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

48
Giovanni Boccaccio
and by magic practices enjoys the pleasures of banquets, music, and
midnight revels.
Simon, like Calandrino earlier, is unable to decipher the transparent
lie and is wistfully seduced by it. He believes that the world
of appearances pulsates with occult life, that a mythic bond exists
between appearances and the beyond. Eager to experience those
imaginary pleasures, he begs to join what Bruno defi nes as a “paradiso
a vedere” (paradise itself, p. 748), so that he might enjoy the most
beautiful woman in the world. 23 In this sense, the story comically
conjures the motif of the Saturnalia, the golden age of revelry where
restraints are abolished and one’s fantasies are realized. 24 When fi nally
the night appointed for the meeting arrives, Simon is instructed to
wear his most sumptuous robe and go to the cemetery of Santa Maria
Novella. Of course, neither otherworldly prodigies nor erotic fulfi llments
take place.
Th e tale actually turns into a masque, a literal carnival which, as
its etymology suggests, is the ironic counterpoint of the erotic expectations.
25 While Simon waits in fear, Buff almacco disguised as a bear
and wearing the mask of a devil comes to take the physician to share
in the delights of the magic paradise but, after a few moments, throws
him into a ditch of excrement. Bruno and Buff almacco are hardly
able to contain their laughter at their own trick. Th e morning after,
with their bodies painted to simulate tortures received on account of
Simon’s cowardice, they visit him to complain for the troubles he has
caused them. Fearful of becoming a public laughing stock, the doctor
from that day forth pampers the two friends more than ever before.
Simon’s fall into the mire marks a symbolic degradation, the
manipulation by which he is defi ned as an inferior to the two tricksters.
Above and beyond this apparent pretext, the degradation implies
that laughter is linked with a fall from Paradise. But for Boccaccio
the fall has no theological focus: Paradise is an illusory misnomer and
what is really lost by the fall is Hell.
Th e novella, I submit, features a deliberate Dantesque design, as
if Boccaccio were directly involved in a parody of Dante’s Hell. Th e
allusion to Michael Scott is an overt recall of Inferno XX, the canto of
contorted shades where divination and necromancy are expiated; 26 the
ensuing description of the assembly’s entertainment, “Costoro adunque
servivano i predetti gentili uomini di certi loro innamoramenti e d’altre
cosette liberamente; . . . poi . . . preserci di grandi e strette amistà con