Mimesis (39 page)

In the case of Frate Alberto, on the other hand, we are told his previous history, which explains the very specific character of his malicious and witty shrewdness. Madonna Lisetta’s stupidity and the
silly pride she takes in her womanly charms are unique of their kind in this particular mixture. And the same holds true of the secondary characters. Lisetta’s confidante, or the
buono uomo
in whose house Frate Alberto takes refuge, have a life and a character of their own which, to be sure, is only hastily indicated but which is clearly recognizable. We even get an inkling of what sort of people Madonna Lisetta’s relatives are, for there is something sharply characteristic in the grim joke,
si posero in cuore di trovare questo agnolo e di sapere se egli sapesse volare
. The last few words approach the form which German criticism has recently come to call
erlebte Rede
(free indirect discourse). Then too the setting is much more clearly specified than in the fablel. The events of the latter may occur anywhere in rural France, and its dialectal peculiarities, even if they could be more accurately identified, would be quite accidental and devoid of importance. Boccaccio’s tale is pronouncedly Venetian. It must also be borne in mind that the French fablel is quite generally restricted to a specific milieu of peasants and small townspeople, and that the variations in this milieu, insofar as they are observable at all, owe their existence exclusively to the accidental place of origin of the piece in question, whereas in Boccaccio’s case we are dealing with an author who in addition to this Venetian setting chose numerous others for his tales: for example Naples in the novella about Andreuccio da Perugia (2, 5), Palermo in the one about Sabaetto (8, 10), Florence and its environs in a long series of droll tales. And what is true of the settings is equally true of the social atmosphere. Boccaccio surveys and describes, in the most concrete manner, all the social strata, all the classes and professions, of his time. The gulf between the art of the fablel and the art of Boccaccio by no means reveals itself only in matters of style. The characterization of the personages, the local and social setting, are at once far more sharply individualized and more extensive. Here is a man whose conscious grasp of the principles of art enables him to stand above his subject matter and to submerge himself in it only so far as he chooses, a man who shapes his stories according to his own creative will.

As for Italian narrative literature before Boccaccio, the specimens known to us from that period have rather the character of moralizing or witty anecdotes. Their stylistic devices as well as the orbit of their views and concepts are much too limited for an individualized representation of characters and settings. They often exhibit a certain
brittle refinement of expression but in direct appeal to the senses they are by far inferior to the fablels. Here is an example:

Uno s’andò a confessare al prete suo, ed intra l’altre cose disse: Io ho una mia cognata, e’l mio fratello è lontano; e quando io ritorno a casa, per grande domistichezza, ella mi si pone a sedere in grembo. Come debbo fare? Rispose il prete: A me il facesse ella, ch’io la ne pagherei bene! (From the
Novellino
, ed. Letterio di Francia, Torino, 1930. Novella 87, p. 146.)

(A man went to his priest to confess and said to him, among other things: I have a sister-in-law, and my brother is away; and when I get home, in her great familiarity, she comes and sits on my lap. What shall I do? The priest answered: If she did that to me, I’d show her!)

In this little piece the whole emphasis is on the priest’s ambiguous answer; everything else is mere preparation and is told straight forwardly, in rather flat parataxes, without any sort of graphically sensory visualization. Many stories of the
Novellino
are similarly brief anecdotes, whose subject is a witty remark. One of the book’s subtitles is, accordingly,
Libro di Novelle e di bel parlar gentile
. There are some longer pieces as well; most of these are not droll tales but moralizing and didactic narratives. But the style is the same throughout: flatly paratactic, with the events strung together as though on a thread, without palpable breadth and without an environment for the characters to breathe in. The undeniable artistic sense of the
Novellino
is chiefly concerned with brief and striking formulations of the principal facts of the event being narrated. In this it follows the model of medieval collections of moral examples in Latin, the so-called
exempla
, and it surpasses them in organization, elegance, and freshness of expression. With sensory visualization it is hardly concerned, but it is clear that here, as with its Italian contemporaries, this limitation is a result of the linguistic and intellectual situation which prevailed at the time. The Italian vernacular was as yet too poor and lacking in suppleness, the horizon of concepts and judgments was as yet too narrow and restricted, to make possible a relaxed command of factual data and a sensory representation of multiplex phenomena. The entire available power of sensory visualization is concentrated upon a single climactic witticism, as, in our example, upon the priest’s reply. If it is permissible to base a judgment upon a single case, that of Fra Salimbene de Adam, a Franciscan and the extremely gifted author
of a Latin chronicle, it would seem that, at the end of the thirteenth century, Latin, as soon as a writer heavily interspersed it with Italian vulgarisms, as Salimbene did, could yield a much greater sensory force than written Italian. Salimbene’s chronicle is full of anecdotes. One of these—which has been repeatedly quoted by others as well as by myself—I will cite at this point. It tells the story of a Franciscan named Detesalve, and runs as follows:

Cum autem quadam die tempore yemali per civitatem Florentie ambularet, contigit, ut ex lapsu glatiei totaliter caderet. Videntes hoc Florentini, qui trufatores maximi sunt, ridere ceperunt. Quorum unus quesivit a fratre qui ceciderat, utrum plus vellet habere sub se? Cui frater respondit quod sic, scilicet interrogantis uxorem. Audientes hoc Florentini non habuerunt malum exemplum, sed commendaverunt fratrem dicentes: Benedicatur ipse, quia de nostris est!—Aliqui dixerunt quod alius Florentinus fuit, qui dixit hoc verbum, qui vocabatur frater Paulus Millemusce ex ordine Minorum. (Chronica, ad annum 1233; Monumenta Germaniae historica, Scriptores 32, 79.)

(One day in winter when he was walking about in the city of Florence, it happened that he fell flat on the frozen ground. Seeing this, the Florentines, who are great jokers, began to laugh. One of them asked the friar who was lying there if he would not like to have something put under him. To which the friar answers Yes, the wife of him who asked. When they heard this, the Florentines did not take it amiss but praised the friar, saying: Good for him, he is one of us!—Some say that he who said this was another Florentine, named Paul Thousandflies, of the Minorite Order.)

Here too the point is a witty rejoinder, a
bel parlare
. But at the same time we have a real scene: a winter landscape, the monk who has slipped and lies there on the ground, the Florentines standing about making fun of him. The characterization of the participants is much livelier, and in addition to the climactic jest (
interrogantis uxorem
) there are other witticisms and vulgarisms (
utrum plus vellet habere sub se; benedicatur ipse quia de nostris est; frater Paulus Millemusce
; and before that
trufatores
) which are doubly amusing and savory by reason of their transparent Latin disguise. Sensory visualization and freedom of expression are here more fully developed than in the
Novellino
.

Yet whatever we choose from among the products of the earlier period—be it the crude, boorish sensory breadth of the fabliaux, or the threadbare, sensorily poor refinement of the
Novellino
, or Salimbene’s lively, vividly graphic wit—none of it is comparable to Boccaccio. It is in him that the world of sensory phenomena is first mastered, is organized in accordance with a conscious artistic plan, caught and held in words. For the first time since antiquity, his
Decameron
fixes a specific level of style, on which the relation of actual occurrences in contemporary life can become polite entertainment; narrative no longer serves as a moral exemplum, no longer caters to the common people’s simple desire to laugh; it serves as a pleasant diversion for a circle of well-bred young people of the upper classes, of ladies and gentlemen who delight in the sensual play of life and who possess sensitivity, taste, and judgment. It was to announce this purpose of his narrative art that Boccaccio created the frame in which he set it. The stylistic level of the
Decameron
is strongly reminiscent of the corresponding antique
genus
, the antique novel of love, the
fabula milesiaca
. This is not surprising, since the attitude of the author to his subject matter, and the social stratum for which the work is intended, correspond quite closely in the two periods, and since for Boccaccio too the concept of the writer’s art was closely associated with that of rhetoric. As in the novels of antiquity, Boccaccio’s literary art is based upon a rhetorical treatment of prose; as in them, the style sometimes borders on the poetic; he too sometimes gives conversation the form of well-ordered oratory. And the general impression of an “intermediate” or mixed style, in which realism and eroticism are linked to elegant verbal formulations, is quite similar in the two cases. Yet while the antique novel is a late form cast in languages which had long since produced their best, Boccaccio’s stylistic endeavor finds itself confronted by a newly-born and as yet almost amorphous literary language. The rhetorical tradition—which, rigidified in medieval practice into an almost spectrally senile mechanism, had, so recently as the age of Dante, been still timidly and stiffly tried out on the Italian
volgare
by the first translators of ancient authors—in Boccaccio’s hands suddenly becomes a miraculous tool which brings Italian art prose, the first literary prose of postclassical Europe, into existence at a single stroke. It comes into existence in the decade between his first youthful work and the
Decameron
. His particular gift of richly and sweetly moving prose rhythms, although a heritage from antiquity, he possessed almost from the beginning. It is already to be found in
his earliest prose work, the
Filocolo
, and seems to have been a latent talent in him, which his first contact with antique authors brought out. What he lacked at first was moderation and judgment in using stylistic devices and in determining the level of style; sound relationship between subject matter and level of style had still to be achieved and become an instinctive possession. A first contact with the concept of an elevated style as practiced by the ancients—especially since the concept was still influenced by medieval notions—very easily led to what might be termed a chronic exaggeration of the stylistic level and an inordinate use of erudite embellishment. This resulted in an almost continuously stilted language, which, for that very reason, could not come close to its object and which, in such a form, was fit for almost nothing but decorative and oratorical purposes. To grasp the sensory reality of passing life was completely impossible to a language so excessively elevated.

In Boccaccio’s case, to be sure, the situation was different from the beginning. His innate disposition was more spontaneously sensory, inclined toward creating charmingly flowing and elegant forms imbued with sensuality. From the beginning he was made for the intermediate rather than the elevated style, and his natural bent was strongly furthered by the atmosphere of the Angevin court at Naples where he spent his youth and where the playfully elegant late forms of the chivalric culture of Northern France had taken stronger hold than elsewhere in Italy. His early works are
rifacimenti
of French romances of chivalric love and adventure in the late courtly style; and in their manner, it seems to me, one can sense something characteristically French: the broader realism of his descriptions, the naive refinement and the delicate nuances of the lovers’ play, the late feudal mundaneness of his social pictures, and the malice of his wit. Yet the more mature he grows, the stronger become the competing bourgeois and humanist factors and especially his mastery of what is robust and popular. In any case, in his youthful works the tendency toward rhetorical exaggeration—which represented a danger in Boccaccio’s case too—plays a role only in his representation of sensual love, as do the excess of mythological erudition and of conventional allegorizing which prevail in some of them. Thus we may assert that despite his occasional attempts (as in the
Teseida
) to reach out for something more, he remains within the limits of the intermediate style—of the style which, combining the idyllic and the realistic, is designated for the representation of sensual love. It is in the intermediate, idyllic style that he wrote
the last and by far the most beautiful of his youthful works, the
Ninfale fiesolano
; and the intermediate style serves too for the great book of the hundred novelle. In the determination of stylistic level it is unimportant which of his youthful works were written partly or wholly in verse and which in prose. The atmosphere is the same in them all.

Within the realm of the intermediate style, to be sure, the nuances in the
Decameron
are most varied, the realm is no narrow one. Yet even when a story approaches the tragic, tone and atmosphere remain tenderly sensual and avoid the grave and sublime; and in stories which employ far more crudely farcical motifs than our example, both language and manner of presentation remain aristocratic, inasmuch as both narrator and audience unmistakably stand far above the subject matter, and, viewing it from above with a critical eye, derive pleasure from it in a light and elegant fashion. It is precisely in the more popularly realistic and even the crudely farcical subjects that the peculiarity of the intermediate elegant style is most clearly to be recognized; for the artistic treatment of such stories indicates that there is a social class which, though it stands above the humble milieu of everyday life, yet takes delight in its vivid representation, and indeed a delight whose end is the individually human and concrete, not the socially stratified type. All the Calandrinos, Cipollas, and Pietros, the Peronellas, Caterinas, and Belcolores are, like Frate Alberto and Lisetta, individualized and living human beings in a totally different way from the villein or the shepherdess who were occasionally allowed to enter courtly poetry. They are actually much more alive and, in their characteristic form, more precise than the personages of the popular farce, as may be apparent from what we have indicated above, and this although the public they are meant to please belongs to an entirely different class. Quite evidently there was in Boccaccio’s time a social class—high in rank, though not feudal but belonging to the urban aristocracy—which derived a well-bred pleasure from life’s colorful reality wherever it happened to be manifested. It is true, the separation of the two realms is maintained to the extent that realistic pieces are usually set among the lower classes, the more tender and more nearly tragic pieces usually among the upper. But even this is not a rigidly observed rule, for the bourgeois and the sentimentally idyllic are apt to constitute borderline cases; and elsewhere too the same sort of mixture is not infrequent (e.g., the novella of Griselda, 10, 10).