Adventures in Speech: Rhetoric and Narration in Boccaccio’s Decameron by Pier Massimo Forni (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER mechanisms oflinguistic change in late Middle English. The process by which northern forms were introduced into Standard English, for exam­ ple, is a subject of continuing controversy, as is the relative importance of influences from the Central Midlands and from East Anglia.1 Even when the evidence is, as Fisher acknowledges, circumstantial, the coher­ ence ofthe story that he traces and the archival materials that he has pro­ vided will continue to stimulate scholarly investigation and discovery. THOMAS CABLE University ofTexas at Austin PIER MASSIMO FORNI. Adventures in Speech: Rhetoric and Narration in Boccaccio's Decameron. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Pp. xiv, 155. $29.95. Pier Massimo Forni is already well known as one of the prominent Boccaccio scholars in the United States. Adventures in Speech is a signif­ icant contribution toward his larger aim of mapping out Boccaccio's "narrative poetics" (p. 114). This book follows close on the heels of Lessico critico decameroniano (coedited with Renzo Bragantini), his essay in which he shares an interest in the relation of Boccaccio's famous re­ alism to his patterns oflanguage; it also develops some lines ofthought suggested a few years earlier in his Forme complesse nel Decameron with re­ gard to "the Boccaccian habit of exploring the narrative potential of rhetorical forms." Hence the title ofthis new book, with its suggestion that narrative adventures are already implicit in figures of speech. While some parts ofthe book have appeared previously in Italian, much of it is new or amplified besides being made available in English. Although the chapters can be read independently, they work together coherently to build up Forni's larger view of the relations between rhetoric and narrative in the Decameron. The book is divided both into five chapters (plus an appendix) and into three sections. The first section focuses on the interplay ofcornice 1 See, for example, Laura Wright, "About the Evolution of Standard English," in M. J. Toswell and E. M. Tyler, Studies in English Language and Literature: "Doubt wisely"; Papers in Honour ofE. G. Stanley (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 99-115. 244 REVIEWS and tales. Chapter 1 surveys the narrators' comments about why they have chosen to tell particular stories. "There is always reasoning on the choice of topic; there is continuous justification and rationalization among the narrators" (p. 7). Their explanations include the production of new tales in response to previous ones; Forni points out how narra­ tors, in referring to the same previous tale, may sum it up-and thus interpret its point-quite differently. The narrators' repeated and prob­ lematic concern about truthfulness is also discussed. Chapter 2 focuses on the production of pleasure for the brigata-and for us-not only from the contents of a tale in itself but also from its structural relations to previous material. The Calandrino cycle is an important example here, as we are shown again how one narrator reopens and reinterprets material seemingly closed and finished by a previous narrator. Section 2 (chapter 3) analyzes the rhetoric of beginnings in Boccaccio's tales, finding a pattern of polarization between the novum and the notum: a promise of new and unusual followed by a normalization through phrases that render this particular character, action, or situation typical. We are asked by this formula to evaluate the tale in relation to everyday life. The syntax of realism, i.e., the parenthetical comments that estab­ lish typicality, are as important as content to the creation of Boccaccio's famous effect of realism. Section 3 (chapters 4 and 5) returns with a new approach to the first section's question of inventio: the how and why of coming up with par­ ticular stories. Chapter 4 develops suggestions of chapters 2 and 3, dis­ cussing the material realization of metaphorical phrases as a source of narrative. Forni sets this technique into the context of other literary ex­ amples, both classical (e.g., Ovid) and modern (e.g., Bontempelli). He adopts as useful Koelb's term logomimesis and Bergson's and Freud's ob­ servations of its production of comic effects, while resisting Todorov's sweeping claim that all of the fantastic...