The cooked and the raw: zoomorphic symbolism in Dario Fo's Giullarate.

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-JAN-04

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Il gioco antropomorfico e zoomorfico alternato e una costante della storia del teatro, e pith in generale di ogni rappresentazione, dal rito allo spettacolo.

(Dario Fo) (1)

Dario Fo's theatrical career began in the early 1950s and culminated in 1997 with the Nobel Prize for literature. (2) Greatly influenced by the writings of Antonio Gramsci, Fo has been a champion of popular culture, and his theatre is based on forms and principles of popular and oral performance traditions. (3) The traditions associated with primordial European carnival rites, which influenced the commedia dell'arte, are a major part of this popular foundation. The carnival tradition is defined in great part by a sense of the grotesque, particularly in the bizarre combinations of human and animal qualities, which survived in the carnival masks. These primordial zoomorphic qualities informed the masked stock characters of the commedia. This study explores Fo's varied use of zoomorphic symbolism in his one-man performances, with a focus on 'Storia della tigre'.

Although he has written and performed in several different genres, Fo's preferred modes by far are the satirical farce and the giullarata, his signature one-man show, named after the giullari, the itinerant street performers of the Middle Ages. His satirical farces incorporate many elements of what he calls 'teatro minore: le farse popolari dell'Otto-Novecento, il teatro di varieta, l'avanspettacolo, gli spettacoli dei clown e perfino le comiche del "muto"'. (4) Thus clowning, puppets, and the slapstick, visual gags, and theatrical devices of variety theatre abound in Fo's plays. His giullarata is based on the principles of performance found in many oral traditions. Perhaps most striking is the art of performing from a skeletal outline and not from a scripted text. This technique is one of the many elements we can deduce that the giullari brought to the commedia dell'arte at its inception in the middle of the sixteenth century. It is the basis of the commedia players' so-called improvisation. The art of 'composition by theme' involves contextualizing preconceived formulaic units in performance, where they are subject to endless variations. (5) Fo demonstrated this technique in his Nobel acceptance speech. Instead of a formal scripted speech, he passed out what amounted to a series of drawings, which served as the formulaic units upon which he developed his discourse. (6)

Owing to its basis in the principles of oral art, the giullarata shares qualities with other oral traditions around the world. Ruth Finnegan's description of African narrative traditions, for example, may be used to describe Fo's giullarata as well:

Stories are often enacted in the sense that, to a greater or smaller degree, the speech and gestures of their characters are imitated by the narrator, and the action is largely exhibited through dialogue in which the storyteller directly portrays various characters in turn. It is true that such enactment of character is not sustained or complete, that straight narration, as well as dramatic dialogue, is used to communicate the events of the story, and that only one real 'actor' could be said to be involved. (7)

To a great extent, Fo's insistence on popular forms can be explained by his interpretation of the writings of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci's Marxist theories focused on the concept of superstructure as the cultural forms of a society, which are a manifestation of the tensions inherent in the economic conflicts at its basis, i.e. the substructure. His theory of hegemony was an attempt to explain how the ruling classes keep the working classes in a subservient position by convincing them of their cultural inferiority. It is the task of the 'organic intellectual' to give to the masses a sense of dignity for their culture. (It should be noted that in Italy during Gramsci's lifetime and Fo's youth, the contrast between culture of the elite classes and the popular culture of the masses was very marked.)

Taking the example of language, Gramsci compares standard Italian to literary Latin of the Middle Ages, in the sense that both were languages of a learned elite: 'L'italiano e di nuovo una lingua scritta e non parlata, dei dottie non della nazione.' (8) Thus while his satirical farces are in Italian, Fo's giullarate are performed in dialect (mainly his native Lombard with elements of Venetan and other neighbouring dialects), which he considers more genuine and expressive than the standard language.

Gramsci's world-view had a privileged place for the intellectual as a disseminator of Marxist ideas. In order to understand the masses, it was important for the Marxist intellect to study their culture:

Il folklore, mi pare, e stato finora studiato (in realta finora e stato solo raccolto materiale grezzo) come elemento 'pittoresco'. Bisognerebbe studiarlo come 'concezione del mondo' di determinati strati della societa, che non sono toccati dalle correnti moderne di pensiero. [...] Il folklore puo essere capito solo come riflesso delle condizioni di vita del popolo, sebbene spesso esso si prolunghi anche quando le condizioni siano modificate in combinazioni bizzarre. [...] Il folklore non deve essere concepito come una bizzarria, una stranezza, una cosa ridicola, una cosa tutt'al piu pittoresca: ma deve essere concepito come una cosa molto seria e da prendere sul serio. (Quaderni del carcere, 1, 89-90)(9)

In Fo's play L'operaio conosce 300 parole il padrone 1000 per questo lui il padrone, three people are removing books from the library of their casa del popolo, while discussing how most members of the working class do not read any more. As they become curious and read passages from the various books they are handling, visions of their Marxist forefathers and other characters appear and interact. At one point the spectre of Gramsci succinctly expresses the crux of Fo's interpretation of Gramscian ideas on folk culture and the role of the Marxist intellectual with relation to the folk: 'Dobbiamo smetterla di considerare l'operaio come una marionetta che non sa, che non puo sapere, perche non ha cultura. L'operaio sa, perche e l'avanguardia del popolo, perche il popolo ha una grande cultura. Il potere borghese, aristocratico, la Chiesa gliel'hanno in gran parte distrutta, sotterrata,...

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