The Author in the Pine Tree: Allegorized Autobiography and Arboreal Mythology in Boccaccio's Filocolo and Decameron

That tree which thou sawest … it is thou"

(Daniel 4: 17–19)

In his studies of folklore, alchemy and dreams, Carl Gustav Jung describes the tree as a privileged symbol of the individual's spiritual growth:

[a]n image which frequently appears among the archetypal configurations of the unconscious is that of the tree or the wonder-working plant. […] If a mandala may be described as a symbol of the self seen in cross section, then the tree would represent a profile view of it: the self depicted as a process of growth;

[i]n East and West alike, the tree symbolizes a living process as well as a process of enlightenment, which, though it may be grasped by the intellect, should not be confused with it.¹

Jungian studies and English literature loomed large in my background in the fall of 1994, when I started my graduate courses in Italian literature under the guidance of Pier Massimo Forni. Our seminar focused on the Filocolo, Giovanni Boccaccio's first prose narrative. [End Page S-90] When we tackled the fifth chapter, the presentation of Boccaccio's alter ego Idalogos recounting his life to the novel's protagonists from within the trunk of a pine tree reminded me of William Shakespeare's alter ego in The Tempest, Prospero, who through his art had to free his creative spirit from imprisonment in a pine tree in order to achieve closure in his personal and creative enterprises. A Prospero figure was indeed featured in the previous book of the Filocolo, in one of the two questioni d'amore that would become novellas in Boccaccio's Decameron: the old Theban man who, thanks to "his books" and mysterious art, creates the blossoming, charity-engendering garden amid the winter of selfish pleasure-seeking and pride.²

In light of Jung's explanation of the tree as a symbol of the developing self—and in light of Prospero's psychomachia between spiritual and carnal desires, embodied in the Ariel-Caliban conflict—the lenitive metamorphosis into a tree which Venus metes out to the similarly conflicted Idalogos in the Filocolo could be seen as an image of the author's personal and artistic growth, involving a sublimation of erotic desires for the purpose of achieving, in time, a full command of his creative powers and becoming a creator of gardens himself. But why a pine tree, of all trees, in both Boccaccio and Shakespeare? Florio-Filocolo himself asks Idalogos to tell why he had been metamorphosed into a pine tree among all the trees.³ Indeed, the chosen image of the tree and its wording can reveal deep-seated psychological attitudes of the author himself. Jonathan Bate's observations on the poetic details of Ovid and Shakespeare's use of Adonis's vegetation myth, that the two poets "are not interested in external nature so much as the nature of sexual desire," are thoroughly valid for Boccaccio as well.⁴

Following in Professor Forni's footsteps, I discovered that an intertextual comparison with Ovid's Metamorphoses was in order. This reveals the presence of Daphne, Cyparissus and Attis in Idalogos's metamorphosis:

[…] soprastare a me Venere, di me pietosa, vidi e desiderante di dare alle mie pene sosta. I piedi, già stati presti, in radici, e 'l corpo in pedale, e le braccia in rami, e i capelli in frondi di questo albero in me trasmutò, con dura corteccia cignendomi tutto quanto. Né variò la condizione d'esso dalla mia natura, se ben si riguarda: egli verso le stelle più che altro vicino albero la sua cima distende, così come io già tutto all'alte cose inteso mi distendea. Egli i suoi frutti di fuori fa durissimi, e dentro piacevoli e dolci a gustare. [End Page S-91] Oimè, che in questo la mia lunga durezza al contrastare agli amorosi dardi si dimostra […].⁵

On Daphne's metamorphosis, Ovid writes:

[…] mollia cinguntur tenui praecordia libro,In frondem crines, in ramos brachia crescunt;Pes modo tam velox pigris radicibus haeret,Ora cacumen habet, remanet nitor unus in...