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Pasolini, Poet of the People: I racconti di Canterbury/The Canterbury Tales

2023; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/frm.2023.a914992

1559-7989

Danielle McGrane,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Pasolini, Poet of the People:I racconti di Canterbury/The Canterbury Tales Danielle McGrane (bio) There's a scene at the beginning of Pasolini's I racconti di Canterbury/The Canterbury Tales (IT, 1972) where a shirtless man with long, flowing blond hair wrestles in a ring with another for the amusement of marketgoers in an English country town in the 1300s. It's a far cry from the typical images associated with Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (originally Tales of Caunterbury) written 1387–1400. For one thing, it looks modern. For a film made in 1972, this could be a precursor to the wrestling entertainment that was big in 1990s American culture. But this is no ordinary retelling of these medieval tales. In the hands of Pasolini, they become stories of enjoyment and celebration, feasts, frolics, and, yes, fornication. Much fornication. And there's a modern sensibility to them. Gone is the trudge through Chaucer's Middle English London dialect as the director brings the humanity of these stories to the surface. These aren't historic tales designed to represent the past. Instead, there's something here to relate to the present—be that 1972 or 2022. Pasolini has ripped open the dusty old tomes of the Tales—which, sadly impenetrable to many, have sat on forgotten shelves in libraries for decades—and sheds light on what these stories were designed to do. Let me back up somewhat: I have been a little unfair when I wrote of Chaucer's Middle English. It can seem like a slog now, wading through this strange "ye olde" language, but, in fact, Chaucer's use of the vernacular was something of a rebellious act. This was the language of the people, spoken by the people, as opposed to the Latin or French that most texts were written in at the time. "No [End Page 98] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Italian film poster. martyr to accuracy in his art," as the introduction to the film in the Criterion Collection puts it, Pasolini seizes on this, runs with it, and goes several steps further in his retelling of several of Chaucer's tales that are interspersed by scenes of Chaucer (played by Pasolini): Chaucer's Middle English was apparently turned into modern colloquial English before it was translated into Italian, which was then itself transmuted into common, slangy Italian speech. When it came time to create the [End Page 99] English-dubbed version of the film, which Pasolini oversaw, the language became, according to scholar Sam Rohdie, another version of "colloquial English 'modern' speech and slang, which are 'like' Chaucerian English but not Chaucerian English."1 That he cast himself in the role of Chaucer tells us how important Pasolini viewed the continued use and preservation of the vernacular—something he had done since his first book of poetry, Poesi a Casarsa (1942) written in the Friulian dialect, and his first two films, Accattone (IT, 1961) and Mamma Roma (IT, 1962), in which the Romanesco dialect of the slum dwellers of Rome breathes life into the characters. What Pasolini sees, and what he wants us to see, in The Canterbury Tales is that these aren't tales to be confined to university libraries but stories that should be put on display for our amusement and delight—much like the puerile but compelling performance of a shirtless, longhaired wrestler. Of Chaucer's 24 tales, Pasolini chose eight—stories that, as Chaucer tells us, his pilgrims told to pass the time on their journey from London to the shrine of Thomas Beckett in Canterbury Cathedral in Kent, the martyr and saint probably best known today from T.S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral (1935). It's a storytelling contest and, while designed to entertain, exposing the best and worst of humanity, the stories also reflect the culture and society of the world of their characters and Chaucer's readers. That said, these are also satirical, anti-clerical, and often scurrilous tales of a strict and punitive society where threats of ex-communication by the Catholic Church or public execution hang over everyone for what seems today like the smallest...