Gravelot, 'Drawings for the illustrations of Boccaccio's Decamerone', 1757.
Colin Burrow’s review of the most recent English version of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (The London Review of Books: 12 March 2009) is less an evaluation of the merits of J.G. Nichols’s translation than an occasion to reopen some pertinent questions regarding the psychological dimension of literary narrative. Though the Decameron’s own generic heritage is mixed–its 100 novelle or short stories combine the French fabliaux, the Ovidian vignette, and the dirty joke, among other things–there is no doubting the profound impact it has had on the subsequent literary tradition. Besides his immense influence on English poets (Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Keats included), Boccaccio is often cited as a sort of proto-novelist, an ancestor of Cervantes, Fielding, Eliot, and Dickens. Burrow starts by pointing out what’s possibly misleading about this genealogy, but ends by making a provocative argument for why it is, in fact, appropriate. The answer in both cases depends upon how we understand the psychological depth of the narrative–that is, how far the story goes in exploring the internal space of its characters, what Burrow takes to mean their motives, emotions, and private thoughts.
Burrow begins by pointing out that unlike the novels of say Dickens or Eliot, the Decameron leaves the psychological space of its characters “underdeveloped.” Boccaccio does not seem much interested in this space, almost to the point of insensitivity. In one striking example Burrow makes much of, Boccaccio tells us very little about how Griselda felt after her husband pretended to kill her children in an elaborately cruel test of her loyalty (it turns out that Gualtieri, the husband, merely banished them). A modern novelist would no doubt have spent some time describing the range of emotions that such an act would occasion. And for Gualtieri to emerge as a full character rather than just a stock villain, the novelist would need to do some work explaining what motivated his actions in the first place. Yet Boccaccio does neither; he simply tells us what the cruel husband did and little else. As a storyteller, Boccaccio “just lets actions speak.”
The modern reader might conclude that Boccaccio is a dull writer, or that the rich psychological portraits of say a Henry James or Jane Austen were simply beyond him. Burrow sees the temptation but has a ready response: Boccaccio’s spare narrative style is purposeful. The sense of “blankness” that we get from reading the Decameron is productive; the blanks are there for us to fill in. It is precisely Boccaccio’s withholding of psychological information that makes us so eager to speculate about the internal space of his characters. As Burrow puts it: “Boccaccio’s great art is to make his readers want to supply the tragic emotions that he does not directly represent.” This “art” makes Boccaccio the sort of proto-novelist we have come to think, and Burrow’s most daring claim comes here:
“The Decameron generates the novel in the form of anticipatory nostalgia: Boccaccio seems not just to be insensitive, but to be actively canceling out of his fiction a novelistic inwardness which hasn’t yet been invented.”
Burrow’s argument is a little too ingenious. First, we might ask: why should absence of psychological data signify a deep psychological “inwardness,” instead of, well, an absence? The its-meaningful-because-its-not-there argument is usually specious, here as well. One could read that absence in several other ways: as suggesting that Boccaccio viewed the human psyche as a dark abyss that we can’t grasp, thus the absence; or that the 14th century didn’t have a notion of the internal human psyche at all, thus the absence. My point is this: before we eagerly construct an inward psychological space for Boccaccio’s characters, doesn’t it seem more reasonable to question whether there is even such an “inwardness” to know?
If we answer “no,” it does not then follow, as Burrow seems to think, that the Decameron is psychologically shallow. Rather, we might question how good a criterion “inwardness” is, or what view of the person such a term implies. Burrow’s picture of “inwardness” looks something like this: there is an internal space of motivations, emotions, and thoughts in each of us, mostly invisible; and it is this space which houses the deepest parts of our selves, the stuff that makes us who we are. It is where character resides, both literary and personal. Burrow seems to take his picture of “inwardness” as more or less uncontroversial, a settled issue, when the philosophical literature in both traditions suggests otherwise. But leaving the philosophical discussions aside, this picture creates (or is determined by?) a quite strange account of why we read and write literature. As Burrow seems to see it, the novelist’s task is to bring that “inward” psychological space of his characters to light. In turn, the job of the reader is to contemplate, be moved by, and/or evaluate this picture of the character, to ask, as Burrow does: “how can it be that Griselda does not complain? What does Gualtieri think she feels? What does he think he’s doing? And what does she feel?” When the writer does not do that first job, as in the case with Boccaccio, we will do it for him. Burrow might actually be right about the persistence of this readerly impulse, but isn’t the kind of speculative psychology Burrow models here wrongheaded, not to mention unhelpful? As anyone who has been in a Lit. class can attest, group speculation about the psychology of fictional characters can become tiresome and often uninteresting. In many ways, the literature teacher tries to work against this knee-jerk, arm-chair psychology, to equip his/her students with some sort of vocabulary (be it formalist, historical, ideological, etc.) to prevent that sort of speculation. Even when that vocabulary is “psychoanalytic,” it often pushes beyond the thin sort of questioning we see modeled here in Burrow’s review.
Arguments such as Burrow’s flatter us too much, I think; great writers like Boccaccio somehow managed to “anticipate” our modernity by the force of their “art,” even though their narrative equipment wasn’t quite up to speed yet. And the really great artists, to paraphrase some prominent arguments about Shakespeare, helped invent some of the features of our modern humanity (see Harold Bloom’s argument in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human). The tone of such arguments tends toward the triumphant and celebratory, but the compliments strike me as backhanded. Past texts are deemed important or worthy of our attention insofar as they contribute to some preferred view of ourselves: as “modern,” complex, irreducibly unique persons, with an “inwardness” we carry around like a secret.
We should be skeptical of this way of reading literature, as well as the limited view of the person it implies (where is the intersubejctive or dialogical self amidst all this priveleged “inwardness”?). When an historically distant text surprises or even disgusts us, that should be an opportunity to view some of our ethical and aesthetic assumptions in a new light, to challenge, to argue, to reconsider, to poke around. Estrangement–both from our ideas about human psychology and narrative–should be cultivated, not assimilated into a newer, more ingenious literary history. Give me cruel Gualtieri and patient Griselda as is.
