Ahead of his upcoming class on Boccaccio’s Decameron for The 92nd Street Y, we sat down with critic, author, and Bard College professor of comparative literature Joseph Luzzi to talk about art’s relationship with historical disaster, the line between high culture and pop culture, why fiction can be just as useful as journalism, and more.
There’s been renewed interest in Boccaccio’s Decameron during Covid. Other great works of literature have taken plague and pandemic as their subjects, but there’s something about Boccaccio that’s singular. What makes the Decameron special?
The Decameron is a work that I’ve taught before and loved for many years, going back to when I was a student. When the pandemic came it gave me an entirely new perspective on the book. I knew it was about a devastating plague in Europe. In Florence, where Boccaccio lived, about two thirds of the population died. Boccaccio describes the devastation in the introduction. It wasn’t until we experienced lockdown, and I witnessed in the blink of an eye how utterly society can be changed, that the Decameron hit home — it’s been celebrated for its humor and sexuality, and it is very funny and forward-thinking in many ways, but Covid made me feel its pathos viscerally. I now see it as an expression of loss and collective trauma. That’s what Boccaccio was getting at.
The Decameron’s influence is everywhere — from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Italo Calvino and into the 21st century — nearly 700 years after it was written. Where do you detect Boccaccio’s influence in our culture?
You’re right. To me, the Decameron’s legacy comes down to three major things. One: art as a response to crisis. What are the ways in which the artist can take something devastating and transform it into something meaningful? Two: storytelling. The Decameron was one of the great early examples of literary narrative. Three: the transition from high culture to popular culture. Dante wrote the Divine Comedy, but Boccaccio wrote what is often called the “human comedy.” You can feel this effect in Calvino’s Italian Folktales. His project was to present tales and fables, but without succumbing to escapism. They’re magical stories, and yet they somehow also explore complex, real-world truths. The Decameron is similar. Even the most fanciful stories, isolated from the plague, have flashes of reality. You can also feel this is Pasolini’s film The Decameron from 1971. He sets his version of Boccaccio in a historically remote, working-class Naples — a far cry from the aristocratic world of Boccaccio’s Tuscan storytellers — and the film is much grittier and realistic than the original Decameron. But in the end Pasolini too, just like Boccaccio and Calvino before him, celebrates the power of storytelling.
Your other literary seminars — on Dante and Calvino, most recently — have been extremely popular with students. What made you want to take on Boccaccio this time?
Of course, the first sense of urgency was because he was writing about a plague and we were living through a pandemic. But additionally, Boccaccio is so essential to the birth of the Renaissance. He’s such a perfectly transitional figure. Dante had a medieval, religious worldview. Boccaccio moves past that and into a concern with secular, earthly life. And you get new forms of identity in Boccaccio — women are treated as complex people, as real cultural figures. He dedicates the book to female readers, and empathizes deeply with them, especially about their sufferings over love. He understood that literature could become a refuge for women within a rigid patriarchal structure. In this and other ways, Boccaccio is one of the first modern thinkers. He criticized the church. He wrote about sexuality. And he did it in the everyday Tuscan vernacular, not Latin. It’s an experimental, audacious text!
What do you hope students will take with them from this class?
This is a book about ten upper-crust Florentines retreating from a disaster and telling stories. Is that escapism? In truth, coming up with these stories in a time of horrifying plague was another way to process its trauma. It was just as powerful a response as, say, journalism or history writing can be. Boccaccio’s stories completely overturned ideas of what men and women could do. Suddenly men and women, who had traditionally been separated, were mixing with one another in ways that had never happened before. That’s a profound change. By writing these stories in which women’s roles were completely upended, the Decameron shows how a fictional take on a crisis can point a new way forward for a society. Imaginative constructs like literature remind us what “could be” or even “should be” — it creates different scenarios from how we actually live. The Decameron helped lead to the birth of the Renaissance from the ashes of the plague. We’re wrestling with something similar right now. What will the world be like after the pandemic? Fiction can give us a path forward.
Joseph Luzzi’s literary seminar, Reading Boccaccio’s the Decameron, begins April 25. Sign up today.