In Praise of Folly: J. Rodolfo Wilcock's The Temple of Iconoclasts

In the customary and deeply-rooted division of Italian writers into those from the north and those from the south, the iconoclastic writer Juan Rodolfo Wilcock (1919-1978) might best count as one from the west. Wilcock is that rare figure who led two literary careers in two different languages, the first in Buenos Aires as a member of the group that included Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo; then second, after fleeing the Perón dictatorship, in and around Rome where he wrote exclusively in Italian and moved within the eminent circle that included Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, and Pier Paolo Pasolini (the screenshot above shows Wilcock playing Caiaphas in Pasolini’s film The Gospel According to St. Matthew). Thus the timely republication of Wilcock’s 1977 book, The Temple of Iconoclasts (Sinagoga degli iconoclasti), makes for an ideal bridge between my current explorations of Italian literature and the annual Caravana de Recuerdos “Argentine Literature of Doom” reading event. Though I’d been curious to read the book after learning of it in an interview with translator Lawrence Venuti years ago, it had proven maddeningly impossible to find. I now know why. Venuti, in a new preface, explains that all but some 500 copies of the original edition of his translation were accidentally pulped.

In this new edition, Venuti expands on Wilcock’s improbable life. I won’t repeat the details (far richer than Wilcock’s current Wikipedia entry), but suffice to say that Venuti’s choice to title his preface simply “J. Rudolfo Wilcock,” thus appearing to slot the writer democratically among the 35 names that follow it in the table of contents, is an apt and clever one. The Temple of Iconoclasts consists of brief fictional and semi-fictional biographies, from 5 lines to 25 pages, of equally improbable inventors, metaphysicians, biologists, artists, sociologists, clerics, anthropologists, engineers, chemists, and others who, despite day jobs ranging from clockmaker to gravedigger, pursued fantastic theories, created unusual inventions, or simply asserted their existence in some idiosyncratic way. In Wilcock’s melding of fact, fiction and whimsicality, he subversively lances intellectual pretense and arrogance. His pieces inhabit that murky zone between human intellectual endeavor and madness, a line further muddied by Wilcock’s tossing in actual persons whose names pop into these sketches from time to time, including Thomas Edison, Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, Wilhelm Reich, and even Wilcock’s own great-grandfather.

Nearly all of Wilcock’s brainiacs also write. If only as a source for additions to The Invisible Library, The Temple of Iconoclasts would still provide abundant amusement. There’s hack vulcanologist’s Klaus Nachtknecht’s The Salubrious Magma; philosopher Absalon Amet and his wife Plaisance’s Select Thoughts and Words from the Universal Mechanical Philosophy; Antonine Amédée Bélouin’s The Bélouin Network: Initial Project for an Underwater Railroad;” Franz Piet Vredjuik’s Universal Sin, or A Discourse on the Identity between Sound and Light; and Aaron Rosenblum’s  beguiling utopian failure, Back to Happiness, or Joyride to Hell, proposing a return to the purportedly rosiest period of human history, identified by Rosenblum as England under the reign of Elizabeth 1. Like César Aira’s Dr. Aira, with his proliferating screens aimed at excluding everything in the universe incompatible with his miracle cures, Rosenblum attempts to subtract from the present everything incompatible with life in the year 1580. The narrator’s extensive list of the glories and afflictions lost and regained through this mercifully unrealized project is both one of the book’s highlights and an almost irremediable skewering of utopian thought.

In another sketch, Jules Flamart, a lexicologist bored with the typical dictionary, creates a dictionary-novel, La Langue en action, which pairs each word with a narrative connection to the next word. Wilcock creates three entire pages of excerpts that had me wishing he’d gone on to complete the entire 850 page work. This is one of several texts Wilcock creates for his “iconoclasts.” The longest of these, in a piece on radical theater director Llorenz Riber, includes four theater reviews and an entire three-act screenplay, all of which reveal that a neurotic obsession with rabbits, born in Riber’s childhood, has burrowed its way into everything the director has created, including adaptations of Sartre’s No Exit and a Georges Feydeau-inspired, everyone-in-the-closet farce in which Riber has replaced the main characters’ family names with those of Nazi concentration camps. The cringe-worthy critical assessments of Riber's productions, worth the price of the book by themselves, are so are gloriously over the top that they could scare off anyone from creative or critical effort, yet simultaneously create an almost desperate desire to see Riber’s pieces produced on stage (or at the very least, some of Wilcock’s own criticism translated into English). Wilcock’s prodigious imagination is perhaps most amply revealed in a lengthy list of inventions created by Jesús Pica Planas, which echoes Kenji Kawakami’s useless Japanese inventions, and each item of which might well have served as a seed for helping populate an additional volume of Wilcock’s eccentrics.

The Temple of Iconoclasts is strikingly reminiscent of the weird, wild stories of Wilcock’s fellow Argentinian, Leopoldo Lugones, an evident influence even to the point of some of Wilcock’s examples seeming to riff on Lugones’ own extravagant conceits (Roger Babson’s nutty experiments with gravity, for instance, or John O. Kinnaman’s unsuccessful attempt to locate Lot’s wife in mounds of salt near ancient Sodom). In some sketches, the patient and detailed elaboration of Wilcock’s creations echoes those of Raymond Roussel. Venuti also notes as a precursor to The Temple of Iconoclasts Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, and as a descendent Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas. Bolaño acknowledged Wilcock’s book as the key influence on his own, and the handful of references to Nazism in The Temple of Iconoclasts seems even to provide the thematic spark for Bolaño’s homage. But Wilcock’s language possesses a density and expressiveness (no knock on Venuti, but one can scarcely imagine how delightful this book must sound in the original Italian); an affection for his subjects; and above all a fat streak of hilarity that rivals and even surpasses those of these other writers. This is one funny book, filled with glacial understatement, pointed one-liners, and a wit that ranges from tender to withering. Given Wilcock’s great funds of whimsy and waggery, his work also calls to mind Los Angeles artist David Wilson’s enchanting and stupefying Museum of Jurassic Technology, where the visitor is seduced by what appears to be a natural science museum until he or she pauses to reflect on the exhibits on display, which, in a moment of epiphany like a quick intake of nitrous oxide, produce a giddy euphoria. To read Wilcock’s book is to enter the paradise of both the mad dreamer and the wry skeptic, to marvel at the varieties of the human pursuit of knowledge, to feel chastened and humbled in one’s most insignificant mental efforts, and to have an exceedingly good time.

Neapolitan Sextet: Jean-Noël Schifano's Chroniques napolitaines

French-Italian writer Jean-Noël Schifano’s Chroniques Napolitaines (1984) contains six tales built around actual persons and events from the Naples of the late 15^th to mid-17^th centuries, brought to life through a combination of linguistic virtuosity, scholarly care and attention to detail, and capacious imagination, making the book an impressive short work of historical fiction. A warning and a pity: the book is unavailable in English.

For anyone still reading, another warning: the tales in Chroniques Napolitaines make for one blood-drenched book. For Schifano, the only French citizen ever to have been named an honorary citizen of Naples, the city where he lived for many years is a one “of bad Catholics and great sinners…capable of anything out of passion,” where the Neapolitan eye is “a demand for forgiveness that accuses,” and where “the passion of love” is only equaled by “the passion for vengeance.” Here the main streets of ancient Naples, Spaccanapoli and Toledo, are a cross on which the city is “every day crucified, every day resuscitated.”  Drawing on old records and anecdotes, yet inserting occasional references to the present as though taking the reader on a guided tour of centuries, Schifano’s versions of these stories depict dramatic love affairs, vicious acts of revenge, frenzied political revolts, and barbaric and bizarre tortures (a punishment for parricide involved throwing the convict into the sea inside a sack shared by a dog, monkey and viper). But Schifano also marvels at the less physically violent aspects of the city: its feverish baroque intensity in both life and art; its citizens’ fierce pride and bristling rejection of orthodoxy and rigidity, particularly when imposed by foreign interlopers (the historical scope of the stories falls largely within the Spanish rule of the city); the manner in which the thick mantle of the past continually oozes up through the lava-black streets into the present.

Schifano’s work contains a plethora of fascinating historical details about Naples. References to the presence of the past in the many-layered city abound, including Schifano’s mention of the discovery in 1973, in subterranean chambers beneath the National Archives, of poems by Tirenella, a female poet, who, like a “Louise Labé of Naples,” wrote in dialect of “tyrannical torments.” Another tale mentions Neapolitan desserts of the period, including “Monks’ Fleas,” rounded cakes dusted with burned bits of ground almonds, and “Oranges of Crime,” eaten with three-quarters of the pulp replaced by a mixture of honey and fresh pig’s blood. A Neapolitan was never said to be “crazy,” but to have “parted into the imagination.” Here amid the garbage piles roamed the zoccola, a cat-sized race of “indestructible” rats. And here in a city that smells “of fish when the sun rises and sulfur when it sets,” one encountered everywhere “the secret watchword” of all Neapolitans: “Chi m’o fa fa?” – “Who’s going to make me?”

The drama and violence of Schifano’s Naples evince themselves in the first story, which recounts the furious love affair between the wife of composer Carlo Gesualdo and the Duke of Andria, and the brutal punishment dispensed by the composer when the affair is discovered. Another story, “La felouque du vice-roi,” briefly recaps the brief reign of fisherman-turned-revolutionary Massaniello, the capopopolo or “boss of the people,” who in 1647 led a bloody and short-lived populist revolt against the city’s Spanish rulers. In “Grecs Intermedes,” Schifano – who evidently relishes mining the city’s history for intriguing cases - explicitly refers readers to source documents for an extraordinary trial in which both a tailor and the donkey with which he had been accused of committing an unnatural act were convicted and publically hanged. Schifano nakedly conveys both the atrocity and absurdity of this scene, including an entire paragraph of taunts from the young lazzaroni who mock with cruel laughter the spectacle of the tailor being led through Naples’ streets, his bare feet tethered with leather straps to the hind legs of the donkey plodding before him. This anecdote opens the tale of Tiberio de Vela, scion of a noble family, one of the city’s most notorious “sodomites,” and proud member of the Camorra, then a fraternal honor society scarcely less criminal than its contemporary incarnation. For a period of two years, de Vela roamed about with his gang, stealing young boys off the streets and taking them to an estate by the steaming fumaroles of Pozzuoli near the sulfurous Phlegraean Fields to the north of the city. Here, fantastically orchestrated orgies occurred until universal dismay at the failure of the miraculous monthly “liquefaction” of San Gennaro’s blood in the cathedral of Naples, having until then occurred without interruption for 13 centuries, forced the authorities to abandon the blind eye turned to de Vela’s obscenities and conferred by his family’s status, and give the people a gruesome public punishment - not for readers with weak stomachs - commensurate with the drama of the failed miracle.

Schifano has a formidable dexterity with language and a keen ability to imagine the dialogue of the time, mining French for archaic, arcane idioms and vocabulary and sprinkling his narrative with words and phrases from Neapolitan dialect. Without sacrificing any wealth of description or essentials of the history, Schifano also condenses grand events into compact packages; all but one of the stories come in under 35 pages, and even the longest one is divided into linked stories.

This long story, “Les heures contraires” (The Contrary Hours, referring to a Neapolitan term for that time of afternoon when the Neapolitan heat seems to make the city a purgatory of souls caught between flames and death), plunges the reader fully into Naples’ gritty ruthlessness (and since Chroniques napolitaines is unavailable in English, I’ll supply perhaps too much plot detail). Schifano’s stories often link discrete anecdotes as though layering impressions upon the reader, and “Les Heures Contraires” is no exception. Using as a motif the common 16^th century practice of poisoning as a means of dispensing of enemies, Schifano begins with an episodic series of poisonings. These culminate in a lengthy account of events that unfolded during the reign of Don Pedro of Toledo. This ill-educated, rapacious Spanish libertine, jealous of the pagan liberties of Neapolitan youth, who “worshipped at the same time Isis, Osiris, the Virgin and Holy Child, the sun and the moon, the member of Priapus and the cross of Christ,” provoked a wave of sexually-driven violence in the city such that even cloisters were not immune.

The most notorious of these incursions occurred in the convent of Sant’Arcangelo di Baiano in Forcella, among the fiercest of Naples’ neighborhoods. Schifano restores to its proper Neapolitan origins this tale borrowed by Stendhal and removed to Tuscany in one of his unfinished “Italian Chronicles.” Into this convent a number of daughters of noble families were inducted in order to put an end to adolescent love affairs and thus prevent scandal and matches unpropitious to the families’ welfare. Schifano sensitively depicts the conflicts of these young novices, who, far from being religious devotees, were essentially prisoners. A scene depicting a young girl’s depilation as part of her “eternal” consecration into Sant’Arcangelo is chilling, as is a scene in which the ambitious new abbess wins protection for the convent by allowing a powerful duke into the convent to rape her own 12-year-old niece.

Subterfuges the girls use to continue to see their lovers often result in disaster. Suitors of two young novices are assaulted by thugs hired by the girls’ families, their bloodied bodies thrown into the convent to die in front of the eyes of the girls (who in revenge conspire to poison the mother superior). When another novice attempts to conceal her lover inside a crate containing a clavier, the delivery, accidentally left in the courtyard to bake under the hot sun, causes the young man to suffocate rather than risk breaking out and compromising his beloved’s honor. Schifano’s omniscient narrator follows another novice who, thanks to a door left unlocked, escapes one night to join a gentleman with whom she is infatuated, but is first castigated by the man for violating her vows, then taken by him, then discovered upon her return. Finally, two fetuses are found discarded next to the convent. Fury erupts out of shock that a mother could kill her own babies (and not, in pagan Naples, out of any religious objection). In the only major European city where, thanks to the “ferocious eccentricities” of its people, “the courts of the Inquisition had no right to be conducted,” the cumulative anger merges with friction in the Neapolitans’ tolerance of Spanish rule, leading to a disastrous eruption of street battles, protests before the convent, and an almost comical wave of efforts by the ecclesiastical authorities to impose inquisitional order on Sant’Arcangelo – the last checked by the intercession of the girls’ families, Neapolitan repugnance at sermonizing foreign clerics, the quick dispatch of one cleric via poison, and by the girls themselves.

In drawing the tale to a close, Schifano constructs successive anecdotes in which three of the girls deliver forceful, furious speeches. The first, Tullia, viciously lances one cleric’s authority, sending him packing simply by raising the specter of her family’s power. Subsequently, when a vicar takes refuge in the cell of another of the girls during an attack on the convent, the narrator juxtaposes both the injurious confinement and the fabulous wealth of these daughters of the rich, as the vicar is “scandalized” to see

…suspended on the walls carpeted in sunflower-colored satin embroidered with silver, two large paintings. One represented a rosy and amorous Aurora lifting into the skies of Syria the hero Cephalus, that same Greek who made love with a bear in obeisance to the oracle of Delphi, thus assuring his progeny; the other, Sélène and Endymion, the beautiful and naked boy asleep beneath the avid yellow shadow of the beautiful and naked Nyctalope, queen of the lunar work of love, descending from her starry chariot. Ostentatiously, the Vicar turned his eyes away from these profane, culpably lascivious visions, slowly directing his steps toward the door, seized abruptly by a whirlwind of thoughts and sensations as heavy and burning as the August sun that swept the second gallery without pity. But the Abbess held him back. She wished to give him the perfidious pleasure of detailing for him furnishings and curiosities, the whole inventory exchanging itself in a jealous and impossible transference between the old woman and the young.

For an entire page, the abbess continues to catalog of the room’s contents: its “ebony footstools inlaid with mother of pearl,” finely wrought silver-work basins enameled in vermillion and “filled with tulips of milky calcedonian,” marble busts of nymphs and éphèbes, “a great ivory chest with fastenings of gold and studded with garnets,” Persian rugs depicting hunting scenes, frescoes of silver putti playing among sinuous vines, grand chandeliers. When the vicar suggests to Guilia, the cell’s inhabitant, that her lodgings should possess an order more appropriate for a religious novice, the girl snarls at him:

Is it insufficient to satisfy your own extravagance…that I waste away in this atrocious solitude? I, Guilia Caracciolo di Brianza, born of a blood more illustrious than the earth, arrivals from Cunes with the first Greeks who founded Paleopolis, who with each of my steps follow the footprints of thirty centuries of armed nobles brandishing the herald of three gold bands beneath an azure field, I, of the most venerable branch of the Caracciolo, deprived of my liberty and my rights, should be disallowed play with such innocent objects because you, who were nothing before your birth, remain nothing while alive, and will be nothing after your death, should so will it?... Is it so great a crime, in this century, to embellish one’s prison cell, when one’s own parentage casts away all one’s worth, despoils it, disperses it across the world? You, civil servant of Heaven, you come here to add upon the cruelties of my cruel family; to preach charity, but invade my bedchamber to tear from the miserable a last and frivolous illusion, the beauty of time going past, the powerful dreams of humanity that course through my veins, to remind us outright of this indignity: the tender age at which, ignorant of the world save for the grandeur of our race, and prepared at any moment for the greatest gestures, for the most supreme sacrifices, we were manipulated so sinisterly in order that we renounce life!...

Chastened, but determined still to make an example, the vicar conducts an expeditious trial, held within the convent’s prayer chapel, which immediately confers sentence: several of the girls are to be imprisoned, others exiled, and the two responsible for poisoning the mother superior to be poisoned on the spot. The speech by one of these girls, Chiara, contains all of the defiance and contempt Neapolitans would expect:

Let us drink, she said, in this royal cesspool, to the health of dead souls and their black thirsts! And she drank in one gulp the viscous liquid, down to the final drop. Eufrasia let the tears course down her cheeks and whimpered, shaken by sobs sounding like some dirge of antiquity. Chiara moved close to her and helped her bring the goblet to her mouth, afterwards brushing with a gentle kiss the already tumescent flesh, bitter with the taste of the hemlock. Whether to collect the empty goblets or interrupt the girls’ embrace, the Sicaire took a step towards them. Chiara turned sharply, hurling at the feet of the armed man the two chalices, which rebounded and rolled upon the marble in twin, resonating circles. Crying aloud she addressed the tribunal and the whole assembly nailed in a stupor before the chapel’s golden aureoles: Back, cursed wasps! I am condemned to die, but stay away from me, macabre abusers from beyond the grave! I am the immaculate, unbridled! Leave us to die alone before our empty vaults, impudent preachers, unspeakable judges, away from the penetrating lasciviousness of your cadaverous eyes!

Her companion already dead, Chiara scribbles to her brother, with her last bit of strength, a note poignantly, devastatingly practical and accusatory, willing her belongings to her sister inmates and affirming that whatever fees may be due to the convent have been paid in full.

Though Schifano’s book is filled with grand characters, the star of Chroniques napolitaines is Naples itself. Woven of passion and punishment, the tales work together to forge an indelible image of a span of history in what may be the most troubled, complex and unique city of Europe. As brutal as Schifano’s tales may be, they still revel in the sharply paradoxical and often hidden splendors of Naples, as though to emulate the exaggerated chiaroscuro and saturated detail of the Neapolitan Baroque paintings of Caravaggio, Stanzione, and Gentileschi (a luxuriousness evident if one compares Schifano’s story of Sant’Arcangelo with the flat affect and spare narrative of Stendhal’s chronicle, The Abbess of Castro, which depicts violent events in another Italian convent). Above all, one senses Schifano’s awe at Naples’ human dimension, his almost obsessive passion to grasp, through its layers of the past, the city’s singularity and the almost theatrical violence of its glory and ferocity, his unflinching attempt to restore to grand measure a people “all at once the most idolatrous, skeptical and ironic people on earth…each individual creat[ing] in his own way his own tolerant religion, constituted from the gestures of the day-to-day and of millennia.” A tour de force.

Translations are my own, as are the defects of them.

“Close your mouths, let your ears hang low, and give me a little attention” - Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales

Reading Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales (Lo Cunto de li Cunti, or alternately, the Pentamerone), I wondered at the evolution of “fairy-tale” as an adjective – as in fairy-tale castle, fairy-tale romance, fairy-tale wedding. How, given Basile’s collection of exceedingly bizarre tales – what translator Nancy Canepa calls “the first integral collection of authored, literary fairy tales in western Europe” – could the term ever have gained such airy, pleasant connotations? Perhaps it was through reaction and flight from the raw, grim, joyful, mercurially dramatic cornucopia of weirdness that makes up The Tale of Tales.  

Basile’s collection came to my attention while I was exploring Teofilo Folengo’s Baldo, an influence on Basile’s work. Through these tales, written in Neapolitan, Basile aligns himself with the vernacular, sardonic tradition of Folengo and, before him, Boccaccio. I hardly expected anything as rewarding as Baldo’s baroquely delirious, macaronic burlesque, but The Tale of Tales, which appeared in five volumes between 1634 and 1636, proved perhaps even more entertaining. Variations of some of the tales will be familiar already to readers. They include the first recorded version of “Cinderella” as well as other stories later filtered through Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen to emerge as “Sleeping Beauty,” “Puss in Boots,” “Rapunzel,” and “The Golden Goose,” to name a few. The richness of Basile’s stories – their unrestrained, frequently gruesome queerness; imaginative and bewitching metaphorical language; and local color, rooted right down to the fennel in Neapolitan specifics – makes them something quite apart from the later stories they inspired.

As Canepa says in her introduction,

The stories of The Tale of Tales are like no other fairy tales; imbued just as much with the formulas of elite literary culture as with those of folkloric traditions and orality; closer to Rabelais and Shakespeare (Basile has been called a Mediterranean Shakespeare) than to most other fabulists; bawdy and irreverent but also tender and whimsical; acute in psychological characterization and at the same time encyclopedic in description; full, ultimately, of irregularities and loose ends that somewhat magically manage to merge into a splendid portrait of creatures engaged in the grave and laborious, gratifying and joyful business  of learning to live in their world – and to tell about it. And reading Basile’s text is an experience like no other, a roller-coaster ride in which the reader glides along smoothly for only brief stretches of what is, overall, a decidedly vertiginous experience.

Containing this “vertiginous experience” is an almost geometrically rigid and simple structure. Basile’s tales nest within an overarching, framing “tale of tales.” Lucia, the evil wife of a handsome prince, Tadeo, has threatened to kill the child she carries unless Tadeo will satisfy her desperate need to hear stories, a desire implanted in her by a fairy intent on aiding the honest Zoza, from whom Lucia stole the vessel full of tears Zoza had shed in order to awaken Tadeo from death and thus become his betrothed. Responding to Lucia’s threats, Tadeo calls on women from across the land to come to the palace to tell stories. From the multitudes who respond, Tadeo picks the ten best, and, over five days, each recounts a story a day. Interspersed between each day’s ten tales are eclogues in the form of dialogues between members of the court. Finally, a concluding chapter resolves the conflict of the opening tale, restoring Zoza to her rightful place by the prince’s side and sending the malevolent Lucia to an especially cruel fate.

Scarcely into the first story, one realizes that Basile’s collection, despite its guileless subtitle, “Entertainment for Little Ones,” is most likely aimed at adults. Holding nothing back, they are filled with not only curious quests and magical transformations, but also violence and brutality, scatological content, blistering insults, wretched punishments and acts of revenge, and an abundance of sexual matters, usually couched in wildly inventive, entertaining metaphorical language. But as in Baldo, the sheer delirious joy in such language excuses all. As Tadeo announces at the beginning of the tales,

There is nothing in the world more delicious, my illustrious women, than to hear about the doings of others, nor without obvious reason did that great philosopher set the supreme happiness of man in hearing pleasant tales; since when you lend an ear to tasty items, cares evaporate, irksome thoughts are dispelled, and life is prolonged.

Interwoven into these “pleasant tales” is a riotous compendium of the bizarre, loathsome, and wondrous: a woman who, instead of having  “a little fart” of a child, gives birth to a branch of myrtle; a young girl who creates her spouse out of almond paste, rose water and precious gems; a live goose used as toilet paper; a virgin who eats a sea dragon’s heart in order to become pregnant; an envious girl who has herself skinned by a barber as she’s been tricked into believing this is how to become beautiful; a donkey that shits “a superb diarrhea” of “pearls, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and diamonds, each as big as a walnut”; as in Baldo, a whale mistaken for an island and containing in its belly “splendid countrysides, breathtaking gardens,” and subterranean chambers (the ubiquity of this conceit in Italian literature might make for an interesting dissertation); and a tale in which, in putting one’s ear to the earth, it’s possible to hear all the intrigues of the world.

“The Cinderella Cat” – Basile’s version of Cinderella – is a concrete example of how Basile’s tales differ from the familiar elements of later iterations. For example, the tale begins with Zezolla – a.k.a. Cinderella Cat - murdering her stepmother by slamming the lid of a chest down on her neck. The place of the fairy-godmother is taken by a fairy who emerges from a date tree whenever Zezolla sings a particular song. Above all, the language is hardly what parents (some parents, anyway) might feel comfortable reading to their children:

Zezolla returned to the date tree and repeated the enchanted song, at which she was magnificently dressed and placed in a golden coach accompanied by so many servants that she looked like a whore arrested in the public promenade and surrounded by police agents.

As in this case, Basile’s metaphorical language shares with Folengo’s a palpable distaste for authority. References to police and other guardians of the law proliferate; in one tale, a character snaps at another’s timidity by exclaiming, “If you’re afraid, you should become a cop!”

But the language of The Tale of Tales is of a stunning metaphorical ingenuity and diversity. Canepa calls attention in her introduction to Basile’s plethora of metaphors related to the cycle of day and night, so striking that the reader can scarcely avoid noting them as one of the work’s most prominent features:

Dawn brought the news that the Sun had been found alive, and the sky shed its mourning clothes…Night’s shadows, chased by the Sun’s cops, were evicted from the town…the Sun lifted high the trophies of light won in victory against the Night…Night was exiled for having stooged for swindlers, and started gathering up its bundles of twilight from the sky… The shadows conspired to see if they could, at dusk, cause the Sun some affront…Night had gone out with its black mask to direct the dance of the stars…

Similarly creative metaphors are employed to describe other phenomena:

…the sea, with a smack of its waves, beat the rocks that wouldn’t give the answers to the Latin exercises they had been assigned…she reached the foot of a spoilsport of a mountain that went around with its head in the clouds just to bother them…the sun holed up in the clouds from fear, and the sky grew dark; the hearts of all those people were like mummies, and they were trembling so hard they wouldn’t have been able to take an enema made of a single pig’s bristle.

Basile’s descriptive passages often employ epic catalogs in which, regardless of subject, he employs a trademark delight in ribald and earthy metaphor. For example, in “The Dragon,” an evil, murderous king encounters a beauty whose

…hair was a set of handcuffs for the cops of Love, her forehead a tablet on which was written the price list for the shop of the Graces of amorous pleasures, her eyes two lighthouses that signaled the vessels of desire to turn their prow toward the port of joys, her mouth a honeycomb amid two rose hedges.

As if in rude answer to this pleasant vision, in “The Dove,” a prince is horrified to find that his beautiful beloved’s mother is an ogress, whose

…hair was like a broom made of dry branches, not to sweep dust and cobwebs from houses but to blacken and smoke out hearts; her forehead was made of Genoese stone, to whet the knife of fear that rips open chests; her eyes were comets that predicted shaky legs, wormy hearts, frozen spirits, diarrhea of the soul, and evacuation of the intestines, for she wore terror on her face, fear in her gaze, thunder in her footsteps, and dysentery in her words. Her mouth was tusked like a pig’s and as big as a scorpion fish’s, twisted like those who suffer from convulsions, and as drooly as a mule’s…a distillate of ugliness and a hospital of deformities.

One notable aspect of Basile’s collection that sets it apart from other fairy tales is the particularity of its Neapolitan setting. Basile’s stories - and Canepa’s helpful notes - offer fascinating gems of historical detail about the city in the 16^th and early 17^th centuries, a good many of them taken from renowned historian Benedetto Croce’s edition of The Tale of Tales. There are innumerable references to Neapolitan customs; to types of dances, songs and games; and in the footnotes, arresting bits of information. For example, one such note explains that servants were known as “settepelle”  (“seven breads”) due to servant families being given seven loaves of bread each Saturday to last them the week. Another describes “The Grotto of the Dogs” located in the seismically active Phlegraean fields north of Naples, “where experiments were performed in which animals were made to lose their senses by inhaling the carbon dioxide of which the cave is full, then plunged into the waters of the nearby Lake of Agnano to see if they could be revived.” Other such annotations prick the conscience, such as one describing that a common custom in Naples for welcoming a newborn child was to spit in its mouth “as a first sign of recognition and affection,” and another noting a “well-known” belief that “bathing in a child’s blood will produce offspring to the barren.”

References to food abound, both descriptions of specific Neapolitan dishes and metaphorical use of foodstuffs, as in “The Three Citrons,” in which a prince cuts open a magic lemon to reveal “a girl as tender and white as curd and whey, with a streak of red on her face that made her look like an Abruzzo ham or a Nola salami…a beauty without measure.” Another footnote observes that Neapolitans, who at the time had not yet adopted pasta, were known elsewhere in Italy as “leaf eaters” due to the profusion of vegetable dishes in the regional cuisine, as underscored in one character’s memorable paean to the city, which reflects a general civic pride that suffuses the collection:

I cannot remove myself from you without a stream of tears flowing from my eyes! I cannot leave you, O Mercato, without a load of grief as merchandise! Beautiful Chiaia, I cannot part company with you without a thousand wounds tormenting my heart! Farewell, carrots and chard; farewell, fritters and cakes; farewell, broccoli and pickled tuna; farewell, tripe and giblets; farewell, stews and casseroles! Farewell, flower of cities, glory of Italy, painted egg of Europe, mirror of the World! Farewell, Naples, the non plus ultra where virtue has set her limits and grace her boundaries! I leave you to become a widower of your vegetable soups; driven out of this dear village, O my cabbage stalks, I must leave you behind!

Though Basile’s collection has been issued in a number of translations, including by British explorer and translator Sir Richard Burton, I found this edition of Basile’s tales tremendously rewarding. Canepa gives us a richly annotated work with a thorough, fascinating introduction; references linking the tales to later variants by other writers; and short synopses prior to each tale that allow the reader to recall them again with ease (one complaint: it’s unfortunate that a hardcover version is not available, as this is the kind of book one is likely to turn to again and again). For readers bothered by the sanitized, Disney-fied fairy tales that proliferate today, The Tale of Tales is a resplendently burlesque, marvel-filled antidote by a writer of enormous talents. Hopefully, a new film based on a trio of Basile’s stories will help bring renewed attention to this exquisite collection.