The Fabliaux Literary Elements

The genre of these stories is actually called fabliaux and require that a certain set of conventions be included though a strictly applied and rigidly enforced set of rules for categorization has never been officially codified.

Generally speaking, the setting of these stories is pastoral France usually in an imprecise medieval time period.

A common unifying element to the fabliaux is an introduction by a first-person narrator who then proceeds to adopt a third-person perspective to relate the narrative before returning to the first-person in a conclusion that sums up the story just told, often directly commenting upon the life lesson to be gained from reading it.

The tone is usually lighthearted, but often with an underlying tone of corrosively brittle satirical irony. The mood remains comic even as the characters are engaging in the most morally despicable acts.

Protagonist: the deceiver. Antagonist: the deceived.

The conflict that drives most of the stories is constructed upon a wife’s infidelity and subsequent acts of deception perpetrated to keep her husband from learning the truth, though this is not a universal application.

Most of the stories reach a climax in which the character who has deceived another meets with their comeuppance, though in some stories in which the deceiver tricks a priest, the climax revolves around getting away with the deception.

Another unifying technique of the stories comprising fabliaux collections is an introductory paragraph preceding each narrative which often foreshadows the lesson which is to be gleaned from the events of the tale.

“William and the Falcon” is a story whose humor and understanding is dependent understanding that the French word for falcon is “faucon” which is pronounced in a way that sounds like the profanity associated with what William wants really desires from the married Lady in the story. This is an example of sexual obscenity that runs rampant through the genre at its more understated.

The story of “Brunain, the Priest’s Cow” is an ironic inversion of its allusion to the Biblical parable of the talents recounted in the Gospel of Matthew.

Proverbial sayings densely populate these tales to the point that their recurring nature transform them into imagery deemed necessary by the authors to punctuate the lesson the stories are intended to teach. Among the many examples range from “When the shepherd is weak, the wolf shits wool” to “One should not deny bread to anyone, not even to him whom one never expects to see again.”

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Priests and clerics are metonymic representatives of the Christian church at large which fell under widespread suspicion—or direct knowledge—of a host of hypocritical acts. Almost to a fault, if a clergyman appears as a character in one of these stories, he will be an especially corrupt antagonist.

“Love is such a king and such a master that he can make the most powerful man in the world so humble and obedient, that he takes no thought for himself but bends his will to another’s.”