Mimesis (38 page)

As I have said, the story ends very badly for Frate Alberto. His host hears on the Rialto what happened that night at Madonna Lisetta’s and infers who the man he took in is. He extorts a large sum of money from Frate Alberto and then betrays him nevertheless; and he does it in so disgusting a way that the frate becomes the object of a public scandal with moral and practical consequences from which he never recovers. We feel almost sorry for him, especially if we consider with what delight and indulgence Boccaccio relates the erotic escapades of other clerics no better than Frate Alberto (for instance 3, 4—the story of the monk Don Felice who induces his lady love’s husband to perform a ridiculous penance which keeps him away from home nights; or 3, 8, the story of an abbot who takes the husband to Purgatory for a while and even makes him do penance there).

The passage reprinted above contains the crisis of the novella. It consists of Madonna Lisetta’s conversation with her confidante and the consequences of their conversation: the strange rumor spreading through the town; the relatives hearing it and deciding to catch the angel; the nocturnal scene in which the frate escapes for the time being by boldly jumping into the canal. The conversation between the two women is psychologically and stylistically a masterly treatment of a vivid everyday scene. Both the confidante who, suppressing her laughter, voices some doubt with simulated politeness to get Lisetta to go on talking, as well as the heroine herself who, in her vaingloriousness, lets herself be lured even beyond the limits of her innate stupidity, impress us as true to life and natural. Yet the stylistic devices which Boccaccio employs are anything but purely popular. His prose, which has often been analyzed, reflects the schooling it received from antique models and the precepts of medieval rhetoric, and it displays all its arts. It summarizes complex situations in a single period and puts a shifting word order at the service of emphasizing what is important, of retarding or accelerating the tempo of the action, of rhythmic and melodic effect.

The introductory sentence itself is a rich period, and the two gerunds
essendo
and
quistionando
—one in initial, the other in final position, with a leisurely interval between them—are as well-calculated as the syntactic stress on
la sua
which concludes the first of two rhythmically quite similar cadences, the second of which ends with
ogni altra
. And when the actual conversation begins, our good Lisetta is so enthusiastic about herself that she fairly bursts into song:
se voi sapeste a cui la mia bellezza piace
. … Still more delightful is her second
speech with its many brief and almost equisyllabic units in which the so-called
cursus velox
predominates. The most beautiful of them,
ma l’intendiménto mío / è l’ágnolo Gabriéllo
, is echoed in her confidante’s reply,
se l’ágnolo Gabriéllo / è vòstro intendiménto
. In this second speech we find the first colloquialisms:
intendimento
, presumably of social rather than local color, can hardly have been in polite usage in this particular acceptation (roughly,
desiderium
, English “sweetheart”), nor yet the expression
nel mondo o in maremma
(which gives us another charming cadence). The more excited she grows, the more numerous are the colloquial and now even dialectal forms: the Venetian
marido
in the enchanting sentence which stresses the praises of Gabriel’s erotic prowess by the adjurational formula,
per le piaghe di Dio
, and the climactic effect (again Venetian),
mo vedi vu
, whose note of vulgar triumph is the more humorous as, just before, she had again been singing sweetly, …
ma perciocchè io gli paio più bella che niuna che ne sia in cielo, s’è egli innamorato di me. …

The next two periods comprise the spreading of the rumor throughout the town, in two stages. The first leads from
la comare
to the
brigata di donne
, the second from
queste donne
to
Vinegia
. Each has its own source of motion: the first in the confidante’s impatience to unburden herself of her story, an impatience whose urgency and subsequent appeasement come out remarkably well in a corresponding movement of the verbs (
partita … le parve mille anni che ella fosse … dove potesse … e ragunatasi … ordinatamente raccontò
); the second, in the progressive expansion, paratactically expressed, of the field covered. From here on the narration becomes more rapid and more dramatic. The very next sentence reaches all the way from the moment when the relatives hear the rumor to their nocturnal ambush, although there is room in it for a few additional details of fact and psychological description. Yet it seems relatively empty and calm compared with the two which follow and in which the entire night scene in Lisetta’s house, down to Frate Alberto’s bold leap, takes its course in two periods which, however, together constitute but a single movement. This is done by interlacing hypotactic forms, with participial constructions (generally a favorite device with Boccaccio) playing the most important part. The first sentence begins quietly enough with the principal verb
avenne
and the corresponding subject clause
che … venne
…; but in the attached relative clause,
il quale
(a secondary subordinate clause, that is), the catastrophe bursts: …
andatovi, appena spogliato s’era, che i cognati … furono all’ uscio
. And then comes
a tempest of verb forms:
sentendo, e avvisato, levatosi, non avendo, aperse, e si gittò
. If only by reason of the brevity of the crowding units, the effect is one of extraordinary speed and dramatic precipitation. And for the same reason—despite the learned and classical origin of the stylistic devices employed—it is not at all literary; the tone is not that of written language but of oral narrative, the more so because the position of the verbs, and hence the length and tempo of the intervening sections of greater calm, is constantly varied in an artistically spontaneous fashion:
sentendo
and
avvisato
are placed close together, as are
levatosi
and
non avendo, aperse
soon follows, but the concluding
si gittò
appears only after the relative clause referring to the window. I do not quite see, by the way, why Boccaccio has the frate hear of the rumor which is going the rounds. So shrewd a knave would hardly put his head in such a trap, in order to give Lisetta a piece of his mind, if he were at all aware that there was any risk. The whole thing, it seems to me, would be more natural if he had no inkling that something was afoot. His quick and bold escape requires no special motivation in the form of a previously crystallized suspicion. Or did Boccaccio have some other reason for making the statement? I see none.

While the frate swims the canal, the narrative becomes momentarily quieter, more relaxed, slower: we have principal verbs, in an imperfect of description, arranged paratactically. But no sooner has he reached the other side than the verbs begin jostling each other again, especially when he enters the strange house:
prestamente se n’entrò, pregando
…
che per l’amor di Dio gli scampasse la vita, sue favole dicendo, perchè … fosse
. The intervals between verbs are likewise brief or urgent. Exceedingly condensed and hurried is
quivi a quella ora e ignudo
. Then the tide begins to ebb. The ensuing sentences are still packed full of factual information and hence with participial hypotaxes, but at least they are governed by the progressively more leisurely pace of principal clauses linked by “and”:
mise, et dissegli, e andò. Entrati … trovarono che … se n’era volato
is still quite dramatic; but then comes the progressive relaxation of the paratactic series
dissero, e ultimamente lasciarono stare, e tornarsi
.

Of such artistry there is no trace in earlier narrative literature. First let us take a random example from the Old French genre of droll tales in verse, the greatest number of which were produced about a century before Boccaccio. I choose a passage from the fablel
Du prestre qui ot mere a force
(from Berlin Ms Hamilton 257, after the text by G.
Rohlfs,
Sechs altfranzösische Fablels
, Halle, 1925, p. 12). The theme is a priest who has a very mean, ugly, and stingy mother whom he keeps away from his house while he spoils his mistress, especially in the matter of clothes. The cantankerous old woman complains of this, and the priest answers:

(“Be still,” he said, “you are silly! What are you complaining about, since you have bread to eat and my soup and my peas? And even that is a burden to me, for you keep saying nasty things to me.” The old woman says: “That won’t do you any good, for I want from now on that you bind yourself to honor me greatly as your mother.” The priest said: “By the Holy Father, never again shall she eat of what I have. Let her do her worst, or her best, as she likes.” “I shall, and more than will suit you,” says the old woman, “for I am going to go to the bishop and tell him about your misdoing and your life, and how well your mistress is served. She has enough to eat and plenty of clothes, and me you want to feed on empty words. Of your wealth I have no part.” With these words the old woman runs off, grieved and angry. Straight to the bishop she went. She gets to him and complains of her son who loves her no more than he would a dog and will do nothing for her. “He cares for his mistress above everything else and loves her more than his relatives. She has plenty of clothes.”
When the old woman had told the bishop everything she could, he answers her in a word. For the moment he will not say more than that he will have her son summoned and he must come to court on the appointed day. The old woman bowed, and leaves without further reply. And the bishop issued his summons to her son that he must come to court. He means to rein him in short if he does not do what is right by his mother. I am very much afraid he is going to pay dearly for it. When the time and the day came on which the bishop held his court, there were many clerks and other people and more than two hundred priests. The old woman did not keep quiet. She went straight up to the bishop and told him her business. The bishop tells her not to leave, because as soon as her son arrives she should know that he will suspend him and take away his whole benefice. …)

The old woman misunderstands the word
soupendra
. She thinks her son is to be hanged. Now she regrets having accused him, and in her anxiety she points out the first priest who comes in, and claims that he is her son. To this uncomprehending victim the bishop administers such a tongue-lashing that the poor fellow has no chance to get in a word. The bishop orders him to take his old mother with him and henceforth to treat her decently, as a priest should. And woe to him if there should be any more complaints about his conduct! The bewildered priest takes the old woman with him on his horse. On his way home he meets the old woman’s real son and tells him about his adventure, while the old woman makes signs to her son not to give himself away. The other priest ends his story by saying that he would gladly give forty pounds to anyone who would rid him of his unwanted burden. Fine, says the son, it’s a bargain; give me the money, and I will relieve you of your old woman. And it was done.

Here too the part of the story reprinted begins with a realistic conversation, an everyday scene, the quarrel between mother and son, and here too the course of the conversation is a very lively crescendo. Just as, in the other case, Lisetta’s confidante, by replying with ostensible amiability, gets Lisetta to talk on and on until her secret is out, so here the old woman, by her cantankerous complaints, irritates her son until he flies into a rage and threatens to cut off the supply of food he has been giving her, whereupon the mother, also beside herself with rage, runs off to the bishop. Although the dialect of the piece is hard to identify (Rohlfs considers that of the Ile de France likely), the
tone of the conversation is far less stylized and more directly popular than in Boccaccio. It is invariably the common speech of the people (and the people includes the lower clergy): thoroughly paratactic, with lively questions and exclamations, full, and indeed overfull, of popular turns of expression. The narrator’s tone is not essentially different from that of his characters. He too tells his story in the same simple tone, with the same sensory vividness, giving a graphic picture of the situation through the most unpretentious means and the most everyday words. The only stylization he permits himself is the verse form, rhymed octosyllabic couplets, which favors extremely simple and brief sentence patterns and as yet knows nothing of the rhythmic multiplicity of later narrative verse forms, such as those of Ariosto and Lafontaine. Thus the arrangement of the narrative which follows upon the dialogue is wholly artless, even though its freshness makes it delightful. In paratactic single file, without any effort to complicate or to unravel, without any compression of what is of secondary importance, without any change of tempo, the story runs or stumbles on. In order to bring in the joke about
soupendre
, the scene between the old woman and the bishop has to be repeated, and the bishop himself has to state his views no less than three times. No doubt these things and, more generally, the many details and lines of padding brought in to resolve difficulties of rhyme, give the narrative a pleasantly leisurely breadth. But its composition is crude and its character is purely popular, in the sense that the narrator himself belongs to the type of people he describes, and of course also to the people he addresses. His own horizon is socially and ethically as narrow as that of his personages and of the audience he wishes to set laughing by his story. Narrator, narrative, and audience belong to the same world, which is that of the common, uneducated people, without aesthetic or moral pretensions. In keeping with this is the characterization of the personages and of the way they act, a characterization which is certainly lively and graphic but also relatively crude and monochromatic. They are popular in the sense that they are characters with which everybody was familiar at the time: a boorish priest susceptible to every kind of worldly pleasure, and a cantankerous old woman. The minor characters are not described as specific individuals at all; we get only their behavior, which is determined by the situation.