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Naturalizing Humanity: Genealogy and the Politics of Storytelling in Boccaccio's Decameron

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2009

Roberto Farneti
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Abstract

In his literary masterwork, the Decameron, Boccaccio undertakes a thorough examination of human values along the lines he had drawn in his history of the origins of the gods, the Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, on the assumption that values, in a world emptied of the gods, retain a similarly normative and aggregating function. To Boccaccio both gods and values are transient items in a moral ontology that acknowledges only one set of perennial items: natural impulses and dispositions. Boccaccio adopts a particular stance towards the emergence of values: genealogy is, for him, a distinctive way to examine the processes whereby beliefs, attitudes, and values come about.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 71 , Issue 3 , Summer 2009 , pp. 363 - 388
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2009

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References

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2 Judith Shklar illustrated the particular conservative attitude by which figures of authority seek to protect the status quo: “The unspoken and sanctified practices that prevail within every tribal order can never be openly analyzed or appraised, for they are by definition already permanently settled within the communal consciousness. Unless there is an open and public review of all the practical alternatives, especially of the new and alien, there can be no responsible choices and no way of controlling the authorities that claim to be the voice of the people and its spirit” (Shklar, Judith, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Political Thought and Political Thinkers [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 16)Google Scholar.

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9 Or it should at least be considered as old as Hesiod's Theogony, as argued in Judith Shklar, “Subversive Genealogies,” in Political Thought and Political Thinkers, 132–60.

10 So, the justification of the political order established by Zeus, in Hesiod's Theogony, “is to be found in success, in the stability and might of his polity and of his own rule” (Shklar, “Subversive Genealogies,” 140).

11 In particular, the authority of a culture or religious system largely depends on the group's ability to “invoke a history of persecution and resistance” (Douglas, Mary, How Institutions Think [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986], 80Google Scholar).

12 I quote from Boccaccio, G., The Decameron. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by McWilliam, G. H. (London: Penguin Books, 2003)Google Scholar, cited in the text as “D,” followed by page number; and from Boccaccio, G., Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, ed. Romano, V. (Bari: Laterza, 1951)Google Scholar, cited in the text as “Gen.” followed by the indication of the volume, section, paragraph, and line.

13 Migiel, Marilyn, A Rhetoric of the “Decameron” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 22Google Scholar.

14 Boccaccio held an articulated sense of values, reflected in his use of such terms as “merit,” “rank,” “virtue,” “manners,” and “practices.”

15 Gen. 15. ix.159a.4.

16 An anonymous reader cautioned me about Boccaccio's world being empty of the gods. This world, to be sure, still bears the indelible mark of the Christian God. I agree with this reader that the detached and relatively ineffective presence of God in the world “in no way contradicts” the article's claim concerning Boccaccio's typical brand of naturalism. I think it is important to stress that while God is not a direct player in the Decameron, it is the widespread perception that he is actually a player that structures the relationships among several characters. Although God has no effective agency in the Decameron, perceptions of a divine agency generate attitudes that Boccaccio addresses throughout. Millicent Marcus argued, successfully in my view, that the first tale of the First Day makes it impossible for us to lay claim to knowing God's judgments. Marcus, Millicent J., An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the Decameron (Saratoga: Anma Libri, 1979), 18Google Scholar.

17 A story is presumed to have taken a certain course depending on some natural features that would prompt the people involved to act in a certain way. As to the second point, Boccaccio's genealogy relies on a state-of-nature story in which natural features and capabilities are not yet corrupted or constrained by arrangements that departed from the direction of fit.

18 Foucault “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 143.

19 Owen, David, “Genealogy as Perspicuous Representation,” in The Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, ed. Heyes, C. J. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 110Google Scholar.

20 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 146; italics added.

21 Skinner, Quentin, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 112Google Scholar; italics added.

22 On the plague as the frame of Decameron, see Bernardo, Aldo S., “The Plague as Key to Meaning in Boccaccio's Decameron,” in The Black Death, ed. Williman, Daniel (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1982), 39–64Google Scholar; Flasch, Kurt, Giovanni Boccaccio: Poesie nach der Pest (Mainz: Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1992)Google Scholar; and, more generally, Herlihy, David, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997Google Scholar).

23 McWilliam, introduction, lx.

24 “The group of storytellers adopts a monarchical regime; each day is managed by a monarch who establishes the topic of the stories, takes care of solving all sorts of practical problems, gives the servants proper instructions, and so on and so forth” (Bruni, Francesco, Boccaccio. L'invenzione della letteratura mezzana [Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990], 238Google Scholar).

25 The test seems consistent with the general inspiration of the letteratura mezzana, “consisting in suspending all matters of principles and putting into brackets all ultimate truths” (Bruni, Boccaccio, 249). Letteratura mezzana, or “middling literature,” is typically “not committed to first principles,” but rather “grounded on premises which do not bear on the principles of the high culture of Virgil and the other auctores” (97, 175). However, according to Bruni, the main achievement of the letteratura mezzana consisted in dissolving the distinction, typical of Boccaccio's early works (notably the Filocolo), between delectable love (amore per diletto) and love pursued and practiced within the boundaries of the socially acceptable (amore onesto). The Decameron is the work in which the amore per diletto legislates its own normativity.

26 Kirkham, Victoria, The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio's Fiction (Florence: Olschki, 1993)Google Scholar elaborates on the significance of the “segno della ragione.”

27 I use “supernatural” throughout to signify whatever is not within the bounds of nature. The term collects all those capacities that are not, in John Searle's words, “a natural extension of other primate capacities” (Searle, John, Rationality in Action [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001], 171Google Scholar). I favor this extended use of the term to stress Boccaccio's uncompromising naturalism in moral matters.

28 In the beginning of her speech from the introduction to the First Day, Pampinea maintains that whoever honestly uses her reason commits an injury to no one [a niuna persona fa ingiuria chi onestamente usa la sua ragione], and that it is naturally reasonable for everyone born into this world “to sustain, preserve, and defend his own life to the best of his own ability—a right so freely acknowledged that men have sometimes killed others in self-defence, and no blame whatever has attached to their actions” (D, 14). I agree with an anonymous reader that Pampinea seems to advocate an embryonic, proto-Hobbesian natural right of self-preservation. Through Pampinea's speech, Boccaccio was trying to distance himself from the ethics of self-sacrifice that constituted the most powerful weapon in the hands of those characters of the Decameron whose moral pronouncements consistently fail to pass Pampinea's test.

29 According to Francesco Bruni, the Decameron “envisions some typical forms of communal life that are possible only within the imaginary space of the letteratura mezzana” (Boccaccio, 263).

30 The direction of fit is exemplified by “the dramatic movement from plague-ridden Florence to orderly gardens” (Olson, Glending, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986], 182Google Scholar).

31 “Such cherished concepts as purity, chastity and virginity are subjected to a fierce and sometimes taunting scrutiny” (McWilliam, introduction, xcviii).

32 Migiel, A Rhetoric of the “Decameron,” 19.

33 I am obviously referring to Gilles Deleuze and Guattari, Felix, L'Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Minuit, 1972)Google Scholar.

34 Levenstein, Jessica, “Out of Bounds: Passion and the Plague in Boccaccio's Decameron,” Italica 3 (1996): 335Google Scholar. Some writers have established the connection between the plague and passionate love. One of the characters featured in the Decameron, the wife of Rossiglione, just like “the plague that occasions the bucolic sojourn of the storytellers, acknowledges no obstacles and knows no bounds” (Levenstein, 335).

35 Tenenti, Alberto, “La rappresentazione della morte collettiva nel Decameron,” Intersezioni 12 (1992): 235Google Scholar. “The stories of the Decameron do not actually need any such preamble. Even though Boccaccio appears to have created a convincing link between the first pages and the bulk of his work, those pages constitute nonetheless a self-sufficient ingredient” (236). Tenenti is implicitly targeting the reading proposed by other critics (notably Giovanni Getto and Vittore Branca), according to whom the proem is necessarily instrumental to the plot of the Decameron. See Branca, Vittore, Boccaccio medievale, e nuovi studi sul Decameron (Firenze: Sansoni, 1990), 32ffGoogle Scholar.

36 Tenenti, “La rappresentazione della morte collettiva nel Decameron,” 241.

37 State-of-nature stories are fictional tales of social beginnings by which one can get a glimpse of the unbiased workings of some powers and dispositions that are deemed to be natural inasmuch as they pre-exist the (supposedly later) inception of those arrangements and beliefs. In other words, “the State of Nature story is a fiction, an imaginary genealogy, which proceeds by way of abstract argument from some very general and, I take it, indisputable assumptions about human powers and limitations” (Williams, Bernard, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002], 39Google Scholar).

38 Kurt Flasch, in talking about Boccaccio's introduction to the first day, has suggested the notion of “epistemisch Null-Punkt” (Flasch, 57, 90).

39 Ovid, Metamorphoses 1, 144.

40 Bruni, Boccaccio, 175; italics added.

41 This is not to say that Ovid is the only source here. While Boccaccio seems to reject the tradition of a primitive Golden Age (see Hesiod Works and Days 109–201 and Plato Statesman 271d3–272b4), one can trace back to Lucretius and others a much bleaker tradition of social beginnings. Cf. Lucretius De rerum natura 5.925–1027; Vergil Aeneid 8.314–18; and Horace Satires 1.3, 99–106. For the specific theme of the plague a possible source of borrowing was Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War 2.47–55. Lucretius, a more plausible source of Boccaccio, illustrates the theme of the causes of pestilence through a description of the plague in Athens that “follows the corresponding chapters in [Thucydides's] Histories fairly closely, and in turn influenced later plague descriptions in Latin literature” (Pade, Marianne, “Thucydides’ Renaissance Readers,” Brill's Companion to Thucydides, ed. Rengakos, A. and Tsakmakis, A. [Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006], 781Google Scholar). See also Grimm, Jürgen, Die literarische Darstellung der Pest in der Antike und in der Romania (Munich: Fink, 1965)Google Scholar. Vittore Branca indicates, as a possible source for the description of the plague, Paolo Diacono, Historia Longobardorum, ii.4–5. Branca, Boccaccio medievale, 383ff.

42 See Bruni, Boccaccio, 95.

43 On the Ovidian influence on the Decameron see Hollander, Robert, “The Decameron Proem,” in The Decameron: First Day in Perspective, ed. Weaver, Elissa B. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 12–28Google Scholar.

44 On the important theme of order from chaos, see Cottino-Jones, Marga, Order from Chaos: Social and Aesthetic Harmonies in Boccaccio's “Decameron” (Washington, DC: University of America Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

45 Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, 50.

46 Boccaccio's tale of the plague does belong, though, to the age-old genre of state-of-nature stories, inasmuch as the condition described by the plague is the ultimate point of departure for any further developments of human values. In the fourth section of the article, I will expand on Boccaccio's understanding of reason. Reason, here, is the force that prompts our natural inclinations to fulfil the direction of fit. What seems paradoxical is that without the intervention of reason our natural dispositions would drift toward the kind of unnatural disorderliness whose ultimate paradigm is the plague. Seemingly paradoxical is also the fact that both the plague and the locus amoenus are, in a way, examples of a state of nature. The fundamental difference is that in the locus amoenus the teleology of nature is ultimately fulfilled.

47 For a brief overview of contemporary criticism on Decameron 1.1 see Franco Fido, “The Tale of Ser Ciappelletto,” in The Decameron: First Day in Perspective, 59–76.

48 Puzzles about the moralizing thrust of the story arise if one assigns to Boccaccio a specific moral intent. But on a closer scrutiny, there is little clue in the story that Boccaccio was targeting the profession of the two brothers and the morality of mercatura in general. The point of the story seems different: Cepperello is portrayed with too vivid imagery and zest—with little parallel in the whole text—suggesting that here the author is not speaking for himself but rather complying with the standard moral view of his readers. The concluding remark that Cepperello “was perhaps the worst man ever born” is too naïve and clichéd if compared to the standard of psychological insight employed throughout the Decameron. The remark, in my view, signals to his readers (at least to those alert enough to pick up his clues) that here the writer is lying. On the writer as liar, see Almansi, Guido, The Writer as Liar: Narrative Technique in the “Decameron” (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975)Google Scholar.

49 According to Vittore Branca the novella of Ser Ciappelletto is the tale in which “the dominance of the ragion di mercatura [i.e., the justificatory mindset and rationale of commerce] is most supreme and merciless, to the limit of the inhuman” (Branca, Boccaccio medievale, 156).

50 Although 3.8 is not narrated by Panfilo, it fits this pattern. It is the story of a “living man who was buried for dead, and who later, on emerging from his tomb, was convinced that he had truly died and been resurrected—a belief that was shared by many other people, who consequently venerated him as a Saint when they should have condemned him as a fool” (D, 254).

51 See on this topic Hastings, Robert A. B., Nature and Reason in the Decameron (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

52 This issue is explored by Emilia in her tale of the third day. “This in turn led him to reflect upon the blind severity of the law and its administrators, who in order to convey the impression that they are zealously seeking the truth, often have recourse to cruelty and cause falsehood to be accepted as proven fact, hence demonstrating, for all their proud claim to be the ministers of God's justice, that their true allegiance is to the devil and his iniquities” (D, 240).

53 On the role of the clergy, and Boccaccio's critique, see Cuilleanáin, Cormac O., Religion and the Clergy in Boccaccio's Decameron (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984)Google Scholar.

54 Flasch, Giovanni Boccaccio, 63.

55 “In the world of the Decameron there is no immorality perceived as such, but rather the feeling that man is part of nature, which is not governed by moral laws or principles, but answers only to instincts and impulses and biological phenomena that fall outside the scope of ethics” (Givens, Azzurra B., La dottrina d'amore nel Boccaccio [Messina and Florence: D'Anna, 1968], 207Google Scholar; cited in McWillliam, introduction, civ). Instincts, impulses, and biological phenomena, though, are amenable to the ordering impulse of reason. The case of the plague shows how biological instincts can fall short of the redeeming force of reason.

56 On this topic, see Ciavolella, Massimo, “Letteratura e pornografia: La novella di Masetto da Lamporecchio (Decameron 3.1)” in ‘Leggiadre donne…’: Novella e racconto breve in Italia, ed. Bruni, Francesco (Venice: Marsilio, 2000), 29–42Google Scholar.

57 On arrangements based on deceit, see Greene, Thomas, “Forms of Accommodation in the Decameron,” Italica 45 (1968): 297–313CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 The pursuit of delectable love is not morally valuable per se. It is rather instrumental to expose fraudulent forms of morality and to test whether existing arrangements are congruent with the teleology of nature. Boccaccio does praise “amore onesto,” but he seeks first to restore and warrant the working of reason (i.e., of a nature transparent to reason) in the making of this social value. He suggests going back to a nature uninformed by reason in order to spur a restart that follows the direction of fit.

59 As specified in footnote 46, the dissolution of human arrangements and bonds is brought about by a corruption of the teleology of nature. Failure to acknowledge this teleology, although contrary to reason, prompts the process that leads inevitably to the situation that, in Decameron's opening pages, is metaphorized by the insurgence of the plague. In the Genealogie, Boccaccio describes the situation in which mutual “accusations” (querelae) prevail over social harmony: “Hinc queritur lascivus amans, hinc auri cupidus, hinc honorum avidus, hinc sanguinis sitibundus et alii plures malum quod introduxerunt ipsi” (Gen. 1. xxvi.5; § “De querela Herebi filia”).

60 Schelling, Friedrich W. J., “Neue Deduction des Naturrechts,” in Werke (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1982), 174Google Scholar.

61 According to several scholars, including Givens (see footnote 55), Boccaccio defends a kind of naturalism that seems to me akin to the one referred to by John McDowell as “bald naturalism” or “naturalism of disenchanted nature.” This particular type of naturalism takes for granted that reality is “exhausted by the natural world” (McDowell, John, Mind, Value and Reality [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998], 173Google Scholar). I am inclined, instead, to see Boccaccio as propounding a fairly defensible type of Aristotelian naturalism.

62 Leiter, Brian, “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” in The Future for Philosophy, ed. Leiter, B. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 105Google Scholar.

63 Ivison, Duncan, “The Secret History of Public Reason: Hobbes to Rawls,” History of Political Thought 1 (1997): 126Google Scholar.

64 Nagel, Thomas, “Honesty and History,” The New Republic, October 21 (2002): 28Google Scholar.

65 Menand, Louis, The Metaphysical Club: A Study of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 432Google Scholar.

66 For this notion of proceduralism, I am indebted to Fitzpatrick, William J., “The Practical Turn in Ethical Theory: Korsgaard's Constructivism, Realism, and the Nature of Normativity,” Ethics 115 (2005): 651–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Taylor, Charles, “Philosophy and its History,” in Philosophy in History, ed. Rorty, R., Schneewind, J. B., Skinner, Q. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 20Google Scholar.

68 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2: “The Use of Pleasure” (New York, Vintage Books, 1990), 9Google Scholar.

69 Dennett, Daniel, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 74Google Scholar.

70 Tuck, Richard, “History,” in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. Godin, R. E. and Pettit, P. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 84Google Scholar.

71 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 90.

72 White, Michael J., Partisan or Neutral? The Futility of Public Political Theory (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 179Google Scholar.

73 Charles Taylor has warned philosophers against models and worldviews that look unquestionable. Although redescriptions internal to the so-called “epistemological model” may prove philosophically fruitful, they are hardly likely to produce genuine alternatives to this model: “[I]f one wants to climb out of the epistemological prison, if one wants to be able to see this model no longer just as the contour map of the way things obviously are with the mind-in-the-world, but as one option among others, then a first step is to see it as something one could come to espouse out of a creative redescription, something one could give reasons for. And this you get by retrieving the foundational formulations” (Taylor, “Philosophy and its History,” 19–20).

74 I think Nagel's critique poses a serious challenge to Williams's argument in favor of genetic explanations, and I am inclined to share the view that values should in principle be able to sustain themselves. Genealogy, though, threatens not so much the value as the success story that supports it.

75 “Turpia autem deorum gentilium dedecora nec dormiunt, nec sopita sunt” (Gen. 15. xi.161b.2; § “Damnose compatimur regibus et diis gentilium”).

76 A close similitude between the ancient gods and human values was drawn by Max Weber in a passage where he was specifically addressing the issue of values [die Werte]: “All the old gods, deprived of their magic and now taking on the forms of impersonal powers, ascend from their graves. They strive to gain power over our lives, and again they reserve their eternal struggle with one another” (from Weber's Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre published in 1922, cited in Mommsen, Wolfgang J., Max Weber and German Politics: 1890–1920 [Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984], 62)Google Scholar.