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

54
Giovanni Boccaccio
Both Andreuccio’s constant predicament and the brigata’s relief
disclose the central oddness of the games of laughter—the comical
tendency, that is, to mistake provisional appearances for the whole
reality. Th is ambiguity informs the novella genre in the Decameron. Th e
novella is a deliberate fragment, a cross section of a totality which, if
it exists at all, can never be fully grasped. Boccaccio repeatedly tries
to impose on his kaleidoscopic range of stories a unifi ed design and
cohesion: the frame, the thematic movement of the text from the
chaos of the plague to the diffi cult order in Griselda’s tale, the transitional
passages, the topics by which stories are duly placed within
given fi elds of signifi cation, the symbolic numbers of totality (ten days
and one hundred novelle). All are expedients which suggest how the
sequence can be constructed as a unifi ed totality.
Much like Petrarch’s Canzoniere, the Decameron aspires to be a
whole of parts but, at the same time, declares the impossibility of its
being arranged as a total and coherent pattern. In the Canzoniere,
the principle of repetition—as each poem begins anew, it inexorably
ends up echoing what has already been said—shows that totality
is an illusory mirage. 46 Nonetheless, the Canzoniere has had, and
continues to have, readers who are taken in by the esthetic simulation
of order; the Decameron, I might add, has had exactly the same
destiny. Auerbach’s close analysis of a passage of a tale, for instance,
depends on the assumption that each part refl ects the totality and
by the synecdoche one knows a fragment and, thus, one can grasp
the whole. In a real sense, Auerbach is like the brigata in the garden
which seizes on the provisional and the partial and wistfully extends
it to cover the whole.
Wistfulness is the heart of laughter. It betrays the desire for sense
and relief which governs the life of the characters and, for that matter,
of the critics. For Boccaccio the metaphor of totality, the project of
both Calandrino and Simone, is madness and hence unspeakable.
Dissolving their pretenses and borrowing from them there is the
world of beff e, the play which discloses the illusoriness of the metaphor
and which has laughter as its proper response.
In the wake of Aristotle, Th omas Aquinas and Dante speak of
laughter as precisely the activity proper to man. [ . . . ] Boccaccio
shows both how laughter is a hollow mask which deceives, blinds us
to what we lose, and how it is produced by a mask behind which the
tricksters try to appropriate the world and, like the brigata, enjoy it.