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

44
Giovanni Boccaccio
emblem of the tabernacle is burdened. Th e promise of the millennium
is inverted into the quest for earthly pleasures; the mystery of the
transfi guration is comically turned into a mad desire to be invisible so
that he can rob the banks of their riches. But above and beyond these
parodic reversals of the biblical and Christian motif, something very
serious takes place. Calandrino, in eff ect, attempts to charge with an
immediate reality both the world of symbolic constructs and Maso’s
fable. Whatever is just a pure image is valueless to him. Th e myth of
formal, esthetic self-enclosure, in which even the Decameron ostensibly
partakes, is dismissed by Calandrino’s sublime artlessness. And as he
tries to seduce both Bruno and Buff almacco into joining him in his
search for the heliotrope, he trivializes the import of their paintings:
“Compagni, quando voi vogliate credermi, noi possiamo divenire i
più ricchi uomini di Firenze: perciòche io ho inteso da uomo degno
di fede che in Mugnone si truova una pietra, la quale chi la porta
sopra non è veduto da niuna altra persona; . . . Noi la troverem
per certo, per ciò che io la conosco; e trovata che noi l’avremo, che
avrem noi a far altro se non . . . andare alle tavole de’ cambiatori, le
quali sapete che stanno sempre cariche di grossi e di fi orini, e torcene
quanti noi ne vorremo? Niuno ci vedrà; e così potremo arricchire
subitamente, senza avere tutto dí a schiccherare le mura a modo che
fa la lumaca.”
Believe me, friends, we can become the richest men in Florence,
for I have heard from a man who is to be believed that along
the Mugnone there is a certain kind of stone, and when you
carry it you become invisible; . . . We’ll fi nd it without a doubt,
because I know what it looks like; and once we have found it, all
we have to do is . . . go to the money changers, whose counters,
as you know, are always loaded with groats and fl orins, and help
ourselves to as much as we want. No one will see us; and so we’ll
be able to get rich quick, without having to whiten walls all the
time like a lot of snails. (p. 684)
It is at this point that the beff a reaches its climax. On a Sunday before
sunrise, Bruno and Buff almacco pretend to join him on his venture but
secretly engineer a spectacle whereby the city of Florence is a stage on
which Calandrino, believing himself unseen, is the visible occasion for