To all you listeners of entitled opinions is the year host Robert Harrison.
We're posting today a show which took the form of a Zoom discussion here at Stanford
among a community of Italianists as well as the larger Stanford community.
It was a follow-up discussion of what Kachos master beats the decamaran,
the first session of which was a discussion of the preface and introduction to the decamaran.
There was enough enthusiasm for a second session that I assigned.
A few of the select stories inside the decamaran for a more extended treatment of O'Kantras' art of storytelling.
Those stories were story five from day two, stories one in ten from day three,
the fifth story of day four, and the ninth story of day five.
So you may want before listening to this episode to go back and listen to the previous discussion,
if not, enjoy the show to follow.
[Music]
Today we are actually going to plunge into the stories of the decamaran,
but I want to go back to the frame for a moment before we move to the stories because I think that the
frame is what is most pertinent to the pandemic that we're living through.
And last time I spoke about the collapse of the world that the Black Death brought about in Europe
1348 and the way that all the bonds of community had given way to the almost the inverse or opposite
namely that my neighbor now has become a contagion or possible contagion of the disease.
And here when we talked last time about the loss of the world, I think it becomes clear
through our reading of Bocatua as well as our own experience in terms of sheltering in place and
six-speed distance between us that what we mean by world is among other things a sphere of exchange,
exchange between human beings, some real exchange, verbal exchanges, also for Bocatua,
so many of the stories of the decamaran have to do with the world of commerce,
namely the business world, the world of exchange of goods and commodities and
this will feature prominently in at least a couple of the stories that many of the stories
actually that we have that are on top for today. So this is a dilemma because if the world is a
place of circulation where you have the circulation of words, the circulation of stories, the circulation
of desire and in Bocatua's case particularly sexual desire that this world is necessary for our
human survival and it's exactly what it gets thrown into crisis during a pandemic.
We saw that the social immune response of the Bocatua, the brigade, is to lead the city of Florence
with all its kind of collapsed institutional structures and move to a marginal
liminal space on the outskirts of the city and there are ten storytellers reconstitute
the basis of the world in a kind of idyllic setting where now there are forms of exchange
that take on the character of combibiality, community and the mutual edification, psychological
and existential edification of this very small community there. So it's somewhat of an experiment,
I want to say a word about the frame of the decamaran because we live in at present in a moment where
all of the efforts of the nations that are under assault by the coronavirus is that of containment.
This fear that we have of something that is uncontained, uncontainable. This is very much the fear
that was associated with the black death as well where a plague became literally uncontainable.
So how does one go about reforming or re-founding a structure of containment and in this
respect I think that the frame of the decamaran, the idea that the author tells us how the brigade
went to the countryside that they decided to establish a certain order where you have
an everyday someone else will take over the role of being the king or queen that you have 10 stories
as you've seen every day begins with a little summary of what the theme of the day is
every story has a little synopsis of what you're out there to expect and this framing device
for the 100 Nobel in the decamaran, I think serves as a kind of allegory for what the forces of
containment amount to when it comes to a literary work.
Here I'd like to say a word about the garden setting because
if we look at what Pompineas says about what the objective of this two-week soldier on the
margins of the city is, the objective is really to maximize the plesure
that is afforded by these beautiful surroundings and this notion of pleasure is something that
I think has a direct connection to the garden setting. Many of the stories you've seen
have to do with thanks or the erotic or some kind of natural vitality that is associated
with the urge which has to do with sexual desire and yet at the same time we know that nature,
those people who read Bocatua as a kind of total naturalist, someone who just celebrates
the irrepressible vitality of nature obviously are not paying too much attention to the kind of
qualifications of the plague. The plague too is a natural phenomenon and this idea that Bocatua is
just celebrating the vitality of sexuality also. Let's remember where to many of the Gavotro,
these swellings, where do they take place? Most of them in the groin of the victims of the plague.
So this idea that there's a certain malignancy at the heart of nature is always on the limits
of all of these stories. So when the Bocatua decides that they are going to maximize their pleasure,
it's interesting for us that the queen, Pampinea, of day one, I'm going to quote her, she says,
"A merry life should be our aim since it was for nor the reason that we were prompted to run away
from the sorrows of the city. However, nothing will last for very long unless it possesses a definite form."
And that idea, and she goes on to correlate order and pleasure in her next declaration to the
fact that our company will be able to live and order and agreeable existence for as long as we choose to
remain together. La nocere companya, gona oredina e compiace de a sensea, una veragon,
nia beva, de deux rí pantu a grado ne fía. So literally with order and with pleasure and without any
shame, this idea of pleasure that is submitted to order or some kind of organization,
some kind of containment so that it doesn't degenerate into the mere gratification of
appetites or something on the order of lust or even pornography, this emphasis Bocatua brings
to bear on the importance of organizing pleasure, I think has its correlate in the garden settings.
I'd like to say one word about the difference between Italian gardens and, for example, French gardens,
where in the latter case, the French art of gardening is one in which if you think of what
Louis XIV did in Versailles, you take a track of land, you raise it down, and then you just
impose upon it a structure in which nature is forced to submit entirely to the will of the architect
and to the artifice of a certain kind of rationality that dominates the garden aesthetic. It can
be very beautiful, but one has a sense that nature in the French garden typically is submitted to a
rather tyrannical will of art. By contrast, the Italian garden, the art of the Italian garden,
is one where nature and art are happily married, one to another, where the gardener,
by giving form to the vitality of nature takes care not to over a control over it, so that you have
a sense that the garden is at once a kind of a place of nature where nature is free to express
itself and its vitality, but it's done so within the limits of the form that is given to that garden.
And I think this is exactly what the frame of the decamaran does. It gives us all the kind of body,
kind of sexual stories or the nature's irrepressible exuberance is given room to breathe,
but at the same time, there is a certain kind of discrete form that organizes and keeps things
contained. The fear of losing containment is ever present among the storytellers, and that doesn't
mean that there's a strict repression of going beyond the limits we spoke about that last time,
a trapezade, you say no, and trapezade, la rajrole, but every time there is an overstepping of limits,
you find that they also go back within the prescribed orders and disappoints. So in that regard,
I think the decamaran's art of storytelling has a great deal to do within the setting in which
the stories are told, which are these beautiful gardens that are described in parts of the decamaran that
we have not assigned for you all to read, but I urge you all to have a look at.
So with that introduction, I'm happy to plunge into some of the stories that are on tap, and I
chose to begin with the fifth story of the second day, which is about this character named Andreutial,
and here we are right in the midst and think of the world of the merchant. So many of the
characters in the decamaran are either merchants or the stories revolve around the kind of exchange
that takes place in the marketplace. The marketplace, the markets are a place of trade,
exchange, and of circulation of goods, and in that sense, they can be highly promiscuous
places of exchange, but vocabulary really is known for having found a way to give a new
qualified heroism to the middle classes, the merchant classes of a thriving, foreign team,
republic, and a kind of a new class, a work in town of class that was emerging in Europe.
So Andreutial is a horse stealer, and we find ourselves in the story right in the marketplace of
Naples, a city that in Bocatros time was very vibrant and had much of the same character as it has today.
And Andreutial, let me start with his name Andreutial, our friend Andreut Al Capra is tuning in from
Paris, but Andros in Greek is a word for man. Andreutial is a diminutive of Andreutial, and in that
sense, his name already signals to us that we're dealing with a little man in the sense that
he is not quite as big or as he thinks he is. And therefore, there's a certain naive day about him.
He goes with 500 gold florins, and he's kind of displaying them in public, trying to make a deal
in terms of buying horses. And of course, no better place than Naples for a woman like
Fjord de Liza, who is the other like the female character in this story, who is basically
a prostitute. And by the way, prostitution is another form of exchange. You get, you know, sex
for money, money for sex, and it belongs right in the thick of the marketplace.
Go, Catro. Well, you know, well aware of that, of course.
Fjord de Liza, she sees Andreutial, she has this woman with her who knows him from another
part of her life and comes up with this brilliant scheme to Rob Andreutial of his money.
I will point out again that the main strategy by which she does that is storytelling.
She invents a beautiful story to to completely enchant Andreutial. In fact, she draws him
into this world, which is really a garden to be. Now, we have another garden within the garden
setting in this story, which is Fjord de Liza's apartment, or whatever her home, and she takes Andreutial
upstairs, and it's full of flowers, and it's full of incense and the sense. And so he is really
at the top of the mountain of purgatory, if we're looking at Dante's image of where the garden
of the building is. You've read the story I'm presuming, so you know that Andreutial ends up
being wind and dined and completely gullible, believing that Fjord de Liza is his natural sister.
And then when he when he goes to relieve himself, he falls from the planky falls right into the
mire in between two buildings in this very bad neighborhood of Naples called Malepyr to join the
Italian. Fjord de Liza was intelligent enough to get her and Andreutial had come there at night
time, so he wouldn't know exactly where he's going. So we have a fall, and it's the first of three
falls from heights. Now Andreutial goes from that garden to be even right into the mire,
and from there realizing what's happened to him, he meets the thieves who are going to rob a
graves of an archbishop. And they want to clean him off, so they
they use a rope and and lower him into the well, so that he can get the stench removed from himself.
And at that moment, these guards or policemen will come on the scene and they run away to do the
thieves, the policemen are hungry. I'm sorry, they're thirsty. They pull up the rope. And Andreutial has
a second. Well, let's say this is his first resurrection. He goes from the bottom of a well,
coming up to the world above. And the guards are terrified. They run away. Andreutial rejoins
the thieves, they go into the cathedral to the tomb of the recently deceased
archbishop of Naples, who's named by the way is Philippe Bo Meenutula. I don't know what to make of it,
but Philippe, I know that but cat there's in procatros stories or sorry, anything that is doesn't have
a reason for being there. Philippe Bo happens to mean a lover of horses. Andreutial is a horse merchant.
So you go figure what you want to make of that. The point being is that these thieves also
had in having listed Andreutial because they they want to send him down into the sarcophagus
to recover whatever goods were buried with the archbishop, including especially a ruby ring
of great value, more valuable than the 500 Florence. And having read the story, you know what happens
there that they when they think they've gotten everything that's there, they close the lid on it.
And Andreutial is really now in the world of the dead. He is he's fallen upon the the cadaver of the
Archbishop and it seems like he is he's doomed. Then of course it's opened again by the
other member of the clergy who had the same idea about to possess themselves of the goods of the
valuables that were buried there. And it's in that one moment where the little man Andreutial who
has been a plaything of fortune up until this point, at least he has that moment of action where
he's intelligent enough to grab the leg and scare the daylights out of these people and who go away
thinking that the devil has somehow taken claim of the of the torsion they flee out and Andreutial
scrambles out of the tomb and is it goes back home with even more money than he left with
given that the ruby ring is highly valuable. So it seems like a very you know fun entertaining story
but there's a lot there under the surface that I think has to do with bokacos vision of a world of
commodity exchange and above all the so called wheel of fortune. In the middle ages there was
this famous image of fortune being a blindfolded goddess and she constantly rotates a wheel and this wheel
is where all the goods and wealth and possessions of a civilization belong and she keeps turning
this wheel so that there will in the end be a kind of equitable distribution from generation to generation
even from individual to individual and therefore while it seems that I've had all this terrible
bad luck I was a rich person now I've lost all my money we're right in the middle of that with
all the people with their investments and their retirement accounts and yours truly you know the
fortune has in the last few weeks just come to take away a lot of what
one had and the idea in the middle ages is that there's this constant turning when when you're at
the top of the wheel you can be sure you're going to go down on the wheel and it's going to go back up
and the usual in the in the space of one night is is kind of turned around that wheel three times no
that fuel to the leaves is house that falls into the mire both into the well and then he's brought
back up on it and then he goes into the into the tune and then he resurrects again so this is both
conscious way of putting into play in a rather subtle way that the wheel of fortune in the case of
the experience of one you know one character I'd like to ask if anyone happens to remember on what
day of the week all this takes place it's another very subtle thing that one would easily
overlook because it's mentioned at the very onset of the story that
and the future left his hometown of Peru just the two Naples on a Sunday
therefore all this takes place on a Monday, lun-de, our word Monday is the same as lun-de which is
goes back to the moon it's the day of the moon and I don't think it's by chance that
Vocantra chooses this day of the week for this story because throughout the decamaran he
distinguished he says that what these two my world is not Dante's world as of this the world
above the spheres of the moon and the eternal heavens my world is the human world which is the sub
lunar world the world under the moon which in ancient and medieval cosmology is the sphere of
change flux fortune fortune belongs to the sub lunar world the moon as we know is fickle it
plays games on us and so forth so it's another typical discrete gesture on Vocantra's part to make
this whole story take place on the day of the moon
mind if I screen a quick question to you absolutely anyone wants to go ahead yeah so Patricia has asked
a great straightforward question about the way that the stories are are addressed in their outset
why is it to women why are they only and always addressed to the women in the in the audience
you mean by the start when they begin their stories it's a dearest ladies and and so I'm
presumed that that's what she means by that yes yeah yeah that's well first thing they they constitute
the majority there seven out of the ten and then it was also typical of medieval lyric Italian
poetry that you address it's part of the chivalric code of addressing the ladies first and
primarily now of course Vocantra he addresses the ladies but he's also has a number of stories in which
the he makes it quite clear what he what he thinks about um that you know that the sexual
let's say freedom that women will appropriate if they are given a chance no against the suppression
but we'll talk about that in in the other stores and I think we have another question from Victoria
Mondo yeah she's got her hand raised go ahead Victoria hear me
you can't hear me okay um so I had a question about um I was really interested in what you mentioned
about containment and I was thinking about how this doesn't necessarily apply to all the stories
we read for today but it does to a few and Andre Ucho also um I was interested in how he the story
in the events happen in a different city than the city of origin and so they're kind of like
contained to like he goes from Peruja to Palermo he has this whole experience and then he returns back
to Peruja like a different man and this is also true for like Masito for example or Masito
he travels to the convent he has this whole experience and then we hear that he returns he's different
and also Alabek who travels to the desert and has these kind of this transgression and the desert
comes back and interacts with the people that she was interacting with prior to the events um so yeah I was
just interested in how and also maybe this idea that the events are contained to a new city and then
there's a return how we can extend this concept further to also like the frame and the storytellers
and returning to the city once they've lived in this kind of ideal like garden like environment
and whether it's changed them because it does for the characters but I'm not sure if for them the
the objective is really to change while they're away from Florence or if it's just a kind of
live in this kind of suspended reality and then return to their life as it was before
so travel is the very medium of mercantileism it's by and oftentimes the travel that takes place in
these stories follow trade trade routes in um of the Middle Ages and there were certain commercial
centers yeah it would uh Naples but they had one of these are places that merchants would go
because of the circulation of goods you know requires also that the merchant also set out in person
to affect the kind of exchange of goods and there are other stories in the
camera on where we have this the travel is much more followed where we have um
I'm thinking of the uh what's her name the Sarah's and Princess who passes through nine
husbands before she's returned home it's a kind of odyssey and in statistical book contro that where
Homer will give us you know the um travel stories of a hero a war hero and a warrior for book contro
this kind of travel takes place really among the merchants who are the diminished heroes of his age
because I'd be the right now to miss heroes the classical nation but nevertheless
book contro had a great admiration for the uh the willingness to venture into the
unknown or into foreign territories in order to make a profit and these merchants oftentimes have
an imagination that book contro admirer is even if they're not fully aware of how much imagination
is required for you to be a successful merchant and travel is really the medium of the mercantile
world I'd like to say a word about the ruby ring the story before the Andrud just stories about
another merchant who takes me of his city of brabedaloy comes from one of those beautiful places in
Italy he already has a lot of money but he wants to double his fortune and so he invests all his money
in what we would call perishable goods he sends off to cypress other people have had the same idea
he finds that there's no market for its goods and then he takes to um he takes to piracy and he's
then captured by other pirates anyway he ends up in a after a shipwreck being saved by holding onto a
chest that is floating on the on the on the sea surface and when he arrives when he's kind of
washed up on the shores of the island of kurfu he opens the chest and is full of precious stones
gems
so the question there is what is this economy there there are two economies one is the economy of needs
and uh this would be the Marxist notion of an economy of essential needs that we find
Landofo at the island of cypress the market is just saturated there's no use for me they have to throw
them away but there's another economy of the imagination what is a precious stone what kind of
pragmatic biological value does it have none really it's because these these precious stones are really
some simulacra of eternity of something that we invest a kind of enormous value in even though
we can't eat them or wear them or do anything that really promotes you know the basic needs of
physical survival so the traffic in precious stones is also something that required
merchants to go from place to place and you can't be a merchant without being a nomadic
in a service so you're right that in so many stories there's a setting out and also a return
but it's in that circle of a circumnavigation around that we find both casual also alluding to
to the marketplace and the role of place in our in our world I think so hello I think we have another
question from Donatella are you there Donatella?
Amir can you hear me? Yes go ahead. So Professor Harrison my question is more about
book-action linguistic choice of using vernacular English so I'm going to read the question that I wrote
in which way does the user vernacular in reach the the camera in other words does the vernacular
language allow the author to portray elements details or teams the Latin cannot yeah well
I think the use of the vernacular is directly linked to what we've been talking about namely
book-catchers ambition to write a mercantile epic which is what the decamaran has been called
rightly so I think it's not only a mercantile I think but it is it is a an epic mostly of the middle
and not yeah the bourgeoisie and to have written book-catcher wrote a number of other of his works in
Latin but they were intended for a very different audience than the decamaran's audience so the
use of the vernacular abusing his vernacular Italian was a I think a decision that assured that
these kind of stories would find their you know their target audience and would
circulate liberally within that class of people now the other
consideration this goes back to the previous question about the the address to the women
that
no-catchers predecessor Dante makes the point in his vita noa among other places that
the reason poets began writing in the vernacular rather than in Latin is because they wanted
the their women the women that they were in love with and for whom they wrote poems to be able to
understand their literary gestures given that women at the time were not educated in Latin
the use of the vernacular had this direct connection with the ability of women to understand
what one was writing and given that the decamaran as a whole is dedicated to women
and only to women it would have been quite ironic and paradoxical had
ochotry written in Latin so the vernacular vernacular is essential to the whole mission of this
okay does that answer your question don't I tell you it does my only concern and I was thinking
about the same about the connection with the audience but I'm considering that I'm not and if you
remember last week I sent you the second question about the female audience if actually this audience
there seems to be like women it's I mean the audience is for in his mind the audience is I mean
the camera is for women or women as audience is just like a sort of not at a logical
speaking in order to talk about certain topics that we'd either like a type of audience he cannot
yeah I that's good I think that bokachua sincere in his address to the women and that his experience
as a socialite was that company company reality the kinds of the kind of pleasure that he is
associated with storytelling and social interaction was infinitely enhanced by the presence of women
and that and therefore I don't think that he's just using women as a you know rhetorical figure
to address an audience it's not primarily made up of women and I'm also thinking like especially because
I know the bokachua sometimes I mean there are like a lot of debates about if bokachua is a
misogynist writer or it's not considering what he wrote in the cormacho so that he says people
see the cormachas a misogynist like um leader at work so I wasn't sure but thank you for the answer
anyway well we can we can talk about that on our own the cormacho will take us a little bit
for a few I know I know I'm so sorry I apologize that's good thank you don't I think we have
another question from Josh do you want to speak your question about the anti-clerical aspects
are you there
okay maybe I'll just read the question uh Josh interrupt me if you'd like so the question that we
received is the following given the anti-clerical and possibly anti-church undertones of these stories
priest trying to rob a sarcophagus nuns enjoying the death mute devil into hell and so on
did the pandemic at the time give bokachua a unique timing opportunity to circulate these
stories which might not have been otherwise possible too many other upheavals for the church to deal
with right yeah that's that's a good question Josh um you know the anti-clericism is part of the
the great humor and believe it or not it wasn't the church did not become inquisitorial and repressive
because of anti-clerical um jobs at it it really the the Protestant Reformation made the the
Catholic church much more paranoid about critique but Dante had been extremely
the anti-clerical and his divine comedy when he puts the popes in hell and a lot of the clergymen
for greed and so forth um and I think certainly the black death of 1348 made the atmosphere much
more liberal than the church uh probably was um you know reeling from the effects of it but I
have it I would imagine that bokachua would have been equally open in the um in the kind of
parody and ridicule of the clergy as as he was even regardless of the other pandemic
so we have another question um coming up from Hilton are you there do you want me to read it
okay so the question is about how was the book produced so of course in the era before the printing press
and distributed how was it received yeah so we know that it wasn't published as uh in its finished form
that it was being published and disseminated at least the first three days had been widely publicly
available before bokachua composed the fourth day because the fourth day begins with a long response to his
critics who found that these stories were too pornographic and not and were beneath the dignity of a
you know of a great literary artist or scholar like bokachua so the fact that he engages in a
rebuttal of his critics at the beginning of the fourth day is evidence enough that it was circulating
we also know that many of the manuscripts were owned by merchants because in the margin
alias uh you would have all these economic uh numbers and figures and sales and and so forth so
clearly the the biggest audience at least the people who were purchasing the available copies of
the individual days or the book as a whole seem to have come from the merchant classes that they
would take this book with them and read it uh you know on their travels and
we thought it was so good. Thank you Robert I think Maria was going to jump in with a question here.
Sure yeah I was um I'm wondering because of the um the fact of the themes of the day that we
haven't quite talked too much about yet but it seems to me to have a lot to do with the idea of an
economy of the stories um the well the ones that we were reading for today we're talking about
happy endings against all odds happy endings and love stories happy endings uh unhappy endings
getting what you want things like that and it I can't help but think of um of narrative mapping
especially with regard to Andrillo and how the worst something gets the more uh drastic and rewarding
that happy ending tends to feel even if you were to look horizontally across the let's say like the
payout of the beginning state and the final state there's really a very small margin of improvement
in the very end but it's this kind of overall economy as if you're watching stocks rise and fall
that makes the ending feel so so dramatically um happy and I wonder if if you think that that does indeed
have to do with this um this general interest in exchange and and value being ascribed to things
rather arbitrarily at times yeah that's very well put I um I think you're you know you're
absolutely right um of course the theme of the second day in particular is characters who after
experiencing um misfortune are are rewarded with a a greater fortune than they could have
imagined so it is that dip and then rise again but in terms of the economy of the narrative
I think it also follows as you said the rise and and follow markets and so forth and let's think about
the economy in a story like the Mazeto story which is the first story of the third day about the um
the gardener who decides to play death and dumb and presents himself to the to the convent where
there are all these nuns who are young and have been probably forced to enter the convent by their
mothers and brothers fathers and so forth and there Mazeto very cleverly goes about
servicing one after another they then they end up having being nine nuns in all including the
abysse herself and it's of course not by chance that there's nine nuns because nine was
the great number in Dante for Dante who associated with Beatrice it's the Trinity times itself
Dante had a whole mysticism about the number nine but Contra takes that number nine and puts it
right down into the into the sexual economy of a of a convent and clearly this story okay so he's a gardener
and there's a lot of play on the traditional christian myth that the womb of the Virgin Mary is
the garden in which grows the flower the lily flower of Jesus and the garden the convent is a garden
which is a forte of the innocence of the garden reading that we will return to after death and so
forth so but Contra is not spoofing but he's engaging in with the christian symbolism of the garden
and having a gardener who really takes care of the vital forces of the sexual forces of the convent
and at the end I mean I think it's quite funny you know Saint Augustine in this confessions when
gives a very famous account for the origins of human language where he says if you look at
infants the way the reason that we begin to speak or an infant learn how to speak is because he's
full of desire and he wants to indicate what the objective is desire is and therefore when he
hears his parents name something that he learns and they because he wants to say you know I
want the cake or I want the toy or I want this so Augustine gives a genealogy of language in this
kind of breathless desire for things.
Vocacho takes this and it's only at the moment of the over-saysiation and sexual exhaustion of
desire that Mazetho will actually break into speech in order to create a barrier between himself
and the excessive desires of the nuns and the abbess has to come to a reason decision what are
they going to do let him out and tell the story you know well they decide they regulate the
big note economy of this community and it's done in such a way that the art of gardening
is brought to bear on the way that they actually organize you know the sexual economy of the
place in a way that suits kind of everyone everyone except the the monklets and the nuns
as is put where they have to be funneled out into orphanages because after all you know sex is related to
procreation and reproduction and so they were but anyway I think the what you're talking about the
in terms of the economy is and the happy ending you know that could end very badly but it's
typical of Vocacho to find a way to bring it all to a kind of harmonious balance here
thank you yeah that's great that to get some of the other stories in there too in this reflection
I'm not sure how much you wanted to say about our other novellas in and of themselves but we do have
Christina wanted to ask a bit of a follow-up questions maybe we can give her a moment
Christina do you want to jump in? I can although I also like the idea of proceedings I'm
happy to feel that yeah I just wanted to ask really after this so if we can think of the group of
time as a rough approximation of Vocacho's audience I'm wondering about those three men
so who are they? Which story? As a general matter the entire decanaran
the audience as women and if we think of the ten as a sort of stand-in for his audience then let's
say the majority of that audience is women right and indeed the stories address themselves to
women but who are the men who are his audience? So when you say that there's a three story teller
male story tellers they have an equal status with the women and so it's interesting that the two
stories that I suggested one the first one is told by one of the male narrators named Philos
Dreto his name already indicates that he is a the frustrated lover that's what the name Philos
said the means and typically tell stories either about men who are completely vanquished by
the sexual prowess of women or he tells stories about this kind of unbelievable you know fantasized
male sexuality the other story about Ali Beck is very much in keeping with the first story the
sentence story the third day it's about the young the young girl who naively goes into the desert
because she wants to serve a serve God and ends up with you know the young hermit who thinks at
first that he can resist and yet it only takes him like a couple of minutes to realize that he
he's no match for nature and of course there too we have the same idea this kind of male
fantasy fantasy of this insatiable female sexual
this story so basically the these men the three men story tellers especially Philos
and Dio neo tell different different types of stories and then the women women story tellers
and you know it's hard to do you know it's is an interesting case because he's the one who has the
special privilege of being exempt from following the assigned themes of the day so he is the one
who always tells the last story of the day as well so he's he's at the limit of containment
no he is the one of the ten who cannot really be contained and but it's by agreement and by
rule that he gets to be outside of the containing theme and also speaking last so he gets to go beyond
the limit but every time he goes beyond the limit he's you know the group as a whole will bring things
back you know within the rule and the story of Ali back is another kind of very brilliant parody
of religious symbolism and religious language about the devil you know Satan the pride of the devil the pride
is superior wanting to rise above the status of God is what gets Satan thrown down into hell
and therefore pride is the the principle sin of all and it's because it's attempt to rise above
say so so this raising of the the the devil the the devil that's raising its head in pride
is all very funny referring to male erection the hell and putting the devil back into hell
the resurrection of the flesh all these um all these ways in which bokatra is is humorously engaging with
with christian language and symbolism it's it's it's well it's it's enchanting because bokatra is the
one writer who can be sexually completely explicit without ever being vulgar no it never
the the camera never becomes pornographic in the sense that even though it doesn't it doesn't repress
any of the details it doesn't do do that in in a way that uh breaches decorum and this
brilliant double-speed double language of the resurrection of the flesh and so forth all that makes it
there's a is a prime example of how bokatra can be completely uninhibited on the one hand
and avoid any kind of a descent into pornographic vulgarity on the other
right we have a really um super rich list of questions coming in so i'm going to turn it over
to Andre Akapra to ask a question really quick um go for it under well first of all greetings
from the other side of the oceans it's great to it's great to see you um i was i was very intrigued by
what you mentioned about the will of fortune right because at times bokatra is heralded as one of the
great anthropocentric writers meaning a writer that talks about humans there are full of agents
and they end up overcoming a set of challenges and eventually impose their will or at least
these advantages of their resolution but i think you're touching on a very interesting point when you
mentioned that the role of the merchant is also eventually in the unknown and indeed i think that
fortune the role of fortune did the camera is precisely this obscure force um that sure i mean at
times can be leveraged by humans but it's not there for the for the humans um the protagonists of
the story that we read they they and the other one that we haven't read yet they do have a strange
awareness that things can indeed go bad and most certainly they will go bad in their lives and
that's why they have this kind of battle ready uh attitude and that's i think one of the main
difference right between a bokatra's time and that were time i mean we kind of have been living in
this long nap after the second war war then now corona kind of snaps us out of this state of you
know things eventually will go well where as an impact there are you know dangers and strange and
uncontrollable forces out there so my question to you is uh what do you think is the role of the
fourth day the day when everything goes bad um is it is a moment when bokatra's just shows
uh lifts this veil and shows the dark forces that lie beneath or is it sort of like safety
or is it something that is an is it is it's controlled by the structure of containment that
we're talking about or uh i i would just consider your thoughts about this
yeah thanks andrea from Paris it's great it's uh so we didn't assign it i didn't assign any
stories from the fourth day but let me just tell you know the people that are participants at
the fourth day the theme the prescribed theme is um tragic tragic story about stories that end in
bad way i think we do have one from the fourth day do we not uh yes yes we lovely's back
that oh at least we expect that's a true that's true actually if you don't mind i think
Sarah proton has a question that might dovetail really well and maybe you could address them both
Sarah do you want to address the burden?
Sure my question was simply about the comic and tragic elements in fact in bokatra and so i had
juxtaposed the endra ucho story with the lise betto story so you know the endra ucho story you
know that that ends well despite the number of challenges and then of course these are better which
just reasons pure tragedy i mean from happy love through death to death by tears so yeah my
question was more broadly if we might talk about these elements of tragic and comic uh sort of in
in bokatra and the function of these these sort of tensions are juxtapositions that's great um
so yeah addressing both those questions the the fourth day are stories that end in misfortune
they end they end badly are they tragic i am not sure because these categories of tragic and
comic i think comedy is definitely the principal m o of the decamaran and the lise betto story
i don't know if it's it's a very sad story whether it's a tragic story i'm not sure in the typical
sense of the um the classical way in which you have a protagonist to magnanimous and
and somehow through an overreaching or some kind of reversal of fortune is cast down you know into
the depths of misery for reasons that may or may not be his fault or her fault no
because of it the reason i chose that story is because it has a lot of pain thus and it shows that
the decamaran is not only stories that are funny and comic but i think it's also if you take the
it's a it's a psychological portrait of a character who is almost born to born and to grieve
and i don't know if i'm over in over determining the fact that she already displays all the
behavior and look accents of grieving before she even knows that her gloennzo is dead
so she goes you know whining to her brothers and she's always be ceaching and what so you have a
sense that vocatrous chosen to give us a a psychology of um of lamentation regardless of what
actually happens or doesn't have i might be over playing the cards here in that respect
but on the question of comedy in general and and tragedy what
and reia was asking about about the fourth day there are there there might be one or two truly tragic
stories i'm thinking maybe the first one about gismoda and greasquatador but
and i'm sorry to talk about a story that most of you haven't read necessarily but that's a story
where it's a father and a daughter and a father who discovers that his daughter he's the prince
of sannen i discovers his daughter is kind of a secret lover who is his servant
his valet servant and in a moment in anger upon this discovery he has a greasquatador rested and then
he cuts out his heart and sends it to his daughter in a chamber and in a chalice saying let this
console you for the loss of your dearest possession referring either to Lorenzo or to make more
more likely to um uh you know a certain part of his anatomy she then confronts her father
because when her father comes and we have this story that would have ended in perfect tragedy
but right in the middle of it there's a confrontation between father and daughter which is three
pages of discourse where she presents her arguments of father and other and all of a sudden you realize
Sophocles could never have introduced that into antigony it would have completely ruined the tragic
effect of action that leads inevitably and necessarily to death you have a sense that the father and
daughter in that in that critical moment that anything could have happened he could have murdered
his daughter he could have even raped his daughter because there was a suggestion that there's an
incestuous obsession of the father for the daughter never explicitly mentioned but the fact is that
both catar chos to introduce a scene which keeps the possibility of real tragedy at bay keeps it
at a distance so I think that even the story that comes closest to having a tragic character avoids
the classical tragedy now another thing that I would like to say about
the tragic and the dark is when dreo was talking about the fourth day but we already know from the
plague that there's a great kind of horror in the in the very background of all these stories
but happy endings are happy endings are something that is a required or insisted upon by the
bourgeoisie there's nothing more bourgeois than happy endings and the desire for happy ending
whereas because the merchant class for bocacho it's a precarious class you're taking a lot of
risks with your investments your investments at any moment can go south and you can lose your money
and the idea that when you lose your money if you're not an aristocrat you lose everything
the aristocracy doesn't run the same risk when it loses its possessions because it has this complete self
confidence of a class that no matter how impoverished you are the fact that you're an aristocrat means
that you will always have a dignity and magnanimity that is independent of your material
possessions of your goods so much so that we have that other story that I recommended the story
of fidde de dico de dio dio de dio de dio dio dio dio he's the one who has this falcon
and he's the one who who squandered his entire fortune trying to win over
the favors of this woman that he's in love with but who never really acknowledged him at all
so he he's left with absolutely nothing except a country house and a falcon he's but he's a noble
he has this kind of no he belongs to that aristocratic class where bocacho is giving a support of
someone who does not even aware of the fact that he's become poor until she presents herself
on his property to ask him a favor and he realizes he has nothing really to offer to eat
he sees the falcon the only and what is the falcon is the very emblem of that class of
aristocracy is the bird of the hunting bird of the imperial
cord of Frederick II it's the bird of loyalty that will always come back to a semester and so
it's it's the emblem of aristocracy without even hesitating for a second when he sees it there
plump and he brings its neck and serves it up to this woman in the typical magnanimity of
an idealized aristocrat and when she finds out what he's done she is horrified on the one hand and
completely in admiration on the other her son dies she inherits the fortune brother's
wanted to remarry and she said okay if I'm gonna have to get remarry I'm the only person I will
marry is to the legal and look at what happens now
but then he go marry sir and he if I can read to you the ending of the story because it has
everything to do with tragedy and comedy it's in the fifth day right yeah it begins you are to know
then that copo de bode des endomani chi who wants used to live in our city and possibly lives
there's still one of the most highly respected men of our century a person worthy of eternal
fame which he his position of preeminence by dint of his character and abilities rather than by
his noble lineage frequently took pleasure during his declining years in discussing incidents
from the past and one of his favorite stories is this story of fiddity go that he tells all the time
his name is copo de bode des endomani means bourgeois he clearly belongs to that
bourgeois class and he takes delight in telling this story about this fiddity go who at the end
of the story last paragraph seeing that her mind was made up and knowing fiddity go to be a gentleman
of great merit even though he was poor her brothers fell in with her wishes and handed her over
to him along with her immense fortune that's for finding himself married to this great lady
with whom he was so deeply in love and very rich into the bargain fiddity go managed his affairs
more prudently and lived with her in happiness to the end of his days i would say this is exactly
the wrong ending for a person like fiddity go because he's been co-opted incorporated into the middle
class ethic and here's someone who didn't hesitate to squander everything he had
out of devotion to the true lady but now he is going to join a family where he's
they're going to manage their affairs more prudently so this ethic of prudence is also one that
it has a class dimension and so i think that this happy ending is in this story in particular
shows us that it's above all the bourgeoisie that climbers for happy endings the aristocracy could
deal with tragedy because okay happens to me but it's going to happen on a grand scale i can
i can i can i can deal with that i don't know if i'm persuading anyone about
about this but what do you say Andrea i agree with you i think my question wasn't
very much referring to the tragic side of darkness but quite on the contrary about the fact that darkness
creates the conditions of possibility for those characters to shine and it's precisely their
awareness of that darkness that allows them to kind of repurpose them and to spin the will of
fortune yet again so i think i think it's more about a decomity side of things you know something
that the awareness that things will eventually go bad and do something that makes them go well
rather than the tragic side of things that ends you know in a disaster yeah that's great
and Sarah what about you to you uh yeah well as i listened to you i mean it struck me that this
this whole element of you know character flaw or strength really doesn't it's not emphasized in
these stories no way that you'd expect for true tragedy so of course and rai ucho you know
ends up in this happy story almost despite being a fool and of course these are but the sufferers
sufferers with no obvious tie to in her character so you know you you got me thinking about that as
well the role of character and how these people's stories play out and the emphasis really does
seem to be on the capacity you know where there is comedy and happy endings for it to be about
built to and once capacity to manage a certain set of situations to turn the circumstances around
rather than it being a reflection of their other character per se so uh those were just you know my
thoughts as i as i listened to you uh work through that question of you know the tragic versus i
guess i guess this element of pathos really um but what i'm very i says about darkness being
an occasion to shine that it's unfortunate as a this unpredictable flux of circumstances
vocatra definitely has certain heroes that he puts forward as as as admirable characters and these
are the ones who know who take initiative and who act in the moment of decisive moments in ways
that will lead to a happy outcome rather than a tragic outcome so many of his
his positive heroes are are resourceful intelligent
not clear of why but at least able to manipulate circumstances in such a way that it will go to
their to their benefit and the new to has that one moment where he does the right thing and that
you know that's enough for him many other in many other cases um vocatra does unlike passive
victims of uh circumstances and that's why lise beth uh he does tell the story of lise beth
full of pathos and stuff but she is exactly the kind of hero that he is that it is not put forward
for for admiration um so i think i if i if i understood and reah properly this this
championing of the empowerment of human agency and the the willingness of characters to
take things into their own hands in the in the critical moments something that um
is a is a book action virtue i think i'm gonna jump in we have a couple more questions and
to help in it so i think it's about right but um just before we do those i want to make sure
Robert did you have something you wanted to bring in about the stories that haven't been talked
about that much yet or so we've mentioned lise beth i i'm glad that we got to speak about the
if they did ego story that's one of my favorite stories about the falcon and they have the ending there
and and the class i'm out of that that's uh you know this idea of prudence yes vocatra
understands crew so we talked about that we talked about mazette the alley beth and i think we've
covered them all Laura own and yeah i the one that i didn't say anything about it but i mentioned
last time is the story of the first story of the sixth day about the night and the lady
on and outing and he wants to tell her a story and he makes a big mess of it
do we have it do do you want me to say something about that Laura or or
i i certainly can do it it's really up to you i think we have a couple questions so maybe we should
do those before you run out of time okay um we have a question from jodie i don't know if you want to
ask it yourself are you there you have to unmute yourself yeah uh head yes just a quick question i
wanted to see if you could comment on the connections between kennedy tails and uh carina
barana and and this that the camera may seem to have a lot of connect uh similarity to me
yeah well uh kamina vurena i don't have a whole lot to say i know that we of course
the chaser um vocatra's de camarran was one of the great one of the sources for the kang
and many of the kangtaberry tails and it was um vocatra was even more important to him than
than done today and so you have a retelling of some of the de camarran tails in um in the kangtaberry
tails but i have to say that it's really amazing to me that chaser it was ahead of vocatra
historically because for me and vocatra just seemed so much vocatra it's kind of full fledged
modern renaissance type of uh writer and chaser it just very medieval and rather um you know historically
you would say anterior to vocatra but chronologically that's not the case anyway the
vocatra and the chaser was an excellent excellent reader of um a vocatra and and it gives us a
de camarran a result in the kangtaberry tails. All right i think we have one more question from
johnny that was about a number of the stories together are you there? Yes can you hear me? Yes
excellent excellent thank you thank you all for another amazing discussion it's been it's been so
interesting to to sit in on again i want to use six one which we haven't really had time to talk about
as a as a vehicle to ask a question about the about the texts uh on a slightly wider level
because it occurs to me the commentators are very quick to underscore the structural and
thematic privileges of that story being as it is an ovenla very much about the first story of the
sixth day madam ore being as it is an ovenla very much bound up with the art of an ovenla
but it's also of course very much placed at the structural centre of the texts now
for as i rassen you've spoken before i think about uh or under for yours or and uh juda
zalim juda zalim eli belata as texts which are inherently polycentric and i think it's a term
that you could absolutely apply to the decanmer as well so what i wondered if was that if you could
maybe unpack exactly what you mean by polycentrism in this kind of literary context
and perhaps what are the implications if there are any of such a concept to our
reading and our appreciation of of this of this text great yeah thank you so
the decanmer on has ten days with a hundred stores and you sit it's unlike the divine comedy
which has a hundred condos and three canticles with the divine comedy you are always aware of the fact
that you everything is part of one large megastore and that and that it's it which has a centre
and that centre is almost everywhere you find the decanmer on the central message of the decanmer
on is reflected in all of its parts with the decanmer on every story it becomes impossible to draw a
particular definitive message lesson or ethic from any particular story because the next story
will revise qualify and in some cases even undermine the previous story and in that sense is polycentric
in the sense that i don't want to say it has a hundred centres but it wouldn't be way off the mark to
suggest something of that sort now they all must relate but they relate to each other more as a network
rather than a uh let's think the rhizomatically rather than our borely it's not it's not a tree
image that everything is unified by a trunk but if the decanmer on does have a numerical centre
it would be between the fifth and the sixth state no i happen to believe that the sixth day is as
close to the numerical centre as you can get and that's is why vocacho devotes the sixth day
as he says here begins the sixth day we're in under the rule of ethics and the discussion turns
upon those who on being provoked by some verbal plasantry have returned like for like or who
by a prompt retort or shrewd maneuver have avoided danger, discomfort or ridicule and thus in the sixth
day we have this um view of the role that language plays the proper use of language as a medium of
human exchange that language takes a form of clever witticisms of retorts to someone who has made an
offhand comment or a vulgar comment to you storytelling and yeah language in vocacho is reminding us
that the vast majority of human relations takes place through the medium of language and that
the quality of our human relations is going to depend entirely upon the degree to which we cultivate
the art of speech and the art of storytelling.
You could use the analogy of calligraphy you know when i when i was in back in in early grade school
we used to have to write essays we were graded on the content and on the handwriting and those
grades were equal in value to a final grade how important was handwriting in that you know in the
previous generation you see that the handwritten letters of people of earlier generations of
beautiful hand if you look at handwriting today it is it even adults tend to write more you know
more like children in a very unrefined kind of calligraphy well fortunately for writing we use
typewriters of we use to use typewriters and keyboards and so forth.
Nevertheless when we speak to each other we are still in the medium of human speech and
I think that by comparison with previous ages we are speaking in the kind of childish handwriting of
people in our own but when you see how this completely lost art of handwriting so
in I think there's a very serious lesson to be learned from day six which is how important it is to
enhance cultivate and use this medium through which most of our communication takes place
you know to its full potential and how what a terrible job we do these days of you know
exploring the potential of our verbal media.
Well you have certainly redeemed it to a certain extent at least for this morning.
Maybe we can on that note take a take a moment to thank you for Professor Harrison and thank
all of these wonderful participants such an example. Thank you all and I appreciate all the
interest that you've shown the camera and thank Maria and Laura Whitman all of you.
And a pleasure so on that I think I will end our meeting and I wish you all a happy rainy Sunday.
1-0. North Side.
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