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

Decameron 45
general laughter. Calandrino never reaches the object of his search, for
the point where the word and its reality coincide is nonexistent, truly
utopian. Nevertheless, the illusion that he has found the stone is to him
an exhilarating experience: he is provisionally freed from the tyranny of
the others’ gaze, unaware that his illusion of being autonomous, to put
it in the terms of the profound insight of the commedia dell’arte, masks
the fact that he is more than ever an automaton.
Nor does the fi nal fall from his fantasy, when on reaching home
he is seen by his wife, bring any sobering self-awareness to him. In the
best misogynistic tradition, he attributes the loss of the stone’s virtue
to his wife and fi ercely beats her. 18 Th is is possibly for Boccaccio a way
of saying that there is no deception which is ever quite as powerful
as self-deception: more cogently, this is his expedient for releasing
Bruno’s and Buff almacco’s hoax into the domain of the inessential.
For their trick is dwarfed by Calandrino. Ostensibly, they occupy
a world of sense, of orderly and meaningful patterns. Th ey are makers
of images who can tell fi ction from reality and reason from unreason,
and who know that the heliotrope is an arbitrary sign without any
reference outside of itself. Calandrino, by contrast, is involved in a
quest over the trails of the imagination. Th is imagination is not to
be understood as the esthetic faculty that duplicates the world or
funnels its experiences into a stable picture. It marks, rather, a purely
visionary venture which blurs the line of separation between illusion
and reality. 19 On Sunday, the dies solis, he seeks the heliotrope, literally
the conjunction with the sun. 20
Th is impossible hope depends on his act of faith that objects must
exist because words for them exist and this, in a real sense, is his folly
to which the text twice has oblique but certain allusions. Th e fi rst
time, when the two friends feign not to see Calandrino, Buff almacco
says: “Chi sarebbe stato sì stolto che avesse creduto che in Mugnone
si dovesse trovare una così virtuosa pietra, altri che noi?” (Who in his
right mind, other than we, would ever have believed all that talk about
fi nding such a powerful stone along the Mugnone? p. 687). Th e second
time madness is Calandrino’s direct attribute: as he is seen by his wife,
“niquitoso corse verso la moglie, e presala per le treccie la si gittò a
piedi” (Like a madman he rushed toward his wife and catching her by
the tresses hurled her to the ground, p. 688). As a fool and madman,
he lives in a world of pure exchange in the sense that everything can
be mistaken for everything else, and a word, literally nothing, can give