Decameron
The ‘paratext’
In the overall architecture of the Decameron a role of particular importance is played by the issues addressed in the paratext. With this term, coined by G. Genette[1], we refer to a series of distinct elements, textual and graphic, which are the “contour” to the text. On the one hand the paratext includes aspects which give information about the work, such as the title, the prologue and the conclusions; on the other it embraces all the graphic characteristics linked to the material aspects with which the text presents itself as a book. In the Decameron, title, prologue, the introduction to day IV and the author’s conclusions constitute a considerable paratextual section, to which are entrusted the author’s metaliterary reflections.
The title of the collection of novellas is a neologism coined upon the model of the Hexaemeron by Saint Ambrose, a treatise on the creation of the world to which Boccaccio counter sets the tale of the “re-creation” of the society of his day, exemplified by the life of the happy brigade. The passage from the six days of the genesis to the ten of the Decameron could be read as alluding to the numeric symbolism of the Commedia, to which a more explicit reference is attributed in the “surname” assigned to the book: “Prencipe Galeotto” or princely scoundrel. The love between Paolo and Francesca, recalled in Dante’s famous fifth canto, and, by means of Galehaut, the intermediary between Lancelot and Guinevere, the entire courtly literary tradition, are here called upon to play the difficult role of an anti-model to be countered and superseded. We indeed do find in the Decameron, if not a total turning of the tables, for sure a new conception of the effects ascribable to reading:
Ben lungi dal causare la dannazione dei protagonisti, com’era accaduto a Paolo e Francesca, il libro (e con esso chi lo scrisse) intende favorire il riscatto delle lettrici -cui il testo è dedicato- dalle pene e dalle contingenze d’una realtà non di rado intollerabile[2]. Far from causing the damnation of the protagonists, as had occurred to Paolo and Francesca, the book (and with it he who wrote it) intends to favour the redemption of female readers – to whom it is dedicated – from the pain and the contingencies of a reality too often intolerable.
[1]G. Genette, Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré, Paris 1981.
[2]L. Rossi, Il paratesto, in Introduzione al Decameron, ed. M. Picone – M. Mesirca, Florence 2004, pp. 35-55.
