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

50
Giovanni Boccaccio
detail that deserves comment: the front wall of Simon’s hospital bears
the emblem of Lucifer. 32 By the detail, Boccaccio casts the physician
as an ineff ectual sorcerer and portrays medicine as a practice of black
magic. 33 At the same time he exposes the lunacy in his belief both
in the uncanny marvels of the Saturnalia and in mysterious bonds
between symbolic representation and hidden essences.
Nor are the tricksters molders of worlds: to fashion themselves
is simply a travesty, the wearing of a mask to make fun of, and gain
ascendancy over, the gullible Simon. In the Genealogy of the Gods,
Boccaccio still vindicates the value of the poet as a creature who forges
and wields the illusion of new worlds. But in this story the imagination,
the power by which man is the chameleon, is parodied. Bruno
and Buff almacco are the wizards who conjure the other world, who
bring fi ctions into life and change life into fi ction; but the process
is contracted into play, a frivolous exercise which has renounced any
claim to be vital.
By so doing, Boccaccio silences Dante’s tragic sense of laughter in
Hell and is far removed from Pico’s belief in myth-making through
the arcana of magic. In a sense, he purifi es the ground, as it were, of the
supernatural and valorizes the world of play and beff e. Th e masque is the
hub of play and we must look closely at it. For both Bruno and Buff almacco,
the mask is the sign of their superiority, the means of unmasking
Simon’s own self-deceit. By wearing the mask and simulating tortures
they appear, however, as actors. Isidore of Seville gives a defi nition
of the hypocrite which is cogent to our point: hypocrisy, he writes, is
the practice of actors who paint themselves in order to deceive. 34 If
Simon’s appearance is false and hides an essential vacuity, Buff almacco’s
impersonation of the devil is a pure fi ction, a fi gure of substitution for
nothing. As he wears the mask, he slips into Simon’s very world of false
appearance; more paradoxically, as he manages to frighten Simon he
vindicates his belief that the world of appearance veils occult realities.
Not one of them steps out of the bounds of illusion.
Th e young people of the brigata, gratifi ed by the story, laugh at
Simon just as they laughed at Calandrino and empathize with the
tricksters. We surely understand why the physician is the object of
laughter. After all, the introduction to the Decameron makes explicit
the point that the art of Hippocrates is superfl uous, has no restorative
power from the threat of death. 35 Th e masque, which is signifi cantly
acted out in the cemetery—the place of death—can hardly conquer