Le parole e le cose. La Settima giornata del «Decameron»

Abstract

On the Seventh Day of the Decameron, Dioneo imposes the theme of the beffa, the tricks wives play in order to hide their infidelities from their husbands. It is a provocative and immoral theme, but most importantly, the falsification of language implied by the beffa brings into focus the troubled relationship between words and facts, voces and res. Words seem to prescind concrete data, and the data may be reorganized within any discourse and given any interpretation, thanks only to the speaker's rhetorical ability. Furthermore, by means of words alone, whether used cunningly or naively - and this is the most worrisome development - it is possible to create new reality. The brigata's respect for the convention of the beffa - that the wife must always get the better of her husband - becomes of secondary importance. In the tales emerges a kind of permanent semantic instability, which takes possession of language and the very possibility of communication. Trickster and Dupe fall equally prisoner to it. The Day mirrors a world in the grip of the Fourteenth-century cultural crisis symbolized by the Plague, a world which can no longer find accurate representation in language