Vision, Logic, and the Comic Production of Reality in the Merchant's Tale and Two French Fabliaux

Abstract

Vision, Logic, and the Comic Production of Reality in the Merchant’s Tale and Two French Fabliaux Michelle Kohler The subversive use of language is at the heart of much of the deception in Old French fabliaux. Indeed, Mary Jane Stearns Schenck has argued that "[l]anguage—its use and power—is so central to the successful completion of a misdeed that counterexamples would be difficult to find."1 InThe Fabliaux: Tales of Wit and Deception, she demonstrates that "[l]anguage is, in fact, the primary tool of the duper. . . . Dupers manipulate language to make empirical reality seem a chimera . . . or fantasy seem reality."2 Language, that is, drives a wedge between reality and perception, producing an absurd relationship between the two that is not only the key source of the duper's power but also a primary source of fabliaux humor. Despite the almost universal presence of verbal manipulation, the precise nature of this fractured relationship between speech and reality varies from tale to tale, so that each fabliau develops its own version of an absurd incongruity between what's real and what's spoken.3 If speech is the duper's tool in this equation, it would seem that vision, as a primary means of accessing reality and thus of "testing" speech, is the duper's bane—a means by which the gap between reality and false speech can be exposed. In some fabliaux, however, visual confirmation becomes another primary tool of the duper, ironically working in tandem with the speech that falsely accounts for reality.4 In these fabliaux, the victims' justifiably skeptical search for visual proof ironically becomes a means of false visual confirmation of narratives told by deceitful characters within the main narrative. A close look at how this peculiar logic of "seeing" a lie develops within the fabliaux may help illuminate not only the force of language in these tales but also the absurdity that is central to their humor. In Les Perdris (The Partridges), for instance, knowledge and truth become slippery because words are not only fractured from reality; more radically, [End Page 137] they are capable of producing the visible "reality" they need to confirm a lie. In this tale, a ravenous wife is left to cook two partridges for lunch while her husband fetches the priest to join them; left alone, the wife devours both partridges, planning to claim that cats stole them. When her husband returns, however, he does not believe her story and becomes enraged; quickly, she claims the cat story was only a joke and asks him to go outside and sharpen his best knife. When the priest enters, the wife points to her husband sharpening his knife and tells the priest to run because the husband plans to castrate him. The priest flees, and the wife promptly runs outside to the husband, directing his attention to the fleeing priest; she tells her husband that the priest has left with the partridges. The husband, seeing that the priest is fleeing the house, wildly brandishes his knife and pursues the priest. Thus the wife successfully orchestrates a scene by which she evades blame for the absent partridges.5 The wife's cat story constitutes a failure to deceive that is unusual within a fabliau because, as Norris Lacy has pointed out, fabliau authors tend to collude with the dupers to make the deception successful, even when that success seems far-fetched.6 Here, the otherwise clever wife's plan to blame hungry cats falls dangerously flat on its face. Because dupers rarely make mistakes, the cat story functions to foreground the need for a lie that is visually confirmable. When the cat story fails, the wife promptly claims that the birds are covered ("Couvertes sont por tenir chaudes!" [4:65]), a strategy that not only buys her some time but does so by accounting visually for the fact that the partridges are nowhere to be seen. Her husband can see that they are indeed covered, and so begins the wife's series of visually confirmable lies. The husband's swift refusal to believe that the cats stole the birds contrasts starkly with his equally swift willingness to believe...

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