Boccaccio's Fabliaux: Medieval Short Stories and the Function of Reversal

Conclusion

Conclusion In this study I have suggested the ways in which reversal participates in a paradigm shift in reading literature. The closed, didactic system of literature, intended in large part for a community of listeners, cedes its place in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to an open literature of choices, whose audience is increasingly private, intimate, and individual: a reading public in the modern sense. As a device, reversal provides a way to situate the Old French fabliaux in relation to other medieval texts, since it is a characteristic of fabliaux that distinguishes them from other short narrative forms. Reversal operates in the language, the literary themes and social norms, as well as the structure of the fabliaux. It also shapes the manuscript collections that preserve the fabliaux. The three types of reversal outlined in this study— chiasmus, narrative or sociogenic reversal, and inversion—reveal the specificity of the fabliaux and the nature of their adaptation in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. By evoking the question of readership in his frame narrative and inscribing an audience that also functions as storytellers in the cornice, Boccaccio sets forth a model reading public that is fully engaged in understanding the tales they hear and tell. Indeed, the Decameron’s frame bridges the gap between writer and reader, producer and consumer, text and imagination, inside and outside that this paradigm shift in reading embodies. The majority of this study has concentrated on the narrative and structural dynamics of texts that produced this shift, in particular the technique of reversal in the fabliaux and the Decameron as crucial to influencing the audience’s reception of, and involvement with, literature. The example of La Grue has indicated the ways in which the fabliaux can combine Eastern and Western narrative traditions through inversion and narrative reversal in a way that prefigures the joining of these traditions in the Decameron. In chapter 2 I have shown that chiasmus in the fabliaux undermines the ostensible lessons in the texts, while this same figure supports the didactic aims of fables. In this way, the fabliaux challenge single interpreta- Boccaccio’s Fabliaux 164 tions of literature central to didactic texts. Similarly, the use of reversal in the fabliaux influences the interpretation of other texts in Western story collections . Whereas the framed Eastern collections point to one lesson, Western collections are open to multiple interpretations. The anthologies that preserve fabliaux contrast with the didactic frames of Eastern narrative collections because , in the Western compilations, the fabliaux provide not negative exempla in relation to the other texts, but rather different interpretive options that are equally valid. Reversal serves to disrupt traditional didactic views of literature in favor of presenting hermeneutic possibilities for the audience of fabliaux, particularly to their public of literary adapters. For this reason, I also considered the ways in which Boccaccio drew from the fabliaux tradition and the “fabliaux manuscripts” for the Decameron. Both the fabliaux and Boccaccian novelle use reversal to bring together opposites, in particular different narrative discourses. In doing so, they give the various parts new meaning and emphasize multiplicity in the creation and interpretation of stories. While reversal in the literature of the High Middle Ages is connected to open interpretation for the individual reader, it is a technique that also has validity for other periods in which a shift in reading practices is prevalent. Contemporary ways of reading, which are increasingly dependent on digital texts and open forum discussions, are in many respects staging a reversal of the private, contemplative reading practices that Boccaccio championed. A move away from a specific reader or patron allowed Boccaccio and composers of fabliaux to create open-ended texts for an increasingly open and unknown audience. Today’s audience is nearly without limits, as are the possibilities of interpretation, since differences in the geographical, social, and cultural circumstances of individual readers are almost endlessly varied. Yet the immediacy and physical distance of the new forms of reading seem to reduce the sense of intimacy and the space for the reader’s imagination. The introduction to this study began with a series of questions about the relationship of the short narrative form to the collection. Through the device of reversal, the fabliaux show that a frame incongruent with the stories it contains can potentially alter the interpretation of the individual stories, as in the case of the Seven Sages tradition, in which the humor of fabliaux themes had to be downplayed by the internal audience in favor...