Decameron and the Philosophy of Storytelling: Author as Midwife and Pimp 0231136080, 9780231136082

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction. Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality
1. Trecento Story and Image
2. Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks
3. Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis
4. Interpretative Method for a decameron Tale: An Enchanted Pear Tree in Argos
5. The Creation of a Total Work of Art
6. Storytelling and Truth
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

decameron and the philosophy of storytelling

decameron

a n d t h e p h i l o s o p h y o f s t o ry t e l l i n g author as midwife and pimp

Richard Kuhns

columbia university press

new york

Image has been suppressed columbia university press

Publishers Since 1893 new york

chichester, west sussex

Quotations from The Decameron, by Boccaccio, translated by G. H. McWilliams (London: Penguin Classics, 1986), copyright © G. H. McWilliams, reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Copyright © 2005 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kuhns, Richard Francis, 1924– Decameron and the philosophy of storytelling : author as midwife and pimp / Richard Kuhns. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–231–13608–0 (alk. paper) 1. Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1313–1375. Decamerone–Criticism, textual. 2. Storytelling. I. title. PQ4294.K84 2005 853’.1–dc22

2004061380

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Designed by Chang Jae Lee Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Art prolongs, it preserves, it consecrates, it raises from the dead. —henry james If you are lucky enough to be born as a character, you have nothing to fear from death. You don’t die. —pirandello

For Peggy, Frederick, Paula, Abigail, and Samuel

contents

list of illustrations acknowledgments preface

xi

xiii

xv

Introduction. Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality 1 Chapter 1. Trecento Story and Image 29 Chapter 2. Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks 53 Chapter 3. Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis 85 Chapter 4. Interpretative Method for a decameron Tale: An Enchanted Pear Tree in Argos 105 Chapter 5. The Creation of a Total Work of Art 123 Chapter 6. Storytelling and Truth 143 notes

157

bibliography index

171

165

illustrations

1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 1.4. 1.5. 1.6. 1.7. 1.8. 1.9. 1.10. 2.1. 2.2. 5.1. 5.2. 5.3.

Giotto di Bondone, view of interior looking toward the altar, Arena Chapel 30 Santa Maria Novella, facade 31 Nardo di Cione, Hell 33 Andrea da Firenze, Triumph of Thomas Aquinas 34 Francesco Traini, The Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas 35 The Biadaiolo Master, The Glorification of St. Thomas Aquinas 35 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Allegory of Good Government: Effects of Good Government in the City 42 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, frescoes of good and bad government 43 Buffalmacco, Il Trionfo della morte, detail 46 Buffalmacco, Il Trionfo della morte, scene in the garden 47 Rene Magritte, La Bonne aventure 70 James Ensor, Self-portrait with Masks 82 Pacino da Bonaguida, Crucifixion 124 Duccio, Maestà 126 Giotto di Bondone, scenes on the left wall, Arena Chapel 129

acknowledgments

S

everal papers on decameron—my first efforts to understand the stories—were published in the following books and journals, and passages of all three appear in the chapters of this book. I am grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to use the following: “The Writer as Painter: Observations on Boccaccio’s Decameron.” In Malerei und Stadtkultur in der Dantezeit. Ed. Hans Belting. Munich: Hirmer, 1989. “The Architecture of Sexuality: Body and Space in The Decameron.” In Freud and Forbidden Knowledge. Ed. Peter L. Rudnytsky and Ellen Handler Spitz. New York: New York University Press, 1994. “Storytelling and Decameron.” New Literary History 30, no. 4 (autumn 1999): 721–736. Many friends, colleagues, and students have contributed to my thinking about the stories of Decameron. My early discussions began a number of years ago with an examination of the interpretations discerned by the late Barbara Schinnerer Tovey. Her intuitive understanding and her enthusiasm encouraged me to continue the work. I am grateful for her friendship and intellectual acuity. I hope this book expresses her spirit. Several distinct groups of critics helped me to deal with various kinds of problems that arise when one looks back to Boccaccio’s world in an effort to

xiv Acknowledgments

set it into storytelling as such and to understand its often overlooked philosophical dedication. First, there are the devoted Italian-speaking lovers of Boccaccio who gave help with a language sometimes archaic and who supported my speculations on the puzzling passages. I have benefited especially from discussions and readings with Eleonora Beck, Teodolinda Barolini, and Luciano Rebay. My thanks also to Eugene Rice, who interpreted passages from the biblical Latin assumed in some of Boccaccio’s stories, and to Robert Hanning, who has shared his sensitive and insightful readings with me. Then there are the art historians who travel Renaissance Italian roads, analyzing and interpreting painters and their paintings, so important to Boccaccio’s ideas on art. Conversations with James Beck, Hans Belting, Joseph Connors, Anthony Grafton, David Rosand, and Leo Steinberg have been immensely helpful and quite amazing in all they opened up for me. Philosophers and artists who understand the ways art and philosophy interinanimate have helped me by their own work and by critiques of mine. I have been fortunate, over many years, to have been in constant aesthetic and artistic exchanges with Arthur Danto. I have immensely profited from our unlimited agenda, all subjects open to exploration. David Carrier, in his philosophical art criticism, and Barbara Divver and Theodore Reff, in their comprehensive knowledge and their fine and acute vision, have enabled me to see the paintings that appear in the book with greater clarity and understanding. Ruth and Peter Gay, as always, have provided stimulating intellectual conversation covering so many aspects of history, art, and psychoanalysis. I am also indebted to and have profited immensely from discussions with Lydia Goehr, Jacqueline and Victor Gourevitch, Martin Greenberg, Peter Kivy, and David Sidorsky. André Green, Eric Marcus, Walter Sokel, and the late Richard Wollheim have in their creative and imaginative psychoanalytic understanding contributed importantly to my thinking. Putting a manuscript together is the work of many hands. I am much indebted to Ajay Rishi, expert on and about computers, who was always patient as he so ably put a mangled manuscript into shape. I feel particularly fortunate to have as my editor Wendy Lochner at Columbia University Press. She has provided wise counsel and sensitive overseeing of the whole process of publication. Most deeply, my wife, Peggy, has contributed to my work and enhanced my life in more ways than I can possibly describe.

preface

S

torytelling in all its modes, from individual myth to endless sequences to contemporary short story and beyond, possesses a history as old as culture. Where human groups established a society, there story cemented individuals to one another. In every social order, the storyteller has always been a central figure, and we today have access to the countless traditions in which the storyteller reigned. We could create a museum of story, and indeed have if we think of the arts as a whole in their storytelling capacities. Within our great cities, we have established repositories of story: our fine arts museums, libraries, anthropological and natural history collections. Our appetite to grasp and ingest every story tradition that we can is satisfied as well by cinema and television. Among our collections there are storytellings that stretch from earliest recorded tales, through the ages, in and about earth’s peoples wherever they have lived, whenever they told stories. We are surfeited with our access to all that ever was told. And therefore we cannot tell stories to ourselves as they were told in the past. Stories have becomes objects of study and instruments of cultural awareness. When we read stories and story sequences today, we assume a posture different from that of original audiences and listeners or even original readers. We are quick to theorize about stories in general and analyze individual stories, suppressing their unique qualities. Children have

xvi Preface

no such postures imposed on them, which is one reason we so enjoy telling them stories and hearing their responses. We then may go on to assume that childlike hearers and readers characterized earlier civilizations, before the entire world of stories became available all at once, as it has for us. A history of storytelling has yet to be written, and philosophical-aesthetic study of the arts has overlooked storytelling though it has been preoccupied with story as such, since each of the arts shapes stories and borrows stories from one another. Before any one of us becomes aware of aesthetic issues surrounding story, we have listened to stories from all over: I heard stories read to me, told to me from first memory of my childhood, and later I made up stories for children as I had had them made up for me out of a tradition we called “made-to-order stories,” in which children name things and actions to be woven into the storyteller’s story. Then in my travels, first to the American Southwest and subsequently to Europe, stories became part of my passion for collecting. I shall speak later of the Smithsonian Museum’s publications of Native American stories, read avidly for my first high school research papers. It was therefore a natural progression for me to be fascinated by the great storystores I encountered when I read in classical Greek and Latin literature. That source reappeared, in revised and rethought form, in the great linked story traditions of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. It became apparent to me, as it has to everyone else, that one foundation for both Chaucer and Shakespeare was Boccaccio as poet and storyteller. Closer study of Boccaccio’s Decameron drew me into its basic thoughtfulness, indeed its philosophical arguments and positions. With that awareness I began to see an early Renaissance creation of truly philosophical literature, first realized in Greek drama and epic, then lost for several centuries, to reemerge as a foundation for philosophical literary art through Boccaccio’s great artistic gifts and philosophical daring. I was prepared for my understanding of that collection of what I call “linked stories” by my examination of more recent literature in two earlier books, Structures of Experience and Tragedy: Contradiction and Repression. One study in the latter book offers an interpretation of Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice.” In coming to understand that play I was helped immensely by the insights of Barbara Tovey, a dedicated Boccaccio reader and interpreter whose brilliant insights have been of great help in my efforts here. She saw in act 1, scene 2 of “Merchant” a series of references to Boccaccio the storyteller in characters named as Portia’s suitors. Not only is Boccaccio one of them (The Neopolitan Prince), but each subsequent suitor, I realized is a famous storyteller, a predecessor to Shakespeare, and each one a storyteller who had, in his own storytelling, relied on Boccaccio. Such

Preface

xvii

recognition of Boccaccio’s richness and influence, a Shakespearian awareness, was not to be ignored, and that discovery intensified my desire to read Decameron as my prime example in this study of story and storytelling.1 Decameron opened itself to my interpretations quite readily, though its massive structure requires continued study and what I will say here where I use it as an example of storytelling will be but partial views from different vantage points. I choose it because of its contribution not only to our great storytellers, Chaucer and Shakespeare, but also because of its profound philosophical thought on many basic issues in religion, ethics, aesthetics, and politics. To see it in its complexity has demanded long study, requiring, because of my impoverished Italian, reliance on native speakers of Italian to understand certain manners of speech and intricate slangy references. Because my concern is the basic thought and argument of Decameron and its insights into storytelling as a basis for an aesthetic inquiry into storytelling, I do not intend to realize a literary-critical assessment of the sort a literary scholar might undertake. To be sure, the books about Decameron are numerous, and many subtle studies of individual stories have been published, but my way of looking at the book is more philosophical and cultural in the broad sense than most of the particular readings that I know of. I am not familiar with the whole of the interpretative assaults on the book. I hope my way of reading it can be appreciated and enjoyed for its own point of view, limited in the ways I have pointed out. Storytellers rose to self-conscious heights long before the entire world’s storystore was available, and we know that in the West stories, such as those that provided plots to dramas, were sometimes used to comment on and interpret the oldest myths. Stories could be listened to naively and then, later, self-consciously; alongside irony and sophistication there was always simple storytelling that made no demands on listeners’ interpretative awareness. That is true of our own time, too; much storytelling goes on at literal enjoyable levels of awareness without need to interpret or comment. But the storyteller who is also a self-conscious artist makes greater demands than the simple teller of tales. So it is that the highly sophisticated, learned storyteller who is Decameron makes demands on us, demanding that we be sophisticated and learned in all the ways of philosophical self-consciousness. Every story collection and story sequence, the tradition in which Decameron takes its place, creates a boundary for itself, the conditions that it establishes as necessary to understanding and enjoyment. Homer, Hesiod, The Thousand Nights and One Nights, Ovid, Apuleius, Dante, Boccaccio, and

xviii Preface

right on to our own storytellers . . . each creates a kind, a genre of the story, structured by internal organizations and external demands on the hearer or reader. In the case of Boccaccio and Decameron, the stories assume a metaphor that directs understanding and guides interpretation. Stated as a subtitle, a cognomen, the metaphor is at once explicit and mysterious: Comincia il libro chiamato Decameron cognominato prencipe Galeotto, nel quale si contengono cento novelle in diece dí dette da sette donne e da tre giovani uomini. Here begins the book called Decameron, otherwise known as Prince Galahalt (Galeotto) wherein are contained a hundred stories, told in ten days by seven ladies and three young men.2

As always with translations (this by G. H. McWilliam, as are most of the ones to follow), shifts in meaning are bound to occur and implied references suppressed. The book has as its cognomen a nickname, we might say, that is a characterization of its qualities as a person, and the nickname is at once a reference to a use of the name “Galeotto.” The nickname occurs in Dante’s Inferno as part of a story, the story of Francesca and Paolo, who became lovers through the sexual excitement aroused by the book they were reading, the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, whose adulterous affair was encouraged by the character named Galahalt, which becomes “Galeotto” in Italian. The name became a metaphor for the pander, the pimp. So one way to give the second or nickname to Decameron is this: “Here begins the book named Decameron, whose nickname is ‘The Pimp.’” The use of the term “Galeotto” occurs in line 137 of canto 5 of Inferno: “Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse” (The book was a Galeotto and he who wrote it). We who enter the world of Decameron are instructed to think the implication of this reference, that both book and creator of the book are pimps. What exactly does that mean to us? Part of the answer will come from reading the stories, thinking about the generic structures Boccaccio has erected as armatures for the whole collection. Part of the answer will come from associations that we make to the idea of a book as pimp, of the storyteller as pimp, and to that end it occurs to me that there is a tradition of reading, writing, and storytelling that metaphorically presents itself in sexual terms. One locus for that kind of metaphor is to be found in the dialogues of Plato. Now, such a reference may seem far-fetched given Boccaccio’s limited access to classical writings, and there is a question over how much of the Pla-

Preface

xix

tonic collection he could have known. But set that aside for a moment; the fact remains that philosophers and poets rely on sexual metaphors embedded in the writing-reading-storytelling complex that reinforce Boccaccio’s use of a seemingly puzzling cognomen. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates suggests that he can be viewed as a pimp and a midwife whose concern is to bring minds together to spawn ideas and to evaluate the health of their offspring. Philosopher as pimp may shock, that role seemingly unbecoming to a thinker, but the sexual metaphor has always been a powerful interpretation for every kind of human act of making. In chapter 4, where I shall discuss the sexual metaphors in a wider classical context, it will become evident that the cognomen applied to Decameron has a long tradition to support its use, and such rare outspokenness makes explicit an intimacy that characterizes all storytelling. The interesting inquiry for us as we look into Decameron is to analyze and understand the ways in which Boccaccio organizes the symbols of eros. It is a great error to think the book simply “sexy” or quasi-pornographic, the usual judgments that come from our confusions about literature and the sexual. For, as Italo Calvino has helpfully observed about the sexual in literature, the thick symbolic armor beneath which eros hides is no other than a system of conscious or unconscious shields that separate desire from the representation of it. From this point of view all literature is erotic, just as all dreams are erotic. In the explicitly erotic writer (such as Boccaccio) we may therefore recognize one who uses the symbols of sex to give voice to something else, and this something else, after a series of definitions that tend to take shape in philosophical and religious terms, may in the last instance be redefined as another and ultimate Eros, fundamental, mythical, and unattainable.3

Calvino’s comment contributes to an understanding of storytelling as such, and especially to those stories created in the Decameron world; we must come to understand the open and the esoteric ways the sexual enters into storytelling’s symbolic power. To metamorphose sexuality, in all its complexities, into philosophic ways of thinking is one of Boccaccio’s great accomplishments. After we think through the implications of the title and its cognomen for the collection of stories known as Decameron, we can attend to the generic structures that shape the book as a whole. The title means “ten days,” and the book followed in the wake of a commentary on the first six days of creation

xx Preface

well known in Boccaccio’s time, Ambrose’s Hexameron. Boccaccio as author is the creator of the universe we are about to explore. Nothing unusual about that: creative artists have always regarded their creations as newborn worlds, appearances, perhaps following earlier universes yet in their own way fresh debuts full of surprises. Decameron creates a universe of stories, many of which were born in earlier collections and made their way here as if meteorites deformed in Boccaccio’s atmosphere and landing with a jolt, to our amazement and delight. We see how much the stories that are parts of past worlds can be fit into (have a cosmological fitness for) this gathering of tales, how many from very differing far-off interstellar space can circle round one another in newly created heavens. To explore Boccaccio’s universe and therefore to read and hear Decameron stories with full appreciation, readers and listeners must be responsive to all the arts, for this book is an early, perhaps the first book instance of a genre we think of as defined in nineteenth-century opera, “the total work of art,” in which all the arts are subsumed. Of course, before bookmaking, Greek tragedy and comedy realized the total work of art because their productions brought together speaking, singing, instrumental playing, scenery, and dance. Each story in Decameron as a little drama projects a similar fullness, for it is an enactment on an imagined stage before which an “announcer” appears to proclaim an introduction, a précis of the story, much as a sideshow barker gives hints of what is inside the tent, a synopsis of what will be said in full as the story unfolds. Together with the prologue and epilogue to the whole collection and the introductions to each day of storytelling, these introductions provide transitional space that prepares us for the set piece. Some prefaces tell of a central recognition or reversal of fortune that defines the plot. But these are only minimal road signs and do not reveal the latent purposes behind or underneath the story. Readers may be pushed away from seeing all that a story has to say by the cruelties, contradictions, and sheer stupidities that are in themselves highly entertaining and therefore seek nothing more. We who read should take the role of reader-actor seriously, assume a role in the drama, perform as if within the drama. We must figure ourselves within the story action as performers performing. In so assuming a role, we interpret the story as we read it, and that opens us up to awareness of hidden meanings. Because Decameron is unusually self-reflective, because it explores the capacities of story to possess an external and internal meaning, and because all its complexities are set within explanatory prefaces and epilogues, the book as a whole serves to explore fully the many cultural traditions of

Preface

xxi

storytelling. In these respects, it makes explicit interpretative methods that have endured as a basic contribution to the aesthetic of narrative. We shall come to see that we readers, as we read, appear to ourselves in several guises, initially under the manifest content of actions and then, as our comprehension deepens, through participation in the more obscure “secrets” of the stories; that is, we “interpret” the story we read. One way to express this hiddenness is through psychoanalytic language, taken from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, specifically, the distinction between “manifest content” and “latent content.” Although Freud developed the distinction for the analysis of dreams, it becomes relevant to every kind of human making, especially to cultural objects linguistically structured. Boccaccio, a master of poetic forms, possessed the power to structure feeling and to endow his tales with a latent content that, one suspects, he himself might not have possessed in full consciousness. His achievement, the distinction of the open, obvious, clearly available meaning as contrasted with the hidden, perhaps unconscious, to-be-discovered meaning, was recognized by a poet of modernity as a common necessity in great poetry. Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1883, several years before Freud published his book on dreams, drew the distinction this way: My thought is that in any lyric passage of the tragic poets . . . there are usually . . . two strains of thought running together and like counterpointed; the overthought, that which everybody, editors, see . . . and which might for instance be abridged or paraphrased in square marginal blocks carefully written; the other, the underthought, conveyed chiefly in the choice of metaphors etc used and often only half realized by the poet himself, not necessarily having any connection with the subject in hand but usually having a connection and suggested by some circumstances of the scene or story.4

Hopkins knew that the “underthought” (Freud’s “latent content”) may be part of the poet’s unconscious thought yet available to the reader by the ways language is metaphorically structured. In storytelling, plot and character reveal underthoughts of great diversity, yet if the overthought is highly entertaining and obvious one may fail to search for and find the underthought. This has been the readers’ fate in understanding Boccaccio as storyteller. So, for example, when Masetto of Lamporecchio (day 3, story 1) begins to speak after feigning muteness, we are expected to interpret that action in such a way that we shall be led to the underthought of the story.5 We cannot grasp the inevitability of the plot unless we move from surface

xxii Preface

conversation and action to the thought that drives them, and that thought must be stimulated in the reader’s consciousness though it is not explicitly in the overthought of the story. The choice of metaphors, Hopkins suggests, leads to a reconstruction of the hidden content. Boccaccio was aware of all this in his own way, for he says in his Vita di Dante that Gregory the Great “said of Holy Scriptures what may also be said of poetic writings: that in the very same discourse it reveals both the text and the mystery that lies beneath it. Thus it simultaneously challenges the intellect of the wise while it gives comfort to the minds of the simple. It possesses openly something to give children nourishment and yet reserves in secret something to hold with fascinated admiration the minds of the deepest meditators.”6 In his extensive study of myth, Genealogia Deorum Gentilium (Genealogy of the Pagan Gods), Boccaccio distinguishes Greek and Latin writings from those he refers to as “barbarian” and says once again that such stories require a two-layered understanding: “I must proceed to tear the hidden signification from their tough sheathing, and I promise to do so, though not to the last detail of the authors’ original intention. Who in our day can penetrate the hearts of the Ancients?”7 Boccaccio’s Decameron serves as a model for storytelling because his art realized the ways stories come to be and come to be heard; his book contains a theory of storytelling within the stories themselves, showing the reader that a philosophy of the genre can be thought out in the process of telling. We need not look to a separate tract to learn how to read and to interpret since the stories talk about themselves in such a way that interpretation leads to latent content. My earlier inquiries pursued this same theme: on the one hand, the ways in which literary art discovers and presents truth; and, on the other, what sort of method might help to interpret how literary art realizes this goal. The first theme led me to close readings of linguistic art in several traditions, with a particular emphasis on tragedy as a dramatic enactment both on the stage and in the book. The second theme evolved into an interpretative method that derived its analytical powers from the psychoanalytic tradition as it has grown and developed since the case studies and so-called metapsychology developed by Sigmund Freud.8 With those studies as a foundation, I believed I could at last find a way to open up the collection of stories written down in the fourteenth century by a wily, difficult, witty, and free-thinking author, Giovanni Boccaccio, whose subtlety challenged past experience and a developed method of interpretation. Of course, the central book he wrote, Decameron, followed on lengthy

Preface

xxiii

poetic and philosophical works of art, and itself was followed by lectures on Dante and a strange, angry, misogynistic tirade, The Crow or Raven, its Italian title, Corbaccio. The variety of both subject matter and interpretative attitude from work to work challenges our interpretative ingenuity, and my way is to read the one, perhaps most difficult work, Decameron, as a selfcontained set of images and arguments. I have come to understand, however, that this one cannot be separated from the total cultural context within which it came to its final form. Therefore I show the necessity of weaving Decameron stories into the art life of Boccaccio’s contemporary painters, composers, and philosophers as he knew them. When I say “contemporary,” I do not mean to refer only to those who lived when he did; rather, I use “contemporary” to denote all that a trecento writer of Boccaccio’s scope and curiosity might find available. His sensibility was such that he obviously looked hard at the painting that was to be seen in his cities, both that produced in his lifetime and that which was already splendidly present, mostly in churches. He, as any welleducated Florentine of his time, listened to sung poetry, music as such, and that which accompanied dance. His was a rich artistic culture, and much of it has been preserved, so we can reconstruct forces of influence that helped to shape the stories he tells. As I have already said, Decameron presents itself to us as a powerful example of the total work of art. Storytelling in our time, by contrast, limits itself to plot and character, perhaps a loss in so impoverishing the total work of art, but then our art world has lost the coherence and focus of the trecento. In reviving a way to read and look and hear in that moment of our own past, I hope to open up ways of hearing and reading later stories in such a way that past storytelling achievements will amplify contemporary limitations. Insensitive to the Boccaccian way with story because of our own less layered, more limited experience with story and storytelling, our awareness has narrowed and must be broadened so that we can participate fully in Decameron subtleties. I will read several key stories to reveal the “secret something” that satisfies “the minds of the deepest meditators.” Let us begin the exploration.

decameron and the philosophy of storytelling

introduction

Storytelling The Bankruptcy of Reality Beneath all human events, when the chaff of time and individual variation is blown away, certain primeval patterns, “stories,” are found, by which these events form and reform in great repeating pulses. —bruno schulz Und so erzähle mir mein Leben. (And so I tell myself my life.) —nietzsche

W

e remember very little of a long life except its high points, traumas, and occasional triumphs. We remember with fidelity and sometimes astonishing completeness the stories we have heard along the way: long life gathers a precipitation of plots, characters, and story sequences. Of lives lived, few achieve anything like a claim to be memorable, and of those that do, it is often in story that they survive, metamorphosed from mere life event to narrative wholeness, from a los t fragment of his tory to a transcendent permanence. The whole of cultural his tory can be compacted into s torytelling, and that has been the subject of many inquiries carried out in our time: in art his tory, anthropology, philosophy, and story s tudies. The shaping and presentation of s tories requires, of course, language, but s tory finds its mode of representation in many media: painted images, architectural decorations, song and dance, ceremonial occasions—in fact, the material, the tonal, and the linguis tic all provide the s tuff and setting for s tories. Philosophical aesthetics has given less attention to s tory, s torytelling, and storyhearing than it has to the central artis tic events of our time: painting, literature, music, dance. Yet s tories underlie almost all these major artis tic representations, for stories exis t, as Bruno Schulz says, as “certain primeval patterns” beneath the elaborations that come with the development of a cul-

2 Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

tural tradition. Since a collection of stories and their transmission, person to person and generation to generation, is a universal presence to be found in every cultural tradition, we ought to think about stories as a necessary form of art and therefore think philosophically about them. Since storytelling begins with memory—and memory is the mother of the Muses—we can move out from that human capacity to the great universe of tales that have entertained us from the beginning of time. There are limitations to how far we can peer into distant galaxies of story clusters. We can begin with those as far from us as oral and written traces permit—myth and mythic tales—move on to folk stories and fairy tales, and then attempt to inventory the vast storystores referred to as “fabliaux,” widely popular in the European Middle Ages. Yet those stories, some believe, have traveled like comets from distant places in our story universe: perhaps the basic stories we know as myths and fabliaux come from Middle Eastern tribal life and Far Eastern cultures—India and the vast reaches of Asia. Whatever their source, stories and storytelling occupy an important place in the social worlds that, taken together, make up a universe of imagination in human history. They compose a reality to be set inside and beside the reality of which philosophy has spoken from its beginning, joined in later centuries by that we have come to call science. Both philosophy and science have marshaled their attacks on story’s claims and its universal dominance. In its persistence as an inner armature of culture, story challenges philosophical and scientific possession of “the truth.” Story implies in its constructions the bankruptcy of reality if “reality” is taken to be that external natural reality into which we are born. That reality alone is incomplete; it lacks a peculiar sustenance that I shall attempt to analyze in the following exercises of memory. Basically, a story is a representational recounting of an event, imagined or experienced, reported in conversation, exhibited in visual presentation, performed in dance, and often preserved in ceremonial enactments. However much story is conveyed by these many modes of representation, story begins with words that describe an action in which characters create a history. Story always has an aspect of duplication, of revisiting and repeating. In many communities, a condition for storytelling in a more formal and constructed setting than simple conversation between two people is, typically, that the story be known and inherited. So there are storytellers and storyhearers in every group that endow the community with continuity and coherence. In some traditions, story, though it begins in repetitious conversation, ends in a written form, like the Bible, really a collection of stories in my basic sense,

Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

3

that is, the inherited without an identified originator. In oral traditions, stories are part of the memory of storytellers whose capacities for repeating stories is vast and who may embroider and edit the stories they tell. When they are written down, further variation and elaboration may well stop, though storytellers are ingenious in inventing ways to worm themselves into “sacred” cultural territory in order to alter the landscape, which means to bring into cultural awareness the limitations of reality. All artists recognize this alteration, powerfully described by Bruno Schulz: Reality takes on certain shapes merely for the sake of appearance, as a joke or form of play. One person is a human, another is a cockroach, but shape does not penetrate essence, is only a role adopted for a moment, an outer skin to be shed. A certain extreme monism of the life substance is assumed here, for which specific objects are nothing but masks. . . . The migration of forms is the substance of life. Thus an all-pervading aura of irony emanates from this substance. There is an ever-present atmosphere of the stage, of sets viewed from behind, where the actors make fun of the pathos of their parts after stripping off their costumes. . . . In some sense we derive a profound satisfaction from the loosening of the web of reality, we feel an interest in witnessing the bankruptcy of reality.1

That loss is necessary to a lifelong gain. Story begins in early childhood, when stories are told and heard within the family, throughout the community, at ceremonial occasions, and in school. One cannot remember when stories first are heard; they are immediate in mother-child conversation. The first tales heard sometimes feature the child as protagonist: that is, parents tell the child about the things the child does as an agent in the world. Early tellings establish a special kind of talk that lasts throughout life; it is talk about events that have happened and events that are made up as having happened. So, for the later stages of life where story will inevitably persist, a foundation has been laid for later identifications of early awareness of the self as agent based on a separation within experience of the perceived, the thought-about, and the imagined. Story founds itself in the imagined and remembered accounts of beginnings, a putting-into-words of something the child did, as, for example, telling the child what happened in playschool, who said this and that early in the day, what was seen in the garden when the bird flew by. Storytelling for the child is part of play. Later on in life, play becomes artistic performance and response to the arts, but that is not to assume the

4 Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

concept “play” satisfactorily covers all stages of life’s encounters with the work of imagination. For the early stages, though, “play” encompasses storytelling, storyhearing, and storymaking, and children develop a capacity to tell stories as play goes on. In fact, much of play is acting in or acting out stories, which may be stories told as the actions unfold. Body motions and storytelling accompany one another and later become dramatic representations, that is, acting proper. After self-centered storytelling with the child as protagonist, an easy move is made to folktale, fairy story, and mythic imagination. Again, every cultural tradition owns a collection of myths, folktales, and perhaps other sorts of inherited stories. While these are told to every generation, the telling and the hearing require conditions that are not accidental or random. Settings, where stories appropriately can be told, range from parent-child, to family as a whole, to ceremonial occasion. In some traditions—in China, Japan, India, and Western Europe, among others—myths and folk stories provide plots and characters for elaborate and thoughtful reworkings, as in comedy, tragedy, opera, and commedia dell’arte. Mothers are usually children’s first storytellers, establishing the language used to enter the realm of cultural reality. The story may begin “Once upon a time,” which establishes the omniscience of the storyteller as far as the story to be told is concerned. The accomplished storyteller knows the story; but characters in the story—and this includes the child who hears the story— do not know how it will come out. As the story is told, the hearer may have questions; the story may be taken as “true,” in the sense that questions about reality seem to clarify events. The child may ask: “Was I really in South America?” “Why did the wolf wear a hat?” “You mean he really died before his father?” (said of Christ on a child’s hearing the Gospel story). The hearer may find the story incomplete, lacking “historical” details that the teller can elaborate if necessary. What is interesting about the storyteller and storyhearer in their relationship to the story is that a cultural form is established: the relationship between storyteller and storyhearer is like the relationship of the historian to one who was present at the original scene, witnessing events as they occurred. So the storyhearer “watches” events as they occur—as, for comparison, the soldier in George Washington’s army witnessed events as they occurred. But the soldier is not the historian, and the storyhearer is not the storyteller. The hearer does not know (on first telling) how story events will come out in the end; the storyteller knows the end, although we all have experienced storytelling in which we as storytellers come to know the end as the story evolves. Once invented, a story may become fixed, and the

Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

5

storyteller then possesses a cultural artifact, a benefit conferred on the storyteller that can be used to create cognitive and aesthetic variations for his and subsequent generations. The storyteller (or dramatist or novelist) can shape a fixed story so it opens up depths of the mind not previously conscious and widens consciousness to apprehend aspects of reality ordinarily overlooked. An example of regeneration wherein a fixed story assumes new powers can be found in the retelling of the Ulysses story by Dante in his Inferno (canto 26, lines 55–142). We hear the voice of Ulysses telling his story as Homer and Virgil never told it. Instead of a happy homecoming to Penelope, the indomitable adventurer sails his craft outside the Pillars of Hercules to a death by drowning. The story regenerates itself for us in a shocking coda, as if a great composition were being rewritten by a later composer. In all likelihood, Dante did not himself know the Ulysses story as we do, for Homer may not have been among his sources. We know both Homer and Dante, and therefore, for us, it is the story of Ulysses wonderfully reimagined. An American poet, Emily Dickinson, retells a classical tale in the briefest compass, the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, only to deny the truth of the story claim: Finding is the first Act The second, loss, Third, Expedition for The “Golden Fleece” Fourth, no Discovery— Fifth, no Crew— Finally, no Golden Fleece— Jason—sham—too.2

Dante and Emily Dickinson retell classical tales with purposes quite different from the original representations so that we suddenly see the plot and characters of the past in a contemporary enlargement. Story is extended and revised in the Inferno, while it is skeptically denied in Emily Dickinson’s poem 870. In both cases, however, we know the story that is renewed along with its variations. Storyworld contains a set of plots we might call universal because they provide a basic structure that can be separated from individual tellings. For example, there is the common story event of a newborn abandoned, found, and growing to adulthood with a variety of endings. We might give it a general name, such as “The Moses Story,” since one well-known version appears in the Hebrew Bible. But it appears over and over again in many

6 Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

traditions, oral and written. One oral tradition that possesses a “Moses Story” with its own cultural development and tragic ending is in the Zuni Native American tradition. It has been given the title “The Boy and the Deer.”3 In this story, the abandoned infant is brought up by a deer family, and after many confrontations with both the human and animal world, the boy dies after plucking out a yucca leaf that, as he wrenches it, stabs him in the heart. The details of storyshaping and storytelling open up amazing thoughts that the basic plot makes possible when formulated in different cultural traditions. Storytellers may let the audience in on events to come that are unknown and hidden from characters in the story. Some storytellers do not want hearers to be shocked at surprise turns in the plot. Others revel in unexpected twists of plot and character. What the storyteller knows and withholds lies outside the events narrated and grasped by the hearer. Story events are in certain ways unlike history events, though in both cases events must follow in a graspable pattern from the opening event. We know the bards of epic tales often changed events as they told stories, without invalidating or making false the stories themselves. In history writing, the historian does not have that latitude. He may exercise it without the constraint of truth if he wishes to do so, but that would make him a bad historian, where it might make the epic storyteller a good bard. When we reflect philosophically on storytelling and its relationship to the writing of history, we question the capacity of historical narration to be in possession of an agreed-upon, shared truth. Such questioning, though, does not take the form of denying the possibility of truth in history but rather suggests that we discover the various ways in which historical narration can function, and one such way is as a mode of storytelling. There is a close affinity between history telling and storytelling. As stories were being brought to birth, mysteriously in so many cases, humankind relied on them to record its history and also to answer its questions, for earliest stories dealt with events that can be seen as issues of historical recounting, of science, and of ethics. By “science,” I mean that stories answer questions about origins, causes, how the earth and the heavens came to be, how humankind came into existence and then inhabited the earth: stories are encyclopedic storages of questions and answers. By “ethics,” I mean that stories have a concern for conduct, for choices that humans make, and for the consequences of actions. Stories provide a huge fund of thoughts, speculations, values, and answers to questions every culture puts to itself. Stories, then, exhibit an affinity with philosophic inquiry and can be seen as part of a philosophic view of the

Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

7

social and natural world. I shall treat the stories I talk about as part of a universal and inescapable philosophic quest, as a way to settle oneself in the world, which flows naturally from all peoples everywhere and in all times. Surveys of story traditions may neglect or ignore story’s philosophical implications. Formalisms tend to overlook story ideas. There are many efforts to organize story plots and story characters simply into a system of meaningful repetitions. A well-known example is that of the Russian critic Vladimir Propp, who organized the plots of fairy tales into segments of events to show that all fairy stories move systematically through elements we might think of as plot morphemes, that is, as sequential images that are presented in language. I will not pursue here Propp’s classificatory method, though it has provided useful validation for the belief that there are defining characteristics in some sets of stories. My concern focuses on philosophical and psychological aspects of story and storytelling, as these are related to the structural organization of stories. Storytelling is as necessary and constant a defining force in human continuity as is drawing, depicting through images. The linguistic experiment in storytelling for the ear accompanies the material exploration in shaping the stuff of representations for the eye. In our evidence of earliest human habitation, representation takes both forms. I imagine that storytelling and visual representation in drawing and painting and carving grew up together. The earliest storytelling sequences we possess, now of course committed to writing, were undoubtedly originally a speaking from mouth to ear, and their force as entertainment derived from the very same elements we today enjoy in films and novels. Perhaps the greatest constancy in culture is storytelling. And yet that activity itself exhibits something of an evolution, a development toward variety. There is no doubt that storytelling precedes philosophy as we think of it, but in their original standing as cultural events, stories often function as modes of thinking through problems just as they were engines for driving individual self-consciousness to new depths and greater compass. Storytelling itself is not only entertainment; it is also thinking through human conflicts and contradictions. Philosophical inquiry, in a parallel yet reversed form, began its career, so far as we possess it, in the Platonic dialogue, itself a mode of storytelling. If we take a further step and set early image making side by side with early storytelling, we see that human capacities of thought are developed through hand-eye representational images and mouth-ear linguistic representations. Language creates images as vividly as does color on a stone wall, and both support beliefs, challenge the senses, carry an audience beyond its immediate confines.

8 Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

Linguistic art, such as stories, and material art, such as paintings, are usually practiced by artists limited to one medium. There are fascinating exceptions: D. H. Lawrence and E. E. Cummings in our time and towering figures in the past, such as Michelangelo, Vasari, and William Blake. The linguistic artist Boccaccio, my concern in this study, stands alongside other storytellers for whom material art figures centrally in their writing, and in a special way that represents painting through writing. (In our time, Henry James should be considered as sharing this dedication of writing to painting.)4 The sensibility of these artists recognizes differences in the representational capacities of writing and painting, differences they take as a subject in their writing. The distinct powers of writing and painting become a theme explored for the ideas and discoveries that the separate gifts reveal when brought together. A basic theme in Decameron, a theme that contributes to stories’ thinking as philosophical, runs as a kind of ostinato of meaning: cultural reality comes into being when both story and image reinforce each other. Decameron exemplifies that synthesis: author is not only storyteller; author can use story to create images so powerful we “see” as we “hear.” We are drawn to recognize that achievement by the ways stories use painters as characters and painting relies on stories—certainly a trecento means of storytelling. Painting draws sustenance from linguistic story as story does from painting.5 Thinking about stories that lie close to us in the West, I began this story journey with the Greek myths, at one time required learning for European and New World students. Certainly, the founding fathers as well as the schoolmasters of our own nation read Greek and Roman collections of myth and knew that mythic story inspired the philosophical and literary writings of the classic authors whose texts constituted their education. Making a nation, the writers of constitutions not only recall the mythic tales of just such endeavors but also their own internal story experiences in their early years. Since the American nation was created in the midst of a native culture—both puzzling and noble—the stories of European origin and national political life turned to native storytelling as a presence to be integrated into the search throughout a New World for its capacity to generate great stories. It seems very likely that early American Federal interest in Native American stories and storytelling was a natural consequence of an education based on stories of the Old World. The American anthropologists thought of Native American stories as primitive science, modes of “savage” explanation, “a body of opinions regarding the genesis, the function, the history, and the des-

Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

9

tiny not only of themselves but also of every subjective and of every objective phenomenon, principle, or thing of their past and present environment.” This was the way Washington, D.C., looked at Native American storytelling.6 With the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution in 1826, indirectly through the bequest of James Smithson, then brought into being by congressional act in 1836, and finally brought to fruition in 1846–47, a library, a museum, and an art gallery were to be founded and filled. From 1848 on, a large number of publications were devoted to Native American culture in all its aspects, including collections of so-called Indian myths, and culminating in 1907 with Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico. In those times, Native American stories were thought of as a kind of myth that could be understood if set beside Greek myths, on the one hand, and biblical stories, on the other. The stories gathered and heard on the tribal lands, and later in the reservations, were reported very seriously as an expression of Indian beliefs and thoughts about themselves, nature, the cosmos, creation, and the afterlife. While the stories were enjoyed as literary works, they were prized particularly for the evidence they give of a whole way of life. Our early anthropologists, also educated in the classical tradition, tended to see native storytelling as an extension and variation of storytelling in the ancient Western world. What comes through as one reads the ethnological reports of the Smithsonian-sponsored research is a huge curiosity about the native peoples of North America, who were rapidly being annihilated and dispersed. Not only artifacts had to be collected and saved in the museum, the linguistic world also was in peril, for Indian languages and myths would soon be lost. I point out the dedication to story in this context because it typifies the immediate natural affinity we all feel toward the stories that give structure to a form of life. We preserve them, sadly, often without internalizing them, but then we have our own stories to contend with and to render appropriate, if that is possible, for our own educational purposes. No longer are the basic Western classical stories widely read and known, segregated as most worth passing down; now, within educational institutions, there is a determination to treat all basic stories, from every tradition, as worthy of preservation, respectful reading, and serious interpretation. That change in cultural focus must itself be part of a developmental history of story and storytelling, a chapter in the story of storytelling. In telling our own, American story of storytelling, we should look at the early nineteenth century, when the Smithsonian was financing the anthropology of storytelling among Native Americans. At the same time, in a different setting, immigrant literary folk, unaware of a native tradition, were

10 Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

preoccupied by the problem of how to create stories fit for the New World. They brought with them models from European collections like those of the brothers Grimm and the fabliaux that entertained medieval European poets. Those gatherings of stories also underlay, as a kind of model, the work sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution. The need for storytelling in the new land that was called America stimulated a rethinking of Old World assumptions. As we move from the older tradition of storytelling that was translated to the New World, we come to realize that storytelling has historical connections, that storytelling undergoes metamorphoses when it travels from past to present and from one land and culture to another. Great stories, like those attributed to Homer, are retold in every generation and every location with subtle transformations in how they are heard. Hearing, like seeing, changes in time. Telling, like the making of visual representations, assumes varying forms and delivers varying ideas as it undergoes translations, interpretations, decodings, and renewed encodings. So the stories retold in New World times and places appear in distinctive guises as their meanings evolve. In societies with writing, storytelling may or may not evolve; where oral telling of tales persists through time, story forms and contents may repeat from generation to generation, but it is likely that great oral epics like the Iliad were elaborated on as the tellings passed from generation to generation, and oral traditions in general seem to encourage variations. Our own awareness of storytelling centers on written forms such as the novel, that is, stories created for a specific audience: an audience of readers, whose memories are stocked with basic stories and whose story universe has expanded exponentially with the creation of newspaper and film. We possess as well not only the expanding universe but the well-mapped story forms of the past, those I refer to as “basic stories.” One segment of basic stories we refer to as “myths.” In the foundation myths of early cultures—Sumerian, Hebrew, Greek—a conflict between mortals and enduring immortals leads to a near wiping-out of human beings, and the communities thus threatened must repopulate themselves, which, the myths assure us, they do. In the Hebrew telling, God promises to restrain ultimate destructive power; in other traditions, the violence of the gods is frustrated by a mythic character who takes the side of human survival, giving to humankind the means to live on. Although Decameron is in most respects far from original early myth, historical forces that brought plague to Italy in the trecento reestablish conditions like those we read about in stories such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which plague, fam-

Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

11

ine, and drought threaten human existence. The black death, in the plague of 1348, could have depopulated Europe, a condition feared by the survivors, and Boccaccio combats its devastating threat through stories, a means to escape annihilation. In early myth, such a survival would be due to divine help, human intelligence, or simple luck. Decameron has moved beyond myth to a self-conscious reflection on the cultural means for overcoming the threat of death. The means is art as against nature, and art as a protection against that which some assumed to be the wickedness of humanity, punished by divine wrath. Boccaccio obviously does not see God’s vengeance in the plague that attacked Florence, and neither does he use story to suggest the suffering was brought on by transgression. He takes as his own an early tradition that sees a power of survival in culture, that is, storytelling as a means to overcome death and perhaps a way to immortality. Although Decameron was thought through and assembled in a period remote from the great mythic traditions, Boccaccio studied classic myths most sympathetically in order to connect his storyworld with that of the past, and of course he had intimate knowledge of Hebrew biblical myth. He had not an inkling of the earlier mythic foundation to Hebrew and Greek myth to be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh. He did not need that early Sumerian story to be aware of how the devastation of the black death paralleled both Hebrew and classical Latin plague stories. This awareness provides a deeply suppressed structure of meaning to Decameron as a whole. In past mythic tellings, humankind was threatened by annihilation; to live through the black death was felt to be an instance of living through mythic catastrophe. In the trecento, the secret to survival was not to be found in discovery of the gods’ designs and ways to thwart them but in a human cultural response that elevated storytelling to a force strong enough to overcome the plague. Thus human acts of a simple cultural kind can foil a threatened annihilation, but the performances must be set in a ritual surround. The storytelling book as a whole becomes, then, an apotropaic gaze that confronts plague and ultimately subdues it. The reward for this ritual performance is not personal immortality but survival. Yet survival under the protection of art achieves the possibility of cultural immortality, through the staying power of story, for story is heard forever. In all cultural traditions, exploration of plots and characters begins at an early age, when the child is introduced to the idea that stories persist, come from older times and generations, have been capable of traversing huge distances and finding welcome in their own lands. Story flies through space and time, as if a penetrating particle, lodging in memories all over the

12 Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

world. One of my first story collections was Book House, which preserved texts with illustrations of stories gathered from many cultures. One of my first modes of story representation was the diorama in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Each tableau was a story told in visual terms. Childhood shapes itself for the child around plots that are repetitions, told endlessly in the group or in family tellings. If the group entertains annual representations of plots and characters, ceremonies and rituals, the coming round of the time of year that marks a recognition also establishes a story whose every detail is well-known. All this is obvious enough but noted here to provide a setting for the interweaving of consciousness with narratives as consciousness expands. Holding as we do the themes of childhood story throughout life, it is a wonder to us that they persist more continuously than any other bits of memory. They are laid down as a plank in the floor of our dwelling place of memory because in the early years stories create cultural reality. As we grow older individually, as the external influences of world and body increase in their shaping force, stories that once were dominant in shaping our world sink beneath the advancing years, till those who are able to live in continuously revivified narratives become a separated, vocationally distinct set of often gifted individuals within the larger group. To make stories one’s business in adult life creates a vocation that may be honored or may be denigrated but holds as undeviating preoccupation for those who are helplessly committed to the tradition of story. For many of those storytellers, “original plot” often leads back to childhood, revivifying, reorganizing and reconsidering the accumulation of the first-met plots, the internalized characters, and, most powerful of presences, one’s own experience and one’s own psychic structure. That is not to say, as it is often said, that an author always writes about the self that is the author; several of the storytellers whose tales lead back to themselves have so metamorphosed the self that they themselves can stand outside themselves as spectator-readers of their own work. The tradition of storytelling and storyhearing perpetuated and sustained in a cultural tradition no longer need depend on the story heard from the mother. Once established, the stories I talk about here are heard with pleasure by every age from a variety of sources. They convey a cultural recognition that often thinks about human finitude and death. The longer the story collection or story cycle, the closer it gets to ruminations on death. The most artful of such collections and cycles I call “linked stories” because they move from story to story as if interconnected links on a chain. They all confront the figure of death in one metaphoric representation or another. I shall men-

Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

13

tion three that are well-known: The Thousand Nights and One Night, The Golden Ass of Apuleius, and the Decameron of Boccaccio. Storytelling in which a finite set of tales is presented as if a part of an infinite collection, I call the “Scheherazade condition.” To write, to paint, to narrate, to perform when the representation is of indeterminate length is to stand outside time in the sense of lifetime time, moving toward death. The whole of Boccaccio’s Decameron rests on powers attributed to storytelling explored elsewhere, as in The Thousand Nights and One Night: creativity in storytelling can stave off death, but only when storytelling and physical love are intertwined.7 This belief is metaphorically represented in Boccaccio’s Decameron, day 6, story 1, one of the shortest stories of the whole collection, which presents Madonna Oretta (in real life, we are told, the wife of Geri Spina, protagonist of day 6, story 2), whose name means “little hour,” or “lack of time.” Stories well narrated will not only keep Madonna Oretta alive but will energize her sexually, an obvious life metaphor.8 In Decameron, life survives the devastation of the black death through a withdrawal from the city to the protection of the countryside, a protection that allows, indeed encourages, the exchange of stories among a little band of women and men, a “brigata.” (There is no satisfactory English equivalent, but the closest would be, in this case, a “company of friends.”) Ravages of plague rage within Florence, and everywhere death dominates life, and restraints on conduct give way to selfish, physically indulgent actions. Sexual inhibition dissolves, yet within the brigata sexual restraint and moral decorum dominate conduct. Stories entertained in retreat to relative safety can deal with physical and emotional forces of sexuality with a freedom that is truly liberating. Many stories explore the invigorating and inspiring powers of sex, a preoccupation that has had the unfortunate consequence of classifying Decameron a salacious collection while in its own inner reality the sexual serves as metaphoric entrance to philosophical inquiry and conclusions. Among its philosophical claims, a lesson taught by Decameron is this: those who live by and within storyworlds may realize immortality. Before Boccaccio’s day, that claim had been made evident in the Homeric epics and the Eastern collections of stories we know as The Thousand Nights and One Night. For us, Boccaccio adds to that ancient evidence with his very first story, that of the rascal, liar, and evil storyteller Cepperello, who, through his storytelling, is metamorphosed into St. Ciappelletto. Immoral, sexually deviant, a confidence man, and, above all, a spellbinder, Ciappelletto achieves

14 Storytelling: Bankruptcy of Reality

immortality through being declared a saint. As we hear or read the story, we distinguish the narrator within the story, the clever Ciappelletto-Cepperello, from the author-narrator of the entire book. We hearers respond to both narrators—that is, author and character—to create with them the reality that is at once a wish fulfillment on the part of the character and a hard-headed rejection of the character’s claim to truth on the part of the author, Boccaccio. Overthought and underthought, manifest and latent, amplify each other to a metamorphosed fusion of the two: the liar-storyteller yet exhibits in his life a truth about storytelling: To Live Forever, Tell Stories. The universe storytelling creates becomes the one Anaxagoras imagined: an endless multiplicity of metamorphoses bounded by the void. But within that great universe of storytelling a striking contrast emerges: endless storytelling on the model of Decameron coexists with plots of a powerful dramatic tradition referred to as “tragedy.” Within the tragic world created in Athens, storytelling takes a different route to its completion. Tragic stories do not accept the model “To Live Forever, Tell Stories” but a model of ending the world and stopping the story. By “the world,” we understand the family histories on which tragedy builds and from which it takes its representations. The model might be described as this: “The killing of generation(s) kills storytelling.” For tragedy in its classical form tells the story of families within which deadly destructions occur, destructions of life, the lives of adults and the lives of children. As I say this, I realize that to analyze and interpret Decameron I must make clear that death by plague and the devastated social order within which the stories are told do not in themselves establish a tragic world within which parents and children destroy one another. For it has often been believed that the description of the black death that functions as an introduction to the hundred (or hundred and one) stories of Decameron is intended to surround the great variety of plots with an overall tragic shield, as if the comic high spirits and sexual images in many of the stories are meant to function as a force to turn away the tragic threat of plague. Linked stories and tragic actions as in Greek tragedy present significantly divergent interpretations of what happens when plots and their tellings confront one another. This differentiation emerges in an insightful argument proposed by the classicist Bennett Simon.9 “Plays that involve the killing of children betray most clearly anxiety about the prospects for storytelling,” that is, the familial conflicts that create tragedy also “undermine the condition that makes storytelling possible.”10 That insight helps to locate the overarching achievement of linked stories such as Decameron within which we become aware that tragic familial de-

Storytelling: Bankruptcy of Reality

15

structions do not occur. Rather, the stories make storytelling a never-ending prospect, and one way to realize the life-giving power of storytelling is to induce infinite themes and variations so that no sooner is one story completed than it gives birth, as it were, to another. This fecundity is never exhausted. In contrast, tragic stories have definite, noncontinuous endings and induce what is sometimes referred to as “katharsis.” This is not to say that sequences such as those that make up Sophocles’ three great Oedipus plays do not exhibit continuities—they do—but each presents a definite ending; the story cannot be continued as it can when Boccaccio’s brigata tosses story themes back and forth. The contrast might be metaphorically compared to a game of bridge in contrast to a game of Monopoly. Boccaccio’s Decameron grew out of and descended from a long tradition of linguistic enactments of a special sort, sequential, linked stories. He rebuilt that long tradition with a collection that overcomes the limitations of linked stories as it also metamorphoses the very idea of the genre and previous attempts to structure it. Our inherited assortment of linked stories could be said to begin with Hesiod, move on to Ovid, Apuleius, The Thousand Nights and One Night, the Diciplina Clericalis, and several French-Italian collections such as Gesta Romanorum, some of which circulated in Italy in Boccaccio’s day, the trecento, that is, the fourteenth century. There is good evidence that Boccaccio read widely in or listened attentively to his storyworld, for several stories from it are transfigured in his collection, and many images from the past reappear in his tellings. Good stories never die; they are revivified in sequential tellings down through the millennia; today, we readily respond to stories created before there was writing; and with writing the same stories appear again and again, slightly embellished or with plot overturnings that exhibit the hidden possibilities of familiar outcomes. Writing may introduce variations on traditional themes but may also erase directness and simplicity. We can therefore raise questions about story performance analogous to questions we ask about so-called authentic music performances. It may be that efforts to recapture a past enactment and its performance setting only distort or hide the aesthetic achievements of its own time, and it may be that performances according to contemporary sensibility satisfy us more adequately than an assumed revival of the past. Certainly, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Shakespeare borrowed from many sources (including one another) with clear intent to rewrite for their modernity. So for our own time, in listening to stories and reading stories, especially linked sequences, we create, with the stories and as part of their telling, conditions for their being understood.

16 Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

Decameron, I believe, tells us how to read and to hear. Sometimes in Decameron we readers know that the three men and seven women who tell the stories have a precise contemporary purpose in their ten days as storytellers outside the city of Florence. Within the city, the plague rages, taking lives, deforming civic existence; outside the city are imaginary plague-free natural landscapes where saying and hearing go on without anxiety, where death is at a distance, even though in reality the plague did not recognize boundaries. While there are many subsidiary purposes and accomplishments for the storytellers and the reader in Decameron, aesthetic and philosophical purposes slowly emerge after the central threat to life has diminished. In contrast, a linked sequence like the Diciplina Clericalis openly expresses its manifest purpose in its misogyny and its aura of “good advice” to young men whom it would help to navigate successfully through the perils of social maturity. It expresses a pedagogical purpose as it entertains, and its aesthetic interests are subordinate to its mission of explaining how to get through life without being taken for a fool. Decameron presents itself as all for entertainment, for the highly aesthetic, yet serious learning and speculation hide beneath the surface; its concealed serious intent emerges more clearly when it is set alongside its predecessors. Boccaccio stands to his linked-tale predecessors much as Shakespeare stands to his story sources, one of which was Boccaccio’s Decameron, and when Boccaccio is a background force for Shakespeare, the dramatist recognizes the storyteller’s latent seriousness. In Boccaccio’s stories, there are serious, often hidden pursuits that include a sharp sense of reality, “facts” within a framework of that which we call “fiction,” and the work of imagination. Imagining, to be artistically successful, requires a firm base in reality. When we enter into the long corridor of linked tales, we immerse ourselves in a reality that surrounds us. Then, as we say, we may get lost in reading, and our everyday surround fades behind imagination. Reading successive tales creates a special enactment experience, different from the single story or the practice so familiar to us of reading a novel. Moving from plot to plot, action to action, character to character, we experience a pause between stories, moments of various extent, to reflect, consider, and prepare for the next story. Each collection of linked stories develops its own special way of controlling this movement. Decameron worked out a unique plan: each day is devoted to a theme imposed on the storytellers so that there will be some continuity of subject, story to story. This offers the possibility of shaping one or more of the day’s stories to act as interpretative agent, help-

Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

17

ing the hearer to understand the “reality” of the theme. Together, themes provide an armature, a structure within, that makes the formulation of latent content (the underthought) a natural inner thought. Since there are ten days of storytelling, eight with specific themes and two of free-for-all, readers seek to uncover a developmental sequence: say, from unawareness to increasing awareness, from primitive morality to sophisticated moral judgments, from immaturity to social and political maturity, and so on. These possibilities distinguish Decameron from like story sequences in which there may be development of awareness, but inside each story separately. That is the case in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which is further individualized because its sequence is not clear, there being several differing manuscripts. For us, Boccaccio avoided that opacity by carefully writing out at least one manuscript, with the intention of exercising total control over his art. In such a case, we can feel somewhat secure in our interpretative readings.11 A music metaphor seems to me appropriate to describe Boccaccio’s careful orchestration of his story days: each day works a tonal or key change, and within each day there are modulations, major-minor alterations, cadenzas, freewheeling variations on a theme, and grand finales. This description is of course only metaphoric, but it can be helpful in working out some of our more recent storytellings in the form we call “the novel.” All storytelling that develops ideas and critical points of view faces the need to develop its themes in such a way that the reader/hearer is led by incremental story bits to the latent thought. I would give as a modern example the collection of stories—really a linked set—written by Herman Melville, The Confidence Man, a world far removed from Decameron, yet that storystore was known to Melville, his favorite being day 7, story 9. (See chapter 4 for an interpretation.) The underthought of The Confidence Man emerges slowly; as each story is told, the reader gains a bit more insight into the overall argument. In this case, the ideas develop out of an ancient philosophical argument, the paradox of the liar, but its full implications can be understood only after all the stories are told.12 In itself, the paradox of the liar sets a problem for the understanding of stories because it generates a condition difficult to accept: that there are many sentences in story language, and in language generally, whose truths cannot be determined. Stories intensify the paradox; their sentences move all around, from assertions of the way things really are to fantasy, dream, and falsehoods. Yet all that variation takes place within the language of the imagination. So we might be inclined to think all story sentences are false in the sense that they do not reflect actual observed events. But of course in

18 Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

many respects they can be truthful since story is free to assert truths of history, character, human life, references to other stories, logical deductions and inductions, as well as the very truths of repetitions within the story. Decameron, complex in its greater scope, develops its deeper thoughts out of several basic themes: that the assumed “truths” of religion can be challenged, that human action rests on contradictions unperceived by the one who acts, that storytelling has its own claims to truth, far more penetrating and valuable than much that passes for philosophical wisdom, and several other claims that will emerge later on. All serious storytelling relies on just such a set of claims (though of different content) in its unfolding, truths that we can say are paradoxical because they are sometimes true though false. So a storyteller can be thought of as a liar yet one who tells the truth. I think Boccaccio considered his vocation as being dedicated to just this paradox, and he was not alone in this belief, for it is shared by all storytellers. Basic themes evolve and develop, exhibiting their internal contradictions as the story collection grows. Characters and events in one story may expose the inconsistencies in characters and events of another, related story. In the most famous collection, The Thousand Nights and One Night, stories are both linked and nested: one story begets not just another story but a story that contains within itself a descending and ascending nest of stories. In this way the story universe achieves complexity and extension, opening opportunities for the truths and falsehoods to be affirmed. In Decameron, although Boccaccio gathered structures from several storytelling predecessors, assembling such a collection was driven by much more than a mere collector’s interest. He sought truths that would be a defense. Beyond the obvious obsession with accumulation lies a need for stories and our search for the unending enactment that might cast a veil over day-to-day reality, transforming it and briefly repressing its anxieties and sufferings. All peoples have created just such enactments, though they can never be presented all at once, anymore than we can read the Decameron nonstop. Therefore a help to the comprehension of linked stories is to recognize the necessary segmentation that they must suffer and our apprehension that they may end. It is the storyteller who is charged with the cultural obligation to keep the stories from faltering. Every storyteller begins with an implied promise to keep the enactment going forever, however much the storyteller knows that it must end prematurely, that is, before it has achieved its unrealistically hoped-for salvation. Salvation in the cultural setting of storytelling means rounding out and fulfilling a life, imagined as a lifelong immersion in story, unrealistic for

Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

19

obvious reasons but not a foolish wish. Decameron understands both that impossibility and the imagined wish, realizing a realistic way toward a fulfilled life: in philosophic thought. In Boccaccio’s day, as in ours, philosophic speculation and philosophic arguments that lead to a conclusion risk losing an audience, but what if story itself could be the means to philosophic wisdom? There were excellent examples in Boccaccio’s inherited tradition, philosophy as story and story that contained in hidden form a philosophic insight, available to the sensitive and questing reader/hearer. Already mentioned are Plato’s dialogues and Ovid’s stories; they proved that story can be put to philosophic use as it maintains its qualities of entertainment. That does not mean sugarcoating philosophy; it means writing with a conscious strategy of manifest and latent content. To do that, however, signals of intention must be made part of the process so the reader/hearer is put on notice, opened to receive what is in the story, and willing to make the effort to dig out suppressed thought. Boccaccio accomplishes that declaration of intent in subtle yet unmistakable ways, and I propose to demonstrate Decameron’s way to philosophic story by reading with you in such a way that you can then extend the method to other stories. That Boccaccio regarded himself as a philosopher-poet can be inferred from his regard for the great poets of his tradition. As Dante joined his poet predecessors in limbo, so Boccaccio makes clear in his discussion, book 4 of the Genealogy, that poetry and philosophy are joined in the works of Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, and the ancient figures, both poets and philosophers, from whom they descend. Though he does not (perhaps dares not) create a group portrait in which he stands with those named, his great work belongs alongside the truly philosophical poetry that pursues questions of art and morality. In following Boccaccio’s evaluations and defense of poetry in the Genealogy, I direct my inquiry to the philosophical ideas in Decameron. In doing so, I recognize that for Boccaccio philosophical thought can be realized in several modes of storytelling, one of which is myth. In the course of storytelling, traditional, age-old, often interrelated myths may guide the plots. Our inclination as modern cultural historians leads us to emphasize the differences that separate the mythic storyworld from the self-conscious writers’ storyworlds, but if we closely regard storytelling in both cases, and if we compare them, we may be led to see and hear an underlying mythic ostinato to the writing of more recent times. In the case of Boccaccio, his extended inquiry into myth, which occupied him for over twenty-five years and culminated in his huge study Genealogy of the Gods, must be kept in mind when reading the stories of Decameron. A man of let-

20 Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

ters ought to know the ancient myths, but what effect does such knowledge have on stories in part or entirely the creative work of the writer? Tantalized and frustrated by their distance from the present, Boccaccio pursued mythic characters and events with the dedication of an artist who in his self-confidence as an artist believes he can outdo inherited stories. To hold such a belief, the storyteller must be able to discern the deeper inner meanings of myth. At first, they are mere tales, entertaining, sometimes frightening in the early stages of childhood. Returning to them later in full aesthetic awareness, their complexity and hidden wisdom begin to emerge. Myths provide a path into the unconscious; this is Boccaccio’s insight, parallel to Freud’s insight that dream is the royal road to the unconscious. Myth shares with dream mysterious properties. Myths are inherited stories from unknown sources; they are just there in the storytelling community, with no attribution of authorship. They furnish a cultural dwelling. Dreams also have no source except the self, a mysterious, hidden aspect of the self that led Nietzsche to say that every person is an artist in his dream life. I would add: every community is an artist in its mythic inheritance. That endowment, when it flowers in the awareness of individuals, gives birth to artists who take up myths in order to elaborate them and respond to them as challenges to further storytelling. Myths, as well as linked story sequences, were inherited by Boccaccio in a cultural tradition that had been working out a parallel mode of representation to that of the linguistic narrative, the narrative form of painted images. That wall decorations of a highly sophisticated narrative sort, often based on biblical stories and tales, both Gospel and Apocrypha, were of great interest to Boccaccio is evident from his friendships with painters. Several of those artists contemporary with him appear in Decameron. Most illustrious, of course, is the great fresco painter Giotto, a character in the fifth story of day 6. Not only does he enter the story space as a character, but his spirit hovers over the book as a whole (in just what way will be discussed in chapter 5). Giotto inspires Boccaccio, who aspires to the freedom granted a material artistic representation, the painted image. Alongside such expressed longings to be, as it were, the Giotto of story, Boccaccio introduces us to his painter counterpart, Buonamico Buffalmacco, who appears in five stories. While Giotto illustrated stories in individual “windows” of representation, as in the Arena Chapel in Padua, Buffalmacco painted stories in a grand continuous design of many scenes occupying a single huge surface that demands a sepa-

Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

21

rating-out as it is “read.” In Italian trecento painting, some images illustrate a story, such as those by Giotto in the Arena Chapel, and some tell a story, as does Buffalmacco’s Triumph of Death in Pisa. A similar comparison could be made between a painting by Poussin, such as Et in Arcadia Ego, which tells a story, and Giotto’s Massacre of the Innocents in the Arena Chapel, which illustrates a story. Triumph of Death takes on a special, somewhat hybrid set of characteristics in making this comparison between telling and illustrating for it does something of each. In this duality, it has a particular relevance to Decameron, for one of its embedded images presents seven women and three men in a lovely, isolated, remote garden where they sing and play music. They coexist with crusader knights setting off to combat, halted in their progression by three encoffined skeletons. Death itself, alongside devotion to contemplation and art on the part of the musicians, effects a shocking contrast. Within telling a story, a story is illustrated. The reverse might be more accurate: the garden might have inspired Boccaccio’s storytelling. Moments of felicity within a world of war and death, a grand compilation of worldly events: this seems as if it might be an imagistic representation of a story sequence that Decameron set linguistically (see figs. 1.1, 1.9, and 1.10). In both the Arena frescoes, telling and illustrating the story of the life of the Virgin, and in Triumph of Death, a narrative unfolds, but in the Marian cycle that Giotto created there is a known narrative to which images may be matched; in Buffalmacco’s Triumph of Death, there is a demand to establish a narrative for that fresco as such, for we have no coherent narrative antecedent to which it can be matched. We do have historical events, however, such as the plague (the black death), and since we have Boccaccio’s book, we have a cycle of narratives that may be themselves illustrated in that one image. For it is possible for a story to be as it were an illustration for a painting, just as a painting may be an illustration for a story. Linked stories and linked images, linguistic and material creations, have always held themselves close to one another. Greek vase painters represented scenes from the Iliad, and the linguistic story the Iliad describes painted scenes, as in the presentation of the shield created by Hephaistos and given to Achilles by his mother. Linguistic art represents material art; material art represents linguistic art. So, as we think about and listen to the stories in Decameron, we must remember that they are told in a cultural world in which the narrative painted vies with the narrative linguistic. Decameron stories not only feature painters and talk about painting; they also vividly represent the seen as well as the heard.

22 Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

Storybook as Pimp: An Interpretation of the Decameron Cognomen, “Prencipe Galeotto” In my reading of Boccaccio’s Decameron, I refer to the book, as did its author, by the term “pimp,” because the book’s second name, or cognomen, is “Prencipe Galeotto,” which might be translated “Prince of Pimps.” It is traditionally pointed out, if the cognomen is accepted as truly bestowed by Boccaccio, that he borrowed the “galeotto” from the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno, where Paolo and Francesca account for their mutual seduction and therefore sin, as induced by a book, the “galleot,” that was to them a pimp. Hence the Decameron refers to itself as an agency of seduction, a pimp, a gobetween, a force to bring together men and women in sexual embrace. As we read the stories that are created in the ten days outside of Florence, however, it is made clear that the three men and seven women, although they enjoy stories and talk with highly charged sexual themes, conduct themselves chastely and are in no overt way seductive toward one another. Why then is the book called a pimp? The chosen cognomen may be a self-reference, the author drawing attention to an authorial presumption: that he brings the reader into a sexual relationship to the book. Would that be intended literally or metaphorically? If literal, then Decameron is written as an inciting instrument: read this for sex. If metaphorically, the author seems to have endowed himself with an unusual potency and an aesthetic task that we at first might think falls outside the usual intentions of the teller of stories, however much such a description of the storyteller is delightfully true even if often repressed. In much of our aesthetic making, we turn away from its more physical, especially sexual, implications. Yet all audiences for all the arts seek there aspects of sexual experience difficult to represent in any other way. The storyteller can entertain us by creating stories with sexual subjects, comments, jokes, double meanings, flights of imaginative eroticism that surely delight as they may offend. Functioning as they do in those ways, the arts allow the artist freedoms of expression that often are challenged on political, moral, religious grounds. Calling oneself a “pimp” anticipates censorious responses and also slyly excites. As I will show later on, the metaphors that apply to artists and writing in the past have often been blatantly sexual. One possibility we ought to consider is that Boccaccio creates before our very eyes a procession of narratives that should be watched—as we would watch a long parade on a saint’s day or on the Fourth of July—for its revivification of ancient modes of storytelling that depended overwhelmingly on physical sexual acts and innuendoes. For example, in its early stages, dramatic enactments, such as those in the Athenian theater, mixed tragic drama with

Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

23

what we call the “Satyr Play,” a wild, obscene, brief storytelling that presented satyrs and primitive half-human–half-animal characters in often vulgarly humorous plots. It’s a bit like the unrepressed, exaggerated, ribald Mardi Gras scenes we know in our own time. Behavior ordinarily considered outrageous is encouraged yet followed by serious religious purification of self and city. A storyteller, we come to see as we study the tradition in many lands, can tell tales that parade a variety of the philosophically complex and the morally serious while yet clothing it all in sexual metaphors. Decameron does just that and in so doing revivifies an ancient tradition, though I suspect there was no time in the past when such “pimping” was not part of storytelling. As always with questions raised by Boccaccio’s writings, however, we must struggle to get enough information to satisfy our curiosity and justify our readings, for the trecento in Italy has left us a far sparser set of documents and historical accounts than the centuries before and after. Boccaccio’s life, his origins, his career, his way of living in the town of Certaldo do not receive the documentation we hope for. So we fall back on a certain amount of reconstructive guessing. Another lack that drives us to fill in as best we can is the degree to which Boccaccio had access to writings of his predecessors. We know he attempted to learn Greek, unsuccessfully, that he read and wrote Latin, that he was an archaeologist of sorts, digging out old manuscripts from dilapidated collections like that at Monte Casino. It is said that he discovered the manuscript of Apuleius’s Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) as well as a clutch of Martial’s Epigrams and brought them back to Florence. Again, falling back on guesses, we suspect that there were manuscripts from many sources in the ancient and medieval world circulating during Boccaccio’s lifetime (1313–1375) and that he may have had access to far more than we have evidence of. We know, for example, that the writing of Maimonides was available in Latin and that the church fathers incorporated into their extensive commentaries bits and fragments from ancient Greek and Latin writers. But the whole of the great philosophical writings, Plato, Aristotle, and the Greek schools, were not yet readily available, and it is thought that of Plato Boccaccio possessed, at best, the Timaeus and half of the Phaedo.13 Yet as I read the stories in Decameron, it seems to me that Boccaccio must have had access, in some form or other, to Plato’s Phaedrus. I assume that because the storyteller behind the stories of Decameron behaves as does Socrates in the Phaedrus, for they both identify themselves as pimps whose knowledge of sexual matters places them in a position to be penetrating judges of human conduct and character. The Latin poets, such as Ovid, in all likelihood, provide a closer and more stimulating source for that identifica-

24 Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

tion, for Boccaccio had access to Latin poetry. However, his way of using the pimp metaphor reflects Plato’s and Dante’s imagination more than that of the Latin poets. They present the poem itself as prostitute while they the poets pimp for their poems. Boccaccio never casts Decameron in the role of soliciting whore for whom he pimps. Rather, like Socrates, Boccaccio sees himself as one who uses his knowledge of sexual matters to match story to reader and, as a judge of the erotic, to understand which pairings will be fruitful.14 It does seem unlikely that in trecento Florence there were whole texts of Aristotle to be had, but clearly Boccaccio read and even perhaps studied them through Thomas Aquinas, toward whom, I believe, he maintained an ambivalent relationship, both venerating and berating. There is no accumulated documented historical background that can be referred to as such, though we have evidences throughout the pimping book that its author knew a great deal of literary, philosophical, historical, and local folk wisdom past. That is confirmed, it seems to me, by a careful reading of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, not only in the plots clearly taken by Boccaccio from the Roman-Egyptian storyteller but also in the beautiful intertwining of philosophic thought with the comic and the satiric, so clear in Boccaccio’s predecessor and a spirited example for a trecento follower.15 If we concentrate on the writing itself—Boccaccio’s so very careful, thoughtful, aesthetically and rhetorically shaped stories, with their interconnecting descriptions, day-end songs and dances, authorial interruptions— then we learn a great deal about the book even lacking sufficient context to resolve all our questions. A few observations will guide my comments. The collection of stories is drawn from earlier story sequences, folk stories in general circulation, and from the author’s own imagination. Together, they convey a sense of unbounded narrative power, a sense that the teller of tales could have continued indefinitely, adding as many fresh and entertaining stories as those already told. I take that expression of infinity to be a psychological and transcendental power of the book. By “transcendental,” I mean that the book promises to account for the origins and the purposes of storytelling, as if deducing that knowledge from a set of first principles. The implied first principle articulates two basic narrative conditions: that stories are never exhausted—they come from an infinite store—and that those who hear them will gain a kind of immortality, for the parallel first principle is a commandment and a promise: “To Live Forever, Tell Stories.” In Decameron, the brigata (seven women and three men) escapes from the city where death reigns—that is, Florence under the pall of the black death—to the idyllic countryside where nature and all constructive human impulses flour-

Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

25

ish. In telling stories, the brigata escapes death. Indeed, toward the end of the book, in the introduction to day 9, the author observes that of the little band of women and men, it could be said, “Either these people will not be vanquished by death, or they will welcome it with joy.” Boccaccio’s implication, “To Live Forever, Tell Stories,” echoes plotlines taken from Apuleius’s Golden Ass and leads me to assume he studied the adventures of poor Lucius who was turned into a donkey and then at last retrieved his human form. The culmination of The Golden Ass is Lucius’s achievement of a priestly sanctity, implied immortality. He leads the way for Boccaccio’s sly induction that turns several stories into symbolic moments of death-defying events. But Apuleius is not the only storyteller to see this as an outcome and therefore a reason to be a storyteller. In the grand collection known as The Thousand Nights and One Night, or “The Arabian Nights,” as it came to be called, Sheherezade escapes death by pleasing the king whom she is charged to entertain; failure means death. She escapes death and indeed presents the king with three children conceived during the years of storytelling. There is a tradition behind Decameron that lends intercultural supports to its sexual and cultural optimism. Notice that with Boccaccio, as with Apuleius and The Thousand Nights and One Night, the stories are spoken by each storyteller; they are not read, though we who follow the brigata in its adventures do read what they speak. So it is as if there were a silent scribe recording what they said. The scribe is the author, Boccaccio, who enters into the telling by telling a story of his own to add to the one hundred stories (as if he had not written all of them) and whose authorial presence is encountered in the opening and closing descriptions of each day. It is also the voice that states the proem, introduction, and conclusion. The whole book is tightly controlled by the author, however much he tries to hide himself. And, in any event, he obviously wants to be discovered, watched, interpreted in his storytelling acts. To further that wish, he places himself as a character in several of the stories, not by name (there is no “Boccaccio” character in any story) but by subtle and indirect descriptions of characters who are clearly storytellers. A basic principle of reading in the case of Decameron is “follow the author; see how he hides and appears.” Storytelling is a magical gift that can be fully exploited only if the magician, like one of his rabbits, appears and disappears. In Apuleius’s narrative, the storyteller within the story is inspired by the magical: Lucius inadvertently metamorphoses himself into an ass, a disappearance of the human but creation of a state of total knowingness that a storyteller must assume. Lucius can see and hear and think; he tells us the stories as if they are reports only

26 Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

he, an assumed dumb beast, could provide as entertainment and wisdom. Boccaccio creates a far more complex gang of storytellers but, like Lucius, appears and disappears through narrative metamorphoses. I’m going to assume that if the book is a pimp, the author takes that role on himself. As already mentioned, Boccaccio relies on a long tradition in bestowing on the author the designation “pimp.” It begins with Socrates, as he is represented in Plato’s images of the great teacher, in the dialogues. Perhaps Socrates is able to bestow names on himself because he never writes but carries on his philosophic inquiries only through speech. So he can say to Theaetetus, “Have you then not heard . . . that I am the son of a noble and burly midwife, Phaenarete? . . . And have you also heard that I practice the same art? . . . I assure you it is true. . . . Have you noticed this also about them (midwives), that they are the most skillful of matchmakers, since they are very wise in knowing what union of man and woman will produce the best possible children? . . . Midwives, since they are women of dignity and worth, avoid match-making, through fear of falling under the charge of pandering. And yet the true midwife is the only proper match-maker.”16 Socrates is portrayed in the dialogue Phaedrus and also in Symposium as one who truly understands love and is able to discourse on human erotic relationships in a mythic as well as a political setting. Although Socrates says he rejects mythic tales and the explanations they offer, he makes it clear in the introduction of the dialogue that he knows the myths and can build his philosophic views on their fictional foundations. Socrates is at once a gifted poet telling mythic tales and a philosopher who seeks analytical understanding of mythic claims. He is not, he says, a believer in the popular stories that all Athenian children know, but he sees through them to their latent content and makes use of that when he addresses one such as Phaedrus, who because of his lack of a philosophic gift must be spoken to in stories that he might, it is hoped, understand and be able to use to broaden his views of the nature of love. Since the Phaedrus emphasizes the distinction between writing and memory, reading and rhetorical improvisation, and Phaedrus comes before Socrates with a written speech hidden under his cloak, Socrates’ self-identity as midwife and pimp can be more fully understood if we contrast the philosopher who does not write with those (including the philosopher Plato) who do. In the ancient world, when writing was established, there were those, Plato among them—though he rethinks these problems late in the day—for whom writing was regarded as an instrument that would undermine the culture since it was created out of but came to take the place of memory, which was thereby diminished. As soon as writing becomes a general practice, a

Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality

27

new set of relationships is established between members of the community, for they become divided into writers and readers. Of course, one person can be both, but most likely most of us will be readers, few will be writers. This belief seems to have been widespread in ancient Greece and later in Rome. With the invention of printing and other aids to communication, another set of new interrelationships came into the community. We should keep that bit of philosophic and narrational history in mind when we look at the writer Boccaccio, for as I have pointed out above, though we are already far removed from Socrates, yet his self-justification and cultural function as a pimp is repeated in Boccaccio’s self-representation. There is a continuity that sounds throughout the literary-philosophical tradition: writing and reading are represented and explored through or by means of or with the help of sexual metaphors. I analyze sexual metaphors more fully in my third chapter, where I examine the way a whole telling of a story rests on a sexual metaphor that spreads into the relationship of writer to reader. Since storytelling is in essence a metaphorically sexual relationship, the possibilities of story consequences can include progeny, lineal and collateral descendants, and therefore an escape from mortality. In listening to stories, we enter a realm of story time that overcomes lifetime time, so, in a further sense, the experience of storytelling and storyhearing induces a feeling of limitless life. In that further sense, storytelling rests on metamorphic transformations, turning one form into another. When stories are linked as they are in the Decameron, a cinematiclike series of metamorphoses occurs. Invoking cinematic analogies does not exhaust the ways in which our own artistic performances relate to Decameron. The collection of stories is at once a Gesamtkunstwerk and a visual representation that takes painting as its model. Boccaccio not only knew and valued painters of his day—they appear in the stories—but also felt a keen affinity to their way of working. Why should not a writer have the same freedom as a painter? he asks in his concluding remarks. In answering his question, we should think of all the ways in which painting and storytelling are alike, and, in the context of the trecento, they possess a remarkable and revealing affinity. It is with that likeness, and also the metamorphic possibility of story into image and image into story, that I will begin.

chapter 1

Trecento Story and Image

T

o the trecento artist Boccaccio, as with Dante before him, storytelling had a parallel life in the fresco scenes and stories of artists like Giotto; his images are very much in the minds of both poets as they limn their own images in words. That fresco cycles, such as Giotto’s in the Arena Chapel in Padua (see fig. 1.1), were inspirational can be assumed from references to Giotto and the presence in Decameron not only of Giotto, a character who appears in day 6, but also of Buffalmacco, Calandrino, and Bruno, who appear in day 8, stories 3, 6, and 9, and day 9, stories 3 and 5. All the artists-as-characters are well-known and can be found in Vasari’s Lives. The presence of painters in linked stories suggests that the storyteller expects the hearer to explore linguistic and material enactments in order to come to understand ways in which they interinanimate one another. In their internal organizations, linked stories can be understood through their likeness to the structural and imagistic properties of painted surfaces, the frescoes in churches and public buildings to which Boccaccio owed so much in his storytelling. The opening scene of Decameron finds the seven women and three men who will form themselves into a brigata meeting by chance in the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella (see fig. 1.2).The choice of that church has complex implications for the understanding of Boccaccio’s intentions.

Image has been suppressed

1.1 Giotto di Bondone, Scrovegni Chapel, view of interior looking toward the altar, Arena Chapel, Paua, Italy. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

Image has been suppressed

1.2 Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Italy, façade. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.

32 Trecento Story and Image

Within Santa Maria Novella, the Strozzi family endowed a chapel, constructed between 1325 and 1350. Its walls present scenes that have an important bearing on the stories the members of the brigata will tell one another in the next two weeks. A catalog of the surrounding frescoes, the scenes the men and women look at as they lay plans for their escape from plague-ridden Florence, reveals themes and characters central to trecento life and thought. The representation of Dante’s great poem, painted by Nardo di Cione sometime around 1350, would be inspirational as well as somewhat ominous (see fig. 1.3). Most startling is the depiction of the Dantean hell, as figuratively violent as the poem is in its descriptions of suffering. One must imagine the effect it would have had on visitors whose lives had been comfortable and safe, who now faced an indeterminate future where all life expectations were in jeopardy. On the walls of a nearby chapel, known as the “Spanish Chapel,” are crowded, highly allegorical scenes of the great teacher, Thomas Aquinas, for Santa Maria Novella is a Dominican church (see fig. 1.4). Andrea da Firenze was commissioned in the 1360s to celebrate the canonization of Thomas by painting scenes from his life, a huge narrative, wonderfully complex, with individual scenes inhabiting the wall space as if parts of a cosmic puzzle. In contrast, the opposite wall shows Thomas in his ultimate heavenly destiny, enthroned, seated in a row with other saints and theologians, above him angels, and below him saintly men and women of the church. Central in the huge wall painting are three figures seated in cowering positions at Thomas’s feet, just below the throne. Their identity was established by Giorgio Vasari in his description of the panel: they are the three heretics Sabellius, Arius, and, in the middle, Averroes.1 Denying the divinity of Jesus was the central heresy supposedly preached by Arius; in a like detraction from Jesus’ godhood, Sabellius preached a doctrine known as “Monarchianism” that argued simply that Jesus was human, deriving extraordinary power from God but not a divinity; and of course the teachings of Averroes had achieved extraordinary influence in thirteenth-century Western thought, so much so that, as already pointed out, Thomas had to attack the heretical beliefs of Averroism, such as denial of Providence and the assertion of unity of the intellect as a transhuman reality. The importance of these heretics to Boccaccio is less than that of Thomas, who appears in several stories through sly narrative references. Of course, questions of faith do underlie many of the conflicts that shape trecento society, and the Dominicans defended Thomas’s theological superiority through their recognition of him as the great teacher whose books not only destroy heretics but give light to the continuing success of Catholicism.

Image has been suppressed

1.3 Nardo di Cione, Hell, after Dante, right wall of Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Italy. Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

34 Trecento Story and Image Image has been suppressed

1.4 Andrea da Firenze, The Triumph of Thomas Aquinas, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Italy. Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

Santa Maria Novella was not the only church in which Thomas’s triumph over heresy was depicted in images. In Santa Catarina in Pisa and in the panel painted by the Biadaiolo Master in the 1320s, now in the Lehman Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Thomas towers over the heretical Averroes whose teachings were of great interest to Boccaccio and whose presence in Italy remained a force through isolated centers of teaching (see figs. 1.5 and 1.6). I will develop this Boccaccian theme in my interpretations of the most forceful Decameron tales. Two painters, Giotto and Buffalmacco, are “painted” into the Decameron story cycle with something of the same vivacity that they were able to achieve in their own images for the eye. Giotto’s presence as a deeply admired artist, the

Image has been suppressed

1.5 Francesco Traini, The Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, Santa Caterina, Pisa, Italy. Scala/ Art Resource, New York. Image has been suppressed

1.6 The Biadaiolo Master, The Glorification of St. Thomas Aquinas, enlarged detail of left quarter. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.99).

36 Trecento Story and Image

greatest Boccaccio knew, may have led the storyteller to complain that writers do not enjoy the same freedom to express ideas that is granted to painters. At the close of Decameron, Boccaccio writes: “No less latitude should be granted to my pen than to the brush of the painter,”2 and such comparisons lead me to consider Giotto’s famous cycle of scenes in the Arena Chapel, Padua, for undoubtedly Boccaccio knew them, as well as much else painted by this artist. Boccaccio credits Giotto with returning painting to its classical and natural roots. He puts his description of Giotto’s genius in the mouth of Panfilo in day 6, story 5: “there was nothing in the whole of creation he could not depict with his stylus, pen, or brush. . . . He brought back to light an art which had been buried for centuries beneath the blunders of those who, in their paintings, aimed to bring visual delight to the ignorant rather than intellectual satisfaction to the wise” (p. 457). Such praise for Giotto’s gifts as painter have an implication for Boccaccio’s gifts as writer and storyteller. Setting painting and poetry side by side, which Boccaccio does in several Decameron passages, continues a long tradition of comparisons that goes back to the ancient world of Greece and Rome, revived in medieval and Renaissance analyses of poetry and painting. Cultural curiosity, the need to see and hear and know all that has been created by art in the human realm, led to the development of ekphrasis as a means to convey absent objects and events through verbal descriptions. In general, this way of representing an image or object through words was called “ekphrasis” (ekphrasis: description; ekphrazo: to tell over, to recount) because words could be used as a means to travel to distant places where the cultural objects—temples, sculptures, paintings, and the like—could be reproduced, if at all, only through the verbal descriptions of the guide who promised in his travel books to take you there. Before such travel books were written, poets had created descriptions of cultural objects through words alone, the most celebrated being Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles, in Iliad, book 18. Poets were valued and praised for their ekphrastic powers. In contrast, painters were praised by travel guides for the gifts that enabled a painting to create a copy of reality so truthful that birds, animals, humans, and painters themselves would be fooled. Ekphrastic accounts dwell on the uncanny realism of fruit so painted that birds pecked at it, of objects so disposed on a flat surface that they appear to be in three-dimensional space. Ekphrasis celebrated the human capacity for words to represent the material, linguistic, and tonal media, but especially the use of descriptive language to represent material works such as sculpture and painting. Words could create images in the mind that would be a surrogate for direct encounters with objects. For its part, paint could create simulacra of poetic expression. And music could rep-

Trecento Story and Image

37

resent the full range of human feelings, emotions, sentiments, and passions. Thus there was a time when it was possible to think of the arts as sharing in their capacities to represent. That time persisted through the late medieval and early Renaissance years in Italy. With the High Renaissance—for example, with Leonardo’s consideration in his Paragone of the differences that distinguish the powers of paint from the powers of words—the capacities of the various arts were declared more separate and distinct than had been the case previously. Leonardo insisted, “Painting surpasses all human works by reason of the subtle possibilities which it contains.”3 Since storytelling in our day coexists with highly developed means to reproduce painted images and music, the stories of modernity fall back on ekphrasis only when such description would serve to realize metaphoric meaning. More to our interest today is the use of paintings, graphics, and photographs to illustrate scenes first encountered in story, and thus stories in Decameron became in later centuries sources of paintings when Boccaccio’s world inspired modern imaginations. The so-called Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an English school that flourished in the middle of the nineteenth century, explored Italian trecento stories for subjects. A famous drawing by John Everett Millais presents Isabella and her two brothers based on day 4, story 5, “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil.”4 Such interinanimations from one story medium to another came to succeed ekphrasis with the technology that allowed accurate reproductions of images in print. This brief description of the evolution from ekphrasis to modern reproduction opens up a history of human dedication to the description of cultural objects that evolved from Greek antiquity through the European, particularly Italian, Renaissance. By the time Boccaccio was writing his poems, descriptions of classical myths, and stories, as in Decameron, poetry-painting interinanimations were not only well established, but the capacities of the two arts to imitate one another had undergone an evolution. It might be said that the whole complex program of ekphrasis was a kind of imitation-inpractice, a way for the arts not only to imitate nature but also to imitate one another, and that mode of imitation could be set alongside the ways each art imitated nature. It is this set of interdependencies and interactions that becomes a theme in Boccaccio’s trecento cultural world. His assertions about painters and poets, his examples of poetic and painterly powers, construct an armature for the activity of storytelling. Stories of artists, of the sort Boccaccio includes in his book, had a rich endowment from the collection put together by Pliny in his Natural History (Naturalis Historiae), a work well-known in the early Renaissance. While

38 Trecento Story and Image

I cannot find evidence of actual repetitions within Decameron taken from Pliny, the tone of delight and pleasure in description certainly can be seen as a transference from Pliny to Boccaccio. It is easy to imagine, though without any direct evidence, that acquaintance with Pliny’s reports of painters’ achievements worked as an inspiration to shape self-consciousness in the trecento, a time when great painting was created, and great painters, such as Giotto and Buffalmacco, could be held up as models for artistic excellence. Mythic though they may be, the stories Pliny recounts of Zeuxis and Apelles must have inspired trecento accounts of painting, so that the reader could see in Giotto the extraordinary realism of Zeuxis, who fooled birds with his painting of fruit and was in turn fooled by the even greater realism of Parrhasios, whose painted linen curtains in front of his painting were taken to be woven cloth. The extraordinary genius of Buffalmacco could be represented by the stories of his force in fooling his playmates into believing they were invisible. That could be a gloss on Pliny’s story of the visit Apelles made to Protogenes, resulting in very fine lines being imposed on other lines so that the resulting painting, simply of lines on lines across a board, ultimately “disclosed nothing save lines which eluded the sight, and among the works by excellent painters it was like a blank, and it was precisely this that lent it surpassing attraction and renown.”5 Developing this painterly illusionistic theme, in day 8, story 3, Buffalmacco leads his gullible painter friend Calandrino to entertain false beliefs about the world. Buffalmacco, with the painter Bruno, convinces Calandrino that he has become invisible through the agency of the magical heliotrope stone. After Calandrino has amassed a huge collection of stones, his companions pretend they cannot see him. When he returns home, his wife, Mona Tessa, sees him, berates him, and thus makes it clear that he is visible. Calandrino blames his wife for breaking the power of the heliotrope to make him invisible, “since things always lose their virtue in the presence of a woman,” and beats poor Mona Tessa unmercifully. There is a moral here: anyone who breaks the magic of storytelling will suffer the consequences. Buffalmacco, the great illusionist, like Boccaccio, the great storyteller, commands the power to turn reality into magical alternatives. To escape Mona Tessa’s drubbing, we had better learn the truth ourselves. Several stories in Decameron assume the techniques of ekphrasis as it was known from classical examples such as Pliny’s, which may in turn have been shaped by Philostratus’s far more elaborate descriptions of painting.6 Boccaccio creates images in words, as all poets do, for language creates scenes that the reader conjures in the mind. There is great subtlety in Boccaccio’s

Trecento Story and Image

39

visual assumptions at the very opening scene of Decameron, in the church of Santa Maria Novella, for though no descriptions of paintings are given, they are there, surrounding the characters, and Santa Maria Novella, as noted above, was decorated with powerful paintings. As we read Decameron, we become aware that the challenge of ekphrasis inspired Boccaccio, as it had Dante, to describe scenes as if they were paintings. Of course, while that was a natural, inevitable poetic act, its function in trecento writing takes on a particular recollection: the poet reaffirms the connection to the past, just as in modernity the Pre-Raphaelite painters found inspiration in colors and forms that they believed revivified classical works and modes of making. Art historians have pointed out that Giotto’s Arena Chapel representations show likenesses to classical figures. That the painter inspired Boccaccio is not in doubt, but it is unlikely that Giotto’s sources in classical art were known to the writer. We cannot know that for sure, however, and there is a striking similarity of purpose in the painter’s images and the writer’s stories as they seek to revivify classical knowledge, techniques, and narrative structures that must be read with an awareness of surface beauty and deep, sometimes hidden, inner meaning. Such manifest-latent organization is readily found in Boccaccio’s tellings, and this duality also characterizes Giotto’s fresco cycles. Alastair Smart describes the Padua paintings in their classical references: Giotto’s “pictorial adventures” had their “true precedents . . . in the art of antiquity; but they indicate also that the temper of Giotto’s mind responded to the spirit of the Greco-Roman tradition at a much deeper level, above all to its heroic dignity and restraint, to its ideal of order and balance.” Smart concludes that “in almost every instance of a borrowing from the antique in the Arena Chapel, Giotto’s direct knowledge of the source in question can reasonably be presumed.”7 Giotto may have been more fortunate in his discovery of the antique than was Boccaccio, who of course had access to Latin authors, and especially used and reveled in his discovery of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, but whose longing to master Greek and obtain original philosophical texts from the great philosophers he knew only indirectly through figures such as Augustine was frustrated by the accidents of history. Boccaccio’s efforts to master his world in both its contemporary complexities and its historical antecedents compelled him to seek out a teacher of Greek in the belief that the original texts would fall open to his translating passion. Alas, the ancient philosophical wisdom and poetic beauty were to remain for him a shadow articulated through the Latin language, and though he readily mastered the powers of Virgil, he would never meet directly the greatest poet of them all,

40 Trecento Story and Image

Homer. Well known as a poetic aspiration, his hunger to do so generated tales—most likely apocryphal—recounting his efforts. They are told by Edward Gibbon and, as fictional entertainments, are quite the sorts of stories Boccaccio himself would have enjoyed. Gibbon believed that Boccaccio succeeded where Petrarch failed, for the older poet, Boccaccio’s friend and rival, had attempted to learn Greek from Barlaam, a native of Calabria mentioned by both authors. Gibbon says Boccaccio did learn Greek from a disciple of Barlaam, Leontius Pilatus, whom the eager poet furnished with room and board only to find that Leo was a filthy rascal. As Gibbon puts it: “The appearance of Leo might disgust the most eager disciple; he was clothed in the mantle of a philosopher, or a mendicant; his countenance was hideous; his face was overshadowed with black hair; his beard long and uncombed; his deportment rustic; his temper gloomy and inconstant; nor could he grace his discourse with the ornaments, or even the perspicuity, of Latin elocution.” Despite this, Gibbon claims, Boccaccio did gain from Leo a knowledge of the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as an acquaintance with myth that enabled the poet to write his Genealogy of the Pagan Gods. Other reports dispute the gifts brought by dirty Leo, however, and maintain that Boccaccio died unlettered in Greek. As for the knowledge he had of classical myth and epic, that can be explained by the availability of Greek culture in Latin texts.8 Boccaccio would have been entertained by Gibbon’s final report on Leo: he precipitously abandoned those by whom he was hired to teach Greek and sailed off into the Adriatic, seeking his homeland, “but on his entrance into the Adriatic, the ship was assailed by a tempest, and the unfortunate teacher, who, like Ulysses, had fastened himself to the mast, was struck dead by a flash of lightning. The humane Petrarch dropped a tear on his disaster; but he was most anxious to learn whether some copy of Euripides or Sophocles might not be saved from the hands of the mariners” (p. 249). While Gibbon was skeptical that anyone in the trecento really mastered Greek, there is evidence that Greek was well understood in southern Italy all through the trecento, even though Petrarch and Boccaccio may never have learned to read it. It is realistic to entertain the belief, as I do, that Boccaccio had access, at least through intermediaries, of some few Greek texts and that it is no accident that one hears echoes of Plato’s Phaedrus in some of Boccaccio’s descriptions of nature, even though the received scholarly view, as I have said, is that only the Phaedo and half the Timaeus were available in Italy during Boccaccio’s lifetime. Since trade with Constantinople was vigorous, and Italians established a rich mercantile beachhead there, it is likely that

Trecento Story and Image

41

tales known to both Arabic-speaking and Greek-speaking peoples were part of the cultural exchange that inevitably becomes part of trade between East and West. Whatever the reality of Giotto’s and Boccaccio’s direct knowledge of ancient art, both material and linguistic, it is clear that they both aspired to aesthetic and philosophical thought in its classical sensibility. The Italian trecento was distinguished by narrative experimentations in both painting and writing, for pictures and texts shared cultural purposes: they were means of instruction, enlightenment, and entertainment. Decameron, as one of its pedagogical attitudes, maintains a remarkably optimistic point of view that is readily distinguished in its storytelling. I interpret this sustained tone as a pressing need to create a utopian society, and that vision, too, has its counterpart in the painting known to Boccaccio. There is a remarkable parallel between the utopianism of Boccaccio’s storyworld and the great fresco by Ambroglio Lorenzetti called The City of Good Government in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico, painted around 1340, just when Boccaccio was creating his book (see fig. 1.7). Its sense of decorum is reflected in the courtly, modest behavior established and maintained among the seven women and three men of the brigata. To be sure, Dioneo behaves discourteously—really a loss of self-control attributable to high spirits—when he makes fun of Fiametta (conclusion, day 5), finally singing a love song after several attempts to sing something scurrilous, but the general tenor of comportment expresses good manners and generous behavior. The brigata could stand as a model for Lorenzetti’s fresco The Country of Good Government, painted next to The City of Good Government. In both, figures of active, happy inhabitants, living in harmony, fill the country and city settings (see figs. 1.7 and 1.8). The painting in its two scenes achieves a philosophical representation as original in its way as the philosophical thought Boccaccio embedded in his stories. A description of Lorenzetti’s panoramic Effects of Good Government sketches how the Thomistic-Aristotelian inspiration behind the work was visually realized: “Here Lorenzetti was free to give full rein to his imagination. . . . Happy youths and maidens dance in a street, farmers with their herds enter the city from their fertile fields. Elsewhere horsemen ride out into the country, leading us to an enchanting prospect of valleys and rolling hills, where small towns, hamlets and farms nestle in the security of peace. . . . Contentment reigns in this ideal country, over which there flies the protective figure of Security.”9 Art historians have identified the personification of Peace that stands outside the landscape and the figure of Security flying over the countryside as inspired by figures on a Roman sarcophagus and by an ancient

Image has been suppressed

1.7 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Allegory of Good Government: Effects of Good Government in the City, detail, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, Italy. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

Trecento Story and Image

43

Image has been suppressed

1.8 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, frescoes of good and bad government, Sala del Pace (Room of Peace), Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, Italy. Scala/Art Resource, New York.

statue well-known to the city’s inhabitants. All these elements, assembled in Lorenzetti’s imagination, produce a huge representation that shares in the thought and action of Decameron and may have been a visual counterpart to the utopian character of Boccaccio’s extended and complex working-out of political and moral comportment. Visiting a chapel such as the Arena in Padua, reading a collection of stories such as Decameron, opened up an external reality that, though set in an object—chapel, book—builds into cultural reality imagination’s learning and beauty. Entering the Arena Chapel is exhilarating; studying the paintings draws the onlooker deeper and deeper into the aesthetic structures, whatever degree of comprehension of narrative they achieve. So, too, with Boccaccio’s book: reading and hearing open a delight of narrative immediacy, however much the underlying thought is apprehended. Comprehension, apprehen-

44 Trecento Story and Image

sion, delight, pleasure, the thrill of the beautiful—all compacted into a small space. The distinguishing characteristic of trecento art, narrative complexity and narrative beauty, comes through as the wall is scanned, as the page is read. Narrative richness relies on a new appreciation and mastery of allegory, as Hans Belting points out in his careful assessment of narrative in its trecento realization. He writes: “The scope of narrative changed. Allegory became its new domain. This was conveyed through fictitious narrative, that is, narrative used as a device for carrying out arguments, or narrative as exemplum to illustrate a point made by a program of an abstract or theoretical nature.”10 Boccaccio himself reaffirms Belting’s observation in several comments in his great work, Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, dedicated to the art of writing in all its cultural past and its powers that ought to be reinforced in the present. In book 14, he writes, “Fiction is a form of discourse, which, under guise of invention, illustrates or proves an idea; and as its superficial aspect is removed, the meaning of the author is clear.” This observation provides an explicit directive to the reader of Boccaccio’s books, most especially Decameron, where, as I will discuss in the chapters to follow, Boccaccio writes so that “sense is revealed from under the veil of fiction.”11 The whole statement is of interest because it provides one of the arguments Boccaccio assumes as he tells his Decameron stories. Boccaccio’s deep interest in and love of painting, as well as his feelings of being trammeled in what he can express in comparison to the freedom enjoyed by painters, helps him to formulate the purposes and inner, often hidden, meanings of stories. This interrelationship of image and word is demonstrated not only by his placing famous painters whom he admired in Decameron but also by his complaints about how much the writer is frustrated in his aims that flow from close looking at paintings. In both the Genealogy and in the conclusion of Decameron, Boccaccio compares writing to painting and longs for the favoritism he believes the painter enjoys in contrast to the censorship endured by writers. But he overcomes the limitation in several ways: one, most powerful, is the presence of Buffalmacco as a character in days 8 and 9; and the other occurs in the last story of day 6, in which Father Cipolla, who is really Boccaccio himself, realizes the talents of both storyteller and painter. Buffalmacco (a nickname for Buonamico di Cristoforo) was, in our language, a practical joker or, in Vasari’s words, “celebrated for his jests” (famoso per i burli). Listening to Vasari tell stories about Buffalmacco, we can hear Boccaccio’s voice because there is such a concordance between painter and storyteller, one who performs somewhat cruel yet entertaining actions

Trecento Story and Image

45

and one who writes stories that match the painter’s tricks. Vasari records some of Buffalmacco’s “jests”: he frightened his master (he was a pupil of Andrea Tafi) by sending beetles with candles on their backs across Tafi’s bedroom floor in order to frighten him with “devils,” for, said the young man, “devils are the greatest enemies of God, and consequently they must be the chief adversaries of painters, because besides the fact that we always make them very ugly, we do nothing else but represent saints on walls and panels, in order to render men more devout or better in spite of the devils. For this cause the devils are enraged with us.” Buffalmacco also used his wit to win more time to sleep at night, a recurrent problem for him since he is reported to have been kept awake by the spinning wheel of his neighbor’s wife. To find some peace, he bored a hole in the wall so he could pour salt into the kettle of soup she was always simmering. Then Buffalmacco approached the husband to assure him that his wife would become a better cook if she did not rise at midnight to spin, for “when she has enough sleep her brain will not wander during the day.”12 Vasari recounts a great many of the painter’s other practical jokes, all directed at human gullibility, as when he convinced the abbess of a nunnery who had the best Vernaccia in all Florence that only with that wine could he render the flesh tones of his figures adequately, thus guaranteeing a regular supply, to his tipsy delight. The tales that fill Vasari’s chapter on the painter could all be part of a Decameron tale. Like Boccaccio, who saw himself as a writer-painter, Buffalmacco set his pen to work where his brush had been, for he composed a sonnet to celebrate his completion of a fresco. It seems to me that the painter subtly takes on himself the creative powers of God, just as Boccaccio, in his praise of his own art, slyly endows himself with all the powers of artists: painters, sculptors, and composers. His is a lofty view of the writer’s art, not only as a calling but as the platform of a political and philosophical teacher whose linguistic creations insist on interpretation that, when achieved, reveals truth. Perhaps that interpretation of the writer’s craft must be applied to the work of the painter in order for its deeper meanings to be opened up. The story character Buffalmacco leads gullible people to entertain false beliefs about the world, just as painters in their actual illusionistic representations lead the looker to beliefs that rest on mere appearances. Yet the actions of the story character Buffalmacco in Decameron have meaning, as serious as the great fresco from which Boccaccio may have taken several of the themes that structure his story cycle. Belting discusses the unusual structure of the fresco Trionfo della morte (see figs. 1.9 and 1.10), observing that the painting “cannot be described in the usual terms of narrative. For all its

46 Trecento Story and Image Image has been suppressed

1.9 Buffalmacco (Buonamico di Cristofano), Il Trionfo della morte (The triumph of death), detail, Camposanto, Pisa, Italy. Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

embedded narrative, it does not claim unity of action or unity of space but offers a conceptual arrangement that organizes the many narrative units. The single narrative is as real as the overall structure is abstract. The subject can be described as the power of death to dash all earthly hopes.”13 Boccaccio, inspired by an elevated classical irony, reverses that subject in the philosophical storytelling that in its wide knowledge and wit protects the brigata from the plague devastating Florence. Storytelling realizes immortal possibilities. Though Buffalmacco in his great fresco seems to express only a worldly pessimism, he and Boccaccio share profound beliefs about the powers of the material and linguistic arts. No longer are painting and poetry simplistic in their message, no longer are they means to instruct the illiterate and the uneducated, as the church would so regard them; rather, as Belting

Trecento Story and Image

47

Image has been suppressed

1.10 Buffalmacco (Buonamico di Cristofano), Il Trionfo della morte (The triumph of death), scene in the garden, Camposanto, Pisa, Italy. Alinari / Art Resource, New York.

states it: “Paintings like the Trionfo della morte could no longer pass for ‘texts for the illiterate’ but were promoted to the rank of learned statements in visual form.”14 While Boccaccio concludes his story cycle by likening himself to the painter whose liberty he envies, he also, as I shall show, structures his stories on an analogy to the means a painter uses to create a fresco. He tells the reader that within his storyworld there is a conscious likeness between the two arts, painting and storytelling. Of course, books were considered more dangerous, generally, than icons, whose presence in churches may attract prayers but otherwise are not as undermining a threat as the arguments in stories. Boccaccio, however, is attempting to open up a far wider awareness of storytelling powers than was part of the usual censorship when he wrote

48 Trecento Story and Image

his complaint. The identification of pen ( penna) to brush ( pennello) has many implications that the writer wants the reader to grasp. One is that his book takes painting as one of its sources for inspiration and comparison. Yet the parallelism between linguistic and material art is here interpreted further than we might at first recognize. Reference made by Boccaccio to depictions of Christ and Eve omits, rather obviously, the other first man, often depicted: Adam. Where is he, and why has he not been explicitly named? Adam, hidden as the author is hidden throughout the book, except for one brief appearance at the beginning of day 4, has been replaced by the writer-painter representative or, as we might say today, surrogate of Adam. The author is Adam, first man, originator of all the images and characters in the book. He (author-Adam) is the progenitor of all ten days of storytelling action, and the introduction to day 4 covertly makes a sly assertion of this identification. Two metaphors structure Boccaccio’s defense of his storytelling: that he considers living ladies as Muses and that he is like fine dust in a windstorm. He, the author, like Adam, is of the dust, created as the first man in order to tell a story and to be the source of all the other stories, just as Adam becomes the first story, as it were, from which all the Bible stories follow. This network of metaphors, transforming the author into first Adamic storyteller and master of all arts, both explicit and inferred, occurs at the end of the book and in the curious introduction to day 4, where the author tells a story of his own, but only after assuring the reader that it does not detract from the stories being told by the brigata. The author, here insinuating himself into the storytelling position as one who has his own voice, assures the reader that he has kept a low profile out of a wish not to offend and out of the inherent modesty that ought to characterize the gifted storyteller. As if to confirm that reticence, he refers to his stories as “these little stories of mine that bear no title, and which I have written not only in the Florentine vernacular and in prose, but in the most homely and unassuming style it is possible to imagine” (introduction to day 4, p. 284). Yet, despite that, he has been attacked by envious critics and competitors. As the Adamic progenitor, the storyteller endows himself with an originality not fully deserved, for Boccaccio, like every storyteller, is in part a bricoleur, a maker of assemblages, however much he creates some stories and retells others in his own voice. He acknowledges a certain dependency with the unusual dust metaphor just mentioned: “For whatever happens [to my work, my collection of stories], my fate can be no worse than that of the fine-grained dust, which when a gale blows, either stays on the ground or is carried aloft, in which case it is frequently deposited upon the heads of

Trecento Story and Image

49

men, upon the crowns of kings and emperors, and even upon high places and lofty towers, whence, if it should fall, it cannot sink lower than the place from which it was raised” (p. 290). And picking up the same image as a kind of coda, Boccaccio concludes his whole collection with a return to dust: “I confess that I do have weight, and in my time I have been weighed on numerous occasions; but I assure those ladies who have never weighed me that I have little gravity. On the contrary, I am so light that I float on the surface of water” (epilogue, p. 801). Adamic dust, blown round the world, not only is a life-creating element as a source for stories, a metaphor that links the author with God’s creativity, but also provides the foundation for painted images. A trecento painter raises the dust of the ground into living images as plaster is spread on the walls. To create a surface for the painted images of fresco, a foundation must first be applied, the arriccio on which the first basic drawing, known as the sinopia drawing, is sketched. This is the very foundation for the subsequent representation. On the arriccio is spread the second, smoother layer of plaster, the intonaco where the colorful, pleasing, beautiful painting with all its wealth of detail will be spread. The writer creates a similar underpainting, the basic structure and truth of the story, on top of which the writer, like the painter, spreads the detailed, colorful, entertaining, and pleasing story that we read. If we know only the image of the intonaco, we fail to penetrate to the sinopia drawn on the foundational “dust,” the arriccio. And it is to the hidden story, the underlayered truth, that we readers must be led. There indeed is the original conception of the author whose fine-grained dust of creation must be penetrated and deeply understood. Such fundamental understanding is rarely the fate of written works, however, just as we rarely come to know the hidden sinopia of fresco. So writers must create as painters do, and writers must show to readers that they are able to move from surface to depth, how this is to be done, and how to enjoy both the narrative world of color, figure, and movement and the inner truth that, as a structural underpinning, gives eternal life to art. As we hear, or read through, the stories of Decameron, the dust of the first man, authorial progenitor, is formed into illusion after illusion into which Boccaccio breathes the life of art. As he understood long before Nietzsche, illusion is the only mode of redemption. Decameron redeems as only artistic reality can, for through word and image we overcome our life limits. To Boccaccio, Giotto was the supreme painter who granted his viewers a salvation, the artist with whom Boccaccio dared to compare himself. For whether the artist be a painter with a brush or a writer with a pen, the

50 Trecento Story and Image

product is story, and it is through story that we gain whatever immortality we may be granted. Giotto makes his appearance in story 5, day 6, the most important central day of most challenging and complex brief tales. Each storyteller on that day tells a tale that demands interpretation, a move from surface entertainment to inner hidden truth, truth about narrative itself. That Giotto and Boccaccio are artists with a shared mission defined by their like gifts and artistic understanding becomes clear in the final tale of day 6, told by Dioneo, in which the protagonist is Friar Onion (Father Cipolla). Preparing his gullible audience to see the feather of the Angel Gabriel, he is frustrated but not deterred in his preacherly mission by the disappearance of the feather, in whose place a trickster has put a piece of coal. Undaunted, Cipolla preaches a brilliant, totally nutty sermon on the coals over which San Lorenzo was roasted in his martyrdom. Feather, of course, is the writer’s instrument; coal, used by Father Cipolla to mark the pilgrims’ clothing, is the instrument of the painter. Since Friar Onion’s name is a clear reference to Boccaccio himself, for he grew up and lived off and on in Certaldo, onion-growing country, Boccaccio here as elsewhere represents himself in his tale, just as many fresco painters of his day pictured themselves in their scenes of biblical events. Boccaccio, as the preacher, is a grand, mesmerizing storyteller who wields with equal skill both the pen and the brush. Certainly, Buffalmacco’s great fresco Trionfo della morte (The triumph of death) in the Campo Santo in Pisa can be a means to understanding the power of art for it leads one through the trecento world in a sequence of powerful images. To Hans Belting, whose scholarship persuasively makes the case that the Pisa fresco is by Buffalmacco and who, as already quoted, asserts that the painting is about “the power of death to dash all earthly hopes,” Boccaccio’s reply might be this: “Decameron demonstrates the power of storytelling art to overcome death, for my book realizes this power through its depiction of the plague and the metamorphosis that story works in saving the storytellers from the sure death the plague would have brought them. My book represents the artist as one who confers immortality through artistic transformations. My book is a confirming instance of the narrative axiom: ‘To Live Forever, Tell Stories.’” The life of art bestows immortality as the life devoted to commerce and to law does not. Boccaccio dismisses the professions he might have entered, and indeed prepared for at his father’s urging, with this comparison in the Genealogy:

Trecento Story and Image

51

If the privilege of long life is not granted a man in any other way, poetry, at any rate, through fame vouchsafes to her followers the lasting benefit of survival—rightly enough called a benefit, since we all long for it. It is perfectly clear that the songs of the poets, like the name of the composer, are almost immortal. As for jurists, they may shine for a little while in their gorgeous apparel, but their names in most cases perish with the body. . . . No educated man will doubt that the poets have chosen wisely, while the jurists have shown less sense in their choice, since they have actually made fools of themselves in trying to impute to those who do not deserve it the fault which is really their own.15

Boccaccio’s defense of poetry includes a rejecting attack on the professions that in his day as in ours attract the insensitive and the unaesthetic temperament. Painters are exempted from the critical appraisal because they, too, are artists whose works achieve immortality. Just as Boccaccio includes descriptions of paintings in his settings for Decameron, there is evidence he is referring to paintings in his Genealogy. He writes: “To painters, even in holy churches it is permissible to paint the dog Cerberus, guarding the gates of Pluto, Charon the oarsman crossing the river Acheron, the Erinnys wreathed with snakes and armed with lit torches, and Pluto prince of the kingdom of hell tormenting the damned, but for poets to have written the same things in verse is a crime, and unforgivable sin for the reader.” Creighton Gilbert believes this description is based on the fresco depicting Dante’s Inferno that is on the wall of Santa Maria Novella, the church where the Decameron storytellers meet.16 Gilbert, in describing Boccaccio’s career in Naples, gives further grounds for our understanding of why Giotto figures so prominently as the painter par excellence. Giotto created a great cycle of frescoes in Naples around 1330. “Boccaccio was then a boy in the same royal court as Giotto,” that of King Robert of Naples, and undoubtedly Boccaccio knew that cycle of images.17 The important reality for us in coming to understand Decameron is that Boccaccio was creating with great awareness of his cultural surroundings a work that in the later nineteenth-century sense would be called a Gesamtkunstwerk, that is, a single work of art that subsumed within it all the art media: linguistic narrative, visual or material narrative, poetry, song, dance, music. Each day of the brigata’s storytelling concludes with music, singing, and dance, while many stories bring together story and painting. Boccaccio was exploring the power of aesthetic interinanimation. That forging of a higher synthesis of the arts, exploring their powers to reinforce one another, marks the movement of aesthetic awareness into a new

52 Trecento Story and Image

era, one that we think of as modernity. Music and song, image and poetic literary creation can come together to flesh out storytelling as an action that no longer simply exhibits a plot but now creates a totality that satisfies every human artistic craving. Storytelling draws into its narratives all the art forms that possess movement and style, representational capacities so far extended that story now thinks and sings, satisfies the ear and eye, and becomes so rich in its meanings that it comes to rival philosophy and the soon-to-be-discovered art of opera. Boccaccio directs the reader and hearer of Decameron to painted images that the Florentine churches and public buildings made a part of everyday life and demonstrates, through his creation, that linguistic artistry has the power to create a total work of art inviting all the other arts to participate in its grand design.

chapter 2

Aspects of Storytelling Dreams and Masks I am a Doppelganger, I have a “second” face in addition to the first one. —nietzsche I have joyously shut myself up in the solitary domain where the mask holds sway. —james ensor The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks. —oscar wilde

I

n reading and hearing stories, we often encounter metamorphosis, a traditional storytelling event described by Ovid as “bodies transformed into shapes of a different kind.”1 In some stories, transformation remolds the human face, something we do when we don a mask. Boccaccio seems to have endowed himself with a mask when he assumed his version of the family name, “Boccaccio,” rather than his father’s “Boccaccino.” Boccaccio’s father was known as “Boccaccino or Boccaccio di Chellino (also Ghelino) di Buonaiuto of Certaldo.”2 “Boccaccio” suggests a pun with which the writer identified himself, for “Boccaccio” has a meaning: “boccaccia” means “ugly mouth,” while the phrase “essere una boccaccia” means to be either one who is spiteful or one who calumniates, who says evil things about a person; and “far le boccacce” means to make faces. I do not know how self-consciously Boccaccio interpreted his assumed name, but I suspect he would have included among his name’s connotations, “one who puts on masks.” Masking, a metamorphosis of face and head, appears in storytelling because storytelling, as a cultural enactment, has roots in two cultural conditions: dreams and magic. Masking itself appears to be a magical transformation: a person becomes another figure, an animal, a character, simply through donning a mask. The transformation generates awe, fright, and

54 Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

often amusement. But whatever the response, onlookers experience a sense of strangeness as a consequence of a simple change that, no matter how often performed, induces strong emotions. Such feelings occur as well and in like manner in dreams. Perhaps the cultural creations, masks and magic, take their forms on a stem that grows from the natural condition of dreaming. In dreams, facial expressions not only arouse powerful feelings in the dreamer but also are taken to be expressions of intention, as they are outward manifestations of supposed inner states. So, too, masks, though immobile in most cases, express character and inner feeling states as they arouse like states in the beholder. Facial expressions, in dreaming and in masking, appear to be symptoms of intentions, often threatening and harmful. When masks, magic, and dreams are metamorphosed into stories, the physiognomy of face expresses intentions that range widely through the universe of feelings and accompanying actions. Faces express lying intentions, hidden intentions, contradictory intentions, concern, love, hate, ambivalent intentions, even unconscious intentions. Thus stories create descriptions of faces that the story may interpret, or may leave to the reader to interpret, and masks in their ritual presence, for all their rigidity, become expressively supple through the stories that contain the masked figures as characters in action. Stories may remove the mask to reveal the “real” face. Such unveilings characterize essential story actions through which the storyteller communicates to the hearer metamorphoses structuring the story. For example, in Melville’s The Confidence Man, the figure of the Man in Cream Colors, appearing at the opening of the story, clearly is one who is masked and becomes unmasked as the story unfolds. Readers should be able to anticipate the forthcoming unmasking by the many metaphoric suggestions in the description of the sheeplike man who is a mute. As we read further into the story, we are challenged to discover the identity of the character, who, it seems, appears in masks representing many characters. By the end of the story, we are supposed to have separated out all the maskings and realities, not an easy task. In like manner, interpretations of dreams remove the dream mask to reveal the dream’s “real” meaning. Dreams and dreaming, a basic source of metamorphosis in all its forms, have played a central role in curing and magical practices of peoples who share the common belief that dreams, though revealing of character, have a source outside the person, that they are sent messages about the dreamer to be decoded. In the cult of Asclepius, cure was produced through dreaming and the necessary subsequent interpretation. Dreams, Asclepius thought, came from the underworld; dreams, Freud

Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

55

teaches, come from the hidden underworld of the unconscious. Dreams come into waking life as if a mask disguising a hidden presence, and in both the ancient and modern theories of dream interpretation, directives are given for the way to remove the masklike covering and thus reveal the hidden face. The dream itself metamorphoses waking experience in the images it creates, for dream fragments, conscious and unconscious, have woven into them conscious waking experience. Dreams tell a story, but in a way that differs from storytelling. If we compare dream to storytelling, dream constitutes an inescapable story, which must be attended to. As the dream is dreamt, the dreamer cannot be distracted from the dream as one might be in listening to a story that is read or spoken out loud. Dreams present themselves as plots to be interpreted. For the interpreter of the dream (Apollo, the psychoanalyst), the dream remains a focus of attention, not to be replaced by anything else, even though upon waking an interpretation may transform the dream into a symbolic narrative that reflects and incorporates the “real” world. Dreams mask reality; interpretation seeks the means to travel from one to the other and back again, to remove the mask. Shared narratives as uttered stories (in contrast to dreams) often occupy in their telling the hour before sleep; and in that longest uninterrupted storytelling, the Thousand and One Nights, the setting is night, the bedroom, and the sleep and sexual play that occur in that place at that time. Dream stories with sexual content intertwine and interweave with the sexual sleep space. Stories heard at bedtime may be transformed into dream stories, and dreams are often transformed into stories. Dreams are the unconscious of story; story interprets dream. Storytelling lifts events out of time and place, strips them of their “real life” affect-aura, and endows them with storytelling properties. To tell a story is to don a mask. This is not to say the events in the story and the mask that is put on for ceremony do not possess the affects they possess in “real life,” for they may, or may even possess and discharge affect with greater potency than they would were they everyday encounters. The one who tells stories, as Boccaccio does, masks himself in and through the stories, and often we who hear or read the stories come upon the author behind the mask. Mr. Bad Face, Mr. Ugly Mouth, Boccaccio, gives evidences of his presence in stories, as he does in the final story of day 6, already referred to in chapter 1. When we hear that the ceremonial events surrounding the priest who makes his annual visit to the community of peasants is named “Father Cipolla,” that is, “Friar Onion,” we should suspect a Boccaccian mask, a face

56 Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

behind the face. Father Cipolla is master not only of story but of the instruments of both story and painting. He arrives with a parrot feather he vows is a feather from the wings of the Angel Gabriel, but on opening the box to show the believers the great relic, he finds a lump of coal, placed there by tricksters. Undaunted, he preaches a moving sermon about St. Lorenzo being roasted over that very piece of coal and proceeds to mark the peasants’ clothes with the lines charcoal makes when pressed against material. His sermon, which we “hear,” is a story of such kited silliness that we laugh as the peasants pay serious attention to every word. And we who “hear” Father Cipolla also pay close attention to his sermon because it fascinates, in its bizarre piling-on of events, like a dream fantasy. Stories of this kind, in their affinity to dreaming, lead us to wonder: we are led to ask ourselves, is there an obvious and immediate means to figure out what is real? Is it the story in its dream-state likeness, or is it the waking state of our consciousness as we read? The story itself takes on the immediacy of lived experience. We ask, might we be trapped in dreaming all the time, so that what we call a story—oh, it’s only a story—is but an inner dream within dream? Nietzsche said it simply: “In the production of dreams every man proves himself an accomplished artist. . . . Men of philosophical disposition are known for their constant premonition that our everyday reality, too, is an illusion, hiding another, totally different kind of reality.”3 Stories, like dreams, are illusions that pull both ways, toward fiction, toward reality, and we may ask, as Nietzsche posed the question, what level of experience is “real”? From these sorts of conditions, and such questions, the creation of masks follows as means to make physically present and communally shared the private inner experiences of dream illusion and the peculiar connections that are sought to weld dream to waking, waking to dream. Stories themselves can be thought of as masks concealing a hidden inner reality. Masks in their stylized power and beauty externalize the universal artistic gifts exemplified in stories and dreams, as they represent the ambiguities of dream-waking interpenetrations. Dreams themselves are, to a great extent, culturally determined, so mask making and mask donning frequently represent myth, a special kind of dream story possessed by a cultural tradition that has grown and developed in its own historical way. Those many different lines of development result in tremendous variety when we look at masking societies around the world because mythic stories generate individually peculiar masks. In one basic respect, however, all masks are alike: they are remappings of the human-animal face, just as dreams are a remapping of waking experience. Masks gain their power from the fact that facial expression commands

Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

57

more immediate response than any other mode of gesture, stance, configuration. Scowling, smiling, blushing, baring the teeth, expanding the nostrils— all convey mood, intention, response to the other and carry instantaneous affect. We metamorphose our physiognomy in a perpetual molding as we communicate to and with others. In addition to that affinity of humans to the animal muzzle, there is an affinity to animal slyness, configured detour around what we really feel and might be compelled to express. Yet human representation extends far beyond animal capacities to deceive or intentionally to mislead. Human deception spans a gamut from ruse to imposture and beyond. In our requirement to achieve that degree of control—far out of the reach of animals—we have created cultural artifacts to contain grimace, to overcome accidental misrepresentations, and these artifacts are brought into our confrontations with elements in dramatic, artistic, aesthetic conditions that themselves have evolved to suppress facial evidences and to stabilize affect, to hold it to a constancy that simple spontaneous performance could not so limit. Those artifacts are generally referred to as “masks,” but that generic term applies to a broad spectrum of face and head metamorphoses. Stories, in several respects, belong to the cultural masking tradition, for stories in their powers to mask and unmask render masking an object of study and ironic interpretation. Stories need not present masked characters (though they often do) to set masking in the center of our awareness. Although Boccaccio tells only one story where a mask really covers a face (day 8, story 9), and that an adventure of Buffalmacco, the painter,4 every story is about the head and face in their many covered and uncovered representations; every story deals with appearance and reality, with human efforts to mislead and be devious. Such a description implies that Decameron moves along the surface of life, representing character in its superficial corruptions, but that would be to misunderstand the stories in their full latent content, for Boccaccio’s intimate purposes are philosophical. In that sense, stories-asmask pose complex challenges to the reader, who must seek the hidden face behind the mask. Masking when applied to storytelling has a metaphoric as well as a literal meaning. The art that is story and storytelling—a traditional form of expression that has the potential to explore all linguistic modes of communication and feeling—occasionally is explored under the self-conscious power of philosophical awareness. When that occurs, the art realizes several levels of consciousness. Reader/hearer awareness begins with a sequence of events, the plot, in its rudimentary unfolding. Then we become aware of the storyteller’s relationship to the simple sequence, that the storyteller takes a

58 Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

stand in regard to what is related, that the storyteller stands within the story, outside the story, pretends indifference to the story, and from that there follows a third level of awareness, that the “truth” of what is related may be questioned, denied, set into several contexts, historical, psychological, philosophical, political, religious, and more. Finally, the storyteller may subtly suggest that the reader/hearer search for and uncover the innermost beliefs that constitute at least in part a motivation for this particular telling. That profound discovery then leads back to affective pleasures so that the result is a balancing of serious thinking intertwined with the passionate life. Boccaccio’s likening himself to a painter, and expressing envy of the painter’s freedom of expression, is itself a mask, for a writer, he says, cannot be as open as a painter. If that is a true description of the limited level of representation suffered by the writer, then linguistic art gives up much of its power to see into the depths of human thought. Boccaccio discerned a way to penetrate the surface mask of his stories to reveal the hidden face behind the mask. He explains how that is to be done in the stories themselves as well as in his introductions and farewells.5 Masks, unlike story characters, have fixed faces, and this rigidity, which masks characteristically present, suggests one of masking’s powers: the masked presence, actor, dancer, shaman draws to his bodily presence fixations in the sense of fixed and unwavering feelings, such as dread, hope, pleasure, fear, awe, belief in a reality beyond the immediate perceived. Many of the masks created for ceremonial and ritualistic performances are themselves representations of “real”—that is, mythic and story-generated—folk who have come to visit the community in which their presence is both wanted and feared. Stories, like those of Decameron, are tellings that enter our community to put a face on a face; the storyteller’s face assumes the mask of the story. Boccaccio, “he who makes faces,” tells stories in which the storyteller appears as a character. Of course, Boccaccio, when he speaks directly to us in his own voice, as he does in the prologue to day 4, denies that he is the storyteller, claiming to be only the one who reports stories told by others. We know differently. So we should see and hear the author-character when he appears, as he does in day 6, stories 2 and 10 (see pp. 000 for interpretations). In every story tradition, masked presences are conjured. Ceremonial and narrative maskings invoke gods and demons, communicate with mythic heroes and animals, and thus reassure the community that it possesses metamorphic powers. Such powers are bestowed on the community by its mythic or simply story-contained characters, many of whom command metamorphic

Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

59

transformations within themselves and can communicate metamorphic states of being to the human realm. To be masked is to be metamorphosed, to take on the potencies—both to work good and to work evil—of characters in a narrative that may be endless, for masks represent natural and supernatural beings set in a mythic universe whose rotations and repetitions require ritual recognitions on ceremonial occasions defined by an annual calendar. This is the condition for endlessness. All who participate are ephemeral; all that is honored and celebrated is eternal. The mask and the story are handed down, performer to performer, storyteller to storyteller, generation to generation, a part of the eternal presence invoked every time the story is told, the dance danced. Truly, in the words of Henry James and of Pirandello, narratives beheld and transmitted overcome mortality. Masked presences, when stories are told, confirm transfiguration. The tradition of masking is deeply embedded in all artistic traditions. Accounts of masking in Greek drama assume two simple types, the mask of comedy and the mask of tragedy. But our contemporary efforts to reconstruct details of classical drama discover a more complex masking tradition. Jean-Pierre Vernant has made us aware of the differences between theatrical masks, which were often stylized and repetitive, and religious ritual masks, which are varied and imaginatively fitted to a specific character. It has become clear from other recent inquiry that in early dramatic stage presentations masks were created specifically for individual theatrical performances. J. J. Winkler saw evidence that dramatic masks were originally role determined, that, at least in Greek stage presentations in the late fifth and early fourth centuries, masks were not as rigidly stylized as they later became, perhaps as a consequence of drama loosening its close tie to religious ritual. A close connection among story, ritual, and religion is one of the generating conditions of storytelling and appears in Decameron transmuted, metamorphosed, translated from earlier ritualistic conditions, for the book not only is set in a church, Santa Maria Novella, from which the little band of storytellers sets out and to which it returns, but the religious presence continues throughout the ten days in story content and in comments that surround the stories. We are never allowed to be far from the storytelling necessity of religion and its ceremonial presentations even when the story undermines inherited beliefs associated with the three dominant religions. Masking as a ceremonial necessity is the narrative and mythic background to performance. In some narratives, the mask is implied by the language describing persons and actions. Thus, in the Perseus myth, Perseus’s success depends on the three sisters known as the Graiae, who share one eye and

60 Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

one tooth. As soon as that is pictured, we can imagine masks to represent the Graiae and easily forge them for an enactment. Such representations of mouth and eye appear in more than one tradition, for facial deformations are inherently expressive.6 The Graiae who have but one tooth to share among the three of them suggest the curious configuration of mouth and teeth readily represented in masks: the one-toothed gape-mouthed old women who determine the fate of Perseus. Separating the eye and tooth as a movable facial element suggests not only that the face can be reorganized, restructured, but that its parts could be owned in common. Satire and comedy hover around the Graiae, who, Hesiod tells us, were born old and gray. That they share eye and tooth may be an expression of the divinatory power at one time attributed to the Graiae, who are sufficiently like the three Fates to be a possible alternative or expressive development of them. Eye and tooth that detach suggests that those facial parts can be cast down in a ritualistic, magical way to foretell events and then replaced, for the power to see the future requires an action of detachment as well as divination. Each part of the face and head in every cultural tradition possesses a history of its metamorphosis. Masks select but a few features for metamorphic representation. Story ranges far wider and suggests ways head-face elements might be picked up by mask making. All that the mask chooses has its base in external configurations: eye, mouth, lips, teeth, ears, facial geography. However, the face is also the medium through which internal conditions, states—all that we call psychological or soul conditions—are externalized and not only expressed to but also impressed on an audience. Metamorphic transformations can be very specific, as in the satiric cartoon drawing of a nose, a head that in itself becomes a mask, a face with grossly exaggerated features. Looking at the face as the mask fragments, pulled apart by our imagination, we confront organ features that are metamorphic revelations. When Decameron stories undergo a similar process of dissection, metamorphic transformations of meaning and metaphor take place before our very eyes. How we reader/hearers may come to reach the greater depths hidden by the masklike manifest story is told to us in the stories of day 6, for by then the little group of storytellers has reached the midway point of their ten days away from the city, and interpretative techniques, if not already clearly apprehended, must become conscious. Of course, it is a Boccaccian test thrown at his reader/hearers in the form of stories that make known in the very language of the telling their readiness to undergo metaphoric interpretations. But that does not make their inner meanings immediately evident; one must work to troll the depths and thereby to discover latent

Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

61

layers. Although day 6 is made up of the shortest stories, they are in some respects the most difficult, for they are structured to reveal truths about all the stories in the collection. Rather than take them up one at a time in the order of the day’s telling, I shall collect from them a set of themes that to my way of reading are the most helpful and also the most delightful in coming to see the book as a whole. By the way, one reason that the interpretational day 6 contains the shortest stories is so that the ladies will have time for their further philosophical education, which is symbolized by their swim in the lake in “The Valley of the Ladies.” That concludes day 6. The swim allows the ladies not only to gain independence from the men but also to internalize in their own way all they have heard, one story from each, during the day. Boccaccio makes fun of mask-face mirrorings in story 6 of day 6, which poses a problem: how might we determine nobility through facial features? Taking that as a metaphor for the “face” of a story, the question becomes how can we determine the quality of a story? While the solution to the problem is a joke, as with some of Boccaccio’s amusing and entertaining stories, there is a serious undertone we must hear and a thought we must come to grasp. The argument is developed over the question, “Who is the most noble and ancient family in Florence . . . and in the whole wide world?” (p. 460). The fanciful argument goes like this: When God created the Baronci (a noble family of Florence), he was just learning his craft, because the Baronci have faces “that are just like the ones that are made by children when they are first learning to draw” (pp 460–61). First faces, we are told, are not “welldesigned and correctly proportioned . . . some have one eye bigger than the other, whilst others have one eye lower than the other” (p. 461). So, too, in the art of storytelling: the storyteller must learn his craft as did the creator of all things. But then storytelling is itself the creation of the world and its inhabitants, and so assigning the number six to this story suggests the completion of creation, the storyteller’s likeness to the God of creation. Boccaccio uses wit in other stories to draw attention to the power of the face: mouth and eyes dominate the face; in particular, the mouth expresses itself in the accomplishments of narrative and dance. Out of the mouth come words, tones, screams and groans—a whole scale of sounds, a tremendous variety of utterances. The mouth communicates, but then the mouth expresses, it demands interpretation of its externalizations. Mouth images have a powerful immediacy in our affective life. Among the mouth’s powers are cursings and blessings; it breathes odors from sweet to acrid. And it is the mouth in its violating stridencies that introduces day 6, that central group of demanding stories.

62 Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

On that day, before the storytelling can begin, a ruckus is heard in the kitchen, and two of the servants, Licisca and Tindaro, appear on Elissa’s command so that Elissa, ruler for that day, can discover the reason for the disturbance. A great emphasis is put on the vocal noise produced, the shouting and the loud voices in a quarrel, and it turns out the dispute burst out over a challenge concerning the virginity of a fellow servant’s wife. Licisca says, “Hold your tongue and let me tell the story” (pp. 444–45). Even the servant class has its storytelling moments. The outburst sets the stage for the first story to come and allows the ladies, who up to this point have been somewhat restrained, to laugh so violently “that you could have pulled all their teeth out” (p. 44). Their increasing openness is a step toward understanding the stories to be told in day 6, for a considerable degree of ingenuity will be demanded of the hearers, who then, after coming to interpret the stories, will be better able to take advantage of the plunge into the water of philosophy, for that, I am suggesting, may very well be the content of the pool in the Valley of the Ladies. The first story of day 6, one of the briefest in the whole book, extends the servants’ uninhibited talk of sex and physical eroticism and functions as a metaphoric fulcrum to the preceding and succeeding narratives. The story asks its protagonists to assume a fantasy, that they are on horseback, when in fact they are walking. Since all storytelling puts the recipient in the position of imagining, our little parable is founded on the condition that each of the tales demands of the reader/hearer. Madonna Oretta, whose name means “little hour” or “little time,” accepts the proposal of her companion, the Knight, that they pretend they are on horseback as he entertains the lady with a story. But his storytelling ability is so awkward and incompetent (he’s no storyteller!) that Madonna Oretta, who has no time for such incompetence, breaks into a sweat and nearly faints. The description of her physical condition (“un sudore e uno sfinimento”—she breaks into a sweat and nearly passes out) under the circumstances sounds more like frustrated sexual arousal than true physical attack. Since Boccaccio has made it clear that Decameron is a pimping book (its cognomen, as I already pointed out, is “Prencipe Galeotto”) well-known for its sexual content, it is justified to suspect that Madonna Oretta had anticipated a story that would be sexually gratifying; her bumbling escort had aroused her expectations of an erotic tale. Contrary to her hopes, she was aroused only to be disappointed. Her sweating and fainting result from what might be seen, in Boccaccio’s art, as a narrative perversion. Madonna Oretta, asking the Knight to set her down,7 breaks the necessary narrative fantasy, which in this case involves an imagi-

Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

63

nary horseback ride. Throughout Decameron, horses and horseback riding take on great importance that is both literary and sexual. In story 7 of day 8, the protagonist, a philosopher, says: “Because a young man will cover more miles in a single day, he seems to you the better rider. . . . And a hard gallop will tire and weaken a man, however young, while a gentle trot, though it may bring him somewhat later to the inn, will at least insure that he is still in good fettle on arrival” (p. 602). Madonna Oretta’s experience should alert us to what to look for in the stories to follow and prompt us to cast a backward glance toward ones already read, amplifying our interpretative techniques as we work through the remainder of day 6. When finished, we should have a fuller understanding of the deeper levels beneath the entertaining surface, and we should know that to seek “the other leg” of each story is essential to full comprehension and enjoyment. I use the metaphor of “the other leg” because it appears as the central image in day 6, story 4, in which the cook, Chichibio, gets himself into hot water with his master but saves himself with a witty comment at the last minute. Seduced by Donna Brunetta, his beloved, he gives her one leg of the crane he is preparing for the night’s meal. He then must face his master’s wrath: “Where is the other leg?” To which, the story tells us, Chichibio replies, “My Lord, cranes have only one leg.” This absurd fantasy is tested in the field, where the cranes are indeed standing on one foot. But the master, Currado, shouts “Ho Ho” at the birds, who then show the other leg. Chichibio’s response is really addressed to the reader/hearer of the story: “You never shouted ‘Ho Ho’ to the one you had last night, otherwise it would have shoved its other thigh and foot [l’altra coscia e l’altro piè] out as these others have done” (p. 456, slightly emended).8 The inner meaning of this brief story refers to all the other stories: one must yell “Ho Ho” at them so that they will show the other leg, that is, their inner meaning will be revealed. Otherwise, they will stand on one leg only—and that’s not the natural way of either cranes or stories. The concept of mask appears in Decameron in several senses, for the whole book stands to Italian and European history as a mask behind which there are “real” events, sometimes explicit, as in the description of the plague; often biographical, in the historical characters that appear; and, most subtly, in the authorial presence masked by witty representations of Boccaccio himself. The very structure of the stories, as exhibited by the parable of Chichibio that tells the reader to yell “Ho Ho” at each story, defines the storytelling method in which a hidden inner reality hides behind a seemingly fictitious exterior. As modern reader/hearers of Decameron, we are apt to abdicate our

64 Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

responsibilities to reconstruct the world in which the book as a whole took shape because we tend to separate our responses into those of the historian and those of the aesthete. We are gratified enough by the surface delights; we turn away from deeper trecento realities, which to the storyteller are conscious settings, backgrounds, surveyed historical events against which narrative events are to be understood. Thus there are references to historical personages, some of considerable importance in European history, not only Giotto but Frederick II (day 2, story 5; day 5, story 6), Saladin (day 10, story 9), and other rulers, families that lived in Florence; and important thinkers such as Fibonacci (Leonardo of Pisa) and Michael Scot (John the Scot) (day 8, story 9). Storytelling, as Boccaccio constructs and reconstructs its tradition, sets before the reader/hearer a reality that is dealt with as if known to be a fiction, something that follows its own internal necessities and therefore may differ from external world causality; and yet that causality provides narrative energy. To trace that force—like a universal gravity—to its source is a task that the reader must undertake. I say “must” in the sense of “in order to gain full apprehension.” All storytelling poses a masked immediate reality—as story 9 of day 7 says, “before our very eyes”—and we must discover if it hides another reality that must be grasped in order to establish the full reality of the story. What is “before our very eyes” cannot be trusted. Boccaccio has schooled himself in philosophical skepticism; the stories are fully aware of the contradictions generated when “appearance” and “reality” can be distinguished. Those contradictions infect every life experience, from religion to morality, to character representation; they stand behind the stories, a philosophical reality glimpsed partially through a dramatic scrim. With these guiding principles, and remembering that every story is a mask and that every character can be a masked presence, the story that tells of Madonna Oretta’s husband, Master Geri Spina, which follows the imaginary horseback ride of day 6, story 1, reveals its “other leg” as a parable about the stories themselves. The metaphor for stories in this story turns out to be fine white wine offered to Geri Spina by Cisti the baker. Meeting him and reading his credentials as one who is a master of storytelling yet a modest man with a modest vocation, who is presented as one who teaches Geri Spina about the quality of wine, I suspect that Cisti is one of Boccaccio’s personae, of which there are several in the course of the ten days of storytelling. Cisti sets out his little glasses of white wine as Boccaccio sets out before us his ten little stories of day 6. The fine clear glasses filled with white wine are stories to be seen through; and they are not to be confused with coarse,

Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

65

vulgar, “muddy” wine (stories) that belongs in the Arno. In this story, wine is made into a complex metaphor that relates not only to the actions of this story but also to the distinction of white and red, these being the two wines in Cisti’s cellar, and these two colors occur as metaphors throughout the collection of stories. The language of the story, language that must be read and interpreted as the reader/hearer goes along, refers in every instance to storytelling. “The best white wine” that Geri Spina, husband of Madonna Oretta of story 1, is invited to taste by Cisti the baker, a persona for Boccaccio, “baker” of the stories, and provider of the little glasses of transparent wine, matching the little transparent stories of day 6, is clear, and when served at the banquet, by Geri Spina, one half glass only is offered to each guest, a reference to the little—we might say “half ”—stories of day 6. The servant who brings a huge flask for refill is told by Cisti to fill it in the Arno, and when this angry directive is reported to Geri Spina, “his eyes were immediately opened to the truth,” and he sends the servant back with a modest flask to fill. In the same way, we readers must drink the half glasses of pure white wine (the stories) with a knowledge of their inner truth. White is a metaphor for truth and philosophic insight; red, the wine withheld, is associated with meat and lack of sensibility. Read the story, and see how easily it opens up to be a parable about storytelling and the relationship the reader/hearer must have to the stories being told if the reader/hearer is to grasp the true inner meaning behind the mask. The last two stories in day 6 challenge our interpretative ingenuity. I’m not sure I can see through all the maskings, but in attempting to do so I can give some sense of the complex references to persons, events, works of art, and social realities that enrich the stories. Day 6 ends with the sermon Father Cipolla preaches to the simple folk of Certaldo. Since Certaldo is Boccaccio’s hometown, renowned for its onions, we can assume the reprobate rascal “Friar Onion” is one of the author’s personae. His language is that of Boccaccio, as is his ingenuity in telling stories with several meanings and in his quick-witted capacity to confront surprise situations, he demonstrates that he has all the guile and technical agility of the storyteller. As I described earlier, Father Cipolla, having discovered that the parrot feather has been replaced with a lump of coal, tells his congregation that he mixed up the box containing the feather of the Angel Gabriel with the casket containing a lump of coal from the fire over which St. Lawrence was roasted. To shift from feather (pen) to coal (drawing material), Father Cipolla fulfills the wish Boccaccio expresses that he command the arts of both writing and of drawing: he has mastered all the arts. Set as it

66 Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

is in the fulcrum of the story collection, it confers on the succeeding stories a mastery of storytelling in which painters will appear as rivals yet also as coordinate aspects of the self. Beyond the mastery of the written storytelling art and the visual representational art, everything about Father Cipolla suggests a fascination with and extraordinary power over language. Beginning with his servant, whose name is Guccio Balena (“the whale”), Guccio Imbratta (“pig swill” or, more to the point, “scribble”), or Guccio Porco (“the pig”), Cipolla attributes nine faults (one should think of the nine angelic orders) to his sidekick, all set in rhyme: “tardo, sugliardo e bugiardo; negligente, disubidente e maldicente; trascutato, smemorato e scostumato” (p. 764; “he is untruthful, distasteful and slothful; negligent, disobedient and truculent; careless, witless and graceless” [p. 471]). The “relic” he is to show the believers is a parrot feather, appropriate to one who is a nonstop talker, a talent we are to enjoy when we hear his sermon, for he has been all around the world to imaginary places that would satisfy everybody’s most infantile wishes. In the course of the sermon, he gives a glancing blow to the reputation of Thomas Aquinas: “Maso del Saggio . . . set up a thriving business . . . cracking nuts and selling the shells retail” (p. 475); “Maso del Saggio, il quale gran mercatante io trovai là, che schiacciava noci e vendeva gusci a ritaglio” (p. 770). Having finished his sermon and pulling forth a lump of coal from the box that should have contained the holy feather, he slides readily from the Angel Gabriel to the Martyr Lorenzo, roasted over the coals, and then marks the clothing of his “parishioners” with the coal, an act reminiscent of the service on Palm Sunday. As a conclusion to day 6, devoted to how we should interpret the book, Boccaccio, Friar Onion, has presented himself in all the complexity of artist/writer/painter/preacher/ ironic commentator on the Catholic faith, as well as one who dominates his world with absolute controlling confidence. The sermon poses a challenge to the reader, who must by now fully understand the author as creator of the Decameron universe. With that understanding, we can approach the most complex masking, in the story just preceding (day 6, story 9) about the poet and philosopher, Guido Cavalcanti. The interpretative challenge of this brief and vivid confrontation between the sophisticated, thoughtful Guido and his crude, ignorant fellow townsmen can be met if we think of Guido himself as the text to be interpreted and the torment imposed on him as echoing the unremitting efforts we must make to force the text to speak and to speak the truth. Guido does, provoked, speak the truth, and now we reader/hearers must interpret that next level of story. Not only is Guido a nonbeliever, an epicurean of

Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

67

sorts, but he is one who frustrates death by leaping over the tombs to escape from the cemetery, leaving his tormentors in the city of the dead. We should think of plague-ridden Florence as such a city, but, in a deeper sense, a city where philosophy is generally misunderstood and must, if it is to be present, lie hidden in the textual complexities of a Guido. The philosophic truth here given so indirectly is consistent with the truths hidden in other tales. It is a defense of freely entertained philosophic thinking that must be approached and then guarded intact within the structure of a society that has been overwhelmed and misled by the Christian religion and the dogmas it imposes, stifling inquiry and blocking the avenues to truth that the arts, as supports to philosophy, can build in and around civic life. That is why the Guido of Decameron is chosen to be the Boccaccian representative of philosophic thought, for he was indeed a philosopher who saw through Christianity, back to classical moral inquiry, and one whom Boccaccio grants the salvational recognition that ought also have been granted to his “heretic” father, whom we meet in Dante’s Inferno. Heresy can be the first step in liberation from falsehood. It is a touching moment that we must recall when watching the young Guido leap over the tombs: his father, in the Sixth Circle of Hell, asks for him, fearing he is dead. Dante the pilgrim assures him that his son lives, and now we, hearing Boccaccio’s answer to Dante, see that he lives as one who has achieved a kind of immortality. That is the gift bestowed by the great artist on a freethinking philosopher, and it is philosophy that Boccaccio holds in highest regard. Since I have argued throughout that Decameron hides as its innermost truth the wisdom of philosophical inquiry in its classical tradition, however indirectly known, I must ask what the risks are in assuming this position. The risk is that of heresy, in the sense that the writer, represented in the last two stories of day 6 directly as Father Cipolla and indirectly as the heretic Guido Cavalcanti, challenges the deepest commitments of Christianity. Father Cipolla includes in his sermon a derisive reference to Thomas Aquinas, and Guido defends pagan thought. Recognition on our part as reader/hearers of the entire story horde puts us in a definite relationship to the teller of tales, the author. He appears, as I have pointed out, several times in his own voice, but when he is represented by characters, the risk of interpretation becomes great, for it is not at all as if we hear authorial voice directly, without intermediary. In day 6, all the characters are intermediate between us and the author. In undertaking interpretation of these stories, we assume a risk as the author has: we endanger ourselves as breakers of a covenant, the covenant that has obtained throughout storytime, past to present. Assuming

68 Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

that risk exposes us to Decameron’s aggressive force, its attack on religion for religions’ obscurantism, foolishness, danger to all humankind, because of the so-called message religion delivers, as well as its cruelty, and the storyteller’s defense of philosophy as the way to truth. Hearing such stories exposes us to the danger of heresy if we understand deeply their underthought or latent content. So the story covers itself as did Father Cipolla with a surface of wit and as Guido did with a surface of paradox. We need not run the risk of understanding and thus breaking the covenant of writer-reader, but then we remain in our confused and benighted condition. Understanding puts us in danger of maintaining a special relationship to the storyteller: we give him our trust, and in so doing we break the covenant that obtains when storytelling is simply an entertainment. On the first level of overthought and manifest content, we accept a covenant but deny the storyteller our trust. We think, there’s more here that is not being told outright to me, so I shall discover what is hidden and give my trust finally to the inner, though challenging and perhaps dangerous, thought, and in so doing I break the covenant of easy reader-author relationship. Teeth have always figured in mouth representations as well as in metaphors that are facially determined. Not only do teeth assault and threaten, they can be guardians of the tongue, hence a hedge to expressed thought. The circumspect person takes advantage of the wall of teeth that can let thoughts out, detain them, or, most appropriately, establish an unbreachable surround. Opening the teeth may let out dangerous ideas or, more shockingly still, animal noises. Bottom would speak but brays. And the ladies of the brigata in Boccaccio’s Decameron arrive at a point in their consciousness when they open their mouths to laugh freely and thus expose their teeth to a neighbor. “The ladies laughed so hard you could have pulled out all their teeth,” says Boccaccio (p. 445). Societal repressions are lifting; the women are coming into their full intellectual consciousness.9 Each facial element has its own mythic history, partially represented in ways that emphasize and deform various facial parts. Ears not only hear; they do their proper job by means of so many shapes, sizes, conformations that they invite satirical comparisons. Poor Lucius, the “hero” of Apuleius’s story, when turned into an ass, hears in proportion to his huge ears, and much fun is made of the fact that a beast understands human speech, overheard with his extraordinary ears. The nose in surrealist painting decomposes the face by standing alone. Magritte painted La Bonne Aventure (1937) as a landscape with a huge nose standing in the middle foreground, a veined tree in the

Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

69

right background (see fig. 2.1), and in the same year painted The White Race (1937), which features an eye on top of an ear on top of lips supported by two noses. Magritte’s paintings that contain facial parts not only achieve expressive specificity for the part depicted—as, for example, the nose—they in addition possess satirical suggestions, for each facial element has its proper scope of expressiveness. Each cultural tradition treats facial elements in its own way, and it is difficult for an outsider to know what expressive qualities a style of mask making seeks to exhibit and what specific responses it seeks to induce. In the American literary tradition of the nineteenth century, nature was interpreted expressively as a face. Henry David Thoreau in his rural America understood the images of metamorphosis such neighborliness to nature generates. Watching the seasons change from frozen winter to liquid thaw of spring, Thoreau suddenly sees, as if in a trance, the continuity of earth and flesh, a metamorphosis to inspire New World storytelling: What is man but a mass of thawing clay. The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. . . . Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen. . . . The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite. . . . The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. . . . Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf.

Then, with his compulsion to mark the territory of his metaphors, Thoreau interprets his observation: “What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last?”10 We might say, along with Thoreau, that the American inspiration for facial interpretations comes from the nature felt so close and in need itself of interpretation. In contrast, a cultural millennium away, trecento facial representations were influenced by the rediscovery of and fascination felt toward antique expressions. It seems to me that Boccaccio shared Giotto’s interest in the recovery of antique art, not only linguistic art but the material art that we see mirrored in Giotto’s figures. There is a passion to reconnect the trecento present with the past that, though seemingly lost, really was available in the Roman and Greek elements come upon in the remains strewn about the landscape. As Alastair Smart remarks, a connection can be seen: “Giotto evidently sought to give his figures a new expressiveness and naturalness, and the rich variety of pose and gesture that characterizes the

Image has been suppressed

2.1 René Magritte, La Bonne aventure, 1937. Copyright 2004 C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

71

dramatis personae of the Arena Chapel cycle must be due as much to his understanding of ancient art as to his study of life.”11 I think the same observation applies to Boccaccio’s dramatis personae for he not only draws on Latin classics but seeks out every reference to Greek characters that he can find in the texts available to him. Decameron’s naturalness and liveliness and the truth-to-action of its characters have a model certainly close to Boccaccio in a teacher like Dante, but there is a surpassing dramatic force in his stories that reflects a tradition of theatrical performance. Where his inspirations come from, since his genius has its own hidden sources, we cannot say. But there is in Boccaccio’s stories a refinding of a force that had gone underground for centuries, only to surface in the early modernity that he established. Two sources, one in part underground and dangerous, one open and entertaining, provided a cultural energy that combined with Boccaccio’s art to generate his plots and characters. Hidden within much that was believed and argued in trecento Italy were the common heresies that for centuries had threatened Christian belief as the traditional church doctors and theologians had defined it. Basic teachings were prescribed within the writings of Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great. But, as I shall point out in the analysis of day 7, story 9, their thought was now and again challenged by Thomas Aquinas, and the tension thus generated led to churches and congregations dedicated to individual sects, each following one or another founder. (Santa Maria Novella, for example, was Dominican and dedicated to St. Thomas Aquinas.) All the accepted theological positions stood in aggressive contrast to threatening heresies, many formulated in the first centuries of Christianity. Boccaccio is not promoting any one or another heresy but relies on an assumed awareness of their play with and criticisms of doctrine. For example, the Cathars denied the resurrection of the body and saw sex as the work of the devil. Some heresies were strictly local and read as if a Boccaccian tale. In Milan, it is said, there “was one of the most extraordinary instances of medieval credulity—the discovery of more than one incarnation of the Holy Ghost. Thus there was established in Milan the worship, after her death, of a certain very pious woman named Guglielma . . . subsequently acclaimed to have been the Holy Spirit in female form.”12 As we learn from the story in which Guido Cavalcanti appears as a character (day 6, story 9), philosophical thought, especially that inherited from the classical past, posed challenges to Christian doctrine, and Boccaccio devoted much of his efforts aimed at mastering the past to philosophy as such. Careful as he must be to suppress what I take to be commitment to a “heresy” that would be the ultimate challenge

72 Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

to Christian belief, the storyteller was able to explore his ideas in story as a mode of thought as well as an expression of aesthetic delight. Therefore, reading Decameron puts the reader/hearer in a demanding position from which the days’ stories must be understood. It is a position of seeing first the mask and then constructing the “real” face. Day 6 stands as a model for the interpretative stance the reader/hearer assumes in order to understand and feel the full storytelling content. It is not a case of simply “reading a story” and laughing or sensing irony; it is a challenge to the masking-unmasking ability of the receiver by whom the stories are seriously entertained. Seriousness extends beyond mere dramatic setting as it is given in the frames of stories and the collection as a whole, for the book is read and heard in a political context, a reality that counts as much for meaning here as political reality does for a Greek tragedy or comedy. What then is the aesthetic, social, and political reality that produces and sustains the masks of all these stories? Given the violent and chaotic political life of Florence in Boccaccio’s lifetime, it is somewhat strange that Decameron could be created with so little immediate history as background and structure within the stories. While there are many historical events referred to and illustrious or infamous names mentioned, the stories create a literary reality that seems remote from the political traumas of Boccaccio’s life. To account for that, however, we must recognize the continuous emphasis on social, moral, and political tranquillity, utopian in its tone, that the stories encourage us as readers to celebrate. The book stands as a dreamlike creation of an aesthetically structured urban life, politically utopian, disturbed most destructively by the black death, rather than by political disruption. Because Decameron has this form and entertains in its remarkably moral way, it delivers a political message in its own artistic terms: in a depraved social life, as that in Florence, where the plague rages as if a punishment for perversity, the artist becomes the rescuer, a force to metamorphose cruelty and destruction into a new order of felicity. Art becomes the ultimate heresy, for its powers are greater than that of God, whose creativity extends merely to the universe: the artist reorders and reinterprets what God put in place and then abandoned. Boccaccio is the medieval doctor of eternal plots, for his teachings are that immortality becomes reality through storytelling. Extended narrative structures such as Decameron and its model forerunner, The Divine Comedy, put the experience of entertaining representations and enactments into a framework that is truly modern, in contrast to classical

Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

73

epic narration by a bard and classical drama in a civic theater, as in Athens. The creation of the book to be read is what determines “modern” as opposed to classical. We know that reading Decameron is a private experience, however much we talk to each other about the book. In privacy, the intimate takes on new force: just as Paolo and Francesca fell into their adulterous love through reading, so Boccaccio wishes to seduce as the “Prince of Pimps.” Readers are alone with the book, and that opens up new prospects for masking. While the mask functions in drama and ritual in ways I shall discuss, it functions differently in narratives produced to be read. If to don the mask is to metamorphose the face, then to remove the mask is to reveal the face, the “real” face. But then it seems the mask maintains a reality beyond the face because it has mythic connections and is itself representative of mythic realities. In a dramatic or ritual performance, donning the mask is fraught with dangers that must be anticipated and avoided. Masks have their own personalities and inherent powers that require control. This is also true for the writer, the Mister “Bad Mouth” masker who is Boccaccio, as it is true for performances that rely on masks, as in a ritual ceremony. In ceremonial masking performance, preparing for the enactment requires mask propitiation. That may seem remote from the preparations Boccaccio makes in order to launch his great assemblage of stories, but the introduction to Decameron in its emotional rhetoric offers a preparation so that the stories as masks will remain under the storyteller’s control. In Decameron’s proem, or preface, a propitiary narrative act prepares the way for storytelling. The storyteller establishes in the reader/hearer an accepting attitude as a part of ceremonial introduction. He dons a mask as the comfortless one in need of comfort, for he suffered an “immoderate” and “illrestrained” passion, an unrequited love. The sympathy of friends mitigated his anguish, their kindness was so great that he is now determined “to offer some solace . . . to those who stand in need of it” (pp. 1–2). The storyteller offers his stories to those who suffer as he did, and so “I intend to provide succor and diversion for the ladies, but only for those who are in love.” Love adventures, both ancient and modern, shall be the theme pursued in one hundred stories, stories that will range through genres of “stories, fables, parables, or histories.” To relate all these kinds of stories, the donned mask of the storyteller protects the hidden face, whose mouth can only speak truth if it utters its harsh realities through the mask of story. Masked as the lover, its stories can effect a cure, and here the cure is addressed to the lovely ladies suffering from passion, ladies who are trying to survive within a city whose very breath is death. Somewhere underneath that dire civic suffering, there

74 Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

is an imagined realm of felicity to be articulated in story. But before that can begin, a long introduction in which the masks are propitiated must be performed. And thus the storytelling cannot begin until the horror of the plague is given its due recognition, as we must recognize evil in a world that supposedly is governed by a benign deity. At the same time that the destruction of society is fully confronted, the natural response is made: those who have the wit and the wherewithal must save themselves. That is just what the seven women who meet in Santa Maria Novella recognize and set out to do. Their conversation serves to propitiate their moral sensibilities, which might direct them to stay in town to help the suffering and the dying. They prepare for their enactments of storytelling by clearly distinguishing obligation from self-preservation. In this recognition expressed by the seven women, attitudes and beliefs that we see expressed in ancient ritual appear in a modern regenerated form. The roots of mask propitiation run deeply into the cultural past; here is a description of an ancient Hindu ceremony of mask propitiation and preparation: Before the performance begins, while the other actors are putting on their costumes and makeup, the actor/priest who is to wear the mask of Narasimha [half woman, half lioness] removes a (frequently red) cloth from the mask and conducts an elaborate puja [ceremony of welcome], welcoming the spirit of the mask as an honored guest. . . . Flower petals are strewn on the mask’s headdress, water is blessed and sprinkled over the mask’s face, a coconut is offered up to the mask, cooling sandal paste is rubbed on the mask’s forehead and incense is lit and held up for the mask to breathe. Throughout this ritual welcoming the mask is treated with reverence. Sanskrit mantras are spoken and appropriate mudras (ritual hand gestures) are performed to invoke Narasimha’s presence and blessing.13

Hearing Boccaccio tell stories may seem a far remove from ritual masking and the propitiation of the mask as preparatory to performance, yet the writer who embarks on a performance addresses the Muses and other overseeing spirits as the effort of creativity begins and as the plots unfold. The plague must be propitiated before the stories may be given shape. Then Decameron invokes the Muses with a wry ironic address to “The Ladies,” the real Muses who inspired this great panoply of stories: “The Muses are ladies, and although ladies do not rank as highly as Muses, nevertheless they resemble them at first sight, and hence it is natural, if only for this reason, that I should be fond of them. Moreover, ladies have caused me to compose

Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

75

a thousand lines of poetry in the course of my life, whereas the Muses never caused me to write any at all” (introduction to day 4, p. 289). Before the Muses are explicitly invoked in day 4, the speaker who introduces the book in what the writer calls its “proemio,” tells a little parable of love in order to entice us to follow him into the world of stories. We wonder who it is that has suffered from the pangs of love and been saved in his distress by loving friends. The proemio begins with the words: “Umana cosa è aver compassione degli afflitti” (p. 5; “To have compassion for those who suffer is a human quality, and I have suffered because of ‘a most exalted and noble love’” [p. 1]). Such a mysterious introduction forces speculation on just what has been suffered and who or what the cause might be. We immediately assume Boccaccio is referring to an earthly love, a woman who betrayed him in love. but as we read on it appears that the speaker may be telling us that his passionate engagement with the Muses was unrequited until he made his book, and that act rescued him from his affliction. Those who saw and recognized his suffering and who gave him consolation were the beautiful ladies he knows and in return for their solace he will provide them with entertainment and wisdom through the stories he will gather for them to read. The writer assures the ladies, in the introduction to day 4, that it is they who have been his real Muses, not the ones we hear about who inhabit Parnassus, for they are not of flesh and blood, and they do not inspire the poet, while his lovely ladies fill him with the desire to create works that will return the inspiration they have stimulated in him. This description, when joined to the foregoing part of this inquiry, brings out a distinction between mask types as they fit on the face of the writer: We can identify two basic kinds of masks. First, there are those that demand a response from the wearer/performer so that to don the mask and enter the enactment requires an individual expression, a psychologically fitting but creatively original contribution. And then there are the masks that impose on the wearer/performer a type, a traditionally repeated presence: the masked one is the character, for example, is Dionysus, is Kali, is the devil, the mother, and so on. The difference to the performer is this: in the first type, a character must emerge from within the performer, stimulated by the mask; and in the second type, the performer and performance is imposed from without, a determination by the mask. In Boccaccio’s face making, both kinds of masking occur. Boccaccio’s painter-artists, Buffalmacco, Calandrino, Bruno who inhabit several stories in days 8 and 9 are character types whose behavior is determined by their vocations as jokester-painters, while, in contrast, a character like Cisti the baker requires an interpretative

76 Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

act on our part so that he can be endowed with his full complexity as both a Florentine historical presence and a symbolic force in storytelling. A second division among masks complicates the first, for not only do masks elicit or impose character, they represent levels of being that were established in the prehistory of costume and mask. Simply stated, masks may represent that which is cult-centered and sacred, on the one hand, or the fashionable and stylish contemporary “modish” visage, on the other. While this distinction does not appear in every tradition, where it does appear, as in Bugaku masks, it may cut across the classification described above. Kyotaro Nishikawa analyzes the mask tradition in Bugaku in terms of the age-old and the more recent. The earliest masks represent creatures of the forest that are neither animal nor human in our terms but kinds of performing spirits that were brought into human habitation and remained in the villages because there they received offerings. The masks representing them are sacred. But ceremonies in which the sacred appear also exhibit the “fashionable” and “stylish” masks of modern artistic imagination. The two must be worked together, and that amalgam is essential to the Bugaku enactment.14 Boccaccio’s sensibility recognizes this distinction: his stories move between that which he inherited, as if part of the primeval culture lost in the past, and the “fashionable” contemporary world of his city and its personages. We become aware of this temporal-cultural spread of Decameron as we read. Some stories are traditional, trecento tellings of age-old plots. Others, such as story 2 of day 3, are pointedly set in the past (“When Agilulf became King of the Lombards,” the story begins); we are carried back to the sixth century when Theodelinda chose Agilulf as her husband and king. The choice of their reign as the setting for this little story of clever escape from punishment on the part of the groom who slept with the empress may be determined by the fact that Agilulf was devoted to the Arian heresy, one the church sought to extirpate, although Catholic and Arian clergy lived in harmony for a time. Boccaccio reminds us, in this story, that there were those who denied the divinity of Christ, the central tenet of Arianism. While the story we read is not interested in that historical controversy, it goes way back in storytelling traditions for its plot is common. The groom, described as having short hair, conceals his identity by shearing the hair of all those who serve the king, thereby escaping the identification that would have destroyed him. In contrast, many stories are contemporary with Boccaccio’s Florentine life, for example, all the stories of day 6, which we can be pretty sure are of his own devising as storyteller. The contrast sets apart masks that determine character from those that elicit character development from the person.

Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

77

However much Boccaccio invented on his own as storyteller, he borrowed, revised, and alluded to story traditions that provide a narrativehistorical foundation to Decameron. An early story tradition, widespread throughout all the European languages and cultures, is that of the quest for the Holy Grail. That set of tales appears in Decameron only once, however (day 10, story 6), and the allusion requires some thought. The précis that prefaces the story makes no mention of the two most important characters we are to meet: “King Charles the Old, victorious in battle, falls in love with a young girl; but later he repents of his foolish fancy, and bestows both her and her sister honorably in marriage” (p. 731). The “Old King” lusts after two young women we meet only within the story, Ginevra and Isotta, whom he first encounters in a strange setting, for they are the daughters of the king’s host, Neri degli Uberti, and they enter the story as, of all things, providers of fish to be fried at a picnic. The young women bear mythic names, better known to us as Guinevere and Isolde, characters in ancient story traditions that flourished in the north—England, Wales, Ireland—and only indirectly in Italy. But it is obvious that Boccaccio needs their presence in his grand design, and we must work out the purpose and reason for the presence in this odd tale. The background of this story is this: King Charles of Anjou, who conquered Sicily and southern Italy as part of the Norman occupation, was a violent military man and womanizer, although there are accounts that paint him in a benign light. It is clear from Boccaccio’s story that he wants to honor the king because his falling in love with two young girls and then giving them up to others provides a case of magnanimous action, one of the central themes of the stories in day 10. Boccaccio paints a delightful setting for his moral tale. Visiting Neri’s garden, King Charles is entertained at dinner, where he sits beside a pool. As he dines, two young girls of about fourteen, lightly dressed, carrying the equipment for fishing, enter the pool and catch fish that they throw to a cook on the shore. Some end up alive on the king’s table, and he throws them back to the young women. He is smitten, and when he asks who the lovely women are, Neri tells him they are his daughters, Ginevra and Isotta. The story continues in a philosophic vein: The king wishes to possess the girls but is dissuaded by the admonishing words of one of his counts, Guy de Montfort. Shown the way of virtue, he bestows dowries on the girls and provides husbands for them. This limited outline fails to convey the poetic elegance of Boccaccio’s telling. Although this story presents political characters whose violent actions created political havoc in the lands they conquered, it metamorphoses them into benign and philosophical persons so that the count can persuade the

78 Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

king in words that we might say remake the historically violent reality into a morality tale. The king is admonished; he is beset on all sides by enemies yet at an old age wants only to satisfy his lust. A moral address from Count Guy de Montfort turns the king from self-indulgence to political wisdom: “You say you have decided that you must abduct his two daughters from this unfortunate knight who honored you in his house . . . and displayed them almost naked to you, thus testifying that he trusts you implicitly, and that he firmly believes you to be no ravening wolf, but a king. . . . Let me remind you, my lord, that you covered yourself with glory by conquering Manfred and defeating Conradin. But it is far more glorious to conquer oneself ” (p. 736). The voice of political philosophy, as formed in the ancient world, serves in the education of a medieval king. Stories 6 and 7 of day 10 recall recent Italian-Sicilian history, the conquest by Charles I, and the cultural heterogeneity of the Mediterranean world, shaped by the Normans, the French, the Italians, and the many religious conflicts that drove the popes to Avignon and strengthened heretical doctrines. In that interweaving of so many diverse claims on storytellers, Ginevra and Isotta (Guinevere and Isolde) appear in this set of stories as invaders from another storyworld. We have of course already been reminded of Dante’s reference to the Arthurian legends, for Francesca was overwhelmed by love through reading, with her lover, Paola, the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. And since Decameron is a pimping book that assumes the reader knows the reference to Francesca in The Inferno, Decameron also would recognize in the famous adultery a tradition that lay behind Dante and Boccaccio as storytellers. Coming upon Guinevere, then, seems appropriate and necessary to a collection of stories that would be universal in attraction and wisdom. When Isolde is added, the great story tradition of the Tristan romance is set beside Arthurian legend, and King Charles, from a distant northern land, becomes the agency through which the story traditions of the north are joined to those of the south. In their earlier lives as Guinevere and Isolde, Ginevra and Isotta entered into adulterous relationships, Guinevere with Lancelot and Isolde with Tristan. Now, in their reincarnations as the beautiful daughters of Neri, they are as it were reborn, morally pure and philosophically wise young women. Their fishing relates them to the ladies of Decameron, who had had their purifying swim in the Valley of the Ladies, and in both cases catching fish implies a direct acquaintance with a realm of ideas. To complete the regeneration themes of this last day of storytelling, both King Charles and Count Montfort are reborn as benevolent and wise men. In historical reality, they

Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

79

ruled as bloody tyrants, just as in narrational reality Guinevere and Isolde lived in sin; now, in the Boccaccian reality of storytelling that confers immortality, they are “saved.” The young daughters of Neri appear before their elders as simply beautiful and good (they are referred to as “Ginevra la bella e . . . Isotta la bionda” (p. 1161). Their elders, through the young women, are transformed into philosophers who, in arguing moral greatness of spirit, realize wise self-control. In several stories of day 10, Decameron realizes its utopian vision. That weaving together is achieved through arguments that were first formulated in a classical philosophic tradition and become the cultura ex machina of conversion. Philosophy not only converts King Charles to magnanimity but, in his conversion, joins together the greatest story traditions with Boccaccio’s own set of tales. As for the fish caught and consumed, they function on two levels: Fish are “a life symbol of immemorial antiquity,” as Jesse Weston puts it in her analysis of the meaning of fish and the Fisher King in the Grail legends. And since Boccaccio endows water with the connotation of philosophic wisdom, the fish may also be understood in a Platonic sense as ideas, forms of thought.15 In their literal and, we might say, practical use, masks are called on as protection to guard against dangerous powers in the universe. Anthropologists’ term for this protection is “apotropaic,” by which they mean that certain configurations of facial forms are thought to fend off evil forces and thus to protect the mask wearer or those in the vicinity of the mask wearer. That function of the mask mixes with others of equal importance to construct a defense for the community, as Florence sought to defend itself against the plague. Masks make it clear that there are secrets to be kept, that the wearer possesses knowledge or understanding not given to the common beholder. The one who is masked acts without individual personal and private responsibility, for the masked one is the god or the cosmic force or the ancestor or the powerful demon. At the same time, the mask is the visage of the god or the ancestor or the demon, so that masks are revelatory: the beholder sees a reality that is generally hidden. During the ceremony, the beholder joins the masked performer in being put in touch with spiritual, historical, generational forces that, though they exist, require ritual enactments to be brought close to the community.16 An apotropaic force protects the masked storyteller, for his mask keeps censor and citizen at a distance, placing those who would destroy the edifice of art behind a protective, though for a sensitive few transparent, wall. The

80 Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

masked storyteller frees himself to take extreme stands, say revealingly satirical, ironic, metaphorical words, and escapes the misunderstandings and consequences in much the way Guido does by leaping over the wall of the city of the dead, a symbol of intellectual and moral emptiness (day 6, story 9). When masks cover the face, a metamorphosis has taken place. The performer or shaman or participant becomes something other than a simple member of the group. In traditional societies without writing or a written history, masking is a mode of recording and transmitting. Those who write, like Boccaccio, make a conscious decision to mask if that works toward their idea of meaningfulness, but those who mask may not write at all, either because the masking is a sacred and secret event, not to be spread about carelessly in words, or because there exists no other mode within the cultural tradition: that is, there is nothing in that which is written to compete with masking. This does not mean writing societies do not mask. But where writing and masking coexist, writing extends and enlarges the meaningful dimensions of the mask. The written can represent the meaning of the mask, its setting, and even provide an interpretation. The stories that are told may represent figures who are the mask, for the mask is a mythic being. By assuming a mask, as Boccaccio (né Boccaccino) does, the teller of stories takes on a larger dimension. His function as go-between, as pimp, fills his book, becoming a dynamic and demonic presence operating on both manifest and latent levels. Our own tradition of Western material art, which I think of in much of its premodern forms as representing story episodes, exhibits the representation of the face and head in masked form as a symbol of transcendent realities implying escape from death. Material art, that is, painting and sculpture, uses masking techniques to express general truths just as linguistic art uses metaphors to transcend simple observations, to do justice to our flights of imagination. There are, as Hans Belting says, “pictorial formulas” that “may be understood like theatrical masks.” “General truths beyond . . . particulars” are arrived at by means of such repetitions in representation. So, for example, when the Virgin and John the Baptist appear together in sixth-century mosaics, “the Virgin, who is of higher rank, uses a general ideal or ‘sacred type’ of figure, while St. John, with the wild movement in both face and hair, makes use of another figure type, which has been identified as that of the tragic variant of the theatrical mask. The artist chose ready-made formulas for presenting the figures, much as an actor performed with the help of a mask.”17 Belting considers the faces in painting and in theatrical costume as masks, that is, as either stereotypes or symbolic representations whose meaning we

Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

81

can discover. Contemporary painting picks up the mask in continuities and reversals of the earlier mask traditions. While a great many European painters use masks in their work—Klee, Picasso, Beckmann, Gross, Redon, to name a few—a consistent and varied uses of masks is found in the painting of James Ensor (see fig. 2.2). There, masks create a separate realm that looks into the daily work and living world of the modern artist and citizen. The mask may be just that but may also become a person, and it often is the face of a skeleton. Masks are the faces of those who have gone—parents, family, beloved memories—and they are a way to represent ghosts without resorting to attenuated ghostly forms. Ensor remarked of himself, as a whole society might have remarked in days gone by, “I have shut myself up in the solitary domain where the mask holds sway.”18 To so remove himself from the world implies that the world we know— we who gaze into paintings—will not be found in his. Instead, the world we know, as where there is an interior with furniture, becomes, we would say, haunted, for the masks hang about objects as if seeping out of them. The effect achieved is one that accounts for human fascination with masks where storytelling is carried out. Not only do masks personify a hidden reality suddenly revealed, they show us the possibilities of metamorphoses that occur all about us as well as within us. Stories such as those Boccaccio assembles turn on transformations of the character in either external circumstances (the poor become rich: see day 2, stories 3 and 9) or internal awareness (see day 1, stories 8 and 9), often through a sharp critical comment about a person’s behavior.19 Masks, dream, magic, and story are cultural events that realize metamorphoses as transforming possibilities. Covering the face and head with the mask raises the wearer to a timelessness that is parallel to the storyteller’s bestowal of immortality on the listeners. Masks and stories intersect in ceremony and ritual, and that complex creates a special experience, for the beholder enters an eternal realm. Around mask and storytelling, special feelings accumulate, feelings that generate a sense of a hidden reality that makes a claim on the witnesses stronger and stranger than that of everyday experience. To hear a story is to be introduced to characters who, by virtue of being in a story, achieve immortality. To tell a story by means of donning a mask is to be raised from the dead, for the teller assumes a character—the storyteller—as a cloak of invisibility and of metamorphosis. Storytelling stands outside time, and that is why the storytellers of Decameron escape the ravages of plague. Their gathering is more than a retreat; it

Image has been suppressed

2.2 James Ensor, Self-portrait with Masks. Menard Art Museum, Aichi, Japan.

Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

83

is a withdrawal in order to tell stories. In the telling, stories become masks each storyteller dons for the purpose of setting a narrative detached from the person; and that is why we have so much trouble identifying the characteristics of the women and men who talk to us as storytellers, for though we tend to ascribe qualities of the storyteller to the story told, as artist, the storyteller removes self from narrative, and even where self appears as character, as Boccaccio often does, it is usually in stories not told by him but by “another.” Even when told by him, as in the beginning of day 4, it is the story that creates the character who is Boccaccio. This is not autobiography; it is a theory of the person as storyteller. That is but one sense, a fundamental sense, in which stories are masks.

chapter 3

Aspects of Storytelling Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis For already I have been a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird and a dumb sea fish. —empedocles She swooned and felt she soared as skin, taut across muscle, gnarled; fingers and toes multiplied and divided into branches, roots; her flying hair thickened into a storm of leaves that slowly settled as all that had been Daphne changed to laurel. —lachlan mackinnon I have transformed myself into the zero of form and dragged myself out of the rubbishfilled pool of Academic art. —kasimir malevich

I

magination works metamorphic alterations on every part of the human body. The body is the “text” that, in Bruno Schulz’s words, lies “in wait for us at the very entrance to life”:

I don’t know how we manage to acquire certain images in childhood that carry decisive meanings for us. . . . There are texts that are marked out, made ready for us somehow, lying in wait for us at the very entrance to life. . . . Such images amount to an agenda, establish an iron capital of the spirit, proffered to us very early in the form of forebodings and half-conscious experiences. It seems to me that all the rest of one’s life is spent interpreting these insights, breaking them down to the last fragment of meaning we can master, testing them against the broadest intellectual spectrum we can manage. These early images mark out to artists the boundaries of their creative powers. . . . They do not discover anything new after that, they only learn how to understand better and better the secret entrusted to them at the outset; their creative effort goes into an unending exegesis, a commentary on that one couplet of poetry assigned to them. . . . I have always felt that the roots of the individual spirit, traced far down enough, would be lost in some matrix of myth. This is the ultimate depth; it is impossible to reach further down.1

86 Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

Transformation of the body, part and whole, is one of the foundations for culture and is accompanied by storytelling that makes up a reading, then interpretation, of the physical self. In many cultural traditions, body metamorphoses concentrate on the head, which is transformed through masks and masking. Masked heads, as noted in the foregoing chapter, create a cultural physiography and metaphorically express beliefs about how the physical self is to be shaped. “Body beliefs,” as I will call the culturally determined shapes into which the body as a whole is molded, extend the idea of mask to the whole of the physical person. Tattooing, scarring, ornamentation, clothing, and a huge variety of other technical innovations treat the body as if it were a canvas to be painted upon. The look of the body in all its varieties of metamorphoses contributes essential presence to ceremonial, ritual, and performing actions as well as to storytelling. The body itself in its looks constitutes part of the “matrix of myth” that Bruno Schulz sees as forming the bedrock of those lifelong images that accompany all persons in their life trajectories, from birth to death, and that constitute “the secret entrusted to them,” a secret that in the imagination of artists calls forth “unending exegesis.” Decameron is one of several storytelling worlds that generate unending exegesis, a diorama of body postures, metamorphoses, and interpretations, so that a complete unfolding of a Decameron map would locate the many dramas of the human body that constitute cultural history. It is not my intention here to draw such a map but only to focus on particular landscapes within the whole. Each story that I turn to can be thought of as a magnified look at a body landmark, a particular pathway for the traveler through Decameron’s world. Each interpretation is like a page of an imagined entire catalog, and just as there are areas of landscape that resemble one another in our physical world, so that one can speak of deserts, oceans, mountains, plains, and so on, so, too, with a storytelling world there are similarities in the areas encountered, perhaps widely spaced in the total survey. One such repetition has to do with the body. Boccaccio dwells on the body in several stories—perhaps every story is “of ” the body because bodies are always in connection with one another in each story, and they are gathered together under the cognomen bestowed on Decameron, “Prince of Pimps.” Metamorphosis, an essential structuring force in stories about the body, is beautifully represented topologically for the body by the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, a paradigmatic sexual fantasy that places the body at the very center of storytelling. I imagine Boccaccio’s self-applied cognomen, “Prencipe Galeotto,” to have been inspired by Ovid, whose mythic tellings

Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

87

focus on bodies, and so, within the sculptor’s studio, a protected space endowed with power of generation, the statue of Galatea metamorphoses into a warm, breathing person, one example of an artistic fascination with the body as the ground for metaphoric mythic awareness. Many transformations represented in myths are born in the artist’s studio because metamorphoses, generated in our conscious and unconscious fantasies, are given external form in linguistic and material art. The broad scope of mythic metamorphoses of which we today are aware originated in classical representations of the body as energized by an internal flow of dynamic forces that inevitably take outwardly different physiognomies. Empedocles, in his own imaginative projection, had been a boy, a girl, a bush, a bird, a fish. We today think of ourselves as having evolved out of germ plasma, biologically primordial matter, moving according to a template to our present shape. Storytelling may, in some cases, posit a biological foundation to metamorphoses (especially in science fiction films, popular today), although most transformations are induced by an agent external to the body. In myth, folktale, fairy story, and fabliaux, the basic linguistic source for transformation of the body seems to come to us quite immediately in the metamorphic language we use in referring to persons, evidence that our bodily shapes and characteristics are deeply locked into the transformation of reality. It is artistic sensibility, as much and often more so than philosophic skepticism, that has the power to identify and to entertain the occasions when “the bankruptcy of reality” forces itself on us. With maturity, alongside storytelling explorations of appearance and reality, we come to understand that “reality” cannot easily be defined. Such an awareness readily generates an anxious question: is there no permanence in the world about us, is there no continuity of the self that will assure me I am forever “myself ”? If we metamorphose as readily as the ancient Empedocles imagined, skeptical doubts assail us. Even if there is a core of that which Bruno Schulz called an “extreme monism of the life substance,” we know the “life substance” only through its constantly changing expressions into one bodily form after another. “Reality,” if it is in constant transformation, appears bankrupt as a concept, and we who seek stability are apt to feel an overwhelming sense of abandonment. Skepticism then becomes a symptom of a feared bankruptcy of reality. Storytelling fills that feared void and relies on metamorphic plots for they convey and instill confidence that a desolate moment in which the body seems to be about to disintegrate can be a metamorphic moment through which it is endowed with a new form. Metamorphosis, then, functions as a

88 Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

metaphor in which the bankruptcy of reality undergoes a refilling plenitude: life is endowed with new energy from imagination’s generative power. Running as a sinew of articulation throughout the ten days of storytelling that make up the corpus of Decameron are repeated descriptions of bodies and buildings metaphorically perceived as bodies. It is at once evident that they metaphorize one another, for in the representations of architectural settings and human bodies in their entirety and in their parts, a latent foundation is laid on which the manifest entertainments of narrative are built. That buildings, physical settings, landscapes stand as metaphors for the human body has been noted by art historians and psychoanalysts. That the human body can be interpreted as a cosmic metaphor—a miniature universe, a microcosm reflecting the great macrocosm and thus corresponding to the entirety of creation—has been the subject of explorations throughout history, from early Greek and Chinese metaphysics to contemporary poetic convention. In that grand exploration of how the human organism fits into and mirrors the universe, Boccaccio’s book takes its place, for it builds on material transformational metaphors linguistically described. Here, as elsewhere, Decameron declares itself to be a Gesamtkunstwerk, establishing a trade relationship among the various arts of the linguistic, the material, and the tonal. Whatever their internal metaphoric transfers, each group of ten stories concludes with a poem, a song, a dance. And within the stories, macrocosm and microcosm everywhere reflect and mirror, metaphorize and metamorphose one another: body and nature, organism and universe, local story and world history, human action and religious models. Our pleasure in hearing the stories intensifies as we recognize metamorphic moments. Boccaccio’s storytelling and the psychology of his creativity, though never explicitly stated within the stories, surprisingly anticipate the English poet Wordsworth’s interpretation of his own works. Wordsworth was explicit in his directions to the reader: “The Poet writes under one restriction only,” he asserts, “namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that information that may be expected from him . . . as a Man. . . . It [the necessity of producing immediate pleasure] is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe. . . . It is a homage paid to the naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves. We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure.”2 No Trecento storyteller would need to say this because the assumption that the arts give pleasure immediately was everywhere taken for granted. It

Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

89

is only later, in the far more repressed Protestant nations, that the arts fell under suspicion of dangerous frivolity. The danger, of course, was seen in poetry’s taking the reader’s attention away from serious matters, such as the political life of communities apt to disintegrate if entertainments predominate. But as soon as we entertain the subject of pleasure, as Boccaccio and Wordsworth both well knew, political life enters the argument, for though pleasure seems at first to be a looking-away from political obligation or, if not, a reduction of the political to the merely private and personal, it is immediately apparent that a person is more apt to become a good citizen if acting in a certain, politically responsible way itself gives pleasure. Those who act otherwise may indeed gain pleasure, but of a degraded sort. The paradox of hedonistic ethics confronts the writer here: whose pleasure, and what sort of pleasure is to be valued, promoted, defended, praised? Wordsworth replies: “The poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.” Poetry realizes a universal humanity, a thought that would not have been alien to Boccaccio. Wordsworth’s tone and vision express an Enlightenment philosophy that is closer to Immanuel Kant than anything Boccaccio could have hammered out in his trecento reliance on both classical and local ethical theory. Yet one of Decameron’s virtues is its ambitious and daring exploration of ideas that could not be consciously assumed in Boccaccio’s day and that compelled him to structure his stories with a latent content. I believe Boccaccio saw the poet’s powers much as Wordsworth did: a kingdom of ends comes into being through poetry properly made. No presupposition of a divine being is needed; humanity provides and realizes out of its own creative gifts its cosmic situation. Divinity, then, is in human creativity. That belief accounts for Decameron’s rejection of theological argument and simple religiosity, for it is clear that the philosophical values of the stories are generated by and metamorphosed out of the tales that begin on the first day, in stories 1, 2, and 3. Each offers a profound critique of the organized and politically dominant religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Indeed, this imaginative opening, the proscenium to the many acts and scenes to follow, confirms one of Wordsworth’s central beliefs: that the poet’s voice shapes social reality, for it is “where the poet speaks through the mouths of his characters” that we hear truths universally understandable, as contrasted with those occasions when the poet’s unfortunate narcissism overwhelms truthful simplicities of speech in order “to excite the admiration of himself by arts.” Of course, both Wordsworth and Boccaccio were self-conscious poets whose ideas represented their sense of self-worth, but they retired behind political views

90 Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

they took to be universal, not simply private. Just such a claim to universality is made in Decameron throughout day 1 in stories that not only affirm the interchangeability and equality of all dominant faiths (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) but also the power of moral persuasion to guide the behavior of those who have not, whatever their religious commitment, lived according to the teachings of their faith. Day 1 can be read as an argument for what came in our day to be called “naturalistic faith.” Boccaccio argues not only that the great religions are all of a piece but that their power to mold character derives from innate human moral sensibilities, possessed by all, and lost only through unusual vicissitudes. In expressing, cleverly and covertly, such observations on human beings, Boccaccio revivifies themes that are part of classical moral theory, and he possesses the genius to present them through storytelling, a gift he recognized in the underlying naturalism of Ovid’s and Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, storytelling with political and moral visions that we in our time might call “utopian.” There is in Decameron, day 1, a foundation of the practical that must give a foundation to the aesthetic glory of the entertainment. So delicately self-conscious is Boccaccio the storyteller in his philosophical commitments that he allows himself only one “personal appearance” during the days of storytelling, although we hear his voice in the introduction and will hear it again in the conclusion. But even when Boccaccio speaks in his own voice, he projects it from the mouth of an old man who resolves to save his son from the sins of pleasure. Giving himself the amplitude of a half-story as an introduction to day 4, Boccaccio tells the tale of Filippo Balducci and his son. Yet again, in his delicacy to avoid appearing overbearing as an author, Boccaccio, refers to his “little stories . . . that bear no title, and which I have written not only in the Florentine vernacular and in prose, but in the most homely and unassuming style it is possible to imagine.” He then praises the lovely ladies as his true Muses, for they bring forth stories as the heavenly Muses do not. Further, that his collection should be called “stories that bear no title” suggests that Boccaccio models himself on Ovid and his collection of stories called Amores, “uno libro sine titulo,” a book without a title. Of course, we know the title Boccaccio has given to his collection, and to himself, is the prince of pimps. And with that in mind, we can understand the tale of Filippo Balducci, who has brought up his son in the remote country in order to protect him from the seductions of city life. Boccaccio’s comment on such an effort reiterates his naturalistic moral and religious theory: “In order to oppose the laws of nature one has to possess exceptional powers, which often turn out to have been used, not only in vain, but to the serious harm of those who employ them.”3

Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

91

So it is that when the son of Filippo sees the beautiful ladies of Florence, nature asserts herself, despite Filippo’s saying, “Don’t look at them for they are evil.” The son says, “Do you mean to say evil looks like this?” “Yes,” replies the father. “You can say what you like, father, but I don’t see anything evil about them. As far as I am concerned, I don’t think I have ever in my whole life seen anything so pretty or attractive. They are more beautiful than the painted angels that you have taken me to see so often.” And when the father identifies the ladies as “goslings” (“papere”), the son exclaims: “Do make it possible for us to take one of these goslings back with us, and I will pop things into its bill” (“e io daro beccare”). Even this longing has both a sexual and a narrative meaning, true to the Galeotto mission of Decameron, for of course the son sees the ladies as sexually attractive, and when the son says, “daro beccare,” the father replies, “Their bills are not where you think, and require a special sort of diet” (p. 287). And here the story ends, but with a further connotation to the son’s sexual longing, for to stuff the bills means also to tell a story, and thus it is once again that storytelling metaphorizes the sexual and sexual actions metaphorize storytelling, as we learned from Madonna Oretta in story 1 of day 6. The little parable told by the author—he assures us, in his own voice— states a claim for storytelling as a kind of inquiry, one in which the nature of things becomes clarified. To tell stories, one must identify objects and events, as Filippo does for his son. Notice that the father’s name means “lover of horses,” a name that relates him to Madonna Oretta, whose storytelling adventure ends disastrously because imagination and reality become confused, lacking in proper articulation. In the Filippo parable, the women toward whom the son feels such attraction are called “papere,” “goslings,” an intentional misidentification, a fault in storytelling, but a fault that allows the storyteller to create a meaningful metaphor: stuffing their bills is a slang way of saying “I shall force them to tell stories” and at the same time “I shall know them sexually.” Again, storytelling and sexual expression are obverse and reverse of one act. Boccaccio’s little half-story establishes him as far more subtle than most storytellers because of its exploration of metamorphic changes. Assuming now that Boccaccio has set his story as a model for all that Decameron surveys in its aesthetic universe, I shall point out metamorphic strategies within the stories. Most prominent, almost a thematic constant, is the ways in which characters are transformed through experience, through slyness, through encounters with criticism of their conduct. In several stories, persons change their basic character, and the importance of such psychological renovations

92 Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

is heralded by the very first story, the account of the rascal Cepperello (Little Log) who after death becomes St. Ciappelletto, who, despite his morally deformed character, becomes an object of veneration. In the next story, a Jew becomes a Christian. These metamorphoses announce a thematic preoccupation of the storyworld. Plots to be encountered later on will offer further metaphoric wonders. One variation on the opening stories recounts a character metamorphosed through correction of a moral fault, as Ermino’s character changes for the better—from miserliness to generosity—through Guilielmo’s remonstrance in story 8 of day 1. A more profound change in character occurs when an uncouth youth, through the power of female beauty, becomes a graceful, refined, versatile young man. This was the happy metamorphosis of Cymon. (day 5, story 1). We see a reflection of Boccaccio’s “little half-story” in this case. More superficial character changes occur through disguise and masking (see chapter 4). Historical characters, politically endangered, often must hide themselves, as Saladin did during the crusade that brought Christian enemies into his lands (day 10, story 9). Boccaccio loves to dress up characters in disguises—women dressed as men are particularly enticing for him—but in all cases the true face emerges after a series of adventures. No one in Decameron disappears through assuming an alien identity. One, Calandrino (day 8, story 3), is led to believe he has “disappeared” through the powerful magic of the heliotrope, a sly authorial interpretation of metamorphic events throughout the book. The author clothes himself with character identities that are never explicitly penetrated or openly discussed within the story. We readers see through Friar Onion in day 6, story 10, knowing it is one of many Boccaccian identities, and it is evident that Cisti the baker in story 2 of that same day is our author in one of his impersonations. Endowing himself with character identities, however hidden, provides the teller of tales with narrational disguises. They pose a challenge to us, for we are kept out of the secret till we penetrate the masks. He is quite able to make fun of such transformations—in all their varieties—by telling the story of the poor peasant who wanted his wife metamorphosed into a mare. Of course, the magic words that effect the change are a cover for the wily priest’s opportunity to satisfy his randy nature (day 9, story 10). The other side of such comedy is the serious literary tradition of metamorphosis that demands thoughtful exploration, and thus Boccaccio’s simple stories of “magical” metamorphoses themselves translate into philosophical reflection that asks what this kind of linguistic art is able to achieve. It is

Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

93

assumed to be a transforming and a psychologically strengthening of the reader’s character. As Decameron unfolds, story to story, Boccaccio discovers a means to weave reader into story; reading, he demands, must be an active involvement with the plot and character, and to that end he set day 6 in the center of the ten days, marking each brief story as an interpretative challenge. When the reader catches on to and responds to the demand made by each story, an evolution occurs, as if a new species suddenly appears. That new presence is the supersensitized reader, able to cope with a linguistic environment that at first was alien. Now it becomes a habitat in which the reader feels at home. That degree of comfort, however, carries with it a certain discomfort, especially the pain of forfeiting received beliefs, attitudes, dispositions. We continue our evolution as the days’ work unfolds, till we are led to bid good-bye to our inherited interpretative stance with the painful recognition that comes with the concluding story of Griselda and the marquis of Saluzzo. Unknown to us at first, the developed sensibility that permits us to confront the Griselda story has been prepared in part by the half-story told by Boccaccio in the opening of day 4 of Fillipo Balducci and his son. The boy undergoes a sudden transformation, a metamorphosis of character, in the presence of beautiful women, kept from him till that moment by his scrupulously observant father. But nature has its way; sexual attraction cannot be erased from the human passions. This story should prepare us for the line of story development that culminates in the book’s conclusion, as if a final step in a long argument, an argument generated by storytelling. The development ends with the inhuman behavior of Gualtieri, Griselda’s husband. It is now for us readers to understand the most devastating attack on religion, religiosity, and the deformation of character and behavior that Gualtieri sets before our by-now-developed, indeed metamorphosed, understanding of metamorphosis. We shall struggle to praise Griselda, in the tradition often referred to as “The Patient Griselda,” but the metamorphosis she undergoes should by now repel, sicken, and even disgust us, while our judgment of Gualtieri must lead us to turn away from the god who oversees, rewards, punishes, and yet is called benign. If we have grasped both manifest and latent levels of the conclusion to the whole Decameron, then we must become, under Boccaccio’s narrational argument, rejecting deniers of God, the ultimate metamorphosis we and the book have undergone. We must be carried through several stages of metamorphosis before we come to the ultimate renunciation as an end point. Along the way, we experience many other character developments that improve us morally and

94 Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

politically. One way to recognize this is to see how the theme of pleasure manifests itself in story after story, a poetic that leads us to understand what would constitute art in a just society. Unlike Wordsworth, whose characters are often rustics, sitting under trees, sometimes in danger of falling into ditches, the Italian poet sought out sophisticated speakers through whom his voice could be made to sound. There is lamentation enough in Wordsworth; it is the human condition of suffering Boccaccio disposes of in his description of the ravages wrought by the black death over all of Europe. Once beyond the plague in Florence, Boccaccio can sustain a far different, worldly storyworld, because of the removal to secluded gardens, and his characters laugh far more than they weep. Yet both poets, so far different in their times and places, promise to deliver to readers pleasures that will make them better neighbors. And for one who can read both poets at once, as we moderns can, I would see them as affined to one another in their vision, so that however removed each one’s work is from the other in time and space, they speak to one another in their underlying political purposes. The pleasure of Boccaccio’s stories that I here try to suggest and induce in readers of his book through interpretations of a few episodes finds further support as a poetic purpose in commentary on another writer who seems even more remote from Boccaccio than does Wordsworth. In chapter 4 of Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling speaks of Jane Austen. Trilling quotes an essay by Richard Simpson that appeared in the North British Review in 1870. Jane Austen, in Simpson’s words, was committed to the ideal of “intelligent love,” a love, Trilling goes on to say, that is based on teaching: “This relationship consists in the giving and receiving of knowledge about right conduct, in the formation of one person’s character by another, the acceptance of another’s guide in one’s own growth.”4 “Intelligent love” drives the storytelling in Boccaccio’s book, for it evolves in its ten days in a way analogous to Dante’s journey in the Commedia, where divine love draws the pilgrim toward. “intelligent love.” Boccaccio’s narrative gravity, however, is unlike the teleological force in Dante’s universe, for Boccaccio’s world is driven from behind in an efficient cause of moral and political love, the search for a coherent community, really, as we would say, utopian, partially realized in some of the stories but completely realized in the book as a whole. As we read we feel the force that drives the story telling. It is the physical force of the human body, as contrasted with the force of divine attraction that pulls Dante’s characters to their goal. But we readers of Decameron are not pulled forward, we are driven by each day to the next day, and our journey ends not in an elevated sacred precinct but back in the

Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

95

city from which we began. Within the city, there are buildings, the work of human hands, and they metaphorize the human body just as they are reflected in the bodies that inhabit them. The brigata began its journey in the church, where painting dominated the architectural landscape, paintings having to do with Dante’s Inferno and with the consecrated St. Thomas Aquinas. From that, we can infer the narrative powers of painted spaces within buildings and their symbolic use that spreads throughout the stories. Gardens, both open and closed, courtyards, walled vestibules—the last of which are given anatomical sexual suggestiveness as chambers that serve as entrances to an inner cavity—appear over and over again in Decameron. It has often been pointed out that the book relies on traditional topoi such as gardens to serve symbolically as felicitous removals from the world of competitive insensitivity. But within this tradition, as with everything else he represents drawn from tradition, Boccaccio works amazing transformations. Metamorphosis reshapes tradition as it establishes new and witty analogies. One of the most entertaining, yet most doleful, is the story of Guiscardo and Ghismonda (day 4, story 1). Preceded by detailed descriptions of women’s lives, their place in the family, their minds and bodies, we are introduced to Ghismonda as a woman who has thought deeply about her position in a social world most unresponsive to and unappreciative of a philosophic temperament in one of her sex. Indeed, this story seems to reflect the very opening of Decameron, which addresses women who are in danger of falling into melancholy because of the sequestered and lonely lives they are forced to lead yet who hide within their breasts a fiery passion that drives them to seek objects not only for sexual gratification but for insight and understanding. Boccaccio wrote his book for such aspiring ladies who need direction and a means of ascent to the proper object of their driving erotic desires. Once again, in that sense, the book functions as a go-between, a pimp. Boccaccio achieved his linguistic power and his storytelling expertise by being erotically bound to the lovely ladies who are his Muses, though he concedes that the heavenly inspiration of mythic Muses might have contributed something, as if they had been “looking over my shoulder” (day 4, introduction). To write in his own way the ultimate satire on the writer’s apprenticeship, development, and maturity, Boccaccio takes a daring position: the arts are won by humankind attending to its own reality. Those who would praise a heavenly source are deeply mistaken, for Christ himself awards those with their poetic voice when they make a cuckold of him, as did Masetto di Lamporecchio, in story 1 of day 3. As I have already pointed

96 Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

out, by depriving Christ of the ministration of his own “brides,” the poet declares himself forever free from any supposed hold that Christianity might be thought to have on poetry’s creative thought. Such an assertion, however hidden in the text, warns the reader that many demonstrations of this freedom will be seen in the work as a whole. Opposition to religious belief is the critical exercise of analysis on that belief through philosophic thought. It is the women to whom this book is dedicated who possess philosophic insight and great moral stamina. This is beautifully demonstrated by day 4, story 1, which further elaborates the book’s cognomen. Of course, such communions have their risks; as with all sexual-artistic play, one may fall over the edge, one may descend from art to pornography, or one may beget bathetic tales. Worse, one may end up dead. That is the fate of poor Guiscardo, who became the lover of the philosophically and sexually adventurous Ghismonda. Here, in the first story of day 4, the architecture of sexuality is explored: the space without and within the body, the room designed for love, the danger of discovery, the penalties attached to women’s explorations of both their own bodies and their sexual relations with men are closely represented in a complex set of metaphors and arguments. Here, philosophy and poetry join forces in a revelation that is at once shocking and ennobling. The philosophically subtle and physically deprived Ghismonda selects the unaffected Guiscardo as her lover-to-be. She hands him a note hidden in a reed and says to him: “Turn it into a bellows-pipe [soffione] for your serving wench, so that she can use it to kindle the fire this evening” (p. 292). The sexual meaning of this exchange is obvious, and it becomes even more provocative when we read that Ghismonda has been exploring her own body and the architecture of the place in which she lives: flesh and earth, body and building metaphorize one another as they subtly metamorphose one into the other. The following passage moves the plot forward from longing to realization: Inside the mountain on which the Prince’s palace stood, there was a cavern, formed at some remote period of the past, which was partially lit from above through a shaft driven into the hillside. But since the cavern was no longer used, the mouth of the shaft was almost entirely covered over by weeds and brambles. There was a secret staircase leading to the cavern from a room occupied by the lady, on the ground floor of the palace, but the way was barred by a massive door. So many years had passed since the staircase had last been used, that hardly anybody remembered that it was still there; but Love, to whose eyes nothing remains concealed, had reminded the enamoured lady of its existence.

Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

97

For several days she had been struggling to open the door by herself, using certain implements of her own as picklocks so that no one should perceive what was afoot. Having finally got it open, she had descended alone into the cavern, seen the shaft, and written to Guiscardo, giving him a rough idea of the distance between the top of the shaft and the floor of the cavern, and telling him to try and use the shaft as his means of access. . . . The following night . . . he made his way to the shaft, wearing a suit of leather to protect himself from the brambles. Firmly tying one end of the rope to a stout bush that had taken root at the mouth of the opening, he lowered himself into the cavern and waited for the lady to come. (pp. 292–93)

But the envy of Fortune brings their pleasure to a tragic end: Ghismonda’s jealously possessive father, Tancredi, hiding in the bedroom, observes his daughter and her lover in their sexual exertions. Tancredi has Guiscardo killed and conveys his heart to Ghismonda with the cruelest words uttered in the whole book: “Your father sends you this to comfort you in the loss of your dearest possession, just as you have comforted him in the loss of his” (p. 299). Ghismonda’s philosophical account to her father of the purposes, necessities, and elevating powers of love gives the impression that Boccaccio had read Plato’s Symposium and The Republic; in fact, he knew of them indirectly: manuscripts of the dialogues became available only in the next century. Nonetheless, Ghismonda’s noble self-control and vivid sense of her absolute intellectual power contribute clearest evidence that Decameron not only achieves philosophic elevation but intends to metamorphose popular story into serious dialectic. Ghismonda speaks as a philosopher when she tells her father: “I propose to tell you the whole truth, setting forth convincing arguments in defense of my good name, and afterwards I shall act unflinchingly in accordance with the promptings of my noble heart” (p. 296). After justifying her choice of Guiscardo as a lover and defending his noble nature, she adds a philosophic generalization: “We were all born equal, and still are, but merit first set us apart, and those who had more of it, and used it the most, acquired the names of nobles to distinguish them from the rest. Since then, this law has been obscured by a contrary practice, but nature and good manners ensure that its force still remains unimpaired; hence any man whose conduct is virtuous proclaims himself a noble, and those who call him by any other name are in error” (p. 297). Reading Ghismonda’s philosophic arguments, I recognize in them elements from several Platonic dialogues and also discern a Platonic metaphor that Boccaccio has applied to his book. In calling Decameron a “Prencipe Galeotto,” he confers on it a truly philosophic character and mission, for

98 Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

Socrates, as noted above, not only referred to himself as a midwife and as a pimp but was able through his great poetic powers to join together rational argument and corporeality, love in its most exalted transformation into spiritual transfiguration, metamorphosed from sheer physicality. In Phaedrus, Socrates leads his young aspirant (who comes to Socrates in order to receive instruction on sexual seduction) from body to mind to mythic entertainments that only poetry can bring into an earthly life. As we listen to Boccaccio, we can hear as a kind of bass ostinato, the Socratic boast: “I am a midwife and a pimp, for I bring lovers together to create ideas, and it is I who then sit in judgment as to their viability.”5 Boccaccio, too, creates lovers who may stay earthbound or who may, like Ghismonda, rise to spiritual heights in which love is finally understood to be the ultimate power of metamorphosis, transforming the physical into the universal ethereal. The power of love has transformed Ghismonda into a philosopher, just the evolution that Socrates promises to his aspiring lovers. Philosophic themes and inquiries continue to unfold as the ten days of storytelling move into more and more complex character development. Day 8, story 7, the longest tale of Decameron, is perhaps the most difficult to interpret, but it is without doubt the most subtle in its exploration of body, mind, sexuality, and thought. Here, a philosopher, Rinieri by name, attempts to become the lover of the beautiful widow Elena. Rinieri represents, I shall propose, mind, while Elena represents body; and the mind-body “problem” was never so delicately yet so harshly and cruelly set forth. In the ten days of storytelling, this is story number 77. It might be taken to be number 87, but we count from the first story ordinally, and since every number in Decameron is meaningful in one context or another, the reader is expected to understand that 77 suggests completion twice over, for seven is the day God rested after completing the universe. The doubleness here, I suggest, refers to twinship and total interdependence of body and mind. It is a story in which philosophy figures as a character and as an intellectual pursuit, and in its assigning equal reality to body as well as mind, it suggests a heretical point of view. This is the story in which the poet-pimp brings together ambiguously defined lovers in what appears to be violent misogyny in a book that up to this point has been openly dedicated to “the lovely ladies.” The would-be lovers in this tale can only destroy one another, yet beneath the antagonistic surface lie depths of calm understanding if we can but penetrate to the latent thought below the manifest plot.

Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

99

The story begins with Rinieri, the philosopher, just returned from studying in Paris, eagerly seeking to win the widow Elena. She already has a lover and finds pleasure in forcing Rinieri to stand outside in the courtyard of her house on a bitterly cold night while the lovers disport themselves inside. Shortly thereafter, Elena loses her lover and seeks out Rinieri, to whom she attributes magical powers—he being a philosopher—and he, amused at her naïveté about philosophy, promises to help her. In midsummer heat, she, following his instructions, stands naked on a tower in the belief that magical charms given to her will bring back her lover. The ladder by which she ascended is removed, and, as Rinieri nearly died of the cold, she nearly dies of the heat. While she stands trapped on the tower, exposed in her nakedness to the sun, Rinieri lectures her: “And even supposing that all my little schemes had failed, I should still have had my pen, with which I should have lampooned you so mercilessly, and with so much eloquence, that when my writings came to your notice, as they certainly would, you would have wished a thousand times a day that you had never been born. The power of the pen is far greater than those people suppose who have not proved it by experience” (p. 602). Having boasted of the rhetorical-sexual power of the pen, a theme that makes it appearance several times in the book, Rinieri delivers a lecture on the sexual potency, staying power, and technique of older lovers, for “they will shake your skin-coat with greater vigor, the older man, being more experienced, has a better idea of where the fleas are lurking” (p. 602). The older man does not go off at a gallop but conveys the lady with a gentle trot to their destination. Now, once again, Boccaccio metamorphoses pen into penis, writing into sexual play, and puts them together in his already established metaphor of horseback riding. In day 6, story 1, already noted as the shortest story in the book (hence appropriately recalled here in the longest story), Madonna Oretta is given a bad ride by the incompetent knight storyteller and suffers sexual arousal without full gratification. So she who has little time suffers from the knight’s inability to use his “pen” to the full and with it to create a satisfying story, whose metaphoric meaning now becomes clear and recalls once again the cognomen Prencipe Galeotto. Story 77 develops thoughts beyond those of many other stories, so further excavation is called for. I have several tentative suggestions to make about the latent content, the symbolic underpinning, of the Rinieri-Elena conflict. Elena represents the body, Rinieri the mind; each must be educated in the powers and needs of the other. Elena teaches Rinieri the coldness of intellect and of philosophy if pursued without attention to the needs of the

100 Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

flesh; Rinieri teaches Elena the destructive force of bodily passions without mind, without caring for truth and thought. Thus Elena falls into the trap set by Rinieri because she believes philosophy to be black magic, an ignorance that leads to self-destruction. In Elena’s life, this kind of superstition allowed her lover to punish her, but, in Boccaccio’s life, this kind of ignorance on the part of his unlettered neighbors may have placed him in a vulnerable position, even subjected him to an attack from common folk. I believe there are hidden references in this story to something that happened to Boccaccio, for there is a strange story told about him, reported by Henri Hauvette in his biography: “The good people of Certaldo, whose intelligence Boccaccio never boasted of, preserved only a memory of him as a kind of magician or sorcerer. The devil, it was said, at Boccaccio’s bidding, joined together by a bridge of glass his house to the strange hill that faced it, since he had a longing to walk there at night. It is told that a woman, whose work as a weaver shook the wall that separated her house from that of the storyteller, saw [through] a break in the wall an avalanche of papers and conjuring books that he had devotedly and with haste cast into the fire.”6 Whether or not there is a private reference here to the superstitious nature of simple folk, the confrontation between Rinieri and Elena conveys vividly the contradictions embedded in mind and intellect separate from the body as base to thought. If isolated from one another, mind and body must fail and deteriorate because then speech, the expression of mind, becomes separated from sight, the receptivity of body. Speech and sight coordinated give the possibility of good judgment. We see in this story that both leading characters are deficient, Rinieri in sight, Elena in speech. Both misuse their gifts; both must come to value the powers of the other. The hero and heroine of this story learn to use and control their eyes and voice, at least that is implied, if not realized, in the story’s ending. To see clearly, to speak truthfully are lessons to be learned by we who hear and see. To suggest to us the essential nature of these two gifts that in their interdependence define the realm of humanity, the story tells us how it is to be read and understood. The gift of sight and its powers are represented in the figure of St. Lucy, for it is in Santa Lucia dal Prato that Elena and Rinieri meet when Elena turns to her “magician” for help. St. Lucy was the virgin martyr of Syracuse, in the reign of Diocletian. She was denounced and condemned as a Christian, but no power could move her from the place where she stood. The order was given to burn her, but the flames did not touch her. She was slain by a sword thrust into her neck. A curious story attaches to the life of the saint: it is recounted that a young man was so moved by

Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

101

the beauty of her eyes that he could find no rest. She, to requite his passion, tore out her eyes and sent them to him. Thus she is represented holding a plate with her eyes on it.7 Here, as throughout the storytelling, Boccaccio slyly refers to a place whose symbolic connotations provide an armature to the events we are to interpret. After the reference to St. Lucy through the name of the church, the characters make reference to eyes over and over again. Elena says: “I’ve been crying so much over the trick I played on you . . . that it’s a miracle I have any eyes left in my head” (p. 598). Rinieri, in boasting of the power of his pen, says: “You would have been so mortified by the things I had written that you would have put out your eyes rather than look upon yourself ever again” (p 602). The presence of St. Lucy hovers over the mind-body mystery that her own history represents in a way that gives us means to think through the conflict between the characters. They are acting out Lucy’s life in their own lives, but without the intervention of divine resolution. Each is a caricature of their model: Elena of St. Lucy, Rinieri of philosophy. The model of St. Lucy should be a guide to Elena, who acted toward Rinieri with unaccountable cruelty; the insights of philosophy should have been a guide to Rinieri, who was unable to rein in his anger and excessive need to revenge himself against a simple-minded body, for to him Elena was simply the body that he should have known to be a corruptible person. To him, St. Lucy should serve as a symbol of the pure body. In Rinieri, we should expect to find the highest exercise of mind (philosophy), and, in St. Lucy, the most severe chastening of body (religious fervor). They come together in a story that teaches how to position mind and body toward their necessary interdependence, defined by the storyteller, whose art has the power to subsume both philosophy and religion under its greater understanding. When Elena and her maidservant are finally freed from the tower, it is recounted that the maid breaks her thigh while climbing down the ladder. The breaking of the thigh is, I believe, a covert reference to Genesis 32:25–33, where Jacob wrestles the angel, and connects as well to the vision of Jacob, that is, Jacob’s Ladder. To break one’s thigh is to sustain, in one’s own life, the injury inflicted by the angel on Jacob. It is a Boccaccian form of the stigmata, only here a physical mark that the woman was in danger of losing her soul. But the maid’s injury is far less destructive than that suffered by Elena, who is herself reduced to the lowest of animal forms, the snake. Suffering extreme sunburn, Elena sheds her skin like a snake. Elena is a snake, that is, without a soul. So the lectures delivered by Rinieri are really for our benefit, we the readers, not hers, for by Elena they must be misunderstood. Rinieri,

102 Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

in delivering the lectures, is opening up to us, as to himself, the mindway of thought, that is, philosophy, and we, who seize this through the story now can put philosophy in its proper place. Neither the model of St. Lucy nor the guidance of philosophy was sufficient to lead the would-be lovers into a spiritual union. The longed-for sexual union was to take place on the day after Christmas, the great feast day of the incarnation of the Lord, a religious conception that dedicates one day of the year to union of body and soul. But the incarnation occurs every moment in which mind and body assume the proper relationship to one another, a coupling that did not occur between Elena and Rinieri. Boccaccio is Prencipe Galeotto, just as the Socrates we meet in the Symposium is Eros; and as the Platonic philosopher joins couples in mind-mind fertility, so the trecento poet couples reader to truth in the ten days of storytelling. As the prince of pimps, Boccaccio works on two levels: that of mindbody, that of everyday reality and the illusion of the aesthetic, of art. Art thus conceived is the offspring of the pen-brush-penis as it inseminates the Muses, and they in turn give birth to imagination’s narratives. The beauty created—and the book emphasizes beauty everywhere it turns—enfolds, encloses, shrouds the deepest mindworks, for through beauty of art the way is gained first into the enclosed garden or courtyard and then into the womb of creative metamorphosis. Mind and body relate to one another; at the same time, mind relates to the spiritual and intellectual heights, ever moving upward, and body relates to its physical surround, to nature and to architecture, ever comparing itself to and testing itself against its environment. The ten days of storytelling in Decameron often rely on images and events that metaphorize the body and the mind. The story of Guiscardo and Ghismonda (day 4, story 1), the story of Elena and Rinieri (day 7, story 7) use nature and buildings to represent the body, for in that way they are able to reach fantasies about the body that dominate our unconscious thinking. In saying this, I am taking a passage from Richard Wollheim’s discussion of the painters Bernardo Bellotto and Thomas Jones. “All paintings that metaphorize the body receive some part of their authority to do so from the way they engage with primitive phantasies about the body.”8 In like manner, narratives that represent buildings (as do the two stories just mentioned) touch us deeply for they, too, lead us to experience the plot with a fullness that would otherwise be lacking. Wollheim continues his comparison: “Indeed it is the submerged presence of this early material—that is, material from the early life-history of the in-

Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

103

dividual—in metaphorical paintings that lends support to my claim that, in the profound cases of pictorial metaphor, what is metaphorized is the body. . . . The investiture of represented buildings with phantasy about the body, which then comes to settle around the picture as a whole, giving the picture a presence quite out of proportion to its size and its manifest ambition” (p. 310). So, too, with the representations of Guiscardo’s entrance to Ghismonda’s room and with the representation of church, tower, ladder, and falling from heights in Rinieri’s revenge on Elena, passageways are opened both in the outer world of story and the inner world of thoughts about the body. All the metaphorizing that I have pointed out takes place in a larger natural order that is either a garden or the metaphorically potent “Valley of the Ladies” that is visited by the brigata at the conclusion of day 6. All these storytelling sites promise seclusion and the opportunity for sexual intimacies, even though the women and men, it is made clear, live chastely with one another. But their natural world and their storyworld are replete with sexual descriptions. When the stories of day 6 end, a metaphorical landscape opens before the ladies who have taken on themselves their first independent exploration, rather against uttered male precautions. The Valley of the Ladies affords them a moment of abandon—stripping off their clothes, they swim in the clear water—after which they are freer and more adult in their conduct than they have been in the first six days. From that moment on, they come into their own as listeners who can hear and interpret tales like that of day 8, story 7, for they have become aware of the principle of metaphorization that relies on metamorphosis, that is, from manifest to latent content and from physical to psychological meaning. In the elevation of consciousness realized after the swim in the waters of the valley, it is assumed that the ladies would penetrate the outer account of the Rinieri-Elena story to perceive its innermost, at first concealed, meaning. In support of my placing so much weight on the swim in the Valley of the Ladies, I draw attention to a passage in Boccaccio’s Life of Dante.9 Boccaccio reports, as the concluding event in his life of Dante, a dream that Dante’s mother had when pregnant with the poet. In her dream, she saw herself giving birth to her son, close by a clear flowing brook. Boccaccio interprets the image of the clear brook as follows: “The clear brook, from whose waters the mother thought that he drank, indicates, I believe, nothing else than the abundance of natural and moral doctrines of philosophy. Just as a brook gushes forth the fertile riches hidden in the womb of the Earth, so it is with these doctrines, which take their essence and cause from

104 Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis

the copious flow of demonstrative logic, which can be interpreted as earthly abundance. . . . And so we may well conclude that by the clear waters (philosophy) Dante digested in his stomach (in other words, the intellect) the berries that he ate—that is poetry” (pp. 8, 11). Assuming that water for Boccaccio is to be understood as the symbol of—or even perhaps an instance of—philosophic wisdom, the ladies’ immersion in water at the end of day 6 symbolizes entering into philosophic wisdom. From then on, they will gain deeper understanding of the stories they and the three men tell. In one sense, it can be said that, up to that immersion, the brigata has been prepared for the advance in insight and depth of understanding by the stories already told, and particularly the interpretative difficulty of the stories in day 6 leading up to the swim. One of the conflicts in human life that they must come to understand is the great range of sexual compatibility and incompatibility that men and women experience. With each other, the men and women have been chaste, careful not to be flirtatious, and open to frank discussions of sexuality without succumbing to lustful behavior. And for the most part the sexual conflicts recounted in the narrative tellings have been resolved with humor and good sense. Only occasionally do sexual relationships in the stories lead to destructive anger, as in the painful conclusion to Elena’s double cross. In most cases, a conflict-free realm of narrative, of art in the widest sense, controls the whole of the aesthetic world, whose values are beauty and self-control but, overall, a dedication to truth, though the truth of human existence and of religious belief cannot be openly revealed but must remain partly inaccessible, to be excavated as it were through the understanding of philosophical argument and with the philosophical “baptism” enjoyed in the waters of the Valley of the Ladies. That is why, in the last words of the Rinieri-Elena story, the brigata is warned: “Think twice, ladies, I advise you, before you play such tricks, especially when you have a scholar to deal with” (p. 610). But, as we shall see, the ladies are far too clever to be intimidated by such warnings since they have understood the deeper truths of narrative shaped to explore intellectual and moral power. They have learned that philosophical understanding, achieved through narrative arguments, is far more penetrating intellectually and far more gratifying to the body than any of the competing modes of inquiry, such as theology and logic.

chapter 4

Interpretative Method for a decameron Tale

An Enchanted Pear Tree in Argos

T

wo dominant rhetorical affects give life and color to Decameron: wit and irony. Boccaccio develops themes of thought and descriptions of actions that are expressed in tricks and jokes and foolings, named in the very topics chosen for some of the storytelling days. The seventh day is to tell stories of “tricks . . . women have played upon their husbands,” the eighth day is devoted to “tricks people in general . . . play upon one another;” and throughout there are stories of women fooling men through wit and devious actions. Summarizing his evaluation of poetry in the book Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, Boccaccio simplifies the storyteller’s achievements: “Such then is the power of fiction that it pleases the unlearned by its external appearance, and exercises the minds of the learned with its hidden truth; and thus both are edified and delighted with one and the same perusal.”1 He himself goes far beyond delight and teaching, for his wit is used to attack with devastating accuracy common beliefs and common judgments; the stories present so many layers of reference that it is difficult to talk about the collection as a whole, and attention to individual stories yields the most insights into “hidden truth.” I have chosen one of the stories of day 7 for extended discussion. In itself, it demands the listening of an audience with a witty sensibility and a developed awareness of irony. In selecting such means and affects, I want the story to be a kind of example carrying us back to a

106 Interpretative Method for a

decameron Tale

storytelling time when the emergence of literary humor and political satire were foundational to our own time. Appreciation of Early Renaissance wit and satire appears as a powerful theme in Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Here is his description of an emerging awareness that can be part of literature—as with Dante and Boccaccio—because of a resurgence of political satire. Indeed, Burckhardt observes, in mentioning Dante’s great poem, we find therein a return of the repressed political themes that in the past expressed the wit and satire of Aristophanes. Here and there . . . under the influence of classical literature, wit began to be used as a weapon in theological disputes, and the poetry of Provence produced a whole class of satirical compositions. Even the Meinensinger, as their political poems show, could adopt this tone when necessary. But wit could not be an independent element in life till its appropriate victim, the developed individual with personal pretensions, had appeared. Its weapons were then by no means limited to the tongue and the pen, but included tricks and practical jokes—the so-called “burle” and “beffe”—which form a chief subject of many collections of novels.2

Certainly, Boccaccio’s interpretation of human behavior and the ways in which human beings create their devious means—through talk and action—of being with one another in communities opens up to reader/hearers a poetic wisdom surpassing all that the philosophers can say in their far more limited ways. At least that would be a claim Boccaccio intends. So I turn to story 9 of day 7, where wit and satire lead to theological criticism. My interpretative method and the cultural-historical principles on which it rests will here be further defined by reading one story as fully as I am able. First, I want to heed my own advice, offered to those who seriously turn to Decameron. The story collection achieves its inner argumentation through an authorial thoroughness in making each object and event doubly meaningful. Every detail in each story demands attention: day of the week, colors, numbers, allusions however remote, saints, locations, folk sayings, and so on and on through a universe of references, many of which may seem at first to be simply a stylistic filling out of narrational specificities but which have significance for the meanings of each story. In my discussions so far, I have been attempting to raise my awareness so that I examine each story in its details for its underlying or deeper meaning, its truth as truth as stated in parables. Boccaccio says in the proem to the book that his stories are “stories or fables or parables or histories” (“cento novelle, o favole o parobole o istorie”). The

Interpretative Method for a

decameron Tale

107

plots conceal truths that the reader is to uncover. My excavations have led me to discover hidden meanings that were at first concealed by a veil of sheer bravado and entertainment. Because the book takes great pains to lead the attentive reader to its inner substance by devoting several sections to issues of interpretation, we can say that the Decameron is, among all else that it is, a handbook on interpretative method. It explains itself theoretically even though it may at first seem to subvert that theory by a practice of such high—often bawdy—delight that we may fail to take the necessary next step toward understanding and therefore miss much that is most poetically significant. As I have pointed out, the passages I have in mind when I refer to the book’s interpretative directives are the proem, the epilogue, the introduction to day 4, and all of day 6. The opening and closing of the book give explicit, though often ignored, instructions for proper reading. The methodological directives scattered throughout the book may be drawn together in a summary that, as I state it, is more explicit than the subtle suggestions Boccaccio has planted in various passages. So, in looking back to the discoveries so far made, I can give a summary statement of Boccaccio’s directives for interpretation, and that begins with an unusual sympathy and understanding of women’s position in trecento society. Women are confined to the house, kept in apparent idleness, and when unhappy in love are not granted the opportunity for exercise, physical activity, and adventure available to men, and they most definitely are forbidden to enter university. Their isolation and the denial of intellectual stimulation induce melancholia. The author offers his book as the cure for their melancholia, and the means to extend their learning comes through this book. It is understood that melancholia is the common condition of a philosophic mind, and we are led to expect the stories in the book to have serious intent and philosophic content; they make demands on the reader to think through issues of conduct, ethics, politics, education, tradition. The ladies, though they will not be able to attend the universities in Athens, Bologna, and Paris, possess the intelligence and have the time to pursue philosophy; they will be ideal, canny, penetrating readers of this book. In drawing a psychological and cultural description of the differences between men and women in their activities and access to knowledge, Boccaccio suggests to those he expects to read his stories a profound philosophical distinction: that between the active life and the contemplative life. Women possess both the temperament, melancholic, and the leisure, enforced on them, that enables them to see deeply into Decameron. They live the contemplative

108 Interpretative Method for a

decameron Tale

life, an achievement that has moral and cognitive implications, for women tend to be more quick-witted than men and are able to be critical of the character and conduct of those around them. Of course, intelligent women, careful to conceal their criticisms of domestic, sexual, and political realities, in Decameron are given rare opportunities to speak out. They see themselves in a book that entertains as it maintains high philosophical truths, moral and aesthetic. Men, in contrast, though supposed to lead the active life in choices of rational action, frequently fail to realize their moral purposes because they suffer from a deformed imagination that women readily see to be ridiculous and self-defeating. There are many examples in the book of male active life in which rational action is realized, however, and there are examples of men who judge wisely, who have achieved wisdom, in some cases through the pedagogy of women. That women should understand the latent arguments and philosophical implications of the stories provides a challenge to the tradition of learning, for their insights go beyond that which would be demanded of them if they did go to university. In maintaining this interpretation of the contemplative life, Boccaccio enlarges the scope and complicates the depth of storytelling. Boccaccio had thought carefully about endowing story with such powers in his inquiry into the sources, meanings, and interpretations of myth. That was carried out in his Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, written over many years, perhaps begun when he lived in Naples, a young man of twenty-some years. By the time of Decameron, Boccaccio could draw on a vast store of literary and mythic story, though his actual writing of the Genealogia, begun before his address to the ladies, probably was completed later. As has been pointed out above, the two titles of Decameron subtly convey much of the structure and function of the stories. “Decameron” refers to the ten days of storytelling. “Prencipe Galeotto,” a cognomen announced in an epigraphic heading to the “proemio,” challenges the reader, for the cognomen becomes more and more meaningful as the stories succeed one another. Boccaccio, by giving his book this second name, is telling the reader that Decameron and its author are to be regarded in a certain interpretative light. The book is a pimp, that is, the book brings people together, as lovers, as knowers, as physical forces interacting on one another, and sharers in intellectual pursuits. The book through its double naming also suggests a doubleness throughout the stories. The stories that recount sexual encounters are to be read metaphorically as well as literally. I think of that in terms of a manifest, readily available narrative and a latent set of meanings to be excavated through interpretation. While in the Decameron sexual events and descriptions have a metaphoric power and intention, they are to be enjoyed as erotic

Interpretative Method for a

decameron Tale

109

in their own right but are also meant to lead us, as a go-between might do, from the sexual to serious, thoughtful ideas, concepts, and principles.3 Once the reader is alerted to the task of discovering more reserved and hidden meanings, readings, as I have suggested, ought to involve formulating hypotheses about the meanings that may lie underneath the manifest content of the book and its individual stories. On encountering the unusually short stories of day 6, the reader will perceive the sudden change of scale from the preceding days; there is an economy in the telling, a striking condensation that establishes a standard for good storytelling, as well as leaving enough time to visit the Valley of the Ladies with its pool of clear water. The women, who by now might be considered aspects of Madonna Oretta, like her have “little time” and must therefore metamorphose themselves from passive to active story interpreters, all at the close of one day’s stories that represent in themselves the action of storytelling. Anticipations of day 6 self-consciousness are part of the experience the brigata has in hearing day 3, story 1, which exemplifies the interpretative issues discussed in foregoing chapters. There is a moment of discovery involving a reversal of perspectives. Although it has been discussed earlier, I repeat the story of Masetto of Lamporecchio, the “hero” of this story. He turns out to be far more than a simple gardener working in a nunnery and helping the nuns to achieve sexual gratification. He lives with nine women, nine nuns, and the reader suddenly realizes they are the nine Muses. Masetto reveals his ability to speak under the sexual demands put upon him by the head Muse, the Mother Superior: “His tongue ligament was cut and he began to speak” (“rotto lo scilinguagnolo, comincio a dire”).4 Since he is not really deaf and dumb, the cutting of the tongue ligament has a special meaning: Masetto has become a poet, that is, the story is about becoming a poet, finding his voice and the means to that artistic end. The means is quite simply bedding down the Muses; the end is twofold, for the poet not only has had intercourse with the Muses and thereby gained his voice; he has had it in a nunnery where the Muses are the brides of Christ. Therefore to be a poet one must dare to cuckold Christ. And that, in a Boccaccio universe, means taking a certain stance toward the church. In this chapter, my reading shall be devoted to one story, one that pleases because it is so amusing, one that intrigues because it contains something suppressed that we sense though may not recognize consciously. It is a story, by the way, that was a favorite of Herman Melville. It is story 9 of day 7. The story sums itself up in these prefatory words: “Lydia [Lidia], wife of Nicostratus [Nicostrato], falls in love with Pyrrhus [Pirro], who sets her three

110 Interpretative Method for a

decameron Tale

tasks as a proof of her sincerity. She performs all three, in addition to which she makes love to Pyrrhus in her husband’s presence, causing Nicostratus to believe that his eyes have been deceiving him.”5 Names draw our attention. “Lidia” is one who lives in the country known as “Lydia,” a land described by Herodotus, who reported that the young women of Lydia gain their dowries through prostitution. This bit of anthropological description has stood out as the reputation of the Lydians. So when we encounter “Lydia” in day 7, story 9, we remember the sexual license attributed to that ancient land. Nicostratus, the husband of Lydia, bears a name meaning “Victory of the Army” or “Victory of the Chiefs.” In accordance with his name, he, for all his bumbling silliness, takes his place in that same ancient world, though here only as head of the household. There are in addition several historical figures with the name “Nicostratus,” and, as it turns out, when we read the story, two of them appear to be possible narrative designata for the Nicostratus of the story. A classical dictionary identifies them as follows: Nicostratus, who lived in Argos, as does our story character, was renowned for his great strength. He imitated Hercules by dressing himself in a lion skin. I assume that if Boccaccio had this Nicostratus in mind, he was to stand in contrast to our story’s rather weak husband. More useful to Boccaccio’s usual manner is a second reference to Nicostratus: “A painter who expressed great admiration at the sight of Helen’s picture by Zeuxis, and said to a person who enquired into the cause of his great surprise, ‘You would not ask if you had my eyes.’”6 Since story 9 of day 7 hides a serious epistemological puzzle and relies heavily on seeing truly and seeing illusionistically, Nicostratus the painter fits well into a concern that is reflected throughout the Decameron in references to painters, to eyes, to seeing truly and seeing falsely. The name “Pyrrhus” (Pirro) means “fire,” but there was also an important Skeptical school of philosophy, Pyrrhonism, famous in the ancient Greek world, named after one of its founders, Pyrrho of Elis. Because of the issues of skepticism that shape the events in this story, our Pyrrhus leads our thoughts back to the Skeptic Pyrrho. The story is set in Argos, “that most ancient city of Greece, whose kings brought it universal renown out of all proportion to its size ” (p. 533). So this little story again carries us back to the ancient world, in which the Lydian hosts, barbarian outlanders as far as the Greeks were concerned, confront the more civilized social forces that shape and give civilized manners to life as a trecento reader might imagine it. Since as we read the story we are conveyed to a world more medieval than ancient, this suggests we transfer the ancient conflicts to Boccaccio’s narrative present. In that world, the stories

Interpretative Method for a

decameron Tale

111

we have been reading maintain a constant interest in philosophical ideas and conflicts. Since Boccaccio makes it clear in both the proem and the epilogue of Decameron that the collection of stories is addressed to women of melancholic temperament who have both the capacity and need to master philosophical thought, we must always be sensitive to philosophical issues, though they may be hidden. Notice that the last sentence of the argument that introduces story 9 of day 7 is this: “[Lydia] gives Nicostratus to believe that what he has seen is not true” (p. 533; “e a Nicostrato fa credere che non sia vero quello che ha veduto” [p. 861]). Lydia’s world is, for narrative purposes, ancient, the Greek city of Argos, where, transferring barbarian directness into a society of indirectness, she will not be contained. Her behavior in that ancient setting is more appropriate perhaps than the storyteller was aware, for Argos was famed as a civic center favoring the needs of women under the protection of Hera. There is no evidence that Boccaccio knew of Argolid feminism, but he may have heard stories of the special sites where women were favored. That classical liberality would reinforce the story’s central theme. And so Lydia sets out to win as her lover the fiery young Pyrrhus, who, surprisingly, coyly rejects her first advances. He will become her lover, he promises, if she will perform three tasks to demonstrate the genuineness of her love and also to confirm that the old man, Nicostratus, is not laying a trap for him, a trusted retainer and not in the habit of betraying his master. Consequently, when Lydia’s servant, Lusca, who is the pimp in this transaction, approaches Pyrrhus, his demands are severe. We ought to note here that the name “Lusca” bears a sound affinity to “losco,” meaning “squint-eyed,” “dimsighted.” The plot of this narrative emphasizes poor sightedness, hallucination, being-in-the-sight-of, doing it before others, doing openly that which ordinarily is done in private. As for the go-between, Lusca, her role as pimp is analogous to the whole of Decameron in its self-reference, already noted, as a pimp. In this story, as throughout the book, sex functions metaphorically in the development of philosophical insight, and sexual metaphors elaborate the metaphorical power of the many kinds of sexual encounters that the stories relate. Since the inhabitants of Argos explore epistemological issues through adultery and sexual tricks, our task as readers is to identify the metaphorical moves that the story makes from sex to philosophy. The three tasks imposed on Lydia by Pirro to win him as lover are these: to kill Nicostratus’s favorite sparrow hawk before his very eyes; to pull out a tuft of his beard and send it to Pyrrhus; and to pull out one of her husband’s good teeth as a gift of demonstrative dedication to her love.

112 Interpretative Method for a

decameron Tale

It is evident that here there is a clear reversal of task imposition that these challenges represent, for in the usual stories of winning the beloved, we find the man given the tests to be performed. His reward is the princess and half the kingdom. In this story where the roles are reversed, it is the woman who must prove her valor. This book encourages women, equally endowed to be philosophers, to be active doers as well as thinkers. I suggest that this set of tasks quite appropriately is given to a woman, for by the seventh day the women have achieved greater independence than they had in the past. The introduction and conclusion of Decameron make clear its concern for female education, for natural and free expression of feeling and thought. As one example of the independent woman, Lydia is a sly and wily negotiator both with her husband and her hoped-for lover. As a story that teaches as well as delights, day 7, story 9, which is told by Panfilo, one of the three men, will provide the women of the brigata an example; they will be able to hold Lydia as a model in their own actions. All of Decameron concerns itself with female position in family and society, and the development throughout the book toward independence in action and thought has been analyzed in a recent study by Teodolinda Barolini, “‘Le Parole Son Femmine E I Fatti Sono Maschi’: Toward a Sexual Poetics of the Decameron.”7 As she points out, the world of deeds belongs to men, the world of words to women. In day 7, women move from words to deeds. In this setting, Lydia’s actions take on both narrative and philosophical implications. Should Lydia’s example be taken to heart, weak, impotent men might well beware, even be fearful, for each of her tasks, imposed by her would-be beloved, are dominating and destructive when seen in their symbolic implications. All three tasks will validate her claim of her husband’s impotence and thus both actually and symbolically his failure as husband, indeed as masculine. Lydia’s complaint is that hers is a cruel fate, to be coupled with an old man. Teeth, the focus of the third task, have from ancient times been regarded as symbolic of seed, and the hair of the head, both beard and locks, the focus the second task, have been regarded as the expression of cerebral-spinal fluid that runs through the body and appears in reproduction as semen.8 When Pyrrhus asks for a tooth, his demand reminds us of the first story of the day. There, Gianni is told to spit as a symbolic curse on the “fantasima” his wife convinces him is outside the door, and when he does that Federigo, the lover, who is indeed the “fantasima” standing on the other side of the door, says “The Teeth” (“I denti”). Mysterious as this countercurse may be, it is suggestive of archaic beliefs that the teeth are, like the beard, outgrowths of the bodily fluid that is sexual and thus symbolic of sexual potency. Federigo

Interpretative Method for a

decameron Tale

113

counters the curse by asserting his domination over Gianni. The killing of the sparrow hawk also symbolizes the destruction of the masculine activity of hunting and the bird as symbolic of phallic power. There are always more reasons for a configuration of characters and actions than appear on the surface or in the sheer entertainment force of the story. This story is surely entertaining and bawdy, one of the stories frequently dropped from editions considered fit for an impressionable reader. Most obviously, it turns expectations upside down. If we ask what number this story bears, we are apt to say, number 79. But if we count from the beginning, then we recognize this is story number sixty-nine, sessanta-nove, soixante-neuf, sixty-nine. As soon as we recognize the numeration that belongs to this story, we see that it is indeed all upside down, in both action, character, and uses of the ears and eyes. Like the metaphor expressed by the number sixty-nine, well known in all European traditions, the number designating a specific sexual posture, this story metaphorically designates the reversals translated from sex to story, from story to sex. It thus becomes one of the many instances in which Boccaccio metaphorizes storytelling as a sexual act and a sexual act as a means of eliciting and hearing and then interpreting a story. Decameron, as its cognomen declares, is a go-between, a pimp, a “Prencipe Galeotto.” In taking the subtitle of his book from canto 5 of Dante’s Inferno, Boccaccio is not only weaving his work into that of a noble predecessor but also setting a topos in the form of a warning to his readers. We should be alert to the presence of a sexual meaning in the narratives, even in those stories where the obvious surface fails immediately to suggest sexual allusions and actions. Often the surface indicates that one should look beneath the seemingly obvious to something hidden, and that may be of a sexual nature. That presence would reassert the topos of the pimp, the go-between, the one who panders, but in a special narrational sense that Boccaccio explores and exemplifies not only in the content of many of the stories but in the interpretational acts the stories require. Stories are pimps. Reading a story is to be solicited by a pimp, for writers or tellers of stories are seducers. They lead us to form connections that may be illicit, for they seduce in the sense that they suggest violations of norms in our political, moral, and religious life. They reveal to the reader, if the reader knows how to read penetratingly, thoughts that might not be entertained if the story were not structured as a seducer. Once again, the book tells its readers how it is to be read. It also tells us that the book may be sexually assertive, even assaulting, in a sense that Boccaccio perhaps knew from the ancient Greek world he so much longed to understand.

114 Interpretative Method for a

decameron Tale

We might say, basing the interpretation on an ancient Greek way of metaphorizing writing and reading, that the narrator of this story pulls the reader into the position of “sixty-nine.” That is, the reader is turned upside down by the narrator, who has the power to reverse our topological expectations: we read the story somewhat befuddled, as is Nicostratus, for it takes a while to get turned right side up. If that describes our experience with the story, we can ask ourselves if this is a common or understood relationship between writer and reader. We ought to give thought to how we readers are used, put upon, seduced, and sexually transformed into the object of a writer’s metaphoric intentions. Storytelling and storyhearing create transactions between teller and listener, the most intimate interactions we have with one another beyond and beside the sexual. Stories have always been understood to create sexual situations not only because they frequently represent just such themes but also because the transaction itself can lead to a joining of bodies in ways that, to the politically and morally repressed, create a threat. Stories overcome and break down inhibitions that obtain in the ordinary transactions of life. Storytelling segregates the everyday, pushes it away, to establish an enclosure within which the rules of conduct can be changed. Most obvious in its power to allow violations of ordinariness is the segregation created by dramatic playacting. Storytelling, the simple central fact of playacting, becomes the setting for anxiety-arousing experiments in behavior, experiments, to be sure, long contemplated and recognized within the fantasy life we all entertain. We are all aware of the fear this engenders when we recall the violent opposition that stage plays always arouse in some part of the citizenry. The restrictions on storytelling—so well known in the Platonic dialogues, perhaps part of Boccaccio’s narrative world—are so common and repetitive in the history of representations that we can assume a recurrent censorship and moral opposition when the representation is sexual. Therefore, in thinking about this story, day 7, story 9, we should keep in mind the traditional way of representing the activity of representation in storytelling itself. The openness of Greek aesthetic speculation states the case most uninhibitedly: reading is a relationship metaphorically expressive of a sexual relationship between the erastes and the eronemos, that is, between the older aggressive lover and the younger beloved he buggers. The reader is the eronemos; the writer or storyteller is the erastes. Boccaccio clearly understood the metaphoric sexual underpinnings of writing and reading. Whether or not he came to that metaphoric transfer himself, Latin inscriptions that Boccaccio could well have known are built

Interpretative Method for a

decameron Tale

115

on the same metaphor. Recent work on Greek and Latin inscriptions has discovered a continuity in the uses of the writer-reader relationship as essentially sexual. Jesper Svenbro cites the explicit analogy in Latin that descends from early Greek inscriptions: “the one who will write is the lover, the one who will read gets buggered” (“amat qui scribet pedicatur qui leget”). And “I, who am reading, am buggered” (“ego qui lego pedicor”). Catullus uses the same metaphor: “I will bugger you” (“pedicabo ego vos”) appears “in a poem addressed to malevolent readers.”9 Such Latin poetic thought expresses a stage of reading-writing that slowly reformulated the relationship as literacy extended its reach, especially to women. By the trecento, Boccaccio had developed for his own literary aspirations a metaphor expressive of a culture that had fully internalized reading. Now, it is women as well as men who are penetrated by the writer, and the aggressive use of the word, the letter, and rhetorical attack is directed against insensitive and gross men. Such thought, directed to women, is stimulated in the author by the fleshand-blood ladies he knows who are his true Muses. They are not at all to be compared to the Muse of poetry that traditionally had been invoked by artists hoping to launch their work on an inspirational charge she would provide. Lovely ladies, sexually seductive, willingly amorous, long for the creative response that their presence will provide, and they are Boccaccio’s Muses: in return for their love, he endows them with wisdom, generated in the heat of narrational sexuality. In the Decameron stories, the number of the day and the number of the story can be understood in terms of any number system of notation. Here, day 7, story 9, as I have interpreted it, presupposes Boccaccio’s familiarity specifically with Arabic numerals and their shapes as themselves metaphors for sexual postures. Although historical accounts of numeral dispersion around Europe from the Middle East differ, it is generally agreed that in 967, when Gerbert, who later became Pope Sylvester II, went to Spain, he learned about the Arabic numerals one through nine, though perhaps not about zero. And there is clear evidence that numerals in the Arabic form appear on coins and in manuscripts from as early as 1138 and right through Boccaccio’s lifetime (1313–1376). Boccaccio was known to be an assiduous pursuer of ancient and foreign knowledge; he mentions John the Scot in one of his stories (day 8, story 9—in the same position but a day later than the story here), and it was to John the Scot that Fibonacci dedicated his Liber Abaci of 1228, in which Arabic numerals are used. John the Scot (also knows as Michael Scot) knew Arabic and in his later years was appointed astronomer-astrologer and

116 Interpretative Method for a

decameron Tale

general scientific knower (he was called “the Wizard”) by Frederick II. It is thought that he was responsible for bringing Greek philosophical and scientific texts into Western Europe through translations from the Arabic. On the basis of this evidence and its impact on Florentine commerce, which found Arabic numerations tremendously liberating in keeping business records, it can be assumed that Boccaccio did know and most probably used Arabic notations. In Fibonacci’s book, the first chapter is devoted to “reading and writing of numbers in the Hindu-Arabic system.” At that time, Fibonacci wrote the numerals from right to left. Later, in his discovery of the so-called Fibonacci series, he wrote them 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on: from left to right. And thus I am suggesting that in setting out his one hundred stories, Boccaccio thought of their numeration in terms of the Arabic numbers that by the time of his work clearly included zero and numerals written from left to right.10 Just as Pyrrhus set out tasks for Lydia, he, the Pyrrhonian philosopher, sets out problems we must solve. Prominent in thematic repetition, and therefore signaling its importance, is the phrase “before your very eyes.” It is first sounded in Pyrrhus’s demand that Lydia kill Nicostratus’s favorite sparrow hawk “in presenzia,” which can be taken to mean “in front of him, in his presence, before his very eyes.” And Pyrrhus admonishes—though pretending—Nicostratus and Lydia, whom he claims to see making love: “How can you be so brazen as to allow it in my presence? Do you think I am blind? . . . you have plenty of fine bedrooms in the house—why don’t you go and do it in one of those? It would surely be more seemly than doing it here in my presence [in mia presenzia].” From then on, the phrases “before your very eyes” and “distorting vision” and the complaint that distortion “must emanate from the pear tree” and “the miraculous way a man’s eyesight could be affected by climbing a pear tree” mark out a pathway through the text (p. 541). In this tale, philosophically driven, taking up for consideration epistemological problems set by the Pyrrhonian school of Skepticism, yet able to entertain such problems in the context of a bawdy folk tale, Boccaccio leads the reader to think through an age-old testing of the senses. In claiming this affinity between day 7, story 9, and the writings of Sextus Empiricus, I am, like Nicostratus, learning to use my eyes and am helped in sharpening my vision by the opening sections of Sextus’s book, Outlines of Pyrrhonism. In chapter 11, Sextus writes: “The criterion, then, of the Sceptic School is, we say, the appearance, giving this name to what is virtually the sense-presenta-

Interpretative Method for a

decameron Tale

117

tion. For since this lies in feeling and involuntary affection, it is not open to question. Consequently, no one, I suppose, disputes that the underlying object has this or that appearance; the point in dispute is whether the object is in reality such as it appears to be.”11 In Boccaccio’s way of putting the tests for viridicality in experience, one’s seeing clearly “may be affected by climbing a pear tree;” and in this story Boccaccio plays on distorted vision and the phrase “in mia presenzia,” which, for a storyteller, has a further implication: it reminds us of an essential aestheticartistic reality. What we imagine and hear in storytelling is placed “before our very eyes,” yet it is, as we say, fiction; sometimes we say it is mere story, and sometimes we deny it any truth value of the sort with which we endow observations in nature. Pretending to see in the context of this story stands in contrast with its claim to truth, that which is, narratively speaking, really happening. This story compels us to think through the differences that must be understood when we work out our epistemologies where storytelling and observations of human behavior as reported in fiction are concerned. Theory of knowing, as dealt with by philosophers, frequently passes over the differences between story and actual happening. Yet our understanding of ourselves and our stance in the world requires us to integrate the place of story in everyday life with the events of everyday life. For Boccaccio, that demand is put on us at the very beginning of Decameron when the mise-enscène places us in Florence in the midst of the plague. Right from the start, we must separate out reality, the description of the devastating black death, and, as we have seen, the deeper truths of story. The men and women who leave the plague-ridden city of Florence to live in the countryside know the horrors of the black death; their intention is to overcome that fear with philosophical storytelling. The whole of Decameron poses a traditional philosophical question: can mere fiction tell the truth? And what claim can it make when it is entertained in the midst of the harshest reality, the destroying plague? May it be the case that “mere fiction” tells truth more surely than everyday experience in the world of suffered and perceived events? Boccaccio seems to be asserting the power of story to open our eyes, to place before our very eyes truths otherwise obscured. And one force that obscures basic philosophic truths is the reality of human ignorance, suffering, and death. Let us then consider the way story 9 of day 7 presents its arguments. When Pyrrhus climbs the pear tree to throw down pears for Lydia, he pretends to see her and Nicostratus in a sexual embrace. He shouts to them: “I am wide awake, and so are you, it appears. In fact, you’re putting so much vigour into it that if this tree were to be given so hard a buffeting,

118 Interpretative Method for a

decameron Tale

there wouldn’t be a single pear left on it” (p. 541). Then when Nicostratus climbs the tree and sees Lydia and Pyrrhus making love—which they in fact do—he is led to believe that his senses have deceived him. In mock wrath, Lydia demands the pear tree be cut down and concludes with these words: “It would be a much better idea to smash Nicostratus over the head with it, since without any reason whatsoever, he allowed the eyes of his intellect to be so easily blinded; for no matter how much you thought you saw what you said you did, Nicostratus, you never should have allowed the judgment of your mind to imagine or admit that it was true” (p. 543). Lydia berates Nicostratus for demanding a rational explanation for what he saw. He should recognize the feebleness of his senses and also the reality of human impotence; our constant encountering of illusions should lead us to question our senses as means to the representation of reality. Truly, Lydia seems to say, the pear tree must be the source of the illusion. The pear tree must be bewitched. Cutting it down removes one source of human illusion and hallucination. But, of course, we know Lydia does not believe the tree to be bewitched. Yet she says she does in order to mislead and further confuse the already befuddled Nicostratus. Considering the attack on the pear tree in these terms, we are expected to see, then, that Lydia invokes, as she makes fun of, a distinction much discussed in theology, the distinction between faith and reason, and that leads us then to recognize a cleverly interwoven theological satire in this story. Thomas Aquinas defended a traditional distinction: human reason has its domain of empirical problem solving, and faith its domain of matters reason cannot argue over. Yet Boccaccio’s story of Lydia and Nicostratus in their argument over the reliability of the senses poses an epistemological problem to the Thomistic distinction. If the pear tree is the source of an illusion, it must be cut down. What of the illusions entertained in religion? What is their source, and ought that source be revealed and extirpated? Or are all religious truths veridical in some untestable sense? But if that is so, how are we to prevent the judgments of reason from being misled by internal blindness induced by passion, or repression, or external authority, the force of which can convince us that certain illusions are true? Mind must take command when we perceive contradictions. There is a contradiction in experience if we accept certain theological “truths,” especially those having to do with domains beyond our sensory capacities. Can human beings sustain the faith-reason distinction? Boccaccio suggests through the interpretation of this story that we cannot. And thus he is really pointing the way to an epistemology of trial and error, evidence and

Interpretative Method for a

decameron Tale

119

the weighing of evidence through reason. There is no room in Boccaccio’s epistemology for faith, faith in this case in those matters that Lydia insists on: faith in the moral uprightness of an honest wife. So in the final analysis, though we must give up faith, we must also give up reliance on the mere appearance of things. That which we see may not be what truly is. At the same time, our epistemology must favor the senses over imagination’s wild fantasies. The real world is like a Decameron story: it presents a surface of entertainment, whose appearances must be systematically doubted, yet its appearances must be first internalized before we engage in interpretation. And once we begin our interpretation, we must not lose touch with the facts of the narrative. A sane, experience-based stance seeks its interpretative extrapolation if each story is to realize its inner truth. The overarching truth of the one hundred stories reveals a hidden depth of elaboration that may even include contradictions to the surface evidence. A persistent emphasis on the pear tree, as on hallucination, distorted vision, and seeing what is not there, alerts the reader to other hidden references in this story. It is an upside-down plot, to be sure, and it brings that plot into conjunction with one of the church fathers who dwelt on a particular pear tree, and the scandal of sexuality, that inevitable expression of humanity’s fallen nature, that impulse that cannot be denied and must be satisfied in private. For these references, the reader must recall St. Augustine’s Confessions and City of God. In book 2, section 4, of the Confessions, Augustine relates his wicked, seemingly unmotivated theft of pears. And we must listen to intense selfscourging on the part of the thief for eating the pears, that, he now realizes, gained savor through sin. Augustine’s taking of the fruit is a kind of rape, and here we might adopt Boccaccio’s image of “pumping the pear tree” (dimenate—dimenasse) as a vulgar yet accurate description of the youthful assault, given its unconscious meaning. Yet a deeper philosophical exploration goes on alongside Augustine’s superficial self-laceration, and that is an inquiry into the nature of attraction, the eyes, the imitation by a boy of the Lord’s powers, but in “a perverse and wicked way.” Perversion follows misuse of the eyes in Augustine’s account. Misuse of the eyes follows perversion in Boccaccio’s story. If Augustine had been an actor like Lydia, he would have chopped down the pear tree, as she did. But Augustine transforms the pears into symbols of sin. Boccaccio transforms what might be thought by some to be sin into symbols of the exercise of intellect that leads to liberation and physical pleasure. And that is the purpose of the book: the book is a pimp, so Lydia’s acts

120 Interpretative Method for a

decameron Tale

are to be seen as the triumph of sexual freedom and independence over the inhibitions of both persons and narrative. This is a story that does not need to hide its true nature in closed rooms, for it celebrates sexuality openly. That theme, too, refers the listener to the voice of Augustine in his comments on sexuality in The City of God. He begins his tirade on sexuality by remarking that the sexual organs can only be motivated by lust, and “the sexual act itself which is performed with such lust, seeks privacy.”12 He then turns to excoriate the Cynics: “The Cynics, those canine philosophers, failed to observe this fact when they put forward an opinion directly opposed to human modesty, an opinion truly canine, that is to say, filthy and indecent. They hold that since the sexual act is lawful between husband and wife, one should not be ashamed to engage in it in public and to have marital intercourse in any street or square.” And Augustine concludes, “Human nature is . . . ashamed about lust and rightly ashamed” (book 14, chap. 20). Well, not our Lydia, not our Pyrrhus. They stand as contradictions to Augustinian preaching and in that respect reverse some of the images that have come down to us from the tradition, images that Boccaccio is powerfully negating, just as he is turning upside down the trope of tasks imposed. One image in particular, derived from my looking at visual depictions, paintings that could be added to Boccaccio’s text, comes to my mind as I read the story of the pear tree; it is a painted image to complement the story images Boccaccio paints so vividly. We know that Boccaccio insists, in the epilogue of the book, that the writer not only possesses talents as a painter but that the writer ought to have as much freedom as the painter to invent his images out of his imagination. This usurpation of the sense of artistic wholeness, Decameron as a Gesamtkunstwerk, is demonstrated in the interpretatively central day 6, in the story of Giotto (story 5) and in the story of Father Cipolla (story 10), who is, of course, one of many representations of the author, Boccaccio. It is Father Cipolla who can draw as well as write, who commands the pen-feather as well as the brush-charcoal. The accompanying image I conjure up as I read about Lydia and Pyrrhus is of Thomas Aquinas sitting on a throne, with Averroes prostrate at his feet. The painting is Florentine, trecento. Boccaccio may well have known the painting; certainly, it depicts conflicts that filled the synods and generated disputes over doctrine of which Boccaccio is well aware. He certainly makes fun of Aquinas in many of the stories, and he would seem for his part to take the view of Averroes seriously, that is, that the human intellect is one, that there is no personal immortality, that the universe is eternal, hence no Last Judgment, and therefore Decameron, insofar as it favors Averroes over

Interpretative Method for a

decameron Tale

121

Aquinas, implicitly argues for a denial of several basic Christian beliefs. We know that Averroistic teachings were condemned in 1277 but survived in Italy, especially at Padua, in the trecento. I take the story of the pear tree to be another in which there are subtle, that is latent, to-be-excavated-and-revealed, inner meanings. The sixty-nine/ sessanta-nove story reverses the teachings of Augustine, just as it also reverses the teachings of Aquinas. Since the church was split between the teachings of the two, and since Thomas had been openly rejected by several pronouncements during the thirteenth century, Boccaccio appoints himself a synod of one to put both Christian theologians in a limbo of philosophical and theological contradiction. Story sixty-nine turns not only basic narrational but also basic religious traditions upside down.

chapter 5

The Creation of a Total Work of Art

E

very large, complex work of art implies a theory of art that can be deduced from its external historical and internal formal conditions of creation. Boccaccio’s Decameron not only provides within itself a method for interpreting its stories, explained and illustrated in the previous chapters, but thinks itself alongside its sister arts in the trecento. Most obvious in Decameron are its competition with and interiorizing of painting, the dominant art of its time. How it sees itself in relationship to painting contributes arguments to ways of understanding its own mode of representation. I have already brought together Buffalmacco’s Triumph of Death with Decameron to describe their ways of animating one another. Boccaccio lived in a painterly culture in which images provided a visual enlargement of his interrelated stories. There are contemporary paintings depicting a visual mode of story representation, sometimes referred to as “The Tree of Life,” in which a large number of painted roundels each contain a scene that is a story or a story illustration (see fig. 5.1). While we immediately recognize basic differences when we set Boccaccio’s stories beside Pacino di Bonaguida’s “Tree of Life,” we can readily imagine them as in converse with one another. They establish a dialogue through which each story, from a scene in Decameron on one side and the roundels on the other, create painterly-visual and linguistic-visual complementary expressions. While I do not

Image has been suppressed

5.1

Pacino da Bonaguida, Crucifixion, Accademia, Florence, Italy. Scala/Art Resource,

New York.

The Creation of a Total Work of Art

125

attribute deep religious commitments to Boccaccio, there are in these two modes of representation shared drives to narration that characterize the trecento fascination with storytelling. In both works of art, there is a narrator-creator who tells stories: the storyteller who reports the stories heard, and the crucified Christ out of whose body stories as images emanate. Both storytellers created their stories in the context of Christian cosmology and myth. Pacino da Bonaguida painted his forty-eight images by translating stories from Bonaventura’s telling of the Christian story into its individual story scenes. Boccaccio created his tales in the face of, often in opposition to, religious narratives that gave structure to his inherited culture. Christ is crucified on the painted tree springing from the skull of Adam that lies beneath the tree’s roots. The iconographic presence of Adam tightens the knot between the two storytelling schemes, for Boccaccio also identifies with Adam, as I shall point out later on. Stories not only hang from the tree but embellish its base as well, so that if we peer closely we can see depictions of events told in books of the Bible, from Genesis and from the New Testament lives of saints. As a whole, the fresco can be understood as an imagistic counterpart to narrated stories. There are several such “Tree of Life” frescoes, the most impressive by Taddeo Gaddi and Pacino di Bonaguida, painted around 1300–10. At the same time, the city of Siena commissioned a great multipaneled painting by Duccio called the Maestà, (Majesty). Its central representation is the story of the Virgin in fifty or more scenes telling the great Bible stories (see fig. 5.2). Regarding it in its wholeness, one gets the impression of an unending generation of scenes that could be extended forever, very like the sense we get of Decameron’s generative power. Complex paintings were everywhere within the towns known to the brigata. In Pisa, closest to Boccaccio’s imaginative flights, Buffalmacco’s The Triumph of Death was created at about the same time as Decameron. It can be said that the three types of painting, Tree of Life, Majesty, and Triumph of Death, complement one another, as if the conscious religious hope that salvation awaits the morally good as a reward for the believer is balanced by the unconscious knowledge of a final mortality from which we never rise and for which we long in its own finality, since life becomes a burden at some point and its continuity, under whatever fantasy, unbearable. In that counterbalancing of belief, wish, and recognition, Buffalmacco’s story weaves together all the social and metaphysical elements that go to create the great tapestry of life, as Boccaccio wove it in his book. On the left of the fresco, we see three corpses identified as lying in the tombs of Pisan nobles buried in the Holy Land. No more ironic depiction of the futility of the human search

126 The Creation of a Total Work of Art Image has been suppressed

5.2 Duccio, Maesta, Museu dell’Opera Metropolitana, Siena, Italy. Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

for salvation can be found in all of trecento art. In contrast, the garden in which the seven women and three men sit, as if a woven tapestry, illustrates the true salvation, that of art. Below, in horrifying contrast, are beggars and cripples who long for death. Such a stark contrast of the salvational power of beauty set against the misery of suffering humanity provides Boccaccio with a realistic counterpart to the Tree of Life. Violently aggressive angels attack the lowly outside the protective garden and lead our eyes to the Last Judgment and a pictorial representation of Dante’s hell, as described in the Inferno. By moving from painted walls to inscribed book, we are able to realize a cultural totality in which the two arts of the linguistic and the material reinforce one another (see figs. 1.9 and 1.10). As a work of art, Decameron strives for an artistic totality, one that stretches beyond painting toward a total work of art, for in addition to painting, music, dance, and poetry round out each day’s storytelling, expanding the aesthetic capacities of the book. Together, alongside the visual, they engender the total work of art, something like the nineteenth-century European ideal promoted by Richard Wagner. Decameron is certainly that, but I do not want to suggest a uniqueness in either Boccaccio’s or Wagner’s achievement as inventors of artistic complex-

The Creation of a Total Work of Art

127

ity and completeness. The total work of art as an aim of art exists in almost every cultural tradition. Certainly, Greek tragic and comic drama interwove speech, song, dance, instrumental music, and mise-en-scène. The artistic enactments of so-called primitive people almost always achieve something on the order of the total work of art, the Gesamtkunstwerk, as it came to be called under Wagner’s ambitious conception. It seems a part of the human drive to representation that enactments include material, tonal, and linguistic elements. Eye, ear, mouth, speech, body interfuse and blend as necessities in acts of representation. In the total work of art, stories and storytelling control and direct the central ideas, providing a scenario for the totality. In the cases of Greek tragic drama and the enactments of cultures far removed from the West, a storehouse of myth gives life to representations, and myths are stories. Telling the stories calls forth far more than simply saying through voice; to tell stories, body, gesture, rhythm, song, hand, foot come alive. The Gesamtkunstwerk seems to be a natural cultural enactment realized in performance, because performance makes demands on each sense modality and on bodily movement and rests on a synesthesia in which all senses contribute to each other. Traditionally, as in ancient drama, music, dance, song, poetry naturally spring forth as the story unfolds. Just such a totality was realized in Decameron. Later on, in Western Europe, inhibited feelings about the body and a wish to purify the arts forced a separation among representations, with the result that the individual arts tended to be isolated, though there are many exceptions as in the plays of Shakespeare. A certain drive toward purity led to a narrowing of the ways in which Boccaccio was interpreted and, of course, a wish to make his book morally elevating, denying its coarser themes. Removing the human physical body from the text suppresses a totality of expression. The body, whatever expressive modalities it relies on, possesses expressive capacities that combine, merge, reinforce, and explicate one another. Such orchestration of modalities based on the body characterizes early societies and has been explored in modernity through reinventing, as it were, ancient and foreign traditions. Modernity’s theatrical explorations, as in the work of Antonin Artaud, seek reincarnation of the total work of art. Artaud writes: “Practically speaking, we want to resuscitate an idea of total spectacle by which the theater would recover from the cinema, the music hall, the circus, and from life itself what has always belonged to it.”1 Decameron explores just such theatrical coreinforcements but in a form we might think of as a score to be read, heard, interpreted. As such, it makes demands on the reader/hearer that go beyond most inscribings. We give ourselves over to song, dance, expressive gesture, as we perform our inter-

128 The Creation of a Total Work of Art

pretations. Of course, in realizing a full performance of the score, there are difficulties to overcome. Reading a book is a solitary imagining. Yet these can be imaginings in which we perform for ourselves. In overcoming reader reticence, we put ourselves, so far as possible, into a Boccaccian frame of mind and sensibility. That implies imagining the Italian trecento in which Boccaccio was thinking in terms of a varied, complex, almost encyclopedic set of stories, as if mythic in their fullness. He had a vision of a total work of art that would encompass all the arts. This vision was shaped by Boccaccio’s passionate need to encompass all stories, and to that end he composed an encyclopedia of myth, Genealogia Deorum Gentilium (Genealogy of the gentile gods). In fifteen books, that huge collection saves the stories of the ancient past. They are transmitted as a monument to classical imagination that ought to be a model for our time but also call for interpretation, as do the stories he himself wrote. We are guided in our interpretative techniques by studying the myths, for, as Boccaccio says in his introduction, “These myths contain more than one single meaning. They may indeed be called ‘polyseme,’ that is of multifold sense.”2 His own storytelling assumes such multiple levels and therefore the necessity of interpretation. The creation of an encyclopedia of myth was driven by the need to know all story possibilities and not necessarily to repeat the myths in Decameron, although themes and scenes from them peep out in various stories. In his pursuit to understand the ways of past narrative consciousness, Boccaccio became anthropologist as well as antiquarian, laying the foundation for his own storytelling. He successfully studied a past and somewhat distant culture as an anthropologist today might do, yet his own trecento world always sits in the very center of his art. An essential aspect of that world was its theological and philosophical preoccupations. Boccaccio realized his total work of art as participating in the thought of his time, such that the stories move as vehicles of philosophic inquiry, carried on in sheer delight of fascinating character and event. This is not to say that Boccaccio thought of stories as functions, as an index to themes of thought; his research has a deeper purpose: to think through the possibility of merging all the arts into one great work of art. Thus his stories “think” as well as “tell.” In myth, these capacities together are realized, a power of myth that before Boccaccio was explored in the Platonic dialogue. Boccaccio’s competition was not tragic drama, as it had been for Plato, but rather the trecento culture of song, dance, poetry, and painting (see fig. 5.3).

Image has been suppressed

5.3

Giotto di Bondone, scenes on the left wall, Arena Chapel, Padua, Italy. Alinari/Art

Resource, New York.

130 The Creation of a Total Work of Art

Just as Plato set himself against and in the midst of the tragic-comic competition that determined so much of Athenian civic life, so Boccaccio set himself in the midst of all the arts against which he had to compete. As we read, we map the many ways Boccaccio presents himself within and without the book, again in somewhat the same way we discover Plato’s presence through a variety of surrogates in the dialogues. Just as Plato reflects on the ways philosophy can be shaped in the dialogues, so Boccaccio reflects self-consciously on the many ways stories can be the mirrors of storytelling as such and, of course, the many ways the storyteller can appear in his stories. Perhaps he enters into more various artistic personae than does Plato, although the character Socrates endows himself with the artistic powers of poet, preacher, lover, and civic critic. In regarding himself as descendant of two great storytellers, Apuleius and Dante, Boccaccio endowed himself with the freedom to draw on folk story and simply the urban talk of his time, and he was singularly free from great epic tellings of the sort we know were common in the North, especially Ireland, Wales, England, and France. There, storytellers could pillage the stories of King Arthur, the Grail legend, Viking explorations, and a vast story trove. It is a remarkable fact that to Dante and Boccaccio those legends, while known, and referred to, were not part of a storyteller’s direct inheritance. As Marc Bloch observes in his great study Feudal Society, special historical forces are at work in the creation of Italian linked stories because of a lack of a native epic: “[Italy] had no native epic, nor does she seem ever to have had one. What is the reason? It would be the height of temerity to pretend to solve so difficult a problem in a few words. One solution nevertheless deserves to be suggested. In the feudal period, Italy was one of the few countries where, among the nobility, as also no doubt among the merchants, a large number of persons were able to read. If the taste for the past did not express itself in songs, might it not be because it found satisfaction in reading the Latin chronicles?”3 Bloch goes on, in his speculation, to say that the epic “exerted a strong influence on men’s imagination.”4 Given Italy’s lacking the epic in poetry and song, it occurs to me that the power of the poet Dante’s great “epic” and the stimulation to the Florentine imagination of Boccaccio’s stories took hold with great force on the urban educated reader. In the place of a traditional inherited epic, the Italian reader had a homegrown poem and story cycle that almost immediately became embedded in the culture. In fact, nowhere else do we find contemporary linguistic enactments having such power and influence.

The Creation of a Total Work of Art

131

I am suggesting a way to think about Decameron as not only a total work of art but a work of art whose completeness, whose drive to artistic wholeness, came into being as a response to the very lack of the epic tradition that Marc Bloch talks about. There was a need to establish a work that would satisfy all sense modalities, all aesthetic modes of expression, a work to give each art its place in a conception of “epic” that can be for Italy what the legendary stories were for the North. In contrast to the art of painting and characters in stories who are painters, Decameron names no composers or music performers, though we assume their presence is implied by the descriptions of melody in song. instrumentation, and the expressive power of song that concludes each day. Each song is a love story in verse set to music. Unfortunately, music is the least available art form from the trecento, the most difficult to assemble into a hearing that might accord with that of the performers who sing and dance. Little has survived, though we do have a few notations and even some of Boccaccio’s verses set to music.5 Trecento ears and our ears, their sense of performance and ours, their very mode of sound production, intonation, pitch, expressive use of instrumental performance may be so different from ours that what we think of as a reconstruction of Ars Nova and trecento song and dance may be remote from aesthetic reality. We can at least “hear” trecento cadences, musical intervals, and rhythms through a few surviving manuscripts even if we are shut out from the totality as an integrated performance. To gain some access to the storyworld of music, we can imagine the ten songs, dances, poems that end each day in Decameron as voices in an operatic entertainment. Then, expanding that imaginative reconstruction, we can think of the book as a huge libretto waiting to be performed by our response to its descriptions and actual verses. Music and dance can join painting in completing the work as a total work of art, a grand operatic creation to outperform even Wagner’s Ring.6 To complement Boccaccio’s conception of a total work of art, trecento painting provides a cultural panorama that contains representations of all the arts. Music, dance, painting, storytelling, architecture, and costume all find representations in the great fresco works of Boccaccio’s time, and each had an important place in the cultural life of Italian cities. To be educated was to be aware and appreciative of all the arts and of their totality. The idea of a total work of art was common and inspiring. In the case of music as such, we might gain a sense of what might have been heard had we been able to listen in. I imagine something on the order of songs we know as madrigals,

132 The Creation of a Total Work of Art

composed at a later time, for example, by Monteverdi (1567–1643), because the madrigal as song came into being around 1340, in the Florentine school of Jacopo da Bologna and Francesco Landini. A confluence of French Ars Nova and Middle East folk song can be heard in the few surviving songs we attempt to reproduce, however inadequately.7 The young men and women who perform at day’s end sing alone, accompanied by lute and other instruments; the songs are not complex and do not follow the general trecento song structure, which requires two voices. That limitation is probably due to Boccaccio’s need to present each character, through the tone and affect of the verse, as having an inner life hidden from the others. Speculation by members of the brigata on songs’ meanings follow several of the performances. While I cannot isolate character individuality for each of the ten storytellers, hints and sly innuendoes about love relationships, losses, and aspirations may be reflected in the songs they sing. Efforts to identify individuals can be amusing, even if only slightly convincing. The French scholar Henri Hauvette thought of a way to identify the meanings of the first three songs by studying one of the frescoes in Santa Maria Novella. I’ve already pointed out that the paintings surrounding the seven women and three men in the church where they meet are significant presences for the days of storytelling to come. Hauvette suggests that the characters of the women might be partially disclosed by studying the St. Thomas fresco in the Spanish Chapel and therefore discloses another way in which painting might contribute to the idea of a total work of art.8 Hauvette argues that it is likely the St. Thomas fresco, Aquinas enthroned, was present or under construction when Decameron was being written and then makes an interesting observation regarding the images: there may be a reflection of some of the women depicted in the lower band of the fresco within the ballads that conclude each day, particularly those of days 1, 2, and 3. He suggests that the first three songs refer to the first three women on the right, who represent grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, and that these disciplines are the “loves” referred to in the first three poems. Those loves, then, are personified in the images of these women in the fresco (see fig. 1.4). Hauvette notes that there is a basic difference between the song verses following days 1, 2, and 3 and the remaining seven songs. The first three might be construed as representing grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric in that order and thus would signify the three disciplines or sciences of the trivium. It is difficult for us to confirm this through a reduced reproduction. Looking as closely as one can at the fresco The Triumph of Thomas Aquinas, one sees three women who could be identified as Hauvette surmises, and

The Creation of a Total Work of Art

133

then we would be faced with the verses themselves, perhaps composed, as Hauvette argues, with allegorical intent. The first three poems then would demand a distinct interpretative awareness, while the final seven would be less demanding and are taken, Hauvette believes, from poems written by Boccaccio in his youth. All the above is speculative, but it is obvious that the ballads as a group sing of passionate romantic love and sexual desire in a poetic form of the sort the stories themselves generally exclude. One essential contribution to the storyworld made by the ballads is sentimental affect, deep emotion; they are striking in their intensity, longing, and hints at unrequited love. Their overall qualities may be summed up in these words: that the songs present “the most variegated distinctions of love, sadness, or gaiety, and especially that sensual rapture that is diffused throughout almost all his youthful works.”9 The song-poetry expresses a romantic view of life and love lacking in most, but not all, the stories. Love, sadness, longing, and gaiety, so forcefully sung in the poetry, account for the attractiveness of these moments of revelation to composers of Boccaccio’s time and later. Several of the verses were set to music in his own day; some after his death. One setting that survived is the poem “Non so quali mi voglia,” set to music by Lorenzo Masini. Music and singing contributed in essential ways to ceremony and worship, a part of religious life that Boccaccio refers to once, in day 7, story 1, in which a foolish husband belongs to a singing group whose hymns were known as “laudi spirituali.” The laud singers were a lay brotherhood whose origin, it is believed, was part of a religious fervor that swept Italy before and at the dreadful time of the black death. It is characteristic of Decameron to present laud singers through the person of a foolish husband benighted by religious silliness, and thus the anxiety and fear that underlay the songs of penance is metamorphosed into a study of the ways laity and friars got along within a tightly knit society. The story begins this way: There once lived in Florence . . . a master-weaver whose name was Gianni Lotteringhi, a man more successful in his calling than sensible in other matters, for although he was a simple sort of fellow, he was regularly elected as the leader of the laud-singers at Santa Maria Novella, and had to conduct their rehearsals, and he was often given other such trifling little duties, so that all in all he had a mighty high opinion of himself, yet the only reason these functions were entrusted to him was that, being comfortably off, he frequently used to supply the friars with a good meal.

134 The Creation of a Total Work of Art

These latter, since they often wrung a pair of hose or a cloak or a scapular out of him, taught him some good prayers and gave him a copy of the Paternoster in the vernacular and the song of Saint Alexis and the lament of Saint Bernard and the laud of Lady Matilda and a whole lot of other drivel, all of which he greatly prized, and preserved with the greatest of loving care for the good of his soul.10

Laud singing, established in 1310, began very simply, all voices in unison, but then developed considerable complexity with the singing of parts, and therefore practice for performance became more demanding. It was generated by religious fervor that pleaded for salvation from annihilation and under that anxiety produced some very fine music, subtle and elaborate. One historian of music observed that the singing is so sophisticated that “it is difficult to believe that these more elaborate melodies were ever sung by a company of penitents, particularly if they were walking in procession and engaged in flagellation. They demanded the skill and judgment of the expert soloist.”11 By the time laud singing was tamed as a performance in the church of Santa Maria Novella, the special place for this set of stories, the voices of penitents sounded to Boccaccio as an object of narrative satire. Such are the powers of storytelling that it can represent as it insinuates a stark reality and in this way puts the storyteller into a position to be a political, social, and religious critic. Decameron stories more readily assume that critical perspective because so many stories represent urban life within which the existence of a total work of art cannot overlook contradictions, such as those generated by Florentine laud singing. The total work of art in modernity, as in past traditions, reflects the city in its many representational powers because it brings together all the arts. Urban density encourages, for us, the return to a form of cultural expression that quite naturally comes into expressive life where creative powers are a unified necessity, as in the cultural past. Human social life creates itself through language and imagistic representation. Eye, ear, mouth, body express not only inner feeling and belief but also the need for cooperative actions. Wherever artistic expression comes into being, it has its foundation in the sensory capacities. All communal actions, artistic-expressive and civiccooperative, depend on these capacities. As they are developed in cultural actions, we project and imagine permanent forms in song, dance, story, myth, ritual. All these I have been referring to as “enactments.” The total work of art collects and organizes individual enactments into a collective: a total enactment. Total works of art function as modes of consolidation, unifica-

The Creation of a Total Work of Art

135

tion, and metaphoric mirrorings of the individual arts as they become one. Because of the many constituents and because of the synesthesia of sense modalities they effect, total works of art exhibit the several ways in which they are enactments. The term as I use it condenses several aspects of the representational actions that are constituents of enactments. To enact, first of all, has the sense of “to decree, to ordain,” and consistent with that sense of the term, the cultural products I have been describing have a constancy; they realize cultural permanence, which implies they last through generations of performers. To enact is also to inspire feelings in a person and audience, to actuate feelings, so in this sense the cultural events we find in a total work of art like Decameron elicit a range of feelings, affective responses, recollections, and anticipations of emotions to come. To enact further has the meaning “to perform, to make a representation through performance in a community.” Enactments involve persons who create for an audience a mimetic reality, a “true” realization when well executed in a meaningful performance. All these senses and aspects of enactment come through with increased intensity in a total work of art for the total work of art calls on song, dance, poetic language, settings, and stories. I think of this as a cultural calling stimulated by life in the city, where all aspects of enactment can be found to compose the total work of art. When the linguistic, material, and tonal modes of enactment join together in Decameron, we encounter an instance in a tradition that precedes and succeeds this one work. In our cultural world—we postmodern secular observers, possessors of all traditions—a total work of art comes to us as a reliving, in experience a kind of commemoration, as if it were a memorial, a presence in our lives that we entertain for its power to allow us to live what others before us have lived. It matters not that I cannot know firsthand the trecento world Boccaccio knew; I have a special cultural awareness and experience of that Boccaccian world and authorial perception of it through my internalization of this total work of art. It becomes part of my tradition and allows me to set trecento art into its own tradition insofar as I can know and experience it. The sense of cultural history of which I can take possession now internalizes a total work of art as an enactment. That process has been described by the philosopher F. R. Ankersmit: “The human mind is associative and feels an irresistible need to connect, to associate and to contextualize. . . . There are few things that require of us such a tremendous and apparently unnatural effort as the effort not to relate something to something else . . . so much so that our need to contextualize is almost always victorious.”12 In our internalization of enactments like Decameron, we associate and

136 The Creation of a Total Work of Art

contextualize, re-creating a world of the Italian past, giving a context to each story in which a manifest and a latent content interinanimate one another. The larger context for the entire total work of art is the city itself, now defined in its historical reality by the work itself. The enactment, so situated, takes on an envelope of social interactions. As we penetrate that envelope, we enter the trecento world as if a remembered past and come to experience it in its aesthetic preoccupations. A total work of art so considered summons up the past cultural reality as it exists for itself in our present as merely a book to read, or an opera to hear and see, or a collection in a museum to be known in filling it out into the visual, the linguistic, the tonal. Decameron, the total work of art, is there, waiting to be actualized, contextualized, and remembered. I emphasize “remembered” because we share the total work of art with other generations and with our contemporaries. We possess a work in common, both historically and immediately. The city, always a usual setting for storytelling in our stage of cultural evolution, has its origin in a distant past. That may account for themes, subjects, inquiries, and arguments we find in many stories; we might sum them up as community conflicts. It is not that stories omit simple moments when the individual confronts the self, nature, or one other person, but behind such musings and meetings stands the larger human community to which the individual belongs, has been exiled from, is in conflict with. Decameron not only opens in an urban setting but also sets many stories within the city. In this constancy, it continues and reinforces a preoccupation extending deeply into the past. Classical Greek epic and drama set their plots in cities, whose complexity of life offers opportunities for many kinds of human conflicts to unfold. Cities house peoples whose thoughts would be rather different in rural, wild, unpopulated settings. The city is, in its inclusiveness, a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, and properly sees itself in a total work of art. Nevertheless, at various critical times in the history of cities, it is their destruction that fascinates as it terrifies. We who live in New York are well aware of that. In the ancient Greek world, when cities were besieged and conquered by enemy armies, there was alongside such human violence another destroying threat, that of plague. Thucydides describes the destruction of Athens from disease within, and Homer describes the sickness induced by Apollo when Agamemnon violated Apollo’s priest. Until recently, we thought of these story plights as remote, on the one hand, and imaginary, on the other. In both cases, now close to our own imaginings, the story preserves the dread and the possibility we, too, can entertain. Decameron tells its stories under the direful canopy of the black death that drives

The Creation of a Total Work of Art

137

storytellers from the city, but all the stories remember and conjure up before our imaginations the city life of Florence and related cities in its present and cultural past, the past it knows about through story. It is in the context of city life that political motives and goals can be understood, and it is cities that nurture education, the promise Decameron holds out to the lovely ladies who have been denied the many educational benefits accorded men. Stories with this purpose must think city thoughts, not least how to reestablish civic virtue after a devastating plague that destroys the foundation of self-control under political and moral conscience. The book opens with a description of a city losing its sense of civic civil organization and obligation. The move of storytellers away from scenes of devastation has as its purpose the reestablishment of the self-composure and self-awareness that were lost under the threat of death, not simply the death of persons but the death of the city itself. For the city had always been, traditionally, personified as a woman over whom political powers, always male, fight. In that reality, the women who dwell in the city can become part of civic life only if protected and given political power. In his stories, Boccaccio endows real women, and therefore the city, with freedom to know and to act. In the great tradition of tragic dramas, a bit of which Boccaccio knew, the conflict within and over the city defined what it means to be a citizen, in terms that recognize the special place of one who belongs to the city as a proper and accepted resident. Cities besieged, whether by armies or plague, gave opportunities to storytellers to explore the delicate politics of women within the city. In that tradition, Decameron takes its place among the great thinkers and playwrights of the past Boccaccio knew of yet felt lay beyond his intimate knowledge. Despite his sense of remoteness, he understood just that kind of inquiry and added to it in his own remarkable way. In Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes, a tragedy that Boccaccio may have known indirectly through Statius’s Thebaid, the city is besieged, and rule threatened. The protagonist of the drama is the city itself, just as in Boccaccio’s storytelling the city and its social organization are chief characters. In both cases, the city has been cursed, in the first by Oedipus’s violation, and in the second by the black death. In each case, the audience—Athenian citizens, Florentine readers—sees the city set within the stories told, and the stories take the city as first character among all the characters. For its terrifying depictions of civic violence and the vulnerability of city life, Statius’s Thebaid was a popular work in Boccaccio’s world. The city enfolds all the actions, by persons of varying life purposes who live within the city and those whose intent it is to destroy the city.

138 The Creation of a Total Work of Art

When a teller of tales designs plots to reflect the everyday world of civic life and historical reality, as Boccaccio does, he must understand beliefs, manners, and social hierarchies and institutions, all interwoven with the political conflicts of his time. Since the Catholic Church in the trecento, despite the removal of its leadership to Avignon, in France, was politically and morally the dominant power shaping to a great extent both government and citizen conduct, the storyteller necessarily takes a stand on religious affairs and interprets them in their complexity, much as the ancient storyteller gave dramatic reinterpretation to politics through myth. As we have seen, Decameron carries out subtle criticism, outright attacks, and satirical misrepresentation of theological arguments through its stories. We today should become aware of the unusual conditions under which Boccaccio formed his criticisms and interpretations. The social, moral, and political crises engendered by the black death were so devastating that the storyworld of Decameron undertakes a unique task in the history of storytelling. The totality of stories there told transcends itself within the “real” world it depicts, for that real world is doomed to disappear. We reader/hearers, if we seriously understand our position, are to exchange a shifting, fast-dissolving reality for story, political-historical reality for story, the one for the other. That is, we are to overcome transitory suffering, mortal disease, for an eternal presence that will never decay. In that exchange, religion becomes a questionable presence, for that which it promises, that which it holds forth, contains no guarantee, no evidence of the truth it claims to possess. Those dying in the plague are promised eternal life in the world to come, yet the institution that promises and oversees last rites has proven hypocritical and corrupt. It cannot even maintain itself as an Italian civic presence and power. If stories such as those the Bible tells could suffice without the institution and the priesthood, then perhaps a cleansing would occur, and in an imagined moment—the Reformation before its time—Boccaccio’s characters could find consolation. This is but a historical fantasy, not to be realized. We must look back rather than forward to find the source for a critique of the sort Boccaccio imagines. Without possessing in a close mastering sense the philosophical critique of religion that ancient philosophy understood, Boccaccio was able to establish his own critique of religion, not in philosophy proper but in his art. In a transference from primitive ritual to regenerated narrative ceremony, the storytellers under Boccaccio’s supervision respond to the crises of their time with a cleansing aesthetic that we might believe rids the city of the plague and ushers in a new vision, perhaps utopian, but in any case salvationally aesthetic. Importantly, that aesthetic

The Creation of a Total Work of Art

139

rests on a mature and thoughtful recognition of the need to come together with a set of structured daily duties, acts, performances. Much is made in the telling of precise orders of meals, rest, hours of the day during which story enactments can be told and heard. However much Boccaccio appears free of religious ritual and religious belief, he follows an age-old pattern in the routines he so carefully describes. In his own preparation for telling stories, Boccaccio studied the close relationship between storytelling and disease through his pursuit of the mythic past. Often a myth recounts how a violation—murder, insult to a god, mistaken identity—is followed by disastrous punishment and then by a need for penance, often prescribed. A god or oracle dictates the terms of expiation: a temple to be built, a ritual slaughter to occur on the anniversary of the violation, a repetition through a recurring representation of the original fault or mistake or act of violence. While such undeviating. often rigid repetitions are common in mythic stories and rituals, when we today encounter a set of tales like those in Decameron, we read them as part of our everyday social exchange and entertainment. We do not think of them as necessary amends made to placate an angry god. We do not think that Boccaccio is telling an Iliad-like story, yet what he tells participates in cultural traditions common to all human social organizations. Storytelling is entertainment, but entertainment in compensation for something that needs to be repaid, reset, atoned for. Stories are a kind of payment, and one does not get stories free of charge. Then what are we paying for? We receive a great gift from storytellers like Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and many others: freedom from mythic rigidities, a vision of a life that fires the imagination, and truths about the civic world and about ourselves. In return, we must open ourselves to truths that often shock and frighten us. Serious storytelling demands a response that will let us come to see our own way in the world—we think ourselves modern folk—as flawed and confused and often filled with contradictions between beliefs and actions. We make payment in accepting a burden of work laid on us. We are expected to seek teachings, meanings, lessons, even wisdom and philosophic insights. Unable to face up to such gifts and the payment they exact, we may comfortably slide by the stories in immediate and superficial satisfactions. Those pleasures in themselves have their own justifications, ones we promote when we are, as it were, just passing through. But those pleasures in the surface—a necessary aesthetic attraction that can lead to greater understanding—hide the depths, and it is in the latent meanings that we get what we pay for, however much there is pain in coming up with the necessary thought.

140 The Creation of a Total Work of Art

To characterize this aspect of his art, Boccaccio introduces his own particular set of metaphoric images to characterize writing. Instead of calling on the mythic Muses or claiming to have gained guidance from a divine realm, he presents himself as one who has suffered in love. He comes before us as a master of erotic experience, some failed, some gratifying. Therefore he can be in understanding control of the themes announced at the beginning of each day. He nominates himself the prince of pimps, one whose love life, as we would call it, has taught him how to bring stories, persons, and philosophic ideas together. His closest relative is the Socrates of the Symposium and Phaedrus, though he may not have recognized himself in that role. As a Florentine poet, he gives first recognition to his great predecessor, Dante, master of poetic and transcendental love. Yet, despite that reverential recognition, Boccaccio describes himself with a private set of metaphors, for he claims in his storytelling to have little gravity and that he floats on the surface of water: “I confess that I do have weight, and in my time I have been weighed on numerous occasions; but I assure those ladies who have never weighed me that I have little gravity. On the contrary, I am so light that I float on the surface of water” (epilogue, p. 801).13 That comment in the concluding words of the author himself relates to the earlier comment that “whatever happens, my fate can be no worse than that of the fine-grained dust, which when a gale blows, either stays on the ground or is carried aloft, in which case it is frequently deposited upon the heads of men, upon the crowns of kings and emperors, and even upon high palaces and lofty towers, whence, if it should fall, it cannot sink lower than the place from which it was raised” (p. 290). The storyteller is of the dust of Adam, the first created, and so we have found him at last, though he, Adam, was missing from the earlier description: “No less attitude should be granted to my pen than to the brush of the painter, who without incurring censure . . . depicts Saint Michael striking the serpent with his sword or lance, and Saint George transfixing the dragon wherever he pleases; but that is not all, for he makes Christ male and Eve female” (p. 799). Once again, as I asked earlier, where is Adam? Now we know: he is the storyteller who is as light and as ubiquitous as the dust of which we are all formed. To be a storyteller whose substance is dust suggests also a universal presence and a secret penetration into secret hidden places, that is, those we would keep secret. The storyteller can ascend to the highest elevations of aristocratic power, for the storyteller-artist as dust may sift down upon a king or emperor, superior to all political powers in wisdom and endurance.

The Creation of a Total Work of Art

141

To story we return again and again, since when story possesses the properties of those that make up Decameron, we read and reread, we sink into the depths as the dust settles on us, a reminder of the biblical “Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” As we read and reread, we are reminded of analogies we remember uttered by companions close to Boccaccio: Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. (Shakespeare, Cymbeline, 4.2.258)

Story remains when kings are done, and we but dust.

chapter 6

Storytelling and Truth

S

torytelling as a part of cultural reality locates itself wherever human communities form; there, storytelling takes place and establishes its place. When we hear Decameron stories we stand in their created space, a place where cultural reality presents us with the gift of imaginative fiction. We say of the gift: “It does not occur as events in the ‘real’ world, or lived life, occur, yet in some sense it is true.” How can we say that? How can we stand in that place where reality and fiction intersect, where philosophy and storytelling overlap, and feel the conviction that grows out of the truth of “mere” imagination? When philosophy looks at stories, overhears stories told, the issue it raises is that of whether or not stories can be believed, can be thought to be true. As soon as that question is entertained, as it is by Plato, Augustine, Rousseau, Tolstoy, Melville, Wallace Stevens, and many others, storytelling finds itself connected to challenging moral and cultural issues. For example, when the storyteller (in contrast to the philosopher) reflects on questions of truth, a series of maneuvers may be taken as defensive actions, that is, as defense against philosophical skepticism. As the philosopher becomes dismissive, the teller may assert that what is about to be heard is true, and then the hearer is asked or expected to assume a stance appropriate to truth events, as contrasted with fiction, or make-believe, or imaginary events.

144 Storytelling and Truth

Hearers may then divide in their interpretative beliefs, some settling into the comfort, or anxiety, of “truth,” others into the excitement of “make-believe.” Such a divided reception may be exactly a condition the storyteller wants to induce, a means to satisfy temperamental differences that also gains maximum attention. Another preface to storytelling claims the story about to be told is traditional, handed down from generations past; and antiquity guarantees truth—hardly a condition to satisfy philosophical skepticism. If that is seen as unconvincing, the storyteller may disclaim responsibility for the story by saying it is gathered from people far away, people not of our sort, not of our experience, but having access to mysterious worlds, leaving truthfulness undecided but a seductive possibility. Storytellers, philosophers point out observing such prefaces, tell “lies” in order to begin telling the ultimate “lie,” the story itself. That sequence of untruths leads to condemnation of story as mere fiction, not a serious avenue to follow when one is in search of truth. Philosophers then ruminate on lying as such: when or why lies are related, when they are appropriate, when to be condemned. For philosophy, resolution of lying as an utterance is centered in language as such, a good example being “The Paradox of the Liar,” which has stood as a puzzle for two millennia.1 For storytellers, among them Boccaccio, lies are dealt with not only in language but also in facial, gestural, and masking expressions of characters and of the storytellers themselves, who challenge us with the indeterminacy of what can be believed Philosophers who denigrate stories for their untruthfulness often ignore the conditions under which stories are told and listened to. Plato makes the assumption that when poets speak we ought to demand verification of the same sort and on the same level as if we were listening to a philosopher. Of course, Plato knows this is disingenuous, but he has a battle on his hands since he is dedicated to establishing the supremacy of philosophic inquiry as a way to knowledge, superior to tradition, poetry, religion, and one’s ancestors. Philosophers condemn poets from the vantage point philosophers assume of self-appointed special prosecutors whose ambition is to destroy old beliefs on behalf of political and moral renovations. When the “speaker” is a story for which the living storyteller is gone, where there is no vocal note sounded in the air, and no face uttering the sentence, then the sentences that make a story create a presence, give life to elements whose quickening depends on the inspired imagination of the reader or hearer. Story may create paradox in order to hide truth, and character in story may be masked, a person elusive, ephemeral, dreamlike. Where there

Storytelling and Truth

145

is paradox, imagination suspects masking; where there is mask, imagination searches for hidden meaning.2 Philosophical acceptance of storytelling as serious, possibly truth-telling utterance requires anthropological and social visions that cannot be reduced to theories of truth as they have been developed in the philosophy of language. Since storytelling relies on language, philosophical questions concerning sentences, reference, reliability, truth can be asked of story in terms that the philosopher would find satisfying. But it is not linguistic issues as such that allow us to think story as truthful or untruthful; closer to storytelling than philosophy is the tellings of and about the past we call “history.” Issues of historical truth, verifiability, and reliability are properly raised about historical narratives, and from such questioning it is but a short step to storytelling. We have seen in Decameron that much storytelling makes claims to historical veracity; some of that assumption derives from myth, novel, poetic utterances that make claims to historical truth just as historical telling makes such claims. Events in stories and events in historical reality often intersect. Responding, then, as we do to storytelling, seeking the truth of stories where fiction and reality intersect, I am led to ask a Kantian kind of question: When, as we believe, stories have the capacity to tell truth, what makes the truth of storytelling possible?” My examination and analysis of Decameron in the foregoing chapters now suggests an answer to the question. The author, Boccaccio, asserts his mere reportorial function: he tells the stories as he heard them from others. That is a kind of defense against an accusation of untruth. But then the author interposes his own story among those for which he is merely a scribe. Now the one hundred stories become one hundred one stories. That creates a middle story; which helps us to move away to a level of cultural reality into which we fit the stories, for now we can ask, which story is the axle around which the whole wheel of one hundred stories turns? And that, as we know, is story 1 of day 6, the little parable about Madonna Oretta and her horseback ride, make-believe within a fictional setting, untruth within truth, for the little parable reveals a method for uncovering the truth of stories. To establish a claim to truth, we recover and construct the frame for the storytelling. By the term “frame,” I do not refer to “frame” and “framing” as they have traditionally been applied to Decameron, for in those uses the words refer to the structure—days, numbers, settings—within which the stories get told. My use of “frame” relates to the conceptual structure within which stories, as but one kind of cultural expression, are set. The larger cultural concept for our understanding of stories I refer to by the term

146 Storytelling and Truth

“enactment.” To that term, I shall add a psychoanalytic concept formulated by D. W. Winnicott: “transitional object.” Stories, I believe, are a class of enactments that function, very often, but not always, as transitional objects. When they do function as transitional objects, they relate story to reality, that is, make-believe to truth. Story as transitional object establishes a covenant between writer-storyteller and reader. A covenant is at once an agreement and a vow: there is truth to be discovered here, in this storytelling, and it will be given to you if you pursue it with the right beliefs and intentions. The foundational sense of a covenant between storyteller and hearer can be found in the culture of childhood. In the stages of growing up, there is, D. W. Winnicott observes, a special class of loved objects that the child takes to be a kind of companion, a consolation, a metaphor for the mother. By “transitional object,” he refers to toys, blankets, dolls, fetishisticlike things that the child takes as first loved objects. The emotional attachment is such that great comfort derives from the simple holding, cuddling, proximity of the transitional object, “transitional” because it allows the child to separate from the mother yet, at the same time, in having the object, retain, as it were, a bit of the maternal protection. With the object, the child can go out into a larger world. Transitional objects move toward being the foundation for enactments in their use as elements in dramatic and storytelling actions. In the early years, storytelling may for some children require the holding of the transitional object, whose presence controls and ameliorates the anxiety storytelling often arouses. Sometimes, the transitional object is woven into the story or acts as a bit of dramatic costume as the child responds to the story. As a preparatory action moving toward cultural enactments, story and object lay a foundation for later participations, for enactments are cultural objects that possess definite qualities and powers, as for example, performance, representation, powers to stir strong affective responses; reinforcing one another, they create a cultural tradition. Enactments refer to linguistic (novels, poems, dramas), tonal (music, dance), and material (painting, sculpture, parts of dance, drama, architecture) made objects, a totality that exemplifies a cultural tradition. Story as enactment, and the transitional object is shaped in part by its style. Though style is difficult to define, it is experienced in the perceptions and feelings that structure our responses to enactments. Decameron’s style becomes evident to us in the course of hearing the first four days of storytelling. But in the opening of day 4, a break occurs, a disjunction that echoes a previous shift that occurred in the introduction. In the introduction, we readers are

Storytelling and Truth

147

shocked at the move the storyteller makes from his private thoughts that explain the dedication of his book to the Muses, his “lovely ladies,” to the description of the black death in all its clinical, physiological, and domestic horrors. Violently thrust as we are into urban suffering, reading of the black death as it takes its devastating toll, we seek the comfort of an entertainment, an escape, a story to lower a veil between us and mortality. Indeed, we are comforted and delighted by the subsequent remove to rural felicity, music, dance, song as accompaniment to story that erects a defense for us, but then, after three days of delightful storytelling, on day 4, the author breaks in, sunders the veil, and forces us to attend harsh reality for a moment in the squabbles of the servants, only to be soothed by a “little story” of the author himself, about Filippo Balducci (see p. 000). Not only is the abruptness of the transition an element of style, but the very name of the father, “Filippo,” functions as a stylistic element repeated many times in several stories, for horsemen and horses and horsiness occur as a theme that we are to recognize as if a phrase in a piece of music. This stylistic element in Decameron was recognized by Shakespeare in the discussion Portia has with Nerissa over Portia’s suitors in act 1, scene 2, of The Merchant of Venice. In that review of wooers for Portia’s hand, “The Neopolitan Prince” is named, to which Portia replies: “Ay, that’s a colt indeed, for he doth nothing but talk of his horse; and he makes it a great appropriation to his own good parts that, he can shoe him himself. I am much afraid my lady his mother played false with a smith” (lines 39–43). We have good reason to suspect that this description refers to Boccaccio himself because he had an important sojourn in Naples, he is obsessed with horses, horse names, and horsiness in Decameron, and he was said to be a bastard. Doubts will be lifted when we read descriptions of the other suitors, all, as I have said, pillagers of Boccaccio stories. Finally, the marquis of Montferrat, a character in day 1, story 5, given the special place of having introduced Portia to Bassanio, her husband-to-be, is named by Nerissa, last on the list. Shakespeare, in The Merchant of Venice, not only recognizes a peculiar style element in Boccaccio’s book, but in Merchant elaborates on the cognomen “Prince of Pimps,” by which Boccaccio labeled himself, through creating a drama in which loving pairing becomes the proper goal of philosophical inquiry. Merchant, like Decameron, realizes philosophical understanding as a function of sex. In giving this characterization of Decameron‘s literary consequences, I am defining one aspect of its style, since style encompasses whole segments of a tradition. Discovery of such continuities then helps me to formulate a

148 Storytelling and Truth

presupposition to the Kantian question, “What makes the truth of storytelling possible?” A story convinces me of its truth in part through its repetitions and consequences as a model. Strong style structures establish ways of being in the cultural world, a world peopled by story characters and story events. Giving such a larger scope to style removes it from its more limited common meaning of individual, idiosyncratic ways of shaping a work of art. Style has always possessed an inner urgency to break out of such limitations, first to a larger setting as “my style,” “her style,” “a nation’s style,” “a century’s style,” and beyond. In expanding the concept of style, I am pushing it to cultural levels evidenced in the judgments we intuitively make. We know immediately a work to be Eastern, Chinese, Ming; we recognize a poem to be sixteenth-century English, circle of Shakespeare, perhaps Shakespeare as author. So we identify, classify, build our aesthetic responses around complex feelings, thoughts, comparisons, subtle apprehension of shapes, tones, coherences—level on level, tradition beside tradition. All such sensitivity to objects, structures, traditions leaves open the possibility of forgery, and yet forgeries always reveal themselves precisely in their stylistic mistakes. As we read Decameron, its fictional forms come into more and more highly defined stylistic focus. Boccaccio the storyteller, with whom we have made a covenant, stands behind and within each of the stories, even though some derive from earlier sources. Their stylistic transformations represent persons and objects with a unique affective aura. The persons and objects are experienced as “that to which a drive is directed.” This statement by Freud in his essay “On Narcissism” characterizes the psychological forces that we direct toward persons, objects, bodies, and bodily organs.3 Objects and events entertained in fantasy, in story, and in dreams attract our drives. Fantasy formulations, all the happenings and presences, animal and human, in stories, become, in psychoanalytic language as it has been translated, “highly cathected,” which simply means, they become objects of the strong feelings they elicit. Everything in stories attracts: magic carpets, imaginary landscapes, transforming elixirs, gorgons, centaurs, Claire’s knee and bound feet, possible worlds, visions of past and future, philosophical fantasies—all enter into stories that so excite our feeling responses that we are immediately convinced of their truth. In reading Decameron, its philosophical argumentations become “highly cathected”; thoughts and themes in Boccaccio’s style, which is to say, philosophical thought, though indirectly presented, becomes affectively powerful for the reader. Under Boccaccio’s story structures, philosophical ideas gather to themselves a heightened charge of internalized meaning that moves philos-

Storytelling and Truth

149

ophy from doctrines and sets of arguments to a way of living, a livelihood, so that what might seem outside the book to be mere learning available to all becomes within the book a personal possession. Philosophy is metamorphosed from an external thought to an internal drama through stories. Story objects and characters and events become felt and known in their values and hence persuasive as truths. Intense emotions aroused by ideas in an imaginative, that is, storytelling, setting become necessary conditions for belief in the truth of what is told. Story thus intensified through feeling is carried away from the reading/hearing to the outer world as a transitional object, just as the child’s transitional object moves away from the mother to the “real” world. We readers of Decameron come into possession—like the storytellers themselves within the book—of narrative thinking, and that sets us into culture. While values in storytelling are always values for me, the values we hearer/ readers attach to objects and events undergo developmental metamorphoses throughout the course of adding story to story. One book is able to engender a developmental process in me as if it were a whole five-foot shelf of books, and the author makes that claim in his address to the ladies, for whom this book will be a “university.” It will yield truth. Crossing from philosophy to storytelling and back again creates a special kind of enactment in the whole tradition of enactments that define culture. It is a transition realized by Boccaccio’s most philosophically gifted successors: Chaucer and Shakespeare. Boccaccio anticipates and influences his two later admirers through his great gift of storytelling that encapsulates serious and wise speeches from a great variety of characters. Story thus achieves philosophical depth, exemplified in the wisdom of day 4, which begins with the author himself pointing out to the ladies for whom he writes his book that the laws of nature are ultimate in the sense that “to oppose the laws of Nature, one has to possess exceptional powers” and to violate them leads “to the serious harm of those who” attempt to do so.4 That observation is explored and developed in story 1 of day 4, immediately following. As I already commented, the love and tragic fate of Ghismonda and Guiscardo metamorphose true love and sexual pleasure into philosophical wisdom. Eros begets philosophical insight: Ghismonda, although addressing her father, Tancredi, speaks to all of us of human nature, desire, and true nobility, as contrasted with the false nobility of social hierarchy. As she drinks the poison that will kill her, she addresses her dead love with a moral insight of great strength: “Ah, sweet vessel of all my joys, cursed be the cruelty of him who has compelled me to see you with the eyes of my body, when it was enough that I should keep you constantly in the eyes of my mind!” (p. 299) 5

150 Storytelling and Truth

As we read, we are taught to use a transitional object of a culturally sophisticated, self-conscious kind, an enactment that reveals to us the ways body and mind are functions of one another, a theme returned to in the philosophical story 7 of day 8. From the beginning, storytelling enactments have presented the many subtle ways human intellectual and emotional life are exchanged within the social structure. That age-old exploration is immensely developed through the intensity of a storytelling structure like Decameron’s: ten persons in a utopian isolation reflect one another’s thoughts and feelings through stories. Historically, every society creates or inherits a tradition of enactments. While this is obvious, less obvious are the ways of appropriating, conveying, and becoming at home within the tradition. Clarification, I believe, can be derived once again from considering the observations of the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott.6 Because he worked with children, his descriptions of ways into culture begin with storytelling, often connected with what he termed the child’s “transitional object.” Children’s internal life can be externalized and interpreted through play, relations to the mother, and the ways they respond to stories. His observations reinforce several aspects of the Boccaccian storytelling sensibility, as well as the ways in which Boccaccio’s storytelling power moves adults into a tradition precisely through play. Of course, what I refer to as adult play differs from children’s play in basic respects, but there is continuity, especially in the narrative themes structuring Boccaccio’s tales: themes of jokes, joking, and playing tricks. If we move outside the stories themselves to the position of reader/hearer, we become aware of the ways storytelling plays tricks on both the teller and the hearer, for that which we listen to as mere fiction tricks us into transforming the made-up into reality and reality into fiction. Storytellers are themselves great tricksters, and we feel that when we first move into their plot-binding circle. Such a move takes us into that area Winnicott described, in analyzing children’s play, as the “third area”: an area of play, separate from everyday experience, on the one side, and the external world, on the other. The third area is to be distinguished from the area of inner private psychic reality and from the outer actual world known perceptually. Early childhood play depends on a dynamic relationship between mother and child, interactions that grow in complexity as mother and child invent games, take on roles, create imaginative plots. The third area (which in some sense stands between them) might be thought of as the area of culture, where children learn cultural facts and cultural

Storytelling and Truth

151

methods that encourage a realm of imagination to surround the actors in storytelling. Child and mother are both actors and storytellers, and as these roles are assumed, transitional objects come into play, serving as props in the primitive enactments. In the play process, which leads developmentally to independence and separation from the mother, the child creates a domain in which transitional objects can take on qualities of character, or presence as a person, an event to be externalized as different from and internalized as part of the child’s self-awareness. Through play, the child learns what it is to be a subject, an object, a self, an other, and above all a pretending person who assumes roles, voices, postures that are “pretend.” In play between mother and child, later among children themselves, the possibility of fictional alternatives to psychological and physical reality is first established and then internalized, becoming the groundwork for the tradition of culture. Boccaccian storytelling and hearing may seem remote from the third area between mother and child, but there are continuities that draw a developmental cultural maturation leading from early to later stages in cultural storytelling. Boccaccio sets up a third area of play, far more sophisticated than early stages and requiring knowledge for those who would enter it. The brigata that leaves Florence to escape the plague and whose stories we “overhear,” constitutes an overseeing parental presence whose rich life we come to infer from the stories, the songs, and the poems. The members of the brigata themselves possess a book that has been given them, as if in play, a transitional object to help them conduct their lives well, to show them the ways to mature understanding from an initial state of comparative unknowing. The book translates their longings into the real world, the world of stories, stories that are fit for their developmental stages on life’s way to wisdom. They learn as they hear, and that endows Boccaccio’s ladies, who have been denied entrance into the third area enjoyed by men, to master the real world through the storyworld. The real world of trecento plague-ridden Florence cries out for and demands stories, stories to create real lives that can be born, that can emerge, and be heard in contrast to the dying multitudes that have no life. The plague is indifferent to character, to individuality; stories create characters that gain individuality, that promote themselves as persons who will live. Boccaccio draws us toward an inner, refined circle of tellers and listeners whose search for wisdom encounters characters, many of whom are immature and foolish, childlike in their ways. They serve to educate: to one another the brigata tells stories as if a mother-child duality were there to oversee their play. The “mother” is of course Boccaccio himself, whose presence, however much ob-

152 Storytelling and Truth

fuscated, fills each day. Play dominates the stories, even when it turns deadly, as it does in day 7, story 8 (the philosopher Rinieri and the widow Elena), which depicts anger, revenge, and suffering caused by immature motives and calculations. In such a fraught relationship, we are shown childishness and moral immaturity, characteristic of much that Boccaccio shows to his lovely ladies. Elena holds immature, ignorant beliefs about the power of philosophic thought, and Rinieri expresses childish hurt from which lust for revenge will follow. Overall, their conduct can be characterized as unjustified and irrational. Such immaturities only etch more sharply the morally and artistically developed characters. Day 6 begins with a delightful, childish argument over virginity and culminates in the storytelling women stripping for a swim. Structured in such a way, this day exhibits Boccaccio’s talent for simplicity of detail, with its implications for truthtelling. He does not preach, and he makes his readers search for truth much as a parent would instruct a child, not with didactic moral precepts but with tales that exhibit modes of conduct—right, wrong, ill-considered, comical, foolish, degenerate, narcissistic—and point a way to what it means to be, as we say, “truly grown up.” To be sure, the tellings are merely stories; at first not to be taken with literal seriousness as we would a political or philosophical tract. But “merely” hides a central purpose: to endow stories with a place in the cultural tradition of serious thought and to allow real characters to come forth out of the undifferentiated multitudes described in generalities, inescapable when painting historical mass events, such as the black death. Boccaccio does not write with the stylistic intention of Aquinas or Averroes, but he intends his understanding of the moral life to be as infallible as theirs: like philosophy, the drive of his stories is toward truth. “But,” exclaims the philosopher, still expressing skepticism, “how can storytelling in its imaginative flights ever reach truth as the philosopher hopes to do?” The reply is given, I believe, by Paul Valéry when he reflects on what it means to be a poet: “If each man were not able to live a number of other lives besides his own, he would not be able to live his own life.”7 For Boccaccio, the life of the philosopher is mirrored in much of Decameron, a shadow life behind the many lives that inhabit the stories. The making of stories, just like the making of poems, constructs a philosophic vision. Valéry’s way of seeing the activity of making poems describes as well the making of stories in the Boccaccian mode: A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words. . . . The construction of the machine demands the so-

Storytelling and Truth

153

lution of many problems. . . . This powerful and perfect work transports us into a world where things and people, passions and thoughts, sonorities and meanings proceed from the same energy, are transformed into one another, and correspond to exceptional laws of harmony, for it can only be an exceptional form of stimulus that simultaneously produces the exaltation of our sensibility, our intellect, our memory, and our powers of verbal action, so rarely granted to us in the ordinary course of life.8

Storytelling in its accumulated mode offers the listener stories combined to create a construction of thought, feeling, passion, memory, and all that Valéry refers to: the depths of philosophic insight as a consequence of aesthetic delight. Philosophical thinking and the thought of literary language both refer to the world and are at the same time the world they refer to. It is not philosophy’s privilege always to speak truth about events, for philosophy is itself a storytelling, and, conversely, it is not story’s fate to be “mere” imaginings, remote from events in the world, for much of storytelling is about reality. Language, in its philosophic and storytelling modes, both hides and reveals reality—a curious but well-known aspect of the many ways we speak. This is the mystery of storytelling: that it structures my world as it also deforms, hides, reconstitutes my world. Storytelling structures my world but is at odds with, even alien, to my world. This paradox drives me to seek to know if reality has a structure like that of story. But I cannot even ask that question, for to do so is to import story into the realm I know as “reality” and therefore to change its very nature, to turn everything into story, a notinfrequent form of madness. If storytelling is the world, what happens to me? In asking that, I think about the puzzle expressed in Wittgenstein’s question and statement: “What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world.”9 Perhaps I am caught in a story whose telling goes on endlessly, one chapter devoted to me. Perhaps I can enter into the storyworld as a character, or sit outside it as a reader, or become a teller of stories myself. Decameron assumes all these possibilities. The teller of tales, “Mr. Badmouth,” “He Who Dons Masks,” appears in his stories, a theme pursued in the preceding chapters. To be a character in a story endows the author with eternal life, for stories persist through generations in cultural consciousness. Author as character places the name “Boccaccio” in two coexistent worlds: that of a person who lived and wrote and that of a storyteller who tells his stories from within. Cisti the baker enters our reading as a twofold being, Cisti

154 Storytelling and Truth

as character and Boccaccio as Cisti, an interpretation that must follow two parallel paths in story and in life lived. Boccaccio in his performing role stands within his stories; as author, he stands without and merely tells them. But his dual existence as author and character cannot be consistently maintained; the stress is too great, and author-character identifies his dualism in the little “half-story” of Filippo and his son on day 4, told by the author who in that act enters the story as a character, in full consciousness of the distinction and the merging. In this way, a demonstration is given, as answer to the question, “What happens to me?” when I entangle my very waking consciousness with stories. Since so much of contemporary literary theory thinks reality as text and text as reality, the answer I attribute to Boccaccio might seem to be an affirmation of our own impoverished way with stories. We cut away one half the world in being text-centered. Boccaccio’s linguistic and material art is the very opposite; rather than impoverished, it is rich in the complexity that comes from taking so many positions as author, character, and storyteller. That is what, at best, might happen to me! Boccaccio, in contrast to his great predecessor and model, Dante, has cut himself loose from the doctrinal theological and religious positions of his day, enforced by the church. Through the variable and flexible foundation of stories that move from gossip to folksy wit to parable, history, and thoughtful rumination, Boccaccio has escaped becoming hostage to ideologies of any sort. This gives him freedom to explore religious, moral, political, and aesthetic problems without having to satisfy a preordained doctrine. His stories therefore create a world of his own making, a world described by Paul Valéry in this way: “The poetic state or emotion seems to me to consist in a dawning perception, a tendency toward perceiving a world . . . in which beings, things, events, and acts . . . stand, however, in an indefinable, but wonderfully accurate relationship to the modes and laws of our general sensibility. . . . They respond to each other and combine quite otherwise than in ordinary conditions. They become . . . musicalized . . . echoing each other. The poetic universe defined in this way bears a strong analogy to the universe of dreams.”10 Valéry’s way of thinking about poetry has close affinities to the way in chapter 2 I described sources for Decameron in dream and mask. Our “general sensibility” finds extraordinary gratification in storytelling’s reorganizing power—its metamorphic power, as I said in chapter 3—that, to use Valéry’s metaphor, “musicalizes” the unconscious and conscious thoughts, the building blocks that go to make up our imagination. Boccaccio takes this possibil-

Storytelling and Truth

155

ity to a realistic extreme by creating what I have called “a total work of art” in chapter 5, a work that uses the aesthetic of music as a master metaphor. The story universe created in this way transports us to a world analogous to dreams, but only analogous, for the Decameron dream, like all great art, never wakes and never fades. That permanence I consider a form of truth, the truth of art, a truth of inner coherence, the truth of imagination.

notes

All citations in English from Decameron are from the second edition of G. H. McWilliam’s translation (New York: Penguin, 1995). All citations in Italian are from Vittore Branca’s edition (Turin: Einaudi, 1980).

Preface 1. The identifications are these: The “Neapolitan Prince” we take to be Boccaccio; The “County Palatine” is Edmund Spenser; “Monsieur Le Bon” is Montaigne; “Falconbridge” is Chaucer; “The Scottish Lord” is Henryson; “The Duke of Saxony’s Nephew” is Hans Sachs; and the list ends with remembering that Bassanio was introduced to Portia by “The Marquis of Montferrat,” a character who appears in Decameron, day 1, story 5. See Richard Kuhns and Barbara Tovey, “Portia’s Suitors,” Philosophy and Literature 13, no. 2 (1989): 325–31. 2. See p. 00, for an amplified reading of Decameron’s nickname. 3. Italo Calvino, “Definitions of Territories: Eroticism,” in The Literature Machine, trans. Patrick Creagh (London: Secker and Warburg, 1987), p. 66. 4. Letter to Alexander Baillie, January 14, 1883, in A Hopkins Reader, ed. John Pick (New York: Image, 1966), p. 177. Hopkins’s description here fits Decameron perfectly. 5. See p. 00, for an interpretation. 6. The Life of Dante, trans. Vincenzo Zin Bollettino (New York: Garland, 1990), pp. 37–38. 7. Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boc-

158 Preface

caccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, trans. and ed. Charles G. Osgood, Library of Liberal Arts (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), pp. 8 and 11. 8. These earlier writings are The House, the City, and the Judge: The Growth of Moral Awareness in the Oresteia (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962); Structures of Experience: Essays on the Affinity Between Philosophy and Literature (New York: Basic, 1970); Psychoanalytic Theory of Art: A Philosophy of Art on Developmental Principles (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); and Tragedy: Contradiction and Repression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

Introduction 1. “Bruno Schulz: An Essay for S. I. Witkiewicz,” in Letters of Bruno Schulz, ed. Jerzy Ficowski; trans. Walter Arndt (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), p. 113. 2. Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. T. H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), no. 870. 3. Finding The Center, trans. and ed. Dennis Tedlock (New York: Dial, 1972), pp. 3–30. 4. There is one manuscript of Decameron with illustrations most likely by Boccaccio, but he did not practice painting as such. See Vittore Branca, “Boccaccio ‘Visualizzato’ dal Boccaccio,” Studi sul Boccaccio 22 (1994): 197–234. 5. This theme has been explored in our time by Balzac: See “The Unknown Masterpiece” (“Le Chez-d’oeuvre inconnu”). 6. “Mythology,” in Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, ed. Frederick Webb Hodge, Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, bulletin 30 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1907). 7. There is no evidence Boccaccio had direct access to The Thousand and One Nights; I assume, however, that some of the stories circulated along the trade routes from east to west. 8. See chapter 2, p. 00, for a discussion of Madonna Oretta and her plight. 9. “Tragic Drama and the Family: The Killing of Children and the Killing of Storytelling,” in Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 152–75. 10. Ibid., pp. 153, 152. 11. It has been pointed out to me that we possess one holograph of Decameron, known as the “Hamilton 90,” and that copies in Boccaccio’s and other hands may be less reliable. 12. See my “Contradiction and Repression: Paradox and Mask in American Tragedy,” chap. 6 of Tragedy: Contradiction and Repression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 13. This information was given to me by the late Paul Oskar Kristeller. 14. See Ovid, Amores, book 3, lines 53–70. 15. Story 10 of day 5 and story 2 of day 7 are taken from the Metamorphoses of Apuleius. 16. Plato, Theaetetus, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), 149A–150A.

2. Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

159

1. Trecento Story and Image 1. Giorgio Vassari, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. A. B. Hinds (London: Dent, Everyman, 1927), 1:150. 2. Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam, 2d ed. (New York: Penguin, 1995), p. 799. 3. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, ed. Edward MacCurdy (London: Cape, 1938), 2:227–28. 4. See Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 30–31, and fig. 105, p. 137. 5. C. Pliny, Natural History, book 35, ll. 82–84, in The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on The History of Art, trans. K. Jex-Blake (Chicago: Argonaut, 1968), p. 123. 6. See Philostratus, Imagines, trans. Arthur Fairbanks (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1931). 7. Alastair Smart, The Assisi Problem and the Art of Giotto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1971), p. 96. 8. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1855), 7:247–48. 9. Alastair Smart, The Dawn of Italian Painting, 1250–1400 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 104–5. 10. Hans Belting, “The New Role of Narrative in Public Painting of the Trecento: Historia and Allegory,” Studies in the History of Art 16 (1986): 152. 11. Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, trans. and ed. Charles G. Osgood, Library of Liberal Arts (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), book 14. 12. Vasari, The Lives of the Painters, 1:109–10. 13. Belting, “The New Role of Narrative in Public Painting of the Trecento,” p. 162; see pp. 151–68. 14. Ibid., p. 166. 15. Boccaccio on Poetry, book 14, sec. 4, p. 26. 16. Quoted by Creighton Gilbert, “Boccaccio Looking at Actual Frescoes,” in Visions in Art History, ed. G. P. Weisberg (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987), p. 226. See fig. 1.3. in the present volume. Cf. Da Vinci: “Painting surpasses all human works by means of the subtle possibilities it contains” (Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, 2:227). 17. Gilbert, “Boccaccio Looking at Actual Frescoes,” p. 226.

2. Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks 1. Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 31. 2. Reinhold C. Mueller, “Boccaccino, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Venice,” Studi Sul Boccaccio 25 (1997): 133–142. 3. Birth of Tragedy, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1956), sec. 1, pp. 27–28. 4. “Buffalmacco, who was tall in stature and sturdy as an ox, had procured one of the masks that people used to wear at those special festivals that are nowadays no longer held; . . . his mask had the face of the devil and was furnished with horns” (Decameron,

160 2. Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks

trans. G. H. McWilliam, 2d ed. [New York: Penguin, 1995], p. 663). Day 4, story 2, presents the wily Friar Alberto who dresses up as the Angel Gabriel, but this is more party costume than mask. 5. In the epilogue, Boccaccio says very directly: “For in order that none of you may be misled, each of these stories bears on its brow the gist of that which it hides in its bosom” (p. 801) The Italian reads: “Per non ingannare alcuna persona, tutte nella fronte portan segnato quello che esse dentro dal loro seno nascose tengano” (Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca [Turin: Einaudi, 1980], p. 1259). 6. Boccaccio exploits facial expressiveness in day 6, story 6, “The Baronci.” See below in this chapter. 7. “Messer, questo vostro cavallo ha troppo duro trotto, per che io vi priego che vi piaccia di pormi a piè” (p. 719). 8. Note that Chichibio refers to “thigh,” which ties the crane to the woman who got the “other leg.” 9. That teeth had some kind of power to curse in Boccaccio’s world is suggested by an episode in day 7, story 1, where Gianni Lotteringhi is told by his wife to spit in order to drive away an evil “phantasima” from his door, and the lover outside responds with “I denti” (the teeth). 10. Walden (New York: Norton, 1956), pp. 202–3. 11. The Assisi Problem and the Art of Giotto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1971), p. 99. 12. A. S. Turberville, “Heresies and the Inquisition in the Middle Ages,” chapter 20 of Cambridge Medieval History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 6:708. 13. John Emigh, Masked Performances: The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre (Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), p. 49. 14. Kyotaro Nishikawa, Bugaku Masks (New York: Harper and Row, 1978). 15. Jesse Weston, From Ritual to Romance (New York: Peter Smith, 1941), chap. 9. For Boccaccio’s interpretation of water as philosophy, see his Life of Dante, trans. Vincenzo Zin Bollettino (New York: Garland, 1990), p. 57. 16. On the subject of mask openness and hiddenness, see Mary H. Nooter, Secrecy: African Art that Conceals and Reveals (Munich: Prestel, 1993). 17. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 132. 18. Quoted in Carol Brown, James Ensor: Theatre of Masks (London: Lund Humphries, for the Barbican Art Gallery, 1997). 19. Maurice Ravel created a musical expression of an Ensor-like space in L’Enfant et les sortilèges, libretto by Colette, where a child finds an interior populated by personified furniture, as animals are metamorphosed into speaking voices.

3. Aspects of Storytelling: Reflections on the Metaphoric Power of Metamorphosis 1. “An Essay For S. I. Witkiewicz,” Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz, ed. Jerzy Ficowski, trans. Walter Arndt with Victoria Nelson (New York; Harper and Row, 1987), pp. 110–114. The great pleasure we take in discovered and created metamorphoses lies at the very center of artistic creativity. The work of the artist might be called the mappiung of metaphoric metamorphoses. Not all metamorphoses are metaphoric, but all

4. Interpretative Method for a

decameron Tale

161

metaphors relate directly or indirectly to metamorphoses. Metamorphosis is both a process in the world and a linguistic trope, so that where metamorphosis appears in myth or story, it may be symbolic or may be simply descriptive. As description it may also be a metaphor for something. 2. Prefaces to Lyrical Ballads, 1800 and 1802. 3. Introduction to day 4, in Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam, 2d ed. (New York: Penguin, 1995), p. 290. 4. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 82. 5. Plato, Theaetetus, trans. H. N. Fowler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), 150 B–C. 6. Henri Hauvette, Boccace: Etude biographique et littéraire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1914), p.286. My translation. 7. See George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford University Press, n.d.), p. 310, plate 79. 8. See chap. 6 of Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 305. 9. Sect. 15, “The Dream of Dante’s Mother and Conclusion,” in The Life of Dante, trans. Vincenzo Zin Bollettino (New York: Garland, 1990), pp. 55–57.

4. Interpretative Method for a Decameron Tale 1. Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, trans. and ed. Charles Osgood (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), book 15, sec. 9, p. 51. 2. Jacob Burkhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (Oxford: Phaidon, 1945), p. 94. 3. Contemporaries of Boccaccio would know he had two names: he was born “Boccaccino” and renamed himself “Boccaccio,” which suggests something like “ugly face,” or “one who makes faces,” or “one who wears masks.” 4. Day 3, story 1, in Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), p. 335. My translation. 5. Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam, 2d ed. (New York: Penguin, 1995), p. 533. 6. Entry in J. Lempriere, Classical Dictionary (London, n.d.), p. 442. 7. Studi sul Boccaccio 21 (1993): 175–97. 8. For references, see R. B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951). 9. For evidence of this way of interpreting writing and reading in the ancient world, see Jesper Svenbro, Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). 10. See Richard Lemay, “Arabic Numerals,” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages (New York: Scribner, 1982), 1:382–98; David Eugene Smith, History of Mathematics (New York: Dover, 1958), 1:211–42, 2:69–80. 11. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. R. G. Bury (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1934), p. 22.

162 4. Interpretative Method for a

decameron Tale

12. The City of God, trans. R. G. V. Tasker (London: Dent, 1945), book 14, chap. 18, 2:49.

5. The Creation of a Total Work of Art 1. “The Theater of Cruelty,” in The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary C. Richards (New York: Grove, 1958), p. 86. 2. Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, trans. and ed. Charles G. Osgood, Library of Liberal Arts (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), p. xvii. 3. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 1:101. 4. Ibid. 5. The most complete analysis and discussion of trecento music, with special reference to Boccaccio, is a study by Nora Maria Beck, Singing in the Garden: Music and Culture in the Tuscan Trecento (Innsbruck: Studien, Biblioteca Musicologica, Universität Innsbruck, 1998). 6. In fact, there is one opera, notorious for its sheer duration—it lasted five hours— based on Decameron, and that of only day 5, story 9, by Virgilio Mazzocchi and Marco Marazzoli, libretto by Giulio Rospigliosi, entitled Chi soffre speri, produced in 1637. It is the story of Federigo degli Alberighi, a noble but poor man who serves his last possession, a falcon, to a lady for her lunch. Read it and imagine what sort of opera it would be. In a 1639 revival, John Milton was in the audience. 7. For an excellent recording of trecento music, with many references to Decameron, listen to Musik Des Trecento Um Jacopo Da Bologna, EMI Classics, 7243 8 26478 2 9. 8. “Boccace,” Journal des savants, September 1905. 9. “Les nuances les plus variées de l’amour, triste ou gai, et particulièrement cette ivresse sensuelle, qui est répandue dans presque toutes ses oeuvres de jeunesse” (ibid., p. 500; translation mine). 10. Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam, 2d ed. (New York: Penguin, 1995), p. 486. See p. 000, where this story is referred to in terms of spitting to exorcise a “phantasima.” 11. J. A. Westrup, “Medieval Song,” in The New Oxford History of Music, ed. Dom Anselm Hughes (Oxford University Press, 1955), 2:267. 12. “The ‘Privatization’ of the Past,” in Historical Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 166. 13. “Io confesso d’esser pesato e molte volte de’ miei dí essere stato; e per ciò, parlando a quelle che pesato non m’hanno, affermo che io non son grave, anzi son io sí lieve, che io sto a galla nell’acqua” (Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca [Turin: Einaudi, 1980], p. 1260).

6. Storytelling and Truth 1. All Cretans are liars. The Cretan asserts: “I am lying.” Is the assertion true or false? 2. These remarks follow from chapter 6, “Contradiction and Repression: Paradox and Mask in American Tragedy,” of my Tragedy: Contradiction and Repression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 119–43.

6. Storytelling and Truth

163

3. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, 1957), 14:69–102. 4. Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam, 2d ed. (New York: Penguin, 1995), p. 290. 5. “Maladetta sia la crudeltà di colui che con gli occhi della fronte or mi ti fa vedere! Assai m’era con quegli della menta riguardarti a ciascuna ora” (Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca [Turin: Einaudi, 1980], p. 483). 6. Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971). 7. “Poetry and Abstract Thought,” The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot (London: Routledge, 1958), p. 58. 8. Ibid., p. 79. 9. “Was geht mich die Geschichte an? Meine Welt ist die erste und einzige!” (Notebooks, 1914–1916, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe [New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961], pp. 82–82e). 10. “Remarks on Poetry,” in “Poetry and Abstract Thought,” p. 198.

bibliography

In this bibliography, I have listed and briefly commented on the writings I cite in the text and others that have made a difference in my thinking. My study concentrates on ways to read Decameron in the light of its major ideas and cultural self-consciousness. It has not been my intention to survey and evaluate all that has been done in studying the trecento past but rather to study the ways in which a linguistic work of art can achieve comprehensiveness in the realm of moral, epistemological, and sexual conflicts that define our lives in communities, families, and friendships. The following books, devoted to a variety of problems, have been both helpful and inspirational for my own thinking.

Boccaccio Editions Used in This Study Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium. Trans. and ed. Charles G. Osgood. Library of Liberal Arts. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956. Difficult to find. Essential to understanding Boccaccio’s views on art and poetry, the past, and the ways in which literary art achieves philosophical depth. A defense of the arts that still speaks to our own concerns about why and how the arts provide the foundations of all we ought to be as human beings. Decameron. Ed. Vittore Branca. Turin: Einaudi, 1980. Basic edition; erudite, comprehensive in its discovery of sources for the stories, and helpful with the ways the language has changed. The Decameron. Trans. G. H. McWilliam. 2d ed. New York: Penguin, 1995. The most satisfactory translation into English, whatever its mistakes and amusing

166 Bibliography

substitutions for terms (such as “werewolf ” for “phantasima”). Helpful notes in this second edition. The Life of Dante. Trans. Vincenzo Zin Bollettino. New York: Garland, 1990. Boccaccio here makes explicit a few of his basic interpretational moves, so this brief history helps us to read other works, such as Decameron.

Decameron Essays Barolini, Teodolinda. “‘Le Parole Son Femmine E I Fatti Sono Maschi’: Toward a Sexual Poetics of the Decameron.” Studi sul Boccaccio 21 (1993): 175–97. Describes and analyzes male-female relationships as explored by Decameron’s analysis of language and action. Basic to an understanding of the book. Cahill, Courtney. “Day Ten of The Decameron.” Studi sul Boccaccio 23 (1995): 120–70. Survey of interpretations of day 10, when the stories become morally and philosophically complex. Useful full bibliography of the many efforts to find coherence among these stories, and Cahill discovers latent meanings that reinforce Boccaccio’s cultural criticisms. The final story (10), so troublesome to interpreters, is given two readings without a final decision. Worth a look. Ferrante, Joan. “Politics, Finance, and Feminism.” Studi sul Boccaccio 21 (1993): 151–74. A sensitive economic, theological, and feminist interpretation of day 2, story 7, which explores Christian-Muslim relationships. Hanning, Robert W. “Words To Fill an Empty Tomb: A ‘Cipollan’ Reading of Three Decameron Novelle.” Paper delivered at Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, Calif., November 1992. Subtle readings, with interpretations of Boccaccian metaphors, of day 2, story 7, and day 3, stories 7 and 10. Hollander, Robert. “Boccaccio’s Dante.” Studi sul Boccaccio 13 (1981–82): 171–98. The many ways in which Decameron refers to, imitates, satirizes, and thinks about Dante’s great poem are discussed with interpretations of the figure Cepperello, who has a real life model, and Father Cipolla, whose wily strategies are analyzed. Kirkham, Victoria. “Painters at Play on the Judgment Day (Decameron VIII, 9).” Studi sul Boccaccio 14 (1983–84): 256–70. All Kirkham’s studies are excellent; this one helps us understand the ways in which Boccaccio uses his painter friends in exploring storytelling with a latent content. Marcus, Millicent Joy. An Allegory of Form. Saratoga, Calif.: Amma Libri, 1979. Differs from Hollander regarding the degree to which affinities between Boccaccio and Dante shape Decameron. Good study of the thinkers that influenced Boccaccio, for example, Ovid, Boethius, and Petrarch. McGregor, James H, ed. Approaches to Teaching Boccaccio’s Decameron. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2000. Useful, suggestive, and wide-ranging survey essays addressed to talking about Decameron. MacMechan, Archibald. The Relation of Hans Sachs to the Decameron. Halifax, Nova Scotia: Printing Co., 1889. A study that helps to confirm the claims made in the essay below by Kuhns and Tovey.

Bibliography

167

Marino, Lucia. The Decameron “Cornice”: Allusion, Allegory, and Iconology. Ravenna: Longo, n.d. Analysis of Boccaccian images that are closely tied to paintings’ presentation of the visual.

Boccaccio’s World Alpatoff, Michael. “The Parallelism of Giotto’s Paduan Frescoes.” In Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes. Ed. James Stubblebine. New York: Norton, 1969. A sensitive exploration of the frescoes that reveals their internal development and affective strength. Giotto created an interpretation of the biblical stories, not simply an illustration, and in this way influenced Boccaccio. Apuleius. Metamorphoses. Ed. and trans. J. Arthur Hanson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1989. The most competent translation; without explicit argument, it lets us see the many ways in which Decameron was inspired by these stories. Baldini, Umberto. Santa Maria Novella. Firenze: Nardini, 1981. The most complete presentation of the history, structure, interior contents of the church where the brigata meets. Battaglia Ricci, L. Ragionari nel giardino: Boccaccio e i cicli pittorici del “trionfo della morte.” Roma: Salerno, 1987. Interpretation of the great fresco by Buffalmacco with special attention to the garden inset that may possibly have a direct connection to Decameron. Beck, Nora Maria. Singing in the Garden: Music and Culture in the Tuscan Trecento. Innsbruck: Studien, Biblioteca Musicologica, Universität Innsbruck, 1998. Superb study of trecento music and its relationship to Decameron. A cultural history that celebrates the complex aesthetic achievement of Boccaccio’s writing. Bedier, Joseph. Les Fabliaux. Paris: Librairie Ancienne Edouard Champion, 1925. Survey and history of a culturally central story form, the fabliaux, which draws on myth, folktale, and story collections from the East. Summarizes plots and compares them as told in medieval literature to their sources, for example, One Thousand Nights and One Night. Conveys in detail the storyworld Boccaccio inherited. Bellosi, L. Buffalmacco e il Trionfo della morte. Turin: Einaudi, 1974. First art historical study that attributes Il Trionfo della morte to Buffalmacco, removing it from the traditional attribution to Orcagna and Francesco Traini. That Buffalmacco painted this fresco is reinforced by the work of Hans Belting, and this attribution opens the way for a deeper understanding of Boccaccio’s creation of the character Buffalmacco in several stories. Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Brilliant art historical account of how images were created and responded to in the West and East. Icons, church frescoes, illustrated manuscripts are analyzed and interpreted theologically and philosophically. ——. “The New Role of Narrative in Public Painting of the Trecento: Historia and Allegory.” Studies in the History of Art 16 (1986): 151–68.

168 Bibliography

Explains the ways painted images functioned when “allegory became the modern and scholarly mode for dealing with human conduct and social patterns” (p. 155). Best demonstration by an art historian of the many ways linguistic and material art interinanimate one another. Belting, Hans and Dieter Blume. Malerei und Stadtkultur in der Dantezeit. Munich: Hirmer, 1989. One of the most useful and enlightening collections of art historical and general cultural essays devoted to the trecento. Bloch, Marc. Feudal Society. 2 vols. Trans. L. A. Manyon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Brilliant, far-reaching, and thorough study of Europe from the seventh to the fourteenth century. Branca, Vittore. Boccaccio visualizzato. 3 vols. Turin: Einaudi, 1999. Delightful gathering of instances, through history, when Boccaccio’s stories were sources for visual presentations. Full bibliography. Cole, Bruce. Giotto and Florentine Painting, 1280–1375. New York: Harper, 1976. Excellent historical study of Giotto’s work. Concludes with an evaluation of Giotto’s critics, beginning with Boccaccio and including Vasari, Lanzi, Ruskin, Berenson, Proust. Doob, P. R. The Idea of the Labyrinth. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Cultural history devoted to a form and an idea (the labyrinth) as it was poetically and architecturally interpreted. The scope is so broad that Boccaccio fits in only briefly, and it is his Corbaccio that receives attention. This sensitive and historically wide-ranging study is an unusual exploration that may have relevance for the Valley of the Ladies in day 6. Gagliardi, Antonio. Giovanni Boccaccio: Poeta Filosofo Averroista. Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 1999. One of the few studies that recognizes the centrality of Averroism in Decameron’s latent attack on Christianity. Gehl, Paul F. A Moral Art: Grammer. Society, and Culture in Trecento Florence. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. The basic education of a Florentine in Boccaccio’s time studied and illustrated with many examples of texts. Gilbert, Creighten E. Poets Seeing Artists’ Work. Florence: Olschki, 1991. ——. “Art Historical Period Terms as a Lens for Looking at Dante.” In Art Studies for an Editor, pp. 85–98. New York. Abrams, 1975. ——. “Boccaccio Looking at Actual Frescoes.” In Visions in Art History, ed. G. P. Weisberg. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987. Gilbert’s careful studies of trecento art discover important connections between Giotto and Boccaccio and between painting and poetry. Hauvette, Henri. “Boccace.” Journal des savants, September 1905. ——. Boccace: Etude biographique et littéraire. Paris: Armand Colin, 1914. Thorough, learned studies of Boccaccio’s life and work, with many entertaining descriptions of the folkways that express the spirit of the time. Holmes, George. Florence, Rome and the Origins of the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1986. Solid, reliable history.

Bibliography

169

Irwin, Robert. The Arabian Nights: A Companion. New York: Penguin, 1994. Best recent discussion of a great collection of stories. Wise and sensitive. Kuhns, Richard. Structures of Experience: Essays on the Affinity Between Philosophy and Literature. New York: Basic, 1970. Studies that illustrate the several ways literary art is philosophical and philosophy approaches poetic expression. ——. Tragedy: Contradiction and Repression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Alongside interpretations of the philosophical power of tragic art, discussions of interpretative method, with special attention to the ways psychoanalytic interpretations complement and amplify the philosophical. Richard Kuhns and Barbara Tovey. “Portia’s Suitors.” Philosophy and Literature 13, no. 2 (1989): 325–31. Reveals Shakespeare’s admiration for Boccaccio through identification of Portia’s suitors as Boccaccio himself and writers who drew on his stories. Land, Norman E. “Calandrino as a Viewer.” Source: Notes in the History of Art 23, no. 4 (summer 2004): 1–6. Interprets the Calandrino stories to reveal that beneath their joking there is a profound understanding of how viewers of visual art are necessarily deceived, that we “wise” viewers, unlike befuddled Calandrino, tolerate the distinction “appearance-reality.” Leonard, E.-G. Boccace et Naples. Paris: Droz, 1944. The years Boccaccio spent in Naples were formative for his intellectual and artistic development. Historically and biographically, this is an excellent study. Long, Michael P. “Francesco Landini and the Florentine Cultural Life.” Early Music History 3 (1983): 83–99. ——. “Trecento Italy.” Chapter 10 of Music and Society: Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Ed. James McKinnon. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1990. Excellent studies of trecento music; as much as we can know about the musical art of that time. Machiavelli. History of Florence. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith, 1974. As highly entertaining as it is biased. Meiss, Millard. Painting in Florence and Siena After the Black Death. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 1951. An important, and controversial, historical and art historical study. Good description and analysis of the Spanish Chapel in Santa Maria Novella. The author, less at home in literary interpretations, concludes with a superficial chapter on Boccaccio. Menocal, Maria Rosa. The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. One of the few studies dedicated to an essential source and inspiration for trecento art. Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Great Age of Fresco: Giotto to Pontormo. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1968. Catalog for a distinguished exhibition; filled with information on how frescoes were created and the language of fresco design. Napier, A. David. Masks, Transformation, and Paradox. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1986. Anthropological study of masks and masking in Asian tradition. Fascinating reports from the field of inquiry.

170 Bibliography

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. Rolfe Humphries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955. Polzer, Joseph. “The Triumph of Thomas Panel in Santa Caterina, Pisa: Meaning and Date.” Mitteilungen Des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 37, no. 1 (1993): 29–70. Fullest and best study of the Dominican representations of St. Thomas and Averroes in northern Italy. Rashdall, Hastings. The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages. Vol. 1, Salerno-BolognaParis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936. One of the great studies of university life, teaching, and contributions to culture in general. Most helpful account of the teachings at Bologna and its holding on to Averroistic thought after it had been declared anathema elsewhere. Renan, Ernest. Averroes et L’Averroisme. Paris, 1866. Reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1986. Most complete study of Averroistic teachings, how they were received, and how represented in both literature and painting. Runciman, Steven. A History of the Crusades. Vol. 3, The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954. Essential historical background for the trecento. Schevill, Ferdinand. History of Florence from the Founding of the City through the Renaissance. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936. Standard text. Simon, Bennett. “Tragic Drama and the Family: The Killing of Children and the Killing of Storytelling.” In Tragic Drama and the Family: Psychoanalytic Studies from Aeschylus to Beckett. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. A psychoanalytic study that is suggestive for ways to think about Decameron stories. Smart, Alastair. The Dawn of Italian Painting, 1250–1400. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978. Excellent studies of Giotto and the great painters of Boccaccio’s time. Just looking at the illustrations is an inspirational pleasure. Stubblebine, James H. Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes. New York: Norton, 1969. Close reading of the most important fresco cycle that we have, one that was central in Boccaccio’s experience of Giotto. Svenbro, Jesper. Phraskleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Cornell, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. Gives cultural substantiation to the sexual language and metaphors that Boccaccio draws on and demonstrates their origins. Trimpi, Wesley. Muses of One Mind. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. Astonishing erudition and ways of thinking about the rhetorical tradition as it culminates in Boccaccio. Essential historical inquiry. Vasari, Giorgio. Le opere di Giorgio Vasari. Ed. G. Milanesi. Firenze, 1906. The great biographical-artistic study that allows us to get close to the painter characters in Decameron. Winkler, J. J. Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’s Golden Ass. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. A brilliant interpretation of the book Boccaccio valued highly and perhaps rescued from Monte Cassino

index

Achilles, 21 Adam, 48, 125, 140 Aeschylus, 137 Allegory of Good Government: Effects of Good Government in the City, 41, 42 allusions: story details, 106 Ambrose, 71 Amores (Ovid), 90 Anaxagoras, 14 Ankersmit, F. R., 135 apotropaic masks, 79–80 Apuleius, xvii, 13, 15, 23, 24, 25, 39, 68, 90, 130 Aquinas, Thomas, 24, 32, 66, 67, 71, 95, 118, 120; paintings of, 34, 35, 132–33 Arena Chapel, 20, 21, 30, 36, 39, 43, 71 Aristophanes, 106 Aristotle, 23, 24 arriccio, 49 art: Decameron as total work of, 123–41; façade, 31; frescoes, 30, 43, 129; paintings, 33, 34, 35, 42, 46, 47, 68, 69, 70; poetry as, 88–90; relationship between

linguistic and material, 29–52, 69, 127, 146; storytelling as, 57–58 Artaud, Antonin, 127 Arthurian legends, 78–79, 130 Asclepius, 54 Asia, 2 Athens, 107 Augustine, Saint, 39, 71, 119, 143 Austen, Jane, 94 Averroism, 32 Balducci, Filippo, 147 Barlaam, 40 Barolini, Teodolinda, 112 Beckmann, Max, 81 Bellotto, Bernardo, 102 Belting, Hans, 44, 46–47, 50, 80 the Biadaiolo Master, 34; Glorification of St. Thomas Aquinas, 35 the Bible, 2, 5, 101, 125 Blake, William, 8 Bloch, Marc, 130, 131 “boccaccia” (ugly mouth), 53

172 Index

“Boccaccino.” See Boccaccio, Giovanni Boccaccio, Giovanni, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxii, 8, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27; dreams/masks and storytelling aspects, 53–83, 160n5; interpretive method for Decameron, 105–21; metaphoric power of metamorphosis, storytelling and, 85–104; “pimp,” 90, 102; trecento story, images and, 29–52 body: mind and, 98–100, 101, 102; sexuality and, 96–97; text as, 85–89 Bologna, 107 Bologna, Jacopo da, 132 Bonaguida, Pacino di, 123, 125; Crucifixion, 124 Bonaventura, Saint, 125 Bondone, Giotto di. See Giotto La Bonne aventure, 68, 70 Book House, 12 bricoleur, 48 “brigata,” 13, 15, 24–25, 29, 32, 41, 46–47, 48, 68, 95, 103, 104, 109, 112, 125, 132, 151 Bruno, Giordano, artists-as-characters and, 29, 75–76 Buffalmacco, Bounamico, 20, 21, 123, 125; artists-as-characters and, 29, 75–76, 159n4; Il Trionfo della morte, 46, 47 Bugaku masks, 76 Burckhardt, Jacob, 106 Calandrino: artists-as-characters and, 29, 75–76, 92 Calvino, Italo, xix Campo Santo, 50 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 17 Cathars, 71 Cavalcanti, Guido, 66 ceremonies: Hindu masks in, 74; masks for rituals and, 58–60 Charles of Anjou (king), 77, 79 Chaucer, Geoffrey, xvi, xvii, 15, 17, 139 Chicago, 12 children: “play,” storytelling, and, 3–4, 12, 14, 150–51 China, 4

Christ, 48, 95, 96, 125, 140 Christianity, 89 di Cione, Nardo, 32; Hell, 33 City of God (Augustine), 119 The City of Good Government, 41 Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Burckhardt), 106 clothing, body and, 86 cognomen, xviii, xix, 22, 86, 108 colors, story details, 106 Confessions (Augustine), 119 The Confidence Man (Melville), 17, 54 Constantinople, 40 Corbaccio (Boccaccio), xxiii The Country of Good Government, 41 creation: metaphors, 48; myths, 98 Crucifixion, 124 cultural reality, storytelling as part of, 143 Cummings, E. E., 8 Dante, Alighieri, xvii, xviii, xxiii, 5, 22, 24, 32, 67, 71, 95, 103, 106, 113, 126, 130; storytelling, painting and, 29, 39, 51 da Vinci, Leonardo, 37 death, 21; metaphors of, 12 Decameron (Boccaccio), xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxii, xxiii, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 18, 20, 21, 24; body as text in, 85–89; doubleness in, 108; interpretive method for, 105–21; literary humor/political satire in, 106; meaning of names in, 110–11; men in, 105, 107–8; metaphoric power of metamorphosis in, 85–104; painting and storytelling’s relationship, 29–52; as “pimp,” 22–27, 62–63, 73, 78, 86, 90, 108; rhetorical affects in, 105–7; storytelling structure, 16–17; as total work of art, 123–41; trecento story and images in, 29–52; women in, 95, 103, 105, 107, 109, 112, 115 Diciplina Clericalis, 15, 16 Dickinson, Emily, 5 The Divine Comedy (Dante), 72, 94 divinity: human creativity as, 89 doubleness, 108; mind/body, 98–100, 101, 102

Index

dreams: facial expressions/emotions in, 54–55; interpretation of, 54–55; sexuality in, 55–56 Duccio, 125; Maestà, 126 dust, metaphors of, 48–49 ekphrasis: trecento story, images and, 36–39 emotions: dreams, facial expressions and, 54–55 Empedocles, 85, 87 England, 77, 130 Ensor, James, 53, 81; Self-portrait with Masks, 82 Epic of Gilgamesh, 10, 11 Epigrams (Martial), 23 “essere una boccaccia” (spiteful one), 53 Euripides, 40 Europe, 4, 10 Eve, 48, 140 Everett, John Millais, 37 “fabliaux,” 2 façade, Santa Maria Novella, 31 facial expressions: dreams, emotions and, 54–55; masks and, 53–54, 56–57, 61–62, 68, 69, 160n6 “far le boccacce” (to make faces), 53 Feudal Society (Bloch), 130 Fibonacci, 115, 116 Firenze, Andrea da, 32; Triumph of Thomas Aquinas, 34 folk sayings, as story details, 106 framework, storytelling, xv–xxiii, 3–4, 145 France, 130 Frederick II, 116 frescoes, 30, 41, 43, 45, 46–47, 49, 51, 125, 129, 132–33; images of, and trecento story, 29–52 Freud, Sigmund, xxi, xxii, 148; dream interpretation and, 54–55 Gaddi, Taddeo, 125 Galatea/Pygmalion myths, 86–87 “Galeotto,” xviii, 22, 91 Genealogia Deorum Gentilium (Genealogy of

173

the Pagan Gods; Boccaccio), xxii, 40, 44, 50–51, 105, 108, 128 Genesis, 101, 125 George, Saint, 140 Gesamtkunstwerk, 27, 51, 88, 120, 127, 136 Gesta Romanorum, 15 Gibbon, Edward, 40 Gilbert, Creighton, 51 Giotto, 20, 21; Arena Chapel fresco, 30, 129; artists-as-characters and, 29; and trecento story, 29–52 The Glorification of St. Thomas Aquinas, 35 God, 32, 98 The Golden Ass (Apuleius), 13, 23 Grail legend, 130 Greece, 27 Greek myths, 8, 9 Gregory the Great, xxii, 71 Grimm brothers, 10 Gross, Anthony, 81 Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, 9 Hauvette, Henri, 100, 132–33 Hebrew myths, 10, 11 Hell (Nardo di Cione), 31 Hephaistos, 21 Hercules, 110 Hesiod, xvii, 15 Hexameron (Ambrose), xx history, “real” events, masks, and, 63–64 Holy Ghost, 71 Homer, xvii, 5, 36, 40, 136 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, xxi human creativity, divinity as, 89 Il Trionfo della morte (Buffalmacco) 46, 47 Iliad (Homer), 10, 21, 36, 40 images: masks and mouth, 61–62; trecento story and, 29–52 India, 2, 4 Inferno (Dante), xviii, 5, 22, 32, 51, 67, 78, 95, 113, 126 “intelligent love,” 94 Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), xxi intonaco, 49

174 Index

Ireland, 77, 130 irony, wit and, 105–7 Islam, 89 Italy, 23, 34, 37, 121 Jacob’s ladder, 101 James, Henry, 59 Japan, 4 Jerome, 71 Jesus, 32 John the Baptist, 80 John the Scot, 115 jokes, tricks and, 105–7, 150 Jones, Thomas, 102 Judaism, 89 Kant, Immanuel, 89, 145, 148 “katharsis,” 15 Klee, Paul, 81 Landini, Francesco, 132 laud singing, 134 Lawrence, D. H., 8 Lehman Collection, 34 the liar, paradox of, 17–18 Liber Abaci (Fibonacci), 115 Life of Dante. See Vita di Dante “life substance,” 87 linguistic art, material art’s relationship to, 29–52, 69, 127, 146 “linked stories,” xvi, 12, 14, 15, 17 literary humor, 106 Lives (Vasari), 29 locations, as story details, 106 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio: Allegory of Good Government: Effects of Good Government in the City, 41, 42; fresco, 43; trecento story, images and, 41–43 Lucy, Saint, story of, 100–102 Mackinnon, Lachlan, 85 Maestà (Duccio), 125, 126 magic: masking and, 53–54; metamorphosis and, 92 Magritte, René, 69; La Bonne aventure, 68, 70

Maimonides, Moses, 23 “Majesty” paintings, 125 Malevich, Kasimir, 85 Martial, 23 Masini, Lorenzo, 133 masking: magic and, 53–54; stories and, 64–67 masks: apotropaic (protective), 79–80; author/character, 58–61, 75–76; Bugaku, 76; ceremonial/ritualistic performance, 58–60; facial expressions and, 53–54, 56–57, 61–62, 68, 69, 160n6; Hindu ceremonies and, 74; history/ “real” events and, 63–64; metaphors and, 54; mouth images, 61–62, 68, 160n9; religious/ritual, 59; stories and, 64–67; storytelling aspects: dreams and, 53–83, 159n4, 160n5; theatrical, 59; writers and, 58–61, 75–76 material art, linguistic art’s relationship to, 29–52, 69, 127, 146 Melville, Herman, 17, 54, 109, 143 memory, storytelling and, 2–3 men, differences between women and, 107–8 Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), xvi, 147 Metamorphoses (Apuleius), 24, 39, 90 metamorphosis: magical, 92; masking, storytelling, and, 53–83; storytelling and metaphoric power of, 85–104 metaphors, xviii; creation, 48; death, 12; dust, 48–49; masks and, 54; music, 17; sex, xix, 13, 22, 27, 113; storytelling, metamorphosis, and power of, 85– 104 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 34 Michael, Saint, 140 Michelangelo, 8 Middle Ages, 2 Middle East, 2 mind, body and, 98–100, 101, 102 Monteverdi, Claudio, 132 mouth representations, masks and, 61–62, 68, 160n9 Muses, 95, 109, 115

Index

music: metaphors, 17; trecento singing and, 131–35 myths, 20; creation, 98; encyclopedia of, 128; Greek, 8, 9; Hebrew, 10, 11; Perseus, 59–60; Pygmalion/Galatea, 86–87; Sumerian, 10 names, meaning of, 110–11 Native Americans, storytelling and, 8–9 Natural History (Pliny), 37 “naturalistic faith,” 90 New York, 136 nicknames, xviii, 22. See also cognomen Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 20, 49, 53, 56 Nishikawa, Kyotaro, 76 North British Review, 94 “the novel,” 17 numbers: as story details, 106; symbolic, 98, 113 Odyssey (Homer), 40 “original plot,” 12 ornamentation, body and, 86 Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Sextus), 116 Ovid, xvii, 15, 23, 53, 86, 90 Padua, 29, 36, 39, 43, 121 painters, 57; trecento story, images, writers and, 29–52, 75–76 painting(s), 33, 34, 35, 42, 46, 47, 68, 69, 70, 124, 125, 126; façades, 31; frescoes, 30, 43, 129; “Majesty,” 125; storytelling’s relationship to, 7–8, 20–21, 27, 29–52, 123–24, 126; “Tree of Life,” 123, 125; “Triumph of Life,” 125; writing’s relationship to, 29–52, 75–76 Palazzo Pubblico, 41 Palm Sunday, 66 “The Paradox of the Liar,” 144 pears, theft of, 119 Perseus myth, 59–60 Petrarch, Francesco, 40 Phaedo (Plato), 23, 40 Phaedrus (Plato), xix, 23, 26, 40, 98, 140 philosophical insight, sex and, 111–12, 147, 149

175

Philostratus, 38 Picasso, Pablo, 81 Pilatus, Leontius, 40 “the Pimp,” xviii, xix, 90; Boccaccio as, 90, 102; storybook as, 22–27, 62–63, 73, 78, 86, 90, 108 Pirandello, 59 Pisa, 50, 107, 125 Plato, xviii, xix, 23, 24, 26, 40, 97, 128, 130, 143, 144 “play,” children, storytelling, and, 3–4, 12, 14, 150–51 Pliny, 37, 38 plot, original, 12 poem 870 (Dickinson), 5 poets, ekphrasis and, 36–39, 51 political satire, 106 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 37 “Prince of Pimps,” 22, 73, 86; Boccaccio as, 90, 102. See also Decameron (Boccaccio) “proemio,” 75 Propp, Vladimir, 7 Pygmalion/Galatea myths, 86–87 Pyrrhonism, 110 Ravel, Maurice, 160n19 “real” events, history, masks, and, 63–64 reality, storytelling and bankruptcy of, 1–27 Redon, Odilon, 81 religion, masks for rituals in, 59 Renaissance, 37, 106 The Republic (Plato), 97 Ring Cycle (Wagner), 131 rituals, masks for ceremonies and, 58–60 Robert of Naples (king), 51 role reversals, 112 Rome, 27 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 143 Santa Maria Novella, 29, 32, 33, 34, 38, 51, 59, 132, 134; façade, 31; painting, 34 “satyr play,” 23 scarring, body and, 86

176 Index

Schulz, Bruno, 1, 3, 160n1; metaphoric power of metamorphosis and, 85–88 Scrovegni Chapel, 30 Self-portrait with Masks (Ensor), 82 Seven Against Thebes (Aeschylus), 137 sex: bodies and, 96–97; dreams and, 55–56; encounters, 108; metaphors, xix, 13, 22, 27, 113; philosophical insight’s correlation to, 111–12, 147, 149; talk, 62–63 Sextus, 116 Shakespeare, William, xvi, xvii, 15, 16, 127, 139, 147, 148, 149 Simon, Bennett, 14 Simpson, Richard, 94 Sincerity and Authenticity (Trilling), 94 singing: laud, 134; trecento music and, 131–35 sinopia, 49 Smart, Alastair, 39, 69 Smithson, James, 9 Smithsonian Institution, 9, 10 Socrates, xix, 24, 26, 27, 98, 102, 130, 140 Sophocles, 15, 40 Statius, 137 Stevens, Wallace, 143 stories: art of telling, 57–58; children, “play,” and, 3–4, 12, 14, 150–51; as cultural artifacts, 5; dream, 55–56; “ethics” and, 6–7; history of, xv–xxiii, 1–2; history’s relationship to, 6; images and trecento, 29–52; linguistic/material art and, 7–8; linked, xvi, 12, 14, 15, 17; masking in, 64–67; numbers and details in, 106; oral traditions and, 3, 6; truth and traditional, 144 storybook, as pimp, 22–27, 62–63, 73, 78, 86, 90, 108 storyhearers, 2, 4, 12, 72, 73; storyteller’s influence on, 114 story 77, and symbolic numbers, 98 storytellers, xvi, xvii–xxiii, 2, 114 storytelling: as art, 57–58; bankruptcy of reality and, 1–27; dreams/masks as aspects of, 53–83; “ethics” and, 6–7; framework of, xv–xxiii, 3–4, 145;

history’s relationship to, 6–7; linguistic/material art and, 7–8; memory and, 2–3; metaphoric power of metamorphosis and, 85–104; Native American, 8–9; oral traditions and, 3, 6; painting’s relationship to, 7–8, 20–21, 27, 29–52, 123–24, 126; “play,” children and, 3–4, 12, 14, 150–51; storyhearers influenced by, 114; structure, 16–17; tragedy and, 14–15; truth and, 143–55 Strozzi Chapel: painting in, 33 Strozzi family, 32 Structures of Experience (Kuhns), xvi subtitles, xviii Sumerian myths, 10 Svenbro, Jesper, 115 Sylvester II (pope), 115 symbolic numbers, 98, 113 Symposium (Plato), 26, 97, 102, 140 tattooing, body and, 86 teeth, 112; masks, mouth representations, and, 68, 111, 160n9 text, body as, 85–89 theater, masks in, 59 Thebaid (Statius), 137 Thoreau, Henry David, 69 The Thousand Nights and One Nights, xvii, 13, 15, 25, 55 Thucydides, 136 Timaeus (Plato), 23, 40 Tolstoy, Leo, 143 Tovey, Barbara, xvi tragedy, storytelling and, 14–15 Tragedy: Contradiction and Repression (Kuhns), xvi Traini, Francesco, Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, 35 “transitional object,” 146 trecento story, 88; ekphrasis and, 36–39; images and, 29–52; painters, writers, and, 75–76 “Tree of Life” paintings, 123, 125 tricks, jokes and, 105–7, 150 Trilling, Lionel, 94

Index

Trionfo della morte (Triumph of Death; Buffalmacco), 21, 45, 50, 123, 125 “Triumph of Life” paintings, 125 The Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, 35 The Triumph of Thomas Aquinas, 34, 132–33 truth: storytelling and, 143–55; traditional stories as form of, 144 Valéry, Paul, 152, 153, 154 Valley of the Ladies, 103, 109 Vasari, Giorgio, 8, 29, 32; trecento story, images, and, 44–45 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 59 Viking explorations, 130 Virgil, 5, 39 Virgin Mary, 80 Vita di Dante (Life of Dante; Boccaccio), xxii, 103 Wagner, Richard, 126–27, 131 Wales, 77, 130 Washington, D.C., 9

177

Washington, George, 4 Weston, Jesse, 79 The White Race (Magritte), 69 Wilde, Oscar, 53 Winkler, J. J., 59 Winnicott, D. W., 146, 150 wit, irony and, 105–7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 153 Wollheim, Richard, 102 women: differences between men and, 107–8; Muses, 95, 109, 115; role reversals and, 112; Valley of the Ladies, 103, 109 Wordsworth, William: poetic characters of, 94; poetry as art and, 88–90 writers: masks and, 58–61, 75–76; trecento story, images, painters, and, 29–52, 75–76 writing, painting’s relationship to, 29–52, 75–76 Zuni people, 6