The occitan fabliaux and the linguistic distribution of genres

Abstract

Only two texts can really qualify as Occitan fabliaux, namely Raimon Vidal de Besalú's Castia Gilos and the Novas del Papagai of Arnaut de Carcassès. Although we can never know about the historical accidents that may have prevented texts from coming down to us, the relative proportions of extant epics, romances, and fabliaux in Occitan may not give an entirely misleading impression of their popularity. In this paper, I attempt to account firstly for the paucity of fabliaux in Old Occitan and secondly for their unusual features when compared with those in Old French. I further consider whether we can even regard the Castia Gilos and the Novas del Papagai as Occitan fabliaux. The question itself may be gallocentric and posed by scholars approaching Occitan from the north. These two texts designate themselves as novas, but the term seems to have too wide an application to be of much use. If not exactly fabliaux, then they at least fill a similar slot in the Occitan Gattungssystem to that occupied by the fabliaux in Old French. They are humorous, didactic, and largely meaningless (except for the basic joke) outside of their own linguistic and cultural intertext.