It may seem strange to yoke the concepts of genre and parody to that of spectacle. Prevailing definitions of genre for medieval French literature are based on formand style as much as (or even more than) content; alternatives to the concept of genre also identify expression, or rather 'register' as Zumthor terms it (see Introduction), as differentiating between various kinds of literary production. Parody is typically seen as exaggerating, distorting, or inverting other texts, and since the comic tales (diversely labelled contes, fabliaux, and nouvelles, and the one-off chantefable of Aucassin et Nicolette) that are discussed in this chapter have often been seen as 'parodic' of other works or genres, critics have paid especially close attention to their formal and stylistic traits. Indeed, some of the best criticism on the work that I shall be centrally concerned with, Aucassin et Nicolette, analyses the role within it of discourse, and the fabliaux have been brilliantly illumined from this angle too. And yet discussions of genre, parody, and the comic tale have always drawn heavily on terms such as 'perspective' and 'distance' that imply a visual field. Witness for example Caroline Jewers’s statement about Aucassin: 'its deviation from the form of romance allows for a privileged vantage point from which to view convention and constitutes another form of generic distance from the body of texts it comically reflects'. In this chapter I propose to develop this visual image, but turn it around. That is, instead of envisaging a text such as Aucassin as a vantage point from which to view other things, I will consider it as engineering positions from which it itself is to be viewed. If we simply adopt the perspectives it creates for us we risk being oblivious to how they were created. However, if we analyse them we glean, among other advantages, a fresh purchase on the nature of genre and parody in medieval French literature.