The Devil in the Flesh: A Reading of Boccaccio’s Decameron

Abstract

Considering Boccaccio’s Decameron only as a “classic” does not render justice to its narrative structure, geometric and complex. For each of its aspects reveals the subversive potential of its narrative. Both the hundred novels and the frame make it into the first organic book in the Literature of the West. A careful reading, however, can identify a new novella, this one whose number is 101: a striking lack of narrative closure and of its architecture. Ciappelletto, the protagonist of the first novel, is transformed from the “worst man in the world” into a hypothetical Saint and Griselda, the heroine of last novel, shows her hyperbolic virtues turning in cruel cynicism. The Decameron thus creates its own future, because it represents an exhaustive Mimesis of his age, and at the same time, creates a radical ironic break. From that point of view, the Decameron could be considered an intriguing response to the current debate on what is contemporary.