Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

38
Giovanni Boccaccio
Th e fi fth novella of the eighth day features Maso del Saggio who goes
to the local law court in the belief that a friend he is looking for may be
idling his hours away watching the lawyers’ performances and squabbles.
As soon as Maso catches a glimpse of the judge who appears “più tosto
un magnano che altro a vedere” (more like a coppersmith than anything
else, p. 698), he abandons the search for his friend and decides to play
a trick on the judge. 1 He feigns a complaint against an imaginary thief
and vociferously pleads his case in order to fi x upon himself the general
attention. In the meantime, an accomplice of his who has secretly
crawled beneath the bench where the judge sits, pulls his pants off .
By these simple touches Boccaccio has drawn the classic pattern of
the beff a—literally a joke, a comic situation—to which we shall repeatedly
return. Th e foolish magistrate, like all fools in the Decameron, is mercilessly
fl outed by the trickster, and by the mockery the very principle of
inviolability of the law is subverted. 2 But what on the surface may seem
to be merely a somewhat anarchic pleasure of undermining pretenses,
of literally divesting the fi gurehead of his semblance of authority, hides
important implications for some comic motifs in the Decameron. Th e
oblique target of the beff a is the notion that there can ever be a detached
perspective snugly sheltering the judge: Maso’s trick actually shatters that
distance and, through the resulting inversion, the man who sits ostensibly
outside the events to judge them is turned into a principal while the
spectators take his place. Th e comical shifts of focus are constant in the
beff a, and because of them any fresh attempt on the part of the critic to
fi x the comedy of the Decameron with stable defi nitions may turn out to
be a hazard, a way of falling into the author’s unconscionable trap and
being caught, like the judge, in the spirals of laughter.
But critics have traditionally practiced a calculated prudence when
engaged in a defi nition of Boccaccio’s laughter. Th ey have generally
eluded the problem or, what amounts to the same thing, have reduced
the comical sense of the Decameron to a caricature of the social order.
Auerbach, to mention a critic who has most powerfully probed the
ideological subversiveness of this text, echoes De Sanctis’ detached
Hegelian stance in his view of Boccaccio’s “light entertainment” as the
radical perspective from which he is enabled to dismantle the moral
relics of medieval Christianity. 3
Auerbach’s critical statement is certainly not wrong; if anything, it
is partial or, more precisely, evasive. Th e evasiveness may be the proper
response to the problem of laughter, which, according to an age-old