Boccaccio, the survivor and the tyranny of death

What makes the authors of novellistica "skilful and light"? It's because they display what Italo Calvino called a "pensive lightness"(pensosità) that makes frivolity seem heavy, inert and opaque. Guido Cavalcanti's "light leap", confronted by Betto Brunelleschi's brigata spendericcia who are out to make trouble for him in the ninth short story of the sixth day of the Decameron , expresses this attitude. We propose here a reading in the light of the historical sociology of communal institutions. But a historical reading of this short story, based on the notion of case and "simple form" (according to André Jolles), must also take into account the fact that the scene takes place in a cemetery. Returning to Boccaccio's framework narrative and the "horrible beginning" of the Black Death of 1348, we define the event as unforgettable and indescribable: the function of fiction is to pierce this fear. It also allows us to define the tyrant, with Elias Canetti, as a survivor of power.

Contents

• Following "light and skilful narrators" is one thing, but what is lightness?
• Italo Calvino calls "pensive lightness" (pensosità) the impulse that makes frivolity seem heavy, inert and opaque (American Lessons, 1986)
• Boccaccio, Decameron, ninth short story of the sixth day: story of a brigata spendericcia
• Seven women, three men and two historical figures: Betto Brunelleschi and Guido Cavalcanti
• Historical time, narrative time and the recent past
• "He was standing between the porphyry columns that can still be seen, the tombs and the gate of San Giovanni, when Messire Betto, crossing the Piazza di Santa Reparata on horseback with his company, spotted him among the tombs and said, in agreement with his friends: "Let's go and make trouble for him" (Andiamo a dargli briga)
• A rather cavalier accusation of atheism
• "Seeing himself surrounded, Guido answered them promptly (prestamente): "Lords, you are at home here, it's up to you to tell me what you think": then having laid his hand on one of these tombs, which were very high, he took off and, gifted as he was with perfect lightness (sì come colui che leggerissimo era), found himself on the other side; having escaped them, he went away"
• Italo Calvino's praise of the light leap: "That its gravity conceals the secret of lightness, while what many take to be the vitality of the times, noisy, aggressive, stamping and boisterous, belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery of rusty automobiles"
• Historicizing our reading of the short story: Giorgio Inglese, Francesco Baussi, Fosca Mariani Zini
• What is a case? "The special thing about the form of the case is that it poses a question without being able to give the answer, that it imposes on us the obligation to decide but without containing the decision itself - it is the place where the weighing takes place but not yet the result" (André Jolles, Formes simples, Paris, 1972)
• The frame story of the sixth day of the Decameron, the witticism as a light bite: "I want to remind you that the nature of repartee is not to bite like a dog, but like a sheep"
• The fall is not fatal: Guido Cavalcanti emerges, Betto Brunelleschi becomes the interpreter of his own defeat
• The violence of a tycoon: "And many rejoiced at his death, for he was a very sad citizen" (Dino Compagni, Cronica, on the death of Betto Brunelleschi in 1311)
• Return to the city (Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, 2006): when the magnate negotiates his reintegration into the ordinary workings of communal institutions
• Guido Cavalcanti, "one of the best dialecticians in the world, an excellent expert in natural philosophy": loquens ut naturalis
• Averroes, the Epicureans and Guido's leggiadria
• Messer Brunetto, questa pulzelletta (Dante, Rime, sonnet 99)
• The brigata of Dante and Guido Calvalcanti: a poetry of knowledge (Emanuele Coccia and Sylvain Piron)
• A Dantesque society: fiction of the case, friction of norms
• 1348: the global history of a long-term event
• "Ceuls qui moururent/nul ne les pourroit nombrer/ Ymaginer, penser ne dire/Figurer, monstrer ne ecrire" (Guillaume de Machaut)
• Practical texts that only document the aftermath of disaster
• Millard Meiss, La peinture à Florence et à Sienne après la Peste noire (1951): la peinture donne-t-elle à voir l'irruption de la mort?
• Vasari and plague denial: "the prodigious good fortune of living in the time of Messire François Petrarque"
• The plague is not depicted, it is painted; it is not described, it is written (Georges Didi-Hubermann, "Feux d'images. Un malaise dans la représentation du ^XIVe siècle", preface to Millard Meiss)
• Mass disfigurement and decomposition of likeness
• "After this upheaval, the city lived in peace until 1348, the time of the memorable plague (quella memorabile pestilenzia) so eloquently described by Giovanni Bocaccio, which took more than ninety-six souls from Florence" (Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, 1526)
• Unforgettable but indescribable, the plague did not produce political upheavals
• Read as a historian the description in the "frontispiece" of the Decameron : "...piled up there, like goods piled up in the holds of ships, they were layer after layer covered with a little earth until the top of the pit was reached"
• After this "horrible beginning", going through the fear: "But I wouldn't want the fear to prevent you from going any further"
• Guido Cavalcanti, "a skilful, light-hearted narrator": he too has lived through the fear
• "The moment of survival is a moment of power. The dread of having seen death unravels into satisfaction, since we ourselves are not the dead" (Elias Canetti, Masse et puissance, 1960)
• The tyrant is a survivor of power