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There are very few books in the history of literature that can be
included amongst those that have stigmatized and censured the concept of
relating, or, to put it more bluntly, the concept of “telling stories”.
And there are very, very few that have underlined the crucial role of
the tale in terms of the production of socio-cultural notions, themes
and values such that the majority actually shares these.
One of these books is without question the Decameron.
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Its one hundred
tales, spread out over ten days and shared by ten young people fleeing
from the plague in Florence in about the mid 14th century, the Decameron
deftly combines the most subtle and carnival-like fun with humanistic
messages dense with a multiplicity of meanings. In short, the Decameron
is an authentic tribute to human ingenuity. An epic masterpiece that
tells the tales of a nascent merchant society, of a new, emerging middle
class that is already highly dynamic and yet already in search of
pleasure and entertainment just as it suddenly finds its very existence
threatened with extinction.
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Like the Divine Comedy, the Decameron can be read on different levels:
Boccaccio’s book, depending on how you decide to delve into it, might
seem to assume the characteristics of a manual on behavioral models
based on transgression, or a situationist compendium steeped in moral
precepts. In either case, it is designed for an a-temporal reader and
is, ever and always, completely devoid of prejudice and conditioning.
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If on first reading it gives
the impression of being a scandalously outrageous book, on closer
analysis it reveals itself to be pure ethical meditation. It is almost
as if nothing should or could be excluded from the Decameron. It is a
veritable narrative continuum, harmoniously ironic and perfectly
balanced in its peculiar structure: a brilliantly assembled set of tales,
whose subject is always and almost exclusively the end result of the
imagination of a great poet, a literary genius whose ideas about what he
wanted were limpidly clear – and that is, to give life to a narrative
phenomenon that would constitute a break and "contradiction" in
reference to contemporary cultural phenomenology, freeing the tale (as
literary trope) from the excessively moralistic backwaters of dogmas and
diktats. Thus Boccaccio made the readers (or listeners) themselves, and
not the narrator, fully responsible for what they were reading, both in
positive and negative terms.
Whether the work is interpreted as an encyclopedia dedicated to the
dawn of modern society, as a wide-ranging glossary of the pleasures and
contradictions of life, or even as a summation of the precepts of
late-mediaeval culture, the Decameron is above all unique, able to deal
with the universal repertory of situations, events and dilemmas that are
always present in humankind. A book that would be perfect were it
necessary to carry out experiments or research into a pedagogical
communication aiming to renew vital dialogue between a long-distant past
and our own present.
©World
Of Art magazine
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