From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale

By Nancy L. Canepa

From Court to Forest is a critical and historical study of the beginnings of the modern literary fairy tale.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: May 1, 1999
• ISBN: 9780814338308

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From Court to Forest

From the Court to Forest

Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale

Nancy L.Canepa

WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS DETROIT

COPYRIGHT © 1999 BY WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS,

DETROIT, MICHIGAN 48201. ALL RIGHTS ARE RESERVED.

NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT FORMAL PERMISSION.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Canepa, Nancy L., 1957–

From court to forest : Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti and the birth of the literary fairy tale / Nancy L. Canepa.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8143-2758-3 (alk. paper)

ISBN:13 978-0-8143-3830-8 (ebook)

1. Basile, Giambattista, ca. 1575–1632. Pentamerone. I. Title.

PQ4607.B5P4 1999

853'.5—dc21                                                       98-43947

THIS VOLUME WAS PUBLISHED WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF A FUND

ESTABLISHED BY THELMA GRAY JAMES OF WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY

FOR THE PUBLICATION OF FOLKLORE AND ENGLISH STUDIES.

A Carmelo e a nostra figlia Gaia

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1

Introduction

Lo cunto de li cunti: A Cinderella of Literary History

The Origins of the Literary Fairy Tale

Defining the Literary Fairy Tale

Fairy Tales and Reality

The Editorial and Critical History of Lo cunto de li cunti

2

The Life and Times of Giambattista Basile

The Kingdom of Naples

The Wandering Courtier

Intellectual Life: The Courts and Academies

3

The Cultural Background of Lo cunto deli cunti).

From Renaissance Novella to Baroque Fairy Tale

From Italian to Neapolitan

The Lettere and Le Muse napoletane

4

Rites of Initiation

The Frame Tale

Rites of Passage (Tale I.1)

Narrative Organization of Lo cunto de li cunti

5

The Disenchantment of Power: Kings and Courtiers

Monarchic Misdoings: Kings

The Dangers of Idleness: Frivolous Kings

The Benefits of Counsel: Inept Kings

The Seduction of the Same: Incestuous Kings

Abandoned Brides: Forgetful Kings

With a Vengeance: Cruel Kings

The Price of Success: Courtiers

6

The Key to Success: Enterprising Heroes and Heroines

Collaborating for Success

Deception and Disguise: Winning through Trickery

Modeling Destinies: The Creation of Fairy-Tale Subjects

7

Significant Others: Ogres, Fools, and Forests

Figures of Alterity: Ogres

In Praise of Folly: Triumphant Simpletons

Fairy-Tale Landscapes: The Case of the Bosco

8

Marvelous Metaphor

Baroque Figures

The Magic of Metaphor

The Metamorphosis of Tradition

Transfiguring Mythological Tradition

Repainting the Renaissance Literary Portrait

The Dawn of a New Day: Baroque Hybridity

9

Epilogue: The Triumph of the Carnivalesque

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My first encounter with Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti was in a graduate seminar on the topic of fairy tales and Italian literature, held at Yale University many years ago. I thank the instructor of that course, Paolo Valesio, for encouraging me to expand my interest in Lo cunto into a dissertation.

I am grateful to Dartmouth College for the support I have received for pursuing my research on Basile and fairy tales. In 1995 the Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund of Dartmouth made it possible for me to co-organize a two-day workshop on literary fairy tales in France and Italy, a marvelous opportunity for meeting and sharing ideas with scholars from a number of disciplines that greatly enriched my own work, and resulted in the publication of a volume of essays, Out of the Woods: The Origins of the Literary Fairy Tale in Italy and France. During the time off from teaching allowed by a later sabbatical and Junior Faculty Fellowship, I was able to write the better part of this book.

I am indebted to Jack Zipes for his generous support of this project since its early days, in the form of willingness to read the chapters in their various phases, invaluable suggestions and comments, mentorly guidance, and just plain encouragement. Thanks also to Paolo Cherchi and Keala Jewell for reading large portions of the manuscript.

This book would still be an idea without the inestimable contributions of my husband, Carmelo Lettere. His unswerving belief in the need to acquaint the English-speaking scholarly community with Lo cunto; the insights he has brought to our decades-long conversations about Basile, fairy tales, narrative, and other vital matters; his love—these have all made it possible to tell my own tale of tales.

1

Introduction

Lo cunto de li cunti: A Cinderella of Literary History

This book is a critical and historical study of what has been called the foundation stone of the modern literary fairy tale, Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti overo Lo trattenemiento de peccerille [The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for the Little Ones]—or Il Pentamerone, as it is sometimes called—written in Neapolitan dialect and published posthumously in 1634–36.¹). The forty-nine tales that make up Lo cunto are told by ten grotesque old women over a period of five days, ten per day for the first four days and nine in the fifth; the fiftieth is the frame tale, which opens and closes the collection. Basile was a court intellectual and academician whose Italian works brought him considerable fame during his lifetime, but it is his other literary corpus in Neapolitan, radically different in its popular content and jocose style from his orthodox courtly production, for which he is remembered today. But although Lo cunto de li cunti has been a central point of reference for subsequent fairy-tale writers as well as a treasure chest for folklorists, there has been surprisingly little critical attention devoted to it on the part of literary scholars.

Basile’s is the first integral collection of literary fairy tales to appear in Western Europe, and contains some of the best-known of fairy-tale types (Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and countless others) in their earliest literary versions. Lo cunto marks the passage from the fairy tale (or folktale, as the non-literary forms of this genre will be subsequently referred to) as an oral, popular genre to the artful and sophisticated authored fairy tale: Basile reinvents the fairy tale in literary form.² Its audience, in fact, probably consisted of the members of the provincial courts around Naples at which Basile served, where tales from it were read aloud as part of after-dinner fun and games. Besides being a seminal text in the history of its particular genre, Lo cunto is also a model of Baroque textuality, participating fully in the period’s radical innovations in literary themes and languages and intense cultural debates on the intersections of low popular traditions with high elite traditions. Lo cunto is, indeed, the most significant Italian example of the Baroque technique of conflating canonical and noncanonical traditions into an original synthesis that ironically subverts the literary—and ideological—expectations of its readers. And Basile’s re-elaboration of what must be considered a new genre also serves to offer a complex portrait of the sociohistorical and cultural contexts in which it was created, and this engagement of Lo cunto with various realities—literary traditions and social institutions, above all—is the focus of my book.

Where this approach departs from others commonly used in reading fairy tales—principally, the structuralist, the folklorist, and the psychoanalytic—is in its refusal to embrace any sort of universalization and its affirmation of the need to move beyond a consideration of the fairy tale as a monolithic genre to the recognition that it is a vital, changing form, firmly entrenched in cultural history.

The term fairy tale is connected, in the minds of many readers, to classic tales such as Charles Perrault’s late-seventeenth-century Contes (which, although it contains only ten tales, includes such standards as Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty) or the Brothers Grimm’s early-nineteenth-century Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Yet many tales from these and other collections appeared in literary form for the first time in Lo cunto. Why, then, is Basile’s work—which, besides being a founding text in the history of the literary fairy tale, is an extraordinarily rich literary text in its own right as well as a tremendously entertaining one—so unfamiliar (or even unheard-of) to the general scholarly community?

It is actually not so very difficult to formulate a number of answers to the question of why Lo cunto has remained until very recently one of the most notorious Cinderellas of the history of literature. First of all, there is the linguistic reason: the fact that Lo cunto is written in Neapolitan dialect—and a very ornate, personalized version of it at that—rendered it of somewhat limited accessibility to a non-Neapolitan audience. During the latter seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, at which time writers such as Perrault and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy initiated the first of a number of fairy-tale vogues that would eventually lead to the institutionalization of the fairy tale as a literary genre, Basile’s text continued to be republished and could probably be appreciated in general fashion by some portion of educated Europeans.³ But by the mid-eighteenth century this was no longer so. Of course, even works in such an exotic language as Neapolitan may be translated (although it is often a two-step process), and Lo cunto proved no exception to this rule. Yet it is certainly indicative that, for example, the most recent complete English translation (Norman Penzer’s 1932 Pentamerone) is an indirect translation of the original Neapolitan, via Croce’s 1925 Italian translation.⁴

The fact that Croce’s translation was completed only in 1925 points to another reason for the unfamiliarity of Basile’s work among scholars until relatively recently, namely, the marginal role that Lo cunto had occupied until then in the literary tradition of the country in which it was created.⁵ This was undoubtedly due to two particular characteristics (or prejudices) of Italian literary historians with specific regard to their treatment of early modern authors, one a general tendency and the other a more specific one. First, both Italian authors and literary historians have always had a strong sense of the continuity of the illustrious canonical tradition which has as its foremost representatives Dante, Petrarch, and, to a more problematic degree, Boccaccio, and of the bello stile associated with this tradition.⁶ Men and women of letters who inscribed themselves at the margins of this tradition, or at the crossroads of high and low traditions, even while, in many cases, working from within canonical literary genres (such as the Petrarchan lyric mode), tended, until this century, to be considered at best as charming or quirky anomalies.⁷ Examples of some of these marginal figures are the women lyric poets of the sixteenth century (Veronica Franco, Gaspara Stampa, et al.) and the entire anti-classicist tradition (from Cecco Angiolieri to Burchiello to Berni, Aretino, and the macaronic poets). It is not that authors such as Berni or Folengo were not recognized by literary scholars before this century as having some place in literary tradition. But only in the last decades has there emerged the tendency to reject the categorization of them as playful eccentrics who followed the Aristotelian directive of using a low or comic register to treat low subject matter, as part of a strategy of conventional rhetorical gaming. Recent critics such as Bruno Porcelli and, in the case of Basile, Michele Rak have suggested, in a radical departure from the earlier, assimilating approaches, that behind the jocose exteriors were serious attempts to interrogate literary institutions and traditions.⁸ And if there has been this sort of critical attitude toward figures such as Berni and Aretino, it is really not at all surprising that Basile—who, we might say, marginalizes himself threefold, by adopting a low, comic style, a nonstandard literary language (Neapolitan), and, most significantly, a noncanonical genre which he transports from the oral to the literary realm—has been treated in similar fashion.

The second prejudice is a corollary of the Italian penchant for classicism, and expresses itself in the negative connotations that the period term Baroque has frequently borne during the course of Italian literary history. Only in this century have Italian scholars begun to consider the seventeenth century as a tremendously dynamic and complex period whose cultural protagonists laid down much of the groundwork for modernity, and not merely as an extravagant blot in literary history between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. One of the best examples of the pejorative light in which seventeenth-century authors have been considered is the critical slaughter that Giambattista Marino has suffered over the centuries. Although it cannot be denied that the seventeenth century was a period of extraordinary activity in all fields—indeed, as many scholars have noted, a century in which the very coordinates of the perceived world were in a state of flux—for Italian literary history it is often dismissed as the dark century, the secolo senza poesia. Even Benedetto Croce, who devoted a good deal of his scholarly energies to analyzing the Baroque and (re)discovering its authors, sums up his general judgment of it in declarations such as the following: The Baroque, like every artistic aberration, is founded on a practical need . . . which takes the simple form of a demand for and appreciation of anything that gives pleasure, in opposition to everything else, and above all, in opposition to art itself. And although Croce clearly appreciated Basile’s literary talents, and indeed considered Lo cunto the greatest literary work of the Baroque, he specifies that this is so only because in it the Baroque executes a merry dance and appears on the verge of dissolving: before Basile the Baroque was torpid; with him it has become limpid gaiety.⁹

A final reason for the scarce popularity of Lo cunto today is based on the modern equivocation of fairy tales with children’s literature. Basile’s collection was originally intended for, and quite obviously addressed to, an adult audience; its subtitle, Lo trattenemiento de peccerille [Entertainment for the Little Ones], is blatantly tongue-in-cheek. This is, of course, the case for all of the early literary fairy tales, from Straparola and Basile up to, at the very earliest, the mid-eighteenth century (for example, Mme de Beaumont’s 1757 version of Beauty and the Beast is often considered one of the texts that initiated the trend of writing fairy tales for the purpose of guiding children and young adults in their social and moral education). This is not to say that in the early modern period the audience of both oral folktales and literary fairy tales could not include children, but only that children were not their exclusive, or even principal, audience. As far as we know, folktales were told by mothers and governesses to children, but they also circulated among members of the lower classes to accompany work and lighten moments of leisure, and were told as an aristocratic pastime at courts and in elite literary circles. But when they entered the literary realm through the pen of a writer such as Basile, the intended audience became the precisely delimited and elite one of the courts, where they were told as after-dinner amusement, in a variant of the ritual of civil conversation that became so popular during the Renaissance. It was only in the late eighteenth century, and especially in the nineteenth, that the genre of children’s literature was recognized as such—due, probably, to changing concepts of the child and of leisure time. Even after the fairy tale was institutionalized as a literary genre in mid-eighteenth-century France, it was still considered, with a few exceptions, a predominantly adult genre for at least another half century.

Furthermore, Lo cunto occupies the somewhat paradoxical position of being the fairy-tale collection that is, at the same time, both closest to its origins in the oral folktale and the most stylized and artistically sophisticated of all these collections. That is, while the narrative structure—the plots—of Basile’s tales usually remains fairly faithful to conventional folkloric motif sequences (vs., for example, some of the later French authors’ tales), what Vladimir Propp would call the attributes or Lutz Röhrich the decorative elements of the tales—descriptions of characters and their environments, in particular—are wildly embellished. Indeed, often they take up a great deal more narrative space than does the unfolding of the basic movements, or functions, of the tales. For example, consider this description of a fairy’s beauty, just one of many that appear in Lo cunto, in which the progression of the classic medieval-Renaissance technique of effictio is playfully punctuated by jumps in register from, for instance, low culinary terminology to lofty mythological references (which themselves become noticeably less noble as the passage comes to an end):

. . . na figliola tennera e ianca commo a ghioncata, co na ’ntrafilata de russo che pareva no presutto d’Abruzzo o na sopressata de Nola, cosa non vista maie a lo munno, bellezza senza mesura, ianchezza fore de li fore, grazia chiù de lo chiù: a li capille suoie ’nce aveva chiuoppeto l’oro Giove, de lo quale faceva Ammore le saiette pe spertosare li core; . . . a chille uocchie ’nce aveva allummato duie cuoppe de lummenaria lo Sole, perché a lo pietto de chi la vedeva se mettesse fuoco ale butte, e se tirassero furvole e tricche-tracche de suspire; a chelle lavra n’era passataVennere co lo tempio suio, danno colore a la rosa pe pognere co le spine mill’arme ’nnammorate; a chillo pietto ’nce aveva spremmuto le zizze Iunone pe allattare le boglie umane.¹⁰

[ . . . a young maid as tender and white as curds and whey, with a line of red on her face that resembled the color of an Abruzzo ham or a Nola salami; you’d never seen such a thing in the world. A beauty without paragon, a whiteness more brilliant than any other, a grace superior to all others: Jove had sprinkled gold in her hair and Amor had used it to make arrows destined to pierce hearts. . . . The sun had lit two lanterns in those eyes, which set off fireworks, rockets, and explosions of sighs in the hearts of those who contemplated her; Venus had alit on those lips, painting a rose whose thorns were destined to prick a thousand enamored souls; Juno had milked her tits on that breast destined to nurse human desire.]

In European folktales, as well as in later literary fairy tales (such as the Grimms’), beautiful women are typically described telegraphically as the most beautiful in the world or through comparison to some precious substance: as beautiful as gold.¹¹ The above passage is typical of how Basile makes extravagant use of amplification to explode the generically spartan contours of fairy-tale description. Moreover, it should be clear from such an example that even when fairy tales originally intended for an adult audience (such as those written between 1690 and 1705 in France, during the first wave of fairy-tale production) were in subsequent centuries appropriated by the new genre of children’s literature, Basile’s collection was not at all a good candidate for this type of operation. For it is this ebullient rhetorical experimentation that is one of the most distinctive features of Lo cunto, and to delete it so as to render the text more accessible to a young readership would strip the tales of what makes them delightful.¹²

Lo cunto was, very differently from the first French collections half a century later, an isolated literary phenomenon. Fairy tales had appeared here and there in a number of Italian collections previous to Basile’s, most notably in Giovan Francesco Straparola’s 1550–53 Le piacevoli notti [The Pleasant Nights], a novella collection in the tradition of Boccaccio in which, however, only thirteen of the seventy-three novellas are actually fairy tales. As the first literary collection entirely made up of fairy tales (and framed by one), Lo cunto clearly occupies a central position in the history of the literary fairy tale. But it was not immediately followed, in Italy, by further experimentations with the genre.¹³ Only at the end of the seventeenth century, in France, when Charles Perrault, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, and others initiated a flurry of tale-writing activity, would the fairy tale embark on its course toward becoming an institutionalized genre. Lo cunto remained a grand and anomalous monument in the context of Italian and European literary history, and the fact that it did not spawn a fairy-tale tradition in Italy also contributed to its subsequent marginality.

The Origins of the Literary Fairy Tale

We should consider the birth of the literary fairy tale in the context of the many shifts in literary culture that took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These centuries saw the rise of other new genres such as the novel, the commedia dell’arte, the opera, and the mock epic, as well as significant experimentation with traditional genres. The fairy tale first appeared on the literary horizon in sixteenth-century Italy, although as a narrative form it was, of course, anything but new. Oral tales had already been in circulation for thousands of years, and had left traces in works ranging from Apuleius’s The Golden Ass to medieval romances to Boccaccio’s Decameron. Fairy-tale scholar Jack Zipes has summarized the uses to which oral tales were put in the period immediately preceding the re-creation of the fairy tale as literary genre:

[F]olk tales were told by non-literate peasants among themselves at the hearth, in spinning rooms, or in the fields. They were told by priests in the vernacular as part of their sermons to reach out to the peasantry. Literate merchants and travelers transmitted them to people of all classes in inns and taverns. They were told to children of the upper class by nurses and governesses. They were remembered and passed on in different forms and versions by all members of society and told to suit particular occasions—as talk.¹⁴

Italian novella collections of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries contained fairy-tale-like episodes, but the fairy tale reached full literary autonomy only with Straparola’s Notti and then, of course, with Lo cunto. It comes as no surprise, really, that three centuries after Boccaccio initiated the genre of the European novella with his Decameron, another Italian, Basile, was the first in Europe to create a similarly framed collection of fairy tales.

It has been argued convincingly that the initial appearance of the literary fairy tale in Italy was in part due to the pivotal role that many Italian cities had in international commerce (thereby facilitating contacts, mercantile and cultural, with other geographical areas, especially the Middle East, which had rich and highly developed narrative traditions), in part due to the intense cultural activity and high literacy rates that Italy enjoyed at that time.¹⁵ Moreover, literary interest in the fairy tale appeared at the bottom of the trajectory of the novella which had begun with Boccaccio, in a period when humanistic literary, ethical, and epistemological models were being called into question.¹⁶ In the literary sphere, for example, the crisis of Renaissance models of verisimilitude already present in sixteenth-century Italy (evidenced in the discussions regarding the epic and the marvelous inspired by the work of Torquato Tasso) and the elaboration of new literary paradigms produced, throughout the seventeenth century, a series of heated cultural debates. These were expressed, for example, in the theorizations of the poetics of the marvelous and in the polemic of the oggidiani or enemies of these days (and, likewise, later in France in the Quarrel of the Marvelous and the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns).¹⁷

Basile’s masterpiece is the culminating point of this interest in the genre, even if after its appearance the fairy tale, at least in Italy, was virtually abandoned by the literary wayside. Although numerous editions of Lo cunto were published throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, and although Basile’s influence on the French authors and on the subsequent history of the genre is undebatable, his remained an isolated effort in the context of Italian literary history. This was perhaps due, as I indicated above, to the fact that Basile wrote in a language—his own, very Baroque reworking of Neapolitan dialect—that was not universally comprehensible, thus making Lo cunto an unlikely candidate for becoming a literary model. Perhaps it had also to do with the fragmented political state of Italy at this time. A country such as France, where the fairy tale would thrive a half century after Lo cunto was published, was already a nation with a monarch and a centralized government, and the grounds for a general discourse on the civilizing process—which presupposed a sense of nation with common cultural and ideological concerns—were fertile. Italy, on the other hand, was still far from these sorts of nationalistic elaborations. Yet even if Basile’s work was more a milestone than a literary model, the use he made of the fairy tale in some way set the tone for its subsequent developments. The effervescent and often racy tales of Lo cunto thrill the reader with their dizzying playfulness, but engage equally intensely with a series of social and literary concerns pertaining to the culture in which they were produced. This heritage would be fully exploited in the next century by the first wave (1690–1705) of French tale-writers (especially female authors such as Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy), who skillfully manipulated the various marginalities associated with the fairy-tale genre to address their own issues of marginality, as well as by, in the Italian tradition, the eighteenth-century playwright Carlo Gozzi.¹⁸

By the end of the seventeenth century, with the boom of tale-writing that occurred in France, the fairy tale had begun its journey toward canonization.¹⁹ The authors—and audiences—of the first French tales, as of the earlier Italian tales, were the elite frequenters of courts and salons, and these authors lost no opportunity to use the tales to air their views on prevailing social and political conditions, sexuality, and mores. D’Aulnoy, one of the most prolific fairy-tale writers of her generation, initiated the vogue with the publication of the fairy tale L’isle de la félicité (which was embedded in the novel L’Histoire d’Hippolyte, comte de Duglas) in 1690, and from 1696 to 1698 she published several volumes of tales. Charles Perrault, perhaps the best-known member of this generation, in 1697 published his Histoires ou contes du temps passé, which included what would later become the classic tales of Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, Bluebeard, and others. The extraordinarily rich and voluminous corpus of tales that was produced during this first stage of fairy-tale development in France was comprised above all of salon fairy tales, so named because many of them had their origins in the literary circles or salons organized and attended by women in the later years of Louis XIV’s reign. Indeed, the great majority of these first French tales were by women, and were frequently used as vehicles for social critique and utopian musings.

In the years from 1705 to 1720, while the fairy tale remained an immensely popular genre, the orientalizing fairy tale took center stage. Antoine Galland’s version of The Thousand and One Nights (1704–20) was probably the single most important stimulus to the many translations, real and false, of Arabic works in this period. Also popular in these years were fairy-tale pastiches of oriental and French folkloric motifs. In the third and final wave (lasting until mid-century), writers either conventionalized the fairy tale, effacing much of the subversive content of the earlier tales (and in doing so preparing the way for its appropriation, especially in the nineteenth century, as one of the stock genres of the nascent category of children’s literature), or elaborated comic versions of fairy tales. The institutionalization of the genre was made complete at the end of the century with the publication of the forty-one-volume collection Cabinet des fées (1785–89), which included tales from the three waves.²⁰

Notwithstanding its enormous popularity (at least in France), in its early history the fairy tale was directly related to a series of exclusions. In the seventeenth century the literary fairy tale as a genre still occupied a liminal space between oral and popular cultures, on the one hand, and elite literary traditions, on the other. As such, it became in many ways a terra franca in which its authors could give freer rein to formal and rhetorical experimentation, as well as to social criticism that would not always have been tolerated in more canonical genres. Moreover, both Basile’s collection and many of the later French collections were written at the margins of the literary institutions of their times, and coincided with moments of sociopolitical instability. In the case of Basile, Lo cunto and the several other dialect works he wrote (and which were all, with the exception of a few letters, published posthumously) were not those that brought him fame in literary circles during his life. He was, instead, recognized and appreciated for his corpus of Italian works: madrigals and odes, pastorals, sacred and mythological poems. Although these Italian works are forgotten today, whereas Lo cunto has become, over the past century, a rising star in the literary firmament, in its own time the latter was probably considered an eccentric anomaly in the orthodox literary production of a court intellectual. Michele Rak has hypothesized (although no documents concerning the actual fruition or performance of the text exist) that the audience of Lo cunto may have consisted of the members of the provincial courts around Naples at which Basile served, where tales from it were read aloud as part of after-dinner fun and games.²¹

Basile wrote at a time of political and economic crisis. The Spanish-ruled kingdom of Naples in which he lived and worked as court intellectual was undergoing a period of internal refeudalization, while at the same time it was being exploited as a colony by the Spanish monarchy in a desperate attempt to finance its involvement in the Thirty Years’ War. These developments resulted in increasingly unbearable and unscrupulously managed taxation as well as recurring scarcities of primary foodstuffs, all of which helped to aliment a situation of social unrest and general lawlessness—expressed, for example, in the forms of banditry and resistance on the part of feudal lords to monarchical directives. These tensions ultimately exploded in the popular Revolt of Masaniello in 1647. This state of social and political turmoil was, furthermore, paralleled by profound changes in the function of the court intellectual, who was increasingly little more than a cultural administrator relegated to the extreme margins of the political arena.

Similarly, the majority of the fairy-tale authors later in the century in France were women who conducted their literary activity on the margins of the cultural establishment. It has been argued that after Louis XIV took power in 1651, the virtual loss of political power that noblewomen wielded in the first part of the century resulted in the rise of female authorship, and in the creation by women of a role for themselves as cultural arbiters and of a new literary space—that of the novel.²² By the end of the century, fairy tales, often intercalated in novels, had begun to occupy significant niches of this space. Moreover, in the years following 1688, which corresponded to the most intense period of tale-writing activity, Louis XIV’s regime was entering a critical phase, characterized by the lowering of standards of living, repressive social policies, and a narrow and censorious view of cultural expression. Far from conceiving of the fairy tale as an escapist genre, the tellers of this period alternately used their tales as vehicles for antimonarchical polemics and ethical critique, or as fantastic, utopian models for a transformed world in which justice, equality, and love would reign.²³ In short, the marginality of these early tales, from Basile to the first wave of French production, took on the status of a space where authors could experiment with different languages and ideological visions and sustain critiques of literary traditions and social institutions.

Defining the Literary Fairy Tale

What, precisely, were the defining characteristics of this re-created genre? That is, what makes the fairy tale a fairy tale? This would on the surface seem like an easy enough question to answer, for this century, especially, has abounded in studies concerned with the structural, stylistic, and thematic aspects of the genre. A survey of the works dedicated to the genre is well outside the scope of this study, but I would like to comment on how several of the best-known of these studies (those by Vladimir Propp and Max Lüthi) do not adequately address some of the literary fairy tale’s most notable traits and, on the other hand, to cite a number of other studies that offer insights which prove to be particularly suggestive for a discussion of the literary tale.

Propp’s groundbreaking 1928 study, Morphology of the Folktale, set forth a series of thirty-one functions or elements of action which constitute the fairy tale (though not all are present in every individual tale): "Function is understood as an act of a character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action. With regard to the sequence of functions, Propp specifies: Morphologically, a tale (skázka) may be termed any development proceeding from villainy (A) or a lack (a), through intermediary functions [which almost invariably include encounters with magical helpers and antagonists] to marriage (W*), or to other functions employed as a dénouement."²⁴ The general thematic progression of the fairy tale is, then, from a lack or a problem (a state of disorder or disequilibrium) to a resolution of the same (state of equilibrium). These functions are distributed, according to Propp’s schema, among seven dramatis personae—villain, donor, helper, princess and her father, dispatcher, hero, and false hero—to whom in turn correspond spheres of action which include specific groups of functions. Propp’s structural analysis has been criticized as being, on the one hand, too all-inclusive, since in its most general contours it could define many narrative forms that are not fairy tales. On the other hand, it has been considered too limiting, for although most fairy tales do indeed follow the lack-to-resolution progression, this is not the case for all forms that we nonetheless consider fairy tales.²⁵

The folklore scholar Max Lüthi, in his two important studies The European Folktale: Form and Nature (1947) and The Fairytale as Art Form and Portrait ofMan (1975), concentrated more on the stylistic or aesthetic characteristics of the fairy tale, as well as on thematic and anthropological issues. For Lüthi, the European fairy tale is distinguished by five essential characteristics: one-dimensionality, or coexistence of human and supernatural characters in the same metaphysical or spiritual dimension; depthlessness, or lack of representation of characters’ psychological life, environment, or history; abstract style, or linear, essentializing descriptive techniques that avoid rhetorical ornament, especially excessive use of metaphor; isolation and universal interconnection, or characters’ lack of sustained relationships or experiences which change them, and the consequent ability to enter into and exit from associations without any sort of lasting effects; and sublimation and all-inclusiveness, the lack of concreteness and realism in the fairy tale, which, although it does not offer in-depth analyses, at the same time produces an effortless interplay that includes all the important themes of human existence.²⁶

When considering a collection such as Lo cunto, it immediately becomes clear that these classic structural and thematic definitions of the fairy tale are of limited usefulness. A good part of the problem lies, of course, in the fact that studies such as Propp’s and Lüthi’s have tended to have the oral folktale, or collections that to some degree simulate orality (such as the Grimms’), as their principal point of reference, thus ignoring the crucial distinctions between oral and literary tales. Thus, although tales by an author like Basile follow fairly consistently, in terms of plot development, Propp’s sequence of functions, this is not the case with all authors. For example, one of the initiators of the fairy-tale vogue in France, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, wrote a number of fairy tales with tragic endings, including one of the first written tales to appear in France, L’isle de la félicité. In such a case, a discussion of the ideological import of these structural changes would certainly be appropriate. But, returning to Basile, much of what gives Lo cunto its unique character lies in the hypertrophic development of what Propp terms attributes: the totality of all the external qualities of the characters: their age, sex, status, external appearance, peculiarities of this appearance, and so forth. Attributes belong to those areas in which the narrator may exercise his or her creativity more freely (as opposed to the sequencing of the functions, which is rigidly fixed). Yet even though theoretically, the freedom here is absolute, Propp liquidates the question by noting that people do not make very wide use of this freedom. Indeed, the canon changes but these changes are very rarely the product of personal artistic creation. It can be established that the creator of a tale rarely invents; he receives his material from his surroundings or from current realities and adapts them to a tale. Moreover, in Basile the superabundance of these peripheral elements is highlighted by the stylistic treatment they receive, another of the freer zones about which Propp has little to say: "The storyteller is free in his choice of linguistic means. This highly rich area is not subject to the morphologist’s study. The style of a tale is a phenomenon which must be studied separately."²⁷ It is, then, the structuralist focus of Propp’s study—and, indeed, of much of the later narratological analysis that he inspired—that ultimately bears little fruit when applied to a text such as Lo cunto.²⁸

When we turn, however, to studies that have as their subject the stylistic and thematic definition of the fairy tale (such as Lüthi’s), a subject that is indeed pertinent to the study of Basile’s work, we find that these definitions prove an uncomfortable fit. In fact, Lo cunto seems to overstep just about every one of Lüthi’s categories. For example, characters’ psychological life, especially in the form of their sometimes violently emotional reactions to the situations in which they find themselves, as well as descriptions of their social and geographical environments, are often the focus of lengthy passages in Lo cunto (which contradicts Lüthi’s definition of depthlessness); as a consequence, characters are often changed as human beings (and not merely as physical entities, as in the common occurrence of metamorphosis).²⁹ And most striking of all, Basile’s stylistic techniques embody anything but an abstract style which eschews verbal ornament and metaphor. It is significant, in fact, that in the very few instances that Lo cunto is mentioned in Lüthi’s works, it is as an example of the exception to the rule.

The above considerations point to the fact that the literary fairy tale and the folktales used as point of departure by these two scholars should bear separate scrutiny, even if they do share some, especially structural, characteristics. It is outside the scope of this chapter to outline a systematic phenomenology of the literary fairy tale, but one of the overall goals of my study is to establish what distinguishes Basile’s version of the literary fairy tale both from oral folktales and from fairy tales of his better-known successors. For although Perrault and the Grimms wrote tales which today are viewed by the general public as the European classics of the genre, they had an illustrious forefather in Basile, who founded the literary model for this reborn genre, even if it was a model that would, over the centuries, be more admired than imitated.

In Lo cunto there is, then, a proliferation of what is often deemed marginal or superfluous material—in the form of elaborate portrayal of people and places, extravagant wordplay, references to social customs and realities, and oblique cultural critique, all of which are only peripherally pertinent to the progression of the tale in question. All narrative, of course, involves a dialectic between repetition and variation, tradition and innovation. There is always some adherence to the historical requirements of genre, even when these requirements are in a state of flux or re-elaboration, as is the case with the fairy tale at this point in history. At the same time, the work of an individual author transforms the generic form into something new that will in its turn effect a redefinition of the genre. In the case of Basile the scales weigh heavily on the side of innovation—and perhaps appropriately so for an author of a period whose poetics valued variatio over repetitio. It is a curious mix, this adoption of a form that has been called by Lüthi the prototype of story for its essential narrative structure, clear-cut moral categories, and lack of digressive intricacies, only to infuse it with what might at first glance seem to be bizarrely extraneous stylistic and thematic details.³⁰ These details, however, serve both to foreground the text’s situation in a given sociohistorical and literary context and to urge the reader to participate in the interpretive unraveling of the text. Indeed, there is in Lo cunto a pervasive tension between the situation of equilibrium and neutralization of contradictions toward which the fairy tale as genre conventionally moves, and the underlying threats to this equilibrium that insinuate their way into the text by means of elements incidental to the main functions of the story.³¹ The true novelty of Lo cunto lies not in any structural re-elaboration of the genre but in the figural and ideological interpolations, the references to diverse social orders and narrative traditions, that crowd the tales and disturb their illusory happily ever after linearity. This unusual interweaving of tradition and innovations, of impersonal popular material and highly personalized references to a specific cultural context, was, in fact, noted early on by Basile scholars as one of the salient features of Lo cunto.³²

What results from this intermingling of different voices and traditions is not a perfectly closed, albeit alternate world where the itineraries of characters and the unfolding of human and natural landscapes is predictable and reassuring, but, on the contrary, an open, polysemic universe where the conventional hierarchies of the fairy tale, as well as linguistic and cultural hierarchies, are rearranged or made to show their weak spots. Basile does not offer easy solutions to the question of how an archaic, oral form can, or should, be re-proposed in literary form. By refusing to substitute one cultural voice—popular or elite, low or high—for another, he dramatizes, within his text, the risks and exciting potentials inherent in any operation of cultural negotiation and exchange.³³ Michele Rak, one of Basile’s most painstaking and convincing readers, makes a related observation: "The beauty and literary quality of Lo cunto lies in the comic and sophisticated intersection of the materials of two different cultures, each extremely rich and each changed and parodied by their contact with this new narrative model. Moreover, this translation of the materials of the oral folktale into a literary form which self-consciously opens up" the contours of the genre characterizes Basile’s work as a strikingly Baroque, and eminently modern, text.³⁴

According to Umberto Eco (and many other scholars), one of the fundamental characteristics of Baroque culture is its openness, and I draw in part on Eco’s considerations when I call Lo cunto an open text. Eco defines openness, with regard to the work of art, as the artist’s decision to leave the arrangement of some of their [the work’s] constituents either to the public or to chance, thus giving them not a single definitive order but a multiplicity of possible orders, and identifies in the new epistemological awareness of the seventeenth century one of the first modern manifestations of the poetics of the open work.³⁵ A text such as Lo cunto embodies many of the aspects of the Baroque open form, which, according to Eco,

never allows a privileged, definitively frontal view; rather, it induces the spectator to shift his position continuously in order to see the work in constantly new aspects, as if it were in a state of perpetual transformation. Now if Baroque spirituality is to be seen as the first clear manifestation of modern culture and sensitivity, it is because here, for the first time, man opts out of the canon of authorized responses and finds that he is faced . . . by a world in a fluid state which requires corresponding creativity on his part. . . . He is no longer to see the work of art as an object which draws on given links with experience and which demands to be enjoyed; now he sees it as a potential mystery to be solved, a role to fulfill, a stimulus to quicken his imagination.³⁶

By subverting the formal and ideological expectations of what a fairy tale should be (which, of course, did exist even if at this time the genre had only just made its entrance onto the literary stage), Lo cunto not only satisfies the Baroque taste for the unexpected, the new, and the marvelous, but also questions, and invites the reader to question, the status of received tradition.

Fairy Tales and Reality

Lo cunto is a text that is openly engaged with the culture in which it was created. This might seem self-evident, indeed an obvious trait of any literary text, but the fairy tale as genre (including both oral folktales and literary fairy tales) lends itself particularly well to a masking of its own sociocultural specificity.³⁷ Rosemary Jackson has pointed out in her work Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion how this essential misunderstanding has persisted in readings of all varieties of fantastic texts, in which the explicit content—the unreal—is taken to be evidence of the lack of engagement with, often in the form of transcendence of, the real at all levels. She cites fabulists such as Auden, Lewis, and Tolkien as espousers of this notion of fantastic literature as fulfilling a desire for a better, more complete, unified reality, which may take the form of a backward-looking, nostalgic yearning for a lost moral and social hierarchy, or a forward-looking construction of a utopian dimension. Jackson, instead, maintains that like any other text, a literary fantasy is produced within, and determined by, its social context, and she argues persuasively for a consideration of the fantastic that takes into account its grounding in reality: The fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ‘absent.’ . . . Since this excursion into disorder can only begin from a base within the dominant cultural order, literary fantasy is a telling index of the limits of that order. Its introduction of the ‘unreal’ is set against the category of the ‘real’—a category which the fantastic interrogates by its difference.³⁸

In this view, the fairy tale, precisely by virtue of its marginality to the real world, is in a privileged position to comment on it. As we have seen above in the references to the studies by Propp and Lüthi, the relationship of the fairy tale to reality has often been glossed over or ignored in favor of a universalizing approach that pays little attention to the context in which individual fairy tales were created. Even when Lüthi, who is much more concerned than Propp with the semantic nature of fairy tales, does address this question, his view remains ahistorical: "What, when unmediated, is a spectacle for an infinite mind, the fairy tale turns into a spectacle for finite minds. The fairy tale is a counterpart of reality only insofar as it presents a contrast to its outer appearances, not its true nature. The true nature of reality is exactly what the fairy tale attempts to perceive and depict. The fairy tale conceives of itself and presents itself as a means of perceiving the essence of the real world."³⁹ For Lüthi, the fairy tale does engage with reality, but the reality he refers to is an essential conglomeration of universal human traits and not a historically—or culturally—bound set of conditions.⁴⁰

In the case of the fairy tale (vs. other forms of fantastic literature), the situation of a given work in a precise sociocultural context is further obfuscated by the tendency to regard fairy tales, even when they are literary creations of individual authors, along the same lines as oral folktales, that is, as collective, anonymous products of a tale-telling community which may span vast chronological and geographical boundaries.⁴¹ Thus, the universalizing approaches in genre criticism that Fredric Jameson has discussed, which tend to focus on semantic (identification of the worldview or essence of a particular genre) and syntactic (structural) aspects of a genre without giving sufficient consideration to how mental categories are historical and not absolute in nature, find an already receptive terrain in the particular