An extract from HEAT 18

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In the fourteenth century, the Great Plague swept through Europe. In Florence, between a third and a half of the entire population perished. Between 1349 and 1351, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote his masterwork, The Decameron. He did not write it to provide a happy alternative to the plague. He wrote it, he said, to cure melancholy, particularly to cure women of lovesickness, though this did not save him from accusations of misogyny. But it seems he also wrote it to provide a glimpse of a world outside the confines of the house, when the home was under siege. It was supposed to be an indoor fantasy of a place elsewhere. This ‘elsewhere’ is the product of a melancholy which runs beneath and beyond Boccaccio’s provision of a so-called ‘happy ending’. Boccaccio’s work is prose which had not yet given birth to the novel. Cut off from the epic and the sublime, its yearning is for stability and permanence, but here is found the first signs of the unconvincingness of its social ‘lesson’. It would take a Cervantes or a Rabelais to provide antidotes to melancholy in the form of humour, exaggeration, and in the suspension of moral judgment, upending the cautionary tale in order to damn all moralising. In Boccaccio’s world though, melancholy is represented as a contradiction, part ‘lesson’ and part catastrophe, turning a cure into a condition.

Boccaccio’s methods, unlike Dante’s (from whom he borrowed extensively) are terrestrial and tyrannical: power is invested not in God but in the narration of Man. Boccaccio’s approach to storytelling is therefore realistic and splenetic, offsetting the divine and the fateful. It is indicative of a fork in the road, between what the French call writers of the stomach, Hugo and Zola come to mind, and writers of the spleen, like Baudelaire and Proust. Writers of the stomach are social thinkers, realists and positivists, while writers of the spleen can only imagine failure, can only evoke depression and anxiety, driven into a self which is at times infantile, at times perplexed; both revolutionary and conformist in that it can never quite instigate insurrection. Of course a writer can be in both of these categories, as Boccaccio’s work seems to show. But in order to examine this early bifurcation which manifested as a contradiction, it may be worthwhile to take a look at Italian Renaissance humanism and to see how melancholy made its way back into contention as a creative humour during the devastation of the Great Plague.