SOURCE: Shklovskij, Victor. “Some Reflections on the Decameron.” In Critical Perspectives on the “Decameron,” translated by Ronald Walter and Robert S. Dombroski, edited by Robert S. Dombroski, pp. 61-68. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1976.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1959, Shklovskij argues that, with the opening tales of the Decameron, Boccaccio subverts traditional Christian piety and its accompanying sexual morality.]

The very first tale of the Decameron leads us into a world full of conflict, irony, and contradictions. The novella's content is anticipated in its title: ‘Ser Cepperello deceives a holy friar with a false confession, then he dies; and although in life he was a most wicked man, in death he is reputed to be a saint, and is called Saint Ciappelletto.’

Boccaccio presents the time and the story's entire band of circumstances with the utmost precision. He tells us that a certain Musciatto Franzesi, compelled to journey into Tuscany with Carlo Senzaterra, brother to the King of France, and discovering that his affairs are in disarray, dispatched a man called Cepperello da Prato to collect the repayment of money he had lent to some Burgundians. Ser Franzesi was a wealthy merchant. The information given about him confers a business-like tone to the prose.

Ciappelletto is small in stature, dresses nicely, is by profession a notary, by nature a false witness, sodomite, glutton, drunk, cheat, and conspirer. He goes to Burgundy and stays at the house of two Florentine usurers. The brothers are not simply usurers, but representatives of the new profession of bankers. Such people were called Lombards, from the place of their origin. They were, so to speak, among the founders of banking, which now flourishes in many countries.

The Lombard gentlemen and Ser Ciappelletto are people of a new age, not patriarchal merchants; in their hands financial operations begin to take on an abstract, almost algebraic character. The collection of pledges, which today is handled by pawn shops, had been practised for some time, but the banking activity in the strict sense was recent. … The Lombards of the first tale were disliked by everyone and still recognized themselves as evildoers. One of the world's most perfect scoundrels is destined to die in their home. After hearing Ciappelletto's confession, the priest would have surely denied him communion and holy burial. The disgrace that the guest would have incurred would have certainly increased the people's contempt for the bankers. To allow the guest to die without confession would have been impossible and would have served to dishonour them. Such is the situation. But the old scoundrel comforts his hosts: ‘I don't want you to worry in the slightest on my account, nor to fear that I will cause you to suffer any harm.’

Ser Ciappelletto willingly prepares his great deception; his last conversation must be a fraud. He deceives the monk who absolves him by confessing sins of no consequence and by showing impassioned repentance for them. The monk accepts the confession with veneration, and, after the villain's death, he proclaims him a saint.

Such is the plot. Let us now examine the tale's composition. The entire fraudulent confession and the story of Ciappelletto's succeeding canonization is related by Panfilo in the manner used in describing the lives of the saints.

The tale begins with a pious reflection: ‘It is proper, dearest ladies, that everything done by man should begin with the sacred and admirable name of Him that was the maker of all things.’ Thus at the outset of his Decameron Boccaccio invokes God and mentions the absolute necessity of His glorification. On the following pages the notion of the mortality of all existing things is developed. Later we are told that divine grace does not descend upon us through any merit of our own, rather through the intercession of the saints who were mortal men but who, by carrying out God's will, became the eternal mediators of all who pray. All of this reasoning seems to be leading to a story about saints.

Then there is a religiously motivated digression. It is possible that a priest has not lived a righteous life, but the sacraments he administers, according to the Church, are none the less valid, for he possesses the grace transferred to him by means of the holy oils of ordination. Boccaccio continues to elaborate this concept, taking it to the absurd: ‘And our regard for Him, who is so compassionate and generous towards us, is all the greater when, the human eye being quite unable to penetrate the secrets of divine intelligence, common opinion deceives us and perhaps we appoint as our advocate in His majestic presence one who has been cast by Him into eternal exile. Yet He from whom nothing is hidden, paying more attention to the purity of the supplicant's motives than to his ignorance or to the banishment of the intercessor, answers those who pray to Him exactly as if the advocate were blessed in His sight.’

The conclusion suggested by the narrator seems to consist in the fact that God, without concerning Himself with the boorishness of whoever prays, listens only to the prayers and does not consider the errors they contain; and not only the priest, but the saint too can be an immoral person and even a criminal.

The tale of this extraordinary scoundrel who swindles the populace before dying is developed in a tone characteristic of hagiographic prose. … The story's hagiographic form underscores the perception of difference, questions the accuracy of the other Lives, and, through the juxtaposition of the villain's story with the Lives of the Saints, negates the very idea of saintly intercession on behalf of a sinner, notwithstanding the pious tone of the conversation.

Ingenuity leads to the discovery of the essence of superstition. Certain slips of the tongue, concise as they are, do not exceed the tonal limits of the hagiographic narrative. The tension in plot is maintained by our sensing that the storyteller might, at any time, say too much and that he wants to say something which is totally impermissible; but, within the limits of what is allowed, he develops his story ironically in the terms of the orthodox faith. For example, he says at the last moment that the usurer could have actually repented: ‘Nor would I wish to deny that perhaps God has blessed and admitted him to His presence. For albeit he led a wicked, sinful life, it is possible that at the eleventh hour he was so sincerely repentant that God had mercy upon him and received him into His kingdom.’ But Boccaccio mentioned before that Ciappelletto had not only confessed, but had received communion, after which he was given extreme unction; and shortly after vespers he was dead. Therefore, although there is some talk about the possibility of repentance, the novella's temporal dimension is already complete. Panfilo ends his story with these words: ‘And therefore, so that we, the members of this joyful company, may be guided safely and securely by His grace through these present adversities, let us praise the name of Him with whom we began our storytelling, let us hold Him in reverence, and let us commend ourselves to Him in the hour of our need, in the certain knowledge that we shall be heard.’ It is as if a man, intending to write to God, reveals beforehand that the mailbox where the letter is to be deposited offers little hope that it will reach its destination. The saint is a cheat and his miracles happen by mistake or through God's indulgence. Rome and the Roman Church are corrupt; they do a business in the faith unequalled even by the cloth business of Parisian merchants. Many doubts may arise about the merchandise, for there can be various qualities of cloth, but faith for the believer is one or does not exist.

Only after having eliminated with the first three tales the standard religious beliefs does Boccaccio go on to tell about the life of the Italians, the true foundations of their morality, and the sins of the clerics; in general, he considers them amusing and for the most part the conclusions are happy ones.

The laws of reason, based on rhetoric, are for Boccaccio logical, incontrovertible and necessary. In the tales, they are often presented to us in a naïve and tedious way, but for the reader of Boccaccio's day they appeared daring on account of their unsuspected application. The precepts of religious morality having been rejected, what remains are the rules of everyday, common sense behaviour, which are justified in detail through the use of rhetoric.

The plot structure is usually based on the juxtaposition of meaning, on the various ways of understanding one and the same phenomenon; the perception of this diversity in the ways of understanding comes about at times by casting the story in a style and a genre which do not correspond to it.

The introductory tale is not the only one with a religious theme. There follows a second in which Boccaccio tells of how a rich Jew, Abraham, merchant and expert in the Jewish law, agrees under the influence of his Christian friend to become a convert, but first decides to go to Rome: ‘and there observe the man whom you call the vicar of God on earth, and examine his life and habits together with those of his fellow cardinals; and if they seem to me such that, added to your own arguments, they lead me to the conclusion that your faith is superior to mine, as you have taken such pains to show me, then I shall do as I have promised; but if things turn out differently, I shall remain a Jew as I am at present.’ His Christian friend was somewhat troubled, knowing what Rome was like. But the Jew departed for Rome and saw there a corrupt city: the selling of the sacraments and, in general, of all that was sellable; he witnessed cupidity, lust, hypocrisy, simony, ‘together with many other things of which it is more prudent to remain silent’. On the sins of the Roman curia, Boccaccio expresses himself generically, as if it were an obvious matter.

From the standpoint of art, the tale sustains itself through an unexpected denouement constructed with paradoxical calembours. Having seen so much corruption, Abraham suddenly decides to become a Christian. He justifies his choice in the following way: ‘I regard the place as a hotbed of diabolical rather than divine activities.’ But he reasons that if all these diabolical vices have not succeeded in putting an end to the Christian faith which continues to exist and grow, ‘I can only conclude that, being a more holy and genuine religion than any of the others, it deservedly has the Holy Ghost as its foundation and support.’

The novella appears to pacify religious censorship. In reality, however, it denies, while pretending to affirm by means of negation. Rome is sinful and immersed in the bartering of sacred things, yet Christianity continues to flourish, while it seems destined to perish. The fact that it withstands even these conditions can only be explained by a miracle. To accept the existence of the Christian faith is a sign of devotion, but as proof of its existence only its ‘growth’ is cited. Such a rhetorical device can only be called irony.

The third tale is the famous story of the ‘three rings’. The sultan Saladin, desirous of obtaining money from a Jew named Melchisedech, decides to ask him which of the three faiths, Islam, Judaism, or Christianity, is the true one. But the person to whom the question was put was a man of sharp wits. Islam, Christianity, and Judaism constituted the traditional religious complex ‘possessing scriptures’. The Moslems believed their religion to be the true one and Judaism and Christianity to be tolerable because genetically bound to the Koran.

The choice of the three rings was a historical fact. The tale circulated for some time among weak peoples: it was an attempt on the part of the infidels to defend before the representatives of the dominant religions their right to worship another cult. At the same time, this novella expresses a tolerance sui generis, that is to say, a sort of diplomatic and commercial indulgence for unorthodox belief. Tolerance of this sort could be found only in the Italian mercantile republics. …

The first three, more or less religious, tales, consciously placed at the beginning of the entire work, reject religion as a norm that gives man a definite moral foundation and certain moral precepts by which he governs his behaviour. The old faith is burned, like rags during the plague for the purpose of disinfection.

In the Decameron there are many novellas that employ devices common to the Greek romances. These stories tell about unjustly slandered wives, lost children, and how they are finally recognised by certain marks, just when the hero is about to be burned at the stake or when he is being led to his death under the lashes of a whip. In that very moment, the hero is not only pardoned, but is allowed to marry the woman he has seduced; for some time marriages of this kind were the dream of parents who had lost their betrothed children.

The greatest number of such tales is found in the Second Day. The topic itself of the Second Day seems to formulate the fundamental principle of the Greek romances: ‘those who after suffering a series of misfortunes are brought to a state of unexpected happiness’. Here particularly important is the expression ‘of unexpected happiness’, which underscores the traditional surprise of the romantic denouement. …

We can ascertain the sources of many of the novellas; critics endowed with greater erudition than mine can determine the sources of all the tales. But even in this kind of research errors can be made. For the echoes of the past, the so-called borrowings, change their meaning when they enter into new relationships. The historian of literature often follows the repetition in diversity of the same element; but he often fails to observe that a thing is not repeated; rather its meaning is changed.

What in the Greek romances was explained by the wrath of the gods, in Boccaccio is explained by the thirst for profit. The shores and destinations are changed even though they seem to be the same stories about shipwrecked persons and pirates.

In the Aethiopica, the Greek romance of Heliodorus, the world is noted but not understood. A Greek who happens among the Ethiopians defeats a giant, but remains fascinated by the magic, religion, and customs of these barbarians; he is amazed by their life. Thus we have before us the first rough draft of a sense for the communality of human kind.

In the Decameron the objectives are more vital; the hero is not weighed down by historical analogies and prejudices. Although he finds himself in situations that are repeated and that have a millenary past, at the end he shows his awareness of new goals, of a new conception of human accomplishment and morality.

In the Second Day, Panfilo recounts a tale (the seventh), the content of which Boccaccio presents with these words: ‘The Sultan of Babylon sends his daughter off to marry the King of Algarve. Owing to a series of mishaps, she passes through the hands of nine men in various places within the space of four years. Finally, having been restored to her father as a virgin, she sets off, as before, to become the King of Algarve's wife.’

The interest shown by the Greek historians in the kidnapping of some beautiful maiden who has fallen under the wrath of the gods (often that of the envious Venus), and in her passing from one suitor to another, is always based on the fact that the maiden remains pure. … Even in the above mentioned tale the lovely Alatiel is shipwrecked and ends up in the hands of a gentleman who obtains her love without much resistance. A little later, she passes on to the suitor's brother, escapes with him, but is taken from her new lover by some shipowners. The author hardly has time to name her suitors who, one after another, wildly possess her. The beautiful maiden reacts to them all with forced consent, but the events are not really unpleasant for her. … Finally some people who were in the service of the heroine's father recognize her and bring her back to him.

A. Veselovskij became interested in the origins of this tale. As a possible source he suggested one of the fables of A Thousand and One Nights; but there the heroine remains virtuous. The critic wonders at this, stating: ‘The theme of the innocent beauty pursued by a series of misfortunes, had to be re-elaborated somewhat in order to arrive at a radical transformation of this sort; but it is quite probable that Boccaccio had in mind, rather than a story of this type, another in which a fatal lack of virtue constituted the main situation.’¹ He then proposes as the source the Hindu story of a woman who was too vain about her beauty. On account of this, in the successive versions of the story, she had little fortune in marriage.

Veselovskij believes that the story could have reached Boccaccio through a Moslem adaptation. It is hardly likely. The fact is that not only does the heroine pass through numerous love adventures, but that she is also insolent, and, after having enjoyed the love of many suitors, talks ironically about her fidelity. Having returned to her father's house, the lovely prisoner relates that immediately after she was kidnapped she was taken from the bandits by some admirable people who escorted her to a convent. The description of the religious services in this convent belongs to the category of the salacious and erotic calembours with which the Moslem Alatiel succeeds in parodying the Christian veneration of the saints and of their names. Boccaccio himself, on behalf of the narrator, refers to what consoled the maiden during the time of her second kidnapping from the home of Pericone by employing an analogous Christian phraseology with an equally parodistic function. Alatiel does not hide her passion. It is not a case of forced abduction, rather one of pleasure with many.

The new unity of the collection of tales consists in a new relationship and a different morality. … The tradition of the inviolability of the heroine was maintained in the romances for millennia. At the dawn of a new century, Dioneo² happily and persuasively breaks it, stirring up sighs of envy in the ladies.

Notes

1. A. N. Veselovskij, Sobraniesocinenij [Works] (Saint Petersburg [Leningrad], 1913), vol. V, p. 495. Aleksandr Veselovskij (1833-1906) was a Russian philologist and historian.

2. [Dioneo tells the story of Alatiel.]