“I do not doubt for a moment that you believe what you say
to be true. But as far as I can judge, you have not devoted much attention to
the study of human nature. For if you had, you surely possess enough
intelligence to have discovered certain things that would cause you to think
twice before making such confident assertions. When the rest of us spoke so
freely… we were merely facing facts.”
Once again, it has been too long. Another busy couple months
went by, during which I read a bit of William of Ockham and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, along with one or
two other things, and I didn’t manage to find the time to update. I had
planned, was even in my own strange way looking forward to writing a dual post
about Ockham and Eco, since the latter’s book is a medieval detective story
featuring a Holmesian monk who cut his teeth on Ockham.
And Ockham himself had a lot of interesting ideas that I would have liked to
have thought more deeply about. Unfortunately, as time went by, I couldn’t
bring myself to make sense of the notes I had taken; Ockham’s thought is difficult,
and though it pains me to admit I just can’t sit down and read logic for very
long. So Ockham and his razor have been shelved for now, until a time when I
can revisit him.
Instead, we get the fortuitous opportunity to follow a post
about Dante with a post about another Italian writer, Boccaccio, who was deeply
influenced by the great poet. In the years since he wrote, he and Dante have
gained a complementary relationship. Whereas Dante wrote The Divine Comedy, Boccaccio’s magnum opus, whose official name
is the Decameron, has been called the
“human comedy.” Although we will return to Dante’s influence, I want to focus now
on the “human” aspect of this comparison, because we notice that above all else
Boccaccio is concerned with the human.
Granted, in the past we have talked about the human––after
all, there isn’t that much else to write about if we are writing about
people––but never have we seen humanness take center stage in
such a frank way. If Dante writing the greatest epic poem of all time in
vernacular allowed his descendents––including Boccaccio––to cast off the
shackles of Latin and write for a wider audience, then Boccaccio writing about
mankind allowed for everyday human life to become the center of the literary
universe in a way that became the status quo.
Truly, the lives of everyday men and women were not written
about until this. (Definitely not women, who play lead roles in many of Boccaccio’s
tales.) I learned in a course on Shakespeare that stories were once reserved
for adventurers, warriors, explorers: those who had a story to tell, so to
speak. Yet by gathering together ten men and women seeking shelter from the
bubonic plague, Boccaccio proved that everyone (even women) have things to say
that entertain not only themselves, but all people.
I put such an emphasis on women because Boccaccio
claimed that the Decameron was
written to women and for women, so that they who were unable to voice their
concerns and laments could see that those laments and those concerns were
universal and thereby lighten their unbearable heaviness. Boccaccio does
not deny the lovesickness and hardships of men––he recounts that he had also
been “inflamed beyond measure with a most lofty and noble love”––but that
women, having to hide their love (which is “far more potent than one which is
worn on the sleeve”), having to spend “most of their time cooped up within the
narrow confines of their rooms,” having to sit “in apparent idleness…reflecting
on various matters,” women have a much more difficult time with their burdens.
And so he writes to such women, who due to decorum would never reveal their
true desires.
I say “such women” because all women were not created equal to Boccaccio. For all his claims of taking pity on
“people in distress,” some of his stories (not all by any means, but a
portion) are terribly misogynistic. At this point, we must do
our due diligence by acknowledging that we as enlightened, 21st-century
people should not condemn people of the past or bind them by our standards of
living. Even still, for all Boccaccio’s talk about writing for women, there are
many stories of women being tormented at the hands of men. Aside from
“tragedies” wherein the mistreatment of the woman is not directed at women in
general, there are stories where a man’s triumph over a woman is glorified in a
rather disturbing way. I’ll leave it to those more qualified than me to decide
what to make of such stories, but it’s good to keep in mind as we’re reading
that Boccaccio carries this worldview. Chaucer, as we’ll see in the next post,
is much more sympathetic toward women, in word as well as deed. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
To confess, I did not read all of the hundred stories of the
Decameron. There are only so many
stories about late medieval life that I can handle, and that number ended up
being around fifty or so. In thinking about how to structure this post, I
decided to concentrate on a few stories that I found particularly interesting
or enlightening, and go over the others only briefly.
Love, Intelligence, Fortune
Dante, as we have said, used the Commedia as a way of summing up all that came before him. In
Boccaccio, we occasionally see references to the old stuff: a Greek name here
or there, a biblical character recast. But the absolute most striking feature is
Boccaccio’s unabashed modernness. His prologue, the very first we read of
his writing, immediately mentions three qualities: gratitude, pity, and love; love is
the greatest cause of distress; pity is taken on those in distress; gratitude,
the result of pity, is, in his words, the virtue most worthy of commendation.
Apart from love, these are not the usual virtues we’ve encountered, especially
in our recent slew of Christian texts (and Boccaccio’s love is not exactly
Christian love either). Sure, gratitude and pity are aspects of greater
virtues, but they themselves are not primary.
The three principal themes of the Decameron, according to my translator, are love, intelligence, and
fortune; since there is little mention of God (only mention of the depravity of
His creation), we must conclude that the love and intelligence are not divine,
but human. It is the love between men and women, between kin, between friends,
between enemies even that is glorified. Auerbach wrote that “the Decameron develops a distinct,
thoroughly practical and secular ethical code rooted in the right to love.” The
narrators, the ten hiding from the plague, have been taken to represent the
drama of the human soul, which pits “the rational appetite against the lower
irascible and concupiscible appetites… the intellectual power of reason
[against] the baser human emotions of anger and lust.” That intellectual power
runs the gamut between the new ethical code that Auerbach indicates and
“strategems adopted by wives and the religious to achieve the gratification of
their sexual desires.”
Of the three, only fortune is still distinctly inhuman, but
even it is less a god or supernatural being than a force of nature. As
intelligent as his characters often are, they still see themselves as subjects
of fortune, and do not appear to have the uniquely Machiavellian insight that
fortune can be tamed by forethought and intelligence.
Aside from this, Boccaccio’s modernness is manifest throughout
the work. Some stories, for example, get their tragic conclusion by way of
“blind and unthinking adherence to an outmoded concept of honour.” Rather than
having things work out because of virtue, virtue, especially a rigid conception
of such, is a hindrance in Boccaccio’s world.
Which, granted, is not hard to imagine. It’s a time when
people are running around trying to escape the plague. And as I read (I forget
if it’s Boccaccio’s own words or the translator’s introduction), the plague
acted in a way as natural selection. For example, women had female attendants
who were, among other things, allowed to see them nude for things like dressing.
But due to the plague, many of these attendants were dead or else just didn’t
want to touch these plague-stricken old broads. So the women who wanted to
survive would often ask male attendants to wash them or attend to their sores.
As such, Boccaccio (I think) implies that the women who made it out of the
plague were distinctly less concerned with decorum than those who died. Not
exactly scientific, but an interesting argument nonetheless. Think of it as
survival of the sluttiest. (Sorry.)
Tancredi and Ghismonda; Guillaume and His Wife
Of course Boccaccio’s masterwork wouldn’t be a masterwork if
there were simply a hundred stories that were only loosely connected by a
framing device. Ten people telling ten stories each is relatively uninteresting
by itself, and so there should be some sort of internal structure lurking below
like a shark beneath the waves.
Indeed, there is such a structure, and if I had read more
closely, I likely would have discovered more than just the two examples
I have below. But let’s not dwell on my shortcomings and instead focus on the
stories that complement each other so well.
One occurs in day four, the first story, wherein
Prince Tancredi discovers that his daughter has been sleeping with a man of whom
he has not approved, and he takes the reasonable action of killing the young
man and sending his daughter the man’s heart in a chalice, at which point the
daughter becomes distraught and poisons herself and dies. Before the heart
incident, however, Tancredi to his credit lets his daughter know that he is
aware of her transgression and asks her to stop. What follows is rather
unprecedented: his daughter, the unfortunately-named Ghismonda, delivers a long
speech to her father declaring that she has done nothing wrong, that she has
acted of her own volition and chosen someone whom she considers worthy of her,
and that she, as an individual should be allowed to make such choices. The
entire speech is rather abrupt, especially for the time: who would give a woman
such a long speech? In fact, Boccaccio says in the first story of day six, “it is more unseemly
for a woman to make long speeches than it is for a man.”
Are we to take him at his word here? That would be difficult
since Ghismonda’s speech is so perfectly reasoned as to make her father seem
like a backwards, oafish moron. In fact, it reminded me quite a bit of Nora’s
speech from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House
both in its veracity and in its utter incongruence with the rest of the story.
I would conclude that it is not unseemly to Boccaccio for a woman to make such
a speech; rather, Boccaccio is demonstrating his more enlightened opinion of
women, namely that they are capable of deep and original thinking, and that
they should be taken seriously; all this taking place more than 600 years ago.
Anyway, in spite of or perhaps due to Ghismonda’s tenacity,
her father kills her lover and his brutishness causes her to kill herself. Her
father realizes the error of his ways far too late, and mourns her death.
In the ninth story of the same day, Guillaume finds out that
his unnamed wife has been sleeping with another man, coincidentally also named
Guillaume. He kills this pseudo-Guillaume and feeds his heart to his unnamed
wife, who, upon finding out what she has done, throws herself off of a casement
sans speech, whereupon the living Guillaume sees the error of his ways and
repents.
What do we make of these parallel stories? There are subtle
differences. Tancredi suffers a speech from Ghismonda, who commits suicide
despite not having ingested the heart of her lover as Guillaume’s wife did.
Both women reach their end because of the lover’s death rather than the abject
horror of cannibalism.
But let’s not speculate whether Guillaume’s wife would have
killed herself had she only seen and not eaten the heart of Guillaume-Part-Two.
Instead, we can notice that Ghismonda speaks her mind, yet comes to no better
conclusion than Guillaume’s wife who does not get to plead her case. (Hell, she
doesn’t even have a name.) The guy writing the introduction to my
edition stresses that for all Boccaccio’s progressive tendency, he still
carries a great deal of anti-feminist and misogynistic baggage. Which granted,
yes he does. But I would argue that these parallel stories are something of a
lamentation. In saying that it is unseemly of women to make long speeches,
Boccaccio is lamenting the lack of voice women have; that a brute like Tancredi
can act so violently even in the harsh light of reason; that for all their
erudition and intelligence, women are subject to the whims of men––or more broadly, fortune––regardless.
Or at least that’s what I gather.
Mithridanes and Nathan; Gisippus and Titus
In day ten, there is another pair of complementary stories.
In the third story, a generous man named Mithridanes is envious of an even more
generous man, Nathan, and decides to kill Nathan so that he can be the most
generous man alive. Nathan, being of almost Christlike generosity, says that
men have been killing other men all throughout history and is happy to see that
Mithridanes is motivated not by hatred, “but in order to be better thought of,”
a motivation Nathan considers noble. Nathan then speaks of how commonplace
killing is, and that, despite being on the receiving end of Mithridanes’
murderous rage, there is “nothing marvelous or novel” about it. In the end,
Mithridanes does not kill Nathan, cannot kill him, and the two end up being
friends.
There is something wonderfully subversive about this story,
as if Nathan were some amalgam of Christ’s simple compassion, John Galt’s overwritten, objectivist dispassion,
and McCarthy’s Judge Holden’s apassion; can you not hear the ringing tones of
“War is God” in Nathan’s serene meditation on murder?
In the eighth story of the same day, Gisippus is pledged to
marry Sophronia. His friend, Titus, however, has meanwhile fallen so in love
with Sophronia that he cannot imagine being with another and is constantly
tormented by his thoughts of her. Titus confesses this to Gisippus who, instead
of being outraged by his friend's treachery, says “The laws of Love are more
powerful than any others; they even supplant divine laws, let alone those of
friendship.” He then offers Titus Sophronia’s hand, though not telling her
about this arrangement at all. Of course this backfires and the story runs for
a while, eventually turning out positively for both men. Sophronia, despite
being tricked into sex with and marriage to another man ends up pretty alright
as well, all things considered.
The similarity between these two stories is the elevation of
vice to divine principle. Nathan opines that murder is a fact of the world, and
that he should feel honored that he is being murdered out of a desire to be
better rather than something more hateful like power or wealth. Similarly,
Gissipus finds that Titus is subject to some universal force the maw of which
he cannot escape. As such, he is sympathetic to his friend and offers him
exactly what he desires, regardless of the difficulties such an act inevitably
present to him. In both stories, there is praise of sin and kowtowing to new
world-principles. Boccaccio sees the power of love and wrath in the world; no
doubt since he writes so many stories about sex and violence. Yet rather than
condemning them categorically as evils, he sees gray areas, times when such transgressions
should be praised. This transcends the otherwise acceptable nature of his
humanism, or at least the nature that is acceptable to us in our time. Sin is
not black and white to Boccaccio. There is some indication of means being
justified by ends, or even those means not being all that mean to begin with. (Jokes.)
Joseph and Melissus
Finally, I want to mention my favorite story. The ninth
story of the ninth day involves Melissus meeting a man named Joseph while both
are on their way to consult with the biblical ruler Solomon about what to do
with their respective predicaments; Joseph has a stubborn wife, and Melissus
seeks to be loved by his fellow man (no homo). Solomon is terse with both men:
he tells Melissus to “love”, and Joseph to “go to Goosebridge.”
At Goosebridge, the two men see a farmer beating the crap
out of his stubborn mule, telling the men that sometimes stubbornness answers
only to wrath. Inspired, Joseph returns home and violently beats his wife until
she becomes submissive to him. Literally, that is what he takes away from the
encounter at Goosebridge. This scene occurs in front of Melissus, and it is
described in great, often repulsive detail. I say great detail mostly in
comparison to Melissus’ part of the story; after watching his companion beat
his wife half to death for a full page or two, Melissus simply returns home and
tells a wise man what Solomon said, and the wise man tells him that it is true,
that one must love others to be loved in return. At which point the story says
that Melissus was loved from then on, and concludes. Josephus gets pages for his domestic violence, and Melissus gets literally a paragraph, and a short one at that.
The obvious point to make here is that Solomon gives
opposite pieces of advice to the men: though they both desire something from
other people, Solomon advises one to love (that is, be generous in some way
toward others) and the other to berate (to withhold pity and kindness); the
opposing pieces of advice both produce the desired effects. The advice to
Joseph to beat his wife takes a little bit of convincing, however: when they
arrive at Goosebridge and the muleteer beats his mule, the men are taken aback at
the man's savagery. Yet when it produces results, they cannot object.
Perhaps Boccaccio is advocating something akin to sparing-the-rod.
What perplexes me more, though, is the brevity with which he
treats the advice given to Melissus. Whereas Joseph needs to be convinced
firsthand, Melissus needs only short words of encouragement to understand the
importance of love. Love, then, may come more naturally in Boccaccio’s mind
than hate. Whereas love is our natural tendency and requires only a nudge in
the right direction, we must be convinced that wrath and discipline are
occasionally necessary. (This goes back to our earlier point that vice can occasionally be elevated to virtue.) Forgetting for the moment that domestic violence is
terrible, we should remember the difficulty and roundabout-ness it took for
Joseph to be convinced to beat his wife: first, he is not told to be wrathful,
but rather to go to a certain place. At that place, he fortuitously encounters
this man. It took the power of chance (that Solomon in his wisdom could somehow
control), of fortune, to convince Joseph of the right course of action. The
words of a stranger, even one as exalted as Solomon, would not have been
enough.
Stray Observations
- The Decameron is similar in structure to the Arabian nights: “the spectre of imminent death is held at a manageable distance” by the telling of stories; here it is the spectre of the plague.
- The translator: "[When Boccaccio says] the power of Love is greater than your power or mine [he] seems intent upon showing its validity. Not only that, he implies that any attempt to interfere with the natural progression of instinctive forces is doomed to failure.”
- Of wicked clergy: “They had applied the name of ‘procuration’ to their unconcealed simony, and that of ‘sustentation’ to their gluttony, as if… God were ignorant of the inventions of their wicked minds and would allow Himself to be deceived, as men are, by the mere names of things.” Man, if I had paid more attention to Ockham, he probably would’ve had a lot to say about that.
- “There is a certain proverb, frequently to be heard on the lips of the people, to the effect that a dupe will outwit his deceiver – a saying which would seem impossible to prove but for the fact that it is borne out by actual cases.”
- In story one of day five, a dullard, Cimon, acquires wisdom after he falls in love with Iphigenia. Recall in Gilgamesh when the wild man Enkidu is tamed by sex.
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