Introduction: The Provocative Body of the Fabliaux

Abstract

The fabliau is a literary form without discrete borders. Mostly anonymous, the more than one hundred and twenty-seven tales that can be called fabliaux are grouped together by a definition that is at once so expansive and so limited that it simply points to the hazy boundaries of this genre, at the very least. 1 Joseph Bédier’s classic formulation of fabliaux as contes à rire en vers potentially acknowledges that all genres are tropological formulations, useful insofar as they give ordering appearance to what might otherwise look like disparate narrative expressions. 2 Genre, no matter the scope of its parameters, provides ground for the intelligibility ofliterary figurae (figures). And it is in terms of their literary legibility that the fabliaux are figuratively most provocative. Moving beyond any “law of impurity or … principle of contamination,” the fabliaux are radically transactional in their ability to fragment the generic boundaries that provide recognizable shape to other poetic bodies. 3 Unstable in terms of authorship, audience, purpose, even effect, the fabliaux are almost impossible to see as a coherent creative corpus. Yet in simplest terms, it is the incoherence of corporeal coalescence that these “comic stories in verse” consistently make visible. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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