 is almost entirely devoted to stories of both magical and not so magical transformations, while at the same time continuing to showcase the active human intervention that characterizes the tales of the third day. Day 4 thus legitimates, by promoting them to the level of bona fide metamorphoses, the transgressions of natural and social boundaries that in day 3 have a more individual character. Finally, the tales of day 5 have much less of an apparent organization around central themes or motifs but instead constitute the culmination of the experiments with themes and rhetorical techniques introduced in the first four days. It is significant that the two tales that do share a similar motif focus on the creation of a spouse out of “raw” materials gleaned from the organic world or from the imagination (5.3 and 5.6)—an apt metaphor for Basile’s fairy-tale project itself.

  READING THE TALE OF TALES

  Let us begin with a very basic question: what is the meaning of the second part of The Tale of Tales’s title, “Entertainment for Little Ones”? To those familiar with fairy tales through later collections such as the Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales (first ed. 1812), Perrault’s Stories or Tales of Past Times (1697), or the anthologies of tales so widespread since the early twentieth century, reading The Tale of Tales can be a revelation. The tales were and are clearly not addressed to an audience of children, and adult readers may find themselves more intellectually and aesthetically engaged by this dense and willfully labyrinthine text than they had imagined they could be by a collection of fairy tales. Even if the title does refer to one of the possible functions of the fairy tale—to entertain children—and children were certainly included in oral storytelling activities at Basile’s time and long before, they became the target audience only later, in the eighteenth and above all nineteenth centuries. Thus, the collection is decidedly not for little ones. The frequent mentions of “nursery stories” and the old wives who tell them refer instead, I believe, to the variety of languages and genres that merge in The Tale of Tales. When, for instance, at the end of the frame story prince Tadeo calls for tales “of the sort that old women usually entertain the little ones with,” he speaks of the larger popular or folkloric culture; it was common practice during Basile’s time to conflate children’s culture with “low” culture, which was often seen as childlike or primitive. At the same time, masking the tales as children’s pastime could have been an effective strategy for encouraging acceptance of this absolutely novel genre by the literary elite among whom the tales originally circulated.

  Basile’s audience would have been determined by its taste or lack of taste for such an idiosyncratic genre; it would also, of course, have been limited by its ability to actually read, or understand, a work written not in standard Italian but in a dialect. By using Neapolitan to re-create his narrative material, Basile thus not only simulated the oral tale-telling situation (in which the “mother tongue,” not the acquired “Tuscan,” would have been used) but also asserted his faithfulness to the native culture that nurtured those tales. And, as we have seen, Basile was not alone in this sort of self-conscious adoption of dialect as a literary language.

  Basile’s project is a fascinating early example of an “ex-centric” text (a term coined by Linda Hutcheon in her discussions of postmodernism), a work that highlights its own marginal or hybrid status and exploits it as a means for a critical engagement with dominant traditions and discourses. Even if the audience for such a work was probably closer in reality to the elite group of the frame tale (prince Tadeo and members of his court) than to the one Tadeo conjures up in his speech on tale-telling (solidly middle class, with its artisans, merchants, doctors, and lawyers), it was an audience of eclectic aesthetic tastes representative of the evolving literate public as a whole in a period that brought significant shifts not only in the system of genres, but also in the reception of cultural products.

  That The Tale of Tales begs a sophisticated audience is quite apparent from the language in which it is written. Hyperbolic description, long-winded accolades, flamboyant metaphor, bloated word lists, endless strings of insults, and deformative citations of the most diverse authors and traditions can at times overshadow the bare storyline to the point of rendering it almost an afterthought. The way the tales are narrated is just as spectacular as what is narrated therein; episodes are memorable as much for how they are drawn as for the events they evoke. Who can forget the poignant farewell pronounced by Cienzo in “The Merchant” (1.7) as he leaves his beloved Naples, in which he recalls the prime landmarks of his city as well as its abundant culinary wonders? Or the account, somewhere between repulsive and hilarious, of a king’s tryst with a haggard old woman in “The Old Woman Who Was Skinned” (1.10)? Or the pages of insults he
aped on a sponging neighbor in “The Buddy” (2.10)? Basile’s very Baroque pyrotechnics may please more or less, but it cannot be denied that they are part and parcel of the stories he tells (which make some recent attempts at abridgment seem so awkward).

  Another technique for engaging polemically with convention is found in the intertextual references woven through the tales, which generally serve to bring the themes, characters, and language of the “illustrious” traditions of classical antiquity or the Renaissance down to the level of everyday—(albeit fairy-tale)—reality and frequently to laughable parody. For example, in “The Myrtle” (1.2) a prince attacks a group of envious courtesans who have tried to end his beloved fairy’s life: “with the heart of Nero and the cruelty of Medea, [you] made an omelet of that pretty little head and minced up these lovely limbs like meat for sausage.” Nero and Medea, emblems of ferocious cruelty, here give added force and solemnity to the prince’s imprecations—at least until the courtesans’ evil actions are likened to those of an overzealous cook. Or, in “The Goose” (5.1), a prince who stops in an alley to relieve himself and then uses what he thinks is a dead goose to wipe himself ends up with the beak of the very live goose stuck to his underside, “like a feathery Salmacis to a hairy Hermaphrodites.” The reference is to the nymph Salmacis, who prayed to keep the unwilling Hermaphrodites in her arms forever, resulting in the fusion of the two into a hermaphrodite; the incongruous juxtaposition of the two contexts creates an irresistibly comic effect, in which a dramatic story of amorous aggression is demoted to an aggressive but mundane search for toilet paper.

  Basile’s manipulation of Renaissance classicism is even more ambitious; the overblown descriptions of princesses and hags, gentle beauties and ogresses that are a distinguishing feature of The Tale of Tales reveal a reworking of the literary portraits that were a centerpiece of the Renaissance love lyric. The sort of rhetorical acrobatics we find in The Tale of Tales was very much part of the Baroque aesthetic, and Basile misses no chance to exhibit his virtuoso skills in passages like the two below. The first depicts the heroine of 4.5, “The Dragon.”

  She was the most resplendent thing you could find on the whole earth: her hair was a set of handcuffs for the cops of Love, her forehead a tablet on which was written the price list for the shop of the Graces of amorous pleasures, her eyes two lighthouses that signaled the vessels of desire to turn their prow toward the port of joys, her mouth a honeycomb between two rose hedges;

  The second describes the ugly and envious co-protagonist of 3.10, “The Three Fairies.”

  [She] was the quintessence of all cankers, the prime cut of all sea orcas, the cream of all cracked barrels. Her head was full of nits, her hair a ratty mess, her temples plucked, her forehead like a hammer, her eyes like a hernia, her nose a knotty bump, her teeth full of tartar, and her mouth like a grouper’s; she had the beard of a goat, the throat of a magpie, tits like saddlebags, shoulders like cellar vaults, arms like a reel, hooked legs, and heels like cabbages. In short, she was from head to toe a lovely hag, a fine spot of plague, an unsightly bit of rot, and above all she was a midget, an ugly goose, and a snot nose.

  What is striking, besides the sheer length of these descriptions, is the range of metaphorical fields that they comprehend—in the first, for example, those of law enforcement, commerce, navigation, and agriculture—and, specifically, the contamination of registers. It is this sort of playful admixture that highlights not only Basile’s strategy of deformation with regard to tradition but also the important role that the exploration of untrod stylistic territory has in the project of forging a new literary genre.

  Perhaps the most ubiquitous metaphorical play is found in the many descriptions of the sun’s movements, interpolations common enough in the epic and the pastoral, but wielded to novel effect in The Tale of Tales. As has often been commented, barely a fairy-tale event goes by without the sun rising or setting on it. But far from serving exclusively as an oblique meditation on time—a favorite Baroque obsession—these periphrastic interpolations are employed as pretext for the encyclopedic survey of daily activities, trades and professions, and social customs and practices that together constitute a whole other collection of “micro-narratives” of the busy, polymorphous material world that was the kingdom of Naples of Basile’s time. Thus we hear of what happened “before Dawn had hung the red Spanish coverlet from the window of the East, to shake out the fleas” (5.8), or when “the Sun, like an unsuccessful whore, began to change quarters” (2.6), or “as soon as the Sun opened its bank to pay out the deposit of light to the creditors of the day” (4.9), and so forth.

  Metaphor is found when a word or groups of words are used not in their customary or literal sense but in a context where they assume another meaning, so that identity between two unlike terms is established (such as the relationship between “mouth” and “honeycomb” in the description above). It is a trope of transformation and transport (translatio); dissimilar objects—often vastly so with the metafora ingegnosa of the Baroque—are united in an attempt, more than to describe or imitate the “real” worlds of phenomena, to effect, in the words of Frank Warnke, an “imaginative modification” of the same,12 and thus create “marvel” through the unusual couplings. The metamorphosis effected by metaphor (the honeycomb that becomes a mouth, or vice versa) also highlights the transformations endemic to the fairy tale itself, on the thematic plane: the endless possibilities for its characters and locales to become what they are not by crossing seemingly insurmountable geographical, class, and even species lines (peasants become royalty, humans bears, and so forth). And as we have seen, the narrative representation of metamorphosis is paralleled by a radical experimentation with metaphor that goes beyond the strictly textual to include the “transformation” of multiple languages and traditions into a uniquely woven end product.

  The stylistic hybridity of The Tale of Tales also comprehends the appropriation of techniques common to oral narration, a logical choice considering the associations of both the genre (the fairy tale) and the language (Neapolitan) with oral culture. We have already considered how the frame scene in which the tale-tellers are selected both cites the oral archetype—a group of old wives telling fairy tales—and revises it by placing this activity in a very different context of orality, the court conversations or “entertainments” theorized by Baldassar Castiglione and others and intensely practiced at the courts and academies that Basile frequented.

  It may be argued that some of the “rougher” aspects of Basile’s style that are immediately apparent—the long, run-on sentences often connected by unsophisticated coordination of the “and” and “but” variety, extensive use of participial constructions, inconsistencies of tense and agreement, replication of lexical elements, and the like—can be attributed to a lack of final textual revision on the part of the author. But the reader will find that many of the “characteristics of orally based thought and expression” as described, for example, by Walter Ong are fully at home in The Tale of Tales’s “additive rather than subordinative” syntax, its “aggregative rather than analytic” style that makes use of “epithets and other formulary baggage,” the predilection for “agonistically toned” exchanges, redundancy and copia, the interplay between repetition and variation, the tendency to catalogue and list, its episodic structure, and so forth.13 For example, one of the foundational conceits of Basile’s literary project—exploring the treasures of Neapolitan culture—is frequently expressed in the form of parenthetical lists: of medicines, contemporary fashions, birds, fish, culinary specialties, games, songs, dances (these last especially evident in the introductions to days 2, 3, and 4), and more. Among those, the most encyclopedic catalogues of The Tale of Tales are of linguistic items such as oaths, proverbs, and, above all, tirades of insults possessing a near physical force (another characteristic of oral culture, according to Ong). This one, for example, is delivered at the climax of tale 2.10 to a parasitic friend who refuses to t
ake no for an answer.

  Now we’ve really filled the spindle! [. . .] You act like an occupying soldier who wants to scare us out of our possessions! A finger should have been enough, but you took the whole hand. [. . .] He who lacks discretion owns the whole world, but he who will not measure his actions is measured by others, and if you have nothing to measure with, we have reels and rolling pins! And finally, you know what they say: “A nice face deserves a nice pounding”! [. . .] You can go find a toothpick if you think this inn is open for your rotten gullet! [. . .] And if you’re a dinner spy, a bread gobbler, a table cleaner, a kitchen sweeper, a pot licker, a bowl shiner, a glutton, a sewer pipe; if you’re ravenous and have a wolf’s appetite [. . .] then go to some other parish, go pull up the trawl net, go pick rags from the garbage dump, go look for nails in the street gullies, go collect wax from funeral candles, and go unplug latrine pipes so you can fill your gorge. May this house be like fire to you! [. . .]

  Even the pervasive punning and wordplay whose urbane manipulation of Baroque conceit was one of the reasons Italo Calvino deemed Basile “an odd Mediterranean Shakespeare” may constitute a simulation of the need, on the part of the oral storyteller, to use every means at his disposition—and the showier the better—to keep his audience’s ears perked.

  On the shore of thematics and characterization, the reader is presented with a morally ambivalent universe in which, for the very reason that their humanity is portrayed with some degree of complexity, protagonists and antagonists undercut our expectations of classic fairy-tale types such as the strong and ingenious hero, the passive and obedient heroine, the upright and just king, the evil ogre, and the like. In this Basile may actually be closer to the paradigms of oral storytelling of his time (when, we should remember, children were a negligible share of the audience), but if we contrast his moral vision to that of authors with whom the fairy tale is more readily associated today—the Brothers Grimm, above all—the differences are enormous. All of Basile’s tales except one or two end well and in this sense affirm that the actions of the winning protagonists are the “right” ones for attaining marriage and riches. But how the heroes reach that end tends to be far more convoluted, ethically, than the itineraries of their brothers and sisters in the Grimms’ tales. “The Cinderella Cat” (1.6), for instance, is the earliest European version of one of the most beloved tales of the canon, familiar to many in later versions in which the heroine is painted as a virtuous martyr: a girl “whose gentleness and goodness were without parallel” (Perrault); “good and pious” (Grimm). The protagonist of Basile’s tale, on the other hand, is a conniving strategist; hardly helpless and even less virtuous, her final triumph results from a criminal intervention in the events of the story. She first attempts to better her lot by killing her stepmother, under the guidance of her teacher (and soon-to-be stepmother number two), and then, when her loyalty is not repaid, claws her way into an even more attractive milieu. Thus, regardless of the final moral, which states “those who oppose the stars are crazy”—only one of many that prove to be inaccurate fits for their tales—Basile’s “Cinderella” tells the story of a worldly young woman’s construction of her own destiny.