Mimesis (41 page)

Io confesso d’essere pesato, e molte volte de’ miei dì esser stato; e perciò, parlando a quelle che pesato non m’hanno, affermo che io non son grave, anzi son io si lieve che io sto a galla nell’acqua:
e considerato che le prediche fatte da’ frati, per rimorder delle lor colpe gli uomini, il più oggi piene di motti e di ciance e di scede si veggono, estimai che quegli medesimi non stesser male nelle mie novelle, scritte per cacciar la malinconia delle femmine.

(I confess to being a man of weight and to have been often weighed in my time, wherefore, speaking to those ladies who have not weighed me, I declare that I am not heavy; nay, I am so light that I abide like a nutgall in water, and considering that the preachments made of friars, to rebuke men of their sins, are nowadays for the most part seen full of quips and cranks and jibes, I conceived that these latter would not sit amiss in my stories written to ease women of melancholy.) Trans. John Payne.

Boccaccio is probably on solid ground with his malicious little thrust at the preaching friars (to be found in almost exactly the same words, though on a quite different level of tone, in Dante,
Par
., 29, 115). But he forgets or does not know that the vulgar and naive farcicality of the sermons is a form—already, it is true, a somewhat degenerate and disreputable form—of Christian-figural realism (see above, pp. 158-161). Nothing of the sort applies in his case. And the very thing which justifies him from his point of view (“if even the preachers joke and jape, why cannot I do the same in a book designed to amuse?”) puts his venture, from the Christian-medieval point of view, in a dubious light. What a sermon, under the aegis of Christian figuralism, has a perfect right to do (exaggerations may go to objectionable extremes, but the right as a matter of principle cannot be denied), a secular author may not do—all the more because his work is not in the last analysis quite as light in weight as he claims; it is simply not naive and devoid of basic attitudes, as the popular farces are. If it were, then, from the Christian-medieval point of view, it could be regarded as a venial irregularity of the kind occasioned by man’s instincts and his need for entertainment, as proof of his imperfection and weakness. But such is not the case with the
Decameron
. Boccaccio’s book is of the intermediate style, and for all its frivolity and grace, it represents a very definite attitude, and one which is by no means Christian. What I have in mind is not so much Boccaccio’s way of making fun of superstition and relics, nor even such blasphemies as the phrase
la resurrezion della carne
for a man’s sexual erection (3, 10). Such things are part and parcel of the medieval repertoire of farce and need not necessarily be of fundamental importance—although
of course, once an anti-Christian or anti-ecclesiastical movement was under way, they acquired great propagandistic effectiveness. Rabelais, for example, unmistakably uses them as a weapon (a similarly blasphemous joke is to be found toward the end of chapter 60 of
Gargantua
, where words from the 24th Psalm,
ad te levavi
, are used in a corresponding sense, a fact which serves, however, to show once again how traditional, how much a part of the repertoire, this type of joke really was; for another example see
tiers livre
, 31, toward the end). The really important characteristic of the attitude reflected in the
Decameron
, the thing which is diametrically opposed to medieval-Christian ethics, is the doctrine of love and nature which, though it is usually presented in a light tone, is nevertheless quite certain of itself. The reasons why the modern revolt against Christian doctrines and forms of life could prove its practical power and its propagandistic efficacy so successfully in the realm of sexual morality are grounded in the early history and in the essential nature of Christianity. In that realm the conflict between the worldly will to life and the Christian sufferance of life became acute as soon as the former attained to self-consciousness. Doctrines of nature which praised the instinctive life of sex and demanded its emancipation had already played an important role in connection with the theological crisis at Paris in the seventies of the thirteenth century; they also found literary expression in the second part of the
Roman de la Rose
, by Jean de Meun. All this has no direct bearing on Boccaccio. He is not concerned with these theological controversies of many decades earlier. He is no halfscholastic pedagogue like Jean de Meun. His ethics of love is a recasting of courtly love, tuned several degrees lower in the scale of style, and concerned exclusively with the sensual and the real. That it is now earthly love which is in question is unmistakable. There is still a reflection of the magic of courtly love in some of the novelle in which Boccaccio expresses his attitude most clearly. Thus the story of Cimone (5, 1)—which, like the earlier
Ameto
, has education through love as its central theme—clearly shows that it is descended from the courtly epic. The doctrine that love is the mother of all virtues and of everything noble in man, that it imparts courage, self-reliance, and the ability to make sacrifices, that it develops intelligence and social accomplishments, is a heritage from courtly culture and the
stil nuovo
. Here, however, it is presented as a practical code of morals, valid for all classes. The beloved is no longer an inaccessible mistress or an incarnation of the divine idea, but the object of sexual desires. Even
in details (though not quite consistently) a sort of ethics of love is discernible—for example, that it is permissible to employ any kind of treachery and deceit against a third person (the jealous rival, the parents, or whatever other powers hinder the designs of love) but not against the object of one’s love. If Frate Alberto gets so little sympathy from Boccaccio, it is because he is a hypocrite and because he won Madonna Lisetta’s love not honestly but by underhanded methods. The
Decameron
develops a distinct, thoroughly practical and secular ethical code rooted in the right to love, an ethics which in its very essence is anti-Christian. It is presented with much grace and without any strong claim to doctrinal validity. The book rarely abandons the stylistic level of light entertainment. Yet at times it does, when Boccaccio defends himself against attacks. This happens in the introduction to the fourth day when, addressing himself to the ladies, he writes:

E, se mai con tutta la mia forza a dovervi in cosa alcuna compiacere mi disposi, ora più che mai mi vi disporrò; perciocchè io conosco che altra cosa dir non potrà alcun con ragione, se non che gli altri et io, che vi amiamo, naturalmente operiamo. Alle cui leggi, cioè della natura, voler contrastare, troppe gran forze bisognano, e spesse volte non solamente in vano, ma con grandissimo danno del faticante s’adoperano. Le quali forze io confesso che io non l’ho nè d’averle disidero in questo; e se io l’avessi, più tosto ad altrui le presterei, che io per me l’adoperassi. Per che tacciansi i morditori, e, se essi riscaldar non si possono, assiderati si vivano; e ne’ lor diletti, anzi appetiti corrotti standosi, me nel mio, questa brieve vita, che posta n’è, lascino stare.

(And if ever with all my might I vowed myself to seek to please you in aught, now more than ever shall I address myself thereto; for that I know none can with reason say otherwise than that I and others who love you do according to nature, whose laws to seek to gainstand demandeth overgreat strength, and oftentimes not only in vain, but to the exceeding hurt of whoso striveth to that end, is this strength employed. Such strength I confess I have not nor ever desired in this to have; and an I had it, I had liefer lend it to others than use it for myself. Wherefore, let the carpers be silent and an they avail not to warm themselves, let them live benumbed and abiding in their delights—or rather their
corrupt appetites,—leave me to abide in mine for this brief life that is appointed me.) Trans. John Payne

This, I believe, is one of the most aggressive and energetic passages Boccaccio ever wrote in defense of his ethics of love. The view he wishes to express cannot be understood; yet one cannot fail to see that it is without weight. Such a battle cannot seriously be fought with a few words on the irresistibility of nature and a couple of malicious allusions to the private vices of one’s adversaries. Nor, indeed, did Boccaccio have any such intention. We treat him unfairly and judge by a wrong standard if we measure the order of life which speaks from his work by Dante’s standard or by the works of the later and fully developed Renaissance. The figural unity of the secular world falls apart at the very moment when it attains—in Dante—complete sovereignty over earthly reality. Sovereignty over reality in its sensory multiplicity remained as a permanent conquest, but the order in which it was comprehended was now lost, and for a time there was nothing to take its place. This, as we said, must not be made a reproach against Boccaccio, but it must be registered as a historical fact which goes beyond him as a person. Early humanism, that is, lacks constructive ethical force when it is confronted with the reality of life; it again lowers realism to the intermediate, unproblematic, and non-tragic level of style which, in classical antiquity, was assigned to it as an extreme upper limit, and, as in the same period, makes the erotic its principal, and almost exclusive, theme. Now, however, this theme contains—what in antiquity there could be no question of its containing—an extremely promising germ of problem and conflict, a practical starting point for the incipient movement against the culture of medieval Christianity. But at first, and merely in itself, the erotic is not yet strong enough to treat reality problematically or even tragically. When Boccaccio undertakes to depict all the multiplex reality of contemporary life, he abandons the unity of the whole: he writes a book of novelle in which a great many things stand side by side, held together only by the common purpose of well-bred entertainment. Political, social, and historical problems which Dante’s figuralism penetrated completely and fused into the most everyday reality, fall entirely by the wayside. What happens to erotic and metaphysical problems, and what level of style and human depth they attain in Boccaccio’s work, can easily be ascertained from comparisons with Dante.

There are in the
Inferno
several passages in which damned souls
challenge or mock or curse God. Good examples are the important scene in canto 14 in which Capaneus, one of the seven against Thebes, challenges God from amid the rain of fire and exclaims:
Qual io fui vivo, tal son morto
—or the scornful gesture of the robber of churches Vanni Fucci in canto 25, upon his recovery from the dreadful metamorphosis caused by the serpent’s bite. In both cases the revolt is conscious and is in keeping with the history, character, and condition of the two condemned sinners. In Capaneus’ case it is the unvanquished defiance of Promethean rebellion, an enmity to God which is superhuman; in Vanni Fucci it is wickedness immeasurably exaggerated by despair. Boccaccio’s first novella (1, 1) tells the story of the vicious and fraudulent notary Ser Ciappelletto who falls mortally ill away from home, in the house of two Florentine usurers. His hosts know the evil life he has led and fear the worst for themselves if he should die in their house without confession and absolution. That he will be refused absolution if he makes a true confession, they have no doubt. To extricate his hosts from this difficult situation, the mortally ill old man deceives a naive confessor with a false and absurdly overpious confession in which he represents himself as a virginal, almost faultless paragon of all virtues, who is yet beset by exaggerated scruples. In this fashion he not only obtains absolution, but after his death his confessor’s testimony gains him the reverence due to a saint. This sneering contempt for confession in the hour of death would seem to be a theme which could hardly be treated without the assumption of a basically anti-Christian attitude on the part of the penitent nor without the author’s taking a stand—be it Christian and hence condemnatory, or anti-Christian and hence approving—in regard to the problem involved; but here it is merely auxiliary to working out two farcically comic scenes: the grotesque confession and the solemn interment of the supposed saint. The problem is hardly posed. Ser Ciappelletto decides upon his course of action quite lightly, merely in order to free his hosts from imminent danger by a last sly trick which shall be worthy of his past; the justification he alleges for it is so stupid and frivolous that it proves that he has never given a serious thought to God or his own life (“in the course of my life I have offended God so much that in the hour of death a little more or less won’t matter”); and equally frivolous and exclusively concerned with what is momentarily expedient are the two Florentine masters of the house who, as they listen to the confession, do, it is true, say to each other: “What sort of man is he, who even now when he is old and ill and about to
appear before the throne of the heavenly judge will not desist from his evil tricks but wishes to die as he has lived”—but who then, when they see that the end of assuring him a Christian burial has been gained, do not give the matter another thought. Now it is certainly true and quite in accordance with common experience that many people undertake the most momentous acts with no full conviction commensurate with such acts, simply in consequence of a momentary situation, force of habit, a fleeting impulse. Yet from the author who relates a matter of this kind, we still expect a comparative evaluation. And in fact Boccaccio does allow the narrator Panfilo to take a position in a few concluding words. But they are lame words, indecisive and without weight; they are neither atheistic nor decisively Christian, as the subject demands. There is no doubt, Boccaccio reports the monstrous adventure only for the sake of the comic effect of the two scenes mentioned above, and avoids any serious evaluation or taking of position.

In the story of Francesca da Rimini, Dante had given grandeur and reality in accordance with his way of being and his stage of development. Here, for the first time in the Middle Ages, is no
avanture
, no tale of enchantment; it is free from the charmingly witty coquetry and the class ceremonial of love which were characteristic of courtly culture; it is not hidden behind a veil of secret meaning, as in the
stil nuovo
. Instead it is a truly present action on the highest level of tone, equally immediate and real in terms of memories of an earthly destiny as in terms of an encounter in the beyond. In the love stories which Boccaccio tries to present tragically or nobly (they are mostly to be found among the novelle of the fourth day), the preponderant ingredients are the adventurous and the sentimental. At the same time the adventure is no longer, as it was in the heyday of the courtly epic, the trial and test of the chosen few, which as a fully assimilated element in the ideal conception of class had become an inner necessity (see above, pp. 134-136), but really only coincidence, the ever unexpected product of quickly and violently shifting events. The elaboration of the coincidental character of the adventure can even be demonstrated in novelle in which comparatively little occurs, as for instance the first of the fourth day, the story of Guiscardo and Ghismonda. Dante scorned to mention the conditions under which Francesca and Paolo were surprised by her husband; in treating such a theme he scorns every kind of finely wrought coincidence, and the scene which he describes—the lovers reading the book together—is the most ordinary
thing in the world, of interest only through what it leads to. Boccaccio devotes a considerable portion of his text to the complicated and adventurous methods the lovers are forced to employ in order to meet undisturbed, and to the chance concatenation of events which leads to their discovery by the father, Tancredi. These are adventures like those in the courtly romance—for example the love story of Cligès and Fenice in Chrétien de Troyes’ romance. But the fairy tale atmosphere of the courtly epic is gone, and the ethical concept of the knight’s testing has become a general morality of nature and love, itself expressed in extremely sentimental forms. The sentimental, in turn, which is often bound up with physical objects (the heart of the beloved, the falcon), and to that extent is reminiscent of fairy tale motifs, is in the majority of cases tricked out with a superabundance of rhetoric—think, for example, of Ghismonda’s long apology. All these novelle lack any decisive unity of style. They are too adventurous and too reminiscent of fairy tales to be real, too free from magic and too rhetorical to be fairy tales, and much too sentimental to be tragic. The novelle which aim at the tragic are not immediate and direct in the realm either of reality or of feeling. They are at best what is called touching.