Lo Cunto de li Cunti: variazioni europee di un prototipo ‘degenere’

The singular literary career of Giambattista Basile was divided between his prolific but mediocre production in Italian, obedient to the Petrarchan canon of Pietro Bembo, and his work in Neapolitan dialect, composed under the pseudonym of Gian Alesio Abbattutis and published only posthumously. On one hand Basile demonstrated a prudent, classicist ‘normality’; on the other, an outright rejection of convention and irreverent experimention with the literary potentialities of dialect. Among the latter, the most remarkable is Lo Cunto de li Cunti overo lo trattenemiento de’ peccerille (The Tale of Tales, 1634-36), recognized as Europe’s first collection of fairy tales, the founding text of a new genre. The Cunto is a clamorous example of how the survival of a work over time and space, even when it constitutes the model of a new genre, depends on its recodification through a process of violation and misunderstanding even of its most essential characteristics. Basile’s tales are often salacious, dense with stylistic eccentricity and erotic metaphor, and his complicated literary adaptation of the dialect of Naples obviously contradicts his claim that the work is intended for children. Once purified of its baroque Neapolitan roots (especially in France), it was nevertheless destined to become the prototype of the European literary fairy tale. In this way the Cunto is a ‘de-generate’ prototype, whose disordinate form establishes a literary model, only to sabotage it from within. As Paolo Bagni has written, a genre’s identity reveals itself only in its transformation. Unlike the archetype, the prototype is by definition incomplete and subject to protean development, always becoming other than itself.