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

Decameron 49
alcuni, più gentili che non gentili” (Th ese two men freely assisted the
above-mentioned nobles in certain love aff airs and other little escapades
of theirs . . . and afterwards they acquired a good number of
intimate friends, without caring whether they were nobles or plebeians,
p. 747) is a paraphrase of Iacopo della Lana’s commentary on
that canto. 27 Th e painted bodies of Bruno and Buff almacco, simulating
the tortures, echo the description of the hypocrites as “gente dipinta”
(painted people) in Inferno (xxiii, 58). And just as in Dante between
the world of the sorcerers in Inferno xix (the canto of Simon magus)
and the world of the simulators there stands the so-called commedia dei
diavoli, in Boccaccio’s text we fi nd its playful reenactment.
By staging the commedia dei diavoli, Dante primarily dramatizes
the common medieval conception of Hell as the place of tricks and
frauds. At the same time, he implies that laughter has a demonic
property and is in touch with the dark powers. Like the Christian
apologists, Tertullian, Cyprian and Boccaccio himself in the Genealogy
of the Gods, Dante sees mimes and spectacles as arts of the devil,
distracting man from his heavenward ascent. 28 He even goes further
than this: the devils’ comedy enacts a steady danger of spiritual degradation
of self. Unsurprisingly the pilgrim, at this stage of the poem, is
directly threatened by the devils. Commentators have tried to explain
the impasse by resorting to raw autobiography, the suspicion that
Dante in his own life may have been guilty of barratry. 29 In eff ect, the
world of comedy is seen as black magic, a fraudulent game in this area
where “Michele Scotto, fu, the veramente / de le magiche frode seppe
‘l gioco” (Michael Scott it was, who truly knew the game of magic
frauds, Inferno xx, 116–117). Dante dismisses this ludic moment
because it is an illusory instrument by which the world can be shaped
and radically juxtaposes to it his own Commedia. 30
What for Dante is an experience of moral terror, Boccaccio
displaces into sheer buff oonery. Part of the fun, no doubt, lies in the
fact that Boccaccio, a serious commentator of Inferno, is here involved
in a deliberate misreading of it. Historically it will be left to Pico
and the Hermetic tradition to reverse altogether Dante’s perspective
and regain magic as a high wisdom, the imaginative realm of man’s
autonomy whereby the possibilities of angelic perfection or descent
into matter are made available to him. 31
For Boccaccio, Simon literally falls into matter in what seems to
be an overt mockery of spiritual falls. In this context there is a further