Chaucerian Fabliaux, Cinematic Fabliau: Pier Paolo Pasolini's I racconti di Canterbury

Despite claiming first prize at the 1972 Berlin Film Festival, Pier Paolo Pasolini's I racconti di Canterbury has never garnered widespread scholarly acclaim. Many Pasolini scholars have condemned the film or apologized for its failings, especially in comparison to the preceding film in Pasolini's Trilogia della vita, Il Decameron. Sandro Petraglia, for example, criticizes I racconti di Canterbury as an outright failure when contrasted to Il Decameron: "I racconti di Canterbury è un brutto calco divitalizzato . . . Tutte le storie del primo film si sono coagulate nel secundo in una preziosa ma sottile operazione di rimasticamento" (105) ("The Canterbury Tales is a poor devitalized copy. . . . The stories from the first film all have coagulated in the second one in a mannered, but subtle, act of rehashing").1 Martin Green summarizes the negative response to I racconti di Canterbury as focusing on "its unevenness, its amateurish editing and acting, and its obsession with sexual intercourse, scatology, and male genitalia" (46). Without question, a large portion of the audience of I racconti di Canterbury deems the film a blatant artistic failure.

Although Pasolini's emphasis on intercourse, scatology, and genitalia may provoke his viewers' disdain, we must view these tropes, not as an adolescent interjection into his reconstruction of the Chaucerian world, but as an integral part of his artistic motivation. Pasolini, through his creative decisions as writer and director, privileges a world of fabliau over other medieval genres evident in Chaucer's texts. Thus, it is critical to view I racconti di Canterbury as a cinematic vision of a now extinct genre, the medieval fabliau. Through the lens of the fabliau, the faults of I racconti di Canterbury fade and the film's comic brio and aggressive, transgressive force come into sharper and more humorous focus.

Chaucerian Fabliaux

Since my argument is that scholars have overlooked Pasolini's debt to the fabliau, a brief review of the genre may be helpful. The fabliau, which flourished in thirteenth-century France and which Chaucer used as the basis for many of his tales, candidly and hilariously depicts a world of erotic obscenity, scatological excess, earthy pleasure, and sexual betrayal. Reading Charles Muscatine's description of the fabliau, one can see that it applies equally well to I racconti di Canterbury:

[T]he . . . fabliaux seem relatively unimportant; they are certainly unpretentious. Some of them are narratives so slight as to raise the question of why they were written down at all. They have further tended to repel interest, or at least public discussion, for their frequent prurience. Some of them are no more than extended "dirty jokes." (2)

Unpretentious, slight, repellent, prurient, dirty-these words both describe the generic trappings of the fabliau and call to mind criticisms of I racconti di Canterbury. Thus, criticizing the film for its faithful adherence to the tropes of the genre would be similar to criticizing science fiction films for portraying extraterrestrial life or westerns for depicting gunfights. Rather than seeing I racconti di Canterbury as an artistic failure due to Pasolini's decision to foreground the fabliau, a genre unknown to many as it died with the waning of the Middle Ages, we should view the film on its own terms as a cinematic fabliau.

Certainly, Pasolini privileges the fabliau over any other Chaucerian genre. The sketches of I racconti di Canterbury, in order, are based on "The General Prologue," "The Merchant's Tale," "The Friar's Tale," "The Cook's Tale," "The Miller's Tale," "The Wife of Bath's Prologue," "The Reeve's Tale," "The Pardoner's Tale," "The Summoner's Tale," and "The Summoner's Prologue." Of these ten episodes, six-"The Merchant's Tale," "The Friar's Tale," "The Cook's Tale," "The Miller's Tale," "The Reeve's Tale," and "The Summoner's Tale"-are fabliaux.2 "The Wife of Bath's Prologue" may not be a fabliau per se, but Alison of Bath represents a fabliau ethos in her hearty sexuality and boisterous personality; likewise, "The Summoner's Prologue," with its depiction of a swarm of friars in Satan's anus, needs little manipulation to reveal its fabliau spirit.3 Although Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale" is genetically a sermon that incorporates an exemplum and retains its ostensible moral valence in the film, Pasolini nevertheless injects its beginning with typical fabliau humor. Even "The General Prologue," a fairly formal and highly stylized affair for Chaucer despite its overarching ironies, is imbued with fabliau themes in Pasolini's vision. Thus, although Green observes that the "emphasis on the bawdy tales . . . [results in] a serious distortion of the complexity and grandeur of Chaucer's conception" (46), this distortion is obviously purposeful.4 Ignoring the wide range of Chaucerian genres-romance, animal fable, dream vision, saint's life, folktale, lai, moral treatise, tragedy-Pasolini creates a world of fabliau rather than one that provides viewers with a representative sampling of the Chaucerian canon.