Fabliau



A fabliau (plural fabliaux) is a comic, often anonymous tale written by jongleurs in northeast France between ca. 1150 and 1400. They are generally characterized by an excessiveness of sexual and scatological obscenity. Several of them were reworked by Giovanni Boccaccio for the Decamerone and by Geoffrey Chaucer for his Canterbury Tales. Some 150 French fabliaux are extant, the number depending on how narrowly fabliau is defined. According to R. Howard Bloch, fabliaux are the first expression of literary realism in Europe.

Fabliaux originally come from the Orient and were brought to the West by returning crusaders; from fabliaux comes the French drama.

History and definition of the genre
The fabliau is defined as a short narrative in (usually octosyllabic) verse, between 300 and 400 lines long, its content often comic or satiric. In France, it flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries; in England, it was popular in the 14th century. Fabliau is often compared to the later short story; Douglas Bush, longtime professor at Harvard University, called it "a short story broader than it is long."

The fabliau is remarkable in that it seems to have no direct literary predecessor in the West, but was brought from the East by returning crusaders in the 12th century. The closest literary genre is the fable as found in Aesop "and its eastern origins or parallels," but it is less moral and less didactic than the fable. In its lack of explicit moralism it is much closer to the novel than to the parable: "the story is the first thing, the moral the second, and the latter is never suffered to interfere with the former."

The earliest known fabliau is the anonymous Richeut (ca. 1159-1175 ); one of the earliest known writers of fabliaux is Rutebeuf, "the prototype of the jongleur of medieval literature."

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

When the fabliau gradually disappeared, at the beginning of the 16th century, it was replaced by the prose short story, which was greatly influenced by its predecessor. Famous French writers such as Molière, Jean de La Fontaine, and Voltaire owe much to the tradition of the fabliau.

Cast of characters, audience
Typical fabliaux contain a vast array of characters, including cuckolded husbands, rapacious clergy, and foolish peasants, as well as beggars, connivers, thieves, and whores. Two groups are often singled out for criticism: the clergy and women. The status of peasants appears to vary, based on the audience for which the fabliau was being written. Poems that were presumably written for the nobility portray peasants (vilains in French) as stupid and vile, whereas those written for the lower classes often tell of peasants getting the better of the clergy.

The audience for fabliaux is estimated differently by different critics. Joseph Bedier suggests a bourgeois audience, which sees itself reflected in the urban settings and lower-class types portrayed in fabliaux. On the other hand, Per Nykrog's argues that fabliaux were directed towards a noble audience, and concludes that fabliaux were the impetus for literary refreshment.

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

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

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

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

Some representative tales:

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

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

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

Other examples
Other popular fabliaux include:


 * "La vielle qui graissa la patte de chevalier" ("The old woman who paid the knight for favors.")
 * "Berangier au long Cul" ("Berenger of the long arse")
 * "Le Pauvre Clerc" ("The poor clerk")
 * "Le Couverture partagée" ("The shared covering")
 * "Le Pretre qui mangea les mûres" ("The priest who ate mulberries")
 * "La crotte" ("The turd")
 * "Le Chevalier qui fit les cons parler" ("The Knight who made cunts speak")
 * (Dit de) La vieille Truande