The Seriousness of Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron

Abstract

The Seriousness of Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron Millicent Marcus (bio) Rereading The World at Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron after twenty-three years was not the journey of nostalgia and regret for lost youth that I feared it would be. Nor was the laudatio temporis acti motif at the top of the list of topoi that assailed me as I pored over the pages of that formative and formidable book. Instead, in reconnecting with Giuseppe Mazzotta’s work, I found myself unraveling the riddle of my own career, and understanding some of its anomalous turns. This story begins with Giuseppe’s Boccaccio seminar, taught in the fall of 1970, my second year at Yale. Having never read the Decameron, and blissfully innocent of Boccaccio criticism, I could not then have known then what I have come to understand now—that my first experience with the Decameron would be one of ‘thick reading’—of interpretation that moved from close textual analysis to soaring philosophical speculation, that asked the large questions of literature while never losing sight of its rootedness in language and its obligation to history. Let me illustrate what I mean by ‘thick reading,’ with an example taken from Giuseppe’s chapter entitled “The Marginality of Literature”, specifically, the section on Decameron 1:1. “As has been shown”, Giuseppe writes, hagiography provides the blueprint for the dramatic process of the tale insofar as the story of Ser Ciappelletto is essentially structured on a saint’s life. […] The Legenda aurea, on which the tale is patterned, is essentially the history of the chain of saints from Abel to the Last Judgment. It is a typological mode because it defines the process of extrapolating from the multifariousness of historical reality the significant inner events of history. [End Page S42] In its general structure, therefore, it provides the true history of the city of God on earth; its particular function in the tale is to provide the nexus between the self and the prophetic history of the world.1 This is a thrilling and vertiginous move, and it is typical of Giuseppe’s modus operandi. Where a previous scholar (Enrico De’ Negri, whom Giuseppe cites in this passage), had made only cursory mention of the hagiographic subtext in Decameron 1:1, Giuseppe probes deeply into the epistemological ramifications of the saint’s tale itself as a narrative mode. He pushes the hagiographic idea outward, to embrace an entire theory of history whose workings are purified of the dross of human messiness and distilled into the simple and repeated patterns of saintly biography. From here, Giuseppe moves to connect the community created by saint worship to the city of God on earth, creating a bridge between the micro and the macro in spatial terms, and between the now of history and its fulfillment at the end of time. This impulse to leap boldly, and provocatively, across interpretive levels has had a formative impact on my own work, but in a somewhat oblique way. Though I could never replicate Giuseppe’s interpretive sweep in my own scholarship as a medievalist, his example emboldened me to stride across centuries and media. In other words, his intellectual bravura gave me permission to experiment, to range freely across the intradisciplinary spaces of italianistica. Not surprisingly, one of my first forays into cinema studies involved Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious adaptation of the Decameron. If it was Giuseppe whose liberating practice led me to film in the 1970s, then it was Pasolini who led me back to Giuseppe’s work, and to Boccaccio’s text, in 2008. Let me untangle this strange chiasmus with the aid of a scene from the conclusion to Pasolini’s version of the Ser Ciappelletto tale. The Friar Confessor has just finished presiding over the man’s funeral, and the camera cuts to the interior of the crypt where Ser Ciappelletto’s body is lying in state. Gregorian chant fills the soundtrack, endowing the scene with a sense of otherworldly dignity and peace. The camera is positioned behind and slightly above the corpse, shrouded in white linen that gleams in the relative darkness of the enclosure. Elevated on a black catafalque and perfectly...