The Decameron: The Marginality of Literature

THE DECAMERON: THE MARGINALITY OF LITERATURE GIUSEPPE ~ZOTTA There has been no sustained examination of Boccaceio's reflections on the meaning of literature in the Decameron.' Probably because Boecaccio himself in his introduction places his fiction in a garden, a critic of the stature of Charles Singleton' has spoken of the Decameron as escapist literature. The plague that necessitates the escape is seen to provide the literal alibi which makes any profound preoccupation with the world irrelevant. If this were all, the Decameron would still be in itself a substantial cultural achievement. To quit the arena of history and voluntarily lapse into intransitive esthetic fruition is perhaps a fundamental revision of St Augustine's Christian doctrine that the esthetic experience be instrumental to man's spiritual ends; that literature, like the prophetic writings, be the nexusbetween man and God.· But Boccaceio, paradoxically known as Joannes tranquillitatum, is radically unable to rest content with a formulation of an absolute and stable antithesis between the esthetic order and historical existence just as he is equally unable to accept the Christian view of a creative unity between literature and life. Far from being an evasion into frivolity, the retreat to the garden is a dramatic strategy which enables Boecaccio to reflect on history and to find, in this condition of marginality, of provisional separation from the historical structures, a place for secular literature. Literature, in a real sense, is always written on the margin, where there is an emptiness, and in the desert, outside the eity of life: the patristic writings are marginalia to the Logos, commentaries around the biblical text. The Divine Comedy is the journey of literature across the desert to the City of God. Writing glosses is also the most conventional activity of the humanists. When Boceaceio, for instance, finished writing his Decameron, he compiled a mythological dictionary and footnotes to Dante.' But the Decameron itself is not an exegesiS of the Logos, the way Dante's Comedy in many ways is. Yet its mode of being is one of marginality in relationship to existing literary traditions, cultural myths and soeial structures, to that which, in one word, we call history. UTQ. Volume XLII, N1,mber 1, FaU 1972 THE Decameron: THE MARGINALITY OF LITERATURE 65 The dramatic relation between literary marginality and history does not have a clear-cut configuration in the Decameron, both because the world of history is seen as absolute negativity, corroded by the plague, and because Boccaceio intentionally writes secular literature. In the absence of the Logos what meaning can literature possibly have? What is its function in this world of death? What does it accomplish in the neutral area Victor Turner calls 'betwixt and between'?' Within this context, we must reject Auerbaclt's remarks that the Decameron never transcends the purely phenomenal aspects of historical experience and that it 'becomes weak and superficial as soon as the problematic or the tragic is touched upon.'" Boecaceio's primary concern is rather to reflect on the continuities and discontinuities between literature and history. He clearly understood that literature always has a historical dimension, yet its historicity is deliberately impoverished, shrunk to the unserious and the banal. When literature fails in its impulse to capture and interpret the mass of empirical fragments in a significant historical structure, it brings itself into being as a degraded object of erotic mediation . The Decameron is, in many ways, a reflection of the essential discontinuity between literature and historical reality and On the deliberate self-reduction of literature to the ontological status of a 'thing.' Boccaccio pursues these problems throughout the Decameron. In this paper, I propose to isolate and examine, on the one hand, some crueial passages in the introduction, the introduction to the fourth day and the conclusion; on the other hand, I propose to relate to these passages some navelle where literary self-reflexiveness and historical awareness are openly dramatized. Undoubtedly, the pastoral mode constitutes the primary strategy of Boecaceio's fiction. He attempts to weave and subsume into the continuity of the pastoral structure the various levels of the book. The retreat of the brigata to the locus amoenus to tell stories, away from the terror of...