10.13125/2039-6597/3377
This brief essay tackles the fundamental connection between fairy tale and hope, between utopia and identity, through an analysis of Basile's "The old woman who was skinned" and Matteo Garrone's recent interpretation. This essay makes use of Ernst Bloch's works on utopia and Gabriel Marcel's Homo viator.
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Armando Maggi
Between
Identity and hope in Matteo Garrone’s adaptation of Giambattista Basile’s tale «The old woman who was skinned» read in the light of Gabriel Marcel’s and Ernst Bloch’s philosophy
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
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In discussion: Ed. Niccolò Scaffai
2017-11-30
2018-06-10
2017-11-30
2018-06-10
1
Armando Maggi
2017/11/30
10.13125/2039-6597/3377
2039-6597
14
Identity and hope in Matteo Garrone’s adaptation of Giambattista Basile’s tale «The old woman who was skinned» read in the light of Gabriel Marcel’s and Ernst Bloch’s philosophy
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/3377/2921
7
           Identity and hope
    in Matteo Garrone’s adaptation
      of Giambattista Basile’s tale
  «The old woman who was skinned»
  read in the light of Gabriel Marcel’s
     and Ernst Bloch’s philosophy

                            Armando Maggi


     In the Western tradition of classic literary fairy tales we often
encounter the motif of two sisters, or stepsisters, who embody two
opposite characters and thus two opposite destinies: one is kind and
humble and thus will be rewarded, whereas the other is arrogant and
rude and will be punished. The best-known example is Charles
Perrault’s «The Fairies», which seems to echo Giambattista Basile’s
«The Three Fairies», in which a donkey’s testicles fall onto the
disrespectful stepsister’s forehead, «where it stuck to her skin and
looked like a birthmark caused by a pregnant mother’s cravings»
(Basile 2007: 284). As Thea Rimini stresses in her article for this journal,
the grotesque is one of the main elements that connect Basile to
Garrone. In selecting «The old woman who was skinned» (the tenth
tale of the first day in Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti) as one of the three
narrative threads of his film The Tale of Tales (2015), Matteo Garrone
was drawn to the multiple disquieting elements of Basile’s tale,
especially its gruesome ending, but also its morbid lingering on the
identification between physical appearance and female self. The
ravaging effects of time on the body, not just the female one, are a


Between, vol. VII, n. 14 (NovembreNovember 2017)
Armando Maggi, Identity and hope



leitmotif of seventeenth-century culture, but in Basile’s tale Garrone
also found an unsettling and misogynistic view of female identity as
intrinsically unstable and transient, an identity that swiftly moves from
visibility to invisibility, from deserving praise to deserving scorn and
insult.
      By focusing on this tale from Basile’s collection, this brief essay
will broach the issue of literary reception as a constantly evolving
process, and thus it will also examine how our changing rapport with
the narrative text has affected Garrone’s appropriation of the tale.
However, a more pressing question will lead our analysis. Basile’s and
Garrone’s tale compels us to examine the connection between self-
awareness and hope, which we will read in the light of two short
essays by the French ‘Catholic existentialist’ Gabriel Marcel and the
utopian philosophy of Ernst Bloch.
      «The old woman who was skinned» presents a first major
problem. Although, as Louis Vax underscores, fairy tales do not
necessarily equal ‘moral tales’, we expect these stories in all their
possible renditions (films, books, etc.) to convey some moral, ethical
teaching (Vax 2001: 205). However, the perfect correspondence
between morality and immorality, and thus between reward and
punishment, is missing from Basile’s story.
      In a nutshell, this Neapolitan tale revolves around two poor old
women living in a dark and miserable room beneath a king’s palace.
Without seeing them, carried away by his imagination the king
becomes convinced that a beautiful girl lives there and rushes to ‘her’
door to ask ‘her’ to show him her beauty. The old women refuse to let
him in and, aware of the king’s excitement, «grow cocky» and decide
to deceive him (Basile 2007: 117). «In a little tiny voice» they reassure
the king standing outside their door that, in eight days, they will show
him one finger (ibid.). Upon his return, the ‘girl’ tells the king, who can
hardly control his sexual arousal, that she will sleep with him only if
she is received at night and in complete darkness. In a reversal of the
Cupid and Psyche myth, which Basile uses in several of his tales
(Maggi 2015: 25-67), after possessing her the king lights a candle,
realizes that a naked old woman is lying next to him, and has her


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thrown out of the window. In Basile, the old woman doesn’t die
because her hair gets entangled in the branch of a fig tree. Some fairies,
who had never laughed, happen to pass by, find the spectacle so
comical that they burst out laughing and, to thank the old woman for
her ridiculous show, turn her into a young and beautiful girl. In
Garrone’s film, a mysterious witch-like woman, whose garb recalls the
characters from Pasolini’s ‘mythic’ films (Oedipus the King, for example,
or Medea), walks by, finds the scene amusing, and suckles the old
woman, who magically becomes young again. In both versions, the
mystified king takes her back to his palace and throws a party to
celebrate their marriage. Like the king, the other sister as well is deeply
confused and struggles to recognize her sibling. Overwhelmed by
envy, at the wedding party the old woman insists that her sister tell her
how she became so young and, when the servants ask her to leave the
palace, reiterates that she has the right to live there because she is the
queen’s sister. In Basile, the young queen puts off all explanation and
tries to comfort her obstinate sister by stressing that now she, the
queen, will take care of all her old sister’s needs. In Garrone’s film, the
queen simply tells her that she doesn’t know how the transformation
happened. In both the book and the film, since the old sister keeps
pestering her during her party, the queen tells her that she looks young
because she had been flayed. In Basile, the old woman asks a barber to
skin her and bleeds to death; in Garrone, she doesn’t die but trudges
back to her village drenched in her own blood.
      Basile’s tale (and Garrone’s interpretation) defies some
fundamental clichés of the fairy-tale genre. First of all, if a fairy tale is
meant to convey a moral teaching, this story doesn’t work. Yes, the old
woman is punished because of her envy toward her luckier sister. It is
essential to point out, however, that the sister who becomes young and
beautiful (called Dora in the film) doesn’t experience this miracle as a
consequence of her staunch morality. In Basile, it is the older sister who
ends up in bed with the king. In Garrone’s version, Dora is the more
mischievous of the two. She is the one who comes up with the plan to
mislead the king; she also forces her sister (Imma in the film) to stick
her finger in the keyhole and let the lascivious king kiss it and suck it.


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Armando Maggi, Identity and hope



Moreover, Garrone rightly highlights the king’s sexual incontinence,
hinted at in Basile, by showing him in two sex scenes with multiple
partners. If we assume that the tale centers on the nefarious
consequences of unbridled passion (envy, lust), the king as well should
be subjected to some sort of punishment, but nothing happens to him.
      The tale also suffers from a basic fallacy. By letting the king
believe that they were one attractive girl, what were the two old sisters
trying to accomplish? Neither the tale nor the film claims that the
sisters were pursuing sexual satisfaction, and not even the expensive
gifts they receive seemed to be the real goal of their deception. To glean
a better understanding of this issue, we need to go back to the original
myth of Cupid and Psyche, which was so dear to Basile. In book 5 of
Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, Cupid beseeches Psyche to respect his wish
to conceal his identity while making love to her every night, even
though her jealous sisters hold that a «monstrous snake» lies with her
in the dark (Apuleius 1996: 283). Cupid does not explain why he must
protect his identity, although innumerable medieval and early-modern
commentators, starting from Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Pagan Gods,
offered diverse interpretations that were mainly reliant on Christian
theology. Basile maintains the motif of a hidden identity that needs to
be preserved, but whereas in Apuleius the mysterious visitor is a
divine beautiful being, in the Neapolitan story the old woman, who
stands for Cupid, tries hard to protect a false image of herself, an
identity that was given to her by the king’s unrestrained sexual
imagination. This is the core of Basile’s, and Garrone’s, narrative: the
woman’s erroneous desire to hold onto a self that does not belong to
her, and does not exist.
      Before we proceed, we must recall what Ernst Bloch states at the
beginning of his book Traces. In the chapter titled «The Mark!», Bloch
emphasizes the importance of ‘the marks’ that appear «among us to the
side» (Bloch 2006: 5). «Apart from the amusement» that a story
provides, writes Bloch, «an impression is still working: What was that?
Something moved! And it moved in its own way. An impression that
will not let us come to rest over what we heard. An impression on the
surface of life, so that it tears, perhaps» (ibid.: 6). This sudden


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impression, which we perceive as an unanswered question, as a
‘tearing apart’ of the fabric of life, is the ‘mark’ that lingers in the
reader’s, or viewer’s, mind. For Bloch, this mark, this insistent question
has a fairy-tale and utopian nature, in the sense that it points to a
resolution to come; it expresses a hopeful request. In the first book of
his opus The Principle of Hope, Bloch stresses that «the never-forgotten
spirit of fairytale works in the dreams of a better life, but also, and this
must finally be understood, suo modo in works of art» (Bloch 1986: 98).
Bloch contends that «every great work of art, besides its manifest
essence, is also carried towards a latency of its coming side, that it:
towards the contents of a future which had not yet appeared in its
time, in fact ultimately towards the contents of an as yet unknown final
state» (ibid.).
      Hypothesizing that a work of art (a Neapolitan tale along with its
film adaptation, for instance) harbors the «latency» of a future
disclosure, the revelation of a broader significance (its «yet unknown
final state»), means that we can’t help but heed its demand. I will argue
that Matteo Garrone’s film adaptation of Basile’s tale does not wipe off
the ‘mark’ from the tale; it actually makes its demand more visible and
more urgent.
      In our brief plot summary, we defined the old woman’s
metamorphosis as a ‘miracle’. In the chapter «Religious Mystery»
(third book of The Principle of Hope) Bloch expresses a disparaging view
of the Catholic belief in miracles (miracles today have «degenerated
into banal occultism» and only survive in Catholic «propaganda») but
contends that the concept of ‘miracle’ acquires a positive significance if
read in the light of the fairy-tale culture (Bloch 1995: 1307). Bloch
despises the common view of a miracle as something supernatural that
a human being experiences in a passive manner. Bloch is more
interested in stressing what ‘miraculous’ means and does to a human
being. «Joy», Bloch states, «is an essential part of the content of the
miracle» (ibid.: 1308). The «miraculous», Bloch explains, is «the figure
of identity», in the sense that «the miraculous is the flash of light of the
subject and of the object, beside which nothing alienated exists
anymore and in which subject and object have simultaneously ceased


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Armando Maggi, Identity and hope



to be separate» (ibid.: 1311). The miraculous, Bloch concludes, is the
disclosure of «homeness». In a miracle, we ‘come home’ because we
finally embody our truest and most joyful identity, in which our
alienation from the world has been transcended. It is almost
superfluous to mention that in «The old woman who was skinned» the
two elderly sisters live in a dark room beneath the king’s tower as if
hiding their ‘repulsive’ bodies from the external world. On the
contrary, Garrone stages the old woman’s miraculous transformation
in the forest as a majestic mise-en-scène in which the tall girl’s
imposing naked body, barely covered by her long red hair, dominates
a luscious natural setting, as if the girl were a new Eve in a new garden
of Eden, having finally healed the separation between self and world.
      Let us pause a moment before we proceed. Garrone’s film
‘betrays’ the original seventeenth-century tale in one significant point:
its ending. In Garrone’s The Tale of Tales Imma, the jealous sister,
doesn’t bleed to death but slowly walks back up the stairs leading to
the main square of her village. We see her bleeding shoulders and her
face entirely covered by blood (her face recalls Sissy Spacek’s in the
final gruesome scene of the horror film Carrie, 1976), and her eyes fixed
in a dazed gaze. In Basile’s book, nothing negative happens to her
luckier sister, Dora. The queen remains young whereas her curious
sister dies a ridiculous death. On the contrary, at the very end of
Garrone’s film, while attending a public event, the queen realizes that
the skin of her hand and her arm is rapidly aging, and alarmed flees
the scene. The mysterious woman who turned her into a young girl
had warned her that «everything passes». At the end of the film, the
sister (Dora) who had paraded her (false) youth is forced to disappear,
whereas the sister (Imma) who were asked to hide her (true) identity
(she shouldn’t say that she is the young queen’s sister!) exposes her
flayed body, a body with no defense (no skin protects her flesh), a
wounded identity visibly exposed to all violation.
      We find in Gabriel Marcel’s collection of essays Homo Viator a
fruitful aid for a clearer understanding of the issues discussed so far. In
«Ego and Its Relation To Others», written in 1941 when Nazism and
Fascism were revealing their ugliest nature, the French Existentialist


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Marcel contends that «presence» is «always dependent on an
experience which is at the same time irreducible and vague, the sense
of existing, of being in the world» (Marcel 1962: 15). The two old
women from Basile’s tale exemplify what we could call an
‘endangered’ or «vague» presence in Marcel’s words, in the sense that
in the tale (in both the literary and the visual version) they become
visible, so to speak, only thanks to a man’s sexual fantasy. They
become ‘present’ (the sisters know that their presence is perceived), but
as one and only one identity who does not exist (a beautiful girl). We
stressed that the two old women’s deepest, impossible request is to
embody the king’s fantasy. One of them, however, would live this
embodiment by proxy.
      If, as Marcel points out, a human being’s «consciousness of
existing» is strictly «linked up with the urge to make ourselves
recognized» by others, the two old sisters used to confirm each other’s
presence in a sort of mirroring effect. Withdrawn from the world
because their advanced age and poverty made them repulsive, Dora
and Imma were specular images, which reflected what Marcel calls
«the wound», that is, the ‘vague’ feeling, common to all human beings,
of not being there or of not being totally there (ibid.: 16). To use a well-
known Lacanian expression, the two sisters had created a ‘mirror-
stage’ effect that made them visible and as a private occurrence (they
were visible only to each other). In his famous 1949 essay on this
subject, Lacan makes clear that the ‘mirror-stage’, which he had
already conceptualized in 1936, is not limited to the infant but is active
in the on-going formation of the ego. The ‘mirror-stage’, writes Lacan,
is an «identification in the full sense analysis gives to the term» (Lacan
2006: 76). Marcel’s philosophical discourse is very close to Lacan’s.
«Each of us», writes Marcel, «appears to himself and to others as a
particular problem for which the circumstances, whatever they may be,
are not enough to provide a solution» (Marcel 1962: 23). «The obscure
consciousness that after all I am nothing but an empty void» leads us
to see others as «a means of resonance or an amplifier» (ibid.: 17). On
the one hand, the king is pursuing what he believes is a charming
young woman; on the other, the two elderly sisters suspend any


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Armando Maggi, Identity and hope



reasonable approach to reality and support the king’s delusion because
it «recognizes» them as they wish they were.
      Both sisters experience the sudden rejuvenation as a revelation, as
a form of awakening. In Garrone’s The Tale of Tales, we first see Dora in
the forest admire her naked young body and then, during her wedding
party, Imma stare in awe at her sister’s beauty. The king himself at first
can’t believe his eyes when he opens the window and, looking down,
spots the young beauty (in Basile) or when he runs into the girl while
hunting in the woods (in Garrone). Rather than an actual ‘awakening’,
the magical transformation is closer to an instance of daydreaming,
because it is the actualization of a communal fantasy (the king’s and
the sisters’). In a key passage of his essay, Marcel offers a sharp insight:
«Each of us, in a considerable part of his life or of his being, is still
unawakened, that is to say that he moves on the margin of reality like a
sleepwalker. Let us say that the ego, as such, is ruled by a sort of vague
fascination» (ibid.: 22-23).
      The film adaptation of Basile’s tale makes a major ‘correction’ to
the original tale. In the Neapolitan collection, the old woman married
to the king remains young forever whereas her nosey sister bleeds to
death. On the contrary, Garrone’s film ends with the queen realizing
that her magical youth is fading away quickly and thus she will soon
return to her original non-identity. Garrone’s The Tale of Tales at once
visualizes and undermines the power of magic by highlighting its
illusory nature. The sisters’ ‘awakening’ had been only an illusion; they
believed they could fill their inner ‘void’ with a fantasy. It is in the final
pages of his essay on the ego that Marcel brings his reasoning to a bold
conclusion: the act of ‘finding oneself’ lies in one’s «availability»
(disponibilité), that is, the subject becomes ‘incarnate’ when «he is aware
of himself far less as a being than as a desire to rise above everything
which he is and is not, above the actuality in which he really feels he is
involved» (ibid.: 25-26). Marcel phrases this crucial concept as an
explicit response to the «pseudo-Nietzschean ideology» dominating
contemporary Europe (ibid.: 27). Speaking of Nazism, Marcel
underscores that the «fanatical multitudes who, taking their orders
without a shadow of enquiry or reflection, rush singing to their death»


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have not ‘risen above themselves’ but have only succumbed to
idolatry, what Marcel had previously called «egolatry» (ibid.: 26; 20).
      As «A Metaphysic of Hope», another essay in Homo Viator, makes
clear, for Marcel ‘the desire to rise above everything’ is nothing but the
subject’s openness to the other, his ‘availability’, thus stressing the
fundamental connection between being a ‘person’ and ‘being there’ for
the other. Being a person is not based, as Basile’s tale shows, on secrecy
and illusion, but rather on a certain «intimacy» resulting from my
‘hoping in’ the other, by ‘other’ meaning the radical otherness of reality
(ibid.: 40). But couldn’t one say that hope as well is an illusion, like the
magical transformation from old woman to beautiful girl? A
fundamental connection, Marcel contends, exists between «absolute
hope» and «liberty» (ibid.: 47; 45). ‘Absolute hope’ «transcends
imagination», that is, it is free from projections and illusions; it is an
inner disposition rather than a demand. «If time», Marcel concludes,
«is in its essence a separation and . . . a perpetual splitting up of the self
in relation to itself, hope on the contrary aims at reunion, at
recollection, at reconciliation» (ibid.: 53).
      What in Basile was a conventional, albeit horrific, derision of
female identity, in Garrone’s film turns into a source of disquiet. The
fleeting nature of female beauty, which traditionally identifies with a
woman’s identity, becomes the locus of reflection on the illusory roots
of human identity, on the ‘void’ that humankind strives to fill up with
‘magical thinking’. Garrone lingers on the rapid decaying of the young
queen’s hand, arm, and face with such morbid insistence that we, the
viewers, can’t help but receive this representation as a pressing
request. In our voyeuristic position, we can’t help but perceive a
demand, the need for a resolution to the ‘problem’ of our existence,
and our death. If a seventeenth-century reader of Basile’s collection of
fairy tales approached this horrendous story with ironic detachment as
if being a reader necessarily meant being male (readership equaled
male identity), in 2015 Garrone’s film turns the trope of the ‘vague’ and
‘unstable’ female identity into a new baroque representation of a
universal condition.



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    Armando Maggi, Identity and hope




                                       Works cited
Basile, Giambattista, The Tale of Tales, Entertainment for the Little Ones, tr.
    Nancy Canepa, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2016.
Bloch, Ernst, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, tr. Neville Plaice, Cambridge,
    Mass., The MIT Press, 1995.
Bloch, Ernst, Traces, tr. Anthony Nassar, Palo Alto, Ca., Stanford University
    Press, 2006.
Lacan, Jacques, “The Mirror Stage As Formative of the I Function”, Ecrits,
    tr. Bruce Fink, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2006, 75-81.
Maggi, Armando, Preserving the Spell: Basile’s The Tale of Tales and Its
    Afterlife in the Fairy-Tale Tradition, Chicago, The University of Chicago
    Press, 2015.
Marcel, Gabriel, “The Ego and Its Relation To Others”, Homo Viator, tr.
    Emma Craufurd, New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1962: 13-28.
Marcel, Gabriel, “Sketch of Phenomenology and Metaphysic of Hope”,
    Homo Viator, tr. Emma Craufurd, New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1962:
    29-67.
Rimini, Thea, “Il tessitore di fiabe: Garrone e Il racconto dei racconti (dalla
    sceneggiatura al film)”, “Il tessitore di fiabe: Garrone e Il racconto dei
    racconti (dalla sceneggiatura al film)”, Maschere del tragico, Eds. C. Cao,
    A. Cinquegrani, E. Sbrojavacca, V. Tabaglio, Between, VII.14 (2017),
    http://www.betweenjournal.it.
Vax, Louis, “Les genres de la littérature orale”, Formes du récit dans la
    première moitié du XIXe siècle. Grimm-Brentano-La Motte Fouqué, Paris,
    Editions du temps, 2001, 184-222.



                                       Filmography
Carrie, Dir. Brian De Palma, USA, 1976.
The Tale of Tales, Dir. Matteo Garrone, Italy, 2015.



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                             The author
Armando Maggi

Armando Maggi teaches in the department of Romance Languages and
Literatures and the College at the University of Chicago.



      Email: amaggi@uchicago.edu




                             The paper
Date sent: 15/05/2017
Date accepted: 30/09/2017
Date published: 30/11/2017



                    How to quote this paper
Maggi, Armando, “Identity and hope in Matteo Garrone’s adaptation
of Giambattista Basile’s tale «The old woman who was skinned» read
in the light of Gabriel Marcel’s and Ernst Bloch’s philosophy”, Maschere
del tragico, Eds. C. Cao, A. Cinquegrani, E. Sbrojavacca, V. Tabaglio,
Between, VII.14 (2017), http://www.betweenjournal.it




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