The Erotics of Excess : fabliaux and the power of/in language

Most of us spend a lot of time trying not to offend people when circumstances call for it. We don’t express continually through excess, though we might use that language with friends.

Yet the fabliaux, and in particular the erotic fabliaux, are obsessed with expressing excess. This is not unique to the fabliaux, by any means, as medieval manuscripts are full of marginalia about sex:

All this begs the question: what is the function of this excess? What does so much sex do?

And for whom is it destined? In our discussion of authorial identity and audience, we identified the dissonance between one version of reading the fabliaux, in which the nobility mocks the peasants ; in the other, the bourgeoisie uses excess to critique the system. What kind of audience is expected by the erotic texts? How does that influence their message?

We identified several levels of interest in the fabliaux, which may help us answer these questions:

• The grotesque as a way of discussing the forbidden
• Class divisions & the use of language
• Education & power
• Dissecting inequality in the middle ages

Perhaps another way of thinking about these issues is to think through them from the comedic but (in my opinion horrible) take by George Carlin, who explores language as he rhapsodizes on the seven words you can’t say on radio :

We are no longer talking just about sex, but about power and language.