Fiction and Religion in Boccaccio and Chaucer

Abstract

By their natures, literature and religion can never converge, but the study of them converges often. This is illustrated here in the instance of Boccaccio's influence on Chaucer. We discern in the late Middle Ages two attitudes toward fiction. Although the religious sensibility that holds this world in contempt rejects fiction as a vanity, fictions simultaneously emerge into literature as a justification for espousing this world. Boccaccio's // Filostrato and the Decameron appealed to both these attitudes, and Chaucer, perceiving Boccaccio's stances, reacted against them in Troilus and Criseyde and The Cantebury Tales. II Filostrato is an unusual romance, a story of pagan sexuality, distanced from the audience, and without the usual conventions and moralizing. Chaucer saw // Filostrato as an ironic fiction, its aesthetic distance forcing the reader to call upon his own moral experience to use the vain tale for good or ill. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde reverses the method of // Filostrato; Chaucer supplies the usual conventions and the expected moral tone, eliminates the aesthetic distance, and instead involves the reader. When we compare the Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer's method again reverses that of Boccaccio, except that now Bocaccio asks the reader to participate, whereas Chaucer keeps him at a distance. The plot of the Decameron follows a predictable ritual, that of The Canterbury Tales is a planned game in which every rule is broken. The outer frame of the Decameron is static and pessimistic (the plague in Florence), that of The Canterbury Tales is dynamic and optimistic (a pilgrimage with a desired end). In the inner form of the Decameron the tales serve as pleasant escapes, but in The Canterbury Tales the story-telling reveals the darker side of human life. Boccaccio and Chaucer develop two conceptions of fiction. Boccaccio implies a contempt for the world as merely temporal, in which fiction is an escapist fantasy; Chaucer's fiction is grounded in the experience of this world and addresses itself to existence. Paradoxically, Boccaccio appears more medieval than Chaucer. The study of the influence of Boccaccio on Chaucer illustrates Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence; it also enables us to see Chaucer as the initiator of humanism, the defense of literary experiences as the confrontation of human values.