Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad

Books read this week: The Decameron (Giovanni Boccaccio) 8/10

I had intended to read and review Graham Greene's The Quiet American this week, but I started reading the Decameron and found that I couldn't stop. Boccaccio's ribald classic is one of the three great short story collections of the middle ages - the other two being the Arabian Nights and the Canterbury Tales. I must admit that I've never succeeded in finishing Chaucer's work; I am determined to read the Canterbury tales in the original, which makes for slow going. I will start again sometime soon. Not being conversant in either Arabic or Italian, I'm spared that necessity for both the Decameron and the Arabian Nights, and so I have read, and enjoyed, both.

The Decameron differs from the Canterbury tales in that it is complete, and that containing so many more stories (100 rather than 25) each tale is perforce shorter (although Chaucer did borrow quite liberally from the Decameron). The framing device is superficially similar (travellers passing the time by telling tales), although in Boccaccio's case more extraordinary; rather than a pilgrimage, the storytellers are brought together by the need to flee the ravages of the Black Death. This is vital to the plot, as it both explains the loosening of social conventions which allows seven young women to travel with three men they aren't related or married to and gives the noble ladies of the party an excuse to tell bawdy stories. The prologue does stress how totally cataclysmic the Black Death was to Italian society; for a modern analogue, think zombie apocalypse.

The stories of the Decameron are also more focused than Chaucer's; each day has a theme (such as "Generosity" or "Tricks Wives Have Played On Their Husbands") and (with the exception of Dioneo), everyone's tale must fit the theme. Dioneo, who tells the last story of the day, is exempt from this restriction, and his tales usually provide a counterpoint to the overarching moral of the nine previous stories. They're also usually the most enjoyable tales. I think it's no coincidence that when the Decameron is over, Dioneo is the only one of the storytellers who is individually memorable; the other Laurettas and Pompineas and Filostratos all blend into one another.

The comparison with the Arabian Nights is also an interesting one; the main difference here is that the Arabian Nights as we have it now is the product of hundreds of years of collaboration, oral transmission and extrapolation, and so any trace of the original author has disappeared; thus although we can see some themes in common with the Decameron, it is hard to say whether they were in the "original". Another product of the collaborative nature of the Arabian Nights is the intricate tales within tales within tales within tales we find, unfolding like a set of russian dolls. Boccaccio does not give us anything so delicate.

That said, the fundamental message of the Arabian Nights is also one of the messages of the Decameron. This message can be summarised in three clauses: (a) Your wife is smarter than you. (b) Your wife is cheating on you. (c) Due to (a) you should not try to do anything about (b). The Decameron's world is far more humdrum and mundane than that of the Arabian Nights, with fewer Djinn and Demons and Magic Carpets and more people tricking other people out of their pigs, and so this is shown less fantastically; my favourite passage of the Arabian Nights is early in the prologue, when the Sultan is travelling and he sees a beatiful woman sitting on a beach next to a hideous and enormous demon, who is snoring loudly. The woman tells the Sultan that the demon is her husband, and that he keeps her in a box, inside another box, at the bottom of the sea. And she has nevertheless committed adultery with no less than 100 different men. The equivalent in the Decameron involves Madonna Beatrice convincing her husband to put on one of her dresses and go into the garden so that her lover can beat him with a stick; rather more prosaic, but no less amusing.

As I said, this is one of the messages of the Decameron, but by no means it's only one; other important messages are: never trust a friar, always be hospitable, never trust a friar, don't marry a woman much younger than yourself, never trust a friar and sleeping with the mother of you godchild is not a sin. This last one is the focus of one of the very few tales involving the supernatural; the ghost of Tingoccio the Sienese claws his way out of hell, just to deliver that one message to his best friend Meuccio: "It's not a sin!"

The morality of the Decameron is also fascinating; I would call it a peasant morality, but I think that might be offensive to peasants; I will settle by calling it Odyssian. It has it's roots in that hearty, loud and often cruel but sometimes extremely witty humour one associates with football crowds. It's a world of elaborate practical jokes, where we admire the cunning and the crafty because they are cunning and crafty and they make us laugh and they are designated the heroes of this particular tale. I can understand this, and certainly one has to admire the audacity of rogues like Friar Cipolla, using a quick wit and a silver tongue to sell a lump of coal as a holy relic, but occasionally the tales do come across as mean spirited; in particular every story that features the painters Buffo and Buffamalco just feels cruel. Sexual mores have also changed, and so there are quite a few tales which were presumably considered screamingly hilarious in the 14th Century, but today would be prosecuted as serious sexual assaults. (Although some of the scenarios become so convoluted that it is hard to work out which party would be prosecuted; for example - A intending to have sex with B disguises herself as C. D intending to have sex with C disguises himself as B. If A and D have sex, each believing the other partner to be someone else, who is in the wrong?).

It is the religious allegories which are most alien to a modern audience however; the tale of Griselda which ends the book, for example, is (according to the notes) intended to be read as an allegory for the total submission to the Lord's will that a Christian should aim for. Instead, it comes across as a series of sadistic power games ("You know I said I murdered your daughter twelve years ago? Well, I didn't; wasn't that a funny jape?"). Likewise, most of the stories on generosity come across bizarre if not downright demented to a modern audience, especially those where women are involved, as Boccaccio seems to ignore the fact that the women are individuals and should be allowed to make their own choices; they're not property and they shouldn't (and can't) be given as 'gifts'.

Now, this type of thinking might not seem unusual in a 14th Century man (in fact, there are probably a large number of 21st Century men who thing that way), but it is still surprising considering how sympathetic towards women trapped in unhappy (arranged) marriages; a sizable proportion of the stories revolve around women who are harassed by unreasonably jealous husbands, or left sexually unsatisfied because their husbands are geriatric and senile (or, in the case of the wife of Pietro di Vinciolo, as gay as a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide). The women in these cases are usually treated sympathetically; but Boccaccio also includes that traditional, but singularly vile fable which also appears in the Arabian Nights, with the moral if your marriage is unhappy, you should beat your wife more. The variation in tone almost makes me wonder if Boccaccio was actually recording stories, rather than inventing them.

The Decameron as a whole shows a surprisingly cosmopolitan outlook; the Jewish and Muslin characters are treated just a well (and just as badly) as the Christian ones, and although it is a plot point that Pietro di Vinciolo is gay, he is no less sympathetic than any of the other cuckolds in the book (and ends up rather happier than most of them). Boccaccio reserves most of his bile for the Church; as the book was written before the reformation, it's not really correct to talk of the Catholic Church, because there weren't any others, and the Christian religion provides a constant background to all the tales; whether it is the necessity of a deathbed confession which moves the plot of the very first tale or the constant preoccupation with the morality of sleeping with the mother of your godchild, religion is pervasive. The unreformed church is however massively corrupt at every level, and all the characters are well aware of this; yet (with individual exceptions) this does not reduce their respect for the church as an institution. Partly, I think this arises from the concepts of original sin and forgiveness central to the message of the medieval church; all people are fallible, and all sins can be forgiven, so we should just try to do our best and keep up appearances. And if we can have a laugh along the way, all the better. Boccaccio reserves most of his anger for hypocrites, and, of course, the friars. For some reason, Boccaccio really doesn't like friars.

For all I've said about the alien mindset exhibited by some of the tales, the thing I like best about the Decameron is how recognisable many of the situations are, especially in the more down to earth tales; in fact, the less "noble" the tale, the more familiar it seems. In my mind's eye I can see Friar Cipolla as a fast talking used car salesman; there is also something very relatable about the story of the Abbess storming from her bedchamber to scold a disobedient novice, having in her haste put the priest's breeches on in place of her wimple. There is something very reassuring about how familiar these stories sound; I guess it's just a reminder that no matter where they are (or when they are) people are still people.

A final note: I have the Penguin Classics edition of the Decameron, which I found was a very readable and clear translation. I find this is usually the case with the Penguin Classics editions; I always try and seek them out when reading literature in translation. I don't know why the Penguin translations are more readable than the OUP ones, but they always are (a particularly inspired translation: "I know it's true - the Arseangel Bagriel told me!).