SOURCE: Marino Lucia. “Audience and Narrators.” In The “Decameron” “Cornice”: Allusion, Allegory, and Iconology, pp. 25-36. Ravennba: Longo Editore, 1979.

[In the following excerpt, Marino examines how Boccaccio's depiction of the various narrators in his cornice or frame-text, amplifies and enriches the Decameron.]

The options not chosen by a writer can offer significant hints of what moves him towards the path he finally does elect. Boccaccio could very well have kept his fictive author an abstract voice with no explicit role within the Decameron text and, moreover, he could have had only one member of his brigata act as narrator to the rest. Instead, he decided on a panoply of viewpoints for his frame-text and represented eleven of them in the act of narrating. He could not have done so without some awareness of the extraordinary potential for complexity and flexibility such a fiction afforded him; he probably set to writing with a good deal of excitement and even curiosity over what results the experiment would lead to.

The perspective (according to the Decameron fiction) that generates the novelle and relays them to the successive outer frames of reception in the cornice lies in the novellieri: one of the novellieri or a friend is the “fededegna persona” who communicates their experience and their tales to the author who relates (filters) all that to us (unless otherwise specified, “author” in our discussion will mean Boccaccio's persona). Neither the novellieri nor the other characters in the cornice are differentiated as unique individuals, because mimesis is not Boccaccio's central concern here. He limns his characters only as much as necessary to turn out a set of paradigms. A close study of the cornice reveals that Boccaccio's novellieri and other characters represent a clever means of setting forth ideas about his art and, specifically, about the work at hand, and that Boccaccio does this by a variey of allusive or illustrative tactics as well as by direct statement.

To pass over the obvious without any mention whatsoever might distort our picture of Boccaccio's experiment, so I shall start with Boccaccio's most direct references towards his art and move from these to his more obscure statements.

Even at his most direct, Boccaccio seems always to favor an oblique posture. This is so when the fictive author introduces some of Boccaccio's theoretical ideas under the guise of refuting certain criticisms. In the Introduction to Day IV, the author frames and reifies his male critics and their contentions, referring to his feminine public refutations that he would not bother to make directly to the men. He does not address these curmudgeons, but rather the issues they raise: whether a serious writer would derive creative inspiration from women or give priority in his work to naturalistic fantasies; whether a serious man would indulge in writing pieces such as the Decameron tales without prudent regard for his mature age, for his reputation, or for his economic subsistence; and whether, in any case, the Decameron tales accurately render the purported originals.

In his general Conclusion the author turns with a similarly oblique strategy to the possibly chary ones among his women readers. He plies courtly flattery while conjuring up to his feminine public the “spigolistra donna” type who knows nothing of love and has no sympathy for lovers; in so doing, he implies hopefully that “of course” his ladies would not be of this ilk. He would see his sympathetic clientele as consisting mostly in “semplici giovinette”:¹ it is with such readers, unspoiled by pseudo-moral or literary sophistication, that he feels communication and confidentiality possible. Nevertheless, some among them just might harbor reservations about his penchant for scabrous metaphor and for bawdy plots; his occasional focus on sacerdotal improprieties; the general frivolity or the length of a few of his tales; or the artistic merit or interest of some others that had perhaps been better omitted. The author endeavors to forestall and smooth away these as yet unvoiced feminine scruples, employing a logic fortified by seemingly guileless charm. His Introduction to Day IV and his general Conclusion respectively evoke a negative male and female public, and together they vindicate his views on the dignity of his art and its autonomy of extrinsic considerations. But what of the less obvious means whereby Boccaccio suggests his art theories through the viewpoints in his cornice?

It is commonly observed that the novellieri incongruously address their companions as if the brigata were comprised entirely of women, though of course it is not. This covey of listeners would mirror the author's expressly invited readers, women who know love and who are therefore axiomatically high-born, rich and idle, young, beautiful, and virtuous (as indeed the invocations of the author's fair readers and the listening novellatrici suggest). The device of dedication to a leisured feminine public was conventional in Boccaccio's day, appearing widely in courtly lyric and in chivalric romance (of which women were the most avid sponsors and consumers) since the first flowering of the chivalric literary tradition in Provence. But it was hardly universal. The Decameron is unique among Tuscan novella cycles inasmuch as it gives women a salient, even dominant role as its declared fictive audience and as the principal protagonists of its tales.²

After nearly a decade's immersion in the Florentine cultural milieu, Boccaccio certainly began the Decameron aware that the Gallicized chivalric tradition of formal dedication to a feminine public would seem foreign and exotic to his actual Tuscan readers. In fact, the apparent motive behind Boccaccio's tactic distinguishes it from the same device in the hands of his French and Provençal predecessors. In the Decameron the topic of dedication to a feminine public is a correlative of Boccaccio's naturalistic Weltanschauung and his artist's credo as presented in the Introduction to Day IV, in the general Conclusion, and more obscurely in the complex symbolism of the Valle delle Donne episode (which we shall examine later).

This is why Giovanni Getto insists correctly, but does not go far enough, when he interprets the meaning of Boccaccio's exclusive choice of “quelle che amano” for his fictive reading public: “all'amore [qui] sarà da attribuire, ancora sulla linea stilnovistica, il significato di riassuntivo simbolo di un virtuoso operare, di un colto costume e di una civilissima esistenza”³ The enamoured ladies of Boccaccio's fictive readership emblematically suggest not only the refined and worldly enjoyment of natural pleasures, but also the artistic inspiration such experience gives rise to:

le donne già mi fur cagione di comporre mille versi, dove le Muse mai non mi furono di farne alcun cagione.

(IV.Intro.35-36)

The author could not be more explicit than this. His insistence on concrete personal experience as the stimulant and the stuff of art is constant throughout the Decameron, and in the cornice it is always linked to his discourse with or about the amorous ladies of his preference. His proemial remarks offer a clear example of this. They open with a precise autobiographical declaration, that with the Decameron the author means to pass along the very gift of compassion he had learned to value as a youth ensnared in a desperate love; his motivation to write arises from compassion for those gentle feminine hearts who, “l'amorose fiamme nascose” (Pr. 10), live out their days sequestered in their rooms.

The incongruity of the individual tales' dedications to an all-female public, the literary and historical allusiveness of the Decameron's dedication to enamoured ladies and, more especially, the peculiarity of this device to Boccaccio's contemporary Florentine readers render it untypically eminent in the narrative texture. The constant references to an enamoured feminine public in two frames of reception in the cornice cannot but be construed as signaling the feminine viewpoint there as a rich metonym and thematic correlative for both the naturalism and the artist's credo pervading the work.

Viewed as a set of narrators rather than as listeners, the brigata provides a paradigm of the fourteenth-century Florentine bourgeoisie. The novellieri reflect the Florentines' appreciation of verbal wit and of down-to-earth sagacity, and moreover, they explicitly project this social class inside some of their tales as the repository of a local oral narrative tradition—as a source for the narrative structures they as artists exploit. Thus the anecdotal tales of Day VI derive entirely from local history and the municipal grapevines, as indicated by statements like “Sì come molte di voi o possono per veduta sapere o possono avere udito” (VI.1.5). Again and again, the novellieri introduce their tales acknowledging that the previous one “m'ha nella memoria tornata una novella …” Occasionally one of the novellieri starts his turn saying that a companion has already recounted just the tale he had in mind to tell. Like the fiction of the female dedicatees, these references to an oral tradition from which many of the tales actually derive are not only a cultural and historical allusion, but also part of the cornice's theme of art.

Since Boccaccio sometimes significantly alters old tales to suit his inventive tastes or thematic purposes, he could very well anticipate that his readers would remark his more extreme departures from convention. His author imagines their possible complaint on this score and deals with it in his preface to Day IV; he defiantly vindicates here his own and his novellieri's artistic license to modify conventional material: “Quegli che queste cose così non essere state dicono, avrei molto caro che essi recassero gli originali” (IV.Intro.39). A case in point, the “novella delle papere” is misogynous in its Oriental source,⁴ from which it finds its way into the early-thirteenth-century Novellino;⁵ it is slanted to exemplify a position quite the opposite of misogynous in the Decameron—precisely in the author's Introduction to Day IV. Although conjectural, it is nevertheless tempting to consider that the “novella delle papere” serves more than one polemical aim and that, given its context and its pertinence there to the author's defense of artistic license, it too contributes to the theme of art in the cornice.

The same is true of another facet of the novellieri's function as narrators. By their very names they suggest a sentimental and literary biography of the author, who gives a synopsis of his own amorous past in the Proem: Pampinea, Fiammetta, Emilia, Filostrato, Panfilo, and Dioneo are the lover-protagonists of previous works (to which, in fact, the persona implicitly refers when he says “le donne già mi fur cagione di comporre mille versi”—IV. Intro 35). As artists the novellieri share their author's love for spinning tales and poetizing, his keen interest in doing it well (“dirla bella”), his flair for irony and for metaphorical pyrotechnics, and his conviction that natural instinct must be accepted and prudently accommodated by those who would be wise—a conviction he vindicates in his own niche in the Fourth Day, in the “novella delle papere”.

As a group, therefore, the novellieri are a set of paradigms imaging both their fictive author and the Decameron's extra-textual audience. They reflect the literary tastes and activities and the social values of the real author and his contemporary public. Moreover, the fictive author and the novellieri all function as vehicles for Boccaccio's ideas about his art.

Among the novellieri, Filostrato alone distinguishes himself by bursting out of his proper frame of viewpoint, if only for a single brief instant. He becomes a renegade by a curious phrase that indicates an additional time frame as known to the entire group, an awareness that the naive reader, duly progressing from one cover of the book to the other, would not till then suspect. Filostrato comes to reflect upon himself, painting a melancholy self-portrait when he prescribes the theme for his Day of rule:

E per ciò non d'altra materia domane mi piace che si ragioni se non di quello che a' miei fatti è più conforme, cioè di coloro li cui amori ebbero infelice fine, per ciò che io a lungo andar l'aspetto infelicissimo, né per altro il nome, per lo quale voi mi chiamate, da tale che seppe ben che si dire mi fu imposto.

(III.Concl.6; emphasis mine)

With these words Filostrato not only introduces an infraction of the time continuum as initially defined by the cornice fiction, but he also indicates a paradoxical, seemingly independent realization of his provenance and dependency as a fictional being on the creative mind of a non-fictional being. He is not a Pirandellian character in search of an author who would be his stepfather, but rather a character secure in the knowledge that he is a well-cherished child of his parent's fantasy. In escaping momentarily from his frame, Filostrato contributes in a unique way to the scheme of the brigata as a mirroring paradigm, inasmuch as he stands out as an individual reflector metonymically imaging the fictive author and at the same time dramatizing the fictitious nature of the latter, as well as of all the novellieri.

Filostrato's abrupt escape from his habitual frame is without precedent in the European tradition of frame stories. In seeking to interpret what Boccaccio means by it, I have observed the sound rule that a good writer aims to pare down his text to include motivated elements only, and that he will establish a point through the convergence of two or more stylistic devices.

The abrupt appearance of preterit verbs (“seppe”, “fu”) in a context of present tense verbs projecting a rule for the morrow should surprise the attentive reader. According to the fiction established at the book's outset, the time of the author's writing follows, albeit by little, the time of the purported storytelling by the brigata. Here, instead, Filostrato suggests the very opposite. The somersault in the time sequence constitutes a breach in the fiction whereby we gain a moment's glimpse of the truth regarding the time and the real circumstances of the narrative invention. As a violation of an established order in the text, it calls our attention to the nature of the work itself, by definition a fabric of lies. Does the passage cited contain an inadvertent burr, or is it motivated in its entirety?

The “per ciò che” that introduces Filostrato's autobiographical justification of the theme for the next Day⁶ echoes the initial “per ciò” and thus acquires salience as the pivot to a hypotactical series of retrospective clauses of which the first is brief, and by its syntactical compression (the predicate of “io” is incomplete) not only intensifies the image it conveys but also sets more clearly apart the sequence of clauses following. The immediately ensuing clause, coordinate to it but not compressed syntactically, sweeps to a solemnly cadenced and gravely strange close: “da tale che seppe ben che si dire / mi fu imposto”. This concluding phrase, which divides neatly through syntax and rhythm into the standard Italian metric lengths of eleven and five syllables, respectively, measures out the deliberate declaration that the author is neither more nor less a fiction than Filostrato, hence all the brigata, and that they are all sibling offspring of the same creative mind.

Boccaccio could easily have omitted this passage. The evident care with which he penned the phrases precludes our dismissing them as a lapsus. Through a convergence of stylistic devices, then, the passage at III. Concl. 6 does throw a spotlight on the fictitious nature of all the narrators in the Decameron cornice. The delicious irony whereby we are told the truth about what we understand to be a fabric of artistic prevarication—within that fabric—clearly constitutes the point of the passage under discussion. We have here another manifestation of the theme of art in the Decameron and a slant on that theme that is not without correlatives in the text.

What are some of these substantiating correlatives? It has been affirmed, for one, that the cornice as a whole functions as an estranging device that “serves the purpose of a standard picture-frame, i.e., a reminder that what is inside is an artistic object”.⁷ Among the novelle, the tale of Ciappelletto (I. 1) has been seen as a germane and signal instance—prominent for its very position in the work—of the theme “literature as falsehood, or falsehood as literature” (ib., pp. 19-62). But there are also some instances within the cornice text itself that point to the whole book as being a fiction.

In the cornice the author twice recalls characters who inhabit other fictions. He peeps in metonymically on the morning of Day VI when Dioneo and Lauretta sing together of Troiolo and Criseide, precisely the pair celebrated in the Filostrato. Likewise he insinuates himself into the evening of Day VII, when Dioneo and Fiammetta sing of Arcita and Palemone and thus recall to us the Teseida. In portraying several of the novellieri as singing specific songs alluding to Boccaccio's previous works,⁸ the author tosses a page of his (and Boccaccio's) professional resumé into their narrative frame, and at the same time enhances its verisimilitude. The recurrence of this allusive tactic in the roughly central portion of the Decameron suggests that it is deliberately inserted as a minor thread of the all-pervasive theme of art. Like Filostrato in the passage cited above, the author here is pointing to the immortal, autonomous—“false”—realm his book partakes of.⁹ Once again we meet with evidence of Boccaccio's preoccupation with the nature of art.

The passage at III.Concl.6 merits further attention since it marks an important moment in the development of a subsidiary motif that also figures into the theme of art in the Decameron. The passage constitutes Filostrato's self-portrait as an unhappy lover, to be amplified by his ballata at the end of Day IV. Filostrato's self-portrait mirrors that of the author as given in the Proem.

At the end of Day III, however, there looms an important difference between these two narrators. The author has already reached the relative serenity of esthetic and emotional distance from his noble love by the time he sets to writing the Decameron:

sol di sé nella mente m'ha al presente lasciato quel piacere che egli è usato di porgere a chi troppo non si mette ne' suoi più cupi pelaghi navigando; per che, dove faticoso esser solea, ogni affanno togliendo via, dilettevole il sento esser rimaso.

(Pr. [Prologue] 5)

In contrast, Filostrato is still pessimistically caught up in love's throes and dreading the unremitting persistence of his passion and his grief: “sempre di male in peggio andato; e così credo che io andrò di qui alla morte” (III.Concl.5-6). This melancholy self-absorption of Filostrato eventually dissipates through the cathartic process of his Day of rule (IV). On that Day, Filostrato aggressively imposes his amorous despair on his comrades when he prescribes unhappy love as the theme for the tales to be told. He concludes the Day himself with a plaintive ballata—his last despondent outpour. The tales and the ballata seem to assuage his grief and to liberate him from it: subsequently he is gay and witty like the rest of his companions.

Filostrato's brief truancy from his proper narrative frame serves not only to point up the fictional nature of all the cornice narrators, including the book's author, but also to underscore the status and the moment from which Filostrato's transformation during Day IV proceeds. At the same time, it illuminates one more prism of the theme of art in the Decameron: art as a medium of catharsis, emotional balm, and enduring change within the one who experiences it as creator or as destinataire.

What of the brigata's servants, who do not expressly figure either as audiences or as narrators in the cornice? Whether they look to their own devices for amusement or comprise another audience, lingering within earshot of their masters' storytelling, we do not know: it does not interest the author enough to specify one way or the other. Tindaro and Licisca's bursting in upon the scene on Day VI as interlopers does have implications, however, which once again evoke the theme of art. The servants' speech, directly quoted, introduces into the cornice the colorful, earthy idiom—and viewpoint—of the lower classes. This idiom signals a break in the otherwise cultivated and aristocratic linguistic register—and viewpoint—of the novellieri and their author. Critics usually point out that this linguistic breach in the cornice occurs on the Day dedicated to tales of verbal wit, to “la parola”. What has so far gone unremarked, however, is the thematic significance of the servants' erupting into the novellieri's ideal and civilized proceedings and into the novellieri's play with make-believe (storytelling), bringing with them an issue from the “real” world. The servants represent the class closest to Nature (according to some fourteenth-century evaluations). They put forth an argument regarding sexual mores (do most women enter into matrimony as virgins?) that is really a question of Nature (drives, instincts, libido) vs. Civilization (religious restraints, social custom, and so forth). The conflict Nature vs. Civilization is ineluctable and irreducible—the author's tale about Filippo Balducci and son makes this point—and it is one that the world of literature (the novellieri's) must confront.

As a concentric array of viewpoints, an englobing multiplicity of narrators and audiences, Boccaccio's cornice provides more than an interesting super-plot or anchor to contemporary places and events. As we have begun to see, it permits a complex game of direct, and sometimes mischievous statements about the fourteenth-century Florentine bourgeoisie (its taste for verbal wit, for a novella well told, for practical ingegno), about the author's views on his art, and about the nature of the Decameron itself.

Notes

1. Concl. 18; G. B., Decameron: Edizione critica secondo l'autografo Hamiltoniano, ed. Vittore Branca (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1976). All further references are from this edition and employ Branca's notation.

2. Giorgio Padoan, “Mondo aristocratico e mondo comunale nell'ideologia e nell'arte di Giovanni Boccaccio”, S. Boc., 2 (1964), 81-216, p. 92.

3. Vita di forme, 2nd ed. (1966), p. 5. All further references are from this edition.

4. An anonymous biography of Buddha composed in Sanskrit in the sixth century, the story of Barlaam and Josafat enjoyed wide diffusion in various versions in medieval Europe: Letterio di Francia, Storia dei generi italiani: Novellistica (Milan: Vallardi, 1924), I, 5, 87-88. Branca finds its distant analogue in the ancient Indian Ramayana and cites a dozen misogynous derivatives of the Barlaam story: Branca, ed., Decameron, by G. B., 2 vols. (Florence: Le Monnier, 1951), I, 452, n. 2.

5. Novella 14: in Novellino e conti del Duecento, ed. Sebastiano Lo Nigro (Turin: U.T.E.T., 1968), pp. 87-88. All further references are from this edition.

6. Note here Filostrato's quasi-replication of the author's proemial procedure, esp. at Pr. 3, 5, whereby he too relates the autobiographical background pertinent to the narrative at hand.

7. Almansi, [Guido], The Writer as Liar; [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975] p. 13.

8. Allusions within one work to a previous work or works do not appear for the first time in the Decameron. Boccaccio's persona dedicates the Teseida to Fiammetta: “già con sommo titolo le mie [rime] esaltaste”; the phrase is echoed by the Decameron author's declaration, “le donne già mi fur cagione di comporre mille versi” (IV.Intro.35). The persona in the Amorosa visione refers implicitly to the Ameto: “Dopo essa, attenta al suono, umilmente / venia la bella Lia che trasse Ameto / dal volgar uso dell'umana gente, / in cui vedeasi il cuor tutto quieto, / inghirlandata di novella fronda / con vista dolce e sguardo soave e lieto”. See Teseida, ed. Alberto Limentani, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, by G. B., gen. ed., Branca, I Classici Mondadori (Milan: Mondadori, 1964- ), II (1964), 246; all further references to the text are from this edition, citing bk., line no. (when pertinent), and p. no.; Tutte le opere will henceforth be cited as Mondadori. See also: Amorosa visione 41.34-39, in Mondadori, III (1964), 248-49; this and all further references are from the second redaction, in the edition by Branca, canto and line no. preceding p. no.

9. This thematic consideration seems to account best for the Decameron's several allusions to Boccaccio's previous works; his possible concern for verisimilitude here would seem incidental at most. Claude Perrus' explanation is tenuous: viz., that these allusions are motifs linking the several novellieri, and that they represent “plutôt le pressentiment d'une saga éventuelle où l'on trouverait les personnages de Filostrato, Dioneo, Fiammetta, etc., d'une oeuvre possible théorétiquement, mais que rien dans les conditions actuelles ne permettra à Boccaccio de réalizer”. Perrus apparently forgets that the reincarnations of “Filostrato, Dioneo, Fiammetta, etc.” do not in each case, if ever, necessarily involve the reappearance, from one work to the next, of characters of the same identity. (It seems excessive to insist that the persona of Boccaccio's fictional works is in each case one of different identity.) See Perrus, “Remarques sur les rapports entre écrivain et public dans le Décaméron de Boccace”, II Colloque de Cluny, April 1970, pub. in La Nouvelle Critique: Littératures et Idéologies, Special No. 29 bis (1971), 294-99, p. 297.